Diana Glenn’s latest contribution to Dante studies is, quite simply, superb.  It is up to date, it is well written and most importantly, it provides a wide range of readers with a very fresh and extremely insightful perspective on a topic that has engaged Dante scholars for generations.  The newness of its contribution is directly attributable to Glenn’s holistic reading of the role of women in the Commedia.

Starting from the premise that Dante’s inclusion of female figures endorses the role of women in the salvific process …

Malgrado durante gran parte del Quattrocento il prestigio umanistico assunto dal latino (e dal greco) avesse oscurato l’attività dei volgarizzatori (che era invece intensa nel Duecento e nel Trecento, basti qui ricordare i Volgarizzamenti del Due e Trecento, curati da Cesare Segre e pubblicati dalla UTET nel 1953), sul finire dello stesso secolo si assisteva a un rilancio dell’esercizio del volgarizzare. Una ripresa che coinvolgeva non solo gli addetti alle scriptae di servizio e di utilità pratica, ma anche diversi letterati, che si cimentavano o con il sapere enciclopedico dell’antichità (le traduzioni della Naturalis Historia di Plinio, quella di Cristoforo Landino e quella, antagonista e meridionale, di Giovanni Brancati, costituiscono gli esempi più autorevoli) o, soprattutto, con opere letterarie classiche.

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Se alcune traduzioni boiardesche (come le Vite degli eccellenti capitani di Cornelio Nepote o l’Asino d’oro di Apuleio e le Storie di Erodoto) sono dunque state largamente esplorate, il volgarizzamento forse più filologicamente controverso dello scrittore ferrarese, quello dell’Historia Imperiale di Riccobaldo di Ferrara (vissuto tra XIII e XIV secolo, autore di diverse compilazioni storiche in latino), ha dovuto aspettare il lavoro approfondito di Andrea Rizzi per un’edizione moderna e un’adeguata indagine delle fonti...

This paper seeks to contribute to an ongoing debate about the centrality and the agency that is recently being attributed to children in films and to demonstrate that the locus of such changed representation is in the new discourse opportunities with which children are endowed. The study reported here belongs to the domain of the linguistic stylistics of cinema and its main objective is to devote attention to the verbal plane of film generally overlooked by media studies scholars as well as linguists. In consideration of the particular context in which it is hosted, an issue of an academic journal promoting scholarly research in Italian literature, the arts and culture, this study also intends to show how text linguistics can contribute to literary or film studies scholarship thus pointing in the direction of a fruitful interdisciplinary cooperation between these research domains.

Although children are a ‘staple’ of Italian cinema and seem to play some constant functions across time, their representation has undergone changes over time. The prevailing orthodoxy in the scholarship on the representation of children in film is that, while recognising their relevance within the film narrative, children are usually represented as having limited agency…

On the 12th of October 1952 at two in the afternoon a young woman, Rosanna Carta, is waiting for her fiancé on a bench in the small park of Piazza Santa Croce in Gerusalemme in the centre of Rome. After a period of time, glancing around, she gets up, moves towards the kerb and then runs out deliberately throwing herself into the path of a passing car which screeches to a halt...  On the 12th of April 1952, Lilia, a young woman with a purposeless, distracted air, leaves her apartment building on the banks of the River Tiber in Rome and walks along the embankment, over a bridge, finally descending some steps to the bed of the river itself. There she passes a child playing who, upon seeing her upset and in tears, takes fright and flees. Then she walks determinedly and slowly into the swirling waters of the river itself…

[…]      During the following year, 1953, a young Italian film director, Michelangelo Antonioni, who began his career as a film critic, but has already been involved with Roberto Rossellini and the neorealist movement and has completed three feature films, is commissioned to direct the second episode of a collaborative film entitled L’amore in città (Love in the City). Cesare Zavattini, the producer and a co-director, wishes to make a film using the metaphor of a magazine and offers Antonioni an ‘article’ in his film/magazine on the theme of suicide. Antonioni in the subsequent months manages to find some actual survivors of unsuccessful suicide attempts and on film he has them discuss and re-enact their attempts, answering questions about their motives addressed to them by an off-screen narrator…

Giorgio Mangiamele, regarded as the most significant first-generation Italo-Australian filmmaker, produced films in the decade from 1953 until 1963 which deal with the Italian diaspora, focusing quite specifically on distinct phases of the Italian migration experience in Australia.

[…]

Il contratto is a work of significant sociological and historical value, or, as Quentin Turnour described it, “one of the most extraordinary independent feature productions in Australian cinema history”. It is also Mangiamele’s film that would best fit what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari theorised as “minor literature”, an expression of “that which a minority constructs within a major language”, and which is “affected with a high coefficient of deterritorialization”. The deterritorialisation intrinsic in the film’s expression is evident “when it is historically positioned against the film culture Giorgio was not yet a part of, but was to adopt”. “Il Contratto is the real thing”, Turnour argues, “in its use of found locations, cast and celebratory communal occasions; in its sense of urban place; and in its interest in the common plight of marginalized Australians”. Furthermore, the impact the film had on mainstream Australian cinema may be understood in terms analogous to what Deleuze and Guattari describe as “the revolutionary condition for every literature within the heart of what is called great (established) literature”.

Il tema del Risorgimento è stato ampiamente utilizzato in letteratura, dapprima come reazione alla versione ufficiale della Storia, fornita dai Governi liberali, ansiosi di ottenere un ampio consenso. Quindi come una sorta di cartina di tornasole per l’Italia contemporanea: attraverso storie ambientate in periodo importante della Storia italiana, infatti, molti scrittori hanno affrontato temi cruciali del loro tempo.

Indubbiamente, uno dei temi dibattuti negli ultimi anni è il successo elettorale della Lega Nord che ha rivelato l’emergere di nuove sub-culture politiche e ha svelato il perdurante stato di debolezza del concetto di Stato unificato creato dal Risorgimento. Il nuovo clima politico sfida la letteratura a interrogarsi sull’identità nazionale. Una sfida, questa, che il giallo italiano non poteva non raccogliere, per tre motivi di cui due di ordine generale e l’altro inerente alla specificità italiana.⁵ Il primo è spiegato da Carlo Ginzburg (“Spie”) che compie un parallelo proprio tra l’attività dello storico e quello del detective. Secondo Ginzburg entrambi arrivano alla conoscenza attraverso l’analisi di elementi frammentari -- in un caso fonti storiche, nell’altro indizi  -- ed entrambi ricostruiscono il quadro di una verità singola attraverso l’analisi di tale documentazione lacunosa. Il romanzo poliziesco è quindi particolarmente adatto a raccontare la Storia con una prospettiva che Luther Blisset/Wu Ming  definirebbe come ipocalittica, ovvero come microstoria che illustra la Storia.

Danese Cattaneo (Carrara, c. 1512-1572, Padua) has been recognized as both a sculptor and a writer, a unique figure among the artistic and literary society of Cinquecento Venice.  Danese the sculptor was famous for his portraits, whether as busts, medals, or most notably his monument of 1565 to the former Doge of Genoa and later Captain-General of Venice, Giano II Fregoso. The latter, his one completed large-scale sculptural monument, was highly praised by his friend, the historian and artist Giorgio Vasari. According to Vasari, Danese’s poetry was as worthy as his sculpture. Giovanni Maria Verdizzotti, the contemporary Paduan printer and poet who had risen in the world through a combination of artistic and intellectual production not unlike that of Cattaneo, praised “misser Danese Cattaneo, scultore eccellentissimo per professione e poeta di bel giudicio più per diletto e per ingegno natural che per professione di lettere…” In 1562 Danese published a portion of his never-completed epic poem, Dell’Amor di Marfisa. With all of this evidence of his recognized qualities as a sculptor there are still questions about Danese’s literary identity within the context of his Venetian contemporaries. This article, a first consideration of this subject, seeks to trace the fluctuations of his literary reputation as reflected in the comments of the two most important professional writers of the Cinquecento, Pietro Aretino and Torquato Tasso, and to consider the afterlife of their comments in our own day. The emphasis here will be on contemporary rather than modern critics.

The question of the intellectual exchange that took place during the life-long relationship between Paola Masino and Massimo Bontempelli and the presence of thematic and ideological analogies between some of their respective works has been repeatedly mentioned and, yet, rarely addressed in detail by scholars of Italian modernist literature. Dated and necessarily imprecise attempts to evaluate Masino’s debt to her older and established companion or to assess whether her original writing style was influenced by Bontempelli’s “realismo magico”, have been replaced in more recent times by the realization – supported especially by the study of the intense correspondence between the two writers and with other figures -- that such an influence was not one-sided. As, for example, Marinella Mascia Galateria observes, if, on the one hand, “nella scrittura di Monte Ignoso entrano anche i consigli di Bontempelli […]” it is, on the other, “l’influsso di Paola Masino che gli suggerisce le fabule di Vita e morte di Adria e di Gente nel tempo” and that “insinua e […] accampa l’idea della morte” in Bontempelli’s fiction and theatrical production (Mascia Galateria 5). Fulvia Airoldi Namer, in turn, adds to the discussion by noting that the issue of the similarities in the fiction works of Masino and Bontempelli “è un tema che meriterebbe uno sviluppo a parte” (Airoldi Namer 182n), implicitly leaving the undertaking of such a “sviluppo” to future scholars.