Encyclopedia of Italian Literary Studies

Encyclopedia of

Italian Literary Studies 1 A–J INDEX

Gaetana Marrone G E N E RAL E ditor

Paolo Puppa Luca Somigli E ditorS

New York London

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

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CONTENTS

Editorial Staff

vi

Advisors

vii

Contributors

ix

Alphabetical List of Entries

xvii

Thematic List of Entries

xxvii

Introduction

xxxv

Entries A to Z

1

Index

I1

v

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

ASSOCIATE EDITORS Elena Past Daniel Seidel

ASSISTANT EDITORS Nicholas Albanese Ileana Drinovan Barbara Garbin Simone Marchesi

vi

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

Ben Lawton Purdue University

Albert Russell Ascoli University of California–Berkeley

Laura Lepschy University College, London

Daniela Bini University of Texas–Austin

Ernesto Livorni University of Wisconsin–Madison

Guido Bonsaver Pembroke College, University of Oxford

Romano Luperini Universita` di Siena

Gian Piero Brunetta Universita` di Padova

Millicent Marcus Yale University

Michael Caesar University of Birmingham

Giuseppe Mazzotta Yale University

Dino Cervigni The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Franco Musarra University of Leuven

Marinella Colummi Camerino Universita` Ca’ Foscari di Venezia

Lino Pertile Harvard University

Teresa de Lauretis University of California–Santa Cruz

Olga Pugliese University of Toronto

Maria DiBattista Princeton University

Lucia Re University of California–Los Angeles

Robert S. Dombroski{ The City University of New York

Antonio Saccone Universita` di Napoli

Walter Geerts University of Antwerp

Anthony Julian Tamburri Florida Atlantic University

Amilcare Iannucci University of Toronto

Elissa Weaver University of Chicago

Victoria E. Kirkham University of Pennsylvania

Rebecca West University of Chicago

{

Deceased

vii

CONTRIBUTORS Stefano Adami Universita` per Stranieri–Siena

Gino Belloni Universita` Ca’ Foscari di Venezia

Michael Aichmayr Universita¨t Salzburg

Ruth Ben-Ghiat New York University

Donatella Alesi Universita` di Roma

Alberto Bentoglio Universita` degli Studi di Milano

Beatrice Alfonsetti Universita` di Padova

Dirk Vanden Berghe Vrije Universiteit Brussel

Beverly Allen Syracuse University

Sandra Bermann Princeton University

Daniela Bisello Antonucci Princeton University

Diego Bertelli Yale University

Antonia Arslan Universita` di Padova

Giorgio Bertellini University of Michigan

Andrea Baldi Rutgers University

Maria Ida Biggi Universita` Ca’ Foscari di Venezia

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

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

Susanna Barsella Fordham University

Barbara Bird University of Wisconsin–Madison

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

Anna Bogo Biblioteca Teatrale Casa di Carlo Goldoni, Venezia

Mattia Begali University of Wisconsin–Madison

Julia Conaway Bondanella Indiana University–Bloomington ix

CONTRIBUTORS

Peter Bondanella Indiana University–Bloomington

Carlo Celli Bowling Green State University

Guido Bonsaver Pembrole College, University of Oxford

Dino Cervigni The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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

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

Ann Hallamore Caesar University of Warwick

Alessandro Croce Universita` di Torino

Marinella Colummi Camerino Universita` Ca’ Foscari di Venezia

Roberto Cuppone Universita` Ca’ Foscari di Venezia

Jo Ann Cannon University of California–Davis

Roberto M. Dainotto Duke University

Rocco Capozzi University of Toronto

Giuseppina Dal Canton Universita` Ca’ Foscari di Venezia

Francesco Carapezza University of Palermo

Mariano D’Amora Royal Holloway, University of London

Carla Carotenuto Universita` di Macerata

Emanuele D’Angelo Universita` di Bari

Peter Carravetta The City University of New York

Giovanna De Luca College of Charleston

Olivia Catanorchi Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa

Federica Brunori Deigan University of Maryland

x

CONTRIBUTORS

Barbara Del Mercato Universita` Ca’ Foscari di Venezia

Barbara Garbin Yale University

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

John Gatt-Rutter La Trobe University

Nicola Di Nino Universita` Ca’ Foscari di Venezia

Giuseppe Gazzola Yale University

Sara Elena Dı´az New York University

Walter Geerts University of Antwerp Academia Belgica, Roma

Maria DiBattista Princeton University

Flora Ghezzo Columbia University

Andrea Dini Montclair State University

Nella Giannetto{ Universita` Ca’ Foscari di Venezia

Antonio D’Isidoro Universita` di Macerata

Manuela Gieri University of Toronto and Universita` della Basilicata

Konrad Eisenbichler University of Toronto

Simon A. Gilson University of Warwick

Edoardo Esposito Universita` di Milano

Paolo A. Giordano University of Central Florida

Massimo Fabrizi Universita` di Macerata

Gian Paolo Giudicetti Universite´ Catholique de Louvain

Marcella Farina Universita` Ca’ Foscari di Venezia

Paola Giuli Saint Joseph’s University

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

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

Deceased

xi

CONTRIBUTORS

Angela Guidotti Universita` di Pisa

Antonia Lezza Universita` degli Studi di Salerno

Stefano Gulizia Colgate University

Ernesto Livorni University of Wisconsin–Madison

Nancy Harrowitz Boston University

Giancarlo Lombardi The College of Staten Island/CUNY

Brenda K. Hedrick Johns Hopkins University

Dennis Looney University of Pittsburgh

Angela M. Jeannet Franklin and Marshall College

Sara Lorenzetti Universita` di Macerata

Keala Jewell Dartmouth College

Stefania Lucamante The Catholic University of America

Victoria E. Kirkham University of Pennsylvania

Federico Luisetti The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Christopher Kleinhenz University of Wisconsin–Madison

Alfredo Luzi Universita` di Macerata

Charles Klopp Ohio State University

Joseph Luzzi Bard College

Patrizia La Trecchia University of South Florida

Armando Maggi University of Chicago

Marcia Landy University of Pittsburgh

Simone Marchesi Princeton University

Inge Lanslots University of Leuven

Anna Laura Mariani Universita` di Cassino

Gloria Lauri-Lucente University of Malta

Marina Marietti Universite´ Paris III–Sorbonne Nouvelle

Ben Lawton Purdue University

Gaetana Marrone Princeton University

Carol Lazzaro-Weis University of Missouri–Columbia

Renato Martinoni University of St. Gallen

Simone Lenzi Independent Scholar

Paola Martinuzzi Universita` Ca’ Foscari di Venezia

Giulio Lepschy University College, London

Giuseppe Mazzotta Yale University

xii

CONTRIBUTORS

Erin M. McCarthy Yale University

´ ine O’Healy A Loyola Marymount University

Anna Meda University of South Africa

Frank Ordiway Princeton University

Alessandra Meldolesi Independent Scholar

Daniela Orlandi Dominican University

Grazia Menechella University of Wisconsin–Madison

H. Marie Orton Truman State University

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

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

Franco Musarra University of Leuven

Olimpia Pelosi State University of New York at Albany

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

Bernardo Piciche` Virginia Commonwealth University

Giuliana Muscio Universita` di Padova

Mark Pietralunga Florida State University

Thomas E. Mussio Iona College

Nicoletta Pireddu Georgetown University

Siobhan Nash-Marshall University of Saint Thomas

Gilberto Pizzamiglio Universita` Ca’ Foscari di Venezia

Ellen Nerenberg Wesleyan University

Gian Filippo Pizzo Independent Scholar xiii

CONTRIBUTORS

Alessandro Polcri Fordham University

Arielle Saiber Bowdoin College

Gordon Poole Universita` degli Studi l’Orientale

Laura Salsini University of Delaware

Paolo Puppa Universita` Ca’ Foscari di Venezia

Giuliana Sanguinetti-Katz University of Toronto

Paolo Quazzolo Universita` degli Studi di Trieste

Carlo Santoli Independent Scholar

Lucia Re University of California–Los Angeles

Alessandro Scarsella Universita` Ca’ Foscari di Venezia

Eileen Adair Reeves Princeton University

Daniele Seragnoli Centro Teatro Universitario, Ferrara

Antonio Ricci York University, Toronto

Mario Sesti University of Rome

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

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

Bruno Rosada Scuola Interateneo di Specializzazione degli Insegnanti del Veneto

Jon Snyder University of California–Santa Barbara

Rocco Rubini Yale University

Luca Somigli University of Toronto

Patrick Rumble University of Wisconsin–Madison

Matteo Soranzo University of Wisconsin–Madison

Myriam Ruthenburg Florida Atlantic University

Giuseppe Stellardi Oxford University

Antonio Saccone Universita` di Napoli

Eleonora Stoppino Dartmouth College

xiv

CONTRIBUTORS

Giorgio Taffon Universita` degli Studi di Roma 3

Alessandro Vettori Rutgers University

Anthony Julian Tamburri Florida Atlantic University

Daniele Vianello Universita` degli Studi di Roma 3

Anna Tedesco Universita` degli Studi di Palermo

Valerio Vicari Universita` degli Studi di Roma 3

Roberto Tessari Universita` di Torino

Antonio Vitti Wake Forest University

Carlo Testa University of British Columbia

Giada Viviani Bern University

Stefano Tomassini Universita` Ca’ Foscari di Venezia

David Ward Wellesley College

Anna Mauceri Trimnell John Cabot University, Rome

Elissa B. Weaver University of Chicago

Sabina Tutone Universitario Teatrale di Venezia

John P. Welle University of Notre Dame

Anne Urbancic Victoria College, University of Toronto

Rebecca West University of Chicago

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

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

Franco Vazzoler Universita` degli Studi di Genova

Vito Zagarrio Universita` di Roma

Paola Ventrone Universita` Cattolica del Sacro Cuore di Milano

Italo Zannier Universita` Ca’ Foscari di Venezia

Gabriella Veschi Universita` di Macerata

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

Piermario Vescovo Universita` Ca’ Foscari di Venezia

xv

ALPHABETICAL LIST OF ENTRIES A

B

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

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

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

xviii

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ALPHABETICAL LIST OF ENTRIES Holocaust Literature Humanism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

O Ojetti, Ugo Olmi, Ermanno xxii

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

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

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

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

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

R Raboni, Giovanni Ragazzoni, Ernesto

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

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

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

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

ALPHABETICAL LIST OF ENTRIES

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

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

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

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

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THEMATIC LIST OF ENTRIES Overviews

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

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

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

Persons Aganoor Pompilj, Vittoria Alberti, Leon Battista xxviii

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

xxxiv

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

INTRODUCTION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A ABECEDARY See Sillabari (Work by Goffedo Parise)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VITTORIA AGANOOR POMPILJ

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

concordance Florence Vuilleumier. Paris: Klincksieck, 1997.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SIBILLA ALERAMO (RINA FACCIO)

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

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

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

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

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

See also: Women’s History

Biography

Fiction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

UNA DONNA, 1906 Novel by Sibilla Aleramo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MIRRA, 1789 Tragedy by Vittorio Alfieri

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

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

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

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

SAUL, 1788 Tragedy by Vittorio Alfieri

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

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

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

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

25

FRANCESCO ALGAROTTI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

27

CORRADO ALVARO

DANTE ALIGHIERI See Dante Alighieri

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

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

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

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

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

CORRADO ALVARO See also: Verismo

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

Selected Works

Essays

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

Poetry ‘‘Poesie grigioverdi,’’ 1917.

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

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

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

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

AGNOLO AMBROGINI See Angelo Poliziano

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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GIOVAN BATTISTA ANDREINI

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lella piangente, 1634.

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

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

Essays Teatro celeste, 1624. Lo specchio, 1625.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

49

ANIMATION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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MICHELANGELO ANTONIONI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

L’AVVENTURA, 1960 Film by Michelangelo Antonioni

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Theater Amate sponde! Commedia italiana, 1974.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Films Mignon e` partita, 1988.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Letters Lettere Lettere Lettere Lettere Lettere Lettere

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

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

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

LA CORTIGIANA, 1534 Play by Pietro Aretino

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

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

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

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

RAGIONAMENTI, 1534–1536 Dialogues by Pietro Aretino

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LUDOVICO ARIOSTO and neo-Platonic oratory to the verbal playfulness of street theater, we witness Ariosto’s searing criticism of the academy and its relation to the marketplace. The piece becomes nothing less than a meditation on the perennial question of who owns knowledge. That vague sociological construct, the marketplace of ideas, gives way to the actual market stall from which Faventino tries to sell his brain child. This short prose work provides a good example of how Ariosto employed the classics in an ironic critique of his own contemporary culture. He might have struck a pose of Horatian disdain for all the hoopla of courtly life (Satire 3.40–44), but Ariosto remained very aware of his surroundings, and he disapproved of much of what he saw. In the same spirit and also in the latter decade of his life, Ariosto rewrote the Cinque Canti, originally composed in 1518–1519 and resumed in 1526, most likely