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 with an eye to adding them to the narrative of the Orlando Furioso. The cantos tell the grim story of the disintegration of Charlemagne’s army, indeed of the chivalric world as a whole. The narrative foregrounds the themes of evil, deceit, and betrayal in a martial setting that is radically different from the world depicted in the Orlando Furioso, so different, in fact, as to prompt a new wave of interpretive debate over the position of the cantos in Ariosto’s corpus. David Quint argued forcefully that the Cinque Canti were meant to be a freestanding work, whereas others, such as Sergio Zatti and Alberto Casadei, argued that the five cantos are fragments the poet could not insert into his larger narrative of the Orlando Furioso. We have 213 letters by Ariosto. The majority of them deal with issues arising from his position as the local representative of the Este family in the Garfagnana region of northern Tuscany from 1522 to 1525. In these letters we sense the author’s fatigue from dealing with the rough inhabitants of the mountainous outpost. As local magistrate of the Estense government, Ariosto was put in the unfamiliar position of serving as a provincial representative of the ruling power. His letters are often merely reports or requests, but in some of them one detects the critical and ironic voice of the poet, on the verge of commenting on the justice of whatever circumstance he must relay to his ducal lords. The remaining letters, approximately 25, are fascinating documents of Ariosto’s intellectual development, shedding light on the composition and production of Orlando Furioso and his other works, especially the comedies. The poet had to make arrangements for the production of his works, for example, requesting permission to have

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

COMEDIES Plays by Ludovico Ariosto

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SATIRE, 1517–1525 Poems by Ludovico Ariosto

Ariosto’s Satire (Satires) are in the tradition of the ancient Roman literary genre of the same name, a literary form marked by the freedom it gives the poet to mock and criticize his contemporary culture. Ariosto took full advantage of the satire’s generic conventions to lambaste the ambitions and foibles of his peers in general, with many individuals in particular skewered by his witty barbs. He accomplished this ongoing critique in these seven poems, composed between 1517 and 1525, in a colloquial and often ironic tone that contributes to what Cesare Segre has called his best comic writing (‘‘Struttura dialogica delle ‘Satire’ ariostesche,’’ 1979). 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 provides the metrical framework for Ariosto. Despite the pitfalls of the autobiographical fallacy, the tone of the Satire does reveal something of a private Ariosto, a man with familial cares and desires in addition to concerns about his career as a poet. In a tone that blends the colloquial and formal, the Satire provide a glimpse into Ariosto’s life, as it is and as he would have liked it to be. Often, the poet gave a passionate defense of the status quo. The first satire, composed and sent both to his brother, Alessandro, and a friend, Ludovico da 93

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

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

GIOVANNI ARPINO Editions

Further Reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Biography

Poetry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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ART CRITICISM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ASHES See Cenere (Work by Grazia Deledda)

105

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anthologies

Poetry

Radiodrama

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NOVELLE, 1554; 1573 Short Stories by Matteo Bandello

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE BANQUET See Convivio (Work by Dante Alighieri)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ANNA BANTI (LUCIA LOPRESTI) Selected Works

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

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

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

Plays Corte Savella, 1960.

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

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

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

ERMOLAO BARBARO (THE YOUNGER)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Translation Aristotle, Rhetorica, 1544.

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

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

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Selected Works

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

GIUSEPPE BARETTI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Play The Sentimental Mother, 1789.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DANIELLO BARTOLI

Biography

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GIORGIO BASSANI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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GIORGIO BASSANI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CESARE BECCARIA Selected Works

Further Reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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FEO BELCARI Rappresentazione Rappresentazione Rappresentazione Rappresentazione

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fiction Emina, 1856.

Translations La Science Nouvelle par Vico, 1844.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other Morte di Pasolini, 1981.

Further Reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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MARCO BELLOCCHIO

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Translations

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

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

PIETRO BEMBO

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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GLI ASOLANI, 1505 Dialogue by Pietro Bembo

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

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

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

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

PROSE DELLA VOLGAR LINGUA, 1525 Dialogue by Pietro Bembo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Biography

Libretti

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other Rime, 1614.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CATERINA BENINCASA See Catherine of Siena

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

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

STEFANO BENNI

Biography

Plays

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

Teatro, 1999. Teatro 2, 2003.

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

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

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

ANGELO BEOLCO See Il Ruzzante (Angelo Beolco)

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GIOVANNI BERCHET

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CARLO BERNARI (CARLO BERNARD)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Theater Via Rasella non passa per via Fani, 1981.

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

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FRANCESCO BERNI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ATTILIO BERTOLUCCI

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

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

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

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

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

BERNARDO BERTOLUCCI Poetry

Translations

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

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

Essays Aritmie, 1991. Ho rubato due versi a Baudelaire: prose e divagazioni, 2000. Amici, viaggi, incontri, 2003.

Other Una lunga amicizia. Lettere 1938–1982 (with Vittorio Sereni), 1994. Le pause operose del poeta. Attilio Bertolucci alla radio e alla tv, 1998. Il divino egoista (with Doriano Fasoli), 2002. Un’amicizia lunga una vita: carteggio, 1929–1984 (with Cesare Zavattini), edited by Guido Conti and Manuela Cacchioli, Parma: Monte Universita` Parma, 2004.

Further Reading Briganti, Paolo, and Maurizio Schiaretti, Sulla paziente storia dei giorni, Parma: Silva, 1998. Castellari, Mariagiulia, Attilio Bertolucci. La trama dei giorni da ricordare, Faenza: Moby Dick, 2001. Giovanuzzi, Stefano, Invito alla lettura Attilio Bertolucci, Milan: Mursia, 1997. Iacopetta, Antonio, Attilio Bertolucci: Lo specchio e la perdita, Rome: Bonacci, 1984. Jewell, Keala, The Poiesis of History: Experimenting with Genre in Postwar Italy, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992. Lagazzi, Paolo, Attilio Bertolucci, Florence: Nuova Italia, 1982. Lagazzi, Paolo, Reˆverie e destino, Milan: Garzanti, 1993. Lavagetto, Mario, ‘‘Pratica pirica,’’ in Nuovi Argomenti, 23–24 (1971): 221–233. Magro, Fabio, Un ritmo per l’esistenza e per il verso: metrica e stile nella poesia di Attilio Bertolucci, Padua: Esedra, 2005. Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo, ‘‘Attilio Bertolucci,’’ in Poeti italiani del Novecento, Milan: Mondadori, 1978.

BERNARDO BERTOLUCCI (1941–) Bernardo Bertolucci is the most international director ever to come out of the Italian film industry. Yet his first films were devoted to representing Italian national history from the early twentieth century to the present. He treated contemporary Italy in his early feature films, La commare secca (The Grim Reaper, 1962), Prima della rivoluzione (Before the Revolution, 1964) and Partner (1968), then looked back upon the decades of Fascism in Il conformista (The Conformist, 1970) and the Resistance in La strategia del ragno (The Spider’s Stratagem, 1970). He returned to contemporary times with Ultimo tango a Parigi (Last Tango in Paris, 1972), and subsequently took a retrospective,

century-long look at modern Italy in Novecento (1900, 1975–1976). In his subsequent film, La luna (Luna, 1979), Bertolucci adopted the viewpoint of the ‘‘stranger.’’ Italy was seen from the vantage point of the film’s protagonist, Caterina, a recently widowed American opera singer who goes on a tour to Italy with her teenage son, Joe. While she is performing in various Verdi operas in Rome, Caterina is shaken by the discovery that her troubled and lonely son is a heroin addict. Her desperate attempts to free Joe from his addiction result in an incestuous relationship; it also provides the possibility of reuniting him, and herself, with his father. The film’s

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BERNARDO BERTOLUCCI apparently personal journey into an individual’s psychological and existential universe represents one of Bertolucci’s many attempts to remap the cultural and historical identity of Italy. In the early days of his career as a filmmaker, he critically deconstructs Italy, but later recreates it as a mythical place that is the source of fears, anguishes, and dilemmas but also the source of inner dreams and hopes. As Francesco Casetti shows, the journey is a common trope in Bertolucci’s films, a way of exploring the complex web of issues that define Italy’s identity as perceived both by Italians generally and by Bertolucci personally (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1978). Bertolucci’s own perspective is framed by his ideological—mostly Marxist—and psychoanalytic—mostly Freudian—paradigms. Inherently and profoundly self-reflexive and intertextual, the whole of Bertolucci’s work, despite its diversity, remains utterly coherent and cohesive in its thematic and ideological structure. Three key images are constantly evoked in Bertolucci’s cinema: the journey, suggesting a coming from and/or going to one’s place of origin; ambiguity, often connected to a generational discomfort; and finally death, constantly attributed to or associated with a painful father-son relationship. Beginning with his first feature film, La commare secca, where a murder takes place in Rome but the murderer comes from Veneto, the trope of the journey provides a distinct narrative structure and thematic strategy for all of Bertolucci’s narratives. More often than not, an arrival provokes de´paysement, while a departure is rarely shown on screen. This dynamic informs the destiny of the main character in La strategia del ragno, a free adaptation of Jorge Louis Borges’ short story ‘‘Theme of the Traitor and Hero’’ that preserves the ambiguity and labyrinthine nature of its literary source. The protagonist is a young man, Athos Magnani, who resembles his father in the most minute details. He returns to his hometown, Tara, to meet his father’s lover, but ends up investigating his father’s past and the circumstances of his death in order to make sense of his own present. The film ends as the camera slowly pans over railroad tracks clogged with weeds and frozen in a timeless dimension suggesting the impossibility of departure from Tara. The search for personal meaning is also the search for a collective and generational understanding about one of the most crucial and problematic moments in Italy’s modern history, Fascism and the Resistance. This historical quest is developed in Bertolucci’s next film, released in 198

the same year, Il conformista, another free adaptation, this time from the novel by Alberto Moravia. The film centers on the troubled existence of a young man from a wealthy family, Marcello Clerici (played by Jean Louis Trintignant) who, in an extreme attempt to conceal his unconfessed abnormality, decides to collaborate with the Fascist regime and work for its secret police. He agrees to assist in the murder of his former teacher, professor Luca Quadri, an exiled anti-Fascist in Paris. The film takes the spectator through a series of flashbacks—a visual tour de force that explores a discomforting personal life and the compulsion to conform—that place Clerici’s actions within a larger metaphorical and political dimension, thus revealing the reasons for the collective fall into Fascism. A brilliant, decadent film, Il conformista fully discloses Bertolucci’s cinematic talent. As Angela Dalle Vacche perceptively remarks, Il conformista proposes an interpretation of Fascism that explicitly grounds the genesis of the regime in the vices of the bourgeois class, but also exploits Benito Mussolini’s ideology of a unified body politic translating it into a mesmerizing spectacle film (The Body in the Mirror, 1992). Bertolucci’s camera becomes an acting subject in exploring the past, together with Trintignant’s highly stylized performance. Cinematographer Vittorio Storaro entices the viewer with the same representational strategies promoted by the regime in order to gain consent from the nation: He uses chiaroscuro and the colour spectrum to blend iconographic elements, philosophical allusions, and psychological nuances. Both La strategia del ragno and Il conformista develop a sense of ambiguity that characterize Bertolucci’s cinema as a whole, including his next film, Ultimo Tango a Parigi, acclaimed as a landmark in cinema history. Such ambivalence works at the level of both form and content. Formally, Bertolucci’s narratives oscillate between diverse generic solutions, resisting facile, prefabricated, and codified plot strategies. At first influenced by Pier Paolo Pasolini, whom he met when he moved to Rome with his family and whom he assisted in the direction of his first feature film Accattone (1961), and later inspired by the French New Wave directors, most importantly by Jean-Luc Godard, Bertolucci pursued a new and contemporary interpretation of cine´ma ve´rite´ that expressed his personal authorial voice. It was with Ultimo Tango a Parigi that he dispatched the past and moved forward to a thoroughly new stage in his development as a filmmaker. The film is a self-reflexive and metadiscursive statement on cinema, its past and

BERNARDO BERTOLUCCI its future, as well as a disenchanted commentary on contemporary social behaviours. Marlon Brando’s performance as Paul, a middle-aged American in Paris, brings to the text Brando’s private and public persona and to the cinema to which he belongs. Brando’s character, indeed, serves as a testament to the last romantic hero. Paul meets the 20-year-old Jeanne (Maria Schneider) in an empty apartment that they both wish to sublet. They make love and come back during the following days, acting out their erotic fantasies. To visually represent their story, Storaro relied on the light of the winter sun to naturally convey a warm tonality and, inspired by Francis Bacon’s paintings, he chose orange as the colour of passion, of emotion. The tragic and romantic ending of the film invokes another trope in Bertolucci’s cinema, death. As they exit the apartment in which most of the story has unfolded, Paul and Jeanne walk to a dance hall where, during a heartbreaking tango sequence, Paul changes from a mythical and mysterious figure to become an older and unhappy man. A fairly plain and vacuous young woman, Jeanne is frightened by him and, as he follows her into her mother’s apartment wearing her father’s military hat, she shoots him. Bertolucci records Brando/Paul’s death in a splendid moment of cinematic bravura. A dying man, but also a fallen angel, he slowly retreats into the background of the image, steps onto the balcony, and raises his gaze to the sky with a smile that will forever remain in the spectator’s memory as a tender and tragic goodbye. Ultimo Tango a Parigi remains, along with Il conformista, one of Bertolucci’s most engaging and experimental films of the 1970s. The director’s remapping of modern Italy continued in his next film, Novecento, where in a long flashback he reviews 75 years of national history through the intertwined lives of Olmo Dalco (Ge´rard Depardieu), nephew of a peasant, and Alfredo Berlinghieri (Robert De Niro), the son of a landowner, born on the same day in the year 1900. The screenplay, authored by Bertolucci with his brother Giuseppe (also a filmmaker and a theatrical director), is a melodramatic saga staged as a political epic (the original director’s cut was five hours and 45 minutes). The film reaches its most climactic and controversial moment in the representation of the violence, decadence, and corruption of the Fascist years. As a whole, however, the film is uneven in its cinematic effects. With La tragedia di un uomo ridicolo (The Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man, 1981), Bertolucci ends his investigation of Italy’s modern history but continues to

use the recurring figure of death as a reflection of a precarious and difficult father-son relationship. The film tells the story of an Italian industrialist Primo Speggiari (played by Ugo Tognazzi) who, when his son is kidnapped and killed, tries to use the ransom money for his personal gain. La tragedia di un uomo ridicolo brings to an end Bertolucci’s personal journey to a place of origin, to the ambiguous relationship one often entertains with one’s past, often due to a deeply strained relationship with one’s father. As he seemed to bid farewell to his own country, he also recapitulated a lifelong dialogue with psychoanalysis, with cinema, but perhaps most importantly with ideology. Indeed, this farewell was reiterated in a documentary released in 1984 and dedicated to the death of Italian Communist Party leader Enrico Berlinguer, tellingly entitled L’addio a Enrico Berlinguer. After that, Bertolucci’s journeys take the spectator to foreign places—China in L’ultimo imperatore (The Last Emperor, 1987), Africa in Il te` nel deserto (The Sheltering Sky, 1990), India in Piccolo Buddha (Little Buddha, 1993). These films were produced with foreign financing and originally released in English. In L’ultimo imperatore, Bertolucci used a flashback structure to relate the spectacularly ambiguous life of Pu Yi, enthroned in 1908, at the age of three, as the emperor of China. He conjures up a complex vision to balance historical reconstruction with imaginative interpretation: Pu Yi’s journey unfolds from the imperial orange glow of his early age in the Forbidden City to the cold and bleak hues (blues and greys) of his prison years. Once again he creates a film of epic grandeur. When he returned to Italy, he did so by representing a group of foreigners who look at Italy as a place of beauty, memory, and inspiration for personal and sexual awakening, as happens in Io ballo da sola (Stealing Beauty, 1996), a film that taps a reservoir of mythical and perhaps even stereotypical images of the country. The foreign experience and understanding of Italy is once again the focus of Bertolucci’s L’assedio (Besieged, 1999), where an African woman Shandurai goes into exile in Italy, after a dictator jails her husband. She studies medicine and lives in one room of a Roman palazzo owned by Mr. Kinsky, an eccentric English pianist and composer. As the story unfolds in beautifully lit, womb-like interiors, the English man besieges her with flowers, gifts, and music, and declares his passionate love for her. Unquestionably, this film, like many other works by Bernardo Bertolucci, raises relevant and pressing questions about 199

BERNARDO BERTOLUCCI personal and collective identity. Italy is once again presented as the ideal place for individual, ideological, and sexual exploration. But the film also raises questions about ambiguity and death, two of the most recurrent topoi in Bertolucci’s distinctive and personal cinematic journey. Bertolucci’s way of telling a story is one of the most sophisticated in cinema. Always torn between Marxist politics and sensuous aesthetics, he works with ideological threads that become tangential, as he weaves a hauntingly beautiful visual fabric. His film, I sognatori (The Dreamers, 2003), which is set in Paris, pays the ultimate homage to Godard, to the great city of cinema. Once again Bertolucci shows that he can create images about which others can only dream.

Biography Born on March 16, 1941, in Parma. His father, Attilio, leading poet and film critic, inspired a love for the cinema by taking him frequently to the movies. Brother Giuseppe born, 1947. In his early teens, made two short films, La teleferica and Morte di un maiale. In 1952, family moved to Rome and settled in an apartment building where Pier Paolo Pasolini lived. Attended University of Rome (1958–1961), studying modern Italian literature; assistant director to Pasolini in Accattone, 1961. After that, left the university without completing his degree, and began training in film independently. In 1962, Bertolucci published his first book of poems, In cerca del mistero, and won the prestigious Viareggio prize. Directed his first feature film, La commare secca, 1962. Prima delle rivoluzione opened at the Cannes Film Festival in 1964, but did not receive theatrical distribution until 1967. In the 1960s, directed documentaries, such as La via del petrolio (1965–1966), and collaborated with Sergio Leone and Dario Argento on the screenplay for Leone’s C’era un volta il West (1968). Joined the Italian Communist Party (PCI), 1969, and began Freudian analysis. Ultimo tango a Parigi opened at the New York Film Festival, 1972. Recipient of numerous awards including an Oscar nomination for Il conformista (best screenplay), 1970, and for Ultimo tango a Parigi (best director), 1973; L’ultimo imperatore won nine Academy Awards, including set design, editing, and cinematography, 1988. Married to Clare Peploe, his closest collaborator on the set; lives in London and Rome. MANUELA GIERI 200

Selected Works Poetry ‘‘In cerca del mistero: poesie,’’ 1988.

Films La commare secca (The Grim Reaper), 1962. Prima della rivoluzione (Before the Revolution), 1964. La via del petrolio (documentary), 1965–1966. Partner (based on Dostoyevsky’s ‘‘The Double’’), 1968. Amore e rabbia (segment ‘‘Agonia’’), 1969. La strategia del ragno (The Spider’s Stratagem, based on Jorge Luis Borges’ ‘‘Theme of the Traitor and the Hero’’), 1970. Il conformista (The Conformist, based on Alberto Moravia’s novel), 1970. La salute e` malata (documentary), 1971. Ultimo tango a Parigi (Last Tango in Paris), 1972. Novecento Atto I and Atto II (1975–1976). La luna (Luna), 1979. La tragedia di un uomo ridicolo (Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man), 1981. L’addio a Enrico Berlinguer (documentary), 1984. L’ultimo imperatore (The Last Emperor, based on the book From Emperor to Citizen by Aisin-Gioro Pu Yi), 1987. 12 registi per 12 citta` (segment ‘‘Bologna’’), 1989. Il te` nel deserto (The Sheltering Sky, based on the novel by Paul Bowles), 1990. Piccolo Buddha (Little Buddha), 1993. Io ballo da sola (Stealing Beauty), 1996. L’assedio (Besieged, based on a short story by James Lasdun, ‘‘The Siege’’), 1999. Ten Minutes Older: The Cello (segment ‘‘Histoire d’eaux’’), 2002. I sognatori (The Dreamers), 2003.

Screenplays La commare secca, Milan: Zibetti, 1962; rpt. 1988. Ultimo tango a Parigi (with Franco Arcalli), Turin: Einaudi, 1973; as Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris, with essays by Pauline Kael, New York: Delacorte Press, 1973. Novecento, atto primo (with Franco Arcalli and Giuseppe Bertolucci), Turin: Einaudi, 1976. Novecento, atto secondo (with Franco Arcalli and Giuseppe Bertolucci), Turin: Einaudi, 1976. Piccolo Buddha (with Rudy Wurlitzer and Mark Peploe), Milan: Bompiani, 1993. Il te` nel deserto (with Mark Peploe), Milan: Bompiani, 1994. L’ultimo imperatore (with Mark Peploe and Enzo Ungari), Milan: Bompiani, 1995. Stealing Beauty, edited by Susan Minot, New York: Grove Press, 1996.

Further Reading Amengual, Barthe´lemy et al. (editors), Bernardo Bertolucci, Paris: Lettres modernes, 1979. Bertetto, Paolo (editor), Vittorio Storaro: Un percorso di luce, Turin: Umberto Allemandi & Co., 1989. Bertolucci Bertolucci: Interviews, edited by Fabien S. Gerard, T. Jefferson Kline and Bruce Sklarew, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000.

BESTIARIES Campani, Ermelinda M., L’anticonformista: Bernardo Bertolucci e il suo cinema, Florence: Cadmo, 1998. Campari, Roberto, In viaggio con Bernardo: il cinema di Bernardo Bertolucci, Venice: Marsilio, 1994. Carabba, Claudio, Gabriele Rizza, and Giovanni Maria Rossi, La regola delle illusioni: il cinema di Bernardo Bertolucci, Florence: Aida, 2003. Casetti, Francesco, Bernardo Bertolucci, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1978. Dalle Vacche, Angela, The Body in the Mirror: Shapes of History in Italian Cinema, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. Garofalo, Marcello, L’ultimo imperatore. Storia di un viaggio verso Occidente: dal film di Bernardo Bertolucci, Rome: Istituto Poligrafico dello Stato, 1991. Garofalo, Marcello, Bertolucci: Images, Lucca: M. Pacini Fazzi, 2000. Gerard, Fabien S., Ombres jaunes: journal de tournage du film Le dernier empereur de Bernardo Bertolucci, Paris: Cahiers du Cine´ma, 1987.

Kline, T. Jefferson, Bertolucci’s Dream Loom: A Psychoanalytic Study of Cinema, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987. Kolker, Robert Phillip, Bernardo Bertolucci, London: British Film Institute, 1985. Pillitteri, Paolo, Il conformista indifferente e il delitto Rosselli, Milan: Bietti, 2003. Pitiot, Pierre, and Jean-Claude Mirabella, Sur Bertolucci, Castelnau-le-Lez: Climats, 1991. Prono, Franco, Bernardo Bertolucci: Il conformista, Turin: Lindau, 1998. Socci, Stefano, Bernardo Bertolucci, Milan: Il Castoro, 1996. Tonetti, Claretta, Bernardo Bertolucci: The Cinema of Ambiguity, New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995. Ungari, Enzo (with Bernardo Bertolucci), Scene madri, Milan: Ubulibri, 1987.

BESTIARIES The literary works whose protagonists are animals have Semitic and Arian origins, which have been passed down through the Assiro-Babylonian tradition and the Indian Panchatantra to Giovanni da Capua, who popularized the animal tale in the West in the twelfth century. This heritage was further elaborated in ancient Greece with Aesop’s literary personification of animals in the fourth century BC. Aesop was followed by Phaedrus, who lived during the first empire. Then, in the second-century AD, Apuleius wrote the Metamorphoses, influenced by the Fabulae Milesiae by Aristide of Mileto (second century BC). The first Italian fables with animal protagonists stem from earlier Latin and French fables found in three different medieval collections: (a) the fables in elegiac couplets, well known in the Middle Ages and Renaissance as Aesopus communis; (b) the Ysopets by Marie de France (late twelfth century), translated into standard Tuscan in the thirteenth century; (c) the medieval bestiaries, allegorical treatises with a morally didactic purpose in strict agreement with medieval aesthetics. Bestiario moralizzato, published in 1889 and reprinted in 1983, presents a manuscript from the fourteenth century written by an anonymous author from Umbria. It

is composed of 64 sonnets, each of which is about a different animal. While the text often refers to the classical tradition—Aesopus communis in particular—it was written in the spirit of medieval mysticism. Thus, it is based on the understanding of the function of literature in terms of a specific manGod relationship, a common feature among the bestiaries of the Middle Ages. On the other hand, the Esopi volgari from the fourteenth century offer political rules of civil prudence to the reader, and, therefore, surpass the exclusively didactic and moralizing medieval tradition. Bestiario politico by the Anonymous Goriziano and the Bestiario moralizzato di Gubbio reveal the same sort of innovative thinking, and so does the mystical bestiary of the Fioretti of Franciscan literature, a simplified Tuscan version (1370–1390) of a doctrinal Latin work. The Italian Humanists also turned back to Aesop and Phaedrus, and their critical approach to the animal tale was later passed down to the thinkers of the Enlightenment. Among those who popularized Aesop in Italy are Chiaro Davanzati in the thirteenth century, Antonio Pucci (1310–1388), Luigi Pulci (1432–1484), Bernardino da Siena (1380–1440), Anton Francesco Doni (1513–1574), and Giaovan Battista Gelli (1498–1563), who 201

BESTIARIES translated the Metamorphoses by Apuleius, discovered by Boccaccio. Moreover, famous Humanists from Poggio Bracciolini (Facetiae, 1452), to Giovanni Pontano (Asinus, 1491) and Leon Battista Alberti (Intercoenales, 1438) also adopted themes from Aesop in their works. Additionally, Leonardo Da Vinci’s writings in praise of Aesop (1483–1499) make up a part of the Codice Atlantico in the Ambrosiana Library in Milan. Written in a style in harmony with the philosophy of the Renaissance, Leonardo’s Aesopian apologies form a Bestiario moralizzato. In them, the author seeks to reveal certain truths about mankind through various images of animal nature. Then, Agnolo Firenzuola (1493–1543) creates an adaptation of the Second Book of Panchatantra focusing on contemporary customs and morality. The work is entitled Prima veste dei discorsi degli animali (The First Version of the Animals’ Discourses) and was published in 1548. On the other hand, Niccolo` Machiavelli’s L’asino d’oro (The Golden Ass, 1515) refers back to the Cricket by Plutarch. It is a work written in a philosophically critical way. Likewise, in Cabala del cavallo pegaseo (The Intrigue of the Winged Horse, 1585), Giordano Bruno makes use of the images of animals in a broader antiperipatetic discourse. The zooepic is another mainstream genre in which the protagonists are animals. Its literary antecedent is the Batrachomyomachy, attributed to Homer. In the twelfth century this work became the basis of the French Roman de Renart, popularized in Italy in Franco-Veneto dialect in the work Rainaldo e Lesengrino. The Batrachomyomachy was then translated anew by Lorenzo Valla in the fifteenth century. Moreover, the zooepic is also present in Teofilo Folengo’s Moschea (The Battle of the Flies, 1521), a parody in macaronic language, well known in Europe at the time. Thus, the zooepic gradually acquired ironic, social, anticlerical, and antifeudal overtones. In the tradition of the fable after Aesop, the animal characters are often the mouthpieces of mankind. The posthumous work of the Abbot Francesco Fulvio Frugoni (ca. 1620–1686), Il cane di Diogene (The Dog of Diogenes, 1689), is even divided into ‘‘barks,’’ thus referring to the Novelas Esemplares (1613) by Miguel De Cervantes composed in accordance with the Baroque taste for laughter. In the eighteenth century, the antisatirical vein of the Arcadia places the animals in a pastoral melicidyllic context. Giovanni Meli (1740–1815) is one of the greatest masters of this style. His Favule murali (Moral Fables, 1814), told in Sicilian dialect, attest to a basic Enlightenment faith in human progress, 202

even though human beings are less wise than the animals, which lead a life according to nature. In opposition to the mild moralism of the Favole esopiane (Fables After Aesop, 1748) by Gasparo Gozzi, a great number of gnomic and satirical works inspired by the poignant moralism of Il giorno (The Day, 1801–1804) by Giuseppe Parini appear in the second half of the century. The most important of these gnomic poets is Giancarlo Passeroni (1713–1803), who parodies all aspects of eighteenthcentury Italian life in the seven volumes of his Favole esopiane (Fables After Aesop, 1779–1786). A characteristic of Italian romantic poetry is the fusion of a sentimental subject matter with classical and realistic elements. Giosue` Carducci (1835– 1907) gives rise to this style with his rendition of the bucolic myth about Versilia in poems such as ‘‘Il bove’’ (The Ox), ‘‘A un asino’’ (To a Donkey), and ‘‘Canti di marzo’’ (March Songs). The works of Giacomo Zanella (1820–1888), in particular his most famous poem ‘‘Sopra una conchiglia fossile’’ (On a Fossil Shell in My Study) and the satiric short poems of Filippo Pananti (1766–1837) are also written in this poetic vein. The latter, moreover, became a model and inspiration for the satirical poetry of Giuseppe Giusti (1808–1850), such as in ‘‘Il re Travicello’’ (King Log) and ‘‘La chiocciola’’ (The Snail), and Gioachino Belli (1791– 1863). Other examples of works composed in this style are Ommini e bestie (Humans and Animals, 1914), Lupi e agnelli (Wolves and Lambs, 1919), Giove e le bestie (Jupiter and the Animals, 1932), three bestiaries by Trilussa (1871–1950) written in modern Roman dialect. Undoubtedly, Giacomo Leopardi’s work surpasses the compositions discussed above with the depth of its insight. In 1815, Leopardi himself translated the Batrachomyomachy, and, therefore, drew the heroic component of his Romanticism from the very source of the zooepic. His heroic and comic poem, Paralipomeni della Batracomiomachia (The War of the Mice and the Frogs), for instance, is a biting satire of the Restoration. Aesopian themes are also present in Leopardi’s Operette morali (Little Moral Exercises) and his Grandi idilli (Great Songs). In fact, the anthropocentric aspect of the Aesopian literature of the Renaissance is brought to an end by Leopardi, whose writing gives rise to the twentieth-century Italian bestiaries. Today, animals no longer serve as moral exemplum in literature and have lost the sacred, fantastic, and symbolic qualities prescribed to them by the allegorical tradition. Giovanni Pascoli, for example, combines his decadent style with images

BESTIARIES from the animal world. Aesopism is also a part of the pantheistic metamorphosis in Gabriele D’Annunzio’s work. Finally, Luigi Pirandello’s bestiaries in Favole della volpe (Fox Tales, 1905) and Novelle per un anno (Short Stories, 1937) are written in the context of the crisis of positivism. Moreover, in the twentieth century, animal protagonists become the embodiments of psychological themes such as the metamorphic imaginary of the unconscious. Arturo Loria’s 70 Aesopian fables, published in 1957, and his Bestiario poetico (A Poetic Bestiary, 1959) are also modeled on Leopardi’s ideas. Likewise, Italo Svevo represents familiar everyday life in his ornithological bestiary Una burla riuscita (The Hoax, 1925), based on Leopardi’s operetta morale ‘‘Elogio degli uccelli’’ (In Praise of Birds). Svevo also uses Darwin’s vision of biological existence as a perpetual struggle and competition. In the sarcastic Primo libro delle favole (The First Book of Fables, 1952) by Carlo Emilio Gadda, the principal characters in a world of chaos are sparrows that represent the author’s anticonformist views, and the pteromorphic moralism of Le favole della dittatura (Fables of the Dictatorship, 1950) by Leonardo Sciascia also goes back to Phaedrus. The protagonist of Il corvo (The Raven) by Sciascia, inspired by Poe’s tale, embodies human illusions, while the work as a whole represents certain existential dramatic tensions. Moreover, in La famosa invasione degli orsi in Sicilia (The Famous Invasion of the Bears in Sicily, 1945), Dino Buzzati rejects the Aristotelian understanding that animals do not have a rational soul. Similarly, Aldo Palazzeschi’s Bestie del 900 (Twentieth-Century Animals, 1951) is a critique of anthropocentrism. This is a parody of medieval bestiaries that satirizes the institutions. In his unfinished Favole e apologhi (Fables and Apologues), Umberto Saba takes up Leopardi’s approach to the personification of animals. The sparrows in his ‘‘Quasi una moralita`’’ represent archetypal domestic sentiments. The she-goat, for instance, becomes a zooerotical image of the womananimal in his well-known poem ‘‘A mia moglie.’’ The same symbol also appears in Italo Svevo’s writing. Likewise, the okapi, the vixen-lover, and

the birds of Eugenio Montale all have a Jungian psychological function. Dialoghi con Leuco` (1947) by Cesare Pavese discusses mythological monsters such as Lycaon (woolf-man), Chimera, Centaurs, while Antonio Tabucchi in his Angelo nero (1991) and Requiem (1992) calls forth a bestiary deprived of any kind of heraldic allure. Tommaso Landolfi has a predilection for insects, from the spider to the cockroach, and, thus, composes a bestiary based on the very first stages of evolution. The creatures in his writing are never presented in an allegorical context. Finally, Giorgio Manganelli transforms his bestiary into a representation of the crisis of literature. His moths, butterflies, worms, and earthworms are all images of the lowest forms of life whose destiny can only be to fade away. PAOLA MARTINUZZI See also: Literature of Anthropology Further Reading Auerbach, Erich, ‘‘Figura,’’ in Archivium Romanicum, Nuova rivista di Filologia Romanza, 22 (1938): 436–489. Biagini, Enza, and Anna Nozzoli (editors), Bestiari del Novecento, Rome: Bulzoni, 2001. Cassirer, Ernest, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, New York: Barnes and Noble, 1963. Durand, Gilbert, Les structures anthropologiques de l’imaginaire, Paris: Bordas, 1969. Eco, Umberto, and Chiara Frugoni, ‘‘A Bestiary in Stone,’’ in FMR: the magazine of Franco Maria Ricci, 92 (1998): 17–36. Lecomte, Mia, Animali Parlanti, Florence: Firenze Atheneum, 1995. Lewinsohn, Richard, alias Morus, Gli animali nella storia della civilta`, Milan: Mondadori, 1956. Mezzalira, Francesco, Beasts and Bestiaries: The Representation of animals from Prehistory to the Renaissance, Turin: Allemandi, 2001. Morini, Luigina, Bestiari medievali, Turin: Einaudi, 1996. Seppilli, Anita, Poesia e magia, Turin: Einaudi, 1962. Theobaldus Epicopus, Physiologus, London: J & E Bumps, 1928. Zambon, Francesco, Il bestiario di Cambridge, Milan: FMR, 1974. Zambon, Francesco, L’alfabetico simbolico degli animali: I bestiaridel medioevo, Milan: Lumi, 2001.

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CARLO BETOCCHI

CARLO BETOCCHI (1899–1986) In 1932, Carlo Betocchi’s first book, Realta` vince il sogno (Reality Defeats Dreams), a thin volume of 32 lyrics, was published in the poetry series of Frontespizio, the literary Catholic review for which Betocchi was an active contributor. This volume declared a new poetics. In the 1930s, Hermeticism was the dominant poetic movement in Florence. Although Betocchi struck up a friendship with many of its major representatives, such as Mario Luzi, Carlo Bo, and Alfonso Gatto, his poetry is not considered a part of the movement. Realta` vince il sogno does not share any of the Hermetic commonplaces or poetic principles. Betocchi’s main intellectual point of reference was a circle of young Florentine intellectuals rather removed from the Hermetics that included the Catholic novelist Nicola Lisi (1893–1975) and the critic and essayist Piero Bargellini (1897–1980). Sharing Lisi’s and Bargellini’s profound religiosity, he collaborated with them in launching the periodical Calendario dei pensieri e delle pratiche solari in 1923. Betocchi’s non-Hermetic poetics are exemplified by the following verse, from the poem ‘‘Della solitudine’’ (On Solitude): ‘‘E godo la terra / bruna e l’indistruttibile / certezza delle sue cose’’ (I enjoy the brown / earth and the indestructible / certainty of earthly things). The poem is typical of Betocchi’s abiding desire to converse with reality, especially with the landscape with which he enjoys intimate contact. The poet seems immune to the exalted mysticism typical of Hermeticism. Saba’s poetics of direct feeling is a more appropriate reference point for understanding his poetry. In their very titles, Betocchi’s poetic collections describe humble events and common facts and creatures in spiritual communion with a divine presence that permeates reality. As he stated in ‘‘Diario della poesia e della rima’’ (Journal of Poetry and Rhyme), a short essay collected in Tutte le poesie (Complete Poems, 1984), rhyme itself is a rhetorical device to achieve objectivity. Betocchi’s verses could be called a poetry of images in which he represents the lyric scene as if drawing it by hand. His poem ‘‘Piazza dei fanciulli la sera’’ (Square with Children at Night), also in Realta` vince il sogno, is an example. The whole 204

poem develops out of a descriptive catalogue of fixed and moving images; the setting and the people are poetically framed as in an idyll. Yet, the poem is a static representation of nature and humanity. Only with his subsequent collections did Betocchi develop this poetic stasis into a more dynamic form of representation. However, the core of his poetry remained essentially the same: Altre poesie (Other Poems, 1939) as well as Notizie di prosa e di poesia (News on Prose and Poetry, 1947) confirm Betocchi’s poetic craft, and display a deeper cultural consciousness and a better use of his metrical skills. The volume Poesie (Poems, 1955) represents a collection of all his poetic production up to that year. Betocchi continued to update his collected works in Prime e ultimissime (First and Latest Poems, 1974), which included L’estate di San Martino (Indian Summer, 1961) and Un passo, un altro passo (A Step, Another Step, 1967). Un passo, un altro passo opens a new phase in Betocchi’s poetic career: As his poetry matured, he began to understand reality in a deeper sense. His poetry became freer to express itself and to release his religious spirit. Considered his greatest poetic achievement, the volume embodies the sincere and humble image of a man dealing with the everyday aspects of religion and deriving from them profound theological insights. The greatness and mystery of the Christian God are treated as facts that must be taken as they are. Indeed, Betocchi’s final message is simply that God is what He is: This dogmatic, biblical formula contains every necessary explanation. Betocchi’s poetry is thus at its most captivating at the very end of the poet’s life. His final collection, Poesie del sabato 1930–1980 (Saturday’s Poems, 1980), which contains the extraordinary section ‘‘Breviario della necessita`’’ (Breviary of Necessity), constitutes both a summa and a continual beginning of his poetry.

Biography Born in Turin on May 23, 1899. When his father died in 1911, family moved to Florence. Graduated from the Istituto Tecnico Statale of Florence as a land surveyor, 1915. Moved to Parma where he joined the army, 1917. Served on the Austrian

CARLO BETOCCHI front during World War I and in Libya as a garrison officer, 1918. Discharged, 1920. In Florence, with Nicola Lisi, Pietro Parigi, and Piero Bargellini, founded the Calendario dei pensieri e delle pratiche solari, 1923. Cofounded Frontespizio, 1930. Contributor to Il Selvaggio, Primato, Campo di Marte, Letteratura, 1929–1938. Moved to Trieste, 1939. Moved to Bologna and then to Rome, 1941. Appointed professor at the Conservatorio Statale of Venice, 1942; professor at the Conservatorio ‘‘L. Cherubini’’ in Florence, 1952–1968. Awarded the Viareggio prize for Poesie, 1955. Appointed editorin-chief of the radio programme ‘‘L’Approdo,’’ 1958; editor-in-chief of L’Approdo letterario until 1977. Awarded the Citta` di Florence prize for L’estate di San Martino with the ‘‘Dante Alighieri’’ Medal, 1961; Bergamo prize for Sparsi nel mondo, 1962; Lerici-Pea prize for poetry, 1966; Libri dell’anno della scuola italiana prize for Un passo un altro passo, 1967. Awarded the Feltrinelli International Prize for poetry, 1967; Isola d’Elba prize for Un passo, un altro passo, 1968. Awarded the ‘‘Penna d’oro’’ by the president of Italy Sandro Pertini for his achievements in poetry, 1981; E. Montale (Librex-Guggenheim) prize for poetry, 1984. Died in Bordighera on May 25, 1986. DIEGO BERTELLI Selected Works Collections Poems translated by Isidore Lawrence Salomon, New York: Clarke & Way,1964. Tutte le poesie, edited by Luigina Stefani, Milan: Mondadori, 1984.

Poetry ‘‘Realta` vince il sogno,’’ 1932. ‘‘Altre poesie,’’ 1939. ‘‘Notizie di prosa e di poesia,’’ 1947. ‘‘Un ponte nella pianura,’’ 1953. ‘‘Poesie,’’ 1955. ‘‘L’estate di San Martino,’’ 1961. ‘‘Un passo, un altro passo,’’ 1967. ‘‘Prime e ultimissime,’’ 1974. ‘‘Poesie del sabato,’’ 1930–1980, 1980.

‘‘Il sale del canto,’’ 1980. ‘‘Del sempre,’’ 1982. ‘‘Dal definitivo istante: poesie scelte e inediti,’’ edited by Giorgio Tabanelli, 1999.

Fiction Cuore di primavera, 1959. Sparsi pel monte, 1965. Vino di Ciociaria, 1965. L’anno di Caporetto, 1967. Collodi, Pinocchio, Florence, 1968. Memorie, racconti, poemetti in prosa, 1983. Confessioni minori, 1985.

Essays Mistici medievali, with Nicola Lisi and Luigi Fallacara, 1956.

Letters Lettere a Franco Scataglini (1976–1984), edited by Massimo Raffaelli, 1991. Incontro a Tursi. Lettere di Betocchi a Pierro, poesie, testi critici vari, edited by Emerico Giachery, 1973. Io son come l’erba: epistolario Carlo Betocchi-Maria Pia Pazielli, edited by Paola Mallone, 2004.

Further Reading Agnello, Nino, La poesia di Carlo Betocchi tra relativo e assoluto, Foggia: Bastogi, 2000. Baldini, Michela (editor), Pagina illustrata: prose e lettere fiorentine di Carlo Betocchi, Florence: Societa` Editrice Fiorentina, 2004. Bo, Carlo, Nuovi studi, Florence: Vallecchi, 1946. Civitareale, Pietro, Carlo Betocchi, Milan: Mursia, 1977. De Robertis, Giuseppe, Scrittori del Novecento, Florence: Le Monnier, 1940. De Robertis, Giuseppe, Altro Novecento, Florence: Le Monnier, 1962. Dolfi, Anna (editor), Anniversario per Carlo Betocchi, Rome: Bulzoni, 2000. Macrı`, Oreste, Esemplari del sentimento poetico contemporaneo, Florence: Vallecchi, 1941. Pasolini, Pier Paolo, Descrizioni di descrizioni, edited by Graziella Chiarcossi, Turin: Einaudi, 1979. Ramat, Silvio, La pianta della poesia, Florence: Vallecchi, 1972. Stefani, Luigina (editor), Dal sogno alla nuda parola, Florence: Gabinetto G. P. Viesseux, 1987. Stefani, Luigina (editor), Carlo Betocchi: Atti del Convegno di studi, Florence: Le Lettere, 1990. Stefani, Luigina, La biblioteca e l’officina di Betocchi, 2 vols., Rome: Bulzoni 1994. Volpini, Valerio, Betocchi, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1971.

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UGO BETTI

THE BETROTHED See I Promessi sposi (Work by Alossandro Manzoni)

UGO BETTI (1892–1953) Next to Pirandello, Ugo Betti is one of the most significant Italian playwrights of the twentieth century. His work dramatizes the typical existential crises of his generation. As a dramatist he is concerned with identifying the underlying causes and motives of human action. Moreover, his writing follows, in form as well as in content, the norms imposed by his career as a magistrate. Questions concerning legal ‘‘actuality’’ and the dialectical confrontation between characters are rather prominent, particularly in his dramatic work. The basic structure of Betti’s dramatic work, his poetry, and his short stories, is rather complicated. The ‘‘three-dimensionality of his poetic writing’’ combines realism, psychology, spirituality, or escapology. His works thus may fluctuate in surprising ways between everyday facts and fairy tale, a logical consequence of Betti’s situating himself al confine, on the ‘‘boundary line’’ (Gaetana Marrone, La drammatica di Ugo Betti, 1988). Literary criticism has often dealt with only one of these three components, although studies open to the multiple sense of Betti’s texts are not totally absent. Betti is mainly preoccupied with problems linked to war, emigration, the contrast between generations, and family. His work not only presents eternal or universal aspects of human reality, but also refers to specific moments in history. His characters are drawn from the social types he had come into contact with during his career as a lawyer. His work is further characterized by religious and existential anxiety, by a desire for some sort of harmony, and by a continuous effort to find a path of escape from worldly concerns. His own experience of social life and of human behaviour is vividly 206

expressed in his representations of modern existential situations. His attempt to be always ‘‘within his time,’’ to give his writing a profound social and existential meaning, is particularly evident in works such as Ispezione (The Inquiry, 1942), Delitto all’isola delle capre (Crime on Goat Island, 1948), La regina e gli insorti (The Queen and the Rebels, 1949), Il giocatore (The Gambler, 1950), L’aiuola bruciata (The Burnt Flower-Bed, 1951– 1952). According to Betti himself, in the essay ‘‘Religione e teatro’’ (Religion and Theatre, 1957), his texts are not intended ‘‘a passare la sera’’ (to pass an evening). For Betti there is a profound identity between art and life: Art is born as ‘‘una scintilla dall’attrito dell’artista con la vita vivente che gli e` intorno’’ (a spark from the friction of the artist with the living life surrounding him). The artist therefore is always ‘‘il giudice e l’interprete’’ (the judge and interpreter) of his own time (‘‘Esame di coscienza,’’ 1933). In the essay ‘‘Teatro grande’’ (Great Theatre), which appeared in La gazzetta del popolo of 16 May 1933, he wrote that the theater had to ‘‘costringere il secolo a guardare in se stesso, a illuminarsi, a ribellarsi magari’’ (to compel the century to look at itself, to illuminate itself, possibly to rebel), a phrase that expresses the threefold structure of his work: rebellion (revolt against a certain way of family and social life), introspection, and escape into some transcendental realm. Apart from a play inspired by a fairy tale, L’isola meravigliosa (The Marvellous Island, 1930), the theater of Ugo Betti resumed the tradition of a naturalistic triangle: the principal character, man or woman, is in conflict with two other characters;

UGO BETTI all of them desire self-realization. La padrona (The Mistress, 1926), La casa sull’acqua (The House on the Water, 1928) and Un albergo sul porto (An Inn on the Harbor, 1930), plays that are clearly influenced by the Russian theater of the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, are representative of this initial way of conceiving drama. In a letter to Luigi Almirante dated 9 November 1936, dealing with the staging of Frana allo Scalo Nord (Landslide at the North Station, 1932) by the Palmer-Almirante Company at the Teatro Valle in Rome, Betti emphasized that dramatic performance should be ‘‘su un tono di assoluta reale umanita`: verita` e naturalezza’’ (in a tone of absolutely real humanity: truth and naturalness) and that the actors ‘‘devono solo essere veri e umani’’ (they should only be true and natural). Drama should be played out in accordance with the real world. However, ‘‘senza che gli attori se lo siano proposto deve sorgere nello spettatore una impressione e quasi un vago sospetto di soprarealta`’’ (an impression and almost a vague suspicion of surreality ought to arise in the spectator, without the overt suggestion of the actors). The transition from reality to surreality should not be signaled by the actors, but suggested by allusions or through scenographic transformations. In Frana allo Scalo Nord Betti achieves his singular artistic style, which had already been anticipated in some passages of his farse, Il diluvio (The Flood), written in 1931 (first performed in 1942). For Betti’s characters the clash between good and evil leads to the acknowledgment of the good and therefore of the divine. The modes of ‘‘suspension’’ and ‘‘silence’’ characterize his theatrical discourse. The Bettian character does not succeed in opening himself up to the other. On the contrary, he withdraws from contact with others and into a sort of existential ressentiment. The central dramatic situation of Betti’s plays thus involves the arrival of a stranger, a sort of ‘‘messenger,’’ who forces the other characters to look into themselves. Soon, the walls between the characters begin to disintegrate. Crevices are opened, sometimes veritable breaches, from which confessions, some of them violent, emerge; confessions that express Angst and desires, themselves feelings that inspire fear. The building contractor Gaucker, in Frana allo Scalo Nord, cries: ‘‘mi sono visto... come se mi si fosse spaccata una crosta’’ (I have seen myself... as if a crust had been cracked). Bettian drama is divided among three principal characters and their distinct functions: the principal character or characters, who admit their guilt; their antagonists, particularly

‘‘lawyers’’ and ‘‘judges,’’ who try to detect the secret motives of the central character; the stranger, the ‘‘messenger,’’ who provokes a confession. The dramatic language accordingly adopts the syntax of the legal debate. Although admitting his guilt, the protagonist goes on to defend his actions. Another, more emotional mode of discourse interacts with the mode of debate without interrupting or fracturing it. Because of this stylistic uniformity, the spectator has the impression that Betti privileges the logical, whereas, in reality, he is abandoning himself to intuition and emotion. Betti’s plays increasingly came to emphasize individuality. Simone in Un albergo sul porto, Valerio in Notte in casa del ricco (Night in the Rich Man’s House, 1938), Antonio in Il vento notturno (The Night Wind, 1941), Cust in Corruzione al Palazzo di Giustizia, (Corruption in the Palace of Justice, 1949), Amos in La regina e gli insorti, and Ennio in Il giocatore are characters born from a historical context; characters who still are beset by the problem of innocence and individual guilt. As Lia Fava Guzzetta shows in her introduction to Novelle edite e rare (2001), the spaces in which the Bettian characters move do not allow memory to effect idyllic or sentimental transformation: Objects are present in all their corporeality and, often, abjection. When nature appears in its most destructive form, as for instance in the short story ‘‘La cancellata’’ (The Gate, 1920), the town is also present in its most impersonal dimension, showing no traces of its historic and cultural past. Bettian characters lose their contact with each other, even if they live close to one another or are separated only by thin walls that transmit sounds but not meaning, as in Il vento notturno. Sometimes space is limited to a few poor rooms in small flats or boarding houses, as in Ispezione, Lotta fino all’alba (Struggle Till Dawn, 1945), Spiritismo nell’antica casa (Spiriualism in the Ancient House, 1946), and in most of the short stories in the collection Le case ( Houses, 1933). The same atmosphere dominates in the plays that are most directly linked to Betti’s profession, as for instance Frana allo Scalo Nord and Corruzione al Palazzo di Giustizia. Justice loses its way in a maze of personal passions and interests. In the preface to La padrona, Betti says that he does not want to identify himself with certain writers who only seek to show off their own intelligence and excellent literary style. For him, on the contrary, ‘‘solamente tutto l’altro, ci sta a cuore: la nostra fatica, il nostro amore, e la gioia... e soprattutto il dolore...’’ (all the other things are most 207

UGO BETTI important: our struggles, our love, and our happiness... but above all our suffering). His moral and social commitment prevented him from conceiving writings as game, artifice, evasion. By virtue of this commitment, the dramatic, narrative, and poetic works of Betti are continuous reflections on the ‘‘why’’ of human conduct. Through his analysis of the individual, Ugo Betti is a ‘‘judge’’ who pronounces on the misery of his time. To Betti, history is only interesting to the extent it mirrors the story of the individual. He concludes his essay ‘‘Religione e Teatro’’ with words that define his poetics: Nell’animo dell’uomo ingiusto e addirittura del giudice eversore della giustizia, scopriremo, alla fine, che egli stesso non potra` respirare e sopravvivere senza una giustizia. Sorprenderemo, nell’animo dei crudeli, degli egoisti, dei perduti, nel fondo delle amarezze piu` indurite, a un certo punto, un ‘ingiustificato’ bisogno di pieta`, d’armonia, di solidarieta`, d’immortalita`, di fiducia, di perdono; e soprattutto d’amore... Ognuna di queste misteriose esigenze e` il lato di un perimetro, il cui disegno completo, quando lo intravediamo finalmente, ha un nome: Dio In the soul of the unjust... we shall discover, at the end, that the unjust himself cannot live without justice. At the far end of atrocity, egoism, moral decline of the most hardened bitterness... we may discover by surprise an ‘unjustified’ need of pity, harmony, solidarity, immortality, trust, forgiveness; and especially love... Each of these mysterious requirements is an edge of a perimeter, of which the complete design, when it will finally be transparent to our sight, has a name: God.

We may place the plays that apparently are connected with the political context of the immediate postwar period within this moral perspective, plays such as La regina e gli insorti and L’aiuola bruciata, which may seem prophetic to the extent that Betti foresaw the growing indifference of human beings toward others. Betti dealt with the same motifs in his poetry and short stories as in his dramatic texts: poverty, family relations, emigration, accidents caused by work, corruption, and political interference into private life. In his first volume of poetry, Il re pensieroso (The Pensive King, 1922), and in his later verses as well, Betti often abandoned himself to the fairy tale. Due to the elegance, grace, and lightness of his poetic style he has a certain affinity with the socalled crepuscolari, although he is substantially far from the manner in which this group of poets privileges the pure musicality of word, rhythm, and metre. His poetry plays the darkness of death and human misery against an ardent desire for light 208

and life. The fairy tale also appears in works that devote a great deal of attention to problematic social issues, such as Canzonette-La morte (Little Songs-Death, 1932), Uomo e donna (Man and Woman, 1937), and the posthumous collection Ultime liriche 1938–1953 (Last Lyrics, 1957). The short stories center on a single and focal point of view. The narrative voice selects and displays the facts in a way that reflects his own sensibility and emotion. Today we can read all the short stories in a critical edition, Novelle edite e rare, edited by Alfredo Luzi in 2001. For the first time, therefore, it is possible to appreciate the high aesthetic value of the whole corpus of short stories, among which are also stories with a realistic, interior, and metaphysic dimension: Caino (Cain, 1928) Le case (Houses, 1933), and Una strana serata (A Strange Evening, 1948). The short stories are certainly not to be considered as test cases for themes that are developed later in the dramatic work. Betti followed his own experimental course from La Ronda to Solaria, one that took as its point of departure a fruitful combination of fairy tale elements with various modes of realism. The same combination of elements appears in the short novel La piera alta (The High Stone, 1948), initially published as a serial in L’illustrazione italiana (6 July–30 November 1947), and thematically based on the film treatment I tre del Pra’ di Sopra (The Three from the Meadow), which Betti had submitted to a 1939 contest promoted by the review Cinema. The innovative aspects of Ugo Betti’s art stem from his disregard of specific literary schools and ideologies. His art originates in his attentive observation of reality and in an irrepressible urge to find the meaning of life.

Biography Born in Camerino (Macerata) on 4 February 1892. In 1901 moved to Parma, where the father had an appointment as director of the municipal hospital. With his brother Emilio, Ugo often returned to visit his grandparents in Camerino. He remained closely attached to his native town. After having completed his high school studies, he enrolled as a student of law at the University of Parma. His doctoral thesis, ‘‘Il diritto e la rivoluzione’’ was later elaborated as the essay ‘‘Considerazioni sulla forza maggiore come limite di responsabilita` del vettore ferroviario,’’ 1920. After attending the military academy in Turin (1916), he volunteered for the front, where he was taken prisoner after the defeat of Caporetto (1917). During his captivity

UGO BETTI he stayed first in Rastatt, then in Cellelager, in barrack 15/C, where he befriended the writers Bonaventura Tecchi and Carlo Emilio Gadda. After the war he worked as a magistrate, first in Parma and then in Rome in 1930, also the year of his marriage to Andreina Frosini. He published his first volume of poetry, Il re pensieroso, in 1922, followed in 1928 by his first volume of short stories, Caino. In 1925, his first drama, La padrona, won a prize in a literary contest; L’isola meravigliosa won first prize in a contest in Rome, 1930; polemicized against the rondisti, 1933; Corruzione al Palazzo di Giustizia received an award from the Istituto del Dramma Italiano as best play in the 1948–1949 theatrical season. Diagnosed with stomach cancer in February 1953. Died in Rome on 9 June 1953. FRANCO MUSARRA Selected Works Collections Teatro completo, preface by Silvio D’Amico and Achille Fiocco, Bologna: Cappelli, 1955; rpt. 1971. Raccolta di novelle, edited by Lia Fava, Bologna: Cappelli, 1963. Il filo verde: Poesie, edited by Luigi Fontanella, Camerino: MIERMA, 1993. Novelle edite e rare, edited by Alfredo Luzi, Fossombrone (PS): Metauro Edizioni, 2001.

Fiction Caino, 1928. Le case, 1933. Una strana serata, 1948. La piera alta, 1948.

Poetry ‘‘Il re pensieroso,’’ 1922. ‘‘Canzonette-La morte,’’ 1932. ‘‘Uomo e donna,’’ 1937. ‘‘Ultime liriche 1938–1953,’’ 1957.

Ispezione, 1942; in Ugo Betti: Three Plays, translated by David Gullette and Gino Rizzo, 1966. Marito e moglie, 1943. Lotta fino all’alba, 1945; in Three Plays on Justice, translated by G. Harry McWilliam, 1964. Irene innocente, 1946. Spiritismo nell’antica casa, 1946. Delitto all’isola delle capre, 1948; as Crime on Goat Island, translated by Henry Reed, 1961. Corruzione al Palazzo di Giustizia, 1949; as Corruption in the Palace of Justice, translated by Henry Reed, The New Theatre of Europe, vol. 1, edited by Robert W. Corrigan, 1962. La regina e gli insorti, 1949; in Three Plays, translated by Henry Reed, 1956; rpt., 1958; as The Queen and the Rebels, translated by Henry Reed, in Three European Plays, edited by E. Martin Browne, 1965. Il giocatore, 1950; in Ugo Betti: Three Plays, translated by Barbara Kennedy, 1966. Acque turbate, 1951. L’aiuola bruciata, 1951–1952; in Three Plays, translated by Henry Reed, 1956; rpt. 1958; in Two Plays, edited and translated by G. Harry McWilliam, 1965; rpt. 1968, 1973, 1978. La fuggitiva, 1952–1953; in Three Plays on Justice, translated by G. Harry McWilliam, 1964.

Essays Ugo Betti, Rome: Bulzoni, 1981. Religione e teatro. Il canto XXIX del Paradiso, edited byAndreina Betti, 1957; as ‘‘Religion and Theatre,’’ translated by Gino Rizzo and William Meriwether, The Tulane Drama Review, 5 (December 1960): 2–12; as ‘‘Religion and Theatre,’’ in Theatre in the Twentieth Century, edited by Robert W. Corrigan, 1963. ‘‘Preface to The Mistress,’’ translated by Gino Rizzo and William Meriwether, in The Tulane Drama Review, 5 (December 1960): 13–14. Scritti inediti, edited by Antonio Di Pietro, 1964; selection as ‘‘Essay, Correspondence, Notes,’’ translated by William Meriwether and Gino Rizzo, The Tulane Drama Review, 8 (Spring 1964): 51–86. Viaggio nella memoria 1892–1953, edited by Sergio Celestre, 2001.

Theater

Further Reading

La padrona, 1926. La casa sull’acqua, 1928. Un albergo sul porto, 1930. L’isola meravigliosa, 1930. Il diluvio, 1931. Frana allo Scalo Nord, 1932; in Three Plays on Justice, translated by G. Harry McWilliam, 1964; in Two Plays, edited and translated by G. Harry McWilliam, 1965; rpts. 1968, 1973, 1978. Il cacciatore d’anitre, 1934. Una bella domenica di settembre, 1935. I nostri sogni, 1936. Il paese delle vacanze, 1937; in Three Plays, translated by Henry Reed, 1956; rpt. 1958. Notte in casa del ricco, 1938. Favola di Natale, 1940. Il vento notturno, 1941.

Corotenuto, Carla, ‘‘La scrittura bettiana tra realismo e trascendenza,’’ in Ugo Betti, Novelle edite e rare, edited by Alfredo Luzi, Fossombrone (PS): Metauro Edizioni, 2001. Di Pietro, Antonio, L’opera di Ugo Betti, 2 vols., Bari: Edizioni del Centro Librario, 1966–1968. Doglio, Federico, and Wanda Raspolini (editors), Betti drammaturgo, Viterbo: EUP, 1984. Fava Guzzetta, Lia, ‘‘Introduzione,’’ in Ugo Betti, Novelle edite e rare, edited by Alfredo Luzi, Fossombrone (PS): Metauro Edizioni, 2001. Imberty, Claude, ‘‘L’atto unico d’Ugo Betti,’’ in The´atre civilisation contemporaine. Me´langes offerts a` Janine Menet-Genty, edited by Marie-He´le`ne Caspar, Paris: Centre de Recherches Italiennes, 2004. Licastro, Emanuele, Ugo Betti. An Introduction, Jefferson, N.C.-London: McFarland, 1985.

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UGO BETTI Lo Cicero, Elena F., Ugo Betti: Teatro de la culpa y el rescate, Buenos Aires: Plus Ultra, 1976. Luzi, Alfredo (editor), Ugo Betti. Letterato e drammaturgo, Macerata-Camerino: Comune di Camerino, 1996. Marrone, Gaetana, La Drammatica di Ugo Betti. Tematiche e Archetipi, Palermo: Novecento, 1988. Moro, Gildo, Il teatro di Ugo Betti, Milan: Marzorati, 1973. Musarra, Franco, Impegno e astrazione nell’opera di Ugo Betti, L’Aquila: L.U. Japadre, 1974. Musarra, Franco, ‘‘La spettacolarita` in ‘Frana allo Scalo Nord,’’’ in The´atre Civilisation contemporaine. Me´langes offerts a` Janine Menet-Genty, edited by Marie-He´le`ne Caspar, Paris: Centre de Recherches Italiennes, 2004. Pandolfi, Vito, Teatro italiano contemporaneo 1945–1959, Milan: Schwarz, 1959. Ruschioni, Ada, ‘‘Stilemi di luce e ansia di trascendenza nella poetica di Ugo Betti,’’ in Otto/Novecento, 5, nos. 5–6 (1981): 183–226. Spera, Gianni, ‘Coscienza e responsabilita`’ nell’opera di Ugo Betti, Florence: Edizioni CLUSF, 1977.

CORRUZIONE AL PALAZZO DI GIUSTIZIA, 1949 Play by Ugo Betti

Literary critics agree in considering Corruzione al Palazzo di Giustizia (Corruption in the Palace of Justice) Ugo Betti’s masterpiece and one of the strongest dramas of Italian twentieth-century theater. In the play, which belongs to Betti’s dramas concerned with questions of social and community relations, corruption intrudes itself into the very institution, known as the Palace of Justice, originally intended to protect society from this sort of depredation. The special prosecutor Erzi is appointed by the ministry to clear up some questionable sentences, which might be the work of a corrupt judge. The presence of Erzi is alarming to various suspect persons, who maintain their innocence. The old President Vanan is the most surprised by the inquiry. Finally Cust, a corrupt judge, confesses his guilt to the Alto Revisore (The Supreme Judge), an ambiguous, almost divine being. In Corruzione al Palazzo di Giustizia, written between the end of 1944 and the summer of 1945, Betti 210

has rendered characters of great dramatic depth: Cust, judge and murderer, efficient orator, who cunningly accuses himself in order to divert attention away from his real guilt; Crost, the First Judge, old and seriously ill, who, although having seen in Cust the murderer of the businessman Ludvi-Pol, does not bring charges against him, convinced that the ‘‘palace’’ must have a ‘‘worthy’’ king; Elena, the daughter of the President Vanan, who cannot prevent the collapse of her dreams; Erzi, the investigating magistrate, who assumes the dramatic role of the ‘‘messenger,’’ who induces the various characters, particularly Cust, to confess their anxieties, tensions, weaknesses, repressed desires. Even today Betti’s representation of corruption and justice continues to persuade us with its sense of actuality. Erzi’s investigation, which unfolds like a detective story, leads to the exposure of the guilty Cust, who confesses his guilt only when Croz is struck by a heart attack and Cust imagines that he is dead. Cust as well as Croz are diabolic characters. Betti has the theatrical intuition to have Croz summon the other judges, while dying, but only to frighten Cust. After having been congratulated by Erzi for his appointment as the new president (the moment of his final triumph), Cust capitulates to his sense of guilt, particularly for having caused the death of Elena. Although some critics have read the play politically as an antifascist drama, or religiously, seeing the Alto Revisore as a divine being, the drama finds its most tense meaning in the dialogues, in particular when Cust is talking. The thesis of the drama is that human justice is always defective, that ‘‘true’’ justice has to originate in the soul of those called before the High Judge. It is, however, not only the theme that makes the masterpiece, but the clever plot and the succession of monologues and dialogues in the various scenes. FRANCO MUSARRA Editions First edition: originally published in Sipario (March 1949); rpt. in Teatro completo, Bologna: Cappelli, 1955. Other editions: Corruzione al Palazzo di Giustizia, Bologna: Cappelli, 1966; Corruzione al Palazzo di Giustizia, introduction by Giovanni Antonucci, Rome: Newton, 1993; Corruzione al Palazzo di Giustizia, edited by Gaetana Marrone, Lucca: Maria Pacini Fazzi Editore, 2006. Translations: as Corruption in the Palace of Justice, translated by Henry Reed, The New Theatre of Europe, vol. 1, edited by Robert W. Corrigan, New York: Dell, 1962; as Corruption in the Palace of Justice,

UGO BETTI translated by Henry Reed, in Classics of Modern Theatre, edited byAlvin Kernan, New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1965.

Further Reading Antonucci, Giovanni, ‘‘Corruzione al Palazzo di Giustizia: fra cronaca e storia,’’ in Ugo Betti, edited by Federico Doglio and Wanda Raspolini, Rome: Bulzoni, 1981. Carlos De Miguel, Juan, ‘‘Progressione drammaturgica in Ugo Betti: da ‘Frana allo Scalo Nord’ a ‘Corruzione al Palazzo di Giustizia,’’’ in Studi italiani, 2 (2000): 95–109. Curetti, Elettra, Zu den Dramen von Ugo Betti, Zu¨rich: Juris Druck, 1966. Di Pietro, Antonio, L’opera di Ugo Betti, vol. 2, Bari: Edizioni del Centro Librario, 1968. Genot, Ge´rard, ‘‘Ugo Betti, l’Engrenage et la balance’’ in La mort de Godot, edited by Pierre Brunel, Paris: Lettres Modernes Minard, 1970. Marrone, Gaetana, La Drammatica di Ugo Betti. Tematiche e Archetipi, Palermo: Novecento, 1988. Musarra, Franco, ‘‘Il concetto di impegno nel teatro di Ugo Betti,’’ in Ugo Betti. Letterato e drammaturgo, edited by Alfredo Luzi, Macerata-Camerino: Comune di Camerino, 1996. Portier, Lucienne, ‘‘Le the´aˆtre en question: Ugo Betti,’’ in Italianistica, II, no. 2 (1973), 247–267. Usmiani, Renate, ‘‘The ‘Felix Culpa’ Motif in the Drama of Ugo Betti,’’ in Humanities Association of Canada, Bulletin, 21 (1970): 39–44.

DELITTO ALL’ISOLA DELLE CAPRE, 1948 Play by Ugo Betti

Since its first performance on 20 October 1950 at the Teatro delle Arti in Rome (Compagni ZareschiRandone), Delitto all’Isola delle Capre (Crime on the Goat Island) has been considered one of Betti’s most successful and significant plays. The plot is quite simple. In a house situated in a barren land lives Agata with her daughter Silvia and her sisterin-law Pia. Her husband Enrico has left her. At first it seems that harmony reigns in the house, where Agata and her husband, professor Enrico Ishi, had chosen to live in order to escape the arbitrary

compromises that prevented them from living according to the ideal of freedom to which the professor had subscribed. But their isolated life causes husband and wife to enclose themselves in silence. After the departure of her husband, Agata falls into a state of apathy and indifference. The life of the three women is upset by the arrival of the stranger Angelo, a name that suggests a´nghelos, messenger. Angelo claims to have been in captivity in Africa with Agata’s husband and to have promised Enrico that he would tell Agata of his death. He settles into the house and becomes the ‘‘pastore delle capre’’ (shepherd), seducing alternately the three women. Both an angel and a demon who subjects them to his own erotic desires, Angelo drags the women into a degrading emotional maelstrom. When it appears that reason is destined to succumb to instinct, Agata revolts. She invents a secret plan while Angelo is trapped in a well, where he had gone down to fetch some bottles of wine, when the rope ladder accidentally falls inside. She decides to help Angelo get out of the well only after her daughter and sister-in-law leave. Her plan, however, does not succeed. When she calls Angelo, she gets no answer. In her final decision to make Angelo her lover-victim and live with him in perpetual struggle, there is an unassailable conviction that human choices may know neither reflections nor forgiveness. Agata’s words that conclude Act Three are in this respect significant: ‘‘Ora siamo noi due, e tutto e` semplice. Tu non potrai certo andartene, e nemmeno io. Seguiteremo a chiamarci e a lottare per tutta l’eternita`’’ (Now we two are alone, and everything is very simple. You cannot go away, no more than I. We shall continue to call each other and to struggle in all eternity). Delitto all’Isola delle Capre, which Betti presumably wrote between 1946–1948 after Ispezione, is a drama rich in symbols that refer to more or less concealed erotic meanings. The language of the characters has a personal value: Agata is a mysterious and dominant character (she is the ‘‘mistress’’); Silvia is a figure of innocence, an innocence that begins to lose its original state as a windowpane that is about to lose its transparency; Pia, in her purity, lives in a world of dreams from which she tries vainly to escape; Angelo, who is first enticing, persuading, then violent when he is convinced he can dominate the women and take full possession of the house. His arrival unchains an ancient struggle between male and female, but also among the three women who each desire to take possession of the male. Central symbols are the island, a space separated from the rest of the world, the well as 211

UGO BETTI reference to the female and to a possible contact between the earthly and the spiritual, the wind as an element of destruction and creation, the wine and the goats as ritual elements of the Dionysian. Delitto all’Isola delle Capre is exemplary in teaching us to understand ‘‘the expressive, staging and thematic codes, on which the theatre of Betti is structured’’ (Gaetana Marrone, ‘‘‘Delitto all’Isola delle Capre,’’’ 1996). Film versions of the play, such as Charles Brabant’s Les posse´de´es (1957) and Gerardo Puglia’s Woman in the Wind (1990), attest to the continuing power of the play over audiences and the particular intellectual and human depth of its drama. FRANCO MUSARRA Editions First edition: originally published in Teatro, 15 November 1950; in Teatro completo, Bologna: Cappelli, 1955; rpt. 1971. Translations: Crime on Goat Island, translated by Henry Reed, San Francisco: Chandler Publishing Co., 1961; in Ugo Betti: Three Plays, translated by Gino Rizzo and David Gullette, New York: Hill and Wang, 1966; Crime on Goat Island, translated by Henry Reed, in Masterpieces of the Modern Italian Theatre, edited by Robert Corrigan, New York: Collier Books, 1967.

Further Reading Balducci, Marino, Alberto, ‘‘La ritualita` dionisiaca nel ‘Delitto all’Isola delle Capre’ di Ugo Betti,’’ in Ugo Betti. Letterato e drammaturgo, edited by Alfredo Luzi, Macerata-Camerino: Comune di Camerino, 1996. Di Pietro, Antonio, L’opera di Ugo Betti, vol. 2, Bari: Edizioni del Centro Librario, 1968. Marrone, Gaetana, ‘‘Sta`sis e empatheia: la trascendenza dell’immagine in una versione cinematografica americana di ‘Delitto all’isola delle capre,’’’ in Lingua e letteratura italiana nel mondo oggi, edited by Ignazio Baldelli and Bianca Maria Da Rif, Firenze: Olschki, 1991. Marrone, Gaetana, ‘‘‘Delitto all’Isola delle Capre’: dalla filologia testuale alla forma cinematografica,’’ in Ugo Betti. Letterato e drammaturgo, edited by Alfredo Luzi, Macerata-Camerino: Comune di Camerino, 1996. Moro, Gildo, Il teatro di Ugo Betti, Milano: Marzorati, 1973. Musarra, Franco, Impegno e astrazione nell’opera di Ugo Betti, L’Aquila: L.U. Japadre, 1974. Puppa, Paolo, ‘‘Il Teatro di Betti: la scena come confessione pubblica del passato,’’ in Betti drammaturgo, edited by Federico Doglio and Wanda Raspolini, Viterbo: EUP, 1984. Tuscano, Pasquale, ‘‘Il senso della vita e della morte nel dramma bettiano ‘Delitto all’isola delle capre,’’’ in Ugo Betti, Rome: Bulzoni, 1981.

SAVERIO BETTINELLI (1718–1808) The polemicist, poet, and critic Saverio Bettinelli was part of the climate of renewal that had a profound impact on literary studies in the age of the Enlightenment. His intellectual activity was complex, and reveals the convergence of numerous and diverse interests. His Jesuit education, acquired in his native Mantua as well as in other northern Italian cities, was an essential component of his productive literary career, and his loyalty to the order remained constant throughout his life. His capacity to remain abreast of the times and his acceptance of the new Enlightenment culture—as well as the tendency to curb its more revolutionary aspects—were indeed the result of the cultural teachings of the Jesuits. Bettinelli’s work can be articulated chronologically. The first phase includes the years up to 1755, during which he obtained his first successes and 212

accolades as he traveled through some of the most vibrant cultural centers of the period: Bologna, Venice, and Parma. He wrote for the theater, imitating French models in plays intended for Jesuit boarding schools. Even though successful, they are works of little interest, just as the satiric poem in octaves Le raccolte (Collections, 1751) and the Versi sciolti di tre eccellenti moderni autori (Poems in Blank Verse by Three Excellent Modern Authors, 1758), published under the Arcadian pen name Diodoro Delfico. Two essential events took place between 1756 and 1759: a trip to France and the publication in Venice of Dieci lettere di Publio Virgilio Marone scritte dagli Elisi all’Arcadia di Roma sopra gli abusi introdotti nella poesia italiana (Ten Letters by Publio Virgilio Marone Written from the

SAVERIO BETTINELLI Elysian Fields to the Roman Arcadia Concerning the Malpractices Introduced into Italian Poetry, 1757), also known as Lettere virgiliane. His sojourn in France allowed him to frequent the most important literary circles and to meet Helve´tius, Rousseau, and Voltaire, who exerted a lasting influence on Bettinelli. The Lettere virgiliane function as an introduction to the Versi sciolti di tre eccellenti moderni autori, a collection of poems written by Algarotti, Frugoni, and Bettinelli himself. In this work, the leading voice is Virgil, who launches a trenchant attack on the Italian poetic tradition and calls for reforms. He begins with Dante, on whom he expresses a limitative judgment, pointing out the obscurity and the lack of good taste in the Comedia. Petrarch is singled out as a model of elegance and harmony, but also accused (with the petrarchisti) of repetition. When Virgil arrives at the eighteenth century, during a trip to Rome, he illustrates the current state of Italian poetry, criticizing its xenophilous trends. The Lettere virgiliane, which caused a great deal of controversy for their critical stance with respect to tradition, are animated by a contentious style, however informed by a mild classicist vein. Bettinelli’s appeal to an ideal of renewal resumes in Dodeci lettere inglesi sopra varii argomenti, e sopra la letteratura italiana principalmente (Twelve Letters by an Englishman on Various Matters and Particularly on Italian Literature, 1766), or Lettere inglesi, which were written for the Milanese journal Il caffe` but published as an appendix to the reprint of the Versi sciolti di tre eccellenti moderni autori. More attention is now given to sociological conditions: the decadence of the contemporary literary scene is now identified in the lack of a national capital and of a common civilization, which cause men of letters to become argumentative and consequently of little benefit to the society in which they live. Bettinelli invited his contemporaries to look outside of Italy, and, at the same time, to protect the autonomy of their poetic experience from the academies and from the trivialization of the editorial industry. These themes are further discussed in an essay on aesthetics, Dell’entusiasmo delle belle arti (On Enthusiasm in the Fine Arts, 1769), which Bettinelli published in Milan under the auspices of Pietro Verri. The sources of aesthetic emotion, whose basic element is identified as enthusiasm (founded on imagination and sensitivity), are researched empirically rather than theoretically. With its focus on the power of feeling and nature, this essay privileges the artist’s freedom, along with a significant openness to the experience of the sublime; though tempered by a constant

appeal to ‘‘good taste’’ or rational control, it reveals Bettinelli’s sensitivity to the most advanced ideas in the field of aesthetics, from sensualism to Romanticism. In the forefront of Enlightenment thinking, Bettinelli reconstructed the Italian civilization from the eleventh to the fifteenth century in his most important work of literary historiography Del risorgimento d’Italia negli studi, nelle arti, e ne’ costumi dopo il mille (On the Revival of Italy in Scholarship, Arts, and Customs after the Year 1000, 1775). The first part is chronological, while the second discusses specific topics such as language, music, the arts, theater, and customs. Influenced by Voltaire’s historical writing (Essai sur les moeurs), Bettinelli sets civil history against political history, using some particularly well-chosen episodes. In the years that followed, he continued his literary investigations with Delle lodi del Petrarca (On Praising Petrarch, 1786) and the Saggio sull’eloquenza (Essay on Eloquence, 1802). Also important for his perspective on contemporary theater are his Dialoghi d’amore (Dialogues on Love, 1796). Bettinelli’s severe judgment of opera and tragicomedy discloses a constant attention to tragedy, recognizing the greatness of Vittorio Alfieri. He also dedicated a series of writings to the new and important female audience with Lettere d’un’amica (Letters from a Girlfriend, 1785) and Lettere a Lesbia Cidonia sopra gli epigrammi (Letters to Lesbia Cidonia Concerning Epigrams, 1788). Bettinelli’s critical reception is mixed. Over time his works have met with diverging judgments, beginning with Gasparo Gozzi’s polemical attacks on Lettere virgiliane to a difficult placement between Classicism, Enlightenment, and pre-Romanticism (Bonora and Binni, respectively). What is clear is the nonlinearity of dynamic ideas of renewal and moderate classicism, respectful of the social and ideological status quo. Yet the attention that he gives to the modes of cultural communication as well as those of the aesthetic experience reveal his sensitivity to the most enlightened cultural debate of the time.

Biography Born in Mantua on 18 July 1718. Studied at Jesuit boarding schools in his native town and later in Bologna; entered into the order, 1738; named instructor of rhetoric in Brescia, and after being ordained a priest, became professor of poetics in Venice, 1748; moved to Parma where he remained 213

SAVERIO BETTINELLI for seven years as instructor of history at the Collegio dei nobili; left Parma and traveled extensively in Germany, Switzerland, and France; relocated to Verona, 1759; appointed professor of eloquence of the University of Modena, 1772; the following year, at the suppression of the Society of Jesus, retired to his native Mantua, where he resided for the last 30 years of his life. Died in Mantua, 13 September 1808. RICCIARDA RICORDA See also: Historiography Selected Works Collections Opere, 8 vols., Venice: Zatta, 1780–1782. Opere edite ed inedite in prosa ed in versi. Seconda edizione riveduta, ampliata, e correttadall’Autore, 24 vols., revised and enlarged edition, Venice: Cesare, 1799–1801. Lettere virgiliane e inglesi e altri scritti, edited by Vittorio Enzo Alfieri, Bari: Laterza, 1930. Opere di Francesco Algarotti e di Saverio Bettinelli, edited by Ettore Bonora, Milan: Ricciardi, 1969.

Poetry ‘‘Le raccolte,’’ 1751. ‘‘Versi sciolti di Diodoro Delfico,’’ 1755.

Prose Dieci lettere di Publio Virgilio Marone scritte dagli Elisi all’Arcadia di Roma sopra gli abusi introdotti nella poesia italiana, 1757.

Dodeci Lettere Inglesi sopra varii argomenti e sopra la letteratura italiana principalmente, 1766. Dell’entusiasmo delle belle arti, 1769. Del Risorgimento d’Italia negli studi, nelle arti e ne’ costumi dopo il mille, 1775. Lettere d’un’amica, 1785. Lettere a Lesbia Cidonia sopra gli epigrammi, 1788. Dialoghi d’amore, 1796. Lettere XX ad una sua amica sopra le Belle arti, 1798. Dissertazione accademica sopra Dante, 1800.

Further Reading Arato, Franco, ‘‘Le tentazioni della filosofia: Bettinelli e Denina,’’ in La storiografia letteraria nel Settecento italiano, Pisa: ETS, 2002. Binni, Walter, ‘‘Fra Illuminismo e Romanticismo: Saverio Bettinelli,’’ in Preromanticismo italiano, Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1947. Bonora, Ettore, ‘‘Introduzione,’’ in Illuministi italiani: Opere di Francesco Algarotti e di Saverio Bettinelli, Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1969. Bonora, Ettore, Parini e altro Settecento: Fra Classicismo e Illuminismo, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1982. Colagrosso, Francesco, Saverio Bettinelli e il teatro gesuitico, 2nd revised ed., Florence: Sansoni, 1901. Crotti, Ilaria, and Ricciarda Ricorda (editors), Saverio Bettinelli: Un gesuita alla scuola del mondo, Rome: Bulzoni, 1998. Fubini, Mario, ‘‘Introduzione alla lettura delle Virgiliane,’’ in Dal Muratori al Baretti, Bari: Laterza, 1954. Gozzi, Gasparo, Difesa di Dante, Venice: Zatta, 1758. Marcialis, Maria Teresa, Saverio Bettinelli: Un contributo all’estetica dell’esperienza, Palermo: Aesthetica Preprint, 1988. Muscetta, Carlo, ‘‘Saverio Bettinelli,’’ in Letteratura italiana: I minori, vol. 3, Milan: Marzorati, 1961.

ALBERTO BEVILACQUA (1934–) Alberto Bevilacqua is among Italy’s most exemplary writers of the postwar period. An immensely prolific novelist, poet, and film director, he has published more than two dozen novels and other prose writings plus several collections of poetry. In recent years, this veteran writer has been especially attentive to changing social and literary tastes. For example, Giallo Parma (Parma Thriller, 1997) is indicative of a new interest by Italian readers in the serious detective novel; Gli anni struggenti (The Yearning Years, 2000) is an attempt to reach a prosperous younger readership eager to find its 214

attitudes toward life and the future taken seriously; and Eros (Eros, 1994), like several of Bevilacqua’s other works, reflects Italian society’s acceptance of more explicit fictional descriptions of sexual activities. In his best fiction, Bevilacqua works against the grain of literary conventions and expectations. His most successful narratives are either set in his native Parma or involve a resident of that city who has moved away physically from familial and cultural roots only to return in imagination to the settings of his childhood. In this regard, the critic

ALBERTO BEVILACQUA Stefano Tani has characterized Bevilacqua as a chronicler of the ‘‘microcosm’’ who has turned away from the macrocosm of history to focus instead on an elegiac description of the land of his youth (Il romanzo di ritorno, 1990). In Bevilacqua’s case, this land is the city of Parma plus the lowlands lying between the city walls and the huge and storied fluvial artery of the Po River. The characters who appear in such collections of loosely connected stories and anecdotes as those in La polvere sull’erba (Dust on the Grass, 1955), Una citta` in amore (A City in Love, 1962), and La festa parmigiana (Parma Festival, 1980), or in the novel La califfa (Califfa, 1964), are sharply unconventional individuals, men and women from different social classes who defy prevailing social customs in pursuit of their unique and often colorful destinies. Among Bevilacqua’s most notable female characters is the demimondaine but utterly honest Irene Corsini, ‘‘La Califfa,’’ who makes the most of her overpowering physical attractiveness to get ahead in the world no matter what. All of Bevilacqua’s fictional women—including Empress Maria Luisa of Austria—are powerfully driven by love and desire. Bevilacqua’s men, by contrast, typically inhabit a world that is political before it is sexual, often to the despair of their female partners who can only mourn when their loved ones are beaten by the police, jailed, exiled, or executed. In Bevilacqua’s stories set in the earlier years of the twentieth century, these heroes are often anti-Fascist political subversives. Later, during the civil war of 1943– 1945—a war that Bevilacqua was too young to fight in but not too young to witness—they are partisans. Combatants of a related but different sort appear in the stories about the years right after the war, when a lawlessness without precise ideological coloration swept over the Po lowlands with the same mindless fury as that of the floods periodically caused by the overflowing of the great river. In these tales, the often fantastic preChristian folklore of the region melds with the equally fantastic but historically based events of these confusing years, which Bevilacqua is one of the few Italian writers to have chronicled. The central characters of these works are individuals of great charisma. They include ‘‘La Califfa’’ and ‘‘La grande Gio`’’ (the big Gio`) of the 1986 novel by that name, the partisan Marco Ridolfi of La polvere sull’erba and the anti-Fascist activist Guido of Una citta` in amore. Like ‘‘La Califfa,’’ who was apparently easily recognized by other Parmigiani, Guido was based on a historical figure, the Parma native and left-wing leader Guido

Picelli. In La pasqua rossa (Red Easter, 2003) Bevilacqua returned to this fictional treatment of a historical person; Ezio Barbieri, the Milanese bandit and leader of a prison revolt, is the near legendary figure at the narrative’s center. Bevilacqua’s favorite, and in his eyes most charismatic character, was drawn from popular history, however, but from his own intimate experience. To an extraordinary degree, and even when writing about such historical individuals as those mentioned, Bevilacqua is always writing about himself as he is or would like to be. This autobiographical obsession, plus his ‘‘cannibalistic’’ tendency to repeat episodes from one book to another, marks the limits of this writer’s achievement. The Parma and the Rome that appear in Bevilacqua’s books are unlike the London of Charles Dickens’ novels, the Paris of Honore´ de Balzac’s, or the Yoknapatawpha County of William Faulkner. Instead of putting into motion the fully realized characters created by these English, French, and American authors, Bevilacqua never seems quite able to create autonomous individuals with their own unique preoccupations, desires, and destinies. Whatever happens in his books, and whatever his characters happen to be named, it is clear that this author’s dominant subject is always himself: his childhood, his family, his sex life, his quirks, the stories he has heard and made up about his native region as they resonate on his own sensibility. The creator of a vigorous, muscular Italian prose unlike that of some of the other writers of best-selling novels in the Italy of the 1960s and 1970s, Bevilacqua has followed a career trajectory similar to that of the film director who appears in many of Federico Fellini’s films from the same period. These films often depict a provincial intellectual of great talent who moves from the outskirts of the dominant culture to a corrupt and corrupting Rome whose corrosive effects on his character and art he is finally unable to escape even as he denounces those who fall prey to its allure. In his films, mostly adapted from his fiction and produced by RAI-TV, Bevilacqua continues to memorialize the promises and disappointments of the plight of many Italian intellectuals throughout the final decades of the twentieth century and, in his case, beyond.

Biography Born in a working-class neighborhood of Parma on 27 June 1934. Studied law at the University of Parma. In 1956, moved to Rome where he has 215

ALBERTO BEVILACQUA lived since. Correspondent or staff writer for the daily newspapers Il messaggero, L’approdo, Il resto del carlino, and Il corriere della sera. Literary prizes include the Campiello in 1966 for Questa specie d’amore, the Strega in 1968 for L’occhio del gatto, and the Bancarella in 1972 for Il viaggio misterioso. Frequent appearances on television talk shows. CHARLES KLOPP Selected Works

Poetry ‘‘L’amicizia perduta,’’ 1961. ‘‘L’indignazione,’’ 1973. ‘‘La crudelta`,’’ 1975. ‘‘Immagine e somiglianza,’’ 1982. ‘‘Vita mia,’’ 1985. ‘‘Il corpo desiderato,’’ 1988. ‘‘Messaggi segreti,’’ 1993. ‘‘Poesie d’amore,’’ 1996. ‘‘Piccole questioni di eternita`,’’ 2002. ‘‘Legame di sangue,’’ 2003. ‘‘Tu che mi ascolti—Poesie alla madre,’’ 2005.

Films

Fiction La polvere sull’erba, 1955; revised edition, 2000. Una citta` in amore, 1962. La califfa, 1964; as Califfa, translated by Harvey Fergusson II, 1969. Questa specie d’amore, 1966. L’occhio del gatto, 1968. Il viaggio misterioso, 1972. Umana avventura, 1974. Una scandalosa giovinezza, 1978. La festa parmigiana, 1980. La mia Parma, 1982. Il curioso delle donne, 1983. La donna delle meraviglie, 1984. La grande Gio`, 1986. La misteriosa felicita`, 1988. Il gioco delle passioni, 1989. I sensi incantati, 1991. Un cuore magico, 1993. L’eros, 1994; as Eros, translated by Ann McGarrell, 1996. Lettera alla madre sulla felicita`, 1995. Anima amante, 1996. GialloParma, 1997. Sorrisi dal mistero, 1998. Gli anni struggenti, 2000. Viaggio al principio del giorno, 2001. Attraverso il tuo corpo, 2002. La pasqua rossa, 2003. Parma degli scandali, 2004. Il Gengis, 2005.

La califfa, 1970. Questa specie d’amore, 1972. Attenti al buffone, 1975. Le rose di Danzica, 1979. Bosco d’amore (based on Giovanni Boccaccio’s story), 1981. Il grande respiro, 1981. La donna delle meraviglie, 1985. Tango blu, 1988. GialloParma, 1999.

Further Reading Ba´rberi-Squarotti, Giorgio, ‘‘I giochi dell’invenzione: Bevilacqua, Malerba e Siciliano,’’ in Storia delle letteratura Italiana, vol. 5, part 2, Turin: UTET, 1996. Bertacchini, Renato, Il romanzo del novecento in Italia, Rome: Studium, 1992. Cadioli, Alberto, L’industria del romanzo, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1981. Ragoni, Eugenio, and Toni Iermano, Scrittori dell’ultimo Novecento, edited by Enrico Malato, Storia della letteratura italiana, vol. 9, Rome: Salerno, 2000. Sanguinetti, Giacinto, Storia della letteratura italiana del Novecento, Rome: Newton Compton, 1994. Scorrano, Luigi, Alberto Bevilacqua, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1982. Tani, Stefano, Il romanzo di ritorno, Milan: Mursia, 1990. Toscani, Claudio, Invito alla lettura di Alberto Bevilacqua, Milan: Mursia, 1974.

ANGELA BIANCHINI (1921–) Many authors contributed to Angela Bianchini’s development, from the United States’ Southern writers to Colette, and from the representatives of Hispanic cultures to Natalia Ginzburg. Bianchini is a writer with a cosmopolitan background, although 216

firmly rooted in Rome’s cultural life. The themes that are central to her fiction are evident in the three short stories composing Lungo equinozio (A Long Equinox, 1962): the intertwining of private passions and historical events, the anguish of exile,

ANGELA BIANCHINI the disenchanted realization of the elusiveness of all returns, and the mysterious quality of love in all its forms. Inevitably, as for many Italian writers of the twentieth century, history is one of her fiction’s protagonists. It shapes the lives of all her characters and visits its violence upon them. It also gives her characters a maturity consisting of humility and compassion that they could not otherwise have achieved. In Capo d’Europa (The Edge of Europe, 1991), a young girl caught in the Jewish diaspora caused by Italy’s 1938 anti-Semitic laws is forced to acknowledge her lack of awareness but also opens her eyes at last to the beauty and tragedy of a world she had until then not known. Capo d’Europa is a masterful narrative about seldom-explored aspects of the Jewish experience in the 1930s and 1940s. The theme of exile returns often in Bianchini’s fiction. The struggle to make sense of personal losses, the errors, the misunderstandings, and the desperate search for new reasons to live are the themes of Le nostre distanze (The Distances We Crossed, 1965). On a barely disguised Johns Hopkins campus, the protagonist, a young woman exiled from her country, discovers the charms of American university life, the hypocrisies and cruelties of the world, loneliness in an American city, and also a hard-won awareness. Earlier short stories, especially ‘‘Gli oleandri’’ (Oleanders, 1962), had already spoken about the heartbreak of displacement and the impossibility of returns, but La ragazza in nero (The Girl in Black, 1990) revisits those themes, suggesting that life will reassert itself with an invincible, sensual power. A young woman, her mother, and a fascinating grandmother are the story’s protagonists. Rome, contemplated with profound love, is more than a background to their lives; it is as changeable and seductive as is the ‘‘girl in black’’ of the title. Human passions and, above all, love cannot exist outside their historical contexts; they are transformed and distorted by events. Le labbra tue sincere (Your Candid Lips, 1995), whose title comes from an early twentieth-century song, takes place in Rome while it undergoes a major political and architectural change because it recently became the capital of the Kingdom of Italy. Nostalgia and the sense of youthful energy that is inherent in all transformations alternatively permeate the novel. Un amore sconveniente (An Unsuitable Passion, 1999) chronicles the stages of a love that blossoms during the first half of the twentieth

century and is bound to be terribly damaging. A Jewish intellectual passionately loves a beautiful woman, marries her, and sees his whole existence ruined not only because of the persecution visited on Jewish people but also because of his wife’s opportunism and his own inability to distance himself from her. Another recurrent element in her writing is the United States, which appears frequently in Bianchini’s fiction. It is a mirage in Capo d’Europa and a puzzling reality in Le nostre distanze, a haunting memory in ‘‘Festa dell’indipendenza’’ (Independence Day, 1962) and a memory of disappointment in ‘‘Gli oleandri.’’ In Nevada (2002), it is the state of Nevada in the early 1950s to which young and not-so-young women flock to get quick divorces and are the guests of a dude ranch that caters solely to them. They are forced to remain in one location as if cloistered. They hide painful secrets, but Bianchini gives each unhappy plot the fragrance of youthful passion. In the background, as essential to the story as any of the characters, hovers the American West, a place of fabulous and forbidding immensity. Most of Bianchini’s essays concern topics of twentieth-century Italian, Spanish, and Latin American literature. However, she also published a fundamental essay on nineteenth-century culture and the serial novel, translated Old French medieval romances, and was the curator of an edition of the letters written by the Florentine patrician Alessandra Macinghi Strozzi (1408–1471) to her exiled sons. Voce donna (Voice: Woman, 1979), a diachronic study of women’s presence in society and literature, remains one of the best works in Italian inspired by the women’s movement. In the 1970s and 1980s, the RAI (Italian Radio and Television) broadcast a number of Bianchini’s adaptations of fictional texts.

Biography Born in Rome on 21 April 1921. In 1941 immigrated to the United States because of the ‘‘racial laws’’ promulgated by the Fascist regime in 1938. Attended Johns Hopkins University, studied with Leo Spitzer, who was also an exile, and gained a Ph.D. in romance philology. In 1952, returned to Rome, where she currently resides, and started writing for prestigious periodicals and journals, Il Mondo, Tempo presente, and L’Espresso. She also wrote plays and contributed to the cultural programs of RAI, the Italian radio and television. 217

ANGELA BIANCHINI She writes for La Stampa and Tuttolibri as well as the RAI, and is a prominent figure in Italian cultural life. She has won a number of literary prizes including the Premio Rapallo in 1991 for La ragazza in nero and the Premio Donne-Citta` di Roma in 1992. She has one son, Mario Fales, a well-known archaeologist. ANGELA M. JEANNET Selected Works Fiction Lungo equinozio, 1962 (includes ‘‘Gli oleandri,’’ ‘‘Festa dell’indipendenza,’’ and ‘‘Lungo equinozio’’). Le nostre distanze, 1965. La ragazza in nero, 1990; as The Girl in Black, translated by Giuliana Sanguineti Katz and Anne Urbancic, 2002. Capo d’Europa, 1991; 1992 (includes a revised version of ‘‘Gli oleandri, ’’ ‘‘La ragazza in nero,’’ and ‘‘Capo d’Europa’’); as The Edge of Europe, translated by Angela M. Jeannet and David Castronuovo, 2000. Le labbra tue sincere, 1995. Un amore sconveniente, 1999. Nevada, 2002.

Radio Play Una crociera di sogno, 1997.

Other Il romanzo d’appendice, 1969, revised as La luce a gas e il feuilleton: due invenzioni dell’Ottocento, 1988. Romanzi medievali d’amore e d’avventura, translated and edited, 1979. Voce donna, 1979. Alessandra e Lucrezia. Destini femminili nella Firenze del Quattrocento, 2005.

Further Reading De Giovanni, Neria, and Giacomo F. Rech (editors), Scrittrici italiane dell’ultimo Novecento, Rome: Presidenza del Consiglio, 2003. Jeannet, Angela M., ‘‘Exiles and Returns in Angela Bianchini’s Fiction,’’ in Italica, 75, no. 1 (1998): 93–111. Jeannet, Angela M., ‘‘Esilio e ritorno nella narrativa di Angela Bianchini,’’ in Angela Bianchini, Capo d’Europa, Milan: Frassinelli, 1998. Sanguinetti Katz, Giuliana, ‘‘The Search for Identity in Angela Bianchini’s The Girl in Black,’’ in Angela Bianchini, The Girl in Black, Welland, Ontario: Canadian Society for Italian Studies, 2002. Urbancic, Anne, ‘‘Memory in The Girl in Black,’’ in Angela Bianchini, The Girl in Black, Welland, Ontario: Canadian Society for Italian Studies, 2002. Wright, Simona, ‘‘Lo sguardo all’indietro: esilio e coscienza nella narrativa di Angela Bianchini,’’ in Italian Quarterly, 40, nos. 157–158 (2003): 71–87. Wright, Simona, ‘‘Intervista a Angela Bianchini,’’ in Italian Quarterly, 40, 157–158 (2003): 89–108.

LUCIANO BIANCIARDI (1922–1971) Luciano Bianciardi was one of Italy’s most provocative writers of the 1950s and 1960s. During his lifetime, he distinguished himself as a novelist, journalist, prolific translator, popular historian, and pamphleteer. His works, which bear a strong autobiographical imprint, present a skeptical analysis of post-World War II Italy. Bianciardi’s early writings demonstrate his close ties to the proletarian values of his native region of the Maremma. He wrote, with the collaboration of Carlo Cassola, I minatori della Maremma (Miners of the Maremma, 1956), a sociological inquiry of the living and working conditions in the mines of the Maremma region. The study investigates the tragic mine explosion at Ribolla of May 1954 and denounces those responsible for the death of 43 218

mine workers. In 1954, Bianciardi left his hometown of Grosseto and moved to Milan, determined to participate in the cultural industry that was then in its nascent stages, and joined the newly formed Feltrinelli Publishing House as a member of its editorial staff. Bianciardi experienced a sense of alienation in Milan, as he failed to accept the rhythm and values of the city. His nonconformist behavior led to his being released by Feltrinelli in 1957. Bianciardi’s first single-authored book, Il lavoro culturale (Cultural Labor, 1957), is set in a small town in the provinces during the immediate postwar years. It is a witty pamphlet/novel of a generation of young Italians, who came out of the war with a sense of social commitment and cultural

LUCIANO BIANCIARDI renewal; instead, they became mired in abstract formulations, indifference, and political bureaucracies, settling ultimately for a life of routine. In his next work, the satiric novel L’integrazione (Integration, 1960), Bianciardi relives his traumatic experiences in Milan’s cultural industry. For the author, the ‘‘moral capital of Italy’’ becomes the bleak symbol of alienation and consumption during the ‘‘miracle,’’ or ‘‘boom,’’ years. Also in 1960, Bianciardi published Da Quarto a Torino (From Quarto to Turin), the first of his four historical works on the Risorgimento. It was followed by La battaglia soda (The Tough Battle, 1964) and by two studies that were originally targeted to a young readership, Daghela avanti un passo! (Move a Step Onward, 1969), and Garibaldi (1972). These writings are a personal and popularized approach to the Risorgimento and are intended to challenge the standard histories of the period whose prejudices and political interferences have transformed history into hagiography and myth. The ‘‘failed revolution’’ of the Risorgimento becomes a transparent allegory that allows Bianciardi to observe and judge the contemporary Italian situation. In 1962, Bianciardi published his masterpiece, La vita agra (It’s a Hard Life), which garnered him international success as an inventive ironist. The novel tells the story of an intellectual from the provinces who comes to the city on a revolutionary mission only to fall victim to the stifling, dehumanizing metropolis that is overly devoted to conformism and economic progress. La vita agra is a satiric protest against Milan, in particular, and the capitalistic society in general. The novel’s innovative style and language reflect the neurotic state of its protagonist, as Bianciardi chose to mix the variety of styles, genres, and languages from his numerous translations in order to illustrate the chaotic condition of contemporary society. Bianciardi’s reaction to the notoriety gained by the critical and popular success of the novel is to retreat from the city to the seaside town of Rapallo where he immersed himself in his translations, an activity that would accompany him his entire professional career. Over his lifetime, his translation production exceeded well over 100 titles and included works by Henry Miller, Saul Bellow, Jack London, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, and the Beat Generation writers. During these years, Bianciardi continued to contribute to numerous magazines and newspapers on a variety of topics, ranging from sports and social customs to television and film.

In his final years, Bianciardi published Viaggio in Barberia (Journey to Barberia, 1969), a diary of an 8,000-mile expedition across North Africa. This journey to the Maghreb region became closely linked to the author’s childhood and enabled him to step outside the boundaries of one’s routine and enter into a world of unrestricted exploration. The last published novel in his lifetime, Aprire il fuoco (Open Fire, 1969), is a highly innovative work in which Bianciardi adapted the revolutionary event of ‘‘The Five Days of Milan’’ in 1848 to a contemporary setting of 1959. It is the story of an exiled, revolutionary professor who, having been deprived of a cause, sees no values in which to believe. Having failed to reignite the mythical passions of the past, his only solution is death. In 1970, Bianciardi returned to Milan where he died on 14 November 1971 of cirrhosis of the liver.

Biography Born in Grosseto on 14 December 1922. Served as interpreter of the Allied forces, 1943; joined the Action Party, 1945; studied at the Scuola Normale of Pisa, degree in philosophy, with a thesis on John Dewey, 1948; married Adria Belardi; his son Ettore is born, 1949; taught history and philosophy at the ‘‘Liceo Classico Carducci-Ricasoli’’ of Grosseto, 1949–1951; contributed to the newspaper Gazzetta of Livorno with the column ‘‘Incontri provinciali,’’ 1952; began collaboration with the literary and cultural magazines Contemporaneo, Belfagor, Il Mondo, and Comunita`, 1954; director of the Chelliana library of Grosseto, 1952–1954; moved to Milan and joined the Feltrinelli Publishing House, 1954; his daughter, Luciana, is born, 1955; his third child, Marcello, is born from his relationship with longtime companion Maria Jatosti, 1958; moved to Rapallo, 1964; began column of television commentaries for magazine ABC, 1965; began to contribute to the magazines Kent, Executive, and Playmen, 1967; returned to Milan, 1970; died in Milan, 14 November 1971. MARK PIETRALUNGA Selected Works Fiction Il lavoro culturale, 1957. L’integrazione, 1960. Da Quarto a Torino, 1960. La vita agra, 1962; as It’s a Hard Life, translated by Eric Mosbacher, 1965.

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LUCIANO BIANCIARDI La battaglia soda, 1964. Aprire il fuoco, 1969. Daghela avanti un passo!, 1969. Viaggio in Barberia, 1969. Garibaldi, 1972. Il peripatetico ed altre storie, 1976. La solita zuppa, 1994.

Journalistic Writing I minatori della Maremma, coauthored with Carlo Cassola, 1956. Chiese Escatollo e nessuno raddoppio`: Diario in pubblico 1952–1971, edited by Luciana Bianciardi, 1995. L’alibi del progresso. Scritti giornalistici ed elzeviri, edited by Luciana Bianciardi with a preface by Dario Fo, 2000.

Letters ‘‘Bianciardi com’era (Lettere ad un amico grossetano),’’ in L’intellettuale disintegrato: Luciano Bianciardi, Rome: Ianua, 1985. La nascita dei ‘‘Minatori della Maremma.’’ Il carteggio Bianciardi-Cassola—Laterza e altri scritti, edited by Velio Abati, Florence: Giunti, 1998.

Translations Saul Bellow, Il re della pioggia, 1959. Aldous Huxley, Ritorno al mondo nuovo, 1961. Gene Feldman and Max Gartenberg (editors), Beat Generation e Angry Young Men, 1961. Henry Miller, Tropico del Cancro. Tropico del Capricorno, 1962. Kenneth Patchen, Memorie di un pornografo timido, 1962. John Steinbeck, L’inverno del nostro scontento, 1962. William Faulkner, Il palazzo. Romanzo della famiglia Snopes, 1963.

Stephen Crane, Il segno rosso del coraggio e altri racconti, 1964. Richard Brautigan, Il generale immaginario, 1967. John Barth, Il coltivatore del Maryland, 1968. Jack London, John Barleycorn. La strada, 1971. William Faulkner, Una favola, 1971. Thomas Berger, Il piccolo grande uomo, 1971.

Further Reading Bianchi, Nedo, Arnaldo Bruni, and Adolfo Turbanti, editors, Luciano Bianciardi tra neocapitalismo e contestazione, Conference Proceedings (Grosseto, 22–23 March 1991), Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1992. Bianciardi, Luciana, editor, Carte su carte di ribaltura. Luciano Bianciardi traduttore, Conference Proceedings (Grosseto, 24–25 October 1997), Florence: Giunti, 2000. Clotilde, Angelini, Bianciardi, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1980. Corrias, Pino, Vita agra di un anarchico. Luciano Bianciardi a Milano, Milan: Baldini &Castoldi, 1993. Ferretti, Gian Carlo, La morte irridente. Ritratto critico di Luciano Bianciardi uomo giornalista traduttore scrittore, Lecce: Piero Manni, 2000. Mauro, Walter, ‘‘Luciano Bianciardi,’’ in Letteratura italiana. I contemporanei, vol. V, Milan: Marzorati, 1974. Paoloni, Giovanni, and Cristina Cavallaro, editors, Dal bibliobus alla ‘‘ Grossa Iniziativa ’’ Luciano Bianciardi, la biblioteca, la casa editrice nel dopoguerra, Conference Proceedings (Viterbo-Grosseto, 21–22 November 2002), Rome:Vecchiarelli Editore, 2004. Pietralunga, Mark, ‘‘The Emotional Deterioration of an Ordinary Man: Luciano Bianciardi and the ‘Miracle’ Years in Milan,’’ in Italiana, 4 (1992): 127–142.

IL BIBBIENA (BERNARDO DOVIZI) (1470–1520) Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena, a cardinal, diplomat, and playwright, was a conversationalist of such great skill that Baldassare Castiglione in his dialogue Il libro del Cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier, 1528) considered him as the exemplary interlocutor, so much so that in Book II he is called upon to describe the types and forms of witticisms, since ‘‘per una acuta e piacevole prontezza d’ingegno fu gratissimo a qualunque lo conobbe’’ (everyone who knew him appreciated him for his sharp and pleasant quick wit). His was the intelligence of a man of letters who was at the same time 220

a diplomat who did not believe that in politics the only option was that of power and an army. A nobleman, he followed the path that, after a Humanist education in Tuscany usually led to the Medici Court in Florence. He was attracted to neither the literary nor philosophical careers prevalent in Marsilio Ficino’s circles. Rather, he steadily pursued the role whose ideal perfection was later described in the portrait made by Castiglione, eventually receiving the honour of being known by the name of his native place while still living. Indeed, the change from his family name, Dovizi, to a

IL BIBBIENA (BERNARDO DOVIZI) toponym suggests the ostentatious display, on the part of a man whose whole life was devoted to the service of the Medici family, of both an autonomous identity and a degree of independence from their milieu. In his early career, Bibbiena’s dispatches from his diplomatic missions were characterized by a certain confident impudence and carefree intelligence. For instance, on October 4, 1494, during a serious political crisis, he wrote a famous narrative letter (a veritable short story) about the love affair between Ferdinand of Aragon and Caterina Gonzaga, as if he were unable to reflect on the meaning of the events, to see himself as an agent and not a mere spectator. Even after the Medicis’ exile from Florence, Piero kept trusting the young diplomat. Following Piero’s death, Bibbiena was appointed as secretary of Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici, and, in opposition to Pope Julius II, became involved with political plans to bring the Medicis back to Florence. On September 1, 1512, after an 18-year exile, the Medicis returned to power, but Bibbiena, who had humbly worked toward that goal, decided to remain in Rome, which he now perceived as the actual centre of politics and power. On September 23, 1513, Giovanni de’ Medici, now Pope Leo X, appointed him cardinal for his personal merits, including services rendered during the conclave. He was, as Carlo Dionisotti has pointed out, ‘‘cardinale diacono, non prete, differenza allora importante’’ (a cardinal-deacon, not a priest, an important difference at that time) (Ricordo del Bibbiena, 1980). At the end of 1515, he moved to the Vatican and commissioned Raphael to arrange his residence, including a bathroom or stufetta decorated according to an iconological project that he had conceived himself and that Franco Ruffini recently interpreted as an interlacing and coexistence of ‘‘passion’’ and ‘‘reason’’ (Commedia e festa nel Rinascimento, 1997). This double use of the intellect against the mere use of force in political life is evident in the numerous dispatches and letters in defense of the Medici cause, collected in their entirety only in recent times by Giuseppe Lorenzo Moncallero in the two-volume Epistolario (1955–1965). In the correspondence written between 1512 and 1515, Bibbiena articulated the idea of a league of the main Italian and European states in opposition to Louis XII of France, who was threatening to invade Italy. However, as Dionisotti shows, this was mainly a literary defense, a form of political literature that, although produced in Tuscany, was also already national rather than regional, in an increasingly tighter

intertwining of politics and literary activity (Ricordo del Bibbiena, 1980). The year 1513 attests to Bibbiena’s political triumph as well as the composition of his scurrilous play La Calandria (The Follies of Calandro, 1521), for which he is chiefly remembered. His only writing within a specific literary context, indeed, within the genre of comedy, La Calandria was first performed in Urbino on February 6, 1513, during carnival, two weeks before the death of Julius II (and thus before the ascent of a Medici to the papal throne). The staging of the play in the throne room of Urbino was prepared by Castiglione, appointed duke of Novellara, who also wrote a prologue for it (although its attribution was questioned by Giorgio Padoan in his 1970 edition of the play). The scenes were designed by Girolamo Genga, a pupil of Raphael and ducal architect. As a result of its success, the play was staged again on several occasions: in the Vatican, in December 1514 and January 1515, with scenery by Baldassare Peruzzi, one of the architects of the Cathedral of St. Peter; in Mantua in 1520 and in 1532, with sets by Giulio Romano; in Venice in 1521 and 1522; in Lyon in 1548 for the entrance into the city of King Henry II and Catherine de’ Medici; and finally in Mu¨nich in 1569. Although attributing to Plautus the main source of the comedy, Castiglione’s prologue argues for its originality and novelty on the basis of the superiority of modern over ancient taste, in line with the position articulated by Ludovico Ariosto regarding his Latin models in, for instance, the prologue to La cassaria (The Coffer, 1508). The subject of the lost twins is inspired by Plautus’ Menaechmi, but also by Boccaccio’s short stories (in particular Decameron, III, 6 and 8; VII, 4, 8, and 9; IX, 5), often to the point of almost verbatim quotations or calques. The main character, the unbelievably gullible Calandro, mimicks the silly, naı¨ve hero from Boccaccio, while the action comes from Plautus: the result is a double and symmetrical game of misunderstandings and mistaken identities, of practical jokes and de´nouements deriving from the incredible likeness of the twins Lidio and Santilla. Lidio, disguised as Santilla, charms Calandro and at the same time enjoys his wife Fulvia. Calandro is persuaded by his servant Fessenio to fake death and is carried away in a coffin to his lover’s house, where he lies with a prostitute. Here, Fulvia arrives, wearing men’s clothes and impatiently waiting to meet Lidio, and angrily yells at her improvident husband. The servants’ intrigue and Ruffo’s supposed magical skills turn Lidio into a woman; the 221

IL BIBBIENA (BERNARDO DOVIZI) de´nouement happens when Fulvia is about to be discovered by Calandro, but once again manages to replace him with his look-alike sister. A double wedding ensues: Lidio marries Perillo’s daughter and Santilla marries Flaminio, Fulvia’s son. This inexhaustible comic vitality and the truly theatrical structural ambiguity of the play (staging the carnivalesque plot of beffa) have been variously interpreted. For Franco Ruffini, they represent the political quest for the union of opposites (Commedia e festa nel Rinascimento, 1986), while for Roberto Alonge, who considers the text in relation to the myth of the androgyne, they stand for the search for the original unity capable of ‘‘trascendere le contraddizioni che determinano la propria nevrosi’’ (transcending the contradictions that define one’s own neurosis) (La riscoperta rinascimentale del teatro, 2000). The text is full of sequences of words and gestures, obscene double meanings, and blasphemous allusions usually derived from the theme of cross-dressing and the carnivalesque inversion of the male/female binary that, in the end, constituted for courtly society an exemplary model of the absolute theatrical autonomy of literary play.

Biography Bernardo Dovizi was born in Bibbiena (Arezzo), on August 4, 1470. Diplomat for the Medici and the Signoria of Florence, 1488; missions to Rome, 1492, and Naples, 1494. After the banishment of the Medicis from Florence (1494), followed Piero and, after his death in 1503, Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici, residing in Urbino, first as a guest of Guidubaldo da Montefeltro, then of Francesco Maria della Rovere. Appointed cardinal, 1513; diplomatic missions to Urbino, 1516, and as the pope’s ambassador to France, 1518. Patron of Raphael and of Francesco Berni, to whom he was related. Died in Rome on November 9, 1520. His death was rumored to have occurred from poisoning. He is buried in the church of Aracoeli in Rome. STEFANO TOMASSINI

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Selected Works La Calandria, 1521; edited by Giorgio Padoan, 1970. Epistolario di Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena, edited by Giuseppe Lorenzo Moncallero, 2 vols., 1955–1965.

Further Reading Alonge, Roberto, ‘‘La riscoperta rinascimentale del teatro,’’ in Storia del teatro moderno e contemporaneo, edited by Roberto Alonge and Guido Davico Bonino, vol. 1, La nascita del teatro moderno Cinquecento-Seicento, Turin: Einaudi, 2000. Andrews, Richard, Scripts and Scenarios. The Performances of Comedy in Renaissance Italy, Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Baratto, Mario, La commedia del Cinquecento: aspetti e problemi, Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1975. Baratto, Mario, ‘‘La fondazione di un genere (per un’analisi drammaturgica della commedia del Cinquecento),’’ in Il teatro italiano del Rinascimento, edited by Maristella de Panizza Lorch, Milan: Edizioni di Comunita`, 1980. Bottoni, Luciano, ‘‘Una commedia per il mistagogo parodico: la ‘Calandria,’’’ in Tra storia e simbolo: Studi dedicati a Ezio Raimondi dai Direttori, Redattori e dall’Editore di «Lettere italiane», Florence: Olschki, 1994. Bottoni, Luciano, Leonardo e l’androgino: L’eros transessuale nella cultura, nella pittura e nel teatro del Rinascimento, Milan: Franco Angeli, 2002. De Feo, Sandro, ‘‘Bernardo Dovizi da Bibiena: La Calandria,’’ (1967), in In cerca di teatro, edited byLuciano Lucignani, vol. 1, Milan: Longanesi, 1972. Dionisotti, Carlo, ‘‘Ricordo del Bibbiena,’’ in Machiavellerie: Storia e fortuna di Machiavelli, Turin: Einaudi, 1980. Fanelli, Carlo, La Calandria. Tematiche e simbologia, Florence: Atheneum, 1997. Guidotti, Angela, Specchiati sembianti. Il tema dei gemelli nella letteratura, Milan: Franco Angeli, 1992. Moncallero, Giuseppe Lorenzo, Il cardinale Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena umanista e diplomatico (1470– 1520): Uomini e avvenimenti del Rinascimento alla luce di documenti inediti, Florence: Olschki, 1953. Ruffini, Franco, Commedia e festa nel Rinascimento: La «Calandria» alla corte di Urbino, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1986. Stewart, Pamela D., Retorica e mimica nel «Decameron» e nella commedia del Cinquecento, Florence: Olschki, 1986.

LIBERO BIGIARETTI

THE BICYCLE THIEF See Ladri di biciclette (Work by Vittorio de Sica)

LIBERO BIGIARETTI (1905–1993) Libero Bigiaretti’s prolific literary career spanned almost 60 years. This keen interpreter of Italian social realities first achieved success with the novel Esterina in 1942, followed by Un’amicizia difficile (A Difficult Friendship, 1945). Already an accomplished poet who had published the collections Ore e stagioni (Hours and Seasons, 1936) and Care ombre (Dear Shadows, 1940), Bigiaretti’s talent as narrator and essayist became evident with the publication of Paese di Roma (Rome’s Country, 1942). In these early works, several conceptual nucleic pairings surfaced: love and estrangement, friendship and hypocrisy, city and country, microhistory and macrohistory, obligation and disengagement, writing and publishing. On one hand, he paid particular attention to describing in great minutiae the sentimental microcosm in bourgeois society; on the other, he analyzed with equal care the process of artistic endeavors. His characters live on a threshold between past and present times. In this liminal space, memory plays the decisive role that drives the narrative of Disamore (Estrangement, 1956). This novel is composed of two elements (the letters exchanged by two ex-lovers) and it is published in an unprecedented two installments. The first half, published in 1948 as Un discorso d’amore (Love Talk), comprises the man’s letter; it is followed eight years later by the woman’s reply. With I figli (Sons, 1954), Bigiaretti shifted the focus to the sentimental life inside the family. The chronicle of the Bernabeis family is the vehicle for a portrait of contemporary bourgeois society. Bigiaretti thus elaborated on themes already visited by great French authors

whose works he had also translated (Flaubert, Gide, Maupassant, Proust, Stendhal). A different narrative structure controls Carlone (1950), a short formative novel that marries leftist ideology with the revival of neorealist literary canons. Bigiaretti was praised by critics for an uncanny ability to condense 70 years of Italian history in the short span of 60 pages. This neorealist influence dominates Il villino (The CountryHouse, 1946). In the 1940s and 1950s, Bigiaretti’s journalistic career exploded in many worthy collaborations with the likes of Giovanni Macchia, Cesare Pavese, Giacomo Debenedetti, Giorgio Caproni, Corrado Alvaro, and Giuseppe Ungaretti. He was responsible for cultural affairs at the Ivrea press office of Adriano Olivetti from 1952 to 1964. He would continue to draw on this experience throughout his literary activity, as well as deepen his understanding for the world of industry through his close friendships with writers such as Paolo Volponi, Franco Fortini, Luciano Codignola, Geno Pampaloni, as well as many architects and artists. Both the poetic collection Lungodora (Along the Dora, 1955) and the novel Il congresso (The Convention, 1963) draw on his time spent at Olivetti. Il congresso presents the reader with the theme of the intellectual engagement in the industrial world woven into the works’ personal resonance. Back in Rome, Bigiaretti published Le indulgenze (Indulgences, 1966), a novel marked by a Fellini-esque atmosphere portraying bourgeois society in the 1960s. Another important narrative strand in Bigiaretti’s work surfaces with the short-story

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LIBERO BIGIARETTI collection Uccidi o muori (Kill or Die, 1958); the surreal and fantastic stories place their protagonists in a world described by the author himself as a sort of ‘‘elsewhere.’’ Abitare altrove (To Live Elsewhere, 1990) is in fact the title of a much later collection that reprises the old theme. Likewise his novels La controfigura (The Stuntman, 1968) and Dalla donna alla luna (From Woman to the Moon, 1972) describe events that spite commonplace morals and the rules of civil existence. With Le stanze (Rooms, 1976) Libero created yet ‘‘another kind’’ of space—a free recourse into the compartments of memory for the author to peruse in searching for traces and protagonists from his familial and social past. Bigiaretti concluded his literary career with the novels Due senza (Two Down, 1979), Il viaggiatore (The Traveler, 1984), the collection of poems Posto di blocco (Checkpoint, 1986), and the story Un sogno di ferragosto (A Mid-August Dream, 1993). Critics took great interest in Bigiaretti’s work as witnessed by his great revival and posthumously published works. In 1995, Il mio paese (My Country) was published—a collection of essays dedicated to Libero’s much loved mother region of the Marche; the stories in Discorsi all’osteria (Discourses at the Tavern, 1999) were likewise inspired by the region. The volume Esercizi di dattilografia (Typing Exercises, 1999) focuses on the problems associated with literary activities. The vehicle of the book is the art of typing; through it the author examines the role of the writer, the function of literature and publishing as previously noted in Il dito puntato (The Pointed Finger, 1967). Bigiaretti’s last published work, Profili al tratto (Sketches, 2003), assembles interviews, or ‘‘encounters,’’ he made with well-known intellectuals. They appeared mainly in the periodical Successo between 1965 and 1966. Libero Bigiaretti’s works have been translated into many languages. In his honor, the township of Matelica has been awarding the National Biennial Prize for Narrative since 1998.

Biography Born in Matelica, in the region of the Marche, 16 May 1905 (not in 1906 as generally reported). Moved to Rome with family at the age of 6; selftaught, interrupted school and started working on construction sites and other odd jobs. In 1932, began publishing poems and short stories in La fiera letteraria, Meridiano di Roma, La tribuna, Il corriere padano, and Augustea; enrolled in the 224

Socialist Party and joined the fight against fascism, 1942; cofounder of the Sindacato Nazionale Scrittori (National Writers Union) together with Corrado Alvaro and Francesco Jovine, 1944; editor of Avanti! and Mondo operaio, 1945; Il villino qualified second for the newly instated Strega Prize, 1947; Fiuggi Prize for the unpublished Un discorso d’amore, 1947; collaborated with Palmiro Togliatti at L’unita`, 1947; as well as Italia libera, MilanoSera, Rinascita, Vie nuove, Il mattino; traveled to Russia as special correspondent for L’unita`, 1949; Venezia Prize for Carlone, 1950; directed the press office for Olivetti, 1952–1964; Selezione Marzotto Prize for I figli, 1955; Puccini-Senigallia Prize for I racconti; 1961; contributed to Paese sera, Il mondo, Successo, Il contemporaneo, Paragone 1960–1966; Chianciano Prize for Le indulgenze, 1966; Viareggio Prize for La controfigura, 1968. Among numerous other honors, Commende de l’Ordre du Merite of the French Republic, 1975; and the Penna d’Oro of the President of the Italian Republic, 1982. Died in Rome, 3 May 1993. CARLA CAROTENUTO Selected Works Poetry ‘‘Ore e stagioni,’’ 1936. ‘‘Care ombre,’’ 1940. ‘‘Lungodora,’’ 1955. ‘‘A memoria d’uomo,’’ 1982. ‘‘Epigrammi, proverbi e altre inezie (1975–1981),’’ 1983. ‘‘Un osso duro,’’ 1985. ‘‘Posto di blocco,’’ 1986; as Checkpoint, translated by Gabriele Erasmi and Gerald Chapple, 1991; it includes the poem ‘‘ Lettera a Valeria’’ (A Letter to Valeria) and the article ‘‘Guida allavecchiaia’’ (A Guide to Old Age). ‘‘Lettera a Valeria,’’ 1988.

Novels Esterina, 1942. Un’amicizia difficile, 1945. Il villino, 1946. Un discorso d’amore, 1948. Carlone, 1950. I figli, 1954; revised edition, 1960. Disamore, 1956. Il congresso, 1963; as A Business Convention, translated by Joseph Green, 1965; as The Convention, translated by Joseph Green, 1965. Le indulgenze, 1966. La controfigura, 1968. Dalla donna alla luna, 1972. Le stanze, 1976. Due senza, 1979. Il viaggiatore, 1984.

PIERO BIGONGIARI Short Stories ‘‘Incendi a Pale`o,’’ 1945. ‘‘La scuola dei ladri,’’ 1952. ‘‘Leopolda,’’ 1957. ‘‘Uccidi o muori,’’ 1958. ‘‘I racconti,’’ 1961. ‘‘Cattiva memoria,’’ 1965. ‘‘Il dissenso,’’ 1969. ‘‘L’uomo che mangia il leone,’’ 1974. ‘‘Abitare altrove,’’ 1990. ‘‘Un sogno di ferragosto,’’ 1993. ‘‘Discorsi all’osteria,’’ 1999.

Plays Intervista con Don Giovanni, 1958. Licenza di matrimonio, 1968.

Nonfiction

Libero Bigiaretti),’’ Dalla sala riservata: Reperti d’autore, Rivista di Letteratura italiana, 19, nos. 2–3 (2001): 295–300.

Translations Henry Becque, La parigina, 1946. Andre´ Gide, La scuola delle mogli, 1949. Gustave Flaubert, La signora Bovary, 1949. Guy de Maupassant, Pietro e Giovanni, 1952. Jean Giraudoux, La bugiarda, 1970. Robert Louis Stevenson, L’isola del tesoro, 1977. Mark Twain, Le avventure di Tom Sawyer, 1984. Jules Verne, Il giro del mondo in ottanta giorni, 1987. Jules Verne, Le tribolazioni di un cinese in Cina, 1989. James Fenimore Cooper, L’ultimo dei Mohicani, 1991.

Further Reading

Paese di Roma, 1942. Roma borghese, 1945. Schedario, 1956. Carte romane, 1957. Olivetti 1908–1958, edited by Libero Bigiaretti et alia, 1958. Il dito puntato, 1967. Questa Roma, 1981. Con i tempi che corrono: Una conversazione-autobiografia con Gilberto Severini, 1989. Scritture di fabbrica: Dal vocabolario alla societa` (Bigiaretti et alia), edited by Carlo Ossola, 1994. Il mio paese, 1995. Esercizi di dattilografia, 1999. Profili al tratto, 2003.

Letters D’Ina, Gabriella, and Giuseppe Zaccaria (editors), ‘‘Libero Bigiaretti,’’ in Caro Bompiani: Lettere con l’editore, 1988. Mazza, Antonia, ‘‘‘Cio` che conta e` la moralita` della scrittura’ (Quattro lettere inedite e uno scritto raro di

Baroni, Giorgio, Bigiaretti, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1980. Carotenuto, Carla, ‘‘Tra gli autografi di Libero Bigiaretti,’’ in Autografo, 13, no. 35 (July-December 1997): 59–70. Carotenuto, Carla, ‘‘La pluridiscorsivita` di Bigiaretti: Leopolda e Le indulgenze tra scrittura e Immagine,’’ in Autografo, 15, no. 38 (January-June 1999): 61–73. Luzi, Alfredoet alia,, ‘‘Incontro con Libero Bigiaretti,’’ in Studi romani, 30, no. 4 (October-December 1982): 496–507. Luzi, Alfredo (editor), Libero Bigiaretti: La storia, le storie, la scrittura. Atti del Convegno Matelica 21–22 marzo 1998, Fossombrone (PS): Metauro, 2000. Mazza, Antonia, ‘‘Libero Bigiaretti,’’ in Scrittori italiani, Milan: Letture, 1989. Piscopo, Ugo, Libero Bigiaretti, Naples: Ferraro, 1977. Silori, Luigi, Invito alla lettura di Bigiaretti, Milan: Mursia, 1977. Strappini, Lucia, et alia, ‘‘Bigiarettiana,’’ in Studi romani, 45, nos. 1–2 (January-June 1997): 27–69.

PIERO BIGONGIARI (1914–1997) From his first poetic work, La figlia di Babilonia (The Daughter of Babylon, 1942), a collection of verses dating from 1934 to 1939, Piero Bigongiari was one of the most systematic and radical representatives of the third Hermetic generation— the so-called Florentine Hermeticism of the 1930s. The poet never distanced himself from this context, which was as much aesthetic as geographic. His entire literary production, both in verse and in prose, presents a strongly homogenous character, to the point of being called by critics

the most coherent oeuvre of twentieth-century Italian literature. Stylistically, Bigongiari’s poetics is characterized by the dissolution of linguistic structure in favor of a new, allusive and combinatorial language, much like that with which the symbolists and surrealists had already experimented. Images are put on the same level almost without any mediation, and thus unprecedented associations are achieved. In this way, the reciprocal relationship between the individual and the world is profoundly renewed, 225

PIERO BIGONGIARI thereby improving the capacity to comprehend reality. The frequent use of symbols and metaphors, the juxtaposition of terms, and the presence of iteration, assonance, and alliteration all assume primary importance in describing this general and thorough disintegration of language. The determination of meaning occurs therefore by way of new syntactic connections and isolated words where language, reduced to the essential, is pushed toward an extreme concentration. Actions are compressed in dense lexical aggregates that are developed in the course of unresolved contradictions. The sense of the grammatical functions appears therefore forced in light of the systematic reinterpretation of traditional hierarchies: adverbs are multiplied, nouns lose their central role in favor of the unopposed affirmation of the adjective, which is pushed to an efficiency of definition that originally only the verb possessed, the verb itself becomes a metaphor, a psychological figure of speech, potential energy bound to the present. Clearly, then, for Bigongiari language is no longer a simple expression of reality, nor does it transcend reality as did symbolist images. As an act of volition, it instead intervenes in the story line of existence: That is, it extracts phenomena from their absolute condition—atemporal and prehuman— and inserts them into the flow of events. Here the phenomena assume an imperfect nature since their dependence on the human will condemns them to a necessarily precarious state. However, it is only in this way that they are able to become a concrete reality in time and become cognizable objects to the individual. Similar themes recur in all of Bigongiari’s writings, both in his literary works and in his critical and journalistic texts. The poet’s unfolding artistic development is evident above all in the tendency to simplify language in order to render the expression simpler and to facilitate communication. After the second collection of poems, Rogo (Pyre, 1952), which still shares with the first volume an often indecipherable symbolism, the poet gradually tended to limit the excesses of obscurity in order to develop a more serene relationship with reality. This process begins already in Il corvo bianco (The White Crow, 1955), but becomes more explicit with Torre di Arnolfo (Arnolfo’s Tower, 1964). In fact, it is from here that one can trace a somewhat linear artistic path that runs throughout all of the successive works up to Dove finiscono le tracce (Where the Tracks End, 1996). Poetic creation consequently occurs as if it were one continuous narrative 226

where the individual books are incarnations of transitory stages that launch the successive phase of evolution. In this compact story line there are attempts at something new, as in the case of the dynamic experimentalism of Antimateria (AntiMatter, 1972) and Col dito in terra (With the Finger to the Ground, 1986). However, the intention of exploring all of the expressive potential of language never calls into question the need for a more serene lyricism, an attitude present above all in the collections Moses (Moses, 1979), Col dito in terra, and Nel delta del poema (In the Delta of the Poem, 1989). Critics are unanimous in recognizing the importance of Bigongiari’s critical writings, to the point of attributing a fundamental role among contemporary reflections on poetry to Il senso della lirica italiana e altri studi (The Meaning of Italian Lyric Poetry and Other Studies, 1952). From his thesis, published with the title L’elaborazione della lirica leopardiana (The Elaboration of Leopardi’s Lyric Poetry, 1937), Bigongiari’s interest focused mainly on Giacomo Leopardi, culminating in the monograph Leopardi (1962). His great merit is the elaboration of a methodology that focuses especially on the ‘‘internal story’’ of the work, in which the understanding of the essence of lyric expression feeds off the concrete testimonies of the ‘‘conditions’’ leading to poetry. The result is an analysis of the text that, starting with its interior relationships, can then observe the new forms that it assumes in its reception by the readers.

Biography Born in Navecchio (Pisa) on October 15, 1914; degree in letters from the University of Florence, 1936; between 1937 and 1938 he came into contact with Montale, Rosai, Gadda, Landolfi, Vittorini and Bonsanti; collaborated with the most significant literary journals of the time such as Letteratura, Campo di Marte, Prospettive and competed with Bo, Macrı`, Gatto, Luzi, Parronchi, and Traverso to define the characteristics of the Florentine Hermetic movement; in the 1950s, collaborated with the literary journals L’approdo and L’approdo letterario as well as with several newspapers, among which Il Nuovo Corriere and La Nazione; was professor of modern and contemporary Italian literature at the University of Florence from 1953 to 1989. Died in Florence on October 8, 1997. GIADA VIVIANI

ROMANO BILENCHI Selected Works

Prosa per il Novecento, 1971. La poesia come funzione del linguaggio, 1972.

Collections

Letters

Tutte le poesie, edited by Paolo Fabrizio Iacuzzi, vol. 1, Florence: Le Lettere, 1994.

Poetry ‘‘La figlia di Babilonia,’’ 1942. ‘‘Rogo,’’ 1952. ‘‘Il corvo bianco,’’ 1955. ‘‘Le mura di Pistoia,’’ 1958. ‘‘Il caso e il caos,’’ 1960. ‘‘Torre di Arnolfo,’’ 1964. ‘‘Stato di cose,’’ 1968. ‘‘Antimateria,’’ 1972. ‘‘Moses,’’ 1979. ‘‘Autoritratto poetico,’’ 1985. ‘‘Col dito in terra,’’ 1986. ‘‘Diario americano,’’ 1987. ‘‘Nel delta del poema,’’ 1989. ‘‘La legge e la leggenda,’’ 1992. ‘‘Dove finiscono le tracce,’’ 1996.

Fiction Visibile invisibile, 1985. Tre racconti inediti: 1933–1934, 1991. Una citta` rocciosa e altri frammenti di un’autobiografia, 1994. Nel giardino di Armida e altre prose memoriali, un racconto e una poesia, edited by Roberto Carifi, 1996. L’azzurro e altri racconti, edited by Paolo Fabrizio Iacuzzi, 1999.

Essays L’ elaborazione della lirica leopardiana, 1937. Il senso della lirica italiana e altri studi, 1952. Poesia italiana del Novecento, 1960. Leopardi, 1962; expanded, 1976. Capitoli di una storia della poesia italiana, 1968. Poesia francese del Novecento, 1968.

Giovinezza a Pistoia: autoritratto del poeta attraverso le lettere a Mario Ciattini, 1933–1971, edited by Paolo Fabrizio Iacuzzi, 1994.

Others Testimone in Egitto, 1985. Nel mutismo dell’universo: interviste sulla poesia 1965–1997, edited by Anna Dolfi, 2001. Un pensiero che seguita a pensare: giornale 1933–1997, edited by Paolo Fabrizio Iacuzzi, 2001.

Further Reading Bernardi Leoni, Margherita, Informale e Terza generazione. Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1975. Biagini, Enza (editor), Per Piero Bigongiari, Rome: Bulzoni, 1997. Noferi, Adelia, ‘‘Piero Bigongiari: la critica come segno di contraddizione,’’ in Le poetiche critiche novecentesche, Florence: Le Monnier, 1970. Noferi, Adelia, ‘‘Piero Bigongiari,’’ in Novecento. I contemporanei. Gli scrittori e la cultura letteraria nella societa` italiana, edited by Gianni Grana, Milan: Marzorati, 1979. Papini, Maria Carla, ‘‘Il viaggio poetico di Bigongiari,’’ in Italianistica, 6 (1977): 295–315. Pinotti, Gianna, ‘‘Giano bifronte come anti-icona dell’essere in ‘Abbandonato dall’Angelo’ di Piero Bigongiari,’’ in Gradiva, 22 (2002): 50–57. Pozzi, Gianni, La poesia italiana del Novecento da Gozzano agli ermetici, Turin: Einaudi, 1965. Ramat, Silvio, Invito alla lettura di Piero Bigongiari, Milan: Mursia, 1979. Santoro, Jose Luiz, ‘‘Aspetti surreali del primo Bigongiari,’’ in Forum Italicum, 11 (1977): 19–35.

ROMANO BILENCHI (1909–1989) Romano Bilenchi is a greatly respected, but not always widely read, author whose beautiful and unusual short stories and novels have yet to be translated into English. Bilenchi was also a political journalist and a cultural figure of major importance in twentieth-century history in Italy. Bilenchi’s fame, however, is likely to rest on his achievements as a writer of prose fiction, especially his Conservatorio di Santa Teresa (The Santa Teresa Conservatory, 1940), a carefully crafted and

elegant coming of age novel set in the provinces during the 1930s that many considered the most enduring work of fiction produced in Italy under Fascism. From a small town in the countryside outside Siena, Bilenchi can be considered part of a tradition of Tuscan writing by authors such as Federigo Tozzi, Mario Pratesi, Carlo Cassola, and Mario Tobino, who expressed themselves in a linguistic style that, while clearly the national language, 227

ROMANO BILENCHI contained nevertheless the regional dialect from where the national language was born centuries ago. Throughout his life, Bilenchi never strayed very far from Tuscany. As a young man, he contributed to such local, regional, and national publications of the 1930s as Il selvaggio, Il bargello, L’universale, Il lavoro fascista, and even Benito Mussolini’s own mouthpiece, Il popolo d’Italia. With the coming of the war and the Resistance, he continued his journalistic militancy—but this time on the other side of the political barrier, first through his contributions to newspapers and other clandestine anti-Fascist publications, and then in active combat. After the war, Bilenchi worked for a number of Communist-supported publishing ventures. These included Societa`, which he helped found, and later Il nuovo corriere and Il contemporaneo. Toward the end of his life, he wrote for less militantly sectarian and nonparty publications, among them La nazione, Il mondo, L’approdo letterario, Il corriere della sera, and Il ponte. Bilenchi’s career as a public intellectual could be said to be paradigmatic of the changing positions held by many Italians on the left during and after Fascism. Like his friend Elio Vittorini and many others, Bilenchi began as a ‘‘frondista’’ (rebel) or left-wing ‘‘sansepolcrista’’ (a term designating someone who had attended the gathering in Milan’s Piazza San Sepolcro at the beginning of the Fascist movement in 1919). After the Civil War in Spain and with the coming of the Communist-Fascist struggle to Italy, he switched to the Communist side. He left the party in 1956, however, after writing an article critical of the suppression of an uprising in Poland that preceded the better-known upheavals in Budapest later that same year. In Italy, these events led to massive defections from the Communist Party by a number of intellectuals and other militants. Unlike many of his comrades from this period, however, whose breaks with the party were definitive, Bilenchi returned to the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in 1972. His return, significantly, took place at the beginning of the anni di piombo (years of lead) when the party was coming under attack from the radical left as well as from its usual adversaries on the right and the center. His value as a cultural commentator was based in part on his experience as a witness—often from close up where bullets were literally flying, to many of the most dramatic events in Italy during more than six decades of cultural and political activity. Bilenchi wrote two full-length novels, the Conservatorio di Santa Teresa and Il bottone di Stalingrado (Button from Stalingrad, 1972). The 228

latter’s title refers to a button taken by an Austrian soldier from the body of a Russian soldier during the Battle of Stalingrad. This button is passed on to the novel’s protagonist, Marco, as a symbol for his political reawakening. Marco’s story unravels from his school days under Fascism through World War II, the Resistance, and the postwar years. His transformation appears to reflect Bilenchi’s progressive political shifting. On the other hand, Bilenchi’s stories, which were written for the most part in the 1930s and published in revised versions in different collections later, dealt almost exclusively with life under Fascism in provincial Tuscany. Much of this writing has to do with childhood. Unlike Marcel Proust, Bilenchi found childhood less than perpetually idyllic—a time filled not only with the universal pains of growing up but hedged in as well by the more pervasive discomforts of life under totalitarianism. Despite this, the characters Bilenchi depicts enjoy the reassurance provided by simple social rituals like communal meals, quiet conversations, or family outings, and activities whose venerability and seeming inevitability, though sometimes marked by eruptions of violence, nonetheless sustain them through the more difficult moments of their personal growth. Such patterns of social interaction endure, Bilenchi’s narratives seem to suggest, despite the violence and bloodshed in the squares, streets, and countryside of an otherwise peaceful Tuscany. All those who have written about Bilenchi’s prose have commented on his undemonstrative style and his aversion for rhetoric that he shared with other writers from the same period such as the poets and his personal friends Eugenio Montale and Mario Luzi. Bilenchi himself has stressed the poetic nature of good narrative. It is partly because his work is so lyrical in intention that it won the admiration of Montale and Luzi as well as that of such sensitive readers of Italian poetry as the critic and philologist Gianfranco Contini. Not at all psychological narratives, Bilenchi’s texts rarely speculate about the inner workings of a character’s mind. What counts instead in these emotionally restrained texts is the simple elegance of Bilenchi’s writing and his skill in rendering even the subtlest of moods. Bilenchi’s descriptions of his native Colle d’Elsa and the surrounding Tuscan landscape are just as lacking in undue effusion. The result is a seemingly effortless prose that, while deeply rooted in the Tuscan literary tradition, seems to have come into existence—as commentators including Montale have remarked—as though arriving from nowhere.

ROMANO BILENCHI While there is a vivid sense of place in Bilenchi’s writings, his narratives, with the exception of the Resistance memoirs set in a carefully described Florence, typically unfold in locations that cannot be precisely verified on any map but are often combinations of places that can be better understood as zones in the author’s memory. An attentive and engaged witness to some of the most difficult times in modern Italian history, Bilenchi was able to capture the essence of those times in at least one region of Italy with insight and restrained precision.

Biography Born in Colle Val d’Elsa (Siena) on 9 November 1909. In 1925, moved to Florence to study at the Liceo Scientifico and began to write fiction. Contracted tuberculosis and followed courses at the University of Bologna. Back in Florence, became friends with Elio Vittorini and worked as a journalist for Il selvaggio, L’universale, Il popolo d’Italia and La nazione, among others. In the 1930s, member of the radical left wing of the Fascist Party but in Florence kept company with critics of the movement and later overt anti-Fascists such as Carlo Emilio Gadda, Eugenio Montale, Vasco Pratolini, Mario Luzi. In 1938, joined the clandestine Italian Communist Party and subsequently took an active part in the Resistance fight in Florence, 1943–1944. Throughout the 1930s and early 1940s wrote and published a number of short stories and his first novel, Conservatorio di Santa Teresa (1940). From 1948 to 1956 the editor-inchief of the left-wing daily Il nuovo corriere and helped establish Societa` and Il contemporaneo, both supported by the Italian Communist Party. In 1957, resigned from the Communist Party but rejoined in 1972. That same year published Il bottone di Stalingrado, which won the Viareggio prize. In 1973, married Maria Ferrara. In 1982, won the prize for narrative for Il gelo from the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. Died in Florence on 18 November 1989. CHARLES KLOPP Selected Works Collections Opere, edited by Benedetta Centovalli, Massimo Depaoli and Cristina Nesi, Milan: Rizzoli, 1977.

Fiction Vita di Pisto, 1931.

Il capofabbrica, 1935, revised edition, 1972. Anna e Bruno e altri racconti, 1938. Conservatorio di Santa Teresa, 1940. La siccita`, 1941. Dino e altri racconti, 1942. Mio cugino Andrea, 1943. Una citta`, 1958. Il processo di Mary Dugan, 1972. Il bottone di Stalingrado, 1972. Il gelo, 1982. Gli anni impossibili, 1984.

Memoirs Cronaca dell’Italia meschina, ovvero storia dei socialisti di Colle, 1933. I silenzi di Rosai, 1971. Amici. Vittorini, Rosai, e altri incontri, 1976.

Other La ghisa delle cure e altri scritti (1927–1989), 1997.

Further Reading Amoroso, Giuseppe, ‘‘Sei capitoli per il Conservatorio,’’ in Narrativa italiana 1975–1983 con vecchie e nuove varianti, Milan: Mursia, 1983. Banchini, Ferdinando, Bilenchi. Analisi e cronistoria, Milan: Laboratorio delle Arti, 1999. Brouwer, Olga-Maria, Invito alla lettura di Bilenchi, Milan: Mursia, 1978. Contini, Gianfranco, ‘‘Per Bilenchi e i suoi ‘Amici,’’’ in Romano Bilenchi, Amici, edited by Sergio Pautasso, Milan: Rizzoli, 1988. Corti, Maria, ‘‘Romano Bilenchi, ovvero connotazione toscana e denotazione italiana,’’ in Metodi e fantasmi, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1969. Klopp, Charles, ‘‘Reconsidering Romano Bilenchi,’’ in Italica, 80 (2003): 428–432. Luperini, Romano, ‘‘Parole e cose, scrittura ed ethos in Bilenchi,’’ in Controtempo. Critica e letteratura fra moderno e postmoderno, Naples: Liguori, 1999. Luti, Giorgio, Passione e inganni. Dieci ritratti di scrittori contemporanei, Verona: Bi & Gi, 1987. Luzi, Mario, Introduction to Romano Bilenchi, Opere, edited by Benedetta Centovalli, Massimo Depaoli and Cristina Nesi, Milan: Rizzoli, 1977. Macrı` Tronci, Albarosa, La narrativa di Romano Bilenchi, Florence: Vallecchi, 1977. Montale, Eugenio, ‘‘Racconti di Romano Bilenchi,’’ in Il secondo mestiere. Prose 1920–1979, Milan: Mondadori, 1996. Muraca, Giuseppe, ‘‘Romano Bilenchi direttore de ‘Il Nuovo Corriere,’’’ in Utopisti ed eretici nella letteratura italiana contemporanea, Catanzaro: Rubbettino, 2000. Peritore, Giuseppe Angelo, ‘‘Ritratti critici dei contemporanei. Romano Bilenchi,’’ in Belfagor, 28 (1973): 685– 701. Petroni, Paolo, Bilenchi, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1972. Polimeri, Giuseppe (editor), Romano Bilenchi, Anna e Bruno: Rami di un romanzo inedito, Milan: Lupetti/ Piero Manni, 1996. Virdia, Ferdinando, ‘‘Romano Bilenchi,’’ in Letteratura italiana. I contemporanei, vol. 2, Milan: Marzorati, 1963.

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BIOGRAPHY

BIOGRAPHY Biography, the description of an individual life, necessarily implies that the culture in which it occurs and the philosophy upon which it is based attribute value to individual lives. The roots of this tenet in Europe are to be found in Platonic and Aristotelian concepts of the bios, or manner of living, of an already-made man, and not a man in his becoming. The focus on the individual remains consistent throughout the history of biography, but the kind of individual deemed worthy of note and the reasons for an individual’s value vary over time. On the Italian peninsula, biography begins as eulogy, continues as in example or a guide for living, becomes a vehicle for political and religious ideologies, flourishes as praise of accomplished men, serves as a vehicle of patriotism and nationalism, and embodies modern notions of psychology and social reality. Often several of these functions occur simultaneously. Early examples of biography outside Italy are to be found in Homer’s laments for dead heroes and praise for victors, kings, and princes, all of which measure the individual in the context of a concept or an ideal. Socrates and Euripides tend toward greater historicization in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE. The biblical and apocryphal Gospels provide biographies of Jesus and, by the second century CE, Plutarch writes his famous Lives. We can see in early biography an impulse toward pedagogy and moralizing that at times veers into the realms of epic and mythology. The Middle Ages demonstrate a theocratic mentality that is far removed from any interest in the study of an individual’s struggle and inner growth. Biographic stories abound, nonetheless, in accounts of the lives, deaths, and miracles of saints, bishops, and abbots. The overwhelming tendency of the genre in medieval times is that of hagiography, and its social function is to provide examples of Christian lives that may serve to inspire its public to stronger faith and moral behavior. Well-known medieval biographies include Tommaso da Celano’s Actus beati Francisci (Life of Saint Francis) in the thirteenth century, and the anonymously penned Vita di Frate Ginepro (Life of Fra Ginepro) of the late fourteenth century. Pope Gregory IX commissioned Tommaso da Celano’s biography of 230

Saint Francis of Assisi in 1228 and approved the finished work the following year. His Via prima was supplemented by a Vita secunda (1246–1247) and in 1253 he added an account of Saint Francis’ miracles. Tommaso was a skillful historian and a writer, well versed in medieval rhetoric. This early biography inspired a Vita written by Giuliano di Spira between 1231 and 1235. We also note the Vite dei Santi Padri (Lives of the Holy Fathers), medieval legends that were rendered in the vulgate by Domenico Cavalca during the first half of the fourteenth century. Not all medieval biography deals with saints or church fathers, however. For example, in addition to his Gesta archiepiscoporum Mediolanensium (Acts of Medieval Bishops), Arnolfo of Milan had produced the Gesta Berengarii imperatoris (Acts of the Berengar Rulers) already during the eleventh century. Nonetheless, medieval biography never attempts to convey any sense of individual personality development, limiting itself, as its ‘‘acts’’ titles imply, to the straightforward chronicling of actual events or events deemed to have occurred. The aim of such works is to convey moral, religious, and political values or to engage in polemics of a historical nature. The Middle Ages are succeeded by the humanism of Petrarch, Boccaccio, and others. Even here biography insists more on type than on individual variant and in fact goes to some lengths to ‘‘Italianize’’ its subjects—that is, to make them resemble the ancients. Petrarch’s own De Viris illustribus (Lives of Illustrious Men), begun in 1338 and amplified many times, exemplifies this era in biography, where it is joined by Boccaccio’s Vita di Dante (Life of Dante, 1373–1374) and, in Latin, by Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris (Concerning Famous Women, ca. 1361–1375) and De casibus virorum illustrium (The Cases of Illustrious Men, ca. 1355–1374). Worthy of mention is also the Vita di Cola di Rienzo (Life of Cola di Rienzo), transcribed by an anonymous writer in the middle of the fourteenth century from a lost Latin text and taken up in the 1800s by both Richard Wagner and Gabriele D’Annunzio. The first half of the fifteenth century witnesses Leonardo Bruni’s lives of Dante, Petrarch, and Cicero. With Bruni, we see an ascendancy of

BIOGRAPHY value given by the biographer to his subjects’ artistic production. Vespasiano da Bisticci (1421–1498), the leading bookseller of Renaissance Florence, further typifies this new attitude in his simple, graceful Vite di uomini illustri del XV secolo (Lives of Famous Men of the Fifteenth Century), which treats contemporary biographic objects. Biographers now emphasize remarkable creative and spiritual achievements of the individuals whose lives they recount variously in Latin or in Italian. Feo Belcari’s exemplary Vita del Beato Giovanni Colombini (Life of the Blessed Giovanni Colombini, 1449) is among the best biographies of its era, while the Vita del Brunellesco (Life of Brunelleschi), attributed to Antonio di Tuccio Manetti (1423–1497), and this same author’s lives of Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Pope Nicolas V also exemplify the tendency to favor spiritual and artistic values in a biographical object. Biography flourishes in Renaissance Italy, given the era’s reclaimed emphasis on the validity of human perception and experience per se. Foremost among its social tasks is its capacity to pit political and religious ideologies against each other as we see in such works as Bernardino Baldi’s Vita di Guidubaldo da Montefeltro, duca d’Urbino (Life of Guidubaldo of Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino) and in Pier Candido Decembrio’s lives of Filippo Maria Visconti (1447) and Francesco Sforza (ca. 1449). Among such exemplary sixteenth-century lives of lords, heads of state, and military leaders, Niccolo` Machiavelli’s Vita di Castruccio Castracani (Life of Castruccio Castracani, 1520) stands out as a clear attempt to create an ideal. In this work, the author cares little for establishing the facts of his object’s life but rather has recourse to invention to the extent that it serves his ideological purpose. In 1549, Paolo Giovio wrote Vite di uomini illustri (Lives of Famous Men) in Latin, later translated into the vulgate, the first volume of which contains biographies of the Visconti family. Along with the use of biography for political goals, we find a continued sixteenth-century emphasis on artistic, spiritual, and heroic achievements presented outside evident politicizing contexts in such works as the Historie della vita e dei fatti di Cristoforo Colombo (Stories of the Life and Events of Christopher Columbus), written by Columbus’ son, Fernando, Pietro Aretino’s Vita di San Tomaso signor d’Aquino (Life of Saint Thomas, 1543), and Ascanio Condivi’s Vita di Michelagnolo Buonarroti (Life of Michelangelo, 1553). The year 1550 sees the appearance of a landmark work, Giorgio Vasari’s Le vite de’ piu´ eccellenti Architetti,

Pittori, et Scultori Italiani (Lives of the Most Excellent Italian Architects, Painters, and Sculptors), an outstanding eulogizing biography. Praising Rafael in his typical fashion, for example, Vasari writes ‘‘Di costui fece dono al mondo la natura’’ (With him nature made a gift to the world). With his Vite, Vasari sets in place a body of artistic achievement in visual and spatial arts that will serve to codify a canon of his era for centuries to come. Several biographies of the following century illustrate the new era’s passion for compendiums. These include Carlo Roberto Dati’s Vite dei pittori antichi (Lives of Ancient Painters, 1667) and Filippo Baldinucci’s Notizie dei professori di disegno da Cimabue in qua (Biographical Data about Design Instructors from Cimabue on, 1681). As the high Renaissance passes into the seventeenth century, a decidedly modern attitude becomes evident in biography. No longer is biography based on praise alone. Now, spiritual, psychological, and moral aspects of a subject contribute to the biographer’s evaluation of the individual, such as in Filippo Sassetti’s Vita di Francesco Ferrucci (Life of Francesco Ferrucci, ca. 1557) and Jacopo Nardi’s Vita di Antonio Giacomini (Life of Antonio Giacomini, ca. 1540). Now, too, biographers engage in acts of effective canon formation by producing actual biographical dictionaries. Foremost among these is Giovanni Baglione (ca. 1573–1644) with his Vite de’ pittori, scultori et architetti (Lives of Painters, Sculptors and Architects, 1642). Toward the end of the century, Vincenzo Viviani, Galileo’s disciple, is commissioned by Leopoldo de’ Medici to write Sulla vita di Galileo Galilei (About the Life of Galileo), a biography from the 1680s that aims at establishing the facts of its subject’s life in the spirit of the awakening Enlightenment and in an effort to mend Galileo’s posttrial and posthumous reputation. In the secular/religious ideology spectrum, we find the Jesuit Daniello Bartoli’s Vita del cardinale Bellarmino (Life of Cardinal Bellarmine, 1678). Two salient aspects of seventeenth-century biography in Italy as exemplified in the biographies just mentioned are its effort to divide its material into categories of knowledge (artistic, religious, and political) and its emphasis on erudition and research, both of which reflect the European valorization of reason that will lead to the Enlightenment. Eighteenth-century biography in Italy, not straying far from the influence of the erudite contemporary historian Ludovico Muratori, is generally characterized by an emphasis on research and documentation. We note the oratorios recounting 231

BIOGRAPHY the lives of the prophets written by the Venetian Apostolo Zeno (1668–1750), Giammaria Mazzuchelli’s Scrittori d’Italia (Italy’s Writers, 1753– 1763), and the works of such biographers as the Jesuit Girolamo Tiraboschi (Muratori’s successor as director of Este’s library in Modena), and Pier Antonio Serassi (1721–1791). A prescient instance of what in the following century will appear as emphatic patriotism and nationalism in biography, Francesco Milizia’s Vite dei piu` celebri architetti d’ogni nazione e d’ogni tempo (Lives of the Most Famous Architects of Every Nation and Every Era) appears in 1771. During the eighteenth century, we also find imported from England, France, and Germany a new aesthetic sensitivity regarding the value, purpose, and possibilities of an individual life. This Romantic attitude allows for a deepening of the biographical endeavor by adding to the alreadyestablished practice of rigorous research and documentation of a new understanding of the value of such work. Romanticism entails a re-evaluation of several aspects of life: its religious meaning, the role of feeling, or sentiment, and the spiritual function of the real world. History for the Romantics is thus the gradual working out of spiritual ideals in which the individual’s role is foremost, agential, and profoundly, even transcendentally, important. The philosopher Giambattista Vico occupies a unique niche with his De rebus gestis Antonii Caraphae (About the Life of Antonio Carafa, 1716). Having already penned his own autobiography, Vico brings to his telling of Carafa’s life a reinvention of biography as a genre including both historical accuracy and psychological analysis. Biography in the nineteenth century is part and parcel of the movement for the unification of Italy as a nation state, the Risorgimento. In 1802–1803, Francesco Lomonaco (1772–1810) publishes his sweeping Vite degli eccellenti Italiani (Lives of Excellent Italians), which contains 23 biographies, from Boccaccio to Lorenzo de’ Medici, from Guicciardini to Tasso, from Campanella to Beccaria, in a classicizing narrative style inspired by Tacitus and Plutarch. Such positivist analyses of figures from the past that exhibit and exemplify nationalist tendencies at times result in ideological exaggerations, such as the neo-Guelph ideology evident in Cesare Balbo’s Vita di Dante (Life of Dante, 1830). Throughout the century, patriotic zeal characterizes such works as Cesare Cantu`’s L’abate Parini e la Lombardia nel secolo passato (The Abbot Parini and Lombardy during the Past Century, 1854) and Luigi Carrer’s Life of Foscolo (1842), which 232

typify biography’s capacity to constitute a national identity by means of ideologically appropriate life stories. Pasquale Villari’s La storia di Girolamo Savonarola e de’ suoi tempi (A History of Girolamo Savonarola and His Times, 1859–1861) and Niccolo` Machiavelli e i suoi tempi (Niccolo` Machiavelli and His Times, 1877–1882) are both published after the success of the national unification movement. Not to be forgotten is the remarkable biography of Cardinal Borromeo that Alessandro Manzoni situates within his masterly novel of national unification, I promessi sposi (The Betrothed), first published in 1827. Here we see an undiluted if subtle example of biography used for nationalist ends. While a historic framework of positivism may at times obscure the object of biography in contemporary European traditions, in Italy, biography remains generally anchored in a tradition of praise throughout the nineteenth century. However, a relative lack of popularity may be due to readers’ suspicions of biography as not being scientific but erring from fact in order either to praise or to blame its object. In the twentieth century, biography takes on elements of novelistic writing and expands its gamut of objects to include figures of industry and popular culture. Giovanni Papini’s Storia di Cristo (History of Christ, 1921), Dante vivo (Dante Alive, 1933), and Vita di Michelangelo nella vita del suo tempo (Michelangelo and Its Times, 1949) exemplify this novelistic narrative bent. Margherita Sarfatti’s Dux, the first official biography of Benito Mussolini, was published in English in 1925 and then appeared in a revised Italian version a year later. Another widespread tendency is the use of literary biography as a kind of philosophical and even political essay. Benedetto Croce, in his 1946 essay, Ariosto, for example, harshly criticizes the Renaissance epic poet for what the critic perceives to be Ariosto’s scarce intellectual, religious, and political passions. In 1973, Nino Borsellino’s biography of Ariosto defends the poet on nationalist grounds, claiming that he gave Italy a national model for modern literature. One may read these two biographies as statements of and a debate about the political role of art. Other biographers have taken up Petrarch as their object. Umberto Bosco publishes a detailed biography of the poet in 1946, focusing his attention entirely on Petrarch’s poetic production rather than on actual biographical events. In 1987, Ugo Dotti gives us a life of Petrarch that highlights the

BIOGRAPHY troubled mind of a poet engaged in an unending existential search for peace and serenity. Such diverse portraits contain implicit and widely diverse value systems, indicating the wide scope of recent biography as a genre in Italy. By similar tokens, such twentieth-century biographies as Giuseppe Prezzolini’s Machiavelli anticristo (Machiavelli Antichrist, 1954) make claims about historic figures that indicate the writer’s ideology in a modern context, including the unique coexistence in Italy of Catholicism and Communism. Prezzolini holds, for example, that Machiavelli believed that political activity was not compatible with Christian ethics; therefore, the Roman state, a great political creation, was weakened and destroyed by Christianity. Freudian elements come to the fore in Rolando Damiani’s 1998 biography of Italy’s great Romantic poet, Leopardi. All’apparir del vero: Vita di Giacomo Leopardi (When Truth Appears: Life of Giacomo Leopardi), in which Damiani sees Leopardi’s life as a continuous unstable balance between dreams of escape from and rebellion against his father’s vigilant power and his own great fear of the real world. Literary lions of the early twentieth century attract biographers engaged in elaborating those writers’ philosophies. Luigi Pirandello, who famously introduced humorism in Italy and sensitized readers internationally to the vicissitudes of apparent identity, is the object of numerous biographies, among them those by Gaspare Giudice, Luigi Pirandello (1963), and by Andrea Camilleri, Biografia del figlio cambiato (Biography of a Changed Son, 2000). Giudice, a scholar, traces the life of the Sicilian author in detail; Camilleri, on the other hand, gives us what he calls a ‘‘novel of Luigi Pirandello’s life’’ in an attempt to understand the man as separate from the author, an endeavor with roots in the psychologizing and sentimental tendencies of Romanticism. Several twentieth-century biographers seem motivated by a desire to set the record straight about certain historical figures, generally when those figures have political significance in contemporary contexts. For example, Marco Nozza and Indro Montanelli’s Garibaldi (1962) intends to fill the gaps that Garibaldi’s own memoir leaves open and to correct later writers who have exiled this hero of the Italian Risorgimento to the realm of mythology. Piero Chiara’s Vita di Gabriele d’Annunzio (Life of Gabriele D’Annunzio, 1978) revisits D’Annunzio’s infamous association with Mussolini and emphasizes his opposition to any

alliance with Germany. A final example of this strand of biography is Giorgio Bocca’s Palmiro Togliatti (1973), where the journalist relies on interviews with such Communist Party comrades as Amendola, Berti, and Secchia in order to trace Togliatti’s political ascent. Biography as an investigation into the lives of living persons is also popular during the twentieth century. Often, such biography is based on interviews between a journalist and the object, as is the case with Enzo Biagi’s Ferrari, l’uomo che invento` il mito del cavallino rampante (Ferrari, the Man Who Invented the Myth of the Rearing Horse, 1980). Maurizio Giammusso’s biography of Eduardo de Filippo, Eduardo (1993) relies on the actor’s private papers to trace his development from the early years when he worked with his brother and sister through his meeting with Pirandello to his international success. Italo Moscati’s Anna Magnani: Vita amori e carriera di un’attrice che guarda diritto negli occhi (Anna Magnani: Life, Loves and Career of an Actress Who Looks You Straight in the Eyes, 2003) presents her as embodying 70 years of Italian history, from variety showgirl to international star. This trend in biography also includes magazines devoted to journalistic and gossipy coverage of the lives of celebrities such as film stars, royalty, politicians, industrialists, and the wealthy in general. In 1983, the novelist Natalia Ginzburg takes up an extensive biographic project when she writes La famiglia Manzoni (The Manzoni Family). This unusual biography attempts to recompose Manzoni and his family’s history through reports of events, actual letters, and contemporary journalistic accounts. The story ranges from 1762, when Giulia Beccaria, Manzoni’s mother, is born to the events of the life of Stefano Borri, the son of Manzoni’s second wife, born from her first marriage. Such a unique and vast range implies that the biography of a single individual, if limited to that person’s lifetime, is inadequate to an understanding of that individual, for which one must, on the contrary, expand the very notion of biography as an individual life story. Finally, we cannot fail to mention the parallel development of biography in twentieth-century Italy and the annals school in first French and then international practice of historiography. This trend in history writing holds that biography is important for the purpose of re-evaluating an appropriate historical object. This perspective includes a valorization of the lives of persons not traditionally considered by scholars to be historic actors (peasants, 233

BIOGRAPHY for example), rather than powerful figures who perform what traditional historiography sees as noteworthy deeds. As is the case in Carlo Ginzburg’s groundbreaking work, Il formaggio e i vermi (The Cheese and the Worms, 1976), this historiography project ranges past the boundaries of traditional genres and even traditional fields defined by high and popular culture, blending history, sociology, and biography, to provide contemporary postmodern insights into the past. BEVERLY ALLEN

Further Reading Backsheider, Paula, Reflections on Biography, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Baldinucci, Filippo, The Life of Bernini, translated by Catherine Enggars, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1966. Boccaccio, Giovanni, The Life of Dante, New York: Garland, 1990. Branca, Vittore, Boccaccio medievale, Florence: Sansoni, 1956. Croce, Elena, Lo specchio della biografia, Rome: De Luca, 1960. Ellis, David, Literary Lives: Biography and the Search for Understanding, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000. Gianolio, Valeria (editor), Scrivere le vite: Consonanze critiche sulla biografia, Turin: Tirrenia Stampatori, 1996. Holroyd, Michael, Works on Paper: The Craft of Biography and Autobiography, Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 2002. Tommaso da Celano, St. Francis of Assisi: First and Second Life of St. Francis with Selections from the Treatise on the Miracles of Blessed Francis (1257), Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1988.

FLAVIO BIONDO (1392–1463) Born into a family of notaries in the northern Italian city of Forlı`, Flavio Biondo became the most notable historian and antiquarian of the fifteenth century. As a whole, his body of work dictated the rules and to a great extent defined a methodology of historiographic research that remained canonical well after his death. Although Biondo eventually gained acceptance among the Humanist elite, the domestic and geographical circumstances concerning his birth did not grant him immediate access to the liveliest cultural centers of Renaissance Italy. Rather, he was exposed from an early age to the aggressive and factious diplomacies of the political powers (Venetian Republic) and families (Visconti, Sforza) that were then vying for supremacy in Northern Italy. Educated in the liberal arts but most importantly trained as a notary, Biondo was forced to lead an itinerant life during which, given his professional education, he had the chance to hone his diplomatic abilities and to develop a necessary pragmatism. From this he acquired the skills that led him to a successful career as the foremost diplomatic representative of Pope Eugenius IV, an experience that played a pivotal role in his life. 234

The year 1433 marked a turning point in Biondo’s career. Eugenius IV appointed him papal secretary at a time in which the Roman curia had been temporarily transferred from Rome to Florence. Even though as a youth he had already had the chance to converse with personalities such as Pier Candido Decembrio (1392–1477) and Guarino Veronese (1374–1460), his period in Florence gave him the opportunity of meeting the leading Humanists of his time. Among them, Leonardo Bruni (ca. 1370–1444), and his works played the most important role in the genesis and development of his ideas. In his short treatise entitled De verbis romanae locutionis (On the Words of Roman Speech, 1435), Biondo undertook the refutation of Bruni’s argument according to which ancient Rome would have been bilingual, its two languages being the Latin of the masterpieces of classical antiquity, and a vernacular idiom spoken by the illiterate. Contrary to Bruni’s view, Biondo asserted that literary and nonliterary language differed in degree and not in kind and based his argument on evidence directly culled from Cicero’s Brutus. The inherent qualities of Latin, Biondo maintained, remained unchanged until the time of the barbaric invasions.

FLAVIO BIONDO The conclusions reached in his first confrontation with Bruni are also central to a work that in its most definitive edition was entitled Historiarum ab inclinatione romani imperii decades (Decades of History from the Decline of the Roman Empire, 1453). This work, which Biondo began writing in 1435, was again inspired by Bruni, who at the time was occupied with his Historiae florentini populi (History of the Florentine People), which he had begun as early as 1415 and formally introduced the first six books to the city government in 1439. Although at first Biondo meant to limit himself to the history of his own century, in the following decades he repeatedly revised the date of his research until finally settling for the event that in his view marked the beginning of Rome’s decline—the sack of Rome of 410 AD. Despite its monumental breadth, the work retained a remarkable unity of intent. Rather than being noted for its historical accuracy—a quality that can more easily be attributed to Biondo’s later works—the Historiarum ab inclinatione romani imperii decades also suggested for the first time the possibility of viewing secular history synoptically. Even though he effected a total departure from the providential historicism presented by Saint Augustine in his De civitate Dei (413–426), a universal history such as Biondo’s unfailingly revealed the temporal identity of man’s misused passions and overpowering greed. In 1443, the papal court returned to Rome and Biondo, just as Petrarch a century earlier, was enraptured by the appeal of the city’s ancient ruins. The antiquarian and archeological frenzy evoked by the Roman sights led Biondo to the composition in 1446 of his Roma instaurata (Rome Restored, 1446). Drawn upon a genre popular in the Middle Ages, this work was a fairly systematic topography of the ancient city’s monuments and architecture. Biondo’s archeological interests were shared by other illustrious Humanists, most notably Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459), who in those very same years was working on his De varietate fortunae (On the Vicissitude of Fortune, 1448). From a comparison of these two works, the novelty of Biondo’s more positive methodology clearly emerges as an alternative to the emotiveness that still permeated the works of his contemporaries. Almost coeval to this work was his Italia illustrata (Italy Illustrated, 1453), in which Biondo undertook, between 1448 and 1453, a comprehensive geographical and archeological description of the

entire Italian peninsula. A peculiar characteristic of his work is the author’s successful attempt to demythologize the accounts regarding the origins of Italy’s most illustrious cities and his acclamation of the personalities who contributed to the rise of Humanism. Thus, after having established the date for the end of the Roman Empire, Biondo also determined, through his descriptions, the places and time central to that period in history that we now call Renaissance. Biondo’s last major historiographic effort is the Roma triumphans (Rome Triumphant, 1457–1459). This work represents the natural conclusion to a career dedicated to the investigation and revelation of Rome’s true features. Famous for the vivid descriptions (especially in the last book) of Rome’s institutions and the activities of its inhabitants, Roma triumphans serves as a true living picture of Rome at the peak of its power. Biondo liberated the study of history from all the philosophical, moralistic, rhetorical, and ultimately subjective contaminations to which it was liable in the works of the early Humanists and in a way proved what, up until then, had been merely taken for granted regarding the magnificence of Rome and its institutions. Only after Biondo did historiography become a truly positive science.

Biography Born in Forlı`, 1392; received an education in rhetoric and grammar by Giovanni Balestreri and trained as a notary; befriended Pier Candido Decembrio, and later Guarino Veronese who introduced him to the Humanistic movement of his time, 1420; resided in many Italian cities, including Imola, Ferrara, and Venice and occasionally worked on diplomatic mission for the Sforza family before moving to Rome, 1433; Pope Eugenius IV appointed him apostolic secretary, 1433. For more than a decade, he oversaw all the diplomatic relations between Rome and the Northern states, and played a significant role in the Council of FerraraFlorence, 1438–1445; forced to leave Rome when Nicholas V succeeded Eugenius IV, 1448; dedicated the last decade of his life to his historiographic research and to the promotion of a Crusade against the Turks. Died in Rome on 4 June 1463. ROCCO RUBINI See also: Historiography

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FLAVIO BIONDO Selected Works Collections Blondi Flauii Forliuiensis De Roma Triumphante libri decem priscorum scriptorum lectoribus utilissimi, ad totiusque Romanae antiquitatis cognitionem pernecessarij; Romae Instauratae libri tre. Italia Illustrata. Historiarum ab inclinato Romano imperio decades tres, Basel: Froben, 1531. Scritti inediti e rari di Biondo Flavio, edited by Bartolomeo Nogara, Rome: Tipografia poliglotta Vaticana, 1927.

Treatises De verbis romanae locutionis, 1435. Roma instaurata, 1446. Historiarum ab inclinatione romani imperii decades, 1453. Italia illustrata, 1453. Roma triumphans, 1457–1459.

Other Recuperi Ammianei da Biondo Flavio, edited by Rita Cappelletto, 1983.

Further Reading

Clavuot, Ottavio, Biondos ‘‘Italia illustrata’’: Summa oder Neuscho¨pfung?: u¨ber die Arbeitsmethoden eines Humanisten, Tubingen: M. Niemeyer, 1990. Cochrane, Eric, Historians and Historiography in the Italian Renaissance, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Fubini, Riccardo, ‘‘Biondo, Flavio,’’ in Dizionario biografico degli italiani, vol. 10, Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1968. Hay, Denys, Annalists and Historians: Western Historiography from the Eighth to the Eighteenth Centuries, London: Methuen, 1977. Ianziti, Gary, ‘‘From Flavio Biondo to Lodrisio Crivelli: The Beginnings of Humanistic Historiography in Sforza Milan,’’ in Rinascimento, 20 (1980): 3–39. Mazzocco, Angelo, ‘‘Rome and the Humanists: The Case of Biondo Flavio,’’ in Rome in the Renaissance: The City and the Myth, edited by Paul A. Ramsey, Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, Center for Medieval & Early Renaissance Studies, 1982. Robathan, Dorothy, ‘‘Flavio Biondo’s Roma Instaurata,’’ in Medievalia et Humanistica, 1 (1970): 203–216. Weiss, Roberto, The Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity, Oxford: Blackwell, 1969.

Ariemma Capriglione, Anna, Flavio Biondo da Forli: storiografia e storiografi dell’eta` dell’Umanesimo, Naples: Loffredo, 1969.

ALESSANDRO BLASETTI (1900–1987) An Italian film, theater, and television director, Blasetti was a central figure within Italian film culture for much of the twentieth century. His belief in the expressive possibilities of film led him to champion and experiment with the medium throughout his 60-year career. Blasetti founded Italy’s first cinema school, La Scuola Nazionale di Cinematografia (1932); he was the first Italian director to use sound in the film Resurrectio (Resurrection, 1931); and the first to use Technicolor in the documentary Caccia alle volpe nella campagna romagna (Wolf Hunt in the Roman Countryside, 1938), shot by the English cinematographer Jack Cardiff. He pioneered the film-inchiesta (film as investigation), of which Europa di notte (Europe by Night, 1959) is the prime example, the episodic film in Italy with Altri tempi (Other Times, 1952), and was among the first filmmakers to work in television. Yet Blasetti has remained little known outside of Italy and underappreciated within his native 236

country, in part because his name is not associated with any one cinematic school or tendency. Although his film 1860 (1934) is considered a precursor of the postwar neorealist movement, he also made historical epics, expressionist-tinged dramas, romantic comedies, and costume films. Blasetti’s early support for Fascism, which translated into several overtly political films, such as Vecchia guardia (The Old Guard, 1934), which celebrated Fascist squadrism, also accounts for the relative silence that has surrounded his career. Although he became disenchanted with the dictatorship much earlier than many of his peers, the aura of ‘‘Fascist filmmaker’’ long surrounded him. Indeed, the ‘‘rediscovery’’ of his work came only in the course of a reappraisal of Fascist-era cinema by critics in Italy and elsewhere that began in the 1980s. Blasetti began his career in the mid-1920s, when the national film industry still suffered from the lingering effects of wartime devastation. His reviews

ALESSANDRO BLASETTI Lo schermo (1926–1927), Cinematografo (1927–1931), and Lo spettacolo d’Italia (1927–1928) urged political and financial elites to invest in the industry. They contributed greatly to the spread of a professional film culture in Italy. His first film, Sole (Sun, 1929), which celebrated Fascism’s reclamation of the Pontine Marshes, mixes realism and expressionism, melodrama and politics. His films of the early 1930s confirm this stylistic eclecticism and his commitment to marrying entertainment and mass persuasion. They range from populist paens, such as Terra madre (Mother Earth, 1931) to experimental movies (the avant-garde tinged Resurrectio, which explores the possibilities of film, music, and sound) to hybrid works (the Risorgimento-themed 1860, which combines realism with stylized historic spectacle). Ideological agendas of reconciliation (classes), unification (national), and redemption (of the nation and its individual members, especially male authority figures who pass from crisis to rebirth) provide continuity among these films. From the mid-1930s on, as Fascism became more bellicose and repressive, Blasetti moved away from overtly political filmmaking. Made on the eve of Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia, Aldebaran (1935) highlights a naval officer’s conflict between private emotions and official duties. La contessa di Parma (The Countess of Parma, 1937), Ettore Fieramosca (1938), and Un’avventura di Salvator Rosa (An Adventure of Salvatore Rosa, 1940) take the director into the genres of sophisticated comedy and lavish spectacle even as they promote Italian achievements and history. Blasetti’s disaffection is more evident in his dark costume dramas: La corona di ferro (The Iron Crown, 1941) and La cena delle beffe (The Jester’s Supper, 1941) question the cult of virility that surrounds male authority figures and highlights their power abuses. The crazed despots of these films represent the culmination of Blasetti’s filmic meditations on the figure of the father-dictator: Quattro passi fra le nuvole (A Walk in the Clouds, 1942), and Nessuno torna indietro (There’s No Turning Back), which was released in 1945, return to the quotidian, in setting if not always in style. The former film, which marks the beginning of a 20-year collaboration with screenwriter Cesare Zavattini, introduces a reflection on the social and psychological costs of bourgeois egotism that is developed in postwar films such as Prima comunione (First Communion, 1950), Amore e chiacchiere (Love and Gossip, 1957), and Io, Io, Io...e gli altri (Me, Me, Me...and the Others, 1966). Although Blasetti liked to proclaim himself a father of neorealism, he did not contribute much

to that movement. His Resistance film, Un giorno nella vita (A Day in the Life, 1946), is a conventionally scripted and professionally acted appeal for an ideal trait d’union between Catholics and Communists (represented in the film by cloistered nuns and partisans). Indeed, his next work, a grand costume epic made with an international cast and set in imperial Rome, Fabiola (1948), ran counter to neorealist style and its national-popular spirit. Blasetti hit a more congenial vein with his 1950s comedies, which featured well-known stars, such as Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni in Peccato che sia una canaglia (‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, 1954) and La fortuna di essere donna (The Fortune of Being A Woman, 1955), and wittily delivered social satire. These films influenced younger directors such as Pietro Germi, who would develop the popular commedia all’italiana. Although Blasetti had mastered a successful commercial formula, he continued to explore new models of filmmaking and forms of narration, such as those proposed in his episodic films of this period—Altri tempi and Tempi nostri (Our Times, 1954)—and in his film inchieste—Europa di notte, and Io amo, tu ami... (You Love, I Love..., 1961)—which documented nightlife in various continental capitals. Both of these new genres spawned many imitators. When Blasetti was in his 60s, his perennial interest in the cultures and technologies of modernity (his 1950s documentaries include a film on the Fiat 600 car and another on the use of animals in laboratory science) as well as his desire to communicate to younger generations led him to embrace television. His works in this medium encapsulate the scope of his talents and interests: They include historical documentaries and dramas, most notably, La lunga strada del ritorno (The Long Road Home, 1962), a three-part series on Italian prisoners of war, and a science fiction program entitled Racconti di fantascienza (Science-Fiction Stories, 1979–1980) that he directed into the last decade of his life.

Biography Born in Rome on 3 July 1900. Studied law at University of Rome, graduated in 1924; married Maria Laura Quagliotti, 1923; daughter Mara born, 1924. Begins column of film criticism at the newspaper L’Impero, 1925; founds Il mondo a lo schermo in 1926, which becomes Lo schermo (1926) and Cinematografo (1927); founds a film co-operative, Augustus, with Solari, Vergani, Serandrei, Alessandrini and Barbaro, 1927; founds journal Lo 237

ALESSANDRO BLASETTI spettacolo d’Italia, 1928; premires Sole, his first feature film, 1929; founds Cine Club d’Italia, 1930; founds Scuola Nazionale di Cinematografia, 1932; premieres his first documentary, Assisi, 1932; produces his experimental mass theater 18BL, 1934; meets the actress Elisa Cegnani, who starred in many of his films and with whom he had a 50year love relationship, 1935; founds Nembo Film to produce Ettore Fieramosca, 1937; King Victor Emmanuel III names him Cavaliere della Corona d’Italia, 1939; wins Leone d’Oro at the ninth Venice International Film Festival for La corona di ferro, 1941; refuses Fascist regime’s invitation to direct war film Bir-el-Gobi, 1943; after the Armistice, he refuses to work in the new Cinecitta` studios of the German-backed Republic of Salo, fall 1943; begins career as a theater director with Il tempo e la famiglia Conway by John Boynton Priestley and Ma non e´ una cosa seria by Luigi Pirandello, 1945. Awarded Nastro d’Argento for Un giorno nella vita, 1946; French ‘‘Victoire’’ for Fabiola, 1949; Spanish ‘‘Triumfo’’ for Prima comunione, 1951; named Commendatore al Merito della Repubblica by President Luigi Einaudi, 1952; Grolla d’oro career award at Saint-Vincent, 1958; re-edits his 1934 film 1860 with a non-Fascist ending, 1958; first documentary, La lunga strada del ritorno, for the RAI-TV, 1962; David di Donatello for ‘‘his professional contribution to the Italian cinema,’’ 1963; special Jury prize at the Moscow Film Festival for Simon Bolivar, 1969; Leone d’Oro for his career at the 50th Venice International Film Festival, 1982; struck by cerebral ictus, which forces him to stop all professional activity, 1981; wife Maria Laura dies, 1984. Dies at home in Rome on 1 February 1987. RUTH BEN-GHIAT Selected Works Feature Films Sole, 1929. Nerone, 1930. Resurrectio, 1931. Terra madre, 1931. Palio, 1932. La tavola dei poveri, 1932. 1860, 1934. Vecchia guardia, 1934. Aldebaran, 1935. La contessa di Parma, 1937. Ettore Fieramosca, 1938. Un’avventura di Salvator Rosa, 1940. La corona di ferro, 1941. La cena delle beffe, 1941.

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Quattro passi fra le nuvole, 1942. Nessuno torna indietro, 1945. Un giorno nella vita, 1946. Fabiola, 1948. Prima comunione, 1950. Altri tempi, 1952. Tempi nostri, 1954. Peccato che sia una canaglia (‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore), 1954. La fortuna di essere donna, 1955. Amore e chiacchiere, 1957. Europa di notte, 1959. Io amo, tu ami... , 1961. Io, Io, Io...e gli altri, 1966. La ragazza del bersagliere, 1967. Simon Bolivar, 1969. Napoli 1860: La fine dei Borboni, made for TV, 1970.

Documentary Films Assisi, 1932. Caccia alle volpe nella campagna romana, 1938. Napoli nuova, 1940. La gemma orientale dei Papi, 1947. Castel Sant’Angelo, 1947. Quelli che soffrono per noi, 1951. La lunga strada del ritorno, made for TV, 1962. Gli italiani del cinema italiano, made for TV, 1964. Storie dell’emigrazione, made for TV, 1972. Racconti di Fantascienza, made for TV, 1979. Mio amico Pietro Germi, made for TV, 1980. Venezia-Una Mostra per il Cinema, made for TV, 1981.

Theater Directing 18 BL, 1934. John Boynton Priestley, Il tempo e la famiglia Conway, 1945. John Boynton Priestley, Ma non e una cosa seria, 1945. Robert Emmer Sherwood, La foresta pietrificata, 1947. Ugo Betti, La regina e gli insorti, 1951.

Writings Scritti sul cinema, edited by Adriano Apra`, 1982.

Further Reading Apra`, Adriano, ‘‘Linee di politica cinematografica da Blasetti a Freddi,’’ in Cinema italiano sotto il fascismo, edited by Riccardo Redi, Venice: Marsilio, 1979. Apra`, Adriano, ‘‘Blasetti regista italiano,’’ in Scritti sul cinema, Venice: Marsilio, 1982. Apra`, Adriano, and Riccardo Redi (editors), Sole: Soggetto, sceneggiatura e note per la realizzazione, Rome: Di Giacomo, 1985. Ben-Ghiat, Ruth, Fascist Modernities: Italy 1922–1945, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Dalle Vacche, Angela, ‘‘National Tradition in Blasetti’s 1860,’’ in Film Criticism, 9, no. 1 (1984): 74–81. Gori, Gianfranco, Alessandro Blasetti, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1984. Grmek Germani, Sergio, ‘‘Blasetti dal periodo fascista al neorealismo,’’ in Il neorealismo cinematografico italiano, edited by Lino Micciche`, Venice: Marsilio, 1975. Masi, Stefano (editor), Alessandro Blasetti 1900–2000, Rome: Comitato per il Centenario della Nascita, 2001.

GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO Micheli, Paola, Il cinema di Blasetti parlo` cosi: Un’analisi linguistica dei film, 1929–1942, Rome: Bulzoni, 1990. Prono, Franco (editor), Alessandro Blasetti: Il cinema che ho vissuto, Bari: Dedalo, 1982. Salizzato, Clavier, and Vito Zagarrio, La corona di ferro- un modo di produzione italiano, Rome: Di Giacomo, 1985.

Schnapp, Jeffrey, 18BL and the Theatre of Masses for Masses, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996. Verdone, Mario, Alessandro Blasetti, Rome: Editrice Roma Amor, 1988. Verdone, Luca (editor), I film di Alessandro Blasetti, Rome: Gremese, 1989.

GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO (1313–1375) Founding father of Italian fiction, Boccaccio forged new literary genres in a late Gothic cultural world, creating classics for the moderns by taking inspiration from antiquity; the recent literary past—above all, his idol Dante; and his revered contemporary, Petrarca. This son of a Florentine banker, educated for business and then a career in canon law, found himself drawn instead by natural inclination to poetry, a pursuit he passionately defends at the finale of his Genealogie deorum gentilium (Genealogies of the Gentile Gods, ca. 1350–1360). By ‘‘poetry,’’ he means the highest form of human expression, a vehicle for moral truth that hides its lesson beneath a fanciful narrative, much as the pith of a tree lies covered inside its bark. Consonant with the medieval aesthetic of allegory, his theory of poetry resonates as well with the ancient ideal defined by Horace, who advocated an art ‘‘sweet and useful.’’ In practice, Boccaccio’s genius as a storytelling teacher leads him to write prolifically, as ready to ply a Latin quill as to play with his native Italian. Unlike Dante and Petrarca, who left much of what they wrote unfinished, he completes one book after another—24 titles in Vittore Branca’s 10-volume edition of the complete works. From sunny university days to solitary last months of tormenting illness, he answers his destiny as a poet with brilliant experiments of genre, register, and style that brought powerful literary revival to the Italian peninsula. Associated today mainly with the Decameron (ca. 1350–1352; rev. ca. 1373), whose history has given him a distorted reputation for obscenity, Boccaccio enjoyed fame of a very different sort during his time. A poet, Humanist, orator, and ambassador (who probably composed the official

correspondence he carried), he was one of only about 70 men among several tens of thousands in Florence with the title dominus (lord), reserved for knights and jurists. Trained as a canonist at the University of Naples, he was well-suited to carry out diplomatic missions for the Florentine Commune, among them trips to popes in Avignon and Rome. The many authors he cites in his writings (no full inventory has ever been compiled) and the contents of his important personal library, bequeathed to the monastery of Santo Spirito in Florence, display the autodidact’s all-embracing curiosity. More eclectic than either Dante or Petrarca, he knows the Church Fathers, citations from whom form the basis of canon law (Augustine, Jerome, Gregory the Great); curriculum authors (Boethius, Martianus Cappella, Macrobius, Fulgentius, Bede, Rabanus Maurus); the Scholastic canon of Aristotle as explicated by Thomas Aquinas (the latter’s commentary on the Ethics survives in Boccaccio’s own hand); the poets (Ovid, Virgil); and an antique heritage newly re-emerging (Cicero’s orations, rediscovered by Petrarca in Lie`ge; Tacitus, which Boccaccio found at Benevento; Homer, translated by Leontius Pilatus at Boccaccio’s behest). In his day and for more than a hundred years thereafter, he was read across Europe as a moral authority, primarily for his histories and encyclopedias, which by the turn of the fifteenth century were circulating both in the original Latin and vernacular translations: Genealogie deorum gentilium; De montibus, silvis, fontibus, lacubus, fluminibus, stagnis seu paludibus et de diversis nominibus maris (On Mountains, Forests, Springs, Lakes, Rivers, Ponds or Swamps, and Diverse Names of the Sea, 1350–1365); De casibus virorum illustrium (Falls of Illustrious Men, 1355–1360; 1373–1374); 239

GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO De mulieribus claris (Famous Women, 1361–1362). Even the Decameron contributed to his good name, since stories from it were used to decorate quattrocento bridal chests (cassoni) with pictures that provided models of wifely fidelity. In the cinquecento the Decameron triumphs as Boccaccio’s most popular work. Subsequently, scholars constructed his career as an amorous youth’s ‘‘apprenticeship’’ up to that masterpiece, considered a brief moment of perfection before rapid decline into learned but sterile and moralistic Latin. A challenge to this dated ‘‘Boccaccesque’’ paradigm comes from recent ‘‘Boccaccian’’ criticism, which recognizes sophisticated artistic accomplishment throughout his corpus. Protocols of self-naming and early portraits express how seriously Boccaccio took his calling. His first four epistolary exercises, signed ‘‘Johannes, at the tomb of Virgil,’’ announce his wish to emulate the poet whose burial place brought honor to Naples. Another youthful signing, encoded at midpoint in Filocolo (1336–1339), identifies him as ‘‘Giovanni di Certaldo,’’ whose fiction will attain renown. In the acrostic of the Amorosa visione (Amorous vision, ca. 1342–1343; rev. ca. 1355– 1360), he proudly spells both a patronymic and toponymic, ‘‘Giovanni di Boccaccio da Certaldo.’’ The formula ‘‘Johannes de Certaldo,’’ consistent in his later Latin works, suggests that the family’s ancestral village was also his birthplace. A talented amateur artist, he paints a late self-portrait in dialogue with his Muse, who greets him, ‘‘Ave, frater, laurum dignum te concipe sertum’’ (Hail, brother, consider thyself worthy of a laurel crown). In this frontispiece for Buccolicum carmen (Pastoral Song, ca. 1347–1366), he sits as a plump cleric in cathedra (a professorial stall chair) explicating his allegorical eclogues to a circle of tonsured monks. Below, the kind of aphorism that was one of his signature motifs teaches, ‘‘Chi semina virtu` fama [raccoglie]’’ (he who sows virtue reaps fame) (Victoria Kirkham, ‘‘Iohannes de Certaldo,’’ 1998). The Certaldan makes his literary debut in Naples, an urban magnet with the most cosmopolitan court in Europe, a distinguished university (Thomas Aquinas had taught on its faculty), and a port that drew merchants from across the Mediterranean. In his early teens, Boccaccio traveled there overland from Florence with his father, chief agent for the Bardi banking house at Robert of Anjou’s court. Business keeps them for a 13-year sojourn, during which, while still a teenager he spends his days working the money counters in the commercial district (ca. 1327–1331) and then studies canon law for another four years at the 240

Neapolitan Studium (ca. 1331–1335). Although he blames his father for forcing him to waste time in such uncongenial pursuits (Genealogie XV, 10), he will later turn to literary profit his reluctant immersion in the mercantile milieu, his privileged proximity to the aristocracy, and contacts cultivated in the lively intellectual community at Naples, always remembered nostalgically as the happy city of his youth. Boccaccio’s habit of endlessly revising, as well as the gaps in our historical knowledge, make it difficult to establish precise dating, but he was in his 20s when he began testing his skills. To this period belong Elegia di Costanza (Costanza’s Elegy, ca. 1332), Allegoria mitologica (Mythological Allegory, 1332–1334), and four Epistole allegoriche (Allegorical Epistles, 1339), all rhetorical exercises in Latin. From Latin he also translates the third and fourth decades of Livy’s History of Rome (ca. 1338–1347), and possibly—a disputed attribution—Valerius Maximus’ Factorum et dictorum memorabilium libri novem (Nine Books of Memorable Deeds and Sayings, ca. 20 BC–ca. AD 50). A jocose letter to Francesco de’ Bardi (1339) attests to his fluency as a speaker of Neapolitan dialect. This is one of only three that survive in vernacular, the two others being his magnificent Epistola consolatoria a Pino de’ Rossi (Consolatory Letter to Pino de’ Rossi, 1361–1362) and a casual note of 1366 to Leonardo del Chiaro, a Certaldan money changer in Avignon. His early vernacular fiction reveals roots in a society ruled by the French Angevin dynasty, politically allied to pro-Guelf Florence. Caccia di Diana (Diana’s Hunt, ca. 1333–1334) cleverly pays tribute to 58 Neapolitan court ladies. Summoned by the goddess Diana to a hunt in Parthenope (Naples), they kill a fabulous menagerie (leopard, lion, wolf, a snake with seven snakelings, unicorn, ostrich, elephants, etc.), but the one unnamed lady incites her companions to reject Diana for Venus. The latter descends, resuscitating the dead animals as handsome young men, who jump into a river and emerge garbed in vermilion. Venus instructs the ladies to be their faithful mistresses, and the narrator, now revealed to be a stag, is transformed like the other beasts (‘‘di cervio mutato in creatura umana e razionale esser per certo’’) into a ‘‘human being and a rational creature’’ (XVIII, 11–12). Casting the Caccia di Diana in 18 cantos of terza rima (1,047 vv.), Boccaccio is the first to authorize Dante’s metrical invention with imitative homage. He draws on many other sources, including Dante’s lost sirventese naming 60 women, Ovid’s Actaeon myth, Boethius’ Consolatio Philosophiae

GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO (via Dante’s Purgatory 14), Claudian’s panegyric On Stilicho’s Consulship, the thirsting heart of the Bible (Psalms 42.1), and the bestiaries. Not definitively credited to Boccaccio until 1939, the Caccia di Diana is at surface a bid for patronage in a triumph of love over chastity. Beneath the veil of fiction, it is an allegorical psychomachia, or struggle in the soul, between sinful appetites (symbolized by the beasts) and uplifting virtue, embodied in the huntresses. In Filostrato (ca. 1334–1335) Boccaccio changes his pose from an amorous heart to a man ‘‘vinto d’amore’’ or ‘‘man struck down by love’’ (the meaning he intended for the title) and addresses his absent lady Filomena. His lonely situation frames a sad story suited to his mood. With a subject filtered through medieval accounts of the Trojan War, Filostrato employs a metrical vehicle from oral tradition (ottava rima, or stanzas of eight hendecasyllables with a rhyme scheme Boccaccio is credited with inventing ABABABCC). A novel fusion of epic and romance, classical and modern, learned and popular gives this tale its Boccaccian stamp, as does the fictional frame, a device that creates distance, permitting a humorous, ironic reading of the narrator’s misogynistic stance and Troiolo’s delusions as a courtly lover. The long prose romance Filocolo follows a creative path along which Boccaccian signature motifs are clearly forming—a Greek compound title ‘‘fatiche d’amore’’ (love’s labors), a frame tale with an amorous narrator named Giovanni from Certaldo, but in a ‘‘fictional persona’’ (a strategy inherited from Roman elegiac poetry); a love story inside the frame, a technique that juxtaposes material from ancient epic and medieval cantari (oral songs); mythological content and Christian conversion. New here is the poet’s mistress Fiammetta, prominent in the proemial scene, where the author describes falling suddenly in love with King Robert’s love child, Maria, also known as Fiammetta. Her returns in Boccaccio’s fiction give rise to a legend of his affair with a princess, not debunked until the second half of the twentieth century. Both the lady and her nickname are the young canonist’s inventions, tailored to the catechism of Filocolo and its calendar, which revolve around the feast days of Easter and Pentecost. With Teseida delle nozze d’Emilia (Thesead of Emilia’s Nuptials, 1339–1341), Boccaccio again sets up a fictional frame, this time in a prose letter to Fiammetta, for whom he pretends to have found a ‘‘most ancient’’ story. His autograph manuscript displays what pains he took to articulate, decorate,

and illuminate with paratextual structures the ottava rima narrative, self-consciously aware of its status as the first Italian epic. Most important is the autocommentary, by an unnamed glossator who wants to make sure we understand its classical features and allegorical meaning. Like Caccia di Diana (and Dante’s Divina Commedia, always in the background), beneath its fictional veil the Teseida describes conflict in the soul between rational and irrational impulses. Resolving both the plot and this inner tension through marriage, Boccaccio anticipates a message central to the Decameron, setting his sights not on the afterworld, as Dante had done, but in civilized society, epitomized by Athens under the rule of Theseus. Boccaccio’s Teseida commentary, completed after an economic downturn forced him back to Florence in the winter of 1340–1341, turns on the cusp of a more difficult decade, when he must confront the end of carefree youth and establish himself in a place that, by comparison with Naples, seems unwelcoming, provincial, and philistine. Adversity brings productivity. Comedia delle ninfe fiorentine (Comedy of the Florentine Nymphs, 1341–1342) translates the Caccia di Diana’s Parthenope into mythic Etruria. Ameto, a primitive hunter, joins seven nymphs with patrician Florentine names hidden in riddles (Tosa, Tornaquinci, Peruzzi, Gianfigliazzi, Strozzi—not all are decipherable). They witness a singing contest between the good shepherd Alcesto (fervid virtue) and the sluggard Acaten accompanied by Teogapen (love of god) on his pipes. Each woman then tells a story in this ‘‘little Decameron’’ of how she betrayed her husband and took a lover—that is, abandoned Diana for Venus—who then descends as Trinitarian grace. The nymphs strip Ameto, bathe, and reclothe him; ‘‘e brievemente, d’animale bruto, uomo divenuto essere li pare’’ (it seems to him that he has been made from a brute animal into a man; XLVI. 5). In an allegory as surprising as it is transparent, the women personify the seven virtues (Mopsa-Wisdom; Emilia-Justice; Adiona-Temperance; Acrimonia-Fortitude; Agapes-Charity; Fiammetta-Hope; Lia-Faith). Beauties described in exquisite cameos modeled on rhetorical treatises by Matthew of Vendoˆme and Geoffrey of Vinsauf, they each subdue a contrary vice and effect Ameto’s Christian conversion. By proper name a Comedia like Dante’s poem—but also known as Ninfale d’Ameto, or just Ameto—this is the first of Boccaccio’s fictions to have a real, historical dedicatee, Niccolo` di Bartolo del Buono. Menippean in structure, with 50 chapters alternating between terza 241

GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO rima and prose, its neo-Platonic dynamics recall both Boethius’ Consolatio Philosophiae and Dante’s Vita nuova. The Divina Commedia again makes a foil for the Amorosa visione. Accompanied by a guide who is an amusing Virgil in skirts, its dreaming narrator allows two youths to pull him into a castle, where he views painted triumphs of Knowledge, Fame, Riches, Love, and Fortune. Outside in a garden, Dreamer sees 15 beautiful women, a scene close to Boccaccio’s contemporary ternario (poem in terza rima), ‘‘Contento quasi ne’ pensier d’amore’’ (Content—almost—in thoughts of love). Just as Dreamer is about to possess the one who is his lady, Maria d’Aquino, he awakens bathetically to find the guide still beside him. Maria’s surname in this teasing allegory suggests a Thomistic key: reason (the Guide), assisted by Wisdom (Maria), subdues the sensual appetites of irascibility and concupiscence (the two young men) and sets the narrator on a less worldly path. A virtuoso metrical feat, the Amorosa visione is the world’s longest acrostic with three prefatory sonnets formed by the first letters of each terzina in 50 cantos of terza rima. Boccaccio returns to prose and contemporary Naples for Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta (Lady Fiammetta’s Elegy, 1343–1344). The married lady of the title, supremely unself-aware, tells how she became the unhappiest female ever—would even have committed suicide like Dido were it not for her wise old nurse—all because her lover Panfilo left her. Although set far from mythic, epic, or visionary landscapes, this is not the realistic modern psychological novel criticism has wanted to make it. A late medieval romance divided like Filostrato into nine books (perhaps with an allusion to the number of circles in Dante’s Hell), it stages a familiar allegorical drama. Fiammetta (who reprises Filostrato in the tale of Troiolo and anticipates their counterpart Filostrato in the Decameron) personifies concupiscence and irascibility; her nurse, reason. In this tour-de-force of crossvoicing, inspired by Ovid’s Heroides and Seneca’s tragedies, Boccaccio explores with brilliant irony the elegiac style, a mid-register between high tragedy and low comedy: ‘‘per elegiam stilum intelligimus miserorum’’ (by elegy we mean the style of those who are miserable) (Dante, De vulgari eloquentia II, 4.6). In Ninfale fiesolano (Nymphs of Fiesole, ca. 1344–1346), a pseudoprimitive pendant to Comedia delle ninfe fiorentine, rustic Africo comes upon the huntress Mensola, Diana’s follower, among 242

beautiful nymphs singing and bathing in the wild, but unlike Ameto, he acts on precivilized instincts and translates his desire into brutal physical possession. Punished by the goddess of chastity, the weeping lovers turn into streams near Fiesole that bear their names. Their son Pruneo, raised by Africo’s parents, fathers 10 children and participates in that town’s legendary foundation. This pastoral jewel (473 octaves), an etiological fable that fosters Boccaccio’s epithet as ‘‘the Tuscan Ovid,’’ resembles Filostrato in its sophisticated antirhetorical stance, which mimics the simple, light oral style of the cantari. With these nymphals, Boccaccio’s invention as a genre, and the burnished Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta, Italy’s master narrator comes to the Decameron (ca. 1350–1352; rev. ca. 1373). The Certaldan’s defining work is a confluence of his manifold writing experiences. Three men, counterparts to the Teseida protagonists, and seven female narrators are protagonists in a frame tale structure carried over from Ameto (but first tested in the Filocolo love debate). Bucolic settings re-created as utopian country gardens surround 100 tales, a symbolically perfect total like the number of cantos in Dante’s Comedia. Their setting is the mercantile world that had been part of his life since his teens in Naples, where he began harvesting a universal narrative heritage with motifs that run from ancient oriental sources to recent bourgeois anecdotes. Pith beneath the bark holds submerged allegorical suggestions that descend from as far back as Boccaccio’s first fiction, Caccia di Diana, and anticipate the overtly moralistic lines of his later Latin humanism. At midcentury, new poetic directions open to Dante’s great admirer when he meets personally Francesco Petrarca, admired from a distance ever since the 1330s and subject of the laudatory De vita et moribus domini Francisci Petracchi de Florentia secundum Iohannem Bochacii de Certaldo (On the Life and Habits of Lord Francesco Petrarca of Florence According to Giovanni Boccaccio of Certaldo, ca. 1348–1350). Cicero’s oration Pro Archia (For Archias), received from Petrarca in 1351 as Boccaccio was working on the Decameron, prompts him to draft in the first of three major redactions De origine, vita, studiis et moribus viri clarissimi Dantis aligerii florentini poete illustris, et de operibus compostis ab eodem (On the Origin, Life, Studies, and Habits of the Most Distinguished Man Dante Alighieri, Illustrious Florentine Poet, and the Works Composed by Him, ca. 1351–1363), known better as Trattatello in laude di Dante (Little Treatise

GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO in Praise of Dante). It echoes the ancient text in a plea for citizenship, argued as an apology for the poetic art: Archias, a Syrian, deserved to become a Roman; Dante, a Florentine should have the ban of exile lifted and his remains honorably returned to his natal city. The ‘‘little treatise,’’ a portrait of Dante’s life and works set around a stirring central defense of poetry, was intended as an accessus ad auctorem (introduction to the author) for one of three anthologies of Alighieri’s poetry that Boccaccio himself transcribed, enhanced with Argomenti (summaries) in terza rima and descriptive prose rubrics (1355; 1363–1366). Always an ardent Dantista, he preserves in his Zibaldoni (Notebooks, 1330s–1350s) the sole copies of letters by the older writer and the latter’s eclogue exchange with Giovanni del Virgilio. During the fertile decade of the 1350s, he further begins taking notes for his Genealogie, drafts his geographical gazeteer De montibus, and conceives De casibus virorum illustrium after seeing De viris illustribus by Petrarca. The latter’s influence clearly also touches Boccaccio’s Rime (Rhymes), composed from youth into old age. The last sonnet, ‘‘Or sei salito, caro signor mio’’ (Now you have risen, my dear lord) mourns Petrarca’s death in 1374. Petrarca’s influence bears, too, on Boccaccio’s last fiction, Corbaccio (Evil crow, 1355), often compared to the novella of the scholar’s revenge (Decameron VIII, 7). Its protagonist, an aging canonist, recounts how he is cured of his mad love for a woman who has publicly spurned him. The ghost of her dead husband comes to the narrator while the latter sleeps to lead him out of a nightmarish valley, ‘‘Venus’ pigsty,’’ with savagely misogynistic attacks against all members of the female sex and the widow in particular (to whom the pejorative title probably alludes). Long taken as autobiography, this ‘‘humble treatise’’ (Corb. 3) seems rather to be a literary joke that uses the dream vision to parody Dante’s Vita nuova in an anthology of antifeminist topoi that Boccaccio had been collecting from such canonical authorities as Jerome, Martial, and Theophrastus since the 1330s. Following the years at Naples (1327–1340/41) and Florence (1340/41–1361), the final phase of Boccaccio’s career attaches him to Certaldo. A Florentine political climate turned hostile and tensions with his half-brother Jacopo prompt his retreat in winter of 1361–1362 to his home in the Boccacci ancestral village. There in a meditative mood he continues work on his Genealogie and De mulieribus claris and completes Buccolicum carmen. His tremendously popular consolatory epistle

to Pino de’ Rossi, a friend exiled from Florence for his role in a rebellion against the Guelph party, reflects the moralistic slant of those Latin works in a mosaic of set pieces on such themes as aging and friendship. Finding the analogies between his own situation and Pino’s (both are removed from Florence, poor, and corpulent), Boccaccio invokes a panoply of literary examples (Dante, Boethius, Seneca, Valerius Maximus) in a rhetorical format resembling the Scholastic method of sic et non (yes and no)—comfort offered cannot help (exile means loss of home, friends, possessions) rebutted by counterargument (the whole world is our home, we can correspond with friends, riches are a burden). Peaceful withdrawal from society is the theme, too, of his Vita sanctissimi patris Petri Damiani heremite et demum episcopi hostiensis ac romane ecclesie cardinalis (Life of the Most Sainted Father Peter Damian Hermit and Then Bishop of Ostia and Cardinal of the Roman Church, 1361–1362), composed for Petrarca, who was writing his treatise on the solitary life. After moving to Certaldo, where he communes with his books, recites Psalms, and meditates on the generosity of God’s gifts to man, Boccaccio still visits Florence and continues to travel, both as a diplomat and poet. On Sunday, October 23, 1373, he begins his last great project, the Esposizioni sopra la Comedia di Dante (Expositions on Dante’s Comedy, 1373–1374), presented in public readings in the church of Santo Stefano di Badia at the invitation of the Florentine city fathers. Medieval by format, the commentary begins with an Accessus that explains in Aristotelian terms the work’s four ‘‘causes’’: its material cause, or matter (literal and allegorical meanings); its formal cause, or form (three canticles in cantos of terza rima); its efficient cause, or maker (Dante); and its final cause, or purpose (to remove the living from misery and lead them to happiness). Literally, the poem describes the state of souls after death; allegorically, it shows how justice rewards or punishes depending on whether we exercise free will for good or evil. Boccaccio then presents for each canto first a literal, then an allegorical exposition (Inferno XI is an exception, having no allegory). He draws on vast knowledge, including the Letter to Can Grande and Dante’s earlier commentators (his sons Pietro and Jacopo, Jacopo dalla Lana, Guido da Pisa), but he digresses creatively to mold engaging poetic biographies (as for Homer and Virgil in Limbo) or develop little novellas (the story of Paolo and Francesca in Inferno V). Ill health interrupted the Esposizioni just as Boccaccio 243

GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO reached Inferno XVII. During his final months at Certaldo, late in 1374, he received the crushing news of Petrarca’s death, which he mourns in the last of his Epistole (Epistles, 1339–1374) and in a moving sonnet, where he imagines that his departed friend has risen to rejoin Dante in the heaven of Venus. The epitaph he composed for himself is mounted on the wall near the marble cenotaph bust of Boccaccio by Gian Francesco Rustici in his burial church at Certaldo: Hac sub mole iacent cineres ac ossa Iohannis, mens sedet ante Deum meritis ornata laborum mortalis vite; genitor Boccaccius illi, patria Certaldum, studium fuit alma poesis. Under this stone lie the bones and ashes of John; his spirit stands in the presence of God, adorned with the merits his mortal labors on earth have earned him. Boccaccio sired him; his native Fatherland was Certaldo; he cherished the nourishing Muses. (Trans. Thomas G. Bergin, Boccaccio, 1981)

Biography Born in Tuscany (either in the Boccacci family’s ancestral village of Certaldo or Florence), JuneJuly, 1313, the illegitimate son of Boccaccino di Chelino and an unknown mother; schooled in Florence by the grammarian Giovanni di Domenico Mazzuoli da Strada for a career in business. Moves ca. 1327 to Naples with his father, an agent of the Bardi bank. Trains as a money changer, then studies canon law at the University of Naples, probably also attends lectures on Justinian code by the jurist and poet Cino da Pistoia. Other important intellectual encounters in Naples with the royal librarian, Paolo da Perugia; the Florentine mathematician Paolo dell’Abbaco; the astrologer Andalo` del Negro; Dante’s commentator Graziolo de’ Bambaglioli, the historian Paolino Minorita (Paolino Veneto); the Augustinian theologian and Petrarca’s spiritual advisor, Dionigi da Borgo San Sepolcro. Forms friendships with his compatriot Niccolo` Acciaiuoli, a pivotal political figure on the Neapolitan scene; Giovanni Barrili and Barbato da Sulmona, leading men of letters at court. Financial reversals force father and son back to Florence in winter 1340–1341. Serves Florentine Commune as official of the Condotta (in charge of administering condottieri, or mercenary soldiers), 1355, 1365, 1367–1368; as chamberlain of the Camera (a city treasury post) and in negotiations for the annexation of Prato, 1351. Diplomatic missions for 244

Florence to Ostasio da Polenta in Ravenna, 1346; to Francesco Ordelaffi in Forlı`, 1347–1348; to Romagna and Ravenna, where he delivered 10 gold florins to Dante’s cloistered daughter, Suor Beatrice, 1350; to Ludwig of Bavaria in Tyrol, 1351–1352; to Pope Innocent VI in Avignon, 1354; to Certaldo, 1354; to Lombardy, 1359; to the Grimaldi doge in Genoa and to Pope Urban V in Avignon, 1365; to Pope Urban V in Rome, 1367. Formally welcomes Petrarca to Florence on latter’s pilgrimage to Rome for Jubilee of 1350; visits Petrarca in Padua, 1351; in Milan, 1359; in Venice, 1363; with Petrarca’s daughter and her family, 1367; visit to Padua with Petrarca and Venice with Donato Albenzani, 1368. Returns to Naples 1355, 1362–1363, 1370–1371. Friendships in Florence include the poets Sennuccio del Bene, Antonio Pucci, and Zanobi da Strada; Francesco Nelli, prior of the church Santi Apostoli; Coluccio Salutati, from 1374 chancellor of Florence; the historian Filippo Villani (Boccaccio’s first biographer); Benvenuto da Imola, who was present for Boccaccio’s Dante readings and wrote one of the most important Trecento commentaries of the Divina Commedia; Giovanni Gherardi, author of the Paradiso degli Alberti, and Franco Sacchetti, his epigones in the novella genre. Never married, fathered at least five natural children; godfather of Mainardo Cavalcanti’s child, born 1373. Legitimized by Innocent VI, 1360; already in holy orders as a cleric and probably eventually as a priest. Cedes house south of Arno to half-brother Jacopo in summer 1361 and the following winter withdraws to Certaldo; gives church of SS. Jacopo and Filippo two altarpieces (lost), one with his portrait as donor, in 1366. Final will dated 28 August 1374. Ill health in last years associated with obesity, scabies, and dropsy; dies in Certaldo on December 21, 1375. VICTORIA E. KIRKHAM Selected Works Collections Opere volgari di Giovanni Boccaccio, corrette su i testi a penna, edited by Ignazio Moutier, 17 vols., Florence, Marghera, 1827–1834. Vols. 1–4 Decameron, 1827; vol. 5, Corbaccio, 1828; vol. 6, Fiammetta, 1829; vols. 7–8, Filocolo, 1829; vol. 9, Teseide, 1831; vols. 10–12, Il comento sopra la Commedia di Dante Alighieri, 1831–1832; vol. 13, Filostrato, 1831; vol. 14, Amorosa visione. La caccia di Diana, 1832–1833; vol. 15, La vita di Dante Alighieri. L’Ameto, 1833; vol. 16, Rime. L’Urbano, 1834; vol. 17, Ninfale fiesolano. Lettere volgari, 1834.

GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO Opere, 14 vols. Bari: Laterza, 1918–1951. Vol. 1, Filocolo, edited by Salvatore Battaglia, 1938; vol. 2, Filostrato, Ninfale fiesolano, edited by Vincenzo Pernicone, 1937; vol. 3, Teseida delle nozze d’Emilia, edited by Aurelio Roncaglia, 1941; vol. 4, L’elegia di madonna Fiammetta con le chiose inedite, edited by Vincenzo Pernicone, 1939; vol. 5, L’Ameto, Il corbaccio, edited by Nicola Bruscoli, 1940; vol. 6, Le rime, L’amorosa visione, La caccia di Diana, edited by Vittore Branca, 1939; vols. 7–8, Il Decameron, edited by Aldo Francesco Masse`ra, 1927; vol. 9, Opere latine minori, edited by Aldo Francesco Masse`ra, 1928; vols. 10–11, Genealogie deorum gentilium, edited by Vincenzo Romano, 1951; vols. 12–14, Il commento alla Divina commedia e gli altri scritti intorno a Dante, edited by Domenico Guerri, 1918. Decameron, Filocolo, Ameto, Fiammetta, selections edited by Enrico Bianchi, Carlo Salinari, Natalino Sapegno, in La letteratura italiana: Storia e testi, vol. 8, Milan: Ricciardi, 1952. Tutte le opere, edited by Vittore Branca, 10 vols., Milan, Mondadori, 1964–1998. Vol. 1, Filocolo, edited by Antonio Enzo Quaglio, 1967; vol. 2, Filostrato, edited by Vittore Branca; Teseida delle nozze d’Emilia, edited by Alberto Limentani; Comedia delle ninfe fiorentine, edited by Antonio Enzo Quaglio, 1964; vol. 3, Amorosa visione, edited by Vittore Branca; Ninfale fiesolano, edited by Armando Balduino; Trattatello in laude di Dante, edited by Pier Giorgio Ricci, 1974; vol. 4, Decameron, edited by Vittore Branca, 1976; vol. 5, pt. 1, Rime, edited by Vittore Branca, with Argomenti e rubriche dantesche, edited by Giorgio Padoan; Carmina, edited by Giuseppe Velli; Epistole e lettere, edited by Ginetta Auzzas with Augusto Campana; Vite, edited by Renata Fabbri; De Canaria, edited by Manlio Pastore Stocchi, 1992; vol. 5, pt. 2, Elegia di madonna Fiammetta, edited by Carlo Delcorno; Corbaccio, edited by Giorgio Padoan; Consolatoria a Pino de’ Rossi, edited by Giuseppe Chiecchi; Bucolicum carmen, edited by Giorgio Bernardi Perini; Allegoria mitologica, edited by Manlio Pastore Stocchi, 1994; vol. 6, Esposizioni sopra la Comedia di Dante, edited by Giorgio Padoan, 1965; vols. 7–8, Genealogie deorum gentilium, edited by Vittorio Zaccaria, 1998; vol. 9, De casibus virorum illustrium, edited by Pier Giorgio Ricci and Vittorio Zaccaria, 1983; vol. 10, De mulieribus claris, edited by Vittorio Zaccaria, 1967. Opere in versi, Corbaccio, Trattatello in laude di Dante, Prose latine, epistole, edited by Pier Giorgio Ricci, in La letteratura italiana: Storia e testi, vol. 9, Milan: Ricciardi, 1965. Opere minori in volgare, edited by Mario Marti, 4 vols., Milan: Rizzoli, 1969. Vol. 1, Filocolo; vol. 2, Filostrato. Teseida. Chiose al Teseida; vol. 3, Comedia della ninfe fiorentine. Amorosa visione. Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta. Ninfale fiesolano; vol. 4, Caccia di Diana. Rime. Corbaccio. Trattatello in laude di Dante. Dalle Esposizioni sopra la Comedia di Dante. Lettere. Opere minori, Florence: D’Anna Thesis, 1995, three computer disks with Caccia di Diana, Filocolo, Filostrato, Teseida, Amorosa visione, Comedia delle ninfe fiorentine, Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta, Ninfale fiesolano, Corbaccio, Rime, Trattello in laude di Dante.

Works in Vernacular Caccia di Diana (ca. 1333–1334); first edition, in Opere volgari, edited by Ignazio Moutier, vol. 14, 1832; in Opere, edited by Vittore Branca, vol. 6, 1939; in Tutte le opere, edited by Vittore Branca, vol. 1, 1967; rpt. 1990; in Opere minori, edited by Mario Marti, vol. 4, 1969; bilingual edition, Caccia di Diana. Diana’s Hunt: Boccaccio’s First Fiction, translated by Anthony K. Cassell and Victoria Kirkham, 1989. Rime (ca. 1334–1374); first ed. 1802; in Opere volgari, edited by Ignazio Moutier, vol. 16, 1834; in Opere, edited by Vittore Branca, vol. 6, 1939; edited by Vittore Branca, 1958; in Opere minori, edited by Mario Marti, vol. 4, 1969; in Tutte le opere, edited by Vittore Branca, vol. 5, pt. 1, 1992; rpt. 1999. Filostrato (ca. 1334–1335). Filocolo (ca. 1334–1336). Lettere volgari, 1. A Francesco de’ Bardi, written 1339; first edition Prose antiche di Dante, Petrarcha et Boccaccio et di molti altri nobili et virtuosi ingegni nuovamente raccolte, 1547; in Tutte le opere, vol. 5, pt. 1, 1992. 2. A Leonardo del Chiaro, written 1366; first edition, Roberto Abbondanza, ‘‘Una lettera autografa del Boccaccio nell’Archivio di Stato di Perugia,’’ Studi sul Boccaccio, 1 (1963): 5–13; in Tutte le opere, edited by Ginetta Auzzas, vol. 5, pt. 1, 1992. Teseida delle nozze d’Emilia (ca. 1339–1341). Comedia delle ninfe fiorentine (Ameto) (ca. 1341–1342); first edition, 1478; in Opere volgari, edited by Ignazio Moutier, vol. 15, 1833; in Opere, as Ameto, edited by Nicola Bruscoli, vol. 5, 1940; in Tutte le opere, edited by Antonio Enzo Quaglio, vol. 2, 1964; in Opere minori, edited by Mario Marti, vol. 3, 1969; as The Comedia delle ninfe fiorentine, or Ameto, of Giovanni Boccaccio, translated with a critical introduction by Judith Powers Serafini-Sauli, Ph.D. dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, 1970; as An Annotated Translation of Boccaccio’s Ameto (Comedia delle ninfe fiorentine), by Bernadette Marie McCoy, Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1978; as L’Ameto, translated by Judith Powers Serafini-Sauli, 1985. Amorosa visione (ca. 1342–1343, rev. ca. 1361); first edition, Amorosa visione Di messer Giou. Bocc., nuouamente ritrouata, nella quale si conte[n]gono cinq[ue] Triumphi, 1521; in Opere volgari, edited by Ignazio Moutier, vol. 14, 1833; in Opere, edited by Vittore Branca, vol. 6, 1939; in Tutte le opere, edited by Vittore Branca, vol. 3, 1974; rpt. 2000; in Opere minori, edited by Mario Marti, vol. 3, 1969; Amorosa visione, bilingual edition translated by Robert Hollander, Timothy Hampton, and Margherita Frankel, 1986. Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta (ca. 1343–1344); first edition, Johannis Bochacci viri eloqventissimi Ad Flamettam Panphyli amatricem libellvs materno sermone aeditus, 1472; in Opere volgari as Fiammetta, edited by Ignazio Moutier, vol. 6, 1839; in Opere, edited by Vincenzo Pernicone, vol. 4, 1939; in Opere minori, edited by Mario Marti, vol. 3, 1969; edited by Maria Pia Mussini Sacchi, 1987; edited by Francesco Erbani, 1988; in Tutte le opere, edited by Carlo Delcorno, vol. 5, pt. 2, 1994; as Amorous Fiammetta wherein is sette downe a catalog of all and singular passion of loue and iealousie, incident to an enamored yong gentlewoman with a notable caueat for all women to eschewe deceitfull and

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GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO wicked loue, by an apparant example of a Neapoltian lady, her approued and long miseries and wyth many sounde dehortations from the same, 1587; as La Fiammetta, translated by James C. Brogan, 1907; as Amorous Fiammetta, translated by Bartholomew Young (1587), 1926; as The Elegy of Lady Fiammetta, translated by Mariangela Causa-Steindler and Thomas Mauch, 1990; as The Elegy of Madonna Fiammetta Sent by Her to Women in Love, translated by Roberta L. Payne and Alexandra Hennessey Olsen, 1992. Ninfale fiesolano (1344–1346); first dated edition, 1477; in Opere volgari, edited by Ignazio Moutier, vol. 17, 1834; in Opere, edited by Vincenzo Pernicone, vol. 2, 1937; in Tutte le opere, edited by Armando Balduino, vol. 3, 1974; rpt. 1997; edited by Pier Massimo Forni, 1991; as A Famous Tragicall Discourse of Two Lovers. Affircan and Mensola, their lives, unfortunate loves and lamentable deaths . . . Newly translated out of Tuscan into French by Anthony Guerin [sic] . . . and out of French into English by Jo. Goubourne [Golburne], 1597; rpt. as Two Tracts: Affrican and Mensola, an Elizabethan Prose Version of Il ninfale fiesolano, edited by Cyril H. Wilkinson, 1946; as The Nymphs of Fiesole, translated by John Goubourne with woodcuts by Bartolomeo di Giovanni, 1952; as The Nymph of Fiesole (Il ninfale fiesolano), translated by Daniel J. Donno, 1960; rpt. 1974; as Nymphs of Fiesole, translated by Joseph Tusiani, 1971. Decameron (1350–1352; rev. 1373); editio princeps 1470; as Decameron, the John Payne translation, rev. and annotated by Charles S. Singleton, 3 vols., 1982; as The Decameron, translated by Mark Musa and Peter Bondanella, 1982; as The Decameron: Selected Tales. Decameron: Novelle scelte. A dual-language book, edited and translated by Stanley Appelbaum, 2000. Argomenti e rubriche dantesche Argumentum super tota prima parte Comedı`e Dantis Aligherii florentini . . . super tota secunda parte . . . super tota tertia parte, 1355; as Brieve raccoglimento di cio` che in se´ superficialmente contiene la lettera della prima parte della Cantica overo Comedı`a di Dante Alighieri di Firenze . . . della seconda parte . . . della terza parte (ca. 1363–1366); in Opere, vol. 14, edited by Domenico Guerri, 1918; in Tutte le opere, edited by Giorgio Padoan, vol. 5, pt. 1, 1992. Corbaccio, or Laberinto d’amore (ca. 1355); 1487; in Opere volgari, edited by Ignazio Moutier, vol. 5, 1828; in Opere, edited by Nicola Bruscoli, vol. 5, 1940; in Tutte le opere, edited by Giorgio Padoan, vol. 5, pt. 2, 1994; as The Corbaccio, translated by Anthony K. Cassell, 1975; revised as The Corbaccio, or The Labyrinth of Love, 1993; as Boccaccio’s Revenge: A Literary Transposition of the Corbaccio, translated by Normand R. Cartier, 1977. Epistola consolatoria a Pino de’ Rossi (1361–1362); first edition, 1487; in Tutte le opere, edited by Giuseppe Chiecchi, vol. 5, pt. 2, 1994. Testamento, will written 21 August 1365; 1574, following Annotazioni e discorsi sopra alcuni luoghi del Decamerone; vernacular draft of will written 28 August 1374, in Domenico Maria Manni, Istoria del Decameron, 1742. Esposizioni sopra la Comedı`a di Dante (public readings 1373–1374); first edition, Commento sopra la Divina

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Commedia di Dante, with annotations by Antonmaria Salvini, 1724; in Opere volgari, edited by Ignazio Moutier, vols. 10–12, 1831–1832; in Opere, edited by Domenico Guerri, vols. 13–14, 1918; in Tutte le opere, edited by Giorgio Padoan, vol. 6, 1965; rpt. 1994.

Works in Latin Elegia di Costanza, ca. 1332. Allegoria mitologica, 1332–1334. Epistole allegoriche, 1339. Epistole, 1339–1374. Buccolicum carmen (ca. 1347–1366). De vita et moribus domini Francisci Petracchi de Florentia secundum Iohannem Bochacii de Certaldo, ca. 1348– 1350. Genealogie deorum gentilium ca. 1350–1360. De montibus, silvis, fontibus, lacubus, fluminibus, stagnis seu paludibus et de diversis nominibus maris, (1350–1365). De origine, vita, studiis et moribus viri clarissimi Dantis aligerii florentini poete illustris, et de operibus compostis ab eodem (Trattatello in laude di Dante; Vita di Dante) (first redaction ca. 1351; second redaction ca. 1359– 1366; third redaction before 1372); first edition, Vita di Dante, 1477; in Opere volgari, edited by Ignazio Moutier, vol. 15, 1833; in Opere, edited by Domenico Guerri, vol. 12, 1918; in Tutte le opere, edited by Pier Giorgio Ricci, vol. 3, 1974; rpt. as Vita di Dante, 2002; in Opere minori, edited by Mario Marti, vol. 4, 1969; as A Translation of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Life of Dante with a Note on the Portraits of Dante, translated by G. R. Carpenter, 1900; as The Earliest Lives of Dante, translated by James Robinson Smith, 1901; various rpts., e.g., 1963; as Life of Dante, translated by Philip Henry Wicksteed, 1904; as The Life of Dante Trattatello in laude di Dante, translated by Vincenzo Zin Bollettino, 1990. De casibus virorum illustrium 1355–1360. De mulieribus claris 1361–1362. Vita sanctissimi patris Petri Damiani heremite et demum episcopi hostiensis ac romane ecclesie cardinalis 1361–1362.

Translations Le Deche di Tito Livio. Volgarizzamento della Prima, Terza e Quarta Deca di Tito Livio, 1476; I primi quattro libri del Volgarizzamento della Terza Deca di Tito Livio Padovano, attribuito a Giovanni Boccaccio, edited by Carlo Baudi di Vesme, 1875.

Further Reading Battaglia Ricci, Lucia, Boccaccio. Rome: Salerno, 2000. Bergin, Thomas G., Boccaccio, New York: Viking, 1981. Billanovich, Giuseppe, Restauri boccacceschi, Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1945. Branca, Vittore, Boccaccio medievale, Florence: Sansoni, 1956. Branca, Vittore, Giovanni Boccaccio: Profilo biografico, Florence: Sansoni, 1977; second ed., 1992. Branca, Vittore (editor), Boccaccio visualizzato: Narrare per parole e per immagini fra Medioevo e Rinascimento. 3 vols. Turin: Einaudi, 1999. Bruni, Francesco, Boccaccio: L’invenzione della letteratura mezzana, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990.

GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO Hollander, Robert, Boccaccio’s Two Venuses, New York: Columbia University Press, 1977. Kirkham, Victoria, ‘‘Amorous Vision, Scholastic Vistas,’’ in The Sign of Reason in Boccaccio’s Fiction, Florence: Olschki, 1993. Kirkham, Victoria, ‘‘Iohannes de Certaldo: La firma dell’autore,’’ in Gli Zibaldoni di Boccaccio: Memoria, scrittura, riscrittura, edited by Michelangelo Picone and Claude Cazale´ Be´rard, Florence: Franco Cesati, 1998. Kirkham, Victoria, ‘‘L’immagine del Boccaccio nella memoria tardo-gotica e rinascimentale,’’ in Boccaccio visualizzato, edited by Vittore Branca, vol. 1, Turin: Einaudi, 1999. Russo, Vittorio, Con le Muse in Parnaso. Tre studi su Boccaccio, Naples: Bibliopolis, 1983. Smarr, Janet Levarie, Boccaccio and Fiammetta: The Narrator as Lover, Urbana: University of Illinois, 1986. Studi sul Boccaccio, published annually or semiannually under the auspices of the Ente Nazionale Giovanni, Boccaccio, 1963-present. Surdich, Luigi, Boccaccio, Bari: Laterza, 2001. Tateo, Francesco, Boccaccio, Bari: Laterza, 1998.

DECAMERON, CA. 1350–1352; REV. CA. 1373 Novelle by Giovanni Boccaccio

A treasury of tales unrivaled in European literary history, Boccaccio’s masterpiece has become—for better or worse—a book synonymous with his name. Within a generation of its appearance, amateur scribes were recopying the Decameron, which by the quattrocento had traveled beyond the mercantile milieu where it first took hold into more courtly settings. In his Prose della volgar lingua (1525), Pietro Bembo canonized it as a linguistic model for literary prose. Others, including Anton Francesco Grazzini, Giovan Francesco Straparola, Giambattista Giraldi Cinzio, and Giovambattista Basile, consecrated it as the archetype of a new vernacular genre, collected novelle (short stories) unified by a fictional frame story. Boccaccio himself drew on framed tales in traditions descended from the Middle Eastern Thousand and One

Nights and related medieval compilations (Dolopathos, Il libro de’ setti savi, and Pietro Alfonsi’s Disciplina clericalis), but in the history of Italian literature he was the first to develop this complex narrative structure. Regarded as the high point of his creative trajectory, the Decameron is a complex, sophisticated construction, to which the frame brings dimensions that make a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Its title rubric christens the collection: ‘‘Comincia il libro chiamato Decameron cognominato Prencipe Galeotto, nel quale si contengono cento novelle in diece dı` dette da sette donne e da tre giovani uomini’’ (Here begins the book called Decameron, surnamed Prince Gallehault, wherein are contained one hundred stories told in ten days by seven women and three young men). Boccaccio, playing a fictionalized ‘‘author,’’ presents himself in the proem as a recovered lover who now offers consolation to others still afflicted. For the neediest, ladies who pine away in their chambers under the watchful eye of fathers and brothers, he will offer his ‘‘novelle, o favole o parabole o istorie’’ (stories or fables or parables or histories), both to entertain and instruct. A long introduction to Day I paints in grim strokes Florence besieged by the Black Death of 1348, all social and moral order destroyed. In the midst of this chaos, seven young women— Pampinea, Fiammetta, Filomena, Emilia, Lauretta, Neifile, and Elissa—gather after Mass in the Dominican sanctuary of Santa Maria Novella and come to a rationally determined, life-affirming choice. Led by Pampinea, the oldest at 28, they will retreat into the countryside. Decorum is preserved thanks to Panfilo, Dioneo, and Filostrato, young men whose fortuitous arrival provides an escort. The merry brigata (company) departs on Tuesday and begins its bucolic sojourn at a villa set amidst marvelous gardens. There, taking turns as king or queen for a day, they conduct their leisure in the measured pursuit of pleasure. Every afternoon, seated in a circle, each tells a story, a ritual repeated 10 times during two calendar weeks for a total of 100 tales. Boccaccio as author intervenes once, in the introduction to Day IV to defend his stories, and as part of the apologia he tells a fragmentary tale sometimes called the 101st novella of the Decameron. He returns for a third and final word of self-justification in the author’s conclusion, at the end of Day Ten. Behind his mask as author, Boccaccio builds an edifice like a Gothic cathedral, on aesthetic principles of analogy, symmetry, and hierarchy. Felicitous in variety, individual tales run from around 247

GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO 800 to 8,000 words; they imitate, sometimes with self-conscious parody, many genres—hagiography, exemplum, fabliau, history, joke (beffa), witty saying (facezia); and they illustrate the three rhetorical registers (comic, elegiac, tragic). With primary themes of fortune, intelligence (ingegno), and love, the stories are on open topics (Days I and IX), the power of luck (II), the power of human industry (III), love that ends badly (IV), love that ends well (V), witty retorts (VI), wives who cuckold their husbands (VII), trickery of all sorts (VIII), and deeds of magnificence (X). The frame tale (cornice), a narrative vehicle for all the other stories (novella portante), echoes the macrotext by enveloping each day in its own introduction and conclusion. These transitions lay a background carpet design from sunrise to bedtime daily and carry the frame down yet one more level, to the narrators’ comments before and after the stories. Alike in their exemplary demeanor, they are distinct personalities, defined through their stories, the topics they impose as ruler, and their evening ballads (10 poems by Boccaccio that make the Decameron a prosimetrum, or Menippean composition). Filostrato, for example, ‘‘abbattuto dall’amore’’ (struck down by love), presides over a day of tragic romance; rambunctious Dioneo, whose name derives from Dione, mother of Venus (cf. Paradiso VIII), delights in amorous escapades and defies each day’s assigned topic. Pauses and shifts articulate the succession, which aptly opens on the day of Mercury, god of speech (mercoledı`, Wednesday). Neifile at the end of Day II, a Thursday, proposes the brigata suspend storytelling Friday and Saturday for religious observances and bathing. On the first day of their second calendar week (III), they move to a second garden setting, reminiscent of the Earthly Paradise. A bawdy servants’ quarrel breaks into the early hours of Day VI, when unusually short tales leave time before sunset for the women to explore the nearby Valle delle Donne. To that secluded circular Valley of the Ladies, with hints of the chaste Venus and Celestial Paradise, the whole brigata retreats for Day VII. Day VIII, again a Sunday, begins after a second two-day devotional break, and Day X concludes with the brigata’s return to Santa Maria Novella. Thus they advance on a circular path, while the novelle extend through two weeks in a symmetrical diptych. Boccaccio’s ‘‘mercantile epic,’’ as Vittore Branca calls it, sings the rising middle class, businessmen who brandish not sword but florin, yet who look back nostalgically on an age of chivalry (Boccaccio 248

medievale, 1956). In this gallery of humanity, historical characters mingle with fictional, secular with ecclesiastical, Christian with Jewish and Moslem (Saladino and Melchisidech’s tale of three rings, I, 3). Mankind from worst to best throngs in a population of hundreds, spanning the social ladder— emperors, kings, popes, knights, aristocrats (tragic Ghismonda, IV, 1), merchants, soldiers, lawyers, judges, doctors, painters (Calendrino, Bruno, and Buffalmacco, VIII, 3; Giotto, VI, 5), poets (Guido Cavalcanti, VI, 9) nuns, abbots, priests, monks, abbesses, gardeners (Masetto in the nunnery, III, 1) sailors, pirates, thieves, usurers, horse traders (Andreuccio da Perugia, II, 5), damsels, wives, widows, prostitutes, virgins (adventures of the sultan’s daughter Alatiel, II, 7), artisans, and peasants. Although mostly set in Florence during the first decades of the trecento, the novelle reach well beyond their Tuscan epicenter. Chronologically, they bridge an era from Roman antiquity (the friendship of Tito and Gisippo, X, 8) to recent living memory; geographically, they crisscross the cardinal points, from Spain and England to China (Natan and Mitridanes, X, 3), wintry Friuli in the Italian Alps, to the desert sands of north Africa (Alibech and Rustico put the devil in Hell, III, 10). Its stylistic realism and anticlerical satire, heavily censored during the Catholic Reformation, led late Romantic critics, notably Francesco De Sanctis, to read the Decameron as a book that bursts the shackles of Dark Ages morality. Seminal midtwentieth-century studies by Giuseppe Billanovich and Vittore Branca set new directions, emphasizing Boccaccio’s literary debts (including those to his own earlier works) and his serious Christian ethic, solidly rooted in a classical and medieval heritage. Oriented intellectually to the trends of the day (Scholasticism, nominalism), the Decameron’s underpinnings lie in Boccaccio’s experience as a student of canon and civil law, patristics, and Aristotle explicated by the Dominican theologian Thomas Aquinas. With a protohumanistic stamp already seen in titles like Filostrato and Filocolo, he coins Decameron (10 days). Its etyma renew Hellenic culture but recall patristic commentaries on Genesis (cf. St. Ambrose’s Hexameron). Pushing his calendar through a second week, Boccaccio as creator forges an earthly time frame in contrast to scripture, where for exegetes like Augustine God’s Creation heralds a transcendental Eighth Day of eternal life. The Decameron subtitle ‘‘Prince Gallehault’’ alludes to Dante’s Inferno V, where Francesca da Rimini, punished among the lustful, tells how she and Paolo fall into a fatal kiss while

GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO reading about Lancelot and Guinevere in the book she calls their ‘‘Galeotto.’’ Boccaccio’s suggestion is that like Gallehault, the knight who arranged for King Arthur’s queen to tryst with her lover, his ‘‘Prencipe Galeotto’’ is a go-between bearing its message from an author-character to amorous women. They are an emblematic audience, not a historical public. The poet’s choice, faithful to the courtly tradition of poets addressing pedestaled ladies, also depends on medieval notions of the female’s proclivity for lust. His program, announced in the proem as literature that will teach both what to eschew and what to pursue, allows him, in the manner of the Discipline of Scholars and Ovide moralise´ (early fourteenth century; Moralized Ovid), to tell bawdy tales under the protective cover of a didactic shield. Tension between these poles allows for wide interpretive possibilities. Giosue` Carducci, Italy’s first Nobel Laureate in literature, puts the Three Crowns of Florence into a nutshell: Dante directs his gaze upward, Petrarca inward, and Boccaccio outward. The Certaldan’s artistic space is the world around us, not the afterlife. He is ‘‘the Tuscan Ovid.’’ From Heroides, Tristia, Ars amatoria, and Remedia amoris, he draws conspicuously for his three appearances (Proem, IV Intro., Author’s Concl.), passages that humorously mark the Decameron both as an Ovidian art of love and remedy for love. Yet Boccaccio is also Dante’s heir—ironically rejecting him some say; still in a medieval spirit for others. He writes his ‘‘human comedy’’ not in the scholar’s Latin but vernacular, a decision underlined by the dedication to women. His anthology, with a total of 10  10 stories, echoes the perfect number 100, sum of Dante’s cantos. The diabolical notary Ser Cepperello, ‘‘il piggiore uomo forse che mai nascesse’’ (perhaps the worst man who ever lived; I, 1), launches the tales, which proceed to the most extreme imaginable example of virtue, ‘‘saint’’ Griselda (X, 10). The narrators progress from an infernal city to bucolic settings that rise from a luminal pastoral scene to places emblematic of Eden and Heaven. The gardens peak with the third, reserved for Day VII. That intersection of three and seven plays out in the pattern opened by the Author’s Defense (30 tales before, 70 after) and again in the brigata gender division, seven women and three men with seven servants among them. On one level, the brigata invites literary comparisons—Boccaccio played Filostrato in his homonymous romance; Fiammetta is the poet’s mistress beginning with the Filocolo; Elissa is another of Dido’s names; Lauretta points to

Petrarca’s Laura and Filomena to Ovid’s Metamorphoses. On another, the women can personify the canonical seven virtues, reiterating Boccaccio’s plan in Comedia delle ninfe fiorentine, a ‘‘little Decameron’’; the men may adumbrate Aristotle’s tripartite soul (the rational, concupiscible, and irascible appetites), already a triad of protagonists in Teseida. The Decameron’s 10 days culminate under Panfilo, who rules as a figure of reason paired chiastically with Pampinea-Wisdom, queen on Day I and brigata leader (in Pythagorean numerology her age is ‘‘perfect,’’ 28 being the sum of its factors). Panfilo decrees as theme for his day deeds of ‘‘magnificence,’’ a virtue of generosity that in Aristotle’s Ethics (IV, 3) crowns and adorns all the others. Ascensional dynamics couple with typically medieval poetics of centering. Approaching the center (intro. to Day IV) Boccaccio inserts his defense as author. Whether so placed as a response to actual criticism (although there is no evidence that the Decameron stained his reputation in his lifetime) or as part of a preconceived structural plan, the interruption grapples jocosely with human sexuality. It is for Boccaccio a powerful, natural, and healthy impulse. Filippo Balducci, in the 101st tale, becomes an anchorite who tries to protect his teenage son from women by naming them papere (goslings), but the 18-year-old craves one anyway. To ‘‘accommodate’’ this drive, disruptive when uncontrolled, society channels it into marriage. Marriage is Fiammetta’s theme as queen, a ‘‘flamelet’’ who alludes to the virtue of temperance, which in Aristotle’s system is a mean between extremes. Speaking for the tempering, happy medium, she fittingly rules at a midpoint and on day 5 (the Pythagorean marriage number). Day VI, also central, begins with a metanovella about how to tell a good story. Devoted to witty retorts, it emphasizes Boccaccio’s respect for Cicero’s civic ideal of wisdom coupled with eloquence (De inventione) and Aristotle’s public virtue of eutrapelia (Ethics), the ability to entertain with a well-turned phrase. The frame narrators, whose speech is exemplary, tell stories in a recreational program of medical and moral healing. Restoring the plague-stricken community in a pastoral utopia, they enact Boccaccio’s commitment to the unity of the polity, under threat in mid-Trecento Florence from disease, internal dissension, and the aggressive duchy of Milan. Anchored to historical reality, the Decameron is above all a fictional construct. Boccaccio crafted his solemn opening pages in the metered cadences (cursus) of formal medieval prose composition (ars 249

GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO dictaminis), achieving heights that would earn him Ciceronian status as the model for imitation from Pietro Bembo onward. Artifice governs his description of the Black Death, meant to remind us of Dante’s Inferno and mounted to display more subtle borrowings from Cicero, Livy, and Paulus Diaconus, who recounts a similar disaster in his Historia Langobardorum (History of the Longobards, eighth century). Scholars have traced wide-reaching sources for almost all the novelle, where even in microtextual bytes, just when he claims to be telling the truth most realistically, as Pier Massimo Forni has shown, Boccaccio is most rhetorical (Adventures in Speech, 1995). Although it was long believed that he rejected the Decameron in old age, the Berlin autograph, not reidentified until the 1960s and decorated with his own lively catchword drawings, dates from the early 1370s, proving that he continued lovingly to revise it into his very last years. Until the great chivalric epics of the Renaissance, no other work of Italian fiction enjoyed such widespread European currency. Beginning with Petrarca’s Latin translation of the Griselda story (Letters of Old Age XVII, 3), Boccaccio’s novelle have left their traces on more than a thousand writers including Aretino, Balzac, Bandello, Byron, Capuana (Il Decameroncino), Chaucer, Dryden, Goethe, Goldoni, Keats, La Fontaine, Lessing, Longfellow, Luther, Machiavelli, Marguerite de Navarre, Morata, Quevedo, Pepys, Shakespeare, Swift, Tennyson, Lope de Vega, and Voltaire. Not until the Index branded it a ‘‘forbidden’’ book did the author take on his reputation as an amoral iconoclast. In twentieth-century popular imagination the Decameron continued to lend a name to whatever promises sensual delight and erotic titillation—I.A. Waters, The Cook’s Decameron (1901; classic Italian recipes tested by upper-crust Londoners on a country holiday); Leo Frobenius, The Black Decameron (1910; Das Schwarz Dekameron, African folktales); Julia Voznesenskaya, The Women’s Decameron (1985; 10 women in a Russian maternity ward tell stories against men and the political regime); Giuseppe Sabino, Il Decamerone popolare (1990; racy Calabrian folk tales). Cinema, too, has mined this archetype. Pier Paolo Pasolini’s splendid Decameron (1971) paved the way for such soft-porn spinoffs in 1972 as Mino Guerrini’s Decameron n. 2, Mario Stefani’s Decameron ‘300, Franco Martinelli’s Decameron proibitissimo, Gian Paolo Callegari’s Le caldi notti del Decameron, and Pier Giorgio Ferretti’s Decameroticus (1974). Meanwhile, on the scholarly front, this masterpiece is still bringing major revelations, 250

among them an early authorial redaction with a complete program of pen and ink drawings in Boccaccio’s own hand. VICTORIA E. KIRKHAM Editions Early Editions: The ‘‘Deo Gratias’’ Decameron, Naples: Francesco del Tuppo (?), ca. 1470, so named from the colophon, is considered the editio princeps. It is closely related both to the autograph (ca. 1370–1372; Berlin, Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Ms. Hamilton 90) and the authoritative manuscript transcribed by Francesco d’Amaretto Manelli, 1384 (Florence, Biblioteca Laurenziana, Ms. 42.1) from a copy probably belonging to Boccaccio. The first edition with a certain date was published by Christopher Valdarfer in 1471 at Venice. Other early editions, more than for any other vernacular book in quattrocento Italy, appeared in Mantua, 1472; Bologna, 1476; Milan, 1476; and Vicenza, 1478. Venice alone produced 11 incunables at five different publishing houses. The first illustrated imprint (Venice: Giovanni and Gregorio de’ Gregorii, 1492) has 104 original woodcuts. Noteworthy among numerous sixteenth-century editions are the first quarto (Venice: Gregorio de’ Gregorii, 1516), the Decameron with Lucilio Minerbi’s appended Vocabolario (Venice: Bernardino di Vidali, 1525) apparatus that was to become customary and a forerunner of the modern Italian dictionary; the ‘‘ventisettana’’ (Florence: Giunti, 1527), admired for textual accuracy; Lodovico Dolce’s Decameron, which went through eight editions and contained his catalogue of the ‘‘words, sayings, proverbs, unfamiliar or difficult figures of speech in the book’’ (Venice: Francesco Bindoni and Mapheo Pasini, 1541, etc.); imprints edited by Francesco Sansovino with textual variants and the author’s life (Venice: Giolito de’ Ferrari, 1546, etc.); those by Girolamo Ruscelli (Venice: Vicenzo Valgrisio, 1552, etc.); Francesco Giuntini’s edition, which indicates passages from the Decameron quoted by Bembo in his Prose della volgar lingua (Lyon: Guglielmo Rovillio, 1555); the Decameron corrected by the Accademia Fiorentina (Venice: Paolo Gherardo, 1557); and the three infamously expurgated texts edited by the ‘‘Deputati,’’ a committee of churchmen headed by Vincenzo Borghini (Florence: Giunti, 1573); Lionardo Salviati (Florence: Giunti, 1582); and Luigi Groto (Venice: Fabio and Agostino Zoppini Fratelli, et Onofrio Fari Compagni, 1588). Critical Editions: The critical tradition, with an ancestor in the 1527 Giunti Decameron, returns after a long period of censorship in an edition sponsored by the Accademia della Crusca (Lucca: Jacopo Giusti, 1761). See further Decameron, edited by Ignazio Moutier, in Opere volgari del Boccaccio, vols. 1–5, Florence: Magheri, 1827–1828; Aldo Francesco Masse`ra, Bari: Laterza, 1927; Giuseppe Petronio, Turin: Einaudi, 1950; Enrico Bianchi, Milan: Ricciardi, 1952; Charles S. Singleton, Bari: Laterza, 1955; Natalino Sapegno, Turin: U.T.E.T., 1956; Mario Marti, Milan: Rizzoli, 1958; Mario Pazzaglia, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1965; Antonio Enzo

GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO Quaglio, Milan: Garzanti, 1974; Aldo Rossi, Bologna: Cappelli, 1977; Natalino Sapegno, Milan: Fratelli Fabbri, 1977; Cesare Segre, Milan: Mursia, 1978; Mario Marti, Milan: Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli, 2001 (with the 1492 woodcuts). Vittore Branca’s editions include: Florence: Le Monnier, 1950–1951; 1965 (with woodcuts from the 1492 Gregori edition); Naples: Marotta, 1966 (3 vols. handsomely illustrated in color from the manuscripts); Decameron: Edizione critica secondo l’autografo hamiltoniano, Florence: Accademia della Crusca, 1976; Turin: Einaudi, 1980; Milan: Mondadori, 1976; 1992; Florence: Le Lettere, 1999 (with Boccaccio’s illustrations). Selections: Decameron: Venticinque novelle scelte e ventisette postille critiche, edited by Luigi Russo, Florence: Sansoni, 1944; Decamerone da un italiano all’altro: Cinquanta novelle, translated into modern Italian by Aldo Busi, 2 vols., Milan: Rizzoli, 1990–1991. Facsimiles: Decameron. Facsimile dell’autografo conservato nel codice Hamilton 90 della Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz di Berlino, edited by Vittore Branca, Florence: Alinari, 1976; Decamerone, o ver Cento novelle, Stuttgart: Cornetto Verlag, 1999 (Reproduces Stadbibliothek, Ulm copy of Venice: Maestro Manfrino da Monferrato da Sustrevo de Bonelli, 1498). Diplomatic Edition: Decameron: Edizione diplomaticointerpretativa dell’autografo Hamilton 90, edited by Charles S. Singleton, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974. Translations: as The Palace of Pleasure, Beautified Adorned and Well Furnished with Pleasant Histories and Excellent Novells (selections), translated by William Painter, London: W. Denham for R. Tottell and W. Jones, 1566; as The Decameron, Containing an Hundred Pleasant Nouels, Wittily Discoursed Between Seauen Honourable Ladies, and Three Noble Gentlemen, London: Isaac Jaggard, 1620; as The Decameron of Giovanni Boccacci (Il Boccaccio), now first completely done into English prose and verse by John Payne, London: Printed for the Villon Society by private subscription and for private circulation only, 1886; frequently reprinted, e.g., New York: The Modern Library, 1931; as The Decameron, translated by J.M. Rigg, 2 vols., London: H.F. Bumpus, 1906; London: privately printed for the Navarre Society, 1921, rpt. as late as 1957; translated by Richard Aldington, 2 vols., New York: Covici Friede, 1930; Chicago: Puritan Publishing Co., 1930, several times reprinted; available on audio cassettes and cd; translated by Frances Winwar, New York: Limited Editions Club, 1933; as The Decameron; the Modell of Wit, Mirth, Eloquence and Conversation Framed in Ten Dayes, of an Hundred Curious Pieces, by Seven Honourable Ladies, and Three Noble Gentlemen; Preserved to Posterity by the Renowned John Boccaccio, the First Refiner of Italian Prose, translated into English, 1620, with an introduction by Edward Hutton and woodcuts in the Renaissance manner by Fritz Kredel, New York: The Heritage Press, 1940; as The Decameron, translated by G. H. McWilliam, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972; rpt. 1995; as The Decameron: A New Translation. 21 Novelle, Contemporary Reactions, Modern Criticism, translated by Mark Musa and Peter Bondanella, New York: Norton, 1977; as Decameron, the John

Payne translation, rev. and annotated by Charles S. Singleton, 3 vols., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982; as The Decameron, translated by Mark Musa and Peter Bondanella, New York: Norton, 1982; as Decameron: A Selection, edited by Kathleen Speight, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983; as Decameron, translated by Guido Waldman, edited with introduction and notes, Jonathan Usher, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993; 1998; as The Decameron: Selected Tales. Decameron: Novelle scelte. A dual-language book, edited and translated by Stanley Appelbaum, Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 2000. See further F.S. Stych, Boccaccio in English: A Bibliography of Editions, Adaptations, and Criticism, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995, who lists 189 English complete or partial translations of the Decameron.

Further Reading Barolini, Teodolinda, ‘‘The Wheel of the Decameron,’’ in Romance Philology, 36 (1983): 521–539. Bausi, Francesco, ‘‘Gli spiriti magni. Filigrane aristoteliche e tomistiche nella decima giornata del Decameron,’’ in Studi sul Boccaccio, 27 (1999): 205–253. Billanovich, Giuseppe, Restauri boccacceschi, Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1945. Bragantini, Renzo, and Pier Massimo Forni (editors), Lessico critico decameroniano. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri Editore, 1995. Branca, Vittore, Boccaccio medievale, Florence: Sansoni, 1956. Branca, Vittore, ‘‘Il narrar boccacciano per immagini dal tardo gotico al primo Rinascimento,’’ in Boccaccio visualizzato, vol. 1, Turin: Einaudi, 1999. Carducci, Giosue`, Ai parentali di Giovanni Boccaccio in Certaldo, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1876. Decameron Web. A Growing Hypermedia Archive of Materials Dedicated to Boccaccio’s Masterpiece, http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/ dweb/dweb.shtml. De Sanctis, Francesco, Storia della letteratura italiana, edited by Paolo Arcari, 2 vols., Milan: Fratelli Treves, 1925. Forni, Pier Massimo, Adventures in Speech. Rhetoric and Narration in Boccaccio’s Decameron, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996. Greene, Thomas M., ‘‘Forms of Accommodation in the Decameron,’’ in Italica, 45 (1968): 297–313. Hollander, Robert, Boccaccio’s Dante and the Shaping Force of Satire, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Kern, Edith, ‘‘The Gardens in the Decameron cornice,’’ in PMLA, 66 (1951): 505–523. Kirkham, Victoria, ‘‘John Badmouth: Fortunes of the Poet’s Image,’’ in Boccaccio 1990: The Poet and his Renaissance Reception, edited by Kevin Brownlee and Victoria Kirkham, Studi sul Boccaccio, 20 (1991–1992): 355–376. Kirkham, Victoria, The Sign of Reason in Boccaccio’s Fiction, Florence: Olschki, 1993. Marcus, Millicent, An Allegory of Form. Literary SelfConsciousness in the Decameron, Saratoga, CA: ANMA Libri, 1979.

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GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO Mazzotta, Giuseppe, The World at Play in Boccaccio’s Decameron, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986. McGregor, James, Approaches to Teaching Boccaccio’s Decameron, New York: Modern Language Association, 2000. Olson, Glending, Literature as Recreation in the Later Middle Ages, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982. Smarr, Janet Levarie, ‘‘Symmetry and Balance in the Decameron,’’ in Mediaevalia, 2 (1976): 159–187. Smarr, Janet Levarie, ‘‘Ovid and Boccaccio: A Note on Self-Defense,’’ in Mediaevalia, 13 (1987): 247–255. Stewart, Pamela, ‘‘La novella di madonna Oretta e le due parti del Decameron,’’ in Retorica e mimica nel ‘‘Decameron’’ e nella commedia del cinquecento, Florence: Olschki, 1986. Wallace, David, Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Weaver, Elissa (editor), The Decameron First Day in Perspective, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004.

FILOCOLO, CA. 1334–1336 Prose Romance by Giovanni Boccaccio

Boccaccio’s Filocolo inaugurates on a grand scale the Italian tradition of prose fiction. Three times in the book the young author trumpets his awareness of its importance. For King Robert’s natural daughter Maria (also known as Fiammetta, or ‘‘Flamelet’’), he recasts the love story of Florio and Biancifiore on a high literary register (I, 1). At precisely the center (IV, 1), he embeds in a riddle his signature as a man with a name ‘‘full of grace’’ who comes from an ‘‘oak grove’’ (cerreto)—Giovanni of Certaldo. His farewell in the final chapter (V, 97) imitates Dante in Limbo (‘‘sixth among so much wisdom’’; Inferno IV, 102) and Statius before (Thebaid XII, 810–819), by creating a new canon that he joins behind Virgil, Lucan, Statius, Ovid, and Dante. Filocolo opens with the author’s description of how, on Holy Saturday in the Franciscan church of San Lorenzo at Naples, he was lovestruck by the sight of Maria, who later asks him to save from ‘‘fabulous parlance of the ignorant’’ an exemplary 252

tale of amorous fidelity. Florio, prince of Spain, and the orphan Biancifiore, born on Pentecost, grow up in his parents’ household and fall in love over ‘‘Ovid’s holy book.’’ The disapproving rulers sell Biancifiore into a harem, but Florio, traveling under the pseudonym Filocolo, ‘‘fatiche d’amore’’ (love’s labors, III, 75), rescues and marries her, once before a statue of Cupid and again, after her Christian origins have been revealed and Filocolo converts, at San Giovanni in Laterano. The newlyweds complete a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela begun by Biancifiore’s parents, Florio ascends the throne, and his kingdom embraces Christianity. From Old French, Spanish, and Italian versions of a source tale that circulated across Europe, Boccaccio derives his plot, which he complicates with new characters in a late antique setting, dresses with an apparatus of pagan gods, elevates with borrowings from Ovid and Dante, and amplifies with imaginative digressions: Fileno, whose tears melt him into a fountain (III, 26–37; V, 34–37); Idalogos, the author’s Venerean double entrapped in a pine tree (V, 8); the ‘‘Questioni d’amore,’’ a love debate presided over by Fiammetta, whose playful court anticipates the Decameron frame tale and two of its novelle (X, 3 and 4). Here Maria/ Fiammetta makes her first appearance in Boccaccio’s oeuvre, a lady not historical but fictional, invented to serve the Filocolo’s fiery Paschal and Pentecostal symbolism. With a five-book structure that points to the Pythagorean marriage number (5) and to Pentecost, the Filocolo is a gold mine of Boccaccio’s Gothic culture. Reflecting Angevin loyalties, it reconciles the poet’s study of canon law with his ambition for fame in an epic-romance of love and church triumphant. Less read today than it should be, the book saw numerous Renaissance editions and left traces in authors from Chaucer, Boiardo, Bembo, and Ariosto to Milton and Keats. The love debate, which circulated independently in Italy from the quattrocento, has enjoyed happy fortunes in English, with reprints of the Elizabethan translation that continue into the twentieth century. VICTORIA E. KIRKHAM Editions Early Editions: Il Philocolo, Florence, Magister Ioannes Petri de Magontia, 1472; Philocolo, Venice, Gabriele di Pietro, 1472; Philocolo, Milan: Domenico da Vespola, 1476; Philocolo, Milan: Phil. de Lavagnia, 1478; Philocolo, Naples: Sixto Riesenger Tedesco, 1478 (with important woodcuts); Philocolo, Venice: Philipo de Piero, 1481; Philocolo, Venice: Pelegrino Pasquale da Bologna, 1487; 1488; 1490; Philocolo, Venice: Antonio

GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO da Gusago Bresano, 1492; 1497; 1514; Venezia: Pincio, 1503; Milan, 1514; Milan, 1520; Venice, 1520; Milan, 1524; Il Philopono, edited by Gaetano Tizzone da Pofi, Venice: Jacopo da Lecco, 1527; Il Philocolo, edited by Marco Guazzo, Venice: Francesco di Alessandro Bindoni and Mapheo Pasyni, 1530; Il Philocopo, edited by Marco Guazzo and Niccolo` Zoppino, Venice: Niccolo di Aristotile detto il Zoppino, 1530; Il Philocopo, Venice, 1538; Il Filocopo, Venice: Giovita Ragirio, 1551; Venice, 1553, Il Filocopo, edited by Francesco Sansovino, Venice: Francesco Lorenzini, 1564; Venezia: Lorenzini, 1566; Venice, Giovan Antonio Bertano, 1575; 1578; Venice, 1585; Filocolo, Florence: Giunti, Edizione della Crusca, 1594; Il Filocopo, edited by Francesco Sansovino, Venice: Lucio Spineda, 1612. Critical Editions: Il Filocopo, in Opere volgari di Giovanni Boccaccio, edited by Ignazio Moutier, Florence: Magheri, vols. 7–8, 1829; Il Filocolo, edited by Ettore De Ferri, 2 vols., Turin: UTET, 1921–1922; 1927; Il Filocolo, edited by Salvatore Battaglia, Bari: Laterza, 1938; Filocolo, edited by Antonio Enzo Quaglio, in Tutte le opere, vol. 1, Milan: Mondadori, 1967; rpt. 1998; Filocolo, edited by Mario Marti, in Opere minori in volgare, vol. 1, Milan: Rizzoli, 1969. Selections: Filocolo: Scelta, edited by Carlo Salinari and Natalino Sapegno, in Decameron, Filocolo, Ameto, Fiammetta, Milan: Ricciardi, 1952; rpt. Turin: Einaudi, 1976. Facsimile: La storia di Florio e Biancifiore: FarbmikroficheEdition der Handschrift Kassel, Gesamthochschul-Bibliothek—Landesbibliothek und Murhardsche Bibliothek der Stadt Kassel 2o Ms. poet. et roman. 3, Munich: H. Lengenfelder, 1999. Theatrical Adaptation: Beatrice del Sera, Amor di virtu`: Commedia in cinque atti 1548, edited by Elissa Weaver, Ravenna: Longo, 1990. Translations: as Giovanni Boccaccio’s Il Filocolo, or The Labours of love, translated, annotated and with an introduction by Rocco Carmelo Blasi, doctoral dissertation, Loyola University of Chicago, 1974; as Il Filocolo, translated by Donald Cheney with the collaboration of Thomas G. Bergin, New York: Garland Publishing, 1985; as Chaucer’s Boccaccio: Sources of Troilus and the Knight’s and Franklin’s Tales (selections), edited and translated by N. R. Havely, Woodbridge, Suffolk: D. S. Brewer, 1980. The Love Debate: A Pleasaunt Disport of Divers Nobel Personages, written in Italian by M. Iohn Bocace, Florentine and poet laureat, in his boke which is entituled Philocopo, and nowe Englished by H.G., London: at the signe of the Marmayd, by H. Bynneman, for Richard Smyth and Nicolas England, [1566] 1567; rpt. as Thirteene Most Plesant and Delectable Questions, Entituled a Disport of Diuers Noble Personages, written in Italian by M. Iohn Bocace Florentine and poet Laureat, in his book named Philocopo, London: Henry Bynneman for Richarde Smyth, 1571; London: Thomas Woodcocke, 1587; London: Peter Davies, 1927, introduction by Edward Hutton; as Pleasant Questions of Love, illustrated by Alexander King, New York: Falstaff Press, 1930; as The Most Pleasant and Delectable Questions of Love, illustrated by Alexander King, introduction by Thomas Bell, New York: Illustrated Editions Company, 1931 (printed in several versions, including New

York: Three Sirens Press, 1931; Cleveland, NY: World Publishing Co., 1931); rpt. New York: World Publishing Co., 1942; Garden City, NY: Halcyon House, 1950; Filocopo (reprints 1567 edition), Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum and New York: Da Capo Press, 1970; as The Filocolo of Giovanni Boccaccio with an English Translation of the Thirteen ‘‘Questioni d’amore,’’ doctoral dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, 1971; Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1978; Thirteen Most Pleasant and Delectable Questions of Love, Entitled a Disport of Divers Noble Personages, refashioned and illustrated by Harry Carter, New York: C.N. Potter (Crown), 1974.

Further Reading Grieve, Patricia, Floire and Blanchefleur and the European Romance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Grossvogel, Stephen, Ambiguity and Allusion in Boccaccio’s Filocolo, Florence: Olschki, 1992. Kirkham, Victoria, ‘‘Reckoning with Boccaccio’s Questioni d’amore,’’ in MLN, 89, no. 4 (1974): 47–59. Kirkham, Victoria, Fabulous Vernacular: Boccaccio’s Filocolo and the Art of Medieval Fiction, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. Morosini, Roberta, Per difetto rintegrare: Una lettura del Filocolo di Giovanni Boccaccio, Ravenna: Longo, 2004. Perella, Nicolas J., ‘‘The World of Boccaccio’s Filocolo,’’ in PMLA, 76 (1961): 330–339. Quaglio, Antonio Enzo, Scienza e mito nel Boccaccio, Padua: Liviana, 1967. Smarr, Janet Levarie, ‘‘Boccaccio’s Filocolo: Romance, epic, and religious allegory,’’ in Forum Italicum, 12 (1978): 26–43. Wilkins, Ernest Hatch, ‘‘Boccaccio’s First Octave,’’ in Italica, 33 (1956): 19.

FILOSTRATO, CA. 1334–1335 Verse Romance by Giovanni Boccaccio

Filostrato, a treasure that traveled into English through Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, and Dryden’s Palamon and Arcite, marks Boccaccio’s debut in the genre of romance. Set to rhyming octaves in 253

GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO the style of the cantari (minstrel songs sung by oral poets), it filters through humorous irony a tale of ill-fated love at the siege of Troy. Troiolo, a son of Priam smitten by Cupid’s arrow, confides in Pandaro, who acts as go-between and topples the chaste widow Criseida’s resistance. Daughter of the seer Calca`s, whose prophetic vision makes him defect to the Greeks, she rejoins her father in the enemy camp and finds amorous consolation with Diomede. Troiolo dwindles in misery over her betrayal, eventually meeting death in battle at the hand of Achilles. Boccaccio frames his ancient story with a present-day parallel: Playing the unhappy poet-lover Filostrato, he hopes his book will bring back Filomena, who has abandoned Naples for the baths at Sannio. Multiple sources flow into Filostrato, FrancoItalian in flavor. Long predating Boccaccio’s acquaintance with Homer, it draws for characters and setting on medieval accounts of the Trojan War, from the apocryphal Dares and Dictys to the Old French Roman de Troie by Benoıˆt de Sainte-Maure and Guido delle Colonne’s Historia destructionis Troiae (History of the Destruction of Troy, 1287). Boccaccio’s ‘‘author,’’ no stranger to Virgil and Ovid, has also mastered Andreas Capellanus’ De arte onesti amandi (The Art of Courtly Love, ca. 1185), and he has explored his immediate vernacular heritage—the dolce stil novo (sweet new style), including poetry by Cino da Pistoia; Dante’s Vita nuova, Rime petrose, and Comedia. Yet for all its debts and early date (deduced from the author’s dedicatory letter to Filomena, a penlady preceding Fiammetta), Filostrato is delightfully fresh. The Hellenizing title (‘‘struck down by love’’), while true to the medieval axiom that ‘‘Names are the consequence of things,’’ heralds Boccaccio the Humanist. He raids a courtly repertoire—love is illicit, difficult, secret, all-consuming, and irresistible; widows make best mistresses; lovers have rivals; they grow pale, sick, insomniac; write letters, give tokens as gifts—but he puts it in witty, ironic perspective. He creates a memorable new character, the go-between Pandaro (whose name via Chaucer’s homonymous character gives the English verb and noun ‘‘pander’’). He articulates the book in nine ‘‘parts,’’ allusive to Dante’s infernal number; enhances it scholastically with a proemial epistle, subdivisions, rubrics, and congedo (farewell). Obedient to dictates of prose composition (ars dictaminis), the proem frames the whole with the parallel voice of an ‘‘author-lover’’ no wiser than the protagonist. Troiolo, a ‘‘little Troy’’ who crumbles under besieging love, speaks like 254

Francesca da Rimini (II, 7), compares himself to Myrrha, Biblis and Phaedra (II, 20), and rages like Dante’s Minotaur (IV, 27). With a psyche dominated by lust and wrath, he makes a perfect match for Criseida, who tosses off her honor like an extra sweater and incarnates the cliche´ of female fickleness. Boccaccio recounts their ‘‘mal concetto amore’’ (ill-conceived love, VIII, 28) in marvelous counterpoint to the Vita Nuova, crafting ‘‘light’’ vernacular rhyme in a ‘‘pietoso stile’’ (Proem 29), later renewed as a vehicle for Madonna Fiammetta’s Elegia and Filostrato in the Decameron. VICTORIA E. KIRKHAM Editions Early Editions: Philostrato, Venice: Luca Veneto, ca. 1480– 1483; El Fylostrato, Bologna: 1498; Fylostrato, Milan: Ulderich Scinzenzeler, 1499; Filostrato, Venice: Sessa, 1501; Filostrato, Venice: Penzio da Lecco, 1528. Critical Editions: Filostrato, in Opere volgari, edited by Ignazio Moutier, vol. 13, Florence: Marghera, 1831; edited by Savj Lopez, Strassburg: Heitz, [1911]; in Opere, edited by Vincenzo Pernicone, vol. 2, Bari: Laterza, 1937; Filostrato, edited by Vittore Branca, in Tutte le opere, vol. 2, Milan: Mondadori, 1964; rpt. 1990; Filostrato, edited by Mario Marti, in Opere minori in volgare, vol. 2, Milan: Rizzoli, 1969; Filostrato, edited by Luigi Surdich with Elena d’Anzieri and Federica Ferri, Milan: Mursia, 1990. Translations: as Il Filostrato: The Story of the Love of Troiolo as It Was Sung in Italian by Giovanni Boccaccio and Is Now Translated into English Verse by Hubertis Cummings, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1924; rpt. as Prose and Poetry of the Italian Renaissance in Translation, edited by Blanchard Harold Hooper, New York: Longmans, 1949; 1955; as The Filostrato of Giovanni Boccaccio, translated with parallel text by Nathaniel Edward Griffin and Arthur Beckwith Myrick, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1929; New York: Biblo and Tanner, 1929; London: Milford, 1930; rpt. New York: Biblo and Tanner, 1967; New York: Farrar, Strauss (Octagon Books), 1970; 1973; 1978; as The Story of Troilus, as Told by Benoıˆt de Sainte-Maure, Giovanni Boccaccio (Translated into English Prose) Geoffrey Chaucer, Robert Henryson, translations and introduction by R. K. Gordon, London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1934; rpt. New York: Dutton, 1964; Medieval Academy Reprints for Teaching, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978; as Il Filostrato, Italian text edited by Vincenzo Pernicone, translated with an introduction by Robert P. Roberts and Anna Bruni Seldis, New York: Garland, 1986; as Chaucer’s Boccaccio: Sources of Troilus and the Knight’s and Franklin’s Tales (selections), edited and translated by N. R. Havely, Woodbridge, Suffolk: D. S. Brewer, 1980.

Further Reading Branca, Vittore, Il cantare trecentesco e il Boccaccio del Filostrato e del Teseida, Florence: Sansoni, 1936.

GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO Gozzi, Maria, ‘‘Sulle fonti del Filostrato: Le narrazioni di argomento troiano,’’ in Studi sul Boccaccio, 5 (1968): 123–209. McGregor, James H., The Shades of Aeneas. The Imitation of Vergil and the History of Paganism in Boccaccio’s Filostrato, Filocolo, and Teseida, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991. Picone, Michelangelo, ‘‘Boccaccio e la codificazione dell’ottava,’’ in Boccaccio: Secoli di vita. Atti del Congresso Internazionale: Boccaccio 1975. Universita` di California, Los Angeles 17–19 Ottobre, 1975, edited by Marga Cottino-Jones and Edward F. Tuttle, Ravenna: Longo, 1977. Stillinger, Thomas, The Song of Troilus: Lyric Authority in the Medieval Book, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992. Wallace, David, Chaucer and the Early Writings of Boccaccio. Woodbridge, Suffolk: D.S. Brewer, 1985.

LATIN WORKS During the first century after his death, Boccaccio’s renown rested on his Latin writings. The major works coalesced into a canon, shaped by his admirers and biographers. When Coluccio Salutati, chancellor of Florence from 1375, composed a tribute to follow Boccaccio’s own modest autoepitaph in the Certaldan’s burial church, he took his cue from Virgil’s tomb verses and cast it as a catalog of the poet’s classics: Why, O glorious Bard, do you speak of yourself so humbly? You with your limpid notes have exalted pastoral verses; You with your arduous labors have numbered the hills and the mountains; You have described the forests and springs and the swamps and marshes; Aye, you have counted the names of the seas and the lakes and the rivers. You bring before us great princes, relating their trials and downfalls, From our first father Adam down to the magnates of our times. You, in most lofty measures, celebrate notable matrons; You have traced all the immortals to their dark and unknown beginnings, Filling fifteen golden volumes, second to none of the ancients. Labors past counting have made you famous among all the people

Nor will an age ever come that will pass over you in silence. (trans. from the Latin by Thomas G. Bergin, Boccaccio, 1981)

Salutati puts Boccaccio’s pastoral song, Buccolicum Carmen (ca. 1341–1342), at the top of his list. Thereafter he inventories the geographical gazetteer De montibus, silvis, fontibus, lacubus, fluminibus, stagnis seu paludibus et de diversis nominibus maris (On Mountains, Forests, Springs, Lakes, Rivers, Ponds or Swamps, and Diverse Names of the Sea, ca. 1350–1365), two biographical compilations De casibus virorum illustrium (Falls of Illustrious Men, ca. 1355–1360, revised 1373–1374), De mulieribus claris (Famous Women, 1360–1375), and last, the ‘‘epic’’ Genealogie deorum gentilium libri quindecim (Genealogies of the Gentile Gods in Fifteen Books, ca. 1360). Filippo Villani, earliest to give Boccaccio a vita in his lives of famous Florentines (ca. 1380– 1390), similarly eulogizes Boccaccio the Latinist. He itemizes the same titles as Salutati and, tellingly, dismisses in a coda Boccaccio’s Italian fiction as just so many unnamed ‘‘worklets’’ (opuscula). Around midquattrocento, Giannozzo Manetti can speak well of Boccaccio’s vernacular prose and poetry, but he too clearly more admires the Latinist, rating the Genealogies a crowning achievement. By 1486, however, matters have changed. Angelo Poliziano’s Nutricia (Homage to My Wet Nurse, Lady Poetry), a universal inventory of famous writers, remembers Boccaccio as ‘‘the man who recounts one hundred short stories in ten days.’’ This shift, which signals revived interest in Italy’s mother language among Lorenzo de’ Medici’s circle, heralds the trend that will triumph. Boccaccio himself moved freely back and forth between Latin and Italian throughout his career. Three working notebooks, the Zibaldone laurenziano and Miscellanea laurenziana (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Ms. Plut. 29.8; Ms. Plut. 33.31), and the Zibaldone magliabechiano (Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale, Ms. Magl. II, II, 327, now Banco rari 50), preserve some of his earliest experiments in Latin. Side by side in the Zibaldone laurenziano appear his first Latin poem, the so-called Elegia di Costanza (Costanza’s Elegy, 1330s), and his Allegoria mitologica (Mythological Allegory, 1330s). In the former (135 vv), inspired by the ancient epitaph of Homonoea and Atimetus, a Neapolitan beauty called Costanza speaks from the tomb where her body decays to console her grieving lover. The Allegoria mitologica, 2,000 words of obscure prose, opens with a gallop 255

GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO through world history, from its golden to iron ages. Following that decline calqued on Ovid’s Metamorphoses I, renewal comes with the Christian era. Into this scenario drops a mysterious figure represented as Phaethon (following Metamorphoses II), who visits disaster on trecento Naples. Perhaps the baffling allegory alludes to conflict between old and new church doctrines. Its syncretism captures perfectly the author’s shared loyalties as a canon law student drawn to poetry. In the same Zibaldone, Boccaccio transcribed four early epistolary experiments. Bombastic salutations announce their tenor: ‘‘Crepor celsitudinis Epyri principatus’’ (Fame of the height of the principality of Epirus), ‘‘Mavortis miles extrenue’’ (Worthy soldier of Mars), ‘‘Nereus amphytritibus lymphys’’ (Nereus with Amphitritean waters), and ‘‘Sacre famis et angelice viro dilecto forti’’ (‘‘To the beloved man of holy and angelic fame’’—perhaps Petrarca). Boccaccio probably never intended to send any of these letters, which are rhetorical practice pieces in the medieval art of prose composition (dictamen), crafted in rhythmic clauses (cursus) after the best models (Dante’s Epistole to Cino da Pistoia and Moroello Malaspina) to display virtuosity on a set theme (friendship). Dating from 1339, they declare the author’s cult for Virgil, near whose tomb at Naples he pretends to be writing. Once back in a bleak Florence, seeking escape to the wonders of a wider world, he drafted De Canaria (On the Canary Islands, ca. 1342). This fascinating account, entrusted to the Zibaldone Magliabechiano, renders into Latin a lost Tuscan letter sent to their native city from Florentine merchants in Seville. An Italian-led expedition of 1341 circumnavigated many of the Canary Islands, where instead of hoped for treasure, they discovered lush vegetation, blond natives, flourishing gardens, and wellbuilt houses. The sailors broke into these dwellings, stocked with figs and luxuriant grain. Discovering a temple, they removed the statue of its god and took it back with them to Lisbon, along with four young men, who had swum out to meet the boats. Precious for ethnographic details, De Canaria has its historical context in the competition among European powers for commercial control over new lands in a burgeoning age of colonialism. Other travels carry Boccaccio into ideal fantasy realms. In 1347, when at Forlı`, he exchanges epistolary eclogues with Checco di Meletto Rossi, secretary to the lord of the city Francesco Ordelaffi, in a four-part correspondence like that between Dante and Giovanni del Virgilio (1319–1320). 256

Later, after seeing Petrarca’s Buccolicum carmen (1359), he forms the idea for a book of eclogues, poems allegorical in intent like their ideal classical antecedents by Virgil. Dedicated to Donato Albenzani and completed ca. 1366, but not released to his friends until 1370, Boccaccio’s Buccolicum carmen (Pastoral song—in the singular because it is a unified collection) gathers 15 eclogues plus a 16th, their ‘‘Messenger.’’ All except the second, a monologue, are dialogues whose speakers dwell variously on love, friendship, politics, religion, and the literary vocation, in registers that run from satiric comedy to serious theological teaching. In ‘‘Faunus’’ (III) Palemon (Boccaccio) and Pamphylus (Checco) praise the laureate Mopsus (Petrarca) and express concern for the present situation of Parthenope (Naples), under threat from Polyphemus (King Ludwig of Hungary) and his ally Faunus (Ordelaffi); in ‘‘Iurgium’’ (The Quarrel, VII), Daphnis (Emperor Charles IV) and Florida (Florence) lock horns; ‘‘Midas’’ (VIII) refers in its title to Nicola Acciaiuoli, a former friend now resentfully attacked; ‘‘Vallis opaca’’ (The Dark Valley, X) imagines a tyrant and prisoner in hell; ‘‘Pantheon,’’ in contrast (XI), convokes Mirtilis (the church of God), Glaucus (the apostle Peter), and Amintas (St. Paul) to recount Christian salvation history; ‘‘Sapphos’’ (XII) and ‘‘Laurea’’ (The Laurel Wreath, XIII) address the quest for poetic fame; ‘‘Olympia’’ (Heavenly realm, XIV), mourns Boccaccio’s little daughter Violante, who has gone to Paradise. For this ‘‘poetry of wisdom,’’ which follows a loosely structured rising narrative line from the lusts of this world to love of the next (Eclogues, xxviii), Boccaccio himself provides a partial key in a letter of ca. 1372–1373 to an Augustinian eremite monk at Santo Spirito, Fra Martino da Signa (Epist. XXIII). Boccaccio’s friendship with Petrarca, beginning at midcentury, inaugurates a second more humanistic period in his Latin poetry. Marked by direct access to previously undiscovered classical sources, it culminates with the Certaldan’s exposure to Homer in the original language, which he studied with Leontius Pilatus, proudly taking credit for restoring Greek to Tuscany (Genealogie XV, 6–7). Even before meeting Petrarca, Boccaccio avidly follows his career. The epistle ‘‘Sacre famis’’ of 1339 extols a man at Avignon, ‘‘educated in the bosom of the Muses’’ and ‘‘nursed on the milk of philosophy.’’ Two years later he copies into his Zibaldone Magliabechiano Petrarca’s Privilegium (Certification for Laureation, 1341). Petrarca’s Coronation Oration, delivered at Rome on Easter

GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO of 1341, buttresses Boccaccio’s laudatory De vita et moribus Domini Francisci Petracchi de Florentia secundum Iohannem Bochacii de Certaldo (On the Life and Habits of Lord Francis Petrarch of Florence According to John Boccaccio of Certaldo, ca. 1348–1350). This vita proliferated from an apograph (an exemplar transcribed from the autograph, in the Zibaldone Laurenziano) through copies made at the Florentine prison of Le Stinche, where inmates worked as amanuenses for money. Together with Petrarca’s Posteritati (Letter to Posterity) it became the basis of all subsequent Renaissance lives of the Aretine man of letters. Shortly after his first stay with Petrarca at Padua in the spring of 1351, when the two visited Livy’s tomb, Boccaccio seems to have composed another biographical piece, his Pauca de T. Livio a Iohanne Boccaccio collecta (A Few Things on Titus Livius Collected by John Boccaccio). Little more than a page and reminiscent of the medieval accessus ad auctorem (introduction to the author), it incorporates from his Zibaldoni two earlier notes on the Roman historian dating from the Neapolitan period when he translated into Italian Livy’s third and fourth Decades. Ten years later, during a sojourn in Peter Damian’s city of Ravenna, Boccaccio received a message from Petrarca, then at Milan, with a request for information about the saint. To comply, the Certaldan located an eleventh-century life of Damian by one of his disciples, Giovanni da Lodi, and rewrote it as Vita sanctissimi patris Petri Damiani heremite et demum episcopi hostiensis ac romane ecclesie cardinalis (Life of the Most Sainted Father Peter Damian Hermit and Then Bishop of Ostia and Cardinal of the Roman Church, 1361–1362). A second visit with Petrarca, at Milan in March of 1359, spurred Boccaccio to complete his De casibus virorum illustrium, a monumental gallery of humanity from Creation to his own day dedicated in its second redaction to Mainardo Cavalcanti (1373). Wide in its range of ancient sources, the compilation retains much that is medieval. Divided into nine books, a number of shortfall vis-a`-vis the perfect 10, this dream vision lays out the universal trajectory of human events as an endless struggle between good and evil, pride and punishment, fortune and providence. As in the Divina Commedia, shades crowd before the author to tell their mournful fates. Adam and Eve lead the procession, which continues through the ages with notables like Nimrod, Saul, Dido, Tarquinius Superbus, Hannibal, Cicero, Arthur King of the Britons, and last, the Sicilian washerwoman who rose to control the

throne of Naples. Between these accounts the author pauses to moralize, bemoaning man’s mortal condition or railing against such evils as pride, riches, and women. Boccaccio, whose energies seem to have flagged after completing seven books, imagines that his ‘‘excellent and venerable master’’ Petrarca appears to rouse him (VIII, 1). Man, argues a laureated Franciscus in Boccaccio’s eloquently scripted speech, was born to strive for fame, a divine gift that brings life after death. If even Jerome and Augustine sought temporal as well as eternal glory, should we not do the same, that we may inspire posterity? An ideal diptych with De casibus, Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris is the first collection of female biographies in Western literature. Drafted around 1361, after Boccaccio’s encounter with Leontius, it passes through eight more compositional phases. An autograph (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana XC, sup. 98) reflects the final version of 1375, dedicated to the noblewoman Andrea Acciaiuoli, manly in spirit like her name, ‘‘since in Greek andres means precisely men.’’ From Eve to Queen Giovanna of Naples, 106 females parade before us in 104 chapters (two are double), each displayed in a cameo that establishes her geographical origins and genealogy, then the story of her life and death, and finally, why she is memorable and what rituals or monuments are linked to her name. Boccaccio the protohumanist details temples, idols, and cult centers; he weighs critically his classical sources. His talent for portraying female beauty warms these lives of women, both good (Lucretia) and evil (Cleopatra), ordered by hierarchy (immortals before mortals) and history, from the beginning through the translatio imperii (translation of empire) from Thebes to Troy to Rome. The lives are unframed, but they cohere through the author’s formulaic narrative pattern and his preacher-like Christian slant, which dismisses pagan beliefs as silly fictions. The same perspective rules Boccaccio’s Genealogie deorum gentilium, an encyclopedia of pagan myths in 15 books written for King Hugo IV of Cyprus. King Robert of Anjou’s erudite librarian Paolo di Perugia must have early suggested this project, for which Boccaccio began making notes around 1350. By 1360–1365 he had a draft, further elaborated in successive phases up to ca. 1373, date of the autograph (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, LII, 9). A proem questions his capacity as mere ‘‘homunculus’’ to accomplish a daunting task better suited to Atlas or Hercules—or Petrarca. So much of the pagan heritage has been 257

GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO lost to fire, floods, and zealots that his task will be like gathering from a vast beach the scattered fragments of a great shipwreck. More than 700 gods and their progeny animate the Genealogie in its first 13 books, each headed by a genealogical tree. (Boccaccio himself drew and colored them in the autograph.) The last two books are a defense of poetry, defined as ‘‘a sort of fervid and exquisite invention’’ that ‘‘veils truth in a fair and fitting garment of fiction’’ (XIV, 7). Boccaccio applies his theory to the myths, deconstructing them with euhemerism (the idea that the gods were once mortals elevated through legend to divine status) or naturalistic explanations to uncover their allegorical meaning. The Genealogie reflects Boccaccio’s newly won knowledge of the Homeric poems, from which he quotes passages in the original language, the first time Greek appears in a humanistic text. This imposing accomplishment became a standard text of reference for scholars, poets, and artists throughout the Renaissance. Several early editions of the Genealogie print it together with De montibus, a geographical gazetteer. Uniquely modern among Boccaccio’s works and ostensibly written as a relaxing pastime (so he claims in a prefatory page), this compendium simply presents its information raw, without any moralistic commentary. Mountains come first, as he explains, because upon them forests grow and from them flow the rivers that feed lakes, swamps, and the sea. Within each category, the order is alphabetical. The mountains go from ‘‘Aalac’’ to ‘‘Ziph,’’ both in Syria; forests include the Ardennes; fountains, Aganippe of the Muses, Arethusa in Sicily, and Sorgue, which gave a retreat from Babylon (Avignon) to the celebrated poet Francesco Petrarca, ‘‘my compatriot and preceptor’’; lakes, Galilee; rivers, Arno (which takes precedence since it is the one he has ‘‘known above all others from infancy’’); swamps, Styx, both one in Upper Egypt and the other in the underworld, famous in the songs of the poets. Boccaccio’s miscellaneous Latin verse goes under the title Carmina (Poems): I. Elegia di Costanza; II. A pastoral poem to Checco di Miletto (1347–1348); III. Faunus, part of same exchange, revised as third eclogue in Buccolicum carmen; IV. Epitaph for the father and son Pino and Ciampi della Tosa, preserved by Coluccio Salutati (ca. 1348); V. To Petrarca (ca. 1351–1353), a metrical epistle accompanying Boccaccio’s gift of a copy of Dante’s Commedia); VI. An epigram to the archbishop of Milan, as if spoken by the Florentine 258

lion; VII. A metrical epistle to Zanobi da Strada, recently crowned poet laureate (ca. 1355); VIII. A tetrastich written as colophon to a copy of Dante’s Commedia in Boccaccio’s hand (Florence, Biblioteca Riccardiana, Ms. 1035. ca. 1360–1365); IX. Verses to Petrarca’s Africa expressing concern about that still-unpublished epic’s fate (1374); X. Boccaccio’s autoepitaph in the church of SS. Jacopo and Michele in Certaldo. Latin is the language of all but three of Boccaccio’s 24 surviving Epistole (Letters)—a pathetic remnant of what his correspondence must have been. Earliest are the four rhetorical exercises of 1339. The others have dates between 1341 (V, to Niccolo` Acciaiuoli, complaining of how unhappy he is to be back in Florence, survives only in Italian translation) and 1374 (XXIV, condolences on the death of Petrarca, to his son-in-law Francescuolo da Brossano): VI, to Zanobi da Strada, in praise of friendship (1348); VII, carried to Petrarca in Padua from the Signoria by Boccaccio as ambassador with the invitation to return, live, and teach in Florence (1351); VIII, a fragment to Zanobi da Strada in praise of ‘‘Virgilian Naples’’ (1352); IX, to Zanobi (1353); X, to Petrarca from Ravenna, obliquely criticizing him for having accepted patronage at the court of the Visconti tyrant (1353); XI, to Petrarca from Ravenna, ‘‘the sewer of transalpine Gaul,’’ referring to Petrarca’s wish for information about Peter Damian (1362); XII, to Barbato da Sulmona about Petrarca (1362); XIII, to his close friend Francesco Nelli, prior of the church of Santi Apostoli in Florence, from Venice, a ferocious attack on Niccolo` Acciaiuoli, who made Boccaccio’s trip to Naples a disaster (1363; survives in an Italian translation except for a fragment of the original Latin); XIV, to Pietro da Moglio, praised as a master of rhetoric (ca. 1366); XV, to Petrarca, a touching letter describing his visit at Venice with the recipient’s daughter Francesca (‘‘Tullia’’) and son-in-law (1367); XVI, to Niccolo` da Montefalcone from Naples, perhaps in hopes of retiring to that monk’s monastery (1371); XVII, to the Neapolitan Matteo d’Ambrasio, from Naples (1371); XVIII, to the nobleman Niccolo` Orsini, a Ciceronian orator and friend of Petrarca, from Certaldo (1371); XIX, to the knight Iacopo Pizzinga (1371); XX, to the lawyer Pietro da Monteforte from Certaldo (1372); XXI, to Mainardo Cavalcanti, describing his deteriorating health, from Certaldo (1373); XXII, to Mainardo (1373); XXIII, to Fra Martino da Signa, of the Augustinian Eremites, with an allegorical key to Buccolicum

GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO carmen (1372–1374); XXIV, to Francesco da Brossano, son-in-law of Petrarch, on the latter’s death (1374). VICTORIA E. KIRKHAM Collections Carmina, miscellaneous Latin verse compositions written throughout Boccaccio’s life, edited by Aldo Francesco Masse`ra, bari: Laterza, 1928; edited by Giuseppe Velli, in Tutte le opere, vol. 5, pt. 1, Milan: Mondadori, 1992. Epistole, written 1339–1374; edited by Aldo Francesco Masse`ra, Bari: Laterza, 1928; edited by Ginetta Auzzas, in Tutte le opere, vol. 5, pt. 1, Milan: Mondadori, 1992. Genealogia deorum gentilium . . . de montibus, silvis, fontibus, lacubus, fluminibus, stagnis, seu paludibus, et de diversis nominibus maris, Reggio: Bartholomeus et Laurentius de Bruschis, 1481; Vicenza: Simone de Gabis, 1487; Genealogiae Ioannis Boccatii, cum demonstrationibus in formis arborum designatis. Eiusdem de montibus et sylvis, de fontibus, lacubus, et fluminibus. Ac etiam de stagnis et paludibus, necnon et de maribus, seu diuersis maris nominibus, Venice: Bonetus Locatellus for Octavianus Scotus, 1494–1495]; Venice: Manfredo de Strevo da Monferrato, 1497; Venice: Agostino de’ Zanni da Portesio, 1511; Genealogie Johannis Boccacij cum micantissimis arborum effigiationibus cuiusque gentilis dei progenium . . . Eiusdemque De montibus et siluis de fontibus, lacubus et fluminibus . . ., Paris: Opera et expensis Dionisii Roce, Lodouici Hornken, 1511; Ioannis Boccatii Peri genealogias deorvm libri quindecim, cum annotiationibus Iacobi Micylli. Eivsdemque De montium, sylvarum, fontium, lacuum, fluuiorum, stagnorum, et marium nominibus, Basel: Ioannes Hervagius, 1532. Lettere, carmi ed altri scritti minori, edited by Attilio Hortis, in Studj (epistolary exchange between Boccaccio and Checco da Mileto, Elegia di Costanza, Allegoria mitologica), 1879, Appendices VI and VII. Le lettere edite e inedite di Messer Giovanni Boccaccio tradotte e commentate con nuovi documenti, edited by Francesco Corazzini, Florence: Sansoni, 1877. Opere in versi, Corbaccio, Trattatello in laude di Dante, prose latine, epistole, edited by Pier Giorgio Ricci, Milan: Ricciardi, 1965. Opere latine minori (Buccolicum carmen. Carminum et epistolarum quae supersunt. Scripta breviora), edited by Aldo Francesco Masse`ra, Bari, Laterza, 1928. Vite di Petrarca, Pier Damiani e Livio, edited by Renata Fabbri, in Tutte le opere, vol. 5, pt. 1, Milan: Mondadori, 1992.

Editions Elegia di Costanza, written ca. 1332–1334; in Hortis, Studj, 1879; in Vittore Branca, Tradizione delle opere di Giovanni Boccaccio I. Un primo elenco dei codici e tre studi, 1958; Carmina, 1992. Allegoria mitologica, written ca. 1332–1334; in Hortis, Studj, 1879; edited by Aldo Francesco Masse`ra, Opere latine minori, 1928; edited by Manlio Pastore Stocchi, in Tutte le opere, vol. 5, pt. 2, 1994.

Epistole, written 1339–1374; first editions: I, II, III, IV, VI, IX, XI, XIV. Sebastiano Ciampi, Monumenti di un manuscritto autografo e lettere inedite di Messer Giovanni Boccaccio, Milan: P.A. Molina, 1830. V. (Survives in the manuscripts only in Italian translation) Prose antiche di Dante, Petrarca e Boccaccio e di molti altri nobili e virtuosi ingegni, Florence: Anton Francesco Doni, 1547. VII, XV. Jacques Franc¸ois Paul Aldonce De Sade, Me´moires pour la vie de Franc¸ois Pe´trarque, Amsterdam [Avignon]: Aske´e and Merkus, 1764–1767, vol. 3. VIII. Francesco Macrı` Leone, ‘‘Il Zibaldone boccacciano della Magliabechiana,’’ in Giornale Storico della Letteratura Italiana, 10 (1887): 1–ff. X. Johannes Boccatius ad Franciscum Petrarcham nunc primum edita epistola, Padua, 1819. XII. Marco Vatasso, Del Petrarca e di alcuni suoi amici, Roma: Tipografia Vaticana, 1904. XIII. Anton Maria Biscioni, ed., Prose di Dante Alighieri e di messer Giovanni Boccaccio, Florence: G.G. Tartini e Santi Franchi, 1723. XVI, XVII, XVIII, XX. In Le lettere edite e inedite, edited by Corazzini, 1877. XIX. Giovanni Boccaccio, Rime di messer Giovanni Boccacci, Livorno: T. Masi e Compagno, 1802. XXI, XXII. Ioannis Boccaccii ad Maghinardum de Cavalcantibus epistolae tres, edited by A.N. Veselovskii, St. Petersburg: V. Demakova, 1876. XXIII. Domenicus Antonius Gandolfi, Dissertatio historica de ducentiis celeberrimis Augustinianis scriptoribus, Rome: Buagni, 1704. XXIV. Lorenzo Mehus, Ambrosii Traversarii latinae epistolae, Florence: Cesareo, 1759. De Canaria, written, ca. 1342; edited by Manlio Pastore Stocchi, in Tutte le opere, vol. 5, pt. 1, 1992. Buccolicum carmen, written ca. 1341–1342, 1347, 1362–1366, published 1369–1370; in Opere latine minori, edited by Aldo Francesco Masse`ra; edited by Giorgio Bernardi Perini, in Tutte le opere, vol. 5, pt. 2, 1994. De vita et moribus Domini Francisci Petracchi de Florentia secundum Iohannem Bochacii de Certaldo, written ca. 1348–1350; first edition: Document historique de Boccace sur Pe´trarque: Manuscrit de la Bibliothe`que de Saint-Marc de Vinese (Ms. Marc. Lat. XIV 223) publie´ pour la premie`re fois et accompagne d’ une dissertation et de recherches nouvelles (includes Boccaccio’s De vita et moribus with facing French trans.), edited by Marquis De Valori (Henri Zosime), Avignon: Typographie de Th. Fischer, 1856; Petrarca, Giul. Celso, e Boccaccio: Illustrazione bibliologica delle vite degli uomini illustri del primo, di Cajo Giulio Cesare attribuita al secondo, e del Petrarca scritta dal terzo (includes Boccaccio’s De vita et moribus with Italian trans.), edited by Domenico Rossetti, Trieste: G. Marenigh, 1828; Solerti; edited by Aldo Francesco Masse`ra, 1928; edited by Renata Fabbri, in Vite, 1992. Pauca de T. Livio a Iohanne Boccaccio collecta, after 1351; edited by Attilio Hortis, Studj sulle opere latine; Aldo Francesco Masse`ra, in Opere latine minori, 1928; Renata Fabbri, in Vite, 1992. De casibus virorum illustrium, first draft 1355–1360; completed 1373–1374; De montibus, silvis, fontibus, lacubus, fluminibus, stagnis seu paludibus et de diversis nominibus maris, written ca.

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GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO 1355–1357, revisions continue until 1374; Venice: Vindelinus de Spira, 1473; edited by Manlio Pastore Stocchi, in Tutte le opere, vols. 7–8, pt. 2, 1998. De mulieribus claris; first redaction 1360, nine redactional phases continue until 1375; edited by Vittorio Zaccaria, in Tutte le opere, vol. 10, 1967; 1970. Genealogie deorum gentilium, written ca. 1360, final redaction after 1372; edited by Raffaele Zovenzoni, Venice: Vindelinus de Spira (Wendelin of Speier), 1472; 1473; Cologne: Printer of the ‘‘Sancte Flores Agostini’’, 1473; Reggio: Bartholomeus et Laurentius de Bruschis, 1481; Vicenza, 1487; Venice: Per D. Octauiani Scoti ciuis Modoetiesis, 1494 (the first to include the genealogical trees); Venice: Manfredo de Strevo de Monferrato, 1495; 1497; Paris, 1511; Venice: Per Agostinum de Zannis de Portesio, 1511; edited by Jacobus Micyllus (Jakob Moltzer), Basil: Apud Io, Hervagium, 1532; Venice: Fabio e Agostino Zoppini, 1581; Hecker 1902; edited by Vincenzo Romano, Bari: Laterza, 1951; Ruggiero Stefanelli, Boccaccio e la poesia, Naples: Loffredo, 1978; edited by Vittorio Zaccaria, in Tutte le opere, vols. 7–8, pts. 1 and 2, 1998. Vita sanctissimi patris Petri Damiani heremite et demum episcopi hostiensis ac romane ecclesie cardinalis, written 1361–1362; edited by Aldo Francesco Masse`ra, 1928; edited by Renata Fabbri, in Vite, 1992.

Facsimile Genealogiae [and De montibus, Venice, 1494], New York: Garland, 1976.

English Version, translated by Charles G. Osgood, Princeton: Princeton University Press, London: Oxford University Press by H. Milford, 1930; rpt. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956; 1978; as Book Eleven of the Genealogy of the Pagan Gods of Giovanni Boccaccio: A Translation with Glossary, translated by Melanie Hoover, M.A. dissertation, University of Florida, 1985; as Vulcan: The Genealogy of the Pagan Gods, translated by Fred Lock, Kingston, Ont.: Lock’s Press, 1999.

Further Reading Bergin, Thomas G., Boccaccio, New York: Viking, 1981. Hortis, Attilio, Studj sulle opere latine del Boccaccio con particolare riguardo alla storia della erudizione nel medio evo e alle letterature straniere aggiuntovi la bibliografia delle edizioni, Trieste: Libraria Julius Dase Editrice, 1879. Pastore Stocchi, Manlio, Tradizione medioevale e gusto umanistico nel ‘‘De montibus’’ del Boccaccio, Padua: CEDAM; Florence: Olschki, 1963. Picone, Michelangelo, and Claude Cazale´ Be´rard (editors), Gli Zibaldoni di Boccaccio: Memoria, scrittura, riscrittura, Florence: Franco Cesati, 1998. Wilkins, Ernest Hatch, The University of Chicago Manuscript of the Genealogia Deorum Gentilium of Boccaccio. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1927. Zaccaria, Vittorio, Boccaccio narratore, storico, moralista e mitografo, Florence: Olschki, 2001.

Translations Note: All titles in Tutte le opere except De montibus are facing text editions with the Latin original and Italian translations. Epistole: as Buccolicum carmen: Boccaccio’s Olympia, edited, with an English rendering by J. Gollancz, London: Chatto and Windus, 1913; rpt. 1914, 1921; as Eclogues, translated by Janet Levarie Smarr, New York: Garland, 1987. De casibus virorum illustrium: as The Fall of princes, translated by John Lydgate, London: Richard Pynson, 1494; rpt. 1527; rpt. London: Richard Tottel, 1554; rpt. London: John Wayland, 1554; rpt. 1558; as Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, edited by Henry Bergen, Washington: The Carnegie Institute, 1923–1927; rpt. Oxford: Early English Text Society, 1924–1927; rpt. 1967; The Fates of Illustrious Men, translated and abridged by Louis Brewer Hall, New York: Frederick Ungar, 1965. De mulieribus claris: as De Preclaris Mulieribus, That Is to Say in Englyshe, Of the Ryght Renoumyde Ladyes, translated by Henry Parker (Parcare), Lord Morley, London: Printed for the Editor, 1789; as Forty-Six Lives, translated by Henry Parker, Lord Morley, edited by Herbert G. Wright, London: Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 1943; as Concerning Famous Women, translated by Guido A. Guarino, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press-London: George Allen and Unwin, 1964; as Famous Women, translated by Virginia Brown, I Tatti Renaissance Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Genealogie deorum gentilium: as Boccaccio on Poetry, Being the Preface and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Books of Boccaccio’s ‘‘Genealogia deorum gentilium’’ in an

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TESEIDA DELLE NOZZE D’EMILIA, CA. 1339–1341 Epic Poem by Giovanni Boccaccio

Memorable as the first epic in Italian, Boccaccio’s Teseida delle nozze d’Emilia (Thesiad of Emilia’s Nuptials) answers a deficiency Dante notes in De vulgari eloquentia II, 2, 10, when he identifies the three subjects worthy of poetic treatment as rectitude, love, and arms, adding that no one, so far, has written on the last in Italy’s vernacular. The compound title announces a creative mix, ‘‘arms and the man’’ (Aeneid I, 1), leavened with love and the woman. Theseus, king of Athens, liberates Thebes and defeats the Amazons, returning triumphant with their queen Ippolita and her sister Emilia,

GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO whose beauty captivates the knights Arcita and Palemone. To resolve their rivalry, Theseus decrees a tournament. The night before, Arcita prays to Mars for victory, Palemone to Venus for the lady, and Emilia to Diana for a happy outcome. Arcita wins but dies from wounds, allowing Palemone to marry Emilia. Final words addressed by the author to his book proclaim his pioneering accomplishment, a song of Mars inspired by Muses in the ‘‘nude’’—without Latin clothing (XII, 84). A bizarre hybrid to the modern eye, the autograph manuscript (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Ms. Doni e Acquisti 325) reproduces classical epic as it looked to Boccaccio in exemplars such as his surviving a twelfth-century copy of Statius’ Thebaid. In the Teseida, after a dedicatory letter to Fiammetta, 15 sonnets frame 12 books of ottava rima (9,904 verses), each further subdivided into chapter-like units by rubric-titles. Boccaccio himself, writing as if he were an anonymous commentator, provides an apparatus of interlinear and marginal glosses that swells on some folios to thousands of words. Inside this complex architecture, he sprinkles his lexicon with a Latinate vocabulary, slips the tale into a time frame before the Trojan War, and decks it with such reminders of antiquity as a machinery of pagan deities, mythic heroes who parade in an epic catalogue, a Roman amphitheater, and funeral games. The Teseida affirms the canonical epic length of 12 books but correlates them with the 12 houses of the zodiac, merging classical epic and medieval Arabic astronomy. Astronomical number symbolism, which Chaucer echoes (‘‘The Knight’s Tale,’’ first in the Canterbury Tales), connects the planetary gods to their protege´s. To the central verse (VII, 30, 1) and chapter (VII, 50, 1) Boccaccio links key descriptions of Mars and Venus, a pair allusive to marriage. Allegorically, in the terminology of Aristotelian-Thomistic ethics, they signify the irascible and concupiscible appetites. Belonging to a tradition that runs from Prudentius’ Psychomachia (fourth century; Battle in Mansoul) to Dante’s Comedia, the Teseida has its moral locus in the mind, site of conflict between reason’s civilizing power, represented by the just ruler Theseus, and the lower appetites of wrath and lust, dramatized by the rival protagonists. The closing marriage of Emilia and Palemone, which couples a tempering Diana with Venus, asserts chaste love in the well-ordered society. Widely read during the manuscript era, the Teseida waned in popularity once printed books took over. Public interest veered to newer narratives,

but their formal debt to Boccaccio is evident. His choice of ottava rima set the metrical standard for Italian chivalric epic throughout the Renaissance, from Pulci and Boiardo to Ariosto and Tasso. VICTORIA E. KIRKHAM Editions Early Editions: La Teseida, Ferrara: Agostino Carnerio, 1475, with the commentary by Andrea da Bassi; La Theseida, edited by Gaetano Tizzone da Pofi, Venice: Gerolamo Pentio da Lecco, 1528. Critical Editions: Teseide, edited by Ignazio Moutier, in Opere volgari, vol. 9, Florence: Marghera, 1831; Teseida, edited by Salvatore Battaglia, Florence: Sansoni, 1938; Teseida delle nozze d’Emilia, edited by Aurelio Roncaglia, Bari: Laterza, 1941; Teseida delle nozze d’Emilia, edited by Alberto Limentani, in Tutte le opere, vol. 2, Milan: Mondadori, 1964; Teseida, edited by Mario Marti, in Opere minori in volgare, vol. 2, Milan: Rizzoli, 1969. Translations: as The Book of Theseus, translated by Bernadette Marie McCoy, Sea Cliff, NY: Teesdale Publishing, 1974 (highly unreliable); as Chaucer’s Boccaccio: Sources of Troilus and the Knight’s and Franklin’s Tales (selections), edited and translated by N. R. Havely, Woodbridge, Suffolk: D. S. Brewer, 1980.

Further Reading Anderson, David, Before the Knight’s Tale: Imitation of Classical Epic in Boccaccio’s Teseida, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988. Hollander, Robert, ‘‘The Validity of Boccaccio’s Self-Exegesis in his Teseida,’’ in Medievalie et Humanistica, n.s., 8 (1977): 163–183. Kirkham, Victoria, ‘‘’Chiuso parlare’ in Boccaccio’s Teseida,’’ in Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio. Studies in the Italian Trecento in Honor of Charles S. Singleton, edited by Aldo S. Bernardo and Anthony L. Pellegrini, Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1983; rpt. in Victoria Kirkham, The Sign of Reason in Boccaccio’s Fiction, Florence: Olschki, 1993. Savj-Lopez, Paolo, ‘‘Sulle fonti della ‘Teseide,’’’ in Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 36 (1900): 59–78. Schnapp, Jeffrey T., ‘‘Un commento all’autocommento nel Teseida,’’ in Boccaccio 1990: The Poet and His Renaissance Reception, edited by Kevin Brownlee and Victoria Kirkham, Studi sul Boccaccio, 20 (1991–1992): 185–203. Schnapp, Jeffrey T., ‘‘A Commentary on Commentary in Boccaccio,’’ South Atlantic Quarterly, 91.4 (1992): 813–834. Smarr, Janet Levarie, ‘‘Boccaccio and the Stars: Astrology in the Teseida,’’ in Traditio, 35 (1979): 303–332. Vandelli, Giuseppe, ‘‘Un autografo della Teseida,’’ in Studi di filologia italiana, 2 (1929): 1–76. Wetherbee, Winthrop, ‘‘History and Romance in Boccaccio’s Teseida,’’ in Boccaccio 1990: The Poet and His Renaissance Reception, edited by Kevin Brownlee and Victoria Kirkham, Studi sul Boccaccio, 20 (1991–1992).

261

TRAIANO BOCCALINI

TRAIANO BOCCALINI (1556–1613) Born into a middle-class family (his father was a known architect), Boccalini spent his childhood and adolescence in his native town of Loreto, which he always mentions in his writings with endearing words. Strongly inclined toward literature and poetry, he desired to become a full-time writer, but the meager finances of his family did not allow him to pursue a literary career and he was compelled to choose more profitable judicial and administrative posts. Boccalini would later portray the years spent studying law in Perugia and then Padua as miserable and dull; indeed, as he reported in De’ Ragguagli di Parnaso (Reports from Parnassus, 1612–1613), in order to endure the effort required, such a career was only suitable to individuals having ‘‘un cervellaccio di bue, una complessionaccia di facchino’’ (the brain of an ox, the body of a porter). In Perugia, Boccalini attended lessons by the famous Giovan Paolo Lancellotti and Rinaldo Ridolfi, and met the satirical poet Cesare Caporali (1531–1601), who might have influenced his initial conception of De’ Ragguagli di Parnaso. As a student in Padua, Boccalini developed a passionate interest in the Roman historian Cornelius Tacitus. His reflections culminated in the compilation of his Commentarii di Traiano Boccalini romano sopra Cornelio Tacito (Commentaries on Cornelius Tacitus), published posthumously in 1677. In this text, a meditation on the contrast between ragion di stato (reason of state) and ethical instances, Boccalini shows his inner nature as a political moralist and opponent of Niccolo` Machiavelli, typical of the Counter-Reformation movement of Tacitism. At the same time, he openly and harshly criticizes the political corruption of his times. In 1592, with the proclamation of the new pontiff, Clement VIII, Boccalini was able to get a permanent position as pontifical governor of small cities belonging to the state of the church, thanks to the intervention of the pope’s nephew, Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini. It was a difficult task that obliged Boccalini to wander throughout Italy for the rest of his life, and in the course of which he experienced frustration, humiliation, and threats, including troubles with the Holy Office. It was indeed in the midst of these difficult years that 262

Boccalini left aside his Commentarii sopra Cornelio Tacito and started to conceive the draft of De’ Ragguagli di Parnaso, an allegoric treatise divided in two centurie (chapters). In it, Boccalini depicts a utopian world out of earthly time and space (Parnassus), where mythical and historical events are mingled with no distinction. The benevolent king is Apollon, who supervises his guests with a serene smile. In Parnassus congregate the greatest philosophers, writers, and statesmen of different historical times, engaged in vivacious diatribes on heterogeneous topics, such as social habits, erudition, literature, science, politics, and ethics. In this context, Boccalini ostensibly penned himself as the menante or gazzettiere (reporter), who objectively takes notes of all discussions. The leitmotiv of the De’ Ragguagli di Parnaso is social and political satire, astutely blended with poetic descriptions and literary reflections. Elegantly positioned at the intersection of several genres—mythical-allegorical fiction, political treatise, and satire—and structured according to the Horatian formula utile dulci (useful and sweet), the work enjoyed the immediate favor of a large audience and consecrated Boccalini as a writer. However, the tone of four satirical chapters, which had long circulated only in manuscript form because their author feared the revenge of the Spanish rulers and of the Inquisition, is quite different. The first collection of these writings was published anonymously in 1614 with the title La cetra d’Italia (The Lyre of Italy). Twenty-nine additional chapters were then published in Venice with the title Pietra del paragone politico (Political Touchstone) later that same year, although the volume was dated 1615. Abandoning the carefully crafted strategy described in a letter of August 27, 1612, to James I, king of England as wrapping ‘‘l’aperta verita` [...] con le larve delle metafore’’ (the open truth within [...] the maggots of metaphors), in Pietra del paragone politico Boccalini compared Spaniards to hopeless lovers, fooled by the clever and beautiful women they want to possess in vain (the Italians): ‘‘Pero´ prestate fede a me [Spagnoli], che purtroppo a mie spese l’ho esperimentato, che nel negozio di soggiogar Italia altro non caverete [...] che danno e vergogna’’ (Therefore trust me [Spaniards], all you will gain from your

MATTEO MARIA BOIARDO attempt to subjugate Italy will be nothing but damage and shame. Boccalini’s attacks against the Spanish invaders hit such a crude and polemical vein that Lope de Vega called him a boca de infierno (a mouth from hell). Thus, De’ Ragguagli di Parnaso and its appendixes made Boccalini famous and infamous, loved and hated. Translated, imitated, and counterfeited for decades, his works became, as Harald Hendrix has rightly put it, the ‘‘cultural conscience’’ of the intelligentsia of seventeenth-century Europe (Traiano Boccalini fra erudizione e polemica, 1995).

Biography Born in Loreto (Ancona), probably in 1556 (there are no official birth records). Studied at the local Jesuit college. Studied law at the University of Perugia, 1578. Moved to Padua to finish his studies, after 1580. Married Ersilia Ghislieri in Rome, 1584. Settled in Rome, 1585. Became a writer of apostolic briefs, 1586. Secretary of the Marquis Spinola, Genoa, 1590. Papal governor of Trevi Umbra, 1592. Magistrate of Tolentino, June 1594. Governor of Brisighella, November 1594. Lieutenant of Scipione Gottifredo, Benevento, 1596. Mission to Venice, 1598. Criminal judge in Campidoglio, Rome, 1599. Governor of Comacchio, 1603. Denounced to the Holy Office, 1603. Faced the trial of the Inquisition, Ferrara-Rome, 1604. Governor of Bagnacavallo, 1606. Governor of Argenta, 1608. Apostolic commissioner, Matelica, 1609. Settled in Rome. His writings attracted again the attention of the Inquisition; tried and acquitted, 1610. Governor of Sassoferrato, 1611. Governor of Nocera Umbra, 1612. Moved to Venice. Died in his house of the neighborhood of Santa Maria Formosa, Venice, probably of a tumor of the liver,

September 29, 1613. However, rumors (unfounded) rapidly spread about his murder by Spanish hands (either by poison or by physical assault). Was buried in the Church of San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice, through the intervention of his longtime friend, the abbot Angelo Grillo. OLIMPIA PELOSI Selected Works Collections Ragguagli di Parnaso e scritti minori, edited by Luigi Firpo, 3 vols., Bari: Laterza, 1948.

Treatises De’ Ragguagli di Parnaso. Centuria prima, 1612; Centuria seconda, 1613. La cetra d’Italia, 1614. Pietra del paragone politico, 1615. Commentarii di Traiano Boccalini romano sopra Cornelio Tacito, 1677.

Further Reading Firpo, Luigi, ‘‘Boccalini, Traiano,’’ in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, vol. 11, Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1969. Hendrix, Harald, Traiano Boccalini fra erudizione e polemica. Ricerche sulla fortuna e bibliografia critica, Florence: Olschki, 1995. Marconi, Laura, ‘‘Traiano Boccalini studente a Perugia (1578–1582): Documenti inediti sulla sua permanenza e laurea nello Studium perugino,’’ in Pensiero politico, 31, no. 1 (1998): 73–87. Martinelli, Bortolo, ‘‘Boccalini Traiano,’’ in Dizionario critico della letteratura italiana, vol. 1, Turin: Utet, 1986. Sterpos, Marco, ‘‘Boccalini tacitista di fronte al Machiavelli,’’ In Studi secenteschi, 12 (1971): 255–283. Varese, Claudio, Traiano Boccalini, Padua: Liviana, 1958. Zaccaro, Vanna, Arte dello stato e retorica in Traiano Boccalini, Fasano: Schena, 2002.

MATTEO MARIA BOIARDO (1441–1494) Matteo Maria Boiardo perfectly embodied the instability, the genius, and the compromises of the late fifteenth century, a turbulent moment in Italian history and culture. Symbiotically connected to the Este court of Ferrara and its culture, Boiardo

successfully negotiated in his literary career the contrast between classical models and medieval romance, typical of the hybrid culture of the Este court. Dividing his energies between political and military duties on one side, and the cult of literary 263

MATTEO MARIA BOIARDO form on the other, he achieved a position of prestige in both realms, as a quintessential courtly man. His most important work, the incomplete Orlando innamorato or Inamoramento de Orlando (Orlando in Love, 1482–1483/1495), makes him the first poet to bring Italian chivalric literature within the realm of high literature, paving the way for the masterpieces by Ludovico Ariosto and Torquato Tasso. The connection of Boiardo’s family to the Este court dated back to his grandfather, Feltrino, who had obtained the county of Scandiano from the lords of Ferrara in 1423. Boiardo spent his youth at the court of the Humanist Prince Leonello d’Este until the year 1460, when he became the ruler of his feudal territory. Nevertheless, he always manifested a strong attachment to Ferrara, where the political and cultural life of the duchy was increasingly concentrated. He was an active participant in the life of the Este court, serving and writing under dukes Borso and Ercole, who shaped the cultural life of Ferrara, partially changing the humanistic tradition initiated by Guarino Guarini under Leonello d’Este. Boiardo’s first poetic endeavors were in Latin, strictly connected to his role as a courtly poet, and they inscribe him within the humanistic circle of Ferrara. Both written between 1463 and 1464, the Carmina de laudibus Estensium (Songs in Praise of the Este) and the Pastoralia (Pastoral Songs, 1500) were both inspired by a close imitation of Vergil. In the Carmina de laudibus Estensium, Boiardo lent his poetic voice to the dynastic reconstruction envisioned by Borso d’Este when the duke decided to call from Naples Ercole and Sigismondo, the two legitimate heirs of the dynasty. The praise of Borso naturally turns into the praise of Ercole, who later became Boiardo’s most important patron. The dynastic project, realized through poetic praise and legitimization of the house of Este, is a constant element of Boiardo’s career, culminating in the Orlando innamorato. The same project characterizes the 10 eclogues of the Pastoralia, where political and love themes alternate. As in the Carmina de laudibus Estensium, Boiardo represents the present and the future lord through common praise, realizing through poetry the continuity desired by the Este dynasty. Both poems clearly point to the school of Guarino Guarini (1374–1460), who had established a canon that included auctores such as Virgil, Tibullus, Propertius, Ovid, Horace, as well as Claudianus and Lygdamus. In the same tradition we can inscribe a later work, which Boiardo composed in 1476. The poem, entitled Epigrammata (Epigrams), 264

praised the victory of Duke Ercole over an internal revolt promoted by his nephew Nicolo`. The use of the humanistic model at the time of his intellectual maturity discredits any easy identification between Boiardo’s Latin production and an early phase of his literary training. During the last years of Borso’s reign, Boiardo was assigned important diplomatic responsibilities. While he was in Reggio Emilia at Sigismondo’s court, he met Antonia Caprara, to whom he dedicated the Canzoniere, the collection of his lyric poems dated by the author 1469–1471 and entitled, following the Ovidian model, Amorum libri (Books of Love, 1499). The collection includes texts composed before these years, organized according to the fiction of a chronological sequence. There are explicit markers placing the Canzoniere into a concrete reality. The setting for the collection is the town of Reggio (sonnet 16), and the first letters of the first 14 sonnets of the first book form the name of the beloved lady. The same is true of the 14 initials of the 14 lines of sonnet 14. In structuring his Amorum libri, Boiardo was more severe than his model, Petrarch: Each of the books consists of 50 sonnets and 10 poems in a different meter, generally highly experimental. Following a classical model, the text is divided into three thematic parts: The first part praises beauty and reciprocated love; the second part describes the frustration and misery of the rejected lover; the third part evokes the nostalgic memory of the lost love, and explores the theme of the ‘‘prison of love.’’ The most reliable manuscript of the Amorum libri (ms. Egerton, London, British Library) is dated January 4, 1477, but Boiardo wrote the poems at an earlier stage. As explained in the opening sonnet, the poet has systematized a series of texts composed during his youth. Boiardo used the Petrarchan model, combining it with a variety of other inspirations, including not only the classics, but also stilnovistic and Provencal poetry. His attitude toward Petrarch is innovative: Stylistically and thematically, Boiardo seeks a colorful tone, and locates himself far from Petrarch’s medietas (middle tone). The lady praised in the collection is framed even more abstractly than the Petrarchan Laura. Distancing himself from Petrarch, Boiardo chooses to reject a representation based upon the filter of memory, embracing the present and its immediate effects. However, to avoid a critical anachronism, we should not judge Boiardo’s heterodox Petrarchism from the point of view of the Petrarchan orthodoxy of the Italian cinquecento: Boiardo was inventing a

MATTEO MARIA BOIARDO tradition, rather than distancing himself from an existing one. The years between 1476 and 1483 were the most productive in his literary career. To this period belongs the Pastorale (Pastoral Song), composed of 10 eclogues in Italian, thematically divided between politics and allegories of love. The political eclogues can be dated after 1482, since they are linked to the war against Venice for the territory of Polesine, whereas the love poems cannot be dated as precisely. The dark tones of the descriptions of the war and of its effects on the familiar landscapes, which Boiardo uses consistently in the political eclogues, expose the most dramatic aspects of a time of uncertainty and fear. In these years, Boiardo was also engaged in the composition of his chivalric poem, the Orlando innamorato. Throughout his career, Boiardo also wrote various translations from the classics (volgarizzamenti) for the use and entertainment of Ercole d’Este, who had not studied Latin. Boiardo’s translations include excerpts from the works of Xenophon and Aemilius Probus (before 1471), the Chronicon Imperatorum by Riccobaldo Gervasio da Ferrara (1472–1478), a history of the Roman and Germanic emperors, Cornelius Nepos and Herodotus’ Histories (translated from a Latin version). The court, with which Boiardo became officially affiliated on January 1, 1476, provides the background and the reason for all these literary endeavors, and the work as a translator acquires particular meaning when connected to the specific nature of the translated texts. Duke Ercole, a courtly lord and military chief, had a particular interest in historiography, and the poet provided him with historical narrations of the past that serve as a model for the present. The poet also translated Lucian and Apuleius. In particular, his translation of the Metamorphoses, which had been attributed erroneously to his grandfather Feltrino, features a very open manipulation of the original, as Boiardo adds a final part to the text, taking it from Lucian’s Lucius e onos. Besides his translations, Boiardo also wrote short poems for the entertainment of the court, such as the sonnets and poems in terza rima written in 1460–1465 and entitled Capitoli (Chapters, 1523), which illustrate the Tarots. Both the translations and this minor production shed light on the various aspects and interests of the court, including the more mundane and playful. The idea of the chivalric poem was also born within the court, and Duke Ercole encouraged its composition. In order to write the Orlando

innamorato, the great epic poem of the origins of the Este, Boiardo was exempted from his political duties. In the same year that he began to write the Orlando innamorato, 1478, he married Taddea dei Gonzaga di Novellara, with whom he lived a happy domestic life. When the political and military life of the court took a turn for the worse, however, Boiardo returned to his diplomatic duties. He was captain of Modena in 1480, a task entailing heavy responsibilities, especially when the war with Venice and the pope broke out in 1482. He ultimately needed to leave the command of Modena in order to defend his own feud, Scandiano. Meanwhile, in 1483, the first edition of the Orlando innamorato appeared: It contained only the first two books of the poem and is now lost. The war was a success, and after the peace signed in 1484, Boiardo followed his lord Ercole in his travels. This is probably one of the reasons for the 1487 Venice edition of the Orlando inamorato, still composed of two books. During this time of peace, Boiardo experimented with new genres, following and shaping the taste of the court. In these years, the Este palace in Ferrara acquired an avant-garde position in the production and representation of plays, and Boiardo contributed the Timone (Timon, 1500), a classical play. This work, probably written between 1486 and 1494, is a re-elaboration of a play by Lucian (which Boiardo could read in a Latin translation), and it is probably the only surviving example of a more extensive production. The adaptation of a classical play to the taste of the modern public involves metric solutions, such as the use of the hendecasyllable, and thematic revisions. As in his translation and rewriting of the Metamorphoses, Boiardo expands the text with his own additions. In writing his Timone, he doubles the two main characters, and this results in a very effective treatment of the main theme of the original comedy. If in Lucian’s play excessive spending is inevitable, and it leads to poverty and misanthropy, in Boiardo’s rewriting there is a more optimistic view, and the poet endorses a vision of human behavior based on balance and courtesy, as he will do in the Orlando innamorato. In 1487, another phase of great political and military endeavor began. Appointed military governor of the town of Reggio, Boiardo must again relinquish his literary efforts. In 1494, due to the military pact between France, Milan, and Ferrara, the French troops left through the Este territories, an event that acquired symbolic undertones, and was perceived as marking the end of independence and freedom for the peninsula. 265

MATTEO MARIA BOIARDO Boiardo, who interrupted the Orlando innamorato with this image of invasion (book 3, canto 9) died during the same year, on December 19. For centuries, Boiardo has been relegated to a marginal position within the canon of Italian literature. As far as the Orlando innamorato is concerned, Boiardo has suffered from the obscuring fame of his successor, Ludovico Ariosto, while, for the rest of his production, he paid a price to the generalized prejudice against courtly literature as instrumental and insincere. His active participation in the courtly life has often produced a stereotyped representation of his personality as a lesser Ariosto, a courtier with a superficial poetic vision of life and love. Once catalogued only as a precursor, Boiardo has now recovered some autonomy, but still only as the author of the Orlando innamorato. Even the Amorum libri, one of the most important canzonieri of the fifteenth century, has received limited critical attention. The volgarizzamenti, of crucial importance as tokens of a cultural project within the court, have never been edited in their entirety. New directions in Boiardo criticism, begun in the 1970s and culminating with the celebrations for the fifth centenary of his death in 1994, seek to focus on the totality of the poet’s works. Boiardo’s multifaceted production could provide critics a wealth of unexplored texts on the uncertain borders of Humanism.

Biography Born in Scandiano (Reggio Emilia), 1441, the son of Giovanni and Lucia Strozzi (sister of Tito Vespasiano Strozzi, Humanist and poet). Spent childhood in Ferrara; after the death of his father (1451), lived with his grandfather Feltrino, count of Scandiano and poet himself (died 1456); educated by the priest Bartolomeo da Prato; invested coruler of his territory along with his cousin Giovanni, 1460; joined the Este court in Ferrara, 1460. Diplomatic missions to Rome with Duke Borso, 1471; to Naples with Sigismondo d’Este, 1473; division of the county, 1474, which left him in charge of Scandiano, Gesso, and Torricella; hired as a direct dependent of Duke Ercole, 1476. Marriage to Taddea di Giorgio Gonzaga di Novellara, 1479; military governor of Modena, 1480–1482; military governor of Reggio Emilia, 1487–1494. Died in Reggio Emilia on December 19, 1494. ELEONORA STOPPINO See also: Epic; Ludovico Ariosto 266

Selected Works Collections Tutte le Opere, edited by Angelandrea Zottoli, 2 vols., Milan: Mondadori, 1936–1937. Opere volgari. Amorum libri, Pastorale, Lettere, edited by Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo, Bari: Laterza, 1962.

Poetry ‘‘Carmina de laudibus Estensium,’’ (ca. 1463–1464); edited by Angelo Solerti, 1894. ‘‘Epigrammata,’’ (1476), edited by Giovan Battista Venturi in Poesie, 1820. ‘‘Pastorale,’’ (ca. 1482), edited by Giovan Battista Venturi in Poesie, 1820. ‘‘Orlando innamorato,’’ 1482–1483 (first two books), 1495 (book 3). ‘‘Amorum libri,’’ 1499; critical editions by Tiziano Zanato, 1998; as Amorum libri: The Lyric Poems of Matteo Maria Boiardo, translated byAndrea Di Tommaso, 1993. ‘‘Pastoralia,’’ edited by Bartolomeo Crotti, 1500; critical edition by Stefano Carrai, 1996. ‘‘Capitoli,’’ 1523; as Tarocchi, edited by Simona Foa`, 1993.

Play Timone, 1500; critical edition by Tissoni Benvenuti and Mussini Sacchi, 1983.

Further Reading Anceschi, Giuseppe (editor), Il Boiardo e la critica contemporanea. Atti del convegno di studi su Matteo Maria Boiardo. Scandiano-Reggio Emilia, 25–27 aprile 1969, Florence: Olschki, 1970. Anceschi, Giuseppe, and Tina Matarrese (editors), Il Boiardo e il mondo Estense nel Quattrocento, Padua: Antenore, 1998. Bigi, Emilio, ‘‘La poesia latina del Boiardo,’’ in Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 146 (1969): 321–338. Cavallo, Jo Ann, The Romance Epics of Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso: From Public Duty to Private Pleasure, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. Cavallo, Jo Ann, and Charles Stanely Ross (editors), Fortune and Romance. Boiardo in America, Tempe: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1998. Dionisotti, Carlo, Boiardo e altri studi cavallereschi, edited by Giuseppe Anceschi and Antonia Tissoni Benvenuti, Novara: Interlinea, 2003. Looney, Dennis, ‘‘A Reading of Boiardo’s Herodotus in the Late Quattrocento: Annotations to Modena MS a. H.3.22,’’ in Manuscripta, 41, no. 2 (1997): 127–132. Marinelli, Peter, Ariosto and Boiardo: The Origins of Orlando furioso, Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987. Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo, La lingua del Boiardo lirico, Florence: Olschki, 1963. Monducci, Elio, and Gino Badini, Matteo Maria Boiardo: la vita nei documenti del suo tempo, Modena: Aedes Muratoriana, 1997. Navarrete, Ignacio, ‘‘Boiardo’s Pastorali as a Macrotext,’’ in Stanford Italian Review, 5, no. 1 (1985): 37–53. Quint, David, ‘‘The Figure of Atlante: Ariosto and Boiardo’s Poems,’’ in MLN, 94 (1979): 77–91.

MATTEO MARIA BOIARDO Quint, David, ‘‘The Best of Romance and Renaissance Epic,’’ in Romance: Generic Transformations from Chre´tien de Troyes to Cervantes, edited by Kevin Brownlee and Marina Scordilis Brownlee, Hanover: University Press of New England, 1985. Tissoni Benvenuti, Antonia and Sebastiano Corradi (editors), Gli Amorum libri e la lirica del Quattrocento con altri studi boiardeschi, Novara: Interlinea, 2003. Tristano, Richard, ‘‘The Istoria imperiale of Matteo Maria Boiardo and Fifteenth-Century Ferrarese Courtly Culture,’’ in Phaeton’s Children: The Este Court and Its Culture in Early Modern Ferrara, edited by Dennis Looney and Deanna Shemek, Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2005. Villoresi, Marco, Da Guarino a Boiardo. La cultura teatrale a Ferrara nel Quattrocento, Rome: Bulzoni, 1994.

ORLANDO INNAMORATO, 1482–1483 (BOOKS 1–2), 1495 (BOOK 3) Epic-chivalric poem by Matteo Maria Boiardo

Orlando innamorato (Orlando in Love), left incomplete upon the death of the author, is the title traditionally used for Matteo Maria Boiardo’s masterpiece, although Boiardo experts agree that the original title was probably Inamoramento de Orlando (which is also the title given to the new, and most authoritative, critical edition by Antonia Tissoni Benvenuti and Cristina Montagnani). Along with Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (The Frenzy of Orlando, 1532), the Orlando innamorato is considered one of the best examples of Renaissance chivalric poetry. Boiardo’s text is deeply rooted in the cultural milieu of the Este court in the city of Ferrara, where the poet (like Ariosto) worked and lived. The poem is conceived as a dynastic epic, aimed at a legitimization of the Este as rulers and defenders of the church. The cultural tradition of the court, divided between the passion for chivalric romances and customs and a recovery of the classical tradition, is perfectly

embodied in the hybrid character of the Orlando innamorato. Traditionally, at least since the definition given by Pio Rajna in Le fonti dell’Orlando furioso (1876), the Orlando innamorato has been interpreted as a mixture of the two great epic cycles of the French Middle Ages, the Carolingian and the Arthurian cycles. The Carolingian cycle, featuring Charlemagne and his knights as protagonists, revolves around the wars between Christians and pagans at the end of the eighth century, whereas the Arthurian cycle, depicting heroes such as Tristan and Lancelot, establishes love at its center. Boiardo’s innovation would consist of presenting the Carolingian heroes as affected by the ‘‘Arthurian’’ forces of love, as the title itself demonstrates. Orlando, the bravest knight of the Frankish army, falls in love with the beautiful pagan princess Angelica, and is drawn to the adventures (venture or aventure) typical of the Arthurian tradition. This mixture, however, is already a specific trait of the tradition of the cantari and poemi cavallereschi, a popular epic genre widespread in Northern Italy during the century preceding Boiardo’s poem. Moreover, the relation between the two cycles is unbalanced: Boiardo’s intent is to subordinate the serious Carolingian knights to the rules of love and unpredictability, as Riccardo Bruscagli has remarked in Stagioni della civilta` estense (1983). Among the main characters of the Orlando innamorato, together with Charlemagne, Orlando, and Angelica, we can find Ranaldo, Orlando’s cousin, the sorceress Falerina, the pagan king Agramante and the two knights Rodamonte and Madricardo, Brunello the thief and Atlante the sorcerer, as well as Rugiero and Bradamante, the destined founders of the Este dynasty. The plot traces the centrifugal and centripetal movements of the pagan and Christian knights in pursuit of war and love, toward and away from the two sites of Paris and Albracca`. The first two books were published in 1482– 1483, and their elaboration probably started even before the reign of Ercole I (1471–1505), during the last years of Borso d’Este, who was duke from 1452 to 1471. Manuscript copies of the first two books circulated in the court before the publication of the editio princeps, of which no copies survive. The second edition in two books (1487) is preserved by only one exemplar (Venice, Biblioteca Marciana). After the publication of the first two books, the composition of the third proceeded slowly, due to the critical political and military situation of the dukedom and of Italy. It is precisely this tragic moment that Boiardo describes in the last lines of 267

MATTEO MARIA BOIARDO the poem, before leaving it incomplete at the ninth canto of the third book: While the poet writes, in the year of his death, Italy is invaded by the French army of Charles VIII. The unfinished poem ends on the striking contrast between poetry and life. The third and last book is also the one that introduces directly the dynastic theme, leaving often aside ventura to focus on Rugiero and Bradamante. The success of the poem was immediate and unprecedented, and such instantaneous triumph encouraged many poets to continue the story at the point where Boiardo had abandoned it. The Orlando innamorato immediately presented itself as a real epic text, subject to rewritings and expansions. The sixteenth century sees many editions of the original text with the addition of continuations by other authors, including Nicolo` degli Agostini, Raffaele Valcieco da Verona, and Pierfrancesco de’ Conti da Camerino. Even the most famous poem of the Italian Renaissance, Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, presents itself as a continuation (gionta) of the Orlando innamorato, a fact that contributed to relegating Boiardo’s poem to a marginal space in the canon of Italian literature. The other factor that obscured the understanding of a poem so widely appreciated soon after its appearance was its rewriting in a different language, the sixteenthcentury Toscanizing rifacimento (rewriting) by Francesco Berni entitled Orlando innamorato, nuovamente composto (The Newly Composed Orlando in Love, 1541). Both factors are part of a crucial phenomenon taking place at the beginning of the cinquecento: the creation of a linguistic norm for literary production, a stable form of language transcending regional differences, embodied in Pietro Bembo’s treatise Prose della volgar lingua (Writings in the Vernacular Language, 1525). The Orlando innamorato, marked by Emilian linguistic traits, is linguistically obsolete only a few years after its first publication, while the Orlando furioso, whose author has exactly the same regional provenance as Boiardo, is corrected and ‘‘normalized’’ by Ariosto himself. Through rewritings and poorly realized editions of the text, the Orlando innamorato faded into the darkness once reserved to the popular texts. Even the title of the poem, obscured by the loss of the editio princeps, is a reconstruction: Antonia Tissoni Benvenuti points in the direction of a different designation, Inamoramento de Orlando. This title, used by Boiardo himself in his correspondence with Isabella d’Este, links the poem even more cogently to the tradition of the cantari and poemi cavallereschi. One of the most read poemi is entitled Innamoramento di Carlo, and 268

features an old and comic Charlemagne falling in love with a young princess. The rediscovery of the Orlando innamorato in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, started by Antonio Panizzi’s edition of the original text published in London in 1830–1831, changed the field of Italian literary studies. The poem provided a bridge to the mutual understanding of the popular and learned epic traditions in Italy by coupling, for instance, the fiction of orality (reminiscent of the cantari tradition) with the use of the entrelacement technique, typical of the French prose romances. Another ‘‘wave of rediscovery’’ of the poem took place in the 1980s and 1990s, when critics such as Tissoni Benvenuti and Montagnani in their edition of the poem, Jo Ann Cavallo (Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato: An Ethics of Desire, 1993), Neil Harris (Bibliografia dell’Orlando innamorato, 1988–1999), and Marco Praloran (Maraviglioso artificio, 1990), to name a few, started interpreting the poem on its own terms. These studies shed more light on the true innovations of the text: its bold insertion of the two cycles within the tradition of learned literature in Italian, its moral tension, its introduction, within the interlaced narration, of various novelle, its creation of a new world of characters and topoi. The history of the poem is a tale in itself, made of readings, rewritings, and misreadings. A necessary part of this tale is to read the Orlando innamorato before its history. ELEONORA STOPPINO Editions First editions: Orlando innamorato, Reggio Emilia, possibly Modena or Scandiano: Pietro Giovanni del fu Filippo da San Lorenzo, 1482 or 1483 (books one and two, no exemplars survive); Venice, Piero de’ Piasi, 1487 (books one and two); Venice, Cristoforo de Pensis da Mandelo, 1491 (books one and two); as El fin de l’inamoramento d’Orlando, Venezia, Simone Bevilacqua da Pavia, 1495 (third book, cantos I–VIII); Scandiano, Pellegrino de’ Pasquali, 1495 (first complete edition, no exemplars survive). Rewriting: Francesco Berni, Orlando innamorato, nuovamente composto, Venice: Eredi di Lucantonio Giunta, 1541. Critical editions: Orlando Innamorato di Bojardo; Orlando Furioso di Ariosto; With an Essay on the Romantic Poetry of the Italians; Memoirs, and Notes by Antonio Panizzi, London: Pickering, 1830–1831; L’Inamoramento de Orlando, in Opere, edited byAntonia Tissoni Benvenuti and Cristina Montagnani, vol. 1, Milan and Naples: Ricciardi, 1999. Translation: Orlando Innamorato, translated by Charles Stanley Ross, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.

GIOVANNI BOINE Further Reading Alhaique Pettinelli, Rosanna, L’immaginario cavalleresco nel Rinascimento ferrarese, Rome: Bonacci, 1983. Bruscagli, Riccardo, Stagioni della civilta` estense, Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1983. Bruscagli, Riccardo (editor), I libri di ‘‘Orlando innamorato,’’ Modena: Panini, 1987. Bruscagli, Riccardo, and Amedeo Quondam (editors), Tipografie e romanzi in Val Padana fra Quattro e Cinquecento. Ferrara, Giornate di Studio 11–13 febbraio 1988, Modena: Panini, 1992. Cavallo, Jo Ann, Boiardo’s ‘‘Orlando innamorato’’: An Ethics of Desire, London and Cranbury, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1993. Di Tommaso, Andrea, Structure and ideology in Boiardo’s Orlando inamorato, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972.

Durling, Robert, The Figure of the Poet in Renaissance Epic, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965. Harris, Neil, Bibliografia dell’Orlando innamorato, Modena: Panini, 1988–1991. Kisacky, Julia, Magic in Boiardo and Ariosto, New York: Peter Lang, 2000. Praloran, Marco, «Maraviglioso artificio ». Tecniche narrative e rappresentative nell’Orlando innamorato, Lucca: Pacini Fazzi, 1990. Rajna, Pio, Le fonti dell’Orlando furioso, Florence: Sansoni, 1876. Sangirardi, Giuseppe, Boiardismo ariostesco: presenza e trattamento dell’Orlando innamorato nel Furioso, Lucca: Pacini Fazzi, 1993. Weaver, Elissa, ‘‘Erotic Language and Imagery in Francesco Berni’s Rifacimento,’’ in MLN, 99, no. 1 (1984): 80–100.

GIOVANNI BOINE (1887–1917) Though a solitary and independent thinker, Giovanni Boine had much in common with members of several literary and cultural groups active in Italy on the threshold of World War I. Like Clemente Rebora and Dino Campana, both of whom he knew and admired, Boine was first and foremost a poet of ecstasy. In his prose poems especially, he scorned logic and pressed language to its limits to attain a more intense and expressionistic apprehension of reality and of the mysteries that lie beyond. Boine could also be compared to the Futurists. Although very unlike him in their enthusiasm for the industrial age just dawning in Italy, and optimistic rather than skeptical about what would come next, the Futurists, too, were determined to break with the past and create new modes of artistic expression. As a contributor to the Florentine journal La voce, moreover, Boine shared in the collective struggle of other ethically committed writers to raise the level of cultural and, in his case, religious discourse in Italy. Boine hailed from the olive country on the Ligurian Riviera between Genoa and the French frontier. Although relatives on his mother’s side were small landholders there, his own economic circumstances were modest at best, and it was only through the help of the Milanese aristocrat Alessandro Casati that he was able to attend the

university. Though he became a member of Casati’s circle of young thinkers concerned with reexamining the tenets of religious belief in Italy, he felt very much the outsider among these wealthy patricians. In addition to his poverty and the sensitivity and acute intelligence that had set him apart from others since childhood, Boine was also mortally ill from tuberculosis and his awareness of this made him an outsider everywhere. A key word in Boine’s writings is ‘‘sano’’ or ‘‘healthy,’’ used in regard to both biological and material matters, and clearly tied to the writer’s own physical condition. Boine’s writings, collected and published only in part during his lifetime, can be considered a vast work in progress rather than a series of completed texts. His miscellaneous prose works include the article ‘‘La crisi degli ulivi in Liguria’’ (The Crisis of the Olive Groves in Liguria, 1911), published in La voce, a lyric evocation, in the context of a contemporary economic crisis, of the Ligurian countryside and the patient and dignified workers who tend the terraced slopes above the sea where olives have been grown for centuries. Published in the periodical L’anima in 1911, ‘‘L’esperienza religiosa’’ (Religious Experience) is a mixture of lyric outbursts and philosophical investigation that concludes with a description not of faith but of the Divinity as ‘‘l’ansia dell’incerto, in ogni definita 269

GIOVANNI BOINE forma, il tremore germinale del vago e del nuovo: una immensa ombra che incombe, che minaccia sul mondo (in cui si divincola il mondo) e che infiltra, che imbeve, che fascia tutte quante le cose’’ (a yearning for the uncertain in every definite form, a germinating tremor for the vague and the new: an immense shadow that hangs over, that threatens the world (and beneath which the world fidgets) and that infiltrates, that soaks, that swaddles everything). In this conceptualization, God is energy, conflict, and above all mystery rather than received truth. Moral struggle is also at the heart of Il peccato (Sin, 1914), a short novel that is perhaps the most finished of all of Boine’s writings. The transgression of the title involves a sensitive, autobiographically inspired young man who, carried away by the singing of a nun in a hillside convent above the sea near his home, persuades the young woman to abandon the cloister and run away to marry him. At the work’s conclusion, the hero has moved successfully from unsatisfied desire and agonized inaction to an act that is certainly a ‘‘sin,’’ but also life affirming and spiritually fruitful. Though not usually included as a major component of the canon of twentieth-century Italian narrative, Il peccato has received high praise from Giorgio Ba`rberiSquarotti, who finds it ‘‘one of the loftiest novels of the entire Italian twentieth-century’’ (‘‘Giovanni Boine,’’ 1994). James Joyce also knew the work, and some have seen connections between it and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, published just two years later, in 1916. Frantumi (Smithereens, 1918) is the title that Boine gave the prose poems he wrote at various periods during his life and that were published posthumously in a volume together with his book reviews. Many of these poems were first published in the Riviera ligure, a publication sponsored by another of Rebora’s patrons, the oil merchant Mario Novaro. In them, Milva Maria Cappellini has pointed to ‘‘the prevailing theme of identity— sought out, lost, dissolved by an individual faced with a world that is blind and dumb, but filled with an undecipherable mythology’’ (Il percorso di Giovanni Boine, 2000). Other matters treated include the disturbing disappearance of familiar verities; the passing of time and rush toward an early death for the ill poet; isolation, solitude, and intimations of madness that blur together in a longing for annihilation. The sea, boats, and setting sail as a way of escaping the abyss of an unbearable life are recurring images in these lyrical texts that evoke the Ligurian landscape and shorelines as settings 270

for the poet’s metaphysical anguish. The physical world evoked is itself frequently unstable, even putrid and disgusting but at the same time achingly beautiful. Boine’s style in Frantumi breaks sharply with conventional linguistic practice as he coins new words, jams adjectives together in a way that is not acceptable in usual Italian practice, and inserts bouncing rhymes in the midst of his highly wrought, rhythmical prose. Such a rush of images liberated from conventional syntax is another reminder that Boine was experimenting with language at the same time as the Futurists, though the suffering at the center of his vision gave his writing a loftier cast than their merely aggressive verbal gesticulations. Throughout his brief life, Boine felt tugged by powerful opposing forces. These included the desire to believe and his disgust with the hierarchy of the contemporary church, his thirst for anarchy and a countervailing respect for tradition. Some of these contradictory forces are at work in his Discorsi militari (Military Statements, 1915), a pamphlet praising military service as a manifestation of loyal citizenship and a means for establishing national identity. The only work by this writer that earned him any significant financial rewards, the Discorsi militari have puzzled some later readers not entirely able to reconcile this work’s support of the conflict already in course at the time of its publication with Boine’s generally antiestablishment stance. Boine also left hundreds of lively, well-written, and revealing letters. The four, carefully edited volumes of this correspondence include communications from many of the better-known writers and intellectuals of the period, among them La voce founder Giuseppe Prezzolini, the poets Rebora and Campana, the polygraph and enfant terrible Giovanni Papini, the scandalous novelist and poet Sibilla Aleramo (with whom Boine had a brief affair), the literary critic Emilio Cecchi, and many more. When read with Boine’s poetry and prose, and the nonconformist and very lively book reviews collected as Plausi e botte (Plaudits and Thumps, 1918), the letters provide an open and often fascinating portrait of this sometimes physically challenged but deadly serious, energetic provincial intellectual. Boine’s turbulent personal life often mirrored the more general intellectual and political confusion of pre-Fascist Italy. Dead before he could outgrow his youthful enthusiasms, intransigencies, and follies, Boine is a writer whose attitudes seem adolescent. But they were typical of a moment of dissatisfaction with the existent order

ARRIGO BOITO and remain as fluid examples of the often inchoate and sometimes incoherent attempts at rebellion by an entire generation of dissatisfied young intellectuals and artists.

Essays

Biography

Letters

Born September 2, 1887, in Finale Marina, today Finale Ligure (Savona), a seaside town on the coast of Liguria. Educated in Genoa and then in Milan, where he studied philosophy with Gioacchino Volpe and became acquainted with Alessandro Casati, Clemente Rebora, Giovanni Amendola, and Antonio Banfi. While in Milan, contributed articles to Il Rinnovamento, a journal associated with the ‘‘modernist’’ religious movement that was later suppressed by the Catholic Church. After completing his studies in Milan, moved to Porto Maurizio (today Imperia) on the Ligurian coast, where he worked as a librarian, 1909. Wrote for La voce and became well-acquainted with its editor, Giuseppe Prezzolini, and for La Riviera ligure. Died of tuberculosis in Porto Maurizio (Imperia) on 16 May 1917. CHARLES KLOPP Selected Works Collections Scritti inediti, edited by Giorgio Bertone, Genoa: Il melangolo, 1977. Il peccato. Plausi e botte. Frantumi. Altri scritti, edited by Davide Puccini, Milan: Garzanti, 1983.

Fiction Il peccato ed altre cose, 1914.

Poetry ‘‘Frantumi seguiti da Plausi e botte,’’ 1918. ‘‘Frantumi. I materiali preparatori,’’ edited by Laura Gatti, 1998.

Discorsi militari, 1915. La ferita non chiusa, 1921; expanded edition by Mario Novaro, 1939. Esperienza religiosa, 1948. La citta`, 1994. Carteggio, edited by Margherita Marchione and S. Eugene Scalia, 4 vols., 1971–1979. Lettere – Letras (with Miguel de Unamuno), 1981.

Further Reading Aleramo, Sibilla, Il frustino, Milan: Mondadori, 1932. Ba`rberi-Squarotti, Giorgio, ‘‘Giovanni Boine,’’ in Storia della civilta` letteraria italiana, vol. 5, Turin: UTET, 1994. Benevento, Aurelio, Primo Novecento: saggi su Giovanni Boine e Piero Jahier, Naples: Loffredo, 1986. Bertone, Giorgio, Il lavoro e la scrittura. Saggio in due tempi su Giovanni Boine, Genoa: Il melangolo, 1987. Cappellini, Milva Maria, ‘‘Il percorso di Giovanni Boine,’’ in Giovanni Boine, Esperienza religiosa, Turin: Aragno, 2000. Cassinelli, Giuseppe, Il tormento, la poesia, gli ulivi: note su Giovanni Boine, La riviera ligure e Mario Novaro, Bologna: M. Boni, 1981. Circeo, Ermanno, Ritratto di Boine ed altri saggi, Naples: Guida, 1974. Contini, Gianfranco, ‘‘Alcuni fatti della lingua di Giovanni Boine,’’ in Varianti e altra linguistica, Turin: Einaudi, 1970. Debenedetti, Giacomo, Il romanzo del novecento, Milan: Garzanti, 1971. Guglielminetti, Marziano, ‘‘Boine, Giovanni,’’ in Dizionario critico della letteratura italiana, edited by Vittore Branca, vol. 1, Turin: UTET, 1986. Luperini, Romano, Il novecento: apparati ideologici, ceto intellettuale, sistemi formali nella letteratura italiana contemporanea, 2 vols., Turin: Loescher, 1981. Raimondi, Ezio, Prime lezioni: Scipio Slataper, Giovanni Boine, edited by Andrea Battistini et al., Bologna: Pendragon, 2004. Rossani, Wolfgango, Tormento di Boine ed altri saggi, Bologna: Alfa, 1959. Viazzi, Glauco, ‘‘Boine nell’oralita` dell’epistolario,’’ in Belfagor, 38, no. 6 (1983): 621–644.

ARRIGO BOITO (1842–1918) A musician, poet, playwright, critic, and writer of short stories and librettos, Arrigo Boito was one of the most complex figures of Italian cultural life in the second half of the nineteenth century. In his

precocious operatic de´but as the poet and composer of Il quattro giugno (The Fourth of June, 1860) and Le sorelle d’Italia (Italy’s Sisters, 1861), he already demonstrated dissatisfaction with 271

ARRIGO BOITO contemporary Italian culture and a need for innovation. He was truly fascinated by the broader European artistic tradition. In the early years of his career—a period marked by his membership in the literary and artistic Milanese movement La Scapigliatura—Boito published a number of articles revealing his extraordinary erudition. An avid reader of a wide variety of literary genres, he admired and studied Dante, Shakespeare, and Victor Hugo throughout his life. The short-lived journal Figaro is the culmination of Boito’s passionate journalistic activity. It was founded by him with Emilio Praga in the beginning of 1864 and became the vanguard of La Scapigliatura’s critical view of Romanticism. Furthermore, Figaro advocated a greater openness toward European culture and reform in Italian opera. According to Boito, it was time to abandon the old operatic conventions because, ‘‘per far breccia nell’avvenire c’e` gran bisogno di pungere, di piegare, di crivellare’’ (in order to break through to the future, one needs to sting, bend, and prick) (‘‘Polemica letteraria,’’ Figaro, 4 February 1864), that is, to demolish all obstacles to innovation. Figaro also publicized the four principles Boito considered fundamental in operatic reform. To begin with, he believed in the complete abolition of the traditional opera formula, namely the aria, rondo`, cabaletta, stretta, ritornello, and pezzo concertato. Instead, he called for the creation of a new dramatic and musical form, free of genre conventions, and for the realization of the greatest tonal and rhythmic development presently possible. Finally, he demanded that the opera be the supreme incarnation of drama (‘‘Cronache dei teatri,’’ Figaro, 21 January 1864). Clearly, these are the very cornerstones of the Wagnerian operatic reform. Yet it cannot be said that Arrigo Boito was strictly an admirer of Wagner. In 1871, Boito wrote Ero e Leandro (Hero and Leander), a Mediterranean alternative to Tristan and Isolde, and, thus, came into direct conflict with the German composer. Then, having quickly abandoned this project, in 1875–1876, Boito wrote a crypto-parodist translation of the Nordic masterpiece in ‘‘i piu` infami versi che siano stati sputati da una penna’’ (the most infamous verses a pen ever scribbled), as he writes in a letter to Eleonora Duse dated 5 June 1888. A cultured man of elitist tastes, a Freemason, and an alchemist, Boito did his best to be misunderstood or even poorly understood by the public. As Angela Ida Villa has recently claimed, Boito’s polysemic works are usually based on esoteric plots 272

(‘‘Arrigo Boito teorico e poeta scapigliato,’’ 1994). Thus, there is much room for ambiguity and mischief in them, which serves the artist well in his conviction that art must be freed from moralistic assumptions. ‘‘Re Orso’’ (King Bear, 1864), for example, is a polymetric narrative poem recounting a sinister fable. The poet’s interest in a wide variety of written forms is revealed in a daring metric and lexical experimentalism, Gnosticism, and complex esoteric symbolism, typical for Boito. Yet, the elaborate form of Boito’s work is unfairly defined as ‘‘an ‘empty mould,’ an exercise of the most sophisticated craftsmanship,’’ by Mario Lavagetto (‘‘Introduzione’’ in A. Boito, Opere, 1979). At first, his short poem is criticized as too gratuitously eccentric, while later, it is believed to demonstrate the author’s intellectual experiments and a certain semantic flimsiness. The critical response to the collection of Boito’s best poems, Il libro dei versi (The Book of Verses, 1877), is identical to that of ‘‘Re Orso’’. The book includes ‘‘Dualismo’’ (Dualism, 1863), which is rich in images and coincidentia oppositorum. Learned Satanism, virulent anti-Catholicism, and Baroque realism come together in this poem. Moreover, ‘‘Dualismo’’ is a firmly anti-Romantic and anticlassicist work. A calculated distortion of figures and concepts leads to intentionally grotesque and ironic endings in a number of the poem’s sections. Moreover, these final lines also reveal the repeated use of aprosdoketon or the effect of scenic surprise. In this context, Boito’s lack of emotional involvement may be viewed as a weakness, but discarding his use of opposites as a mere intellectual amusement might be misleading. In his short stories ‘‘L’alfier nero’’ (The Black Bishop, 1867), ‘‘Iberia’’ (Iberia, 1868), ‘‘Il pugno chiuso’’ (The Closed Fist, 1870), ‘‘La musica in piazza’’ (Music in the Square, 1870–1871), and ‘‘Il trapezio’’ (The Trapeze, 1873–1874), Boito’s poetics is less violent but remains conceptually unchanged. Among those stories, ‘‘Iberia’’ stands out as an aesthetic forerunner of Gabriele D’Annunzio’s prose. Boito’s refined narration is carried out in a decadent style that brings out a mellow and dream-like sensuousness in the text. A story with a significant Templar-Gnostic substratum, ‘‘Iberia’’ ends with the birth of the Antichrist as a result of the alchemic unification of the two young protagonists. Thus, Boito concludes ‘‘Iberia’’ with a universal palingenesis. A distinct decadent style characterizes Boito’s theater as well. The only exception is ‘‘Le madri galanti’’ (The Amorous Mothers, 1863), a weak

ARRIGO BOITO bourgeois comedy written in collaboration with Emilio Praga. While the influence of the French pie`ce a` the`se is easily recognizable in it, this work echoes La Scapigliatura’s experimentalism only linguistically. Likewise, the link between Le madri galanti and Boito’s criticism of Alessandro Manzoni’s use of language is rather superficial. A few years later, Amleto (Hamlet, 1865), a libretto-like adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragedy, was a success. At the opening night, Boito improvised a Sapphic ode, making a toast ‘‘alla salute dell’Arte Italiana! / perche´ la scappi fuora un momentino / dalla cerchia del vecchio e del cretino / giovane e sana’’ (to the health of Italian art! / that it may escape, if just for a moment, / the circles of the old and of the idiots, / and remain young and genuine). Thus, the poet offended Giuseppe Verdi, who broke all relations with him even though the two had written Inno delle Nazioni (The Hymn of Nations, 1862) together only three years before. This bright phase in Boito’s career ended in 1868 with the fiasco of Mefistofele (Mephistopheles) at La Scala in Milan. A synthesis of Goethe’s Faust, this work was intended to be the application of Boito’s theory on reforming opera. As usual, the poetic text is based on esoteric ideas. It, furthermore, reveals the author’s experiments with classical prosody, which were later used by Giosue` Carducci as well. In 1875, Mefistofele was revised and put on stage again in Bologna. Still, after the opera’s initial debacle, Boito preferred to sign his works with the anagram-pseudonym Tobia Gorrio. In the following years, his dramatic works often followed a pattern: The plot was always extravagant while the characters were psychologically abstract. The Gnostic idea of the alchemic wedding of the protagonists also invariably added an esoteric level to the text. Finally, the writing style revealed a restless to and fro between innovation and ironic insertions of conventional structures. Not devoid of esoteric allusions, Boito’s lyrical comedies differ in tone from the rest of his dramatic works. For example, in Ira`m and Basi e bote (Kisses and Blows in Venetian dialect), which were written between 1879 and 1881, Boito finds an expression for his exceptional humoristic talent. During this time he also reconciles with Verdi and writes two libretto masterpieces, namely Otello (Othello, 1887) and Falstaff (1893). It is for these works that Arrigo Boito is best known. Shakespeare was also the starting point of Boito’s stormy artistic and sentimental liaison with actress Eleonora Duse, for whom he translated and adapted Anthony and Cleopatra, Romeo and Juliet, and Macbeth.

Immediately after Verdi’s death, Boito published Nerone (Nero, 1901), the ultimate realization of the poet’s artistic journey. Boito worked on it for over 40 years, and this opera embodies his talent for the theatrical, his dramatic and intellectual impulse, and his endless research of aesthetics and esoteric ideas as a foundation for his work. A scrupulous historical reconstruction of imperial Rome, subtly balancing modernity and antiquity, Nerone reveals more than a simple touch of selfirony. It was performed posthumously in 1924 at La Scala, directed by Arturo Toscanini.

Biography Enrico Giuseppe Giovanni Boito was born in Padua, on February 24, 1842. His father, Silvestro, was a painter who died in 1856. His mother, Jo´zefa Karenicka-Radolieska, a Polish countess, died in 1859. Boito was first schooled in Venice. From 1853 to 1861 he studied at the Conservatory of Milan, and then traveled, meeting Verdi, Gounod, and other musicians in Paris. In 1862, he returned to Italy, settled down in Milan, and joined the Scapigliatura movement. In 1866, he fought under the command of Giuseppe Garibaldi. Among his friends at the time were Victor Hugo, Antonio Fogazzaro, Giovanni Verga, Camille Bellaigue, and Arturo Toscanini. Had an affair with actress Eleonora Duse in 1887–1888. In 1890–1891, was appointed honorary director of the Parma Conservatory. He frequently traveled in Italy and Europe. In 1893, he was awarded an honorary degree in music by Cambridge University, England. In 1912, he became a senator of the Italian Kingdom. Died in Milan, June 10, 1918, from angina pectoris. EMANUELE D’ANGELO Selected Works Collections Tutti gli scritti, edited by Piero Nardi, Milan: Mondadori, 1942. Opere, edited by Mario Lavagetto, Milan: Garzanti, 1979. Poesie e racconti, edited by Rodolfo Quadrelli, Milan: Mondadori, 1981. Opere letterarie, edited by Angela Ida Villa, Milan: IPL, 1996.

Poetry ‘‘Inno delle Nazioni,’’ 1862. ‘‘Re Orso,’’ 1864; other editions, 1873, 1877, 1902. ‘‘Il libro dei versi,’’ 1877; new edition, 1902.

Opera Il quattro giugno, 1860. Le sorelle d’Italia, 1861.

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ARRIGO BOITO Mefistofele, 1868; new edition, 1875; as Mefistofele, translated by Theophilus Marzials, 1880; 1920. Nerone, 1901; new edition, 1924.

Libretti Amleto, 1865; new edition, 1871. Un tramonto, 1873. La falce, 1875. La gioconda, 1876; new edition, 1880; as La gioconda, translated by Henry Hersee, 1883. Ero e Leandro, 1879; new edition, 1896; as Ero e Leandro, translated by Mowbray Marras, 1896. Otello, 1887; as Otello, translated by Francis Hueffer, 1887; translated by Walter Ducloux, 1963; in Giuseppe Verdi, Seven Verdi Librettos, translated by William Weaver, 1973. Pier Luigi Farnese, 1891. Falstaff, 1893; as Falstaff, translated by William Beatty Kingston, 1894; in Giuseppe Verdi, Seven Verdi Librettos, translated by William Weaver, 1973; translated by Andrew Porter, 1979. Basi e bote, 1914. Ira`m, edited by Piero Nardi, 1942. Semira, edited by Piero Nardi, 1942.

Plays Le madri galanti, 1863 (with Emilio Praga).

Fiction L’alfier nero, 1867. Iberia, 1868. Il pugno chiuso, 1870. La musica in piazza, 1870–1871 Il trapezio, 1873–1874

Translations Richard Wagner, Rienzi, 1869. Richard Wagner, La cena degli apostoli, 1872. Michail Glinka, Ruslano e Ludmilla, 1875. Richard Wagner, Tristano e Isotta, 1876; new edition, 1888 (with Angelo Zanardini). William Shakespeare, Antonio e Cleopatra, edited by Laura Vazzoler, 1973.

William Shakespeare, Giulietta e Romeo, edited by Laura Vazzoler, 1984. William Shakespeare, Macbeth, edited by Laura Vazzoler, 1984.

Letters Lettere, edited by Raffaello De Rensis, 1932. Lettere inedite e poesie giovanili, edited by Frank Walker, 1959. Carteggio Verdi-Boito, edited by Mario Medici and Marcello Conati, 1978; as The Verdi-Boito Correspondence, translated by William Weaver, 1994. Lettere d’amore (to Eleonora Duse), edited byRaul Radice, 1979.

Further Reading Ashbrook, William, and Gerardo Guccini, Mefistofele di Arrigo Boito, Milan: Ricordi, 1998. D’Angelo, Emanuele, ‘‘Il Tristan und Isolde di Boito,’’ in Ero e Leandro: Tragedia lirica in due atti di Arrigo Boito, edited by Emanuele D’Angelo, Bari: Palomar, 2004. Farinelli, Giuseppe, ‘‘Arrigo Boito (1842–1918),’’ in La Scapigliatura: Profilo storico, protagonisti, documenti, Rome: Carocci Editore, 2003. Lavagetto, Mario, ‘‘Introduzione’’ in Arrigo Boito, in Opere, Milan: Garzanti, 1979. Maeder, Costantino, Il real fu dolore e l’ideal sogno: Arrigo Boito e i limiti dell’arte, Florence: Franco Cesati Editore, 2002. Morelli, Giovanni (editor), Arrigo Boito, Florence: Olschki, 1994. Nardi, Piero, Vita di Arrigo Boito, Milan: Mondadori, 1942. Tintori, Giampiero (editor), Arrigo Boito musicista e letterato, Milan: Nuove Edizioni, 1986. Villa, Angela Ida, ‘‘Arrigo Boito massone, gnostico, alchimista, negromante,’’ in Otto/Novecento, 3–4 (1992): 5–51. Villa, Angela Ida, ‘‘Arrigo Boito teorico e poeta scapigliato,’’ in Otto/Novecento, 2 (1994): 135–195.

CAMILLO BOITO (1836–1914) The intellectual figure Camillo Boito must be characterized by diverse descriptions—designer-architect, teacher, art and literary critic—which are all united by an extraordinary capacity to observe the contemporary world. Accused of being superficial and eclectic, in reality Boito was able to understand the complexities and varied nature of his own times. His skill in describing and analyzing the 274

real meanings of the contemporary world are illustrated in his theoretic works. The cultural activity he carried out, along with his teaching and research in history and theory, exceeded the limits of his architectural production. Opposing the tired eclecticism prevalent in Italian architecture of the time, which he considered to be an evident consequence of the deterioration of Romanticism, he strongly

CAMILLO BOITO advocated a renewal of the Italian architectural culture. Boito intended to highlight what are for him the fundamental components in architecture, which he defines as ‘‘the organic part and the symbolic part,’’ meaning with the first the logical framework that is dependent upon distributive and functional qualities as well as to the structural and material elements of the building, and meaning with the symbolic part the aesthetic qualities of the architecture. His didactic activity was long and constant, both at the Brera Academy in Milan— of which he became president, remaining in this capacity up until his death—and at the Polytechnic Institute, where he taught for 43 consecutive years, first teaching history of architecture, then embossment and restoration, and later style and finally architecture. Boito was present and often even arbitrator in almost all the most important architectural debates of the united Italy: from the competition for the new fac¸ade of the Cathedral of Milan to the events for the completion of the Cathedral of Florence, from the monument dedicated to Vittorio Emanuele II to the Justice Building of Rome. In the field of restoration, Boito emphasized respect for history, meaning reverence for the formal stratifications caused by the successive epochs of the same building. His stance clearly differed from that of Viollet-le-Duc and of John Ruskin as it supported the conservation and absolute respect for the monument as historic testimony as well as a product of a specific style. He proposed discreet interventions that provided for consolidation and, in the most difficult cases, reparation with different materials with the intent, however, to not alter the appearance of the work. He also collaborated with art and cultural journals; from 1865 to 1899 he was involved with the artistic and literary review for Nuova Antologia, and he periodically wrote for L’Illustrazione Italiana; his writings about various topics, including literary and musical subjects, appeared in Lo Spettatore. He attributed a noteworthy importance to the minor arts, teaching them and editing several volumes about them, but above all directing the journal Arte italiana decorativa e industriale, from July 1892 until the last issue in December 1911. Unique in its kind in Italy, this journal was for more than a decade among the first European journals to provide graphic models for industry. Boito’s narrative experience, though marginal with respect to his overall cultural production, reveals an authentic writing ability. In his first volume, Storielle vane (Vain Little Stories, 1876), seven short stories, pictorial in nature, recall the

atmosphere of the Milanese Scapigliatura; the taste for the fantastic and the macabre is accompanied by a vivacious interest for the visual arts and for the figure of the artist, often the protagonist of the narrated action. His second volume, Senso. Nuove storielle vane (Senso and Other Stories, 1883) is a more mature writing effort that demonstrates how the verismo movement influenced his new manner of narrating. His most famous novella, Senso, is in some ways a small masterpiece: It recounts, with force and coherence, the story of an unprincipled and cruel noblewoman, the lover of a cynical Austrian officer, with the Venice of the historical crisis of the wars of independence in the background. In 1953, the director Luchino Visconti adapted this work into the celebrated film of the same name, which accentuates the climate of bitter decadence. In the short story, Il maestro di setticlavio (The Master of the Setticlavio), published in Nuova Antologia in 1891, Boito nostalgically elicits the Venetian musical life of his childhood and introduces several autobiographical elements from his youth spent in the lagoon city where, together with his brother, he received a good musical education.

Biography Born in Rome on October 30, 1836, oldest of two brothers (Arrigo) of Silvestro and the Polish Countess Giuseppina Raolinska; at the age of 14, frequented courses at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice with professors Francesco Lazzari and Pietro Selvatico, where in 1856 was appointed adjunct faculty member in the Department of Architecture; in 1860, became full professor in architecture at the Accademia di Belle Arti of Brera in Milan, which he held until 1909; also taught at the Politecnico from 1862 to 1908; in 1862, married his cousin Cecilia Guillaume and, in 1887, Madonnina Malaspina of the Marchionesses of Portogruaro; enjoyed a long activity as a designer, participating in important competitions, such as that for the job of the square of the Cathedral in Milan; in 1861, restored the Pusterla of Porta Ticinese in Milan; in 1965, constructed the new cemetery of Gallarate and, from 1873 to 1880, executed three demanding works in Padova: the Debite palace, the entrance and staircase of the Civic Museum, and the elementary schools of the Reggia Carrarese; in 1882 in Venice, completed the large staircase in the Cavalli Franchetti palace with precious materials in the neoGothic style; worked at length on Donatello’s altar in Saint Anthony’s Basilica in Padova, where in 1895 also designed the bronze doors; last work 275

CAMILLO BOITO was the Casa di riposo for musicians, desired by Giuseppe Verdi, completed in Milan in 1899; as a narrator Boito published numerous short stories and travel journals; died in Milan on June 28, 1914. MARIA IDA BIGGI Selected Works Fiction Storielle vane, 1876. Senso. Nuove storielle vane, 1883; edited by Piero Nardi, 1961; Senso and Other Stories, translated by Christine Donaugher, 1993. Il maestro di setticlavio, 1891.

Art Writing I restauri e la ricchezza dell’arte vecchia a Verona e a Padova, in Nuova Antologia, June 1873. Architettura del Medio Evo in Italia, 1880. Gite d’un artista, 1884. I restauratori, 1884.

Questioni pratiche di Belle Arti, 1893. I principi del disegno e gli stili dell’ornamento, 1910.

Further Reading Agosti, Giacomo, and Costanza Mangione (editors), Camillo Boito e il sistema delle arti, Padua: Il Poligrafo, 2002. Borlenghi, Aldo, Narrativa dell’Ottocento, Milan: Goliardica, 1961. Castellani, Francesca, and Guido Zucconi (editors), Camillo Boito, un’architettura per l’Italia unita, Venice: Marsilio, 2000. Crippa, Maria Antonietta (editor), Camillo Boito: Il nuovo e l’antico in architettura, Milan: Jaca Books, 1989. Grassi, Liliana, Camillo Boito, Milan: Il Balcone, 1956. Maderna, Marco, Camillo Boito: pensiero sull’architettura e dibattito coevo, Milan: Guerini, 1995. Nardi, Piero, ‘‘Camillo Boito narratore,’’ in Lettere italiane, 11, no. 2 (1959): 217–223. Zucconi, Guido, and Tiziana Serena (editors), Camillo Boito: un protagonista dell’Ottocento italiano, Venice: Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, 2002.

BOLOGNA The chief city of the Emilia Romagna region, Bologna bases much of its own cultural image on the role played by a nine-century-old university, among the oldest in Europe, which from its beginnings develops the study of grammar, rhetoric, and legal research. Between the twelfth and thirteenth century, the dictatores, the initiators of the exegesis of the Justinian Corpus iuris, and the theoretical systematization of the law, made Bologna into the European capital of jurisprudence. Among these theorists are Irnerio, Adalberto Samaritano, and Ugo da Bologna. Meanwhile, between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, an intense effort began to translate the classics into the vernacular, which was thereby elevated into a complex language and form. There emerged a group of rhymers, among whom stand out Onesto da Bologna and Guido Guinizzelli, one of the initiators of the Stilnovo. In the first decades of the fourteenth century, Bologna became one of the centers of Dante scholarship, with the commentaries of Graziolo de’ Bambagliuoli on the Inferno and especially those of Iacopo della Lana on the entire Commedia. However, there occurred a 276

profound crisis in the university, which was shaken by internal ideological disagreements and by the repression directed by the church, even during the Avignon captivity, against any theoretical and scientific innovation. Later, it was Cardinal Egidio Albornoz who would restore the fortunes of the studio by establishing the Department of Theology and encouraging the opening of the colleges to host foreign students (among them the Collegio di Spagna, founded in 1364 and still active today). Legal studies, along with grammar and rhetoric, also began to flourish again, now imbued with the doctrine of Petrarch and Boccaccio. One famous teacher of the period was Benvenuto da Imola, a pupil of Petrarch and one of the principal commentators on the Commedia. The transition from the Comune to the Signoria in 1401, with the definitive supremacy of the Bentivoglio family in 1454, saw first another decline in the university’s fame, and then the growth of a profound work of renewal that led to the flowering of ‘‘academic humanism,’’ in which exegetes and scholars such as Antonio Urceo detto Codro,

BOLOGNA Francesco dal Pozzo, and Filippo Beroaldo Senior and Junior emerged. Along with Latin, room was given to culture in the vernacular, supported by the patronage of the Bentivoglios. Out of this setting came the Porretane (1483), by Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti (ca. 1445–1510), a collection of 61 novelle narrated by members of the nobility at Porretta over five days in 1475. In addition, an intense publishing industry developed, sustained by the university demands and the cultural policies of Giovanni II Bentivoglio, who had numerous printing presses running in Bologna, and that included among its most noteworthy products Ptolemy’s Cosmography, along with texts on law and medicine. With the end of the Bentivoglios in 1506, and the definitive return of the church, Bologna’s phase of humanistic civilization came to an end. The cultural models changed in the sixteenth century. Family-run typographical enterprises were set up that diffuse classical and humanistic texts, treatises on law, philosophical and scientific works, and texts on Christianity, but also those popularizing heterodox doctrines, which are consequently subject to rigorous control in the age of the CounterReformation. During the first half of the 1500s, the debate between Latin and the vernacular, of whether or not to adopt the Ciceronian model, remained alive. In the middle of the sixteenth century, various literary academies were born, though they did not produce any important achievements. On the other hand, the theater was rather lively, in the form of the public festivals organized on the occasion of solemn events, often with the staging of comedies, as in 1530 with Agostino Ricchi’s I tre tiranni (The Three Tyrants) for the coronation of Charles V. But it is above all the piazza festivals (like the famous Porchetta), the jousts, and the tournaments that animated Bolognese life. The decline of legal studies corresponded to the growth of philosophical, historical, geographical, and scientific interests, above all with Pietro Pomponazzi’s De Immortalitate animae (On the Immortality of the Soul, 1516), Leandro Alberti’s monumental Descrittione di tutta Italia (A Description of All of Italy, 1550), as well as Carlo Sigonio (an investigator of antiquity) and Ulisse Aldrovandi, the founder of a rich museum and botanical garden (1568) and the creator of an observatory that opened the path for the Galilean method. However, at the beginning of the seventeenth century an ecclesiastical restoration mobilized against this scientific method, and provoked another period of crisis for the university. This crisis notwithstanding,

individual personalities were still able to take shape, such as the doctor and biologist Marcello Malpighi (1628–1694). Various academies emerged as a counterweight to the declining university, among them, in the scientific field, that of the Inquieti (1690), and later the Accademia delle Scienze (1711). Furthermore, the literary, musical, and artistic academies endured; musical drama and oratorios achieved great success; and a literary trend emerged that had its benchmark in the Accademia dei Gelati and in the figure of Giovanbattista Marino (1569–1625), without, however, elevating itself to the level of a school. Bologna remained, therefore, within the limits of a provincialism that is little inclined to new experimentation, and that preserved the poetic heritage of a prudent moralistic classicism. Ultimately, the most prominent figure was Giulio Cesare Croce (1550–1609), the author of Bertoldo (1606) and Bertoldino (1608), a witty testimony of the daily life of the lower classes. At the other end of the century, important cultural experimentation found expression in the stage setting and theatrical architecture choreographed by the brothers Ferdinando and Francesco Bibiena, the founders of a dynasty that imposed all throughout Europe the model of the scenography ‘‘seen from an angle’’ that is able to create illusionary effects. In Bologna, the Arcadia found an active representative in the lyric poet and playwright Pier Jacopo Martello (1665–1727), who proposed a modern form of versification (the heptasyllabic instead of the free hendecasyllables) that was inspired by the French alexandrine. The theater was still a considerable presence in the second half of the eighteenth century: The count Francesco Albergati Capacelli, a cultured amateur and supporter of democratic ideals, enjoyed relations with Carlo Goldoni, Vittorio Alfieri, Giuseppe Baretti, and Carlo Gozzi, but above all with Voltaire. In a city controlled by the church, however, the culture of the Enlightenment was not able to penetrate effectively; the literature of this period was barely touched by new ideas. It was not until the second half of the nineteenth century that there was in Bologna a true cultural flowering, which coincided with the appointment of the university chair of Italian literature to Giosue` Carducci in 1860. Thanks to Carducci’s teaching, Bologna became the intellectual capital of Italy. Two classical licei (high schools) were established (Galvani and Minghetti), whose role was the formation of the new ruling class. The publishing house Zanichelli opened in 1866, and became another Carduccian 277

BOLOGNA place: It was not simply a commercial enterprise, but a true literary caffe`. In 1887, along with Carducci’s Odi barbare (The Barbarian Odes), there came out the erotic collection Postuma by Lorenzo Stecchetti, a pseudonym of Olindo Guerrini (1845– 1916), the first of the poets of the Carduccian school, which boasted many other authors, among whom is noted Enrico Panzacchi, an intellectual with multiple interests (music, painting, poetry). When Carducci died, his university chair passed in 1905 to his most famous pupil, Giovanni Pascoli, who, just as ideologically committed as his teacher, marked out another path that was decisive for the image of modern Bologna and of Italian literature, through a poetics that foreshadows later stylistic and formal experimentations. At the beginning of the twentieth century, with the progressive decline of the Carduccian school, the cultural primacy of Bologna ceased to exist, though the city did generate novelists such as Adolfo Albertazzi and Alfredo Panzini and poets such as Renato Serra. The university was no longer the undisputed center of the city’s intellectual life, and its function was replaced by periodicals and cultural journalism. Among the many newspapers were La raccolta, founded in 1919 by Giuseppe Raimondi, which opposed Futurism, and Il resto del Carlino, which was established in 1885 but expanded into a national daily under the management of Mario Missiroli between 1919 and 1921. In a period of social tension and postwar crisis, Il resto del Carlino maintained its terza pagina (third page) open to intellectuals such as Georges Sorel, Piero Gobetti, Adriano Tilgher, Benedetto Croce, Filippo Turati, and Claudio Treves. It was a brief season that was harshly snuffed out by the advent of Fascism and by the expulsion of Missiroli. The subsequent cultural journalism boasted titles such as L’Italiano (1926) of Leo Longanese, balanced between provincialism and refined intellectual presences; Vita Nova (1925), founded by the Fascist Leandro Arpinati; L’orto (1931), born under the influence of journalist and politician Giuseppe Bottai, which became training ground for young intellectuals. Fascism welcomed the adherence of classicist academics, but intellectual autonomy was restricted. Still, prestigious figures were able to emerge: the philosopher Rodolfo Mondolfo, the jurist Arturo Carlo Jemolo, the art historian Roberto Longhi. But the racial laws of 1938 practically emptied out the university, which was populated by teachers and students of Jewish descent. The 278

students belonging to the Gruppo Universitario Fascista (GUF) nevertheless reacted to the widespread conformism through the pages of Architrave (1940), a journal that openly rejected the denigration of contemporary art and poetry, before it was shut down by the regime. Also in 1942, under the group name ‘‘Antonio Labriola,’’ a political-cultural initiative was born whose mouthpiece was the journal Tempi nuovi, which, at the height of the world conflict, advocated social, economic, and cultural changes. This initiative failed nevertheless in the immediate postwar period, with the advent of a city government formed by leftists who lacked a broad vision for the future. During the 1950s, there was a profound renewal that extended beyond politics. Catholic culture produced a Centro di Documentazione (1952), which was later transformed into the Istituto per le Scienze Religiose (1960), and into the journal Il Regno. In 1951, the first number of the periodical Il Mulino came out, the work of a group of young university intellectuals who, three years later, created the eponymous publishing house and who introduced into political culture the innovations of sociological, anthropological, and economic studies. Among the founders were Antonio Santucci, Luigi Pedrazzi, and Nicola Matteucci. Later, they will include Ezio Raimondi and Gino Guigni, who shared secular and Catholic reformist visions, and established a dialogue with the Catholic antiFascism parliamentarian Giuseppe Dossetti. In the meantime, Il resto del Carlino refurbished its own image under the leadership of the liberal Mazzinian Giovanni Spadolini (1955–1968). The reinvigoration of Bolognese culture during the second half of the twentieth century was also attested to by other publishing houses (Cappelli, Nuova Alfa, CLUEB Pa`tron), as well as the glorious Zanichelli. But it was still the cultural journals that signaled an intellectual commitment, which existed side-by-side with a reorganization of the university into close harmony with the city’s policies: Opinione (1956), Il Verri of Luciano Anceschi (originally established in Milan in 1956), Rendiconti (1961), Lingua e stile (1966), Impegno presente (1960), Classe e Stato (1965), and more recently, Intersezioni (1981). These publications give space to the neoavant-garde, linguistic structuralism, semiology, as well as new philosophical and psychoanalytical trends, and Marxist political intellectuals. Among the many writers (several are university professors) who regularly contribute are Alberto Arbasino,

BOLOGNA Umberto Eco, Renato Barilli, Alfredo Giuliani, Angelo Guglielmi, and Gianni Celati. Therefore journals became a vital component of Italian culture, in particular Officina, a bimonthly of poetry founded by Roberto Roversi, Francesco Leonetti, and Pier Paolo Pasolini, which is published by the antiquarian bookstore Palmaverde (owned by Roversi himself), a veritable workshop of poetic apprenticeship situated in a street with a prophetic name: Via de’ Poeti. Officina carries a spirit of renewal that is opposed both to the official nineteenth-century tradition and to postwar neorealism, whose theoretical failure it denounced. Its declared ‘‘new task’’ begins with the cultural modification of reality in order to erase the distance between writer and society, between politics and culture. Its contributors include Carlo Emilio Gadda, Franco Fortini, Paolo Volponi, Alberto Moravia, Italo Calvino, and Leonardo Sciascia. In this climate of a cultural city-laboratory (which also comprises sociologist Achille Ardigo`, economists Romano Prodi and Beniamino Andreatta, psychologists Renzo Canestrari and Gianfranco Minguzzi), the 1970s witnessed the inauguration of one of the most advanced academic curricula undertakings in Italy: the DAMS (Discipline delle Arti, della Musica, e dello Spettacolo), inspired by the work of the Greek scholar Benedetto Marzullo. It is an atypical institution in the field of humanistic studies, based on a project that merges the many languages of contemporary neoexperimentation and mass media, while promoting a renovation of traditional methodologies. Alfredo Giuliani, Umberto Eco, Furio Colombo, Renato Barilli, Gianni Celati, and Gianni Riotta are some of the intellectuals brought to teach there, alongside directors (Luigi Squarzina), musicologists and musicians (Luigi Rognoni, Roberto Leydi, Aldo Clementi), theater and film critics (Fabrizio Cruciani, Claudio Meldolesi, Giuliano Scabia, Adelio Ferrero), to name only a few. Thanks to DAMS as well, the cultural profile of Bologna changed radically during the last quarter of the twentieth century. Not only for the flowering of new enterprises, above all in the theater and the cinema, but for establishing in 1974 the regional Istituto per i Beni Artistici, Culturali e Naturali (IBC), which, among other things, produced during the 1980s a research project on the eighteenthcentury Emilia Romagna. Beginning in 1988, with a series of multidisciplinary initiatives on the occasion of the ninth centenary of the university, the relationship between the city and the academy was

consolidated and culminated in the choice of Bologna, along with eight other cities selected by the European Community, as the European city of culture in the year 2000. DANIELE SERAGNOLI Further Reading Ady, Cecilia M., I Bentivoglio, Milan: Dall’Oglio, 1968. Anselmi, Gian Mario, and Alberto Bertoni, ‘‘L’Emilia e la Romagna,’’ in Letteratura Italiana. Storia e Geografia, vol. 3, L’eta` contemporanea, edited by Alberto Asor Rosa, Turin: Einaudi, 1989. Avellini, Luisa, ‘‘Cultura e societa` in Emilia Romagna,’’ in Storia d’Italia. Le regioni dall’Unita` a oggi. L’EmiliaRomagna, edited by Roberto Finzi, Turin: Einaudi, 1997. Avellini, Luisa et al. (editors), Sapere e/e potere. Discipline, dispute e professioni nell’Universita` medievale e moderna: il caso bolognese a confronto, Atti del 4 Convegno, Bologna, 13–15 aprile 1989, 3 vols., Bologna: ComuneIstituto per la Storia di Bologna, 1991. Basile, Bruno (editor), Bentivolorum magnificentia: principe e cultura a Bologna nel Rinascimento, Rome: Bulzoni, 1984. Berselli, Aldo (editor), Storia dell’Emilia Romagna, 3 vols., Imola: University Press Bologna, 1975–1980. Berselli, Aldo (editor), Editoria e Universita` a Bologna tra Ottocento e Novecento, Atti del 5 Convegno, Bologna, 26–27 gennaio 1990, Bologna: Comune-Istituto per la Storia di Bologna, 1991. Calore, Marina, Bologna a teatro: vita di una citta` attraverso i suoi spettacoli 1400–1800, Bologna: Guidicini e Rosa, 1981. Capitani, Ovidio et al. (editors), L’Universita` a Bologna, 2 vols., Bologna: Cassa di Risparmio, 1987–1988. Cremante, Renzo, and Walter Tega (editors), Scienza e letteratura nella cultura del Settecento, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1984. Dionisotti, Carlo, ‘‘Regioni e letteratura,’’ in Storia d’Italia. I documenti, vol. 2, edited by Ruggiero Romano, and Corrado Vivanti, Turin: Einaudi, 1973. Fasoli, Gina, and Mario Saccenti (editors), Carducci a Bologna, Bologna: Cassa di Risparmio, 1985. Federzoni, Luigi, Bologna carducciana, Bologna: Cappelli, 1961. Ferrarotti, Franco, and John Fraser, Pci e intellettuali a Bologna in Studi sul rapporto cultura e societa`, edited by Franco Ferrarotti, vol. 4, Naples: Liguori, 1982. Ferretti, Gian Carlo, ‘‘Officina.’’ Cultura, letteratura e politica negli anni cinquanta, Turin: Einaudi, 1975. Lenzi, Deanna, and Jadranka Bentini (editors), I Bibiena. Una famiglia europea, Venice: Marsilio, 2000. Malatesta, Maria, ‘‘Il Resto del Carlino.’’ Potere politica ed economia a Bologna dal 1885 al 1922, Parma: Guanda, 1978. Oldrini, Guido, and Walter Tega (editors), Filosofia e scienza a Bologna tra il 1860 e il 1920, Bologna: Cappelli, 1990.

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BOLOGNA Piana, Celestino, Nuovi documenti sull’Universita` di Bologna e sul Collegio di Spagna, Bologna: Publicaciones del Real Colegio de Espan˜a, 1976. Raimondi, Ezio, Codro e l’Umanesimo a Bologna, Bologna: Zuffi, 1950. Ricci, Giovanni, Bologna, Bari: Laterza, 1985. Saccenti, Mario (editor), Carducci e la letteratura italiana. Studi per il centocinquantenario della nascita di Giosue` Carducci, Atti del Convegno di Bologna, 11–12–13 ottobre 1985, Padua: Antenore, 1988.

Sorbelli, Albano, I Bentivoglio: signori di Bologna, Bologna: Cappelli, 1969; rpt. 1987. Tega, Walter (editor), Storia illustrata di Bologna, 8 vols., Repubblica di San Marino: AIEP Editore, 1987–1991. Trezzini, Lamberto (editor), Due secoli di vita musicale: storia del Teatro Comunale di Bologna, 2 vols., Bologna: Alfa, 1966. Verti, Roberto, Il Teatro Comunale di Bologna, Milan: Electa, 1998. Zangheri, Renato (editor), Bologna, Bari: Laterza, 1986.

MAURO BOLOGNINI (1922–2001) Italian criticism quickly included Mauro Bolognini in the ranks (often reviled and, in any case, regarded with suspicion) of the formalists. An architect with a degree in stage design from the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, as well as an assistant director in Italy and France, Bolognini never showed off his own cultural credentials. He started modestly as an assistant to Luigi Zampa in 1948 and then debuted working on lightweight comedies in the early 1950s. His first film was Ci troviamo in galleria (Let’s Meet on the Balcony, 1953), but he refused to cultivate the shameless vulgarity of the traditional comedies, unlike the cinematic hirelings. It was only in 1959 that he began attracting attention, under the banner of literature. Bolognini is credited for revealing to the Italian cinema the talent of Pier Paolo Pasolini, whose ‘‘scandalous’’ first novel, Ragazzi di vita (The Ragazzi, 1955), about the life of the underclasses inhabiting the Roman slums, is at the root of La notte brava (Night Heat), with a screenplay by the writer himself, while the following year, Alberto Moravia’s Racconti romani (Roman Tales, 1954) offer the subject matter for La giornata balorda (A Crazy Day), scripted by Pasolini and Moravia himself. They are two stories of wild young boys in search of a future, set among Rome’s working class and subproletariat. They are tragic characters in their atavistic indolence and sullen bluster, which Bolognini transfers to the screen with great accuracy, with a kind of pictorial complacency and great narrative sharpness that certainly border on formalism but which do not themselves constitute formalism. They, rather, attest to the commitment—both 280

cultural and ideological—of an intellectual who strives to practice cinema with a close realistic gaze filtered through the rigor of the production (the precise portrayal of characters and of setting, suggestive photography, a constantly monitored rhythm that never becomes an end in itself). This commitment, which is of entirely literary descent, is far from the neorealist movement that had just come to an end, and is inclined toward the subtle pleasures of classicism. The dry, immediate, often brutal realism that imposes itself on the glorious path of postwar Italian cinema is not congenial to him: He cannot tolerate the simplistic manipulation and flavor of raw discovery of the world, which cannot but conflict with his temperament as a patient lover of order. Bolognini’s films would not always be so rigorous (the industry has demands that are not easily reconciled with artists’ fidelity to their own inspiration). This occurred on at least five occasions, all tributaries of literature (like a great deal of the director’s filmography). They are five little gems, which are adapted from a sarcastic novel by Vitaliano Brancati about the sexual obsessions of an impotent southern male, Il bell’Antonio (Bell’Antonio, 1960); from a novel by the more cynical Moravia focused on a boy’s sentimental education, Agostino (1962); from a naturalistic story by Mario Pratesi, a minor Tuscan writer of the nineteenth century, La viaccia (The Lovemakers, 1961); from one of the most lucidly existential masterpieces of Italo Svevo, Senilita` (As a Man Grows Older, 1962); and, finally, from an ambitious novel by Vasco Pratolini— almost a social panorama—that the director envelops in the luminous Florentine atmosphere of the

MAURO BOLOGNINI beginning of the twentieth century, at the time of the first great trade-union struggles, Metello (1970). All are shot in black-and-white, with the exception of the last, whose figurative look is inspired by the paintings of the Florentine artistic movement named macchiaioli. All disclose a cultivated feeling for the visual portrayals of certain Italian cities and landscapes. They are all portraits of men who are suffering, inept, or wounded by destiny: Masks or marionettes of a life—of a society, a psychology—that are in danger at every step of losing their way in the attempt to gain, or to brush up against, freedom. Beneath the veneer of a severe classicism there rumbles an indefinable disquiet—a hidden neurosis, one might say. The wretched and mocked protagonist of Il bell’Antonio, played by Marcello Mastroianni, hides within himself a malaise that gives a meaning to the clinical case that is the object of Brancati’s satire. The precocious nastiness depicting the sexual and intellectual awakening of the young boy Agostino, who, neglected by his mother, gives in to the temptation of adventure— a piece of moralism that recalls Vittorio De Sica’s I bambini ci guardano (The Children Are Watching Us, 1944)—proves to be something more than an initiation into adult life. Similarly in La viaccia, Bolognini’s clever cinematic reconstruction of ‘‘time lost’’ unfolds the story of a peasant family from Tuscany shattered in the clash between country and city, between patriarchal styles of life and those of the ascending bourgeois class. Although La viaccia does not transcend the limits of a small melodrama, Bolognini’s polished presentation of the portrait of the defenseless Emilio and of a gray, uninviting Trieste at the center of Svevo’s Senilita` (1898) often comes close to the bitterness of an irremediable desperation. Even though it is rougher and brighter, less enclosed within a neurotic introspection, the pathos-filled panorama of Metello denounces, at each turn of the story, the plight of characters condemned to struggle each day to hold onto the improbable thread of their proletarian existence. This, perhaps, is Bolognini’s narrative leitmotif. This is the reason for his successes, as of his failed attempts: from Bubu` (1971), Gran Bollito (Black Journal, 1977) to La venexiana (The Venetian Woman, 1981), La villa del venerdı` (In Excess, 1992); and of his search for difficult themes as in Fatti di gente per bene (The Murri Affair, 1974), Libera, amore mio...! (Libera, My Love, 1975), Per le antiche scale (Down the Ancient Stairs, 1975), and L’eredita` Ferramonti (The Inheritance, 1976).

For Bolognini, filmmaking means being always in a condition of extreme freedom. Sometimes freedom, however tenaciously sought, does not let itself be captured—because it is too elusive, or too remote from the director’s temperament.

Biography Born in Pistoia, 28 June 1922. Studied architecture at the University of Florence; then attended the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, section of art direction. Worked as assistant director in Italy and in France, 1948–1952; awarded the Golden Sail for Il bell’ Antonio at the Festival of Locarno, 1960; and for the best director at the Festival of St. Sebastian for Senilita`, 1962; directed Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca at the Teatro dell’Opera in Rome, 1964; prize for the best director for Madamigella di Maupin at the Festival of St. Sebastian, 1966; directed Vincenzo Bellini’s Norma at Teatro alla Scala in Milan, 1972; special Jury Prize at the Locarno Film Festival for Per le antiche scale, 1975; directed Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Teatro Romano in Verona, 1975; worked for RAI, the national Italian television (operas and miniseries) 1977–1995; member of the Jury of the Festival of Cannes, 1985; awarded the Ecumenical Jury Prize for Mosca addio at the Montre´al Film Festival, 1987; directed Luigi Pirandello’s I giganti della montagna at the Valle dei Templi in Agrigento, 1989; Franc¸ois Truffaut award at the Giffoni Film Festival, 1990; David di Donatello for career achievement, 1999. Died in Rome on 14 May 2001. CRISTINA BRAGAGLIA Selected Works Films Ci troviamo in galleria, 1953. Gli innamorati, 1955. Giovani mariti, 1958. La notte brava (Night Heat, based on the novel Ragazzi di vita by Pier Paolo Pasolini), 1959. Il bell’Antonio (Bell’Antonio, based on Vitaliano Brancati’s novel), 1960. La giornata balorda (A Crazy Day or From a Roman Balcony, based on Racconti romani by Alberto Moravia), 1960. La viaccia (The Lovemakers, based on the novel L’eredita` by Mario Pratesi), 1961. Agostino (based on Alberto Moravia’s novel), 1962. Senilita` (Senilita` or Careless, based on Italo Svevo’s novel), 1962. Madamigella di Maupin (based on The´ophile Gautier’s novel), 1966. Le streghe (episode Senso civico), 1967.

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MAURO BOLOGNINI Un bellissimo novembre (based on Ercole Patti’s novel), 1969. L’assoluto naturale (based on Goffredo Parise’s play), 1969. Bubu` (based on Bubu` de Montparnasse by Charles Louis Philippe), 1970. Metello (based on Vasco Pratolini’s novel), 1970. Libera, amore mio...!, 1973. Fatti di gente per bene, 1974. Per le antiche scale (based on Mario Tobino’s novel), 1975. L’eredita` Ferramonti (based on Gaetano Carlo Chelli’s novel), 1976. Gran bollito, 1977. La storia vera della signora delle camelie, 1980. Mosca addio, 1987.

Screenplays La viaccia, edited by Pietro Bianchi, Bologna: Cappelli, 1961, rpt. 1978.

Further Readings Bolognini, Rome: Ministero delgi Affari Esteri, 1977. Di Montezemola, Vittorio Cordero (editor), Bolognini, Rome: Istituto Poligrafico dello Stato, 1977. Frintino, Antonio, and Pier Marco De Santi, Mauro Bolognini. Cinema tra letteratura, pittura e musica. Restauro del film ‘‘La viaccia,’’ Pistoia: Brigata del Leoncino, 1997. Frintino, Antonio (editor), Mosca addio: Storia di Ida Nudel ebrea russa dissidente deportata, Pistoia: Brigata del Leoncino, 2000. Micciche`, Lino (editor), Il bell’Antonio di Mauro Bolognini: Dal romanzo al film, Turin: Lindau, 1996. Natta, Enzo (editor), Mauro Bolognini il fascino della forma, Rome: ANCCI, 1996.

GINEVRA BOMPIANI (1939–) The end of the 1960s saw the emergence of a new generation of women writers and intellectuals in Italian literary culture. Ginevra Bompiani was part of this group. Her first novel, Ba`rtelemi all’ombra (Ba`rtelemi in the Shadow, 1967), dealt with a theme often underrated in contemporary Italian fiction: the relationship between literature and myth. The novel charts a woman’s search for an alternative space in a world of fixed and rigid gender roles. There are few previous works in this mythological vein: I daloghi con Leuco` (Dialogues with Leuco`, 1947) by Cesare Pavese, and Anna Maria Ortese’s Il prto di Toledo (The Port of Toledo, 1975). La specie del sonno (A Kind of Sleep, 1975) was favorably received by Italo Calvino, who observed in his introduction to the book: ‘‘Ginevra Bompiani’s eye fixes the mythological emblems like Rorschach ink blots, with the difference that her perception cannot be naı¨ve.’’ Bompiani’s relation to myth has nothing of the bitterness of death that we find in Pavese, nor does her writing contain the disturbing surreal aspects of Ortese’s fiction. On the contrary, she depicts mythical creatures who have no inkling that they are mythical. Sleepless centaurs, hypnotic hermaphrodites, the god Pan, struggling heraldic lions, the monster in the labyrinth, and an exhausted Eracles live in her pages, but their mythical qualities are absorbed into the 282

details and routines of their everyday life. Her creatures live in a suspended time, as if they could never have a life; they speak as if they could never have a language. This explains the somnambular effect— Bompiani’s myths lightly set about unstitching the threads connecting words and the world, creating a small break between ourselves and our lives in which we see our existence fading away, that is, when we feel the approaching end of our own myth. Thus, Bompiani fuses dream, fable, and myth, in an exotic and fantastic world of her own imagining. Her subsequent novels L’incantato, (The Enchanted, 1987), Vecchio cielo, nuova terra, (Old Sky, New Earth, 1988), and L’attesa (The Waiting, 1988) are characterized by a surrealist poetic tone. Reality is presented as hostage to an imagination that dominates and torments it. In each of Bompiani’s novels, as Neria De Giovanni writes, ‘‘there is a strong tendency toward not only psychological, but I would say psychoanalytical introspection, toward...the metamorphosis of objects and people’’ (E dicono che siamo poche, 2003). In 2001, Bompiani published L’eta` dell’argento (The Silver Age), a work inspired by three motifs: farina, eta` dell’argento, and nostos (flour, silver age, nostalgia). Each motif is conceived as a pivot of a narration that, according to Bompiani, is generated

GINEVRA BOMPIANI ‘‘dall’attrito poetico fra un segno e l’immagine da esso suggerita; in grado di generare un’emozione narrativa’’ (from the poetic friction between a symbol and the image it suggests, thus creating a narrative emotion). The first motif ( farina) reminds us of the baker-character in fairy stories. The second (eta` dell’argento) alludes both to ‘‘una parola che salva la sera, la stanchezza, la vecchiaia dalle sue zavorre’’ (a word which rescues the evening, fatigue, and old age from its wastes), and also to the spring of life ‘‘agitata dal vento e dalle risa, che non va da nessuna parte’’ (shaken by the wind and by laughter, which goes nowhere). The silver age is symbolized by two opposing figures: an elderly woman (Amber) enrapt in thought to the point of disenchantment, and a young woman (Cecilia), sensual and rather empty-headed, ‘‘bambina formosa, di quelle che fanno gola agli uomini’’ (a big busty child, so tempting to men). The third motif centers on nostos or homecoming, which conveys a longing to return to one’s native land. It is a word evoking regret and nostalgia, the pain that comes with the perceived impossibility of such a return. Such feeling is experienced by one of the main characters in the story: a traveler, returning home after many years, finds it ‘‘il luogo piu` estraneo di tutti’’ (the most foreign place of all). When Cecilia drowns after she falls down into a well, a sense of anxiety makes its way into the fable. Homicide is suspected. A young male may have witnessed the crime; he saw someone near Cecilia on the evening of the crime but was only able to make out a vague shape. ‘‘Ho visto un’ombra su per la collina’’ (I saw a shadow on the hill) but he then adds that he is not sure. A chorus composed of the native islanders voicing their despair gives the novel the structure of a musical score composed of the solos of the main characters and the choric echoes alternating with and responding to each other. The main character in the story is the old woman Amber, who eventually will have to solve the mystery, but not before she has taken an important step in her own life. She must examine her own self and ask questions about the meaning of the silver age. She concludes that the silver age is the age ‘‘in cui l’isola diventa raccontabile’’ (in which the island becomes narratable), a time and place ‘‘dove infanzia e senilita` s’incontrano e si confondono’’ (where childhood and senility meet and merge into one another). Bompiani’s age/land of silver alludes to the mythological epoch described by Hesiod in his Works and Days, but hers is one inhabited by a race of ‘‘bambini incanagliti, vanitosi e storditi’’ (vain, nasty, benumbed, children), whose toys are ‘‘parole

senza peso e senza radice’’ (meaningless and rootless words). Among her critical works, Lo spazio narrante (The Narrating Space, 1978) is particularly remarkable for introducing the methods and insights of structuralism to Italian literary criticism. In analyzing narrative spaces, Bompiani discusses Jane Austen’s ‘‘gardens and labyrinths,’’ Emily Bronte¨’s ‘‘imaginary geography,’’ and Sylvia Plath’s ‘‘difficult limbo.’’

Biography Bompiani was born in Milan on August 5, 1939, daughter of the publisher Bompiani. She studied at La Sorbonne in Paris, where she took a psychology degree. Bompiani got her first job in her father’s publishing house as a director of a fantasy literature series, ‘‘Pesanervi.’’ In 2002, she founded a new publishing house with Giulia Einaudi: ‘‘Nottetempo.’’ L’incantato was shortlisted for the Rapallo-Carige prize in 1988. From 1986 to 1996 Bompiani was member of the jury for the Italo Calvino literary prize. She currently teaches comparative literature at the University of Siena, where she lives. All her works have been translated into French. MARIANO D’AMORA Selected Works Novels Ba`rtelemi all’ombra, 1967. Piazza pulita, 1968. La specie del sonno, 1975. Mondanita`, 1980. L’incantato, 1987. L’attesa, 1988. Vecchio cielo, nuova terra,, 1988. L’orso maggiore, 1994; as The Great Bear, translated by Brian Kern and Sergio Parussa, 2000. L’eta` dell’argento, 2001. Ritratto di Sarah Malcolm, 2005.

Children’s Books Via terra, 1994. L’amorosa avventura di una pelliccia e di un’armatura, 2000.

Essays Lo spazio narrante, 1978. L’attesa, 1988. Tempera, 1993.

Translations Emily Bronte¨, Poesie, 1971. Emily Dickinson, Poesie, 1978. Virginia Woolf, ‘‘Fasi della narrativa,’’ in La signora dell’angolo di fronte, 1979. Marguerite Yourcenar, I trentatre´ nomi di Dio, 2003.

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GINEVRA BOMPIANI Further Reading Botta, Annalisa, Monica Farnetti, and Giorgio Rimondi, Le eccentriche, Mantua: Tre Lune, 2004. Calvino, Italo, Introduction to La specie del sonno, Milan: Franco Maria Ricci, 1975. Ceserani, Remo, Raccontare il postmoderno, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1997. De Giovanni, Neria, E dicono che siamo poche, Rome: Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca di Stato, 2003.

Farnetti, Monica, ‘‘Scritture del fantastico,’’ in Letteratura italiana del novecento: Bilancio di un secolo, edited by Alberto Asor Rosa, Turin: Einaudi, 2000. Farnetti, Monica (editor), Il centro della cattedrale: I ricordi d’infanzia nella scrittura femminile, Mantua: Tre Lune, 2002. Rasy, Elisabetta, Le donne e la letteratura, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 2000. Ronchey, Silvia (editor), La decadenza, Milan: Nuovo Prisma, 2002.

GIUSEPPE BONAVIRI (1924–) Giuseppe Bonaviri, a poet and novelist, belongs to the group of Sicilian twentieth-century novelists, such as Gesualdo Bufalino, Vincenzo Consolo, and Leonardo Sciascia, who form a unique postmodern stream within Italian literature. He began his literary career with Il sarto della stradalunga (The Tailor on Main Street, 1954), published by Elio Vittorini in the prestigious Einaudi series I gettoni. Il sarto della stradalunga is an autobiographical novel whose protagonist is the author’s father, Settimo Emanuele, the tailor of the title, who secretly wrote poems that his son would later collect and edit under the title L’arcano (The Arcane, 1975). As a result of the success of his first novel, the young author was able to leave the hospital where he worked as a doctor and set up a private practice as a cardiologist in Frosinone, so that he could dedicate his time primarily to writing. Bonaviri was influenced not so much by Sicilian or Italian literary personalities, but rather by the simple elements of nature, such as the different shapes of clouds, or the sounds and colours of the landscape, which he saw as the elements of a sort of ‘‘prelogical’’ language. Through irony and fantasy, he overcame the naturalist tradition without a wholesale acceptance of any specific antirealist poetics such as surrealism. Rather, Bonaviri severed himself from the naturalist tradition using a unique style. For instance, while Bufalino became receptive to the complexity of linguistic quotations, which echoed the unnaturalistic mood of his narrative, Bonaviri, on the contrary, uses a direct, simple language to enrich his magic imagination populated by hidden symbols and myths. Thus, Bonaviri’s writing is an original synthesis of both the stream 284

of neorealism and the contemporary avant-garde, while also recalling Marcel Proust in its evocation of past impressions, and Dino Buzzati and Garcı`a Ma`rquez for its atmospheres of enchantment. The novel La divina foresta (The Divine Forest, 1969) continued Bonaviri’s narrative maturation toward a new literary direction. The story, which includes underlying elements of myth, history, and science, deals with traveling and metaphysical research, and is part of a trilogy consisting of L’isola amorosa (The Loving Island, 1973), which narrates the Arabic atmosphere and civilization of Bonaviri’s birthplace by means of the structure of the fable, and Notti sull’altura (Nights on the Heights, 1971). In the latter, Bonaviri is much more involved with the theme of investigation and unravels his plot within fascinating and surreal landscapes, An atypical novel within the context of contemporary Italian narrative, Notti sull’altura tells the story of a mysterious bird that leaves unusual symbols upon the death of the father of the narrator, who then starts an investigation to find the bird of death and consequently to find signs of his father’s thoughts. Dolcissimo (Dolcissimo, 1978) is acclaimed as Bonaviri’s most complex, rich and characteristic novel, in which the Sicilian novelist combines the detached irony of Leonardo Sciascia with the magical settings of Garcı`a Marquez. The story tells of the physician Ariete returning to his Sicilian birthplace to investigate the inexplicable disappearance of its villagers. He and Mario Sinus, the psychoethnologist sent to accompany him, discover a world of archaic gods, rituals, and beliefs that may provide redemption from the destructive forces of modern life. Il dottor Bilop (Doctor Bilop, 1994) is

GIUSEPPE BONAVIRI an anachronistic novel that includes fictional and poetical forms. The plot is apparently unreal, but strongly plausible, and the book narrates Doctor Giovanni Bilop’s life and his daughter’s wedding. On the train back from Rome, Giovanni meets a young physician who is working on an experiment to transform any kind of sounds into music. In Bonaviri’s novels, the realistic elements of any single circumstance and plot are subjected to his surrealistic imagination and this is a characteristic that increasingly dominates all his narratives and poetry. Most of his novels and tales closely parallel events in his own life. Hesitantly but openly, he writes about his private circumstances. His novels, tales, and poems blend neorealism, fantasy, and autobiography; he combines linguistic experimentation with the more traditional storytelling techniques of Sicilian folklore. His work has been translated into several languages, including English, French, Spanish, German, Polish, Swedish, Russian, and Chinese.

Biography

Novelle saracene, 1980. L’incominciamento, 1983. ` un rosseggiar di peschi e d’albicocchi, 1986. E Il dormiveglia: Sicilia-Luna-New York, 1988. Lip to lip, 1988. Ghigo`, 1990. Apologhetti, 1991. Il dottor Bilop, 1994. Silvinia, 1997. L’infinito lunare, 1998. Il verde ramo oscillo`: fiabe di folli, 1999 (with Giuseppina Bonaviri). Il vento d’argento: un racconto con dodici finali, 2002. Acqua d’argento e altre storie, 2003. Il vicolo blu, 2003.

Poetry ‘‘Martedina e il dire celeste,’’ 1976. ‘‘Il dire celeste e altre poesie,’’ 1979. ‘‘Nel silenzio della luna,’’ 1979. ‘‘Di fumo cilestrino,’’ 1981. ‘‘Quark,’’ 1982. ‘‘corpo sospiroso,’’ 1982. ‘‘L’asprura,’’ 1986. ‘‘Il re bambino,’’ 1990. ‘‘Poemillas espan˜oles ed altri luoghi,’’ 2000. ‘‘I cavalli lunari,’’ 2004.

Plays

Giuseppe Bonaviri was born in Mineo (Catania), 11 July 1924, the first of five children. Began to write poems and stories before he was 10; enrolled in medical school at the University of Catania, 1943; graduated in 1949; was drafted and sent to the Accademia Militare in Florence, 1950; specialized in cardiology, 1955; practiced as a doctor and health official in Mineo, then moved to the Ciociaria region and married Raffaella Osario, 1957; they had two children (Pina and Emanuele); began private practice as a cardiologist in Frosinone, 1964. Awarded the Campiello prize Dolcissimo, 1978. His work has been widely translated. Currently lives in Frosinone. ANNA SICA Selected Works Fiction Il sarto della stradalunga, 1954. La contrada degli ulivi, 1958. Il fiume di pietra, 1964. La divina foresta, 1969. Notti sull’altura, 1971; as Night on the Heights translated by Giovanni R. Bussino, 1990. Le armi d’oro, 1973. L’isola amorosa, 1973. La Beffa`ria, 1975. L’enorme tempo, 1976. Dolcissimo, 1978; as Dolcissimo translated by Umberto Mariani, 1990. Il treno blu, 1978.

Follia, 1976. Giufa` e Gesu`, edited by Sarah Zappulla Muscara`, 2001.

Nonfiction L’arenario, 1984. Minuetto con Bonaviri, with Sarah Zappulla Muscara` and Roberto Bertoni, 2004.

Edited Work Settimo Bonaviri, L’Arcano, 1975. Fiabe Siciliane, 1990. Giufa` e altre storie della terra di Sicilia, 1996.

Further Reading Bertoni, Roberto, ‘‘Bonaviri ermetico: il motivo del rito di passaggio,’’ in Italianist, 16 (1996): 161–175. Di Biase, Carmine, Bonaviri e l’oltre: l’opera intera, Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 2001. Di Biasio, Rodolfo, Giuseppe Bonaviri, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1978. Iadanza, Antonio, and Marcello Carlino (editors), L’opera di Giuseppe Bonaviri, Rome: La Nuova Italia Scientifica, 1987. Mauri, Paolo, L’opera imminente: diario di un critico, Turin: Einaudi, 1998. Musarra, Franco, Scrittura della memoria, memoria della scrittura: l’opera narrativa di Giuseppe Bonaviri, Florence: Cesati-Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1999. Zangrilli, Franco, Bonaviri e il mistero cosmico, Abano Terme: Piovan, 1985. Zangrilli, Franco, Il fior del ficodindia: saggio su Bonaviri, Acireale (CA): La cantinella, 1997. Zappulla Muscara`, Sarah (editor), Giuseppe Bonaviri, Catania: G. Maimone, 1991. Zappulla Muscara`, Sarah, and Enzo Zappulla (editors), Bonaviri Inedito, Mineo (CA): La cantinella, 2001

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MASSIMO BONTEMPELLI

MASSIMO BONTEMPELLI (1878–1960) Bontempelli’s literary career unfolded in several stages, each a mirror of issues at the forefront of twentieth-century history. Poetry was his first genre; he began with traditional forms (the eclogue and sonnet) and then moved to avant-garde forms with a Futurist edge. Bontempelli eventually disavowed nearly all his entire poetic production and after 1919 wrote only short stories, novels, theater and various forms of journalism and criticism (literary, film, music). The author’s strong convictions about the social and political value of aesthetic forms were instrumental in his changes in styles over the years. This makes his output fascinating from a historical perspective. What remained from avant-garde experiments was an antirealist bent coupled with a profound disgust for ‘‘anemic’’ nineteenth-century naturalism. The antinaturalist viewpoint implied the conviction that literary change would occur only if the practice of copying an all-too-prosaic and overmaterialistic world were abandoned in favor of fictions striving for what Bontempelli called stupore (wonderment) or miracolo (miracle). In the work that Bontempelli produced right after World War I, he used jarring, even boggling literary forms such as the micronovel or the comic halfpage dialogue. La vita intensa (Intense Life, 1920), first published serially in L’Ardita in 1919, collects a series of miniature novels, one of which tells the minimalist ‘‘adventures’’ of one man in a city, Milan, between 12:00 p.m. and 12:30 p.m. on a single day. Serialized in 1920 in Industrie Italiane Illustrate and collected in a volume in 1921, La vita operosa (Productive Life) tells the story of a soldier who returns to Milan from the front. It illustrates Bontempelli’s attempt to avoid an overrealist style by drawing together descriptions of the city and hallucinatory landscapes that in some sections are close to science fiction—for instance, when the protagonist imagines frightening new devices such as a prototelevision set. Bontempelli’s literary thinking was by the mid1920s consolidated into a critical voice that became influential in the interwar years. As editor-in-chief of the literary review ‘900, Bontempelli articulated positions that are considered points of reference in literary history. He produced a theory and practice 286

of realismo magico (magical realism) that was linked in distinctive ways both to his advocacy of European literary culture and his critique of twentieth-century culture in Italy, which he found provincial and rotting. A supranational outlook was a key element of his position in the crucial debates in the interwar years. In the context of Fascist politics of culture, Bontempelli stood for an urban viewpoint dubbed stracitta` (ultracity) as opposed to a rural, traditional, nationalist one called strapaese (ultracountry). At issue was which of these two contrasting cultural heritages might be the way of the future and how each might serve the Italian nation by providing a system of values suited to a culture moving into modernity. The meaning of ‘‘modernity’’ is, and has always been, hard to pin down. What concerns Bontempelli is how the cultural imagination will interact with the historical realities of modernization. The growing dominance in Europe of industrialized nations threatened an Italian sense of national identity based on the longevity and splendor of its heritage, so that modern Italian literary texts often lament the alienating effects of a modernity that separates its population from comforting and magnificent traditions. In this sense, Bontempelli undertakes a critique of a potentially dangerous modernity, and even of ‘‘rationality,’’ and he engages these issues in both fiction and nonfiction (including editorials, journalism, and travel writing). No reactionary, however, he did not advocate a return to former eras. His works attempt to blend elements of the tradition with an attack on what he sees as a dominant middle-class ideology that refuses revolutionary changes in modern society. The parts of tradition that Bontempelli held on to were narrative coherence over fragmentary temporalities, and spatial cohesion over the deformed spatialities of Futurist writing and cubist painting. While his style of writing is lucid, he inserted the ‘‘jarring’’ element of fantasy in his works in order to shake up his readers. The blend of tradition and experiment that Bontempelli forged was consonant with Fascist policies and aesthetic ideals. Since Mussolini both engaged in a rhetoric of revolutionary change and at the same time harked back to the imperial grandeur

MASSIMO BONTEMPELLI of ancient Rome, Fascism appeared to Bontempelli to be a hybrid movement with a potential for conservative innovation. He theorized that Fascism was the dawn of a new era in world history: First the Roman world collapsed and then Christian Europe ended with the cataclysm that was World War I. This schema was complicated by the author’s views on European unity. Disdainful of institutions such as the League of Nations, which has not furthered Italian territorial demands, he believed that the writer’s task in modern society was the invention of new myths for this new, Fascist epoch. Fascist Italy became the model in his view for a new European collectivity rooted in Latin and Mediterranean culture (Italy being the link). In the good graces of Mussolini and the head of the Fascist writers’ union for several years in the mid-1920s and 1930s, Bontempelli advocated Fascism wholeheartedly as a bulwark against both plutocratic capitalism and Soviet communism. In time, his dissent from Fascism cohered around nonnationalist positions. Italian writers were in his view in a unique position to invent new myths, yet culture cannot be contained by national borders. Bontempelli resisted the idea that specific political formulations should dictate any literary themes and styles, since that would kill all spontaneity and stupore. He argued against the institution of a government authorization for the work of the critic. In 1938, Bontempelli was officially censored by the regime for criticizing Fascist leaders. His party card was confiscated with the result that he was not allowed to speak in public—although he was able to continue to publish in the press. He was allowed to reside only in Venice. Significantly, when Bontempelli was offered the position of a noted Jewish scholar, Attilio Momigliano, forced to resign from the university because of the racial laws of 1938, he refused it. Bontempelli’s refusal to accept domination by one political outlook is not wholly surprising for another reason: It was typical of Bontempelli’s way of composing his works to dramatize belief systems at odds with one another. Evidence of multiple viewpoints and their complex interactions is found in the deep structure of his texts. Frequently, an enigmatic or ‘‘magical’’ event is imagined; that in turn stimulates controversial interpretations stemming from clashing viewpoints. He adds openly social and political contents to the theme of the ‘‘relativity’’ of subjectivity. His novel Il figlio di due madri (The Boy with Two Mothers, 1929) is exemplary. Set in the year 1900, this novel tells the story of a miraculous eruption of the past into

the present: A 7-year-old boy becomes another boy who had died seven years earlier, and so he comes to have two mothers—each with her own ‘‘reality.’’ The boy represents a knot of enigma that cannot be untied. Bontempelli orchestrates a contradiction meant to put old paradigms of the unity of being into question. This undefined being, named Mario and Ramiro, articulates a series of fearful doublings in the novel. Maternal love, which ought to be prime and indivisible, is split into two conflicting loves and thus two worlds. Gendering is an important signifying discourse in this effort. Men are cast as the representatives of the institutions that have murdered the imagination and thus the possibility of leaving behind profane, materialist modernity: They are callous businessmen, narrow-minded doctors, and grasping lawyers. None believes in miracles or magic. The triumphant mother in the novel, Luciana, is, instead, a kind of ‘‘new woman.’’ She undergoes an apotheosis founded on her association with the richness of flux, with journeys, and with a liberating rootlessness. She befriends a gypsy (in this exceptional case, a male) who is an emblem of transformation in the book and who attempts to retrieve the lost son. Bontempelli associates ‘‘Woman’’ with a fecund distance from a post-Risorgimento, preFascist Italy. Realistic narrative logic is also stymied. When two universes (death and life) enter into contact, the temporal progression one expects in a novel comes to a halt. The novel cannot propel itself forward toward a conclusion because the enigma introduced cannot be resolved by any of the characters. This device suits Bontempelli’s realismo magico; mystery does not evoke a spirit world, or a national spirit, but instead it opens up a perspective onto social dilemmas inseparable from the culture’s myths. Bontempelli puts into relief in other works of fiction the defects in familial, legal, economic, and government institutions that are the bases of social stability and yet at the same time are causes of social stagnation. Vita e morte di Adria e i suoi figli (The Life and Death of Adria and Her Children, 1930) dramatizes the degeneration of the social institutions of post-Risorgimento Italy. The ruling classes (made up principally of property owners), the bourgeois family, and gender conventions all are put under a microscope in the narrative of one mother, the beautiful and extremely fashionable Adria, who becomes the cult object of Roman high society. Adria lives only to propagate and preserve her beauty; she decides at age 30 to wall herself up before she begins aging. Bontempelli’s 287

MASSIMO BONTEMPELLI novel takes on tragic tones when Adria forsakes her children and husband, interrupting life cycles that had always been presumed to be natural. Even natural death is at issue for the modern citizen, for example in Gente nel tempo (People in Time, 1937), in which a family member mysteriously dies on the same day at five-year intervals. In the play Nostra Dea (Dea by Dea, 1925), another fashionable protagonist changes personalities each time she changes outfits. Constructed identities constitute mere cogs in wheels of industry—fashion or otherwise. In the drama Minnie la candida (Candid Minnie, 1929), Bontempelli moves away from the family context toward even broader categories: The naı¨ve protagonist believes that a race of soulless, artificial beings is taking over humanity. The high purpose of the literary imagination and the writer’s work as Bontempelli conceived them was to move modernity out of its paralysis and dullness and to usher in a new era in world history. Fiction is an expose´ and at the same time it draws its readers away from that soulless modern world into a ‘‘magical’’ one that exists in the pages of the book. The war years delivered little by the way of either fantastical or literal escapes to Bontempelli, however, as he remained confined in Venice and his writing veered away from fiction. Full of hope for the future of Italy when Fascism began losing ground and battles, and eager to redeem a nowsuspect past by means of enduring anti-Fascist activity, he was in 1948 elected to office in Tuscany as a senator on a Popular Front ticket. Because of his association with Fascism, however, Bontempelli was not allowed to be seated in the Parliament of the newly minted Italian Republic.

Biography Born 12 May 1878, in Como; 1897, he enrolls in Turin University and earns two degrees, in classics and philosophy; adheres to Fascism in 1924 and in the same year founds the Teatro degli Undici with Luigi Pirandello; the first issue of ‘900 appears in 1926; appointed to the Accademia d’Italia in 1930; in 1933 he founds the architectural journal Quadrante; in 1938 he is confined to Venice by the Fascist government; in 1948 he is elected as a senator for the Popular Front party but is not seated because of his collaboration on a textbook in the Mussolini years; L’amante fedele wins the Strega prize in 1953; died in Rome, 21 July 1960. KEALA JEWELL 288

Selected Works Collections Racconti e romanzi, edited by Paola Masino, 2 vols., Milan: Mondadori, 1961. Opere scelte, edited by Luigi Baldacci, Milan: Mondadori, 1978. Nostra Dea e altre commedie, edited byAlessandro Tinterri, Turin: Einaudi, 1989.

Poetry ‘‘Verseggiando: Intermezzo di rime,’’ 1905. ‘‘Amori,’’ 1910. ‘‘Purosangue e L’Ubriaco: Poesie nuove,’’ 1919.

Fiction Sette savi, 1912. La vita intensa, 1920. La vita operosa, 1921. La scacchiera davanti allo specchio, 1922. Eva ultima, 1923. La donna dei miei sogni, 1925. Il figlio di due madri, 1929; as The Boy with Two Mothers, translated by Estelle Gilson, 2000. Vita e morte di Adria e i suoi figli, 1930; as The Life and Death of Adria and Her Children, translated by Estelle Gilson, 2000. Mia vita, morte e miracoli, 1931. ‘‘522’’: Racconto di una giornata, 1932. Gente nel tempo, 1937. Giro del sole, 1941. L’amante fedele, 1953.

Nonfiction La donna del Nadir, 1924. L’avventura novecentista, 1938. Pirandello, Leopardi, D’Annunzio: Tre discorsi, 1938. Dignita` dell’uomo (1943–1946), 1946.

Plays La guardia alla luna, 1920. Siepe a nordovest, 1922. Nostra Dea, 1925; as Dea by Dea, translated by Anthony Oldcorn, 1994. Minnie la candida, 1929. Bassano padre geloso, 1934.

Further Reading Airoldi Namer, Fulvia, Massimo Bontempelli, Milan: Mursia, 1979. Amigoni, Ferdinando, ‘‘Putting Ghosts to Good Use: Savinio, Bontempelli, Landolfi,’’ in Italica 77, no. 1 (2000): 69–80. Amoroso, Giuseppe, Il Realismo Magico di Bontempelli, Messina: Editrice Universitaria, 1964. Baldacci, Luigi, Massimo Bontempelli, Turin: Borla, 1967. Bo, Carlo, Massimo Bontempelli, Padova: CEDAM, 1943. Caesar, Ann Hallamore, ‘‘Changing Costume, Changing Identity: Women in the Theatre of Pirandello, Bontempelli and Wedekind,’’ in Romance Studies, 20 (1992): 21–29. Cecchini, Carlo, Avanguardia, mito e ideologia: Massimo Bontempelli tra futurismo a fascismo, Rome: Il Ventaglio, 1986.

BONVESIN DA LA RIVA Donati, Corrado, and Fulvia Airoldi Namer (editors), Massimo Bontempelli: Scrittore e intellettuale, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1992. Fontanella, Luigi, Storia di Bontempelli. Tra i sofismi della ragione e le irruzioni dell’immaginazione, Ravenna: Longo, 1997. Lapini, Lia, Il teatro di Massimo Bontempelli. Dall’avanguardia al novecentismo, Florence: Vallecchi, 1977. Mascia Galateria, Marinella, Tattica della sorpresa e romanzo comico di Massimo Bontempelli: Saggio su ‘‘La vita intensa’’ e ‘‘La vita operosa,’’ Rome: Bulzoni, 1977. Masino, Paola, Io, Massimo e gli altri: Autobiografia di una figlia del secolo, edited by Maria Vittoria Vittori, Milan: Rusconi, 1995.

Piscopo, Ugo, Massimo Bontempelli: Per una modernita` delle pareti lisce, Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 2001. Saccone, Antonio, Massimo Bontempelli. Il Mito del ’900, Naples: Liguori, 1978. Somigli, Luca, ‘‘Modernism and the Quest for the Real: On Massimo Bontempelli’s Minnie la candida,’’ in Italian Modernism, edited by Luca Somigli and Mario Moroni, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. Urgnani, Elena, Sogni e visioni. Massimo Bontempelli fra surrealismo e futurismo, Ravenna: Longo, 1991.

BONVESIN DA LA RIVA (CA. 1240/1250–CA. 1313/1315) Bonvesin da la Riva lived in Milan and Legnano, where he was a teacher, educating the children of the wealthy classes. He is the most important author of the didactic literature written in Northern Italy in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, and composed approximately 20 poems in the old Milanese vernacular, amounting to a total of about 9,000 lines, as well as three works in Latin. Bonvesin’s poems in the vernacular are contained in eight manuscripts of the fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries, the two most significant ¨ ffentliche Wisof which are now in Berlin (O senschaftliche Bibliothek) and in Milan (Biblioteca Ambrosiana). Like most Northern Italian didactic poems, they consist mainly of vernacular adaptation of medieval Latin and French didactic and hagiographic literary texts. Bonvesin wrote the majority of them in monorhymed alexandrine quatrains and intended for them to be recited in front of wide, popular audiences with the practical aim of enhancing moral and religious beliefs. Ezio Levi, who brought this didactic literature to scholarly attention in the 1920s, argued that its genesis was connected with heretical movements (I poeti antichi lombardi, 1921). Levi’s thesis is now generally rejected, and it is commonly agreed that no heterodox element is present in any of the texts of this literary tradition. Bonvesin, in particular, was a lay tertiary of the Humiliati—a religious group that

originated from mid-twelfth-century pauperistic and evangelic movements in Northern Italy—and his religiosity is, as Gianfranco Contini argues, mite e ordinaria (mild and ordinary). In addition to being some of the earliest and most extended documents in old Milanese, Bonvesin’s poetry therefore also conveys the common beliefs and culture of the time in which it was written. Bonvesin’s vernacular poems can be grouped in three categories: debates, expository, and narrative poems, and didactic poems. Of the six debates, three—Disputatio rose cum viola (The Debate of the Rose and the Violet), Disputatio musce cum formica (The Debate Between the Fly and the Ant), and Disputatio mensium (The Debate of the Months)—convey a moral and, albeit not explicit, sociopolitical message. Maria Corti locates the sociopolitical implication in the contrast between the rose and the violet, which for the first time has the humble violet (the people and merchants of Milan) win against the arrogant rose (the powerful magnates) (‘‘Il genere disputatio e la transcodificazione indolore di Bonvesin da la Riva,’’ 1973). In his 1987 edition of the Volgari scelti, Ruggero Stefanini extends such sociopolitical overtones to the other two poems. However, unlike the Disputatio rose cum viola and the debate between the lazy fly and the zealous ant—which also praises the humbleness and industriousness of the communal 289

BONVESIN DA LA RIVA class—the Disputatio mensium (where the months of the year contest the leadership of January but fail) expresses the claims of the new signories and indicates that a leader is necessary. Bonvesin’s remaining three debates are more overtly religious, and the Virgin Mary, who is at the core of Bonvesin’s spirituality, is the protagonist of two of them. The De peccatore cum Virgine (The Sinner and the Virgin) depicts Mary’s contrast with a sinner and deals with the familiar theme of Mary’s ties with the rest of humankind. The De Sathana cum Virgine (Satan and the Virgin), on the other hand, is one of the most original poems written by Bonvesin and portrays Satan arguing with Mary about why, unlike all other sinners, he was not granted the opportunity to repent. As Francesco Zambon shows, Mary’s words here represent the official doctrine of the church against the beliefs of Cathar heresy as they were defended in the anonymous Liber de duobus principiis, a mid-thirteenth-century treatise contesting the principle of free will (‘‘Bonvesin e il libero arbitrio degli angeli,’’ 1993). The lively and sophisticated figure of Satan, who denies his responsibility and refuses to accept the irrevocability of his condemnation, is one of Bonvesin’s best (and most tragic) figures and has often been related to the logician devil of Dante’s Inferno 27. The last debate is the De anima cum corpore (Soul and Body), a dialogue between the body and the soul on Earth, after physical death and at the Resurrection. It is an original variation of a common genre and attests to the great interest in the afterlife frequently found in Northern Italian didactic poetry. Three of Bonvesin’s expository and narrative poems are in fact eschatological descriptions that aim to convince audiences to follow Christian precepts on earth. The ‘‘De die iudicij’’ (Judgment Day) and the ‘‘De quindecim miraculis que debent apparere ante diem iudicij’’ (The Fifteen Marvels Which Are to Appear Before the Day of Judgment) are short poems concerned with the traditional preoccupation with the end of time and the Last Judgment, while ‘‘Il Libro delle tre Scritture’’ (Book of the Three Scriptures) is a long poem expressing the newer interest in the experience of separated souls during the eschatological time between physical death and the Resurrection. As the author of ‘‘Il Libro delle tre Scritture’’, Bonvesin has often been considered—together with Giacomino da Verona—as one of Dante’s precursors. The poem is divided into three parts: Nera (Black Scripture), which describes the 12 pains of 290

hell; ‘‘Rossa’’ (Red Scripture), which gives a detailed account of Christ’s Passion and physical sufferings; ‘‘Dorata’’ (Golden Scripture), which describes the 12 glories of Heaven. ‘‘Il Libro delle tre Scritture’’ illustrates the significance that medieval culture attributed to the body as a component of human identity and to physical pain as a productive experience of change. Bonvesin’s poem is also important as a document of contemporary eschatology, and a joint analysis of the ‘‘Scrittura Rossa’’ and Dante’s Purgatorio reveals the tight connection between the suffering body of Christ and the transformative power of pain in purgatory (Manuele Gragnolati, Experiencing the Afterlife, 2005). The religious and moral didacticism of Bonvesin’s eschatological texts also informs some of his other expository poems: the ‘‘De Vanitatibus’’ (On Vain Things), which is composed of two parables contrasting the deceptive and transient possessions of Earth to the eternal rewards of Heaven; the ‘‘De falsis excusationibus’’ (On False Excuses), which refutes the pretexts usually adduced by men in order to neglect Christian obligations, and pushes its audience—as Bonvesin often does—toward humility, moderation and acceptance; and the ‘‘Vulgare de elymosinis’’ (On Almsgiving), which recommends the practice of almsgiving and exemplifies its value through a series of parables. In this text, Bonvesin shows great narrative technique and achieves some of his best results, as in the ‘‘exempla De Ortulano’’ (The Gardener) and ‘‘De patre cuiusdam Donati’’ (Donatus’ Father). Three poems are hagiographic and offer more positive examples of acceptance and humility— the virtues that transform suffering into a productive experience: the ‘‘Vulgare de passione Sancti Job’’ (The Suffering of Saint Job), which retells the Job story from the Bible; the ‘‘Vita Beati Alexi’’ (The Life of Saint Alexis), which translates a tenth-century account of a Roman nobleman who endorsed a life of suffering and penitence; and the ‘‘Laudes Virginis Mariae’’ (In Praise of the Virgin Mary), which begins by praising Mary’s greatness and ends with five exempla of people—including the prostitute Mary of Egypt and the humble ‘‘friar Ave Maria’’—being saved or benefited by her. The remaining two expository poems are related to Bonvesin’s intense devotion to Mary and to Christ: the ‘‘Rationes quare Virgo tenetur diligere peccatores’’ (Reasons Why the Virgin Is Obligated to Help Sinners), which is very similar to the ‘‘De peccatore cum Virgine,’’ and the fragmentary ‘‘De Cruce’’ (On the Cross), which narrates the legend of Christ’s cross.

BONVESIN DA LA RIVA The last two poems in Bonvesin’s corpus in the vernacular provide secular teachings and attest to Bonvesin’s civic and social commitment: the Expositiones Catonis (An Exposition of Cato’s Distichs), which translates the popular Distica Catonis from Latin, and the Quinquaginta curialitatibus ad mensam (Fifty Table Manners), which outlines 50 rules about appropriate dining behavior. Although the two texts are also written in alexandrine quatrains, the quatrains are not monorhymed (as they are in the rest of Bonvesin’s vernacular poetry) but rhymed instead according to the scheme AABB. Bonvesin’s three extant works in Latin are contained in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century manuscripts. The De controversia mensium (The Contrast of the Months) is written in hexameters and is similar to the vernacular debate between the months of the year. The De vita scholastica (The School Life), which is written in couplets and was widely read until the late Renaissance, adapts the anonymous poem Rudium doctrina and is also connected to Bonvesin’s work as a schoolteacher. It instructs students how to attain wisdom and also briefly offers advice to teachers about teaching effectively. The De magnalibus urbis Mediolani (The Marvels of Milan) is the only text in prose and is a panegyric of Milan. Written in 1288, it narrates the events of Milanese history until the death of Emperor Frederick II in 1250. It praises the city first for its material excellence (location, buildings, inhabitants, and wealth) and then for its moral distinction (fortitude, loyalty, freedom, and nobility). The text differs from the conventions of the genre and supports the rhetorical praise of Milan with the accuracy of archival research and the liveliness of real-life observations. It was usually read as a nostalgic idealization of Milan’s past, but, in their critical editions, Guido Orlandi and Paolo Chiesa argue that a more pragmatic Bonvesin is siding with the Viscontis (who were consolidating their power in Milan when the work was written).

Biography The son of Petrus de Laripa, Bonvesin was most likely born in Milan between 1240 and 1250. He was a successful and wealthy teacher of Latin in a private capacity in both Legnano and Milan. A tertiary of the Humiliati and arguably also of the Franciscans, he was committed to constant charitable activity, such as donations to public hospitals and participation in the administration

of charity institutions. He was married twice and died between 1313 (the date of his last testament) and 1315. MANUELE GRAGNOLATI Selected Works Collections Le opere volgari di Bonvesin da la Riva, edited by Gianfranco Contini, Rome: Societa` Filologica Romana, 1941; as Volgari scelti: Selected Poems, edited and translated by Patrick Diehl and Ruggero Stefanini, 1987.

Works in the Vernacular Poeti del Ducento, edited by Gianfranco Contini, vol. 1, 1960; reprint 1995. De Cruce. Testo frammentario inedito, edited by Silvia Isella Brusamolino, 1979. Le cinquanta cortesie da tavola, edited by Mario Cantella and Donatella Magrassi, 1985. I volgari di Bonvesin da la Riva: Testi del ms. berlinese, edited by Adnan Go¨kc¸en, 1996. Expositiones Catonis, edited by Carlo Beretta, 2000. I volgari di Bonvesin da la Riva. Testi dei mss. Trivulziano 93 (vv. 113-fine); Ambrosiano T. 10 sup., N 95 sup.; Toledano Capitolare 10–28, edited by Adnan Go¨kc¸en, 2001.

Works in Latin De magnalibus urbis Mediolani (1288); as Grandezze di Milano, edited by Angelo Paredi, 1967; as Le meraviglie di Milano, edited by Giuseppe Pontiggia, introduction by Maria Corti, 1974; edited by Paolo Chiesa, 1998. Quinque claves sapientiae. Incerti auctoris rudium doctrina. Bonvicini de Ripa Vita scolastica, edited by Anezka Vidmadova´-Schmidtova´, 1969. De controversia mensium, in Giovanni Orlandi, ‘‘Letteratura e politica nei Carmina de mensibus (De controversia mensium) di Bonvesin da la Riva,’’ in Felix olim Lombardia. Storia di studi padani dedicati dagli allievi a Giuseppe Martini, 1978, 103–195.

Further Reading Avalle, D’Arco Silvio, ‘‘Bonvesin da la Riva,’’ in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, vol. 1, Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1970. Bologna, Corrado, ‘‘La letteratura dell’Italia settentrionale del Ducento,’’ in Letteratura italiana: Storia e geografia, directed by Alberto Asor Rosa, vol. 1, Turin: Einaudi, 1987. Cerroni, Monica, ‘‘Tipologia dell’allegoria e dinamiche del vero in Giacomino da Verona e Bonvesin da la Riva,’’ in Strumenti critici, 15 (2000): 53–74. Corti, Maria, ‘‘Il genere disputatio e la transcodificazione indolore di Bonvesin da la Riva,’’ in Strumenti critici, 7 (1973); rpt. in Il viaggio testuale, Turin: Einaudi, 1978. Degli Innocenti, Mario, ‘‘L’ Elucidarium o l’Elucidario in antico milanese fonte di Bonvesin da la Riva?’’ in Italia medioevale e umanistica, 25 (1982): 125–149. Garbini, Paolo, ‘‘Sulla Vita scolastica di Bonvesin da la Riva,’’ in Studi medievali, 31 (1990): 705–737.

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BONVESIN DA LA RIVA Gragnolati, Manuele, ‘‘From Decay to Splendor: Body and Pain in Bonvesin da la Riva’s Book of the Three Scriptures,’’ in Last Things: Death and Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, edited by Caroline Walker Bynum and Paul Freedman, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. Gragnolati, Manuele, Experiencing the Afterlife: Soul and Body in Dante and Medieval Culture, Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2005. Leonardi, Lino, and Francesco Santi, ‘‘La letteratura religiosa,’’ in Storia della letteratura italiana, directed by Enrico Malato, vol. 1, Rome: Salerno, 1995. Levi, Ezio, I poeti antichi lombardi, Milan: Cogliati, 1921. Marri, Fabio, Glossario al milanese di Bonvesin, Bologna: Patron, 1977. Mussafia, Adolfo, ‘‘Darstellung der altmaila¨ndischen Mundart nach Bonvesins Schriften,’’ in Sitzungsberichte der Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Philosoph.–histor. Klasse), 59 (1868): 5–40.

Orlandi, Giovanni, ‘‘Note sul De magnalibus Mediolani di Bonvesin da la Riva,’’ in Studi Medievali, series 3, no. 17 (1976): 863–906. Orlandi, Giovanni, ‘‘Letteratura e politica nei Carmina de mensibus (De controversia mensium) di Bonvesin da la Riva,’’ in Felix olim Lombardia: Storia di studi padani dedicati dagli allievi a Giuseppe Martini, Milan: [s.n.], 1978. Pasquini, Emilio, ‘‘La letteratura didattica e allegorica,’’ in La letteratura italiana: Storia e testi, edited by Carlo Muscetta, vol. 1, Bari: Laterza, 1970. Rossi, Aldo, ‘‘Poesia didattica e poesia popolare del Nord,’’ in Storia della letteratura italiana, vol. 1, Milan: Garzanti, 1965. Sasse Tateo, Barbara, Tradition und Pragmatik in Bonvesin’s ‘‘De Magnalibus Mediolani,’’ Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1991. Zambon, Francesco, ‘‘Bonvesin e il libero arbitrio degli angeli,’’ in Omaggio a Gianfranco Folena, Padua: Editoriale Programma, 1993.

BOOK CULTURE The history of printing presupposes a neat separation between the manuscript and the book, between a culture of the manuscript and one of the printing press, differentiated within the history of communication. The history of printing, however, does not concern simply ancient books, but books in all of their forms, including the nonbook form that cannot be ignored. The history of printing is often restricted to manual printing, incunabula, cinquecentine, seicentine, eighteenth-century books, with the important appendix that reaches to 1830, and manually printed nineteenth-century books. Yet all of this keeps the modern book trade out of the discussion, although it too must be the object of the history of printing. There is also another aspect to touch upon, namely the confusion in the history of printing between production and product. Concepts such as Renaissance book, Baroque book, Bodoni’s neoclassicism, and so on are useful in connecting the book-product to literary history, art history, and aesthetic history, but they say little about the specific history of printing. One can decide to leave aside technology, but an exclusive approach to the book as product places its origins in the history of ideas, of arts, and, letters. Indeed this is sufficient when 292

considering the history of the book as literary history, but it does not suffice from the point of view of a history of printing that takes into account the processes of production, which occurs according to determinate materials, that generate, accordingly, new materials. The material component of the book is a reality long denied, because, particularly in Italian culture, an entire system of humanistic knowledge founded on idealistic premises has always considered the book separately from the text. The book as a material object remains in some sense scandalous, because the habit of considering it an intellectual object has given way to deeply rooted automatism. The concept of the book as material object transgresses the common perception of the book as fetishized object, the neutral container of an idea. On the contrary, the container sometimes contains more information than the content, provided that it is considered the fruit of a process, specifically, the history of printing as determined by technological variables. Technology and investment of capital also change the concept of author, as editors follow the book from the incision of the characters, to the accuracy of the text, to the construction of the binding. Presiding over such a process are the alpha and omega of the history of

BOOK CULTURE the Italian book: Aldo Manuzio (ca. 1452–1515), whose creative innovations have left an enduring mark in publishing, and Giambattista Bodoni (1740–1813), who brought the art of printing to great heights in pursuit of neoclassical beauty. In this way, the uniqueness of the author is divided and multiplied; one can no longer speak of the author if not in the sense indicated by the rules of cataloguing. The author is responsible for the intellectual content of the text, but in the sixteenth century he is already surrounded by coauthors responsible, in modern terms, for the editing. This happens above all in the author’s absence: For example, when planning for the publication of an edition by a classical author, highly qualified support was requested by Humanist philologists; or in the case of other publications, the publisher and typographer would seek the advice of an expert of the language and of texts to prepare the definitive edition of the manuscript to send to the presses. Aside from some charismatic authors who followed their book in the phases of typographical production (from Ludovico Ariosto to Giambattista Vico to Alessandro Manzoni), there exists another typology of publication that requires the participation of people specialized in the preparation of editions dealing with the question of context, including printing costs, the graphic aspect, decorations, and the illustration of the book. In the archives, there also exist other traces that help us reconstruct the contexts of production that can relate to either private or public laws, as evidenced in the form of records and documents relating to the history of printing (contracts, licenses, etc.). In the analysis of these documents, three main figures stand out: typographer, publisher, and author, or alternatively, the translator or other figures not recorded in the book. Legal permission was conceded to the book, not to each of its reprinting, excluding short works and loose sheets, The classical formula cum gratia et privilegio at times does not apply in some editions. The privilege covered a span of a number of years, which were requested by the publisher himself to safeguard his assets. In the case of Francesco Colonna’s famous Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (The Strife of Love in a Dream, 1499), for example, the publisher, Leonardo Grassi, obtained a 20-year privilege that he successively renewed in 1519, and it expired around 1540. He is thus a figure who appears in the paratext, only in the dedicatory letter, and not in the explicit capacity of publisher, nor with a proper typographical mark that, in any case, in 1499, was not yet conceived with protective criteria.

From one of the hieroglyphs contained in that book, Aldo Manuzio derives the mark of the Anchor and Dolphin that will be the same used in 1545 when the heirs of the great Humanist-printer (who had preserved the xylographs of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili) republished the work, considering it by then a text of distinction. Several historians of printing value the Aldine edition of Colonna’s remarkable novel as the most beautiful book printed during the Italian Renaissance. Until the modern era there does not exist a homogeneous form of protection of publishing rights. From the second half of the sixteenth century forward, in order to in some way protect literary property, which did not exist in modern terms, some printers began to record the concession of privilege after the colophon. When the censorship of the Indice dei libri proibiti impoverished, from 1550 onward, publishers’ catalogues, the way to escape a relatively strict control was to use pseudonyms to falsify the names of the censored authors or auctores damnati (for example, from Pietro Aretino to Partenio Etiro). Conferring a centrality to the editions, the history of printing becomes the history of publishing. In the fifteenth century, considering the Roman and Venetian editions of Cicero, there exist an exorbitant number with respect to the effective demands of the community of literate people. Regarding classics that were part of the Humanist library more generally, if one adds up the editions produced from Italian presses, those of French presses and, in particular those of Lyon that always competed with the Italian catalogues, it is evident how, at the end of the sixteenth century, the Italian market was relatively saturated. However, leafing through the inventories of the libraries of men of letters until the end of the nineteenth century, we do not yet find first editions in their libraries used as the definitive editions. The incunabulum is considered a reliable edition until the beginning of the nineteenth century, while in the seventeenth century, there is little reason to reprint either Cicero or the classics. The realm of the ancient book also comprises brief printed texts, in octaves or smaller formats, on one printing folio. Furthermore, in the history of printing, there is also a nonbook production, that is to say, a type of production not centered on the printing of booklets, but rather on one side of the page for the printing of loose sheets, calendars, and posters. This is the nonbook trade use of texts, to be hung in public or private places, or affixed in the act of selling, at fairs, in markets, or in piazzas. 293

BOOK CULTURE Regarding formats, in the fifteenth century, two formats prevail: in-folio and in-quarto; in the sixteenth century, the dominant commercial format becomes the octavo that anticipates the folding of the folio three times. This is the ‘‘pocket-edition’’ format, corresponding to an increasing demand for transporting a book as a more personal object, a need emerging from documents and private writings of the time. But classic editions also emerge in the form of the octavo, as demonstrated by the collection by Aldo Manuzio of ‘‘enchiridia’’ (reference books) that emerged from his press with personalized binding, giving the qualified reader an elegant, finished product that combines textual reliability, printed equilibrium, and aesthetic uniformity (including binding ‘‘in the Greek style’’). The seventeenth century is a century of crisis, above all in the realm of technology: old machines, shoddy paper, and acid ink. But it has its dimension: dramatic editions in duodecimo and sextodecimo format, destined for the theater-going public, find a style and a market position, rendering this typology specific to the historical epoch. In the seventeenth-century book, there is a mistake connected to the birth of the antiporta (the page that precedes the frontispiece): The Baroque book must ‘‘overflow,’’ or ‘‘escape the edge’’ by definition from the frontispiece, occupying an extra page with its own rhetoric of graphic communication. In truth, the antiporta arises in the high Renaissance, with the goal of summarizing an entire text in a single image, reaching maturation only in the eighteenth century. One of the most important editions of the first half of the eighteenth century, Giambattista Vico’s Principi di scienza nuova (The New Science), emerged in three editions between 1725 and 1744 and is characterized by an antiporta conceived and designed by the author himself. The antiporta cannot alone define the book of the seventeenth century, which remains, like the eighteenth century, a century still little known from this point of view. Finally, in the modern definition of the activity of printing works for distribution and profit, publishing did not emerge in Italy as a business venture independent from typesetting until the nineteenth

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century, and even during the twentieth century some prominent publishers, who had began as printers (Mondadori, Laterza, to name a few), continued to retain a combined printing/publishing activity. ALESSANDRO SCARSELLA See also: Printing and Publishing Further Reading Baldacchini, Lorenzo, Il libro antico. Nuova edizione aggiornata, Rome: Carocci, 2001. Baldacchini, Lorenzo, Lineamenti di bibliologia, Rome: La Nuova Italia Scientifica, 1992. Braida, Lodovica, Stampa e cultura in Europa tra 15 e 16 secolo, Rome: Laterza, 2000. Fahy, Conor, Saggi di bibliografia testuale, Padua: Antenore, 1988. Febvre, Lucien P. V., The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450–1800, edited by Geoffrey NowellSmith and David Wootton, London: NLB, 1976. Infelise, Mario, Prima dei giornali: alle origini della pubblica informazione, secoli XVI e XVII, Rome: Laterza, 2002. Nuovo, Angela, Il commercio librario nell’Italia del Rinascimento, Milan: Franco Angeli, 1998. Petrucci, Armando, Libri, scrittura e pubblico nel Rinascimento: Guida Storica e critica, Bari: Laterza, 1979. Romani, Valentino, Bibliologia: avviamento allo studio del libro tipografico, Milan: Sylvestre Bonnard, 2000. Santoro, Marco, Storia del libro italiano: libro e societa` in Italia dal Quattrocento al Novecento, Milan: Bibliografica, 1994. Sorella, Antonio (editor), Dalla textual bibliography alla filologia dei testi italiani a stampa, Pescara: Libreria dell’Universita`, 1998. Stoppelli, Pasquale (editor), Filologia dei testi a stampa, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1987. Tavoni, Maria Gioia, Precarieta` e fortuna nei mestieri del libro in Italia: dal secolo dei lumi ai primi decenni della restaurazione, Bologna: Pa`tron, 2001. Tortorelli, Gianfranco (editor), Fonti e studi di storia dell’editoria, Bologna: Baiesi, 1995. Tortorelli, Gianfranco (editor), Gli archivi degli editori: studi e prospettive di ricerca, Bologna: Pa`tron, 1998. Zappella, Giuseppina, Il libro antico a stampa: struttura, tecniche, tipologie, evoluzione, 2 vols., Milan: Bibliografica, 2001–2004. Zappella, Giuseppina, Manuale del libro antico: guida allo studio e alla catalogazione, Milan: Bibliografica, 1996.

GIUSEPPE ANTONIO BORGESE

THE BOOK OF THE COURTIER See Il libro del Cortegiano (Work by Baldassare Castiglione)

GIUSEPPE ANTONIO BORGESE (1882–1952) Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, a writer known for his critical and political writing, is a rare example of a scholar who published the entirety of his creative works—aside from an early volume of poetry— during his 40s and 50s. His first novel, Rube` (Rube`), was published in 1921, and his last volume of prose, Tempesta nel nulla (Tempest into Nothingness), in 1931. Rube` is one of the first Italian novels to relate World War I. Told in the first person, this semiautobiographical novel tells the story of a young Sicilian lawyer recently relocated to the continent in search of fortune and success. Filippo Rube` deludes himself with a quest for serenity in his professional career, in his marriage to the docile Eugenia, in the campaign in support of Italy’s involvement in the war, in the war itself (which he survives wounded), and in his amorous affair with the beautiful Celestina. Constantly dissatisfied and incapable of reconciling his superhuman desire for self-elevation with the mundane difficulties of life, Rube` dies in 1919, while casually involved in a political demonstration during the turbulent postwar period in Italy. He is clutching the black and red flags of the Fascist and Communist parties. Both the Italian and foreign critics (especially the French) read Rube` through a political and ideological lens (as a representation of the intellectual petite bourgeoisie and of a general rendition of Italian history during the Great War), thus foreseeing the protagonist as unfit for living, a reference to the inept antiheroes in the fiction of Italo Svevo, Federigo Tozzi, or Alberto Moravia. Only from

1986 onward do critics like Giuseppe Langella and Luciano Parisi highlight the hopeful component seeded in the novel. In fact, the defeated character of Filippo Rube` is contrasted in essence with a religious armature of metaphors, symbols, and allusions. Borgese’s other literary works met with minor attention from both camps of critics and publishers. Most of these works have not been re-edited since the 1950s. Among them is his second novel, I vivi e i morti (The Living and the Dead, 1923). The main character, Eliseo Gaddi, is in a way successor to Rube`. In the vein of Tozzi’s Remigio in Il podere or Tolstoy’s Levin in Anna Karenina, the intellectual Gaddi, tired by urbane existence, retires to an unsuccessful endeavor in agriculture with his mother. Lacking practical affinities as well as an interest in life itself, Eliseo subsequently refuses Sofronia’s advances (a woman he nevertheless loves); abandons his agricultural pursuits; stops reading occult books—through which he had aspired to seek his raison d’etre. Eventually he allows himself to die detached from the reality of all political events. Borgesse’s two plays, L’arciduca (The Archduke, 1924) and Lazzaro (Lazarus, 1925) are also untouched by current events. L’arciduca accounts for the last days in the life of Rodolfo of Hapsburg, the prince heir to the imperial crown, before committing suicide together with his lover Maria Ve´tzera in Mayerling, 1889—an event historically reconstructed by Borgese in La tragedia di Mayerling (The Tragedy of Mayerling, 1925). Lazzaro tells the story of the biblical character’s resurrection 295

GIUSEPPE ANTONIO BORGESE through a distinctive religious exaltation. Lazzaro toils with accepting the idea of his own resurrection because he will have to face death yet again, and he is indebted to Jesus. Borgese’s three volumes of short stories, La citta` sconosciuta (The Unknown City, 1925), Le belle (Beautiful Women, 1927) and Il sole non e` tramontato (The Sun Has Not Set, 1929), republished with very few alterations as Il pellegrino appassionato (The Passionate Pilgrim, 1933) are equally neglected by critics. Borgese’s stories are clear examples of geographical and historical abstraction, as well as of the classical style encumbered by Gabriele D’Annunzio’s influence, which marks Borgese’s narrative up until the last novel, Tempesta nel nulla. Set in Engadine, this novel tells the story in the tradition of Nietzsche, of a man who, during the course of a stroll through the mountains, comes to believe he has discovered the secret of existence itself and ascended into Man-God; only later he realizes that he has been mistaken and committed the mortal sin of pride. The resulting Christian lesson in humility is Borgese’s conscious and zealous aim, pervasive throughout his novels, stories, and plays. The other key to understanding the writer is his reaction against the ‘‘fragmentism’’ and impressionism that has marked Italian literature in the first three decades of the 1900s. He reflects on the problem of the juxtaposition of lyricism and storytelling, and between these two poles, he chooses the latter. Even on critical grounds, Borgese rails against those whom he calls (using a term he minted) ‘‘calligraphers.’’ He accuses these refined novelists and the literary milieu of La ronda of sacrificing literature’s moral voice for the superficial aesthetic product of the ‘‘pretty page.’’ In order to follow his view on this matter, it is important to read Tempo di edificare (Time to Build, 1923), whose title bears two intended meanings of Borgese’s. One relates to the personal sphere: Borgese explains that time for criticism has expired—to be allotted to the devices of the youth—and time for literary creation has begun. The other, more general meaning is the incitement to return to a kind of fiction that is architectural, organic, capable of conjugating form and human vibrancy, and modeled on the great novelists of the 1800s—first among them Alessandro Manzoni, Giovanni Verga, and Dostoyevsky. Borgese passionately favors and pursues with a characteristic provocative predilection the narrative over the lyrical. Even in Le poesie (Poems, 1922), his verses are consecrated to the prosaic in their rhythm and flow, 296

written using the colloquial long line. He also coined the term crepuscolari (twilight poets), now commonly used to identify a number of poets such as Guido Gozzano, Aldo Palazzeschi, and Sergio Corazzini. Borgese pays particular attention to foreign works (German, French, English, American, Russian, Scandinavian) in the three volumes of La vita e il libro (Life and the Book, 1910–1913), in Studi di letterature moderne (Studies of Modern Literatures, 1915), and again in Ottocento europeo (Nineteenth-Century Europe, 1927). Within these books, the weight attributed to foreign literatures (Borgese had for a long time been a professor of German literature) is directed above all to the narrative and theater. Borgese’s critical career had an early start. Already in 1903, as a 21-year-old university student in Florence, Borgese contributed to Giovanni Papini’s Leonardo, Enrico Corradini’s Il regno, and Benedetto Croce’s La critica. The latter quickly remarked the youth’s talent. In 1904, he founded the literary review Hermes (which folded in 1906), influenced by D’Annunzio both artistically and politically. In the editorial manifesto printed in the first issue, Borgese writes: ‘‘Aristocratic in our own art...we are pagan and D’Annunzian. And yes: we love and admire Gabriele D’Annunzio more than any other of our modern poets, whether dead or alive, and from him we set off within our own art.’’ In 1905, he publishes, thanks to Croce’s favoritism, his thesis entitled Storia della critica romantica in Italia (History of Romantic Criticism in Italy). Borgese is usually described as an ambitious, charismatic and fiery youth. In 1903, he nearly crosses swords with Prezzolini. According to Giacomo Debenedetti’s famous statement, Borgese ‘‘already from recruitment seemed to have the marshal’s stick in his satchel’’ (Il romanzo del Novecento, 1971). In 1909, he publishes the essay entitled Gabriele D’Annunzio, trying to define once and for all the poet’s work while at the same time expressing the will to supercede the D’Annunzian aesthetic. In 1911, he launches into his 40-year collaboration with the newspaper Il corriere della sera. Borgese will prove to be among the most important collaborators to Editor Luigi Albertini, and within the pages of that newspaper will recognize the budding talents of young writers such as Guido Piovene, Mario Soldati, and Moravia. His review of Moravia’s first novel, Gli indifferenti (1929), is particularly relevant. Furthermore, Borgese is one of the first to perceptively remark on the merit of the narrative voice of Tozzi, whom he befriends and whose posthumous works Ricordi di un impiegato

GIUSEPPE ANTONIO BORGESE (1920), Gli egoisti (1923), and L’incalco (1923) he edits. Borgese’s last important critical work is Poetica dell’unita` (Poetics of Unity, 1934). With it he insists on the literary impetus to transcend man’s cognitive barriers and to sublimate oneself into what he calls ‘‘the unity of idea.’’ Elsewhere he speaks of ‘‘representing the world as a form of perfection and eternity; a virtual world which exists as a sublimation or transfiguration of that which we live’’ (Il senso della letteratura italiana, 1931). In Poetica dell’unita`, rather than focus on the narrative character of literature, Borgese insists upon its symbolic and idealistic aspects, thus re-addressing at a distance the 1911 dispute with Croce over the essay Filosofia di Giambattista Vico (1910). In support of the Italian involvement in World War I, he publishes mostly political (though not nationalistically extreme) works—Guerra di redenzione (War of Redemption, 1915); Italia e Germania (Italy and Germany, 1915); La guerra delle idee (War of Ideas, 1916); L’Italia e la nuova alleanza (Italy and the New Alliance, 1917)—and often carries out diplomatic services in Switzerland. After the declaration of peace and at the recommendation of Luigi Albertini, Borgese plays an important role in the establishment of the Italian-Yugoslavian accords. His self-imposed exile to the United States in 1931—where he remained to avoid the Fascist oath—as well as his marriage to Thomas Mann’s daughter, Elizabeth, have served critics as events indicative of his firm antitotalitarian and liberal principles. This interpretation is seconded by Goliath, the March of Fascism (1937), a fluent English language study of Fascism, aimed to support peace and the vision of a world republic. For further reading on this subject, refer to Common Cause (1944) and Foundations of the World Republic, published posthumously in 1953, as well as Idea della Russia (The Idea of Russia, 1951) related to the same utopian ideal.

Biography Born in Polizzi Generosa, in Sicily, 12 November 1882. Studied literature at the University of Palermo and then at the University of Florence, 1903; married Maria Freschi, with whom he had two children, Leonardo and Giovanna; contributor to Leonardo, Il regno, and La critica, 1913; established Hermes, 1904–1906; lived in Germany as correspondent for Il mattino (Naples) and La stampa (Turin), 1907–1908; taught German literature at the universities of Turin and Rome, 1909–1917;

contributor to Il corriere della sera, 1911–1952; established La nuova cultura, 1913, later published under the name Il conciliatore; publicly intervened in support of anti-Fascist Gaetano Salvemini, 1925; taught aesthetics and history of criticism, at the University of Milan, 1926. In 1930, several members of the Association of Fascist Academics obstructed his courses; took refuge to the United States, 1931; taught at Berkeley, 1931–1932; Smith College, 1932–1936; the University of Chicago, 1936–1948; U.S. citizen, 1937; divorced from Maria Freschi, married Elizabeth Mann, 1937; returned to Italy, 1948; resumes his chair of aesthetics at the University of Milan, 1949. Died in Fiesole (Florence), 4 December 1952. GIAN PAOLO GIUDICETTI Selected Works Fiction Rube`, 1921; as Rube`, translated by Isaac Goldberg, 1923. I vivi e i morti, 1923. La citta` sconosciuta, 1925. Le belle, 1927; as Beautiful Women, translated by John Shepley, 2001. Il sole non e` tramontato, 1929. Tempesta nel nulla, 1931. Il pellegrino appassionato, 1933. La Siracusana, 1953.

Plays L’arciduca, 1924. Lazzaro, 1925.

Poetry ‘‘La canzone paziente,’’ 1910. ‘‘Le poesie,’’ 1922.

Nonfiction Gabriele d’Annunzio: Da ‘‘Primo Vere’’ a ‘‘Fedra,’’ 1909. La nuova Germania, 1909. La vita e il libro, 3 vols., 1910–1913. Studi di letterature moderne, 1915. Guerra di redenzione, 1915. Italia e Germania, 1915. La guerra delle idee, 1916. L’Italia e la nuova alleanza, 1917. Tempo di edificare, 1923. La tragedia di Mayerling: Storia di Rodolfo d’Austria e di Mary Ve´tzera, 1925. Ottocento europeo, 1927. Autunno di Costantinopoli, 1929. Escursioni in terre nuove, 1931. Il senso della letteratura italiana, 1931. Poetica dell’unita`, 1934. Atlante americano, 1936. Goliath, The March of Fascism, 1937. Common Cause, 1944. Idea della Russia, 1951. Foundations of the World Republic, 1953.

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GIUSEPPE ANTONIO BORGESE Da Dante a Thomas Mann, 1958. La citta` assoluta e altri scritti, 1962.

Letters Olivieri, Mariarosaria (editor), Lettere a Giovanni Papini e Clotilde Marghieri, 1988. Stentella Petrarchini, Giuliana (editor), Lettere a Giovanni Gentile, 1998. ——— (editor), Per una cultura europea: Le lettere di Giuseppe Antonio Borgese a Otto von Taube (1907– 1952), 2002.

Further Reading Cavalli Pasini, Annamaria, L’unita` della letteratura: Borgese critico scrittore, Bologna: Pa`tron, 1994. Debenedetti, Giacomo, Il romanzo del Novecento, Milan: Garzanti, 1971. Gentili, Sandro, Gli anni di apprendistato di Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, Verona: Gutenberg, 1991.

Langella, Giuseppe, ‘‘Borgese e Manzoni,’’ in Aevum, 60 (September-December 1986): 397–414. Licata, Vincenzo, L’invenzione critica: Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, Palermo: Flaccovio, 1982. Parisi, Luciano, Borgese, Turin: Tirrenia, 2000. Rampolla del Tindaro Dominici, Ida (editor), Atti del Convegno su G. A. Borgese (Polizzi Generosa 11–12 settembre 1982), Polizzi Generosa, Palermo: Comune di Polizzi Generosa, 1984. Santangelo, Giovanni Saverio (editor), G. A. Borgese: La figura e l’opera. Atti del convegno nazionale (PalermoPolizzi Generosa 18–21 aprile 1983), Palermo: Stass, 1985. Sciascia, Leonardo, Per un ritratto dello scrittore da giovane, Milan: Adelphi, 2000. Sipala, Paolo Mario (editor), Borgese, Rosso di San Secondo, Savarese: Atti del convegno di studio CataniaRagusa-Caltanissetta 1980–1982, Rome: Bulzoni, 1983.

RAFFAELLO BORGHINI (1537–1588) A typical representative of the Florentine courtesan literary environment in the late sixteenth century, characterized by the Counter-Reformation academic spirit and bigoted religiosity, besides the treatise Il riposo (The Rest, 1584), Borghini wrote poetical works, translations, and plays, some of which he signed with the significant pseudonym of Filarete. Born into a noble and historically wealthy family, alternating between hostility and good relations with the Medicis, Raffaello in his early period appears to have been in a relationship with their opponents (1567–1573), as the canzone addressed to Archbishop Antonio Altoviti attests. Later Borghini also wrote a canzone on the death of Cosimo I (1574), another one on the death of Grand Duchess Giovanna (1578), and was in contact with all the noble families who collaborated with the grand duke. Borghini’s first poetical work is the still-unpublished short poem La veglia amorosa (The Love Vigil, 1565), addressed to Filippo Spina, whose original manuscript is catalogued at the Vatican Library (Fondo Patetta, n. 361). This allegorical-pastoral composition, rich in mythological and classical influences, is based on examples by Giovanni Boccaccio and Angelo Poliziano; it tells the tragic story 298

of Alcee’s love for the beautiful Luclitia, enriched with a discussion about Platonic and carnal love. Apart from a few sonnets and the canzone on the death of the duchess, all of Borghini’s poetical works are recorded in an autograph manuscript entitled Rime di R. B. detto Filarete (Rhymes by Raffaello Borghini, Called Filarete, undated) in Florence at the Biblioteca Nazionale (ms. II. IX.18), with notes and corrections by the author himself. The Rime include a large number of love sonnets, sonnets of religious or moral theme, five canzoni, short poems in ottave, like the Stanze alla Ninfa Tabelista (Stanzas for the Nymph Tabelista, undated) or the Stanze alla Ninfa Trialuce (Stanzas for the Nymph Trialuce, undated), and a group of sonnets on the death of Piero di Gherardo Capponi (1586). In the manuscript, Borghini was careful in evaluating his own work, and separates those poems he considered his best from the ones he rejected. The Rime were edited by Domenico Moreni only in 1882, and were published together with the poetry of court artist Agnolo Bronzino (1503–1572). As a translator from French into Tuscan volgare, Borghini edited the Trattato di Giovanni Marco Villa sopra l’Origine de’ Tempii de’ Giudei, de’ Cristiani e dei Gentili, e la infelice morte di quelli che gli hanno saccheggiati, spogliati e ruinati (Treatise by

RAFFAELLO BORGHINI Giovanni Marco Villa on the Origins of Jewish, Christian and Pagan Temples and the Doomed Death of Those Who Sacked, Spoiled, Damaged Them, 1577). This is a curious historical work written in 1563 by Jean de Marcouville, which concerns the origins of temples of various religious denominations and the tragic destiny reserved to those who desecrated them. Borghini also authored theatrical plays: La donna costante (The Constant Woman, 1578) and L’amante furioso (The Delirious Lover, 1583), the latter written during his second trip to France (1579–1580). La donna costante is based on the dramatic story of Romeo and Juliet, which Borghini adapted from an anonymous literary source but chose to take to a happy end. Instead, L’amante furioso, which is more fragmentary than the earlier play, is characterized by a complex plot where particular attention is given to the female characters. Moralizing and pathetic elements also prevail, with some spectacular events. Finally, the pastoral play Diana pietosa (Merciful Diana, 1586) unfolds a pathetic plot, in accordance with the taste of the period. In 1584, Borghini wrote his most famous work, Il riposo, a treatise in the form of dialogue, first published in Florence with a dedication to Giovanni de’ Medici, Cosimo’s illegitimate son. It is divided into four books: the first two are theoretical in nature, the others historical. The dialogue derives its title from the name of the villa in which the author imagines it was held: Il riposo, the property of Bernardo Vecchietti, an art collector. The interlocutors, besides Vecchietti himself, are the sculptor Rodolfo Sirigatti and the Florentine noblemen Baccio Valori and Girolamo Michelozzi. Much of the treatise lacks originality, because Borghini, who could be considered Vasari’s successor, somehow relies on Giorgio Vasari’s Vite (Lives, 1568) for most of his background data. The prose style is often academic and pedantic notwithstanding a certain brilliance in the dialectical Platonic form, modeled on authors from the late antiquity (Athenaeus and Macrobius), rather than on Plato himself. Anyway, Il riposo remains an important source of information reflecting the oral culture of its age, because Borghini accurately describes art works exhibited in Tuscan villas, palaces, and churches, as well as the prevailing tastes of contemporary Florentine society. In the historical section of the treatise, when the author departs from his Vasarian source, he provides a valuable discussion of Florentine (and also non-Florentine) artists of the second half of the cinquecento.

Biography Born in Florence, in 1537 or 1541, probably from Francesco and Alessandra Buontempi. In his early period an opponent to the Medicis; forced to move to Provence (1572–1575), changing both name and activity and probably becoming a dance master. Back to Florence, wrote plays and published translations (1575–1586). A second trip to France is documented in 1579–1580. Often distressed because of economical reasons, by the end of his life his circumstances improved because of closer relations with Florentine nobility. Some register him as a Benedictine monk in 1584, but there is no real evidence for this. Died in Florence on 26 December 1588 and is buried in the church of Santa Croce. MARIA AGNESE CHIARI MORETTO WIEL Selected Works Treatises Il Riposo di R. B. in cui della pittura e della scultura si favella, de’ piu` illustri pittori e scultori e delle piu` famose opere loro si fa mentione, e le cose principali appartenenti a dette arti s’insegnano, 1584; as Il riposo, translated by L. H. Ellis, 2002.

Plays La donna costante, 1578. L’amante furioso, 1583. Diana pietosa, 1586.

Poetry ‘‘La veglia amorosa’’ 1565. ‘‘Canzone in morte della Serenissima Reina d’Austria Granduchessa di Toscana,’’ 1578. ‘‘Rime,’’ edited by Domenico Moreni, 1882.

Translations Trattato di Giovanni Marco Villa sopra l’Origine de’ Tempii de’ Giudei, de’ Cristiani e dei Gentili, e la infelice morte di quelli che gli hanno saccheggiati, spogliati e ruinati, 1577.

Further Reading Avanzini, Elena, Il Riposo di Raffaello Borghini e la critica d’arte nel Cinquecento, Milan: Gastaldi, 1960. Barocchi, Paola, Scritti d’arte del Cinquecento, Turin: Einaudi, 1977–1979. Blunt, Anthony, Artistic Theory in Italy, 1540–1600, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956. Ceserani, Remo, ‘‘Borghini, Raffaello,’’ in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, Rome: Istituto Enciclopedico Treccani, 12 (1970): 677–680. Ellis, L.H. Jr., Raffaello Borghini’s ‘‘ Il Riposo ’’: A Critical Study and Annotated Translation: Cleveland, OH: Case Western Reserve University, 2002.

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RAFFAELLO BORGHINI Ferroni, Giulio, ‘‘Le commedie di Raffaello Borghini,’’ in La rassegna della letteratura italiana, 78 (1969): 37–63. Geerts, Walter, Annick Paternoster, and Franco Pignatti (editors), Il sapere delle parole. Studi sul dialogo latino e italiano del Rinascimento, Rome: Bulzoni, 2001.

Rosci, Marco, introduction to Raffaello Borghini, Il riposo, 2 vols, Milan: Labor riproduzioni e documenti, 1967. Schlosser Magnino, Julius, Die Kunstliteratur (1924); as La letteratura artistica, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1977.

VINCENZIO MARIA BORGHINI (1515–1580) A leading figure in the Florence of Cosimo I, Borghini divided his time between the duties of administering the Spedale degli Innocenti (and other works of piety) and participation in the cultural life of the city, which saw him among the protagonists of a society still enjoying the splendor of the High Renaissance. With a solid classicist formation, and an excellent knowledge of Greek, the Benedictine monk, beginning in his youth, assured himself a constantly growing prestige with those whom he knew, and soon began to collaborate with the duke himself (and later grand duke) Cosimo de’ Medici, who made him one of the cornerstones of his cultural policy. In fact, Cosimo kept him bound to the exacting tasks of administration, but at the same time gave him rewards: in the literary circles toward which his most authentic callings drew him; and in the milieu of artists, for whom Borghini did not hesitate to acknowledge ‘‘singolare inclinazione e affezzione’’ (singular inclination and affection). From 1563 as the lieutenant of the ‘‘Accademia del disegno’’ (Academy of Drawing) that has its seat in the new sacristy of San Lorenzo, Borghini enjoyed final say and influence on the disputes and debates of the artists, and his activity as an inventore (inventor) was diverse: from his various interventions as a deviser of pictorial subjects, often in collaboration with his friend Giorgio Vasari (among others, the scenography of the Sala dei Cinquecento in the Palazzo Vecchio in 1565); the preparation of Michelangelo’s obsequies in 1564; the displays for the marriage of Prince Francesco and Giovanna d’Austria in 1565; the obsequies of the Grand Duke Cosimo himself in 1574. His industriousness in public celebrations and in apparati effimeri (ephemeral displays) developed 300

in parallel to his studies of and interests in antiquity and in the history of Florence’s origins: His activity as an inventore is a channel in which his erudition and his talents gradually found an outlet and concrete realization. On the other hand, the greater part of his writings—works that are long and laborious, meticulous and erudite, most often unfinished—was not published. This is noteworthy when we consider his friendship and collaboration with Florentine typographers. He wrote a letter to Filippo Giunta (in the Florence codex, Biblioteca Nazionale, Filze Rinuccini 21, 11) about an edition of Matteo Villani, an edition later printed for Giunta press. The edition of Michelangelo’s Esequie (Obsequies) was also published by Iacopo Giunta. With Torrentino, Borghini collaborates on an edition of Vasari’s Vite (Lives, 1550), compiling its illustrations. Later, Borghini continued to help Vasari in improving his grand biographical work until its publication by Giunta in 1568. In 1565, his debate with Girolamo Mei on the origins of Florence was important in countering the thesis that the city was rebuilt by the Longobards on a different site from that of Augustus’ ancient colony. Borghini demonstrated that Mei’s idea of a supposed refoundation by the Longobards was based on a forgery by Annio da Viterbo. It is believed that an early development of this correspondence with Mei prompted the idea for a short treatise on the mode of conducting literary polemics, a treatise that survives in manuscript (Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale, II.X.107), published in the nineteenth century with the title Dello scrivere contro alcuno (On Writing Against Someone). The composition was first begun between November and December of 1559, and remains in

VINCENZIO MARIA BORGHINI draft form. In this work, Borghini intends to formulate an etiquette of writing, or, better yet, a breviary of literary polemic, excluding the subject matters of satire and those of religious polemic. Borghini was concerned, among other things, with an argument close to his heart: his Florentine tongue, defended many times by those who are unqualified to do so—hence his accusations against Ludovico Dolce and Girolamo Ruscelli. He identifies the border that separates humanistic studies from those that conceal, on the other hand, personal attitudes unworthy of the high function of writing, and in this way become ‘‘studi di bestialita`’’ (studies of beastiality). We can see not only the originality of the theme, but also its timeliness, when we consider that the fierce polemic between Annibal Caro and Ludovico Castelvetro on the so-called canzone of the gigli d’oro had already broken out, in which many Italian literati participate, and about which, in 1559, Castelvetro published in Modena the contest’s final document, entitled Ragione d’alcune cose segnate nella canzone d’Annibal Caro (The Reason for Certain Things Recorded in the Canzone of Annibal Caro). The polemic with Mei, moreover, produced a decisive turning point in the historical studies of Borghini, whose antiquarian investigations are begun at the end of the 1540s with a vast work on the names and history of Roman families, and with a small treatise on the Conviti degli antichi (Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale, Strozzi XXVIII, 52; Feasts of the Ancients), and which are followed by studies on Florence in the high medieval period that served him well for the frescoes of the Palazzo Vecchio in 1565. He then developed his design for a history of Florence, from its origins through the times preceding the famous chronicles of fourteenth-century Florentine writers, with studies like the Trattato della chiesa e vescovi fiorentini (Treatise on the Church and Florentine Bishops), published in the posthumous Discorsi (Dicourses, 1584–1585); and he began to occupy himself with other historical disciplines: with coins, in Trattato sulle monete fiorentine (Treatise on Florentine Coins, 1577), and with heraldry, in particular with the escutcheons of the Florentine nobility. The last of the three books of his grand project foresaw a treatise on the language of Florence, on its origin, its characteristics, and the reasons it should not be contaminated by foreign tongues. In Borghini’s judgment, not only had Pietro Bembo not ‘‘compreso il tutto della lingua’’ (understood the language in its entirety), but Benedetto Varchi himself had been unequal to the task. The Trattato

della lingua (Treatise on the Language), planned as an appendix to the treatise on origins, began to be conceived as an autonomous treatise. It is based on the language of the fourteenth-century writers, and is open to the so-called minori (minor ones) as long as they are Florentine, to the vernacular editions, and to a wide range of documents, including domestic writings and family memoirs, which represent for Borghini ‘‘la lingua pura e propria del popolo’’ (the pure, true language of the people). Borghini’s great ability in linguistic matters had a foundation in his solid philological preparation. The ascertaining of the original reading, which he practiced in the school of Pier Vettori on Greek and Latin classical texts, was primary for Borghini, and demanded resorting to the manuscript tradition. It is not coincidental that it is precisely to the texts recommended by Bembo as models for prose—that is, Boccaccio’s Decameron and Giovanni Villani’s Cronaca—that Borghini dedicated his most difficult studies in the field of the vernacular: He was in fact the organizer of the grand philological undertaking at the basis of the edition of the Decameron (published in 1573), and prepared, without being able to publish it, the text of Villani’s Cronaca. The edition of the Decameron put back into circulation a work that according to the Roman Inquisition contains passages contrary to religion. The Inquisitors in Rome sent a copy with the incriminating passages to Duke Cosimo himself, who presided at a commission of Florentine men of letters, the so-called deputati alla rasettatura, which included Borghini himself. The deputati, with Borghini at their head, exploited this chance to revise the manuscript tradition of Boccaccio’s work, so that, although producing a severely altered text, they improved the readings of the vulgata (vulgate), making use especially of the oldest manuscripts and particularly of the one they called l’ottimo (the very best), which is to say the manuscript transcribed in 1378 by Francesco d’Amaretto Mannelli. The endeavor of Borghini and the deputati is documented by a book entitled Annotazioni et discorsi sopra alcuni luoghi del Decameron (Annotations and Discourses on Some Places of the Decameron, 1574), that is in fact a philological commentary on the text. Borghini refused, on the subject of language, to accept fixed norms, and therefore conceived that the work of restoration as well cannot obey rigid rules. However, while he worked on Villani and on the Decameron, he had the idea of gathering his approach on the ways of emending ancient texts, and in particular on the problem of the choice of 301

VINCENZIO MARIA BORGHINI the best manuscripts and of the recognition of a good reading: ‘‘che regola ci ha da conoscere la miglior lezione dalla men buona o pure autorita` da risolversene’’ (what rule there is to know the better reading from the worse one, or else what authority to resolve it). Once again, a completed book does not emerge, but rather a work halfway between a responding letter (addressed to an unnamed friend) and a short treatise, of which we have the autograph manuscript, and which has been published in modern times under the title Lettera intorno a’ manoscritti antichi (Letter on Ancient Manuscripts, 1995). It is a short treatise of Italian philology, and as such it is unique among Italian studies on philological method in the sixteenth century and for long afterwards. At the end of the nineteenth century, there appeared the studies of Michele Barbi, whose nuova filologia (new philology), fundamental for the textual studies of the twentieth century, has strict presuppositions in Borghini’s philology.

Biography The fourth son of Domenico and of Mattea di Agnolo Capponi is born on October 29, 1515. He dons the Benedictine habit in the Abbey of Florence in 1531. He studies in the Benedictine abbeys, and primarily in the Florentine Abbey: among his teachers are Francesco Verino the elder, Chirico Strozzi, and Francesco Zeffi. But his most important teacher is the great philologist Pier Vettori, who from 1538 on is lector of Greek and Latin in the Florentine studio, and with whom the young Borghini collaborates on the publication of classical texts. In 1539, he visits with his abbot the Benedictine monasteries of southern Italy during a long trip, in the course of which he meets Pope Paul III with his cardinals, among whom is Gaspare Contarini, a protector of the Benedictine Order. In 1541, he is ordained a deacon and moves from the Florentine abbey to the abbey of San Fiore d’Arezzo. In 1542, he is temporarily moved to the monastery of San Benedetto in Mantova, where he teaches Greek, and in 1544 he is in Venice, where he stocks up on books. In 1553, he assumes the post of Spedalingo degli Innocenti, a position he maintains for his entire life, and which will occupy much of his time. In 1563, he inaugurates the Accademia del Disegno, of which he is named lieutenant. In the first months of 1571, he works on the correction of the manuscript of the Decameron. By order of Cosimo, the Florentine academicians chosen to compile the ‘‘regole della lingua toscana’’ (rules of the Tuscan language) consult with Borghini and with Giovan 302

Battista Adriani on everything. On June 22, 1574, he writes his testament, and is able to make a will— subject to papal permission—in favor of his nieces, Baccia and Maria, the daughters of his brother Lorenzo. He dies on August 15, 1580, in Florence, where he has a tomb in the church of the Spedale degli Innocenti. In the papers of the Florentine notary Raffaello Eschini, there survives an inventory, composed after his death, of his books and goods (unpublished in its entirety). GINO BELLONI Selected Works Collections Raccolta di prose fiorentine. Parte Quarta. Volume quarto contenente lettere, Florence: Stamperia Ducale, Tartini e Franchi, 1745. Scritti inediti o rari sulla lingua, edited by John R. Woodhouse, Bologna: Commissione dei testi di lingua, 1971. Vincenzio Borghini dall’erudizione alla filologia. Una raccolta di testi, edited by Gino Belloni, Pescara: Libreria dell’Universita` editrice, 1998.

Philological Writings Annotazioni, 1574; Le Annotazioni e i Discorsi sul Decameron del 1573 dei Deputati Fiorentini, edited by Giuseppe Chiecchi, 2001. Lettera intorno a’ manoscritti antichi, edited by Gino Belloni, 1995. Annotazioni sopra Giovanni Villani, edited by Riccardo Drusi, 2001.

Historical Treatises Discorsi recati in luce da’ Deputati per suo testamento, 2 vols., 1584–1585. Storia della nobilta` fiorentina, edited by John R. Woodhouse, 1974.

Other Dello scrivere contro alcuno. Discorso inedito di V. Borghini, edited by Giuseppe Aiazzi, 1841; rpt. in Opuscoli inediti e rari di classici ed approvati scrittori, vol. 1, 1844. Ruscelleide, ovvero Dante difeso dalle accuse di G. Ruscelli, edited by Carlo Arlia, 2 vols., 1898. Considerazioni sopra l’allogare le donne degli Innocenti, fuori dal maritare o monacare, edited by Giorgio Bruscoli, 1904. Ricordi intorno alla sua vita, edited by Antonio Lorenzoni, 1909. Carteggio artistico inedito, edited by Antonio Lorenzoni, 1912. Il Carteggio di V.B., vol. I (1541–1552), edited by Daniela Francalanci, Franca Pellegrini, and Eliana Carrara, 2001.

Further Reading Barbi, Michele, ‘‘Degli studi di Vincenzio Borghini sopra la storia e la lingua di Firenze,’’ in Il Propugnatore, new

POGGIO BRACCIOLINI series, 2 (1889): 87–131; rpt. in Vincenzio Borghini dall’erudizione alla filologia. Una raccolta di testi, edited by Gino Belloni, Pescara: Libreria dell’Universita` editrice, 1998. Belloni, Gino, ‘‘Borghini. Dello scrivere contro altrui: un abbozzo di galateo per lapolemica letteraria,’’ in Bufere e molli aurette. Polemiche letterarie dallo Stilnovo alla ‘Voce,’ edited by Maria Grazia Pensa, Milan: Guerini, 1996. Belloni, Gino, ‘‘Notizia di un nuovo documento per la biblioteca del Borghini,’’ in Il filodella ragione. Studi e testimonianze per Sergio Romagnoli, edited by Enrico Ghidetti e Roberta Turchi, Venice: Marsilio, 1999. Belloni, Gino, and Riccardo Drusi (editors), Vincenzio Borghini. Filologia e invenzionenella Firenze di Cosimo I, Florence: Olschki, 2002. Bertoli, Gustavo, ‘‘I quaderni storico-linguistici di Vincenzio Borghini,’’ in Giornale storico della letteratura italiana,’’ 176 (1999): 85–93.

Bertoli, Gustavo, and Riccardo Drusi (editors), Fra lo «Spedale» e il Principe. Vincenzio Borghini. Filologia e invenzione nella Firenze di Cosimo I. Atti del Convegno (Firenze 21–22 Marzo 2002), Padua: il Poligrafo, 2005. Folena, Gianfranco, ‘‘Borghini Vincenzio,’’ in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 12, Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 1970. Gigli, Ottavio (editor), Studi sulla ‘Divina Commedia’ di Galileo Galilei, Vincenzo Borghini e altri, Florence: Le Monner, 1855. Legrenzi, Ada, Vincenzo Borghini. Studio critico, Udine: Del Bianco, 1910. Pozzi, Mario, Lingua e cultura del Cinquecento. Dolce, Aretino, Machiavelli,Guicciardini, Sarpi, Borghini, Padua: Liviana, 1975. Tapella, Claudia, and Mario Pozzi, ‘‘L’edizione del ‘Decameron’ del 1573: lettere edocumenti della rassettatura,’’ in Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 165 (1988): 54–84, 196–226, 366–398, 511–544.

POGGIO BRACCIOLINI (1380–1459) Like many other Humanists of his time, Poggio Bracciolini owed his fame to treatises, dialogues, and letters as much as to his own biography. Praised first and foremost for his role as a restitutor antiquitatis (meaning at once he who ‘‘returns to’’ and ‘‘restores’’ the ancient past), Bracciolini’s life is so exemplary that it has often overshadowed his literary merits. Undoubtedly, the accounts regarding his enthusiastic recovery of hitherto unknown masterpieces of classical literature embody all too perfectly those pioneering qualities that were attributed to Humanism as a whole. In connection with his discoveries, Bracciolini rejected Gothic bookhand and invented a new graphic system drawn from elements of Carolingian script, which is an antecedent of contemporary Roman type. Bracciolini’s lifelong quest led him through the monasteries and abbeys of Italy, Germany, Switzerland, and France where he discovered, among others, works by Cicero, Lucretius, Valerius Flaccus, and the complete text of Quintilian’s Institutiones Oratoriae. However, this yearning for rare manuscripts should not be seen as the only significant aspect of his life. Bracciolini also witnessed the decline and end of that first golden age of cultural rebirth, which took place in Florence between the

last decades of the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth century. Over the course of his life Bracciolini mourned, one by one, the deaths of his mentors and chief interlocutors—among them, Coluccio Salutati, Leonardo Bruni, and Niccolo` Niccoli—and proudly, albeit unsuccessfully, resisted the methodological suggestions advanced by the upcoming generation of Humanists. Absorbed as he was by practical missions (his journeys and duties as secretary to several popes), Bracciolini began circulating his ideas in written form at a mature age. Taken singularly, his works touched upon most of the subjects that were debated in his own time. One of the first and most notable is certainly the dialogue De avaritia (On Avarice), which he sent to the Venetian senator and Humanist Francesco Barbaro in 1428. In this work, differing views regarding the topical subject of human greed were argued in utramque partem (on both sides of the question) according to the best norms of Renaissance moral dialogues. While rehashing many of the commonplaces concerning the theme of avarice, Bracciolini had one of his characters, Antonio Loschi, present a firm and quite novel defense of capitalist acquisition. Together with the more elaborated ideas developed in Leon Battista Alberti’s I Libri della Famiglia 303

POGGIO BRACCIOLINI (The Family in Renaissance Florence, 1433–1441), Antonio’s words represented a definitive acknowledgment of the shift of values that went hand in hand with the rise of a mercantile society. In the De avaritia, Antonio affirms that everyone, even children, desire money and this proves that such a yearning is natural to human beings. Avarice, which in the character’s words is taken to define an appropriate approach to civic life rather than a mere vice, is thus identified as the true force spurring both practical labor and intellectual activity. Bracciolini’s dialogue sets the standard for a moral philosophy the terms of which are no longer dictated by either religious or philosophical doctrines, but rather by a sound and appreciative observation of social life. Qui enim sunt isti qui publicum quaerant bonum seposito privato emolumento? Ego ad hunc diem neminem cognovi, qui id quidem posset impune. Dicuntur eiusmodi nonnulla a philosophis de praeponenda utilitate communi magis speciose quam vere. Sed vita mortalium non est exigenda nobis ad statheram philosophiae. Who, in fact, are those who setting aside their private advantage go after the public good? Up until this day I have not met anyone who could afford to do this. The philosophers maintain something of this kind, namely that the common use should take precedence over one’s own, but this is more of a pretended argument than a true one. We cannot weigh human life with the scale of philosophy.

Bracciolini’s relativistic approach to the definition of human virtue—an interest that is fully elaborated in the dialogue De Vera Nobilitate (On True Nobility, 1440)—was coterminous with his attack upon the ascetic values advocated in those very same years by religious preachers such as Bernardino of Siena (1380–1444). If read within the social and economic framework of the De Avaritia, Bracciolini’s criticism of the existential model advanced by the observants emerges as an updated restatement, in terms of the opposition between poverty and wealth, of the medieval dispute over the relative merits of the active and the contemplative life. Bracciolini’s moral philosophy found ready application in later attempts to define human virtue within a societal and urban context as, for example, in the work of Giovanni Pontano. Later, in his Contra hypocritas (Against Hypocrites, 1447–1448), Bracciolini developed the antimonastic and anticlerical sentiments first adumbrated in the dialogue on avarice. Such an indictment of those who preach the withdrawal from civic life was made in a tone at once sardonic and 304

injuriously polemical that Bracciolini contributed to legitimize as a viable form of expression and for which he would be criticized by, among others, Erasmus of Rotterdam. In view of Bracciolini’s celebration of every aspect of active life, the De Avaritia and the Contra hypocritas delineated a moral philosophy that was reminiscent of Lorenzo Valla’s Christian Epicureanism: an ethos in which the principles of Christian charity were assimilated to the values inherent to secular life. Bracciolini’s conclusions are less surprising if one considers that his views must have been greatly influenced by his reading of Lucretius’ De rerum natura, a text that he himself had rediscovered. The salacious language and the criticism of contemporaries found in the Contra hypocritas is also at the basis of the work that made Bracciolini internationally known and turned him into an unchallenged model for satirical writing: His notorious Facetiae, a term that can be translated as ‘‘witticisms’’ or ‘‘jests,’’ written between 1438 and 1452. The anecdotes and short stories that comprise the collection lay bare the fallibility and ludicrous nature of human beings. Even though the clergy is reserved a special treatment, Bracciolini’s insightful eye considers every possible human typology. While the Facetiae were soon translated into the vernacular, Bracciolini himself asserted in his preface to the collection that he meant to prove that Latin could be made to accommodate a subject as base as his. The straightforward nature of his language, which never shies away from calling things by their proper name, is definitely part of the background of any polemical discourse against the linguistic abstruseness of the literati up until and including Pietro Aretino and Giordano Bruno. The Humanist who could so skillfully portray the essence of human existence was also the author of a series of pessimistic works such as De infelicitate principum (On the Unhappiness of Princes, 1440), De varietate fortunae (On the Vicissitude of Fortune, 1448), and De miseria humanae condicionis (On the Misery of the Human Condition, 1455). In these later works the vicissitudes that Bracciolini himself had pointed out as being at the basis of human existence led him to less celebratory conclusions. Bracciolini’s surliness, however, was not merely a pose struck in order to reject what he had accepted as an essential part of human earthly experience. Rather, his pessimism should be interpreted as the reaction of an older man who, throughout his entire life, made it his priority to take in and elaborate as many aspects of the social

POGGIO BRACCIOLINI world as possible. Certainly, Bracciolini was also motivated to write these dialogues by the negative example set by the Roman Curia under the pontificate of Eugenius IV. Among these works, the most significant is probably De varietate fortunae, in which Bracciolini explores the topography of ancient Rome by strolling through the city’s ruins. As had been the case for Petrarch, the visit leads him to considerations regarding the power of fortune and the objective causes of the decline of ancient majesty. These musings give way in books II and III to contemporary history, evidence of an interest for historiography that Bracciolini also developed in a work that he never brought to completion, the Historiae Florentini populi (History of the Florentine People), later translated into Italian by his son Jacopo as Historia fiorentina (History of Florence, 1476). Of particular significance, finally, is the last book of De varietate fortunae, in which the disquisition on fate is now continued by Niccolo` de’ Conti, a traveler through whose eyes Bracciolini described exotic India. In addition to his dialogues, Bracciolini is a crucial figure for our understanding of the fifteenth century because of his vast corpus of letters as well as a series of polemical texts and invectives. In these works, which should be read alongside those penned by his adversaries, Bracciolini engaged in fierce controversies with some illustrious contemporaries such as Guarino Veronese (1374–1460) and Francesco Filelfo (1398–1481), and most notably with Lorenzo Valla (1407–1457) over the approach to ancient texts, authors, and their language. His controversy with Valla, in which he defended the authorities of the classical period from the intrusion of the new philological science, gave Bracciolini the label of conservative and reactionary. In truth, he was the last representative of a world that also owed its decline to the force of the individualism that he defended.

Biography Born in Terranuova (Arezzo) in the Arno Valley on February 11, 1380; received his first education in Arezzo before moving to Florence and training as a notary. Moved to Rome in 1403 where through the mediation of Coluccio Salutati he was employed as a scribe in the papal curia. Worked for Popes Boniface IX, Innocent VII, and Gregory XII as well as the antipopes of the Pisan party Alexander V and John XXIII, the latter of which appointed

him apostolic secretary. After the deposition of Pope John at the Council of Constance in 1415, Bracciolini remained in Germany looking for rare manuscripts of classical works, traveling then also to Switzerland and France. Between 1418 and 1423 he lived in England and worked for the bishop of Winchester, Henry Beaufort. Returning to Rome as apostolic secretary to Martin V, he worked for the Roman Curia until 1453, when he moved to Florence and succeeded Carlo Marsuppini as the city’s chancellor. Died in Florence on October 30, 1459. ROCCO RUBINI See also: Humanism Selected Works Collections Opera omnia, edited by Riccardo Fubini, 4 vols., Turin: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1964–1969.

Dialogues De avaritia, 1428. De Infelicitate Principum, 1440. De Vera Nobilitate, 1440. Contra hypocritas, 1447–1448. De Varietate Fortunae, 1448. Facetiae, 1452; as The Facetiae, translated by Bernhardt J. Hurwood, 1968. De miseria humanae condicionis, 1455.

Historical Works Historia fiorentina di Messer Poggio, 1476.

Other Lettere, edited by Helene Harth, 3 vols., 1984–1987. La Controversia di Poggio Bracciolini e Guarino Veronese su Cesare e Scipione, edited by Davide Canfora, 2001.

Further Reading Bisanti, Armando, ‘‘Dall’‘exemplum’ alla facezia: L’apologo dell’asino,’’ in Esperienze letterarie, 19, no. 3 (1994): 37–50. Bradley, Dennis R., ‘‘Poggio’s Noble Dialogue: Textual Variations in Three Early Printed Editions,’’ in Renaissance Quarterly, 8, no. 1 (1994): 1–12. Castelli, Patrizia (editor), Poggio Bracciolini, un toscano del ’400 (1380–1459), Arezzo: Sant’Agnese, 1980. Flores, Enrico, Le scoperte di Poggio e il testo di Lucrezio, Naples: Liguori, 1980. Fubini, Riccardo, Umanesimo e secolarizzazione da Petrarca a Valla, Rome: Bulzoni, 1990. Marsh, David, The Quattrocento Dialogue: Classical Tradition and Humanist Innovation, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980.

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POGGIO BRACCIOLINI Oppel, John W. ‘‘Poggio, S. Bernardino of Siena, and the Dialogue on Avarice,’’ in Renaissance Quarterly, 30, no. 4 (1977): 564–587. Poggio Bracciolini, 1380–1980: Nel VI centenario della nascita, Florence: Sansoni Editore, 1982. Struever, Nancy S., The Language of History in the Renaissance. Rhetoric and Historical Consciousness in

Florentine Humanism, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970. Ullman, Berthold L., The Origin and Development of Humanistic Script, Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1960

ROBERTO BRACCO (1861–1943) Roberto Bracco was a poet, short-story writer, playwright, critic, musicologist, and journalist. A complex personality, he had intense relations with such intellectuals as Marco Praga, Renato Simoni, and Lucio D’Ambra. Through his theatrical and musical criticism, Bracco also contributed to the diffusion of Ibsen’s theater in Italy and helped overcome the hostility against Wagner, especially in Naples. He was the author of several successful popular songs (often written upon request or in response to a current fashion), including ‘‘Salamelic’’ (1882), which he wrote for the Piedigrotta Festival at Martino Cafiero’s request, ‘‘La frangetta’’ (1884), ‘‘Come te voglio ama`’’ (1887). He wrote verses in Neapolitan dialect, dealing with the themes of love, social matters, oddities (the bicycle), current events (the war of Africa). He even wrote duet scenes or tragicomic fantasias with a clear theatrical structure. An original and nonconformist writer, he was attracted, in both his journalistic writings and in his literary works, by such matters as spiritualism, women, the animal kingdom, and by social and moral themes, such as the celibacy of priests, which he addressed both in a text published in volume 25 of Opere (Works, 1935–1938), the author’s complete works, and in Il piccolo santo (The Little Saint, 1910), one of his best-known works. In Il piccolo santo, the protagonist Don Fiorenzo, a priest-saint, tries to suppress his feelings for the young Annita, but Barbarello, an insane young man, acting on thoughts the priest has not confessed to himself, kills Don Fiorenzo’s brother Guido, to whom Annita is engaged. Bracco also won great theatrical acclaim with works such as Infedele (Unfaithful, 1895), in which the protagonist, Clara, who, though faithful 306

and in love with her husband, is unwilling to abdicate her freedom. She avenges all the wrongs she has suffered by making fun of her husband and her several suitors. The title character of Don Pietro Caruso (1895), memorably interpreted by the great actor Ermete Zacconi, is a shady and deceitful fellow, but also a loving father and protector of his only daughter. He commits suicide when he feels responsible for the negative example he has given her. The protagonists of Sperduti nel buio (Lost in Darkness, 1901) are two foundlings, Pauline and Nunzio, who, in a shady and disreputable Naples, suffer abuses and degradation. The work of Bracco’s full artistic maturity was I pazzi (The Madmen, 1922), dealing with madness and the uncertain boundary between sanity and insanity, a frequent theme in the early twentieth century’s theater, especially in Pirandello. Notwithstanding the success of his works, Bracco was an outsider in Naples, which seemed to him the last outpost before the desert. Unhappy with himself and with the world of the theater, he often burned or wished to burn his plays, despite being one of the most translated and staged playwrights outside Italy, known even in America, where one of his most famous works, Infedele, was performed in New York to great acclaim. This strong feeling of exclusion pervades his texts, and led to the revision of his entire corpus, the last edition of which, for the publisher Carabba (1935–1938), was edited by himself. His drama belonged to the neoidealistic and Ibsenian current that spread throughout Italy at the end of the nineteenth century. His constant search for new cultural themes and tendencies spurred him to welcome enthusiastically the new experiences of the twentieth century, even anticipating the

ROBERTO BRACCO psychoanalytic and surrealist theater. To Bracco, the theater was a valid medium for representing the reality of human emotion. There was a strong link between his narrative and theatrical productions: Many short stories were sketches for future plays and in them, as in the theater, tragic and humorous elements, sometimes eccentrically burlesque, alternated. The title of his two 1909 short story collections, Smorfie gaie (Cheerful Grimaces) and Smorfie tristi (Cheerless Grimaces), confirmed this double intent, where the grimace is the grotesque deformation of the truth. Interested in novelties, he could not be indifferent to the invention of silent films. In 1914, he consented to the cinema version of his drama Sperduti nel buio, directed by Nino Martoglio and starring Gianni Grasso and Maria Carmi. During the next decade, several of Bracco’s plays were adapted, including Don Pietro Caruso (1916), La piccola fonte (1917), Il perfetto amore, 1918), and Il piccolo santo (1920). Friends with such actresses as Adelaide Ristori, Eleonora Duse, Tina Di Lorenzo, Irma and Emma Grammatica, and actors such as Ermete Novelli and Ermete Zacconi, he had strong relationships with such intellectuals as Gabriele D’Annunzio, Salvatore Di Giacomo, Ferdinando Russo, and Luigi Pirandello. He was friends with Raffaele Viviani and Peppino De Filippo, and strongly appreciated by Matilde Serao, who wrote the preface to an anthology of Bracco’s texts, Col permesso del babbo (With Daddy’s Permission, 1926). Due to Fascist persecution, his texts, in the last years of his life, were censored.

Biography The date of Bracco’s birth is uncertain; Bracco himself did not clarify the several hypotheses and gave the date as ‘‘Naples, 1861,’’ without indicating the day. Son of Achille and Rosa De Ruggiero, who belonged to a noble family. Self-taught; at 17 the manager of Il mattino d’Italia, Martino Cafiero, invited him to contribute to the newspaper. Wrote under the pseudonym of Baby. Also wrote for Il corriere del Mezzogiorno, Capitan Fracassa, Il piccolo, and Il corriere di Napoli. In 1914, at the age of 56, married 20-year-old Laura Del Vecchio. In 1924, joined the ‘‘Unione nazionale’’ of Giovanni Amendola in opposition to Fascism, and was later persecuted and boycotted for his political position. After refusing an allowance the Fascist government

had offered him, retired to Sorrento, where he died on 20 April 1943. ANTONIA LEZZA Selected Works Collections Col permesso del babbo: versi dialettali, teatro, novelle, scritti vari, Palermo: R. Sandron, 1926. Opere, 25 vols., Lanciano: Carabba, 1935–1938.

Plays Infedele, 1895. Don Pietro Caruso, 1895; as Don Pietro Caruso, translated by Carl A. Swanson, 1948. Maschere: dramma in un atto; Le disilluse: fiaba in un atto per marionette, 1896. Uno degli onesti, 1900. Il diritto di vivere, 1900. Sperduti nel buio, 1901. La piccola fonte, 1906. Il piccolo santo, 1910. Il perfetto amore, 1913. I pazzi, 1922.

Fiction Il diritto dell’amore, 1898. Smorfie umane, 1906. Smorfie gaie, 1909. smorfie tristi, 1909.

Poetry ‘‘Vecchi versetti,’’ 1910. ‘‘Versi napoletani: con postille, glossario e una chiaccherata dell’autore; poi Pulcinella innamorato,’’ 1939.

Essays Frottole di baby, 1881. Spiritismo di baby, 1886. Donne, 1893. Lo spiritismo a Napoli nel 1886, 1907. Tra le arti e gli artisti, 1919. Tra gli uomini e le cose, 1921. Tra i due sessi. Fioretti di esperienza, 1921.

Letters Lettere a Laura, edited by Pasquale Iaccio, 1994. Roberto Bracco e la societa` teatrale fra Ottocento e Novecento: lettere inedite a Stanislao Manca, Adolfo Re Riccardi, Luigi Rasi, Francesco Pasta, edited by Antonella Di Nallo, 2003.

Further Reading Brunetta, Gian Piero, Storia del cinema italiano 1895–1945, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1979. Croce, Benedetto, La letteratura della nuova Italia, vol. 6, Bari: Laterza, 1945. Frascani, Federico, ‘‘Riflessioni in un cinquantenario: la parte viva del teatro di Roberto Bracco,’’ in Misure critiche, 88–89 (1993–1994): 139–149.

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ROBERTO BRACCO Giovanelli, Paola Daniela, ‘‘...i posteri sapranno che siamo stati amici.’’ Lettere di Roberto Bracco a Sabatino Lopez e Dario Niccodemi, Marano di Napoli: GraficArte, 2002. Gobetti, Piero, Scritti di critica teatrale, Turin: Einaudi, 1974. Iaccio, Pasquale, L’intellettuale intransigente. Il fascismo e Roberto Bracco, Naples: Guida, 1992. Kuitunen, Maddalena, ‘‘Ibsen and the Theatre of Roberto Bracco,’’ in Petrarch to Pirandello: Studies in Italian Literature in Honour of Beatrice Corrigan, edited by Julius Molinaro, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973. Lezza, Antonia, ‘‘La casa editrice Carabba e la cultura italiana ed europea tra Ottocento e Novecento,’’ in

La casa editrice Carabba e la cultura del Novecento, edited by Gianni Oliva, Rome: Bulzoni Editori, 1999. Palomba, Salvatore, La canzone napoletana. La storia, i testi, gli autori, Naples: L’a`ncora del Mediterraneo, 2001. Pedulla`, Gianfranco, Il teatro italiano nel tempo del fascismo, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1994. Salsano, Roberto, Intrighi e dissonanze: sondaggi critici e percorsi di lettura in Bracco novelliere, Citta` di Castello: Edimond, 2002. Stau¨ble, Antonio, Tra Ottocento e Novecento: il teatro di Roberto Bracco, Turin: ILTE, 1959. Venditti, Mario, Roberto Bracco, Naples: Marotta, 1962.

VITALIANO BRANCATI (1907–1954) A vital link between the tradition of nineteenthcentury verismo and the generation of Leonardo Sciascia, Vitaliano Brancati was a key transitional figure in the evolution of contemporary Sicilian literature. A writer of short stories, novels, essays, plays, and film scripts, he began his literary career as a follower of Gabriele D’Annunzio. In his youth he adhered to Fascism, deluding himself that the regime would help Sicily out of its inertia. His early works, in which Brancati favored drama, are to be understood in this context. The play Fedor (1928), for instance, is a ‘‘myth’’ whose protagonists are, metaphorically, D’Annunzio and Fascism. In the play, Prometheus orders the sculptor Fedor to make a series of statues of the Titans to place at the summit of several mountains. In the name of art, Fedor renounces his life and discovers too late that he has made a mistake. The play exalts strength and vitality, in accordance with the demands of the Fascist regime. Brancati’s encounter in 1930 with Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, perhaps the critic who best understood his psychology and work, constituted a turning point in his intellectual maturation. Borgese sowed the seeds of doubt in the mind of the young Fascist playwright, who rose above his D’Annunzian apprenticeship to conceive a radically new approach to writing in which the example of the veristi played a notable part. Abandoning every illusion, he developed a skeptical and pessimistic worldview. He translated this pessimism narratively into the atmosphere of death and corruption that 308

pervades much of his fiction, in which he implacably describes the decline of the contemporary bourgeoisie. After his youthful enthusiasm, Brancati no longer believed either in the myth of ‘‘progress’’ or in the church. He transformed himself into a radical heretic, a critic who suspected every dogmatic institution (political or ecclesiastical) and supported liberal views. Brancati’s fiction now focused on a Sicily filled with ambitious and foolish ‘‘Don Juans,’’ failed rakes defeated by life who live in a world of sensual fantasies, and amazing, erotic adventures (the so-called Italian ‘‘gallismo’’). In a Catania beaten by the sirocco, which numbs and blocks all vital impulses, his characters often fall into a condition of total inertia, metaphorically represented by long afternoon siestas and by vain gossip, the sole subject of which is women. The characters’ murky eroticism, which is expressed only on the level of fantasy, is seen as the manifestation of a Mediterranean sensuality that is closely intertwined with a fatal sense of imminent death. The protagonists of Brancati’s works are thus unable to carry out actual transgressions (even their desire to escape to the North ends in failure when put into practice), and their main ambition is to live a ‘‘normal’’ and conformist life. Brancati’s characters cannot really communicate with others. Living on dreams on which they were incapable of acting, they represent the soul of the Sicilians. When he had written his thesis on Federico De Roberto (1861–1927) for his university degree in

VITALIANO BRANCATI 1929, Brancati had criticized the static conception of history expressed in I vicere´ (The Viceroys, 1894), one of the most important works of Italian verismo. He completely reversed himself in his later years when he contributed to the antibourgeoisie and anticonformist debate and compared himself with another master of verismo, Giovanni Verga. He looked at turn-of-the-century literature with a growing sense of nostalgia, and completely identified with the realist and skeptical tradition. His style shifted from the D’Annunzian pomposity of his youth to a more careful and synthetic prose, and he attempted to reach the extreme essentiality of Verga. For this reason, he disowned his early works, and placed himself in that ‘‘impure,’’ demystifying, and materialistic line that makes the literary history of Sicily unique, up to and including Leonardo Sciascia and Andrea Camilleri. When Brancati abandoned Fascism in 1934, he started to write the first novel that he did not repudiate in his later years: Gli anni perduti (The Lost Years, 1941). The novel represents a group of bored, young noblemen in Catania, tired of both the Fascist regime and D’Annunzianism, who devote their energies to building a tower. In the end, their project fails and its originator, Buscaino, is forced to leave the city. The plot, which emphasizes the Southern aristocratic and petty bourgeois incapacity for action, was a turning point in Brancati’s career. The same theme reoccurs in Sogno di un valzer (Dream of a Waltz, 1938), the story of Ottavio Carruba, a defrocked priest who is charged with organizing a ball in the Sicilian city of Caltanissetta and in the end is assassinated. Don Giovanni in Sicilia (Don Juan in Sicily, 1941), the grotesque story of Giovanni Percolla, a 40-year-old man from Catania who is roused from his inertia after his marriage to the Florentine Ninetta, was Brancati’s most successful attempt at a ‘‘comic’’ novel (it was also made into a film directed by Alberto Lattuada in 1967). When he moved to Milan, Giovanni underwent another metamorphosis, or at least he appeared to conform perfectly to the industrial city. But when he returned to Sicily he fell once more into a deep depression, as if his return to his homeland had brought his authentic character back to the surface. The comedy of the novel lies in its parodic overturning of every form of heroism and in the bizarre figures that crowd Fascist Catania, all condemned to a grey, monotonous existence with no possibility of escape. Paradoxically, the female characters display a greater practical

sense and energy, even though Brancati appears to favour a male (and aristocratic) point of view in his works. Not by chance, Brancati returned to the ‘‘myth’’ of Don Juan, turning the character once again into an ambitious fool in Don Giovanni involontario (The Involuntary Don Juan, 1943). The decadence of the nobility was described in a muted way in Il vecchio con gli stivali (The Old Man in Boots, 1946). Its protagonist is Aldo Piscitello, a clerk who was forced to become a party member during the Fascist era in order to keep his job. After the fall of the regime the mayor, a true Fascist, fires him for political reasons. In the society represented by Brancati, there is no space for redemption and the sufferings caused by Fascism have not taught anything. Brancati’s works for the theater suffered from the censure of the Fascist regime and, after the war, the hostility of the church: Indeed, a number of scenes had to be deleted when his play Raffaele (1946) was first staged. Political satire is present also in some other of Brancati’s later theatrical works, such as Questo matrimonio si deve fare (This Marriage Must Happen, 1936), the story of Pierina Monelli who, in order not to marry the extremely powerful Paolo Pannocchietti, prefers to remain a spinster. In other dramas, such as the gloomy La governante (The Governess, 1952), in which the Calvinist Caterina Leher conceals that fact that she is a lesbian behind an apparently rigid morality, Brancati revisits the theme of the hidden tensions behind the fac¸ade of bourgeois society. In the end, everything goes back to its initial state, with the privileged and the ‘‘astute’’ returning to their places of command. The bitter metaphoric situation of Paolo Castorina, the protagonist of Brancati’s last, unfinished novel Paolo il caldo (Paolo the Hot, 1955) presents familiar themes through the perspective of the author’s concerns about postwar Italy. In order to escape from an existence of increasing boredom, Castorina lives in a state of growing anxiety fed by an overactive sensuality. The novel also testifies to a crisis of faith in reason, which now appears unable to affirm itself in the triumph of sensuality. Above all, it demonstrates the disappointment of the writer faced with Italian society of the 1950s, a society characterized by a Ritorno alla Censura (Return to Censorship, 1952), as he had put it in the title of a polemical pamphlet, and by the victory of the most bigoted form of clericalism. Nor could Brancati find consolation in Communism, like 309

VITALIANO BRANCATI many other Italian intellectuals did, as he considered it as inimical to freedom as Fascism itself.

Il bell’ Antonio, 1949; as Bell’Antonio, translated by Stanley Hochman, 1978. Paolo il caldo, 1955.

Biography

Plays

Born in Pachino (Siracusa) on 24 July 1907; his father was a fairly rich lawyer. Spent the first years of his life in Sicily where he became close to his paternal grandfather, while experiencing difficult relations with his mother; attended the ‘‘Liceo Ginnasio’’ in Modica with excellent results; moved to Catania, 1920; joined the Fascist Party, February, 1922; university degree in literary studies with a thesis on Federico De Roberto, 1929; moved to Rome and became a collaborator of the newspaper Il Tevere, 1929; met Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, 1930, and Benito Mussolini, 1931. His novel Singolare avventura di viaggio was hindered by censorship, 1934; returned to Sicily and taught in Caltanissetta, 1934; returned to Rome, 1941, where he met the actress Anna Proclemer; married Proclemer, 22 July 1946; after World War II, retired from teaching and worked for several periodicals including L’europeo, Cronache, and Il corriere della sera; daughter Antonia was born, 1947; met Benedetto Croce, 1947; worked as scriptwriter, 1947–1954; awarded the Bagutta prize for Il bell’Antonio, 1949; separated from Proclemer, 1953. Died in Turin on 25 September 1954 during surgery to remove a cyst. ALFREDO SGROI Selected Works Collections Teatroi, Milan: Bompiani, 1957. Opere, edited by Angelo Guglielmi, Milan: Bompiani, 1974. Opere 1932–1946, edited by Leonardo Sciascia, Milan: Bompiani, 1987. Opere 1947–1954, edited by Leonardo Sciascia, Milan: Bompiani, 1992. Tutti i racconti, edited by Domenica Perrone, Milan: Bompiani, 1994. Romanzi e saggi, edited by Marco Dondero, Milan: Mondadori, 2003. Racconti, teatro, scritti giornalistici, edited by Marco Dondero, Milan: Mondadori, 2003.

Novels L’amico del vincitore, 1932. Singolare avventura di viaggio, 1934. Sogno di un valzer, 1938. In cerca di un sı`, 1939. Don Giovanni in Sicilia, 1941. Gli anni perduti, 1941; as The Lost Years, translated by Patrick Creagh, 1992. Il vecchio con gli stivali, 1945.

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Fedor, 1928. Everest, 1931. Piave, 1932. Questo matrimonio si deve fare, 1936. Don Giovanni involontario, 1943. Raffaele, 1946. La governante, 1952.

Essays I piaceri: (parole all’orecchio), 1943. I fascisti invecchiano, 1946. Ritorno alla censura, 1952. Le due dittature, 1952. Diario romano, edited by Sandro De Feo and Giovanni Antonio Cibotto, 1961. Il borghese e l’immensita`: scritti 1930–1954, edited by Sandro De Feo and Giovanni Antonio Cibotto, 1973. De Roberto e dintorni, edited by Rita Verdirame, 1988.

Letters Lettere da un matrimonio, with Anna Proclemer, 1978.

Further Reading Amoroso, Giuseppe, Brancati, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1978. Brancati, Corrado, Vitaliano mio fratello, Catania: Edizioni Greco, 1991. Dombroski, Robert, ‘‘Brancati and Fascism: a profile,’’ in Italian Quarterly, 13 (1969): 41–63. Ferretti, Gian Carlo, L’infelicita` della ragione: nella vita e nell’opera di Vitaliano Brancati, Milan: Guerini, 1998. Gazzola Stacchini, Vanna, Il teatro di Vitaliano Brancati. Poetica, mito e pubblico, Lecce: Milella, 1972. Gesu`, Sebastiano (editor), Vitaliano Brancati. Incontri con il cinema, Acicatena: Incontri con il cinema, 1989. Gioviale, Fernando, Intermezzi serio-comici e idilli imperfetti, Cosenza: Marra, 1992. Lauretta, Enzo, Invito alla lettura di Vitaliano Brancati, Milan: Mursia, 1973. Mangiavillano, Sergio, I piaceri dell’umorismo: Vitaliano Brancati a Caltanissetta (1937–1938), Caltanissetta: Salvatore Sciascia, 2004. Perrone, Domenica, Vitaliano Brancati: le avventure morali e i ‘‘piaceri’’ della scrittura, Milan: Bompiani, 1997. Puppa, Paolo, ‘‘La scena disturbata di Vitaliano Brancati,’’ in Storia della Sicilia, vol. 8, edited by Natale Tedesco, Rome: Editalia, 2000. Schiliro`, Massimo, Narciso in Sicilia: lo spazio autobiografico nell’opera di Vitaliano Brancati, Naples: Liguori, 2001. Spera, Francesco, Vitaliano Brancati, Milan: Mursia, 1981. Tedesco, Natale, La scala a chiocciola: scrittura novecentesca in Sicilia, Palermo: Sellerio, 1991. Traina, Giuseppe (editor), Vitaliano Brancati scrittore del Novecento, Ragusa: Centro studi Feliciano Rossitto, 1995.

VITALIANO BRANCATI Zappulla Muscara`, Sarah (editor), Vitaliano Brancati, Catania: Maimone, 1986. Zarcone, Stefano, La carne e la noia: la narrativa di Vitaliano Brancati, Palermo: Facolta` Magistero di Palermo, 1989.

IL BELL’ANTONIO, 1949 Novel by Vitaliano Brancati

In a letter to the publisher Bompiani dated 21 September 1948, Vitaliano Brancati defined Il bell’Antonio (Bell’Antonio), first entitled Il gallo non ha cantato (The Rooster Did Not Crow), ‘‘la mia opera piu` completa’’ (my most complete work). It was a lucid judgment, as the novel is a polyphonic work in which all narrative forms typical of Brancati’s fiction found their best expression. The text is formally balanced, thanks to a classically limpid prose enhanced by lyrical interludes, concise descriptions of settings and characters, and refined psychological analysis. At the center of the novel is Antonio Magnano, a very handsome man who attracts all the women he meets. Antonio, however, is a Narcissus with a defect, a defect made worse in a Fascist Italy that exalts the myth of virility: Antonio is impotent. His impotence is a metaphor for Italy under Fascism and its cult of power and strength. The novel thus runs along two parallel lines: the history of Fascist Italy and the personal story of Antonio. Catania, the city in which the characters move and act, is crowded with grotesque figures, metaphors of a nation that is going to the dogs. Antonio’s cousin, Edoardo Lentini, first tries to become the ‘‘podesta`,’’ but eventually develops a profound disgust for the empty rituals of the regime, represented by Calderara, who exhibits his uncontrolled sexual desire in a whorehouse in Catania. The degradation of the dominant social class

finds its sharpest expression in Antonio: Once his reputation as a Don Juan is dispelled, even his old father Alfio is dragged into ruin and shame. The novel is set against a crepuscular and nocturnal background in a Catania suffocated by the warm sirocco winds. The tragedy of the Anglo-American invasion looms on the horizon and the church positions itself to be on the side of the victor. A novel in the style of Stendhal, as Leonardo Sciascia wrote in his introduction to Brancati’s Opere 1947–1954 in 1992, Il bell’Antonio has been compared to Armance. Yet the novel is much richer in its implications and should be read with great care. For example, the final telephone conversation between Antonio and Edoardo is significant (and well-staged in Mauro Bolognini’s 1960 film adaptation starring Marcello Mastroianni). Two typical representatives of a world in ruins face each other: the defeated Edoardo, who believed he could change the course of history, and Antonio, the dreamer locked in his own private world. Ultimately, the bourgeoisie is condemned to sterility and death. ALFREDO SGROI Edition First edition: Il bell’Antonio, Milan: Bompiani, 1949. Translation: Bell’Antonio, translated by Stanley Hochman, New York: Ungar, 1978.

Further Reading Di Grado, Antonio, ‘‘Per i quarant’anni del Bell’Antonio,’’ in Da Malebolge alla Senna, Palermo: Palumbo, 1993. Di Grado, Antonio, ‘‘Brancati o Vittorini? L’intellettuale al bivio,’’ in La parola quotidiana, edited by Fernando Gioviale, Florence: Olschki, 2004. Lo Curzio, Guglielmo, Scrittori siciliani, Palermo: Novecento Editrice, 1989. Mineo, Nicolo`, Letteratura in Sicilia, Catania: Tringale, 1988. Schiliro`, Massimo, ‘‘Tempo del privato e tempo della storia. Il XII capitolo del Bell’Antonio,’’ in La letteratura, la storia, il romanzo, edited by Mario Tropea, Caltanissetta: Edizioni Lussografica, 1998. Sciascia, Leonardo, and Salvatore Guglielmino (editors), Narratori di Sicilia, Milan: Mursia, 1967. Sciascia, Salvatore, Introduction to Vitaliano Brancati, Opere 1947–1954, Milan: Bompiani, 1992.

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LEONARDO BRUNI

LEONARDO BRUNI (CA. 1370–1444) Leonardo di Cecco Bruni d’Arezzo, hence also known as Leonardo Aretino, is a leading figure of Florentine Humanism. A diplomat at the papal curia and chancellor of the Florentine republic, he significantly contributed to Humanist historiography and translation theory. Crucial to his intellectual formation were his decision to study Greek with the Byzantine scholar Manuel Chrysoloras (ca. 1355–1415) and his lifelong friendship with Coluccio Salutati (1331–1406), the learned chancellor of the Florentine republic. Influenced by Salutati, Bruni pursued an ideal of erudition that places classical antiquity at the core of civic education, supporting Salutati’s ideals of republicanism and freedom. His works show the synthesis of culture and politics he exemplarily achieved in life. Bruni’s contribution to the theory and practice of translation is remarkable. For him translation had both political and moral purposes. In divulging and preserving the glory of the Greco-Roman civilization and in providing society with valuable ethical and political models, the translator becomes with Bruni a paradigmatic figure of Humanist. His translation of Saint Basil’s Oratio ad adolescentes (Letter to the Youth, 1400–1403) is dedicated to Salutati, who was engaged in a controversy with the Camaldulese monk Giovanni of San Miniato on the beneficial study of pagan literature, and offers him an authoritative Christian opinion in support of the study of classical literature. Basil argues that, by inspiring virtue, classical poetry is not only compatible with, but also valuable to, Christianity. Controversial but of great influence are Bruni’s Latin translations of Aristotle’s Ethics (1417–1418), Economics (1420–1421), and Politics (1437), in which he reaffirms the compatibility of Aristotle’s moral philosophy with Christian doctrine and stresses the importance of introducing moral philosophy in the educational curriculum. Complementing these translations is the Isagogicon moralis disciplinae (Introduction to Moral Philosophy, ca. 1421), a commentary to Aristotle’s ethics in which Bruni supports a universal ideal of happiness founded on classical virtue. Attacked by his contemporaries, Bruni defended his translations in the De recta interpretatione (On Correct Interpretation, 312

1420–1426). Although his method rested on grammatical and rhetorical expertise, Bruni abandoned the medieval ‘‘word by word’’ translation to adopt an ‘‘ad sensum’’ criterion whereby the translator must adhere to the meaning of the original text. To achieve this goal, he must combine command over both the original and the target languages with the ability to imitate the stylistic elegance of the original texts. Bruni’s translations had exceptional diffusion in Italy and Europe. Furthermore, he translated from Homer (Iliad book IX), Plato, Xenophon, Plutarch’s Vitae, and from Eschynes and Demosthenes’ orations, and offered Latin paraphrases of some of the works of Polybius and Xenophon. In these selected translations, through the exemplary deeds of illustrious men of the Roman republic and Greek city-states, Bruni celebrates his republican ideal. His Latin version of Giovanni Boccaccio’s novella of Ghismonda and Guiscardo (Decameron IV.1) is also notable. Political and literary writings represent another important aspect of Bruni’s activity as a ‘‘civic’’ Humanist. Among these, the most significant is the Laudatio Florentinae urbis (Panegyric of the City of Florence), written before 1405. Although almost a rhetorical exercise, this oration already shows the fundamental traits of a mature historian. Modeled on Panathenaicus by Aelius Aristides (117–181), it conveys the idea that political freedom produces cultural supremacy and presents Florence as an ideal city, built on Roman republican foundations and equal to Athens in its cultural achievements. In the oration, the defensive war against the Visconti of Milan becomes the paradigmatic war against tyranny in defense of freedom. The Dialogi ad Petrum Paulum Histrum (Dialogues for Pier Paolo Vergerio), dedicated to Pietro Paolo Vergerio and probably composed between 1401 and 1406, is a work of particular interest for its humanistic themes. Modeled on the genre of the ‘‘pro-con’’ debate, it establishes the literary value of the vernacular canon of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. In the first book, the Humanist antiquarian Niccolo` Niccoli attacks the poets by contrasting their inelegant language with the eloquence of the ancients. In the second book, Niccoli offers a

LEONARDO BRUNI palinody of his previous speech by arguing that excellence in the vernacular is comparable with excellence in any ancient language. The work shows Bruni’s rhetorical dexterity and, in a typical Humanist way, does not solve the question posed. Ultimately, it celebrates the cultural supremacy of Florentine genius. Bruni rarely engages in pure literary production. Among his works are an early carmen composed for the descent in Italy of Emperor Venceslaus (1397–1398); a Latin play, Gracchus et Poliscena (Gracchus and Poliscena, 1407–1408); and a canzone morale (Moral Song, 1421), restating the principles exposed in the Isagogicon moralis disciplinae. Of particular relevance is the educational treatise on De studiis et litteris tractatulus ad Baptistam Malatestam (A Treatise on Literary, 1423–1426), dedicated to the wife of Galeazzo Malatesta from Pesaro, in which Bruni expounds the principles of the studia humanitatis and insists on the harmonization of classical and Christian education. Two biographies, Vita di Dante (Life of Dante) and Vita di Petrarca (Life of Petrarch), both of 1436, set a model for studies on Dante and Petrarch and posit the equal literary dignity of vernacular and Latin literatures. From a Humanist perspective, Bruni praises Dante for his civic commitment over the solitary Petrarch. During his diplomatic career, Bruni wrote many orations, from the funeral orations for Ottone Acciaiuoli (1406) and Giovanni Strozzi (1428), to the antimonastic polemic of the Oratio in hypocritas (Oration against Hypocrites, 1417). In all, Bruni celebrates Florentine libertas. He also significantly contributed to the formation of Humanist historiography. His most important historical work is the Historiae Florentini populi (History of the Florentine People) completed by 1430, and written in classicizing Latin. Although in some books Bruni maintains the annalistic structure and oratorical digressions typical of medieval historiography, his accurate archival research, his philological approach to the analysis of the documents, and his effort to distinguish facts from imagination, evidence a Humanist imprint. Introducing an innovative perspective, the author presents the local history of Florence as reflecting universal history. The narrative shows that ideals of peace and freedom have constantly inspired the presence of republican institutions in Florence and determined the crucial political role the city achieved in Bruni’s time. He thus expresses similar views to those already articulated in his Vita Ciceronis (Life of

Cicero, ca. 1415), which celebrates the orator as defender of the Roman republic. The Rerum suo tempore gestarum commentaria (Commentary on the Events of His Own Time), written between 1440 and 1441, contains Bruni’s autobiographical account of the main historical events that occurred between 1378 and 1440, when the Battle of Anghiari ended the war against Milan. It is followed by De bello italico adversus Gothicos libri IV (On the Italian War against the Goths, 1441), a rather free adaptation of an earlier classical history by Procopius. The most celebrated Humanist after Petrarch, Bruni’s political thought aimed at reconciling the popular Florentine republicanism with the rise of the oligarchy, later ruled by the Albizzi and Medici families.

Biography Born in Arezzo around 1370. In the 1380s, the Ghibelline victory affects his family, and he moves to Florence after his mother and father die. Because of the political turmoil in Arezzo, Bruni completes his secondary education relatively late, in Florence, where he studies with Giovanni Malpaghini. From 1397 until 1400, he studies Greek with Manuel Chrysoloras, the first Byzantine scholar Coluccio Salutati had called to teach Greek in Florence. In the Florentine intellectual circles of Chrysoloras, Ambrogio Traversari, and Coluccio Salutati, he meets great Humanists such as Niccolo` Niccoli, Giovanni Francesco Poggio Bracciolini, Pier Paolo Vergerio, and Francesco Filelfo. In 1405, Poggio recommends Bruni for a secretarial post at the papal curia of Innocent VII. The political complexity of the period, in which three popes claimed to be the legitimate Roman bishop (Western Schism), makes this position important and delicate as diplomatic letter writing requires rhetorical skills rather than technical legal competence. Bruni remains apostolic secretary during the vicissitudes of Innocent VII and, after his death in 1406, to Gregory XII. In 1409, when Florence withdraws its support to Gregory XII, Bruni leaves the curia and moves to Pisa, called by the cardinals who elect Alexander V. Bruni maintains his post after the death of Alexander V in 1410, and during the first months of John XXIII’s papacy. From November 1410 to April 1411, he accepts the chancellorship of the Florentine republic. Probably attracted by better economic conditions, he returns to his secretarial post in Rome and in early 1412, he marries Tommasa della 313

LEONARDO BRUNI Fioraia, of a noble Florentine family. In 1416, Bruni becomes a Florentine citizen and, after the Council of Constance deposes John XXIII, he settles in Florence. The council elects Martin V in 1417, and the new pope decides to move his residence to Florence from 1419 to 1420. In this period, Bruni resumes his secretarial offices, but when the pope returns to Rome, he does not follow him. From 1420 to 1427 Bruni resides and works in Florence as a private citizen. From 1427 to 1444, Bruni is chancellor of the Florentine republic. Bruni grew in authority during the Florentine residence of Pope Eugenius IV (1434–1443) and during the Council of Florence (1439–1445). He plays an important role in the war against Lucca and in the long struggle with the Visconti of Milan, which ends with the Battle of Anghiari in 1440. He assists in the rise of the Medici political power under Cosimo I, but does not see the end of the republic and the establishment of the Medici Signoria. Bruni died in Florence on March 9, 1444. The city celebrates Bruni’s funeral with solemn public honors, in recognition of his prestige. Giannozzo Manetti pronounces the eulogy and crowns his teacher and friend with the laurel wreath. Bernardo Rossellino is the sculptor of Bruni’s funeral monument in the Church of Santa Croce. SUSANNA BARSELLA See also: Humanism Selected Works Collections Opere letterarie e politiche, edited by Paolo Viti, Turin: Utet, 1996.

Latin Works Dialogi ad Petrum Paulum Histrum, 1401–1406; critical edition by Stefano U. Baldassarri, 1994. Laudatio Florentine urbis, before 1405; critical edition by Stefano U. Baldassarri, 2000. Vita Ciceronis, ca. 1415. Oratio in hypocritas, 1417. Isagogicon moralis disciplinae, ca. 1421. De recta interpretazione, 1420–1426. De studiis et litteris tractatulus ad Baptistam Malatestam, 1423–1426. Historiae Florentini populi, 1430; critical edition by Emilio Santini and Carmine Di Pierro, 1914; as History of the

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Florentine People, translated by James Hankins, 2 vols., 2001–2004. Rerum suo tempore gestarum commentaria, 1440–1441; critical edition by Carmine Di Pierro in Rerum Italicarum Scriptors, 19, no. 2 (1926). De bello italico adversus Gothicos libri IV, 1441.

Vernacular Works Vita di Dante, 1436; as Life of Dante, translated by Francesco Basetti-Sani, in The Earliest Lives of Dante, 1963. Vita di Petrarca, 1436.

Plays Gracchus et Poliscena, 1407–1408.

Letters Epistolarium libri VIII, edited by L. Mahus, 1741.

Further Readings Baron, Hans, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966. Baron, Hans, From Petrarch to Leonardo Bruni, Chicago: Newberry Library and The University of Chicago Press, 1968. Baron, Hans, In Search of Florentine Civic Humanism: Essays on the Transition from Medieval to Modern Thought, 2 vols., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. Garin, Eugenio, ‘‘Retorica e Studia humanitatis nella cultura del Quattrocento,’’ in Rhetoric Revalued: Papers from the International Society for the History of Rhetoric, edited by Brian Vickers, Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1982. Griffiths, Gordon et al. (editors), The Humanism of Leonardo Bruni, Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1987. Hankins, James, ‘‘The ‘Baron Thesis’ after Forty Years and Some Recent Studies of Leonardo Bruni,’’ in Journal of the History of Ideas, 56, no. 2 (1995): 309–338. Ianziti, Gary, ‘‘A Life in Politics: Leonardo Bruni’s Cicero,’’ in Journal of the History of Ideas, 61, no. 1 (2000): 39–58. Luiso, Francesco Paolo, Studi su l’Epistolario di Leonardo Bruni, edited by Lucia Gualdo Rosa, Rome: Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo, 1980. Vasoli, Cesare, ‘‘Bruni, Leonardo,’’ in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 14, Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana, 1972. Viti, Paolo, Leonardo Bruni e Firenze: studi sulle lettere pubbliche e private, Rome: Bulzoni, 1992. Viti, Paolo (editor), Leonardo Bruni cancelliere della repubblica di Firenze, Florence: Olschki, 1990. Wilcox, Donald J., The Development of Florentine Historiography in the Fifteenth Century, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969.

GIORDANO BRUNO

GIORDANO BRUNO (1548–1600) The life and thought of Giordano Bruno have always symbolized, in Italian culture, the conflict between the Counter-Reformation and intellectual freedom. In fact, aside from being the consequence of the harsh, repressive conditions that ruled Italy during the Counter-Reformation, Giordano’s death was an integral part of his life, the result of his particular character and philosophy. For the most part, those who came before the inquisitors of Sant’Uffizio recanted and thus saved their lives. That Bruno refused to retract his writings, and on 17 February 1600 was burned at the stake in Rome in the Campo de’ Fiori, constitutes an inescapable comment on his philosophy. Like many Italian intellectuals of the sixteenth century, especially those from Southern Italy, Bruno donned the habit of the Dominicans without ever taking up their intellectual beliefs. He therefore soon came up against inquisitorial investigations. He faced them while being subjected to trials and beginning an itinerant life that led him first throughout Italy, and later to Geneva and France. In Geneva, Bruno joined the Calvinist Church but soon found himself in conflict with the city’s academic authorities. He resumed his travels and arrived in France, where after much wandering he settled in Paris. Here his intellectual efforts followed the philosophy of knowledge inspired by Lull’s Ars Magna and the art of memory. In 1582, he published De umbris idearum (Shadows of Ideas), in which he re-elaborated Lull’s work in a mnemotechnic register, developing the Platonic principle of the correspondence between the physical world and the world of ideas. This work was followed by the publication of the Cantus Circaeus (The Incantation of Circes, 1582), two dialogues in which he offered a concrete mnemotechnic application of the principles laid out in De umbris idearum. The second dialogue of Cantus Circaeus in fact constitutes a short treatise on the art of memory based on the theory of shadows: Sensible images are the appearances of the real forms that in turn represent the appearances of the ideas. The book served to introduce him to the court of Henry III, where an interest in the secrets of the art of memory was quite strong. In Paris, Bruno also had his sole experience of the theater, publishing Il

Candelaio (Candlebearer, 1582), a burlesque comedy featuring a bitter polemic against the humanistic and university culture of the day. But the Brunian philosophy truly emerges in the great dialogues published in London, where the philosopher moved in 1583 to live at the residence of the tolerant French ambassador, Michel de Castelnau. In a rapid series of texts published in the brief two-year span of 1584–1585, Bruno set forth the core of his philosophy, the concept of ‘‘infinity’’ as a constitutive problem for cosmology as much as for the relation between God and the world, the human intellect and truth. In La cena de le ceneri (The Ash-Wednesday Supper, 1584), a literary adaptation in the form of a dialogue of a real incident that occurred on 11 February 1584 (Ash Wednesday) at the residence of Sir Fulke Greville, Bruno defends the Copernican theory while extending it to embrace his own cosmological conception of the infinite universe populated by multiple worlds and innumerable stars. These stars are animate and eternal, distinct from the tiny individuals inhabiting them, who are subjected instead to death and the transmigration of the soul. Bruno ontologically grounds this conception of an infinite and spiritual universe in De la causa, principio, et uno (Cause, Principle, and Unity, 1584): Form, or soul, and matter are indissolubly united in the one who is ‘‘whole.’’ Life is an infinite material effect constituted by innumerable stars, ‘‘grand intellectual souls’’ inhabited by simple and composite individuals. In De l’infinito universo et mondi (On the Infinite Universe and Worlds, 1584), the theory of the infinity of the universe and of the plurality of worlds at last receives a theological foundation. The infinite cause can only produce an infinite effect: God therefore cannot have produced a finite universe. In De l’infinito universo et mondi, the new cosmological doctrine inevitably raised the question of its relation to the theological doctrines of the world’s creation taught by the contemporary churches. Bruno resolves the conflict by recurring to Averroes’ doctrine that philosophy and religion are complementary: Philosophy teaches the rational truth that can be understood by the learned, while religion dresses rational content in a mythic 315

GIORDANO BRUNO form suited for the minds of the unlearned majority. The solution posited in De l’infinito universo et mondi thus established a complementarity between philosophical truth and ecclesiastical teaching based not only on the supremacy of the first over the second, but also on the esoteric fate of truth, inevitably limited to narrow circles. This solution, however, constituted only one aspect of Bruno’s philosophy, since the pages of De l’infinito universo et mondi were shortly followed by Spaccio de la bestia trionfante (The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, 1584), in which he wrote about the subject of the moral universe, and with it of the Christian religion. Constructed in a satiric register probably derived from the burlesque dialogues of Niccolo` Franco (1515–1570), which in turn were composed in the mode of Lucian, Bruno’s dialogue develops a critique of Christian morality turning on a critique of the Pauline theology of justification through faith. This doctrine, according to Bruno, destroys the necessary and real relation between works and the fate of the soul, and hence dissolves the justice that can only exist through communication between the human and the divine. In the same way, it destroys magic, which, like justice, is founded on communication between the human and the divine. The departure of the gods, lamented by Hermes Trismegistus in Spaccio de la bestia trionfante, alludes to this decline of the effectual relation between the human and the divine, upon which the operations of magic, as well as human justice, are founded. The task of hermetic reform will therefore be to restore such a relation. As for the reform of the current religion, the solution offered by Spaccio de la bestia trionfante is ambivalent, since on the one hand Christianity is destined to be overcome by hermetic reform and the return of the gods among men, and on the other hand, pending the reform of the current church, it is temporarily left in place. To crown his grand theoretical effort in London, he published the Eroici furori (The Heroic Frenzies, 1585), in which the question of the infinite is seen under the gnoseological aspect of the encounter of the exceptional spirit, the frenzied hero, with the intelligible species of emanations from the divine infinity. As the place of the coincidence of contraries, the infinite is also where the subject and the object coincide. To know infinite being is also to be a being known by the infinite, to become an object of knowledge. On the whole, the world of the Reformation rejected Bruno, academically as much as religiously. This occurred in Geneva and at Oxford. He 316

suffered a better fate in Germany, where he nevertheless lacked a position within the university circles that alone would have allowed his teachings to flourish. The fact is that Bruno was a total foreigner to the Protestant culture of Northern Europe because his departure from Catholic orthodoxy pointed in precisely the opposite direction from the one taken by Reformation theologians: While these men abandoned justification through ‘‘works,’’ leaving only ‘‘justification through faith,’’ Bruno instead abandoned justification through faith and allowed only for justification ‘‘through works,’’ establishing a direct relation between merit and the place of the soul’s transmigration. The only political and intellectual environment in Europe that Bruno found congenial, therefore, belonged to the French politiques, the more tolerant Catholic current that sought a settlement of the wars of religion based on a common submission to the ruler’s sovereignty. The North of Europe was able to offer Bruno a somewhat greater degree of freedom than Italy, where the Inquisition was operating, but it could not furnish him a greater intellectual affinity with its culture. This was the cause of such substantial uneasiness that when the intolerant Pope Sextus V died, Bruno decided to return to Italy, and after a brief stay in the university city of Padova settled in Venice. Here, however, he fell into the clutches of the Inquisition, prompted by the denunciation of Giovanni Mocenigo, the nobleman who had invited and then hosted Bruno so that he would teach him the art of memory outlined in De minimo (On the Minimum, 1591). Thus began the last stage of Bruno’s life, the period of the inquisitorial trial that lasted eight years and kept him detained first in Venice and then in Rome, where he was extradited in February 1593. The lengthy trial was based on the accusatory testimony of Giovanni Mocenigo and the doctrines contained in Bruno’s books. Bruno’s writings were thus subjected to a new type of reading: judiciary examination by the censors of Sant’Uffizio. Bruno’s defense at his trial was the one traditionally adopted by writers in his position: It consisted in denying the gravest accusations, taking shelter behind the ‘‘Averroist’’ distinction between philosophical and theological discourse. What was not traditional was the conclusion of the trial at the end of 1599, when Bruno, after proposing various compromises with the judges’ demands, determined that a recanting of his entire philosophy was not possible, and faced the punishment the Inquisition reserved for impenitent heretics.

GIORDANO BRUNO

Biography Born in Nola (Napoli) in January or February 1548; in 1562 comes to Naples where he takes lectures in dialectic taught by Giovan Vincenzo Colle, and in logic taught by the Augustinian Teofilo da Vairano; on 15 June 1565 enters the novitiate of the Dominican Order in the great convent of San Domenico Maggiore; in February 1572 is ordained a priest; on 21 May 1572 registers for the course in theology in the studium of the convent of San Domenico Maggiore; in 1576 flees Naples as a result of a trial instigated by the provincial father for heresy relating to the concept of incarnation; takes refuge in Rome, where he resettles in the Dominican convent of Santa Maria sopra Minerva at the end of March; caught up in a new judicial inquiry and leaves Rome for Genova; after two years of wandering through various Italian cities, in 1578 comes to Geneva; registers in the local university, making a living as an editor of proofs in a print shop; is brought to trial on the charge of defaming a professor of philosophy; reaches an honorable settlement, but, disillusioned with Calvinist discipline, leaves Geneva and comes to Paris in 1581; in April 1583, travels to London, armed with letters of recommendation from King Henry III and is received by the French ambassador, Michel de Castelnau; in June 1583, visits Oxford and there first disputes with the theologian John Underhill and then participates in a series of conferences on cosmology and the immortality of the soul; in October 1585, returns to Paris with the French ambassador; in June 1586, leaves Paris for Germany; in March 1592, comes to Venice as a guest of the nobleman Giovanni Mocenigo; on 23 May is detained and then denounced as a heretic by Mocenigo; on 19 February is extradited to Rome to be subjected to the direct justice of the cardinal congregation of Sant’Uffizio; on 21 December 1599 refuses to retract the errors drawn from his writings; on 20 January 1600 is condemned as a formal, impenitent heretic; on 17 February 1600 is led to the Roman piazza of Campo de’ Fiori, tied to a stake and burned alive. VITTORIO FRAJESE Selected Works Collections Opera latine conscripta, edited by Felice Tocco et alia, 3 vols., Naples-Florence: Le Monnier, 1879–1891; rpt. Stuttgart: Holzboog, 1961–1962.

Scritti scelti, edited by Luigi Firpo, Turin: UTET, 1949. Opere di Giordano Bruno e di Tommaso Campanella, edited by Augusto Guzzo and Romano Amerio, MilanNaples: Ricciardi Editore, 1956. Dialoghi italiani, annotated by Giovanni Gentile, edited by Giovanni Aquilecchia, Florence: Sansoni, 1958. Opere latine, edited by Carlo Monti, Turin: UTET, 1980. Opere italiane, edited by Giovanni Aquilecchia, Naples: Bibliopolis, 1991; edited by Nuccio Ordine, Turin: UTET, 2002. Oeuvres comple`tes, edited by Yves Hersant and Nuccio Ordine, Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1993–1999. Dialoghi filosofici italiani, edited by Michele Ciliberto, Milan: Mondadori, 2000. Opere magiche, edited by Simonetta Bassi et alia, Milan: Adelphi, 2000. Opere mnemotecniche, edited by Marco Matteoli et alia, Milan: Adelphi, 2004.

Philosophical Writings De umbris idearum, 1582; as Arte della memoria: Le ombre delle idee, edited by Manuela Maddamma, 1996. Cantus Circaeus, 1582. La cena de le ceneri, 1584; edited by G. Aquilecchia, 1955. Spaccio de la bestia trionfante, 1584; edited by M. Ciliberto, 1985; edited by Eugenio Canone, 2001; as The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, translated and edited by Arthur D. Imerti, 1964. De l’infinito universo et mondi, 1584. De la causa, principio, et uno, 1584; edited by G. Aquilecchia, 1973; edited by Augusto Guzzo, 1985; as The Infinite in Giordano Bruno: Concerning the Cause, Principle, and One translated by Sidney Greenburg, 1950, rpt. 1978; as Cause, Principle, and Unity, 1962; translated and edited by Robert De Lucca, with Essays on Magic, translated and edited by Richard J. Blackwell, 1998. De gl’eroici furori, 1585; as The Heroic Enthusiasts: An Ethical Poem, translated by L. Williams, 1887–1889; as The Heroic Frenzies, translated by Paul Eugene Memmo, 1964. Cabala del cavallo pegaseo, 1585; edited by Carlo Sini, 1998; as The Cabala of Pegasus, translated by Sidney L. Sodergard and Madison U. Sowell, 2002. De minimo, 1591.

Plays Il Candelaio, 1582; as Candlebearer, translated by Gino Moliterno, Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 2000.

Further Reading Aquilecchia, Giovanni, Giordano Bruno, Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 2000. Ciliberto, Michele, Lessico di Giordano Bruno, 2 vols., Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo e Bizzarri, 1979. Ciliberto, Michele, Giordano Bruno, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1990. Ciliberto, Michele, Dialogo recitato: per una nuova edizione del Bruno Volgare, Florence: Olschki, 2002. De Le´one-Jones, and Karen Silvia, Giordano Bruno and the Kabbalah: Prophets, Magicians, and Rabbis, New Haven, CT: Yale UP 1997. Firpo, Luigi, Il processo di Giordano Bruno, edited by Diego Guaglioni, Rome: Salerno Editrice, 1993.

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GIORDANO BRUNO Gatti, Hilary, Giordano Bruno and Renaissance Science, Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1999. Gentile, Giovanni, Giordano Bruno e il pensiero del Rinascimento, Florence: Vallecchi, 1920, rpt. 1925. Ingegno, Alfonso, Cosmologia e filosofia nel pensiero di Giordano Bruno, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1978. Ingegno, Alfonso, La sommersa nave della religione: Studio sulla poemica anticristiana del Bruno, Naples: Bibliopolis, 1985. Ingegno, Alfonso, Regia pazzia: Bruno lettore di Calvino, Urbino: Quattro Venti, 1987. Mercati, Angelo, Il sommario del processo di Giordano Bruno, Citta` del Vaticano: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1942. Nappi, Andrea G., Giordano Bruno, quattro tempi drammatici, Naples: Guida, 1982. Ordine, Nuccio, La cabala dell’Asino: Asinita` e conoscenza in Giordano Bruno, Naples: Liguori, 1987. Ordine, Nuccio, La soglia dell’ombra: Letteratura, filosofia e pittura in Giordano Bruno, Venice: Marsilio, 2003. Ricci, Saverio, La fortuna del pensiero di Giordano Bruno (1600–1750), Florence: Le Lettere, 1990. Sacerdoti, Giliberto, Sacrificio e sovranita`: Teologia e politica nell’Europa di Shakespeare e di Bruno, Turin: Einaudi, 2002. Singer, Dorothea, Giordano Bruno: His Life and Thought, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1950, rpt. 1977 (with a translation of On the Infinite Universe and Worlds). Vedrine, He´le`ne, Censure et pouvoir: Trois proce`s, Savonarola, Bruno, Galile´e, Paris-La Haye, Mouton, 1976. Vincenzo Spampanato, Vita di Giordano Bruno con documenti editi e inediti, Messina: Principato, 1921. Yates, Frances Amelia, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964. Yates, Frances Amelia, Giordano Bruno e la cultura europea del Rinascimento, Rome-Bari, Laterza, 1978.

IL CANDELAIO 1582 Play by Giordano Bruno

Il Candelaio (The Candlebearer) is a comedy written in Italian that Giordano Bruno published in Paris, but which he probably sketched out in Italy and completed in the summer of 1582. This play, Bruno’s sole theatrical production, is divided into five acts, as the ancient and humanistic canon demanded, but it is preceded by a series of unusual 318

literary materials: a burlesque sonnet recited by the book, a dedicatory letter to ‘‘Madama Morgana B.,’’ a tripartite ‘‘argument,’’ and finally a prologue, also in three parts. If the division into five acts is canonical, the long introduction constitutes instead a pyrotechnic phantasmagoria of inventions with which Bruno establishes his distance from the humanistic tradition and from the models of the contemporary culture, literary as well as philosophical and religious. And indeed the comedy is written in a language that is rich in terms drawn from spoken Neapolitan, and that absorbs the realistic and burlesque practice of Aretino and Berni, mixing it with parodic echoes of classical and ecclesiastical rhetoric. The result is a contamination of linguistic planes, rhetorical levels, and literary genres that yields a violent critique of the learned language, which is reduced to a repertory of formulas, and that transports onto the social plane the coincidence of ‘‘greatest’’ and ‘‘least,’’ infinitely large and infinitely small, illustrated in the cosmological dialogues. Candelaio is a play of action, of gesture, and above all of word. It is a theater of sight, but more particularly a theater of the ear. As occurs in many Renaissance dialogues and comedies, the characters are not the bearers of particular dramatic tasks (to which specific speeches are attributed) but are the occasion for witticisms, jokes, plays on words, judgments, and interventions by the author himself. The action unfolds in Naples in 1577, near the Nilo quarter and thus not far from the convent of San Domenico, which had hosted Bruno during his stay in that city. The theme of the comedy consists of the interweaving of three jokes concerning the fixations of three characters: ‘‘the love of Bonifacio, the alchemy of Bartolomeo, and the pedantry of Manfurio.’’ Bonifacio is an ancient ‘‘candle-bearer,’’ an obscene allusion to the practice of anal sex, who wants to restore the normal relation with a woman, and to do this he chooses Vittoria, whom he courts as a grand lady but who is in reality a cunning courtesan who tries to steal his money. Bartolomeo is a dilettantish alchemist who seeks to transform base metals into gold, while Manfurio is a Humanist pedant who adopts a ridiculous language. Each of the three characters will be mocked for his improper desires or ridiculous habits. Deceived by the classical expedient of the substitution of another person, the ‘‘candle-bearer’’ will only be able to go to bed with his own wife, will have his unfaithful intentions discovered, and will be punished in turn by his wife, Carubina, with her love for the painter Giovan Bernardo, and then by

GIORDANO BRUNO his arrest and scorn. Bartolomeo will be cheated by the cunning Cencio and then beaten, and the same fate will befall the pedant Manfurio, who is mocked and then beaten in order to put an end to his unbearable language. We are dealing therefore with a traditional comedy of mockery, where each character, through his behavior, deserves the mockery he suffers and is punished for an unbridled desire or improper attitude. While in the traditional structure of Renaissance comedy the peripeteia of the character leads to a happy ending, an improvement of his original condition (through marriage, social advancement, wealth, etc.), in Candelaio the happy ending is replaced by the simple enactment of the mockery itself, which assumes the moral function of a ‘‘just recompense’’ for the characters’ stupidity. We thus see applied the correlation between deed and destiny that is at the foundation of Bruno’s ethics. The entire comedy is subjected to a philosophical lesson illustrated by Bruno in the dedicatory letter to Madama Morgana B., according to which ‘‘time takes everything away and gives everything, everything changes, nothing is destroyed; there is only one who cannot change, only one who is eternal and can persist eternally as one, similar and the same.’’ Of this fundamental ontology, the comedy lays out the moment of ‘‘vicissitude,’’ of the contrariety and mutability ordained by the correspondence of distinct elements within the one who is universal. And this principle implies on the gnoseological plane the mnemotechnical designs set forth in the Latin works. The comedy thus develops a bitter satire against the insipid lover, the sordid miser, and the foolish pedant, and through these figures against Petrarchan love, bourgeois greed, and academic knowledge. Both on the linguistic level and in the weaving of the scenic action, Bruno challenges institutional knowledge in a provocative, or ‘‘avantguardistic’’ way, as Ba´rberi Squarotti defines it (‘‘La struttura del Candelaio,’’ 1993). And he also rejects the false lyricism of the spiritualized lover, who is deceived by the reality of economic interest; the illusions of alchemical science, which is mocked for its desire for easy gain; the empty formulas of the humanistic language, which is reduced to pure grammatical declamation; and finally, the deceptive versatility of biblical quotations, which are always subject to deformations and double meanings. And this is precisely the function of the frequent obscene allusions throughout the comedy. These perform the task, for the most part traditional, of ‘‘bringing down’’ the formulas of ritual

language in order to subject them to the critique of popular materialism. VITTORIO FRAJESE Editions First edition: as Candelaio, Paris: Guillaume Julien, 1582. Critical editions: in Opere, edited by Augusto Guzzo and Romano Amerio, Milan: Naples: Ricciardi, 1956; edited by Giorgio Ba´rberi Squarotti, Turin: Einaudi, 1964; as Chandelier, bilingual edition by Giovanni Aquilecchia, in Oeuvres comple`tes, Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1993. Translations: as Candlebearer, translated by Gino Moliterno, Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 2000.

Further Reading Ba´rberi Squarotti, Giorgio, ‘‘La struttura del Candelaio,’’ in Ariel, vol. 7, no. 1 (1993): 51–66. Borrelli, Clara, ‘‘Spoglio linguistico del Candelaio di Giordano Bruno,’’ in Misure critiche, vol. 10, nos. 35–36 (1980): 25–67. Borsellino, Nino, ‘‘Necrologio della pazzia,’’ in Rozzi e intronati: Esperienze e forme di teatro dal Decameron al Candelaio, Rome: Bulzoni, 1974. Ferrone, Siro, ‘‘Il Candelaio: Scienza e letteratura,’’ in Italianistica, vol. 2, no. 3 (1973): 518–543. Hodgart, Amelia Buono, Giordano Bruno’s The CandleBearer: An Enigmatic Renaissance Play, LewstonQueenston-Lampeter: Mellen, 1997. Quarta, Daniela, ‘‘Sul Candelaio di Giordano Bruno,’’ in Il mago, il cosmo, il teatro degli astri: Saggi sulla letteratura esoterica del Rinascimento, edited by Gianfranco Formichetti, Rome:Bulzoni, 1985. Quarta, Daniela, ‘‘De umbris idearum, Candelaio, Cena delle Ceneri: Considerazioni e osservazioni sulle strutture comunicative nei primi dialoghi bruniani,’’ in Il dialogo filosoficonel ‘500 europeo, Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi (Milan, 28–30 May 1987), edited by Davide Bigalli and Giorgio Canziani, Milan: Franco Angeli, 1990.

EROICI FURORI, 1585 Philosophical Dialogue by Giordano Bruno

Eroici furori (The Heroic Frenzies) was published in England and dedicated to Philip Sidney, a prominent member of the court of Queen Elizabeth I. It was the last philosophical dialogue written in the 319

GIORDANO BRUNO course of Bruno’s stay in London at the residence of the French ambassador to England, Michel de Castelnau. On the literary level it is presented as 10 dialogues in Italian, constructed as a commentary on a sonnet (set out in the course of the dialogue) whose symbolic significance is uncovered. The interlocutors of the dialogues are two inhabitants of Nola, Bruno’s birthplace, or else friends of Bruno’s father. After having shown in the cosmological dialogues the relation that exists between the infinite cause and the infinite universe that is its effect, which is to say the relation between God and the worlds, Eroici furori illustrates the process through which the knowledge of the heroic frenzy is united with the infinite cause and, passing beyond the apparent wisdom of sensible knowledge, rises to knowledge of the truth. Finite reality, a shadow of the shadow of the infinite cause, is marked by the opposition of contraries. The infinite, on the other hand, is the place where contraries coincide—center and circumference, potentiality and action, matter and spirit. The movement of spirit toward the infinite is thus the movement through which the contraries present in the frenzy achieve their union. The path of the intellect toward truth is represented through the myth of the hunter Actaeon, symbol of the intellect, who seeks Diana, symbol of the supreme intelligible species of the divine. While in Spaccio de la bestia trinofante, the false Diana, symbol of the false representation of divinity, transformed Actaeon into a beast; the perception of the true Diana, which is to say the intelligible forms produced by divinity, transforms Actaeon into the hunted, that is, the subject into an object and the seeker of the first cause into that which is sought by it. At the end of the path, therefore, the understanding of the intelligible species achieved by the soul coincides with the being composed of these forms. Having attained the sight of the infinite cause, the intellect is converted into it, and as the knower is changed into the known through the operation of the act of love. The intellect of the heroic frenzy no longer has to seek outside of itself for what it has ‘‘drawn’’ into itself. This path of the intellect toward the infinite cause is conceived by Bruno in terms of an initiation: It is

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not a path open to all, but a fate reserved for the few. Hence the particular kind of Averroeism set forth in La cena de le ceneri and De l’infinito universo et mondi: Only few can know and unite themselves with philosophical truth, while the multitude must be content with the representations offered by the religious leges or laws. The heroic destiny is thus reserved only for the frenzied man. VITTORIO FRAJESE Editions First edition: De gli eroici furori, Paris: Antonio Baio, 1985. Critical editions: De gli eroici furori, in Opere, edited by Augusto Guzzo and Romano Amerio, Milan-Naples: Riccardo Ricciardi, 1956; as Gli eroici furori, edited by Nicoletta Tirinnanzi, Milan: Rizzoli, 1999; as Des fureurs he´roiques, bilingual edition by Giovanni Aquilecchia, commentary by Michelangelo Granada, in Oeuvres comple`tes, Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1999; De gli eroici furori, in Giordano Bruno, Dialoghi filosofici italiani, edited by Michele Ciliberto, Milan: Mondatori, 2000. Translations: as The Heroic Enthusiasts: An Ethical Poem, translated by L. Williams, London: G.Redway, 1887– 1889; as The Heroic Frenzies, translated by Paul Eugene Memmo, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina, 1964.

Further Reading Aquilecchia, Giovanni, ‘‘Dialoghi tassiani e dialoghi bruniani: Per una comparazione delle fonti,’’ in Nuove schede di italianistica, Rome: Salerno Editrice, 1994. Badaloni, Nicola, ‘‘Note sul bruniano De gli eroici furori,’’ in Scienza e filosofia: problemi teorici e di storia del pensiero scientifico. Studi in onore di Francesco Barone, edited by Silvestro Marcucci, Pisa: Giardini, 1995. Canziani, Guido, Le metamorfosi dell’amore: Ficino, Pico e i Furori di Bruno, Milan: CUEM, 2001. Ellero, Maria Pia, ‘‘Allegorie, modelli formali e modelli tematici negli Eroici furori di Giordano Bruno,’’ in La rassegna della letteratura italiana, vol. 98, no. 3 (1994): 38–52. Farinelli, Patrizia, Furioso nel labirinto: Studio su Degli eroici furori di Giordano Bruno, Bari: Adriatica, 2000. Ingegno, Alfonso, ‘‘L’unita` dell’opera bruniana e il significato degli Eroici furori,’’ in Il dialogo filosofico nel ‘500 europeo, Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi (Milan, 28–30 May 1987), edited by Davide Bigalli and Giorgio Canziani, Milan: Franco Angeli, 1990. Nelson, John Charles, Renaissance Theory of Love: The Context of Giodano Bruno’s ‘‘Eroici Furori,’’ New York: Columbia UP, 1958.

GESUALDO BUFALINO

GESUALDO BUFALINO (1920–1996) Sicilian novelist and poet Gesualdo Bufalino had been teaching in a secondary school in Comiso, his hometown, for some 25 years when he published his first novel, Diceria dell’untore (The PlagueSower), in 1981, and became an overnight success at the age of 61. Bufalino fell passionately in love with writing at a very early age, secretly composing verses since he was 10. His omnivorous reading habits, equaled by his relentless moviegoing, afforded him imaginative escape from provincial Sicilian life. Drafted in 1942, he brought along, as part of his baggage, a thick notebook of verses by Baudelaire, Montale, and Dante. At the end of the war he continued to write and, with the encouragement of a friend, Angelo Romano`, one of the most important editors of Officina, contributed to various newspapers. He soon withdrew, however, from all public engagements and publishing ventures. At the beginning of the 1970s, Bufalino completed a novel, a kind of a fable that recounted his stay at a sanatorium between 1944 and 1947. In 1978, he found some old nineteenth-century photographs in an attic. He decided to organize an exhibition and write the introduction to the catalogue. The publisher Sellerio put them together as a book, Comiso ieri (Comiso Yesterday, 1978). Persuaded to submit his manuscripts, he reluctantly sent Diceria dell’untore. After the remarkable critical reception of his debut novel, Bufalino published many books and essays. Le menzogne della notte (The Night’s Lies, 1988), which was translated into 16 languages, won the coveted Strega prize. The eminent author and literary critic Pietro Citati would write about Bufalino: Per lui, esiste soltanto il libro [...] Il libro e` l’oggetto supremo, che raccoglie in se´ tutta la vita reale—quel bambino che in questo momento attraversa la strada, quella nuvola che proprio ora splende sotto i raggi del sole—e la vita fantasticata, immaginata, irreale, impossibile; e questa mescolanza lo affascina come la piu` inebriante delle bevande For him, only the book exists [...] The book is the supreme object, which encloses actual life—that kid who is crossing the street, that cloud that is shining under the rays of the sun—and fantastic life, that which is imagined, unreal, impossible; and this mixture fascinates him like the most inebriating drink (‘‘Cannibale divoratore di libri,’’ 1988).

Thus, for Bufalino, to read is to renounce living. Literature exists apart and beyond empirical reality. The artist engages in a kind of personal resistance toward the raw experiences and facts of life. In an autobiographical portrait sketched for the Antologia del ‘‘Campiello’’ 1981, he wrote: Una vita come tante [...] un cristianesimo ateo e tremante, inetto a capire se l’universo sia salute o metastasi, grazia o disgrazia; un odio della storia: lastrico di fossili ideologici, collana inerte di errori; un trasporto per cio` che dura e resiste—luoghi, solidali gerghi, abitudini oneste, strette di mano-nel fondo della mia provincia sperduta. In letteratura un amor di menzogna e di musica, purche` radicate nel punto favoloso e geometrico del dolore e della memoria My life is like many others [...] a Christian faith, fickle and atheistic, unfit to understand whether the universe is healthy or cancerous, grace or damnation; a hatred of History: paved with ideological fossils, an inert series of errors; a transport for what lasts and endures—places, sound jargons, honest customs, firm handshakes—in my secluded region. In literature, a love for the untrue and music, provided they are rooted in the fantastic and geometric dimension of suffering and memory; cited in Nunzio Zago, Gesualdo Bufalino, 1987.

The appeal of Bufalino’s literary production is in this self-integrated conception of life and in Bufalino’s sensory evocations of Sicily: its light, sound, and odor, which stimulate his own self-creativity. He was preoccupied with writing, an art he mastered after a long apprenticeship in reading—primarily the work of Baudelaire, Proust, Montale, and Dante. His syncopated style, characterized by a certain ironic distance and Baroque tendency, is whimsical, transparent, objective, and yet utterly personal. Much of his nonfiction, with sensitive portrayals of the local people of his childhood and adolescent years, depicts the vanishing culture of Comiso and its surroundings. During the early 1980s, Bufalino became, with Vincenzo Consolo, whose Il sorriso dell’ignoto marinaio (The Smile of the Unknown Mariner, 1976) had also set new standards for the historical novel, the main figure in the revival of the great tradition of Sicilian fiction. Diceria dell’untore was followed by a number of remarkable books: the 321

GESUALDO BUFALINO autobiographical Museo d’ombre (Museum of Shadows, 1982), a fantastic-historical portrait of Comiso and its vanishing past, and Argo il cieco, ovvero, i sogni della memoria (Blind Argus, or, The Fables of the Memory, 1984), a story about love and memory, an elegant diary recoding the painfulness of aging; the short stories of L’uomo invaso e altre invenzioni (The Keeper of Ruins and Other Inventions, 1986); the verses of L’amaro miele (Bitter Honey, 1982); a collection of aphorisms, Il malpensante (The Evil-Minded, 1987), and a theatrical pie`ce, La panchina (The Bench, 1989). Bufalino’s essays and journalistic articles are collected in two volumes, Cere perse (The Lost Wax) and La luce e il lutto (Light and Mourning, 1988). Among his later major works: Calende greche (On the Greek Calends, 1990) and Qui pro quo (1991), a parody of the detective novel. Although Bufalino’s work has been translated into several languages, the first English edition of The Plague-Sower appeared only in 1988, with a preface by Leonardo Sciascia. In 1988, Bufalino returned to fiction with the widely acclaimed Le menzogne della notte, which many consider his masterpiece. This intellectually subtle novel is remarkable and intriguing in its use of wordplay. It is set in an inhospitable islandfortress where four political prisoners—a baron, a poet, a soldier, and a student—await death for plotting against the Bourbon Monarchy. On the eve of their execution, the governor proposes a last-minute reprieve: If only one of them were to reveal the identity of their leader, they would all go free. The prisoners sit through the night telling stories of love and war, loyalty and revenge. As they see the scaffold being set up, each searches into his past for a memory that will give meaning to approaching death. Through the narrators’ inventions, one unequivocal fact surfaces: Whether their leader will be betrayed or not, the truth will rescue them anyway. Magnificently structured, Le menzogne della notte is the work of a magical poet in full control of his writing powers. Bufalino’s storytelling is deeply rooted in such narratives as Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (ca. 1350–1352) and the tales of the Arabian Nights. His is fabulist territory evocative of Italo Calvino’s best fiction. It is indeed metafiction in the most ancient tradition. Le menzogne della notte is a book that transcends the formal constrictions of literature. It reveals Bufalino’s vision of the fate of man: We are nothing, he says, but ‘‘paper tropes,’’ ‘‘uncreated symulacra,’’ and ‘‘unsubstantial non-existences’’ on the stage of a pantomime of ashes, bubbles blown by 322

the straw of a hostile conjurer. Bufalino indulges in stories and, like a cinematic spectator, finds shelter in the darkness of the screening room: His writing is private, touching upon the meaning of existence through mystification, ambiguity, and the tricks of the human tongue. As Leonardo Sciascia has pointed out in his introduction to the English edition of Diceria dell’untore, ‘‘a book, indeed, is a theatre of ‘untruth’—‘untruth’ that has become ‘truth.’’’ In all of his works, Bufalino uses a highly stylized form of Italian, which he purposely cultivates. In his last novel, Tommaso e il fotografo cieco (Thomas and the Blind Photographer, 1996), he uses elaborate realistic and fantastic imagery to present paradoxical attitudes toward life. Bufalino introduces the motifs of sickness and memory and emphasizes the healing of his protagonist, Gesualdo, the same Gesualdo, whom Bufalino had named, since Argo il cieco ‘‘lo stesso autore, forse, ma forse no, a dispetto della coincidenza onomastica’’ (the same author, perhaps, but perhaps not, notwithstanding the onomastic coincidence). Gesualdo, whoever he may or may not be, revisits himself from novel to novel in search of a long lasting recovery. Bufalino is aware of the lack of stability of the human condition. All of his leading characters know that they are condemned. Their creator offers no solution, no superior vision of the death awaiting all. Not even art has the power to transcend the absurdity of living. Bufalino’s work speaks of a nature and tradition particular to Sicilian narrative from Luigi Pirandello to Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa and Sciascia. Unlike them he is not moralizing in his representations of Sicily. The world is represented as a theater where life is played, as a game, a labyrinth, a chessboard. He wonders in Cere perse: si scrive per popolare il deserto, per non essere piu` soli nella volutta` di essere soli; per distrarsi dalla tentazione del niente o almeno procrastinarla. A somiglianza della giovane principessa delle Mille e una Notte, ognuno parla ogni volta per rinviare l’esecuzione, per corrompere il carnefice One writes to populate the desert; not to be alone in the voluptuousness of being alone; to distract oneself from the temptation of nothingness or at least to postpone it. Like the young princess in the Arabian Nights, one speaks each time to delay death, to bribe the executioner.

Gesualdo Bufalino is the mythical island’s magic man of letters, who was able to translate his uneventful life into fictional themes of loneliness and dread. Bufalino also made an important contribution to the field of literature with his translations; above

GESUALDO BUFALINO all, with his translations of Hugo, Baudelaire, Toulet, and Giraudoux.

Biography Born in Comiso (Ragusa) on 15 November 15 1920, to Biagio, a blacksmith, and Maria Elia, a housewife. Began his studies in Comiso; his scholastic accomplishments included a first prize in Latin prose for high school students bestowed upon him by the Institute of Roman Studies, 1939; this award encouraged him to attend the university, but he was drafted in the Italian Army in 1942 and so interrupted his studies. After the Armistice (8 September 1943), was taken prisoner by the Germans; escaped and hid at first with a family of peasants and later in Scandiano (Emilia), where he remained until the winter of 1944, when he contracted tuberculosis and was admitted to the local hospital. After liberation, went to a sanatorium, ‘‘La Rocca,’’ situated between Monreale and Palermo, where he stayed until February 1947. Returning to Comiso, he took up private tutoring and substitute taught until he was appointed to a permanent position in 1951. Taught humanities in a high school for 25 years; retired from teaching in 1976. Diceria dell’untore published in 1981. In 1982, met and befriended Leonardo Sciascia, and married in December. That same year, lost his father. He retired in Comiso in voluntary isolation, until his death in a car crash, on 14 June 1996. GAETANA MARRONE-PUGLIA Selected Works Collections Opere 1981–1988, edited by Maria Corti and Francesca Caputo, Milan: Bompiani, 1992.

Poetry ‘‘L’amaro miele,’’ 1982; enlarged edition, 1989.

Fiction Diceria dell’untore, 1981; as The Plague-Sower, translated by Stephen Sartarelli, 1988: as The Plague-Spreader’s Tale, translated by Patrick Creagh, 1999. Museo d’ombre, 1982. Argo il cieco, ovvero, i sogni della memoria, 1984; rpt. 1990; as Blind Argus, or , The Fables of the Memory, translated by Patrick Creagh, 1989. L’uomo invaso e altre invenzioni, 1986; as The Invaded Man and Other Inventions, translated by Kathrine Jason, 1990: as The Keeper of Ruins and Other Inventions, translated by Patrick Creagh, 1994. Le menzogne della notte, 1988; as Night’s Lies, translated by Patrick Creagh, 1990 (English edition); as Lies of the Night, translated by Patrick Creagh, 1991 (American edition).

Calende greche, 1990; rpt. 1992. Qui pro quo, 1991. Bluff di parole, 1994. Tommaso e il fotografo cieco, 1996; as Tommaso and the Blind Photographer, translated by Patrick Creagh, 2000.

Theater La panchina, in Trittico: Bufalino Consolo Sciascia, edited by Antonio Di Grado and Giuseppe Lazzaro Danzuso, 1989.

Aphorisms Il malpensante, lunario dell’anno che fu, 1987.

Essays Cere perse, 1985. La luce e il lutto, 1988. Saldi d’autunno, 1990.

Anthologies Dizionario dei personaggi di romanzo da Don Chisciotte all’Innominabile, 1982; rpt. 1989 Il matrimonio illustrato: testi d’ogni tempo e paese scelti per norma dei celibi e memoria dei coniugati (with Giovanna Bufalino), 1989.

Other Comisso ieri, 1978. Saline di Sicilia, 1988. Il guerrier meschino: Frammento di un’opera dei Pupi, 1993. Carteggio di gioventu`, 1943–1950 (with Angelo Romano`), edited by Nunzio Zago, 1994. Il fiele ibleo, 1995. Il languore e le furie: Quaderni di scuola (1935–38), 1995. In corpore vili: Autoritratto letterario, 1997.

Further Reading Amoroso, Giuseppe, ‘‘Gesualdo Bufalino,’’ in La realta` e il sogno: Narratori italiani del Novecento, edited by Gaetano Mariani and Mario Petrucciani, vol. 1, Rome: Lucarini, 1987. Ba`rberi Squarotti, Giorgio (editor), Gli eredi di Verga, Catania: Letteratura Amica, 1984. Cinquegrani, Alessandro, La partita a scacchi con Dio: Per una metafisica dell’opera di Gesualdo Bufalino, Padua: Il Poligrafo, 2002. Citati, Pietro, ‘‘Cannibale divoratore di libri,’’ in Il corriere della sera, 22 April 1988, p. 3. Curry, Corrada Biazzo, ‘‘La sicilianita` come teatralita` in Sciascia e Bufalino,’’ in Quaderni d’Italianistica, 22, no. 2 (2001): 139–157. Hainsworth, Peter, ‘‘Gesualdo Bufalino: Baroque to the Future,’’ in The New Italian Novel, edited by Zygmunt G. Baranski and Lino Pertile, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993. Lo Curzio, Guglielmo, Scrittori siciliani, Palermo: Novecento Editrice, 1989. Monastra, Rosa Maria, ‘‘Bufalino e il linguaggio biblicocristiano: Tra pieta` empieta`,’’ in Rivista di Studi Italiani, 19, no. 2 (2001): 107–118. Neri, Francesca, and Giampiero Segneri, ‘‘Reshaping Memory: Bufalino, Consolo and the Sicilian Tradition,’’ in European Studies, 18 (2002): 91–105.

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GESUALDO BUFALINO Nigro, Salvatore, ‘‘Gli specchi scritti: Sciascia e Bufalino,’’ in Scrivere in Sicilia: Vittorini ed oltre,’’ Syracuse: Ediprint, 1985. Rizzo, Cettina (editor), Le voleur de feu: Bufalino e le ragioni del tradurre, Florence: Olschki, 2005. Sciascia, Leonardo, Introduction to Gesualdo Bufalino, The Plague-Sower, Hygiene, CO: Eridanos Press, 1988. Zagarrio, Vito, ‘‘La moviola della memoria: Il caso Bufalino,’’ in Studi Novecenteschi, 28, no. 61 (2001): 199–213. Zago, Nunzio, Gesualdo Bufalino: La figura e l’opera, Marina di Patti (ME): Pungitopo, 1987. Zago, Nunzio (editor), Simile a un colombo viaggiatore: per Bufalino, Comiso: Selarchi Immagini, 1998. Zampardi, Arnaldo, ‘‘Bufalino e la memoria,’’ in Studium, 2, no. 2 (March-April 1986): 268–271. Zampieri, Walter, ‘‘Notes from an Invisible Orchestra: Gesualdo Bufalino as Historical Novelist,’’ in Risorgimento in Modern Italian Culture: Revisiting the Nineteenth-Century Past in History, Narrative, and Cinema, edited by Norma Bouchard, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005. Zappulla Muscara`, Sarah (editor), Narratori siciliani del secondo dopoguerra, Catania: Maimone, 1990.

DICERIA DELL’UNTORE, 1981 Novel by Gesualdo Bufalino

When Gesualdo Bufalino’s most celebrated book, Diceria dell’untore (The Plague-Sower), was published in Italy in 1981, it became the major literary event of the year, winning the Campiello prize. A high school teacher until his retirement in 1976, Bufalino, who had lived in enforced seclusion from the literary world, captivated the attention of the Palermitan publisher Elvira Sellerio through a photography book on his hometown. Eventually, he agreed to surrender a manuscript he had begun to write in 1950, completed in 1971, and subjected to several revisions. The plot of Diceria dell’untore exemplifies Bufalino’s economy of style and the themes that preoccupied him. In 1946, in a sanatorium near Palermo, an estranged group of people find themselves brought and bound together by disease and destiny. All survivors of the war, they are kept 324

waiting in the antechamber of death. Life for them pulsates with a monotonous, wearisome beat, but their gestures and words enact a cathartic ritual. As the narrator-protagonist recalls at the end of chapter 2, ‘‘Oh sı`, furono giorni infelici, i piu` felici della mia vita’’ (Ah yes, those were unhappy days, the happiest of my life). Bufalino’s memory evokes the most extraordinary characters: Il Gran Magro (The Great Thin One), who is the direct opposite of the young narrator; a doctor/ director who orchestrates the spectacle of life and death; Father Vittorio, the military chaplain; Sebastiano, who throws himself down a spiral staircase; Angelo, for whom ‘‘la morte e` un paravento di fumo fra i vivi e gli altri’’ (death is a mere screen of smoke between the living and the others); Marta, a Jewish deportee from the Nazi camps, the main female character, a mysterious ballerina the protagonist passionately loves. Feverish, vibrant, sensuous, Baroque, atoned by an atmosphere that envelops hyperbole and excess, intemperance and passion; a striking blend of irony and theatricality: these are some of the distinguishing features cited by the reviewers of Diceria dell’untore. The novel begins memorably with a dizzying opening confession: O quando tutte le notti—per pigrizia, per avarizia— ritornavo a sognare lo stesso sogno: una strada color cenere, piatta, che scorre con andamento di fiume fra due muri piu` alti della statura di un uomo; poi si rompe, strapionba sul vuoto [...] mi sorprende un ribrezzo di pozzo, e con esso l’estasi che solo un irrisorio pedaggio rimanga a separarmi...da che? O that time when each night-out of laziness or greed—I would dream the same dream: a flat, ash colored road, running with a river’s flow between two walls taller than a man; then it breaks off, jutting over the void [...] suddenly I am overwhelmed by the horror of the pit, accompanied by delight at the knowledge that a trifling toll is all that separates me... from what?

With this bravura opening, Bufalino establishes the tone and the boundaries of that unique literary form that is ‘‘diceria,’’ that vivacious rigmarole through which the protagonist will recount his personal story as well as memories. In Bufalino’s novel, the traumatic experience of the war and the hallucinatory impressions recorded at ‘‘La Rocca’’ sanatorium, near Palermo, produce a complex representation of reality and a lucid investigation into the agony of being. At the end, we are told why the protagonist is the only survivor: M’aspettava una vita nuda, uno zero di giorni previsti, senza una brace ne´ un grido. Uscire mi toccava dalla

GESUALDO BUFALINO cruna dell’individuo per essere uno dei tanti della strada, che amministrano umanamente la loro piccina saviezza d’alito e d’anni. Ma, allo stesso modo dell’istrione in ritiro che ripone nel guardaroba i corredi sanguinosi di un Riccardo o di un Cesare, io avrei serbato i miei coturni, e le tirate al proscenio dell’eroe che avevo presunto di essere, in un angolo della memoria. Per questo forse m’era stato concesso l’esonero: per questo io solo m’ero salvato, e nessun altro, dalla falcidia: per rendere testimonianza, se non delazione, d’una retorica e d’una pieta` A naked life awaited me, a nothingness of predictable days, without a sparkle or voice. I had to come out from the eye of my selfhood in order to be one of the many men in the street who humanly administer the petty wisdom of their breath and years. Like a retired actor putting back into the closet the bloody vestments of King Richard or Caesar, I would lay aside my buskins, and the soliloquies of the hero that I had pretended to be, in a corner of my memory. Perhaps this was why I had been granted a pardon, why I alone, and no one else, had survived the massacre: to bear witness to, if not denounce, a rhetoric and pity.

In his first novel, the artist offers a poetic tribute to his memories of Sicily, her people and her traditions. The Mediterranean island becomes a mythic place where stories are told through highly expressive words. As Bufalino explained in his ‘‘Istruzioni per l’uso’’ of Diceria dell’untore, originally addressed only to his friends, he devised his narrative rhetoric with great care: Confesso che il primo capitolo che scrissi (non e` il primo nell’ordine canonico e non conta dire qual e`) nacque come un gioco serio, la scommessa di trovare intrecci plausibili fra 50 parole scelte in anticipo per timbro, colore, carica evocatoria comuni. Qualcosa di meno maniacale delle matematiche di Raymond Roussel... I must confess that the first chapter I wrote (it is not the first in the definitive order, and there is no need to say which one it is) was born of a serious game, the challenge of finding plausible interconnections among fifty words chosen beforehand for their common tone, color, and evocative charge. Something a bit less maniacal than the mathematics of Raymond Roussel.

Such connections are neither esoteric nor cabalistic, but are born ‘‘da una parentela e coalizione

espressiva e musicale’’ (of a kinship and an expressive and musical coalition). He strives to construct, through literature, a mythopoeic self. Diceria dell’untore is a successful experiment in self-critical autobiography. It was adapted to the screen in 1991 by director Beppe Cino, with a remarkable Vanessa Redgrave playing the role of Suor Crocifissa. GAETANA MARRONE Editions First edition: Diceria dell’untore, Palermo: Sellerio, 1981. Other editions: in Opere 1981–1988, edited by Maria Corti and Francesca Caputo, Milan: Bompiani, 1992. Translations: as The Plague-sower, translated by Stephen Sartarelli, with an introduction by Leonardo Sciascia, Hygiene, CO: Eridanos Press, 1988; The Plague-Spreader’s Tale, translated by Patrick Creagh, London: Harvill, 1999.

Further Reading Aronica, Salvatore, ‘‘La trama della menzogna in Diceria dell’untore,’’ in Quaderni d’Italianistica, 16 (1995): 289–293. Cattanei, Luigi, ‘‘Per la poetica di Gesualdo Bufalino,’’ in Otto/Novecento, 19 (March-April, 1995): 215–222. Di Biase, Carmine, ‘‘Il mistero della more in ‘Diceria dell’untore,’’’ in Studium, 77, no. 5 (September-October 1981): 603–608. Hainsworth, Peter, ‘‘Imagining Losers in Bufalino’s Diceria,’’ in European Memories of the Second World War, edited by Helmett Peitsch, Charles Burdett and Claire Gorrara, Oxford and New York: Berghan Books, 1999. Klopp, Charles, ‘‘The Return of the Spiritual with a Note on the Fiction of Bufalino, Tabucchi and Celati,’’ in Annali d’Italianistica, 19 (2001): 93–102. Marrone, Gianfranco, ‘‘Gesualdo Bufalino: Diceria dell’autore,’’ in Nuove effemeridi (Palermo), 4, no. 13 (1991): 4–11. Papa, Enzo, ‘‘Gesualdo Bufalino,’’ in Novecento, edited by Gianni Grana, Milan: Marzorati, 1989. Raspanti, Antonino, ‘‘La domanda sulla morte in Gesualdo Bufalino,’’ in Letteratura siciliana del novecento. Le domande radicali, edited by Massimo Naro, Caltanissetta-Roma: Sciascia, 2002. Zago, Nunzio, ‘‘Gesualdo Bufalino,’’ in Gli eredi di Verga, edited by Giorgio Ba`rberi Squarotti, Catania: Letteratura Amica, 1984.

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MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI

MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI (1475–1564) God sent Michelangelo down to Earth, Giorgio Vasari writes in the last chapter of Vite de’ piu` eccellenti pittori, scultori, architetti (Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, 1568), because he saw that modern artists were struggling to compose a perfect imitation of nature in the attempt to attain ‘‘quella somma cognizione che molti chiamano intelligenza’’ (that supreme knowledge that many call intelligence). Vasari portrays Michelangelo as a second Christ who has descended from Heaven ‘‘per cavarci da tanti errori’’ (to take us away from all our errors) caused by our ‘‘arroganza’’ (arrogance). Living in the darkness of our fruitless efforts, we now can turn to Michelangelo to receive God’s enlightenment, what he defines as ‘‘intelligenza.’’ In Vasari’s view, Michelangelo is not only the greatest artist who has ever lived, but his art has a deeply moral and religious significance as well. Accompanied by a profound knowledge of ‘‘filosofia morale’’ (moral philosophy) and of ‘‘dolce poesia’’ (sweet poetry), Michelangelo is a divine model of perfection. As Vasari states in a later passage of his biography, his ‘‘bellissime canzoni’’ (beautiful canzoni) and his ‘‘stupendi suoi sonetti gravemente composti’’ (wonderful sonnets that he composed with grave care) are read and debated in all Italian academies. Michelangelo’s ‘‘dolce poesia,’’ as Vasari says, is the most original collection of poetry of the Italian Renaissance, an unprecedented and candid autobiographical account, a unique meditation on the relationship between visual and verbal expression, and a heartfelt meditation on religious enlightenment. Michelangelo’s Rime bear a close resemblance with Shakespeare’s canzoniere because of their essential themes: the love for a young man and for a woman, who is also but not exclusively Vittoria Colonna. In these two collections of poetry, the tone and philosophical influences are also very similar. Walter Pater’s powerful definition of ‘‘Michelangelesque,’’ which expresses ‘‘sweetness and strength, pleasure with surprise, an energy of conception that seems at every moment about to 326

break through all the conditions of comely form, recovering, touch by touch, a loveliness found usually only in the simplest natural things,’’ is in part applicable also to Michelangelo’s poetry (The Renaissance, 1877). ‘‘Strength’’ more than ‘‘sweetness’’ dominates the artist’s texts. ‘‘Loveliness’’ in his poetry becomes the painful struggle to bring out the concept lying dormant within the matter, as we see in his unfinished four sculptures called Schiavi (Slaves) for the tomb of Julius II. Thus the legacy of Michelangelo’s poetry might truly lie in his tormented and unfinished compositions, which challenge the traditional metrical forms of Petrarchan poetry. Only a few of Michelangelo’s poems were published during his life. His Rime (more than 302 pieces) were composed between 1503 and 1560. In a letter to Vasari dated September 19, 1554, from his vast epistolary, Michelangelo jokes about his crazy decision to write sonnets in such a late period of his life. His poems often defy the metric and structural rules of the Italian lyric tradition. Along with some 80 sonnets and some 100 madrigals on habitual themes such as the love experience, we find numerous ‘‘fragments,’’ isolated stanzas, but also single verses written in a seemingly spontaneous manner, for instance on the back of letters or next to his sketches. Michelangelo’s canzoniere is both a product alternative to his figurative works and the invaluable means through which the artist meditates upon his expression. Thematically, Marsilio Ficino’s Neoplatonism, primarily his De amore (On Love, 1469), a seminal rewriting of the Symposium, exerts a central influence on Michelangelo, together with Pico della Mirandola’s Commento sopra una canzone de amore composta da Girolamo Benivieni (Commentary on a Canzone of Benivieni, 1486), which is considered one of the first treatises on love. In terms of poetic models, Dante’s Comedia deeply influenced Michelangelo’s Petrarchan language. Michelangelo’s ‘‘fragmentary’’ poetry must be related to the debate on the ‘‘nonfinito’’ (unfinished) in his sculpture, that is, the artist aims at giving form to a ‘‘concetto’’ (concept), a

MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI key term of Renaissance art theory. He dedicates some of his most famous sonnets to this theme, for instance ‘‘Non ha l’ottimo artista alcun concetto’’ (The best of artists never has a concept), which is a perfect, albeit very dense, synthesis of Michelangelo’s artistic view. The poet contends that a great artist succeeds in bringing out the ‘‘concept’’ that a marble block contains (‘‘in se´ circonscriva’’) within its husk (‘‘suo superchio’’) only if his hand follows the intellect (‘‘la man che ubbidisce all’intelletto’’). That is, hand and mind must work together to give life to the artist’s insight. This sonnet was the object of a famous lecture of the philosopher Benedetto Varchi at the Florentine Academy in 1546. Varchi underscores that a ‘‘concept’’ is an act of the imagination, and it stands for ‘‘form,’’ ‘‘idea,’’ ‘‘example,’’ ‘‘similitude,’’ ‘‘image,’’ but first of all for the Aristotelian forma agens, which exists in the artist’s mind and compels him to create an immaterial hybrid, something between seeing and sensing. The presence of Aristotelian philosophy in Michelangelo’s poetics, usually underestimated, plays in fact a major role in shaping the artist’s idea of ‘‘concept.’’ For Michelangelo, a ‘‘concept’’ is both an act of imagination and a synonym for ‘‘form’’ and ‘‘image,’’ thus his incomplete texts materialize his effort to give form to a ‘‘concept,’’ and therefore are fragmentary only from a metrical point of view. Take for example the fragment ‘‘Ben fu, temprando il ciel tuo vivo raggio’’ (To me Heaven was surely merciless), which is part of a brief sequence of three poems (two complete sonnets and a fragment) dedicated to a young man, Febo del Poggio, all of them focusing on the end of their friendship. In a letter written before September 23, 1534, Michelangelo shares with Poggio his decision of leaving Rome for Florence and reassures him of his unflinching love and dedication. The letter also reveals that some sort of disagreement has tainted their relationship. In ‘‘Ben fu, temprando il ciel tuo vivo raggio,’’ Michelangelo offers a deeply spiritual analysis of his love for Febo, in which self-discovery and self-abandonment coincide. By punning on the name of his young friend, ‘‘Febo’’ (Phoebus) and ‘‘poggio’’ (hill), in only eight verses the poet visualizes the act of falling in love through sight (the sun’s rays descend on those who love the young man-Phoebus) as a blinding experience and as an actual fall from the hill (poggio) to which the beloved Febo had decided to fly. This intense, obscure ‘‘fragment,’’ which rephrases the opening lines of Canto 28 of Dante’s Purgatorio (the pilgrim’s walking up the hill over the forest of Eden),

works as a cogent concetto, that is, as an insight that transcends expression. Its main source is Ficino’s De raptu Pauli (Paul’s Rapture, ca. 1476), in which the Florentine philosopher interprets the apostle Paul’s ascension to the third heaven in connection with his Neoplatonic vision of Christian theology. Michelangelo had explored a similar theme in some of his famous sketches for Tommaso Cavalieri, such as Il ratto di Ganimede (Ganymede’s Rapture) and La caduta di Fetone (The Fall of Phaeton). Michelangelo’s poetry could be thus seen as an original form of anti-Petrarchism, which questions the strict rhetorical structures of Italian poetic tradition, its trite metaphors, and its empty and redundant language. The influence of Ficinian Platonism is apparent in Michelangelo’s concept of love. However, it is important to bear in mind his unique interpretation of the meaning and role of the body in the love experience. In the sonnet ‘‘D’altrui pietoso e sol di se´ spietato’’ (With grace to all, to itself only scorn), written for Tommaso Cavalieri, Michelangelo describes himself as a lover who, like a snake, wishes to shed his own skin in order to protect the limbs of his beloved. The extent of Michelangelo’s allegiance to Renaissance Florentine thought is still the object of an intense academic discussion. The fundamental emphasis on the transcendence inherent in human physicality is at once accepted and modified in Michelangelo’s poetic works. In this regard, aging and death become recurrent themes, only partly justifiable by the fact that most of his literary production corresponds to a mature phase of his life. Images of tortured, flayed, dissected bodies recur both in his verses and his figurative works (such as his self-portrait in the Giudizio universale). In Michelangelo’s masterpiece, the saints manifest signs of their martyrdom according to traditional Christian iconography, whereas St. Bartholomew, who was flayed to death, holds his skin like a shroud. The face we see on the saint’s crumpled skin is Michelangelo’s. Michelangelo turns the act of sculpting into a metaphor for a process of self-revelation that can be attained only through suffering. He himself is the matter or stone from which an inner form is chipped forth. The act of molding, or better yet, bringing to the surface one’s own identity by means of hammering or melting becomes the key metaphor of Michelangelo’s verses. But similar to the ‘‘nonfinito’’ in sculpture, the poet’s self-image can only be a work in progress that defies the static rules of poetic rhetoric. The concetto expressed through poetry is a partial reflection of an inner image that lies under 327

MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI the aegis of human physicality, as in the beginning lines of the long poem ‘‘I’ sto rinchiuso come la midolla/da la sua scorza, qua pover e solo’’ (I live shut up here, like the doughy middle/inside the bread crust, poor and all alone). Michelangelo’s poems on visual art (primarily sculpture) are particularly original. The opening section includes poems that address the figurative arts and the artist’s work. They comprise important autobiographical references, like the famous ‘‘I’ ho gia` fatto un gozzo in questo stento’’ (I’ve got myself a goiter from this strain), in which he humorously describes his painful working on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Other lyrics present his philosophical view of artistic expression, where Michelangelo emphasizes the power of art to produce beauty and thus self-knowledge, according to the well-known concepts of Florentine Platonism. In a compelling manner, the artist envisions love as a form of sculpture: He does not visualize the beloved’s beautiful forms in order to make them eternal (a common topos of the Petrarchan tradition) but contends that it is the beloved who, through the power that love has granted her or him, is able to give form to the lover. For Michelangelo, the beloved is a sculptor that ‘‘carves’’ out the truthful, and beautiful, form of the lover. The beloved, as he writes in a madrigal dedicated to Vittoria Colonna, has the power to strip away the bark that hides the good lying inside the poet. The last part comprises a handful of compositions in which Michelangelo speaks of divine creation as a form of artistic expression. Of particular relevance for a correct understanding of Michelangelo’s poetic writing is his complex relationship with Vittoria Colonna, whose influence on the artist’s religious expression has been the object of intense critical scrutiny. In 1546, Michelangelo made a selection of his verses in the attempt to create a coherent canzoniere, as the manuscript Vaticano Latino 3211 proves. This project failed also because of Vittoria Colonna’s death in 1547. In his poetic anthology, Michelangelo excluded his ‘‘realistic’’ and occasional compositions and emphasized his love verses. The artist created two female interlocutors, a mysterious ‘‘donna bella e crudele’’ (a beautiful and cruel woman) and Vittoria Colonna, who became the sole recognizable addressee of the entire selection. Critics have noted that Michelangelo’s important anthology does not offer spiritual compositions, although spiritual concerns later become a central component of Michelangelo’s poetic production. Michelangelo continues his dialogue with Vittoria 328

Colonna after her death by appropriating and responding to some of her deeply religious sonnets. Students of sixteenth-century Italian Catholicism have debated Michelangelo’s possible adherence or interest in Italian Protestantism. Vittoria Colonna, who was in contact with the followers of Juan Valde´s’ reform spirituality, gave Michelangelo a manuscript of her poetry (MS Vaticano Latino 11539), which exclusively focuses on her love for Christ and thus challenges the traditional structure of a Renaissance Petrarchan canzoniere. Michelangelo began writing explicitly religious poetry also in response to Vittoria Colonna’s religious canzoniere. Michelangelo’s canzoniere can be roughly divided into three periods. A first group of poems (written between 1503–1532) covers a variety of different themes, but apart from the self-ironic sonnet on the labor in the Sistine Chapel, it focuses, at times with uneven results, on the love experience using basic topoi of Petrarchan language (the vision of love as inner fire, sight as the origin of love). For instance, ‘‘La vita del mie amor non e` ‘l cor mio’’ (What sets my love alive is not my heart), ‘‘I’ fe’ degli occhi porta al mie veneno’’ (I let my eyes become my poison’s gate), and ‘‘Dagli occhi del mie ben si parte e vola’’ (A burning beam from my beloved’s eyes). The most famous section of the canzoniere is the series of poems composed between 1532–1547, including the sonnets for the young Tomaso Cavalieri considered to be the highest poetic expression of the Florentine Neoplatonic notion of homoerotic love. Among them, the stunning ‘‘Sento d’un foco un freddo aspetto acceso’’ (I feel how a cold face that fire has lit), in which the poet gives new life to the trite theme of the paradoxical nature of love (cold and burning), a recurring topos in his early lyrics. These also comprise a handful of intense compositions on the young Febo del Poggio, 50 epitaphs in memory of the young Cecchino Bracci, and the better-known poems for Vittoria Colonna. The final part of the canzoniere (between 1547 and 1560) is primarily made of spiritual texts and meditations on death.

Biography Born in Caprese, Arezzo, on March 6, 1475, he first studied with the Humanist Francesco Galatea of Urbino and the painter Francesco Granacci. In 1488, he joined the Florentine bottega of the painters Domenico and David Ghirlandaio, who gave him a three-year contract. At Lorenzo de’ Medici’s, he met Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, and

MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI Poliziano. He became acquainted with Florentine Neoplatonic thought. He left Florence before the arrival of Charles VIII’s armies, moving first to Venice and then to Bologna. In 1496, in Rome he sculptured the Bacco, which is at the Bargello. In 1498, he began working on the Pieta` now in St Peter’s. In 1501, he was back in Florence. In 1502, his first poetic works. In 1504, he painted the Tondo Doni. On September 8, 1504, his David was placed in Piazza della Signoria. In May 1508, he embarked on the project for the frescoes on the vault of the Sistine Chapel, which occupied him until 1512. In 1509, he described his travail in a sonnet for Giovanni da Pistoia. In 1513–1515, for the tomb of Pope Julius II, he completed the Mose` in St Peter’s in Vincoli and the Schiavi in the Louvre. In 1526, for Giuliano’s tomb, he completed the Notte e Giorno. In 1528, his brother Buonarroto died. In 1532, he met Tommaso Cavalieri in Rome, where he was working on a new project for the tomb of Julius II. In 1534, the death of his elderly father, Ludovico, occurred. He moved to Rome in September to plan the Giudizio universale in the Sistine Chapel, which he started in 1535, the same year of his last letter to the young Febo del Poggio. In 1536, he became friends with Vittoria Colonna, who died in 1547. In 1544, he sketched the tomb for Cecchino Bracci, to whom he dedicated a series of epitaphs. In 1561, he completed the great model in wood for the cupola of St. Peter’s. Died on February 18, 1564. ARMANDO MAGGI See also: Literature and Visual Arts Selected Works Rime di Michelangelo Buonarroti, raccolte da Michelagnolo suo nipote, Florence: Giunti, 1623. This seminal edition (137 poems) is deeply flawed because of its editor’s frequent subjective interventions. Le Rime di Michelangelo Buonarroti, pittore, scultore e architetto, edited by Cesare Guasti, Florence: Le Monnier, 1863. Rime, con varianti, apparato, nota filologica, edited by Enzo Noe` Girardi, Bari: Laterza, 1960; as The Complete Poems of Michelangelo, translated by Joseph Tusiani, New York: Noonday Press, 1960; as The Poetry of

Michelangelo: an Annotated Translation, edited by James M. Saslow, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991 (this is the only recent translation including the original Italian texts); as The Complete Poems of Michelangelo, edited by John Frederick Nims, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. The Complete Poems and Selected Letters of Michelangelo, translated by Creighton Gilbert, New York: Modern Library, 1965. Carteggio di Michelangelo, edited by Giovanni Poggi, 5 vols., Florence: Sansoni, 1965–1983.

Further Reading Altizer, Alba B., Self and Symbolism in the Poetry of Michelangelo, John Donne, and Agrippa d’Aubigne´, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973. Barsella, Susanna, ‘‘Michelangelo. Le rime dell’arte,’’ in Letteratura e arte, 1 (2003): 213–225. Binni, Walter, Michelangelo scrittore, Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 1965. Cambon, Glauco, Michelangelo’s Poetry, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985. Clements, Robert John, The Poetry of Michelangelo, New York: New York University Press, 1965. Colonna, Vittoria, Sonnets for Michelangelo: A Bilingual Edition, edited and translated by Abigail Brundin, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005, 1–45. Fedi, Roberto, La memoria della poesia, Rome: Salerno, 1990, 264–305. Francese, Joseph, ‘‘On Homoerotic Tension in Michelangelo’s Poetry,’’ in Modern Languages Notes, 117, no. 1 (2002): 17–47. Girardi, Enzo Noe`, Studi sulle Rime di Michelangelo, Florence: Olschki, 1974. Maggi, Armando, ‘‘L’immagine del concetto d’amore: Una lettura del frammentomichelangiolesco ‘Ben fu, temprando il cielo tuo vivo raggio,’’’ in Revue d’e´tudesitaliennes, 46, nos. 3–4 (2000): 259–268. Pater, Walter, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, New York: Macmillan, 1877; rpt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. Ryan, Christopher, The Poetry of Michelangelo. An Introduction, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998. Scarpati, Claudio, ‘‘Michelangelo poeta dal ‘canzoniere’ alle rime spirituali,’’ in Aevum, 78 (2003): 593–613. Summers, David, Michelangelo and the Language of Art, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981. Vecce, Carlo, ‘‘Petrarca, Vittoria Colonna, Michelangelo. Note di commento a testi e varianti di Vittoria Colonna e di Michelangelo,’’ in Studi e problemi di critica testuale, 44 (1992): 101–125. Wallace, William E. (editor), Michelangelo, selected scholarship in English, 5 vols., New York: Garland, 1995.

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IL BURCHIELLO (DOMENICO DI GIOVANNI)

IL BURCHIELLO (DOMENICO DI GIOVANNI) (CA.1404–1447/1449) Domenico di Giovanni, generally known as Il Burchiello, was a Florentine barber as well as a poet. His barbershop is considered one of the most interesting cultural centers of fifteenth-century Florence, and was frequented by prominent poets and intellectuals of the day, including the architect Leon Battista Alberti. Contemporary perspectives on his biography and literary work are often influenced by a nineteenth-century myth that portrayed him as a second Dante and a rebellious poet sent into exile because of his unconventional personality. More recently, archival research and Michelangelo Zaccarello’s 2000 critical edition of his poems have helped to clarify his complex literary career. A considerable number of fifteenthcentury Italian manuscripts attribute the authorship of a varying number of poems to Burchiello, under the title Sonetti del Burchiello (Burchiello’s Sonnets). This poetic corpus includes about 220 sonetti caudati, that is, sonnets characterized by the addition of at least one tercet to the customary 14 lines. While most of the poems are indeed by Burchiello, some are by different authors; thus, the Sonetti del Burchiello was a work in progress, rather than a compact collection of poems, organized into a book only in later editions such as Anton Francesco Grazzini’s I sonetti di Burchiello, et di Messer Antonio Alamanni, alla burchiellesca (Burchiello’s Sonnets and Those of Antonio Alamanni in the ‘‘Burchiellesca’’ Fashion, 1552) and Anton Francesco Doni’s Le rime del poeta Burchiello (Burchiello’s Poems, 1553). In addition, the texts circulated independently and were often rewritten, transformed, and renamed by new writers. Defining the genre of the sonnets is a problematic task. The corpus is a synthesis of at least three Tuscan literary traditions: comic-realistic poetry, and the oral traditions of motti (witty sayings) and facezie (witty remarks). In addition, it documents the formation of a new poetic style, the so-called stile alla burchia. The comic-realistic component is evident in certain poems that transform typical situations of the medieval tradition. Sonnet CVXXIII, ‘‘Ardati il fuoco vecchia puzolente’’ 330

(May fire burn you, stinking old woman), for instance, develops the topos of the vituperation of an old woman, and Burchiello respects the conventional elements of this tradition, which fuses the goliardic genre of the vituperium with the motifs of misogynist literature. The elaboration of such elements results in a caricatural deformation: The woman’s ‘‘veder sottile’’ (attentive sight) may refer either to her habit of splitting hairs or to her wrinkled and feeble eyes. The comic-realistic tradition is also rich in models that are suitable to express autobiographic experiences. A night spent in bad lodgings, for instance, is a common situation and also a comic topos: the so-called mala notte (bad night) or malo albergo (bad lodging). This traditional situation is present in sonnet LXXXII, ‘‘Borsi spetial, crudele e dispietato’’ (Oh Borsi the apothecary, cruel and pitiless), where the poet describes the night he spent on a disgusting bed filled with fleas, bedbugs, and lice, and compares his pain to a religious penitence. Time spent in prison, on the other hand, is both a documented autobiographical detail (Burchiello was indeed arrested in Siena in 1439) and a literary situation modeled on Cecco Angiolieri’s poetry. Burchiello’s lament is rich in grotesque and visionary elements, such as the hyperbolic description of how his stomach rumbles for food: ‘‘El corpo m’urla spesso e fa rimbombo / onde un dı` mi rispose una colomba / la qual credette ch’i’ fussi un colombo’’ (My body howls and echoes so loudly / that one day a female dove answered me, for she believed I was a male dove). The oral tradition of the motti and facezie is represented, for instance, by sonnet CXCVI, vv. 9–11, in which a cat confuses his owner’s testicles with a mouse and attacks him; or in sonnet LXXIX, ‘‘Prestate nobis de oleo vestrosso’’ (Lend us some of your oil), which reports the dialogue of two ignorant ambassadors who, forgetting the text of their speech, misquote Matthew’s Gospel and engage in a pointless argument. Both anecdotes are documented, respectively, in Franco Sacchetti’s Trecentonovelle (Three Hundred Tales, 1390s) and in Poggio Bracciolini’s Facetiae (1452).

IL BURCHIELLO (DOMENICO DI GIOVANNI) The sonnets written in alla burchia represent the originality of the Sonetti del Burchiello. This locution literally means ‘‘pell-mell’’ in that it refers to the way a certain kind of boat (‘‘burchiello’’) is usually loaded with everyday goods like food, tools, and sundry items. Some critics suggested that the locution might also refer to written inventories of goods, as numbers introduce most of the lists used in the poems. The Florentine painter, architect and poet Andrea di Orcagna (ca. 1308–1368), whose poems are included in the main corpus, invented this poetic style. Burchiello, however, took this literary game a step further, turning it into a veritable poetic genre. According to the definition given by Emilio Pasquini, the style alla burchia consists of a ‘‘decomposition of reality into its elements and their subsequent recomposition on a different level of visionary and oneiric reality’’ (‘‘Letteratura popolareggiante, comica e giocosa, lirica minore e narrativa volgare del Quattrocento,’’ 1996). The effect is an optical illusion in which objects of daily life and names of real places are fused and connected to mythological, biblical, and literary names, or an everyday creature, such as a duck, is said to produce milk and butter. As Zaccarello noted in his introduction to Sonetti del Burchiello (2004), the poet reinterprets reality through an ‘‘illogical and visionary creative syntax, which constantly threatens the conventional linearity (causal, chronological, narrative) of the text with unexpected developments and verbal associations.’’ Sonnet XCIX, ‘‘A meza notte, quasi in sulla nona’’ (At midnight, almost at the ninth hour) is a good example of the new technique. The incipit of the text is a chronological detail and also an oxymoron, as ‘‘in the ninth hour’’ corresponds to three in the afternoon. The second line introduces two characters, a fictional hero from the Carolingian tradition, ‘‘Bravieri,’’ and a Florentine physician and geographer, ‘‘Pozzo Toscanegli’’ (whose name is also misspelled). The two characters are engaged in the quaint activity described in the third line: ‘‘presono una nidiata di bacegli’’ (they caught a nest of peapods). The setting of the action is described with a geographical oxymoron, ‘‘tra il corso degli Strozi e Pampalona’’ (between Strozzi street and Pamplona), which are respectively a street in Florence and a Spanish town. Sometimes Burchiello’s poems are rich in obscene double meanings associated with the carnivalesque tradition. Sonnet CCXXVII, ‘‘Qualunque al bagno vuol mandar la moglie’’ (He who wants to send his wife to the thermal waters), for instance, explains a remedy for infertility in women, thermal

baths, which implies abundant sexual activity described with rather explicit sexual metaphors. Obscenity, however, is not the only way to interpret Burchiello’s poems, and frequently this reading is deceptive. For instance, sonnet LXXVII, ‘‘Ficcami una pennuccia in un baccello’’ (Stick me a little pen in a pod) is only apparently vulgar; according to Zaccarello, it should in fact rather be read in the context of other sonnets about prison, so that the opening line explains a way to hide a pen for a prisoner. The alla burchia style neither obscures nor foreshadows the poetics of the absurd or surrealism, as has been rather anachronistically suggested. Rather, Burchiello and the other poets collected in the Sonetti del Burchiello sought a new way of practicing literature. This is documented specifically by autobiographical poems that do not exactly fit the comic-realistic cliche`s. For example, sonnet XCIII, ‘‘Va in mercato Giorgin, tien qui un Grosso’’ (Go to the marketplace, Giorgin, here is a Grosso) seems to follow the traditional scheme of the shopping list. Since ‘‘Grosso’’ is the name of a Florentine coin whose value is not enough to buy all the things on the list, however, Burchiello transforms this traditional scheme into a new discourse meant to be imaginary, rather than realistic. The essential elements of this new poetics are more evident in sonnet CXXVI, ‘‘La poesia contende col rasoio’’ (Poetry argues with the razor), and sonnet CXIX, ‘‘Fior di borrana, se vuoi dire in rima’’ (Herbaceous flower, if you want to write verses). In the first sonnet, Burchiello, barber and poet, refers to himself in a fictional discussion between the allegorical figure of his literary activity, poetry, and the symbol of his work, the razor. For parodic purposes, both characters adopt the language and the style of lyric poetry; only the poet, in the end, stops the conversation with a statement of practical wisdom, by saying: ‘‘Non piu` romore, / ch’e’ non ci corra la secchia al bacino, / ma chi meglio mi vuol mi paghi il vino’’ (No more quarrel: / so that the pail and the bowl are not in danger, / rather, let the one who loves me best pay for some wine). In ‘‘Fior di borrana, se vuoi dire in rima,’’ Burchiello defines his innovative idea of poetry. He counsels the poet to refuse erudition and philosophical doctrine; rather, daily life should be the only source of inspiration in order to write ‘‘naturale e facilmente’’ (naturally and easily), while fantasy should be the only method for editing. Burchiello thus contributes a new idea of poetry to Renaissance literature. Culturally speaking, his literary production is an alternative to the imitation of Petrarch and to 331

IL BURCHIELLO (DOMENICO DI GIOVANNI) the Humanist idea of art. Ideologically, his poetry and its considerable number of imitators reflect a rejection of institutions like the court, the academy, and the university and instead favor the manual arts, painting, sculpture, and architecture.

Biography Born in Florence, near Santa Maria Novella, 1404. His mother was a weaver, and his son a carpenter. Began to work as a barber, 1427. Involved in a trial against a barber named Giovanni de’ Nobili, 1428. Involved in another trial, against a barber named Cambio di Marco, 1431. Admitted to the ‘‘Arte dei Medici e Speziali,’’ 1432. Rented his barbershop, 1432. Exiled from Florence by Cosimo de’ Medici because of his political ideas, 1434. Arrested in Siena on charges of robbery, 1439. Joined the Vatican court, 1443. Died in Rome, sometime between 1447 and 1449. MATTEO SORANZO Selected Works I sonetti di Burchiello, et di Messer Antonio Alamanni, alla burchiellesca, edited by Anton Francesco Grazzini, Florence: Giunti, 1552. Le rime del poeta Burchiello, edited by Anton Francesco Doni, Venice: Francesco Marcolini, 1553. Sonetti del Burchiello, critical edition by Michelangelo Zaccarello, Bologna: Commissione per i testi di lingua, 2000.

I Sonetti del Burchiello, edited by Michelangelo Zaccarello, Turin: Einaudi, 2004.

Further Readings Alfie, Fabian, ‘‘I’ son sı` magro che quasi traluco: Inspiration and Indebtedness among Cecco Angiolieri, Meo Dei Tolomei and Il Burchiello,’’ in Italian Quarterly, 35, no. 135–136 (1998): 5–28. Avellini, Luisa, ‘‘Metafora ‘regressiva’ e degradazione comica nei sonetti del Burchiello,’’ in Lingua e stile, 8 (1973): 291–319. Corsaro, Antonio, ‘‘Burchiello attraverso la tradizione a stampa del ’500,’’ in ‘‘La fantasia fuor de’ confini.’’ Burchiello e dintorni a 550 anni dalla morte (1449– 1999), edited by Michelangelo Zaccarello, Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2002. De Robertis, Domenico, ‘‘Una proposta per Burchiello,’’ in Rinascimento, 8 (1968): 3–120. Pasquini, Emilio, ‘‘Letteratura popolareggiante, comica e giocosa, lirica minore e narrativa volgare del Quattrocento,’’ in Storia della Letteratura Italiana, vol. 3, Il Quattrocento, edited by Enrico Malato, Rome: Salerno, 1996. Smith, Alan K., ‘‘Fraudomy: Reading Sexuality and Politics in Burchiello,’’ in Queering the Renaissance, edited by Jonathan Goldberg, Durham-London: Duke University Press, 1994. Tartaro, Achille, ‘‘Burchiello e i Burchielleschi,’’ in La letteratura italiana. Storia e testi, edited by Carlo Muscetta, vol. 3, tomes 1–2, Il Quattrocento. L’eta` dell’Umanesimo, edited by Francesco Tateo and Achille Tartaro, Bari: Laterza, 1972. Zaccarello, Michelangelo (editor), ‘‘La fantasia fuor de’ confini.’’ Burchiello e dintorni a 550 anni dalla morte (1449– 1999), Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2002. Zaccarello, Michelangelo, Introduction to I Sonetti del Burchiello, Turin: Einaudi, 2004.

ALDO BUSI (1948–) Aldo Busi is one of the most prolific and controversial writers in the contemporary Italian literary landscape. At the age of 14, he decided to leave his family and school to travel around Europe, study languages, and earn a living working as a waiter in restaurants and hotels. His literary debut came in 1984 with the publication of an autobiographical bildungsroman, Seminario sulla gioventu` (Seminar on Youth). The story begins in Busi’s hometown, Montichiari, where the young Barbino is carefully observing his own world: his mother’s harsh life, 332

the labour in the country, his father’s shortcomings, his peculiar interest and love for the world of women, and, finally, the violent and traumatic discovery of his sexual diversity. Barbino understands that he has to escape from the ghetto of his family, overcoming the limits of his condition and education, and this escape is the subject of the early chapters. The core of the novel, however, is dedicated to Barbino’s new life in Milan, where, working as a barman, he follows his homosexual sensibility, even as it leads him to extremely violent

ALDO BUSI experiences with strange and complex characters such as the Colonel and Adel the Egyptian. As Walter Pedulla` points out in La letteratura italiana contemporanea (1998), for all its humor and irony, the huge success of this novel is due to its fascinating mixture of the protagonist’s inner life and current popular culture, especially in the second part. Moreover, Seminario sulla gioventu` came totally unexpected upon the Italian literary scene of the 1980s. Although then-current critical debates focused on the so-called ‘‘death of the novel’’ and on the quest for new forms of experimental novel, Busi’s work was able to revitalize the genre. His postmodern fiction signaled a new beginning and was especially praised for its extravagant plot, for the spontaneity and audacity of the narrative and the language, and for its literary style. In the following years, Busi published a number of novels that continued to defy conventional expectations of genre, mixing stream of consciousness narrative with the explicit representation of contemporary life (particularly for sexual encounters between men). Works such as Vita standard di un venditore provvisorio di collant (The Standard Life of a Temporary Pantyhose Salesman, 1985), La delfina bizantina (The Byzantine She-dolphin, 1986), Sodomie in corpo 11 (Sodomies in Elevenpoint, 1988), Altri abusi: viaggi, sonnambulismo e giri dell’oca (Uses and Abuses: Journeys, Sleepwalking and Fool’s Errands, 1989) display a similar Baroque mixture of mannerism and parody of sentimental pathos. From this point of view, Vendita galline Km 2 (Chicken for Sale 2 Km, 1993), a book characterized by a complex structure and an elaborate style, marks a turning point. The novel is the long autobiographical monologue of a dead Argentinean woman, Delfina Unno Pastalunghi, a proud lesbian who rebels against her family and her society, whose corruption and hypocrisy she carefully reports. In recounting her love story with a poor Sardinian musician, Caterina Multimuoriu, Delfina mercilessly describes the Italian ruling class, its thirst for power, its dishonesty. Busi is influenced by the trials for corruption held in Milan after 1991—the so-called ‘‘Mani Pulite’’ operation—that laid bare the utmost degeneration of the political class. Casanova di se stessi (Casanova to Yourself, 2000), apparently structured as a mystery, is more obviously satirical. A judge, Eros Torellino, and a schoolmaster, Amato Perche, are found dead and stark naked in a chalet on the Lake of Iseo. Nearby, investigators discover a copy of

Gian Giacomo Casanova’s Histoire de ma vie. Subi, the homosexual narrator and thinly disguised alter-ego for Busi himself (his name is an anagram of the author’s) tries to solve the mystery and to tell the story of the victims because he does not trust heterosexuals to truly understand it. Casanova’s autobiography, a book viewed as a mere product of vanity and egoism, is a symbol of this lack of understanding. Busi’s latest works, often couched ironically in the guise of manuals and guidebooks, challenge both gender roles and social institutions. Manuale della perfetta Mamma: con qualche contrazione anche per il Papa` (Guidebook for the Perfect Mother: With a Few Contractions for Dad, 2000) tends more toward the portrayal of an idealized mother figure. On the contrary, Manuale del perfetto papa`: beati gli orfani! (Guidebook for the Perfect Father: Orphans Are Lucky!, 2001) is a fierce indictment of the cult of virility because, for Busi, masculinity (and above all paternity) signifies spite, violence, caginess, and an inability to listen to others. Busi’s eclectic interests have driven his literary career in various directions, including the cinema. In his quest to develop a personal language and style, he has translated European classics, among them Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Friedrich Schiller’s works. But his most controversial work of ‘‘translation’’ is undoubtedly his rewriting into contemporary Italian of Boccaccio’s Decameron (1991) and Baldassare Castiglione’s Il Cortigiano (1993). Busi’s fascination with the icons of mass media culture has resulted in numerous articles on celebrities, which were collected, along with other pieces on ‘‘commoners’’ he had met during his lecture tours, in the volume Sentire le donne (Listening to Women, 1991). With his latest book, E io, che ho le rose fiorite anche d’inverno? (And I, Who Has Roses Blossomed even in Winter?, 2004), Busi returns to the genre of the travel memoir, already exploited in Cazzi e canguri. Pochissimi i canguri (Cocks and Kangaroos. Very Few Kangaroos, 1994). In its seven chapters, E io, che ho le rose fiorite anche d’inverno? tells the story of the author’s travels to Paris, Moscow, Argentina, and New Zealand. In the end, he finds himself alone, but not altogether unhappy with his life.

Biography Born in Montichiari (Brescia), on 25 February 1948, the son to a family of farmers. Left his hometown in 1962 to work and study around Europe; excluded from military service because of his 333

ALDO BUSI homosexuality, 1968; traveled and lived in France, England, Germany and Spain, 1969–1974; completed high school in Florence, 1976; graduated from the University of Verona with a thesis on the American poet John Ashbery, 1981; tried for obscenity and acquitted, after the publication of Sodomie in corpo 11, 1990; edits the series ‘‘I classici classici’’ for publisher Frassinelli, 1995. Works as a freelance journalist, translator, and consultant for various publishers and media. Lives in Brescia. STEFANO ADAMI

Baldassare Castiglione, Il Cortigiano, with Carmen Covito, 1993. Friedrich Schiller, Intrigo e amore, 1994.

Other Sentire le donne, 1991. Manuale del perfetto Gentilomo, 1992. Manuale della perfetta Gentildonna, 1994. Nudo di madre: manuale del perfetto scrittore, 1997. Per un’Apocalisse piu` svelta, 1999. Manuale della perfetta Mamma: con qualche contrazione anche per il Papa`, 2000. Manuale del perfetto papa`: beati gli orfani!, 2001. Manuale del perfetto single: e della piu`ccheperfetta fetta per fetta, 2002. Incipit, 2004.

Selected Works Fiction Seminario sulla gioventu`, 1984; as Seminar on Youth, translated by Stuart Hood, 1988. Vita standard di un venditore provvisorio di collant, 1985; as The Standard Life of a Temporary Pantyhose Salesman, translated by Raymond Rosenthal, 1989. La delfina bizantina, 1986. Sodomie in corpo 11. Non viaggio, sesso e scrittura, 1988; as Sodomies in Elevenpoint, translated by Stuart Hood, 1992. Altri abusi: viaggi, sonnambulismo e giri dell’oca, 1989; as Uses and Abuses: Journeys, Sleepwalkings and Fool’s Errands, translated by Stuart Hood, 1995. Vendita galline km 2, 1993 Madre Asdrubala: all’asilo si sta bene e s’imparan tante cose, 1995. Grazie del pensiero, 1995. Casanova di se stessi, 2000. La signorina Gentilin dell’omonima cartoleria, 2002. Guancia di Tulipano, 2003.

Plays Paˆte´ d’homme: tragoedia peninsulare in tre atti, uno strappo, due estrazioni e taglio finale, 1989.

Poetry ‘‘L’amore trasparente (canzoniere),’’ 1997.

Travel Writing Cazzi e canguri. Pochissimi i canguri, 1994. Aloha!!!!!: gli uomini, le donne e le Hawaii, 1998. La camicia di Hanta: viaggio in Madagascar, 2003. E io, che ho le rose fiorite anche d’inverno?, 2004.

Translations John Ashbery, Autoritratto in uno specchio convesso, 1983. Giovanni Boccaccio and Aldo Busi, Decamerone da un italiano all’altro, 2 vols., 1990–1991. Lewis Carroll, Alice nel paese delle meraviglie, 1993.

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Further Reading Ammirati, Maria Pia, Il vizio di scrivere: letture su Busi, De Carlo, Del Giudice, Pazzi, Tabucchi e Tondelli, Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 1991. Bacigalupo, Massimo, ‘‘Aldo Busi: Writer, Jester and Moral Historian,’’ in The New Italian Novel, edited by Zygmunt G. Baranski and Lino Pertile, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993. Camarota, Francesca Romana, ‘‘Aldo Busi ovvero l’opposto nelle Lezioni Americane di Italo Calvino,’’ in Piccole finzioni con importanza: Valori della narrativa italiana contemporanea, edited by Nathalie Roelens and Inge Lanslots, Ravenna: Longo, 1993. Capoferri, Federica, ‘‘Barocco e i suoi fratelli: Busi sceneggia Boccaccio tra cinema e letteratura,’’ in Quaderni dell’archivio Barocco, 7 (2001): 125–156. Ferme, Valerio C., ‘‘Aldo Busi’s Gay Detectives: The Otherness of Homosexual Discourse as a MysterySolving Tool,’’ in Pacific Coast Philology, 33.1 (1998): 58–68. Giusti, Eugenio, ‘‘Aldo Busi: Writer, Translator, Celebrity,’’ in World Literature Today, 71.2 (1997): 325–330. Jansen, Monica, ‘‘Verso il nuovo millennio: Rappresentazione dell’apocalisse nella narrativa italiana contemporanea (Benni, Busi, Vassalli),’’ in Narrativa, 20–21 (2001): 131–150. Neiger, Ada (editor), Il vampiro, don Giovanni e altri seduttori, Bari: Dedalo, 1998. Papotti, Davide, ‘‘Lo spazio violentato: Strategie di descrizione spaziale in Sodomie in Corpo 11 di Aldo Busi,’’ in Tropos, 22:1 (1996): 83–97. Pedulla`, Walter, La letteratura italiana contemporanea, Rome: Newton Compton, 1998. Raimondi, Ezio, Barocco moderno, Milan: Mondadori, 2003. Sommavilla, Giorgio, Peripezie dell’epica contemporanea, Milan: Jaca Book, 1983.

DINO BUZZATI

DINO BUZZATI (1906–1972) There is an Italian writer, recorded in his birth registry as Dino Buzzati Traverso, who has had a rather peculiar fate. On the one hand, he has been much read and widely known abroad; in Italy, on the other hand, proportionately much less so. Today this division has weakened, and we can speak of him as a classic author in Italy as well. Buzzati was an artist greatly fascinated by the obscure and occult side of things, so that he considered his masters to be writers like Edgar Allan Poe or Ernst Theodor Hoffmann, insofar as he found in them an explicit attention to mystery, the invisible, and the unknowable. His most famous novel is Il deserto dei Tartari (The Tartar Steppe, 1940), which is followed in importance by the collection Sessanta racconti (Sixty Tales), composed and published in periodicals between 1942, as Temporale sul fiume (A Storm on the River), and 1958, with the title Appuntamento con Einstein (An Appointment with Einstein). Buzzati began his career as a journalist with Il corriere della sera in 1928. He occupied himself with news, and hence with crime and gossip, but also with mountain climbing, a grand passion that would accompany him throughout his life, and with theater and music criticism. He remained a journalist until the end of his life, becoming one of the most authoritative and respected names in Italian journalism of the time. Some of his memorable work includes his legal reporting on the Fort murder case, his pieces as a war correspondent, the articles dedicated to mountains, among which is ‘‘Una grande notizia’’ (Big News), in which he comments on the Italian conquest of K2, and the epic pages as a correspondent on the Giro d’Italia, in which, reliving his youthful passion for cycling, he harkens back to the image of Achilles slaying Hector in order to describe the duel between the legendary cyclists Fausto Coppi and Gino Bartali. But there is also Buzzati the painter and illustrator. Right from his adolescence, he was enamored of painting and drawing—he often represented, for example, images of mountains or of bicycles in the letters he wrote to his friend Brambilla. This passion expressed itself in a series of experiments of great figurative interest, albeit of scant technical value, often supported by ideas or rhetorical suggestions

of high impact. Drawings and other types of illustration emerged from this that are devoted to his first literary compositions, both in verse and in prose. In particular, Buzzati personally illustrated the fable La famosa invasione degli orsi in Sicilia (The Bears’ Famous Invasion of Sicily), which was designed in 1945 and immediately afterwards adorned with captions as well. Buzzati also wrote texts for the theater, even though they are of minor literary value. The most important of these is Un caso clinico (A Clinical Case), adapted for the stage by Giorgio Strehler and performed for the first time in 1953 at the Piccolo Teatro in Milano. The work reached the stage in Paris in 1955, and thanks to the role played by Albert Camus in the French translation and reworking of the script, was a success. The success of this theatrical show allowed the French translation of Il deserto dei Tartari to enjoy a noteworthy circulation, to the point that it even became a classic in French-speaking countries. Buzzati also composed the monologues Sola in casa (Home Alone, 1958) and L’orologio (The Clock, 1959), both written for the famous actress Paola Barboni, in which the technique of kammerspiele conjures a claustrophobic atmosphere with grotesque implications; as well as Piccola passeggiata (A Little Walk, 1942) and Drammatica fine di un noto musicista (The Dramatic End of a Famous Musician, 1955), in which we find the Nordic and neo-Gothic motif, taken from August Strindberg and Maurice Maeterlinck, of the arrival of death personified or announced by strange noises, and which is taken up as well in Il mantello (The Cloak, 1960), an adaptation of the story of the same name in the collection I sette messaggeri (The Seven Messengers, 1942), a story imbued with a strong antimilitarist polemic. In particular, for its unusual experimental openness, we must single out La fine del borghese (The End of the Bourgeoisie, 1968), with a dramaturgical syntax articulated by nursery rhymes, in which the parody of family and of perbenismo (good behavior) is mixed with the apocalyptic denunciation of Marxist ideologies and the specter of social revolution. Buzzati also wrote several librettos for operas. Among these, for the music of Luciano Chailly, is Ferrovia sopraelevata (The Elevated 335

DINO BUZZATI Rail, 1955), which tells the story of the devil Max who, having fallen in love with his prey, sacrifices himself in order to save her. The text foreshadows many themes that will be treated in Poema a fumetti (A Poem in Comics, 1969), one of whose frames actually represents the devil’s train emerging from the clouds. Among Buzzati’s novels, in addition to Il deserto dei Tartari, of note before all else are his first two efforts as a young man, Ba`rnabo delle montagne (Ba`rnabo of the Mountains, 1933) and Il segreto del Bosco Vecchio (The Secret of the Old Forest, 1935), both markedly different from the stories, which often draw their origins from journalistic ideas, insofar as they are set in a simple, natural world. Ba`rnabo delle montagne is the story of a forest guard who is fired for having fled during a firefight with some brigands. Readmitted into the service many years later, in the same mountains, he finds himself once again face to face with the same brigands, and he might easily take revenge by killing them, but he ‘‘pensa a quante inutili pene gli hanno riempito la vita’’ (thinks about how many useless troubles have filled his life) and lets them go. With this novel, which is of notable importance in his development as a writer, Buzzati expressly proposed writing something dedicated to the mountains—dedicated not in a superficial, but rather in a slightly unusual manner. It is enough to consider that, speaking of its genesis in a letter to Brambilla, he writes: ‘‘Io sto cercando una storia in cui la montagna si riveli da sola, semplicemente’’ (I am attempting a story in which the mountains are revealed in themselves, simply). Such a perspective is decidedly peculiar because normally we do not think of the mountain as an object of liberation. Buzzati’s debut novel was awarded a prize by, among others, Il popolo di Lombardia, which had already published some of his stories (including satires) and vignettes. Il segreto del Bosco Vecchio is structured like a fable. Within a fantastical setting consisting once again of forests and mountains, its protagonists, along with humans, are various beings, such as the genii of the forest and the powers of nature. It is the story of a bitter and surly old man, the colonel Sebastiano Procolo, who freezes to death in the forest while he searches for his nephew Benvenuto, whom he fears has been overwhelmed by an avalanche. The book closes with the unforgettable page devoted to the extreme ascent by the wind Matteo, who, having recounted to Benvenuto his uncle’s noble end, dissolves into the high mountain peaks. 336

During the 1960s, Buzzati’s life underwent some noteworthy changes determined by his encounters with two women: Silvana Costa, whom he met in St. Moritz, and Almerina Antoniazzi, whom he met in Milan during a photographic assignment and married six years later. The theme of the woman, presented above all as a negative being, particularly in the novels Il grande ritratto (Larger than Life, 1960) and Un amore (A Love Affair, 1963) thereafter becomes very important in his works. This can be considered a limitation of Buzzati’s poetic world—having represented the female world only under certain aspects. The woman also returns in the minor stories, and is for the most part an ambiguous figure. In Il grande ritratto, which tells the story of a scientist in the grips of a mysterious machine (an enormous electronic brain in which Laura, the woman he loved, is reincarnated), the role given to science fiction is emphatic. It is immediately defined as the first novel of Italian science fiction that is not mere entertainment. Un amore, on the other hand, is the story of the architect Antonio Dorigo, who is overcome by a morbid and desperate love for a Milanese prostitute, Laide, ‘‘creatura verde, spavalda, impertinente, autentica’’ (a young, arrogant, impertinent, authentic creature). It is a fascinating novel, not only for the themes already noted, but also for two other important elements: its language, full of fractures and symbolic expressions, and the utterly crucial role assumed in it by the city of Milan. And in this case the style seems intended, in its way, to brush up against the flux of consciousness, to represent the emotional and depressive disorientation of the protagonist, the victim of the senses and of the anxiety of possession. In these same years, Buzzati devoted much time to painting, and as an art critic. In this role, new fundamental ideas entered into his maturation as an artist, as he frequented, among others, the studios of artists of the ‘‘pop art’’ movement in New York. They, together with the surrealists and the metaphysicists, had a discernible influence on Buzzati’s art. Important examples from this period are the ex voto collected in I miracoli della Val Morel (1970). Buzzati has also written numerous stories, which, along with the novels, are, taken as a whole, the most important part of his oeuvre. His first collection, I sette messaggeri, contains stories published in Il popolo di Lombardia (a weekly newspaper of the fascist federation of Milan) and in La lettura (an illustrated monthly magazine with Il corriere della sera). These stories succeed in

DINO BUZZATI expressing, in an extraordinary way, many things about life, man, and his destiny; they succeed in condensing emblematic incidents, and moral and emotional tensions, into a few pages, through an undisputable talent of narrative montage. His second collection, Paura alla Scala (Fear at La Scala, 1949), contains perhaps Buzzati’s finest story of the same title, and one of the most complex, since it plumbs not only the human aspect but also the sociopolitical one at a particular historical moment for Italy: We are on the eve of the political elections of 1948. And it is in the foyer of the celebrated theater, the gathering place of the Milanese bourgeoisie, that the fear spreads of some kind of revolution underway in the city. Like the first two collections, Il crollo della Baliverna (The Fall of the Baliverna, 1957) also contains 18 stories, all characterized by the sense of catastrophe, of the unexpectedness of things, through which we may find ourselves at the collapse of a house or in another terrifying situation without having any apparent responsibility and without understanding anything. In this case as well, the most important story is the one that gives its name to the entire collection. La Baliverna is a ‘‘squallido e torvo’’ casermone (squalid and forbidding housing project) that crumbles in a domino-like effect when a rusted iron pole, which the protagonist off-handedly grabs and begins to climb, collapses. Esperimento di magia (A Magic Experiment, 1958) groups together stories of a previous age. Part of this fourth collection is ‘‘Ehi, ce l’hai tu un cavallino’’ (Hey, you got a horse?), a unique story for its originality and inventiveness. The protagonist, a young boy, badly wants a little horse. At a certain point he finds one, like a kind of gift, and he does not know from whom it could have come. This sense of seemingly implausible gratuity leaves everyone astonished. I sessanta racconti also collects texts published previously. The most interesting thing is that Buzzati is able to express his best work within the form of the short story. The first 36 stories come from the first three collections. In the second block, we have less important stories that are characterized by a decidedly repetitive common thread: the negative woman, who betrays and deceives, or, only through a discourse of speculative projection, the man who does the same to her. The privileged theme remains fear and the impending, indeterminate threat. The fear is private before all else, as in ‘‘La notte’’ (The Night), which presents a handbook-like summary of noises and shadows, but it is also a collective fear, as in ‘‘Qualcosa era

successo’’ (Something Happened), a story in which the passengers on a train appear inexorably drawn toward the place of a mysterious catastrophe. And it is, finally, a class fear, as in the case of ‘‘Paura alla Scala.’’ But it is not the short stories that characterize the second part of Buzzati’s life and artistic production. His most interesting work is in fact Poema a fumetti, in which both his experience as a writer and as an illustrator come together simultaneously, with a whole series of extremely suggestive crossreferences. The work re-creates the story of Orpheus and Eurydice in a modern key. And it places the entrance to Hades in the imaginary via Saterna, between the famous via Solferino (the locale of the newspaper, Il corriere della sera), and Corso Garibaldi, in the very center of a nocturnal Milan where witches fly around the Velasca tower. The city of Milan is also the protagonist of another important part of Buzzati’s activity during this period: verse poetry. The most interesting aspect is surely that of the double binary he attempts in this period: a binary in which decidedly satirical moments and references to the news are mixed together. Apart from the short poem entitled ‘‘Tre colpi alla porta’’ (Three Knocks at the Door), which is connected with the satirical journal Il caffe´, the thematic and ideal center of this new nucleus of poetic inspiration is for the writer the city of Milan, of which he furnishes a particularly lively, personal, and new image: the Milan of the glass mountains, of numerous license plates and of billboards, where already the wheel of Theobroma with its chocolate smell evokes nostalgia and memory.

Biography Born in Belluno on 16 October 1906, the second son of four, among whom is also the nuclear physicist Adriano, born in 1913. Having obtained a high-school diploma in classics, he enrolls in 1924 at the Facolta` di legge, where he graduates in 1928 with a thesis on canonical law. He is hired as a trainee reporter with Il corriere della sera on July 10 of the same year, and, promoted to editor in 1929, remains there until his death. In 1941 he participates as a war correspondent in the battle of Capo Matapan. In 1951, he wins the Napoli prize for his collection Il crollo della Baliverna, and in 1958 he wins the Strega prize for his collection Sessanta racconti. In 1966, he marries Almerina Antoniazzi. In 1967, he takes on the post of art critic at Il corriere della sera. In 1970, he paints I miracoli della Val Morel. He dies in Milan on 337

DINO BUZZATI January 28, 1972, of pancreatic cancer, like his father. His books have been translated into more than 30 languages. NELLA GIANNETTO Selected Works Collections Teatro, edited by Guido Davico Bonino, Milan: Mondadori, 1980. Romanzi e racconti, edited by Giuliano Gramigna, Milan: Mondadori, 1982. Opere scelte, edited by Giulio Carnazzi, Milan: Mondadori, 1998.

Novels Ba`rnabo delle montagne, 1933. Il segreto del Bosco Vecchio, 1935. Il deserto dei Tartari, 1940; as The Tartar Steppe, translated by Stuart C. Hood, 1952. Il grande ritratto, 1960; as Larger than Life, translated by Henry Reed, 1962. Un amore, 1963; as A Love Affair, translated by Joseph Green, 1965.

Short Stories ‘‘I sette messaggeri,’’ 1942. ‘‘Paura alla Scala,’’ 1949. ‘‘In quel preciso momento,’’ 1950. ‘‘Il crollo della Baliverna,’’ 1957. ‘‘Esperimento di magia,’’ 1958. ‘‘Sessanta racconti,’’ 1958. ‘‘Il colombre,’’ 1966. ‘‘Le notti difficili,’’ 1971; as Restless Nights, translated by Lawrence Venuti, 1983.

Plays and Librettos Piccola passeggiata, 1942. Un caso clinico, 1953. Drammatica fine di un noto musicista, 1955. Ferrovia soprelevata, 1955. Sola in casa, 1958. L’orologio, 1959. Procedura penale, 1959. Il mantello, 1960. Fantasmi al Grand-Hotel, 1960. Battono alla porta, 1963. Era proibito, 1963. La fine del borghese, 1968.

Poetry

Le montagne di vetro, 1989. Il buttafuoco: Cronache della guerra sul mare, 1992. La nera di Buzzati, 2002.

Further Reading Arslan Veronese, Antonia, Invito alla lettura di Buzzati, Milan: Mursia, 1974; rpt. 1988. Asquer, Renata, La grande torre: Vita e morte di Dino Buzzati, Lecce: Manni, 2002. Baumann, Barbara, Dino Buzzati: Untersuchungen zur Tematik in seinem Erza¨hlwerk, Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1980. Cavallini, Giorgio, Buzzati: Il limite dell’ombra, Rome: Studium, 1997. Chailly, Luciano, Buzzati in musica: L’opera italiana nel dopoguerra, Turin: Eda, 1987. Crotti, Ilaria, Buzzati, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1978. Gianfranceschi, Fausto, Dino Buzzati, Turin: Borla, 1967. Giannetto, Nella, ‘‘Buzzati a teatro: Rassegna,’’ in Quaderni veneti, 14 (1991): 117–146. Giannetto, Nella (editor), Il pianeta Buzzati, Milan: Mondadori, 1992. Giannetto, Nella (editor), Dino Buzzati: La lingua, le lingue, Milan: Mondadori, 1994. Giannetto, Nella, Il sudario delle caligini: Significati e fortune dell’opera buzzatiana, Florence: Olschki, 1996. Giannetto, Nella, Buzzati giornalista, Milan: Mondadori, 2000. Lagana` Gion, Antonella, Dino Buzzati: Un autore da rileggere, Venice: Corbo and Fiore, 1983. Panafieu, Yves, Les miroirs e´clate´s, Paris: Y.P. E´ditions, 1988. Panafieu, Yves, Le myste`re Buzzati, Liancourt-Saint-Pierre: Y.P. E´ditions, 1995. Stempel, Ute, Realita¨t des Phantastischen: Untersuchungen zu den Erza¨hlungen Dino Buzzatis, Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1977.

IL DESERTO DEI TARTARI, 1940 Novel by Dino Buzzati

‘‘Il capitano Pic e altre poesie,’’ 1965. ‘‘Due poemetti,’’ 1967. ‘‘Poema a fumetti,’’ 1969.

Other La famosa invasione degli orsi in Sicilia, 1945; as The Bears’ Famous Invasion of Sicily, translated by Frances Lobb, 1947. Egregio signore, siamo spiacenti di..., 1960. Buzzati al giro d’Italia, 1969. Cronache terrestri, 1972. Lettere a Brambilla, edited by I. Simonelli, 1985.

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Il deserto dei Tartari (The Tartar Steppe) was written by Dino Buzzati before the outbreak of World War II, between 1938 and 1939. It is therefore incorrect to consider this novel as a war narrative. The story is inspired by life, in all of its absurdities and contradictions: the protagonist, Giovanni Drogo, is a border soldier who lives in a fortress at

DINO BUZZATI the edges of a strange, surreal kingdom. The Tartar steppe is one of the countries bordering this kingdom, and certainly the most significant, on the symbolic level as well. Of the other bordering countries, we have the impression that the author prefers to identify them for us with the minimum number of characteristics, in such a way as to accentuate the mystery that looms within. Drogo, arriving at the Bastiani Fortress for his first assignment, spends his life waiting for the enemy. When at last ‘‘l’armata del Nord’’ (the army of the North) approaches, Drogo, old and sick, is forced to flee. He goes to close out his life in the dark room of an inn. The plot, terse and peculiar, takes place within an equally suggestive setting, which is dominated by the yellowed color of the fortress’s walls, the ever-swirling dust in the desert, called ‘‘Il sudario delle caligini’’ (the shroud of mist), which is a favorite phrase of Buzzati’s, and the strange sounds that are always the same, which repeat themselves to the point of exasperation, like the cloc cloc of the boiler, which strikes Drogo the first night of his arrival at the fortress. Buzzati was interviewed many times about the genesis of this novel. Among the most famous interviews, the oldest was published on May 26, 1959, in Milan’s Il giorno, and conducted by Guido De Monticelli, a literary critic and dramatist: ‘‘in the monotonous routine of composing at night...very often I had the impression that this would go on forever, that it would thus uselessly consume my life. It’s a common feeling, I think, for the majority of men, especially if they are pigeonholed in an existence within the timetable of the city. The transposition of this idea into a fantastic military world was, for me, instinctive: Nothing better than a fortress at the extreme frontier, it seemed to me, could be found to express precisely this strain of waiting.’’ Buzzati extends this argument to all of existence, which is understood by him as the stressful, albeit motivating, expectation of something that does not come, in this respect connecting himself explicitly to a certain twentieth-century tradition of absurdism and nihilism, ranging from Franz Kafka to Samuel Beckett. What tie is there between the novel’s protagonist, Drogo (and his alter-ego, the author himself ),

and life? What ties Drogo (and the author himself) to life is precisely his way of looking at it. Both of the story’s protagonists, the one in the literal sense of the word (the Drogo who goes in search of his fortune in a remote fortress in the mountains), the other in a more symbolic sense (Buzzati, who sets up his post at Il corriere della sera), both spending their lives in pursuit of an important goal without being able to reach it. At this point, the choice that the writer makes for Drogo is to confront death in a dignified manner. What becomes important in the novel’s epilogue is not life, but rather death and the way in which it is accepted and confronted by Drogo in definitively stoic terms: ‘‘poi nel buio, benche´ nessuno lo veda, sorride’’ (then in the dark, although no one sees it, he smiles). NELLA GIANNETTO Editions First edition: Il deserto dei Tartari, Milan-Rome: Rizzoli, 1940. Critical edition: in Opere scelte, edited by Giulio Carnazzi, Milan: Mondadori, 1998. Translations: The Tartar Steppe, translated by Stuart C. Hood, New York: Avon Books, 1952; rpt. 1985; rpt. 2000.

Further Reading Biaggi, Pietro, Buzzati: I luoghi del mistero, Padua: Messaggero, 2001. Biondi, Alvaro, ‘‘Metafora e sogno: La narrativa di Buzzati tra ‘Italia magica’ e ‘Surrealismo italiano,’’’ in Il pianeta Buzzati, edited by Nella Giannetto, Milan: Mondadori, 1992. Carlino, Marcello, Come leggere ‘‘Il deserto dei Tartari’’ di Buzzati, Milan: Mursia, 1976. De Monticelli, Roberto, ‘‘L’uomo libero Buzzati cerca un uniforme per vincere la paura,’’ in Il giorno (Milan), 26 May 1959. Giannetto, Nella, Il coraggio della fantasia: Studi e ricerche intorno a Dino Buzzati, Milan: Arcipelago, 1989. Giannetto, Nella, Il sudario delle caligini: Significati e fortune dell’opera buzzatiana, Florence: Olschki, 1996. Ioli, Giovanna, Dino Buzzati, Milan: Mursia, 1988. Livi, Franc¸ois, Le De´sert des Tartares de Dino Buzzati: Analyse critique, Paris: Hatier, 1973. Panafieu, Ives, Dino Buzzati: Un autoritratto, Milano: Mondadori, 1973.

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C GIACOMO CA’ ZORZI See Giacomo Noventa

ROBERTO CALASSO (1941–) Since the beginning of the 1980s, Calasso has been engaged in a complex project of investigation of myths and knowledge, which incorporates philosophy, literary criticism, and anthropology. He has so far published four volumes. The first, La rovina di Kasch (The Ruin of Kasch, 1983), is a book constructed of fragments and digressions, anecdotes and aphorisms, in a sort of search of what Italo Calvino called the ‘‘fonti avvelenate del ‘moderno’’’ (poisoned sources of the ‘modern’) in his ‘‘La rovina di Kasch e quel che resta’’ (1995). At the center of the narration is the historical figure of Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, the prototype of the turncoat and the supporter of the concept of the legitimacy of power but also a marginalized figure in the salons of the period after the Congress of the Vienna. Calasso also articulated a theory of sacrifice as ‘‘cerchio vibrante dell’ordine antico’’ (vibrating circle of ancient order), to which the title alludes, inspired by an African legend that was narrated by Frobenius. Other topics include douceur (sweetness),

‘‘Clever fellow, that Calasso,’’ Theodor W. Adorno is reported to have said. ‘‘He’s read everything I’ve written and even some things I haven’t had the time to write yet’’ (Andrea Lee, ‘‘The Prince of Books,’’ 1993). Adorno’s comment finds an echo in the experience of many readers of Roberto Calasso’s works: Indeed, he seems to have read all the books, both present and future. His very first work, L’impuro folle (The Impure Madman, 1974), already conveys this impression. It is, ideally, the sequel of Denkwu¨rdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken (1903), by Daniel Paul Schreber, the president of the Royal Superior County Court of Dresden who was detained in an asylum between 1893 and 1902, from whom Sigmund Freud derived his theory of paranoia. Here Calasso described the slow collapse of the dogma of the immateriality of the soul, the rediscovery of the nervous system as the prison of the psyche, medical research on the material conditions of brain activity, and the dependence of spirit and ethics on the body. 341

ROBERTO CALASSO taste as a ‘‘sigillo dell’esistenza’’ (seal of existence) that replaces esoteric knowledge, and repetition as an instance that can warn about the ‘‘debolezza e precarieta` del gesto fondatore di ogni cultura’’ (weakness and precariousness of the foundation act of every culture). At the same time, the figure of the ‘‘grande tappeto’’ (great carpet) or of the ‘‘smisurato tappeto senza margini’’ (immeasurable carpet without edges) returns constantly as a symbol of continuity and of the correspondence between sky and earth, space and time, myth and destiny. The second volume, the encyclopedic Le nozze di Cadmo e Armonia (The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, 1988), was a best seller in Italy and has enjoyed a great international success in translation in many languages. The book is a vision of ancient Greece through some of its cultural mythologies, in a complex plot whose climax is finally reached ‘‘nel silenzio della mente’’ (in the silence of the mind) and with the introduction of the alphabet by Cadmus, as told in a passage by Nonnus of Panopolis’s Dionysiaca (fifth century AD). Calasso investigated the rules governing the parallelisms between myths and events that stem from the remote depths, thus giving back to myth, as to language, integrity even in a fragmented state and distinguishing it from ritual. He ultimately viewed myths from a modern perspective, as the source of human behavior and aesthetics. In his third book, Ka (1996), Calasso applied the procedure used in Le nozze di Cadmo e Armonia to the literary tradition of archaic India, from the Veda (the sacred books of Aryan Indians from the first half of the second millennium BC) to Buddha (sixth century BC). The title Ka, which literally means ‘‘Who,’’ is the initial syllable of a hymn, ‘‘Essence of the Veda, estuary toward the hidden Ocean,’’ in which, starting with the question, a new interrogation is generated: the ‘‘secret name’’ of the original father god, whose sacrifice implies the loss of plenitude and the origin of finitude. Finally K. (2002) explores the work of Franz Kafka. It is neither an essay nor an interpretation but rather a quest for traces that may enlighten against the common places and the most overused critical readings of the writer. The starting point is precisely the letter of the alphabet through which Kafka narrates the world and thus completely renames it. Calasso’s essays on subjects ranging from Karl Kraus to Max Stirner to Coca-Cola are collected in the volume I quarantanove gradini (The Forty-Nine Steps, 1991), a title is derived from the Talmudic doctrine of the degrees of meaning of every passage of Torah, with which Walter Benjamin introduced 342

his experience of allegorical exegesis. In 2000, Calasso was visiting professor at Oxford, where he held the Weidenfeld Lectures, later collected in the volume La letteratura e gli de`i (Literature and the Gods, 2001). STEFANO TOMASSINI

Biography Roberto Calasso was born in Florence on 30 May 1941. He studied in Rome under Mario Praz and wrote a dissertation on I geroglifici di Sir Thomas Browne. In 1962, Calasso joined the small intellectual group directed by Roberto Bazlen and Luciano Foa` and worked on the program for a new publishing house, Adelphi, founded in 1963. He became its publishing director, 1969, then managing director and president, until 1999. He was awarded the Prix Veillon and the Prix du Meilleur Livre E´tranger, 1991. He was appointed Literary Lion in New York, 1993, and appointed Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2000. He is married to the writer Fleur Jaeggy and lives in Milan. Selected Works Narrative Works L’impuro folle, 1974. La rovina di Kasch, 1983; as The Ruin of Kasch, translated by William Weaver and Stephen Sartarelli, 1994. Le nozze di Cadmo e Armonia, 1988; as The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, translated by Tim Parks, 1993. Ka, 1996; as Ka, translated by Tim Parks, 1998. K., 2002; as K., translated by Geoffrey Brock, 2005.

Essays I quarantanove gradini, 1991; as The Forty-Nine Steps, translated by John Shepley, 2001. La letteratura e gli de`i, 2001, as Literature and the Gods, translated by Tim Parks, 2001. Cento lettere a uno sconosciuto, 2003. La follia che viene dalle Ninfe, 2005.

Further Reading Calvino, Italo, ‘‘La rovina di Kasch e quel che resta,’’ in Saggi 1945–1985, Milan: Mondadori, 1995. Di Biase, Carmine, ‘‘Il mito, o la riconquista dell’armonia,’’ Esperienze letterarie, 14:3(1989), 115–117. Doniger, Wendy, ‘‘The Ancient Postmoderns,’’ The New Republic, 7 December 1998, 42–45. Ferroni, Giulio, ‘‘Scritture saggistiche,’’ in Storia della letteratura italiana. Il Novecento, Turin: Einaudi, 1991. Giuliani, Alfredo, ‘‘Franz Kafka: Nel mondo disadorno la normalita` e` terrorizzante,’’ La Repubblica, 1 November 2002, 38–39.

ITALO CALVINO Kirby, John T., ‘‘The Revestiture of Myth. Roberto Calasso’s The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony,’’ in Secret of the Muses Retold, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2000. Lee, Andrea, ‘‘The Prince of Books,’’ The New Yorker, 26 April 1993, 43–51. Manguel, Alberto, ‘‘Mnemonic waves,’’ TLS, 13 September 2002, 6–7. Nigro, Salvatore S., ‘‘Il mondo in un risvolto,’’ Il Sole 24 ore, 12 October 2003, 33.

Pieri, Marzio, ‘‘Casa Greci: La letteratura italiana moderna e la provocazione della grecita`,’’ in Nicola Villani, Trettanelo`: Poesie sopra Venetia, edited by Marzio Pieri, Parma: Zara, 1989. Shorrock, Roberto, ‘‘The Artful Mythographer: Roberto Calasso and The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony,’’ Arion, 11:2(2003), 83–99. Simic, Charles, ‘‘Paradise Lost,’’ The New York Review of Books, 48:14(2001), 62–64.

ITALO CALVINO (1923–1985) At the time of his death in 1985, Italo Calvino was widely acclaimed as Italy’s most prominent contemporary writer. Calvino began his literary career in the period immediately following World War II with a novel considered both neo-Realist and fantastic. He ended his career internationally acknowledged as Italy’s most original postmodernist. Never an easy author to label, Italo Calvino explored the nature, limits, and role of literature in both his fiction and his essays. The author’s fictional creations, ranging from the baron in the trees, to Le cosmicomiche’s Qfwfq, to the nearsighted Mr. Palomar, engage in a never-ending search for a map of the universe, a compass by which to navigate in a labyrinthine world. Calvino’s first novel, Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (The Path to the Nest of Spiders, 1947), tells the story of a band of Resistance fighters from the perspective of a young boy, Pin. Critics have debated where this novel fits in the context of the neoRealist movement, which focused on telling the story of the Resistance and the immediate postwar period in Italy. While Calvino’s novel is a testimonial to the partisan experience, it differs from other neo-Realist novels in that it is narrated from an ideologically neutral perspective, that of the young Pin. Furthermore, it exhibits a ‘‘fantastic’’ quality that would characterize much of the author’s later fiction. That quality was first noted by the novelist Cesare Pavese, one of early Calvino’s mentors. Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno was followed by Ultimo viene il corvo (Adam on Afternoon, and Other Stories, 1949), another look at the Resistance period but from a darker, less triumphant perspective. Calvino then began work on two projects that

would be faithful to the tenets of neo-Realism by focusing on the present day from an ‘‘objective’’ perspective: Il bianco veliero and I giovani del Po. As a diversion from the project, which stalled for several years, Calvino wrote, in the space of only three months, the first novel in the trilogy, Il visconte dimezzato (The Cloven Viscount, 1952). Apparently worlds apart from the neo-Realist concern with documenting the immediate social and political reality, the fantastic novels of I nostri antenati (Our Ancestors, 1960) tell the stories of a viscount cloven in half in a battle between Christians and Turks, an eccentric Italian nobleman who lives in the trees and a nonexistent knight in Charlemagne’s army. These otherworldly tales may be read as allegories, as the author himself has suggested. The nonexistent knight whose only identity is an empty suit of armor, the symbol of the chivalric code that dominates his every action, serves as an allegory of modern ‘‘organization man.’’ Cosimo’s ‘‘aloofness’’ dramatizes the need for evasion and escape from the heaviness of the world, or, conversely, symbolizes the intellectual’s need to establish a critical distance in order to intervene in the world’s affairs. The cloven viscount stands for the divided self, the mutilation of modern man. As J. R. Woodhouse has suggested, however, ‘‘It would be pedantic and dull to interpret the three stories simply as moral allegories’’ (Italo Calvino, 1968). The trilogy is a fantastic romp through the fictional woods of Calvino’s imaginary universe. The second novel in the trilogy, Il barone rampante (The Baron in the Trees, 1956), chronicles the development of the main character from his youthful determination to defy his father and live out his life 343

ITALO CALVINO in the trees to his mastery of his new environment and overcoming of such obstacles as forest fires and invading Turkish pirates, from the youthful pangs of first love to maturity to the wisdom and indignities of old age. Cosimo’s story contains in nuce many of the motifs of Calvino’s fiction. The importance of nature and modern man’s loss of contact with the natural world, the need for political solidarity, and the potential for disillusionment in the political arena, the utopian craving that can never be satisfied, the role of literature and its didactic function are recurring themes in the author’s work. In Marcovaldo, ovvero le stagioni in citta` (Marcovaldo, or the Seasons in the City, 1963), Calvino returns to the reality of postwar Italy from the ‘‘otherworldliness’’ of the fantastic trilogy. Marcovaldo is a collection of stories set in an unnamed, industrialized city. The protagonist, an alienated worker struggling to feed his family on his meager salary, wants nothing more than to participate in the prosperity surrounding him. In ‘‘Marcovaldo al supermarket,’’ he takes his family to window shop in a supermarket filled with brightly packaged merchandise. Dazzled by these riches, his family and the paterfamilias himself cannot follow Marcovaldo’s advice, ‘‘Look but don’t touch.’’ In the surreal, deus ex machina ending, Marcovaldo, his wife, and their children each escape with brimming shopping carts through a hole in the supermarket wall only to be confronted by a monstrous crane that devours the family’s stolen booty. The conclusion underscores the painful reality that Marcovaldo will never participate in the prosperity surrounding him. In each of the stories in the volume, this Chaplinesque character doggedly perseveres in his attempts to offer his family a better life, only to be defeated by the modern industrial city. Marcovaldo, ovvero le stagioni in citta` reflects the growing uneasiness, the dark underbelly of the ‘‘miracolo economico,’’ the economic miracle that brought prosperity to some of Italy after World War II. Le cosmicomiche (Cosmicomics, 1965) and ti con zero (T zero, 1967) are loosely related stories featuring a chameleonic protagonist, Qfwfq. Qfwfq narrates his adventures from the time of the Big Bang to the present day as he changes form. Qfwfq’s metamorphoses, from a dinosaur, to a mollusk, to an amphibian, to a human, cannot be contained within the confines of a traditional narrative persona. The only thing that Qfwfq’s various incarnations have in common is their exercise of language in the function of storytelling. One section of ti con zero, ‘‘Il conte di Montecristo’’ (The 344

Count of Monte Cristo) features Edmond Dante`s and Faria imprisoned in the Castle of If in a fanciful rewriting of the Dumas story. Although Dante`s and Faria do not escape at the end of Calvino’s fiction, the story dramatizes the potential of the literature of the labyrinth to serve as a challenge to the complexity of the world. Le citta` invisibili (Invisible Cities, 1972) is Calvino’s rewriting of Il Milione, Marco Polo’s account of his travels to the East. The novel is composed of a dialogue between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo, interspersed with Marco Polo’s description of the cities in Kublai Khan’s vast empire. The emperor is at Polo’s mercy for any knowledge he has of his boundless realm. The Khan experiences a sense of relief when he begins to perceive order in his chaotic realm. He is convinced that he can arrive at a generative model from which to deduce all the possible cities in his empire. That model is symbolized by the chess board. The emperor decides he need no longer send Marco Polo on expeditions throughout his realm. Instead, he engages Polo in interminable games of chess in which he generates various combinations that would correspond to the cities in his empire. But the Khan’s is a pyrrhic victory. By reducing his world to an abstract model, a system of pure differences, he has lost its richness and variety. Through his persistent storytelling Polo undermines the Khan’s attempt to reduce his empire to an abstract, relational model. Marco Polo cannot describe a city without entering into its specificity by telling a story. Storytelling transforms the reductive model and acknowledges the inexhaustible richness of the world. Calvino’s fascination with literature as a combinatory game inspired one of his most intriguing texts: Il castello dei destini incrociati (The Castle of Crossed Destinies, 1973). The novel is divided in two parts. The first, ‘‘Il Castello dei destini incrociati,’’ tells the story of wayfarers who lose the power of speech in an enchanted forest. They take shelter in an inn where they use tarot cards to exchange the stories of their adventures. The narrative unfolds as each player lays down a sequence of cards, reproduced in the margins of the text. The written text poses as just one of many possible interpretations of the tarot cards. When the cards are read in reverse, they produce entirely new stories. Ariosto’s tale of Astolfo on the moon, for example, when read in reverse becomes the story of Helen of Troy. In both ‘‘Il castello dei destini incrociati’’ and ‘‘La taverna dei destini incrociati,’’ Calvino uses the tarot cards to represent the minimal units or fictional universals of which all stories

ITALO CALVINO are composed. Calvino’s perception of narrative as a combinatory game in which a limited number of prefabricated elements is combined and recombined is outlined in his essay ‘‘Cibernetica e fantasmi’’ (‘‘Cybernetics and Ghosts’’). Calvino’s essay was inspired by his reading of Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale (1968) and of the structuralist critics, including Roland Barthes, A. J. Greimas, and Tzvetan Todorov. ‘‘Cibernetica e fantasmi’’ serves as a companion piece to the combinatory game masterfully played by Calvino in Il castello dei destini incrociati. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this experimental text is the way in which it underscores the importance of the reader in the creation of fiction. Although the stories of ‘‘The Castle’’ and ‘‘The Tavern’’ are composed of a finite number of elements, the combinatory potential of the narrative system is portrayed as infinite. As Calvino’s text unfolds, the reader sees that the same card may be read in a variety of ways. This underscores the idea, articulated in several of Calvino’s essays, that it is ultimately the reader who invests the fictional text with meaning. Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore (If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, 1979) is a series of beginnings of novels, contained by a framing story that recounts a search for the ideal novel. The protagonist of the novel is the reader, ‘‘tu’’ (you). The search for the missing book leads the reader-protagonist to a writer-in-crisis and a charlatan, Ermes Marana, whose jealousy of the writer has inspired a diabolical plot to produce a literature of apocrypha, false attributions, and pastiches. This postmodern pastiche acknowledges what John Barth calls the ‘‘exhaustion’’ of literary forms and lays bare the Borgesian notion that the writer, a mere a translator or annotator, can only rewrite. Palomar (Mr. Palomar, 1983) is an ambitious and highly original work of fiction. Calvino’s protagonist is in search of nothing less than ‘‘la chiave per padroneggiare il mondo’’ (the key to master the universe). Palomar attempts to master the phenomenal world—a wave, a lizard, a flock of birds—through observation. As the author explained in a 1983 lecture in New York, he adopted a phenomenological approach to ‘‘il mare dell’oggettivita`’’ (sea of objectivity) surrounding him: ‘‘An important international trend in the culture of our century, what we might call the phenomenological approach in philosophy, the estrangement effect in literature, urges us to break through the screen of words and concepts and see the world as if it appeared for the first time to our sight’’ (‘‘The Written and Unwritten Word,’’ The

New York Review of Books, 12 May 1983). The phenomenological approach translates in the novel into the narrative technique known as estrangement or defamiliarization. As Palomar observes the awkward lovemaking of two turtles, an otherwise familiar scene is ‘‘defamiliarized’’ by the comical addition of the turtles’ cumbersome shells. He attempts to give order to the multiformity of the world through the catalog. In ‘‘Un chilo e mezzo di grasso d’oca,’’ the catalog poses as the key to mastering the external world. The enumeration of delicacies in a Parisian shop seems to capture the richness and heterogeneity of the world. However, the catalog ultimately fails as a means to shape an intelligible reality. As the various delicacies are swallowed up in shopping bags coated with mayonnaise, the multiplicity of forms that the catalog strives to capture disintegrates into a formless, amorphous mass. In each story of Palomar the hapless, nearsighted, ineffectual protagonist exercises his powers of observation with dogged determination. Each time the protagonist’s good intentions give way to a sense of bemused perplexity. Palomar provides no easy answers or reassuring consolation to the reader. It does embody, however, Calvino’s conviction that literature should represent not a surrender but rather a challenge to the labyrinthine complexity of the world. Calvino’s early works, while often sparking controversy, were widely discussed and generally acclaimed. His genius was immediately recognized by his mentors, the novelists Elio Vittorini and Cesare Pavese. Although never formally a member of the Gruppo 63, Calvino was loosely affiliated with many of the writers of that Italian experimentalist movement. His move to Paris and the increasing degree of experimentalism in his fiction baffled many Italian critics, as Renato Barilli has pointed out: ‘‘Gone was a solely Italian Calvino, son of the Resistance, heir apparent to Cesare Pavese’’ (‘‘My ‘Long Infidelity’ Towards Calvino,’’ 1989). Gradually, the ‘‘new’’ Calvino came to be accepted, admired, and virtually revered in Italy and throughout Europe. No other twentieth-century Italian writer is more widely recognized and read in North America than Italo Calvino. As Rebecca West shows, Calvino was ‘‘discovered’’ and popularized in the United States by several American writers, Gore Vidal, John Barth, and John Updike (‘‘L’identita` americana di Calvino,’’ 1987). Gore Vidal’s ‘‘Fabulous Calvino’’ published in New York Review of Books (30 May 1974) introduced Italo Calvino to the American public. Articles by John Barth and John Updike followed. Barth’s 345

ITALO CALVINO ‘‘The Literature of Replenishment’’ (1980) gave the English-speaking world a ‘‘label’’ to attach to Calvino’s work and a perspective from which to understand him. Barth cites Calvino’s Le cosmicomiche and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude as examples of works that approach an ideal, postmodernist program. From the mid-1970s until his death in 1985, Calvino enjoyed tremendous popularity in North America. His 1956 collection, Fiabe italiane, was published in English translation (Italian Folktales) in 1980 to rave reviews. His subsequent works were immediately translated in English by William Weaver and favorably reviewed in The New Yorker, New York Review of Books, and the New York Times Book Review. The invitation to deliver the 1985 Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard, lectures never delivered due to his untimely death on the eve of his departure, was a further sign of Calvino’s international stature. Five of the six Norton lectures were published posthumously under the title Lezioni americane (Six Memos for the Next Millennium, 1988). This volume, like the author’s earlier volumes of essays, Una pietra sopra (The Uses of Literature, 1980) and Collezione di sabbia (Collection of Sand, 1984), provide the reader with a useful interpretive framework in which to read Calvino’s fiction.

Biography Italo Calvino was born in Santiago de las Vegas, La Habana, Cuba, 15 October 1923, where his parents worked as botanists. He moved to Italy in 1925. Calvino studied agriculture at the University of Florence for one year, 1943; then Literature at the University of Turin. He joined the Resistance movement in 1944 and fought with the Garibaldi brigade in the Alps. After the Liberation, Calvino worked in Turin for the publisher Einaudi. He married Esther Judith Singer, ‘‘Chichita,’’ in La Habana, 19 February 1944. Calvino was awarded the Premio Bagutta for I racconti in 1959 and the Premio Feltrinelli in 1972. His daughter Giovanna was born in Rome, 1965. He moved to Paris, 1967. Calvino was awarded the prestigious Legion d’Honneur in 1981. For Adam Pollock, who directs every summer in Tuscany the baroque opera festival Musica nel Chiostro, Calvino wrote a ‘‘frame’’ for Mozart’s unfinished opera Zaide, 1981. Calvino died of brain hemorrhage in Siena, 18 September 1985. JO ANN CANNON 346

Selected Works Collections Romanzi e racconti, vol. 1, Milan: Mondadori, 1991. Romanzi e racconti, vol. 2, Milan: Mondadori, 1992. Fiabe italiane, Preface by Mario Lavagetto, Milan: Mondadori, 1993. Romanzi e racconti, vol. 3, Milan Mondadori, 1994. Saggi, 2 vols., Milan: Mondadori, 1995.

Fiction Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno, 1947; as The Path to the Nest of Spiders, translated by Archibald Colquhoun, 1976. Ultimo viene il corvo, 1949; as Adam One Afternoon and Other Stories, translated by Archibald Colquhoun, 1957. Il visconte dimezzato, 1952. L’entrata in guerra, 1954. Il barone rampante, 1957; as The Baron in the Trees, translated by Archibald Colquhoun, 1959. Il cavaliere inesistente, 1959; as The Nonexistent Knight and The Cloven Viscount, translated by Archibald Colquhoun, 1962. La giornata d’ uno scrutatore, 1963; as The Watcher and Other Stories, translated by William Weaver, 1971. Marcovaldo, ovvero le stagioni in citta`, 1963; as Marcovaldo or The Seasons in the City, translated by William Weaver, 1993. La formica argentina, 1965. Le cosmicomiche, 1965; as Cosmicomics, translated by William Weaver, 1968. Ti con zero, 1967; as T zero, translated by William Weaver, 1969; Also known as Time and the Hunter, translated by William Weaver, 1993. Gli amori difficili, 1970; as Difficult Loves. Smog, A Plunge into Real Estate, translated by William Weaver, 1985. Le citta` invisibili, 1972; as Invisible Cities, translated William Weaver, 1974. Il castello dei destini incrociati, 1973; as The Castle of Crossed Destinies, translated by William Weaver, 1977. Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore, 1979; as If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, translated by William Weaver, 1992. Palomar, 1983; as Mr. Palomar, translated by William Weaver, 1992. Sotto il sole giaguaro, 1986; as Under the Jaguar Sun, translated by William Weaver, 1993. La strada di San Giovanni, 1990; as The Road to San Giovanni, translated by Tim Parks, 1993.

Edited Works Fiabe Italiane, 1956; as Italian Folktales, translated by George Martin, 1980.

Nonfiction Una pietra sopra, discorsi di letteratura e societa`, 1980; as The Uses of Literature, translated by Patrick Creagh, 1986. Collezione di sabbia, 1984. Lezioni americane, 1988; as Six Memos for the Next Millennium, translated by Patrick Creagh, 1988.

Further Reading Asor Rosa, Alberto, Stile Calvino. Cinque studi, Turin: Einaudi, 2001.

ITALO CALVINO Barilli, Renato, ‘‘My ‘Long Infidelity’ Towards Calvino,’’ in Calvino Revisited, edited by Franco Ricci, Ottawa: Dovehouse, 1989. Barth, John, ‘‘The Literature of Replenishment’’, The Atlantic (January 1980): 65–71. Belpoliti, Marco, L’occhio di Calvino, Turin: Einaudi, 1996. Belpoliti, Marco, Settanta, Turin: Einaudi, 2001. Benedetti, Carla, Pasolini contro Calvino, per una letteratura impura, Turin: Boringhieri, 1998. Bruner, Jerome, Actual Minds, Possibile Worlds, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986. Cannon, JoAnn, Postmodern Italian Fiction: The Crisis of Reason in Calvino, Eco, Sciascia, Malerba, Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1989. Jeannet, Angela, Under the Radiant Sun and the Crescent Moon: Italo Calvino’s Storytelling, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. Lavagetto, Mario, Dovuto a Calvino, Turin: Boringhieri, 2001. Lucente, Gregory, Beautiful Fables: Self-Consciousness in Italian Narrative from Manzoni to Calvino, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986. McLaughlin, Martin, Italo Calvino, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998. Milanini, Claudio, L’utopia discontinua, saggio su Italo Calvino, Milan: Garzanti, 1990. Quaderni d’Italianistica, 5 (1984): issue devoted to Calvino. Re, Lucia, Calvino and the Age of Neorealism: Fables of Estrangement, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990. Ricci, Franco (editor), Calvino Revisited. Ottawa: Dovehouse, 1989. Rushdie, Salman, Imaginary Homelands, London: Granta, 1991. Scarpa, Domenico, Italo Calvino, Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 1999. Vidal, Gore, ‘‘Fabulous Calvino,’’ New York Review of Books, 30 May 1974, 13–21. West, Rebecca, ‘‘L’identita` americana di Calvino,’’ Nuova corrente, 34(1987): 363–374. Woodhouse, J. R., Italo Calvino: A Reappraisal and an Appreciation of the Trilogy, Hull: Hull University Press, 1968.

I NOSTRI ANTENATI, 1960 Novels by Italo Calvino

In his 1960s trilogy, I nostri antenati (Our Ancestors), Italo Calvino apparently left behind the problems that animated Italian neo-Realist fiction of the postwar period. The first novel, Il visconte

dimezzato (The Cloven Viscount, 1952) tells the story of a viscount, Medardo of Terralba, who is cloven in two halves in a battle between the Christian forces and the Turks. Medardo’s evil half returns to his homeland and wreaks destruction in his path. The good half returns to Terralba. Order is restored after the two halves fall in love with the same woman, fight a duel, and are miraculously sewn together by Dr. Trelawny. Il visconte dimezzato is not unequivocally an allegory of human wholeness or good and evil. Martin McLaughlin cites the conclusion to Il visconte dimezzato in support of this supposition. The whole Medardo at the end ‘‘does not inaugurate ‘an era of marvelous happiness; . . . obviously a whole Viscount is not enough to make all the world whole’’’ (Italo Calvino, 1998). In his preface to the trilogy Calvinosuggests that the figure of the cloven viscount is an allegory of contemporary man: ‘‘Dimidiato, mutilato, incompleto, nemico a se stesso e` l’uomo contemporaneo; Marx lo disse alienato, Freud represso; uno stato d’antica armonia e` perduto, a una nuova completezza si aspira’’ (Mutilated, incomplete, an enemy against himself, that’s contemporary man. Marx called him alienated, Freud repressed. We have lost an ancient harmony, and aspire to a new completeness). In Il barone rampante (The Baron in the Trees, 1956), the second book in Calvino’s fantastic trilogy, the protagonist is an eighteenth-century nobleman, Cosimo Piovasco di Rondo`. As a 12-year-old, Cosimo defies his dictatorial father and climbs into the trees, vowing never to return to terra firma. The story, as narrated by Cosimo’s younger brother, Biagio, has an episodic, picaresque quality. Cosimo overcomes trials and obstacles, much like Calvino’s folktale heroes whose stories constitute ‘‘il catalogo dei destini che possono darsi’’ (the catalog of potential destinies) beginning with ‘‘la giovinezza, dalla nascita . . . al distacco dalla casa, alle prove per diventare adulto e poi maturo, per confermarsi come essere umano’’ (youth . . . then the departure from home, and finally, through the trials of growing up, the attainment of maturity and the proof of one’s humanity) (Introduction to Fiabe italiane, 1956). Cosimo fights savage cats and Turkish pirates. When Ombrosa is threatened by forest fires, Cosimo organizes a volunteer fire brigade and discovers the joy of solidarity in a common cause. This youthful episode of activism and camaraderie undoubtedly reflects Calvino’s participation in the Italian Resistance movement. But Cosimo’s political activism, like Calvino’s, is short lived and ends in disillusionment. 347

ITALO CALVINO Cosimo opts instead for mapping out plans for a utopian society in the trees. The protagonist’s utopianism might at first seem to brand him as a disengaged, aloof, misanthrope. But Calvino himself articulated another interpretation of Calvino’s withdrawal from the world. Cosimo’s aloofness is characterized as a necessary condition for true commitment. This is made clear when Biagio is questioned by Voltaire about his eccentric brother Cosimo: ‘‘Mais c’est pour approcher du ciel, que votre frere reste la` haute?’’ (But is it to be nearer the sky that your brother stays up there?). The brother explains, ‘‘Mio fratello sostiene che chi vuole guardare bene la terra deve tenersi alla distanza necessaria’’ (My brother considers that anyone who wants to see the earth properly must keep himself at a necessary distance from it.). This need for a critical balance between activism and withdrawal from the world, between contemplation and action, is also articulated in the ‘‘Leggerezza’’ (Lightness) chapter of Lezioni americane (Six Memos for the Next Millennium, 1988). Many of the motifs of Calvino’s later, experimental works may be located in Il barone rampante. Entering the exotic garden of the neighboring Ondariva family, Cosimo navigates the garden through the sense of smell. Later in the novel, the protagonist begins to master his arboreal realm through the sense of touch. He classifies the various trees in the vicinity of Ombrosa using a tactile classification system. Cosimo’s enriched, multisensory access to the world foreshadows the posthumously published novel of 30 years later. The desire to draw upon all five senses, much like primitive man, is a theme that inspired Sotto il sole giaguaro (Under the Jaguar Sun, 1986). The protagonists of Sotto il sole giaguaro fail in their attempts to use the five senses as a means of mastering the world. By contrast, Cosimo confidently and masterfully draws upon his five senses in Il barone rampante in order to navigate his arboreal realm. Another theme of the novel is the self-conscious exploration of the status and limitations of language. This is evident in the chapter describing Cosimo’s madness. Il cavaliere inesistente (The Nonexistent Knight, 1959) is a fanciful rewriting of the exploits of Charlemagne’s knights. The protagonist, Agilulfo, an empty suit of armor, represents ‘‘inesistenza munita di volonta` e coscienza’’ (nonexistence furnished with will and conscience). His companion, Gurdulu, is his specular opposite, ‘‘uno che c’e` ma non sa d’esserci’’ (one who exists but does not know he exists). As Calvino has explained in his 348

introduction to the trilogy, Agilulfo, who is entirely defined by his devotion to the laws of an institution, in this case chivalry, represents contemporary ‘‘organization man’’ in consumer society. The other characters in the novel include two couples, Rambaldo and Bradamante and Torrismondo and Sofronia. Rambaldo and Torrisomondo are familiar character types in Calvino’s work, young men on the brink of maturity who define themselves by overcoming trials and obstacles. One of the more interesting aspects of the novel is the figure of the narrator. The early chapters seem to be narrated by an undramatized, omniscient narrator. At the beginning of Chapter Four, however, we learn that the story is being told by a nun, Sister Teodora. At the conclusion of the novel, it is revealed that Sister Teodora and Bradamante, the warrior maiden of Carolingian legend and heroine of Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, are one and the same. With this conclusion, Calvino is attempting to unite the realms of contemplation and action, writing and engagement in society. The conclusion anticipates similar moments in Calvino’s later fiction, where the man of contemplation, the Hermit, is equated with the man of action, the Knight of Swords. The desire to reconcile the apparent incompatibility between contemplation and action, art and life, withdrawal and commitment, is a constant theme in Calvino’s works. JO ANN CANNON Editions First Editions Il visconte dimezzato, Turin: Einauadi, 1952. Il barone rampante. Turin: Einauadi, 1957. Il cavaliere inesistente, Turin: Einaudi, 1959. As I nostri antenati with author’s preface, Turin: Einaudi, 1960.

Critical Editions In Romanzi e racconti, vol. 2, edited by Mario Barenghi and Bruno Falcetto, Milan: Mondadori, 1991.

Translations The Baron in the Trees, translated by Archibald Colquhoun, New York: Random House, 1959. The Nonexistent Knight and The Cloven Viscount, translated by Archibald Colquhoun, New York: Random House, 1962.

Further Reading Adler, Sara, Calvino: The Writer as Fablemaker, Potomac: Jose Porrua Turanzas, 1979. Bolongaro, Eugenio, Italo Calvino and the Compass of Literature, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003.

ITALO CALVINO Bonura, Giuseppe, Invito alla lettura di Italo Calvino, Milan: Mursia, 1972. McLaughlin, Martin, Italo Calvino, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998. Woodhouse, J. R., Italo Calvino: A Reappraisal and an Appreciation of the Trilogy, Hull, U.K.: Hull University Press, 1968.

LE COSMICOMICHE, 1965 Stories by Italo Calvino

Le cosmicomiche (Cosmicomics) is one of Calvino’s most engaging and well-received texts. Inspired by the author’s reading of books on cosmology, astronomy, and non-Euclidean geometry, Le cosmicomiche has often been described as science fiction. For Calvino, however, science fiction deals with the future, while his stories deal with the origin and evolution of the universe. The protagonist of Le cosmicomiche is one Qfwfq, a chameleonic consciousness and observer of the universe from the Big Bang onward. Qfwfq takes many forms, including a mote of cosmic dust, a one-celled organism, a dinosaur, and a university researcher. As Qfwfq adapts to his ever-changing universe, he speculates about time and space, predictability and randomness, the birth of language. Each tale is an encounter between Qfwfq and the ‘‘Mare dell’oggettivita`’’ (sea of objectivity) surrounding. Each begins with an italicized epigraph summarizing a scientific theory on the origins of the universe or the evolution of the species. The epigraph is followed by the introduction of a human consciousness, Qfwfq. In ‘‘Gli anni-luce’’ (The LightYears) Qfwfq, observing the night sky through his telescope, spots an admonishing sign from a faraway galaxy: ‘‘TI HO VISTO’’ (I Saw You). He calculates that the unspecified, shameful action witnessed occurred two million light-years earlier. Qfwfq frets about the injustice of being captured in an uncharacteristically unflattering moment and wrestles with ways to correct the bad impression

the universe has formed of him. Toying with excuses such as ‘‘LASCIATE CHE VI SPIEGHI’’ (Let me explain) and ‘‘AVREI VOLUTO VEDERE VOI AL MIO POSTO’’ (I would have liked to have seen you in my place), he settles on responding with a terse sign of his own: ‘‘E CON ` ?’’ (What of it?). As the story continues, CIO Qfwfq takes comfort in the fact that his many subsequent, decent actions will by now have reached the distant galaxies that have so misjudged him. Alas, he patiently waits the millions of lightyears for the distant galaxies to see him at his best, only to read the evidence that his hopes have been ` ,’’ dashed. The signs reading ‘‘TRA LA LA LA ` ? VATTELAPESCA’’ (Who Can It ‘‘CHI SARA Be? Go Figure) and ‘‘HAI LA MAGLIA DI LANA’’ (You Have a Woolen Sweater) indicate the bitter reality that the universe has become indifferent. In the conclusion, Qfwfq resigns himself to being misunderstood, misjudged, and, finally, ignored. A fanciful conte philosophique, Le cosmicomiche provides a poignant glimpse at the human condition. John Barth calls it ‘‘beautifully written, enormously appealing space-age fables . . . whose materials are as modern as the new cosmology and as ancient as folktales, but whose themes are love and loss, change and permanence, illusion and reality’’ (‘‘The Literature of Replenishment,’’ 1980). JO ANN CANNON Editions Le cosmicomiche, Turin: Einaudi, 1965. As La memoria del mondo e altre storie cosmicomiche, Milan: Club degli editori, 1968 (Including Le cosmicomiche and Ti con zero, Turin: Einaudi, 1967). As Cosmicomiche vecchie e nuove, Milan: Garzanti, 1984.

Critical Editions In Romanzi e racconti, vols. 2 and 3, edited by Mario Barenghi and Bruno Falcetto, Milan: Mondadori, 1991.

Translation As Cosmicomics, translated by William Weaver, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1968. T zero, translated by William Weaver, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1969.

Further Reading Barth, John, ‘‘The Literature of Replenishment,’’ The Atlantic (January 1980): 65–71. Bernardini, Napoletano Francesca, I segni nuovi di Italo Calvino. Da ‘‘Le cosmicomiche’’ a ‘‘Le citta` invisibili,’’ Rome: Bulzoni, 1977.

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ITALO CALVINO Carter, Albert Howard, Italo Calvino: Metamorphoses of Fantasy, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1987. Hume, Kathryn, Calvino’s Fictions: Cogito and Cosmos, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Olken, Ilene, With Pleated Eye and Garnet Wings: Symmetries of Italo Calvino, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984. Ricci, Franco, Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001. Weiss, Beno, Understanding Italo Calvino, Columbia: University of South Carolina, 1993.

SE UNA NOTTE D’INVERNO UN VIAGGIATORE, 1979 Novel by Italo Calvino

breach the gap between signifier and signified mirrors Calvino’s own anxiety. In essays such as ‘‘The Written and the Unwritten Word’’ (1983) and throughout his fiction Calvino explores the nature, limitations, and inadequacies of literary language. The centrality of the reader, a recurring theme in Calvino’s work, is embodied in Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore in the character of Ludmilla. An avid reader, Ludmilla becomes the object of Flannery’s obsession. His desire to seduce the reader comes to symbolize the writer’s always unrealized desire to endow literature with power. The encounter between Arkadian Porphyritch and the reader further dramatizes the importance of the reader in determining literature’s influence. The Director of the Archives of the unnamed Police State points out that, in countries where there is no censorship, literature descends to the status of ‘‘un passatempo innocuo e senza rischi’’ (an innocuous pastime without risks). Only the police state acknowledges the true power of the pen. This novel explores the relationship between fiction and society, writer and reader, reader and text. The novel ultimately defends the supremacy of reading over writing while it poignantly portrays the writer’s unquenchable desire to ‘‘seduce’’ the reader through the pleasure of the text. JO ANN CANNON

Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore (If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler) is one of Calvino’s most experimental and self-referential texts. The protagonist is a reader who opens a book by Italo Calvino and becomes immersed in the text. Unfortunately, through an error in the binding, the first 32 pages repeat over and over throughout the book. The reader goes to the bookstore to return the defective book, only to discover that the Calvino book was accidentally switched with another novel. This is the novel that has captured the reader’s attention. Thus begins a search for the missing book. Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore is a series of interrupted fragments embedded one within the other and interspersed with the protagonist’s search for the original, authentic text. The repeated interruptions of the novels within the novel function as an extended metaphor on the fragility and inconclusiveness of literary communication. This deficiency is captured in the character of Silas Flannery, the hack detective novelist who has lost his ‘‘fiducia nella comunicazione’’ (faith in communication) because his novels fail to capture or compete with the material world. The hack detective novelist is a comical authorial surrogate. Flannery’s inability to 350

Editions First Edition Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore, Turin: Einaudi, 1979.

Critical Edition In Romanzi e racconti, vol. 3, edited by Mario Barenghi and Bruno Falcetto, Milan: Mondadori, 1991.

Translations As If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, translated by William Weaver, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1981.

Further Reading Calvino, Italo, ‘‘The Written and the Unwritten Word,’’ The New York Review of Books, 12 (May 1983), 38–39. Cannon, JoAnn, Italo Calvino: Writer and Critic, Ravenna: Longo Editore, 1981. Contini, Gianfranco, Schedario di scrittori italiani moderni e contemporanei, Florence: Sansoni, 1978. Feinstein, Wiley, ‘‘The Doctrinal Core of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, in Calvino Revisited, edited by Franco Ricci, Ottawa: Dovehouse, 1989. Ferretti, Gian Carlo, Le avventure di un lettore. Calvino, Ludmilla e gli altri, Lecce: Piero Manni, 1997. Milanini, Claudio, L’utopia discontinua. Saggio su Italo Calvino, Milan: Garzanti, 1990.

MARIO CAMERINI

MARIO CAMERINI (1895–1981) Mario Camerini’s long and influential career as a film director began with Jolly, clown da circo (Jolly, Circus Clown, 1923), featuring a carnivalesque setting to which he would return in Daro` un milione (I’ll Give a Million, 1935). His subsequent silent films—Voglio tradire mio marit o (I Want to Betray My Husband, 1925) a version of C. B. DeMille’s successful Hollywood comedy Why Change Your Wife (1920); Maciste contro lo sceicco (Maciste Against the Sheik, 1925), one of the many adventure films produced during the silent era involving the popular superhero, Maciste; and Kiff Tebbi (As You Please, 1927), a romantic adventure film set in Africa, a location to which Camerini would return in Il grande appello (The Last Roll Call, 1936)—are rich with signs of his directorial promise. Many of his films, once unknown to the postFascist world, were finally screened during a 1975 retrospective at Ancona, enabling an overdue critical reassessment of his style and of Italian popular culture during Fascism. The screening of these films not only revealed that the Italian cinema of the Fascist era was innovative but became an occasion to rethink the complex relations between the culture and politics of those years. Camerini’s first notable achievement as director was the silent melodrama Rotaie (Rails, 1929), reissued as a sound film in 1931. Not a propagandistic text in behalf of the regime, the film is notable for its experimentation with camera work and editing, heralding new directions in an Italian cinema struggling to regain its former commercial and international prestige. Rotaie follows the vicissitudes of a young petit bourgeois couple, led astray by the promises of wealth via gambling but ultimately converted to acceptance of a working-class milieu, a narrative common to many of his subsequent films. The style of the film exploits the image of train wheels linked to that of a roulette wheel. The reiterative circular images of the wheels, the rhythmic editing, and the chiaroscuro lighting develop a tension between the couples’ entrapment in a selfdestructive life and their struggle to extricate themselves from an obsession for wealth that almost destroys their relationship. Camerini’s films were not overtly political, despite Fascism’s authoritarian, theatrical, and

propagandistic tendencies. They have been described as ‘‘escapist,’’ similar in certain ways to pre–World War II Hollywood cinema with its indirect but meaningful insights into the changes induced by modernity and the rise of mass culture. With the coming of sound (1929), Camerini directed films in genres that were to become his trademark: in particular, sentimental light comedies and melodramas that were tinged with pathos. His first successful sentimental comedy, Gli uomini che mascalzoni... (Men What Rascals, 1932), starred Vittorio De Sica as a chauffeur-mechanic trying to impress a young woman by pretending to be a wealthy man whose affectations threaten the relationship. The romance is coupled to the landscape of modernity: the automobile, industry, commerce—and the fast pace of life inherent to it. The dynamic character of landscape is developed through a mobile camera and the use of location setting (in the street scenes, at an inn, and at the Milan Trade Fair). The film’s popularity was enhanced by Cesare Bixio’s song, ‘‘Parlami d’amore Mariu`.’’ The film elevated De Sica to stardom, and his collaboration with Camerini left a mark on De Sica’s later films as a director. The comedies that followed—Gli uomini che mascalzoni, Il signor Max (Mr. Max, 1937), Daro` un milione, Batticuore (Heartbeat, 1938), and I grandi magazzini (Department Stores, 1939)—pair De Sica with Assia Noris and feature a motif common to Camerini’s films: impersonation. A millionaire masquerades as a beggar and a beggar as a millionaire. A newspaper vender assumes the identity of an upper-class gentleman. A young woman, the graduate of a school for thieves, assumes the role of an aristocrat. A delivery driver seeks to extort money from a department store. In the spirit of Frank Capra’s films, with their sympathetic focus on petit bourgeois protagonists, the culprit in Camerini’s films is the vain and destructive desire for wealth, success, and upward mobility expressed through the protagonists’ attempts to escape their everyday existence. After their encounters in the upper-class world, the protagonists find safety in restored familial, if not community, relationships. Daro` un milione was remade in Hollywood by Walter Lang as I’ll Give a Million (1938) and 351

MARIO CAMERINI Batticuore as Heartbeat in 1946. Camerini was also responsible for remakes of his earlier films— T’amero` sempre (1933; I’ll Love You Always, 1943) and Il cappello a tre punte (The ThreeCornered Hat, 1934) retitled as La bella mugnaia (The Miller’s Wife, 1955) based on the short novel by Pedro de Alarc¸on. Il cappello a tre punte, set in the eighteenth century, is a satire on the abuse of power, focusing on a lecherous, vain, and incompetent governor who seeks to seduce a miller’s wife. The film, unlike other Camerini films, was subject to censorship, cut, and denied approval for several months. The witty dialogue, the exaggerated characterization (thanks to the famous Neapolitan comic actors Eduardo and Peppino De Filippo), the vivid character of the pastoral setting, and the use of song are characteristic of Camerini’s comedic style, which invites comparison with the French director Rene´ Clair in the ironic and self-conscious focus on the cinematic medium, masquerade, and carnival. Camerini’s melodramas also portray conflicts between domesticity and the desire for adventure and leisure. T’amero` sempre highlights the fate of a young woman abandoned by her aristocratic lover. Pregnant and alone in the city, she seeks to rebuild her life. The film’s opening introduces images reminiscent of documentaries produced by LUCE (L’Unione Cinematografica Educativa) on maternity but veers in a darker direction in its portrait of the female protagonist, whose early blighted life is presented through flashbacks of her mother’s death, life in an orphanage, and meeting with the Count. Through vignettes, the film presents a contrast between the leisurely and extravagant life of the aristocracy and the modest life of workers, ending not in reconciliation with the Count but in her engagement to a modest accountant. Come le foglie (Like Falling Leaves, 1934) portrays a wealthy family almost destroyed by the social pretensions of the maternal figure and her playboy son. The beleaguered family that appears in so many of his films is not a celebration of Fascist familial ideology but a critical flight from the harsh realities of contemporary life. Camerini’s images of Italian modernity often portray images of upperclass life while at the same time disavowing their appeal. His only film that qualifies as conforming to the Fascist ideology of nationalism is Il grande appello, and even that film is tempered by the pathos of the father-and-son relationship that overwhelms the patriotic and nationalist motifs. Not often commented on by critics, Camerini’s oeuvre also includes adaptations of Italian literary 352

and dramatic classics to film. His version of Luigi Pirandello’s Ma non e` una cosa seria (It’s Really Not Serious, 1936) is set in a boardinghouse run by an aging and unappreciated woman whose life changes when a handsome rake, weary of womanizing, proposes marriage to her in jest and thereby alters her life. Parallels are evident between Camerini’s comic treatment of bourgeois life and marriage and Pirandello’s use of humor to dissect the folly of romantic love, sexual intrigue, and self-deception. The filmmaker’s adaptation of Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi (The Betrothed, 1941) is another instance of a compatible union between the filmmaker and his literary source. Though he had to scale down characters and episodes, Camerini’s film creates a dramatic sense of the novel’s historical milieu and conveys the filmmaker’s populist predilection for dramatizing the disruption of familial and class solidarity through abuses of power by the upper classes and through elevating the virtues of religious belief and modest aspiration. In the immediate postwar era, Camerini made Due lettere anonime (Two Anonymous Letters, 1945), which displays ‘‘almost the same intensity as Roma, citta` aperta’’ (Gili, 1993). From the 1950s to the early 1970s, he directed a variety of genres: comedies, dramas, crime films, and the superproduction Ulisse (Ulysses, 1954), another adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey. Camerini’s last film was another literary adaptation, based on a Giovanni Guareschi novel, Don Camillo e i giovani d’oggi (Don Camillo and Today’s Youth, 1972), a congenial vehicle for a filmmaker who excelled in a form of comedy that was critical of crude materialism, elevated common sense as a strategy for survival, and displayed a sympathy for religious piety, though not a devotee of individualism. Camerini continued to be actively involved in legal, cultural, and political issues affecting postwar Italian cinema.

Biography Mario Camerini was born in Rome, 6 February 1895, and educated at the Lyce´e le Tasse in Rome. He worked as scriptwriter, 1913, and abandoned his intention to study law and served as officer in the Italian light infantry from 1914–1918. He was taken as prisoner of war by the Austrians in 1917 and repatriated to Italy in 1919. Camerini worked as scriptwriter and assistant to the prominent director, Augusto Genina, 1919–1923; he debuted as a

MARIO CAMERINI director of silent cinema with Jolly, clown da circo; 1923, and had his first directorial successes with Rotaie and Gli uomini che mascalzoni, 1930, 1933. Camerini married Assia Noris, who starred in several of his films, in 1940. They were divorced in 1943, and he married Mathilde ‘‘Tully’’ Hruska, 1943. The couple had two children. Camerini retired from filmmaking in 1972. He was the featured speaker at the Ancona retrospective of films of the Fascist era, 1975. A retrospective of his films was shown at the 45th Locarno Festival in 1992. Camerini died of pneumonia at Gardone Riviera, 4 February 1981. MARCIA LANDY Selected Works Films Jolly, Clown da circo, 1923. Saetta principe per un giorno, 1924. La casa dei pulcini, 1924. Voglio tradire mio marito (based on the play by Ermanno Geymonat), 1925. Masciste contro lo sceicco, 1925. Kiff Tebbi (based on the novel by Luciano Zuccoli), 1927. Rotaie, 1929. La riva dei bruti (based on Victory by Joseph Conrad), 1930. Figaro e la sua gran giornata (based on the play Ostrega che sbrego! by Arnaldo Fraccaroli), 1931. Gli uomini che mascalzoni..., 1932. T’amero` sempre, 1933. Giallo (based on The Man Who Changed His Name by Edgar Wallace), 1933. Il cappello a tre punte (based on El sombrero de tres picos by Antonio Pedro de Alarc¸on), 1934. Come le foglie (based on the play by Giuseppe Giacosa), 1934. Daro` un milione, 1935. Ma non e` una cosa seria (based on the play by Luigi Pirandello), 1936. Il grande appello, 1936. Il signor Max, 1937. Batticuore (based on a short story by Lilly Janu¨sse), 1938. I grandi magazzini, 1939. Centomila dollari, 1940. Una romantica avventura (based on The Loves of Margery by Thomas Hardy), 1940. I promessi sposi (based on the novel by Alessandro Manzoni), 1941.

Una storia d’amore (based on the novel by Mary McDougal Axelson), 1942. T’amero` sempre, 1943. Due lettere anonime, 1945. L’angelo e il diavolo, 1946. La figlia del capitano (based on the novel by Aleksander Pushkin), 1947. Molti sogni per le strade, 1948. Il brigante Musolino, 1950. Due mogli sono troppe, 1950. Moglie per una notte (based on the play L’ora della fantasia by Anna Bonacci), 1952. Gli eroi della domenica, 1952. Ulisse (based on the Odyssey by Homer), 1954. La bella mugnaia (re-make of Il cappello a tre punte), 1955. Suor Letizia, 1956. Vacanze a Ischia, 1957. Primo amore, 1958. Via Margutta (based on the novel Gente al Babuino di Ugo Moretti), 1960. I briganti italiani, 1961. Kali-Yug, la dea della vendetta, 1963. Delitto quasi perfetto, 1966. Io non vedo, tu non parli, lui non sente, 1971. Don Camillo e i giovani d’oggi (based on the novel by Giovanni Guareschi), 1972.

Further Reading Apra`, Adriano, and Patrizia Pistagnesi, I favolosi anni trenta: Cinema italiano 1929–1944, Milan: Electa, 1979. Brunetta, Gian Piero, Storia del cinema italiano: Il cinema muto 1895–1929, vol. 1, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 2001. Brunetta, Gian Piero, Storia del cinema italiano: Il cinema del regime, 1929–1945, vol. 2, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 2001. Farassino, Alberto, Mario Camerini: Sous la direction de Alberto Farassino, Belgium: Editions Yellow Now, 1992. Gili, Jean A., ‘‘Etre cine´aste en Italie pendant les anne´es du fascisme,’’ Dossier Mario Camerini, Positif, 301 (March 1986): 38–43. Gili, Jean A., ‘‘Terzo tempo: Retrospective Mario Camerini,’’ Positif, 384 (February 1993): 70–71. Grmek Germani, Sergio, Mario Camerini, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1980. Landy, Marcia, Fascism in Film: The Italian Commercial Cinema 1931–1943, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986. Savio, Francesco, Cinecitta` anni trenta: Parlano 116 protagonisti del secondo cinema italiano (1930–1943), vol. 1, Rome: Bulzoni, 1979.

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ANDREA CAMILLERI (1925–) Although a contemporary of his distinguished literary colleague and often-acknowledged font of inspiration Leonardo Sciascia, Andrea Camilleri began his own prolific narrative production much later in life. His first novel, Il corso delle cose (The Way Things Go), was published in 1978, and his publicly acclaimed series of works dedicated to the investigations of the Commissario Montalbano began with the publication of La forma dell’acqua (The Shape of Water) in 1994. Like Sciascia, Camilleri has produced numerous works of historical and investigative fiction, rooted firmly in the geographic, linguistic, and historical context of Sicily. His novels engage topics of contemporary interest to Sicily and to Italy, such as the controversy over police brutality at the G8 summit in Genoa in July 2001, which is a source of great professional and personal frustration for Montalbano, in Il giro di boa (Rounding the Buoy, 2003), or the problems posed by waves of immigration from northern Africa, subject of La gita a Tindari (Excursion to Tindari, 2000). These novels take as inspiration microhistorical episodes from chronicles, elaborating narratives around such events as public opposition to the opening of a theater in Caltanissetta as in Il birraio di Preston (The Brewer from Preston, 1995). His historical fiction, set in large part in at the end of the nineteenth century, criticizes the immobility of the Sicilian bureaucracy, the corruption of the clergy, and the insidious presence of the Mafia. But Camilleri, who has frequently paid homage in both novels and in interviews to Sciascia and to other eminent Sicilian literary predecessors, including Verga, Pirandello, De Roberto, Brancati, and Toma`si di Lampedusa, shapes a Sicily markedly different from that of his regional peers. This difference is exemplified in the Montalbano series, which creates a serialized, demystified Sicily in which the police chief confronts the laws of omerta` and the difficulties of bureaucratic inefficacy with ironic humor: He can meet with and come to grudging understandings with Mafia bosses or ridicule the practice of sending anonymous letters by writing them, strategically and contemptuously, to himself. The weighty, cyclical nature of Sicilian history depicted in Verga’s I Malavoglia, Tomasi di 354

Lampedusa’s Il Gattopardo, or Sciascia’s Il consiglio d’Egitto is replaced by the linear functioning of the classical detective story, proceeding from the commission of a crime through its investigation and eventual resolution. Camilleri’s Sicily is marked by a grudging optimism, the hesitant belief in the possibility for change; and his detective hero, as head of the police force of Viga`ta, works to successfully fight crime from within the very system of bureaucracy that he perpetually critiques. The resulting narrative structure enjoys the epistemological stability made possible in a context where evidence is provided and questions answered, a framework that derives more directly from the tradition of detective fiction than from the workings of Sicilian literature, which often depicts obscure, destabilized foundations of knowledge and thus dysfunctional or unresolved detective narratives (such as Sciascia’s A ciascuno il suo, in which the detective-figure is killed). In fact, the author acknowledges in part his appreciation of traditional detective fiction in the very name of his protagonist, which besides being a common last name in Sicily also recalls Manuel Vasquez-Montalba`n, a prolific Catala`n writer of detective fiction. Like Maigret and Pepe Carvalho, Vasquez-Montalba`n’s detective, Montalbano is an outsider in a system that privileges an ever-greater reliance on technology. He relies on old methods of detection and a traditional sense of integrity and morality in his administration of justice and does not adhere strictly to the procedural or legal tenets of the police bureau. As in the canonical detective fiction of his investigative fictional muses, Montalbano employs reason and the gift of intuition to combat bureaucratic and societal complications and unravel the intricacies of the mysteries he confronts. Camilleri’s fiction develops in great detail the regional qualities that tie his writing firmly to his native island. Both historical and detective fiction occupy a universe centered around the fictional town of Viga`ta, situated between the hills and the sea and near the real city of Porto Empedocle in the province of Agrigento. Recurrent themes such as Montalbano’s passion for Sicilian delicacies, like the beloved arancini, or rice balls, of the title of the short story collection Gli arancini di Montalbano

ANDREA CAMILLERI (Montalbano’s Arancini, 1999), or his affection for a gnarled olive tree under which he contemplates difficult cases, contribute to the creation of Camilleri’s characteristic atmosphere of sicilianita` (‘‘Sicilianness’’). Foremost among the distinguishing features of Camilleri’s cultural landscape is his language, a dialect-inflected, inventive version of standard Italian that creates the lingua franca of his narrative universe and serves as a unifying force throughout his literary production. The most elaborately developed language is Sicilian in derivation, but his linguistic innovation also extends to other regional varietals, including a Tuscanized Italian in Il birraio di Preston, the Spanish-influenced language of Il re di Girgenti (The King of Girgenti, 2001), and various passages in a Genoese-inspired Italian in La mossa del cavallo (The Knight’s Move, 1999). These idiosyncratic ‘‘dialects’’ are used to differentiate social strata and regional appurtenance of the characters, to distinguish their particular humor, or to shed light on their relationships with other characters. The most important function of Camilleri’s version of Sicilian, however, is the creation of the contextual theater in which the narrative action unfolds. Virtually all of the direct and indirect discourse in his work is reported in some version of this dialect, but the narrative voice, too, employs the fictional regional language to create the colorful backdrop against which the action is set. In order to facilitate the reading of the sometimes unfamiliar vernacular, the narrative often explains the significance of Sicilianisms, either defining them directly or including the standard Italian version alongside them. This linguistic stage, then, upon which both the historical and the contemporary plots are performed, lends a sense of coherence and continuity to Camilleri’s fiction, linking the Viga`ta of the past to that of the present. The peculiar language that initially caused editors concern about the comprehensibility and wide public appeal of Camilleri’s work has ultimately become one of the most celebrated and critically discussed characteristics of his fiction. While the Sicilian landscape predominates in Camilleri’s work, the author’s books are also filled with references to other literary traditions that allow him to situate himself stylistically, thematically, and philosophically in a global literary context. All of Camilleri’s writing is marked by literary self-consciousness, sometimes present thematically in his work (as when Montalbano, for example, deciphers a clue in the short story ‘‘La sigla’’ by remembering the plot of a short story by Edgar

Allan Poe), and sometimes employed as part of the form of the text itself (as in Il birraio di Preston, in which the first sentence in each chapter is a citation from a famous work of fiction). The often playful pastiche of literary reference also contributes to the tone that predominates throughout Camilleri’s production, one of ironic self-awareness, often described as farcical, in which even the most biting critiques or tragic occurrences are rendered humorous or curious. This sense of distance from the subjects of his works has been a topic of criticism for those who perceive it as a lack of seriousness, although for Camilleri irony represents a mode of self-defense in the face of the problems confronted by Sicily and Italy. The tradition of detective fiction in which Camilleri participates, and which has also been criticized as indicative of a lack of literary seriousness, has provided a model not simply for narrative creation but also for the enthusiastic popular success of his work. The philosopher and cultural critic Antonio Gramsci famously noted in his Quaderni dal carcere (written in the late 1920s and 1930s, the ‘‘golden age’’ of detective fiction), that Italy lacked a national popular literature and that even detective fiction had failed to flourish among Italian-language writers. Camilleri’s works arguably fill the literary gap of which Gramsci made note; his success is discussed among critics as the ‘‘caso Camilleri,’’ the literary and publishing phenomenon that his writing represents. Critical interest in the Sicilian author follows on the heels of overwhelming, unprecedented public success, both in Italy and abroad (as in 2000, when he was the Italian writer most read in France). Thanks to his resulting status as a public figure of note, Camilleri also regularly contributes short stories, essays, and articles on literature, culture, and politics to Italian periodicals, including Il messaggero, La repubblica, and La stampa. His writing career was preceded by a long stint as director of works for radio, television, and theater, during which he produced two television series, the first Tenente Sheridan and the second based on Georges Simenon’s Chief Maigret mysteries for the RAI. It was in deconstructing and reconstructing the narrative lines for the television public that he became skilled in exploiting the mechanisms of the detective story. Almost a half-century later, the former television producer has collaborated in writing scripts for the popular adaptations of his own Montalbano works for television and radio by the RAI, with Luca Zingaretti playing the part of the renowned detective. 355

ANDREA CAMILLERI

Biography Andrea Camilleri was born in Porto Empedocle (Agrigento), 6 September 1925. He married in 1957 and is the father of three children. Camilleri studied at the University of Palermo, where he wrote his dissertation on Mallarme´; he completed further study at the Accademia Nazionale di Arte Drammatica in Rome under Orazio Costa. Beginning in 1942, Camilleri directed numerous theatrical productions, including works by Beckett, Ionesco, Adamov, T. S. Eliot, and Pirandello. He worked as assistant to Ruggero Jacobbi, noted director and poet; together with Jacobbi, he directed Pirandello’s La Sagra del Signore della Nave in Agrigento. Commencing in 1958, Camilleri produced television and radio series on the theater of Eduardo De Filippo, the investigator Tenente Sheridan, and adaptations of Georges Simenon’s Maigret series, Commissario Maigret, starring Gino Cervi. He taught at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome, 1958–1965 and 1968–1970, and held the Accademia Nazionale di Arte Drammatica ‘‘Silvio D’Amico,’’ chair in directing, 1977–1997. Camilleri has been a contributor to several periodicals, including Il messaggero, La stampa, and La repubblica. He was winner of the Gela prize for Un filo di fumo, 1980; the Vittorini prize for Il birraio di Preston, 1995; the Elsa Morante prize for La mossa del cavallo, 1999; and the Flaiano prize for La voce del violino, 1998. ELENA PAST See also: Detective Fiction Selected Works Fiction Il corso delle cose, 1978. Un filo di fumo, 1980. La strage dimenticata, 1984. La stagione della caccia, 1992. La bolla di componenda, 1993.

La forma dell’acqua, 1994; as The Shape of Water, translated by Stephen Sartarelli, 2002. Il gioco della mosca, 1995. Il birraio di Preston, 1995. Il cane di terracotta, 1996; as The Terra-Cotta Dog, translated by Stephen Sartarelli, 2002. Il ladro di merendine, 1996; as The Snack Thief, translated by Stephen Sartarelli, 2003. La voce del violino, 1997; as The Voice of the Violin, translated by Stephen Sartarelli, 2003. La concessione del telefono, 1998. Un mese con Montalbano, 1998. La mossa del cavallo, 1999. Gli arancini di Montalbano, 1999. La gita a Tindari, 2000. La scomparsa di Pato`, 2000. Biografia del figlio cambiato, 2000. Il re di Girgenti, 2001. L’odore della notte, 2001. La paura di Montalbano, 2002. Il giro di boa, 2003. La prima indagine di Montalbano, 2004.

Other I teatri stabili italiani (1898–1918), 1959. Interviste impossibili, 1975–1976.

Further Reading Capecchi, Giovanni, Andrea Camilleri, Fiesole: Cadmo, 2000. De Montis, Simona, I colori della letteratura: Un’indagine sul caso Camilleri, Milan: Rizzoli, 2001. Lodato, Saverio, La linea della palma: Saverio Lodato fa raccontare Andrea Camilleri, Milan: Rizzoli, 2002. Lupo, Salvatore, et al., Il caso Camilleri: Letteratura e storia, Palermo: Sellerio, 2004. Pistelli, Maurizio, ‘‘Montalbano sono’’: Sulle tracce del piu` famoso commissario di polizia italiano, Florence: Le Ca`riti, 2003. Santoro, Antonella, ‘‘I romanzi storici di Andrea Camilleri,’’ Quaderni d’italianistica, 22:2(2001): 159–182. Sorgi, Marcello, La testa ci fa dire: Dialogo con Andrea Camilleri, Palermo: Sellerio, 2000. Vitale, Armando, Il mondo del commissario Montalbano: Considerazioni sulle opere di Andrea Camilleri, Caltanissetta: Terzo Millennio, 2001. Vizmuller-Zocco, Jana, ‘‘I test della (im)popolarita`: Il fenomeno Camilleri,’’ Quaderni d’Italianistica, 22:1(2001): 35–46.

FERDINANDO CAMON (1935–) The poet, novelist, and critic Ferdinando Camon occupies a special place in Italian literature. His concern for and understanding of country life in the Italian northeast are rooted in his own 356

experience because he comes from a peasant family, a very unusual occurrence in the world of Italian letters. He has explored in depth the conflict between oral culture and the culture of the written

FERDINANDO CAMON word. He has elaborated a most personal medium to write about that chasm and about war violence, both of which he experienced personally. He has addressed in his fiction the most disturbing phenomena of post–World War II Italy, terrorism and consumerism, reaching a varied and responsive readership. Il mestiere di poeta (The Poet’s Trade, 1965) and Il mestiere di scrittore (The Writer’s Trade, 1973) are collections of interviews that focus on the ‘‘craft’’ of writing. The dialogues, which Camon called ‘‘spoken criticism,’’ explore the relationship between technique and experience, writer and audience, and the place of literature in a society in rapid transformation. This last topic inspired Camon’s most influential critical work, Letteratura e classi subalterne (Literature and the Subordinate Classes, 1974). Language is the place where conflicts between past and present social realities are revealed: On the one hand there is a literary tradition whose medium is the Italian written language, and on the other hand there is the dialectal orality of the subproletariat. Camon, however, was not concerned with the fate of industrial workers, city proletariat, and lower-level bourgeoisie. His ambition—which he felt was almost a compulsion and a curse—was to give a voice to the forgotten humanity that still lived in the plains bordering the Po river, ‘‘a pocket of Third World, unchanging and on the verge of extinction, at the heart of one of the most rapidly changing European nations,’’ as he wrote in Romanzi della pianura (Novels of the Plain, 1988), ‘‘people who did not know their nation’s language, either written or spoken, anchored in ancient beliefs.’’ Camon’s poems and a volume of newspaper articles, Avanti popolo (Go Ahead, People, 1977), also address the persistence of memories from a phantom world and the monstrosity of a soulless postindustrial culture. His first novel, Il quinto stato (The Fifth Estate, 1970), is utterly original in form and thematics. It is the story of the ‘‘fifth estate,’’ the despised subproletariat who lived and died in the harsh environment of the marshy lands along the Po. A firstperson narrator, a boy, relates his experience of a way of life that is bound toward extinction. His sudden discovery of a different world, the alien and marvelous cities of the Italian ‘‘economic miracle,’’ fills him with awe and yearning. But moving away from ‘‘the plains’’ in which the boy is rooted and being reborn in that other wondrous place is a transgression that brings loneliness, rage, and the torments of a divided consciousness. Language is the witness of that betrayal and the instrument of

salvation. Un altare per la madre (Memorial, 1978) is an homage to the different codes of expression, celebration, and interpretation of the two universes, the one that was left behind and the writer’s present home. An altar handmade by a widower in memory of his lifelong companion is paralleled by the written memorial of their estranged son. La vita eterna (Life Everlasting, 1972) completes the ‘‘ciclo degli ultimi’’ (cycle of those who come last). It revisits the same landscape during the many wars that unleashed unspeakable ferocity on its inhabitants. The peasant world does not distinguish between armies and causes, years and centuries; it remains immobile, subjected to violence, and eternally last. La malattia chiamata uomo (The Sickness Called Man, 1981) is one of the most original Italian novels of the second half of the twentieth century. Psychoanalysis provides the tools to probe deeper in the dislocation caused by the disappearance of an entire social class that existed since prehistoric times and a man’s choice to enter the world of the city and written language. Instead, Occidente (The West, 1989) and La storia di Sirio: parabola per la nuova generazione (The Story of Sirio: A Parable, 1991), components of a ‘‘Cycle of Terror,’’ record the effects of terrorism during a period of Italian life filled with mysterious assassinations. Later novels excoriate the trends of contemporary society and speak about today’s chaotic human migrations. But in 2004, Camon returned with a hard-won serenity to the fields that lie along the Po River. La cavallina, la ragazza e il diavolo (The Young Mare, the Girl and the Devil) is a novella about the pleasure and beauty one can find in that earth. Animals and plants elicit the admiration and love of the narrator, who praises the wisdom of those who have remained faithful to the land.

Biography Ferdinando Camon was born in San Salvaro d’Urbana (Padua), 14 November 1935. He studied in Montagnana (Padua), then at the University of Padua in the School of Letters and Philosophy. He taught at the University of Padua and Bologna (1976), then became a functionary of the Ministry of Public Instruction. In 1973, he began a career in journalism as a columnist for several major Italian newspapers. He was editor of Nord-Est, a collection of short essays he authored and/or edited (1987–1989). Camon writes for La Stampa, l’Unita`, L’Avvenire, and a number of newspapers in the Italian northeast. He is married to Gabriella Imperatori, a journalist. They have two sons, Alessandro 357

FERDINANDO CAMON and Alberto. He has won many prizes, including the Viareggio Prize (1973), the Campiello Prize twice, the Strega Prize (1978), and the Giovanni Verga Prize (2004). ANGELA M. JEANNET Selected Works

I miei personaggi mi scrivono, 1987. Autoritratto di Primo Levi, 1987; republished as Conversazione con Primo Levi, 1991; as Conversations with Primo Levi, translated by John Shepley, 1989. Alberto Moravia: io e il mio tempo, intervista, 1988. Perche´ scrivete? Rispondono 109 scrittori italiani 1989. Il Santo assassino: dichiarazioni apocrife, 1991.

Further Reading

Fiction Il quinto stato, 1970; as The Fifth Estate, translated by John Shepley, 1987; definitive version in Romanzi della pianura, 1988. La vita eterna, 1972; reprinted, 2001; as Life Everlasting, translated by John Shepley, 1987; definitive version in Romanzi della pianura, 1988. Occidente, 1975. Un altare per la madre, 1978; as Memorial, translated by David Calicchio, 1983. La malattia chiamata uomo, 1981; as The Sickness Called Man, translated by John Shepley, 1993. Storia di Sirio: parabola per la nuova generazione, 1984; as The Story of Sirio: A Parable, translated by Cassandra Bertea, 1985. La donna dei fili, 1986. Romanzi della pianura, 1988 (includes Il quinto stato and La vita eterna). Il canto delle balene, 1989. Il Super-Baby, 1991. Mai visti sole e luna, 1994. La terra e` di tutti, 1996. La cavallina, la ragazza e il diavolo, 2004.

Poetry ‘‘Liberare l’animale,’’ 1973. ‘‘Dal silenzio delle campagne: tori, mucche, diavoli, contadini, drogati, mercanti di donne e serial killer, scene e raccontini in versi,’’ 1998.

Critical Writing Il mestiere di poeta, 1965; reprinted, 1982. La moglie del tiranno, 1969; republished with one addition as Il mestiere di scrittore, 1973. Letteratura e classi subalterne, 1974. Avanti popolo, 1977. Nord-Est, 1987–1989.

Albu-Stanescu, Ion, ‘‘Die Kontinuitat eines Krisenbewusstseins: Ferdinando Camon,’’ Weimarer Beitrage, 33(1987), 222–235. De Michelis, Cesare, ‘‘Ferdinando Camon,’’ Studi novecenteschi, 12(1985), 7–35. De Michelis, Cesare, ‘‘Camon, Ferdinando,’’ in Dizionario critico della letteratura Italiana, Torino: UTET, 1987. Dornetti, Vittorio, ‘‘Sociologia e letteratura nel Quinto stato di Camon,’’ Otto-Novecento, 3(1979), 329–340. Jeannet, Angela M., ‘‘Conversazione con Ferdinando Camon,’’ Italian Quarterly, 29(1988), 59–68. Jeannet, Angela M., ‘‘Ferdinando Camon,’’ in Dictionary of Literary Biography: Italian Novelists Since World War II, 1965–1995. Vol. 196, edited by Augustus Pallotta, Detroit, Washington, DC, and London: Gale, 1998. Jeannet, Angela M., ‘‘The Worlds of Ferdinando Camon,’’ in Italiana, edited by Albert N. Mancini, Paolo Giordano, and Pier Raimondo Baldini, River Forest, IL: Rosary College, 1988. Liucci, Raffaele, ‘‘Ferdinando Camon,’’ Belfagor, 55(2000), 545–560. Madrignani, Carlo A., ‘‘Il rosso e il nero del ‘cittadino’ Camon,’’ Quaderni piacentini, 58–59(1976), 19–195. Pasolini, Pier Paolo, ‘‘Ferdinando Camon: Letteratura e classi subalterne,’’ in Scritti corsari, Milan: Garzanti 1975. Pesetti, Nada, ‘‘Camon: lingua e narrazione dei ‘vilani,’’’ L’immagine riflessa, 1(1977), 182–198. Postman, Sheryl-Lynn, ‘‘From Amorphous Nuances to Specific Visions: The Use of Memory in Ferdinando Camon’s The Fifth Estate,’’ Rivista di Studi Italiani, 12(1994), 91–100. Toscani, Claudio, ‘‘Ferdinando Camon,’’ in Novecento. Gli scrittori e la cultura letteraria nella societa` italiana, edited by Gianni Grana, vol. 11, part 2, Milan: Marzorati, 1989.

DINO CAMPANA (1885–1932) ‘‘Dino Campana, even independently of the merits of his poetry, would remain one of the most striking, dramatic, and exciting figures of Twentieth Century Italian literature, and certainly one 358

of the most controversial.’’ Thus wrote Luigi Bonaffini in his preface to his 1991 translation of Campana’s single work, Canti orfici (Orphic Songs, 1914). Bonaffini inadvertently raised a sore point:

DINO CAMPANA Campana, widely translated into English, was famous and beloved, not (or not exclusively) for the merits of his poetry but for the mythical quality of his poetic biography. Campana’s life was undoubtedly characterized by misunderstandings and confusion. Impulsive in temper, even morbid from childhood, he spent a considerable part of his short life in prisons and asylums. Like Rimbaud, Campana made his life into a sort of book of his own existence. More than in Rimbaud’s case, his fame as a poet was conditioned by the myth of the man—a myth that Campana himself was careful to nurture. His restless, nomadic life was full of actions that, in the context of provincial Tuscany in the beginning of the last century, appeared strange and eccentric. His wanderings, his disregard for his appearance, his total rejection of social and literary conventions, played a great part in the creation of his personal myth of the cursed poet, adventurous and unstable. This mythology of the maudit poet has undermined the understanding of Campana’s poetic production, hiding the logical approach underlying his literary researches. Campana’s poetry reflects a wide array of mundane and intellectual experiences, the extraordinary breadth of his readings and travels, his knowledge of the world and of foreign languages. Thanks to his familiarity with the languages and literatures of the rest of Europe, with the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and Henri Bergson, Campana was able to sketch a complex cultural project, one that sought to filter the primacy of contemporary German philosophical thought through the theories of primitivism he detected in the Italian tradition. Campana’s travels first took him through all of northern Italy and Switzerland. His wanderings then took him to South America, to Montevideo and other parts of Argentina, from which he returned to Europe by way of Odessa. At the beginning of 1909 Campana was in Saint-Gilles, Belgium, where he spent two months in prison for vagrancy. After his prison term he was transferred, because of his eccentric behavior (and, no doubt, because the specification ‘‘demented’’ appeared on his passport), directly to the mental asylum of Tournay, where he remained, however, for only a few days. Released, he returned to Florence, where he was again committed, under duress, to a mental clinic. Once he left the clinic, however, he experienced what was probably the most tranquil and productive period of his life. He returned to Marradi, his hometown near Florence, to work on a project, left untitled and referred to simply as

Taccuino (Notebook). These writings were subsequently repudiated by the author and published only posthumously in 1949. In 1912 he published a small group of poems in Il papiro, the Bolognese student magazine with which he had remained in contact since his years at the university. Spending time with the members of the Florentine avantgarde, he befriended Ardengo Soffici, Giovanni Papini, and the new generation of poets who were crowding the issues of La Voce and Lacerba. Late in 1912 he began to compose verse and lyrical prose for the Canti orfici, which he presented to Soffici and Papini as a manuscript entitled Il piu` lungo giorno (The Longest Day), a title derived from a novel by Gabriele D’Annunzio, hoping that they would agree to publish it in the series Quaderni della Voce. However, in what was to become the most famous controversy of Italian literature, Soffici lost the manuscript. It was rediscovered in 1971, among the papers of the Soffici archive in Florence, and published in 1973. Overcome with grief, and having threatened Soffici with death on several occasions, Campana returned to Marradi to reconstruct the text from memory and notes. He published the work privately as Canti orfici in 1914. A fog of facts and legends surround the book’s publication. It is true that Campana, oppressed by the rumors about him in Marradi, inserted the polemical subtitle ‘‘Die Trago¨die des letzen Germanen in Italien’’ (The Tragedy of the Last of the Germans in Italy), and dedicated the entire work to ‘‘Guglielmo II, Imperatore dei Germani’’ (William II, Emperor of the Germans) at the very moment when Italy was about to enter the war against Germany. But he later regretted this act, and biographies tell of how he wanted to use a penknife to cut the dedication out of all the printed copies. Probably mere legend, on the other hand, is the story that he used to tear out the pages containing poems that, in his opinion, the purchaser of the book would not be capable of understanding, and that the copy sold to F. T. Marinetti retained only the front and back cover. It is certain that sales of the book in Florentine cafe´s did not make him any richer or more famous than he had already become for his eccentricities. And so Campana again began to wander. Not even the love of his life, the writer Sibilla Aleramo, could make him happy, even though she did everything she could to help him, even standing surety for him when, in 1917, he was committed to the asylum of Novara. Campana began writing verse again for Aleramo, composing poems that have since been 359

DINO CAMPANA incorporated into the critical editions of the Canti orfici. But their love story was doomed from the beginning by Campana’s mental instability. In 1918 he was definitively rejected by the military authority of Florence and was transferred to the asylum of Lastra a Signa, which he would never leave. It is easy to understand how these biographical details, coupled with Campana’s visionary, ‘‘orphic’’ poetic vocation, gave rise to the legend of the crazed, vagabond poet. Even the intelligent and thoughtful biography written in the form of a novel by Sebastiano Vassalli still tends toward the romantic description of Campana as the pure artist trapped in a hostile, philistine environment. Only recently have Campana’s angst, his irresistible impulse to wander, the recklessness of his character, that is to say everything that were once regarded as the symptoms of madness, been seen as signs of his uniqueness, a psychological uniqueness that translates into a unique poetic production. Campana’s poetry aims at the absolute, transcending the cultural horizons and literary movements of his epoch. Even if the reference to symbolism is unavoidable in describing his poetry, philological scholarship has demonstrated that the Canti orfici owes much more to Dante than to Campana’s poetic contemporaries. Above all, the Canti orfici is indebted to the author’s experience. As Ruggero Jacobbi notes, ‘‘Campana pursues a lyrical ideal, a personal expressive note, and failing to establish it fully, he multiplies his approaches and experiments, he attacks the problem from different points of view, always starting over from the beginning, and in so doing he introduces psychological data and vague philosophical references, always however in pursuit of poetry. [...] It is poetry, in conclusion, that justifies a life otherwise wasteful and senseless; it is in poetry that this life burns itself out and, at the same time, defines itself as whole’’ (Invito alla lettura di Campana, 1976). Campana’s protest against society and flight from the world was expressed in dark, desperate tones that often clash with the music derived from Giosue` Carducci’s ottonari. An example is this line from ‘‘La petite promenade du poe`te’’ (The Poet’s Short Walk): Me ne vado per le strade Strette oscure e misteriose: Vedo dietro le vetrate Affacciarsi Gemme e Rose. ... E cammino poveretto Nella notte fantasiosa,

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Pur mi sento nella bocca La saliva disgustosa. Via dal tanfo Via dal tanfo e per le strade I go walking through the streets Mysterious dark and narrow: Behind the windowpanes I see Gems and Roses looking out.... And poor wretch I keep on walking In the whimsy of the night, Still I feel inside my mouth The disgust of my saliva. Away from the Stench From the stench and through the streets

The maudit expressions of such lyrics did not, however, make Campana a hopeless pessimist: On the contrary, he opened up the aspirations of the flaneur to the entire world. He lingered over the themes of departure and voyage and descriptions of port cities, transforming them into fabulous and syncretic images that blended mysterious nocturnal atmospheres, chimerical echoes, and the secret voices of the arcane, as in ‘‘Il canto della tenebra’’ (The Song of Darkness): La luce del crepuscolo si attenua: Inquieti spiriti sia dolce la tenebra Al cuore che non ama piu`! Sorgenti sorgenti abbiam da ascoltare, Sorgenti, sorgenti che sanno Sorgenti che sanno che spiriti stanno Che spiriti stanno a ascoltare... Ascolta ... The twilight is waning: Unquiet spirits may darkness be sweet To the heart that no longer loves! Springs springs we must listen to, Springs, springs that understand Spring that understand that spirit stand That spirits stand by and listen... Listen ....

Campana’s orphic technique is well represented here: a pattern of repetitions, accumulations, and successive augmentations of the phrases. The resulting rhythm is very recognizable (an accented syllable and two nonaccented syllables) and recalls, once again, Carducci’s experiments. But the vortexes of sounds and the suggestions derived from the verbal accumulations reveal a carefully considered poetic heritage: Gabriele D’Annunzio, whose influence is apparent in the use of ‘‘Ascolta’’ (Listen) in the poem just cited. Precisely because he was unique, Campana very early on became a sort of litmus test for aesthetic theories, which championed or discarded him according to the objectives they sought to achieve.

DINO CAMPANA He was despised by Umberto Saba and all others who aspired to any measure of classicist formalism. However, the Hermetic movement saw in him the founder, in Italy, of its own orphic experience, and the neo-avant-garde appreciated above all his challenging of literary institutions.

Biography Dino Campana was born in Marradi (Florence), 20 August 1885. He had a turbulent childhood and a troubled relationship with scholastic authority. Around his fifteenth year, the first manifestations of aggression were recorded, involving his mother. After graduating from the Liceo classico, he studied general chemistry in Bologna, then pharmaceutical chemistry in Florence and Genoa, 1903–06, but he never earned his degree. After being committed, for the first time, to the mental hospital in Imola, 1906, he was released after two months at the request of his father and against the advice of his doctors: This first diagnosis of mental instability marked him for life. In the following year he began the wanderings described in the Canti orfici: He was first in France, then in Argentina, Russia, Belgium, and again in France. By late 1908, Campana returned to Marradi and was again committed, for a fortnight, to a Florentine clinic. He submitted the manuscript of Il piu` lungo giorno to Papini and Soffici, but the manuscript was lost, 1913. He returned to Marradi and rewrote the manuscript, privately printed by Ravagli, a local publisher, 1914. At the outbreak of World War I, he sought to enlist as a volunteer but was rejected on grounds of insanity and was again sent to a clinic. He returned to live with his father in Lastra a Signa, near Florence. He met Sibilla Aleramo, with whom he had a tempestuous relationship that lasted only a few months, 1916. After a second examination by the military authority, he was committed to the asylum of Castel Pulci, 1918. Campana died from septicemia in Castel Pulci, March 1, 1932. See also: Hermeticism

GIUSEPPE GAZZOLA

Selected Works Collections Opere e contribute, edited by Enrico Falqui, 2 vols., Florence: Vallecchi, 1973.

Poetry ‘‘Canti orfici,’’ 1914; as Orphic Songs, translated by Charles Wright, 1984; as Orphic Songs, translated by Luigi Bonaffini, 1991. ‘‘Inediti,’’ edited by Enrico Falqui, 1942. ‘‘Taccuino,’’ edited by Franco Matacotta, 1949. ‘‘Taccuinetto faentino,’’ edited by Domenico De Robertis, 1960. ‘‘Fascicolo marradese,’’ edited by Federico Ravagli, 1972. ‘‘Il piu` lungo giorno,’’ 2 vols., edited by Domenico De Robertis, 1973.

Letters Lettere, with Sibilla Aleramo, edited by Niccolo` Gallo, 1958. Le mie lettere sono fatte per essere bruciate, edited by Gabriel Cacho Millet, 1978. Souvenir d’un pendu. Carteggio 1910–1931, edited by Gabriel Cacho Millet, 1985. Un viaggio chiamato amore, Lettere 1916–1918, with Sibilla Aleramo, edited by Bruna Conti, 1987.

Other Dolce illusorio sud: autografi sparsi 1906–1918, edited by Gabriel Cacho Millet, 1997. Dino Campana: sperso per il mondo: autografi sparsi 1906–1918, edited by Gabriel Cacho Millet, 2000.

Further Reading Bazzocchi, Marco A., Campana, Nietzsche e la puttana sacra, Lecce: Manni, 2003. Bernardini Napoletano, Francesca (editor), Dino Campana nel Novecento, il progetto e l’opera, Rome: Officina, 1992. Bonaffini, Luigi, ‘‘Introduction,’’ to Orphic Songs and Other Poems, translated by Luigi Bonaffini, New York: P. Lang, 1991. Bonifazi, Neuro, Dino Campana, Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 1968. Capodaglio, Arturo, Un’idea di poetica: nuovo saggio su Dino Campana, Galatina: Congedo, 1991. Cudini, Piero (editor), Materiali per Dino Campana, Lucca: Fazzi, 1986. Dino Campana oggi, Florence: Vallecchi 1973. Gentilini, Anna Rosa (editor), Dino Campana alla fine del secolo, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1999. Jacobbi, Ruggero: Invito alla lettura di Campana, Milan: Mursia, 1976. Mazza, Riccardo, La forza, il nulla, la chimera: saggio su Dino Campana, Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1986. Millet, Cacho Gabriel, Dino Campana fuorilegge, Palermo: Novecento, 1985. Vassalli, Sebastiano, La notte della cometa: il romanzo di Dino Campana, Turin: Einaudi, 1984; as The Night of the Comet, Manchester: Caracanet, 1989.

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DINO CAMPANA

CANTI ORFICI, 1914 Poetry by Dino Campana

The Canti orfici (Orphic Songs) is Campana’s unius libri, as he himself (re)wrote and organized it. The construction is more solid than might appear at a first reading. As Mario Luzi pointed out in his important essay ‘‘Al di qua e al di la` dell’elegia’’ (1973), Campana grafted the tradition of symbolist prose poetry onto the form of the Dantean prosimetrum of La vita nova (New Life, 1294), which is, indeed, cited within the text. But it was Dante’s other work, the Comedia (1305–1321) that provided the inspiration for the tripartite structure of the Canti orfici: an initial descent into the infernal city in section one, ‘‘La notte’’ (The Night); a purgatorial, artistic pilgrimage in the second section, ‘‘Notturni’’ (Nocturnes) and ‘‘Immagini del viaggio e della montagna’’ (Images of the Journey and of the Mountain); and an ascent, though not to Paradise, in the third section. The book’s ‘‘trajectory,’’ however, is not only vertical: The poem’s horizontal movement, an account of the vagrant wanderings for which Campana was stigmatized by the medical authorities of his day, metaphorically represents the experience par excellence of sensory knowledge and of the human condition. The biographical element, though it has assumed a mythical character or rather has been deliberately adapted in the work of art, is fundamental for the Canti orfici. The poet is not only the author of the work, even within the text itself, but is also the privileged object of the poem, the first-person speaker who comprehends all the other themes of the book: the erotic instinct (purged, however, of the homosexual references found in Campana’s early poems); poetry in all its incarnations and manifestations (whether the Chimera, or Michelangelo’s sculpture, or the bordello owner); the wanderings of the first-person narrator (Faenza, Genoa, the Argentine pampas, even the asylums and hospitals). However, it should be said that to explain fully the Canti orfici would be an oxymoronic undertaking and would, indeed, be contrary to the very essence of the text. Starting with the title itself, the book refers to a lyric that takes leave of logic 362

and that, by invoking the figure of Orpheus, openly declares its own mystical and esoteric component, while suggesting its tragic character. The Orpheus-poet sacrifices himself, becoming literally the scapegoat who makes poetry possible. Both the subtitle of the book, ‘‘Die Trago¨die des letzten Germanen in Italien’’ (The Tragedy of the Last of the Germans in Italy), where Campana understood ‘‘German’’ as the superior moral type, a perspective that, at the dawn of World War I, did not yet carry the stain of racism; and the epigraph, ‘‘They were all torn / and cover’d with / the boy’s / blood,’’ which is a modified quotation of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself (‘‘The three were all torn and cover’d with the boy’s blood,’’ v. 894), articulate the idea that sacrifice is required in order for the poet to realize his destiny and for poetry to cross the boundary of knowledge and of expression. GIUSEPPE GAZZOLA Editions First edition: Canti orfici, Marradi: Tipografia F. Ravagli, 1914. Critical editions: Canti orfici e altri scritti, edited by Enrico Falqui, Florence: Vallecchi, 1952; Canti orfici, edited by Fiorenza Ceragioli, Florence: Vallecchi, 1985; Canti orfici, edited by Giorgio Grillo, Florence: Vallecchi, 1990; Canti orfici e alter poesie, edited by Renato Martinoni, Turin: Einaudi, 2003. Translations: as Orphic Songs, translated by I. L. Salomon, New York: October House, 1968; translated by Charles Wright, Oberlin: Oberlin College, 1984; as Orphic Songs and Other Poems, translated by Luigi Bonaffini, New York: P. Lang, 1991.

Further Reading Asor Rosa, Alberto, ‘‘Canti orfici di Dino Campana,’’ in Letteratura Italiana: Le opere, vol. 4, Il Novecento, part 1, L’eta` della crisi. Turin: Einaudi, 1987. Contini, Gianfranco, ‘‘Dino Campana,’’ in Esercizi di lettura, Florence: Parenti, 1939. Del Serra, Maura, L’immagine aperta. Poetica e stilistica dei ‘‘Canti orfici,’’ Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1973. Falqui, Enrico, Per una cronistoria dei ‘‘Canti orfici,’’ Florence: Vallecchi, 1960. Li Vigni, Ida, Orfismo e Poesia in Dino Campana, Genoa: Il Melangolo, 1983. Luzi, Mario, ‘‘Al di qua e al di la` dell’elegia,’’ in Dino Campana oggi, Florence: Vallecchi, 1973. Martinoni, Renato, ‘‘Introduction’’ to Dino Campana, Canti Orfici e altre poesie, Turin: Einaudi, 2003. Parronchi, Alessandro, ‘‘‘Genova’ e il senso dei colori nella poesia di Campana,’’ in Artisti toscani del primo Novecento, Florence: Sansoni, 1958. Savoca, Giuseppe, Concordanza dei Canti orfici di Dino Campana: testo, concordanza, liste di frequenza, indici, Florence: Olschki, 1999.

TOMMASO CAMPANELLA

TOMMASO CAMPANELLA (1568–1639) Campanella was a Calabrian philosopher, magician, and astrologer who spent most of his adult life in prison, where he wrote the vast majority of his works. He therefore constitutes one of the most important cases of prison writing in Italian cultural history. An inexhaustibly prolific writer and poet, a man of surprising physical resources and extraordinary vitality, he was able to survive horrendous torture and a desperate legal predicament to regain, after a long imprisonment, a prophetic role in the Europe of Urban VIII and Richelieu. His was an exceptional human journey. In the communist messianism that animated his political-religious ideals—and that was later readapted in a form of authoritarian messianism—we can glimpse the representation of the profound hopes of the rural world from which he came and whose imprint he never lost. On the philosophical level, he was a theorist of the identity of God and Nature, a philosophy that, during his imprisonment, he pushed toward a reconciliation, or an attempt at reconciliation, with Christianity. Whether this was done with full conviction or with a degree of dissimulation is a question that cannot be resolved, and in any case is hardly pertinent in the Italy of the Counter-Reformation. The extraordinary harshness of his life, in fact, only compelled Campanella, moreso than others, to the conditions of dissimulation generally imposed by the repressive apparatus of the Inquisition on all those who wrote. These circumstances prevented him from being either a rigorous system builder or a great innovator in philosophy, but they let him perceive with an extraordinary sensibility the cultural structures of his time and to arrange them in grandiose and brilliant syntheses. In order to understand an oeuvre that can sometimes appear contradictory, it is therefore necessary to connect it with the life to which it was indissolubly tied. Born to a working-class family—his father was a cobbler—in one of the poor provinces of Southern Italy, Campanella donned the habit of the Dominicans when he was 14 and went to study first in Placanica, then in San Giorgio Morgeto, and afterward to Nicastro, ending up at the great Dominican school of Cosenza to receive the traditional Thomistic theological formation appropriate to

the order. He quickly distanced himself from Thomism, however, and was drawn to the philosophy of nature propounded by Bernadino Telesio, a compatriot whose De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things) he read. From this cultural encounter sprang various writings, among which was Philosophia sensibus demonstrata (Experimental Philosophy, 1591)—the only text we possess that we know to have been written before his imprisonment—in which Campanella attacked Aristotle and defended Telesio, expounding the idea that the divine essence may be contained in an anima mundi (spirit of the world) that permeates the universe, rendering it sensible and intelligible. Just as hungry for human experiences as he was for intellectual ones, in 1589 he abandoned the Calabrian province and went to live in the Naples, at that time the largest city in Italy, where he took up residence in the convent of San Domenico, a political and intellectual center rather liberal in its discipline and politically inclined toward the lower classes. It was here that he formed his first cultural politics. Subjected to an investigation within the order for his Telesian philosophy and asked to return to Calabria and to San Tommaso, he left instead in the opposite direction and came to Padova, which at that time contained the most anti-Curial university and intellectual atmosphere in Italy. The great rebellion, a radical attitude of thought and practice of which today we are only able to make out faint traces, had begun. In Padova, in fact, Campanella traveled in heterodox circles and was investigated for the first time for ‘‘acts of sodomy’’ toward the general of his order, and hence was subjected by the Inquisition to a trial that, beginning on more limited grounds, quickly expanded to include accusations of heresy and atheism. The trial came to an end in Rome in October 1595 with a recantation, followed by a condemnation of his writings and a confinement that lasted until the end of 1597. Returning to Calabria, Campanella tried at first to win the goodwill of the Spanish authorities by writing Monarchia di Spagna (A Discourse Touching the Spanish Monarchy, 1633)—an astrological defense interwoven with Machiavellian hints of the universal mission assigned to Spain—but was then involved in 1599 in a plot aimed at having Calabria 363

TOMMASO CAMPANELLA rise up against the Spanish. Campanella’s contribution to the plot was announcing that the stars indicated a political-religious revolution for the year 1600 and preaching the advent of a new age of love and brotherhood ruled by natural law and communal life. After the plot was uncovered through an informer, he was arrested and transferred to a Neopolitan jail where his Dominican habit protected him from the judgment of the Spanish tribunal—which would have immediately sentenced him to death—in order to subject him instead to an ecclesiastical trial based on a doctrinal scrutiny of his preaching. At the Neapolitan trial there emerged evidence of his pantheism; his political-Machiavellian explanation of miracles, religious dogmas, and ceremonies; along with his self-proclamation as a new messiah entrusted by an astrological conjunction of the stars with the task of reforming humanity. Because he had recanted in his previous trial of 1594–1597, even the ecclesiastical tribunal would have sentenced him to death, and, in order to escape it, on 2 April 1600 his formidable theatrical talent helped him to simulate madness. Subjected on May 4 and 5 of 1601 to the terrible torture of the veglia (36 hours suspended from a rope with dislocated bones) in order to legally certify the authenticity of his madness, he passed the test and thus escaped a death sentence. He then began his life sentence in Neapolitan jails, an imprisonment in the course of which Campanella reelaborated the themes of his Calabrian preaching. He wrote the Aforismi Politici (Political Aphorisms, 1601), in which he recast in a propapal key his previous religious Machiavellianism, and La citta` del sole (The City of the Sun, 1602), in which he described the kind of communist hierocracy promoted in his revolutionary designs. Between the end of 1605 and the first half of 1606 he portrayed his own conversion to Catholicism in mournful poems and in Atheismus triumphatus (Atheism Defeated, 1631), an autobiographical journal of his own philosophical evolution from initial disbelief to discovery of the identity of Christianity and natural law. Following the conflict between Rome and Venice in 1606, Campanella tried to earn merit in the eyes of the new pope, Paul V, and of the congregation of Sant’Uffizio, on whom his future fate depended, by compiling various writings against the Venetians. The most important of these was La Monarchia del Messia (The Monarchy of the Messiah, 1633), in which Campanella reelaborated the messianic prophecy he had preached during the Calabrian 364

plot, altering it to support the pope and his rights. The reign of the new messiah there took on the connotations of the church, and the future city was identified with all humanity reunited in one flock under the reformed papal power. The temporal powers reclaimed in the conflict with the Venetians were therefore no different, for Campanella, from the powers possessed by the sacerdotal prince described in La citta` del sole. In the following long years of his Neopolitan imprisonment, Campanella dedicated himself to the composition of grand systematic works. He wrote the Filosofia epilogistica (Epilogist Philosophy), dividing it into the three parts of Physics, Ethics, and Politics; wrote a Medicina (Medicine) in two books; reelaborated his Metaphysica (Metaphysics); compiled a Philosophia rationalis (Rational Philosophy) composed of Rhetoric, Dialectics, Poetics, and Historiography; and drafted a Theologia (Theology, 1623–1624) and a large part of the seven books of the Astrologicorum. On the philosophical level, this last work entailed a grandiose project of constructing a system of universal philosophy that would be a compendium of all knowledge, from metaphysics to politics. On the theological and religious levels, it involved an attempt to reconcile the primitive identification of God and Nature with Christianity. The keystone of such a reconciliation is the ‘‘discovery’’ of the identity of Christianity and natural reason, based in turn on the identification of Christ–Divine Logos with ‘‘first reason’’ or universal rationality. From this premise derived several Campanellian ideas: that the truths known through revelation are not qualitatively different from those known through natural illumination, but rather constitute a completion of them made necessary by the limitation of our minds; that the truth of the Bible is no different from any other true book; and that Christianity is reason perfectly unfolded and adds nothing to nature except the sacraments, which are intended to be natural signs of rational truths. But, in turn, such an identification of Christ-Divine Logos with universal reason has as its necessary premise the identification of God and Nature. We are not dealing therefore with a denial of his previous philosophy but simply with its recapitulation in a Catholic key. In 1626, Campanella was finally able to leave the Neapolitan prisons and to have himself extradited to Rome, where, however, he was once again locked up until 1629 for further judicial investigations. In 1629, after 33 years in prison, he began the

TOMMASO CAMPANELLA last phase of his life as a free man, in the course of which Campanella obtained a certain degree of credit in Rome by earning the favor of the new pope, Urban VIII, and his title of Magister in theology, thanks especially to his astrology. He now tried to publish the works he wrote in prison and was able to publish La Monarchia del Messia (1633) and Atheismus triumphatus in Latin, not to mention, in Lyon, the Astrologicorum (1629). But the persistent doctrinal ambiguity of his works, together with the harsh condemnation of astrology emerging in 1631, put him in new difficulties in the papal circles, causing him to leave for the more hospitable Paris at the end of 1634. There he received a warm welcome from Richelieu and the French cultural establishment, but as an old man he was unable to enter fully into the circle of the court. He died in Paris at peace with the church and above all with his order which, on the whole, had never denied him its protection.

Biography Giovanni Domenico, in religion Tommaso, was born in Stilo, in Calabria, 5 September 1568, the son of Geronimo, a cobbler, and of Caterina Martello. In 1582, he entered as a novice the Dominican convent of Placanica, near Stignano; having completed the year of apprenticeship, he was sent to the convent of the Annunciation, in San Giorgio Morgeto, where he undertook his first philosophical studies. In the autumn of 1586 he was transferred to the convent of the Annunciation of Nicastro, where he completed his philosophical formation. In the summer of 1588, he was sent to Cosenza for theological studies, but at the end of the year he was exiled to the convent of Altomonte. In 1589, he came to Naples, where he took up residence at the grand convent of San Domenico Maggiore. In 1592, he was subjected to an investigation within the order and sentenced to return to Stilo. On 5 September 1592, he left Naples for Rome and then Florence. The Grand Duke Ferdinand I refused him the assignation of a post as lecturer in the school at Pisa. At the beginning of 1593, he was in Padova. He was involved in a trial for sodomy, and at the beginning of 1594 he was put on trial by an inquisition for heresy; he tried to escape imprisonment in Padova. He was extradited to Rome and locked up in the prisons of the Sant’Uffizio. On 30 October 1595, he was condemned to recant de vehementi; he remained shut up in Rome in various convents. On 17 December 1597, all of his

books were banned, and Campanella was sent to Calabria, where he was put under surveillance. In September 1599, he was arrested for having participated in an anti-Spanish plot and transferred to a Neapolitan prison. On 2 April 1600 Campanella staged his madness. On 4–5 June 1601, he survived the atrocious torture of the veglia and thus avoided a death sentence. On 13 November 1602, Campanella was sentenced to life in prison; he remained detained in Neapolitan prisons until 23 May 1626, when he was extradited to Rome, where he arrived on 8 July 1626 and was locked up in the jails of the Sant’Uffizio. He left the Sant’Uffizio prison on 27 July 1628 and was lodged in the Dominican convent of Minerva pro loco carceris; on 11 January 1629 he was set free; and on 6 April 1629 his name was crossed out from the Indice dei proibiti (Index of Banned Books). On 2 June 1629 the chapter-head of the Dominicans conferred on Campanella the title of Magister in theology, and he entered into the good graces of Urban VIII. On 21 October 1634, he left Rome dressed as a brother of the Minimi in order to escape Spanish reprisals and the ever-growing distrust of the Romans. Arriving on 1 December 1634 in Paris, he endorsed the policies of Richelieu. He died in Paris, 21 May 1639, and was buried in the nearby Church of the Annunciation. VITTORIO FRAJESE See also: Utopian Literature Selected Works Collections Scritti scelti, edited Luigi Firpo, Turin: UTET, 1949. Opere di Giordano Bruno e di Tommaso Campanella, edited by Augusto Guzzo and Romano Amerio, MilanNaples: Ricciardi, 1956. Opere letterarie, edited by Lina Bolzoni, Turin: UTET, 1977.

Political and Philosophical Treatises Philosphia sensibus demonstrata (1591), edited by L. De Franco, 1974. Monarchie d’Espagne (1598), as La monarchia di Spagna, 1600; first Latin edition 1640; edited by Germana Ernst, 1997; as A Discourse Touching the Spanish Monarchy, translated by Edmund Chilmead, 1654. Aforismi politici (1601), edited by Luigi Firpo, 1941. La citta` del sole (1602), edited by Luigi Firpo, 1997; as The City of the Sun: A Poetical Dialogue, translated by Daniel J. Donno, 1981. Del senso delle cose e della magia (1604), first Latin edition, 1620; edited by Antonio Bruers, 1925. Antiveneti (1606), edited by Luigi Firpo, 1945.

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TOMMASO CAMPANELLA Atheismus triumphatus (1607), 1631. Articuli prophetales (1608–09), critical edition by Germana Ernst, 1977. Teologia (1613–24), edited by Romano Amerio, 1936; 1950; 1955. Apologia pro Galileo (1616); as Apologia di Galileo, edited by Luigi Firpo, 1968; A Defence of Galileo, translated by Richard J. Blackwell, 1994. La Monarchia del Messia (1606), first Latin edition 1633; edited by Vittorio Frajese, 1995. De libris propriis et recta ratione studendi syntagma (1632), edited by Vincenzo Spampanato, 1927; edited Armando Brissoni, 1996. Epilogo Magno (Fisiologia italiana), edited Carmelo Ottaviano, 1939. Astrologicum (1629), as Opuscoli astrologici, edited by Germana Ernst, 2003.

Poetry

Yates, Frances Amelia, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964; 2002.

` DEL LA CITTA SOLE, 1602 A Philosophical Dialogue by Tommaso Campanella

‘‘Poesie, edited by Giovanni Gentile,’’ 1915; edited by Francesco Giancotti, 1998.

Letters Lettere, edited by Vincenzo Spampanato, 1927. Lettere 1595–1638, edited by Germana Ernst, 2000.

Trial Proceedings Amabile, Luigi, Fra Tommaso Campanella, la sua congiura, i suoi processi e la sua pazzia, 3 vols., Naples: Morano, 1882. Firpo, Luigi, Il supplizio di Tommaso Campanella: Narrazioni, documenti, verbali delle torture, Rome: Salerno, 1985. Firpo, Luigi, I processi di Tommaso Campanella, Rome: Salerno, 1998.

Further Reading Amabile, Luigi, Fra Tomaso Campanella ne’ castelli di Napoli, in Roma e in Parigi: Narrazione con molti documenti, 2 vols., Naples: Morano 1887. Amerio, Romano, Introduzione alla teologia di Tommaso Campanella, Turin: SEI, 1948. Amerio, Romano, Il sistema teologico di Tommaso Campanella, Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1972. Blanchet, Le´on, Campanella, Paris: Alcan, 1920. De Mattei, Rodolfo, Studi campanelliani, Florence: Sansoni, 1943. Dentice D’Accadia, Cecilia, Campanella, Florence: Vallecchi, 1921. Ernst, Germana, Tommaso Campanella: Il libro e il corpo della natura, Rome: Laterza, 2002. Firpo, Luigi, Ricerche campanelliane, Florence: Sansoni, 1947. Frajese, Vittorio, Profezia e machiavellismo: Il giovane Campanella, Rome: Carocci, 2002. Gardner, Edmund, Thomas Campanella and His Poetry, Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1923. Headley, John M., Tommaso Campanella and the Transformation of the World, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. Kvacˇala, Jan, Thomas Campanella, ein Reformer der ausgehenden Renaissance, Berlin: Trowitzsch and Sohn, 1909.

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La citta` del sole (The City of the Sun) is a short text in the form of a dialogue, composed by Tommaso Campanella in 1602, nearly three years after his arrest in September of 1599 for agitating against the Spanish in Calabria and little more than a year after his terrible torture by the veglia. The small text is presented as the tale of a navigator who has discovered a perfect city established on a lost island in the ocean. The traveler is ‘‘a Genovese helmsman of Columbus,’’ and the city has good reason to be called a new world, though it is found in the Orient, not the Occident, on the island of Taprobana—Ceylon, south of India—and is populated by ‘‘people who came from India.’’ The city is a perfect image of the universe. It is divided into seven concentric circles spread along the slopes of a hill and ‘‘named after the seven planets.’’ Four intersecting roads traverse and end at the summit of the hill, at the central and highest point, where a circular temple is topped by a cupola representing the sky with all of its major constellations. At the center of the temple is an altar above which ‘‘there is only a rather large globe, where all of the heavens are depicted, and another which depicts the earth.’’ Nature is at once the model of the city and the object of its cult. The two globes placed above the altar are means of influencing the heavens and represent the object of the cult of the solari (the inhabitants of the city of the sun), which is, in the strictest sense, a religion of nature. As Francis Yates has written, ‘‘it is clear that the temple is a model of the world, intricately described, and that the elaborate cult must be a cult of the world’’ (Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, 1964). This religion has an extensive basis in the

TOMMASO CAMPANELLA philosophy of Campanella, a philosophy that identifies God and Nature, and hence Christ and reason, Christian and natural law. Aside from its description in La citta` del sole, such a religion of nature, with its cult of the sun and the planets, was practiced by Campanella during his years of imprisonment. The government of the city, in its turn, repeats the theological structure of God-Nature: It is entrusted to a supreme philosopher-king named ‘‘Sole’’ (‘‘Sun’’) and to ‘‘three collateral princes, Pon, Sin, Mor: which mean Power, Wisdom, Love’’ corresponding to the three ‘‘divine primal qualities’’ in which God-Nature reveals itself. Therefore, in its form, government, and religion, the city recapitulates the structure of the universe. Campanella, who practiced astrology, constructed an astrological city built so as to capture celestial causality, and, what is more, to influence it. Sowing, harvesting, mating, and reproduction are ordained as a ‘‘second science’’ by priest-astrologers who know the conjunctions of the stars and, according to those conjunctions, rule all economic activity. In this sense, his city furnishes us with a perfect example of the ‘‘microcosmic city’’ in which social organization and the institutions and form of government are meant to echo nature and harness its powers. The literary inventio at the heart of the text that assures its lasting reputation consists in the extraordinary Campanellian intuition that the utopian genre inaugurated by Thomas More can provide the most suitable and persuasive narrative frame for representing the unity of messianic prophecy, the myth of the Golden Age, and the Platonic doctrine of the ideal republic, which is essential to Campanella’s political thought. The defining trait of La citta` del sole, in fact, is that it is not only a literary text but also one that Campanella forcefully preached to Calabrian conspirators during the messianic agitation of 1599, which he was to pay for with two episodes of torture and 27 years of prison. This city is discovered by a follower of Columbus, but it is a new world in the Orient and arises from the most ancient of civilizations. These ambivalent characteristics respond to the astral character of La citta` del sole, which retains a literary frame and important ideas from More’s Utopia even as it transplants them into a substantially different ideological soil. Despite the characteristics of this frame—the story of the voyage and its presentation as a lost happy isle in the ocean—that seem to make it a utopia, La citta` del sole does not have much in common with the literary playfulness and humanistic irony of Thomas More’s treatise.

For Campanella, it is grounded on a prophetic model—something hoped for and anticipated for the future. La citta` del sole is a messianic writing or, more precisely, the place in which the propheticmessianic tradition spills into a new utopian genre. Its political construction constitutes the realization of the ideal Platonic republic and is located in the time of the new messianic advent, when the return of the heavenly bodies to their positions at the birth of Christ will lead to the reunification of all mankind into one fold, under one pastor. La citta` del sole possesses all the characteristics attributed by Campanella’s prophetic preaching to the happy age of the new messiah: the community of goods, the well-regulated procreation of the virtuous, the unity of sacerdotal and political power, the rational religion that will be professed, the white clothes of its citizens, and the radiance that distinguishes it. Rather than a utopia, it therefore constitutes an event that, far from taking place in no particular place, discovers its justification in divine and astral prophecies and assigns itself to a not-too-distant future. VITTORIO FRAJESE Editions First Edition La citta` del sole appears first in a Latin translation as Civitas Solis, Appendix Politicae, in Thoma Campanella, Realis philosophia epilogistica, Frankfurt: Typis Egenolphi Emmeli, 1623; enlarged edition in Philosophia realis, Paris: Denis Houssaye, 1637; first Italian published edition by Edmondo Solmi Modena: Tip. Lit. della Provincia, 1904; edited by Giuseppe Paladino, Naples: Giannini, 1920; edited by Norberto Bobbio, Turin: Einaudi, 1941.

Critical Editions Edited by Luigi Firpo in Scritti scelti di Giordano Bruno e Tommaso Campanella, Turin: UTET, 1949. As La citta` del sole, new updated edition by Luigi Firpo, Bar: Laterza, 1997.

Translations The City of the Sun: A Poetical Dialogue, translated by Daniel J. Donno, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981. The City of the Sun: A Poetic Dialogue, translated by A. M. Elliot and R. Miller, London: Journeyman Press, 1981.

Further Reading De Mattei, Rodolfo, La politica di Campanella, Rome: Anonima Romana Editoriale, 1927.

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TOMMASO CAMPANELLA Firpo, Luigi, ‘‘La Cite´ ideale de Campanella et le culte du soleil,’’ in Le soleil a` la Renaissance, Bruxelles: Presses Universitaires de Bruxelles, 1965. Firpo, Luigi, ‘‘L’Utopia politica della Controriforma,’’ in Lo stato ideale della Controriforma, Bari: Laterza, 1957. Frajese, Vittorio, ‘‘La Monarchia del Messia di Tommaso Campanella: Identificazione di un testo tra profetiamo e Controriforma,’’ Quaderni storici, 3(1994): 723–768. Kelly-Gadol, Joan M., ‘‘Tommaso Campanella: The Agony of Political Theory in the Counter Reformation,’’ in

Philosophy and Humanism Renaissance: Essays in Honor of P. O. Kristeller, edited by E. P. Mahoney, Leiden: Brill, 1976. Solari, Gioele, ‘‘Di una nuova edizione critica della Citta` del Sole e del comunismo del Campanella,’’ Rivista di filosofia, 32(1941): 180–197. Treves, Paolo, La filosofia politica di Tommaso Campanella, Bari: Laterza, 1930. Yates, Frances, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964.

CRISTINA CAMPO (VITTORIA GUERRINI) (1923–1977) Cristina Campo, a pseudonym of Vittoria Guerrini, was a poet, essayist, and translator. Her fate is a typically literary one. She was marginalized by critics while she was alive, perhaps because her works, permeated by the spiritualism for which she had exchanged aestheticism, were foreign to the Italian trend that demanded realism and political commitment from writers. She was reevaluated only at the end of the 1990s, due to, above all, the interest of her friends Alessandro Spina and Margherita Pieracci and of the publishers Scheiwiller and Adelphi. Cristina Campo spent her youth in Florence, where she developed under the guidance of private tutors. During World War II, she published her first translations (of Bengt von To¨rne and Katherine Mansfield) and met Leone Traverso, who introduced her to the circle of Florentine literati and to the work of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who became for Campo a stylistic model. In the 1950s, she began to collaborate on the literary review Paragone and initiated the column ‘‘La posta letteraria’’ in Corriere dell’Adda with Gianfranco Draghi. In the meantime, her house in Florence became a gathering spot and was frequented by Margherita Pieracci, Mario Luzi, Piero Bigongiari, Maria Luisa Spaziani, Maria Chiavacci, Maria Chiappelli, the Draghi brothers, and the De Robertis family. It is in this context that Mario Luzi had her read Simone Weil’s La pesanteur et la graˆce (Gravity and Grace, 1947). Campo discovered deep affinities with the French writer and began to translate her works into Italian; most importantly, she shared 368

with her the constant and patient quest for ‘‘attenzione’’ (attention). She took up this concept again, in fact, in the programmatic essay Attenzione e poesia (Attention and Poetry, 1953), in which Campo wrote that l’attenzione e` il solo cammino verso l’inesprimibile, la sola strada al mistero’’ and ‘‘chiedere a un uomo di non distrarsi mai, di sottrarre senza riposo all’equivoco dell’immaginazione, alla pigrizia dell’abitudine, all’ipnosi del costume, la sua facolta` di attenzione, e` chiedergli di attuare la sua massima forma. Attention is the only path toward the inexpressible, the only road to mystery’’ and ‘‘to ask a man never to distract himself, ceaselessly to withdraw his faculty of attention from the ambiguity of imagination, the laziness of habit, and the hypnosis of custom, is to ask him to realize his highest form.

It is thus that that Campo understood her distance from the contemporary world, which is banal and heedless, and she began to seek another value that earthly reality had forgotten: perfection. ‘‘La tensione continua verso la perfezione,’’ wrote Luzi in the essay ‘‘L’imperdonabile voglia di poesia’’ (1966), ‘‘era il segno di una incontentabilita` vera, Cristina Campo ha pubblicato pochissimo e quando lo ha fatto se ne e` sempre scusata come se la sua opera non fosse quella che secondo lei avrebbe dovuto essere’’ (the continuous straining toward perfection was the sign of a true insatiability; Cristina Campo published very little, and when she did she always apologized for it, as though her work were not,

CRISTINA CAMPO (VITTORIA GUERRINI) according to her, what it ought to have been). Hence the driving force of Campo’s literary production was precisely this quest for perfection, which was to be achieved both from the point of view of form and of content. Her move from Florence to Rome marked a fundamental break in her young life. The need to erase the signs of past experiences can be seen in the request she made her to friends to destroy every letter predating 1957, and especially in Passo d’addio (Farewell Time, 1956), her first and only collection of poems published during the poet’s lifetime. The 11 compositions of the slender plaquette (some of them anticipated in the private Quadernetto, or notebook, which she gave to her friend Pieracci) retrace the painful incidents of an impossible, irrecoverable love to which her memory returns, distinguishing its now-vanished traces in the Florentine landscape. The theme is condensed in the beautiful lines of ‘‘Moriremo lontani’’ (We will die far apart): ‘‘E` rimasta laggiu`, calda, la vita / Ora non resta che vegliare sola’’ (Life remained down there below, warm / Now there is only waking up alone). It is not so much a love song or a journal of summer, but, as Pietro Gibellini suggested, a ‘‘canzoniere dello spirito’’ (songbook of the spirit), a movement from profane love to sacred love, a perfecting of the soul, an education toward the forsaking of vain things (La poesia di Cristina Campo, 2001). Campo returned to poetry after another ten years of silence, a sign that a new existential season had opened within her. The new poems, intended for a new but uncompleted plaquette entitled Le temps revient, attest to the tormented, endless interior quest of the poetic animus in desperate search for a stable resting place. This yearning for spirituality became more marked at the end of the 1960s, when the death of her parents and Vatican Council II, which put an end to the liturgy in Latin, increased Campo’s sense of loss and detachment and the desire to withdraw into complete solitude. In this regard the poems ‘‘La Tigre assenza’’ (Tiger Absence) and ‘‘Missa romana’’ (Roman Mass) are emblematic. Campo emerged from this retreat only to attend the Collegium Russicum in Aventino, where she celebrated the orthodox rites. The splendid final poems of Diario bizantino (Byzantine Diary), published in Conoscenza religiosa along with the announcement of her death in 1977, are really the spiritual testament of the poet who had finally found peace and interior serenity due to primitive Christianity.

Ultimately, poetry was for Campo a spiritual exercise, intimate and unsharable. For her, composing poems meant seeking to achieve the highest degree of perfection—a long and tiring path that entailed complete involvement. During her years in Rome, Campo met Ele´mire Zolla, who introduced her to Eastern philosophies, to mysticism, and to esotericism. Together they participated in the Italian group of La voce, which sought to stop the liturgical reform effected by the Church after the Vatican Council II (1962–1965). Zolla turned Campo toward new reading, and thus Campo’s interests moved from Hofmannsthalian aestheticism to religion and Western and Eastern asceticism. With Zolla, she edited the anthology I mistici (The Mystics), which was published in 1963. In these years she also made the acquaintance of the Greek poet Margherita Dalmati, Bobi Bazlen, and Alessandro Spina. To the latter she remained bound by a deep friendship, which began with Storia della citta` di rame (A History of the Copper City, 1963), translated from the Arabic by Spina and introduced by Campo and which was nourished by the correspondence Lettere ad un amico lontano (Letters to a Distant Friend, 1998), a conversation between two writers outside the mainstream. From the second half of the 1950s, Campo dedicated herself entirely to translating—German novels, the seventeenth-century mystics, William Carlos Williams, and Donne, which can be read in part in La Tigre assenza (1991), which also collects all of her poems. She began a close correspondence with the American poet before the publication of Il fiore e` il nostro segno (The Flower Is Our Sign, 1958), a selection of 16 poems by Williams translated by Campo. A wider collection, with the addition of translations by Vittorio Sereni, was published by Einaudi in 1961. Her first collection of essays, Fiaba e mistero (Fable and Mystery) was published in 1962 and was partially merged with Il flauto e il tappeto (The Flute and the Carpet, 1971), which includes other unpublished writings or those already published in magazines. Finally, Gli imperdonabili (The Unforgivable, 1987) gathers all of the essays contained in the works already cited and other contributions that appeared in magazines. Sotto falso nome (Under a False Name, 1998), on the other hand, collects all of her scattered writings and includes some contributions to radio during her collaboration with RAI. Campo did not write literary essays in the common sense of the term, but her discourse is filled 369

CRISTINA CAMPO (VITTORIA GUERRINI) with references that are precious gems of interpretation. We find ourselves confronted with dense and perfect texts that approach various themes. One of the most important of these is fable. Fable, according to Campo, hides a path of initiation that, if observed with ‘‘attention,’’ reveals to us our destiny. The same message is contained in the parables of the evangelists and in the lives of the saints, monks, and the hermits. Abandoning oneself to one’s destiny is the way that leads to perfection, and those who make this choice are ‘‘imperdonabile’’ (unforgivable) to the common person, who is not able to strain toward a higher reality where beauty, truth, and spirit converge. Campo thus dedicated her essays to those few authors who have contrasted to the horror of the world the ‘‘sapore massimo di ogni parola’’ (the greatest taste of each word), that is, absolute linguistic perfection. Her two principal models are, as noted earlier, Hofmannsthal and Weil (the cult of beauty and the impulse to charity), but we can add D’Annunzio, Dante, Borges, Proust, and Shakespeare. The language of the poems and of her poetic translations unites the rich images of hermeticism with a great precision and elegance. The same musical perfection can be found in her essays and in the ardent, crystalline letters to her closest friends (Pieracci, Spina) that have been only partly published and that are useful in reconstructing the stages of her life and, more importantly, her literary and spiritual evolution.

Biography Cristina Campo was born in Bologna on April 28, 1923, the only daughter of Guido Guerrini, a music teacher, and Emilia Putti. Because of a congenital heart defect, which made her health precarious, she did not pursue a regular course of studies but spent her childhood in San Michele in Bosco, near the residence of her uncle Vittorio Putti in the park of the Istituto Rizzoli in Bologna. In 1928, she moved to Florence, where her father was director of the Conservatorio Cherubini. She met Leone Traverso, who became her companion for a number of years, 1946–1954; later, in 1955, she moved to Rome, again following her father, who headed the Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia. There she met Ele´mire Zolla, with whom she formed an intense emotional and intellectual relationship. At this time, Campo collaborated with RAI and wrote for numerous magazines, among which are Conoscenza religiosa, Elsinoire, La Chimera, Palatina, Paragone, Questo 370

e altro, and Stagione. The loss of her mother (December 1964) and of her father (June 1965) caused such pain that she moved from her home at the Foro Italico first to a pensione in the San Anselmo Hotel in Aventino and then, in May 1968, to a nearby apartment. Campo died in Rome on January 10, 1977 of a heart attack. NICOLA

DI

NINO

Selected Works Poetry ‘‘Passo d’addio,’’ 1956. ‘‘Diario bizantino,’’ 1977. ‘‘La Tigre Assenza,’’ edited by Margherita Pieracci Harwell, 1991.

Essays Attenzione e poesia, 1953. Fiaba e mistero e altre note, 1962. Il flauto e il tappeto, 1971. Gli imperdonabili, edited by Margherita Pieracci Harwell, 1987. Sotto falso nome, edited by Monica Farnetti, 1998.

Translations Bengt Von To¨rne, Conversazioni con Sibelius, 1943. Katherine Mansfield, Una tazza di te` ed altri racconti, 1944. Eduard Morike, Poesie, 1948. Hugo von Hofmannstahl, Viaggi e saggi, 1958. William Carlos Williams, Il fiore e` il nostro segno, 1958; enlarged edition as Poesie, 1961 (with Vittorio Sereni). Virginia Woolf, Diario di una scrittrice, 1959 (with Giuliana De Carlo). Storia della Citta` di Rame, 1963 (with Alessandro Spina). Simone Weil, Venezia salva, 1963; new edition, 1987. John Donne, Poesie amorose. Poesie teologiche, 1971. Racconti di un pellegrino russo, 1973. Simone Weil, La Grecia e le intuizioni precristiane, 1974 (with Margherita Pieracci Harwell). Detti e fatti dei Padri del deserto, 1975 (with Piero Draghi).

Other

I mistici (with E´lemire Zolla), 1963. Lettere a un amico lontano, 1998. Lettere a Mita, edited by Margherita Pieracci Harwell, 1999. Il fiore e` il nostro segno. Carteggi e poesie, 2001 (with William Carlos Williams and Vanni Scheiwiller).

Further Reading Bianchi, Enzo, and Pietro Gibellini (editors), Cristina Campo, Brescia: Morcelliana, 2001. Cristina Campo, Florence: Citta` di Vita, 1996. De Stefano, Cristina, Belinda e il mostro. Vita segreta di Cristina Campo, Milan: Adelphi, 2002. Di Nino, Nicola, ‘‘Commento a ‘Passo d’addio’ di Cristina Campo,’’ Il Nuovo Baretti, 1(2003), 277–317.

ROSSANA CAMPO Di Nino, Nicola, ‘‘Cristina Campo: ritratti e carteggi,’’ Rivista di letteratura italiana, I(2004), 185–199. Farnetti, Monica, and Giovanna Fozzer (editors), Per Cristina Campo, Milan: All’insegna del pesce d’oro, 1998. Ghibellini, Pietro, ‘‘La poesia di Cristina Campo: un ‘passo d’addio,’ ’’ Humanitas, 3(2001), 333–340.

Luzi, Mario, ‘‘L’imperdonabile voglia di poesia,’’ Citta` di Vita, 6(1996), 551. Pieracci Harwell, Margherita, Cristina Campo e i suoi amici, Rome: Studium, 2005. Spina, Alessandro, Conversazione in Piazza Sant’Anselmo e altri scritti. Per un ritratto di Cristina Campo, Brescia: Morcelliana, 2002.

ROSSANA CAMPO (1963–) Rossana Campo belongs to a generation of Italian writers who in the 1990s experimented with a new approach to the novel; among them are Silvia Ballestra, Niccolo` Ammaniti, Enrico Brizzi, Tiziano Scarpa, Aldo Nove, Giuseppe Caliceti, and Giuseppe Culicchia. Calvino’s latest work and that of the neo-avant-garde (Sanguineti, Balestrini, early Celati) supplied Campo with a departure point into a narrative course all her own. From the first she chose an easygoing and ironic tone used by youth culture of the media. The language is interspersed with obscenities and literary and cinematographic references: The exaggerated language of her first novel, the uninterrupted mimesis of oral speech overwhelmingly present starting with Mai sentita cosı` bene (I Never Felt So Good, 1995) represent her attempt to be in touch with reality. However, the reality that usually emerges from her novels (mostly narrated in the first person) proves void, deformed, tragically loaded with unanswerable questions about the world even when transfigured into a comic vision. The paradoxical and at times surreal comic aspect arises first in the title of her first novel, In principio erano le mutande (It Began with Underwear, 1992)—the book that inspired the namesake film starring Stefania Rocca, directed by Anna Negri in 1999. It tells the story of a lonely, idle girl who describes, employing vivid language, her romantic failures, her passion for bakers, lady-killer gynecologists, mama’s-boy psychologists, and depressed archeologists. It all comes to an end when she encounters a bizarre portly man, semialcoholic as the protagonist herself, and true love happens. Rossana Campo’s world is purely feminine— with the immutable setting of Paris in the background—and inhabited by somewhat unstable and

outcast Italian girls with a strong sense of life. They live by their wits in a postmodern bohemian world and cross paths with ostracized characters in a world naturally populated by alcohol, drugs, and homosexual encounters. In some ways, the young and coarse protagonists of these novels are the rebellious followers of the small, frail, disorganized, and straying, nonetheless charming women populating the novels and dramaturgy of Natalia Ginzburg. Il pieno di super (Fill It up with Premium, 1993) tells the story of a group of sexually curious young girls who run into an unpredictable coming-to-terms face-off: the racist teacher, sexual repression leading up to the disappointing discovery of boys. Mai sentita cosı` bene is a true conversational novel wherein nothing seems to happen. It is a collection of eccentric, quasi-theatrical stories told on a September afternoon by a group of Italian girlfriends living in Paris. The featured men, despised though obsessed over constantly, are dull muscle-heroes, frustrated writers, and obese psychoanalysts. They are the underside of a reality that revokes happiness as it nonetheless accepts games and slapstick humor even throughout the telling of the stories: ‘‘O un uomo e` uno stronzo che ti considera una specie di cosa di sua proprieta`, e in tal caso le corna se le merita, oppure e` un tipo a posto che ti capisce e non rompe i coglioni’’ (Men are either assholes who consider you property, in which case they deserve to be cheated on, or they’re someone all right who understands you and doesn’t bust your balls). In L’attore americano (The American Actor, 1997), the protagonist travels from Paris to New York to follow the American actor who made her fall desperately in love. She is in possession of her own fundamental theory: ‘‘Comunque al primo posto per me c’e` la liberta`, 371

ROSSANA CAMPO sı`, andarmene in giro col naso per aria e vaffanculo alla sicurezza’’ (the number one thing for me is freedom, yeah, going around with my nose in the air and ‘‘fuck you!’’ to safety). Campo’s other works feature complicated love stories of women, as in Il matrimonio di Maria (Maria’s Wedding), a radio drama aired in 1997 and published in 1998, whose protagonist agrees to an arranged marriage with a crazy musician. However, on the night of their wedding, the fake husband and wife end up making love, and Maria becomes pregnant. In Mentre la mia bella dorme (While My Darling Is Sleeping, 1999), Campo experiments with the detective novel. There are obvious allusions to the Parisian detective novels of Daniel Pennac. La gemella buona e la gemella cattiva (The Good Twin, the Bad Twin, 2000) recalls for Campo the world of her childhood. In Sono pazza di te (I’m Crazy About You, 2001), she describes the tumultuous life of a painter who rediscovers in Paris the father who abandoned her at an early age. The most recent novel, L’uomo che non ho sposato (The Man I Never Married, 2003), narrated in the third person, is the well-choreographed and enthralling story of Rosi, who after 20 years reencounters her first love. Throughout Rossana Campo’s novels, a vital life-vision prevails over the often negative conclusion of the stories otherwise filled with a sense of disappointment and emptiness. The reader emerges from her work with the idea that one can make light of life’s bad tidings.

Biography Campo was born in Genova as Rossana Iannantuomo, of Neapolitan origins, 17 October 1963. She attended the University of Genova (influenced by the courses of Edoardo Sanguineti and anthropologist Ernesta Cerulli) and graduated with a degree in literature, June 1987. Campo collaborated as translator to Feltrinelli publishers and became an occasional contributor to L’espresso; she won the Capri Prize for first literary work for In principio erano le mutande, 1992. She made her debut as a painter in 2002 and exhibited at the Baruchello Foundation in Rome, 2003; some of her drawings

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have graced the covers of her novels. She lives in Rome and Paris with her companion, writer Nanni Balestrini. SILVANA TAMIOZZO GOLDMANN Selected Works Fiction La storia di Gabri, in Narratori delle riserve, edited by Gianni Celati, 1992. In principio erano le mutande, 1992. Il pieno di super, 1993. Mai sentita cosı` bene, 1995. L’attore americano, 1997. Mentre la mia bella dorme, 1999. La gemella buona e la gemella cattiva, 2000. Sono pazza di te, 2001. L’uomo che non ho sposato, 2003. Duro come l’amore, 2005.

Plays Il matrimonio di Maria, 1998.

Further Reading Barilli, Renato, ‘‘Campo, due donne sole e un padre randagio,’’ Il corriere della sera, 19 June 2001, p. 33. Barilli, Renato, ‘‘Maschio di celluloide cercasi, scopo erotico,’’ Il corriere della sera, 13 March 1997, p. 33. Guglielmi, Angelo, ‘‘Rossana Campo ritorna a Parigi sempre spregiudicata e rivoltosa,’’ Tuttolibri, 21 July 2001, p. 3. La Porta, Filippo, La nuova narrativa italiana: Travestimenti e stili di fine secolo, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1999. Lepri, Laura, ‘‘Donne che si prendono in giro,’’ in Tirature ‘96, edited by Vittorio Spinazzola, Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1996. Pellini, Pierluigi, ‘‘Tra noir e romance,’’ L’immaginazione, no.160 (September 1999): 27–28. Rosa, Giovanna, ‘‘Giovani scrittrici nella ‘citta` proibita,’’’ in Tirature ’93, edited by Vittori Spinazzola Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1993. Tamiozzo Goldmann, Silvana, ‘‘Un nuovo studio sull’uomo,’’ L’immaginazione, no.141 (September– October 1997): 30–31. Tamiozzo Goldmann, Silvana, ‘‘Ragazze sguaiate e tenere conversano,’’ L’immaginazione, no.124 (November 1995): 23. Turchetta, Giovanni, ‘‘Romanzo comico: Sette specie di comicita`,’’ in Tirature 2000, edited by Vittorio Spinazzola, Milan: Il Saggiatore, 2000.

CANNIBALI

THE CANDLE-BEARER See Il Candelaio (Work by Giordano Bruno)

CANNIBALI Giovani cannibali is the name accorded a group of emerging writers who have been active from the mid-1990s onward. The Cannibali groups together writers of such disparate style, content, and narrative strategies as Aldo Nove, Simona Vinci, Tiziano Scarpa, Isabella Santacroce, Daniele Luttazzi, Silvia Ballestra, Enrico Brizzi, Rossana Campo, Elena Stancanelli, Niccolo` Ammaniti, Luisa Brancaccio, Carlo Lucarelli, and Guiseppe Caliceti. The name was derived from an anthology of stories, Gioventu´ cannibale: La prima antologia dell’orrore estremo (Cannibal Youth: The First Anthology of Extreme Horror, 1996), published by Einaudi in the ‘‘Stile libero’’ series. Prior to its publication, several of these authors had already found small publishers; after publication, they were acknowledged by a large number of reluctant critics and literary journalists. Because of their visible, if often critical, fascination with American mass culture, these new writers were quickly characterized as purveyors of pulp and ‘‘splatter’’ fiction, that is, with a subliterary mode of writing. They all seemed to have been creatively stimulated by the consumerism of today’s open market, which sells the belief that merchandise can bring happiness. After the 1996 symposium Narrare dopo Pulp Fiction, the Cannibali have often been described as cultivators of the cinematic narrative approach of filmmaker Quentin Tarantino. The term ‘‘Italian pulp’’ is more useful as a point of comparison, however, since there were actually few structural, thematic, or contextual commonalities between the Italian literary movement and American cinema during approximately the same period. Indeed, the Cannibali reject any artistic resemblance, and

their blood-and-splatter narratives are limited to superficial effects. The editor of the anthology, Daniele Brolli, contended that academic moralism, reacting against their cutting edge subject matter, gritty narrative approach, and the ambiguity inherent in their everyday stories of violence, has prevented the Cannibali from being widely accepted or seriously read. Brolli further claimed that dictating what a writer can or cannot say prevents literature from becoming a legitimate source of reference for future readers who would like to study the society and popular culture of the 1990s as it was represented in contemporary fiction and not merely in newspapers. Cannibali narratives are disturbing, even if we are aware that they present only a simulation of reality. The Cannibali were encouraged, however, by Pier Vittorio Tondelli and Ricercare, the annual meeting held in Reggio Emilia that showcases emerging talents in poetry and fiction. Furthermore, the endorsement by Renato Barilli and Edoardo Sanguineti, former members of Gruppo 63, has contributed to their success, while giving renewed notoriety to the old guard of Gruppo 63. The works of the Cannibali mirror the heterogeneous provenance of their authors. For example, Cannibali tales of metropolitan horror are generally set in disturbing postindustrial urban and suburban landscapes (chiefly Milan and Rome, although Emilia-Romagna and Bologna are also common settings), which breed alienation and nihilistic action. The depiction of urban chaos and squalid hinterlands at the peripheries of Italian larger cities often alludes to the authors’ own marginalization, both in real life and in their creative expression. 373

CANNIBALI Apart from the unrelenting commercialism in the works of Nove, Scarpa, Ammaniti, and others, there are serious reservations about the Cannibali’s calculated use of subcultural codes and the manner in which they downplayed linguistic experimentation. Their jargon derives directly from regional expressions: for instance, the Milanese urban slang identifying Nove’s characters; the Venetian idioms of Scarpa; the Romanesque-Italian of Ammaniti’s ‘‘Seratina,’’ published in Gioventu´ cannibale. They use the language the average Italian speaks every day; the regional elements in their work help give the ‘‘pulp’’ phenomenon an even stronger Italian resonance. The Cannibali challenge an arcane literary mannerism that they believe had entrenched itself in Italian narrative since the death of Italo Calvino in the mid-1980s. What worked for them was the ‘‘market,’’ in particular, mass media. They thus became part of the so-called globalization of ‘‘the false.’’ The splatter and the blood and the stress on violent action in their works signal, however, their need to tear reality apart. Some of the most interesting examples of Cannibali fiction are Enrico Brizzi’s Jack Frusciante e` uscito dal gruppo (Jack Frusciante Left His Group, 1994) and Niccolo` Ammaniti’s Branchie (Gills, 1994), which became a cult novel, and Fango (Mud, 1996). Ammaniti always strikes readers with his vivid characters, often retelling stories taken from the newspapers’ cronaca (news). Unlike the shady characters of Vinci and Santacroce, Ammaniti proposes clear-cut situations in which protagonists face choices. Aldo Nove’s syntax in Woobinda e altre storie senza lieto fine (Woobinda and Other Stories without a Happy Ending, 1996) and Superwoobinda (1998) shows his innate ability to recreate, in poetic ways, the squalor of industrialized northern Italy. The imagery in his settings is paralyzing, even in the literary flop Puerto Plata Market (1997). He wrote two Proustian novels, Amore mio infinito (My Endless Love, 2000) and La piu´ grande balena morta della Lombardia (The Biggest Dead Whale in Lombardy, 2004). Amore mio infinito remains poetic even when we read about Milan. But Nove’s elegy to Milan—further exemplified in his city guide Milano non e` Milano (Milan Is Not Milan, 2004)—is written according to his style. It is spectacular, ironic, satiric, a rap version of Lombard history. Along with Scarpa and Raul Montanari, Nove published Nelle galassie oggi come oggi (In the Galaxies Today as Today, 2001), a collection of poems based on the lyrics of some of the most 374

popular songs of the period. Once again high-low, hybrid culture, poetry, and musical texts are mingled, illustrating the Cannibali dictum that the very existence of an uncorrupted culture is impossible. Even though Silvia Ballestra, Isabella Santacroce, and Simona Vinci were not initially included in Gioventu´ cannibale, they share similar aims and literary methods. For example, with Compleanno dell’iguana (The Birthday of the Iguana, 1991), Ballestra (1969–) establishes herself as a famed writer of slangy fiction focused on urban youth, mostly in Milan where she lives. In 1996, Santacroce formed, with Scarpa and Nove, the group SS9. This year was important in the history of the Cannibali because so many of their works were published at that time, including Santacroce’s own Destroy; Tiziano Scarpa’s Occhi sulla graticola (Eyes on the Grill, 1996), an exhilarating love story notable for its offbeat sense of irony; and Aldo Nove’s Woobinda e altre storie senza lieto fine. While the fragment in Nove’s prose is devoid of any lexical refinement and deliberately flat and banal, Santacroce’s uses oxymoron and paradox to visualize a world turned upside-down. She writes in short sentences (unusual for Italian literary style). Thus far the legacy of Santacroce is to show that female narrative is more open in its presentation of sexuality. While Santacroce represents sexuality as transgressive and desperate, Simona Vinci writes about ambiguous sexuality with very different results. Aside from the different literary itineraries these writers have chosen, it is important to recognize their inexhaustible desire for describing a society in which people seem to have lost a clear sense of who they are and where they want to go. The desire to speak of human (or posthuman) beings is still the founding premise of the work of the Cannibali. In a world where the unbelievable happens all the time, fragmentary discourse, excessive lyricism, and merchandisable narrative become tools for representation. STEFANIA LUCAMANTE See also: Niccolo` Ammaniti, Rossana Campo, Simona Vinci Further Reading Barengo, Mario, Oltre il Novecento: appunti su un decennio di narrativa (1988–1998), Milan: Marcos y Marcos, 1999.

GINO CAPPONI Barilli, Renato, E` arrivata la nuova ondata: dalla neo alla neo-neoavanguardia, Turin: Testo & immagine;, 2000. Barilli, Renato, Nanni Balestrini, et al. (editors), Narrative Invaders: Narratori di Ricercare 1993–1999, Turin: Testo & immagine, 2000. Brolli, Daniele, Introductio to Gioventu´ Cannibale: la prima antologia dell’orrore estremo, Turin: Einaudi, 1996. Lucamante, Stefania (editor), Italian Pulp Fiction: The New Narrative of the Giovani Cannibali Writers,

Madison-Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh-Dickinson University Press, 2001. Ottonieri, Tommaso, La plastica della lingua: stili in fuga lungo un’eta` postrema, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2000. Pezzarossa, Fulvio, C’era una volta il Pulp: corpo e letteratura nella tradizione italiana, Bologna: Clueb, 1999. Sinibaldi, Marino, Pulp: la letteratura nell’era della simultaneita`, Rome: Donzelli, 1997.

CANTOS See Cinque Canti (Work by Ludovico Ariosto)

GINO CAPPONI (1792–1876) Count Gino Capponi is considered one of the most influential personalities amongst the intellectuals who lived during the Italian Risorgimento. He was not only a politician, but also an economist, a philologist, an educator, a historian and one of the advisors of the founders of the Italian nation. He passionately read St. Augustine, Michel de Montaigne and Blaise Pascal and formulated his personal pedagogical theories combining the thought of John Locke and Etienne de Condillac with that Anthony Shaftesbury and Jean Jacques Rousseau. He had also a close and fruitful relationship with Giampietro Viesseux, whose pedagogical ideas he shared. He developed an ethical-religious and personal notion of education that rejected any form of intellectual analysis of the educational process, whether on a philosophical basis, as in the case of the Jesuits, or on a scientific basis, as in the case of positivism. Capponi favoured the establishment of a public school system administered by the state and firmly believed both in the superiority of the study of the humanities over that of the sciences and in the preeminence of family and maternal education over that provided by public

schools. However, he did not produce any single work that can witness to the greatness of his intelligence, the breadth of his culture, and the strength of his style. Fragmentation seems to be the most evident characteristic of his literary production. Rich in critical acumen and expository clarity, Capponi’s prose displays evident classical influences in the articulation of its rhetorical structure. His Storia della Repubblica di Firenze (A History of the Republic of Florence, 1875) is one of the most significant products of Tuscan political thought of the Risorgimento. In 1843 the French writer Hortense Allart published the Histoire de la Republique de Florence. Upon the author’s request, Capponi contributed to it by adding some notes and by expanding or reducing certain sections. In the end, he wrote his own Storia, which was influenced by his disappointment over the failure of his government and the consequent return of the Grand Duke at the head of the Austrian troops after his overthrow in 1848. Because of its complex and troubled genesis, this is not an organic work, and it lacks unity in spite of some wonderful pages full of historical truth and the simple and effective writing style. 375

GINO CAPPONI The first book is an introduction to the city from its origins to the triumph of the Guelfs. The central section, which constitutes the core of the work, is more than a thousand pages long. The last ten pages describe in a concise way the historical events of the state from the collapse of the Republic to the wise rule of Leopoldo I. Storia di Pietro Leopoldo (A History of Pietro Leopoldo, 1877), one of his minor works, was begun in 1823 and never finished. Only the first chapter, which concisely analyses the origins and the characteristics of the absolute monarchies in Europe, and some other fragments remain. Capponi’s interest in Pietro Leopoldo, whose government of Tuscany in the eighteenth century was one of the most significant examples of enlightened despotism, clearly demonstrates his reformist attitude, which he shared with other liberal Tuscans. Capponi’s most significant work is Frammento sull’educazione (Fragment on Education, 1845). It can be considered the most important essay on education of the first half of the nineteenth century and certainly the one that best shows how Catholic thought influenced the liberal reform in Italy. Capponi starts by observing that, with the French Revolution, education shifted from the clergy to secular teachers, something that the Restoration was unable to change. The responsibility for this shift lay not with the Enlightenment but with the Jesuits who had inspired it. Pushed to its extreme consequences, the Enlightenment had denied itself, and Romanticism had risen from its ashes. After Napoleon’s fall, realizing the impossibility of going back to the old ways, people had begun reading Rousseau, and most misinterpreted him by taking him literally. Rousseau describes the kind of abstract education that must be avoided by educators at all costs. The core concept of his work is that, in the educational process, synthesis must prevail over analysis. Capponi condemns everything that makes reason prevail over the emotions and art over nature: Indeed, it is absurd to encourage sentiments by means of reason. Education should find its grounds within the family, with the support and the enlightenment of the ethical values of Catholicism. Profoundly sceptical regarding the validity of the educational methods of his times, Capponi saw history as a progressive unfolding, and, as good Catholic, he considered positively the educational function of the papacy. His conclusion was that the spiritual personality of the educator himself holds the secret for good results, but these results depend only on the will of the Divine Providence. Arguing further that education must also arise from the 376

history of a people and not from the solitary mind of a reformer, Capponi reached an obvious contradiction.

Biography Capponi was born on 13 September 1792 into an old and illustrious Florentine family. He traveled extensively throughout Italy, France, England (where he befriended Ugo Foscolo), Switzerland, Holland, and Germany; in Florence, he worked within the academies and other cultural associations and became a prominent personality in the Tuscan liberal Catholic party. He married the Marchioness Riccardi in 1811. Capponi founded the periodical L’Antologia with Giampietro Viesseux in 1821. He was elected senator of the Kingdom of Tuscany in 1848 (he was Prime Minister between 17 August and 12 September 1848). He supported annexation of Tuscany to Italy in 1859 and was senator of the Kingdom of Italy from 1860 to 1864. Capponi died in Florence, 3 February 1876. ANDREA BOSELLO Selected Works Collections Scritti editi e inediti di Gino Capponi, edited by Marco Tabarrini, 2 vols., Florence: Barbera, 1877. Scritti inediti, edited by Guglielmo Macchia, Florence: Le Monnier, 1957.

Historical Writings Sulla dominazione dei longobardi in Italia, 1844. Storia della Repubblica di Firenze, 1875. Storia di Pietro Leopoldo, 1877.

Letters Niccolo` Tommaseo e Gino Capponi. Carteggio inedito, dal 1833 al 1874, edited by Isidoro Del Lungo and Paolo Prunas, 1911–1932. Lettere di Capponi e di altri a lui, edited by Alessandro Carraresi, 1882–1990. Carteggio Capponi-Galiotti (1845–1875), edited by Aglaia Paoletti Lange´, 2002. Carteggio Capponi-Ridolfi (1817–1863), edited by Aglaia Paoletti Lange´, 2002.

Other Cinque lettere di economia toscana, 1845. Frammento sull’educazione, 1845.

Further Reading Bagnoli, Paolo (editor), Gino Capponi. Storia e progresso nell’Italia dell’Ottocento, Florence: Olschki, 1994. Bonafede, Giulio, La pedogogia di Gino Capponi, Palermo: Fiamma Serafica, 1971.

PAOLA CAPRIOLO Gambaro, Angiolo, La critica pedagogica di Gino Capponi, Bari: Laterza, 1956. Gentile, Giovanni, Gino Capponi e la cultura toscana nel secolo XIX, Florence: Vallecchi, 1922. Gentili, Rino, Gino Capponi, un aristocratico toscano dell’800, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1974. Nencioni, Giovanni, Gino Capponi: linguista, storico, pensatore, Florence: Olschki, 1977.

Paoletti Lange´, Aglaia, Gino Capponi, un fiorentino europeo, Florence: Le Monnier 2000. Sestan, Ernesto, La Firenze di Vieusseux e di Capponi, Florence: Olschki, 1986. Spadolini, Giovanni, La Firenze di Gino Capponi fra restaurazione e romanticismo, Florence: Le Monnier, 1985. Treves, Piero, Ottocento italiano fra il nuovo e l’antico, Modena: Mucchi, 1992.

PAOLA CAPRIOLO (1962–) Much of Capriolo’s fiction might be classified as fantastic. In La spettatrice (The Woman Watching, 1995), for example, an actor turns to stone, Don Giovanni-style. In La grande Eulalia (The Great Eulalia, 1988), a young woman falls in love with a man inside a mirror and is at once magically transformed from an impoverished waif into a musical phenomenon and grande dame. An accomplished translator from German, including works of Goethe and Thomas Mann, Capriolo writes fiction often characterized by a gothic feel, creating labyrinthine, puzzling, often feudal or restorationstyle spaces whose inhabitants seem ghostly and ethereal. The appellations ‘‘fantastic’’ or ‘‘magical’’ cannot, however, capture the complexities of Capriolo’s works. The singularity of her style within the panorama of contemporary prose derives from the exceptional direction Capriolo’s fantastic bent takes. The scholar Gianfranco Contini observed in his introduction to the collection Italia magica (1988) that the literary sensibility toward ‘‘magic’’ appears too often geographical specific: It reigns, we think, in the foggy North or in the Orient. On the contrary, Italy, with its overbearing classical tradition, is usually considered to be bereft of ‘‘gothic’’ sensibilities, and authors of fantastic literature not fitting into the gothic or horror mode are said to belong in modern times to the currents of magical realism or, perhaps, surrealism. Yet these particular currents have characteristics that do not apply to Capriolo’s brand of fantasy. Contini noticed that Italian fantastic literature is often crossed with the burlesque mode. Paola Capriolo stands out as an exception because she creates subtly magical atmospheres and plots without including comic

or satirical notes. In her fiction, philosophy and the fantastic are blended in a masterly elegance of style. Combining psychological insights about the instability of the self with modern philosophical discourse on the relativity of individual perceptions, one of Capriolo’s most important themes is the labyrinth of existence. Her texts are often visionary, imagining in detail other, metaphysical, worlds—as when a character steps into a mirror world. Her novels are closely focused on characters in pursuit of something intangible that often proves their undoing. These characters are far from types, though, and their courageous flights into creativity (imagining lovers, for example) are unforgettable. Many live out obsessions that verge on madness. Though rife with visual and musical metaphors, Capriolo’s short stories and novels tend to leave settings and historical epochs indeterminate and enigmatic. For this reason and because of her use of magical elements, critics have often used the word ‘‘fable’’ to describe these narratives. The short novel Barbara (1998) provides an excellent example of a fablelike story with gothic elements. In it, a young knight’s father, fearful of losing his fiefdoms, arranges the son’s marriage to Barbara, the daughter of a nouveau riche family. The distant, cryptic Barbara insists that her betrothed, utterly smitten by her despite her ordinary looks, carry out the task of recovering a precious ring. In obtaining it, the handsome but naive knight commits a crime, murder; the marriage match is dissolved, the father’s lands are lost, and the son is eventually imprisoned. The protagonist seeks for years to unravel the enigma of the woman, embarking on exploits of various kinds, yet he is unable to 377

PAOLA CAPRIOLO exact the vengeance that he passionately desires. The symbolically unnatural, cruel, and unmaternal Barbara so puzzles the protagonist that he ‘‘creates’’ for himself an otherworldly, distant, nearly mythic being who becomes his only raison d’eˆtre. Perversely, she inspires him to ‘‘author’’ his own life and worldview, and as such she is a fearsome muse—a sadistic Beatrice or Laura of lyric fame. Ultimately, the knight’s destruction is complete. Only as an impoverished old man can he put together what now appear to him as the fragments of a lifetime around the empty space of Barbara’s mysterious aberrations. Barbara is not Capriolo’s only work to undertake a revision of a familiar genre such as the knight’s tale. Capriolo’s sophisticated rewritings of well-known myths and motifs of European intellectual life take the form of metafictions and are particularly well represented by the novel Vissi d’arte (Floria Tosca, 1992). The focus is diverted from the Tosca of the operatic narrative to the lustful, villainous Baron Scarpia, the police chief who tracks down political dissidents and arranges the hero’s execution and, indirectly, Tosca’s suicide. Written in diary form, the novel reformulates the problem of sadistic violence. Rather than follow a suspenseful melodrama, the reader learns the inner workings of perverse desire in the form of metafiction. In another accomplished novel, Una di loro (One of Them, 2001), echoes of nineteenthcentury Europe resonate in a love story between a hotel guest and an immigrant maid. The protagonist, a writer, discovers that a colony of poor and apparently homeless people have taken over an abandoned, eerie, grand-style hotel that once housed the aristocratic elite on holiday. The dense woods surrounding the unearthly place are menacing; and, in a twist on gothic romance, tree boughs are sporadically laden with trash from floods instead of serving as bandits’ lookouts. Capriolo presents us the decay of the European continent but also brings the elegant prose style and narrative wealth of its earlier eras into the new contexts of contemporary literature and its postmodern experimentation.

Biography Paola Capriolo was born in Milan on 1 January 1962. She earned her degree in philosophy from the University of Milan. Her first work of fiction, La grande Eulalia, won the Giuseppe Berto Prize in

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1988; Il nocchiero won the Premio Selezione Campiello in 1991. Capriolo works as a translator from German and writes for the culture section of the Corriere della sera. She lives in Milan. KEALA JEWELL Selected Works Fiction La grande Eulalia, 1988. Il nocchiero, 1989; translated as The Helmsman by William Weaver, 1991. La ragazza dalla stella d’oro e altri racconti, 1991. Il doppio regno, 1991; translated as The Dual Realm by Gillian Ania and Doug Thompson, 2000. Vissi d’amore, 1992; translated as Floria Tosca by Liz Heron, 1997. La spettatrice, 1995; translated as The Woman Watching by Liz Heron, 1998. Un uomo di carattere, 1996; translated as A Man of Character by Liz Heron, 2000. Barbara, 1998. Il sogno dell’agnello, 1999. Una di loro, 2001. Qualcosa nella notte: storia di Gilgamesh, signore di Uruk, e dell’uomo selvatico cresciuto tra le gazzelle, 2003.

Nonfiction L’assoluto artificiale: Nichilismo e mondo dell’espressione nell’opera saggistica di Gottfried Benn, 1996.

Further Reading Ania, Gillian, ‘‘At Capriolo’s Hotel: Heaven, Hell, and Other Worlds in Il Doppio Regno,’’ Italian Studies, 54 (1999): 132–156. Ania, Gillian, ‘‘Inside the Labyrinth: The Thematics of Space in the Fiction of Paola Capriolo,’’ Romance Studies, 18:2(2000): 157–171. Ania, Gillian, ‘‘Simulated Bodies: Transforming Relationships in Capriolo’s ‘La Donna di Pietra’ and Un Uomo di Carattere,’’ Spunti e Ricerche, 18(2003): 53–76. Basili, Sonia, ‘‘Il doppio regno e Oceano mare: Punti di confine e alibi di fuga nei personaggi di Paola Capriolo e Alessandro Baricco,’’ Narrativa, 10(1996): 185–206. Contini, Gianfranco (editor), Italia magica, Turin: Einaudi 1988. De Luca, Giovanna, ‘‘Un uomo di carattere di Paola Capriolo: Il movimento impossibile,’’ Quaderni d’Italianistica, 19: 2(1998): 137–143. Hipkins, Danielle, ‘‘Evil Ambiguities: The Fantastic Flight from Interpretation in Dino Buzzati’s Il deserto dei Tartari and Paola Capriolo’s Early Fiction,’’ Spunti e Ricerche, 13(1998): 81–98. Wilson, Rita, ‘‘The Space(s) of Myth in Paola Capriolo’s Con i miei mille occhi,’’ Studi d’Italianistica nell’Africa Australe/Italian Studies in Southern Africa, 12:2(1999): 37–57.

GIORGIO CAPRONI

GIORGIO CAPRONI (1912–1990) ‘‘Oggi tutti gli de`i e tutte le dee son morti’’ (All Gods and Goddesses are dead today): This quotation recalls the title of one of Giorgio Caproni’s most representative ‘‘scritture in versi’’ (verse writings), as he called them. Indeed, ‘‘il congedo’’ (farewell) is a favorite subject of his poetic speculation. His is departure without redemption, between despair and joy, often taking allegorical forms peculiar to musical variations, almost a sentimental oxymoron. In his life, he experienced a number of farewells, as when he left Genoa to move to Rome and also when he left Livorno—where he was born—for Genoa. He adopted the Ligurian capital and was linguistically educated there, if not in a dialectical sense, in the actual structure of the language, in its mentality. In fact, he remembered and lived Genoa as ‘‘citta` di continua musica per il vento,’’ ‘‘citta` dagli amori in salita’’ (the city of never-ending music for the wind, the city of climbing loves) (‘‘Sirena’’). Caproni is one of the most individual of modern Italian poets and one of the most inattuali (out-of-date), along with Vittorio Sereni and Attilio Bertolucci, often in opposition to Montale’s nobler and better-known literary position. Recently, renewed interest in twentieth-century counterpoetics—whose main representative is Pier Paolo Pasolini—has led to a new interest in Caproni. His interviews, correspondence, and essays are now read again, and even his work as a narrator, journalist, critic, and translator, though partially edited, is deemed important. After studying violin and composition, Caproni demonstrated a talent for narration, and his initial immediacy and sensory easiness, experienced in his first poetic works, gradually became a complex achievement. As a mature author, especially after fighting in World War II and then as a partisan in the Resistance, Caproni began to expose the inner tragedy of human life; he explored anatomically the pain of enduring loss while facing the void, a testament to the absence of God, even though it did not mean atheism, necessarily, as the poet himself often stated. As a youth he read both Spanish and South American Surrealists widely. He then felt the need for a more astute analysis of the poetical word,

from Giosue` Carducci to Umberto Saba and Carlo Betocchi’s musical realism. Thanks in part to his discovery of Giuseppe Ungaretti’s ‘‘word economy,’’ Caproni composed Come un’allegoria (Like an Allegory, 1936), his first collection, gathering 16 poems, 11 of which had already been published in literary reviews. Aldo Capasso, who wrote the preface, defined it as ‘‘descriptive poetry’’; poetry of things, almost a macchiaiolo style of writing, a lyricism based on rhythm and timbre, yet with some crepuscolare tones. Caproni experimented with being concise, through skilful variations; his images, almost allegorical signs, echo something that eludes reason and are therefore inevitably unattainable. In the sensory universe of Ballo a Fontanigorda (Dance at Fontanigorda, 1938), women begin to appear. The collection’s main subject is youth, described by Caproni as painfully fragile. These first two collections also outline the landscapes and emblematic milieu of his homely minded style, such as the image of the sea as a metaphor of female sensuality in ‘‘Spiaggia di sera’’ (Beach by Night); the Ligurian landscape and its dialect; the succession of days in a symbolic cycle of death, exemplified by the night in ‘‘Fine di un giorno’’ (End of a Day); and rebirth in ‘‘Prima luce’’ (First Light), a title in Latin from Julius Caesar’s Prima luce Caesar profectus est, which hints at dawn. In Finzioni (Deceitfulness, 1941) and Cronistoria (Chronicle, 1943), Caproni continually experimented with the closed form of the sonnet—as in the series of 18 ‘‘Sonetti dell’anniversario’’ (Anniversary Sonnets)—according to a new structure the poet himself defined as a ‘‘monoblocco’’ (‘‘monoblock’’). The formal technique consists of a steady use of enjambments, a modern style that also adheres to tradition, in accordance with Stravinsky’s modernist experimentalism in a still tonal language, an example that Caproni followed. Between 1940 and 1947 he wrote three short stories published in 1984 in Il labirinto (The Labyrinth), including ‘‘Giorni aperti’’ (Open Days), a recollection of war, and ‘‘Il labirinto,’’ on the Resistance struggles for liberation. These first literary documents— about the Italian army at the Western front and the partisan war—were written chronologically in 379

GIORGIO CAPRONI direct connection with the action and the events described. The following collection, Stanze della funicolare (Funicular Rooms, 1952), describing a funicular connecting the two very different sections of Genoa, seems to lead Caproni’s poetry further toward the themes of the metaphysical journey and the meeting with the limit, or as he calls it ‘‘il muro della terra o l’ultimo borgo’’ (the Earth’s wall or the last stop), the unknowable. Instead, Il passaggio d’Enea (The Passage of Aeneas, 1956) alludes to a monument in Genoa dedicated to Virgil’s hero, a monument for which no suitable place was found in the city squares. Caproni’s Virgilian antihero—‘‘figlio e nel contempo padre, Enea sofferse tutte le croci e le delizie che una tale condizione comporta’’ (son and father at the same time, Aeneas suffered both joys and pains for such a condition)—becomes the symbol of modern humankind, exiled and unable to cope under the weight of tradition and who need support following the fall of the myth. The sonnet form dominates the section entitled ‘‘Gli anni tedeschi’’ (The German Years), which is overwhelmed by the slaughter of war. Caproni gradually mistrusted the word, to the point of perceiving its ‘‘insufficienza’’ (inadequacy), dispelling the object it names, moving toward the exile of pure nominalism: ‘‘E chi si salvera` dal vento / muto sui morti — da tanto distrutto / pianto’’ (Who will survive the wind/ dumb on the dead / who will survive such a painful cry; ‘‘I lamenti 1’’). Il seme del piangere (The Seed of Weeping, 1959), a title taken from Dante’s Paradiso (Canto XXXI, v. 46), includes the important section ‘‘Versi livornesi’’ (Livornese Verses,), dedicated to the memory of his beloved mother, whose figure is celebrated in a loving relationship with a young girl. His rhymed couplets suggest the poetic desubjectification of the characters, if only in defying tradition (specifically, the Sicilian canzone and Guido Cavalcanti’s ballad). From the mid-1960s, the poet took on forms that were distinctively ironic. In the collection Congedo del viaggiatore cerimonioso & altre prosopopee (The Ceremonious Traveler’s Farewell and Other Prosopopoeis, 1965), which gathers the work of four years (September 1960–November 1964), his writing shows a theatrical, meta-literary bent, giving the (anonymous) characters a voice: Caproni called it ‘‘simulazione teatrale’’ or theatrical simulation (with a dedication to the actor Achille Millo). Il muro della terra (The Wall of the Earth, 1975), the title of which is the incipit of Canto X of Dante’s Inferno and hints at the boundaries of the walled city of 380

Dite, opened Caproni’s final poetic season. Repetition and the ironic use of parenthesis obstruct the prosodic stream, which is more typical than that of Caproni’s former works, up to the paradox of ‘‘Ritorno’’ (Going Back): ‘‘Sono tornato la` / dove non ero mai stato’’ (I went back there / where I had never been). Some of his last collections are ambitious poetic works as well. In Il Conte di Kevenhu¨ller (The Earl of Kevenhu¨ller, 1986), the theme of the hunt for evil (embodied by the Beast), partly anticipated in his 1982 Il franco cacciatore (The Free Hunter), carries on the game of ‘‘simulazione teatrale.’’ It was inspired by an eighteenth-century Avviso, or note, Caproni found, in which the Earl promised fifty sequins to the man who would kill a fierce beast infesting Milan. Res amissa (Lost Thing, 1991) leads instead to the edge of the darkness. This collection, published posthumously, is dedicated to the theme of Evil and Lost Good represented by the indefinite object hinted at in the title; it is perhaps the Grace given ab origine to humanity, who would not thus need any further Grace, what St. Augustine violently rejected in Pelagius’s notion of ‘‘admissible Grace.’’ As Giorgio Agamben noted in his introduction to the collection, nostalgia becomes a hopeless loss, clearing out a landscape almost totally empty, ‘‘taking leave of the farewell itself while entering the regions of extreme disengagement between man and God.’’ A definitive congedo is the main theme of Caproni’s last poetry that, beyond Redemption and Fall, expresses the joy of not belonging to worldly things. As in ‘‘Tombeau per Marcella’’ in Res amissa: ‘‘Ma che vale il lamento? / La legge e` la separazione’’ (What is grief worth? / Departing is the law).

Biography Giorgio Caproni was born in Livorno on January 7, 1912, to Attilio, an accountant, and Anna Picchi. From 1922 to 1938 he lived in Genoa, where he studied music and taught at the elementary school until 1973. He fought as a soldier in World War II and later in the anti-Fascist armed resistance in Alta Val Trebbia. In 1938, Caproni married Rina (Rosa Rettagliata) and had two children, Silvana and Mauro. In 1945 he moved to Rome. He was a delegate at The First World Intellectuals for Peace Congress in Wroclaw (Breslavia), Poland, August 25–28, 1948. Caproni was awarded the Viareggio Prize for Le stanze della funicolare (1952) and

GIORGIO CAPRONI Il seme del piangere (1959). In 1982, he received the Feltrinelli Prize for Poetry. Caproni died January 22, 1990, and is buried in Loco di Rovegno, in Val Trebbia; as he requested, only his name is on his grave. STEFANO TOMASSINI Selected Works Collections Poesie, 1932–1986, Milan: Garzanti, 1989. L’opera in versi, critical edition by Luca Zuliani, Milan: Mondadori, 1998.

Poetry ‘‘Come un’allegoria (1932–1935),’’ 1936. ‘‘Ballo a Fontanigorda,’’ 1938. ‘‘Finzioni,’’ 1941. ‘‘Cronistoria,’’ 1943. ‘‘Stanze della funicolare,’’ 1952. ‘‘Il passaggio d’Enea,’’ 1956. ‘‘Il seme del piangere,’’ 1959. ‘‘Congedo del viaggiatore cerimonioso & altre prosopopee,’’ 1965. ‘‘Il muro della terra,’’ 1975, as The Wall of the Earth (1964– 1975), translated by Pasquale Verdicchio, 1992. ‘‘Erba francese,’’ 1979. ‘‘Il franco cacciatore,’’ 1982. ‘‘Il Conte di Kevenhu¨ller,’’ 1986. ‘‘Res amissa,’’ edited by Giorgio Agamben, 1991. ‘‘L’opera in versi,’’ edited by Luca Zuliani, 1998. ‘‘I faticati giorni: quaderno veronese 1942,’’ edited by Adele Dei, 2000.

Fiction Giorni aperti. Itinerario di un reggimento dal fronte occidentale ai confini orientali, 1942. Il gelo della mattina, 1954. Il labirinto, 1984; reprinted, 1992. La valigia delle Indie e altre prose, edited by Adele Dei, 1998. Aeroporto delle rondini e altre cartoline di viaggio, 2000. Aria celeste e altri racconti, 2003.

Nonfiction Frammenti di un diario (1948–1949), edited by F. Nicolao, 1995. La scatola nera, edited by Giovanni Raboni, 1996.

Carissimo Giorgio, Carissimo Mario: Lettere 1942–1989, edited by Stefano Verdino, 2004. ‘‘Era cosı` bello parlare’’: conversazioni radiofoniche con Giorgio Caproni, 2004.

Translations Marcel Proust, Il tempo ritrovato, 1951. Rene´ Char, Poesia e prosa, 1962. Louis-Ferdinand Ce´line, Morte a credito, 1964. Guy de Maupassant, Bel-Ami, 1965. Andre´ Fre´naud, Il silenzio di Genova e altre poesie, 1967. Andre´ Fre´naud, Non c’e` paradiso, 1971. Guillaume Apollinaire, Poesie, 1979. Gustave Flaubert, L’educazione sentimentale, 1997. Quaderno di traduzioni, edited by Enrico Testa, 1998.

Further Reading Baroncini, Daniela, Caproni e la poesia del nulla, Pisa: Pacini, 2002. De Marco, Giuseppe, Caproni poeta dell’antagonismo e altre occasioni esegetiche novecentesche, Genoa: Il melangolo, 2004. Dei, Adele, Le carte incrociate: Sulla poesia di Giorgio Caproni, Genoa: Edizioni San Marco dei Giustiniani, 2003. Dei, Adele, Giorgio Caproni, Milan: Mursia, 1992. Frabotta, Biancamaria, Giorgio Caproni: Il poeta del disincanto, Rome: Officina, 1993. Frabotta, Biancamaria, ‘‘Il seme del piangere di Giorgio Caproni,’’ in Letteratura italiana. Le Opere, vol 4, pt. 2, Turin: Einaudi, 1996. Genova a Giorgio Caproni, edited by Giorgio Devoto and Stefano Verdino, Genoa: San Marco dei Giustiniani, 1982. Leonelli, Giuseppe, Giorgio Caproni: Storia d’una poesia tra musica e retorica, Milan: Garzanti, 1997. Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo, ‘‘Giorgio Caproni,’’ in Poeti italiani del Novecento, Milan: Mondadori, 1978. Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo, ‘‘Per la poesia di Giorgio Caproni,’’ in Giorgio Caproni, L’opera in versi, edited by Luca Zuliani, Milan: Mondadori, 1998. Orlando, Roberto, La vita contraria: Sul Novecento di Giorgio Caproni, Lecce: Pensa, 1998. Scarpa, Raffaella, Sintassi e respiro nei sonetti di Giorgio Caproni, Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2004. Surdich, Luigi, Giorgio Caproni: Un ritratto, Genoa: Costa & Nolan, 1990. Surdich, Luigi, Le idee e la poesia: Montale e Caproni, Genoa: Il Melangolo, 1998.

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LUIGI CAPUANA

LUIGI CAPUANA (1839–1915) A novelist and critic, Luigi Capuana played a crucial role in opening up Italian culture to the newest European trends at the end of the nineteenth century. Influenced by the theory of the death of poetry expressed by Angelo Camillo De Meis (1817–1891) in his autobiographical novel Dopo la laurea (After the Degree, 1868), Capuana formulated the hypothesis that the novel was the modern artistic form par excellence and that literary genres, like natural beings, are subject to the law of evolution. Thus, the novel represents the modern version of the ancient epic, a ‘‘mixed genre’’ whose realism, voided of fantastic and supernatural elements, fully expresses the modern sensibility dominated by the advent of positivist science. His wide-ranging interests led him to the discovery of the theories of physiologist Claude Bernard (1813–1878) and of sociologist Hippolyte Taine (1828–1893), as well as those of E´mile Zola (1840–1902), to whom he dedicated many essays. He was profoundly influenced by literary realism, admiring especially the works of Victor Hugo, Honore´ de Balzac, and Gustave Flaubert, while in philosophy he read Hegel’s works and absorbed the idealist doctrine. In 1865 he wrote his first short story, ‘‘Il dottor Cymbalus’’ (The Doctor Cymbalus) and planned the novel Adriana, which he never wrote. However, Capuana’s first important contribution to the literary debate were the theatrical reviews that he wrote between 1864 and 1868, while he lived in Florence, and later collected in the volume Il teatro italiano contemporaneo (Italian Contemporary Theatre, 1872), published in Palermo with the active cooperation of his friend Giuseppe Pitre´ (1841–1916), the founding figure in the study of folk culture in Sicily. In addition to the influence of the intellectual figures mentioned above, the volume witnesses to Capuana’s debt to the Florentine cultural milieu and in particular to the painter Telemaco Signorini and the critic Enrico Nencioni. From the latter, he took the notion of the need to redefine the canons of an authentically modern art, based on the observation of real events and their transposition onto paper. Consequently he revised his opinions about the theater and forcefully argued for the superiority of the novel over all other 382

artistic forms. His articles of literary criticism published between 1877 and 1882 and later included in the two volumes of Studi sulla letteratura contemporanea (Studies on Contemporary Literature, 1880–1882) also exemplify his scientific and evolutionary approach to literary forms. Articulating his theory of the modern novel, Capuana explained the meaning of the ‘‘positive method’’ in literature: The new art must set aside every form of subjectivity and adopt the method of modern science. For the text to be realistic and objective, the author must be invisible in his works and simply let realistic events with realistic characters unfold. Nevertheless, Capuana did not accept the naturalistic theories of Zola wholesale, preferring to consider naturalism simply as a method. The task of the artist should be to organize the narration in an organic way, but art cannot limit itself to photographing reality. Art is form, or rather the organization of data according to set principles in which the artist must use his imagination and not only represent what he sees. His involvement, however, must remain hidden, and this is the norm of the so-called canon of impersonality. In a later volume of criticism, Gli ismi contemporanei (Contemporary Isms, 1898), Capuana recognized the crisis of the novel and suggested some solutions to overcome it. Most importantly, he now considered the different schools as outdated and called for a return to realism interpreted, however, as a simple method of composition. In his last major theoretical statement La scienza della letteratura (The Science of Literature, 1902), Capuana’s theories found yet another arrangement, linking materialism and evolutionism, Taine and Darwin. Capuana was an eclectic writer and in his career wrote numerous short stories, novels, plays, and fables. Indeed, his eclecticism is evident in his themes as well, since while exalting the scientific method, he also cultivated his interests for the occult world, about which he wrote two important essays, Spiritismo? (Spiritualism?, 1884) and Mondo occulto (The Occult World, 1896), in addition to conducting experiments such as photographing ectoplasms. He also wrote works devoted to Sicilian traditions and history, including the provocative

LUIGI CAPUANA L’isola del sole (The Island of the Sun, 1898), in which he examined the phenomenon of ‘‘brigantaggio’’ and of the Mafia, arguing, against the false image of Sicily then common in Italy, that the island was not a land inhabited by violent and wild people but rather that its misery was quite common all over the world. In fact, the representation of Sicilian social reality constitutes an essential element in Capuana’s art, and many of his novels and short stories are set on the island. For example, he presented its corrupted clergy in the short story ‘‘Breviario di quaranta fogli’’ (A Forty-Sheet Breviary), from the collection Dalla terra natale (From the Native World, 1915), which features the figure of Dean Monitore, who prefers playing cards to performing his priestly office, or in ‘‘I bestia’’ (The Animals), from Anime a nudo (Naked Souls, 1900), in which the priest Don Bastiano devotes himself above all to the pleasures of the table. Indeed, all classes, including peasants and the bourgeoisie, come under scrutiny and are described realistically, with their financial or psychological problems. Capuana made his literary debut in 1877 with the collection of six short stories Profili di donne (Portraits of Women), which presents women involved in a variety of love relations. In every story, the plot is slight, as the writer was more interested in focusing on the psychology of his characters, articulating a phenomenology of love based on a series of fixed stereotype, and contrasting the passionate temperament of women to the superficiality and egoism of men. Following a fortunate trend of nineteenth-century fiction, Capuana privileged the portrayal of the middleclass and of drawing-room environments, where superficial amorous intrigues develop. The psychology of the characters is analysed using a scientific and analytical method, and as a result the passion of love is derived from psychological factors linked to organic physiology, especially in women. In ‘‘Fasma,’’ for instance, the author considered the repercussions on the body of a psyche tormented by the sentiment of love. At the same time, Capuana attempted to apply the principles of realism by writing some tranches de vie, ‘‘slices’’ of reality presented in an objective way, a task in which he had some difficulties, especially with language. In an attempt to overcome his Sicilian dialect, he wrote in a language that was too close to literary Tuscan and too rich in archaic words to sound like common speech. The problem is present also in Giacinta (1879), a ‘‘documento umano’’

(human document) in the vein of Zola, to whom it is dedicated. The novel, based on a true story told to the author by his friend the Senator Lorenzo De Luca during one of their walks in Rome, revolves around Giacinta, a woman who as a young girl was raped by the cruel Beppe. As an adult, this event marks her psychology. She falls in love with Andrea Gerace and takes him as a lover, preferring to marry a dull suitor, and accepting with full awareness the role of dishonored woman to which she was predestined after the rape. The growing mental illness that will lead her to commit suicide is examined by Doctor Follini, Capuana’s alter ego. The internal world of the character is thus scientifically analyzed in all its aspects, and such analysis represents the most important element in the novel. Giacinta thus effected a clear and revolutionary break with the Catholic tradition, represented by Alessandro Manzoni, and as a result was branded immoral upon publication. For its adherence to the principles of Zola’s naturalism, the novel is considered a sort of manifesto of early Italian verismo. The novel Profumo (Perfume, 1892), first published in instalments in Nuova Antologia, shows a partial overcoming of Capuana’s previous influences and his adhesion to the new cultural models of decadent culture, from Friedrich Nietzsche and Paul Verlaine to Joris Karl Huysmans and Gabriele D’Annunzio. As a result, the decadent theme of ‘‘disease’’ becomes the focal point of the new novel, the protagonists of which are Patrizio Moro-Lanza and his wife Eugenia. Their family life is disturbed by Gertrude, Patrizio’s mother. In a backward, patriarchal Sicily, the tragedy of a man torn between his love for his wife and the Oedipal love for his mother is enacted. After many torments, Eugenia falls prey to a terrible hysterical crisis, and she inexplicably emanates a perfume of orange blossom from her skin. However, she is far from mad: On the contrary, she plans an adulterous relationship with the young man Ruggiero. However, the affair does not happen, and the woman finally rejoins her husband, now finally free from the morbid bond with his mother. The most relevant element in this novel lies not in the setting but in the acute psychological analysis of the main characters and in particular of what Freud will later call the unconscious, although still considered from a fundamentally objective and external perspective. Without a doubt Capuana’s masterpiece is Il marchese di Roccaverdina (The Marquis of 383

LUIGI CAPUANA Roccaverdina). The product of a long gestation, the novel appeared in 1901, when the age of realism was almost at an end. Once again, the topic is a family tragedy. A Sicilian nobleman, the Marquis of Roccaverdina, kills his lover Agrippina Solmo’s husband, and as a result an innocent is accused of the crime and dies in prison. The marquis now lives in the pangs of remorse, made worse by the lawyer Don Aquilante’s fondness of spiritualism, as he declares that he is in touch with the spirit of the dead man. At the end the marquis can no longer bear the weight of his guilt and commits suicide. In addition to the careful representation of the protagonist’s mental breakdown, the novel also offers an effective rendition of the life of a Sicilian village of the nineteenth century, Rabbato, described using the usual objective method. The reality that emerges is one still dominated by feudal social relations, in which the rich and proud aristocrats can abuse their subordinates and live outside the law. Capuana also wrote for the stage. His most successful theatrical works were his plays in dialect, contaminated by Italian to express the language of the Sicilian petit bourgeoisie. While he turned to the theater for its financial rewards and the hope of recognition (but also following the example of his friend Giovanni Verga), his naturalism presented a number of original elements. In Malia, first produced in 1891 and published in Teatro dialettale siciliano (Theater in Sicilian Dialect, 1911–1912), the protagonist Jana lives a lacerating inner drama that leads her to death. The traditional ingredients of the theater of verismo (honor, passion, greed) are thus reinterpreted in a new framework. His best-known work, however, is Lu paraninfu (The Paranymph, 1914), the story of a retired officer, Don Pasquali Minnedda, whose only obsession is arranging marriages, from which ensue all kinds of misunderstandings and comic situations, thanks also to a lively cast of ridiculous secondary characters leading up to the inevitable happy ending. After the publication of Il Marchese di Roccaverdina, Capuana worked intensely and published numerous volumes of short fiction and essays in which he confirmed his sensitivity and receptiveness for the new literary tendencies of the time but above all expressed an increasingly disenchanted and sceptical vision of the world. He thus gradually overcame his previous adhesion to the canons of positivism and reached the belief that the ‘‘isms’’ that had flourished in literature all had a relative value. 384

Biography Luigi Capuana was born in Mineo (Catania) on 29 May 1839, the firstborn son of a large rich family, and spent his childhood in Mineo, influenced by his Uncle Antonio, who educated him and convinced him to study law. He moved to Catania, 1857, where he befriended poets and men of letters, showing a natural inclination for classical studies. He worked with the Sicilian poet Lionardo Vigo on the composition of a collection of Sicilian songs, some invented but passed off as more ancient works. Capuana supported the national unification process and devoted his life to intense political activity, 1859. He lived in Florence, 1864–1869, where he met Giovanni Verga and worked as a theater critic. He served as mayor of Mineo, 1870–1876. He lived in Rome where he remained, 1888–1902, where he contributed to periodicals such as Fanfulla della domenica and Cronaca Bizantina and established relationships with critics and writers like Gabriele D’Annunzio. He taught at the university, 1890. In 1902 he returned to Catania, where he taught at the local university, 1910. He married Adelaide Bernardini, 1908. Luigi Capuana died on 29 November 1915. ALFREDO SGROI See also: Verismo Selected Works Novels Giacinta, 1879; Giacinta: secondo la prima edizione del 1879, edited by Marina Taglieri, 1998. Profumo, 1892. Il marchese di Roccaverdina, 1901. Rassegnazione, 1907; edited by Luciana Pasquini, 2000.

Short Stories ‘‘Profili di donne,’’ 1877. ‘‘Storia fosca,’’ 1883. ‘‘Homo,’’ 1883. ‘‘Fumando,’’ 1889. ‘‘Le appassionate,’’ 1893. ‘‘Le paesane,’’ 1894. ‘‘Nuove ‘‘paesane,’’ 1898. ‘‘Anime a nudo,’’ 1900. ‘‘Il Decameroncino,’’ 1901. ‘‘Delitto ideale,’’ 1902. ‘‘Un vampiro,’’ 1907. ‘‘Passa l’amore,’’ 1908. ‘‘Nel paese della Za`gara,’’ 1910. ‘‘La volutta` di creare,’’ 1911. ‘‘Gli ‘‘Americani’’ di Rabbato,’’ 1912. ‘‘Dalla terra natale,’’ 1915. ‘‘Le ultime paesane,’’ 1922.

VINCENZO CARDARELLI Poetry ‘‘Semiritmi,’’ 1888.

Plays Garibaldi, 1861. Giacinta, 1890. Teatro dialettale siciliano, vols. 1–3, 1911–1912; vols. 4–5, 1920–1921. Lu paraninfu, 1914. Ribelli: dramma inedito, edited by Gianni Oliva, 1981.

Essays Il teatro italiano contemporaneo, 1872. Studi sulla letteratura contemporanea, 2 vols., 1880–1882. Spiritismo?, 1884. Per l’arte, 1885; edited by Riccardo Scrivano, 1994. Libri e teatro, 1892. Mondo occulto, 1896; edited by Simona Cigliata, 1995. Gli ismi contemporanei, 1898. L’isola del sole, 1898. La scienza della letteratura, 1902.

Letters Carteggio Verga-Capuana, edited by Gino Raya, 1984. Luigi Capuana e le carte messaggiere, edited by Sarah Zappulla Muscara`, 2 vols., 1996. Lettere inedite a Lionardo Vigo (1857–1875), edited by Luciana Pasquini, 2002.

Further Reading Gallini, Clara, La sonnambula meravigliosa. Magnetismo e ipnotismo dell’Ottocento italiano, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1983. La Monaca, Donatella, Il marchese e la maestrina: Luigi Capuana e altri studi, Caltanissetta: Sciascia, 2003. Madrignani, Carlo Alberto, Capuana e il naturalismo, Bari: Laterza, 1970. Pestelli, Carlo, Capuana novelliere. Stile della prosa e prosa in ‘‘stile,’’ Povegliano Veronese: Gutenberg, 1991. Raya, Gino, Bibliografia di Luigi Capuana, 1839–1968, Rome: Ciranna, 1969. Romagnoli Robuschi, Giuseppina, Luigi Capuana, scrittore per l’infanzia, Milan: Le stelle, 1969. Santangelo, Vincenzo, Luigi Capuana e i suoi critici, Rome: Ciranna, 1969. Scalia, Samuel Eugene, Luigi Capuana and His Times, New York: Vanni, 1952. Sipala, Paolo Mario, Capuana e Pirandello: storia e testi di una relazione letteraria, Catania: Bonanno, 1974. Storti Abate, Anna, Introduzione a Capuana, Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1989. Traversa, Vincenzo, Luigi Capuana, Critic and Novelist, The Hague: Mouton, 1968. Tropea, Mario, Nomi ethos follia negli scrittori siciliani tra Ottocento e Novecento, Caltanissetta: Lussografica, 2000.

VINCENZO CARDARELLI (1887–1959) Writer and poet Vincenzo Cardarelli is mostly considered in relation with the literary experience of the periodical La Ronda, of which he was one of the founders, and, for a short time, also director, as well as the main theoretician. Self-taught, he consolidated his culture through readings of modern and contemporary authors, with a preference for French writers such as Blaise Pascal, Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, and Charles Pe´guy. Later on, he ‘‘discovered’’ Giacomo Leopardi, and particularly his Operette morali (Moral Essays, 1827), who became the principal model in his new poetics. He in fact began advocating a return to formal classicism, based on a refined prose, freed from sentimentalism and controlled by reason. Thus, Cardarelli intended to distance himself from the literary tendencies of the early twentieth century, characterized by experimentalism and the refusal of the Italian literary canons. He discarded the Italian authors after Leopardi, particularly

Giovanni Pascoli, to whom he dedicates a rather polemical survey in La Ronda, Gabriele D’Annunzio, the Futurists, the crepuscolari poets, the early works of Ungaretti, and also the experience of La Voce, a journal with which he had previously collaborated. Against the extremism of the avant-gardes, Cardarelli proposed a form of ‘‘ritorno all’ordine’’ (return to order), meaning that the literary discourse should be characterized by a quiet regularity, a classical prose, intellectual and meditative tones, the richness of a solid morality, and should avoid any autobiographical gratification. In fact, though Cardarelli’s works show autobiographical references, they are changed into a profound meditation, a means for measuring human destiny and its relationship with nature. The stream of his poetry is constantly interrupted by the determination of explaining, commenting, motivating his choice for a chosen subject and style of writing. In this way, Cardarelli intended ‘‘to 385

VINCENZO CARDARELLI show an absolute model of prose, and he succeeds in this by denying any form of eloquence, any emotional writing, any verbal gratification (Folco Portinari, et al., ‘‘Il secondo Ottocento e il Novecento,’’ 1996). It is difficult to isolate a single work in Cardarelli’s production, as his whole opus is characterized by a continuous stylistic commitment to create an authentic ‘‘prosa d’arte.’’ His first work, Prologhi (Prologues, 1916), is often considered by critics as his best. It is a collection of prose and poetic writings, structured according to a scheme that will return also in the following works, Viaggi nel tempo (Journeys in Time, 1920) and Favole e memorie (Fables and Memories, 1925). The collection comprises 12 lyrics and a prose section that has the form of a poem in prose. The Prologhi begins with the author presenting himself and his art, underlining his limits, the clashes in his soul, and his aspirations. It is an internal dialogue that already reveals some of Cardarelli’s central themes, such as the sentiment of time, solitude, and the search for an elegant language. Viaggi nel tempo, which reproposes the same mixed structure of prose and poetry, is a transitional work. Here, Cardarelli enriched the precedent selection of topics with the theme of the encounters: encounters with nature, women, or historical literary figures such as Socrates, Ibsen, and Leopardi. The journeys of the title are quests for the meaning of life, and they start from the awareness that Cardarelli found in Leopardi’s works of the flowing of time and the endless repetition of the seasons, which underline the precariousness of the self. By alternating prose and poetry the poet also moved between instinctive and meditative moments, in the second of which he submitted his soul to the control of reason. In Prologhi, viaggi, favole (Prologues, Journeys, Tales, 1929), the author attempted a new vision of the universe with a journey at the origins of time. He searched for the self through the myths of humanity that he read with a Leopardian allegorical eye. He then reproposed and reread the biblical tales since the creation of humanity, and a sense of human suffering powerfully emerges. Poesie (Poems, 1936), published in successive stages (enlarged editions appeared in 1942 and 1946), accompanied Cardarelli throughout his artistic life. In comparison with the prose writings, his lyrics appear more linear and communicative, openly opposing the hermetic poetry that was becoming established in the same years. His poems unfold with linearity and clarity, yet not without a meditative tone and stylistic elegance. They show a 386

tendency to prose, however, often allowing for long passages of landscape descriptions, portraits of women, melancholic evocations of the end of youth, and the despair for the end of a love. Through his entire artistic production, Cardarelli incessantly returned to the question of the sentiment of death, and, with it, to related themes such as the consuming action of time, life’s progression to its extreme limit, youth yielding to old age. Yet, before death, the author dwelled also on solitude, though with illusory moments of trust in friendship, as in the poem ‘‘Amicizia’’ (Friendship, 1936): Noi non ci conosciamo. Penso ai giorni che, perduti nel tempo, c’incontrammo, alla nostra incresciosa intimita`. Ci siamo sempre lasciati senza salutarci, con pentimenti e scuse da lontano. Ci siam rispettati al passo, bestie caute, cacciatori affinati, a sostenere faticosamente la nostra parte di estranei. Ritrosie disperanti, pause vertiginose e insormontabili, dicevan, nelle nostre confidenze, il contatto evitato e il vano incanto. Qualcosa ci e` sempre rimasto, amaro vanto di non ceduto ai nostri abbandoni, qualcosa ci e` sempre mancato we do not know each other. I think of the day that, lost in time, we met, our unfortunate regrettable intimacy. We always left without saying goodbye, with regrets and apologies from far away. We showed respected at the step cautious animals, keen hunters, laboriously bearing our role as strangers. Despairing reluctances, vertiginous and insurmountable pauses, they spoke, in our confidences, of the avoided contact and the vain enchantment. Something was always left, sour pride of not surrendering to our abandons something we always missed

Other recurrent themes in Cardarelli’s lyrics are disappointment, refusal of love, the departing from beloved people and things, and the ultimate conclusion, where everything is canceled out. All

VINCENZO CARDARELLI these themes are then related to the sentiment of time, which almost entirely dominates his poetry. The apprehension and uncertainty characterizing his art find an explanation in his awareness of the changing of the self, in the recognition of the inexorable passage of the seasons and life. Thus, the poet needs to travel back in time to find the origins and the explanations of human life. These are journeys both in time and space, either to physical or imaginary places, often intended to exorcize death and exalt life. Yet, his journeys to the past also presuppose returns and rediscoveries, such as the one in Il sole a picco (The High Sun, 1929), in which the author experienced the land of his origins, the Etruscan civilization, the places of his childhood, and its beloved people, getting a grasp of the self through memory. Another important theme in Cardarelli’s art is nature, not only in the descriptions of seasons, nocturnal landscapes, dawns, and sunsets, but also in the evocation of the places of his childhood, magnified through the eyes of the imagination. Without surrendering to Romanticism, the author transferred his state of mind onto nature and found a perfect consonance between humanity and the surrounding landscape, between imagination and reality. In the rich variety of topics characterizing Cardarelli’s poetry, there is however a stylistic and inventive consistency, which, as Carmine Di Biase showed, ‘‘focuses and revolves around the central theme of the sentiment of time-space, whose passing and changing mark the very rhythm of life’’ (Invito alla lettura di Vincenzo Cardarelli, 1975).

Biography Vincenzo Cardarelli (pseudonym of Nazareno Caldarelli) was born in Corneto (today Tarquinia, Viterbo) on May 1, 1887. From a modest family, he spent the first part of his life in his native town, where he attended school, though irregularly because of his father’s opposition. After his father’s death, he left Tarquinia to Rome, where he began his cultural and journalistic apprenticeship as theater critic for the Socialist newspaper Avanti!, 1906. Cardarelli met the writer Sibilla Aleramo, with whom he had a relationship until 1912. He contributed to cultural journals such as Il Marzocco, La Voce, and Lirica. After a period in Florence (1911– 1914), he settled definitely in Rome, where, in 1919, he founded, together with Riccardo Bacchelli, Emilio Cecchi, and Antonio Baldini, the literary magazine La Ronda, from where he fought for a

classicist restoration modeled on Leopardi’s example. He traveled to Russia as a reporter for the newspaper Il Tevere, 1928. During World War II and in the postwar years, Cardarelli suffered from a physical paralysis and retreated in increasing isolation, which reinforced his reputation as an unsociable person. He was awarded the Strega Prize for Villa Tarantola, 1948. He directed the periodical La Fiera Letteraria and was a theater critic for the daily Il Tempo, 1949–1955. Cardarelli died on June 18, 1959, in Rome, at the hospital of the Polyclinic from a thrombosis complicated by bronchial pneumonia. PAOLO QUAZZOLO Selected Works Collections Opere complete, edited by Giuseppe Raimondi, Milan: Mondadori, 1962.

Prose Terra genitrice, 1924. Favole e memorie, 1925. Il sole a picco, 1929. Prologhi, viaggi, favole, 1929. Parole all’orecchio, 1929. Parliamo dell’Italia, 1931. Il cielo sulle citta`, 1939. Rimorsi, 1944. Lettere non spedite, 1946. Solitario in Arcadia, 1947. Villa Tarantola, 1948. Il viaggiatore insocievole, 1953. Viaggio d’un poeta in Russia, 1954.

Poetry ‘‘Prologhi,’’ 1916. ‘‘Viaggi nel tempo,’’ 1920. ‘‘Giorni in piena,’’ 1934. ‘‘Poesie,’’ 1936; expanded edition, 1942; expanded edition, 1948. ‘‘Poesie nuove,’’ 1946. ‘‘Invettiva e altre poesie disperse,’’ edited by Bruno Blasi and Vanni Scheiwiller, 1964.

Further Reading Benevento, Aurelio, Vincenzo Cardarelli: l’opera in versi e in prosa, Naples: Loffredo, 1996. Boni, Massimiliano, Cardarelli, Montale, Tilgher: appunti per un ritratto e quattro note, Bologna: EDIM, 1980. Burdett, Charles, Vincenzo Cardarelli and His Contemporaries: Fascist Politics and Literary Culture, Oxford: Claredon Press, 1999. D’ Alerio, Dante, Vincenzo Cardarelli sindacalista rivoluzionario: politica e letteratura in Italia nel primo Novecento, Rome: Bulzoni, 2005.

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VINCENZO CARDARELLI Di Biase, Carmine, Invito alla lettura di Vincenzo Cardarelli, Milan: Mursia, 1975. Fuselli, Roberto, Sul cammino di Cardarelli, Bologna: Massimo Boni, 1985. Grasso, Giuseppe, La poesia di Vincenzo Cardarelli, Rome: Cadmo, 1982. Martellini, Luigi (editor), Vincenzo Cardarelli: il sogno, la scrittura, Naples: Edizioni scientifiche italiane, 2003. Piccioni, Leone, Cardarelliana, Florence: Panati, 1993.

Portinari, Folco, et al., ‘‘Il secondo Ottocento e il Novecento,’’ in Storia della civilta` letteraria italiana, edited by Giorgio Ba`rberi Squarotti, vol. 6, Turin: UTET, 1996. Romani, Bruno, Vincenzo Cardarelli, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1972. Vecchio, Salvatore, Vincenzo Cardarelli: l’etrusco di Tarquinia, Rome: Edizioni Italiane di Letteratura e Scienze, 1989.

GIOSUE` CARDUCCI (1835–1907) Whether considered as a late and even anachronistic chapter in the history of Italian classicism, or as an anticipation of the ‘‘dark’’ and disillusioned sensibilities of post-Romantic scapigliatura, Giosue` Carducci’s anti-Romantic poetry, written in the critical years 1857–1899, is representative of all the passions, illusions, and disillusionments inspired by the Italian Risorgimento. Raised in the provincial, dormant Tuscan Maremma and then educated in Florence at the Jesuit College of the Scolopi by the hyper-classicist and ‘‘Tuscanist’’ Father Geremia Barsottini, Carducci soon found himself caught up in the querelle of classicists and romantics that characterized Florentine intellectual life in the 1850s. As the heir of an artistic patrimony—Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and the Renaissance—that had been eclipsed by the recent cultural hegemony of Milan, Florence resisted all trends coming from the new cultural capital. The novel, above all, which Milanese Alessandro Manzoni had theorized and promoted as the Romantic genre par excellence, was denounced by the local intelligentsia as a fundamentally un-Italian literary form. Against the ‘‘foreign’’ novels of Walter Scott and Manzoni, the academies and journals of Florence advocated, with a mixture of narrowmindedness and sheer dilettantism, a return to the classical genres and forms (such as the sonnet) of the great Tuscan writers of the trecento. Under the slogan ‘‘we ought to be Italians,’’ Carducci gave intellectual coherence and poetic substance to this otherwise sterile parochialism, which, by 1856, has been institutionalized in the academic circle of the Amici Pedanti. The program of the Amici Pedanti led by Carducci had one single 388

objective, which was political and cultural at the same time. First, after the failure of the revolutions of 1848, the Amici called for a departure from radical Jacobean politics fashioned on the model of the French Revolution and proposed a more Italian type of liberal or socialist reformism. Second, from a cultural perspective, they felt the need to dispose of the Romantic experience as a whole, since it was responsible for the contamination of Italian culture with foreign models. For Carducci and his circles, the Risorgimento and the Unification were inseparable from the question of national culture. On May 18, 1856, Carducci wrote to his Pedante friend Giuseppe Chiarini complaining that the peninsula was not only occupied militarily but was also subject to a literary invasion. From this xenophobic point of view, a return to classicism meant nothing less than a resistance against all foreign yokes, and the restoration of the civic poetry of Dante and Petrarch, as well as Alfieri, Foscolo, and Leopardi. That Carducci, in his spirited defenses of national culture, often assumed that what is national equals Tuscan, remains one of the critical problems about his work. He is deeply convinced, for instance, that the question of national language, which engaged the likes of Alessandro Manzoni and Graziadio Isaia Ascoli, was but an irrelevant one. Despite all evidence to the contrary, for Carducci, Italians had one language, and that language was Tuscan. Furthermore, the Tuscan one found in Dante or Leopardi was not the highly individualized language of the Romantic bourgeoisie but a classicist encounter of aristocratic and popular language. In sum, it was national and popular.

GIOSUE` CARDUCCI Carducci’s first poetic collections, the Rime (Rhymes, 1857), or Rime di San Miniato from its place of publication, and the Juvenilia (Poems of Youth), which were published in Levia gravia (Light and Heavy, 1868), show such a mixture of professed nationalism and anti-Manzonism. In adherence to classicist precepts of imitatio, these collections can be viewed as early exercises in which the aspiring poet learns the art of the trade by emulating established models: for love poetry (Dante, Guido Cavalcanti, Petrarch), for elegy (Ugo Foscolo, Giacomo Leopardi), and for satirical invective (Giuseppe Giusti). The praise of the ancients as examples of high style and lofty civic engagement, which provides the material for many poems, is indeed explicit in the Dedication and Preface of Juvenilia. It is also a pretext to chastise contemporary ‘‘sophists and poets.’’ Thus, for Carducci, the rich apparatus of classical citations, allusions, and reminiscences represents a form of poetic militancy against the corruption of both taste and virtue in present-day Italy. Classicism becomes a cultural program that identifies poetic value with the overcoming of Romantic sentimentalism and a return to the civic morality of the poet-patriot. An interesting by-product of such an exercise in classicism is, paradoxically, linguistic hybridism: The more Carducci reverts to a classical (if not archaic) lexicon, the more he is forced to coin neologisms in order adequately portray present-day reality. In this coexistence of Homeric battlefields and cannonballs with Republican Rome and ‘‘liverpolica’’ (Liverpoolian) England, of Horace with ‘‘Voltero’’ (Voltaire), lies perhaps the most interesting aspect of Carducci’s early poems, which are an important chapter in the history of the modernization of Italian literary language. In 1860, Carducci moved from Florence to Bologna, where he was called to teach at the university. The change was an important one because it offered him the possibility to mold, as a teacher and academic, future generations of educators and poets (Giovanni Pascoli was among his students). Leaving Florence also meant a widening of his cultural horizon well beyond the Amici Pedanti. From this point on, Carducci no longer resisted foreign literary invasions and began to read the socialist Proudhon, the Romantic Sainte-Beuve, and even the European Romantics par excellence, Heinrich Heine and Victor Hugo. He was also exposed to the radical environment of Bolognese revolutionaries. For example, the ‘‘Inno a Satana’’ (Hymn to Satan, 1865), like many of the poems composed in the 1860s and published in Levia

Gravia (under the pseudonym of Enotrio Romano), reacts to the historical events that were shaping the new Italy. Carlo Pisacane’s heroic expeditions to Ponza and Sapri to free the Italian patriots from Austrian jails, and, most importantly, Giuseppe Garibaldi’s liberation of Sicily from the Bourbons in 1860, created a climate of revolutionary euphoria, in which Carducci poetically partook. In ‘‘Inno a Satana’’ (a William Blake–like allegory of Revolution and Reaction, which he would later disclaim as youthful radicalism), he singled out two forces driving European history: Satan, symbolizing health, progress, democratic freedom, and the revolutionary will of the people; and the anti-Satan, embodying the force of despotism, malady, and decadence institutionalized in the forms of political and religious power. Attacked by contemporaries not for its anticlericalism but for being antidemocratic (its populist celebration of revolutions is imbued with obscure classicist allusions), the ‘‘Inno a Satana’’ sets the tone of youthful rebellion, maudit Satanism, Baudelairian posing, and moralistic denunciation of petty bourgeois mentality. In other poems more overt is the sense that Satan’s work is unstoppable, and that the poetry of revolution, in the 1860s, has decayed into the prose of a mediocre political reality. Levia Gravia is perhaps the most ambivalent of Carducci’s collections: along with a certain euphoria for Italy’s Unification, there is a profound sense of disillusionment, exemplary of an entire generation, for the incompleteness of the Unification (papal Rome was annexed only in 1870). Carducci’s dismay at the inability of the Italians, whose virtues he had sung in the Juvenilia, to achieve anything without international negotiations and foreign aide, is genuine. Giambi ed epodi (Iambics and Epodes, 1882), collecting poems from 1867 to 1879, reaffirms Carducci’s civic indignation and social denunciation already present in Levia gravia but also begins, from its very title, a new epoch of metric experimentation. The iambics Carducci had in mind were those of Greek and Latin classical satiric poetry, notably Archilocus and Horace. The term ‘‘epodes’’ alludes to the rhythm and prosody of ancient satire. The overall satiric tone attests to Carducci’s continued faith in the loftiest ideals of civic life and to his frustration at a less heroic reality that fails to meet his high standards. While still indebted to the model of civic and even militant poetry, Giambi ed epodi introduces a new dimension to Carducci’s poetics of disillusionment: the impotence of poetry to change or even influence 389

GIOSUE` CARDUCCI historical reality. But what the poet could not accomplish, indeed il popolo (the people) can: This is truly the leitmotif of the collection. Carducci’s popolo is endowed with the whole repertoire of Romantic virtues: uncontaminated instincts and superior ideals, always ready to fight for a new cause, always ready for martyrdom and heroism. It is utterly committed and selfless. Carducci, who was once accused of writing about revolutions but never participating in one, excused himself on the account of having to feed his family. The antithesis of such popular virtues is of course Italy’s hegemonic ruling class, the despicable bourgeoisie of parliamentary negotiations and half measures, but also, and more importantly, the intellectuals, like Carducci himself, who failed to lead the people to their just historical nemesis. As Giambi ed epodi concludes with the poet’s mea culpa, the annexation of Rome and the normalization of the political situation seem to relieve Carducci from his defiant civic responsibilities. The satirical Muse made room for a more docile, homely Muse. In a letter to his old friend Chiarini dated 10 December 1871, Carducci communicated his intention to leave satirical poetry behind in favor of a pure form of art for art’s sake. As a matter of fact, by disposing of the tone of invective that had defined Giambi ed epodi, the poet also relinquished the mythical Frankenstein he had contributed to create: that is, the people. Convinced by now that the Italian Unification process had exhausted its historical course, Carducci believed that internal peace should be the next goal. But internal peace was jeopardized by peasants asking for the longpromised redistribution of lands and church estates; by workers’ strikes in Milan and Turin; by the formation of a revolutionary International; and by the panic caused by news of the Paris Commune spreading in Italy. It is therefore not surprising that the diagnosis was that the people should be stopped and the bourgeoisie protected. Carducci turned monarchist. He wrote a poem entitled ‘‘Alla regina d’Italia’’ (To the Queen of Italy. 1878) and even a curious essay, ‘‘Eterno femminino regale’’ (The Eternal Regal Feminine, 1882), which claimed that the monarchy was, in Italy, the only ‘‘realized ideal.’’ The transformation of the revolutionary poet into an institutional one, and the shift from invective to more elegant tones, ensured the possibility of Carducci becoming the literary giant, the best seller of the new Italy. In these years, working-class crowds cheered him, the bourgeois bought his books, and the nobility courted his presence in its salons: Carducci had become a 390

national icon—responsible for shaping the cultural and poetic physiognomy of a unified country. Rime nuove (New Lyrics, 1887) and the third edition of Odi barbare (Barbaric Odes, 1893) collect the poems written during these years of celebrity. Conscious of his role as national poet and cultural conscience of Italy, Carducci sought inspiration from the once-abhorred foreign literatures. Along with the usual classical authors (Archilocus, Sappho, Anacreon), the Rime nuove and the Odi barbare reveal the poet’s more modern literary preoccupations: Charles Baudelaire and Edgar Allan Poe for their bleakness, Leconte de Lisle for the myth of barbarism, and then Heine, Goethe, and Hugo for the tone of classicist sentimentalism. Although such opening to European literatures widened the scope of Carducci’s poetry, both the Rime nuove and the Odi barbare are hardly experimental. Long past was the time when Carducci searched for his own poetic voice: The poems composed after 1870 show the confidence of a poet consciously and solemnly planning, without taking too many risks, his ultimate canonization. Carducci’s last collection, Rime e ritmi (Rhymes and Rhythms, 1899), is stylistically a composite of all preceding ones, and it combines traditional verses reminiscent of Juvenilia with the more experimental classicist meters of Giambi ed epodi and Odi barbare. Thematically, this new collection is characterized by a radicalization of Carducci’s monarchic reactionary nationalism that may well irritate even the most conservative of modern readers. A conviction in Italy’s historic mission was at the basis of his decision to poetically celebrate the most important episodes of Italian history. In these poems, the Risorgimento becomes myth, and all the frictions between realists and revolutionaries, republicans and monarchists (let alone the invectives against Italian quiescence) that characterized the history of the Risorgimento are set aside to make room for mere hagiography. Along with the celebration of popular heroes who sacrificed their lives for the nation, Rime e ritmi introduces the new (for Italian poetry) topic of colonialism. Written before the defeat of Adowa, Ethiopia, in 1896, these poems about Italian colonial glories exercised some influence on Gabriele D’Annunzio. Carducci stopped writing poetry long before his death. Already Rime e ritmi did not indicate any new direction for Carducci’s poetry except the revisitation of old meters and modes. Much of its success seems to derive from its anachronistic tone: It must have sounded, especially after Adowa, like a reminiscence from the days of Risorgimento heroics.

GIOSUE` CARDUCCI Carducci’s prose production is gathering particular interest today as an example of an ‘‘Italian style’’ of eloquence that defined the institutional rhetoric (public speeches, eulogies, praises of heroes, commemorative plaques) of post-1870 Italy until, and arguably past, the Fascist era. Along with epigraphs and the celebratory pieces, characterized by an archaic and baroque language, worth mentioning are the political and militant pamphlets, and the pieces of literary criticism, in which Carducci distanced himself not only from Manzoni’s Romanticism but also from the historical Hegelianism of Francesco De Sanctis. Read in postwar Italy as a typical document of positivist criticism, reevaluated in the 1970s for its prescient attention to formal values, and praised in the 1990s for its attention to geographical and regional differences, Carducci’s critical writings are at times rather naı¨ve, especially when compared to those of De Sanctis. They remain, nonetheless, extremely important to understand the formation of a generation of writers and critics (the so-called northern philologists versus De Sanctis’s Neapolitan school) that Carducci taught in Bologna between 1860 and 1904. Finally, especially instructive are Carducci’s book reviews, which remain perhaps the highest achievement in the cynical art of the stroncatura, the savage trashing of both book and writer.

Biography Giosue Carducci was born in Val di Castello (Lucca) on July 27, 1835; the family moved to Bolgheri (Livorno), in the Tuscan Maremma, 1838. His father Michele, suspected of revolutionary activities, moved to Bolgheri, 1848. In Florence, Carducci attended the College of the Scolopi, 1849. He became a founding member of the classicist Accademia dei Filomusi, 1852, and studied at the Universita` Normale Superiore of Pisa, 1853–1956. He was active in the controversies between classics and romantics and constituted the group of the ‘‘Amici Pedanti,’’ 1856. He taught rhetoric at the high school of San Miniato (Florence), where he published his first collection of poems, 1857. Carducci married his cousin Elvira Menicucci, 1859. The Minister of Education offered him a professorship in ‘‘Italian Eloquence’’ at the University of Bologna, 1860, but he was fired from the University of Bologna for alleged conspiratorial activities, 1867. He was reinstated at the university and published Levia gravia, 1868. His son Dante died on November 9, 1870. He conducted an epistolary correspondence with Carolina Cristofori-Piva,

whom the poet addressed with the more classical name of Lidia, 1871, and had an affair with Lidia, 1872. Carducci met the royal family in Bologna, 1878. He collaborated with the philo-monarchic journal Fanfulla della domenica, 1879. He met Annie Vivanti, his last love affair, 1890. He was contested by his students at the University of Bologna for his radicalized monarchism, 1891. He defended Francesco Crispi’s colonial policies even after the Italian defeat at Adowa, 1894–1895. He published Rime e ritmi, 1899. He retired from the University of Bologna, 1904 and was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, 1906. Carducci died in Bologna on February 16, 1907. ROBERTO M. DAINOTTO Selected Works Collections Edizione nazionale delle opere di Giosue` Carducci, 30 vols., Bologna: Zanichelli, 1935–1940. Lettere, 20 vols., Bologna: Zanchelli, 1938–1957. Selected verse, translated by David H. Higgins, Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1994.

Poetry ‘‘Rime,’’ 1857. ‘‘Levia gravia,’’ 1868. ‘‘Odi barbare,’’ 1877. ‘‘Giambi ed epodi,’’ 1882. ‘‘Nuove odi barbare,’’ 1882. ‘‘C ¸ a ira: settembre 1792,’’ 1883. ‘‘Rime nuove,’’ 1887; as The New Lyrics of Giosue` Carducci, translated by William Fletcher Smith, 1942. ‘‘Terze odi barbare,’’ 1889. ‘‘Odi barbare,’’ 1893; as Odi barbare, translated by William Fletcher Smith, 1950. ‘‘Rime e ritmi,’’ 1899.

Other Prose critiche, edited by Giovanni Falaschi, 1987. Carteggio, ottobre 1888–aprile 1904, edited by Torquato Barbieri, 2000.

Further Reading Binni, Walter, Carducci e altri saggi, Turin: Einaudi, 1960. Caccia, Ettore, Poesia e ideologia per Carducci, Brescia: Paideia, 1970. Contarino, Rosario, and Rosa Maria Monastra, Carducci e il tramonto del classicismo, Bari: Laterza, 1975. Croce, Benedetto, Giosue` Carducci: studio critico, Bari: Laterza, 1920. Della Torre, Renato, Invito alla lettura di Giosue` Carducci, Milan: Mursia, 1985. Flora, Francesco, La poesia e la prosa di Giosue` Carducci, Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1959. Getto, Giovanni, Carducci e Pascoli, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1957.

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GIOSUE` CARDUCCI Masini, Pier Carlo, Poeti della rivolta: da Carducci a Lucini, Milan: Rizzoli, 1978. Panzini, Alfredo, and Renato Serra, Carducci, Santarcangelo di Romagna: Fara, 1994. Pascoli, Giovanni, Commemorazione di Giosue` Carducci nella nativa Pietrasanta, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1907. Pasquazi, Silvio, Antimanzonismo del Carducci e altri saggi, Florence: Le Monnier, 1966. Pavarini, Stefano, Carducci, Palermo: Palumbo, 2003. Piromalli, Antonio, Introduzione a Carducci, Bari: Laterza, 1988. Russo, Luigi, Carducci senza retorica, Bari: Laterza, 1970. Scalia, Euge`ne, Carducci: His Critics and Translators in England and America 1881–1932, New York: Vanni, 1937. Toppani, Innocente, Carducci e il mondo latino, Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 1973.

ODI BARBARE, 1893 Poetry by Giosue` Carducci

Odi barbare (Barbaric Odes) were initially published in three separate volumes as Odi barbare (1877), Nuove Odi barbare (New Barbaric Odes, 1882), and Terze Odi barbare (Third Book of Barbaric Odes, 1889). In 1893, Carducci restructured these volumes into a single one, divided into two parts. Composed at a time when he was preparing an edition of the Rime nuove (New Rhymes, 1887), the Odi barbare comprise many of the themes and concerns of his previous collection, most notably, the poet’s adherence to a classicist model of poetry understood as civic engagement. The novelty of the Odi barbare is stylistic. These poems represent an attempt to return to classical meters and transpose them into modern verse. The ancient system of versification, typically Greek or Latin, organized the verse according to the length, and not, as is normative in modern poetry, according to the rhythmic accentuation of the syllables. By now well secured within the boundaries of official culture, Carducci was confident that he could take some formal risks. Whereas in the Rime nuove he had conformed to the taste of the intellectual e´lites and his classicism was perceived as a continuation of the poetic discourse advanced 392

by Ugo Foscolo and Giacomo Leopardi, in the Odi barbare, Carducci felt that he no longer needed to abide to any models. He abandoned the blank verse of Foscolo and the canzone of Leopardi, recapturing instead the architectural complexity of Petrarch’s canzone as well as the rhythmic experimentation of classical lyrics. Thus the Odi barbare attest to and call for a new reform of the classic tradition. They are so entitled, with a clear allusion to Leconte de Lisle’s Poe`mes barbares (1862), because they experiment in adapting ancient odes into Romance languages, born from the corruption of Latin. For Carducci, such a conversion would have been viewed as ‘‘barbaric’’ by the ancients. However, his position is not that of a naı¨ve return to a mythical past but rather a critical operation that involves reviving and confronting the classics with the demands of present-day poetic experimentations. Although some models are easy to discern (Horace, Gabriello Chiabrera, and the neoclassic Giovanni Fantoni), this collection includes some of Carducci’s more original and memorable lyrics. This return to classical meters also has social and political implications. Carducci assimilated Greek metrics not by direct imitation of Pindar and Sappho but through the mediation of Horace, in whose style he identified the model suited for unified Italy. Thus it is Rome, not Athens, that inspires the nationalist myth of Carducci’s classicism; and to Rome he devoted an impressive number of the poems. After the dissemblement of the Papal States and their annexation to the kingdom of Italy in 1870, the myth of Rome was a central preoccupation for the new nation. Carducci participated in such epochal discussions by pitting the myth of the great empire of the past against the decay of the present. Albeit liberated, Rome was no longer what it ought to be. His poetry entered into a more conservative phase. In ‘‘Alle fonti del Clitumno’’ (At the Sources of the Clitumno), he depicted emblematically the old happiness of a pastoral world of peasants and simple sentiments corrupted by the ruling of the Catholic Church. Nationalism and anticlericalism resurface in ‘‘Nell’annuale della fondazione di Roma,’’ written for the celebrations of the 2,630th anniversary of the founding of Rome (1877). For Carducci, the pontiff was accountable for the loss of all the ancient glories, and these poems are reminiscent of his polemical secularism in ‘‘Inno a Satana’’ (Hymn to Satan, 1865) as well as the coeval attacks of Italian patriots against the Pope’s ‘‘betrayal’’ of the Risorgimento. With its

GIOSUE` CARDUCCI preaching of asceticism and renunciation, Christianity was primarily responsible for the decline of Roman civilization. ‘‘Dinanzi alle Terme di Caracalla’’ (Before the Baths of Caracalla), a poem in sapphic stanzas, translates this discrepancy between the grandeur of past and the miseries of the present into the Romantic figure of the ruins: What remains of the Empire is nothing but a heap of rubble, a site where ‘‘uomini novelli’’ (new men) desecrated the monuments of antiquity, now mere subject matter for a poetic archeology of what no longer exists. This recurrent feeling of belonging to a great civilization now gone, of being excluded from a heroic past, transformed the poet into an elegist living the contradictions of his own epoch as a formal dichotomy between old meters and modern barbarisms. Old meters, like ancient civilizations, cannot be fully restored; and the poet’s experimental e´lan is a constant negotiation of past and present. Compared to the Rime nuove, the Odi barbare reveal a sort of Romantic melancholic disenchantment, which intensifies in the second part of the collection, when the poet focused more and more on his sorrow rather than on the larger canvas of public history. Whereas in the Rime nuove Carducci could still find shelter from the present in the memories of the uncontaminated Tuscan Maremma of his youth, in the Odi barbare no recollection of Rome, or any other place for what matters, can prevent the observation of its present corruption. Reality is nothing more that the perception of a world devoid of meaning; a world at its twilight. Landscapes become funereal, dark and frigid: for example, in ‘‘Nevicata’’ (Snowfall), where the premonitory signs of death are highlighted by the winter storm; or in ‘‘Alla stazione in una mattina d’autunno’’ (At the Station, on an Autumn Morning), composed in alcaic stanzas, where the poet describes the departure of his beloved on a cold, rainy morning at the Bologna railway station. Both poems evoke the gloomy atmosphere that underlines much northern Romantic poetry. In Odi barbare, the sense of a larger epochal disillusionment coincides with a more intimate sense of melancholia: Carducci, the late descendant of a once-glorious race, experienced the sadness of a man who has reached the winter of his life. His ‘‘barbaric’’ odes attest to the epochal distance between the old tone of the epic and the modern mood of angst, grief, and spleen. The classical model of civic poetry became, at times, mere self-commiseration. ROBERTO M. DAINOTTO

Editions First editions: Odi barbare, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1877; Nuove odi barbare, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1882; Terze odi barbare, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1889; collected as Odi barbare, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1893. Critical editions: Odi barbare, edited by Gianni A. Papini, Milan: Fondazione Arnoldo e Alberto Mondadori, 1988. Translations: as Odi barbare, translated by William Fletcher Smith, New York: S.F. Vanni, 1950

Further Reading Allan, Alberto, Dizionario delle voci, delle forme e dei versi notevoli contenuti nelle Odi barbare e in Rime e ritmi di G. Carducci, Pavia: Mattei, 1913. Caruso, Carlo, ‘‘Metri barbari, verso libero,’’ in Poe´tiques barbares/Poetiche barbare, edited by Juan Rigoli and Carlo Caruso, Ravenna: Longo, 1998. Ferrari, Demetrio, Commento delle Odi barbare di Giosue` Carducci, 3 vols., Bologna: Zanichelli, 1919–1922. Giordani, Maria Anna, Le Odi barbare di Giosue` Carducci, Mantua: CITEM, 1968. Lopriore, Giuseppe Italo, ‘‘Saggio d’una lettura critica delle ‘Odi barbare,’’’ Preludio, 1(1950), 1–47. Papini, Gianni A., Osservazioni sugli autografi delle ‘‘Odi barbare’’ carducciane, Florence: Sansoni, 1964. Petrini, Mario, Letture delle prime Odi barbare (1877), Pisa: Libreria goliardica, 1962. Petrini, Mario, Postille al Carducci barbaro, Messina and Florence: G. d’Anna, 1963. Piromalli, Antonio, ‘‘Giosue` Carducci: Le ‘Odi barbare,’’’ Cristallo, 30:3(1988), 19–36. Robecchi, Franco, Carducci, poeta barbaro, Milan: Cooperativa libraria I.U.L.M., 1981.

RIME NUOVE, 1887 Poetry by Giosue` Carducci

Published in the heyday of Giosue` Carducci’s popular and critical fame, the Rime nuove (New Lyrics) assembles poems previously included in other collections or that appeared in literary journals. By then Carducci was conscious of his new role as the bard of a nation. The title alludes not so much to newly composed poems, but rather to their selection and critical arrangement carefully orchestrated by Carducci himself: These 105 poems, divided into nine books and ranging from 1861 to 1887, represent a kind of autobiography in verse, the story of a 393

GIOSUE` CARDUCCI poetic education; an ambitious project aimed at providing an authoritative manifesto of his poetics. The collection enjoyed instant success, and, with the Odi barbare, became the capstone of Carducci’s oeuvre. Rime nuove opens, significantly, with an Anachreontic ode entitled ‘‘Alla rima’’ (To Rhyme), in which Carducci proclaimed his continued faith in the rhythmic pacing of classical vernacular poetry and attacked modern experiments in the area of blank verse. Other poems present the author as the heir of a classical, more specifically Italian tradition that harks back to the Tuscan Middle Ages and humanism: among them, ‘‘Al sonetto’’ (To the Sonnet), ‘‘Omero’’ (Homer), ‘‘Virgilio’’ (Virgil), ‘‘Dante,’’ and ‘‘Commentando il Petrarca’’ (Commenting on Petrarch). Carducci also wanted to be remembered as an innovator capable of revitalizing old meters and rhymes. Then he chose poems with a modern sensibility, which display a more personal inspiration: the sentimental ‘‘Pianto antico’’ (Ancient Lament) and ‘‘Funere mersit acerbo’’ (Plunged in Bitter Death), in which he lamented the sudden passing of his 3-year-old son, Dante, and painfully summoned his dead brother to welcome the soul of his little boy; the gothic ‘‘Notte d’inverno’’ (Winter Night); the melancholic ‘‘Nostalgia’’; and the picturesque ‘‘Traversando la maremma toscana’’ (Crossing the Tuscan Maremma). Whereas earlier collections were bound by a strict adherence to conventional models, the Rime nuove proposes a lighter version of classicism, tempered by Romantic sentimentalism. Though ancient lyric genres (sonnet, ode, and canzone) are still predominant, modern forms (such as ballad) were also included. Arguably the most modern of Carducci’s compositions remains ‘‘Davanti San Guido’’ (In front of San Guido), a masterpiece of intimate and solipsistic sentimentalism beginning with the poet traveling on a train in the midst of a bucolic countryside after meeting his beloved Lina. Nostalgia for the abandoned lover soon turns into nostalgia for his carefree childhood. The translation of melancholic sentiment onto the soothing beauty of nature, which was at the basis of the Romantic experience of Heine and Wordsworth, is a striking novelty for Italian lyrics and would later inspire Gabriele D’Annunzio and Giovanni Pascoli. By the time Carducci published the Rime nuove, he had politically shifted from a distinctively

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republican sensibility to one of monarchic conservatism; however, he selected a few poems written earlier in the spirit of the liberal and Jacobin ideals. One of 12 sonnets devoted to the events of 1792, ‘‘C ¸ a ira!’’ (It Will Happen), titled after the songmanifesto of the French Revolution, ignited heated discussions in 1887. Carducci felt compelled to answer his critics with an apologetic essay, also titled ‘‘C ¸ a ira!,’’ in which he assured that the poem was just a poem and not a revolutionary anthem. The ninth and last book is devoted to a single poem, ‘‘Congedo’’ (Farewell), in which Carducci celebrated himself as an exemplary prophet-poet: Neither courtier nor clown, the poetic genius forged artifacts out of humankind’s loves, memories, nostalgias, hopes, and disillusionments. This poem, an apt conclusion to the Rime nuove, is a synthesis of Carducci’s poetics. ROBERTO M. DAINOTTO Editions First edition: Rime nuove, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1887. Critical edition: Rime nuove, edited by Pietro Paolo Trompeo and Giambattista Salinari, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1961. Translation: as The New Lyrics of Giosue` Carducci, translated by William Fletcher Smith, Colorado Springs: Privately printed, 1942.

Further Reading Baldacci, Luigi, ‘‘Motivazioni oscure di una poesia troppo chiara,’’ Bimestre, 2:1(1970), 1–5. De Michelis, Eurialo, ‘‘Il ‘silenzio verde,’ o della sinestesia in Carducci,’’ Nuova antologia, 493(1965), 463–482. Gorni, Guglielmo, ‘‘Il melograno, l’asino e il cardo (su due ‘Rime nuove’ del Carducci),’’ Studi di filologia italiana, 50(1992), 183–195. Jeannet, Angela M., ‘‘Nell’officina carducciana,’’ Italica, 43:3(1966), 264–275. Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo, ‘‘Una lettura di ‘Pianto antico’ (con un’appendice),’’ Rivista di letterature moderne e comparate, 57:2(2004), 169–178. Papini, Gianni A., ‘‘Ipotesi e realta` per dieci primavere elleniche,’’ Studi di filologia italiana, 32(1974), 205–282. Ruggiero, Gerardo, ‘‘Tempo, natura e storia nel ‘Comune rustico’ di Giosue` Carducci,’’ Critica letteraria, 16:1 (1988), 141–150. Salinari, Giambattista, ‘‘Storia ed interpretazione della lirica carducciana ‘Brindisi funebre,’’’ Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 135(1958), 304–316.

ANNIBAL CARO

ANNIBAL CARO (1507–1566) Annibal Caro was a poet, playwright, translator of Latin and Greek, and diplomat who perhaps most vividly realized sixteenth-century classicism. A cleric and courtier, Caro was also the protagonist in one of the greatest literary quarrels of the Renaissance. The young Caro’s friendship with the humanist man of letters Benedetto Varchi introduced him to the literary circle of Giovanni Gaddi, clerk of the Apostolic Chamber and a patron of the publication of classical and contemporary works, to whom he became private secretary. Through Gaddi, he made the acquaintance of literary figures such as Cardinal Bembo and Benvenuto Cellini and became a member of the Roman Accademia dei Virtuosi, a society of literati and papal secretaries who showed off their technical ability through literary dialogues. In the company of the academy, Caro penned at least three burlesque parodies and became well known for his comic writing. Gli straccioni (The Scruffy Scoundrels, 1582), Caro’s only published play, seems to integrate the author’s comic sensibility and linguistic interests with ‘‘realistic’’ aspects of life in contemporary Rome. The structure of the play combines elements of erudite comedy and poesia bernesca, a burlesque satirical style (named after Francesco Berni) that reverses conventional literary models and portrays deformed images of reality and social values. Three loosely connected plots are delineated: the story of the two straccioni, based on well-known Roman citizens, brothers Giovanni and Battista, who don the clothing of beggars after their unsuccessful lawsuit against the Bank of San Giorgio; the love story, derived from Achilles Tatius’s Greek romance Leucippe and Cleitophon, of Tindaro and his Giulietta, who is abducted and assumed dead, only to reappear before Tindaro is forced to marry another woman; and finally the revelation of Argentina as the long-lost niece of the straccioni. The secrecy with which Caro treated the play’s production and the jealousy with which he thereafter guarded it from publication have caused some scholars to suggest that the play served a purpose of more than mere entertainment. Pier Luigi Farnese, son of Pope Paul III, commissioned Caro to write the play upon employment as his private secretary

in 1543 and seems to have taken an active role in its development. The result is a masterpiece in Tuscan vernacular prose fulfilling all of the expectations in the tradition of the commedia erudita but with a propagandistic subtext, promoting specific enterprises by the Farnese family. The play is set in a new Rome under the Farnese reforms in which the ‘‘hero’’ and the only rational character in the play, the attorney Messer Rossello, acts as representative of the Farnese regime and restorer of order. Scholars further suggest an allusion in the title to the 1531 revolt of the straccioni, a reference to the poor citizens of Lucca in defense of whom Caro’s former employer, Monsignor Guidiccioni, wrote a well-known speech, the Orazione ai nobili di Lucca (Speech to the Noblemen of Lucca, 1557). Diplomatic assignments and the assassination of Pier Luigi prevented Caro from staging Gli straccioni. Long after his patron’s death, however, the author repeatedly refused permission for the play to be copied or performed. His insistence that its moment had passed, testified by several letters, suggests the existence of an outdated political aim. It was published posthumously in 1582, and only in 1942 was it edited according to its original manuscript (Vaticano Urbinate 764). Caro’s poetry is important for its stylistic and linguistic experimentation and is said to exemplify the height of the development of the verso sciolto, or blank verse, in Italy. His place in poetic history, however, is perhaps secured by his well-known antagonism toward the critic Ludovico Castelvetro (1505–1571) in one of the greatest literary and philological disputes of the sixteenth century. The dispute is centered around the poem ‘‘Venite all’ombra dei gran gigli d’oro’’ (Come to the shade of the great golden lilies), one among the 100 sonnets and five canzoni in a collection commissioned by Alessandro Farnese in 1553 in praise of the French house of Valois. Castelvetro criticized not only Annibal Caro’s lack of Petrarchan style but also his use of non-Tuscan and unconventional or vernacular linguistic elements. Incensed by this critique, Caro launched a bitter attack against Castelvetro, writing a defense of linguistic invention in the Apologia degli Accademici di Banchi contra messer Lodovico Castelvetro (Apology of the Banchi 395

ANNIBAL CARO Academics against Ludovico Castelvetro, 1558), a series of texts in which fictitious characters emphasize the importance of enriching literary Tuscan with components of the spoken language. The popular volume was reprinted three times by the original publisher in Parma and later printed in Florence, Milan, Venice, and Turin. Castelvetro replied with Ragioni d’alcune cose segnate nella canzone d’Annibal Caro: Venite a l’ombra de gran gigli d’oro (Argument on Some Things Noted in the Canzone of Annibal Caro, 1559). Caro, greatly insulted by the criticism, accused Castelvetro of heresy and denounced him to Church authorities. Although the accusations were found false, Castelvetro left his native Modena and eventually Italy. After Caro’s death, Benedetto Varchi further defended his position in L’Ercolano, subtitled Dialogo nel quale si ragiona generalmente delle lingue e in particolare della fiorentina e della toscana (Ercolano: Dialogue in Which One Argues Generally about Languages, in Particular about Florentine and Tuscan, 1570). In addition to his legacy as a poet and playwright, Caro left behind a number of translations and a vast collection of letters. A talented translator, he enjoyed exploiting the expressive possibilities of the vernacular and adroitly transformed the languages of antiquity into some of the most classical poetry in Italian. His earliest translation, written between 1537 and 1539, was Longus’s Gli amori pastorali di Dafni e Cloe (The Pastoral Love of Daphnis and Chloe, 1784), followed by Aristotle’s Rettorica (Rhetorics, 1570) and the works of Saints Cyprian and Gregory Nazianzen. Undoubtedly his most famous translation is the Aeneid of Virgil. Written in hendecasyllables and published in 1581, Caro’s Aeneid endured until the twentieth century as a standard text in Italian schools. The epistles, published in two volumes entitled Lettere familiari (Familiar Letters, 1573–1575), provide a detailed history of the period, painting a colorful portrait of life in sixteenth-century Italy. The 800 letters document the complex and at times artificial social relationships in the writer’s daily life.

Biography Annibal Caro was born in Civitanova Marche (Macerata), June 19, 1507; his father was an apothecary and clothes merchant, his mother a noblewoman. He moved to Florence to study, 1525, and became private secretary to Giovanni Gaddi, 1529. He served Monsignor Guidiccioni, Bishop of Frossombone, 1542, and became secretary to Pier Luigi 396

Farnese, 1543. Gli straccioni was completed, June 28, 1543. Caro was appointed administrator of justice in Piacenza, 1545, but he fled Piacenza upon assassination of Pier Luigi Farnese (1547) when rumors that he was in collusion surfaced. He moved to Rome and became secretary to Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, 1547. He engaged in a literary dispute with Lodovico Castelvetro, 1553– 1560. He retired to his own villa near Frascati, 1563. Caro died in Rome, November 20, 1566. ERIN M. MCCARTHY See also: Ludovico Castelvetro Selected Works Collections Opere, 8 vols., Milan: Classici italiani, 1807–1812. Opere, edited by Vittorio Turri, Bari: Laterza, 1912. Opere, edited by Stefano Jacomuzzi, Turin: Unione tipografico-editrice torinese, 1974.

Poetry ‘‘Commento di ser Agresto da Ficaruolo sopra la prima ficata del Padre Siceo,’’ 1539. ‘‘Nasea o vero diceria de’ nasi,’’ 1539. ‘‘La statua della Foia ovvero di Santa Nafissa. Diceria al Sesto Re della Virtu`,’’ 1547. ‘‘Rime,’’ 1569.

Play Gli straccioni 1582; as The Scraffy Scoundrels, translated by Massimo Ciavolella and Donald Beecher, 1980.

Other Apologia degli accademici di banchi di Roma contra messer Lodovico Castelvetro, 1558. Lettere familiari, 1573–1575.

Translations Aristotle, Rettorica, 1570. Virgil, Eneide, 1581. Longus, Gli amori pastorali di Dafni e Cloe, 1784.

Further Reading Aurigemma, Marcello, Studi sulla letteratura teatrale ed eroica del Rinascimento, Rome: A. Signorelli, 1968. Battaglia, Salvatore, ‘‘Tradizione e attualita` nella coscienza linguistica di Annibal Caro,’’ Lingua parlata e lingua scritta: Convegno di studi 9–11 novembre 1967, Palermo: Centro di studi filologici e linguistici, 1970. Ferroni, Giulio, ‘‘Mutazione’’ e ‘‘Riscontro’’ nel teatro di Machiavelli e altri saggi sulla commedia del Cinquecento, Rome: Bulzoni, 1972. Greco, Aulo, Annibal Caro, cultura e poesia, Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1950. Olivieri, Caterina, L’Eneide del Caro, Turin: Paravia, 1965.

LUIGI CARRER Phillips-Court, Kristin, ‘‘Emblematic Narrative in Caro’s Gli straccioni (with an Eye to Titian’s Paul III),’’ Italica 81:2(2004), 184–199. Samuels, Richard S., ‘‘An Addition to Annibal Caro’s Lettere familiari: Notes on a Letter to Benedetto Varchi,’’ Renaissance Quarterly, 27:3(1974), 300–305.

Sarri, Francesco, Annibal Caro: saggio critico, Milan: L’Universita` del Sacro Cuore, 1933. Ward, Michael T., ‘‘Benedetto Varchi and the Social Dimensions of Language,’’ Italica, 68:2(1991), 176–194.

LUIGI CARRER (1801–1850) Polymath, romantic, Venetian: Luigi Carrer joined the cultural and political movements of his era through his intense activity as a writer, philologist, biographer, and translator, but above all for his poetry and his work in theater, for which he is most widely known. The theater was the first object of his study. At 16, after having heard the famous Tuscan improviser Tommaso Sgricci in Venice, he attempted to emulate him. He appeared at the Accademia degli Invulnerabili in two improvised tragedies, Saul (1818) and La morte di Agrippina (The Death of Agrippina, 1818). Success gained him enormous fame and countless invitations for similar performances in the houses of noble families and academies. He became famous at the impromptus held at the salon of Isabella Teotochi Albrizzi (1760–1836), where he improvised a tragedy on the theme of Medea in front of Sgricci in person; another performance was witnessed with enthusiasm by Byron; his Atalia was hailed by Luigi Pezzoli (1772– 1834) as a return to the tragic form of the Greeks in the light of the poetry of Vittorio Alfieri. Of these performances, subsequently repudiated by the author, along with the two years of tourne´es throughout the Veneto region in which he was acclaimed as ‘‘Ovid brought back to life,’’ only La Morte di Agag (The Death of Agag) remains. It was included in his first collection of verse, Saggio di poesie (Essay of Poems, 1819) along with comments on the failure of La sposa di Messina (The Wife of Messina), a pie`ce written in imitation of the tragedy of the same name by Schiller and staged in Venice in 1821 by actor-impresario Gustavo Modena (1803– 1861). Disenchanted with the theater, Carrer would only write one more complete tragedy, Giulia Cappelletti (1837), a weak rewriting of Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare and a short story by Luigi Da Porto, that was eventually published in the

anthology Il teatro contemporaneo italiano e straniero (The Italian and Foreign Contemporary Theater, 1837–1839). L’ultimo colloquio di Antonio Foscarini (The Last Conversation of Antonio Foscarini) remained unfinished, although he did publish a few scenes from it in 1839. His interest turned to biographical studies, such as the three-volume Vita di Carlo Goldoni con notizie della commedia italiana prima di lui (Life of Carlo Goldoni with Notes on Italian Comedy before Him, 1824–1825), in reality a compendium of Goldoni’s own Me´moires (1784). The Vita contained a superficial classification of the works of the famous Venetian playwright as ‘‘familiari, romanzesche, popolari, eroiche’’ (familiar, romantic, popular, heroic) and a dissertation on the theater taken from the monumental work by Pietro Napoli Signorelli (1731– 1815). Despite its excesses, such as the criticism of Goldoni’s language as ‘‘la piu` abbietta e trasandata che dare si possa’’ (the most contemptible and slovenly to be used), the work was the first mournful defense of Italian dramaturgy against the European ‘‘nordiche novita`’’ (Nordic novelties). His classical education, his admiration for Vittorio Alfieri and Ugo Foscolo, and his acquaintance with Vincenzo Monti did not prevent his reacting to the romantic influences reaching him from Europe through Bu¨rger, the early Schiller, and Byron himself. His work became more and more a personal me´lange of classicism, innovation, and nationalistic ideals. For example, he composed Clotaldo (1826), a short story in blank verse on the Venice revolt against foreign dominion; the first of 15 unfinished poems of La fata vergine (The Virgin Fairy), which was published in 1840 but written in 1827; a small volume of Poesie per nozze Papadopoli-Mosconi (Wedding Poems for Papadopoli-Mosconi, 1831). He revealed himself 397

LUIGI CARRER as a poet to a wider public with the publication of 14 Ballate (Ballads, 1834), some of which had already appeared the previous year in the periodical Il Gondoliere (formerly La Moda), which Carrer had transformed into a new literary journal, frequently filled with civil and patriotic invective, which enjoyed a great following. Carrer’s successes are also attributable to his having been one of the first to introduce the romantic ‘‘ballad’’ into Italy, with its historical, legendary subject matter and polymetric structure. It is not by chance that, at a time when his creative vein and civic inspiration are becoming more reconciled, he wrote his best prose work, Anello di sette gemme o Venezia e la sua storia. Considerazioni e fantasie di Luigi Carrer (The Ring of Seven Jewels or Venice and Its History. Considerations and Fantasies by Luigi Carrer, 1837), in which he narrated the history of Venice through its seven most brilliant jewels: Giustina Renier Michie`l, Catterina Corner, Gaspara Stampa, Bianca Cappello, Eufemia Giustinian, Irene da Spilimbergo and Elena Corner Piscopia. Carrer’s activity as a critic and philologist, aimed at a revival or ‘‘risorgimento’’ of national culture, also deserves attention. After a youthful edition of Petrach’s Rime (Rhymes, 1826) and the compilation, together with the Abbot Fortunato Federici, of the Dizionario della lingua italiana (Dictionary of the Italian Language, 1827–1830), Carrer set to work on an old, titanic project, a ‘‘Biblioteca classica italiana di scienze, lettere ed arti’’ (Classical Italian Library of Science, Literature and Art, 1839–1841), managing to finish the prefaces and comments for 27 volumes of the 100 initially planned. He also assumed the trusteeship of the economic series, ‘‘Scelte opere d’italiani illustri antichi e moderni’’ ( Selected Works of Illustrious Italians, Ancient and Modern, 1842) and, for the same publisher Tasso, undertook the management of an encyclopedia. Lastly, he edited the complete works of Ugo Foscolo, the major inspiration of his youth, availing himself of unpublished documents and the poet’s collection of correspondence: Prose e poesie edite e inedite di Ugo Foscolo (Published and Unpublished Prose and Poetry by Ugo Foscolo, 1842). Perhaps this marked the highpoint of Carrer’s militancy as a critic. Carrer planned, but never finished, a history of Italian literature as an expression of the reviving spirit of nationalism.

Biography Luigi Carrer was born in Venice on February 12, 1801. From 1814, he attended high school at Treviso, 398

then continued his studies in Venice; he received a law degree in Padua. At the age of 22, he fell ill with tuberculosis. He taught high school at Castelfranco Veneto until 1823. Once again in Venice, and later in Padua, he managed the Minerva Printing Works. He married Brigida Palicala`, 1825. In 1827 his daughter Elena was born, and he was appointed assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Padua, a post he held until 1830. In 1832 Carrer returned to Venice, separating from his wife. He was a professor of literature and geography at the Venice technical school, 1842–1844. He also held the positions of vicesecretary of the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti; secretary and later vice-president of the Ateneo Veneto; and curator of the Correr Museum, 1846. In 1847 his daughter died. With the failure of the insurrection of 1848, some patriotic poems led to his dismissal; this measure was revoked at the price of his disavowal. Ill, aided by Adriana Renier, an organizer of a salon of artists and a neighbor to whom he would leave his manuscripts, he died in Venice on December 23, 1850. ROBERTO CUPPONE Selected Works Collections Opere di Luigi Carrer, con cenni biografici dell’autore, edited by Francesco Prudenzano, Naples: Rossi, 1852. Scritti critici, edited by Giovanni Gambarin, Bari: Laterza, 1969.

Poetry ‘‘Saggio di poesie,’’ 1819. ‘‘Clotaldo,’’ 1826. ‘‘La Gerusalemme liberata col riscontro della Conquistata,’’ 1828. ‘‘Poesie per nozze Papadopoli–Mosconi,’’ 1831. ‘‘Ballate (La sorella, La vendetta, Jerolimina, Il cavallo di Estremadura),’’ 1834. ‘‘Poesie edite e inedite,’’ 1845.

Fiction Racconti, 1857.

Plays Ultimo colloquio di Antonio Foscarini, 1839.

Prose Discorso sopra la rappresentazione de La sposa di Messina, tragedia di Luigi Arminio Carrer, 1822. Vita di Carlo Goldoni con notizie della commedia italiana prima di lui, 3 vols., 1824–1825. Anello di sette gemme o Venezia e la sua storia. Considerazioni e fantasie di Luigi Carrer, 1837. Prose edite e inedite, 1846. L’amore infelice di Gaspara Stampa, 1851.

GIACOMO CASANOVA Edited Works Dizionario della lingua italiana (with Fortunato Federici), 7 vols., 1827–1830. Prose e poesie edite e inedite di Ugo Foscolo, 1842.

Further Reading Abrate, Mario, L’opera poetica di Luigi Carrer, Turin: Paravia & C., 1905. Cattelan, Levi Clotilde, Tracce dell’arte giovanile di Luigi Carrer nelle opere della sua maturita`, Venice: Libreria Emiliana Editrice, 1927. Crotti, Ilaria, ‘‘Carrer biografo di Goldoni,’’ Rivista di Letteratura Italiana, 18(2000), 2–3. Damerini, Gino, Tommaseo amico e nemico di Carrer. Con lettere e documenti inediti, Venice: Per la fondazione Omero Soppesa, 1934.

Dani, Aristide, ‘‘Lettere inedite di L. Carrer a P. Mistrorigo,’’ in Studi in onore di F. M. Mistrorigo, Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1958. Giachino, Monica, In ignorata stanza: studi su Luigi Carrer, Treviso: Canova, 2001. Lattes, Laura, ‘‘Luigi Carrer, la sua vita, la sua opera,’’ in Miscellanea di storia veneta, series 3, 10(1916), 216–245. Molmenti, Pompeo, ‘‘Pier Luigi Carrer di Pompeo Molmenti,’’ in Atti del Reale Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, 58:2(1898–1899), 7–88. Sartorio, Guido, Luigi Carrer, Rome: Societa` Editrice Dante Alighieri, 1900. Tommaseo, Niccolo`, ‘‘Notizie sulla commedia italiana, compilate da Luigi Carrer, Venezia 1824,’’ Antologia (August 1826), 52–62.

GIACOMO CASANOVA (1725–1798) In Casanova’s own biography, not even his birth escapes the ambiguity and mystification that enshrouds his entire life. In the first pages of his masterpiece, Histoire de ma vie (The History of My Life, 1826–1837), Casanova claimed to be the son of actors Gaetano Casanova and Zanetta Farusso (Farussi), both performing at the San Samuele theater in Venice. This version contradicts his booklet Ne´ amori ne´ donne; ovvero la stalla ripulita (Neither Loves nor Women, or The Stable Cleaned Out, 1782) in which he declared to be the illegitimate son of a Venetian noblemen, Michele Grimani. Commonly with Casanova, it is difficult to verify the historical accuracy of such statements. Yet, the ambiguity about his origins highlights an important aspect of his personality. Beginning with Edmund Wilson’s article ‘‘Uncomfortable Casanova’’ (1941), scholars have consistently pointed out the simultaneous presence in Casanova of a sense of pride in being a self-made man and a strong inferiority complex due to his obscure origins. The personal myth he tried to build through his eccentric life and great literary output can be seen as a desperate attempt to make a place for himself in the social and intellectual e´lite of the old re´gime. His autobiographical works certainly played a fundamental role in this struggle to become a prominent protagonist of his age.

As Gilberto Pizzamiglio wrote in his Englishlanguage edition of Histoire de ma vie (2000), the monumental work should not be seen as an isolated literary achievement but rather as the final product of an autobiographical project that was started in 1780 with Il duello (The Duel). Published in Opuscoli miscellanei, a monthly journal written entirely by Casanova during his last Venetian sojourn (1774–1783), it presents a lively account of his encounter with Count Branicki 14 years earlier in Warsaw. The composition of Il duello coincided with a difficult moment for Casanova, whose libertine and transgressive past was preventing him from finding a role in Venetian society. This work can therefore be seen as an attempt to restore its author in the eyes of the establishment, presenting Casanova as a defender of national honor grievously offended by the statements of a Polish nobleman. In spite of being an editorial failure, the booklet, combining autobiography and novelistic writing, represents an important artistic accomplishment and is the first step toward the perfect merging of life and literature that characterizes the author’s subsequent works. In 1785, Casanova accepted the position of librarian offered to him by Count Waldstein, a Bohemian nobleman. In the Castel of Dux, the former adventurer spent his last years saddened 399

GIACOMO CASANOVA by loneliness and constantly quarreling with the count’s servants. In spite of the inconveniences of his new accommodations, however, Casanova during this period was able devote himself fully to his literary activity. The results of his efforts amounted to an enormous number of manuscripts, ranging from history to mathematics and philosophy, which demonstrate his openness and versatility. Among the published works is the noteworthy Soliloque d’un penseur (The Soliloquy of a Thinker, 1786), a pamphlet attacking Giovanni Balsamo, otherwise known as Count Cagliostro. There is little doubt that this work was motivated by selfinterest in order to obtain the sympathy of Emperor Joseph II and an offer of employment. Nevertheless, the opportunistic invective against the necromancer becomes an indirect way of reckoning with his own past. By demolishing Cagliostro’s myth, Casanova abjured, not without a streak of irony, his brilliant career as adventurer and unscrupulous gambler. The same autobiographical and apologetic attitude emerges openly in the Histoire de ma fuite des prisons de la Re´publique de Venise qu’on appelle les Plombs (Story of My Escape from the Prisons of the Republic of Venice Called ‘‘I Piombi,’’ 1787), an account of Casanova’s spectacular escape from the jails of the Venetian government in 1756. The episode, with which he had entertained princes, mentors, and friends for over 30 years, was later reelaborated and included in his autobiography. There is critical agreement over the fact that in the Histoire de ma fuite des prisons de la Re´publique de Venise qu’on appelle les Plombs, Casanova can be seen at his best as a writer. Far from stifling the narrative, the detailed descriptions help the reader visualize the scene of action, creating the condition for involvement in the story, and the result is one of the most engaging and suspenseful texts of eighteenth-century literature. Even though the public’s immediate reaction did not match the author’s expectations, the relative success of the work encouraged Casanova to undertake more challenging and ambitious artistic enterprises. A year later, he completed an extravagant novel in five volumes that he entitled Icosameron. Published in Prague in 1788, it is the heir of the eighteenth-century tradition of allegoricalphilosophical tales best typified by Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and Voltaire’s Candide (1759). However, it is also possible that Casanova was inspired by other minor works such as Charles de Fieux de Mouhy’s novel, Lamekis ou les Voyages extraordinaires d’un Egyptien dans la Terre inte´rieur (1734), and La de´couverte australe 400

par un Homme-Volant (1781) by Restif de la Bretonne. In deference to its genre, the plot of Icosameron is thin and straightforward: Two brothers, following a shipwreck, fall to the center of the earth. Here, they encounter the ‘‘Megamicrons,’’ a race of small, brightly colored people, with whom they live for 81 years, studying in depth their social organization. In fact, the detailed description of the customs and habits of the Megamicrons serves as a pretext for the insertion of learned digression on every field of human knowledge. The most interesting pages are devoted to scientific and technological problems. With an imagination comparable to Julius Verne’s, Casanova foresaw the motorcar, the airplane, television, and several other inventions that were not realized for more than a century. The Icosameron thus displays the encyclopedic knowledge of its author, showing an important aspect of his personality often overshadowed by the more famous image of Casanova as lover and adventurer. It is significant that the idea of a novel concerned with an escape to a perfect society dates back to 1782, when the author, at odds with the Venetian aristocracy, was forced to leave his homeland. Nevertheless, it would be wrong to look at it as a work animated by a revolutionary spirit. Far from being a Jacobin project, the perfectly organized world of Megamicrons is presented as an idealized picture of the Old Regime. Like the Histoire de ma vie, the Icosameron was written in French, in order to reach a wider European audience. The complete disregard of readers for a work on which Casanova bestowed so much care disappointed and embittered the author. In the spring of 1789, he fell gravely ill, showing signs of deep melancholy, and Dr. James Columb O’Reilly ordered him to suspend his philosophical and mathematical research. Knowing Casanova’s temperament, he suggested a form of entertainment that he considered more restful: writing his reminiscences. The patient followed the prescription, relying not just on his prodigious memory but also on a great bundle of notes (the so-called capitulares) that he had carried with him throughout the years all over Europe. According to a letter addressed to Johann Ferdinand Opiz, he had completed the first draft by July 27, 1792. From that time to the eve of his death six years later, Casanova was constantly retouching and redrafting his monumental work. The more than 3,600 manuscripts later entitled Histoire de ma vie represent an original literary achievement that is difficult to classify among traditional autobiographical genres.

GIACOMO CASANOVA By describing a dissolute life, Casanova distinguishes his work from the more sober autobiographies of the early eighteenth century in which the authors, usually historians or philosophers, would present themselves as models to be imitated. Not less significant is the fact that a title like Confessiones, already used by St. Augustine and by the hated Rousseau, had to be discarded as an option for his work, writing in a letter to Opiz dated February 20, 1792: ‘‘I cannot, as man of honor, give these memories the title of Confession, for I repent of nothing and without repentance one cannot, as you know, be absolved.’’ It would be wrong to consider these statements simply as the product of an impenitent effrontery. Scholars have pointed out the influence exerted on Casanova by Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655), the French philosopher who, during the seventeenth century, tried to blend the ideas of Epicurean philosophy with Christian morality. From his readings of Gassendi, Casanova most likely developed the belief that satisfying the sexual appetite is in conformity with natural and divine laws. According to these philosophical argument, ‘‘pleasure is not simply entirely emancipated from feelings of guilt but also indefinitely and happily repeatable,’’ as Giorgio Ficara has written (Casanova e la malinconia, 1999). Literary activity plays an important role in this hedonistic Weltanschauung. As Casanova explicitly emphasized, writing his autobiography allowed him to live his life again, recalling happy experiences with retrospective pleasure. From this premise, his decision to end his account in the year 1774 seems clear: After the age of 40, all he would have to record would be a tale of declining vigor and increasing melancholy. Born with a therapeutic aim, the Histoire de vie soon became the last and most accomplished literary enterprise of the Venetian writer. With this work, which was put on the Index even before it was finished, past experiences were reinterpreted through the conventions of the novel. Casanova was able to make a mark in the literary world and finally establish his place in the European literary canon. The image of Casanova that we get from this work, far from being uniform and consistent, is chameleonic and fluid: an actor able to change masks and roles while simultaneously keeping his inner authenticity and genuineness. The history of Casanova’s Histoire de ma vie often seems nearly as complicated as the story of his life itself. On his deathbed, the author gave the manuscript to Carlo Angiolini, the son-in-law of his sister Maria Maddalena. In 1820, Angiolini’s son in turn sold the

manuscript to the Leipzig publishing firm Brockhaus for the small sum of 200 thalers. The text was first published between 1822 and 1828 in a German translation and adaptation by Wilhelm von Schu¨tz. While the German edition was being readied for publication, Herr Brockhaus employed Jean Laforgue, a professor of French at Dresden, to revise the original manuscript and correct Casanova’s vigorous but often somewhat Italianate French. His edition actually presents wholesale changes in Casanova’s original. James Rives Childs has noted that the French editor ‘‘had omitted few episodes he found overly licentious and, on other occasions, he had disfigured Casanova’s generally chaste prose with offensively prurient details’’ (Casanova, 1961). Being an anticlerical republican, he ignored many of Casanova’s professions of Christian faith and expurgated most of the passage in which the Venetian violently inveighs against the ‘‘execrable’’ French revolution. This ‘‘revised’’ text was published in 12 volumes, the first two in 1826, the third and fourth in 1828, the fifth to the eighth in 1832, and the ninth to the twelfth in 1837. Unfortunately this edition became the most accepted and authoritative version of Casanova’s Histoire de ma vie and the text upon which nearly all other editions and translations would be based for over 130 years. It was not until 1960 that Brockhaus allowed the unexpurgated, uncut, and ‘‘unpolished’’ publication of Casanova’s manuscript. In his 1976 film Casanova, Federico Fellini, who was initially reluctant to adapt the (in) famous libertine’s memoirs, lavishly visualized Casanova’s picaresque erotic stories as a somber journey leading to self-annihilation. Fellini’s images, charged with the baroque opulence of eighteenth-century Venice and decadent sexual symbolism, fully translate the ambiguity and vulnerability of the protagonist’s existential quest.

Biography Giacomo Casanova was born in Venice on April 2, 1725. He studied law at the University of Padua from 1738 to 1742. After having attempted the military and ecclesiastic career, Casanova became a friend and adopted son of the Venetian patrician Matteo Giovanni Bragadin (1745). Suspected by the Inquisition, Casanova fled Venice in 1749 and traveled to Lyon (where he joined the Masonic order) and then to Paris (1750–1752), Dresden, Prague, and Vienna. After returning to Venice in 1753, Casanova was arrested in 1755, on suspicion of being a Freemason and a magician, and was cast 401

GIACOMO CASANOVA into the state prison, I Piombi, from which he escaped on the night of October 31, 1756. In 1757, Casanova returned to Paris where he instituted the French State Lottery, amassing a large fortune that he promptly lost. Beginning in 1759, Casanova traveled throughout Europe, stopping in Spain, England, Poland, and Russia. On November 15, 1774, the Venetian government allowed Casanova to return to his homeland after a long exile. In Venice he devoted himself to writing and also to his position as a theatrical producer. He became a secret agent for the Inquisitors at the end of December 1776. In 1782, he published Ne´ amori ne´ donne; ovvero la stalla ripulita, a satirical pamphlet on the Venetian aristocracy, which focused specifically on the powerful Grimani family. The book provoked an uproar that forced him to leave the city on January 17, 1783. In 1784, Casanova met Count Josef Karl Emmanuel von Waldstein, who offered him a position as a librarian at his castle in Dux (now in the Czech Republic). Casanova spent the rest of is life in Dux, where he suffered from depression as a result of partial isolation. In April 1798, Casanova became ill with a urinary tract infection and died on June 4, 1798. According to Prince de Ligne, his last words were: ‘‘I have lived as a philosopher, and die as a Christian.’’ MATTIA BEGALI Selected Works Collections Saggi, libelli e satire, edited by Piero Chiara, Milan: Longanesi, 1968.

Autobiographical Works Il duello, 1780; as The Duel, translated by J. G. Nichols, 2003. Ne´ amori ne´ donne; ovvero la stalla ripulita, 1782. Soliloque d’un penseur, 1786. Histoire de ma fuite des prisons de la Re´publique de Venise qu’on appelle les Plombs, 1787. Histoire de ma vie (1789–1798), 12 vols., 1826–1837; critical edition, 12 vols., 1960–1965; as History of My Life, translated by Willard R. Trask, 12 vols., 1966; as The Story of My Life, edited and abridged by Gilberto Pizzamiglio, translated by Stephen Sartarelli and Sophie Hawkes, 2000.

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Fiction Icosameron, 1788; as Casanova’s Icosameron, translated and abridged by Rachel Zurer, 1986.

Essays Confutazione della Storia del Governo Veneto d’Amelot de la Houssaie, 3 vols., 1769. Istoria delle turbolenze della Polonia, 3 vols., 1774. Scrutinio del libro ‘‘Eloges de M. de Voltaire par diffe´rents auteurs,’’ 1779.

Letters Epistolario (1759–1798), edited by Piero Chiara, 1969. Lettere di Lorenzo da Ponte a Giacomo Casanova, 1791– 1795, edited by Giampaolo Zagonel, 1988. A Giacomo Casanova: lettere d’amore di Manon Balletti ed Elisa von der Recke. edited by Vittorio Orsenigo, 1997.

Further Reading Abirached, Robert, Casanova ou la dissipation, Paris: Grasset, 1961. Aruta Stampacchia, Annalisa, Passione e gioco della moda nell’Histoire de ma vie di Giacomo Casanova, Naples: De Frede, 2000. Boatto, Aldo, Casanova e Venezia, Rome: Laterza, 2002. Capaci, Bruno, Le impressioni delle cose meravigliose: Giacomo Casanova e la redenzione imperfetta della scrittura, Venice: Marsilio, 2002. Childs, James Rives, Casanova, A Biography Based on New Documents, London: Allen and Unwin, 1961. Childs, James Rives, Casanoviana, Vienna: Nebehay, 1956. Ficara, Giorgio, Casanova e la malinconia, Turin: Einaudi, 1999. Flem, Lydia, Casanova, ou, L’exercice du bonheur, Paris: Seuil, 1995. Luna, Marie‐Franc¸oise (editor), Casanova fin de sie`cle, ´ diteur, 2002. Paris: Honore´ Champion E Luna, Marie‐Franc¸oise, Casanova me´morialiste, Paris: Honore´ Champion E´diteur, 1998. Parker, Derek, Casanova, Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2002. Pieri, Piero, Duelli di penna: Casanova, Goudar e Caterina II, Rome: Bulzoni, 1994. Pizzamiglio, Gilberto (editor), Giacomo Casanova tra Venezia e L’Europa, Florence: Olschki, 2001. Poulet, Georges, ‘‘Casanova et le temps,’’ in Sensibilita` e razionalismo nel Settecento, edited by Vittore Branca, Florence: Sansoni, 1967. Roustang, Franc¸ois, Le bal masque´ de Giacomo Casanova, Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1984. Serra, Francesca, Casanova autobiografo, Venice: Marsilio, 2001. Sollers, Philippe, Casanova l’admirable, Paris: Plon, 1998. Wilson, Edmund, ‘‘Uncomfortable Casanova,’’ in The Wound and the Bow: Seven Studies in Literature, Cambridge, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1941.

CARLO CASSOLA

CARLO CASSOLA (1917–1987) Carlo Cassola, a prolific author and intellectual, is recognized as an emblematic figure of a Tuscan literary tradition that spans from Federigo Tozzi to Vasco Pratolini and Mario Tobino. Cassola himself disclaimed any labels and was often in disagreement with the specific ideas endorsed by contemporary literary currents such as neo-Realism or the neo-avant-garde. His writing distinctively identified with a poetics of the subliminal experience (subliminare) that is found in the intensely emotional experience that lies below the threshold of consciousness and awareness. His narrative is characterized by an antiheroic vision of the world, and recurrent themes include an opposition to any repressive force, whether physical or psychological, and the material life of working people. Cassola disclosed his literary inclination at the age of 15, when, as a student of the popular Liceo Tasso in Rome, he became involved in an antiFuturist movement called ‘‘Novismo.’’ In 1935, he entered the University of Rome to study law. At the same time, he continued reading Italian and foreign classics, particularly James Joyce. Indeed, Joyce’s Dubliners provided a significant inspiration for Cassola’s earliest works, a series of short stories written in the late 1930s for periodicals such as Il meriadiano di Roma and Letteratura and later collected in two volumes, Alla periferia (On the Outskirts, 1942) and La visita (The Visit, 1942). Both collections portray ordinary people and their uneventful existence over the course of one day: Young women, adolescents, widows, soldiers, hunters, all are involved in chance encounters described in an unsophisticated language that relies on paratactic structures and avoids an elegiac tone. The result is nevertheless poetic, as Cassola, evoking Joyce’s ‘‘epiphanies,’’ attempted to represent, through linguistic sublimation, the sense of the Absolute that lies behind the ordinary and its manifestations. In the essay ‘‘Il film dell’impossibile’’ (The Film of the Impossible), published in 1961 in the journal Tempo di letteratura, the writer rejected the naturalistic narrative of the nineteenth century and proclaimed that the role of narration is not to portray reality as the result of observation and experience but rather to evoke an image of reality that is divested of any ideological, psychological,

scientific, or moral content. During the postwar years, Cassola was often criticized for his lack of political commitment. Like many artists and intellectuals of his generation, Cassola joined the anti-Fascist Resistance movement in 1942. His family was no stranger to political activity, as his father had been the editor of the socialist newspaper L’Avanti, but Carlo viewed his war experience not so much in terms of his political engagement and growth but rather as an opportunity to become more closely acquainted with ‘‘la gente del popolo’’ (the common people), as he wrote in his introduction to the 1965 Einaudi edition of Il taglio del bosco (The Cutting of the Woods, 1959, but first published in Paragone in 1949). After the war, he began a new phase in his writing career, moving toward longer works in which the autobiographical element becomes clearly visible. Following his wife’s sudden death (1949), Cassola faced a period of profound crisis, aching unceasingly from the loss of his beloved. He stopped working on Il taglio del bosco for a few months, and, when he resumed writing, he started his Resistance novel Fausto e Anna (Fausto and Anna, 1952). A new edition appeared in 1958 with major structural and linguistic changes. Here Cassola enriched his previous poetics of subliminare, adopting new narrative strategies that called for a more traditional approach in tune with the historical events, a greater attention to detail, and a deeper articulation of the psychological dimension of the characters. Set against the background of Fascism and the war, the novel tells the story of Fausto Errera and Anna Mannoni, who meet during a summer holiday and fall in love. Fausto, a selfcentered intellectual with a complicated personality, embraces those very bourgeois values that he also fiercely challenges. Anna, a quieter individual, becomes increasingly fascinated by the young man’s intellectual appeal and urban life. They separate and write letters, but Fausto’s jealousy, which turns into verbal abuse, takes a toll on their relationship. Eventually Anna marries the simple but reliable Miro, while Fausto joins the Resistance fight. They will meet again, one last time, when the Allied forces arrive and the Resistance comes to an end. A complex novel, Fausto e Anna weaves 403

CARLO CASSOLA together several themes, from Fausto’s existential struggle, to ideological and political disillusionment, to the conflict between the private dimension and history. It was also Cassola’s first best seller, although it was attacked for its structural and stylistic ambiguity as well as for its unflattering depiction of the partisans. The author’s defence stressed his refusal to submit literature to any political and ideological propagandistic purpose. But it was with his second major work, La ragazza di Bube (Bebo’s Girl, 1960), which was awarded the Strega Prize, that Cassola achieved notoriety. The novel, a best seller, was translated into some 20 languages and was adapted to the screen by Luigi Comencini, with popular stars (a young Claudia Cardinale and George Chakiris). Again, the author deals with life’s expectations, history, love, chance, political involvement, and hope. The novel, based on a true story, is divided into four parts and is carefully structured. Arturo Cappellini, also known as Bube, is a former partisan whose nickname is ‘‘the Avenger’’; Mara Castellucci is a young girl, beautiful and self-confident. After the war, they fall in love and get engaged, but Bube has to flee the country after committing a murder partly justified by the rancors of his past fight. Mara has to choose between him and Stefano, whom she had met in the meantime, eventually deciding to stay with Bube, who is in jail serving a 14-year sentence. Far from simply being a story of love, sacrifice, and destiny, the novel calls for a deeper understanding of its themes, which include loyalty and ethics in a broad sense: loyalty toward a lover but also a role, that of the ‘‘avenger,’’ construed by political ideology. The novel reflects Cassola’s explicit disenchantment from the ideals of the Resistance. At the awards ceremony for the Strega Prize, Pier Paolo Pasolini uttered a funerary oration, ‘‘In morte del realismo’’ (Upon the Death of Realism, 1960), patterned after Anthony’s speech in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, in which he cast Cassola as Brutus and blamed him for betraying his socialist ideas and for indulging into a kind of ‘‘lyrical’’ writing that sealed the death of Realism. Negativity takes over in Un cuore arido (An Arid Heart, 1961), which offers vividly detailed descriptions of objects and places that, for Cassola, encompass the authenticity of human existence. The novel is not set in any specific historical context nor does it indulge in naturalistic portrayals of reality. Clearly, Cassola had no intention of abiding by the neo-Realistic mandate, but 404

rather of finding a model in authors such as the late-nineteenth-century English poet and novelist Thomas Hardy. The same process of distillation of life into a revealing moment returns in his fourth novel Paura e tristezza (Fear and Saddness, 1970), where the condition of ‘‘fear’’ and the sentiment of ‘‘sadness’’ for an ill-fated life are not simply related to the miserable existence of the protagonist, Anna Dell’Aiuto, but more generally to an a priori universal human condition, torn between the impossibility of understanding each other and the unknown destiny to which human beings are subject. In the same anti-Realist vein, Cassola wrote Monte Mario (Portrait of Helen, 1973) in the form of a dialogue that elucidates the incommunicability of his protagonists, following a tradition that, from Luigi Pirandello to Alberto Moravia, highlighted the psychological condition of the characters. Cassola also wrote numerous essays on a wide range of topics: from the role of literature to political engagement and social change, to antimilitarism and disarmament. Some of the most significant are Viaggio in Cina, (Journey to China, 1956), describing his experiences in Maoist China, perhaps with an overly appreciative tone; and I minatori della Maremma (Miners in Maremma, 1956), written in collaboration with Luciano Bianciardi, which offers a sensitive and compelling reportage of the poor working conditions of miners in southern Tuscany. In the 1970s Cassola took up an antinuclear stance, and his writings such as Diritto alla sopravvivenza (The Right to Survival, 1982) and La rivoluzione disarmista (The Unarming Revolution, 1983) attest to a continuous interest in the pacifist movement.

Biography Carol Cassola was born in Rome on March 17, 1917, and educated at the Liceo Tasso, where he joined the anti-Futurist movement of ‘‘Novismo.’’ He published his first poems in the student journal Anno XIII, 1935. He entered the Faculty of Law of the Universita` ‘‘La Sapienza’’ in Rome, 1935, and graduated with a thesis on civil law, 1939. After the armistice of September 8, 1942, Cassola joined the Resistance movement in Tuscany, where he had moved with his family. He spent most of his life in Grosseto, in southern Tuscany; he taught in high school, 1949–1962; his wife died, 1949. He remarried and had a daughter, 1951. Cassola travelled to China, 1955. He was awarded the Strega Prize for La ragazza di Bube, 1960; and was

CARLO CASSOLA awarded the Napoli Prize for Una relazione, 1969. He collaborated with peridocals such as Il corriere della sera and Il mondo and the literary journals Il ponte and La fiera letteraria. Cassola died in Montecarlo (Lucca) on January 29, 1987, after a long illness. MARIA LAURA MOSCO Selected Works Fiction Alla periferia, 1942. La visita, 1942. Fausto e Anna, 1952; as Fausto and Anna, translated by Isabel Quingley, 1960; reprinted, 1975. Il taglio del bosco, 1949; expanded as Il taglio del bosco: racconti lunghi e romanzi brevi, 1959. La casa di Via Valadier, 1956. Un matrimonio del dopoguerra, 1957. Il soldato, 1958. La ragazza di Bube, 1960; as Bebo’s Girl, translated by Marguerite Waldman, 1962. Un cuore arido, 1961; as An Arid Heart, translated by William Weaver, 1964. Il cacciatore, 1964. Tempi memorabili, 1966. Storia di Ada, 1967. Una relazione, 1969. Paura e tristezza, 1970. Monte Mario, 1973; as Portrait of Helena, translated by Sebastian Roberts, 1975. Gisella, 1974. L’uomo e il cane, 1977. La disavventura, 1977. Un uomo solo, 1978. Ferragosto di morte, 1980. La morale del branco, 1980. La zampa d’oca, 1981. Gli anni passano, 1982. Colloquio con le ombre, 1982. Mio padre, 1983. Le persone contano piu` dei luoghi, 1985.

Nonfiction Viaggio in Cina, 1956. I minatori della Maremma, with Luciano Bianciardi, 1956. Poesia e romanzo, with Mario Luzi, 1973. Fogli di diario, 1974. Ultima frontiera, 1976.

La lezione della storia, 1978. Contro le armi, 1980. Il romanzo moderno, 1981. Diritto alla sopravvivenza, 1982. La rivoluzione disarmista, 1983.

Letters La nascita dei Minatori della Maremma: il carteggio Bianciardi–Cassola–Laterza e altri scritti, edited by Velio Abati 1998.

Further Reading Asor Rosa, Alberto, Scrittori e popolo: saggio sulla letteratura populista in Italia, Rome: Samona e Savelli, 1965. Bertacchini, Renato, Carlo Cassola: introduzione e guida allo studio dell’opera cassoliana, Florence: Le Monnier, 1977. Calvino, Italo, ‘‘Due domande su La ragazza di Bube,’’ Mondo Operaio, 13(1960), 87–100. Carlo Cassola: letteratura e disarmo, San Giovanni Valdarno: Lega per il disarmo unilaterale, 1988. D’Agostino, Annamaria and Mariantonietta Mariotti, Cassola: l’intellettuale dimenticato, Empoli: Ibiskos, 1988. Falaschi, Giovanni (editor), Carlo Cassola. Atti del convegno (Firenze, Palazzo Medici–Riccardi, 3–4 Novembre 1989), Pontassieve: Becocci Editore, 1993. Ferretti, Gian Carlo, Letteratura e ideologia: Bassani, Cassola, Pasolini, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1964. Jodi Macchioni, Rodolfo, Cassola, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1967. Luperini, Romano, ‘‘Il sentimento della vita in Cassola saggista,’’ Paragone, 478(1989), 32–42. Madrignani, Carlo, L’ultimo Cassola: letteratura e pacifismo, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1991. Napoleone, Patrizia, Carlo Cassola e la ragazza di Bube, Turin: Loescher, 1997. Pedroni, Peter N., Existence as Theme in Carlo Cassola’s Fiction, New York: Peter Lang, 1985. Rutter, Itala T. C., ‘‘Carlo Cassola: Partigiano nella vita,’’ Italian Culture, 11(1993), 301–310. Spinazzola, Vittorio, Il realismo esistenziale di Carlo Cassola, Modena: Mucchi, 1993. Turchetta, Gianni, ‘‘Dall’ ‘epifania’ al ‘film dell’impossibile’: il giovane Cassola e il giovane Joyce,’’ in Studi vari di lingua e letteratura italiana in onore di Giuseppe Velli, Milan: Cisalpino, 2000. Valori, Massimo, Ipotesi di lavoro su La ragazza di Bube e Carlo Cassola, Florence: Libra, 1992.

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LUDOVICO CASTELVETRO

LUDOVICO CASTELVETRO (1505–1571) Ludovico Castelvetro is generally known as the critic and commentator of Aristotle’s Poetics who codified the rules for the unity of time and the unity of place. Yet his works reflect an independence of thought and a tireless devotion to close reading, and his acute and original observations on a wide variety of literary and philosophical texts make him one of the outstanding critics of the sixteenth century. Castelvetro’s most important work is his commentary on the Poetica d’Aristotele vulgarizzata et sposta (The Poetics of Aristotle Translated and Explicated, 1570), to which he devoted the last years of his life, which he spent in exile. He also commented on Dante’s Inferno (1305–1308) and Petrarch’s Canzoniere (ca.1342–1374) and I Triumphi (The Triumphs, 1354–1374). His work on Petrarch was first published posthumously in 1582 but was already well developed by 1545. Castelvetro’s minor critical notes are selected in Lodovico Antonio Muratori’s 1727 edition, which includes observations on such diverse topics as Roman comedy, poetic inspiration, and the role of poetry in society. In addition, there are short essays on Plato, Euripides, Julius Caesar, Virgil, and Boccaccio, among others. During the twentieth century, important discoveries concerning Castelvetro’s authorship led to a number of publications of his work. In 1903, for example, Giuseppe Cavazzuti identified a manuscript, in Castelvetro’s hand, comprising his commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics. Francesco Donati traced and published in 1970 a series of notes on Aristotle’s Rhetoric (‘‘Un commento inedito del Castelvetro: ‘In tertium rhetoriches Aristotelis’’’). In his 1963 essay entitled ‘‘Castelvetro’s Annotations to the Inferno: A Second Look at a Scarcely Known Manuscript,’’ Robert Melzi made the case that Castelvetro wrote a commentary on not only the first 29 cantos of the Inferno but on the entire Comedia. This work was presumably lost in Lyons in 1567, when the author had to flee the city. Castelvetro’s literary scholarship consistently disclosed a sharp and uncompromising mind, at times impertinent and pedantic. His fierce polemic with the academician Annibal Caro (1507–1566), a poet of wide renown and the secretary of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, spanned across a period of 406

nearly 20 years. The dispute began in 1553 when he attacked Caro’s canzone, ‘‘Venite all’ombra dei gran gigli d’oro’’ (Come to the shade of the great golden lilies), because it praised the Farnese family as well as the French throne. Often rancorous and distasteful, their exchange, consisting of four major documents, nevertheless reflects many aspects of the contemporary debates on language and literary models. As a defense to Castelvetro’s initial critique, Caro wrote a commentary of his poem, entitled Apologia degli Accademici di Banchi contra messer Lodovico Castelvetro (Apology of the Banchi Academics against Ludovico Castelvetro, 1558). Here he focused on the linguistic liveliness of the canzone and his desire to imitate the spirit rather than the language of Petrarch. Castelvetro’s reply engages in a more detailed criticism of the disputed poem, Ragioni d’alcune cose segnate nella canzone d’Annibal Caro: Venite a l’ombra de gran gigli d’oro (Argument on Some Things Noted in the Canzone of Annibal Caro, 1559). Then Caro enlisted the support of Benedetto Varchi, who prepared a first draft of a response as early as 1560, but his dialogue, the Ercolano, remained unpublished until 1570. Varchi aimed at discussing broader issues of linguistic relevance, not at a mere refutation of Castelvetro’s arguments. But Castelvetro’s response, Correttione d’alcune cose del Dialogo delle lingue di Benedetto Varchi (Correction of a Few Things in the Dialogue on Language by Benedetto Varchi, 1572), rejects Varchi’s position and indeed expands the controversy to include his handling of dramatic dialogue as a genre. At times too restrictive, Castelvetro’s criticism is dictated by a strong sense of the need for verisimilitude, a close attention to the text, and a concern for philological rigor. For him, poetic license indicates lack of artistic skills. Such a thorough reading of texts represents his strongest asset. For example, Castelvetro’s commentary on Petrarch stands out for its meticulous references to the original sources (Dante in particular) and an ability to break away from orthodox views when they compromise a rational inquiry. His commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics also reveals how he defined his work as an effort to fill in what others had missed by emphasizing the main theme of the text, or the poetic act.

LUDOVICO CASTELVETRO Yet his goal was not to elucidate Aristotle’s ideas but rather to interpret, expand, and correct the incomplete text for the benefit of the reader: ‘‘quello anchora che doveva o poteva essere scritto per utilita` piena di coloro che volessero sapere come si debba fare a comporre bene poemi’’ (what still he should or could have written for the full benefit of those who want to know what they must do to compose poems well). He singled out some inconsistencies and erroneous assumptions in Aristotle’s text and highlighted, at the same time, the powerful effects on the soul of melodia (melody) and vista (vision). Castelvetro set out to ‘‘supplire anchora quello che manca’’ (supply what is missing), when he proposed three types of plots by subdividing Aristotle’s category of complex plots into plots that have only one change in fortune and those with multiple changes. Thus Castelvetro used Aristotle’s Poetics as a point of departure for his own treatise on poetics, so much so that he extended his discussion to include contemporary works as well as sources not available to Aristotle (from the classical Latin period to Dante, Boccaccio, and Marguerite de Navarre). For Castelvetro, the plot was the fundamental element of the work of art, and it should imitate human action. This led him to draw a close connection between history and poetry: The poet must look to history in order to know what action is probable and possible. Yet, he cannot merely put into verse known historical events; he must contrive a story that does not imitate any specific event but rather a possible action. Furthermore, Castelvetro rejected the commonplace that poetry ought to teach and delight (docere delectando); instead it ought to give only pleasure to the audience, whom he viewed as an uneducated throng. This is the reason why he expelled science from poetry (science was meant to teach). Somehow Castelvetro was faithful to Aristotle, since the latter never mentioned poetry’s ‘‘instruction,’’ even though he seemed to admit its moral effect on the audience. In one of his most interesting expansions on Aristotle, when he explored the complexity of the tragic effect, Castelvetro allowed that after an initial displeasure at viewing a fortunate evil man or an unfortunate good man, the audience experiences a kind of pleasure, because a sense of justice is revealed: ‘‘Onde godiam per quel dispiacere della riconoscenza della nostra giustizia’’ (whence through this displeasure we enjoy the recognition of our own justice). This passage shows that Castelvetro recognized that poetry ‘‘may’’ instruct, even if that is not its primary function.

Castelvetro’s polemical vein resurfaces in the commentary. He contested the opinions of such authorities as Quintilian, Cicero, and Horace; he labeled Terence and Plautus (who take their plots from the Greeks), not poets of invention but mere versificatori (verse-makers) and traslatori (translators). In the end, even Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Ariosto are classified as ‘‘thieves’’ for their various stages of borrowing.

Biography Ludovico Castelvetro was born in 1505 in Modena to Jacopo Castelvetro and Bartolomea dalla Porta. He studied law at the University of Siena and became a member of the Accademia degli Intronati. After earning his degree in law, he abruptly left Rome for Siena, where he immersed himself in the study of literature. To appease his father, he returned to Modena but continued his studies, despite his chronic ill health. In Modena, he promoted the study of Greek, Latin, and law in the public schools. By the early 1540s he had joined the Accademia di Modena. Active in civic work, in 1551 he was on the governing counsel of Modena. In 1555, the Inquisition began an investigation of him and in 1560, after a period in hiding, he went to Rome to face charges of heresy. In custody, but not willing to be on trial indefinitely, he escaped with his brother, also held by the Inquisition in Rome. He spent more than two years in Chiavenna and then went to Lyons where he composed his commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics (1563–1567). Because of religious violence in Lyons and his sudden flight from his house in 1567 there, many of his works were lost. From Lyons, Castelvetro went to Geneva for several days, before he returned to Chiavenna, where he gave private lessons in Greek. He then joined his brother Giovan-Maria in Vienna, where he was received by Massimiliano II in 1569 and first published his commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics in 1570. Because of the threat of the plague in Vienna, Castelvetro moved back to Chiavenna, where he died on February 21, 1571. THOMAS E. MUSSIO See also: Annibal Caro Selected Works Collections Opere varie critiche di Lodovico Castelvetro, edited by Lodovico Antonio Muratori, Bern: Pietro Foppens, 1727.

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LUDOVICO CASTELVETRO Commentaries Ragioni d’alcune cose segnate nella canzone d’Annibal Caro: Venite a l’ombra de gran gigli d’oro, 1559. Poetica d’Aristotele vulgarizzata et sposta, 1570; critical edition by Werther Romani, 2 vols., 1978–1979; as Castelvetro on the Art of Poetry: An Abridged Translation of Ludovico Castelvetro’s Poetica d’Aristotele vulgarizzata, et sposta, edited and translated by Andrew Bongiorno, 1984. Correttione d’alcune cose del Dialogo delle lingue di Benedetto Varchi, 1572. Le Rime del Petrarca brevemente sposte, 1582. Sposizione di Lodovico Castelvetro a XXIX canti dell’Inferno dantesco, ora per la prima volta data in luce da Giovanni Franciosi, 1886.

Further Reading Adams, Hazard (editor), Critical Theory since Plato, San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971. Cavazzuti, Giuseppe, Lodovico Castelvetro, Modena: Societa` Tipografica Modenese, Antica Tipografia Soliani, 1903. Charlton, Henry Buckley, Castelvetro’s Theory of Poetry, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1913. Crane, Ronald Salmon (editor), Critics and Criticism: Ancient and Modern, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952. Donadi, Francesco, ‘‘Un commento inedito del Castelvetro: ‘In tertium rhetoriches Aristotelis.’’’ Lettere italiane, 22(1970), 545–581.

Drusi, Riccardo, La lingua ‘‘cortigiana romana’’: note su un aspetto della questione cinquecentesca della lingua, Venice: Il Cardo, 1995. Jossa, Stefano, ‘‘Petrarchismo e umorismo: Ludovico Castelvetro poeta,’’ Lettere italiane, 57:1(2005), 65–86. Marazzini, Claudio, ‘‘Varchi contro Castelvetro: ‘Tipologie’ linguistiche in una polemica letteraria del sec. XVI,’’ in Kontinuita¨t und Innovation: Studien zur Geschichte der romanischen Sprachforschung vom 17. bis zum 19. Jahrhundert, edited by Gerda Haler and Ju¨rgen Storost, Mu¨nster: Nodus, 1997. Mazzacurati, Giancarlo, ‘‘Aristotele a corte. Il piacere e le regole: Castelvetro e l’edonismo,’’ in Culture et socie´te´ en Italie du Moyen Age a` la Renaissance, Paris: Universite´ de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1985. Melzi, Robert C., Castelvetro’s Annotations to The Inferno: A New Perspective in Sixteenth Century Criticism, The Hague: Mouton, 1966. Melzi, Robert, C., ‘‘Castelvetro’s Annotations to the Inferno: A Second Look at a Scarcely Known Manuscript,’’ Italica, 40:4(1963), 306–319. Nasta, Michel, Le fonctionnement des concepts dans un texte ine´dit de Castelvetro, Padua: Antenore, 1977. Perocco, Daria, ‘‘Lodovico Castelvetro traduttore di Melantone (Var. Lat. 7755),’’ Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 156(1979), 541–547. Romani, Werther, ‘‘Lodovico Castelvetro e il problema del tradurre,’’ Lettere italiane, 18(1966), 152–179. Weinberg, Bernard, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961.

BALDASSARE CASTIGLIONE (1478–1529) Baldassare Castiglione, the man whom Emperor Charles V called one of the finest gentlemen in the world, was born into an old noble family of Mantua. Castiglione had an active, successful, and sometimes difficult life, earning the reputation of an exemplary courtier. He served in the most brilliant courts of the age for families such as the Gonzaga, the Sforza, the Montefeltro, and the Della Rovere. Through such experiences, he gained deep insights into the realities of courtly life and politics that underlie his idealized and nostalgic portrait of the court of Urbino, Il libro del Cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier, 1528), which had a remarkable influence on the behavior and manners of European courts for over two centuries. He also wrote Italian and Latin poems, a eulogy, and a

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substantial body of private letters and diplomatic correspondence. Castiglione’s poetry reflects the classical and vernacular traditions. His ten sonnets and four canzoni are derivative efforts that describe lover and lady with the standard Petrarchan images and phrases—love as a burning fire, rivers of weeping, fire and ice. Authentic emotion is far more apparent in letters written to his wife, Ippolita. The sonnet ‘‘Cesare mio, qui sono ove il mar bagna...’’ (My dear Cesare, I am here where the sea bathes...) describes the disastrous French campaign of 1503 in southern Italy with Petrarchan language that reveals his misgivings about war. The splendid sonnet, ‘‘Superbi colli e voi sacre ruine’’ (O lofty hills and you, sacred ruins), inspired by the past glory

BALDASSARE CASTIGLIONE of Rome and its inevitable decline, was often imitated but never surpassed. His canzone ‘‘Manca il fior giovenil de’ miei primi anni’’ (Gone is the youthful flowering of my early years) laments the loss of youth and the folly of his amorous passions. Castiglione’s Latin carmina regularly appeared in collections of Latin poetry over the next two centuries. Most are fashionable and technically good imitations of classical eclogues and elegies, and sincere sentiments enliven some of them. Expressing his sorrow over the death of his dear friend Falcone (ca. 1505), Castiglione’s eclogue Alcon imitates Virgil’s fifth eclogue, from which he takes the name Alcon as well as the setting, meter, and metaphors. With its deeply felt sorrow, this elegiac poem inspired the ‘‘Alcon’’ of William Drummond of Hawthornden on the death of his friend Sir William Alexander (1648) and the ‘‘Epitaphium Daminis’’ (1640) John Milton wrote on the death of his friend Charles Diodati. His wife’s complaints at his absence from Mantua inspired his touching ‘‘Elegia qua fingit Hippolyten suam ad se ipsum scribentem’’ (Elegy to Himself Supposedly Written by His Wife Hippolyta), written while he was serving as Federico Gonzaga’s ambassador at the papal court. Although it draws inspiration from an elegy of Propertius, the affection Castiglione depicts between husband and wife is fresh and new. He also wrote an elegy on the death of his friend Raphael, who had painted his portrait and to whom he provided assistance in producing a survey of classical monuments in Rome, ‘‘De morte Raphaelis pictoris’’ (On the Death of Raphael, Painter). To celebrate carnival in 1506 and to pay tribute to the duke and duchess of Urbino, he composed the dramatic eclogue Tirsi (Thyrsis), collaborating with his cousin Cesare Gonzaga. Written in ottava rima, Tirsi takes place in a pastoral countryside, where three shepherds, Iola, Tirsi, and Dameta, tell a tale of unrequited love. Iola laments the cruelty of the nymph Galatea for rejecting his love; in traditional pastoral fashion, all of nature joins in his sorrow. Attracted by the song, Tirsi arrives and goes with Dameta to the goddess’s court, a splendid environment like the one created by Duchess Elisabetta at Urbino. Over this pastoral kingdom the good shepherd, representing Duke Guidobaldo, keeps watch, ensuring a peaceful existence. Meant to entertain the aristocrats at court, Tirsi also reminds them of the importance of good government and the rewards of service, notions central to Il Cortegiano. When King Henry VII gave the ailing Guidobaldo a knighthood, Castiglione went to England

in 1507 to receive the honor on his behalf. At the Italianate English court, he met the English king and his son, the future Henry VIII, eulogized in the Il Cortegiano. After Guidobaldo’s death, Castiglione sent the English king a Latin eulogy, ‘‘Ad Henricum Angliae regem Epistola de vita et gestis Giudubaldi Urbini Ducis’’ (To Henry, King of England, Epistle on the Life and Deeds of Guidobaldo, Duke of Urbino), which commemorates Guidobaldo’s great virtues, decorum, self-restraint, and stoicism, qualities indispensable to courtiership in Il Cortegiano. Castiglione’s own broad knowledge and experience inform Il Cortegiano, which looks back to precedents such as Plato’s Symposium, Cicero’s De oratore, humanistic models like Marsilio Ficino and Leon Battista Alberti, and Pietro Bembo’s dialogue, Gli Asolani. The book is set in Urbino on four evenings during the visit of Pope Julius II in March 1507. The characters, from Julius’s retinue and Guidobaldo’s court, form a cross section of Italian society and a range of personalities and opinions. Although Castiglione’s depiction of the court at Urbino is idealized, the use of historical figures lends an element of realism, and multiple viewpoints on the issues debated reflect the ambiguities of courtly environments. Each book in Il Cortegiano contains a philosophical exordium by the author, who claims he was not present at the gathering in Urbino and that he is only recounting the conversations at second hand. In book one, Castiglione’s fiction of nightly conversations as a form of courtly entertainment permits him to create a less formal atmosphere in which topics are discussed from different perspectives and at different degrees of seriousness. His physical and moral portrait of the courtier draws on Cicero’s Roman orator, the medieval chivalric code, and classical and contemporary humanist ideals. By requiring a noble background for his courtier, Castiglione conservatively ties nobility to family origins rather than individual merit, but his view conforms to the social prejudices typical of courtly settings. An aptitude for both physical and intellectual activities is crucial, but the goal of the courtier’s training is to enable him to act with grazia (grace). The courtier achieves grace through self-restraint, mastery of the social conventions, and sprezzatura, an ideal invented by Castiglione to refer to a certain nonchalance or casualness in word and deed, often associated with disinvoltura (natural spontaneity). Since the chief tool of action at court is wit, the courtier needs a sophisticated knowledge of the 409

BALDASSARE CASTIGLIONE humanities, essential to developing verbal skills, sound judgment, and morality. Thus, the humanist ideal becomes an integral part of the education of the courtier, the prototype of the gentleman, but his learning must never be obvious, just as affectation and pedantry must be avoided. Graceful behavior must be seemly, reflecting the classical ideal of the ‘‘golden mean.’’ Castiglione’s courtier is well rounded, able to adjust his behavior to every person or situation, and the second book focuses on how the courtier should exercise his talents, emphasizing the importance of acting with discretion and good timing. Such adaptability is an invaluable, practical skill in a profession that had to navigate adroitly through the complex, even perilous, courtly environment. The model courtier avoids flattery, provides honest counsel, and tries to avoid serving a wicked ruler. He chooses proper fashions and friends, because first impressions matter at court. The discussion of humor and laughter at the end of this book grows rather naturally out of the emphasis on the role of wit in the courtier’s success. In Castiglione’s courtly world, all human relationships are defined through words, and humor may provide a kind of safety valve to deflect the tensions that lie beneath the polished surface. In the third book, the ladies move the conversation to the courtly lady, who creates the refined environment of a court. Beauty and circumspection are more important for the courtly lady, but she must be the courtier’s equal: She must come from a noble family, exhibit liveliness of mind, be clever in conversation, shun affectation, engage in appropriate exercise, know how to dress herself, and possess natural grace and virtue. She needs sufficient wit to maintain an atmosphere of goodwill, while entertaining all kinds of people; she must be adept in matters of love. Her essence lies in her affabilita` piacevole (pleasing affability) and in conduct and speech measured against una certa mediocrita` difficile (a certain difficult mean). In a lively debate that opposes misogynistic attacks and protofeminist positions, the idea that a woman can be as worthy as a man is supported with classical examples. Women create the sophisticated background against which the courtier displays his talents. Relationships between the prince and the courtier and between men and women are at the center of courtly life. In book four, the discussion moves beyond role playing and appearances, assigning to courtiership tangible moral and political goals. Whereas book two leaves moral distinctions to the courtier’s discretion, book four expands the courtier’s role to teaching the prince the difference 410

between reality and appearance, truth and falsehood, good and evil. Machiavelli and other political theorists ascribed Italy’s political chaos to corrupt leadership. Castiglione’s courtier addresses the problem by teaching the prince an essentially Platonic morality, linked to knowledge and choice of the good. A second radical ideal transforms courtiership. The perfect courtier must be in love, because love can lead him to the divine. Modeled on Plato’s Symposium and the writings of Marsilio Ficino and Pietro Bembo, the debate contrasts physical love and ideal love. The vision of earthly, corporeal beauty eventually leads the courtier up the ‘‘ladder of love’’ toward ideal beauty and the divine. The courtier must love the lady in her beauty of mind no less than that of her body. Aided by the senses of sight and hearing, this rational love involves no physical contact. Moving away from one beauty to the contemplation of many beauties allows him to form a universal concept of beauty, which liberates his soul from its earthly prison and guides it to a purifying introspective, intellectual experience allowing the soul to see in itself a spark of the divine. Finally, it experiences a mystical union with the divine, leaving behind all the senses and rational discourse. The company is spellbound by Bembo’s final discussion of ideal beauty, but the book ends on a playful note that brings both the speakers and the reader back to reality. Used as a book on etiquette and a guide to life at court, Il libro del Cortegiano earned a large public audience all over Europe. Others have seen it as an idyllic picture of a dazzling and fleeting moment in Italian culture. Yet, Castiglione clearly has more serious goals—an exploration of wit and humor in human society, the nature of women, the goal of providing wise counsel to the prince, spirituality and Platonic love, and the pleasures of living in a refined environment. Il Cortegiano moves beyond a sorrowful preoccupation with the past: Its primary concern is the formation and education of a moral individual. At his best, the courtier reflects the humanistic ideal of realizing one’s potential and living a rewarding life, a matter of concern to aristocrats, the wealthy bourgeoisie, artists and writers in societies centered around the institution of the court. As a courtier and diplomat, Castiglione may have sought the reputation of a wise and moral counselor, and his tone in Il Cortegiano would have appealed to the age, which reacted so negatively to Machiavelli’s realistic portrait of princes. Charles V kept the book by his bedside, along with the Bible and, interestingly, Il Principe.

BALDASSARE CASTIGLIONE Unable to retrieve the copy he had given to Vittoria Colonna, Castiglione hurried to publish his book at the famous Aldine Press in Venice, where it appeared in April 1528 according to his meticulous instructions. Castiglione’s future as a courtier and diplomat seemed secure, because of Charles V’s favor and the historical situation pointing to Spanish supremacy in Italy and central Europe. In early 1528, he was offered the bishopric of Avila, which he did not accept; it was rumored that Pope Clement was considering him for a cardinalate. But the capricious fortune that took away so many of his friends and family denied him his reward. At his death in 1529, he also left behind a significant diplomatic and personal correspondence that offers the reader a fascinating view into Renaissance society.

Toledo Cathedral, his remains were carried back to Italy in 1530 and buried next to his beloved wife in a church outside Mantua. JULIA CONAWAY BONDANELLA Selected Works Collections Opere volgari e latine, edited by Gianni Antonio e Gaetano Volpi, Padua: Comino, 1733. Poesie volgari e latine, edited by Pierantonio Serassi, Rome: Pagliarini, 1760. Opere, edited by Giuseppe Prezzolini, Milan‐Rome: Rizzoli, 1937. Libro del cortegiano con una scelta delle opere minori di Baldesar Castigione, edited by Bruno Maier, Torino: Unione tipografico–editrice torinese, 1964.

Dialogues

Biography Baldassare Castiglione was born into an old noble family on December 6, 1478, at Casatico (Mantova), his father’s estate, and named for his paternal grandfather. He moved to Milan in 1492, where he completed his education and gained experience while enjoying the cultural attractions at the court of Ludovico Sforza, Il Moro. Castiglione returned to Mantua after his father’s death in October and assumed his father’s responsibilities at the court of Francesco Gonzaga, the Marquis of Mantua. He witnessed the French invasion of Milan and the fall of Ludovico in the autumn of 1499. He worked for the French alliance for five years, accompanying Gonzaga on the ill-advised campaign against the Spanish in the Kingdom of Naples in 1503. Castiglione remained as Gonzaga’s representative in Rome, cultivated the papal Curia, and met Guidobaldo da Montefeltro and his wife, Elisabetta Gonzaga. He entered Duke Guidobaldo’s service at the court in Urbino in 1504, much to Gonzaga’s displeasure, and remained with Francesco Maria della Rovere after Guidobaldo’s death. He participated in several military campaigns organized by Julius II between 1509 and 1514 and again entered the service of Francesco Gonzaga, when Pope Leo X removed Francesco Maria as Duke of Urbino. Castiglione married Ippolita Torelli in 1516 and had three children before her death in 1520. During this period he again represented the Marquis of Mantua in Rome. He was appointed papal nuncio to Spain in July 1524 by Clement VII and gained the favor of Charles V. He died on February 7, 1529. Although he was buried in

Il Cortegiano, 1524; as The Book of the Courtier, edited by Daniel Javitch, translated by Charles Singleton, 2002.

Letters Lettere, edited by Pierantonio Serassi, 1769–1971. Lettere inedite e rare, edited by Guglielmo Gorni, 1969. Le Lettere. Tomo primo (1497–March, 1521), edited by Guido. La Rocca, Milan: Mondadori, 1978.

Further Reading Cartwright, Julia, The Perfect Courtier Baldassare Castiglione: His Life and Letters, 1478–1529, 2 vols., New York: E. P. Dutton, 1927. Cian, Vittorio, La Lingua di Baldassarre Castiglione, Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 1942. Cox, Virginia, The Renaissance Dialogue: Literary Dialogue in Its Social and Political Contexts, Castiglione to Galileo, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Finucci, Valeria, The Lady Vanishes: Subjectivity and Representation in Castiglione and Ariosto, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992. Fucilla, Joseph G., Superbi colli e eltri saggi, Florence: Olschki, 1963. Hanning, Robert W., and David Rosand (editors), Castiglione. The Ideal and the Real in Renaissance Culture, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983. Harrison, Thomas Perrin, Jr., ‘‘The Latin Pastorals of Milton and Castiglione,’’ Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 50(1935): 480–493. Ossola, Carlo, Dal Cortegiano’’ all’ ‘‘ Uomo di mondo’’: Storia di un libro e di un modello sociale, Turin: Einaudi, 1987. Saccone, Eduardo, ‘‘The Portrait of the Courtier in Castiglione,’’ Italica, 64(1987): 1–18. Scarpati, Claudio, and Uberto Motta. Studi su Baldassarre Castiglione, Milan: ISU Universita` cattolica, 2002. Woodhouse, John R., Castiglione: A Reassessment of ‘‘The Courtier,’’ Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1978.

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BALDASSARE CASTIGLIONE

IL LIBRO DEL CORTEGIANO, 1528 Dialogue by Baldassare Castiglione

Baldassare Castiglione worked on Il libro del Cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier) for nearly 20 years between around 1508 and 1524. He hurriedly sent the manuscript to the Aldine Press in Venice, because he feared a copy in the hands in Vittoria Colonna might be printed without his permission. After publication in April 1528, its popularity extended across Europe and made Castiglione’s model of civilized conduct a useful and enduring one, despite the idealized character of the work, which honors Guidobaldo da Montefeltro and the illustrious court of Urbino. The earliest plans for Il Cortegiano appear in a manuscript notebook dating from around 1508. After returning to Francesco Gonzaga’s service in Mantua in 1514, Castiglione had two manuscripts for his book prepared: The first dates from 1514– 1515; the second, which contains the first version of Il Cortegiano, from 1515–16. He revised and enlarged a second version of Il Cortegiano in three books around 1520–1521. The final manuscript, composed of four books, dates from 1524, after most of the characters in Il Cortegiano were dead. The dedicatory letter to Don Michel de Silva dates from 1527. Written as a dialogue or symposium in four books, Il Cortegiano has both classical and humanistic antecedents. Although Castiglione claims Cicero’s De oratore as his model, the form of the work is closely related to that of Plato’s Symposium. Besides the dedicatory letter to the work, each book contains an address to Alfonso Ariosto by the author. The book’s fiction is that Castiglione himself was in England at the time of the gathering in March 1507 at Urbino’s ducal palace, and that he is only setting down in writing a detailed account he heard of the lively conversations that took place as part of the entertainment, after the arrival of Pope Julius II and his entourage. The participants include a variety of notable historical figures, who lend an element of realism to the idealized picture of this brilliant court. 412

In book one, the speakers decide to amuse themselves by defining an ideal courtier. At the center of his physical and moral attributes lies grace that arises from sprezzatura, often defined as nonchalance or a kind of artful naturalness. They focus on the courtier’s nobility; his devotion to arms and sport; his education, especially in letters as the foundation of moral character; his cleverness in speaking and writing; and his expertise in social interactions. The second book focuses upon such issues as sound judgment, good timing, offering honest counsel, avoiding affectation, and following the classical rule of moderation. The long analysis of humor and the role of laughter in human life relates to the necessity of wit in the often dangerous courtly environment. When the question of the courtier’s behavior with women arises, the ladies insist that the courtier must have a woman who is his equal. The courtly lady, the topic of book three, has a civilizing function at court. While a natural kind of beauty is important, a lady must be circumspect and cautious in her behavior. Yet, many of her traits are identical to those of the courtier: liveliness of mind, appropriate physical exercise, prudence, virtue, skill in conversation, and securing goodwill. The courtly woman must exhibit a pleasing affability while observing a certain difficult mean. Some of the speakers defend women from misogynistic attacks through ancient examples, suggesting that women can be as worthy as men. Finally the concern with appearances is superseded by the question of the courtier’s political functions and higher aspirations, in particular toward Platonic love. The courtier’s principal goal serves an important political function, that of guiding his prince toward virtuous thoughts and actions. Furthermore, the perfect courtier must be in love, because love can lead him to the divine and spiritual, to true virtue. Rather than mere physical sensation, love becomes, in the words of Bembo, a purifying force inspired by the sense of sight rather than touch. Modeled on Plato’s Symposium and the writings of Marsilio Ficino and Pietro Bembo, the vision of earthly, corporeal beauty leads the courtier up the ‘‘ladder of love’’ toward ideal beauty and, ultimately, the divine. Talking until dawn, the company is captivated by the final discussion of ideal beauty that transforms the woman into an inspiration to lead the soul to the good or God. The book ends on a playful note that brings both the speakers and the reader back to reality.

BALDASSARE CASTIGLIONE Il Cortegiano is about the education of the ruling classes, but it offers a higher purpose. The contemplative ideal of love complements the active life of guiding the prince. The enthusiastic reception of this work demonstrates the power of its advice in European courtly circles for nearly two centuries. It appeared in over 150 editions in various European languages between 1528 and the end of the eighteenth century. JULIA CONAWAY BONDANELLA Editions First Edition Il libro del Cortegiano, Venice: Aldus, 1528.

Critical Editions Il libro del Cortegiano, edited by Vittorio Cian, Florence: Sansoni, 1897, reprinted in 1947. Il libro del Cortigiano, edited by G. Preti, Turin: Einaudi, 1960. As Il libro del Cortegiano con una scelta delle Opere minori, edited by Bruno Maier, Turin: UTET, 1964. Il libro del Cortigiano, edited by Giulio Carnazzi, Milan: Rizzoli, 1987. Il libro del Cortigiano, edited by Walter Barberis, Turin: Einaudi, 1998.

Translations As The Book of the Courtier, edited by Daniel Javitch, translated by Charles Singleton, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2002.

Further Reading Berger, Harry, The Absence of Grace: Sprezzatura and Suspicionin, Two Renaissance Courtesy Books, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. Burke, Peter, The Fortunes of the Courtier: The European Reception of Castiglione’s Cortegiano, Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 1995. Cavallo, JoAnn, ‘‘Joking Matters: Politics and Dissimulation in Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier,’’ Renaissance Quarterly, 53(2000): 402–424. Motta, Uberto, Castiglione e il mito di Urbino: studi sulla elaborazione del ‘‘Cortegiano,’’ Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 2003. Motta, Uberto, ‘‘Per Elisabetta: Il ritratto della Duchessa di Urbino nel Cortegiano di Castiglione,’’ Lettere Italiane, 56(2004): 442461. Patrizi, Giorgio, and Amedeo Quondam (editors), Educare il corpo, educare la parola: nella trattistica del Rinascimento, Rome: Bulzoni, 1998. Pugliese, Olga Zorzi, ‘‘L’evoluzione della struttura dialogica nel Libro del cortegiano, ’’ in Il sapere delle parole: Studi sul dialogo latino e italiano del Rinascimento, edited by Walter Geerts, Annick Paternoster, and Franco Pignatti, Rome: Bulzoni, 2001. Quint, David, ‘‘Courtier, Prince, Lady: The Design of the Book of the Courtier,’’ Italian Quarterly, 37(2000): 185–195. Quondam, Amedeo, ‘‘Questo povero Cortegiano,’’ Castiglione, il Libro, la Storia, Rome: Bulzoni, 2000. Rebhorn, Wayne, Courtly Performances: Masking and Festivity in Castiglione’s ‘‘ Book of the Courtier,’’ Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1978. Wirth, Petra, ‘‘Il libro del cortegiano: La figura femminile– segno ideale nel mondo illusorio del cortigiano,’’ Romance Review, 8(1998): 38–59.

THE CASTLE OF FRATTA See Le confessioni d’un italiano (Work by Ippolito Nievo)

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CATHERINE OF SIENA (CATERINA BENINCASA)

CATHERINE OF SIENA (CATERINA BENINCASA) (1347–1380) Dominican tertiary, mystic, theologian, canonized saint, doctor of the Catholic Church, and patroness of Italy, Catherine is the most prominent mystic of the fourteenth century. She was the author of 382 Lettere (Letters, ca. 1374–1380), 26 Orazioni (Prayers, ca. 1376–1380), and one book, the Dialogo della Divina Provvidenza (Dialogue of Divine Providence), also known as Dialogo della Divina Dottrina, or Dialogo delle Rivelazioni (Dialogue of Divine Doctrine, or Dialogue of Revelations), or simply as Dialogo (Dialogue). Catherine was the first woman to have left substantial amounts of writing in the Italian vernacular. Despite her lack of education and her social class, Catherine broke the boundaries of feminine conventions for her times. Rather than remaining within the confines of the household or monastery, as would have been customary for a religious woman, she became a public figure and a strong presence in the civic, ecclesiastical, and political struggles of the fourteenth century. She gained unprecedented power, to the point of being consulted by the pope for advice and being asked to lecture the College of Cardinals on its dutiful loyalty to the pope. Her influence on two major historical occurrences is particularly noteworthy: convincing the pope to return to Rome from Avignon and contributing to a peace agreement between Florence and the pope. Living at the time of papal residency at Avignon, Catherine actively committed herself to the pope’s return to Rome and eventually succeeded in convincing him to abandon his political intrigues and to revert to his traditional role as bishop of Rome. Pope Gregory XI moved the court back to the Vatican in 1378. In March of the same year, at the pope’s request, Catherine departed on a mission to Florence, which was then under papal interdict, in order to bring peace between the two contending states. In Florence, she witnessed the Ciompi revolt in June. Catherine imposed herself on popes and princes by means of her wisdom and her simple but profound rhetoric. Her written works are a unique specimen of what may be called ‘‘ecclesiastical mysticism.’’ They are nothing more than an inspired 414

exposition of basic Catholic creeds, which Catherine renewed and presented in a more approachable fashion, thanks to her acquired closeness to God. Traditional criticism focused on the retelling of Catherine’s life and began while she was still alive. In 1374 Tommaso della Fonte and Bartolomeo Dominici wrote hagiographic texts on her life. In 1398 her secretary Raymond of Capua wrote the Legenda maior (Major Legend), the first biography, from which over 40 subsequent lives would draw their material for edifying purposes. In recent years, Catherine’s mystical writing has received more attention, both for its theological content and for its literary value. After being proclaimed Doctor of the Catholic Church in 1970, her written works have been investigated more thoroughly, paying particular attention to the originality of her theological approach and her unique style. Catherine overcame the obstacle of her own illiteracy with the help of her spiritual director and secretary, the Dominican friar Raymond of Capua, who was a theologian and a scholar in his own right. Despite her initial ignorance, the constant interaction and discussion about theological and spiritual issues with her cohort of followers, most of whom were literate and knowledgeable people, and the continuous reading of mystical and theological texts helped Catherine develop a cultural background of her own. Although at some point she may have learned how to write her own texts, she always preferred to dictate her writings to her numerous followers who served as her secretaries. Through her writings, Catherine contributed strongly to the spreading of the vernacular, which was at its beginning stages of development as a written language. She wrote in Sienese dialect, and her works, besides being crucial theological investigations, gain importance from a literary and linguistic point of view, because they were written at a time when literary language was not yet definitively formed. After a long period of prayerful solitude climaxed in an unexpected ‘‘mystical marriage’’ with Christ at the age of 21, Catherine came to the realization that the love of God must be complemented by service to her fellow human beings. She

CATHERINE OF SIENA (CATERINA BENINCASA) began by tending to the indigent and underprivileged, but soon her service would involve civic, political, and ecclesiastical commitments. Catherine quickly became well known for her ecstasies and also gathered around herself a large number of followers, whom she named famiglia, the Italian for ‘‘family.’’ Some of her followers were secular, but most of them were religious belonging to different orders. The formation of the group around her is important because theologically Catherine was influenced by the four major mystical schools of the Middle Ages: Dominicans, Franciscans, Augustinians, and Benedictines. Some of her followers were Dominicans like herself (Raimondo da Capua, Tommaso Caffarini, Bartolomeo Dominici), others were Franciscans (Gabriele da Volterra, Lazzarino da Pisa), still others were Augustinians (Giovanni Tantucci and other hermits of Lecceto, as well as William Flete), and one was the Vallombrosan Benedictine Giovanni dalle Celle. Catherine’s Lettere constitute indispensable documents of cultural and historical significance. The variety of her correspondents and abundance of situations offer an opening into the real life of fourteenth-century Europe. Catherine corresponded with friends, relatives, strangers, prisoners, prostitutes, popes, queens, and kings. To all of them she imparted advice, counsel, and information, in an attempt to find a spiritual explanation and moral maturation for their private or public condition. She wrote most of her letters between 1370 and 1380, at a most difficult time in the history of the Church, when the Avignon ‘‘captivity’’ underwent important changes, before a permanent solution was found. For this reason, some of the letters addressed to the pope or to government officials attest to Catherine’s political stance. Her undeniable political naı¨vete´ transpires through her observation of every situation from a moral and spiritual perspective. She maintained deference and subordination in her relations with state and clerical officials, but she surpassed the confines of her sex and role, when she clearly voiced judgment and expressed condemnation. While hiding behind the rhetorical shield of misogynistic inferiority, she made strong arguments to support her opinions. In literary history, at the time of the diatribe over the standardization of the Italian language, her letters would be considered a model of Sienese dialect to be contrasted with the Florentine dialect. The Lettere were the subject of numerous critical studies in the course of the nineteenth century. Given the historical approach of most scholarship in that period of time, the letters offer abundant

material for investigation into the crucial questions linked to the papal exile in France. Catherine wrote the Dialogo between 1377 and 1378, dictating it to her secretaries, who were already used to writing the letters she dictated. In this case, they transcribed what the saint uttered during her ecstatic moments, when she was rapt in visions. As suggested by the title, the structure of the book is that of a dialogue with God the Father, in which Catherine reports her experience of Christ and concerns herself with the whole spiritual life of human beings. The dialogic form of this work derives directly from Catherine’s composition technique, because the book was divinely inspired and the result of her prayerful exchanges with God. It is divided into six sections: an Introduction (Chapters 1 to 8), the ‘‘Trattato della Discrezione’’ (Treatise on Discretion, Chapters 9 to 64), the ‘‘Trattato dell’Orazione’’ (Treatise on Prayer, Chapters 65 to 134), the ‘‘Trattato della Divina Provvidenza’’ (Treatise on Divine Providence, Chapters 135 to 153), the ‘‘Trattato dell’Obbedienza’’ (Treatise on Obedience, Chapters 154 to 167), and the ‘‘Devota rivelazione’’ (Devout Revelation) or ‘‘Dialogo breve’’ (Brief Dialogue). In the Dialogo, Catherine concentrates on the suffering body of Christ. The incarnate Word and above all the crucified Christ originate all her revelations, which then become expanded to the mystical body of Christ, the Church. The underlying theological concept involves a refutation of self-love, which is the root of all vices, and the desire to achieve perfect virtue, which is the gift of charity and must be complemented by the service of others. The Dialogo is an expansion of the revelation that Catherine had in a vision, after receiving Holy Communion on the feast of the Blessed Virgin. It gathers together the spiritual teachings she had already scattered in the various letters. Its language attempts to express the ineffable essence of God in the symbolism of its own times. Catherine’s Orazioni follow the same compositional technique as the Lettere and the Dialogo. The prayers report words she uttered during her ecstasies, which were recorded by her secretaries, possibly without her consciousness of it. The majority of her prayers were recorded in the last few months of her life, during her stay in Rome between 1379 and 1380. Catherine’s exchanges with God in the Orazioni are rhetorically and spiritually not very dissimilar from the Dialogo, because they are conceived as reporting revelations inspired in her by the Spirit during ecstatic moments. Judgment on Catherine’s theological thinking varies greatly. Far from trying to develop a 415

CATHERINE OF SIENA (CATERINA BENINCASA) systematic theology, she more simply offered her spiritual intuitions and pastoral suggestions. Catherine’s mystical theology concentrates on imagery rather than theoretical conceptualization. Some of her images are particularly significant, such as the ‘‘bridge.’’ The humanity of the divine Christ, the incarnate Word, stands as the bridge between prayer and action, heaven and earth, humans and God, contemplation of God and service of others, time and eternity. The cross of Christ becomes the bridge uniting humanity and divinity; three most important constitutive parts of the cross are the three steps of the bridge: Christ’s feet nailed to the Cross, his pierced side, and his mouth reveal in ascending succession his ineffable love and peace. The ‘‘inner cell’’ or cell of the mind is another such powerful image. It signifies the bringing into the interior of the prayerful practice of contemplation. Living in the world, Catherine made her own monastic cell inside herself; even while living in the troublesome family environment in her youthful years, she gained isolation by retreating in her private cell of the mind. Other concrete images include the ‘‘rope’’ of charity, which binds God and humans together, and the tree of life, which was dead but has been restored to new life thanks to its grafting with the love of God; it is now a new and fruitful tree. Catherine’s novelty is stylistic more than conceptual. She used very concrete and graphic images to account for her theological arguments. Morality, truthfulness, and strong imagery are some of the chief qualities of her literary work, which manages to express even the most complex and sublime theological concepts in popular style and simple, direct language. The depth of Catherine’s spiritual revelations shaped her humble rhetoric into inspiring images that can be easily comprehended by scholarly and ignorant readers alike.

Biography Catherine of Siena was the twenty-fourth child born to Jacopo and Lapa Benincasa, middle class wool-dyers from Siena, in southern Tuscany. Prophetic indications of her religious mission have been identified in her date of birth, March 25, 1347, which coincides with the feast of the annunciation to Mary and the miraculous conception of Christ, in the fact that Catherine was the only one of 25 children to be nursed by her mother, and also in her death in 1380 at the age of 33, traditionally the age of Christ. Catherine displayed clear signs of her religious vocation from a very early age. She 416

decided not to marry, in order to devote herself entirely to the service of God. After her first vision at the age of 6, she made a vow of virginity. In defiance of her parents’ marriage plans for her, Catherine cut off her hair and lived as a recluse in the basement of her family home. At 16, she took the habit of the Sisters of Penance of the Third Order of Saint Dominic, the Mantellate, which up to that time had been an order solely for widowed women. She devoted her life to praying, fasting, physical penance, and the service of her family members. Catherine received no formal education and taught herself how to read and write during the years of isolation at home. When she was 20, Christ instructed her in one of her visions to conduct an active life of service in the world. She gathered around herself a large group of followers, from every station of life and rank. Most of her followers were older, more educated, and socially higher than she. She even gained the faith of popes, cardinals, politicians, kings, and queens, who exchanged letters with her in search of advice. On April 1, 1375, while in Pisa on a mission, she received the stigmata. She also convinced Pope Gregory XI to move the papacy back to Rome from Avignon, thereby ending the 70-year ‘‘captivity’’ in 1378. In the same year, she witnessed the Ciompi revolt in Florence, where she was sent by the pope to pacify the city. At the death of Gregory XI, she became deeply involved in the dispute between the newly elected Pope Urban VI and the anti-Pope Clement VII, which started the Great Schism of the western Church. Having been called to Rome by the pope to be on his side, Catherine lived in Rome for the last two years of her life and died on the Sunday before the Feast of the Ascension, on April 29, 1380, after offering her life for the unity of the Church. Since Catherine’s death, her relics have been credited with numerous miracles. Upon the demand of the Sienese people for the saint’s body to be returned, Catherine’s head was severed and sent to Siena to be venerated as a relic. She was canonized in 1461 and proclaimed patroness of Italy in 1939 and doctor of the Church in 1970. ALESSANDRO VETTORI See also: Religion and Literature Selected Works Libro della divina dottrina: Barduccio Canigiani, Epistola della morte di S. Caterina (written in 1377–1378), ca. 1475. Epistole: Orazioni scelte, edited by Bartolommeo da Alzano, 1500.

CARLO CATTANEO Il Dialogo (written in 1377–1378), edited by Giuliana Cavallini, as The Dialogue (1968), translated by Suzanne Noffke, 1980. Le orazioni (written in 1376–1380), edited by Giuliana Cavallini, 1993, as The Prayers of Saint Catherine of Siena, translated by Suzanne Noffke, 1983. Epistolario di Santa Caterina da Siena (written in 1374– 1380), edited by Eugenio Dupre´ Theseider, 1940; as The Letters of Saint Catherine of Siena, 2 vols., translated by Suzanne Noffke, 2000–2001.

Further Reading Anodal, Gabriella, Il linguaggio cateriniano: indice delle immagini, Siena: Cantagalli, 1983. Bell, Rudolph M., Holy Anorexia, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. Cavallini, Giuliana, Catherine of Siena, London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1998. Fawtier, Robert, and Louis Canet, La double expe´rience de Sainte Catherine Benincasa, 6th edition, Paris: Librairie Gallimard, 1948.

Foster, Kenelm, and Mary John Ronayne, editors, I, Catherine: Selected Writings of Catherine of Siena, London: Collins, 1980. Getto, Giovanni, Saggio letterario su S. Caterina da Siena, Florence: Sansoni, 1939. Hilkert, Mary Catherine, Speaking with Authority: Catherine of Siena and the Voices of Women Today, New York: Paulist Press, 2001. Levasti, Arrigo, My Servant, Catherine, translated by Dorothy M. White, Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1954. Noffke, Suzanne, O.P., Catherine of Siena: Vision through a Distant Eye, Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1996. Papa`sogli, Giorgio, Sangue e fuoco: Santa Caterina da Siena, Rome: Citta` Nuova, 1986. Raimondo da Capua, The Life of St. Catherine of Siena, translated by George Lamb, London: Harvill, 1960. Zanini, Lina, Bibliografia analitica di s. Caterina da Siena: 1901–1950, Rome: Edizioni Cateriniane, 1971.

CARLO CATTANEO (1801–1869) The Milanese philosopher and economist Carlo Cattaneo launched his career as a writer in 1822, publishing a review of his university professor Gian Domenico Romagnosi’s influential book Assunto primo della scienza del diritto naturale (The First Thesis of the Science of Natural Law, 1820) in the Florentine journal Antologia di Vieusseux. Romagnosi (1761–1835) was the most important figure in Cattaneo’s formation; in his article, Cattaneo strongly supported Romagnosi’s esteem for the French Enlightenment, especially as exemplified in Diderot’s and D’Alembert’s Encyclopedie. In 1839 Cattaneo founded Il Politecnico: Repertorio mensile di studi applicati alla prosperita` e alla cultura sociale (The Polytechnic: Monthly Index of Studies Applied to Welfare and Social Culture), which became the most important cultural journal of its time. Il Politecnico continued to be published until 1844, then resumed in 1859, continuing under Cattaneo until 1862 and ceasing publication in 1868. As its editor, he sought to analyze the Italian and European situation from historical, sociological, and economic perspectives and to disseminate news of the latest scientific advances among his readers. Cattaneo also wrote on literary matters from a quasi-anthropological perspective, addressing the

problem of romanticism, the status of the ‘‘modern’’ novel in Italy, and the relationship among literature, history, and responsible citizenship within the context of national customs. He analyzed and recommended such books as Vita di Dante (Life of Dante, 1839), by Cesare Balbo and the Romancero del Cid, translated into Italian by Pietro Monti in 1839, while criticizing works like Niccolo` Tommaseo’s Fede e Bellezza (Faith and Beauty, 1840), which he faulted for its weakness in ideas and style. In 1843 he was appointed to the Istituto Lombardo-Veneto, composed of scholars in economic and historical studies, and was entrusted to prepare a guide of Lombardy for the scholars who were to come to Milan for the Congress of Scientists in 1844. Notizie naturali e civili su la Lombardia (Natural and Civic Notes on Lombardy, 1844) is a two-volume analysis of the scientific and social history of the region that concludes with a discussion of its contemporary problems. Between 1846 and 1847, Cattaneo published Alcuni scritti (Some Writings), a collection of essays elaborating his political hopes for independent European states. In 1848 he was part of Consiglio di Guerra, which organized the ‘‘cinque giornate,’’ the ‘‘five days’’ of political insurgency in Milan, of which he wrote a 417

CARLO CATTANEO vigorous account in French, L’Insurrection de Milan (The Insurrection of Milan, 1848). Cattaneo abandoned active political involvement when King Carlo Alberto and his ministers, who considered him an unreliable reactionary, became the leaders of Risorgimento. Cattaneo’s position was, in fact, a republican federalist one: He was hostile to the unification strategy of Giuseppe Mazzini and Camillo Cavour. In Cattaneo’s view, Mazzini’s politics were idealistic, mystic, and visionary, while Cavour took the opportunistic and utilitarian line of a professional politician. Cattaneo held that social and political policy should be based on an objective analysis of all the relevant economic and historical factors. In his view, the vision of the leaders of the Italian Risorgimento was a vast idealistic synthesis that lacked a scientific foundation. The very first step of the Risorgimento movement, the unification between developed Lombardy and the backward Piedmont, was a social and economical mistake in Cattaneo’s view, an example of such unrealistic idealism. Cattaneo’s attitude was in any case the attitude of a scholar who worked to apply the principles of the French Enlightenment to contemporary realities. Analysis should be based on experimental observation, on a lucid and considered rational judgement, on a scientific culture, able to mediate, as he wrote in the introduction to his Notizie naturali e civili su la Lombardia, between ‘‘le meditazioni dei pochi e i costumi e le necessita` dei molti’’ (the thoughts of the few and the habits and needs of the many). He hoped to ‘‘render fertile il campo d’azione e di pratica’’ (to fertilize the field of action and pratice) by inspiring a series of social and economical structural reforms. Cattaneo was profoundly hostile to the ideas of the ‘‘primato morale e civile degli italiani’’ (the moral and civic preeminence of the Italians) introduced and promoted by the republican philosopher Vincenzo Gioberti. In 1860 Cattaneo published a collection of his complete essays in economics, Memorie di economia pubblica (Memoirs of public economics). As he wrote there: ‘‘L’Italia dovrebbe muoversi all’unisono con l’Europa, per conquistare una nobile posizione nell’associazione scientifica d’Europa e del mondo, poiche` gli scopi del popolo son gli stessi, coerenti, unici e comuni: una scienza, un’arte, una cultura, una societa`’’ (Italy should move in unison with Europe, to assume a noble position in the scientific association of Europe and the world, because the aims of the people are the same, consistent and common ones: one science, 418

one art, one culture, one society). Switzerland was a political model for him. In the ancient League of the Free Cantons, it gave birth to a new constitution in which political rights and individual freedom were guaranteed; it had a common army, security policy, and government, but the economic and social individuality of each of the cantons was respected. In Switzerland Cattaneo published his Corso di filosofia (Course in Philosophy, 1852), in which, in powerful and incisive language and images, he discussed the economic value of free enquiry and the importance of combining intellectual with scientific, technical research. When he resumed publication of Il Politecnico in 1860, he published an essay dedicated to the poet Ugo Foscolo and his fight for Italian independence and autonomy. After 1867 Cattaneo became an elected member of the Italian Parliament, but he never exercised his mandate, being deeply disappointed by the way in which a united Italy was achieved and ruled. Cattaneo’s ideological positions were revived during World War II when Elio Vittorini launched a literary and cultural review called Il Politecnico (1945–1947).

Biography Born in Milan, on 15 June 1801, Cattaneo studied law in Pavia under Gian Domenico Romagnosi and graduated in 1824. He worked as a professor in various high schools in Milan and as a German translator for the Lombard publisher, Londonio. He became a leader of the 1848 ‘‘cinque giornate’’ insurrection in Milan. When the Austrians regained their power, Cattaneo took refuge first in Lugano, then in Paris, where he sought French republican support to the Italian independence movement. He moved to Lugano in 1855. In 1860, he joined Garibaldi in Naples. He was elected a member of the Italian Parliament in 1867. Cattaneo died in Castagnola (Switzerland), on 6 February 1869. STEFANO ADAMI See also: Risorgimento Selected Works Collections Opere, edited by Alessandro Bertani, Florence: Le Monnier, 1881. Le piu` belle pagine di Carlo Cattaneo, edited by Gaetano Salvemini, Milan: Treves, 1922.

GUIDO CAVALCANTI Scritti filosofici, edited by Norberto Bobbio, Florence: Le Monnier, 1960. Tutte le opere, edited by Luigi Ambrosoli, Milan: Mondadori, 1967. Opere scelte, edited by Delia Castelnuovo Frigessi, 4 vols., Turin: Einaudi, 1972. Scritti filosofici letterari e vari, edited by Franco Alessio, Florence: Sansoni, 1990. L’innovazione come leva dello sviluppo: Scritti e discorsi per la Societa` d’Incoraggiamento d’Arti e Mestieri di Milano, edited by Carlo G. Lacaita, Florence: Le Monnier, 2001.

Philosophic, Political, and Economic Writings Notizie naturali e civili su la Lombardia, 1844. Alcuni scritti, 1846–1847. Dell’insurrezione di Milano nel 1848 e della successiva guerra, edited by Norberto Bobbio, 1949. Corso di filosofia, 1852. Memorie di economia pubblica, 1860.

Letters Epistolario, edited by Rinaldo Caddeo, 1949–1956.

Further Reading Armani, Giuseppe, Carlo Cattaneo, una biografia, Milan: Garzanti, 1997. Bracaloni, Ruggero, Cattaneo, un federalista per gl’italiani, Milan: Mondadori, 1995. Cafagna, Luciano (editor), Atti di intelligenza e sviluppo economico. Saggi per il bicentenario della nascita di Carlo Cattaneo, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2001. Della Peruta, Franco, Carlo Cattaneo politico, Milan: Angeli, 2001. Frabotta, Biancamaria, Carlo Cattaneo, Lugano: Fondazione Ticino, 1971. Gili, Antonio, Carlo Cattaneo (1801–1869) un italiano svizzero, Lugano: Casagrande Editore, 2001. Levi, Alessandro, Il positivismo politico di Carlo Cattaneo, Florence: Centro Editoriale Toscano, 2001. Moos, Carlo, L’altro Risorgimento: L’ultimo Cattaneo tra Italia e Svizzera, Milan: Angeli, 1992. Puccio, Ugo, Introduzione a Cattaneo, Turin: Einaudi, 1977. Rotelli, Ettore, L’eclissi del federalismo: da Cattaneo al Partito d’Azione, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2003.

GUIDO CAVALCANTI (CA. 1259–1300) Guido Cavalcanti was one of the most distinctive poetic voices of the dolce stil nuovo; indeed, in the Vita Nuova, Dante refers to him as his ‘‘first friend.’’ Cavalcanti’s poetic compositions, 52 in all (2 canzoni, 2 cobbole, 11 ballate, 36 sonnets, and 1 mottetto), are collected in more than 100 manuscripts, among which the oldest and most authoritative are three in the Vatican Library (Chigi L.VIII.305, Lat. 3214, and Barb. 3953), two in Florence (Laurentian Rediano 9 and Banco Rari 217, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale), one in Spain (Escorial e.III.23), one in Verona (Capitolare 445), and one in Milan (Ambrosiano O.63 sup.). Cavalcanti’s poetry is generally dedicated to the exploration of amorous phenomena and may be divided into several distinctive and broad categories defined both by subject and style: the doctrinal and intellectual disquisition on the nature of love and loving; the praise of love and the lady’s beauty; the complaint over the harshness of love’s tyranny; humorous caricature in the comic-realistic vein; and poetry of more popular inspiration. No fewer than eight of his sonnets are in correspondence (tenzoni) with other poets. Of these, perhaps

the earliest ‘‘historically datable’’ one was written in response to the younger Dante’s first sonnet in the Vita Nuova,‘‘A ciascun’alma presa e gentil core,’’ which requests an interpretation of his erotically charged dream. In his responsive sonnet, ‘‘Vedeste, al mio parere, onne valore,’’ Guido provides an explanation that, at the time of its composition, may have been plausible, but one that, in retrospect, Dante found wanting. In the category of tenzoni, some poems directed to other poets do not appear to have had a response, or at least none has survived, as, for example, the two sonnets he addressed to Dante—‘‘Dante, un sospiro messagger del core’’ and ‘‘Se vedi Amore, assai ti priego, Dante’’— and particularly the one he addressed to Guittone d’Arezzo, ‘‘Da piu` a uno face un sollegismo.’’ In this latter sonnet Guido takes the older poet to task for the lack of clear logical procedures and structures in his poetry. As was the case with most of the important poets of the age, Cavalcanti both borrowed from the lyric tradition and contributed to it; he was an imitator as well as an innovator. Nevertheless, his poetic voice almost always has a fresh and distinctive 419

GUIDO CAVALCANTI quality. Cavalcanti was a poet with many faces, perhaps as many as five different aspects. In poems such as ‘‘Fresca rosa novella’’ and ‘‘Avete ‘n vo’ li fior’ e la verdura,’’ we may observe the more ‘‘traditional’’ Cavalcanti, for here he shows himself to be the master of the relatively uncomplicated poetry of praise that imitates both the Sicilian School and Guido Guinizzelli. In sonnets such as ‘‘Tu m’a`i sı` piena di dolor la mente’’ and ‘‘Voi che per li occhi mi passaste il core,’’ we may view the poet’s darker, tragic side, particularly in his seeming obsession with the ‘‘spiritelli’’ (little spirits) and with the torment occasioned by love that leads to death. In other poems, such as the sonnet ‘‘Guata, Manetto, quella scrignutuzza,’’ Cavalcanti displayed his ability to write effectively and humorously in the lower stylistic register of the goliardic poets and the ‘‘rimatori comico-realistici,’’ such as Rustico di Filippo and others. In the ballata ‘‘In un boschetto trova’ pasturella,’’ Cavalcanti demonstrated his awareness of the troubadour tradition of the pastourelle and his skill in composing in a more popular genre. Finally, in his doctrinal canzone ‘‘Donna me prega,’’ he gave ample evidence of his intellectual powers and exegetical talents—of what Dante termed in Inferno 10 Guido’s ‘‘altezza d’ingegno’’ (v. 59). Indeed, Cavalcanti’s reputation as a ‘‘natural philosopher,’’ a follower of Epicurus and Averroes, is attested by the chroniclers Giovanni and Filippo Villani and by Giovanni Boccaccio, who cast him as such in the ninth tale of the sixth day of the Decameron. These philosophical strands found their way into many of his poems and into ‘‘Donna me prega’’ in particular. Cavalcanti was obsessed with the psychology of love, and in many of his poems he represented, externalized, the inner struggle of the soul afflicted by contrasting emotions, which he personified as spiritelli. The tragic, mournful quality of his lyrics attests to the mental and physical anguish induced by love and often reflects the abject state of the lover, as in the following sonnet, which also marks a new development in the history of the form: L’anima mia vilment’ e` sbigotita de la battaglia ch’ell’ave dal core: che s’ella sente pur un poco Amore piu` presso a lui che non sole, ella more. Sta come quella che non ha valore, ch’e` per temenza da lo cor partita; e chi vedesse com’ ell’ e` fuggita diria per certo: Questi non ha vita. Per li occhi venne la battaglia in pria, che ruppe ogni valore immantenente,

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sı` che del colpo fu strutta la mente. Qualunqu’ e` quei che piu` allegrezza sente, se vedesse li spirti fuggir via, di grande sua pietate piangeria. My soul suffers harsh anguish because of the battle the heart wages on it: if it senses that Love is closer to it than normal, it will die. It remains as one that has no power and is through fear separated from the heart; whoever would see how it has fled would say for certain: ‘‘This one is not alive.’’ The battle first came through the eyes and immediately broke down all resistance, such that the mind was devastated by the blow. Whoever may be in a state of great happiness, if he were to see my spirits fleeing, he would weep from pity

This intentionally asymmetrical and unique rhyme scheme (ABBB BAAA CDD DCC) is the metrical counterpart to the emotional disequilibrium, to the disordered state of the poet-lover’s existence brought about by love. Relying neither on fragmented syntax nor on harsh language, Cavalcanti was able to convey the sense of imbalance through subtle manipulation of the rhyme scheme. As is customary, the poet-lover’s amorous affairs are acted out with ‘‘real’’ characters, the personifications of his soul, mind, and heart. Cavalcanti’s doctrinal canzone ‘‘Donna me prega’’ is structured along the lines of a philosophical and scientific treatise and was intended to be a sort of scientific proof (a ‘‘natural dimostramento’’) that defines the origin, nature, and effects of love. The first stanza of the canzone announces the several questions about love that the poet will seek to resolve: Donna me prega, — per ch’io voglio dire d’un accidente — che sovente — e` fero, ed e` sı` altero, — ch’e` chiamato amore: sı` chi lo nega — possa ’1 ver sentire! Ed a presente — conoscente — chero, perch’io no spero — ch’om di basso core a tal ragione porti canoscenza: che`, senza — natural dimostramento non ho talento — di voler provare la` dove posa, e chi lo fa creare, e qual sia sua vertute e sua potenza, l’essenza — poi e ciascun suo movimento, e ’l piacimento che ’l fa dire amare, e s’omo per veder lo po` mostrare. A lady beseeches me, and therefore I am willing to treat of an accident that is often fierce, and yet so majestic, which is called Love: so that those who disbelieve in it may hear the truth. And now I require an intelligent audience, because I have no hope that people of inferior quality can muster sufficient understanding for a discussion of this kind. For I am not inclined to try, without

GUIDO CAVALCANTI scientific exposition, to demonstrate where it resides, and who brings it into existence, and what its virtue and its power are, and then its essence and all its movements, and the attraction that earns for it the name of loving, and whether one can show it so that it can be seen. [Translated by J. E. Shaw]

Although the exact meaning and sources of the canzone are still the subject of much debate, certain points emerge as valid: The lover, gazing upon a real woman, formulates within himself his own idea of beauty, and this ideal conception then completely dominates his mind, causing him to strive anxiously and ceaselessly to obtain its earthly manifestation, that is, a real woman. The anguish and torment of this vain pursuit (vain because the real can never measure up to the ideal) ultimately deprives the lover of reason and causes death. Cavalcanti’s poetry, for the most part, has as its subject the externalization, with appropriate personifications, of this inner struggle. While Cavalcanti is well known for his distinctively ‘‘tragic’’ poetry, not all of his lyrics are concerned with the anguish of the lover. The ballata ‘‘Fresca rosa novella’’ is a fine example of his richly flowing and exuberantly optimistic love lyrics, which demonstrate his strong ties to the poetic tradition. The first line evokes the colorful contrasto of Cielo d’Alcamo, ‘‘Rosa fresca aulentissima,’’ as well as a host of other poems that feature the Natureingang with the related floral and seasonal imagery of springtime: Fresca rosa novella, piacente primavera, per prata e per rivera gaiamente cantando vostro fin presio mando — a la verdura. Fresh, new rose, pleasing springtime, through meadows and streams joyously singing I proclaim your worth to all the countryside

The first two verses contain the almost ecstatic double invocation of the lady who is both rose and spring, flower and season. The adjectives ‘‘fresca,’’ ‘‘novella,’’ and ‘‘piacente’’ focus on her marvelous aspects: vitality, newness, and beauty. These are the qualities that combine to form the lady’s worth— her ‘‘presio’’— that the poet will evoke in his song of praise and that will echo throughout the springtime landscape, denoting the universality of Cavalcanti’s message. The ballata form, not common among the earlier poets, became for Cavalcanti a major vehicle for expression. This five-line ripresa contains the essential elements of the composition,

and its repetition after each strophe would ensure that the poem’s message—the celebration of the woman’s beauty, worth, and miraculous qualities—was proclaimed unequivocally and universally. The ballata is then a prime example of what we might call Cavalcanti’s overt adherence to the Guinizzellian ‘‘poetics of praise’’ and, more generally, to the celebration of the lady’s beauty and worth that is integral to a large part of duecento poetry. In a related vein, the sonnet ‘‘Bilta` di donna e di saccente core’’ belongs to the genre of the Provenc¸al plazer, which is intended to evoke those things that bring pleasure to the poet. One of many topoi in the thirteenth-century lyric is the presentation of the scene describing the encounter between the lover and the lady on the street (e.g., Giacomo da Lentini’s ‘‘Meravigliosamente’’; Guinizzelli’s ‘‘Io vogl’ del ver la mia donna laudare’’; Dante’s ‘‘Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare’’; Cino da Pistoia’s ‘‘Tutto mi salva il dolce salutare’’). Cavalcanti’s variation on this particular theme, the sonnet ‘‘Chi e` questa che ve`n, ch’ogn’om la mira’’ (Who is she who comes, that every man admires), demonstrates his attempt to bridge the distance between the joyful and the tragic styles. While Cavalcanti was obviously not the first poet to speak of the pains and anguish of love, his poetry is distinguished because of the intensity of the emotion and the dramatic qualities of the poetic mise-en-sce`ne. In a number of finely tuned lyrics, mainly sonnets, Cavalcanti demonstrated his ability to describe the state of desolation wrought by love, to stage a dramatic scene of conflicting emotions that results in the harsh reality of a battlefield of love strewn with the victims of passion, as, for example in the sonnet ‘‘Voi che per li occhi mi passaste il core,’’ which presents a fantastic vision of Love who destroys the poet’s inner self. Cavalcanti’s preoccupation with the tragic dimension of amorous passion found followers in two of the minor members of the dolce stil novo, Dino Frescobaldi and Gianni degli Alfani. For his many fine qualities and numerous innovations Cavalcanti has a place of prominence in the poetic tradition of the thirteenth century.

Biography Guido Cavalcanti was born in Florence sometime in the 1250s (and not later than 1259) into a wealthy and powerful Guelf family. Guido’s father, Cavalcante, participated in the battle of Montaperti (1260) that resulted in the defeat of the Guelfs 421

GUIDO CAVALCANTI and the six-year reign of the Ghibellines in Florence (1260–1266). In 1267 Guido was married to Bice, a daughter of Farinata degli Uberti, the leader of the Florentine Ghibellines, in an attempt to make peace between the warring political factions of the city. They had two children, Tancia and Andrea. Guido was active in Florence politics. In the peace concluded by Cardinal Latino in 1280 he was one of the guarantors for the Guelf party, and in 1284 he served, together with Brunetto Latini and Dino Compagni, on the Consiglio Generale del Comune. In his chronicle, Compagni refers to the animosity between Guido and Corso Donati, a hatred based on political affiliations (Guido was a white Guelf, Corso a leader of the black Guelf faction), and this enmity led to Corso’s attempted assassination of Guido while he was on pilgrimage to the shrine of St. James in Compostella (1293–1295). The passage of the Ordinances of Justice in 1295 effectively excluded Guido from serving in the Florentine government. Fierce partisan rivalry continued, however, and Guido took part in an attack on the Donati family in Florence and was wounded. On June 24, 1300, Guido and other leaders of both the white and the black factions of the Guelf party were exiled to Sarzana in an attempt to restore civic order. On August 19, 1300, the ban was lifted, but Guido had contracted an illness, probably malaria, and died shortly after his return to Florence on August 29. CHRISTOPHER KLEINHENZ See also: Dolce stil novo Selected Works Collections Rimatori del Dolce Stil Novo, edited by Luigi di Benedetto, Bari: Laterza, 1939. La poesia lirica del Duecento, edited by Carlo Salinari, Turin: UTET, 1951. Le rime, edited by Guido Favati, Milan–Naples: Ricciardi, 1957; as Rime, edited by Giulio Cattaneo, Turin: Einaudi, 1967; as Rime con le rime di Iacopo Cavalcanti, edited by Domenico De Robertis, Turin: Einaudi, 1986; as Rime, edited by Letterio Cassata, Rome: Donzelli, 1993; as The Poetry of Guido Cavalcanti, edited and translated by Lowry Nelson, Jr., New York: Garland, 1986; The Complete Poems, translated by Marc Cirigliano, New York: Italica Press, 1992.

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Poeti del Duecento, 2 vols., edited by Gianfranco Contini, Milan–Naples: Ricciardi, 1960. Poeti del dolce stil nuovo, edited by Mario Marti, Florence: Le Monnier, 1969.

Selected Translations Pound, Ezra, Translations, New York: New Directions, 1963. German and Italian Lyrics of the Middle Ages: An Anthology and a History, edited and translated by Frederick Goldin, Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1973. The Age of Dante: An Anthology of Early Italian Poetry, translated by Joseph Tusiani. New York: Baroque Press, 1974. Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, The Early Italian Poets [1861], edited by Sally Purcell, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981. Wilhelm, James J., Lyrics of the Middle Ages, New York: Garland, 1990.

Further Reading Ardizzone, Maria Luisa, Guido Cavalcanti: The Other Middle Ages, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Ardizzone, Maria Luisa (editor), Guido Cavalcanti tra i suoi lettori, Fiesole: Edizioni Cadmo, 2003. Barolini, Teodolinda, Dante’s Poets: Textuality and Truth in the Comedy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. Calenda, Corrado, Per altezza d’ingegno: Saggi su Guido Cavalcanti, Naples: Liguori, 1976. Cecchi, Emilio, and Natalino Sapegno (editors), Storia della letteratura italiana, vol. 1: Le origini e il Duecento, Milan: Garzanti, 1965. Corti, Maria, La felicita` mentale: nuove prospettive per Cavalcanti e Dante, Turin: Einaudi, 1983. Corti, Maria, ‘‘La fisionomia stilistica di Guido Cavalcanti,’’ Rendiconti dell’Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 8(1950): 530–552. Dronke, Peter, The Medieval Lyric, New York: Harper & Row, 1968; 2nd ed., 1977. Favati, Guido, Inchiesta sul Dolce stil nuovo, Florence: Le Monnier, 1975. Fenzi, Enrico, La canzone d’amore di Guido Cavalcanti e i suoi antichi commenti, Genoa: Il Melangolo, 1999. Kleinhenz, Christopher, The Early Italian Sonnet: The First Century (1220–1321), Lecce: Milella, 1986. Malato, Enrico, Dante e Guido Cavalcanti: Il dissidio per la ‘‘ Vita nuova’’ e il ‘‘disdegno’’ di Guido, Rome: Salerno Editrice, 1997. Marti, Mario, Storia dello stil nuovo, 2 vols., Lecce: Milella, 1973. Pasquini, Emilio, and Antonio Enzo Quaglio, Lo stilnovo e la poesia religiosa, Bari: Laterza, 1971. Russell, Rinaldina, Tre versanti della poesia stilnovistica: Guinizzelli, Cavalcanti, Dante, Bari: Adriatica, 1973., Shaw, James E., Guido Cavalcanti’s Theory of Love: The ‘‘Canzone d’Amore’’ and Other Related Problems, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1949.

PATRIZIA CAVALLI

PATRIZIA CAVALLI (1947–) ‘‘Qualcuno mi ha detto / che certo le mie poesie / non cambieranno il mondo. / Io rispondo che certo sı` / le mie poesie / non cambieranno il mondo’’ (Someone said to me / that for sure my poems will not change the world. / I replied that for sure / my poems / will not change the world). These verses from a poem that supplies the title of Patrizia Cavalli’s first collection, Le mie poesie non cambieranno il mondo (My Poems Will Not Change the World, 1974), have been taken as the motto of her poetry since her debut. Cavalli’s profound awareness of being immersed in a subjective reality in which absolute truth is elusive or unknowable is reflected in her clear conviction that poetry cannot provide salvation and cannot change the ‘‘present.’’ The claim that her work has no pragmatic consequences demonstrates an intellectual honesty that denies any larger role for poetry. At the same time, this claim also leads her to focus on the personal experience of everyday life. Most of her poems are sharp, concise sketches or portraits of ordinary human experience. The poetic world of Patrizia Cavalli, dominated as it is by erotic themes, in some ways resembles that of a modern-day Sappho. Her poems are often populated with unspecified lovers who so lack a specific identity that they are often indistinguishable from each other. Cavalli offers constant reflections on life that show her ability to perceive lucidly and directly every event in the very moment in which it happens. She thus conveys the feeling that the present is temporary and unstable. As in Le mie poesie non cambieranno il mondo, emotions are often presented as fleeting: ‘‘Ridero`, sparlero` / raccontero` bugie. / E domani l’avro` gia` dimenticato’’ (I’ll laugh, I’ll defame, / I’ll tell lies. / And tomorrow / I will have already forgotten). Cavalli employs stylistic devices that place her poetry outside traditional lyric modes without surrendering to experimentalism. Her poetic diction excludes the rhetorical exhibition of literary forms in favor of transparency and clarity. There is consequently a minimal gap between the language of her poems and spoken language. Colloquialisms are completely absorbed into her work, which occasionally presents ‘‘streetlevel’’ treatment of certain words and phrases in an amusing and provocative way.

In form and structure, she shows a preference for brevity. Her poems are short, as are the measures of her lines and verses. Her poems assume the style of conversations, diaries, and above all, epigrams, without renouncing rhythm and musicality. Her style encompasses a wide range of registers and tones: ironic, calmly thoughtful, or tender and melancholy. In their variety, her poems recall important poets in the Italian canon such as Guido Gozzano, Aldo Palazzeschi, and, above all, Sandro Penna. In Cavalli’s poems the first person is omnipresent. The poet herself explains the nature of the continuous use of io (I) in a poem entitled ‘‘L’io singolare proprio mio’’ (The Singular I, Really Mine, 1992): ‘‘Se quando parlo dico sempre io / non e` attenzione particolare e insana / per me stessa, non e` compiacimento / che´ anzi io mi considero soltanto / un esempio qualunque della specie, / percio` quell’io verbale non e` altro / che un io grammaticale’’ (If I always say I when I talk, / it’s not because of a particular and unhealthy self-obsession / it’s not self-gratification / because I consider myself just / an ordinary example of the human species, / therefore that word I is nothing more / than a grammatical I). As Stefano Giovanardi noted, Cavalli casts doubt upon the origin of the poetic ‘‘I’’ in a self-derisory manner (‘‘Patrizia Cavalli,’’ 1996). The ‘‘I’’ therefore becomes a voice without any expressed identity and acts as a vehicle for collecting, examining, and transmitting to the reader the multiple fragments of reality. The diction used in the poems has a theatrical quality. This tendency is particularly evident in the collection Sempre aperto teatro (Always Open Theatre, 1999), which follows a narrative line that is clearly autobiographical, with a troubled selfaware undertone. The story represents a relationship between two female protagonists who play their respective parts in a very modern yet ancient human tragedy of unsatisfied and empty love. Although her poetry is thematically oriented toward erotic subjects, one can also see in the poems wider references to the life of contemporary society. However, Cavalli’s poetic world is characterized by its strong passions, which are expressed in a vital, colloquial style and centered on everyday life. Cavalli has also translated plays by Molie`re and Shakespeare. 423

PATRIZIA CAVALLI

Biography

Fiction

Patrizia Cavalli was born in Todi (Perugia), 17 April 1949. She studied at the University of Rome, ‘‘La Sapienza,’’ and graduated with a thesis in musical aesthetics. Besides being a poet, she is also a theater translator. Her translation of Molie`re’s Amphitryon was staged by Carlo Cecchi in 1980, and her translation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream was staged by Elio De Capitani in 1987 as well as by Carlo Cecchi in 1997. She travels in Italy and abroad giving poetry readings, among them at the Istituto Italiano di Cultura, New York City, 1997; the San Francisco International Poetry Festival, 2003; Auditorium in Rome, 2005; Salon international du livre, Geneva, 2005. She was awarded the Viareggio-Repaci Prize for Sempre aperto teatro, 1999. Cavalli currently lives in Rome. ANNA MAUCERI TRIMNELL Selected Works Collections Poesie: 1994–1992, Turin: Einaudi, 1992; as My Poems Will Not Change the World. Selected Poems 1974–1992, edited by Barry Callaghan and Francesca Valente, translated by Judith Baumel et al., 1998.

Poetry ‘‘Le mie poesie non cambieranno il mondo,’’ 1974. ‘‘Il cielo,’’ 1981. ‘‘Sempre aperto teatro,’’ 1999. ‘‘La guardiana,’’ 2005.

‘‘Ritratto,’’ in Narratori delle riserve, edited by Gianni Celati, 1992. ‘‘Arrivederci addio,’’ in Il pozzo segreto, edited by Maria Rosa Cutrufelli, 1993.

Translations William Shakespeare, Sogno di una notte d’estate, 1996. Molie`re, Anfitrione, 1981. William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, edited by Paolo Bertinetti, 2002.

Further Reading Cecchetti, Valentino, ‘‘Patrizia Cavalli: Poesie,’’ Nuovi Argomenti, 46(1993), 109–112. Giovanardi, Stefano, ‘‘Patrizia Cavalli,’’ in Poeti italiani del Secondo Novecento 1945–1995, edited by Maurizio Cucchi and Stefano Giovanardi, Milan: Mondadori, 1996. Manacorda, Giorgio, ‘‘Per la poesia. Manifesto del pensiero emotivo,’’ Poesia, 66(1993), 71–72. Merola, Nicola, ‘‘Vecchie fedi e nuovi credenti in alcuni esemplari della recente poesia italiana,’’ Filologia antica e moderna, 8(1995), 217–229. Nunez Garcia, Laureano, ‘‘Patrizia Cavalli: la poesia que no cambiara el mundo,’’ in Lengua y lenguaje poetico. Actas del IX congreso nacional de italianistas, edited by Porra Castro Soledad, Valladolid: Universitad de Valladolid, 2001. O’Brien, Catherine, ‘‘Poetry 1870–2000,’’ in A History of Women’s Writing in Italy, edited by Letizia Panizza and Sharon Wood, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pautasso, Sergio, Gli anni Ottanta e la letteratura. Guida all’attivita` letteraria in Italia dal 1980 al 1990, Milan: Rizzoli, 1991. Pontiggia, Giancarlo, ‘‘Patrizia Cavalli,’’ in Poesia italiana del Novecento, edited by Ermanno Krumm and Tiziano Rossi, Milan: Skira, 1995. Raboni Giovanni, ‘‘Patrizia Cavalli,’’ Tabula, 2(1979), 35–36.

LILIANA CAVANI (1937–) One of Italy’s most challenging and controversial filmmakers, Liliana Cavani began her career at RAI, Italy’s national television network, in the early 1960s as a director of historical documentaries and investigative programs. Her four-part documentary series La storia del terzo Reich (History of the Third Reich, 1961–1962), which chronicles the rise of the Nazi regime, was the first

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historical investigation of German totalitarianism to appear on television. Among her subsequent documentaries are L’eta` di Stalin (The Stalin Years, 1962), an investigation into the massive abuse of power perpetuated by the Soviet leader, and Philippe Pe´tain: Processo a Vichy (Trial at Vichy, 1965), on Pe´tain’s collaboration with Nazi Germany. The issues of power, its negotiation and

LILIANA CAVANI abuse, are investigated in depth in her early work for television and reappear in many of her subsequent feature films. Cavani’s interest in ‘‘heretical’’ idealists also dates from her early career. Francesco di Assisi, her highly acclaimed first feature film, produced by RAI in 1966, reconstructs the life of the radical idealist who became Italy’s most popular saint. In a spare, minimalist style that evokes to some extent the work of Roberto Rossellini, the film focuses on the youthful defiance of the legendary St. Francis, whose spiritual conversion led him to divest himself of all the possessions that were his birthright as the son of a wealthy merchant. Years later, availing of more sophisticated production values, a cast of internationally recognized actors (Mickey Rourke, in the title role, and Helena Bonham Carter, as Chiara) and more complex stylistic strategies, Cavani explored a different aspect of the same medieval figure. Francesco (1989) presents a wearier, more mature Francis who struggles in tormented fashion not with his family and society but with his own religious calling. Milarepa (1974), similarly inspired by a story of spiritual searching, invokes the figure of the eleventh-century Buddhist saint Milarepa. Shifting in setting from the contemporary world to a timeless, imaginary Asian landscape, the narrative unfolds on two levels, as contemporary characters become the reincarnations of ancient Tibetan figures. Like Francesco di Assisi, this is a story of radical divestiture, of idealism and heroic transgression. Milarepa, however, has a more complex narrative structure than the earlier film and points forward to the stylistic assurance of the director’s mature work. Galileo (1968), also commissioned by RAI, was the first of Cavani’s dramatic films to fall prey to censorship. This film, which relies heavily on dialogue, focuses on the ‘‘heretical’’ struggle of the seventeenth-century scientist Galileo Galilei to maintain his intellectual integrity in the face of official censure. Purportedly as the result of its provocative depiction of the battle of the intellectual against the vested interests of ecclesiastical authority, RAI administrators deemed the film unsuitable for broadcast. Eventually sold to Cineriz, it was cut from 105 minutes to 92 for theatrical release. I cannibali (The Cannibals, 1969), Cavani’s first independently produced feature film, is also concerned with acts of resistance by courageous individuals in the face of oppressive rule. An allegorical drama that unfolds in an urban setting in the near future, it is loosely based on Sophocles’s

Antigone and recounts the struggle of the young protagonists Antigone and Tiresias against the inhuman cruelties of a tyrannical state. Though Cavani’s early films did not attain broad international distribution, they received high praise from contemporary Italian critics and commentators, who appreciated their stylistic freshness and originality of inspiration. The power of her early work is symptomatic of the wave of creativity and innovation that invigorated Italian cinema in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and she was acclaimed, along with her contemporaries Bernardo Bertolucci and Marco Bellocchio, as part of a new, talented generation of Italian filmmakers. It was not until the release of Il portiere di notte (The Night Porter, 1974), however, that Cavani’s work came to the attention of audiences throughout the world. Though the film was received with widespread acclaim, it also provoked a degree of scandalized perplexity. Set in Vienna in the 1950s, the narrative focuses on the accidental reunion of Lucia, a survivor of a Nazi concentration camp played by Charlotte Rampling, and Max (Dirk Bogarde), the former SS officer who sexually abused her as a 14-year-old prisoner. Cavani’s screenplay puts into the foreground not only the woman’s compulsion to reenact the scene of her earlier, enforced submission, but also the man’s obsessive dedication to renewing their transgressive bond, despite the threat of death at the hands of his former comrades. In the course of the years that followed, Cavani directed Al di la` del bene e del male (Beyond Good and Evil, 1977) and Interno berlinese (The Berlin Affair, 1985), which similarly contextualize private, transgressive relationships within a specific sociohistorical framework. Along with Il portiere di notte, these films constitute what Cavani describes as her ‘‘German trilogy.’’ Unfolding mainly in German or Austrian settings, the three films construct a series of striking erotic scenarios against a background of crucial moments in modern German history: the consolidation of Bismarckian nationalism in the late nineteenth century, the tightening grip of Nazi terror in the 1930s, and the horror of the concentration camp system in the 1940s. In contrast to the austerity of much of Cavani’s earlier work, the films of the trilogy are reminiscent of the sumptuous visual style of the late director Luchino Visconti. Al di la` del bene e del male offers a fictionalized account of the triangular friendship established by Friedrich Nietzsche, Paul Re´e, and Lou AndreasSalome´ in the 1880s. In a lavish, almost operatic 425

LILIANA CAVANI style that alternates realistic sequences with surreal, hallucinatory tableaux, the film sketches the course of a highly unconventional relationship from its intense beginnings to its painful aftermath, ending with Nietzsche’s descent into madness and Re´e’s untimely death. The negotiation of power and transgression, prohibition and freedom, attachment and independence is central to the erotically charged struggle played out among the characters. Only the figure of Salome´ survives the struggle intact, as she internalizes the lessons of Nietzsche, defying convention and rejecting personal attachments to pursue her own fiercely independent path. In ironic contrast to Salome´, Cavani’s Nietzsche is vulnerable, undisciplined, and unable to transcend his own human weaknesses. Since the film is ultimately more concerned with exploring the negotiation of desire and the pull of sociohistorical forces than with constructing a factual biography, it was criticized by those reviewers who had anticipated a more conventional presentation of the events of Nietzsche’s life. Interno berlinese is similarly concerned with an intense triangular relationship, though its characters are entirely fictional. Loosely based on the novel Manji by Junichiro¯ Tanizaki, the plot focuses on the wife of a German government official who embarks on a passionate affair with a young daughter of the Japanese ambassador in Berlin at the height of the Nazi moralization campaign. By shifting the setting of the novel from Osaka in the 1920s to Berlin in the late 1930s and introducing the element of racial difference, Cavani invests a narrative that might otherwise have been interpreted simply as melodrama with a provocative political dimension. Here, as in much of Cavani’s work, there is a blurring of the lines between victims and victimizers, obsession and opportunism, domination and divestiture. At the heart of the German trilogy lies Cavani’s concern with the connections among sex, politics, power, and knowledge, issues that are explored in each film through the prism of a transgressive relationship that is simultaneously linked to and set against the forces of political or societal repression. In response to critics’ heated comments and occasional hostility toward Il portiere di notte and Al di la` del bene e del male, the director’s controversial approach to the representation of politics and sexuality was praised and defended at various junctures by such prominent figures as Michel Foucault, Fe´lix Guattari, Alberto Moravia, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. 426

Cavani’s choice of film projects has sometimes puzzled even her keenest supporters. La pelle (The Skin, 1981), which is adapted from a novel by the politically controversial writer Curzio Malaparte, met with a sharply divided response. Set in Naples during the Allied occupation in 1943, the film offers a bitterly ironic depiction of the ‘‘liberation’’ of the city’s residents from wartime suffering. One of the harshest portrayals of the deprivations of war ever presented by a filmmaker, La pelle is a deliberately disturbing film. In its unflinching portrayal of human degradation, it stands in sharp contrast with the constructions of the same historical period presented by other Italian filmmakers. After completing Francesco in 1989, Cavani directed only two feature films over the course of the next 16 years. Offering a sensitive portrayal of the relationship between two deaf mutes, Dove sei? Io sono qui (Where Are You? I’m Here, 1993) took critics by surprise. Though some themes characteristic of Cavani’s cinema, such as resistance to the influence of a bourgeois family system, reappear here, it has a gentler, more intimate tone than any of her previous films. In 2002 she directed Ripley’s Game, based on the eponymous thriller by the American novelist Patricia Highsmith, which focuses on the relationship between the ruthless, yet sympathetic, Ripley and the hapless man he obliges to become his accomplice in murder. Though the film echoes some of the themes present in Il portiere di notte (the intimate complicity of victim and victimizer) and Al di la` del bene e del male (Ripley’s effort to fashion himself as a type of Nietzschean Overman), it is shot through with a mordant humor, unusual in Cavani’s work, that undercuts the dramatic potential of the narrative events. Though Liliana Cavani has been recognized as one of the most gifted film directors working in Italy since the 1960s, she remains a self-declared outsider. In an era dominated by the values of mass media, she is uncompromising in her efforts to pursue an independent artistic vision. Indifferent to imperatives of political correctness, she embraces a purely aesthetic vocation. Since the late 1970s, she has increasingly devoted her energies to the production of operas, a medium to which she brings her unique directorial skills and striking visual imagination. She returned to filmmaking in 2005, however, with De Gasperi, a film produced by the RAI network, which undertakes an original investigation into the personal and political life of one Italy’s most popular Catholic leaders and reformists, Alcide De Gasperi.

LILIANA CAVANI

Biography Liliana Cavani was born in Carpi in Modena Province, January 12, 1937. She studied literature and philology at the University of Bologna, then moved to Rome and enrolled in the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia (Italy’s national film school) to study directing in 1960. She began working at RAI (Italian national television network) in 1961 as a producer of documentaries and made several documentaries between 1961 and 1965, including Philippe Pe´tain: Processo a Vichy, winner of the Golden Lion at Venice Film Festival (documentary section), 1965. She directed her first feature film, Francesco di Assisi, in 1966. Her film Galileo was suppressed by RAI in 1968. I cannibali was shown at the New York Film Festival in 1969. Il portiere di notte received international distribution and won widespread acclaim in 1974. In 1979, Cavani began directing operas with Wozzeck in Florence; subsequent operas include Iphigenie in Taurus and Medea at the Ope´ra de Paris, 1984, 1986; Cardillac in Florence, 1991; La vestale at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, 1993; La cena delle beffe in Zurich, 1995; Cavalleria rusticana at the Ravenna Festival, 1996; Il ballo in maschera and La traviata in Milan, 2001–2002. Carpi, her hometown, has established the Associazione Fondo Liliana Cavani, where her films are preserved and made available for consultation. She was appointed to the administrative board of RAI in 1996. Awards include Labaro d’oro for Francesco di Assisi at the Valladolid Film Festival, 1966; Premio Cineforum for Galileo, 1968; Premio Riccione and Consorzio Stampa Cinematografica for Il portiere di notte, 1974; Palladio d’oro and Nastro d’Argento for Al di la` del bene e del male, 1977; Coppa Volpi at the Venice Film Festival for Dove siete? Io sono qui, 1993. She was also awarded the title of Commendatore by the President of the Italian Republic, in 1986, and the Vittorio De Sica Prize for career achievement in 1998. She lives in Rome. ´ INE O’HEALY A Selected Works Documentary Films La vita militare, 1961. Gente di teatro, 1961. Storia del Terzo Reich, 1961–1962. L’eta` di Stalin, 1962. L’uomo della burocrazia, 1963. Assalto al consumatore, 1963. La casa in Italia, 1964.

Gesu` mio fratello, 1964. Il giorno della pace, 1965. La donna nella Resistenza, 1965. Philippe Pe´tain: Processo a Vichy, 1965.

Feature Films Francesco di Assisi, 1966. Galileo, 1968. I cannibali (The Cannibals), 1969. L’ospite (The Guest), 1971. Milarepa, 1973. Il portiere di notte (The Night Porter), 1974. Al di la` del bene e del male (Beyond Good and Evil), 1977. La pelle (The Skin), 1980. Oltre la porta (Beyond Obsession), 1982. Interno berlinese (The Berlin Affair), 1985. Francesco, 1989. Dove siete? Io sono qui, 1993. Ripley’s Game, 2002. De Gasperi, 2005.

Screenplays ‘‘Uno ‘Spiritual cinematografico’: Black Jesus,’’ Fiera letteraria, 12 December 1965, 6–7 (with Ludovico Alessandrini; unfilmed). ‘‘Francesco di Assisi,’’ Part 1, Rivista del cinematografo, 41 (August 1968): 503–512. ‘‘Francesco di Assisi,’’ Part 2, Rivista del cinematografo, 41 (September–October 1968): 577–587. ‘‘Galileo,’’ Cineforum, 78(October 1968): 598–624. Francesco e Galileo: Due film, Turin: Gribaudi, 1970. ‘‘I cannibali,’’ Sipario, 25(February 1970): 40–49 (with Italo Moscati). Milarepa, edited by Italo Moscati, Bologna: Cappelli, 1974. Il portiere di notte, Turin: Einaudi, 1974. Lettere dall’interno: Racconto per un film su Simone Weil, Turin: Einaudi, 1974 (with Italo Moscati; unfilmed). Al di la` del bene e del male, Turin: Einaudi, 1977 (with Franco Arcalli and Italo Moscati). Oltre la porta, Turin: Einaudi, 1982 (with Enrico Medioli). Francesco, Milan: Leonardo, 1989 (with Roberta Mazzoni). Dove siete? Io sono qui, Venice: Marsilio, 1993 (with Italo Moscati).

Further Reading Buscemi, Francesco, Invito al cinema di Liliana Cavani, Milan: Mursia, 1996. Marrone, Gaetana, The Gaze and the Labyrinth: The Cinema of Liliana Cavani, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. ´ ine, ‘‘Desire and Disavowal in Liliana Cavani’s O’Healy, A ‘German Trilogy,’’’ in Queer Italia, edited by Gary Cestaro, New York: Palgrave, 2004. Silverman, Kaja, ‘‘The Female Authorial Voice,’’ in The Acoustic Mirror, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. Tallarigo, Paola, and Luca Gasparini (editors), Il cinema di Liliana Cavani: Lo sguardo libero, Florence: La Casa Usher, 1990. Tiso, Ciriaco, Liliana Cavani, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1975. Waller, Marguerite, ‘‘Signifying the Holocaust: Liliana Cavani’s Portiere di notte,’’ in Feminisms in the Cinema, edited by Laura Pietropaolo and Ada Testaferri, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995.

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ERMANNO CAVAZZONI

ERMANNO CAVAZZONI (1947–) Starting with his first novel, Il poema dei lunatici (The Voice of the Moon, 1987), which inspired Federico Fellini’s 1990 film La voce della luna, Cavazzoni’s interests lie with the theme of the relationship (both complex and comical) between reality and fiction: The genre best fit to describe Cavazzoni is, as the author himself declares, the tradition of the fantastical, which runs the gamut from Teofilo Folengo to Ariosto, and all the way to Gogol. The self-styled inspector Savini’s exploits happen within a moon cycle and show the reader, against the background of the Padan plains, extravagant dreams and strange illusions—like voices that leap from wells and speak or the imagined cityscape as theatrical backdrop. Savini accomplishes his eccentric investigations flanked by an ex-prefect in disgrace, Gonnella. The investigation stories are paradoxical in their referral to the secret regions of the soul and involve those who are assailed by great doubts. It is a voyage within people’s habits and customs that burrow in our thoughts: obsessive echoes, pigeons that resemble the Madonna, minute worms, deserts of melancholy, characters and enterprises that are extraordinary or just simply bizarre. Among these the following stand out: Alessandro Magno, who saddles alligators and water snakes; Nestor and his insatiable wife, who resembles a steam engine; Father Solimano, who does not know how to officiate the mass; the gravedigger, who dresses up the dead in evening attire; the Visigoths, who do not manage to impress anyone. The full moon, with its influence, creates more charms and paradoxical stories, leading up to the story of Judas Iscariot, who symbolizes a nonsensical world. The skeptical glance cast on the human world and the mistrust in its great positive moral systems are the common denominator in Cavazzoni’s novels, who uses as countermeasure an easygoing though sometimes harsh comical voice derived from the incoherence inherent to the story. In this respect, Cavazzoni resembles Ariosto, whose emblematic theme was that of considering human life one great idiocy: ‘‘The knights of Ariosto and the idiots I try to describe are like insects in a field. They have no sense of birth, life, death, the beyond, or God [...] The idea of the beauty in living without 428

seeing the sense of living has always attracted me’’ (Peter Kuon and Hermann H. Wetzel, Cavalieri, santi, lunatici, idioti... e scrittori inutili, 1997). In Le tentazioni di Girolamo (Jerome’s Temptations, 1991), Cavazzoni continued to focus on eccentric characters: Jerome (allusion to the saint bearing this name) searches for an impossible place of peace and quiet in a library inhabited by strange nocturnal creatures. In Vite brevi di idioti (The Short Lives of Idiots, 1994), the main theme is that of the idiot as maniac but also as philosopher who tries to give an explanation to the problems of the world: The character of Primo Apparuti, for example, reveals his personal take on moral philosophy through his compassion for ordinary objects, mistreated and snubbed by people. The short stories, inspired by evangelical parables, though without any teaching aspirations, descend also from lengthy research conducted by the author in the archives of the insane asylums of Emilia Romagna. Thus, the free translation of Leggenda aurea by Jacopo da Varagine (ca. 1229–1298) recreates the moving yet comical simplicity of the socalled miracles of the saints shown as inadaptable, as nuts that lead incomprehensible lives in the eyes of common men. Cavazzoni’s narratives proceed by accumulation: The ‘‘main’’ story unfurls into digressions, which in turn spin off autonomous stories into a sort of ‘‘word relay’’ from one protagonist on to the next. Cirenaica (Cyrenaic, 1999) sets up flawed characters, ‘‘life failures’’ who populate a ‘‘lowly world,’’ a place where they arrive by train and where everything is lacking: There are only the dreams entrusted to the movie by the same name (‘‘Cirenaica’’), gradually worn out by the endless screenings in the only theater of the place. The characters are also actors who live for the spectacle, unaware of the true identity of their spectators. The protagonist who roams this fantastical city at a certain point reemerges in the central train station of Milan and discovers that in the real city one cannot distinguish between being and seeming. The novel of great stature is very theatrical in its choral effects (the grand nocturnal scenes, the sudden apparitions). In an enjoyable though bitter catalogue, Gli scrittori inutili (Useless Writers, 2002), Cavazzoni illustrated the indispensable

ERMANNO CAVAZZONI seven vices to becoming a ‘‘useless’’ writer: lust, gluttony, avarice, sloth, envy, anger, and pride. The novel is a manual that presents, in an impious and surreal way, the contemporary literary world: from writers who are ‘‘slaves of other writers’’ to ‘‘obsolete’’ writers; from alcoholics to those who love inflatable dolls, leading up to his final delirious tale of pride, which concludes the work. A lateral but significant side to Cavazzoni is that of play, of ‘‘oulipian’’ exercises in the vein of Perec, like the brief text Morti fortunati (The Fortunate Dead, 2001), or the literary jokes of I sette cuori (Seven Hearts, 1992), in which the comical aspect emerges from the incongruous coexistence of different discursive registers.

Biography Ermanno Cavazzoni was born in Reggio Emilia on June 5, 1947. He lives in Bologna. He was educated through the school of Luciano Anceschi and is currently teaching aesthetics at the University of Bologna. In 1994 he cofounded, with Gianni Celati and Stefano Benni, the magazine Il semplice, published by Feltrinelli. Cavazzoni serves as codirector, with Gianni Celati and Walter Pedulla`, of the bimonthly Il caffe` illustrato. He worked as a screenwriter for La voce della luna of Fellini, based on his Il poema dei lunatici, 1990. He has been awarded various literary prizes, among which are the Arcangeli prize for Il poema dei lunatici and the Comisso prize for Cirenaica. His novels have been translated into English, French, Portuguese, German, Dutch, Spanish, and Turkish. SILVANA TAMIOZZO GOLDMANN Selected Works Fiction Il poema dei lunatici, 1987; as The Voice of the Moon, translated by Ed Emery, 1990. Le tentazioni di Girolamo, 1991. Vite brevi di idioti, 1994. Cirenaica, 1999.

Morti fortunati, 2001. Gli scrittori inutili, 2002.

Other I sette cuori, 1992. Jacopo da Varagine Le leggende dei santi, 1998 (translation and adaptation). Galleria san Francesco (libretto for Tristan Honsinger), 2002. Anatra al sal (text for Lucia Ronchetti), 2002.

Further Reading Budor, Domenique, ‘‘En e´coutant la voix des lunatiques,’’ Chroniques italiennes, 63–64(2000): 419–430. Caddeo, Rinaldo, ‘‘I nomi e le cose (resoconto di un viaggio a ritroso nell’incubo labirintico del romanzo di Ermanno Cavazzoni Le Tentazioni di Girolamo),’’ Arenaria, 9:29–30(1994): 10–22. Cavazzoni, Ermanno, ‘‘Risposte al questionario,’’ Il verri, 19(May 2002): 51–54. Ceserani, Remo, Treni di carta. L’immaginario in ferrovia: L’irruzione del treno nella letteratura moderna, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2002. Cortellessa, Andrea, ‘‘In favore di un testo frenologico: Piccolo avviamento a Cavazzoni,’’ in Stupidi e idioti, edited by Felice Ciro Papparo, Rome: Sossella, 2000. Deshoulie`res, Vale´rie, Le don d’idiotie, Paris: Editions L’Harmattan, 2003. Jaccard, Roland, ‘‘Humor macabre,’’ Critique, 53(1997): 412–413. Kuon, Peter, and Hermann H. Wetzel (editors), ‘‘Cavalieri, santi, lunatici, idioti... e scrittori inutili: A colloquio con Ermanno Cavazzoni,’’ Sonderdru¨ck aus Italienisch, 38(November 1997): 5–20. La Porta, Filippo, La nuova narrativa italiana: Travestimenti di fine secolo, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1999. Morbiato, Luciano, ‘‘Di una varieta` padana nel sogno raccontato: Cavazzoni tra ‘‘poema e tentazioni,’’ in Il sogno raccontato, Atti del Convegno Internazionale (Rende, 12–14 November, 1992), edited by Nicola Merola and Caterina Verbaro, Vibo Valentia: Monteleone Stampa, 1995. Pedulla`, Walter, Le caramelle di Musil, Milan: Marietti, 1993. Tamiozzo Goldmann, Silvana, ‘‘Che cosa e` ancora narrabile?’’ in Le donne, i cavalier, l’arme, gli amori: Poema e romanzo: La narrativa lunga in Italia, edited by Francesco Bruni, Venice: Marsilio, 2001. Tani, Stefano, Il romanzo di ritorno: Dal romanzo medio degli anni Sessanta alla giovane narrativa degli anni Ottanta, Milan: Mursia, 1990.

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EMILIO CECCHI

EMILIO CECCHI (1884–1966) Emilio Cecchi was a conservative literary and art critic, a mannerist writer, and an ‘‘official’’—although radically anti-academic—intellectual. He was awarded the highest Italian prizes and honorary posts and worked for the most prestigious cultural institutions of pre-Fascist, Fascist, and postFascist Italy, including the film institute Cines (1932–1934) and the newspaper Il corriere della sera (1927–1966). His literary works mainly consist of prose d’arte and journalistic essays, which were collected in a number of books, the most famous of which are Pesci rossi (Red Fishes, 1920), L’osteria del cattivo tempo (The Tavern of Bad Weather, 1927), and Corse al trotto (Trotting Races, 1936). Pesci rossi includes 12 capriccios that previously appeared in the journal La Ronda, and eight articles written, from London, for the newspaper La Tribuna. The book represents the best example of Cecchi’s lyrical prose and his aptitude for elegant critical discourse, midway between Tuscan idiomatic literary speech and Roman academism. In 1910, Cecchi started his career of literary critic, collaborating with other periodicals such as Il Leonardo, Il Regno, Hermes, and Il Nuovo Giornale. Cecchi was deeply influenced by Gabriele D’Annunzio and by the idealistic aesthetics of Bendetto Croce, with whom he started a long-lasting correspondence. Croce’s conception of the autonomy of art is well represented by Cecchi’s prosa d’arte, a rhetorical device meant to create an Alexandrine literary atmosphere, a formally elaborated and refined style. This literary taste was applied by Cecchi to both criticism and journalism and represents his most original contribution to Italian cultural discourse. During his critical apprenticeship at Giuseppe Prezzolini’s La Voce (1909–1912), Cecchi developed a literary vision, marked by the attempt to connect Italian literary tradition with British literature (such as in his 1911 Rudyard Kipling) and visual arts (Note d’arte a Valle Giulia, 1912). Most the articles of La Voce, which were mainly devoted to the exploration of D’Annunzio’s and Pascoli’s poetry (such as his 1912 La poesia di Giovanni Pascoli), were later collected in Studi critici (Critical Studies, 1912). A self-taught art critic and a 430

follower of Bernard Berenson, whom he translated into Italian, Cecchi wrote extensively on figurative art and coedited, with the influential art historian and critic Roberto Longhi, the periodical Vita artistica. Although technically naı¨ve, his books and catalogs on nineteenth-century Italian painting, Piero Lorenzetti, Giovanni Fattori, Giotto, Donatello, and the Florentine sculpture of the quattrocento showed a coherent project: A fervent anti-avant-gardist, Cecchi tried to counteract the revolutionary aesthetics of Futurism. He therefore elaborated a historicist defense of classicism, opposing Greek-Florentine classicism to AngloAmerican pragmatic visual culture and grounding on a classical and ethical dimension the constellation of words, images, and human nature that same reality that Futurism directed toward a utopian renovation of mankind, driven by technology. Cecchi’s name is commonly associated not only with his literary and critical contributions but also with the rebellion against avant-gardism of La Ronda, the literary magazine that Cecchi helped to found at the end of the war and the closing of Prezzolini and De Robertis’s La Voce. A refuge for liberal intellectuals, many of whom then joined Fascism, La Ronda pursued, in an age of militant art, the dream of a national classicism and a petrified literary language, able to communicate universally within the realm of art. Influenced by Giacomo Leopardi’s classicism and Renato Serra’s ideology of stylistic balance, the founders of La Ronda (Vincenzo Cardarelli, Riccardo Bacchelli, Lorenzo Montano, Bruno Barilli, and Antonio Baldini) affirmed in the midst of political turbulence the absolute value and purity of art: The rhetorical elegance of Cecchi’s prosa d’arte was a telling expression of this program, which Fascist despotism helped to overcome. Cecchi, the travel writer and the snobbish ruler of aesthetic taste, is well represented by his reportage, written mainly for Il corriere della sera and then assembled as Messico (Mexico, 1932), Et in Arcadia ego (1936), America amara (Bitter America, 1940), and Appunti per un periplo dell’Africa (Notes for a Periplus of Africa, 1954). In his travel accounts of Mexico, the United States, Africa, and Greece, Cecchi

EMILIO CECCHI explicitly underlined the exotic, sacred, and demonic sides of cultural difference. However, in America amara he offered a polemic and derisory account of Roosevelt’s New Deal. In Mexico his approach to America was less schematic: Cecchi, who resolutely discredited Diego Rivera’s paintings and the Communist revolutionary ideology, gave voice to his irrational fascination for the marvels of the New World, describing both the pagan religion of Mexico and California’s cultural industry. Cecchi, who went to London as a correspondent, befriended writers such as Gilbert Keith Chesterton and Lytton Strachey and was an admirer of Rudyard Kipling and Charles Lamb, as well as a passionate critic of British literature, which he introduced in Italy with his Storia della letteratura inglese nel secolo XIX (History of British Literature in the Nineteenth Century, 1915). He also translated works by Shelley, Shakespeare, and Chesterton. Cecchi also worked in the cinema and published several collections of poems, among them Inno primo (First Hymn, 1908), Liriche (Lyrics, 1913), and L’uva acerba (Sour Grapes, 1947). Emilio Cecchi, once strongly criticized for his political and cultural conservatism, remains an influential voce as a literary and art historian as well as a prolific journalist. This is attested by his important collection of essays Ritratti e profili (Portraits and Profiles, 1957) and by the project that he coedited, with Natalino Sapegno, of the Storia della letteratura italiana (History of Italian Literature, 1965–1969).

Biography Emilio Cecchi was born in Florence, July 14, 1884. He was educated in Prato and Florence, where he attended the Istituto di studi superiori until 1910, studying literature but not taking the ‘‘laurea’’ (which he received ad honorem in 1958). He joined the Gabinetto Vieusseux, 1901. Cecchi moved to Rome in 1906. He married Leonetta Pieraccini in 1911; their daughter Giuditta was born in 1913, their daughter Suso was born in 1914, and their son Dario was born in 1918. Cecchi was a captain in the army during World War I, 1915–1918. He collaborated on a number of literary journals and newspapers, such as Il Leonardo, Il Regno, Hermes, La Voce (1909–1912); La Critica, Primato, La Tribuna (1910–1923); Il Secolo, La Stampa, Il corriere della sera (1927–1966); and the Manchester Guardian (1919–1025). Cecchi founded the literary periodical La Ronda in 1919. He was a professor of Italian culture at the University of California at

Berkeley (1930–1931) and was nominated director of film productions for Cines, 1932. He became Accademico d’Italia in 1940. Cecchi joined the Accademia dei Lincei, 1947. He was awarded the literary prize Penna d’oro, Presidenza della Repubblica italiana, in 1961. Cecchi died in Rome, September 5, 1966. FEDERICO LUISETTI See also: History of Literary Criticism Selected Works Poetry ‘‘Inno primo,’’ 1908. ‘‘Inno,’’ 1910. ‘‘Liriche,’’ 1913. ‘‘L’uva acerba,’’ 1947.

Prose Writings Pesci rossi, 1920; critical edition by M. Ghilardi, 1989. L’osteria del cattivo tempo, 1927. Messico, 1932. Corse al trotto, 1936. Et in Arcadia ego, 1936. America amara, 1940. Appunti per un periplo dell’Africa, 1954. Taccuini, edited by N. Gallo and P. Citati, 1976.

Literary and Art Criticism Rudyard Kipling, 1911. Studi critici, 1912. La poesia di Giovanni Pascoli, 1912. Note d ’arte a Villa Giulia, 1912. Storia della letteratura inglese nel secolo XIX, 1915. Pittura italiana dell’Ottocento, 1926. Trecentisti senesi, 1928; as The Sienese Painters of the Trecento, translated by Leonard Penlock, 1931. Pietro Lorenzetti, 1930. Giotto, 1937; as Giotto, translated by Elizabeth Andrews, 1960. Donatello, 1942. Scultura fiorentina del Quattrocento, 1956. Ritratti e profili, 1957. Piaceri della pittura, 1960. I macchiaioli toscani, 1963. Ricordi crociani, 1965. I cipressi di Bolgheri, 1970. Fiorentinita` e altri saggi, 1985.

Edited Works Storia della letteratura italiana, 1965–69 (with Natalino Sapegno).

Translations P. B. Shelley, La difesa della poesia, 1911. G. C. Leibniz, Nuovi saggi sull’intelletto umano, 1911. Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Opere scelte, 1956. William Shakespeare, Le allegre comari di Windsor; Otello, in Teatro di William Shakespeare, 1946–1947. Bernard Berenson, I pittori italiani del Rinascimento, 1965.

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EMILIO CECCHI Further Reading Bolzoni, Francesco (editor), Fra Buster Keaton e Visconti, Rome: Centro Sperimentale per la Cinematografia, 1995. De Crescenzo, Assunta, La forma gordiana: classicismo e romanticismo in Emilio Cecchi, Naples: Giannini, 1988. Dei, Adele, La scacchiera di Cecchi, Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1984. Di Biase, Carmine, Emilio Cecchi, Florence: Nuova Italia, 1982. Fedi, Roberto (editor), Emilio Cecchi oggi, Florence: Vallecchi: 1981.

Jeannet, Angela, and Louise Barnett (editors), New World Journeys: Contemporary Writers and the Experience of America, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977. Leoncini, Paolo, Cecchi e D’Annunzio: Cecchi critico tra novecentismo, Rome: Bulzoni, 1976. Luzi, Giorgio, ‘‘Emilio Cecchi,’’ in Letteratura italiana: I critici, Milan: Marzorati, 1969. Macchioni Jodi, Rodolfo, Emilio Cecchi, Milan: Mursia, 1983. Scudder, Giuliana (editor), Bibliografia degli scritti di Emilio Cecchi, Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1970.

CAMILLA CEDERNA (1921–1997) Camilla Cederna belongs to a tradition of Italian literature in which literature and journalism converge. This tradition, which developed especially in the late 1960s and 1970s, is recent but prestigious, and includes, among others, Luigi Barzini, Indro Montanelli, Enzo Biagi, and Oriana Fallaci. Their writings enrich popular literature with books that, through critical comment and analysis of current events, create a historical perspective on the present. Cederna’s attention was initially focused exclusively on fashion and lifestyle; for this reason it is also possible to place her in the ranks of Matilde Serao and many other contemporary female journalists. Her unique style is characterized by a great liveliness, accessibility, and simplicity. She is light but never frivolous and can be caustic and cutting in her descriptions. As Giulia Borgese wrote in the preface to the 2000 edition of Cederna’s Il lato debole (The Weak Side), first published in 1977, her writing is elegant and humorous, easy to read, yet severe. She had the ability to observe and convey social reality through small details. People’s gestures express their habits, their manner of speaking reflects the moral and material world they inhabit. How people dress and behave in Milanese high society thus comes to signify their underlying ambition and what they strive to become. Cederna’s habit of using apparently light subjects to comment on society is already evident in an article entitled ‘‘Moda nera’’ (Black Fashion), written for Il corriere della sera on 7 September 1943, the day before the armistice between Italy and the Allies during World War II. The article discussed 432

the dress of women in the Fascist hierarchy, in particular Claretta Petacci, Mussolini’s lover. Because of the article, she was arrested by the Fascist police and subsequently sent to prison. After the war, Cederna wrote for magazines and periodicals that had wide circulation, including L’europeo and L’espresso. She concentrated her critical observations on the habits, vices, slang, and fashion of the rapidly changing Italian society of the 1950s and 1960s. She commented on the first postwar trips to the United States and first holidays in exotic locations made by the nouveaux riches. She recorded the effects of the so-called Italian economic miracle by describing the manifestations of luxury, such as the increase in antique shops and interior designers and the enthusiasm of women on receiving expensive gifts. Her articles, which portrayed stereotypical women from Milanese high society, offered a detailed typology: the Single Woman, the Boring Lover, the ManHunter, the Efficient Woman, the Shrink-Obsessed Woman, the Snob, and so on. She also wrote cutting portraits of artists, including conductor Arturo Toscanini, popular singer Wanda Osiris, soprano Maria Callas, film director Federico Fellini, as well as of young entrepreneurs like Silvio Berlusconi. This long and intense work gave rise to numerous books of criticism on Italian lifestyle and habits: Noi siamo le signore (We Are the Ladies, 1958), La voce dei padroni (The Masters’ Voice, 1962), Signore & Signori: personaggi illustri e meschini della vita pubblica e privata dell’Italia d’oggi (Ladies and Gentlemen: Famous and Squalid Figures of

CAMILLA CEDERNA Public and Private Life in Italy Today, 1966), and Callas (1968). She also began to write about current events and politics: investigative reports on the city of Avellino and its politicians and on the femminielli (transvestites) of Naples; articles on Algeria, China, Greece under the dictatorship of the colonels; and the rebirth of neo-Fascism in Germany. September 12, 1969, the day of the terrorist bombing at the Banca Nazionale dell’Agricoltura in Piazza Fontana in Milan, marked a turning point in Cederna’s career. Being among the first to reach the scene, she was forced to report on the horror of what she witnessed and could not distance herself from what had happened. In spite of sharp criticism from her colleagues, first among them Montanelli, the focus of her work became increasingly political and her journalistic activities more investigative, including denunciations and accusations. Although she continued her lifestyle column, ‘‘Il lato debole,’’ in L’espresso until 1976, she wrote increasingly on the events of the day. Concurrently, the lightness that had always characterized her style and tone gradually gave way to seriousness. Her capacity to observe details remained intact, but her observations took on the character of an investigation marked by a scrupulous examination and analysis of the facts. At the same time, however, her work remained focused on the men and women caught up in events. Her books and articles were still populated with complex characters and personalities, with the important difference that these figures were no longer the Milanese stereotypes of her earlier works but real people: the victims of the Piazza Fontana slaughter, their relatives, and the survivors. She also turned her attention to the victims of injustice and the silence and lies of the authorities and the police. In 1971, she published Pinelli: una finestra sulla strage (Pinelli: A Window on the Slaughter), dedicated to the controversial case of Giuseppe Pinelli, the anarchist accused of the Piazza Fontana bombing who died after falling out of Police Commissioner Calabresi’s office window. In Sparare a vista: Come la polizia del regime DC mantiene l’ordine pubblico (Shoot on Sight: How the Police of the Christian Democrat Regime Maintain Public Order, 1975), she investigated the police violence, especially during political demonstrations. Toward the end of the 1970s, her militant journalistic activity focused on political corruption. Reacting against the unaccountability of powerful politicians, she examined the personality and actions of the then president of the republic, Giovanni Leone.

The result was Giovanni Leone. La carriera di un president (Giovanni Leone. The Career of a President, 1978), in which she accused him of having various suspect connections. The book was a big success, selling more than 700,000 copies, and the president was forced to resign. However, because of some inaccuracies in her book, Cederna was found guilty of defamation of character, and all remaining copies were ordered destroyed. Cederna’s works touch a wide variety of subjects, but they all exhibit, as she writes in Sparare a vista, the same profound principles: the search for truth and the desire to ‘‘capire...denunciare, spiegare a tutti’’ (understand...denounce and explain to everyone). These principles explain the value of her work for deepening our understanding of the difficult years of the 1970s and 1980s.

Biography Camilla Cederna was born in Milan, 21 January 1921. She graduated from the University of Milan with a degree in Latin literature and a thesis on feminine luxury in the view of the minor Greek philosophers and the founding fathers of the Church. Cederna wrote for L’Ambrosiano, 1939, and Secolo Sera, 1940. She wrote an article on the fashion of Fascist women, 1943, and was subsequently sent to prison for a month. She worked for the new magazine L’Europeo, writing a column called Societa`, 1945–1955. She was a columnist and special correspondent and for L’Espresso, 1956–1981 and then wrote for Panorama, 1981–1997. Camilla Cederna died of cancer in Rome on 5 November 1997. ANNA MAUCERI TRIMNELL See also: Journalism Selected Works Noi siamo le signore, 1958. La voce dei padroni, 1962. Signore & Signori: personaggi illustri e meschini della vita pubblica e privata dell’Italia d’oggi, 1966. Callas, 1968. Le pervestite, 1968. Pinelli: una finestra sulla strage, 1971. Sparare a vista: Come la polizia del regime DC mantiene l’ordine pubblico, 1975. Il lato debole, 1977. Giovanni Leone. La carriera di un presidente, 1978. Nostra Italia del miracolo, 1980. Il mondo di Camilla, with Grazia Cherchi, 1980. Casa nostra, 1983 Vicino e distante: gente, ambienti, salotti, usi, costumi: impressioni sull’Italia di ieri e di oggi, 1984.

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CAMILLA CEDERNA De gustibus, 1986. Il meglio di Camilla Cederna, 1987. Il lato forte e il lato debole, 1991. Quando si ha ragione: cronache italiane, edited by Goffredo Fofi, 2002.

Further Reading Ajello, Nello, ‘‘La svolta politica,’’ La repubblica, 12 February 2000, 39. Aspesi, Natalia, ‘‘Quel lato forte della frivolezza,’’ and ‘‘Camilla Cederna, giornalista contro,’’ La repubblica, 10 November 1997, 9. Bellesia, Giovanna, ‘‘Camilla Cederna: Portrayer of Italian Society,’’ in Contemporary Women Writers in Italy: A Modern Renaissance, edited by Sante Arico`, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990.

Borgese, Giulia, ‘‘La Camilla,’’ in Camilla Cederna, Il lato debole, edited by Giulia Borgese and Anna Cederna, Milan: Feltrinelli, 2000. Bossi Fedrigotti, Isabella, ‘‘Tutta la forza del lato debole. Dal salotto alla rabbia civile,’’ Il corriere della sera, 10 November 1997, 23. Cagnetta, Mario, Il giornalismo di denuncia di Camilla Cederna, Milan: Associazione Culturale Ponte della Ghisolfa, 1999. Del Buono, Oreste, ‘‘Preface,’’ to Camilla Cederna, Il meglio di Camilla Cederna, Milan: Mondadori, 1987. Fofi, Goffredo, ‘‘Preface,’’ to Camilla Cederna, Quando si ha ragione: cronache italiane, Naples: L’a`ncora del Mediterraneo, 2002. Polese, Ranieri, ‘‘La fiera Camilla armata di penna contro la sua Manhattan,’’ in Il corriere della sera, 28 February 1992, 21.

GIANNI CELATI (1937–) Gianni Celati began to publish essays in the 1960s, at a time when the neo-avant-garde was at its height of activity in Italy. This early work, appearing in journals associated with the neo-avantgarde, such as ll verri and Quindici, was on writers and theorists such as Joyce, Ce´line, and Bakhtin, and it often took as its starting point a critique of institutionalized and traditional forms and ideas about language and literature. Celati was, from the first phase of his career, a writer with strong ties to scholarly pursuits; he was a professor of AngloAmerican literature at the University of Bologna for many years, and he is an accomplished translator of works from French and English. His first fictional work, the 1971 Comiche (Slapstick), was included in an Einaudi series, ‘‘La Ricerca Letteraria,’’ edited by Davico Bonino, Giorgio Manganelli, and Edoardo Sanguineti, and oriented toward the presentation of first works by young experimental writers. It was introduced by Italo Calvino, who admired Celati’s brand of experimentalism and comic flair. Calvino describes Celati’s book as being made up completely of ‘‘verbal gags, lapses, malapropisms, ecolalia, and incomplete actions’’ (‘‘Gianni Celati Comiche,’’ 1971). He also highlights the importance of the cinema to Celati’s mode of writing, which is inspired by spoken rather than literary language and is akin to 434

slapstick comic films such as those of Laurel and Hardy and the Marx Brothers. Comiche is recounted in the voice of its protagonist, a professor who finds himself in a strange place, which is some sort of repressive institution, be it a school, a regimented inn for seaside vacationers, or a psychiatric hospital. The professor is persecuted by phantom voices as well as by the eccentric and menacing people who share this odd place with him, and the book is not so much plot driven as fuelled by the sound of language as spoken and heard by a person in the grips of extreme (and comic) paranoia. Celati was to remain friends with Calvino for the rest of the latter’s life, and they enjoyed many years of informal collaboration as writers strongly committed to literary creation and innovation. Celati’s second novel, Le avventure di Guizzardi (The Adventures of Guizzardi, 1973), is the culmination of his early interest in linguistic and stylistic experimentation based on spoken language and filmic techniques. The book is a tour de force, maintaining throughout the comically grotesque, agrammatical language of Guizzardi, a clownish figure who flees his oppressive family home only to end up embroiled in seemingly endless mishaps and adventures that are reminiscent once more of those of cinematic comics such as Chaplin, Harry Langdon, Laurel and Hardy, and the Marx

GIANNI CELATI Brothers. In 1976 and 1978 were published, respectively, La banda dei sospiri (The Gang of Sighs) and Lunario del paradiso (Paradise Almanac), books that embodied avant la lettre what would become, in the late 1980s and 1990s, the trend in Italian fiction of novels by, for, and about youth. These books, called racconti comuni (everyday tales) by Celati himself, take as their inspiration the daily, common vicissitudes of the family and of young men seeking love and their place in the world, and they, like the first two novels, were written in a comic, if less linguistically extreme, style. The stories they recount are picaresque and somewhat autobiographical, mirroring Celati’s own experience as a young man who traveled about looking for independence, love, and some future direction in his life. These three books were published in a single volume in 1989, with an entirely rewritten version of Lunario del paradiso, under the title Parlamenti buffi (Funny Chatter). Celati continued to teach and to write essays and do translations throughout the 1970s and into the mid-1980s; however, after the positive critical response to his early fictional works, which resulted in the award of the coveted Bagutta Prize in 1973 for Le avventure di Guizzardi, for example, he nonetheless felt the need to withdraw from the literary scene in order to rethink his approach to writing prose fiction. He therefore remained essentially absent from the mainstream publishing world until 1985, when his collection of short stories, Narratori delle pianure (Voices from the Plains), appeared, to great interest on the part of readers and critics alike. This was an apparently entirely different Celati; from the exuberant linguistic experimentation of his early fiction, he had moved to a minimalist style and a more somber and, for some, dark thematic emphasis on the loneliness and alienation of contemporary life. Celati had become interested in the work of photographers during his period of silence, and his collaboration with Luigi Ghirri and others as they traveled around the Po Valley in search of photographs of landscapes and everyday scenes strongly influenced his thinking about and elaboration of the stories included in the new collection. He and Ghirri shared a deep conviction about the necessity of avoiding aesthetically contrived effects and of instead validating quotidian experience in all of its apparent banality and lack of extreme spectacle, the latter of which they believed had come to dominate art and media in the contemporary world with very deleterious effects. Celati therefore sought to lower the threshold of his prose’s tonalities and to reach after a

mode of recounting allied to ancient forms of shared oral storytelling. His stories of this period are moving, quirky, and sometimes sad tales of people living their lives in the desolation of a world more and more shaped by today’s impersonal technology, solitude, fears, and loss of human companionship once provided by traditions of shared histories and styles of daily life. He wrote essays and gave interviews in which he described his poetics of the everyday, which has an ethical as well as aesthetic basis. Celati believes that only by finding our common links as mortals and by facing the limits of our own existences, embracing without desperation caducity and our own death, can we escape the negative effects of an increasingly impersonal and spectacularized Western society. Storytelling is one of the means by which we can share our common humanity, and language is the medium of this sharing, language that is itself a repository of centuries of common usage, modes of life, and culture. Since moving to England in the mid-1980s, when he gave up his teaching career at the University of Bologna, Celati has continued to write fiction and essays and to translate, and he began to make art films, starting with Strada provinciale delle anime (Provincial Road of Souls, 1991). He has since then directed two documentary films, Il mondo di Luigi Ghirri (Luigi Ghirri’s World, 1998) and Visioni di case che crollano (Crumbling Houses, 2003), and another, on the culture of the Dogon people in Northwest Africa, was prepared for release in 2005. His interest in Africa is of long standing, and in 1998 he published a travel diary, Avventure in Africa (Adventures in Africa). Celati was a cofounder of the short-lived literary journal, Il Semplice: Almanacco delle prose (Almanac of Prose Writings), which appeared in six issues between 1995 and 1997, and he often contributes essays and stories to newspapers such as Il manifesto. Celati has become an important model for and mentor of younger writers, especially those with an interest in Emilia-Romagna, his region of origin and inspiration for much of his more recent work. Celati is a peripatetic and restless soul, always on the move and always searching for an understanding of his art and of human existence. His preferred authors include Boiardo, Melville, Tomaso Garzoni, and Leopardi, upon whose works he has written illuminating essays. In 1991 he published his translation of Melville’s famous story ‘‘Bartleby,’’ with a deeply thoughtful introduction that was the fruit of many decades of contemplation of the tale, and in 1994 he published 435

GIANNI CELATI a prose version of Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato (Orlando in Love), which he has recited in many venues in Europe and North America to the delight of rapt audiences. Celati is a genuine scholar and theorist of literature, as well as a completely original fiction writer and filmmaker. He is one of contemporary Italy’s most richly talented voices, a multifaceted artist and thinker who has never stopped honing his craft through hard work, experimentation, and risk taking. Although it might seem that his body of work is eclectic, there are certain interests and orientations that run throughout it and condition his large production: a belief in the ethical and human value of artistic creations; disdain for the institutional and hierarchical aspects of the literary and academic worlds; a preference for the marginalized, the eccentric, and the muted aspects of experience and expressive modes; a love for travel, discovery, and alterity of both the personal and cultural kinds. His central importance to the contemporary Italian and European literary world is by now evident, and he has joined the ranks of those few creative individuals who, through their books and their films, have shaped post–World War II Italian culture both by returning to its regional and local riches and by deprovincializing it through serious attention to its ties to other literary and cultural traditions.

Selected Works Fiction Comiche, 1971. Le avventure di Guizzardi, 1973. Il chiodo in testa, 1974. La banda dei sospiri, 1976. Lunario del paradiso, 1978. Narratori delle pianure, 1985; as Voices from the Plains, translated by Robert Lumley, 1989. ‘‘Condizioni di luce sulla via Emilia,’’ in Esplorazioni sulla via Emilia, edited by Giulio Bizzarri, 1986. La farsa dei tre clandestini: Un adattamento dai Marx Brothers, 1987. Quattro novelle sulle apparenze, 1987; as Appearances, translated by Stuart Hood, 1991. ‘‘Il paralitico nel deserto,’’ Dolcevita (1987): 19–23. ‘‘Verso la foce (estratti da un diario di viaggio)’’, in Narratori dell’invisibile: Simposio in memoria di Italo Calvino, edited by Beppe Cottafavi and Maurizio Magri, 1987. Verso la foce, 1989. Parlamenti buffi, 1989. L’Orlando innamorato raccontato in prosa, 1994. ‘‘Fata Morgana,’’ Il Semplice: Almanacco delle prose, 2 (January 1996): 15–30. Recita dell’attore Vecchiatto nel teatro di Rio Saliceto, 1996. ‘‘Notizie sul popolo dei Gamuna,’’ Altofragile, 7(February 1997): 1. Avventure in Africa, 1998; as Adventures in Africa, translated by Adria Bernardi, 2000. Cinema naturale, 2001. Fata Morgana, 2004.

Edited Work

Biography Gianni Celati was born in Sondrio, 10 January 1937. His family origins were in Ferrara. Celati studied at the University of Bologna and graduated with a thesis on James Joyce. He was a visiting professor at Cornell University, 1970–1972 and professor of Anglo-American literature at the University of Bologna, 1972–1978 and 1980–1985. Celati moved to Brighton, England, 1985. He was a visiting professor at the University of Caen, France, 1986–1987; Brown University, 1989–1990 and 2000; Princeton University, 1999; and the University of Chicago, 2003. Celati has been the winner of several literary awards, including the Bagutta Prize for Le avventure di Guizzardi, 1973; Cinque Scole and Grinzane–Cavour Prizes for Narratori delle pianure, 1983; Mondello Prize for Parlamenti buffi, 1990; Zerilli-Marimo` Prize for Avventure in Africa, 1998; and the Chiara and Settembrini Prizes for Cinema naturale, 2001. His books have been translated into eight languages. REBECCA WEST 436

The Celebrated Art of U.S. Short-Story Writing, with Guido Fink, 1986. Narratori delle riserve, 1992.

Translations Jonathan Swift, Favola della botte, 1966; new ed., 1990. William Gerhardie, Futilita`, 1969. E. T. Hall, Il linguaggio silenzioso, 1969. Louis-Ferdinand Ce´line, Colloqui con il professor Y, 1971. Louis-Ferdinand Ce´line, Il ponte di Londra, 1975. Jack London, Il richiamo della foresta, 1986. Herman Melville, Bartleby lo scrivano, 1991. Stendhal, La certosa di Parma, 1993. Friedrich Ho¨lderlin, Poesie della torre, 1994. Jonathan Swift, I viaggi di Gulliver, 1997. Joseph Conrad, La linea d’ombra, 1999. Henri Michaux, Altrove, 2001.

Other ‘‘Salvazione e silenzio dei significati,’’ Marcatre´, 14–15 (1965): 112–113. ‘‘Parlato come spettacolo,’’ Il verri, 26(1968): 80–88. ‘‘Il sogno senza fondo,’’ Quindici, 9(1968): 6. ‘‘Anatomie e sistematiche letterarie,’’ Libri nuovi, 5 August 1969; rpt. in Riga, edited by Mario Borenghi and Marco Belpoliti, 14(1998): 84–87. ‘‘Al bivio della letteratura fantastica,’’ Periodo ipotetico, 6 (1972): 10–12. ‘‘Il racconto di superficie,’’ Il verri, 1(1973): 93–114.

BENVENUTO CELLINI ‘‘Finzioni occidentali,’’ Lingua e stile, 2(1974): 289–321. Finzioni occidentali: Fabulazione, comicita` e scrittura, Turin, Einaudi, 1975; 2nd edition, 1986. ‘‘Il bazar archeologico,’’ Il verri, 12(1975): 11–35. ‘‘Il corpo comico nello spazio,’’ Il verri, 3(1976): 22–32. ‘‘La bottega dei mimi,’’ Nuovi argomenti, 50(1976): 9–20. La bottega dei mimi, Pollenza and Macerata: La Nuova Foglio, 1977. ‘‘Oggetti soffici,’’ Iterarte, 17(1979): 10–15. Frasi per narratori, 1984. ‘‘Finzioni a cui credere,’’ Alfabeta, 67(1984): 13. ‘‘Commento su un teatro naturale delle immagini,’’ in Luigi Ghirri, Il profilo delle nuvole, Milan, Feltrinelli, 1989. ‘‘Morte di Italo,’’ Riga, 9(1995): 204–208. ‘‘Le posizioni narrative rispetto all’altro,’’ Nuova corrente, 43(1996): 3–18. ‘‘In memoria di Enzo Melandri,’’ with Ivan Levrini, Il semplice, 3(1996): 171–177. ‘‘Il narrare come attivita` pratica,’’ in Seminario sul racconto, edited by Luigi Rustichelli, West Lafayette, IN: Bordighera, 1998.

Films Strada provinciale delle anime, 1991. Il mondo di Luigi Ghirri, 1998. Visioni di case che crollano, 2003.

Further Reading Almansi, Guido, ‘‘Celati, uno, due, tre,’’ Nuovi Argomenti, 59–60(1978): 74–90. Barile, Laura, ‘‘Un ostinato inseguimento: Linguaggio e immagine in Calvino, Celati, Perec, e l’ultimo Beckett,’’ Forum Italicum, 26:1(1992): 188–200. Benedetti, Carla, ‘‘Celati e le poetiche della grazia,’’ Rassegna europea di letteratura italiana, 1(1993): 7–33. Caesar, Michael, ‘‘Caratteri del comico nelle Avventure di Guizzardi,’’ Nuova corrente, 97(1986): 33–46. Calvino, Italo, ‘‘Gianni Celati Comiche,’’ in G. Celati, Comiche, Turin: Einaudi, 1971.

Hanne, Michael, ‘‘Narrative Wisdom in Celati’s Narratori delle pianure,’’ Rivista di studi italiani, 14:1(1996): 133–152. Iacoli, Giulio, Atlante delle derive: Geografie da un’Emilia postmoderna: Gianni Celati e Pier Vittorio Tondelli, Reggio Emilia: Diabasis, 2002. Kuon, Peter, ‘‘La vita naturale, cosa sarebbe? Modernita¨t und Identita¨t in Gianni Celati’s Narrratori delle pianure,’’ Italianistica, 37(1997): 24–37. Lumley, Robert, ‘‘Gianni Celati’s Fictions to Believe In,’’ in The New Italian Novel, edited by Zigmunt G. Baranski and Lino Pertile, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993. Manica, Raffaele, ‘‘La pianura e la frontiera di Celati,’’ in Discorsi interminabili, Naples: Societa` Editrice Napoletana, 1987. Moroni, Mario, ‘‘Il paradigma dell’osservazione in Verso la foce di Gianni Celati,’’ Romance Languages Annual, 4 (1992): 307–313. Nocentini, Claudia, ‘‘Celati, artigiano della narrativa,’’ Civilta` italiana, 19:1(1995): 129–139. Novero, Cecilia, ‘‘Baratto di Gianni Celati e l’affermazione passiva del pudore,’’ Romance Languages Annual, 4 (1992): 314–318. Piazza, Roberta, ‘‘The Usual Story: The Narrative Imperfect in Celati as an Indicator of Information Already Familiar to the Reader,’’ Sguardi sull’Italia: Miscellanea dedicata a Francesco Villari, Leeds: The Society for Italian Studies, 1997. Piccolo, Pina, ‘‘Gianni Celati’s Silence, Space, Motion, and Relief,’’ Gradiva., 4:2(1988): 61–65. Picone, Generoso, ‘‘Da Walser a Celati: Materiali per un’ecologia dello sguardo,’’ Grafica, 8(1989): 9–16. Rizzante, Massimo, Il geografo e il viaggiatore: Variazioni su I. Calvino e G. Celati, Fossombrone (Pesaro): Tipografia Metauro, 1993. ‘‘Scritture Contemporanee: Gianni Celati,’’ Nuova Corrente, 97(1986) (special issue on Celati). Sironi, Marco, Geografie del narrare: Insistenze sui luoghi di Luigi Ghirri e Gianni Celati, Reggio Emilia: Diabasis, 2004. West, Rebecca, Gianni Celati: The Craft of Everyday Storytelling, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000.

BENVENUTO CELLINI (1500–1571) A celebrated artist and writer, Benvenuto Cellini composed the first surviving modern autobiography. Written between 1558 and 1562, Cellini’s Vita (My Life) was not published until 1728. Two English translations followed in 1771 and 1822; Goethe himself translated it into German (1798). Stendhal had enormous enthusiasm for the book,

and it inspired Hector Berlioz’s famous opera Benvenuto Cellini (1838). Not surprisingly, Cellini’s work appealed to the Romantic mythology of the solitary, brilliant, bold, and misunderstood artist. In recent times, Cellini has inspired a variety of undertakings, which reflect the tastes of the twentieth century, including psychoanalytic studies by 437

BENVENUTO CELLINI Paul Courbon, Francesco Querenghi, Luigi Roncoroni, and George E. Price; several films, including the 1934 The Affairs of Cellini, adapted from Edwin Justus Mayer’s 1924 play The Firebrand by Bess Meredyth and directed by Gregory La Cava; the operetta, The Firebrand of Florence, with lyrics by Ira Gershwin and music by Kurt Weill (1934), also inspired by Mayer’s play; an issue of Classic Comics’ Classics Illustrated series (No. 38) in 1947; and, in 2001, an off-Broadway play, Cellini, written and directed by John Patrick Shanley, who wrote the script for Moonstruck. Cellini now appears in recent anthologies or works on gay literature. Cellini, whose life spanned most of the sixteenth century, depicted himself as an individual of vast talent, while providing fascinating insights into his life and times and into the nature of his crafts, both goldsmithing and sculpture. He left over 100 poems, several discourses on art, many letters, and a prose commentary on two dream poems. Cellini, who had no formal university training, began the transition from artist to writer after his conviction for sodomy. His works mirror social, intellectual, and historical tendencies and tensions of the age of Counter-Reformation, revealing much about social and economic relationships; codes of male behavior, including homoeroticism; the system of patronage; the education and technical knowledge of artists; their relationship to antiquity; and the nature of creativity. His Vita depicts him as a multitalented artist of special excellence (virtu`), whose lineage, which he traced back to Roman Florence and the staff of Julius Caesar, made him the equal of any aristocrat. His birth and childhood were punctuated by miraculous events. His struggle with his father over whether he would study music or goldsmithing revealed the power of his artistic vocation. His constant competition with other artists disclosed his incomparable talent in whatever he touched—jewelry, medals, coins, vases, and finally large bronzes and marble. Cellini’s superhuman feats as a soldier during the 1527 Sack of Rome, of later escaping from the prison there, of surviving a second imprisonment, and of casting his Perseus against all odds show him in a heroic and saintly light. Toward the end of his second incarceration in a horrible dark, humid dungeon, God himself blessed Cellini with a mystical vision, reflecting the religious fervor of the Counter-Reformation. During the casting of his great Perseo, Cellini arose from his sickbed, warned by yet another divine vision, to save his imperiled masterwork from the ignorance of his workers and the elements of wind, rain, and fire. 438

Although Cellini’s story of his halo can be traced to the scientific phenomenon of the Heiligenschein (halo effect), it is more difficult to determine whether or not he killed the commander of the imperial forces, Charles de Bourbon, during the assault on the Castel Sant’Angelo; whether Pope Clement compared his medal favorably to the ancients; whether Pope Paul III said that uniquely talented men like Benvenuto are above the law; or whether King Francis called him ‘‘mon ami’’ and said that his works surpassed those of the ancients. Cellini’s life was a continual series of struggles and competitions with jealous rivals, stingy patrons, and ignorant women, whose knowledge of the arts was never as great as they assumed. Occasionally his confrontations resulted in physical violence or death, but he was absolved by popes. Cellini was arrogant, impatient, and argumentative with prelates, kings, dukes, their wives and servants, not to mention his fellow artists, because they failed to appreciate his genius, his painstaking methods, or the Herculean labors (fatiche) needed to produce extraordinary artistic achievements. His Renaissance-style individualism seemed somehow out of step with the authoritarian Counter-Reformation culture, but it reflected his attempt to elevate the social and professional status of the artist. Against the background of these struggles, Cellini’s unique talents appear in sharp relief. Demonstrating his worth as an artistic adviser and a witty interlocutor, he regularly offered his judgments of other artists’ work. Contributing to scholarly discourse on art, he also discussed his own works of art in detail. In the case of the conception of the famous Saliera di Francesco I, he competed with intellectuals at the court of the Cardinal of Ferrara, insisting that his own ideas were superior to their suggestions and that he alone knew how to create such a work. All of these elements contributed to Cellini’s desire to transform his own image and status as well as those of his fellow artists. Cellini proved himself a master goldsmith and sculptor, capable of working in both bronze and marble. By moving from sculptures in bronze to marble, he provided a worthy conclusion to his great success story, in which originality and mastery of materials and techniques were key. At Fontainbleau, Cellini’s Giove (now lost) outshone Il Bologna’s copies of classical statues. Cosimo observed that the Perseo (Perseus) could become the most beautiful work in the square, thereby surpassing Donatello’s Giuditta e Oloferne (Judith and Holofernes) and Michelangelo’s David. Even Vasari, no friend to Cellini, described his cantankerous

BENVENUTO CELLINI contemporary in the Vite not merely as terribile (forceful) but as terribilissimo, the special adjective he reserved for Michelangelo. Cellini’s technical writing, poetry, and letters contain many links to the Vita. These works, setting forth his boschereccia filosofia (rustic philosophy), defend his poetry and himself as an expert and innovator, who understood issues central to the arts, their history, their methods, and their secrets. Dedicated to Cosimo De’ Medici’s sons Francesco and Ferdinando, both potential patrons, the Trattati dell’oreficeria e della scultura (Treatises on Goldsmithing and Sculpture, ca. 1565–1567) exist in two versions. The more polished and technically focused manuscript published in 1568 had been revised and edited by Gherardo Spini. The second version, based on a manuscript in the Biblioteca Marciana, was finally published in 1857. It is the text used in virtually all modern editions, with its closer ties in form and content to the Vita. It contains autobiographical elements, including stories of artistic competitions and Cellini’s tribulations. In the treatise Dell’oreficeria, he provided a brief historical summary of goldsmiths who preceded him. He emphasized the role of design and drawing in this craft, bringing it in line with the greater arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture. He discussed various methods for working in niello, filigree, and enamel; making jewelry, including setting, cutting, and tinting stones; making small pieces (seals, seals, dies, medals) and larger pieces (vases, gilding, parting, etching, engraving), and casting bronze. The Trattato della scultura examines casting bronzes as well as chiseling and sculpting marble, specifically projects on a large scale, which require great talent, skill, and experience. Like the Vita, the second version of these treatises contains examples, stories about other artists, and accounts of his own experiences. He actually praised Salvatore Guasconti, with whose family he had had a violent quarrel; and his life of Piero di Nino, reminiscent of Boccaccio, ends with a beffa or joke that leads to the old man’s death. The theoretical and practical elements reveal much about the artistic practices of Cellini’s age. Cellini’s suggestion that he may have done sculptures in Rome in the 1530s cannot be verified. Several short discourses continue these technical and philosophical discussions. The Discorso sopra l’arte del disegno (Discourse on the Art of Design, n.d.) explores materials and methods in drawing and design, in particular sketching the human figure, and the family relationship between sculpture

and painting. In Della architettura (On Architecture, n.d.), as in the discourse on design, he discussed the family relationship between sculpture and its ‘‘children,’’ painting and architecture. In these works, he showed his familiarity with other writers and famous practitioners. Sopra la differenza nata tra gli scultori e pittori circa il luogo destroy stato dato alla pittura nelle essequie del gran Michelangolo Buonarroti (On the Difference between Sculptors and Painters upon the Place of Painting in the Funeral Rites of Michelangelo Buonarroti, ca. 1564) debates the artistic arrangements for Michelangelo’s funeral, during which Cellini found himself at odds with other artists, especially with the representation of the arts. With Platonic overtones, he described two-dimensional painting as a ‘‘lie’’ and clearly less real and worthy than sculpture, which is three-dimensional. The incomplete Sopra i principii e ‘l modo d’imparare l’arte del disegno (Principles and Method of Learning the Art of Drawing, ca. 1665) provides a guide, based on Michelangelo’s works, to teaching anatomical drawing to workshop apprentices in goldsmithing and the greater arts. Learning to draw anatomical structures, especially bones and muscle that support flesh, is crucial, and he systematized the order in which bones must be learned, beginning with the legs and moving upward. He attacked artists who work too quickly and imprecisely. Cellini’s poetry, which includes madrigals, canzoni, and sonnets, touches on his personal and artistic experiences, spiritual concerns, and the polemics of art, particularly the debate over the superiority of sculpture or painting. The poems exhibit an innovative and original spirit in the use of language and literary tradition. In one group of poems, Cellini clearly took the side of sculpture, observing that God made man as the first sculpture and that even philosophers cannot understand the tools of sculpture. He found a new use for the tenzone in this artistic debate. In a significant group of sonnets, which reject the idealized love, celebration of female beauty, lofty sentiments, and refined diction of the Petrarchan tradition, he attacked his artistic rivals, caricatured his enemies, or celebrated sex over love, sex with whores or sex between males. ‘‘Porca fortuna, s’tu scoprivi prima / che ancora a me piacessi ‘l Ganimede!’’ (Filthy Fortune, had you found out before / that Ganymede, too, pleases me) curses Fortune as a woman to be discarded for a male lover in rather crude and vulgar language. His spiritual poems, which tend to conform to the conventions of love poetry, 439

BENVENUTO CELLINI including those written while he was imprisoned, contain images of crucifixion and martyrdom, prayers of thanks, poems of contemplation, and expressions of his hope that God will rescue him. Many other poems, including encomiastic sonnets, are addressed to patrons, fellow artists, men of letters, and friends on a variety of topics. Offering further insights into Cellini’s artistic philosophy, two dream poems (84 and 85), placed within the context of a prose analysis, echo Dante and the visions of the Vita. Mostly a product of his later years, Cellini’s writings served to glorify his artistic virtuosity, to enhance his reputation as a man of letters, and to depict the artist as an educated, witty, and wellrounded gentleman worthy of mingling with the best of Renaissance society and capable of teaching them the high secrets of art. He made a distinctive contribution to the task of elevating art from the status of a craft through establishing connections with classical antiquity and providing a theoretical and practical basis for artistic production.

Michelangelo in Rome (1551). A son was born in 1553. Cellini unveiled Perseo in 1554; the finishing took seven years. His stipend from the duke began in 1555, continuing irregularly until 1565. Cellini was imprisoned in 1556 for assaulting a goldsmith. He was condemned for sodomy in 1557, fined, and released to house arrest, with the duke’s intervention. Cellini completed his marble Crocifisso in 1562. He composed the Vita between 1558 and 1562. A second son, Giovanni, was born in 1561. Cellini joined the new Accademia delle Arti del Disegno in 1563; he was delegated to organize the funeral for Michelangelo in 1564, but withdrew after a quarrel. He officially married Piera de’ Parigi in 1567, the mother of three daughters, born in 1562, 1564 (Reparata), and 1566, and a son, in 1569. Cellini began the Trattati in 1567. He died on 13 February 1571, with official ceremonies by the Accademia and burial in the Chapel of St. Luke in the Church of the Santissima Annunziata in Florence. JULIA CONAWAY BONDANELLA

Biography Benvenuto Cellini was born in Florence on 3 November 1500. He entered the workshop of Michelangelo Grandini, a goldsmith and father of Baccio Bandinelli, in 1513 and, for about ten years, trained and worked with goldsmiths in Siena, Bologna, Pisa, Florence, and Rome. Cellini executed a silver belt buckle in 1518 and gained admission into the goldsmiths’ guild in Florence. He moved to Rome in 1519 and opened his own workshop in 1524, making vases, medals, and seals for important churchmen. He helped defend the Castel Sant’Angelo during the Sack of Rome in 1527. He moved to a shop in 1530 on the Via dei Banchi Nuovi. He visited various Italian cities and went to France, meeting other artists and patrons. Cellini killed the goldsmith Pompeo de’ Capitaneis in 1534. He was imprisoned in 1538. Cardinal Ippolito d’Este obtained his release in late 1539. Cellini lived in France between 1540 and 1545, working on large statues and various projects for King Francis I, including the Ninfa di Fontainebleau. He probably completed the ‘‘saliera di Francesco I’’ in 1543. His daughter Costanza was born in June 1544. After his return to Florence in 1545, Cellini received various commissions from Duke Cosimo I. In 1547, he completed a bronze bust of the duke, restored the Greek marble Ganimede, and sculpted a marble Narciso. He cast the Perseo (1548–1549); completed a bust of Bindo Altoviti (1550); and met 440

Selected Works Collections Opere di Benvenuto Cellini, 2 volumes, edited by Gio. Palamede Carpani, Milan: Societa` Tipografica de’ Classici Italiani, 1806. Le opere di Benvenuto Cellini arrichite di note ed illustrazioni, Florence: Societa` Editrice Fiorentina, 1843 (uses first printed edition of the Trattati, not the Marciano manuscript). Scritti di Benvenuto Cellini scelti a illustrazione della sua vita e della sua arte, edited by Giulio Urbini, Milan: Vallardi, 1923. Opere, edited by Bruno Maier, Milan: Rizzoli, 1968. Opere di Benvenuto Cellini, edited by Giuseppe Guido Ferrero, Turin: UTET, 1980. La vita, i trattati, i discorsi, edited by Pietro Scarpellini, Milan: Gherardo Casini, 1987. Benvenuto Cellini, Rime, edited by Vittorio Gatto, Rome: Archivio Guido Izzi, 2001.

Autobiography Vita (1558–1562), 1728. As Autobiography, translated by George Bull, 1956. As My Life, translated and edited by Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Treatises Due trattati di Benvenuto Cellini uno intorno alle otto principali arti dell’oreficeria. L’altro in materia dell’arte della scultura; dove fi veggono infiniti fegreti nel lauorar le Figure di Marmo, & nel gettarle di Bronzo (ca. 1565–1567), 1568. Due trattati di Benvenuto Cellini scultore fiorentino uno dell’oreficeria, l’altro della scultura, 1731.

BENVENUTO CELLINI I trattati dell’oreficeria e della scultura di Benvenuto Cellini, edited by Carlo Milanesi, 1857; reprinted 1994. The Treatises of Benvenuto Cellini on Goldsmithing and Sculpture, translated by C. R. Ashbee, 1967; rpt. 1999 (based on the Biblioteca Marciana manuscript).

Scalini, Mario, Benvenuto Cellini, Antella: Scala and New York: Riverside, 1995. Woods, Gregory, A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998.

Further Reading Altieri Biagi, Maria Luisa, ‘‘La Vita del Cellini. Temi, termini sintagmi,’’ in Benvenuto Cellini artista e scrittore, Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1972. Barzman, Karen-edis, The Florentine Academy and the Early Modern State: The Discipline of Disegno, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Biancofiore, Angela, Benvenuto Cellini artiste-ecrivain: L’homme a` l’oeuvre, Paris: Harmattan, 1998. Coates, Victoria C., ‘‘‘Ut vita scultura’: Cellini’s Perseus and the Self-Fashioning of Artistic Identity,’’ in Fashioning Identities in the Renaissance, edited by Mary Rogers, Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2000. Courbon, Paul, E´tude Psychiatrique sur Benvenuto Cellini, Paris: Maloine, 1906. Gallucci, Margaret A., Benvenuto Cellini: Sexuality, Masculinity, and Artistic Identity in Renaissance Italy, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Gardner, Victoria C., ‘‘Homines non nascuntur, sed figuntur: Benvenuto Cellini’s Vita and the Self-Presentation of the Renaissance Artist,’’ The Sixteenth-Century Journal, 28(1997): 447–465. Gatto, Vittorio, La protesta di un irregolare: Benvenuto Cellini, Naples: Liguori, 1988. Guglielminetti, Marziano, Memoria e scrittura. L’autobiografia da Dante a Cellini, Turin: Einaudi, 1977. Mimis, Jean, ‘‘La Vita de Benvenuto Cellini: Espace de la me´moire, espace du re´citt,’’ Litte´ratures, 40(1999): 79–93. Morigi, Lorenzo, ‘‘Cellini’s Splendor: The Reversible Theory of Restoration,’’ Sculpture Review, 48:3 (1999), 16–19. Pope-Hennessy, John, Cellini, London: Macmillan, 1985. Price, George E., ‘‘A Sixteenth Century Paranoic: His Story and His Autobiography,’’ New York Medical Journal, 99(1914): 727–731. Querenghi, Francesco, La Psyche di Benvenuto Cellini, Bergamo: Istituto Italiano d’Arti Grafiche, 1913. Roncoroni, Luigi, ‘‘Benvenuto Cellini (Contributo allo studio delle parafrenie),’’ Minerva Medicolegale, 26(1905): 271–297. Rossi, Paolo L., ‘‘The History and Reception of Cellini’s Trattati,’’ in Benvenuto Cellini: Sculptor, Goldsmith, Writer, edited by Margaret A. Gallucci and Paolo L. Rossi, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Rossi, Paolo L., ‘‘Sprezzatura, Patronage and Fate: Benvenuto Cellini and the World of Words,’’ in Vasari’s Florence: Artists and Literati at the Medicean Court, edited by Philip Jacks, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Rossi, Paolo L., ‘‘The Writer and the Man: Real Crimes and Mitigating Circumstances: Il caso Cellini,’’ in Crime, Society and the Law in Renaissance Italy, edited by Trevor Dean and K. J. P. Lowe, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

VITA, 1558–1562 Autobiography by Benvenuto Cellini

Benvenuto Cellini’s Vita (My Life) glorifies personal accomplishments over personality, avoiding the pattern of Pauline conversion that rejects worldly success. Lively, anecdotal, fresh and fast-paced, like oral discourse, Cellini’s Vita, part of which he claims to have dictated, was carefully composed, scarcely the result of casual recollections. With its varied style, it draws on the rhetoric of mercantilism, comedy, art, honor codes, and legal defense. By combining the genre of the artist’s life, especially the model of Vasari’s life of Michelangelo, with traditions reflective of historical, heroic, chivalric, picaresque, and hagiographic narratives, Cellini created a tale of heroic resistance, artistic preeminence, and the sometimes hilarious struggle between an often malevolent Fortune and his unique talent (virtu`). He constructed a recognizable selfportrait around the facts of his life, but he transformed them into a self-defense and his own personal myth of the artist as hero. The Vita never, however, reaches a definitive ending in which Cellini would have had to recount his difficult last years. Centered on the climactic event of his imprisonment after being accused of stealing papal jewels during the Sack of Rome in 1527, the narrative focuses on his early artistic training and his achievements. Cellini depicted himself as an artist who far surpasses his competitors—even the ancients. Cellini also proved himself to be a uomo universale, a true Renaissance man. He was a goldsmith, sculptor, poet, musician, courtier, and warrior. His family history and the events surrounding his early years foreshadow his greatness. Rebelling against his father’s wish that he study music, Cellini insisted on learning the goldsmith’s trade. Like all artists of the time, he served as an apprentice, 441

BENVENUTO CELLINI finally settling in Rome, where he lived for almost 20 years. Following humanist tradition, he educated himself by studying the work of the ancients and great contemporary innovators, including Michelangelo and Raphael. Including jewels, medals, coins, and vases, even his early work shone in comparison with that of contemporary and ancient artists. Bound by codes of honor and masculinity, which he sometimes flouted, Cellini cultivated male friendships, sought important commissions, and engaged in aggressive and violent behavior that included murder and assault. Cellini developed powerful and wealthy social connections but provoked conflicts with competitors and patrons with the strong speech, biting wit, and defiant impatience of someone who refused to recognize any superior. He personified a new kind of hero in his ability to use modern military technology, which energized his almost single-handed defense of Castel Sant’Angelo during the 1527 Sack of Rome. His impetus to greatness was, however, challenged by revenge killings, envious competitors, and accusations of theft. When he killed a jeweler named Pompeo who had spoken ill of him to the new pope, Paul III, he made an enemy of Pompeo’s son-in-law, Pier Luigi Farnese, who also happened to be the pope’s son. No matter where he went, Cellini faced down the obstacles to achieving his goals. Although he received commissions and a pardon from Pope Paul III, who declared men of his gifts above the law, Pier Luigi succeeded in having him imprisoned in the Castel Sant’Angelo. His incarceration tested his physical and spiritual powers, but he also amuses the reader with the stories of his daring escape and the mad castellan. Betrayed by Cardinal Cornaro, he returned to prison with a broken leg. During his Dantesque experience in an infernal dungeon, a heavenly presence saved him from suicide. God then rewarded him in the form of a medieval, otherworldly vision of Christ and the Virgin in molten gold that freed him from the darkness of his prison and the power of his captors. Finally rescued by the Cardinal of Ferrara and the King of France, Cellini left prison with the halo of a Christian martyr, the affirmation of his honor and his spiritual and artistic prowess. Cellini revealed a broad sense of humor with such stories as those about his role as a magus, capable of raising demons in the Colosseum, and his trial in a French court for sodomy, both reminiscent of novelle by Boccaccio. After his imprisonment, he became an intimate of two of the most 442

important patrons of the age, King Francis I of France and Duke Cosimo de’ Medici of Florence, whom he served, not always harmoniously, as an artist and an expert who could advise them on matters of art. In Paris, he completed the famous ‘‘saliera di Francesco I’’ and several statues, now lost, including a silver Giove that in King Francis’s opinion outshone Il Bologna’s copies of ancient statues. While in France, he received great favors from the king but also combated jealous courtiers and competitors, as well as King Francis’s mistress, Madame d’E´tampes. In a show of male dominance, he regularly assaulted one of his models, Caterina, out of concern for his art and his reputation. Back in Florence, the stingy Duke Cosimo, his servants and court artists, along with the Duchess Eleonora, another small-minded woman incapable of understanding his great male talent, made his life equally miserable. Again accused of sodomy, this time by the sculptor Baccio Bandinelli, Cellini rose above his enemy, using his wit to ridicule Bandinelli’s claim and to praise homosexual love through an allusion to the figure of Ganymede. His analytic tour de force on the defects of Bandinelli’s Ercole e Caco demonstrated his superior artistic knowledge. His own brilliant creations included bronze busts of Duke Cosimo and Bindo Altoviti, a Florentine banker, the Perseo, and a marble crucifix. Michelangelo himself praised the bust of Bindo, and the Perseo won wide acclaim for Cellini and his patron. His account of the casting of the Perseus is a heroic tale of creative frenzy, masculine vigor, and technical achievement, which allowed him, arising from a vision in his sickbed, to save the statue. Still struggling for commissions and honor, Cellini rode off to Pisa at the end of his autobiography to find the Duke. JULIA CONAWAY BONDANELLA Editions First Edition Vita, published in Naples by Antonio Cocchi in 1728 with a fictitious place of publication, i.e. Colonia, the first edition contains many errors and is not based on the autograph manuscript, the Codice Mediceo-Palatino 2342 in the Biblioteca Laurenziana of Florence. The first edition based on this manuscript is Vita di Benvenuto Cellini orifice e scultore fiorentino scritta da lui medesimo restituita alla lezione originale sul manoscritto Poirot ora Laurenziano ed arricchita d’illustrazioni e documenti inediti, 3 vols., edited by Francesco Tassi, Florence: Guglielmo Piatti, 1829.

CENSORSHIP Critical Editions La vita di B. Cellini, edited by O. Bacci, Florence: Sansoni, 1901; in Opere, vol.?, edited by Bruno Maier, Milan: Rizzoli, 1968; edited by Guido Davico Bonino, Turin: Einaudi, 1973; edited by Ettore Camesasca, Milan: Rizzoli, 1985; edited by Lorenzo Bellotto, Parma: Fondazione Pietro Bembo, 1996.

Translations As The Life of Benvenuto Cellini, translated by Robert H. Hobart Cust, 2 vols., London: G. Bell, 1910; as The Life of Benvenuto Cellini Written by Himself, translated by John Addington Symonds, introduced and annotated by John Pope-Hennessy, London: Phaidon, 1951; as Autobiography, translated by George Bull, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1956; revised edition, 1998; as The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini (abridged edition with illustrations), edited by Charles Hope, translated by John Addington Symonds, New York: St Martin’s Press, 1983; as My Life, translated and edited by Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Further Reading Arnaldi, Ivan, La vita violenta di Benvenuto Cellini, RomeBari: Laterza, 1986. Barolsky, Paul, ‘‘Cellini, Vasari, and the Marvels of Malady,’’ The Sixteenth-Century Journal: Journal of Early Modern Studies, 24(1993): 41–45. Cervigni, Dino S., The Vita of Benvenuto Cellini: Literary Tradition and Genre, Ravenna: Longo, 1979. Davico Bonino, Guido, Lo scrittore, il potere, la maschera: Tre studi sul Cinquecento, Padua: Liviana, 1979. Ferroni, Giulio, ‘‘Dalla Farnesina a Fontainebleau: Il confronto con la donna nella Vita del Cellini,’’ in Culture et socie´te´ en Italie du Moyen Age a` la Renaissance, Paris: Universite´ de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1985.

Galetta, Maria, ‘‘Tradizione ed innovazione nella Vita di Benvenuto Cellini,’’ Romance Review, 5(1995): 65–72. Gaspari, Gianmarco, ‘‘La Vita del Cellini e le origini dell’autobiografia,’’ Versants, 21(1992): 103–117. Goldberg, Jonathan, ‘‘Cellini’s Vita and the Conventions of Early Autobiography,’’ Modern Language Notes, 89 (1974): 71–83. Guglielminetti, Marziano, Dalla parte del’io: modi e forme della scrittura autobiografica nel Novecento, Naples: Edizioni scientifiche italiane, 2002. Klopp, Charles, Sentences: The Memoirs and Letters of Italian Political Prisoners from Benvenuto Cellini to Aldo Moro, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. Mirollo, JamesV., ‘‘The Lives of Saints Teresa of Avila and Benvenuto of Florence,’’ Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 29:1(1987): 54–73. Mirollo, James V., ‘‘The Mannerisms of Benvenuto Cellini (1500–71),’’ in Mannerisms and Renaissance Poetry: Concept, Mode, Inner Design, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984. Morigi, Lorenzo, ‘‘Cellini’s Splendor: The Reversible Theory of Restoration,’’ Sculpture Review, 48:3(1999), 16–19. Orsino, Margherita, ‘‘Il fuoco nella Vita di Benvenuto Cellini: Aspetti di un mito dell’artista-fabbro,’’ Italian Studies, 52(1997): 94–110. Rossi, Paolo L., ‘‘The Writer and the Man: Real Crimes and Mitigating Circumstances: Il caso Cellini,’’ in Crime, Society and the Law in Renaissance Italy, edited by Trevor Dean and Kate J. P. Lowe, Cambridge, U. K.: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Tylus, Jane, ‘‘Resisting the Marketplace: The Language of Labor in Benvenuto Cellini’s Vita,’’ Bucknell Review, 35(1992): 34–50. Woods-Marsden, Joanna, Renaissance Self-Portraiture: The Visual Construction of Identity and the Social Status of the Artist, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.

CENSORSHIP The critical discussion about censorship acquired considerable importance after World War II. The themes related to freedom of speech and thought, along with the rights of freedom itself, considered the pillars of the Republican Constitution (1948), emerged when the Fascist dictatorship came to an end. Since the Roman period, from Livius, Svetonius, and Tacitus’s time, to the persecution of Arius’s heresy determined by Constantine after the Nicæa Council (325), forms of censorship were imposed

on freedom of thought through repressive measures. The Commento sulla sfera (Comment on the Sphere, 1324–1327) by Cecco d’Ascoli sent the author and his works to the stake. Giordano Bruno was found guilty of heresy by the Inquisition due to his anti-Ptolemaic philosophical dialogues on cosmology and was sentenced to death and burnt alive at Campo dei Fiori, in Rome, on 17 February 1600. In 1633, Galileo Galilei went on trial for his Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo (Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, 443

CENSORSHIP 1632), in which he backed Copernicus’s theory. The biblioclastia (the pyre of books that is the most symbolic and effective form of censorship) was found in every historical period. In a single day, for example on 18 March 1559, in Venice (the most important European center of Hebrew printing up to the eighteenth century) 12,000 volumes of Hebrew culture were burnt. The damaging effects of censorship on Italian literary life often reflected the Catholic Church’s claim that it was its pastoral duty to review books and condemn them if necessary (this included unauthorized translations of the Bible). However, the first official indices were issued in the sixteenth century by secular governments in Milan (1538), Siena (1548), and Venice (1549). During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, governments of several Italian states limited the interventions of clerical censors. In April 1848, the Decreto Albertino introduced freedom of the press, and in 1897 Pope Leo XIII entrusted the duties for the control of literary books to diocesan bishops. The activities of the Congregation of the Index were transferred back to the Sant’Uffizio (Holy Office) in 1917. Far more incisive was the repression during the Fascist ventennium (1922–1943). After the racial laws were introduced in 1938, a committee for the bonifica libraria (Book Cleansing) was created by Alfieri, Minister of Popular Culture. It aimed at using censorship as an instrument of racial and political purges. Over time, the objectives of censorship were subject to change. During the Renaissance and the Counter-Reformation, it was the Church of Rome that first established defensive barriers in an effort to protect its own orthodoxy. This was especially evident after the invention of the movable-type printing press and the rise of the Lutheran Reformation. At the onset of the sixteenth century, the Renaissance cultural climate of freedom persisted; paradoxically, Niccolo` Machiavelli’s Mandragola (The Mandrake, 1518), which was once forbidden, was performed in Venice by religious companies in 1522. In the following years, there was a deep consciousness of the repressive mechanism. This meant not only a factual limitation, but also a self-limitation of the free creative ability, and literary works were subjected to self-censorship and revision. An example that supports this situation is the self-censorship of Torquato Tasso in his Gerusalemme conquistata (Jerusalem Conquered, 1593), an emended rewriting of the Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem Delivered, 1575). 444

In 1542, the Holy Office and the Inquisition, which was established in 381 after the Edict of Theodosius made Christianity official, involved the whole Christian world. Pope Paul IV (Gian Pietro Carafa, 1476–1559) banished the vulgarization of the Bible and Erasmus’s works and created the Congregazione dell’Indice (The Congregation of the Index) in 1571. Defying the ecclesiastic censorship, princes and kings implemented their own tactics of vigilance within their political territory. Italy was the testing ground of all European censorial situations due to the political divisions that made it the theater of many historical changes: from the invasion of Charles VIII of France (1494), to the Cateau-Cambre´sis treaty (1559) that ratified the Spanish dominance, which was then followed by the Hapsburg reign, in 1748. The Republic of Venice, which used to take great care of its own independence, and where 40 percent of all books were published, opposed the ecclesiastic censorship; and, in order to safeguard its own sovereign rights, challenged Pope Paul V (Camillo Borghese, 1552–1621), who excommunicated Venice and subjected it to an interdiction. The works by Paolo Sarpi, and in particular his Istoria dell’Interdetto (The History of the Quarrels of Pope Paul V with the State of Venice, 1624) and the Istoria del Concilio tridentino (History of the Council of Trent, 1608–1612) are remarkable documents of this jurisdictional conflict, which represented one of the most infamous episodes of censorship in Italian history. The Church also interfered by means of expurgation, which was practiced in Rome by the Holy Office after the first Index librorum prohibitorum (Index of the Forbidden Books, 1559), and it was enforced by the General Inquisitor, Michele Ghisleri, in 1561. In their instructio, or guidelines, the Indexes laid down the procedures to apply to the text. In 1560, Ascanio Censorio degli Ortensi expurgated the Novelle by Matteo Bandello: He eliminated 64 tales because they were indegne (disgraceful). Girolamo Malipiero undertook a meticulous rewriting of the Canzoniere by Francesco Petrarca, which resulted in Petrarcha spirituale (1536–1587), surpassed by a Decamerone spirituale by Francesco Dionigi da Fano in 1594. In 1582, Leonardo Salviati twisted the 100 tales in such a way that he was nicknamed Boccaccio’s ‘‘public killer.’’ The same happened to Il libro del cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier, 1528) by Baldessare Castiglione in 1584 and to Il Morgante (Morgante, 1483) by Luigi Pulci in 1574. The Imprimatur, which lay

CENSORSHIP down the ecclesiastic preventive censorship in accordance with a medieval custom, unfolded with Innocent VIII in 1487. In 1549, the first Index was produced in Venice by I Savi dell’Eresia (Secular magistrates) in collaboration with the local inquisitor of the Holy Office. In 1564, the Council of Trent appointed a Committee of Bishops, whose regulations concerning censorship lasted until 1897. The ecclesiastic censorship lost its incisiveness in 1789 when the Diritti dell’uomo e del cittadino (The Rights of Men and Citizens) were proclaimed according to the culture of the Enlightenment. The Index changed into an internal instrument used only within Catholic environments (the last Index was published in 1948, and it eventually was abolished in 1966). But the clerical censorious behavior did not come to an end. In 1864, Pius IX published the Sillabo with the Quanta Cura Encyclical, a document that precedes the decrees by Pius X (1907) about the condemnation of modernism. The industrial revolution of the nineteenth century, by promoting the publishing of periodicals that were able to deeply influence society and its opinions, decreased the censorial hold on books and, at the same time, extended it to theatrical performances and products of new technology. Since medieval times, the various ecumenical councils had criticized the art of the theater, taking a strong stance against comic actors. After the Council of Trent, bishops watched over the theaters, and women were not allowed to perform. Innocent XI (1611–1689), who was named the ‘‘Attila of the stage,’’ spared no performance. In 1697, Innocent XII had the Roman theater of Tordinona pulled down; this extreme intervention revived the old polemical custom of the pasquinade (lampoon). The most famous writer of pasquinades was the arch-censured Pietro Aretino. In addition, Carlo Borromeo (1538–1584) collaborated on censorial operations by fighting to abolish carnival and attacking the commedia dell’arte and the presence of women on stage. Many Italian theatrical companies went abroad. At the end of the eighteenth century, Enlightenment and moralism became allies to banish obscene jokes from the commedia dell’arte. During the French Revolution, Italy was also involved in the famous querelle des the´aˆtres, which aimed at faire du the´aˆtre une e´cole des mœurs (to turn theater into a school of behavior). A new, anticlerical form of censorship was born, provoking the repressive intervention of many rulers. In January

1791, the censorship on drama came to an end; however, given the political divisions of the peninsula and the local systems of control, not all governments acted upon it. For example, after the fall of the Repubblica Partenopea (1799), the reactions against the stage were intensified, and dramatists and actors exiled, condemned, and imprisoned. The Hapsburg censorship hit the historical drama, and in Venice, a number of theaters had to close down. Ferdinand II of Bourbon, who recaptured the throne of Sicily in 1849, assigned the supervision of theatrical works to the police. In the Papal States, Pius IX abolished the preventive censorship but exacerbated the repressive one. As for opera, the librettos had to be approved, as well as costumes, sets, bulletins, and programs. The most censured author of the Italian theater was Vittorio Alfieri, whose tragedies could not be performed even if they were published. Carlo Goldoni and Ugo Foscolo were also subject to censorship. The theater was feared more than books. After the Unification, local control was retained, and censorship powers were passed on to prefects. Under Fascism, censorship became an important weapon of social control. In 1923, the freedom of the press was limited by decree; it was completely abolished by 1925. The Press Law of December 1925 lay down that only registered journalists could write for newspapers (and the regime controlled the register). The preventive censorship of the theater was reinstated with the decree of 6 January 1931. Particularly rigid was radio censorship. Some of the banned plays were Uno degli onesti (One of the Honest, 1900) by Roberto Bracco and Viaggio di nozze (Honeymoon, 1917) by Giannino Antona Traversi. In the second half of the 1930s, the regime embarked on a more rigorous censorship of literature and cinema. One famous case was Vittorini’s Il garofano rosso (The Red Carnation), which was not published until 1948. When the Republican Constitution was ratified in 1948, there was only partial change, as the Fascist laws on censorship of cinema and theater remained in force until 1962. In order to voice his disillusionment as a liberal intellectual, Vitaliano Brancati wrote ‘‘Ritorno alla censura’’ (Back to Censorship), a prefatory essay to his play La governante (The Governess, 1952), censored over its lesbian content. Neo-Realist cinema, which is identified with films such as Rossellini’s Roma, citta` aperta (Rome, Open City, 1945), De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette (The Bicycle Thief, 1948;), and Visconti’s La terra trema (The Earth Trembles, 1948), 445

CENSORSHIP suffered clerical censorship because of its complex representation of postwar life. Neo-Realist drama was also affected. When L’Arialda by Giovanni Testori was staged in 1960 by Visconti at the Piccolo Teatro in Milan (MorelliStoppa Company), the play was seized due to its obscene content and the playwright tried in court. The same happened to Anima nera (Dark Soul, 1958) by Giuseppe Patroni Griffi. During the 1960s, some of the films censored include Fellini’s La dolce vita (1959), Visconti’s Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers, 1960), Bolognini’s Una giornata balorda (A Foolish Day, 1960), and Antonioni’s L’avventura (1960). Galileo (1968) by Liliana Cavani, initially intended as a three-part series for RAI-TV, never aired due to Vatican interference. Sold to Cineriz, the film was cut down for theatrical distribution in 1969, and R-rated (the condemnation of Galileo was recognized as an error by Pope John Paul II in 1992). In an act of self-censorship, Dino De Laurentiis chose not to produce Il prete bello (Don Gastone and the Ladies), adapted from the 1954 novel by Goffredo Parise. A conflict of power and the lack of the certezza del diritto (knowledge of the law) characterized both the theatrical and cinema world. Article 21 of the Republican Constitution guarantees freedom of speech and specifically condemns censorship of the press. Article 529 of the Penal Code, however, limits its application to any work that might be offensive to the comune sentimento del pudore (a common sense of decency). From the 1970s onward, the concept of censorship changed. The control was taken over by commercial corporations that promoted conventional programs, a new form of self-censorship. Broadcasting and television networks were subjected to a state monopoly. Then, in 1976, through a Constitutional Court decree, private ‘‘independent’’ channels were approved. Media enterprises, such as Silvio Berlusconi’s Fininvest, began to dominate the market. These new leaders were industrial entrepreneurs. Since the late 1990s, the state has retained only minimal power of control, and the principal threat to freedom of expression has come

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from a commercial monopoly that established the direction to be taken by cinema and television. Gasparri’s Law, which passed on 3 May 2004 and was intended to rule on broadcasting organization, simply promotes monopoly. This calls for a necessary reform of antitrust legislation. PAOLA MARTINUZZI Further Reading Argentieri, Mino, La censura nel cinema italiano, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1974. Baldi, Alfredo, Schermi proibiti: La censura in Italia 1947– 1988, Venice: Marsilio, 2002. Barbierato, Federico (editor), Libro e censure, Milan: Edizioni Sylvestre Bonnard, 2002. Bonsaver, Guido, ‘‘Fascist Censorship on Literature and le Case of Elio Vittorini,’’ Modern Italy, 8:2(2003): 165–186. Bonsaver, Guido, and Robert Gordon (editors), Culture, Censorship and the State in 20th Century Italy, Oxford, U.K.: Legenda, 2005. Caroli, Menico, Proibitissimo! Censori e censurati della radiotelevisione italiana, Milan: Garzanti, 2003. Censura e spettacolo in Italia, monographic issue of Il Ponte, 17:11(1961). Cesari, Maurizio, La censura nel periodo fascista, Naples: Liguori, 1978. Cesari, Maurizio, Censura in Italia oggi (1944–1980), Naples: Liguori, 1982. Di Stefano, Carlo, La censura teatrale in Italia (1600– 1962), Bologna, Cappelli, 1964. Fabre, Giorgio, L’elenco: Censura fascista, editoria e autori ebrei, Turin: Zamorani, 1998. Giornata, Luigi Firpo, Censura ecclesiastica e cultura politica in Italia tra Cinquecento e Seicento, Florence: Olschki, 2001. Liggeri, Domenico, Mani di forbice: La censura cinematografica in Italia, Alessandria: Edizioni Falsopiano, 1997. Marrone, Gaetana, ‘‘Non placet: La censura e il cinema italiano,’’ in Incontri con il cinema italiano, edited by Antonio Vitti, Caltanissetta: Salvatore Sciascia Editore, 2003. Prima dei codici 2: Alle porte di Hays, 48th Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Cinematografica, La Biennale di Venezia, Milan: Fabbri Editori, 1991. Pulitano`, Domenico, ‘‘Il buon costume,’’ in Valori socioculturali della giurispridenza, Bari: Laterza, 1970. Quadri, Franco, Teatro del regime, Milan: Mazzotta, 1976.

VINCENZO CERAMI

VINCENZO CERAMI (1940–) Vincenzo Cerami not only wrote the screenplays for some of the most popular Italian films of the last decades but has explored the darker aspects of contemporary life in his fiction. Both theater and film mark his literary style. He frequently pays tribute to his mentor, Pier Paolo Pasolini, who was his high school teacher in Ciampino: indeed, Cerami credits Pasolini for instilling in him a love for literature and for teaching him how to narrate life through language and dissimulate one’s intentions through indirection. Indeed, cinema has been particularly important in the definition of his literary technique, which is often intent on communicating images. Cerami’s ‘‘art of fiction’’ is summarized in his book Consigli ad un giovane scrittore (Advice to a Young Writer, 1996), where his advice is expressed in a simple and clear style. However, Pasolini has not been his only influence. Cerami first devoted himself to the theater and in 1975 produced an adaptation of Paolo Volponi’s novel Il sipario ducale (Last Act in Urbino, 1975), performed in Rome under the direction of Franco Enriquez, and in 1984 he wrote the comedy L’amore delle tre melarance (The Love of the Three Oranges), which was performed the same year under the direction of Angelo Savelli in Fiesole. From his first novel, Un borghese piccolo piccolo (A Very Petit Bourgeois, 1976), made into a movie by Mario Monicelli in 1977 starring Alberto Sordi in the title role, to his recent La sindrome di Tourette (Tourette’s Syndrome, 2005), Cerami attempts to adhere to the reality of his times. Un borghese piccolo piccolo, the story of a civil servant, Giovanni, who spends his life shuffling paperwork and waiting for retirement, demonstrates the writer’s taste for representing the horror of everyday life. Giovanni’s greatest desire is to have his 20-year old son, Mario, join the Ministry of the Interior in order to ensure a life of ease and quiet dreariness. He supplicates his superiors and joins a masonic lodge in order to further his scheme for his son. But then his son is accidentally killed during a bank robbery, and the despairing father is subsequently transformed into the sadistic persecutor and kidnapper of the killler. Cold and controlled, the writing confines itself to registering the facts, leaving the satire of the deeply corrupt state bureaucracy

in the background. The author returns to the headlines with Fattaci (Brutal Crimes, 1997), four tales that recall the noir thriller and that assume the tone of real-crime accounts. Little room is left, therefore, for the personal interpretations of the narrator, who rather privileges objectivity. The facts are communicated in raw reportage, a police document, or a journalistic article. Cerami illuminates all the characters equally, probing their psychologies and exploring their environments. Echoes of his work as a scriptwriter can be found in one of his latest works, Fantasmi (Ghosts, 2001), the story Morena, a woman haunted by the ghosts of her father and her lover. As she travels through Italy, anxious to experience the different realities that she encounters, she becomes two different women, Angela and Gabriella. The problem is not simply changing her outward appearance but also altering her own personality. Morena finally returns to herself when she is finds she is expecting a child. Her approaching motherhood inspires reflections on life. In 2005, Cerami published a collection of short stories, La sindrome di Tourette, and a novel, L’incontro (The Encounter). The stories range from the romantic to the grotesque to the unreal. However, even in the most absurd situations there are glimpses of truth. Cerami’s language is supple enough to articulate the many themes and situations that contribute to the sense of uneasiness in contemporary life. In L’incontro, Cerami turns again to the Italy of the 1970s. The meeting of the title, which occurs only in the book’s final pages, is between two people who have never seen one another and belong to very different generations: an old univeristy professor, Sandro Bulmisti, who disappears without leaving a trace, and 20-year-old Lud, who has a passion for puzzles. In a magazine, Lud comes across a mystery fashioned by Bulmisti in the form of a nursery rhyme. In pursuit of the solution, Lud goes from Rome to Paris and little by little comes to know the professor’s private life. Meanwhile, terrorism is emerging on the horizon. Cerami’s style moves across registers and mixes levity with ethical engagement. The writing is fast paced, thanks to the unexpected turns of the plot. While the characters come to terms with history and with their consciences, the past does not seem to have changed. 447

VINCENZO CERAMI As a scriptwriter, Cerami is primarily known for his long collaboration with actor and director Roberto Benigni. The most important result of their partnership is La vita e` bella (Life Is Beautiful, 1998), a film Benigni defined in his introduction to the published script as ‘‘una storia in bilico tra la lacrima e il riso’’ (a story suspended between tears and laughter). La vita e` bella does not mock the Shoah, the greatest tragic moment in contemporary history, but rather tries to find a germ of hope even in horror.

Biography

MARCELLA FARINA

Fiction Un borghese piccolo piccolo, 1976. Amorosa presenza, 1978. Tutti cattivi, 1981. Ragazzo di vetro, 1983.

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Poetry ‘‘Addio Lenin: 1977–1980,’’ 1981.

Plays L’amore delle tre melarance, 1985. Sua Maesta`, 1986.

Scripts

Vincenzo Cerami was born in Rome, 2 November 1940. He abandoned his intention to study physics at the University of Rome and began working as scriptwriter for Pier Paolo Pasolini in Teorema (1968). He became an assistant director in films with Toto`. Cerami traveled to the United States in 1968 where he worked for a year. He married Mimsy Farmer and had a daughter, Aisha, in 1970. He was awarded the ‘‘Bartolo Cattafi’’ poetry prize for Addio Lenin, 1982. Cerami and Mimsy Farmer divorced in 1986. He was awarded the Vittorio De Sica Prize in 2004. Since 1996, he has taught creative writing at several universities, including La Sapienza and the Pontificia Universita` Gregoriana in Rome and the Catholic University in Louvain. Since the 1980s Cerami has contributed to various newspapers: Il messaggero, Il giornale, L’unita`, La repubblica, La stampa, Il secolo XIX, Avvenire. He has been a scriptwriter for directors Roberto Benigni, Marco Bellocchio, Gianni Amelio, and Giuseppe Bertolucci. Cerami currently lives in Rome.

Selected Works

La lepre, 1988. L’ipocrita, 1991. La gente, 1993. Il mostro, with Roberto Benigni, 1994. Fattacci, 1997. Fantasmi, 2001. La sindrome di Tourette, 2005. L’incontro, 2005.

Johnny Stecchino, with Roberto Benigni, 1991. Colpire al cuore: trattamento e sceneggiature dell’omonimo film di Amelio, 1996. La vita e` bella, with Roberto Benigni, 1999.

Comic Books Olimpo S.p.A., 2000. Olimpo S.p.A. caccia grossa, 2002.

Other Consigli ad un giovane scrittore, 1996. Canti di scena: concerto di parole e musica, with Nicola Piovani, 1999, Storia di altre storie, with Francesco Guccini, 2001. Pensieri cosı`, 2002. Vincenzo Cerami racconta l’Odissea tradotta da Giovanna Bemporad, 2003.

Further Reading Asor Rosa, Alberto, Novecento primo, secondo e terzo, Milan: Sansoni, 2004. Barbalato, Beatrice (editor), Vincenzo Cerami: le re´cit et la sce`ne, Louvain: Presses universitaires de Louvain, 2004. Benigni, Roberto, Introduction to La vita e` bella, Turin: Einaudi, 1998. Comes, Annalisa, ‘‘Un borghese piccolo piccolo,’’ in Letteratura italiana: Dizionario delle opere, vol. 2, Turin: Einaudi, 2000. De Candia, Mario, ‘‘Vincenzo Cerami dal cinema al teatro,’’ Ridotto, 1–3(1985): 26–32. Mannocchi, Maria Cristina, ‘‘Tabucchi, Vassalli, Cerami, Morselli, Ceronetti,’’ in Storia generale della Letteratura italiana, edited by Nino Borsellino and Walter Pedulla`, vol. 15, Part 1, Il Novecento: sperimentalismo e tradizione del nuovo, Milan: Motta, 2004. Mauri, Paolo, L’opera imminente: Diario di un critico, Turin: Einaudi, 1998.

LAURA CERETA

LAURA CERETA (1469–1499) In 1488, on the threshold of European forays into Africa and the New World, Laura Cereta sent her patron, Cardinal Ascanio Sforza, a manuscript of her collected letters, announcing that she was offering him not the monkeys of Mauritania or the rhinoceroses and cinnamon of Ethiopia but instead ‘‘mercedula...ex secretis ingenii—maius inventum’’ (little gifts from the secret places of my mind—a greater discovery). Cereta’s epistolario, containing 82 letters and a dialogue in Latin, circulated widely in manuscript during her lifetime, as did the substantial Latin letter collections of two other women humanists, Isotta Nogarola (1410–1466) and Cassandra Fedele (1465–1558). Discoursing on stock humanist themes, Cereta addresses female friends as often as males. She stages the humanist debate on the virtues of city versus country in a pair of letters to women. Imitating Petrarch’s letter on his ascent of Mt. Ventoux in her letter to Deodata di Leno, Cereta describes her scaling of Mt. Iseo, while she echoes Lorenzo Valla’s Epicurean interlocutor’s praise of the pleasures of the mind in his De voluptate (1431). Perhaps modeling her advice to a woman she calls Europa solitaria on Coluccio Salutati’s famous epistle to his friend Zambeccari urging him not to retire from city politics to enter a monastery (1398), she seems to take issue with Petrarch’s eulogy of rural life in his De vita solitaria (1346). Cereta’s self-consolatory letters after her husband’s death comprise at least one third of her letterbook. But epistles venting her sorrow, addressed to the nun Olympica Nazaria and the widow Martha Marcella, also include detailed narratives of her early life, her intellectual formation, and the terrifying, recurrent dreams that plague her. Cereta’s letter to another woman friend, Elena di Cesare, on the threat from Islam, differs from other humanist responses to the Turkish invasion of Constantinople: She calls for the waging of peace, not war, with the Turks, since an Italian campaign will only end in further death and destruction on Italian soil. Two epistolary essays—the De de subeundo maritalis iugo iudicium (On entering the bonds of matrimony, 1486) addressed to Pietro Zecchi and the De liberali mulierum institutione defensio (In defense of a liberal education for women, 1488) to

Bibolo Semproni—represent her most feminist and polemical works. Both works follow the period of her father’s banishment from Brescia in 1485, when, according to Cereta’s own testimony, she wholly assumed on the role of paterfamilias herself, supervising her father’s business and legal dealings as well as her brothers’ education. Relying largely on Boccaccio’s history of famous women (De claris mulierbus), to argue the worth of women as a class, her letter to Zecchi constitutes an antiepithalamium in which Cereta characterizes marriage as slavery for women and motherhood as a trap. Revealing a struggle for power and erotic frustration in her marriage, her five extant letters to her husband do not undercut her essay on matrimony so much as they supplement it. Continuing to draw exempla from Boccaccio’s lives, Cereta’s letter to Bibolo on women and education views the rich history of learned women as a continuity and a fact: She calls her historically constituted community the respublica muliebris (republic of women). As in Christine de Pizan’s City of Ladies (1404–1405), Cereta’s catalog of distinguished women from antiquity to the present— from the Greek poet Sappho to the Ethiopian prophet Sabba and the Roman orator Hortensia down to such contemporary scholars as Isotta Nogarola and Cassandra Fedele—stands as irrefutable proof of women’s worth. Extending the quattrocento idea that the greatness of a man’s mind is not tied to class or birth to cover gender, Cereta argues that women too are born with the right to education. Concerned with the commitment and hard work an education demands, she worries only that not all women will push for advancement. Writing at the precise moment when debates about women’s nature and women’s roles in the family and society were beginning to awaken interest in the Italian cities and courts in the ‘‘female point of view,’’ Cereta met frequently with other scholars and writers at the Santa Chiara convent, the Ursine monastery, and several literary coteries in Brescia. Some of her epistolary essays were tailor-made for such scholarly circles: Among these are her essays Execratio contra fortunam (An invective against fortune, undated), De Theutonico 449

LAURA CERETA conflictu (On the German War, 1487), In avaritiam admonitio (A Warning Against Greed, 1487), and Consolatio de morte filiolae (On the Death of a Child, 1486). The participants in these circles included the learned friar Lodovico de la Turre, the professors of rhetoric Clemenzo Longolio and Bonifacio Bembo, and the physicians Michele Beto and Felice Tadino, among others. Only two fifteenth-century humanist dialogues by women are known: Cereta’s comic In asinarium funus oratio (On an Asses’s Funeral, 1485–1486); and Isotta Nogarola’s De pari aut impari Evae atque Adae peccato (On the Equal or Unequal Sin of Adam and Eve, 1451). Placing In asinarium funus oratio at the head of her letterbook, right after the dedication letter, Cereta showcases the dialogue as her most original and impressive work. A mockserious inquest into the murder of a donkey, with three speakers in dialogue, Cereta herself acts as the lead interlocutor (‘‘Laura’’), while the miller who owns the ass (‘‘Soldus’’) and the miller’s rogue slave (‘‘Philonacus’’) play supporting roles. While the In asinarium funus oratio borrows heavily from Apuleius’s second-century novel The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) for its plotline and rustic Latin vocabulary, ‘‘Laura’’ delivers a bizarre oration on drugs and ointments made from the body parts and bodily fluids of asses, lifting her medical data from Pliny’s Natural History. Cereta’s dialogue and humanist themes live on in the call for social, legal, and economic advances for women in the early seventeenth-century Venetian writers Lucrezia Marinella, Modesto da Pozzo, and Arcangela Tarabotti. Her letters further anticipate themes commonly associated with the French and British feminists of the eighteenth century: among these, the contextualization of the debate on women within a historical ‘‘republic of women’’; the attempt to redefine and reconstruct the concept of gender; the privileging of the emotions in humanist discourse—a genre long assumed to be the preserve solely of the rational faculties; the construction of housework as a barrier to women’s literary and artistic aspirations; and the use of the salon or convent salon as a passage for women into the public sphere.

Biography Laura Cereta was born the first of six siblings, three brothers and two sisters, in Brescia in 1469, to Silvestro Cereto, an attorney and magistrate in Brescia, and Veronica di Leno, whose family 450

claimed descent from a noble lineage. She was convent educated, 1476–1480, and taught Latin and classics by a learned nun; her father played no role in her schooling. She moved to Lake Iseo with her father during the war of Ferrara, 1482–1484 and served as her father’s secretary, 1484–1485. Cereta married to Pietro Serina, a Venetian merchant, in 1484/85; she was widowed in 1485. There were no children. She met regularly with humanist circles at Brescia and the monastery at Chiari and gave readings from her epistolary essays in both venues; she sustained a number of intellectual friendships with women, the nuns at Chiari among them. Her attempt at forging a literary friendship with the famous Venetian humanist Cassandra Fedele failed. Cereta died at age 30 of unknown causes in 1499; her burial mass was said at San Domenico in Brescia. She left behind an unpublished manuscript dedicated to Cardinal Ascanio Sforza of Milan containing 82 Latin letters and a comic dialogue also in Latin; her complete works first appeared in print in 1640 in Padua. DIANA ROBIN Selected Works Laurae Ceretae Brixiensis Feminae Clarissimae Epistolae iam primum e MS in lucem productae, edited by Jacopo Filippo Tomasini. Padua: Sebastiano Sardi, 1640. Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. Vat. Lat. 3176. Cart. 3. XVI in 73 fols. Contains 83 items; the only manuscript source containing all Cereta’s extant works. Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana. Marc. Cod. Lat., XI.28 [4186] mbr. XV, 154 fols. Includes 74 items containing many lacunae. The manuscript begins on fol. 11. Divae Laurae in Asinarium Funus Oratio and selected letters, in Laura Cereta: Quattrocento Humanist, edited by Albert Rabil, Jr., Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts, 1981. Contains the Latin texts of the dialogue and 11 letters not included in the 1640 edition. Collected Letters of a Renaissance Feminist, transcribed, translated, and edited by Diana Robin, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997.

Further Reading Fedele, Cassandra, Letters and Orations, edited and translated by Diana Robin, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. King, Margaret L., and Albert Rabil, Jr., Her Immaculate Hand: Selected Works by and about the Women Humanists of Quattrocento Italy, Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts, 1983. Nogarola, Isotta, Complete Writings: Letterbook, Dialogue on Adam and Eve, Orations, edited and translated by

GUIDO CERONETTI Margaret L. King and Diana Robin, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Pasero, Carlo, ‘‘Il dominio veneto fino all’incendio della loggia,’’ in Storia di Brescia, Vol. 2, La dominazione Veneta (1426–1575), edited by Giovanni Treccani degli Alfieri, Brescia: Marcelliana, 1961. Rabil, Albert, Jr., ‘‘Laura Cereta,’’ in Italian Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook, edited by Rinaldina Russell, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994. Rabil, Albert, Jr., Laura Cereta: Quattrocento Humanist, Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1981. Robin, Diana, ‘‘Culture, Imperialism, and Humanist Criticism in the Italian City-States,’’ in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Volume 3: The Renaissance. 1500–1700, edited by Glyn P. Norton, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Robin, Diana, ‘‘Humanism and Feminism in Laura Cereta’s Public Letters,’’ in Women in Italian Renaissance

Culture and Society, edited by Letizia Panizza. Oxford: Legenda European Humanities Research Centre, University of Oxford, 2000. Robin, Diana. ‘‘Laura Cereta,’’ in Encyclopedia of the Renaissance, edited by Paul F. Grendler, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1999. Robin, Diana, ‘‘Laura Cereta: Biography, Latin Texts, Translations,’’ in Women Writing Latin, Vol. 3: Early Modern Women Writing Latin, edited by Laurie Churchill, Phyllis R. Brown, and Jane E. Jeffrey, New York: Routledge, 2002. Robin, Diana, ‘‘Space, Woman, and Renaissance Discourse,’’ in Sex and Gender in Medieval and Renaissance Texts: The Latin Tradition, edited by Barbara K. Gold, Paul Allen Miller, and Charles Platter, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. Russell, Rinaldina (editor), Feminist Encyclopedia of Italian Literature, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997.

GUIDO CERONETTI (1927–) An acclaimed and renowned translator of biblical as well as classical and modern texts, Guido Ceronetti is also an influential critic and poet. His exemplary and courageous translation of a passage from the Book of Job (19, 26), made difficult by its corrupted textual tradition, does in itself full justice to his intense and multiform literary activity, in which narrative and theater, journalistic writing and translation converge. Ceronetti—for whom writing is a moral mission and translating an act of faith in the liberating power of the word—seems to be especially concerned with recovering the sacredness of creation and the relation between the divine and human flesh. He professes a gnostic faith in the possible redemption of the obviously evil nature of humankind. His art is thus opposed to the spectacle and appearances of everyday life that, in contemporary society, are illusions diametrically opposed to true life. In this context, writing is a form of plague (‘‘pestigrafia’’ as Ceronetti calls it) because, as Giovanni Mariangeli explained, ‘‘it expresses the impossibility of disembodying form from its content, of freeing words from the turbid journeys and the secret rooms where thought is constrained’’ (Guido Ceronetti il veggente di Cetona, 1997). An example is the ‘‘favola sommersa’’ (hidden fable) Aquilegia (1973), the name of a rare Alpine

flower and symbol of a prophetic initiation in which Ceronetti, a radical vegetarian, described and denounced the slaughter of creation in the practice of vivisection. Olam and Enarchı`, the male and female protagonists of the fable, escape from an impending catastrophe that can only be resisted through inner freedom, exemplified by conjugal love, the mystical union recalled symbolically by the flower. The collection of short stories, D. D. Deliri disarmati (D. D. Disarmed Deliria, 1993), notable for its surrealistic and fantastic atmosphere, also uses the moral apologue to develop an allegory of the mystery of evil that is also aimed at the repressive mechanisms created by human society. In Ceronetti’s literary universe, even a journey through the Italian landscape turns into the quest for understanding and a conceivable truth. This is the case of Un viaggio in Italia 1981–1983 (An Italian Journey, 1983). At the urging of the publisher Giulio Einaudi, Ceronetti traveled through Italian cities and towns between 1981 and 1983, describing in detail the vulgar and declining way of life in which the moral discomforts of modernity are revealed. In 1970 Ceronetti established, with Erica Tedeschi, a marionette theater, Teatro dei sensibili, for which he wrote La iena di San Giorgio (St. George’s Hyena), written in 1984 and published 451

GUIDO CERONETTI in 1994. This work was followed in 1988 by the so-called ‘‘Mystic Luna Park,’’ a variety theater that marked the debut of the marionette ‘‘ideofore’’ (from the Greek etymological root meaning ‘‘carrying’’ or ‘‘producing’’ ideas). In recent years, Ceronetti has tried to revive the folk tradition of street performers and has toured Italian cities with his marionette theater. Ceronetti is an indefatigable explorer of contemporary reality and a vocal opponent of mass consumer culture in his essays as well. Driven by a moral imperative to bear witness and to denounce the evils of society, his political writings attempt to unite disenchantment and participation, anger and contemplation, as is the case with the articles that appeared in La stampa and were later collected in La carta e` stanca (The Paper Is Tired, 1976), or with the diary La pazienza dell’arrostito: Giornale e ricordi 1983–1987 (The Patience of the Roasted Man: Journal and Memories, 1983–1987, 1990). His notion of writing as a totality made up of fragments is most clearly evident in his poetry, however, of which the most important collection is Compassioni e disperazioni: Tutte le poesie 1946–1986 (Compassions and Despairs: Complete Poems 1946–1986, 1987). Starting with Poesie per vivere e non vivere (Poems for Living and Not Living, 1979), Ceronetti experiments with an increasingly warped and almost strident vocabulary. In his prose writings in particular, Ceronetti’s style echoes that of Maurice Blanchot (whom he translated), while his poetry continues the dark and apocalyptic lineage of Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Antonin Artaud, and Emil Cioran.

Fiction Aquilegia, 1973. D. D. Deliri Disarmati, 1993. La vera storia di Rosa Vercesi e della sua amica Vittoria, 2000. N.U.E.D.D.: nuovi ultimi esasperati deliri disarmati, 2004.

Poetry ‘‘Poesie per vivere e non vivere,’’ 1979. ‘‘Il silenzio del corpo: materiali per studio di medicina,’’ 1979; as The Silence of the Body: Materials for the Study of Medicine, translated by Michael Moore, 1993. ‘‘I pensieri del te`,’’ 1987. ‘‘Compassioni e disperazioni: Tutte le poesie 1946–1986,’’ 1987. ‘‘Scavi e segnali: 1986–1992,’’ 1992. ‘‘La Distanza: poesie 1946–1996,’’ 1996.

Plays Viaggia viaggia, Rimbaud!, 1992. La iena di San Giorgio, 1994.

Journalistic and Critical Writing Difesa della luna, 1971. La carta e` stanca, 1976. La musa ulcerosa, 1978. La vita apparente, 1982. Un viaggio in Italia 1981–1983, 1983. Albergo Italia, 1985. Briciole di colonna 1975–1987, 1987. L’occhiale malinconico, 1988. La pazienza dell’arrostito: Giornale e ricordi 1983–1987, 1990. Tra pensieri, 1994. Cara incertezza, 1997. Messia, 2002. Piccolo inferno torinese: fogli dispersi restaurati, 2003. Oltre Chiasso: collaborazioni ai giornali della Svizzera italiana, 1988–2001, edited by Paolo Tesi, 2004.

Translations

Biography Guido Ceronetti was born on August 24, 1927, in Turin. He earned a degree in humanities at the University of Turin (where he studied with Luigi Pareyson), with a thesis entitled Considerazioni sul valore della poesia, 1954. In Albano (Rome), with Erica Tedeschi, he founded the puppet theater Teatro dei sensibili, 1970. He began his long-standing collaboration with the newspaper La stampa, 1972. In the autumn of 1996, the ‘‘Fondo Guido Ceronetti’’ opened at Archivi di Cultura Contemporanea della Biblioteca Cantonale di Lugano, to which the author gave his archive, catalogued by Diana Ru¨esch and Prisca Orler. He lives in Cetona (Siena), where he has resided since the 1980s. STEFANO TOMASSINI 452

Selected Works

Nuovi Salmi, 1955. Martial, Epigrammi, 1964. Catullus, Le poesie, 1969. Maurice Blanchot, Il libro a venire, 1969 (with Guido Neri). Qohe´let o l’Ecclesiaste, 1970; revised edition, 1980. Juvenal, Le satire, 1971. Il Libro di Giobbe, 1972. Il Cantico dei cantici, 1975. Il libro di Giobbe, 1982.

Further Reading Bezzi, Valentina, ‘‘Il viaggio di Guido Ceronetti: Un nuovo pellegrinaggio nell’Italia della fine del XX secolo,’’ Studi Novecenteschi, 22:49(1995), 219–246. Fioroni, Giosetta, Marionettista: Guido Ceronetti e il Teatro dei sensibili, Mantua: Maurizio Corraini, 1993. Fortini, Franco, Nuovi saggi italiani, Milan: Garzanti, 1987. Giuliani, Alfredo, ‘‘Sacro e dissacro di Guido Ceronetti,’’ in Letteratura Italiana. I Contemporanei, vol. 11, Milan: Marzorati, 1988.

MELCHIORRE CESAROTTI Mariangeli, Giovanni, Guido Ceronetti il veggente di Cetona, Isola del Piano (Pesaro-Urbino): Fondazione Alce Nero, 1997. Pagnamenta, Roberto Bruno, ‘‘I segni della fine: Un viaggio in Italia con Guido Ceronetti,’’ in Erwartung des Endes: Apokalypsen in der Literatur des 20. Jahrhunderts,

edited by Christiane Uhlig and Rupert Kalkofen, Bern: Peter Lang, 2000. Roncaccia, Alberto, Guido Ceronetti. Critica e poetica, Rome: Bulzoni, 1993. Zolla, Ele´mire, Uscire dal mondo, Milan: Adelphi, 1992.

MELCHIORRE CESAROTTI (1730–1808) An attentive interpreter of the Italian literary scene of the second half of the eighteenth century and a teacher of style for entire generations of writers, from Vittorio Alfieri to Ugo Foscolo, the abbot Melchiorre Cesarotti lived and worked almost exclusively in the Veneto region, which did not prevent him from carrying on epistolary relations with all of Europe and from achieving undisputed international fame through his works. His first cultural formation was as a classicist in the seminary of Padua, onto which he soon grafted a lively attention to the Enlightenment, facilitated by the long period he spent in Venice as a tutor, beginning in 1760. It was in Venice, in fact, which was certainly more open to European influences, that Cesarotti conceived his first works of translation, thus beginning a reflection that, perpetually balanced between theory and practice, would form the mainstay of his literary activity and that was expressed with Discorso sull’origine e i progressi dell’arte poetica (Discourse on the Origin and Progress of Poetic Art, 1762) and Ragionamento intorno al diletto della tragedia (An Argument on the Pleasure of Tragedy, 1762), introduced by Italian versions of two tragedies by Voltaire. The same principles expressed here—of a poetry that imitated the infinite variety of nature and that therefore could not be contained within rigid limits—soon animated his clamorous and innovative poetic version of the Poesie di Ossian, antico poeta celtico (The Poems of Ossian, Ancient Celtic Poet, 1763), a series of popular epic songs in prose and verse, a good deal of which the Scot James Macpherson had composed and popularized with great success with the title A Fragment of Ancient Poetry (1760), passing them off as the work of the mythical bard and Scottish prince Ossian (third century AD), and which Charles Sackville, a friend of Cesarotti, had

quickly translated literally into Italian. It was a fabrication that the Padovan abbot, and a large part of Europe along with him, believed to be authentic, and with which he intended to propose an epic model distinct from and even superior to Homer. This model was of a modern ‘‘primitive,’’ distinguished by tumultuous and extreme passions that are stirred up in characters with strong wills and, just as frequently, melancholic doubts, up until the tragic catastrophes set in misty and disquieting Nordic landscapes where the great powers of nature, along with those of men, are encountered. Although he was not a poet himself, Cesarotti, with his rather free reelaboration of the Ossianic text, thus proved to be a metrical innovator of great importance for his work in the prose sections of the short poems in hendecasyllabic free verse, which, from the Enlightenment on, was the principal meter of Italian poetry between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Alfieri, Foscolo, Monti, and later, with a more sparing use, Manzoni and Leopardi). The construction of a new poetic style derived from this innovation, a style distinct from the Petrarchan one on which the Arcadia had remodeled itself in the first half of the century and opposed to the purist temptations of strictly observing the Tuscan fourteenth century that became popular at the century’s end. At the same time, the lesson of the classics was put to good use and revised in the guise of a new syntactic structure, rendered more ruptured and dramatic by suspensions, pauses, and inversions that were shaped by the characters’ sentiments. It was precisely these elements that attracted Alfieri in the course of his stylistic quest, in which Cesarotti participated directly as an adviser and reviser of the Astian poet’s verses through a thoughtful epistolary correspondence 453

MELCHIORRE CESAROTTI and direct meetings, which were broken off, however, in 1783, because of Cesarotti’s growing wariness of the antityrannical sentiments carried to their extreme consequences that typified Alfieri’s tragedies. Published for the first time in 1763—the same year as the first part of Giuseppe Parini’s Il giorno—and then continually revised and expanded up through 1772, Cesarotti’s translation of Poesie di Ossian, with its many apostrophes and invocations, with the repetitions, questions, and unanswered exclamations of his broken and fragmented style, also exercised a strong influence on nineteenthcentury libretto writing. The translation was strongly marked, furthermore, by the use of a certain metrical variety that Cesarotti adopted to render the parts in verse by Macpherson, taking up cadences and motifs of popular poetry that surpassed the example of Pietro Metastasio’s musicality and constituted a reference point for the romantic opera’s quest for new languages. This same grafting of a modern sensibility onto the classical tradition was also at the heart of Cesarotti’s complex work of translating the Iliad, which began in 1768 when he came to occupy the chair of Greek and Hebrew at the University of Padua and devoted a renewed attention to classical texts, ranging from the Greek orators to the Homeric poems. At this time, he also published Elegia sopra un cimitero di campagna (1772), a new important version of Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, which was also destined for great success in the field of sepulchral poetry. In actual fact, for the Iliade di Omero, we are dealing with three successive ‘‘translations,’’ which kept him occupied until 1794; the first, literal and in prose, with a vast apparatus of notes and essays; the second, free, in hendecasyllabic free verse; and a third in free verse, which was a true, liberal reworking entitled La morte di Ettore (The Death of Hector, 1795). This was a full confirmation, in this latter text and beyond its modest success, of Cesarotti’s idea of translation as recreazione poetica (poetic re-creation), which was meant to re-evoke in the reader the spirit rather than the letter of the original. Along with practical examples of translation, Cesarotti also developed, as with his versions of Voltaire, a prolonged theoretical reflection, the most original moments of which came in 1785 with the Saggio sulla filosofia del gusto (Essay on the Philosophy of Taste) and especially with the famous Saggio sulla filosofia delle lingue (Essay on the Philosophy of Languages). Here, in a brilliant synthesis of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism and 454

the study of tradition, and distinguishing grammatical aspects, which remained stable from rhetorical and stylistic ones, which were subject to continual changes insofar as the style only followed reason and taste, Cesarotti maintained the legitimacy of every language. He broadly reevaluated the historical dynamics against the normative claims of the purists, on the basis of the principle that linguistic changes corresponded to the changing in time of the spirito nazionale (national spirit) and the genio retorico (rhetorical genius) of every country. The last years of his life saw Cesarotti aligned during the three-year Jacobin rule alongside the Padovan municipality in launching projects of educational reform, and, afterwards, with the oscillation peculiar to many writers of the neo-Classical age, he participated in the Napoleonic myth with a short encomiastic poem, Pronea (1807), which attracted severe criticism from his old disciples, most notably Ugo Foscolo.

Biography Melchiorre Cesarotti was born in Padua to a noble family on 15 May 1730. He studied at the Seminary of Padua, where he took vows and became a teacher; he lived in Venice as a tutor for the Grimani family from 1760 to 1768. Cesarotti returned to Padua to occupy the university chair of Greek and Hebrew in 1768 and spent the rest of his life in his villa of Selvazzano, near the city. In the final years of his life, he occupied himself with revising all of his writings and with a monumental edition of them in 40 volumes (1800–1813). Cesarotti died at Selvazzano on 4 November 1808. The edition of his works, including his letters, was completed by his pupil Gaetano Barbieri in 1813. GILBERTO PIZZAMIGLIO See also: History of Italian Language Selected Works Collections Opere scelte, edited by Giuseppe Ortolani, 2 vols., Florence: Le Monnier, 1945–1946.

Translations Poesie di Ossian, antico poeta celtico, 1763; enlarged ed., 1773; final ed., 1802. Thomas Gray, Elegia sopra un cimitero campestre, 1772. Iliade di Omero, 1786–1794. La morte di Ettore, 1795.

GABRIELLO CHIABRERA Other Discorso sull’origine e i progressi dell’arte poetica, 1762. Ragionamento intorno al diletto della tragedia, 1762. Saggio sulla filosofia del gusto, 1785. Saggio sulla filosofia delle lingue, 1785. Pronea, 1807.

Further Reading Barbarisi, Gennaro, and Giulio Carnazzi (editors), Aspetti dell’opera e della fortuna di Melchiorre Cesarotti, 2 vols., Milan: Cisalpino, 2002. Bigi, Emilio, ‘‘Le idee estetiche di Cesarotti,’’ Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 136(1959): 341–366. Bigi, Emilio (editor), Critici e storici della poesia e delle arti nel secondo Settecento, Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1960. Binni, Walter, ‘‘Melchiorre Cesarotti e la mediazione dell’Ossian,’’ in Preromanticismo italiano (2nd ed., 1948), Bari: Laterza, 1974.

Folena, Gianfranco, L’italiano in Europa: Esperienze linguistiche del Settecento, Turin: Einaudi, 1983. Gilardino, Sergio Maria, La scuola romantica: La tradizione ossianica nella poesia dell’Alfieri, del Foscolo e del Leopardi, Ravenna: Longo, 1982. Mari, Michele, Momenti della traduzione fra Settecento e Ottocento, Milan: IPL, 1994. Marzot, Giulio, Il gran Cesarotti: Saggio sul preromanticismo settecentesco, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1949. Pizzamiglio, Gilberto, ‘‘Melchiorre Cesarotti: Teoria e ‘pratica’ della tragedia tra Voltaire e Alfieri,’’ in Le The´aˆtre italien et l’Europe (XVIIe-XVIIIe sie`cles): Actes du II Congre`s International, edited by Christian Bec and Ire`ne Mamczarz, Florence: Olschki, 1985. Ranzini, Paola, Verso la poetica del sublime: L’estetica ‘‘tragica’’ di Melchiorre Cesarotti, Pisa: Pacini, 1998. Romagnoli, Sergio, ‘‘Melchiorre Cesarotti politico’’ (1948), in La buona compagnia, Milan: Franco Angeli, 1983.

THE CHEERFULNESS OF SURVIVORS See Allegria di naufragi (Work by Giuseppe Ungaretti)

GABRIELLO CHIABRERA (1552–1638) Gabriello Chiabrera’s literary muse did not limit itself to one specific itinerary, nor did it follow one path. This wide variety of literary interests goes far in explaining his pervasive and long-lasting fame, which waned only during the twentieth century. Respected by many of his contemporary writers, Chiabrera was a friend of such prominent writers and intellectuals as Ansaldo Ceba` of the Accademia degli Addormentati, the Florentine librettist Ottavio Rinuccini, and scientist-poet Francesco Redi. Chiabrera’s influence on his contemporaries and the succeeding generation of writers was such that he is considered a precursor of the eighteenthcentury literary movement, Arcadia. Chiabrera began his prolific writing career in the Ligurian city of Savona, where he wrote the heroic

poem Della guerra de’ Goti (The War of the Goths, 1582), as well as Pindaric odes, canzonette amorose, poemetti sacri, canzoni against the Protestant reformers, and celebratory verses dedicated to various princely dynasties of the Italian peninsula. From 1586 to 1588 he published three books of canzoni in Genoa, and in 1590 he began writing the Amedeide (1620), an epic poem dedicated to Amedeo of Savoy. Chiabrera’s poetry, much like that of Giovanbattista Marino, is innovative and evokes a sense of meraviglia (wonder) in the reader. Unlike Marino and his followers, who created this effect through an abundance of extravagant metaphors and witty conceits, Chiabrera’s sense of wonderment was based on his use of classical forms. Although he read widely and was well versed in the 455

GABRIELLO CHIABRERA classical canon, his models were Pindar, Anacreon, Horace, and Catullus. His understanding of the Greek and Latin tradition was filtered through his reading of Pierre de Ronsard, the preeminent poet of the Ple´iade, who aimed at breaking away with the earlier French poetry and enriching his native language with a literature equal to that of the classical world and the Italian Renaissance. Chiabrera produced a vast quantity of verse (epic, tragic, pastoral, lyrical, and satirical), but his reputation as Italy’s most celebrated poet of the seventeenth century after Marino is associated with lyrical compositions, in particular the Canzonette (1591) and the verses written in celebration of epic deeds. Chiabrera was drawn to the composition of canzonette by his love for metrical and strophic experimentation, his quest to connect his lyrics with the world of music, and his search for a greater reading public. He was well aware that a variety of short verses are more easily adaptable to music and that such verses are sung with greater ease. The beauty and value of these compositions reside in their high level of musicality, in their proclivity to being sung, and in their aural quality, whereby the sounds emanating from the succession of words become more important than the images themselves. It was also Chiabrera’s contention that a new reading public, made up of less sophisticated young men and women, needed a poetry radically different from the gravity of a Dante or of a Petrarch. In his Dialoghi dell’arte poetica con altre prose e lettere (Dialogues on the Art of Poetry, 1830), Chiabrera discussed the art of writing heroic verse (‘‘Il Vecchietti’’), canzoni (‘‘L’Orzalesi’’ and ‘‘Il Geri’’), verse composition (‘‘Il Bamberisi’’), and a Petrarchan sonnet (‘‘Il Forzano’’). In Il Geri, dedicated to the Florentine Francesco Geri, he also suggested that not all readers are able to understand or enjoy lyric poetry and that it is up to the poet to compose light verses that are pleasing to them and can also be sung or recited. Thus, he popularized the canzonetta metrical form, and through the use of iterations, he gave us charming melodies and magical images, gracious poems where the logical sense of the words and the use of diminutives created a blend of images and sounds that heighten the senses. Chiabrera’s Canzonette and anacreontic poems appealed later to the taste of the Arcadians and were critically praised during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Chiabrera wanted to be remembered by posterity as the celebratory poet of epic deeds. To this end, he composed numerous canzoni and odes that praised the exploits of heroes and famous 456

individuals. His verses celebrated the election of popes, sang the praises of the victors of athletic events, and extolled the victories of Christian knights over the infidels. Some of his odes were written in honor of Emanuele Filiberto, Duke of Savoy; Christopher Columbus; Maria de’ Medici; and Pope Urban VIII on the day of his inauguration. Here Chiabrera emulated Pindar and attempted to construct a new noble, learned, heroic poetry previously unknown in Italy. His canzoni were also in a broad sense ‘‘Pindaric’’ due to Chiabrera’s frequent use of classical topics and mythology. Chiabrera’s characters were immersed in a world populated by heroes and heroines, gods and demigods, legends and myth, Achilles and Jason, the Odyssey and the Iliad, elements that create the fantastic scenery for Chiabrera’s paradigm of the meraviglioso. Gabriello Chiabrera was also a writer of librettos and tragedies. He played a central role in the development of musical and dramatic theater at the courts of Florence, with Il rapimento di Cefalo (The Abduction of Cephalus, 1600) set to music by Giulio Caccini, and of Mantova, where he composed intermezzi for Guarini’s comedy Idropica (1584), set to music by Claudio Monteverdi in 1608, and ‘‘favolette’’ (little fables) to be recited while singing. His technical inventions for the intermezzi in honor of Giovanni de’ Medici, as well as the sumptuous balls and veglie at the Florentine court, were highly celebrated. Chiabrera’s theatrical activity brought him fame and recognition and solidified his reputation as a preeminent man of letters. Much less known is his involvement with the theater in his hometown of Savona and in Genoa, where he wrote numerous pieces that parody the idleness and rivalries among the ruling aristocracy and that bring to light certain aspects of contemporary Genoese society. In his pastoral fables Gelopea (1604) and Alcippo (1614), he introduced relevant innovations to the favola boschereccia by eliminating the chorus, simplifying the story with the omission of the subplot and the resolution through recognition. He stressed also the rapport between the audience and the performance. In his Gelopea, inspired by Guarini’s Il pastor fido, Chiabrera interwove games of trickery and jealousy with the theme of ‘‘rightful marriage.’’ The rivalry between Filebo, a poor shepherd boy, and Berillo, a farm laborer, for the hand of Gelopea, the daughter of a rich and powerful shepherd, alluded to the conflicts afflicting the Genoese nobility (the new and old, the rich and the impoverished). In the end, the marriage of Filebo with Gelopea pointed to a

GABRIELLO CHIABRERA solution based on tolerance, love, and reconciliation. Women’s destiny was the theme of Alcippo: whether they are free to pursue their wishes or rather entrapped by the existing patriarchal structure. The play concludes with the matrimony of Alcippo and Clori, the protagonists, but the traditional ending is marred by the bride, who is resigned to her fate and accepts the inevitable marriage with an unconventional remark: ‘‘che piu´ dirvi degg’io? / Sia nelle vostre mani, e voi reggete il freno / di ciascun mio desio’’ (What more can I say to you?/I am in your hands / and you apply the brakes / to all of my desires). In his autobiography, Vita scritta da lui medesimo, published posthumously in 1718, Chiabrera wrote that he endeavored to discover a new world as Columbus did. Indeed, his discovery was to create a new world of poetry, as a reaction against the constraints of a lackluster Petrarchism that saturated the poetry of his time. Chiabrera’s verse and poetic reforms were influential in the development of the eighteenth-century Arcadian ideals, informing the literary and cultural patterns of the Roman Academy.

Biography Gabriello Chiabera was born in Savona, 18 June 1552. His father passed away before he was born. After his mother remarried, he was brought to Rome by his paternal uncle, Giovanni, 1561; his uncle entrusted him to the Jesuits at the Collegio Romano, where he studied Latin and philosophy, 1561–1572; he entered the court of the Venetian Cardinal Luigi Cornaro in Rome, where he met a number of leading cultural figures, like MarcAntoine Muret, friend and translator of Pierre Ronsard, the critic, dramatist, philosopher Sperone Speroni, and Torquato Tasso, 1572–1576. Chiabrera had a violent altercation with a Roman gentleman and was forced to leave the city and return to Savona, 1576; he then became involved in violent altercations and was forced to flee the city, 1581. Chiabrera returned to Savona in 1585 a changed man, and there he lived, almost uninterruptedly, for the rest of his life. He was invited to Florence to attend the wedding of Maria de’ Medici to Henry IV, King of France, and received the title of Gentiluomo del Granduca (Courtier of the Grand Duke of Tuscany), with a monthly allowance for the rest of his life and no residency requirement, in 1600. He married his cousin Lelia Pavese, 29 July

1602. Chiabrera presented the first edition of the Amedeide to Carlo Emanuele I, Duke of Savoy, 1607. He received a brief from Pope Urban VIII that praises the moral, classical, and heroic values of his poetry, 1623. Chiabrera died in Savona, 14 October 1638. PAOLO A. GIORDANO Selected Works Collections Opere, 5 vols., 1757. Liriche, edited by Francesco Luigi Mannucci, 1926. Canzonette, rime varie, dialoghi, edited by Luigi Negri, 1952; reprinted, 1968; selected poems in From Marino to Marinetti, translated by Joseph Tusiani, 1974. Opere di Gabriello Chiabrera e lirici del classicismo barocco, edited by Marcello Turchi, 1974; reprinted, 1984; includes the five dialogues on the art of poetry and the Vita scritta da lui medesimo Maniere, scherzi e canzonette morali, edited by Giulia Raboni, 1998.

Poetry ‘‘Della guerra dei Goti,’’ 1582. ‘‘Canzoni,’’ 1586–1588. ‘‘Canzonette,’’ 1591. ‘‘Scherzi e canzonette morali,’’ 1599. ‘‘Le maniere dei versi toscani,’’ 1599. ‘‘Herodiate,’’ 1602. ‘‘Alcuni scherzi,’’ 1603. ‘‘Rime sacre,’’ 1604. ‘‘Rime,’’ 1605; with Le vendemmie di Parnaso and the poemetto Egloghe, 1608. ‘‘Il Firenze,’’ 1615 (9 cantos); 1628 (15 cantos). ‘‘Vegghia delle Grazie,’’ 1616. ‘‘Poesie,’’ 3 vols., 1618. ‘‘Il presagio dei giorni,’’ 1618. ‘‘Per lo gioco del pallone celebrato in Firenze,’’ 1618. ‘‘Il vivaio dei Boboli,’’ 1620. ‘‘Per San Carlo Borromeo,’’ 1620. ‘‘Amedeide,’’ 1620. ‘‘Galatea o le grotte di Fassolo,’’ 1623. ‘‘Poesie,’’ 4 vols., 1628. ‘‘Ruggiero,’’ 1653. ‘‘Foresto,’’ 1653.

Plays and Melodramas Il rapimento di Cefalo, 1600. Gelopea: Favola boschereccia, 1604; edited by Franco Vazzoler, 1988. Alcippo, 1614. La vegghia delle grazie, 1615. Il pianto di Orfeo, 1615. Angelica in Ebuda, 1615.

Other Sermoni, 1718. Vita scritta da lui medesimo, edited by G. Paolucci, 1718. Dialoghi dell’arte poetica con altre prose e lettere, 1830. Autobiografia, dialoghi, lettere scelte, 1912. Lettere: 1585–1638, edited by Simona Morando, 2003.

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GABRIELLO CHIABRERA Further Reading Bertone, Giorgio, Per una ricerca metricologica su Chiabrera, Genoa: Marietti, 1991. Bertone, Giorgio, Per una ricerca su Chiabrera, Genoa: Marietti, 1988. Bianchi, Fulvio, ‘‘Per una definizione critica del Chiabrera: Riflessioni su una questione ancora aperta,’’ in Studi di filologia e letteratura offerti a Franco Croce, Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1997. Bianchi, Fulvio, and P. Rossi (editors), La scelta della misura: Gabriello Chiabrera. L’altro fuoco del barocco italiano, Genoa: Costa & Nolan, 1993. Calcaterra, Carlo, Il Parnaso in rivolta: Barocco e antibarocco nella poesia italiana, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1961. Calcaterra, Carlo, Poesia e canto: Studi sulla poesia melica italiana e sulla favola per musica, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1951. Cerisola, Pier Luigi, L’arte dello stile: Poesia e letterarieta` in Gabriello Chiabrera, Milan: Franco Angeli, 1990. Corradini, Silvia, Teatro e spettacolo nel Seicento, Bari: Laterza, 1990. Croce, Benedetto, Storia dell’eta` barocca, Bari: Laterza, 1921.

Fasoli, Paolo, ‘‘‘Non Prima ebbe favella che vena’: Preliminari per un discorso su Marino e Chiabrera,’’ in The Sense of Marino, edited by Francesco Guardiani, New York-Ottawa-Toronto: Legas, 1994. Getto, Giovanni, ‘‘Gabriello Chiabrera poeta barocco,’’ in Barocco in prosa e poesia, Milan: Rizzoli, 1969. Girardi, Enzo Noe´, Esperienza e poesia di Gabriello Chiabrera, Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1950. Mamone, Sara, Il teatro nella Firenze medicea, Milan: Mursia, 1981; rev. ed., 1991. Merola, Nicola, ‘‘Gabriello Chiabrera,’’ in Dizionario biografico degli italiani, vol. 24, Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1980. Neri, Ferdinando, Chiabrera e la Ple´iade francese, Turin: Bocca, 1920. Pieri, Marzia, ‘‘Vanita` e onesti diletti: Il teatro di Gabriello Chiabrera,’’ Rassegna della letteratura, 95(1991): 5–11. Vazzoler, Franco, Introduzione to G. Chiabrera, Gelopea: Favola boschereccia, Genoa: Marietti, 1988. Vazzoler, Franco, ‘‘Lettere inedite di Gabriello Chiabrera,’’ Rassegna della letteratura italiana (1969): 29–36.

LUIGI CHIARELLI (1880–1947) The same type of irony that led Pirandello to embrace the concepts of the grotesque in some of his earlier plays is found in an essay by Luigi Chiarelli entitled ‘‘Anticipo alle mie memorie’’ (In Anticipation of My Memoirs), written in 1921 at the height of his popularity for the international success of La maschera e il volto (The Mask and the Face, 1916): E` giunta una grande notizia da Londra. Un illustre cercatore ha scoperto in quella meravigliosa testa di Omero che e` al ‘British Museum’ il manoscritto di una commedia sconosciuta di Willy Shakespeare. La commedia s’intitola La maschera e il volto. L’azione si svolge sul lago di Como. Si tratta di un marito che.... Ahime`! Adesso tutto si spiega! Great news from London! An illustrious scholar has discovered the manuscript of an unknown comedy by Willy Shakespeare in that wonderful head of Homer that is at the British Museum. The comedy is called La maschera e il volto. The action is set on Lake Como. It deals with a husband who... Alas! Now all becomes clear!

This post scriptum by Chiarelli to his humorous ‘‘memoirs’’ describes the artistic vision of Italy’s 458

most prominent grottesco dramatist, whose La maschera e il volto promoted a kind of theater that breaks down middle-class barriers by destroying rigid ways of responding to life. At the same time, Chiarelli’s statement acknowledges the relevance of tradition exemplified by the age of Shakespeare and the commedia dell’arte. In Italy, the term ‘‘grottesco’’ (borrowed from a line in Chiarelli’s play) applies to a group of playwrights whose works were written and produced during the World War I era. First used by Renaissance art critics, the adjective ‘‘grotesque’’ is retained in its original connotation of fantasy and playfulness, with ironic overtones. The best plays of the teatro grottesco, which comprise Pier Maria Rosso di San Secondo’s Marionette, che passione! (Puppets of Passion, 1918), Luigi Antonelli’s L’uomo che incontro` se stesso (The Man Who Met Himself, 1918), and Enrico Cavacchioli’s L’uccello del paradiso (The Bird of Paradise, 1919), attest to the destruction of the classical notion of personality at the core of modern humanity’s alienation. Such esteemed critics as Adriano Tilgher and Silvio D’Amico

LUIGI CHIARELLI claimed it to be an innovative movement with a shared philosophical experience. From his early works, Chiarelli experimented with contemporary literary models, particularly the popular verist and psychological dramas. The same holds true for the plays that he wrote before La maschera il volto and succeeded in having staged in Milan: Er gendarme (The Policeman, 1912), Extra Dry (1913), Una notte d’amore (Night of Love, 1913), and La portantina (The Sedan Chair, 1913). Between 1904 and 1910, Chiarelli strengthened his theatrical training while working for several newspapers. During this time he submitted a new play, Dissolvimento (Dissolution), to Luigi Pietriboni, the artistic director of the Compagnia Virginia Reiter. It depicted the decline of an aristocratic family. Though it was well received, Dissolvimento lacked a strong role for the leading actress and therefore was rejected. He also wrote a social drama, Sorgente amara (Bitter Spring), a historical play about a Roman patriot set in 1849 (Don Prospero Spada), and a light comedy, Il terzo gode (The Third One Lucky). He became a regular at the Caffe` Aragno, the gathering place for many Roman artists and literary figures, and with a group of friends, he founded the Societa` dei Giovani Autori. In 1911, after spending six months in Paris, he decided to move to Milan, where he joined the newspaper Il secolo as a reporter. Milan was considered to be an ideal city for aspiring young playwrights. Historically, it had been the first Italian city to officially support a theatrical company (the Compagnia Reale Italiana). Here some of the best actors had settled. Chiarini collaborated with the Compagnia Gastone Monaldi and in 1912 he wrote in six days Er gendarme, a patriotic drama in Roman dialect that was successfully represented at the Teatro Fossati on September 21. In the play, which is set in 1867 Rome, a Vatican policeman is forced to arrest his daughter’s revolutionary fiance´ in order to do his duty. During the next year, Chiarelli wrote a satirical comedy for the actor Ferruccio Benini, La portantina, which was not produced until 1917, and two one-act plays, Extra Dry and Una notte d’amore, for Alfredo Sainati, the capocomico of the Grand Guignol Company. They both premiered on 24 January 1914 at the Teatro Olimpia. Of these three plays, only Extra Dry has been published in La scena (1926). Chiarelli’s masterpiece, La maschera e il volto, was written in 20 days during the summer of 1913, at the Pensione Piemontese in Milan. Gabriellino D’Annunzio, as well as Paolino Giordani and Cesare Ludovici, among others, attended the

evening readings of the play, which always concluded with singing Chopin’s Funeral March. At this time, D’Annunzio was working with the Compania Virgilio Talli, and he submitted the play to the famous actor, who rejected it. So did the companies of Marco Praga, Armando Falconi, and Dario Niccodemi. In 1916 Chiarelli’s playwriting career entered a new era. On 31 May, upon the recommendation of Annibale Gabrielli, the Compagnia Drammatica di Roma, housed at the prestigious Teatro Argentina, premiered La maschera e il volto. It was directed by Ernesto Ferrero, and the principal roles of Paolo Grazia, his wife Savina, and Cirillo Zanotti were played by Giannina Chiantoni, Ettore Paladini, and Ferrero himself. It was an instant success. As Manlio Lo Vecchio Musti wrote (‘‘L’opera di Luigi Chiarelli nella storia del teatro moderno,’’ 1948), by the end of the first act the audience became aware that they were witnessing something new and provocative. La maschera e il volto, which began like a traditional realist play (the stock bourgeois ‘‘triangle’’), was unfolding on a subversive premise: the protagonist’s defiance of preestablished social norms. At the core of Chiarelli’s grottesco lies a satirical attack on psychological drama, with its empty social conventions. The critical reception of La maschera e il volto’s first performance was hailed as a new form of playwriting. Luigi Chiarelli considered himself to be an innovator. At the end of the nineteenth century the Italian theater was still geared toward the bourgeoisie, a class that knew exactly how to represent its values. Chiarelli’s polemical reform aimed at subverting all aspects of bourgeois comedy, yet using the traditional triangle of husband-wifelover, which was the basic plot for much of the teatro borghese. In his essay ‘‘L’ironia’’ (Irony), which first appeared in L’idea nazionale in 1920, Pirandello defined La maschera e il volto as ‘‘a transcendental farce.’’ La maschera e il volto deals with the discrepancy between the attitudes imposed on people by societal codes and their true feelings. Count Paolo Grazia and his wife Savina are typical members of the high bourgeoisie. Paolo pretends to kill his wife to avoid the appearance of looking ridiculous, and he is acquitted for it, only to be tried again when she is found to be alive. The play opens by establishing its programmatic thesis: One evening, during a gathering of friends at his villa on Lake Como, Paolo declares that a husband is required to kill an unfaithful wife in order to retain his selfrespect or otherwise commit suicide. However, 459

LUIGI CHIARELLI once he is faced with his own wife’s infidelity, he plans a stratagem, fearing ridicule should he forgive her. He will make everyone believe that he has killed Savina in order to avenge his honor and dispose of her body in the lake. Savina is sent abroad under a false name. Ten months later complications arise when a decomposing body is recovered from the lake. Once Savina’s death is discovered to be a setup, Paolo is facing a prison sentence. Having recaptured their old love bond, the couple decides to escape the cynical norms of their society, running away to start a new life incognito. In the closing scene, Paolo and Savina embrace passionately at the sound of Chopin’s Funeral March. In Chiarelli’s grottesco, fantastic, bizarre situations create a bitter ironic comment on societal values. The author injected himself into the play by means of an alter ego character, Cirillo, who embodies his aesthetic philosophy. During the following years, Chiarelli’s theatrical work relied primarily on the celebrated grottesco plot and dramatic setups that made him famous overnight. However, he never enjoyed the same critical reception. With the end of World War I and the rise of Fascism, the appeal of the grotesque movement on the public faded away. Such influential critics as Adriano Tilgher would label it as a reflector of the intellectual crisis of the times. Few looked beneath the mask to see the intimate human drama that existed there. Chiarelli wrote his second grottesco, La scala di seta (The Silken Stairs, 1917), and a propaganda war drama, Le lacrime e le stelle (The Tears and the Stars, 1918), both staged by the Compagnia Drammatica di Roma. Tilgher’s and D’Amico’s somewhat mixed reviews of Chiarelli’s political satire La scala di seta, as a work in which the playwright failed to achieve a balance between drama and farce—which both critics considered to be the authentic novelty of La maschera e il volto— are telling examples. The play is based on the conflict between two men: the honest Roberto Felci, doomed to failure, and Desire´, a ruthless ballet dancer, who enjoys a life of success represented by the silken staircase that leads him up to fame. Around them lies a world of corrupt politicians, greedy businessmen, and complaisant women, who embody degrading human appetites. La scala di seta, which premiered at the Teatro Argentina on 28 June 1917, becomes a mirror of a generational attitude toward society. These same themes return in Chimere (Chimeras, 1920) and La morte degli amanti (Death 460

of the Lovers, 1921), a parody of melodramatic bourgeois comedy. What concerned Chiarelli was the inability of people to speak the language of truth and to express genuine love for each other, particularly in their emotional responsiveness. In his 1918 essay concerning the state of the theater, Teatro di prosa (Prose Theater), he lamented the lack of undefined and poetic elements that are the quintessential components of a work of art. At that point, Chiarelli was recognized as one of Italy’s foremost playwrights, and his ambition was to have his own company. And so in 1918 he formed the Ars Italica (1918–1919), under Virgilio Talli’s artistic direction. The company successfully produced a repertoire of comedies, which included Carlo Goldoni and Guido Morselli. By the early 1920s the grotesque movement had virtually disappeared. Chiarelli would write one last grottesco, Fuochi d’artificio (Fireworks, 1922). It portrays the plight of Gerardo, a poor man whom everybody believes to be wealthy. He is helped in this game of appearances by his own secretary, Scaramanzia. Fuochi d’artificio enjoys the distinction in Chiarelli’s career of being the only other play as widely acclaimed and translated as La maschera e il volto. Luigi Chiarelli was also instrumental in promoting the establishment of the Teatri di Stato (State Theaters). Traditionally a few managers controlled the national theaters, often selecting troupes and their repertoires to please the public. His commitment to the theater continued until the last years of his life, combining artistic endeavors with administrative appointments. During this period, he officially joined the Fascist Party, as did Pirandello and other contemporary artists. Chiarelli also wrote about 100 short stories, which originally appeared in La stampa and then were published in the collections La mano di Venere (The Hand of Venus, 1935), La figlia dell’aria (The Daughter of the Air, 1939), and Karake` e altri racconti (Karake` and Other Stories, 1944). The importance of Luigi Chiarelli in the history of dramatic literature has to be viewed in relation to the Italian repertoires at that time, which were embedded in old formulas and foreign models and lacked originality (with the exception of D’Annunzio). La maschera e il volto marks a date in the Italian theater, not just because it was very successful, but mostly because it was a turning point in Italian dramatic literature, while remaining within the limits of the national tradition.

LUIGI CHIARELLI

Biography Luigi Chiarelli was born in Trani (Bari), on 7 July 1880, the eldest of five sons of Carlo Chiarelli and Maria Teresa Fortunato. His father belonged to a wealthy Sicilian family and had enlisted as a volunteer with the Italian army in 1866. After finishing his studies in Palermo, he moved to Rome, where he met and married Maria Teresa in 1879. Luigi was born in his mother’s hometown and was named after his paternal grandfather, a patriot with Giuseppe Garibaldi’s 1860 expedition. Brought up in Rome, Luigi received his secondary education at the Liceo ‘‘Ennio Quirino Visconti,’’ where he disclosed an early inclination for writing love poems and dramas. At the age of 15, he composed his first play, Lena, a realist portrait of a peasant girl that transcends the mere regionalism of Italian verismo. However, Luigi had little interest in school. He loved to read dramatic literature and attend theatrical productions. In 1900, the sudden death of his father interrupted Luigi’s studies, and so he had to forego his university career. Carlo Chiarelli had lost his substantial fortune in risky investments and died heartbroken, leaving his family in financial distress. The 20-year-old Luigi was entrusted with supporting his mother as well as his younger brothers. He eventually found a position as a government employee at the Corte dei Conti, where his father had also worked. This post only lasted for a few months. Luigi’s uncommitted performance and recurring absences from work led to his resignation. Soon after he became a journalist and gained a reputation in literary circles, contributing regularly to the daily papers L’Alfiere and La patria. In 1914 the playwright moved to Turin to direct the review Armi e politica, whose publication was discontinued with the outbreak of World War I. Though drafted and assigned to spend his military service in Terni, he was able to continue his literary activities. In 1923, he joined the Il corriere italiano as a regular drama critic. In December 1916 Luigi married Anna (Ne`nette), to whom he dedicated La maschera e il volto with an inscription that read: ‘‘Alla mia Ne`nette, di cui conosco tutte le maschere e i volti’’ (To my Ne`nette, of whom I know all masks and faces). In his later years, Chiarelli became the regular film critic for the Roman daily Il tempo and was commissioned by the Istituto Nazionale del Dramma Antico to translate Plautus’s L’Aulularia (1938) and I Menecmi (1938), which were staged in the Roman theaters of Ostia, Gubbio,

and Fiesole. Some of his plays were also adapted for the screen. Among them are La maschera e il volto, directed by Augusto Genina (1919) and by Camillo Mastrocinque (1942); La scala di seta, directed by Arnaldo Frateili (1920); and Fuochi d’artificio (Fireworks, 1938) with Amedeo Nazzari, directed by Gennaro Righelli. In 1942 Chiarelli collaborated on the screenplay entitled Luisa Sanfelice by Leo Menardi. During the early 1940s Chiarelli directed the Compagnia Ninchi-Lanczy and began experimenting with new theatrical approaches, including a mythical representation, Ninon (1940), and an allegorical drama, Essere, staged posthumously in 1953, which discloses the playwright’s search for a supreme being. In 1946 he suffered a stroke and died in Rome on 20 December 1947. GAETANA MARRONE Selected Works Plays Er gendarme, 1912. Extra Dry, 1914. Una notte d’amore, 1914. La maschera e il volto, 1916; as The Mask and the Face, translated by Chester Bailey Fernald, 1927; translated by Noel de Vic Beamish, in International Modern Plays, 1950; translated with an Introduction by M. Vena, in Italian Grotesque Theater, 2001. La scala di seta, Rome, Teatro Argentina, 28 June 1917. La portantina, 1917. Le lacrime e le stelle, 1918. Chimere, 1920. La morte degli amanti, 1921. Fuochi d’artificio, 1923. Les Tripes a` la mode de Caen, 1925. Jolly, 1928. K. 41, 1929. La reginetta, 1931. Leggere e scrivere, 1931. Lettere d’amore, 1931. Un uomo da rifare, 1932. Una piu` due, 1935. Il cerchio magico, 1937. Il teatro in fiamme, 1945. Essere, 1953.

Further Reading Angelini, Franca, Il teatro del novecento, Bari-Rome: Laterza, 1976. Antonucci, Giovanni, Storia del teatro italiano del novecento, Rome: Studium, 1986. Apollonio, Carla, ‘‘Luigi Chiarelli,’’ in Novecento, vol. 2, part 1, Settimo Milanese: Marzorati, 1989.

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LUIGI CHIARELLI Bassnett, Susan, ‘‘The Mask and the Face,’’ in International Dictionary of Theatre: Plays, Chicago-London: St. James Press, 1992. Calendoli, Giovanni, ‘‘Chiarelli,’’ in Enciclopedia dello spettacolo, vol. 3, Rome: Editrice Le Maschere, 1956. Cardarelli, Vincenzo, ‘‘‘Le lacrime e le stelle’ di L. Chiarelli all’Argentina,’’ in La poltrona vuota, edited by G. A. Cibotto and B. Blasi, Milan: Rizzoli, 1969. D’Amico, Silvio, ‘‘Il teatro grottesco,’’ in Il teatro dei fantocci, Florence: Vallecchi, 1920. Ferrante, Luigi, Teatro italiano grottesco, Rocca di San Casciano: Cappelli, 1964. Fiocco, Achille, Teatro italiano di ieri e di oggi, Bologna: Cappelli, 1958. Gobetti, Piero, ‘‘‘La Scala di seta’ di L. Chiarelli,’’ L’ordine nuovo (7 May 1921); reprinted in Scritti di critica teatrale, Turin: Einaudi, 1974. Gori, Gino, Il grottesco nell’arte e nella letteratura: Comico, tragico, lirico, Rome: Stock, 1926. Gramsci, Antonio, ‘‘‘La maschera e il volto’ di Chiarelli al Carignano,’’ Avanti! (Turin ed., 11 April 1917) and

‘‘‘Chimere’ di Chiarelli al Carignano,’’ Avanti! (Turin ed., 7 February 1920), reprinted in Letteratura e vita nazionale, Turin: Einaudi, 1950. Livio, Gigi, Teatro grottesco del novecento: Antologia, Milan: Mursia, 1965. Lo Vecchio Musti, Manlio, L’opera di Luigi Chiarelli, Rome: Cenacolo, 1942. Lo Vecchio Musti, Manlio, ‘‘L’opera di Luigi Chiarelli nella storia del teatro moderno,’’ Il dramma, 53(15 January 1948), 28–34. Pirandello, Luigi, ‘‘Immagine del ‘grottesco’’’ and ‘‘Ironia,’’ in Saggi, poesie, scritti vari, edited by Manlio Lo Vecchio Musti, Milan: Mondadori, 1973. Tilgher, Adriano, ‘‘Il teatro del grottesco,’’ in Studi sul teatro contemporaneo, Rome: Libreria di Scienze e Lettere, 1923. Vena, Michael, ‘‘Luigi Chiarelli (1880–1947): Profile of a Playwright,’’ Connecticut Review, 7(1974), 59–63. Vena, Michael, ‘‘The ‘Grotteschi’ Revisited,’’ Forum Italicum, 31:1(1997), 153–162. Verdone, Mario, ‘‘Teatro grottesco,’’ in Teatro contemporaneo, vol. 1, Rome: Lucarini, 1981.

CHILDREN’S LITERATURE Although children’s literature as a recognized genre emerged in Italy during the nineteenth century, its origins go back to Greek, Latin, and Asian models. Its artistic significance and its pedagogical and psychological effectiveness are the subject of never-ending debate. In his La letteratura della nuova Italia (1914–1940), the leading philosopher Benedetto Croce examined the question of whether children’s literature can truly express artistic values. On the other hand, Ernesto Codignola, Lamberto Borghi, and Francesco De Bartolomeis, who were influenced by John Dewey, all took a more modern stance on this subject. Indeed John Dewey and his pedagogical activism had a strong impact in Italy, particularly on writers like Gianni Rodari. In recent years, however, the focus of school reforms and pedagogical trends has shifted to more complex technologies, granting children’s literature a minor part in education. The traditional novella (a specifically Italian form of the tale) and the fable have been the two predominant forms of prose fiction in the Italian vernacular since the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Handed down orally, the fable retains its ancient origins in the emblematic character of the Fata (Fairy), which is 462

etymologically related to the Latin fatum (destiny) and Parca (the goddess of childbirth and destiny), as well as the Greek Moira (the goddess of destiny). In the folk and popular traditions, the character of the fairy has great ethical significance, as is the case of the Fata Turchina in Carlo Collodi’s classic children’s story Le avventure di Pinocchio (The Adventures of Pinocchio, 1883). The century of humanism mainly championed education based on classical texts. Venice, Milan, and Florence were the pivotal centers of the cultural translatio, or transformation, of this age. Scholarly work was no longer done solely in convents and monasteries. Instead, humanists promoted a secular curriculum whose purpose was to reform and improve the way humankind thought and lived. In the process the pagan fable was revived. The Medicis’ commitment to philology assured the collection and proper contextualization of classical primary texts. Thus, subsequently adapted to the vernacular, these works provided a model and inspiration for spiritual growth among aristocrats. It was precisely in this way that the pedagogical school of the most famous of the humanist educators, Vittorino da Feltre (ca. 1378–1446), promoted

CHILDREN’S LITERATURE a progressive cultural opening toward a secular education. Vittorino became the tutor of the young Gonzaga noblemen in Mantua and founded the Ca’ Giocosa (as he named his school) where the curriculum focused on the studia humanitas, Latin and Greek classics were taught in addition to the natural sciences, mathematics, and music. The Ca’ Giocosa emphasized strict moral discipline resting on Stoic ethics, with physical training as well. Vittorino’s pedagogical approach became the epitome of the humanistic ideals of learning and virtue. Such reformist views on education are also expressed in Della vita civile (On Civic Life, 1529) by Matteo Palmieri (1406–1475) and in Della famiglia (The Family in Renaissance Florence, 1433– 1441) by Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472), whose first book (‘‘De officio senum erga juvenes...et de educandis liberis’’) is devoted to educational practices. Both treatises define the qualities of the ideal citizen of all ages and are among the most telling expressions of Florentine humanism. It was, however, Agnolo Firenzuola (1493–1543) who introduced the first innovations to the literary genre of the fairy tale. He had a good knowledge of Aesop and Phaedrus and was well acquainted with the narrative techniques used by Ovid. Furthermore, Firenzuola had translated The Golden Ass by Apuleius and, thus, was proven to have a talent for working with language as well as erudition. He wrote a popular collection of novelle in the vernacular, La prima veste dei discorsi degli animali (The First Version of the Animals’ Discourses, 1548), through which he introduced, with strong moral overtones, a series of Asian tales—the Indian Panchatantra, which had first appeared in a Latin translation during the thirteenth century. Firenzuola went beyond the original pedagogical drive of the humanists of the Italian Renaissance. This, however, can also be said about the fables that Ludovico Ariosto chose to include in his Satire (The Satires, 1517–1525). Two other early texts of great importance for children’s literature in Italy are Le piacevoli notti (The Entertaining Nights, 1550–1553) by the Venetian Giovan Francesco Straparola (ca. 1480–before 1557) and Pentamerone (The Pentameron, 1634–1636) by the Neapolitan Giambattista Basile (ca. 1566/1575–1632). Straparola’s collection is comprised of 75 fables narrated by a group of storytellers invited to the island of Murano on the 13 nights of carnival. Each fable ends with a riddle with multiple interpretations, some of which are of obscene nature. In fact, the relevance of Le piacevoli notti to children’s

literature lies in Straparola’s storytelling techniques, which were common at the time. The Venetian author chose to retell magical Asian folk stories and to include animal fables in a larger narrative of a different genre. He is also famous for having presented the oldest known version of the classic ‘‘Puss in Boots.’’ Like Le piacevoli notti, Basile’s tales are set within a frame story modelled after Boccaccio’s Decameron (ca. 1373). Basile’s work reveals the growing interest of humanist writers in the literary and popular folk narrative traditions and in Asian legends in particular. Basile wrote in the old Neapolitan dialect, and his Pentamerone’s first important Italian translation was done by Benedetto Croce. It later became an inspirational text for the Brothers Grimm, Charles Perrault, and Ludwig Tieck. In fact, the subtitle of the original text is Lo cunto de li cunti, o vero lo trattenemiento de li peccerille (The Tale of Tales, or the Entertainment of the Little Ones). Thus, the Pentamerone was adequately abridged for children and published in Florence in 1889 in an edition illustrated by Enrico Mazzanti. Moreover, the first theatrical fantasy by Carlo Gozzi (1720–1806), L’amore delle tre melarance (The Love of Three Oranges, 1761), was also an adaptation of a story by Basile, ‘‘I tre cedri’’ (The Tree Cedars). Finally, Basile’s ‘‘La gatta cenerentola’’ (The Cinderella Cat) was presented by Roberto De Simone in 1976, during the Spoleto Festival, while many of the Renaissance author’s tales continue to be staged today. During the eighteenth century, Italian literature was predominantly influenced by the fables of La Fontaine. Aurelio Bertola De’ Giorgi, Giambattista Casti, Lorenzo Pignotti, Luigi Fiacchi, and Giovanni Meli are some of the writers who celebrated the spirit of learning particular to the Enlightenment. De’ Giorgi wrote a Saggio sopra la favola (An Essay on the Fable, 1788), while Casti composed the Animali parlanti (Talking Animals, 1802), a poem in 26 canti in six-line stanzas that was praised by Giacomo Leopardi as a model of political satire. Pignotti also achieved some literary success with his verse fables, Favole e novelle (Fairy Tales and Novellas, 1782), inspired by La Fontaine and by the sensualist philosophy of Condillac, a pedagogue at the court of Ferdinand of Bourbon in Parma. Another key figure in children’s literature of the time is the educationalist Father Francesco Soave (1743–1806), whose pupils included Manzoni. His Novelle morali (Moral Fables, 1786) were written in the spirit of an eclectic philosophical empiricism, 463

CHILDREN’S LITERATURE derived from John Locke, Bonnet, and Condillac, underlying the author’s Christian humanitarian style. A landmark in Italian children’s literature, the Novelle morali went through numerous editions and were translated into French and German. Furthermore, Father Soave’s pedagogical commitment led him to establish the first state elementary school in Lombardy (1786–1789). With the birth of the Italian nation-state, the production of books and magazines for children became associated with national schooling policies. Language problems emerged due to the diversity of Italian dialects. The Italian language of the sixteenth century, a heritage of those of letters only, could not be understood by children. Thus, in 1860, under the secretariat of Terenzio Mamiani, a project of linguistic and cultural unification was put forward. Manzoni proposed to adopt the Florentine dialect as the official language, an idea eventually implemented despite the criticism of Isaia Ascoli, Raffaello Lambruschini, Giosue` Carducci, and Luigi Settembrini (among others), who hoped to preserve the century-old oral traditions of fables, legends, and nursery rhymes. The reintegration of the local linguistic and cultural features of children’s literature was only initiated a century later. Thus, for example, the reforms affecting the Scuola Media (middle school) of 1979 and the Scuola Elementare (elementary school) of 1985 were based on theories of comparison and bilingualism in education. The books for early childhood had to meet pedagogical standards after a decree was issued on September 15, 1860. The tales by Francesco Soave and Il Giannetto (1837) by Luigi Alessandro Parravicini (1800–1880) became a part of the national syllabus and circulate among the schools of many Italian regions to this day. The plot of Parravicini’s short stories, set in the industrial factories of Lombardia, is based on the exemplary deeds of the main character, a sort of Italian self-made man. Historian Cesare Cantu` also published a collection of poems for children, Fior di memoria pei bambini (The Best of Memory for Children, 1846). Other exemplary writers for children include Edmondo De Amicis (1846–1908), whose Cuore (Heart, 1886) reflects his patriotic educational zeal and a deeply felt mission to engender a sense of nationhood in the youth of different regions; Ida Baccini (1850–1911), with Le memorie di un pulcino (Memories of Hatchling, 1875), who was also the editor of Cordelia, a magazine for young ladies founded in 1895 by the ethnologist Angelo De Gubernatis; and Antonio Stoppani (1824–1891), whose Il Bel 464

Paese (The Beautiful Country, 1875), addressed to young readers, praises the beauty of Italy’s diverse regions and variety of customs. In 1870, when Rome became the capital of the new kingdom, interest in children’s literature grew, particularly in central and northern Italy. Both educational and publishing enterprises doubled in number, which led to a boom in pedagogical texts as in the translation of a number of important foreign authors. Post-Risorgimento Italy was greatly influenced by Daniel Defoe (Robinson Crusoe was available in many abridged versions for children), Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and the works of Sir Walter Scott and Charles Dickens. James Fenimore Cooper also exercised a decisive influence on adventure novelists for the young, from Emilio Salgari (1862–1911) to Mino Milani (1928–), with his Leatherstocking tales. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, interest in fables and adventurous tales waned while legends became a more popular genre for young readers: for example, Luigi Capuana’s reworking of Sicilian folk stories in C’era una volta (Once upon a Time, 1882) and the collections of fables and folk songs by Giuseppe Pitre`, Vittorio Imbriani, Gherardo Nerucci, Alessandro D’Ancona, and Costantino Nigra. The poetics of Giovanni Pascoli’s Il fanciullino (The Eternal Child, 1897), endorsing a theory of poetry as a purely intuitive act, also had a strong impact on children’s literature. For Pascoli, the poet is endowed with a childlike vision; his lexical innovations were based on Hermann Hebbingham’s theory of perception founded on simple sensory elements linked according to coordination, proximity, and contrast. Pascoli’s poetics affected the crepuscular writers for children (Guido Gozzano, Marino Moretti, Corrado Govoni), as well as authors such as Angelo Silvio Novaro, Giuseppe Fanciulli, Ada Negri, Luciano Folgore, Diego Valeri, and Alfonso Gatto. At the beginning of the twentieth century, journalism for children achieved high standards with Il giornalino della domenica (1906–1927) and Il corriere dei piccoli (1908–). Years later the Fascist regime also tried to indoctrinate schoolboys by means of children’s newspapers such as the popular Il balilla, first published in 1923. Other significant publishing initiatives include the series Biblioteca dei miei ragazzi (1931–1955), sponsored by Salani in Florence, ‘‘La Scala d’oro’’ (1932–) by UTET, and Libri per ragazzi (1956–) by Einaudi in Turin, Junior Mondadori (1988–) in Milan, and Il battello a vapore (1992–)

CHILDREN’S LITERATURE by Piemme. More recently, Antonio Faeti, the founder of the first Italian department of children’s literature at the University of Bologna in 1994, proposed the reedition of the Libri d’acciaio of the 1930s, a project carried out by Bompiani in their series I Delfini. In general, during the twentieth century, children’s literature underwent considerable development, partly due to the growth in the number of Italian publishers. An increasingly larger group of writers chose to specialize in literature for young readers. Yet, as this industry grew, the market became a greater factor in the production of books for children. Hence, almost every established author at the time (including Dino Buzzati, Alberto Moravia, Tommaso Landolfi, Luigi Malerba, Mario Tobino, Alberto Arbasino, Andrea Zanzotto, Mario Rigoni Stern, and Elsa Morante) wrote at least one children’s book. In addition, the two world wars were reflected in children’s literature in the works of Salvator Gotta, Giovanni Arpino, Pinin Carpi, and Beppe Fenoglio, among others. The postwar reconstruction, industrial boom, and the ever-increasing development of the mass media have had a strong impact not only on writing for children, but on the role of the young reader as well. A high order of imaginative writing resurfaces with Italo Calvino in his Fiabe italiane (Italian Folktales, 1956), a collection of Italian fairy tales that he translated from different regional dialects, and Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (The Path to the Nest of Spiders, 1947), the story of a band of Resistance fighters recounted from the perspective of a young boy, Pin. More recently, Roberto Piumini and Susanna Tamaro, among others, have published significant children’s fiction; while a particular sort of avant-garde theater, born in Turin in 1969 and centered on the role of the animatore, captures the actor-director on stage, side by side with the young, as he guides them in a collective writing/acting of a spectacle. Memorable animatori include Giuliano Scabia, Remo Rostagno, Franco Passatore, Silvio De Stefanis, and Loredana Perissinotto. On the other hand, the best-known twentiethcentury Italian children’s writer was Gianni Rodari (1920–1980), who began working for Il corriere dei piccoli in the early 1960s. From Il libro delle filastrocche (Nursery Rhyme Book, 1950) and Filastrocche in cielo e in terra (Nursery Rhymes in the Sky and on the Ground, 1960) to the impressive Favole al telefono (Fairy Tales on the Telephone, 1962) and C’era due volte (Twice upon a Time,

1978), Rodari proposed a fancy that becomes real through a verbal game. In his stories, he combined elements from popular European children’s literature (the Grimm brothers, Brentano, Arnim, Lewis Carroll, and Saint-Exupe´ry) as well as ancient aphorisms and sayings, with a touch of utopian Marxism. In his 1973 Grammatica della fantasia (The Grammar of Imagination), Rodari introduced his educational approach and advanced experimental techniques that foster creativity. Among his most successful illustrators were Bruno Munari, whose work, along with that of Carlo Chiostri, Enrico Mazzanti, Giove Toppi, and Piero Bernardini is grounded in the tradition of the figurinai of the nineteenth century. Children’s literature also made a breakthrough in academia. In 1965, in Genoa, the ‘‘Centro Studi di Letteratura Giovanile’’ was founded along with the ‘‘Biblioteca Internazionale per Ragazzi De Amicis,’’ following the model of the Jugendbibliothek in Munich. Two years later the University of Padua also developed a research department for children’s literature, under the guidance of Giuseppe Flores d’Arcais. In Florence, the ‘‘Biblioteca di Documentazione Pedagogica,’’ founded in 1974, has become the most important pedagogical archive in Italy and holds some 33,000 texts of children’s literature, collected since the nineteenth century. Similarly, the library ‘‘Gianni Rodari’’ in Florence, established in 1987, currently publishes an important review entitled ‘‘Li.B.e.R,’’ which includes bibliographic information in the field of children’s literature. At last, in 1996, the ‘‘Associazione Culturale Hamelin’’ was founded by some of Antonio Faeti’s students, aiming at promoting continuity in Italian publishing for young readers. PAOLA MARTINUZZI

Further Reading Argilli, Marcello, Ci sara` una volta: Immaginario infantile e fiaba moderna, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1995. Asor Rosa, Alberto, ‘‘Le voci di un’Italia bambina,’’ in Storia d’Italia, vol. 4, Turin: Einaudi, 1975. Boero, Pino, Una storia, tante storie: Guida all’opera di Gianni Rodari, Turin: Einaudi, 1992. Boero, Pino, and Carmine De Luca, La letteratura per l’infanzia, Rome: Laterza, 1995. Contini, Gianfranco, Letteratura dell’Italia unita 1861– 1968, Florence: Sansoni, 1968. Faeti, Antonio, Guardare le figure: Gli illustratori italiani dei libri per l’infanzia, Turin: Einaudi, 1972. Faeti, Antonio, Letteratura per l’infanzia, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1977.

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CHILDREN’S LITERATURE Liberovici, Sergio, Un paese: Esperienze di drammaturgia infantile, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1973. Lugli, Antonio, Libri e figure: Storia della letteratura per l’infanzia e la gioventu`, Bologna: Cappelli, 1982. Perissinotto, Loredana, In ludo: Idee per il teatro a scuola e nella comunita`, Rome: Armando, 1998.

Rostagno, Remo, Un teatro-scuola di quartiere, Venice: Marsilio, 1975. Solinas Donghi, Beatrice, La fiaba come racconto, Venice: Marsilio, 1976. Zanzotto, Andrea, Fantasie di avvicinamento, Milan: Mondadori, 1991.

CHRIST STOPPED AT EBOLI See Cristo si e` fermato a Eboli (Work by Carlo Levi)

FAUSTA CIALENTE (1898–1994) The question of inhabiting, whether a geography or an historical period, is central to the work of Fausta Cialente, who, in a 1984 interview with Sandra Petrignani (Le signore della scrittura, 1984), described herself as a ‘‘straniera dappertutto’’ (foreigner everywhere). Her first novel, Natalia, was completed in 1927 but published only in 1930. Natalia’s story unfolds in a remote Italian province with her nomadic family constantly uprooted by the father’s military career—a situation reflecting Cialente’s own childhood. The novel is a daring representation of the coming of age of a young girl during the historically traumatic rite of passage of World War I. As is often the case in Cialente’s narrative, the story is filtered through the disingenuous yet ironic and pitiless eyes of children who judge the adult universe: a crumbling bourgeois world, self-satisfied, blinded by its lies and rituals. In contrast to the claustrophobic universe of Alberto Moravia’s Gli indifferenti (The Time of Indifference, 1929)—a text that resembles Natalia in other regards—the geographical displacement here has shaken the structures of the traditional family, freeing Natalia’s experience. Natalia’s transgressive love for her childhood friend Silvia gives her an unconventional access to 466

the world. A victim at first of this process of selfdiscovery is Malaspina, the young soldier who falls in love with Natalia and eventually discovers with her that life must be reinvented together in order to be lived. Awarded a prestigious literary prize, Natalia was soon suppressed by Fascist censorship because of its antiwar stance and frank depiction of female sexuality. In a world shaken to the roots, the images of the old overgrown courtyard where Natalia and Silvia played as children and Malaspina’s old farmhouse emerge with great poetic force, emblematic of a tension dominating all of Cialente’s stories, that between a homeless humanity and an affective spaciality. In Cortile a Cleopatra (Courtyard in Cleopatra, 1936), written after the writer’s move to Egypt, it is a courtyard at the outskirts of Cleopatra (a suburb of Alexandria) that structures a story whose formal beauty, elegance, and inventive freshness make it a little-known masterpiece of twentieth-century Italian literature. The multi-ethnic exile community of Greeks, Italians, Armenians, and Jews in Egypt is the central setting; their lives revolve around the indolent vagabond Marco, just arrived from Italy in search of his Greek mother Crissanti. Cialente represents through Marco the

FAUSTA CIALENTE condition of outsider/insider of all her subjects as they confront the otherness of Egypt, a familiar yet distant Europe, and the both loved and hated space of the colony. This world, rich, lively, yet dominated by pettiness, envy, and distrust, comes to life with the unforgettable characters of Dinah, daughter of the Jewish merchant Abramino and the beautiful Eva; Haiganush, an Armenian girl; and Kiki, a resilient girl of mixed race. The wanderings and careless behavior of the sensual and indifferent Marco—a character without a home, a future, or a country—constitute an ironic counterpoint both to the colonial subject, with its ethos of work and respectability, and the Fascist subject just prior to the Ethiopian adventure. In Cialente, the Orient, the ‘‘other’’ on which Europe relies for its identity, offers instead a stage for its dissolution—a theme that links Cialente’s work to that of Joseph Conrad; Andre´ Gide, who she greatly admired; and another writer of the Levant, Lawrence Durrell. After a 20-year silence, during which Cialente actively participated in the anti-Fascist resistance in Alexandria, and returned to postliberation Italy to work as a journalist and occasional screenwriter, Ballata levantina appeared (The Levantines, 1961). Here the memorialistic impulse that would dominate Cialente’s subsequent production was central to the epic representation of three generations of an outcast Levantine family: the grandmother, a dancer who became the lover of a rich merchant; the mother, marked by the stigma of illegitimacy; and Daniela, the protagonist and first-person narrator of the story. An upper-middle-class society of merchants, aristocrats, and artists became the object of a pitiless scrutiny that unveiled their racism and their guilty enthusiasm for Mussolini, the irresistible father figure for an orphaned exile community. The story of Daniela—like Natalia, a young woman defiantly in search of her own path—can be read as a first ‘‘gynealogy,’’ the construction of a sense of belonging, identity, and personal and collective history by retracing the almost invisible, yet arduous path of individual women (Graziella Parati, Public History, Private Stories, 1996). In her subsequent work, Cialente gradually approached the memories of her Triestine family. There was a first rehearsal of these autobiographical motifs with Il vento sulla sabbia (Wind on the Sand, 1972), in which a middle-aged narrator revisits her Italian youth. Before this novel, Cialente returned to an Italian setting with Un inverno freddissimo (An Icy Winter, 1966), a story of hope, solidarity, and disillusionment set in the winter of

1946 in an overcrowded attic in Milan. Since Ballata levantina, Cialente had been experimenting with a double register, one oscillating between an intimate setting and the wider social and historical canvas. This movement is central to Le quattro ragazze Wieselberger (The Four Wieselberger Sisters, 1976). The unhappy destiny of the Wieselberger sisters is played contrapuntally with the representation of a society on the brink of self-annihilation. The condemnation of the blind and exasperated nationalism of the Triestine bourgeoisie, which brought about its irreparable economic decline by severing all ties with Austria and Europe and ‘‘marrying’’ the Italian cause, finds an allegorical parallel in the story of the last sister, Fausta’s mother, who starts a brilliant career as an opera singer, only to abandon it for an unhappy marriage to an Italian officer. Both the collective and personal histories reflect blindness and self-denial. Out of this void, however, the narrator’s voice emerges, firm and full of pathos. Told in a first person that grows more and more present as the narration progresses, this last novel is enriched by an insistent dialogism; the family sayings in Triestine dialect are woven into the text like a faraway musical motif. Such a linguistic attention to the local language was already present in the use of dialect and Arabic in the Levantine novels. Lastly, Cialente collected her short stories in the volume Interno con figure (Interior with Figures, 1976). As Emilio Cecchi wrote in his 1952 introduction to Cortile a Cleopatra, it is surprising that Cialente’s name does not appear more often in a discussion of twentieth-century Italian literature. The honest and irreverent glance of Cialente’s women— displaced subjects, nomads within the crumbling architecture of various societies—still compels a readership, enticed by her protagonists’ stubborn faith in life and the possibility of inhabiting the world.

Biography Fausta Cialente was born in Cagliari (Sardinia), 29 November 1898. She had a nomadic childhood with her father, an army officer. In 1921, she married the composer Enrico Terni and moved to Alexandria, Egypt, where she took part in the intellectual life of the colony. In 1940, Cialente joined the anti-Fascist resistance, writing pamphlets and making broadcasts from Radio Cairo. She returned to Italy in 1947, where she lived until 1984, when she moved to England. She was winner of numerous literary awards, including the Dieci 467

FAUSTA CIALENTE Savi Prize, for Natalia, 1929; Premio Galante Bompiani for ‘‘Marianna,’’ 1931; Enna Prize, for Il vento sulla sabbia, 1973; Strega Prize for Le quattro ragazze Wieselberger, 1976. Cialente died 13 March 1994 in Pangbourne, England. She was survived by her daughter, Lionella Muir Terni. GIULIANA MINGHELLI Selected Works Fiction ‘‘Marianna,’’ in L’Italia letteraria, 1929. Natalia, 1930. ‘‘Pamela o la bella estate,’’ in Occidente, 1935. Cortile a Cleopatra, 1936. Ballata Levantina, 1961; as The Levantines, translated by Isabelle Quigly, 1962. Un inverno freddissimo, 1966. Il vento sulla sabbia, 1972. Le quattro ragazze Wieselberger, 1976. Interno con figure, 1976. I bambini, 1995.

Translations Lawrence Durrell, Clea, 1962; new edition 1973. Louisa May Alcott, Piccole donne, 1976. Louisa May Alcott, Le piccole donne crescono, 1977. Louisa May Alcott, Piccoli uomini, 1981. Henry James, Giro di vite, 1985.

Further Reading Asquer, Renata, Fausta Cialente, la triplice anima, Novara: Interlinea, 1998. Cecchi, Emilio, Introduction to F. Cialente, Cortile a Cleopatra, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1962. Ferroni, Giulio, ‘‘La libera passione di Fausta Cialente,’’ L’unita`, 13 March 1994, p. 4. Malpezzi Price, Paola, ‘‘Autobiography, Art, and History in Fausta Cialente’s Fiction,’’ in Contemporary Women Writers in Italy, edited by Santo Arico`, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990. Merry, Bruce, ‘‘Fausta Cialente,’’ in Italian Women Writers: A Bio-bibliographical Sourcebook, edited by Rinaldina Russel, Westport: Greenwood Press, 1994. Minghelli, Giuliana, ‘‘L’Africa in cortile: La colonia nelle storie levantine di Fausta Cialente,’’ in Quaderni d’Italianistica, 15:1–2(1994): 227–235. Nozzoli, Anna, ‘‘Fausta Cialente: testimonianza storica e tipologia femminile,’’ in Tabu` e coscienza: la condizione femminile nella letteratura italiana del Novecento, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1976. Papotti, Davide, ‘‘Urban Winter Landscape with Female Figures: Representations of Space in Fausta Cialente’s Un inverno freddissimo,’’ in Italian Women and the City, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 2003. Parati, Graziella, ‘‘From Genealogy to Gynealogy and Beyond: Fausta Cialente’s Le quattro ragazze Wieselberger,’’ in Public History, Private Stories: Italian Women’s Autobiography, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Petrignani, Sandra, ‘‘Fausta Cialente. Straniera dappertutto’’ in Le signore della scrittura, Milan: La Tartaruga, 1984.

CINEMA AND LITERARY WRITERS The relationship between literary writers and cinema constitutes one of the key dynamics of twentieth-century Italian culture. From the arrival of the Edison kinetoscope and the Lumie`re cine´matographe in the 1890s to the emergence of digital forms of cinema and new media technologies in the 1990s, Italian writers have reacted to the moving image and taken part in shaping its development. Literary writers have collaborated directly in the development of film art by contributing intertitles and dialogues, scenarios and screenplays, as well as by participating in publicity campaigns, discussions, and debates. Influential arbiters in the cultural reception of cinema, writers were called upon in the early decades of the twentieth century 468

to lend cultural prestige and to articulate an identity for the new cinematic medium. In the years between the wars, literary writers played a role in the rebirth of the Italian film industry after its collapse in the early 1920s. They also helped to establish an intellectually serious and methodologically rigorous film criticism and to lay the foundation for Italian film historiography. In the postwar period and through the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, Italian writers contributed to neo-Realism, helped shape popular film genres, and collaborated with internationally successful directors. Furthermore, in addition to their direct contributions to film art, and in the process of mediating between print and visual cultures, Italian writers

CINEMA AND LITERARY WRITERS have also produced a rich body of ‘‘cinema literature’’: interviews and articles, criticism, theoretical interventions, and manifestos, as well as poems, literary fiction, and plays that demonstrate the impact of cinema on literature. Given the richness of this tradition, and the multiplicity of forms involved, the relationship between cinema and literary writers in Italy sheds light on film and literary history, on the history of intellectuals and media, and on cultural history more broadly. The early period of film history constitutes one of the most important periods in the relationship between cinema and Italian literary writers. After moving picture technology arrived in the 1890s, a decade of transitory exhibition venues ensued, with films being shown in fairground tents, in public squares, and in cafes and theaters. In 1905, with the establishment of permanent cinemas and with the beginning of Italian film production, literary writers began to play a key role in forming an identity for the nascent cinema. The first Italian essay to examine film from a theoretical perspective, La filosofia del cinematografo (The Philosophy of the Cinema), was penned by Giovanni Papini (1881–1956) and published in La stampa in May of 1907. Reacting to the proliferation of permanent cinemas in the major cities, Papini observed that the cinema constituted a new social space, marked a change in the urban landscape, and resembled other emerging modern phenomena. According to Papini, the cinema was already more popular than theater due to its lower cost, the brevity of its performance, and the effort of attention required of the film spectator. Due to film’s technological means of reproduction, the cinematic apparatus makes possible the representation of ‘‘avvenimenti vasti e complicati, che non potrebbero esser riprodotti sopra un palcoscenico neppure dai piu` abili macchinisti’’ (vast and complicated events that could not be reproduced on a stage even by the most able technicians) (‘‘La filosofia del cinematografo,’’ 1907). Most importantly, recognizing that cinema was worthy of serious reflection, Papini called on Italian intellectuals to pay greater heed to this burgeoning form of popular entertainment. Responding to the booming appetite for film, the international film industry around 1908 began to turn from documentaries or actualities to fictional stories. Film language developed through an increasing emphasis on narrative. Seeking to counter the moral criticism directed against the cinema and in an attempt to expand its audience to the middle and upper classes, film producers

sought to gain respectability by moving toward established forms of culture. Following the lead of the film d’art movement in France, the Italian film industry developed films based on literary works or featuring scenarios written (sometimes purportedly) by literary authors. Shortly after their initial discovery of the cinema, literary writers were invited to permit their works to be adapted into films or to write film subjects and scenarios. Writers drawn to the film industry during this period, although with varying degrees of enthusiasm, included Guido Gozzano, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Nino Martoglio, Giovanni Verga, Salvatore Di Giacomo, Matilde Serao, Luigi Pirandello, Lucio D’Ambra, Ferdinando Martini, Luciano Zuccoli, Grazia Deledda, Nino Oxilia, and many others. During the ‘‘Golden Age of Italian Silent Film’’ in the years around World War I, when the Italian film industry was among the most prominent internationally, a number of masterworks exemplified the literary writer’s ‘‘authorial’’ presence in the cinema. The Milano Film Company’s version of Dante’s Inferno in 1911, directed by Adolfo Padovan and Francesco Bertolini, marked a high point in the early cinema’s turn toward canonical literature. It was the longest Italian film yet produced at 1,300 meters, boasted marvelous special effects, and was innovative in its distribution methods. Its success contributed in the transition from the onereel to the multireel film as the new international standard, a process that occurred between 1911 and 1914. Cabiria (1914), directed by Giovanni Pastrone (1883–1959) with the collaboration of D’Annunzio, capitalized on the success of earlier Italian historical spectacles. The legendary Sperduti nel buio (Lost in the Dark, 1914), directed by Nino Martoglio (1870–1921) and based on a successful verismo play by Roberto Bracco, gave further impetus to the impression that the Italian cinema had a literary foundation. Assunta Spina (1915), another verismo play written by Salvatore Di Giacomo and directed by Francesca Bertini (1888–1985) and Gustavo Serena (1882–1970), also reflected this tendency. In addition to his key role in ‘‘authorizing’’ Cabiria, another form of D’Annunzio’s influence on the cinema can be found in divismo, an Italian version of stardom. Diva films, one of the richest veins of Italian silent cinema, featured femmes fatales and new modern women in melodramas centered around high society. The successful Ma l’amor mio non muore (Love Everlasting, 1913), starring Lyda Borelli and directed by Mario Caserini (1874–1920), provided a prototype for 469

CINEMA AND LITERARY WRITERS this genre. Through flamboyant characters, exotic locales, and opulent settings, diva films reflected the world of dangerous women and decadent aesthetes portrayed in D’Annunzio’s novels and short stories. D’Annunzio also wrote a number of scenarios, including the avant-garde L’uomo che rubo` la Gioconda (The Man Who Stole the Mona Lisa) and a scenario resembling a religious mystery drama, La crociata degli innocenti (The Crusade of the Innocents), which was made into a film in 1920. The poet Guido Gozzano also composed a lengthy scenario on the life of St. Francis of Assisi (for a film that was never produced). Giovanni Verga, while remaining highly conflicted in his relationship with the emerging cinema, participated in scenario writing as well. Literary narratives about early cinema frequently involved going to the movies or took the reader ‘‘behind the scenes’’ into the world of filmmaking. These fictional works constituted another important dimension in the cinema’s relationship with writers. Luigi Pirandello published a film novel in serial format, Si gira! (Shoot!) in 1915. He later republished this work under the title Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore (The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematograph Operator, 1925). Pirandello’s novel has long been considered one of the high points in the development of film discourse in the early decades. Other writers to publish fictional narratives about the world of filmmaking, or who register the influence of film on modes of perception during this period, included Edmondo De Amicis, Gualtiero Fabbri, Yarro (Giulio Piccini), Guido Gozzano, Ettore Veo, Annie Vivanti, Federico Tozzi, Enrico Roma, Bruno Corra, and Paolo Buzzi. The Futurists, together with avant-garde intellectuals such as Ricciotto Canudo and Anton Giulio Bragaglia, made significant contributions to Italian film culture, particularly in the areas of aesthetics and theory. Seeking to valorize film as an autonomous art form, F. T. Marinetti, Bruno Corra, Emilio Settimelli, and other Futurist writers published ‘‘La cinematografia futurista’’ (Manifesto of Futurist Cinema) in 1916. Celebrating film as a prototypical form of modern art, the Futurists sought to free cinema from its moorings in the theater, while emphasizing film’s potential to develop as a visual form of expression. A scenario written by Marinetti, Velocita` (Speed), illustrated the aesthetic principles articulated in the ‘‘Manifesto.’’ A self-proclaimed cine-letterato, an Italian coinage that combines the identity of the literary intellectual with that of the film enthusiast, Lucio 470

D’Ambra (1880–1939), the pen name of Renato Manganella, was an important journalist, novelist, dramatist, and literary and film critic who became one of the leading figures in the Italian film industry. From 1916 when he wrote his first ‘‘official’’ film script (he had worked anonymously in the cinema since 1911) until the crisis of the Italian film industry in the early 1920s, D’Ambra was a key figure in the cinema’s relationship with writers. Active as a director, scriptwriter, and producer, D’Ambra was involved in the production of some 24 films, most of which are now lost. Known for an offbeat sense of humor, whimsical flights of fancy, and modernist sets and decor, his films have been compared to those of Ernst Lubitsch ante litteram. Two of d’Ambra’s many films, Le mogli e le arance (Wives and Oranges, 1917), and L’illustre attrice Cicala Formica (The Illustrious Actress Cicala Formica, 1920), were restored in the 1990s. Following the absorption of his production company, Lucio D’Ambra Film, into the ill-fated Unione Cinematografica Italiana, a consortium of film producers that became bankrupt in 1922, he returned definitively to journalism and literature. His memoirs concerning the film industry in Rome during this pivotal period of grandeur and crisis, Sette anni di cinema (Seven Years of Cinema, 1937–1938), provide rich material for the study of Italian film history during its formative stages. The years following World War I brought on a decade-long decline in the Italian film industry. During the 1920s, therefore, given the predominance of American, French, and German films on Italian screens, the role of literary writers lay primarily in the realm of cultural reception. Among the notable contributions in this area, Umberto Saba published a poem ‘‘Un poeta ha incontrato Charlot’’ on Charlie Chaplin. Short stories by Ada Negri, Carlo Emilio Gadda, and Giacomo Debenedetti describe fictional visits to movie theaters. The avant-garde author Alberto Savinio wrote perspicacious articles of film criticism. Beginning around 1926, literary journals such as Il Baretti, Solaria, and La fiera letteraria took up the ‘‘question of the cinema.’’ Under the rubric ‘‘letterati al cinema,’’ an intellectually serious film criticism began to emerge. From within the ranks of these ‘‘writers at the cinema,’’ Emilio Cecchi (1884–1966), who had visited Hollywood, made the transition from writing about cinema to producing films. He played a crucial role in the rebirth of the Italian film industry as head of the Cines Company in the early 1930s, opening the door to such writers as Mario Soldati, Luigi Pirandello,

CINEMA AND LITERARY WRITERS Umberto Barbaro, and Corrado Alvaro. He served as a bridge between the literary community in Rome and the film industry, which was now centered in the Italian capital. The transition to sound in the early 1930s and the rebirth of the Italian film industry under Cecchi’s leadership at Cines intensified the relations between literary intellectuals and cinema. While during the silent period writers had been recruited to bring a patina of high culture to film production, literary intellectuals and theater personnel were now being asked to contribute in a more concrete fashion. As film production became more robust, writers were needed to create film subjects, to write dialogue, to create screenplays, and to participate in dubbing practices, while remaining practically nameless in the process. Reflecting the anonymity surrounding their work in the cinema, Emilio Cecchi characterized these literary writers associated with film as la Legione Straniera dell’intellettualita` italiana (the Foreign Legion of the Italian intelligentsia) (Margherita Ghilardi, editor, Cecchi al cinema, 1984). This phrase indicated that the cinema had yet to obtain the full acceptance of Italian high culture. At the same time, however, Cecchi’s characterization illustrated that artists and writers active in the film community may have chosen or at least accepted this marginality as a form of evasion from and perhaps even resistance to the official culture of Fascism. And in fact, toward the end of the decade and in the early 1940s, through journals such as Cinema and Bianco e nero and within institutions such as the national film school, the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, a segment of Italian film culture began to develop a critical stance regarding Mussolini’s politics and cultural policies. Indeed, in 1939, the president of Cinema, Vittorio Mussolini, invited prominent Italian writers to submit a scenario for a national competition. The jury presided by Camerini, De Feo, Meccoli, Pasinetti, Riganti, Visentini, Leone, and Cecchi awarded the prize to Ugo Betti’s I tre del Pra’ di Sopra, which was never made into a film, but began Betti’s intense collaboration with the film industry and directors such as Gherardo Gherardi and Augusto Genina. Between 1930 and 1943, therefore, three interrelated phenomena could be detected with regard to cinema and literary writers: a quantitative increase in the presence of literary intellectuals in the film industry; a qualitative shift in the nature of their contribution; and a dramatic increase in popular writing about cinema as well as the establishment

of film criticism as an institution. This period also witnessed the emergence of Italian film historiography through the writings of Leo Longanesi, Francesco Soro, Eugenio Ferdinando Palmieri, Umberto Barbaro, Luigi Chiarini, and Francesco Pasinetti. Given this explosion of writing about film, the definitive recognition of film as an art form, and the significant presence of literary writers in the film industry, the title of Giacomo Debenedetti’ essay, La conversione degli intellettuali al cinema (The Conversion of Intellectuals to the Cinema, 1931), stands as a defining description of this ‘‘conversion’’ phase in the relationship between cinema and writers. Delio Tessa (1886–1939) was a particularly significant case in point. A Milanese lawyer and journalist and one of the major Italian poets of the last century, Tessa wrote over 100 articles of film criticism, two screenplays, and numerous poems registering the influence of cinema. A number of literary figures who began their careers in the cinema as scriptwriters and critics during the 1930s and 1940s continued to be active in film through the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Cesare Zavattini (1902–1989), for example, debuted as a popular writer with the highly successful Parliamo tanto di me (Let’s Talk a Lot About Me, 1931) and became in turn a film critic, screenwriter, novelist, dramatist, dialect poet, and film director. His accounts of Hollywood stars, Cronache da Hollywood (Hollywood Chronicles), which appeared in Italian movie fan magazines such as Cinema illustrazione in the early 1930s, were written without ever leaving Italian soil. His contributions to neoRealism in the 1940s and 1950s as a screenwriter, theorist, and advocate were second to none. In a similar fashion, Mario Soldati (1906–1999) transitioned from journalist, to screenwriter, to critic, to novelist, to film director. His literary narrative, 24 ore in uno studio cinematografico (24 Hours in a Film Studio, 1935), published under the pseudonym Franco Pallavera, added to the list of Italian film novels, as did his Le due citta` (The Malacca Cane, 1964). In addition to his ‘‘calligraphic’’ films of the late Fascist period such as Piccolo mondo antico (Little World of the Past, 1941) and Malombra (1942), adapted from Antonio Fogazzaro’s novels, Soldati directed some 26 films, including La donna del fiume (The Woman of the River, 1955) starring Sophia Loren. Emilio Cecchi’s daughter, Suso Cecchi d’Amico (1914–), who grew up in a household frequented by writers and film artists and who began her career as a journalist and translator after World War II, 471

CINEMA AND LITERARY WRITERS would become one of cinema’s leading screenwriters, working with directors such as Luchino Visconti and Francesco Rosi. ‘‘Il dato concreto del rapporto tra cinema e letteratura e` la sceneggiatura’’ (The concrete datum in the relationship between cinema and literature is the screenplay), Pier Paolo Pasolini declared (Empirismo eretico, 1972). In his essay La sceneggiatura come struttura che vuole essere altra struttura (The Screenplay as a Structure That Wants to Become Another Structure), Pasolini reflects on the necessity of developing new critical codes for analyzing the screenplay. In addition to its value as a theoretical statement, Pasolini’s essay, and more importantly Pasolini’s career itself, shed light on the relationship of cinema and literary writers during the extraordinary flowering of Italian film culture in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. Pasolini began his career in the film industry by collaborating on screenplays with such directors and scriptwriters as Federico Fellini, Mario Soldati, and Giorgio Bassani. His first films as a director, Accattone (1960) and Mamma Roma (1962), share linguistic and thematic affinities with his Roman novels of the period, Ragazzi di vita (The Ragazzi, 1955) and Una vita violenta (A Violent Life, 1959). Pasolini’s encounter with the cinema found expression in his novels, poetry, and prose narratives, while his work as a filmmaker, as a film critic, and as a film theorist was profoundly marked by his vocation as a poet. Moreover, while Pasolini’s poetry in the 1960s began to register the effects of his turn to directing, his films provided him with a new outlet in which to experiment with the cinematic adaptation and rewriting of classical literary texts: from the Bible and Greek tragedies to the Il Decamerone (1971), I racconti di Canterbury (The Canterbury Tales, 1972), and Le storie delle mille e una notte (The Arabian Nights, 1973). The effects of cinema on literature, the impact of the mass media on society, and film’s influence on modes of human perception were dealt with by a number of writers during this period. Andrea Zanzotto’s long poem in Veneto dialect, Filo`: per il Casanova di Fellini (Peasants Wake for Fellini’s ‘‘Casanova,’’ 1976), for example, which grew out of his collaboration with Fellini on his film with Donald Sutherland, Casanova (1976), stages a dialogue between poetry and film, between the spoken idiom of a small agricultural community and the powerful visual language of an increasingly global medium. In a similar fashion, Italo Calvino’s novel Palomar (Mr. Palomar, 1983) was an exemplary 472

literary text that explored the effects of visual media. Calvino’s essay L’autobiografia d’uno spettatore (The Autobiography of a Spectator, 1974) published as a preface to a volume of Fellini’s screenplays, described the role of the cinema in the lives of Italians growing up under Fascism. The literary generation following that of Pasolini, Zanzotto, and Calvino continued to express an interest in cinema through references to film in novels, criticism, short stories, and poetry. These writers and poets included Gianni Celati, Andrea De Carlo, Valerio Magrelli, and Gianni d’Elia, among many others. From neo-Realism and the popular cinema of the 1950s, to the great season of famous directors and comedy hits of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, the careers of a number of notable Italian writers, poets, and dramatists intersected with the cinema. Alberto Moravia (1907–1990), for example, developed a relationship with film that found creative expression in a variety of ways. Novels such as Il conformista (The Conformist, 1951) and La ciociara (Two Women, 1957) were adapted into important films by Bernardo Bertolucci and Vittorio De Sica, respectively. His brief stint as a screenwriter provided the background for his novel, Il disprezzo (A Ghost at Noon, 1955), whose storyline revolved around tensions between a director and scriptwriter in their ill-fated attempt to collaborate on a film based on Homer’s Odyssey. This novel was also adapted into a film by Jean Luc Godard, Le me´pris (Contempt, 1964). Moravia’s most notable contribution to film culture, however, remained in the realm of criticism. Having begun to write about the cinema in 1945 for the short-lived Roman weekly, La nuova Europa, he went on to write weekly film reviews for such magazines as L’europeo (1950–1954) and then for L’espresso from its founding in 1955 until his death in 1990. A collection of some 148 of his reviews—he penned around 1,800—are gathered in a volume, Al cinema (At the Cinema, 1975). Ennio Flaiano (1910–1972) was an equally distinguished contributor to Italian film culture. As a literary writer, he is perhaps best known for his novel, Tempo di uccidere (The Short Cut, 1947), considered one of the most acute descriptions of the Italian experience of Fascism. As a writer for the cinema, Flaiano was a major force in the years between 1950 and 1965, credited with the creation of some 80 film subjects, scenarios, and screenplays. Attracted to modern spectacle in its many forms, he was also a prolific film and theater critic who authored plays and theatrical sketches.

CINEMA AND LITERARY WRITERS A volume of his selected writings on film, Lettere d’amore al cinema (Love Letters to the Cinema, 1978), reveals his talent as a satirist. For Flaiano a reflection on a particular film offered an occasion for criticizing commonly held attitudes and social customs. Another literary writer with a distinguished career in the cinema, Tonino Guerra (1920–), discovered his vocation as a poet during World War II. Deported to a concentration camp in Germany, he composed poetry in his native Romagnol dialect for the diversion of his fellow prisoners. These poems form the backbone of his first volume of poetry, I scarabo´cc (The Scribbles, 1946). In 1952, Guerra made his debut as a writer of tales and short stories with La storia di Fortunato (Fortunato’s Story). In 1953, he began his career in the cinema working as a screenwriter. In the ensuing decades, his film treatments and screenplays would bring him into collaboration with some of Italy’s most prestigious directors, including Giuseppe De Santis, Elio Petri, Francesco Damiani, Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, Francesco Rosi, and the Taviani brothers. Guerra’s collaboration with Antonioni on the film Zabriskie Point led to a trip to the United States in 1969 and an ensuing nervous breakdown. Guerra described these experiences in his prose fiction work, L’uomo parallelo (Parallel Man, 1969), which dealt with alienation, anxiety, and the loss of personal identity in contemporary culture. In the 1970s and early 1980s, Guerra collaborated with the writer Luigi Malerba to coauthor a series of popular stories centered around Millemosche, a hapless medieval knight. Published collectively as Storie dell’anno Mille (Stories from the Year One Thousand, 1977) these ‘‘comic-surreal fables’’ became the basis of a television series and a film. A novelist, poet, playwright, short story writer, essayist, and filmmaker, as well as a leading voice of Italian feminism, Dacia Maraini (1936–) began her career with the novel, La vacanza (The Holiday, 1962). Over the ensuing decades, she published numerous narrative and theatrical works focusing on the social conditions facing women, among them a book of short stories, Mio marito (My Husband, 1968); a film, Mio padre amore mio (My Father My Love, 1978); as well as three novels that have been made into films. Memorie di una ladra (Memories of a Female Thief, 1972) inspired a film, Teresa la ladra (Theresa the Thief, 1973), starring Monica Vitti. In Storia di Piera (Piera’s Story, 1980) the actress Piera Degli Esposti recounts her life to Dacia Maraini in an interview. This

experimental literary work is the basis of an eponymous film (1983) starring Hannah Schygulla and Marcello Mastroianni. Maraini’s acclaimed historical novel La lunga vita di Marianna Ucrı`a (The Silent Duchess, 1990) was brought to the screen in 1997 by Roberto Faenza. In the 1990s and in the early years of the third millennium, Italian cinema continued its longstanding fertile relationship with literary writers. Faenza collaborated with the novelist Antonio Tabucchi (1943–) on an adaptation of the writer’s award-winning historical novel, Sostiene Pereira (Pereira Maintains, 1994) set in Portugal in 1938. Tabucchi himself contributed to the screenplay and assisted in shaping the film’s dialogues. Moreover, Tabucchi, like other writers of his and the following generation, including Vincenzo Cerami (1940–), Susanna Tamaro (1957–), Alessandro Baricco (1958–), and Niccolo` Ammaniti (1966–), exemplify the current situation of the ‘‘new Italian cinema,’’ in which literary and cinematic storytelling have become closely interrelated. Cerami, for example, at the young age of 20, began working in the cinema as an assistant to Pasolini, who had been his teacher in a junior high school at Ciampino in the early 1950s. Pasolini’s vital experimentalism in various media inspired in Cerami a similar desire to tell stories through diverse means of expression. A prolific screenwriter, Cerami has collaborated with such directors as Sergio Citti, Gianni Amelio, Marco Bellocchio, Giuseppe Bertolucci, Ettore Scola, and Roberto Benigni. His most notable literary works include his first novel, Un borghese piccolo piccolo (A Tiny Bourgeois, 1976) made into a film by Mario Monicelli in 1977; Fantasmi (Ghosts, 2001), and Consigli a un giovane scrittore (Advice to a Young Writer, 2002). Susanna Tamaro, a graduate of Rome’s film school, the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, earned a degree in film directing before publishing in 1994 her internationally acclaimed bestseller, Va dove ti porta il cuore (Follow Your Heart), made into a film by Cristina Comencini in 1996. Alessandro Baricco worked as a music critic, an advertising copywriter, and a journalist before publishing his first novel, Castelli di rabbia (Castles of Rage, 1991). His third novel, Novecento: un monologo (The Twentieth Century: A Monologue, 1994) was adapted into a film, La leggenda del pianista sull’oceano (The Legend of 1900, 1998) by Giuseppe Tornatore. In 1999, Baricco’s prose work, City, became the first Italian novel to be published exclusively online. Niccolo` Ammaniti debuted as a writer in 1994 with the novel Branchie. His short 473

CINEMA AND LITERARY WRITERS stories in the genre of horror fiction were featured in the best-selling anthologies, Gioventu` cannibale (Cannibal Youth, 1996) and Tutti i denti del mostro sono perfetti (All of the Monster’s Teeth Are Perfect, 1997). His novel, Io non ho paura (I Am Not Afraid, 2001) was made into a widely acclaimed film in the thriller genre by Gabriele Salvatores in 2003. JOHN P. WELLE See also: Screenwriters Further Reading Bernardini, Aldo, Cinema muto italiano, 3 vols., Bari, Laterza, 1980. Brunetta, Gian Piero, Gli intellettuali italiani e il cinema, Milan, Mondadori, 2004. Brunetta, Gian Piero, Intellettuali, cinema e propaganda tra le due guerre, Bologna, Patron, 1972. Ca`llari, Francesco, Pirandello e il cinema, Venice, Marsilio, 1991. Calvino, Italo, ‘‘L’Autobiografia di uno spettatore,’’ in Federico Fellini, Quattro film, Turin, Einaudi, 1974. Canosa, Michele (editor), A nuova luce: Cinema muto italiano. I / Italian Silent Cinema, I, Bologna, CLUEB, 2000. Cerami, Vincenzo, Consigli a un giovane scrittore, Turin, Einaudi, 1995. Colombo, Fausto, La cultura sottile: Media e industria culturale in Italia dall’ottocento agli anni novanta, Milan, Bompiani, 1998. Costa, Antonio, Immagine di un’immagine: Cinema e letteratura, Turin, UTET, 1993. Debenedetti, Giacomo, Al cinema, edited by Lino Micciche`, Venice, Marsilio, 1983. Falaschi, Francesco (editor), Scrittori e cinema tra gli anni ’50 e ’60, Florence: Giunti Gruppo Editoriale, 1997. Flaiano, Ennio, Lettere d’amore al cinema, edited by Cristina Bragaglia, Milan: Rizzoli, 1978. Gambacorti, Irene, Storie di cinema e letteratura, Verga, Gozzano, D’Annunzio, Florence: Societa` Editrice Fiorentina, 2003.

Genovese, Nino, and Sebastiano Gesu` (editors), Verga e il cinema, Catania: Maimone, 1996. Ghilardi, Margherita (editor), Cecchi al cinema: Immagini e documenti 1930–1963, Florence: Gabinetto Vieusseux, 1984. Marcus, Millicent, Filmmaking by the Book: Italian Cinema and Literary Adaptation, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. Meneghelli, Andrea, ‘‘Il cinema italiano e le nuove leve letterarie,’’ Annali d’Italianstica, 17(1999), edited by Gaetana Marrone. Moravia, Alberto, Al cinema: Centoquarantotto film d’autore, Milan, Bompiani, 1975. Papini, Giovanni, ‘‘La filosofia del cinematografo,’’ La stampa , 18 May 1907, 1–2. Pasolini, Pier Paolo, Empirismo eretico, Milan: Garzanti, 1972. Pellizzari, Lorenzo, L’avventura di uno spettatore: Italo Calvino e il cinema, Bergamo: Pierluigi Lubrina, 1990. Tinazzi, Giorgio, and Marina Zancan (editors), Cinema e letteratura del neorealismo, Venice: Marsilio, 1983. Verdone, Mario, Cinema e letteratura del futurismo, Rovereto: Manfredi, 1990. Welle, John P., ‘‘The Cinema of History: Film in Italian Poetry of the 1960s and 1970s,’’ in From Eugenio Montale to Amelia Rosselli: Italian Poetry in the Sixties and Seventies, edited by John Butcher and Mario Moroni, Leicester, U.K.: Troubador Publishing, 2004. Welle, John P. (editor), ‘‘Film and Literature,’’ Annali d’Italianistica, 6(1988). Welle, John P., ‘‘Film on Paper: Early Italian Cinema Literature, 1907–1920,’’ Film History: An International Journal, 12(2000): 288–299. West, Rebecca (editor), Pagina pellicola pratica, Ravenna: Longo, 2000. Zanzotto, Andrea, Peasants Wake for Fellini’s Casanova and Other Poems, edited and translated by John P. Welle and Ruth Feldman, Champaign and London: University of Illinois Press, 1997. Zappulla Muscara`, Sarah, and Enzo Zappulla, Martoglio cineasta, Rome: Editalia, 1995. Zavattini, Cesare, Cronache da Hollywood, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1996.

CINO DA PISTOIA (CA. 1270–CA. 1336/1337) In many respects, Cino was the major poetic link between the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italian lyric traditions, for he was an acquaintance not only of Dante and the poets of the dolce stil 474

novo, but also of Petrarch and Boccaccio. Because of his extreme poetic versatility and longevity, Cino mediated among various ‘‘schools’’ and individual poets, composed lyrics in a number of modes and

CINO DA PISTOIA styles, and ultimately benefited from and contributed directly to the several major literary currents of his age. Cino’s literary consciousness developed during his period of study in Bologna: He became aware of poets such as Guido Guinizzelli, Guittone d’Arezzo, and Onesto degli Onesti and more than likely met Dante, who was present in Bologna in 1287, although the first textual evidence of their friendship dates from 1290, the date of Beatrice’s death, for which Cino composed the consolatory canzone ‘‘Avegna ched el m’aggia piu` per tempo’’ (Although more than once). As evidence of his long and productive friendship with Dante, we have the testimony of several tenzoni on amorous topics, the citation in De vulgari eloquentia of no fewer than three of Cino’s canzoni for their excellence—‘‘Degno son io ch’io mora’’ (I am worthy to die), ‘‘I’ no spero che mai per mia salute’’ (‘‘I hope that never for my salvation’’), and ‘‘Avegna ched el m’aggia piu` per tempo’’—and the letter (Epistola III) addressed to the ‘‘exulanti Pistoriensi’’ (Pistoians in exile). Cino and Dante were also joined in their enthusiastic support of Henry VII of Luxemburg, who was elected Holy Roman Emperor on 27 November 1308, as the one leader capable of bringing peace to the warring factions of Italy. Unfortunately Henry’s death in 1313 dealt a severe blow to this hope. In his solemn canzone marking Henry’s death, ‘‘Da poi che la natura ha fine posto’’ (Since nature has brought to an end) Cino conveys the desolate state that many felt in Italy at the time, and in another moving canzone, ‘‘Su per la costa, Amor, de l’alto monte’’ (Up the slope of the tall mountain, Love), he commemorates the death of Dante. Cino’s poetic corpus is the largest of the dolce stil novo (Marti’s edition includes 20 canzoni, 11 ballate, and 134 sonnets, including fragments; another 21 poems are of dubious authenticity) and reflects virtually all of their major themes, images, and ideas. Cino’s poetry contains an exceptionally high degree of emotional fervor, as well as an unusual sense of spatial orientation. Both of these characteristics give his poems their distinctive nature. Cino fashioned his lyrics in such a way as to reflect the psychological contours and recesses of the persona of the poet-lover who is, at once, the same as and different from himself, presenting the broad range of a person’s affective life in an objective and conventionalized manner, yet ostensibly being the subjective account of these experiences. The tension produced in the individual poems provides the dynamic force for the corpus as a whole.

In addition to his lyrics on amorous topics, Cino’s canzoniere is especially rich in tenzoni (some 22 in all) and in poems inspired by local partisan strife and political exile. The object of Cino’s affection is known as ‘‘Selvaggia,’’ and she has been identified as the wife of Giovanni de’Cancellieri (nicknamed ‘‘Focaccia’’), whom she had married in 1289. While Selvaggia’s identity, either as an historical figure or as a literary fiction, remains an open question, this is relatively unimportant for a critical appraisal of Cino’s lyrics, many of which were written to praise a woman (whom he addresses with this particular senhal or poetic code-name), to complain of her harshness and lack of mercy, to describe the ambivalent nature of the amorous relationship, and to mourn her death. If Selvaggia was a member of the Vergiolesi family, then she belonged to the White faction, was exiled in 1306, and died sometime between 1307 and 1309. The historical data, however, are less important than the literary persona described in Cino’s lyrics, through which Selvaggia has a place in the literary tradition alongside the other two famous ladies of Dante (Beatrice) and Petrarch (Laura). After Selvaggia’s death, Cino was attracted to a number of other women, for and about whom he wrote lyrics. Dante, for one, takes him to task for his inconstancy in matters of love in the sonnet ‘‘Io mi credea del tutto esser partito’’ (I thought that I had utterly departed), and other poets shared this view as well. The greatest contemporary Italian poets recognized Cino’s brilliance: Dante praised him in De vulgari eloquentia as the most excellent Italian love poet (2.2.9), Boccaccio honored him by incorporating almost all of his canzone, ‘‘La dolce vista e ’l bel guardo soave’’ (‘‘The sweet sight and the lovely soft look’’) in the Filostrato (5:62–5:65), and Petrarch lamented his death in the sonnet, ‘‘Piangete, donne, et con voi pianga Amore’’ (‘‘Weep, ladies, and let Love weep with you’’). Just as Dante defined Cino as the most excellent Italian poet of love, so Petrarch in this commemorative sonnet centers on precisely these qualities—Cino is called amoroso (v. 10: ‘‘’l nostro amoroso messer Cino’’) and dolce (v. 13: ‘‘sı´ dolce vicino’’), he is the one who knew how to bestow honor on women and lovers in general in his verses: ‘‘colui che tutto intese / in farvi ... honore’’ (vv. 3-4: the one who was wholly intent on honoring you). In the second quatrain, Petrarch reveals his very strong sense of personal loss, and this may suggest the extent of his literary indebtedness. He also refers to Cino’s participation in Pistoian politics, for which the 475

CINO DA PISTOIA ‘‘cittadin perversi’’ (v. 12) exiled him—their loss and, we are given to understand, heaven’s gain: ‘‘Pianga Pistoia, e i cittadin perversi / che perduto a`nno sı´ dolce vicino; / et rallegresi il cielo, ov’ello e` gito’’ (vv. 12–14: May Pistoia together with her perverse citizens weep, who have lost such a sweet companion, and may heaven rejoice, where he has gone). Cino’s lyrics present most of the various themes and motifs of the earlier schools of poets, from the troubadours to the Scuola Siciliana and the ‘‘guittoniani’’ to the dolce stil novo. These include the image of the beloved ‘‘painted’’ within the lover’s heart or mind, the constant combination of love and fear, the use of personified figures (Amore, Pieta`, Merce´), the reference to those idle gossipers who seek to destroy love—the losengeors or ‘‘malparlieri,’’ the play on phonically similar terms (e.g., amore-amaro and amore-morte), and the incorporation of the senhal to hide the identity of the lady (Selvaggia). In terms of poetic language, we see evidence of Occitan (dolzore, coraggio, leanza, dottanza), Old French (cera, beltate, doneare, aitare), and Sicilian (finare for finire), as well as certain metrical characteristics, such as the so-called rima siciliana (vui / fui, grido / credo, allora / criatura). Of course, the greatest influence on Cino’s poetry came from his fellow stilnovisti, and we may see how he assimilated their themes in sonnets such as ‘‘Una gentil piacevol giovanella’’ (A noble and pleasing young woman) and ‘‘Tutto mi salva il dolce salutare’’ (I am completely saved by the sweet greeting) where he praises his lady’s angelic qualities and speaks of her marvelous effect on those whom she meets and greets (the ‘‘saluto salutifero,’’ the greeting that confers a state of blessedness). Similarities between these poems and those by Guinizzelli (‘‘Io vogl’ del ver la mia donna laudare’’: I truly wish to praise my lady), Cavalcanti (‘‘Chi e` questa che ve`n ch’ogn’om la mira’’), and Dante (‘‘Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare’’) abound, although in Cino’s poetry, in general, we do not sense the mental and physical anguish present in Cavalcanti or the idea of spiritual salvation contained in Dante. While Cino’s lady is certainly beautiful and ‘‘angelic,’’ she is not a transcendental being, remaining quintessentially earthbound both in her being and in her effects. A defining characteristic of Cino’s lyrics is their phonic quality; for example, he was able to convey the sorrow induced by love through use of mournful notes, as in the two sonnets—‘‘Omo smarruto che pensoso vai’’ and ‘‘Signori, i’ son colui che vidi 476

Amore’’—that represent aurally the lover’s lament through repeated use of the vowel o, especially in rhyme position (for example, ‘‘Signori, i’ son colui che vidi Amore / che mi ferı` sı` ch’io non campero`e / e sol pero` cosı` pensoso voe....’’; My lords, I am the one who saw Love, who wounded me such that I cannot survive, and for this alone I go about so mournfully). This same pathetic quality is also present in the canzone on the death of his lady Selvaggia, ‘‘Oime`, lasso, quelle trezze bionde’’ (Alas, those blonde tresses), and may have influenced Petrarch in the composition of his sonnet, ‘‘Oime` il bel viso, oime` il soave sguardo’’ (Canzoniere 267, Alas the lovely face, alas the soft look). Political themes are also present in Cino’s poetry. His distaste for the city of Naples and her citizens occasioned his bitingly satiric canzone, ‘‘Deh, quando rivedro` il dolce paese’’ (Ah, when will I see the sweet country), in which he complained about the vile, untutored citizenry; the envy of his legal colleagues; and the generally disreputable nature of the city. The political vicissitudes of Pistoia played an important role in Cino’s lyrics, as, for example, in the sonnet ‘‘Deh, non mi domandar perche´ sospiri’’ (Ah, do not ask me why I sigh) that may refer to the poet’s return from exile in 1306 and his discovery that his lady (Selvaggia) and her family have left the city, an absence that caused him ‘‘pene e martiri’’ (v. 8: torment and pain). What is new in this poem is the idea that the poet’s weeping eyes may be at least partially consoled by the sight of the now empty dwelling where they had fallen in love: ‘‘li usci e’ muri / de la contrata u’ sono ’nnamorati’’ (vv. 13–14: the doors and the walls of the place where they fell in love). It is precisely this keen sense of spatial orientation that is without precedent in thirteenth-century poetry. Memories were occasioned by sight, by the observation of a particular physical place, and this anticipated the ‘‘memorializing’’ tendency to which Petrarch subscribed in many of his lyrics, for example in ‘‘Era il giorno ch’al sol si scoloraro (It was the day the sun’s discolored) and ‘‘Chiare, fresche et dolci acque’’ (Clear, fresh and sweet waters). In addition to his synthesis of various elements of the earlier poetic traditions, Cino’s most important contributions were his extensive use of the phonic/musical qualities of poetry, his recognition of the commemorative power of the sonnet (and of the lyric in general), and his objective psychological realism, which manifested itself in the intensely personal, almost confessional tone of his poems.

CINO DA PISTOIA Cino da Pistoia is the major link between the dolce stil novo and Petrarch.

Biography Cino (or Guittoncino) was born ca. 1270 in Pistoia, a prosperous city some 20 miles northwest of Florence. His father, Francesco dei Sinibuldi (or Sighibuldi, or Sigisbuldi), was a notary and a member of one of the older and powerful families (and adherents to the Black faction). His mother, Diamante, was the daughter of the well-known physician Bonaventura di Tonello. Cino’s first introduction to the law probably began in Pistoia under the tutelage of Dino dei Rossoni of Mugello (1279–1284), after which he continued his legal studies in Bologna, where he remained in all probability from 1284 to 1292, attending the lectures of Francesco d’Accursio and Lambertino Ramponi. In 1292–1294, Cino’s work as a jurist may have taken him to France (Orleans and Paris), for in his major juridical work, the Lectura in codicem, he made specific references to the legal writings of Pierre de Belleperche and Jacob da Revigni, both teachers in Orle´ans. Cino referred to Belleperche as doctor meus (my teacher), the same phrase he used for Dino dei Rossoni. Having returned to Italy, Cino lectured at the Studium in Bologna (1297–1301/2). In 1302, he was in Pistoia, where he married Margherita di Lanfranco degli Ughi, whose family belonged to the White faction. We may imagine that, since Cino’s family belonged to the Black party, the marriage was probably contracted in an attempt to establish peace between the two factions, at least at the level of individual families. The marriage produced five children: one son—Mino—and four daughters— Diamante, Giovanna, Lombarduccia, and Beatrice. In the early years of the fourteenth century Pistoia was beset by civil strife, and in 1303 Cino was exiled. Shortly after his return from exile, on 11 April 1306, he was elected as a judge to preside over civil suits (assessore di cause civili), and some of his legal decisions found their way into his legal writings. Cino was deeply involved with the political aspirations of Henry VII in Italy. As part of the preparations for his coronation, Henry sent Ludwig of Savoy as his personal ambassador (June 1310) to Rome, and Ludwig in turn invited Cino to accompany him first to Florence (in what was a futile attempt to secure Florentine support for Henry) and then to Rome, where Cino served as advisor to the Imperial tribunal. However, this great plan was never completed, for on 24 August 1313,

Henry VII died, probably of malaria, at Buonconvento, near Siena, and with his death all hopes (Cino’s and Dante’s in particular) for peace and political unity under the Imperial aegis dissipated. After Henry’s death Cino withdrew from active involvement in partisan politics but not from his dedication to Ghibelline ideals, as may be observed in his legal writings. Cino’s most famous work, the Lectura in codicem (an extensive commentary on the first nine books of the Justinian code of laws), was finally completed on 11 June 1314. Cino was awarded the doctoral degree in legal studies in Bologna on 9 December 1314. As both lawyer and teacher, Cino practiced in several cities (Florence, Macerata, Siena, Bologna, and Perugia), and it was during these peregrinations that he may have met Petrarch, who was a student in the Studium at Bologna in 1324. Because of Cino’s great reputation, gained through his legal writings and lectures, many Italian cities sought his services to enhance the luster of their respective Studia. On 15 August 1330, Robert of Anjou invited him to teach civil law at the University of Naples, where he remained for only one year. If Cino’s brief residence in Naples and his political inclinations displeased King Robert, we should note that the king did value the Lectura in codicem, for he acquired a personal copy in 1332. Cino spent the last four years of his life in Florence, Perugia, and Pistoia. He was elected ‘‘gonfaloniere’’ in Pistoia for August and September of 1334, a post that he resigned perhaps because of failing health. Nevertheless, on 31 March 1336, the citizens elected him to a six-month term on the Consiglio del Popolo (Council of the People). On 23 December 1336, Cino made his will and died shortly thereafter in Pistoia, either in late December, 1336, or early January, 1337. See also: Dolce stil novo

CHRISTOPHER KLEINHENZ

Selected Works Collections Le rime di Cino da Pistoia, edited by Guido Zaccagnini, Gene`ve: Olschki, 1925. Rimatori del Dolce Stil Novo, edited by Luigi di Benedetto, Bari: Laterza, 1939. La poesia lirica del Duecento, edited by Carlo Salinari, Turin: UTET, 1951. Poeti del Duecento, 2 vols., edited by Gianfranco Contini, Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1960. Poeti del dolce stil nuovo, edited by Mario Marti, Florence: Le Monnier, 1969.

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CINO DA PISTOIA Selected Translations German and Italian Lyrics of the Middle Ages: An Anthology and a History, edited and translated by Frederick Goldin, Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1973. The Age of Dante: An Anthology of Early Italian Poetry, translated by Joseph Tusiani, New York: Baroque Press, 1974. Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, The Early Italian Poets (1861), edited by Sally Purcell, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981.

Further Reading Chiappelli, Luigi, Nuove ricerche su Cino da Pistoia, Pistoia: Officina Tipografica Cooperativa, 1911. Chiappelli, Luigi, Vita e opere giuridiche di Cino da Pistoia con molti documenti inediti, Pistoia: Tip. Cino dei Fratelli Bracali, 1881. Colloquio Cino da Pistoia (Roma, 25 October 1975), Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1976. Corti, Maria, ‘‘Il linguaggio poetico di Cino da Pistoia,’’ Cultura neolatina, 12(1952): 185–223. De Robertis, Domenico, ‘‘Cino e le ’imitazioni’ dalle rime di Dante,’’ Studi danteschi, 29(1950): 103–177.

De Robertis, Domenico, ‘‘Cino da Pistoia’’ in I Minori, Milan: Marzorati, 1961. De Robertis, Domenico, ‘‘Cino da Pistoia e la crisi del linguaggio poetico,’’ Convivium, 1(1952): 1–35. De Robertis, Domenico, ‘‘Cino e i poeti bolognesi,’’ Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 128(1951): 273– 312. Hollander, Robert, ‘‘Dante and Cino da Pistoia,’’ Dante Studies, 110 (1992): 201–231. Kleinhenz, Christopher, ‘‘Cino da Pistoia and the Italian Lyric Tradition,’’ in L’imaginaire courtois et son double, edited by Giovanna Angeli and Luciano Formisano, Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1992. Kleinhenz, Christopher, The Early Italian Sonnet: The First Century (1220–1321), Lecce: Milella, 1986. Monti, Gennaro Maria, Cino da Pistoia giurista, Citta` di Castello: ‘‘Il Solco,’’ 1924. Ragni, Eugenio, ‘‘Cino da Pistoia,’’ in Dizionario Critico della Letteratura Italiana, 2nd ed., dir. Vittore Branca, Turin: UTET, 1986. Treves, E., ‘‘La satira di Cino da Pistoia contro Napoli,’’ Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 58(1911): 122–139. Zaccagnini, Guido, Cino da Pistoia: Studio biografico, Pistoia: Pagnini, 1918.

CITY OF THE SUN See La Citta` del sole (Work by Tommaso Campanella)

CLASSICISM The term ‘‘classicism’’ comes from the Latin classicus, which in ancient Rome indicated those citizens belonging to the highest social class, hence implying a difference based on social, moral, and cultural superiority. In literature, the term ‘‘classic’’ was used for the first time in the first century AD by Quintillian, and later by the erudite Aulus Gellius, to indicate an excellent and exemplary author. Thus, classicus would denote an author of ‘‘first class,’’ or ‘‘excellent quality.’’ Subsequently, the adjective was adopted to identify the authors of the 478

Augustan era who were to be taken as literary models for their noble contents and formal perfection. In the broadest sense, the word ‘‘classic’’ refers to the ancient Greek and Latin cultures, whereas ‘‘classicism’’ refers to the numerous cultural movements repeatedly occurring in the history of Italian literature, which looked at the ancient world for models and canons of expression. This would take place any time an ancient work was considered ‘‘classic,’’ hence worthy of being imitated for its superior contents and its stylistic and linguistic excellence.

CLASSICISM A first form of classicism may already be found in the Middle Ages, when the fracture following the advent of Christianity generated a form of nostalgia for the ancient world and produced, in authors such as Fulgentius and Boetius in the fifth and sixth centuries, a first timid attempt for reinstating the ancient culture. As a matter of fact, even before this reemergence of classicism, ethical principles and rhetorical figures of the ancient world had been readopted by Saint Augustine (354–430). However, the presence in medieval culture of classical philosophers such as Aristotle and the use of examples from ancient poetry ought to be ascribed to two separate sources. Whereas in matter of philosophy the classical age was considered imperfect and limited, needing therefore to be included in Christianity and reread in the light of Christian teaching, classical poetry, on the contrary, was constantly considered as a sort of absolute model, thus explaining the great and perpetual fortune of poets such as Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, and Statius, whose works and examples were imitated throughout history. Occasionally, however, even these forms of literary classicism were condemned as an allusion to pagan culture, hence opposed to Christianity and therefore deserving to be banned. Indeed, an overtly anticlassical movement occurred in early Christian time, both in the Patristic tradition, which condemned the pagan world as an enemy of Christianity, and in Tertullian (160–ca. 220/230), an impetuous and intolerant author, who not only repeatedly attacked the ancient world, but in his De spectaculis (About Performances, ca. 197–202) even forbade Christians from participating in pagan spectacles, regarded as a source of corruption. Medieval classicism reached its greatest splendor in the eighth and ninth centuries with the Carolingian revival and later in the twelfth century with Scholasticism, which found the highest achievements of philosophical speculation in the classical world. It should not be forgotten that forms of classicism were present also in vernacular literature, for instance in the various chansons de gestes, which celebrated the glorious deeds of Aeneas, the events of the war of Troy, and the heroic actions of Alexander the Great. Finally, Dante achieved the climax of classicism by choosing Virgil as his guide through Hell and Purgatory, by assuring salvation to figures of the classic world such as Statius and Trajan, and by placing numerous Greek and Latin heroes in Limbo. From medieval classicism derived Humanism, especially in Italy. In this historical period the classical world was acclaimed as an

instantiation of perfection and a crucial model to ensure any work its dignity and place in the world of literature. Differently from medieval classicism, quattrocento and cinquecento classicism not only bestowed an increasing admiration toward the ancients but also established the definitive detachment of modern humankind from the classic world. From now on, imitation involved images as well as ideas, thus profoundly influencing both the figurative arts and architecture. In Humanism, ancient works were not only philologically recuperated but also investigated and studied to unveil rules and patterns that would then be applied in modern literature. In the broadest sense, Humanist intellectuals sought in the ancient works directions to outline norms of conduct, ideologies, political techniques, as for instance Niccolo` Machiavelli did in his works on military strategies. After Humanism, with its primary interest in rediscovering and studying classical texts, Renaissance intellectuals began to formulate classicist poetics, modeled first and foremost on Aristotle. In Renaissance classicism, theater played a crucial role. On the example of ancient dramatic texts and theoretic works such as Aristotle’s Poetics and Vitruvius’s De Architectura, the academicians of the early cinquecento—in particular the members of the Roman Academy of Giulio Pomponio Leto (1428–1497)—elaborated a scenic praxis and a theatrical space that simultaneously resuscitated ancient theater and opened the road to the birth of modern theater. The ‘‘commedia regolare’’ (regular comedy), written to revere the ancient models, represented the starting point of a profound renovation in drama. It not only paid respect to classical works but also reflected modes and ideals of Renaissance humanity. Court feasts were particularly important. Organized to celebrate crucial events of the city life, these feasts revolved around a theme designed to establish a precise connection between the current celebration and classic mythology. In the organization of these events, artists were inspired by the spectacular shows of Roman time, as for examples the Roman parades that were reenacted in the Renaissance ‘‘trionfi’’ (triumphs), featuring magnificent corteges of classical characters and allegorical figures. The classical influence was also tangible in newly adopted theatrical settings. Inspired by Vitruvius’s teachings, specific settings for tragedy, comedy, and satire started being employed and codified. Vitruvius also conveyed the concept of the ‘‘ideal city,’’ that is, the perfect organization of the urban environment. Renaissance artists aspired to re-create the ‘‘ideal 479

CLASSICISM city’’ in theatrical settings, using perspective painting, which was one of the great discoveries of the time. The Trattato di architettura (Treatise on Architecture, 1537–1575) by Sebastiano Serlio (1475–1554), in seven books, is the first Renaissance treatise on architecture in which an entire section is dedicated to theater and stage design. In the literary scene, the courtly literature of the cinquecento created a series of well-defined genres aiming not only at satisfying the taste of the courts but also at proposing the genres of Latin literature in the vernacular. The study of the ancient cultures raised in classicist scholars the urge for traveling to Rome, Florence, and Venice, considered privileged locations for gaining knowledge of the new classicist sensitivity. It became a sort of initiatory visit, indispensable for anyone who wanted to devolve his or her time to classical studies. The word ‘‘classicism’’ was employed also in architecture and in the figurative arts both to indicate the imitation of the ancient works’ formal perfection and to define universally accepted paradigms. The points of reference were, above all, Greek architects and sculptors from the fifth and fourth centuries BC, such as Phidias and Polycletus. From their teachings and from Vitruvius’ De Architectura, exceptional Humanist and Renaissance artists such as Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472), Donatello (1386–1466), Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1436), Andrea Mantegna (1431–1506), Andrea Palladio (1508–1580), Vincenzo Scamozzi (1548–1616), Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564), and many more found inspiration. In the second half of the sixteenth century, the period generally classified as Mannerism, classicist canons became more rigid, in opposition with the moralistic tension following the CounterReformation. Thus, literary genres were subjected to extremely severe regulations that limited the author’s imagination and creative freedom. At the end of the cinquecento, for historic and artistic reasons, a new sensitivity, the Baroque, spread, carrying with it an anticlassicist perspective. By this time, the disappearance of courts and artistic patrons, the closures of academies, and the occurrence of deep changes in society resulted in an artistic position that diverged overtly from the previous aesthetics. The quest for novelty, characteristic of the Baroque, brought a refusal of classicist rules and their limitations and fostered an exploration of all the expressive possibilities of literature. A new interest for the ancient world rose in the Arcadia era, in the first decades of the eighteenth 480

century. Born as a reaction to baroque conceptualism, the Academy of Arcadia founded its poetical ideals on Cartesian rationalism, generating an elegant and formally simplified literature, close to the aristocratic classicism of the cinquecento. The resolute refusal of previous poetics also brought numerous literary reforms, first of all the reform of opera by Apostolo Zeno (1668–1750) and Pietro Metastasio (1698–1782). Determined to return artistic dignity to the libretto, the two authors profoundly reconfigured the genre by simplifying the language, unraveling the plots, and, above all, using mythological contents. Between the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, a movement called neoclassicism emerged in many European countries and in different forms of art. In literature, it originated from archeological and architectural experience and more generally from the fashion and taste inspired by ancient Greece. The theory of ‘‘ideal beauty’’ of the German archeologist Johann Joachim Winkelmann (1717– 1768)—an absolute beauty that does not exist in nature and can be created only in art by combining the most perfect things in the world—profoundly influenced Italian intellectuals and generated increasing numbers of artistic treatises, as for example the works on architecture of Francesco Milizia (1725–1798). The appeal of the classic world became visible in the novels of Alessandro Verri (1741–1816), such as Notti romane (Roman Nights, 1792), where the author imagined conversing with ancient Romans on the tombs of the Scipios. The major representative of Italian literary neoclassicism was Vincenzo Monti (1754–1828), a prolific author whose translation of the Iliad would receive great favor from its appearance and is now considered one of the most significant works of the time. In neoclassical style, Ugo Foscolo wrote his sonnets in 1803 and the incomplete poem Le Grazie (The Graces), both of which echoed classic elegance and transfigured characters and events from personal and modern life into a distant and mythical world. Moreover, his poem Dei sepolcri (On Sepulchres, 1807), an original meditation on the consolatory role of sepulchres, was partially inspired by neoclassical style. Generally speaking, neoclassical literature favored elegant words, a linear construction of thoughts, mythological erudition, and harmonious unity. However, in Dei sepolcri, the imitation of ancient classics and their art reveals not only the desire to reach the same level of artistic beauty and perfection but also a deep nostalgia for a world irremediably lost. Through

COLA DI RIENZO Winkelmann’s theoretical principles, neoclassicism influenced architecture and figurative arts as well, as is testified by the hundreds of palaces and paintings still visible throughout Italy. Neoclassicism was soon replaced by a Romantic sensitivity, which, though acknowledging the artistic relevance of the ancient world, encouraged modern humankind to differentiate ourselves from it. The decorous harmony of classical and neoclassical poetry was now substituted by a ‘‘sentimental’’ poetry, restless, dramatic, nostalgic, and capable of expressing new tensions. In the contemporary era, classicism has been interpreted mainly as a cult of the ancient world, often in polemical position against the canons of the Christian culture. The classical world may epitomize supreme human values, a primordial and uncontaminated contact with nature, or a place with no moral restriction, where desires, impulses, and sexual drives remain unbound. Numerous authors are still inspired by the classical models—particularly in theater—and rewrite ancient works offering a new interpretation and exalting their extraordinary actuality. In music, classicism defines the style elaborated in Vienna by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, between 1760 and the first decade of the nineteenth century. It was characterized by the search for maximum formal and stylistic equilibrium, and the use, technically speaking, of the sonata, structured in three movements: exposition, development, and recapitulation, in both chamber and symphonic music. PAOLO QUAZZOLO

Further Reading Antal, Frederick, Classicism and Romanticism, with Other Studies in Art History, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966. Assunto, Rosario, L’antichita` come futuro, Milan: Medusa, 1973. Binni, Walter, Classicismo e Neoclassicismo nella letteratura del Settecento, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1963. Carlson, Marvin, Theories of the Theatre: A Historical and Critical Survey, from the Greeks to the Present, Ithaca, NY : Cornell University Press, 1984. Castelli, Patrizia (editor), L’ideale classico a Ferrara e in Italia nel Rinascimento, Florence: Olschki, 1998. Fornaro, Pierpaolo, Trapassato presente: l’appropriazione psicologica dell’antico attraverso la narrativa moderna, Turin: Tirrenia, 1989. Gigliucci, Roberto (editor), Furto e plagio nella letteratura del Classicismo, Rome: Bulzoni, 1998. Grandi, Roberto, Il suono del flauto: ricognizione critica antologica del gusto classico, Milan: Eura Press, 1996. Munk Olsen, Birger, I classici nel canone scolastico altomedievale, Spoleto: Centro italiano di studi sull’alto Medioevo, 1991. Pieri, Piero, Il violino di Orfeo: metamorfosi e dissimulazione del classicismo, Bologna: Pendragon, 2000. Quondam, Amedeo (editor), Rinascimento e classicismo: materiali per l’analisi del sistema culturale di antico regime, Rome: Bulzoni, 1999. Settis, Salvatore, Futuro del classico, Turin: Einaudi, 2004. Spaggiari, William, La favolosa eta` dei patriarchi: percorsi del classicismo da Metastasio a Carducci, Rome: Archivio Izzi, 1996. Sypher, Wylie, Four Stages of Renaissance Style: Transformations in Art and Literature, 1400–1700, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955. Timpanaro, Sebastiano, Classicismo e illuminismo nell’Ottocento italiano, Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1965. Treves, Piero (editor), Lo studio dell’antichita` classica nell’Ottocento, Turin: Einaudi, 1979. Zorzi, Ludovico, Il teatro e la citta`: saggi sulla scena italiana, Turin: Einaudi, 1977.

COLA DI RIENZO (1313–1354) In 1342, during his first important political mission as ambassador of the Roman government to the papal court in Avignon, Cola di Rienzo met the poet Petrarch. This was the beginning of a lifelong friendship and correspondence based on the two men’s hopes of reconciling and uniting the Italian municipalities under the political guidance of

Rome. Petrarch and Cola shared an admiration for ancient Rome and for the classical spirit, which they considered models of political and social perfection. On May 20, 1347, Cola summoned the populace to the Campidoglio, proclaiming a series of edicts against the nobles. He formally assumed control of Rome and shortly thereafter

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COLA DI RIENZO assumed the title of tribunus. This event established his political career, even though this government lasted only a few months. Cola was a famed anticlerical, a fame justified by the tone of some of his comments on Dante’s Monarchia (Monarchy, ca. 1317). Nevertheless, his political ascent was due to the support he received from the Catholic Church as well as the widespread approval of the citizens. Thus, once he lost that support and his disagreements with the Church became apparent, his government collapsed. Nevertheless, during this period Cola maintained extremely good relations with the pontiff, Clement VI, who intended to build a new empire under the political and spiritual guidance of papal authority. Cola’s short-lived government, which sought to limit the power of the ruling nobility while working to raise the morale of the lower social classes, brought about profound changes in the Italian peninsula. His actions were intended to reestablish the image and the prestige of Rome and to spread the idea of a popular regime throughout Italy. It was precisely because of the success of these notions among the people that Cola lost the support of the pope, who pushed for the readmission of the barons into government in December 1347, after which Cola left the city. The most important of Cola’s written works is his commentary on Dante’s Monarchia, which remained anonymous for centuries but is now unanimously attributed to him. It was probably written between 1348 and 1352, during the period in which Cola lived at the court of Carl IV of Bohemia. Indeed, the aim of the commentary was to convince the emperor to demand his legitimate rights over the throne of Rome and to restore the kingdom of God on earth. In this work, Cola showed his admiration for Dante’s concept of an ideal Church devoid of political ambition. He fiercely criticized the corrupt clerical authorities, whose corruption he probably experienced firsthand during his time he lived in a monastic community of Fraticelli after his fall from power. From a literary point of view, the text shows some weaknesses. Cola was not highly educated in matters of philosophy and theology and was thus incapable of understanding the full complexity of Dante’s work. Nevertheless, in his attacks against the Church he demonstrated a lucidity and strength in recalling the greatness of ancient Rome, a strength in part derived from his extensive knowledge of classical authors, of Latin historians in particular. In addition to his commentary on Monarchia, Cola’s correspondence is a significant 482

document on the culture of his times. Cola’s style recalls Cicero’s but also shows the influence of his contemporaries, Dante and Petrarch in particular. The letters, full of cultural and historical references, are remarkably unlike the flat and dry political prose of the time. Much of what is known about Cola derives from an anonymous fourteenth-century Cronica. Although the section on Cola had already appeared in print as early as 1624, the Cronica was published for the first time in 1740 by Ludovico Antonio Muratori with the editorial title of Historiae Romanae Fragmenta (Fragments of Roman History) in the third volume of his Antiquitates Italicae Medii Aevi (Medieval Italian Archeology). The myth of Cola, the Roman tribune, survived in Lord Byron’s verses and in Richard Wagner’s opera Rienzi (1842), which describes him as a hero who fought for freedom and against tyrannical rulers.

Biography Born Nicola di Rienzo, in Rome in 1313, while still young Cola was educated in classical texts and Roman law. He was appointed first ambassador of the popular government of Rome to Avignon, 1342. He assumed the title of tribunus, May 1347; fell from power and was sent into exile, December 1347; and after a period spent in a monastic community of Fraticelli, moved to the court of Charles VI of Bohemia with the intention of urging him to claim his rights to the throne of Rome, 1350. Suspected of heresy, he was arrested, sent to Avignon, and eventually freed, 1353. He returned to Rome to represent the interests of the pontiff, 1354. On August 1, he assumed political power for the second time. Cola di Rienzo died in Rome on October 8, 1354, during an insurrection organized by the Colonna family. VALERIO VICARI Selected Works Epistolario di Cola di Rienzo, edited by Annibale Gabrielli, Rome: Lincei, 1870. Commentario di Cola di Rienzo (1348–1352), in Dante Alighieri, Monarchia, edited by Francesco Furlan, Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 2004.

Further Reading Anonimo Romano, Cronica, edited by Giuseppe Porta, Milan: Adelphi, 1979.

CARLO COLLODI (CARLO LORENZINI) Collins, Amanda, Greater than Emperor: Cola di Rienzo (ca. 1313–54) and the World of Fourteenth-Century Rome, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. Crescenti, Carmela, Cola di Rienzo: simboli e allegorie, Parma: All’Insegna del Veltro, 2003. Di Carpegna Falconieri, Tommaso, Cola di Rienzo, Rome: Salerno, 2002. Musto, Ronald G., Apocalypse in Rome: Cola di Rienzo and the Politics of the New Age, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.

Reale, Ugo, Vita di Cola di Rienzo, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1982. Ricci, Pier Giorgio, ‘‘Il commento di Cola di Rienzo alla ‘Monarchia’ di Dante,’’ Studi medievali, 4:2(1965), 665–708. Vigueur, J.-C. Maire, ‘‘Cola di Rienzo,’’ in Dizionario biografico degli italiani, vol. 26, Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 1982.

COLLECTED POEMS See Tutte le poesie (Work by Eugenio Montale)

CARLO COLLODI (CARLO LORENZINI) (1826–1890) Journalist, humorist, author of pedagogically oriented children’s stories, Carlo Collodi first made his literary mark with Il Signor Alberi ha ragione! (Mr Alberi Is Right! 1860), a work written to support his political and cultural vision of a democratic, independent, secular, and united Italy. It was in this work that he first used his pseudonym, Collodi, taken from the name of his mother’s hometown. In 1875, he translated Charles Perrault’s fairy tales, Histoires, which were to prove a major influence on his development. During this period he became a public figure in Florence, a cultural center and the capital of the new state. He was a regular contributor to reviews and newspapers such as La Nazione, La Gazzetta del Popolo, Il Fanfulla, and La Gazzetta d’Italia. Collodi’s experience with Il Fanfulla della Domenica was an especially important one. Its first issue was introduced by a long letter written by the critic Francesco De Sanctis that discussed the

educational and unifying function of literature and culture in the new Italy. Moreover, in publishing stories and articles by Giovanni Verga, Luigi Capuana, Giosue` Carducci, Gabriele D’Annunzio, and other Italian and European authors of the age, this journal was a workshop for the new Italian writers and—for Collodi—a confrontation with them. The political unification of Italy presented writers with the literary challenge of understanding and describing the life and cultures of the different regions of the new state. There was also, however, a strong normative tendency in contemporary visions of the political role of literature, visions primarily based on Alessandro Manzoni’s ideas about the best way to create and educate a new country. Thus, Collodi’s work was inspired by a tradition of nostalgic and poetic description of Tuscan life but also reflected a strong pedagogic and ethical desire to help in the creation of a new world. In fact, Collodi published a collection of 483

CARLO COLLODI (CARLO LORENZINI) vivid and witty stories under the impressionistic title Macchiette (Sketches, 1880), which was soon followed by Occhi e nasi: Ricordi dal vero (Eyes and Noses: Memories from Real Life, 1881). Collodi himself emphasized his connections to De Sanctis and Carducci, writers who criticized the traditional, formal, and sentimental tendencies of Italian literature symbolized by the ‘‘empty’’ poetry written by Giovanni Prati. Collodi’s tone was close to satire, especially in his stories and theatrical pie`ces, whose characters, as in his three-act drama Gli amici di casa (The Friends of the House, 1856), are generally hypocritical and treacherous. His plays, showing the influence of the free-flowing dialogue of French drama, reflect the sparkling conversation of the salon and the caustic wit of the typical discussion play. There is, unquestionably, a strong streak of moral denunciation in his work. One of the most famous sketches in Macchiette, ‘‘Un paio di stivaletti’’ (A Pair of Ankle Boots), is in fact a detailed study of corruption that insinuates itself into the soul of a poor young girl through her desire for a pair of new boots. Moreover, Collodi seems to be very close to the linguistic quest of the scapigliati Giovanni Faldella and Carlo Dossi. Yet Collodi’s writing also displays a profound documentary and social interest. For example, in Un romanzo in vagone, da Firenze a Livorno, guida storico-umoristica (A Train Novel, from Florence to Leghorn, a Humorous and Historical Guide, 1856), Collodi offered a comic chronicle of the people he met travelling from Florence to Livorno on a train that was a wonder of Tuscany at that time. Collodi published a novel in the same vein called I misteri di Firenze, scene sociali (The Mysteries of Florence, Social Scenes, 1857), in which, following the great model of Eugene Sue’s Myste`res de Paris, he described a city divided between the rich classes in all their falseness and hypocrisy and the poor and their struggle for life. This, Collodi sadly said in his book, was the only real mystery of Florence: the mystery of a rich city that, due to the blindness of its inhabitants, was a poor, confused and ‘‘ill’’ city. In 1872, there was a significant new interest in Collodi’s intellectual life: writing for children. Florence had a great tradition in children’s literature, of which Collodi was perfectly aware. In 1836 the Genovese reformer and pedagogist Raffaello Lambruschini (1788–1873) founded a magazine called La guida dell’educatore. Sometime later, Pietro Thouar (1809–1861) published a collection of tales under the title Nuova raccolta di scritti per fanciulli (New Collection of Writings for Children, 484

1868), which established the form of the ‘‘moral story’’ for children, written in a Manzonian style. Another important book in this tradition was the enormously popular children’s book, Le memorie di un pulcino (The Memories of a Chick, 1875), published by Paggi and written by the Florentine school teacher Ida Baccini (1850–1911). With her anthropomorphic and childlike animal protagonist, Baccini anticipated Pinocchio. Indeed, Paggi, realizing the profitable market in the new genre of children’s literature, asked Collodi to translate Perrault’s Contes and Histoires as well as the French fairy tales written by the Countess de Aulnay and Madame Leprince de Beaumont. Translating the best of French writing for children, Collodi had the opportunity to study carefully the themes and structures, the psychological motives and patterns, and the various forms of the genre. Deeply stimulated by his experience as translator and by his editor, who wanted Italian settings for children books, Collodi soon attempted to write original children’s stories himself. He soon published a volume under the title Racconti delle fate (Tales of the Fairies, 1875), which was very close in both its form and content to the French models of Perrault. Collodi’s first original production was a series called Giannettino (1877), whose title echoes Dossi’s ironic Giannetto prego` un dı` la mamma che il lasciasse andare a scuola (Giannetto Prayed His Mother Once to Let Him Go to School), written in 1866. In Collodi’s story, a wild, unruly, and lazy boy has a number of funny and humiliating experiences, first in Florence, then travelling all around Italy. Soon after, Collodi published Viaggio per l’Italia di Giannettino: l’Italia superiore (The Italy of Giannettino: Northern Italy, 1880), followed by a book dedicated to L’Italia centrale (Central Italy, 1883), and by another about L’Italia meridionale (Southern Italy, 1886), in which the unruly Giannettino, learning from his experiences, becomes, finally, a good boy. As we can see, the plot and moral scheme of Giannettino is the same as that of Pinocchio, but the inspiration, the style and the setting of the entire Giannettino series, like the one that follows it, dedicated to Minuzzolo (Scrap, 1878), are dull, rigid, and mechanical, lacking in the liveliness of the characters in Collodi’s most famous work. On 7 July 1881, Collodi published the first instalment of his serial, Le avventure di Pinocchio: Storia di un burattino (The Adventures of Pinocchio: Story of a Puppet) in Il giornale dei bambini (1881–1883). Collodi was now an older man of 55, sceptical and disenchanted. In fact, Guido Biagi, one of Collodi’s

CARLO COLLODI (CARLO LORENZINI) best friends and his collaborator in Il giornale per i bambini, asked Collodi many times to write a new children’s story, but Collodi seemed uninterested. Finally, wrote Biagi in his Aneddoti letterari (1887), Collodi sent him the first pages of his Storia di un burattino, called ‘‘bambinata’’ (childish thing). This ‘‘bambinata’’ was in fact his Pinocchio. In its basic conception, the story resembled the story of Giannettino: a ‘‘wild’’ boy who becomes, after a series of adventures, a good boy. The serial adventures of the puppet who becomes human and who alternates between rebellion and resignation may have intensified Collodi’s own divided feelings. For an entire intellectual generation, it may also have intensified the conflict between their Mazzinian idealism and the necessary compromises imposed upon them by a still authoritarian society and by a nation that remained, in reality, poor and underdeveloped. Since it was first written in the early 1880s, Pinocchio has remained one of the most universally recognizable works of Italian literature. All versions of the story, from the well-known Disney cartoon to Roberto Benigni’s controversial cinematic version of 2002, emphasize Pinocchio’s status as a national icon.

Biography Carlo Collodi was born in Florence, November 22, 1826, the son of a cook, Domenico, and Angiolina Orzali, a seamstress, both employed by the Marquis Ginori Lisci. He studied at the seminary in Colle Val d’Elsa, 1837–1842, and Florence, 1842. Collodi served among the Tuscan volunteers in the battles of Curtatone and Montanara, 1848, and in the Piedmontese Army in the Second War of Independence in 1859. He was editor to the humorous magazine Il Lampione, which he had founded himself in 1848; moreover, he founded in 1853 another magazine called La Scaramuccia. Collodi died in Florence, 26 October 1890. STEFANO ADAMI See also: Children’s Literature

Selected Works Collections Tutto Collodi per i piccoli e per i grandi, edited by Pietro Pancrazi, 2 vols., Florence: Le Monnier, 1948. Opere, edited by Daniela Marcheschi, Milan: Mondadori 1995.

Fiction Un romanzo in vapore: Da Firenze a Livorno. Guida storicoumoristica, 1856. I misteri di Firenze: Scene sociali, 1857. Racconti delle fate, 1875. Giannettino, 1877. Minuzzolo, 1878. Viaggio per l’Italia di Giannettino: L’Italia superiore, 1880. Viaggio per l’Italia di Giannettino: L’Italia centrale, 1883. Le avventure di Pinocchio: Storia di un burattino, 1883; as The Adventures of Pinocchio, translated by Nicolas J. Perella, 1986, rpt. 1992. Viaggio per l’Italia di Giannettino: L’Italia meridionale, 1886.

Theater Gli amici di casa, 1856.

Other Il Signor Alberi ha ragione! 1860. La manifattura delle porcellane di Doccia, 1861. Macchiette, 1880. Occhi e nasi: Ricordi dal vero, 1881. Bettino Ricasoli, Camillo Cavour, Luigi Carlo Farini, Daniele Manin: Biografie del Risorgimento, 1941.

Further Reading Benigni, Roberto, Io un po’ Pinocchio, Florence: Giunti, 2002. Bertacchini, Renato, Collodi educatore, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1964. Bertacchini, Renato, Il padre di Pinocchio: Vita e opere di Collodi, Milan: Camunia, 1993. Biagi, Guido, Aneddoti letterari, Milan: Treves, 1887. Cantucci, Luigi, Collodi, Brescia: La Scuola, 1982. Maini, Riccardo, and Piero Scapecchi (editors), Collodi giornalista e scrittore, Florence: S.P.E.S., 1981. Marcheschi, Daniela, and Carlo Alberto Madrignani (editors), I ragazzi grandi: Bozzetti e studi dal vero, Palermo: Sellerio, 1989. Petrini, Enzo, Dalla parte di Collodi, Bologna: Patron, 1982. Serenella, Salimbeni, (editor), Da Collodi, su Collodi, Florence: Salimbeni, 1984. Traversetti, Bruno, Introduzione a Collodi, Bari: Laterza, 1993.

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LE AVVENTURE DI PINOCCHIO, 1883 Novel by Carlo Collodi

Le avventure di Pinocchio: Storia di un burattino (The Adventures of Pinocchio: Story of a Puppet) was never intended to be a book. In 1881, Collodi was asked by the editors of a magazine for children, Il giornale per i bambini, to write a series of tales. The stories—simple, linear, and vivid, but extremely ironic, full of philosophical reflections and allusions to the literary canon—recounted the adventures of a ‘‘child’’ who is trying to learn the strange rules of the adult world. Like Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865) and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Collodi’s stories initially took the form of a classic novel of formation; they were stories that could help educate the children of the new Italy unified in 1870 after a long period of struggle. But Collodi’s central character is another thing: He is a pezzo di legno (piece of wood) trying to be human. His story thus invokes mythic tales of metamorphosis, and, in fact, there are many interpretations (Giovanni Jervis, Ge´rard Genot, and Sergio Martella, among others) that stress the anthropological and religious aspects of the story, casting Geppetto as a paternal figure like St. Joseph and presenting Pinocchio’s metamorphosis as a form of reincarnation. But in the novel, Collodi also skillfully combine many other traditions of storytelling: the old Tuscan tradition of village children tales, popular oral tradition, biblical tales like the story of the prophet Jonah, and elements from Apuleius’s Latin romance The Golden Ass. The book begins like a traditional Tuscan tale, the veglia, in which an old man is telling a story to children. When the children express surprise, even disbelief, about what they are about to hear, they are told to pay close attention to every detail. The narrator relates how Maestro Ciliegia, a carpenter, finds a piece of wood that can cry and wail. He makes his friend Geppetto a present of it. Geppetto intends to make a puppet that can dance and fence out of the wood. He christens it Pinocchio and hopes to make a living displaying it. But the puppet’s eyes 486

can move and look at him, and his nose begins to grow by itself. Finally, the puppet grabs and plays with Geppetto’s wig, rushing out from the house. Geppetto, trying to stop him, is arrested by the carabinieri. In a later episode, Pinocchio is going to school with a new spelling book, determined to learn everything at once, when he hears music coming from the puppet theater. Pinocchio changes his mind: School can wait until tomorrow; today he will go to the theater. The adventure does not prove to be a happy one, since the master of the theater, Mangiafuoco, wants to kill him. However, when Pinocchio starts crying and praying, Mangiafuoco takes pity on him and gives him five gold pieces to help him and his father. Outside the theater, Pinocchio meets two of Collodi’s best inventions, the lame Fox and the blind Cat. They explain to Pinocchio how he could profit from the money Mangiafuoco has given him by going to the Field of Miracles. If he sows his coins there, they tell him, he will find a tree laden with gold pieces. On his way to the field, the puppet meets some assassins. They run after him and, after a long pursuit, they capture Pinocchio and hang him on a tree called Big Oak. This was the original ending of Collodi’s story. Pinocchio is finally and cruelly punished for his idleness, his credulity, his obstinacy. But many readers, charmed by the character, protested that he did not really deserve to die. Collodi revived Pinocchio in the February 16, 1882, issue of the Il giornale per i bambini. He introduced new inventions into the story, including the Fata Turchina and a final reward for Pinocchio—the chance to become a flesh-and-blood boy. Collodi’s social criticism also became more precise in satirizing the new Italian political situation: Pinocchio, being robbed of his money, is sent to prison. Four months later, there is a general amnesty for all the criminals, but Pinocchio does not qualify because he is not a criminal. Once he insists that he is a criminal, he is immediately released. In the Paese dei Balocchi (Land of Toys), he meets Lucignolo, and the two of them are transformed into a pair of donkeys. As a ciuchino, or little donkey, Pinocchio works in a circus until he becomes ill and is thrown into the sea. Like the prophet Jonah, he is eaten by a fish, which also has eaten his father Geppetto, who was swallowed during his quest for the puppet. Finally the puppet becomes a boy ‘‘perche` quando i ragazzi, di cattivi diventano buoni, hanno la virtu` di far prendere un aspetto nuovo e sorridente anche all’interno delle loro famiglie’’ (because when bad boys become good, they have the power of putting

COLONIAL LITERATURE a new and smiling expression on the faces of their family). Moreover, Pinocchio becomes a living boy, leaving the realm of myth for the moral human world, during the constricted and severe Italy of King Umberto I. STEFANO ADAMI Editions First Edition Le avventure di Pinocchio: Storia di un burattino, Florence: Paggi, 1883; revised editions by the author were published by Paggi in 1886, 1887, 1888, and by Bemporad in 1890.

Critical Editions Le avventure di Pinocchio, edited by Amerindo Camilli, Florence: Sansoni, 1946. Le avventure di Pinocchio, edited by Ornella Castellani Polidori, Pescia: Fondazione Nazionale Carlo Collodi, 1983. In Opere, edited by Daniela Marcheschi, Milan: Mondatori, 1995.

Translations The Story of a Puppet, or, The Adventures of Pinocchio, translated by Mary Alice Murray, London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1892, revised by Giovanna Tassinari, London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1951. The Adventures of Pinocchio: Story of a Puppet, translated by Nicolas Perella, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986, reprinted 1992.

Further Reading Croce, Benedetto, ‘‘Pinocchio,’’ La critica, 20 November 1937; reprinted in La letteratura italiana della nuova Italia, vol. 5, Bari: Laterza, 1939.

Dedola, Rossana, Pinocchio e Collodi, Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2002. Gagliardi, Antonio, Il burattino e il labirinto, una lettura di Pinocchio, Turin: Einaudi, 1980. Garroni, Emilio, Pinocchio uno e bino, Bari: Laterza, 1975. Gayling, Willard, Adam and Eve and Pinocchio: on Being and Becoming Human, New York: Viking, 1990. Genot, Ge´rard, L’Analyse structurelle de Pinocchio, Pescia (Montepulciano): Fondazione Nazionale Carlo Collodi, 1970. Giannelli, Luciano, ‘‘Una lettura dei ’dialettalismi’ di Pinocchio,’’ in Interni e dintorni del Pinocchio. Atti del Convegno ’Folkloristi italiani del tempo del Collodi,’ edited by Mariano Fresta and Pietro Clemente, PesciaMontepulciano: Editori del Grifo, 1986. Incisa di Camerana, Ludovico, Pinocchio, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2004. Jervis, Giovanni, Introduction to C. Collodi, Le avventure di Pinocchio, Turin: Einaudi, 1968. Malerba, Luigi, Pinocchio con gli stivali, Milan: Mondadori, 1988. Manganelli, Giorgio, Pinocchio: Un libro parallelo, Turin: Einaudi, 1977. Martella, Sergio, Pinocchio eroe anticristiano: il codice della nascita nei processi di liberazione, Padua: Saper, 2000. Papini, Giovanni, Schegge: Le fonti di Pinocchio, Florence: Vallecchi, 1995. Perrella, Nicolas, ‘‘An Essay on Pinocchio,’’ Italica, 63:1 (Spring 1986): 1–47. Rodari, Gianni, Grammatica della fantasia, Turin: Einaudi, 1973. Teahan, James, The Pinocchio of Carlo Collodi, New York: Schocken, 1985. Tommaso, Rodolfo, Pinocchio: Analisi di un burattino, Milan: Sansoni, 1992. Wunderlich, Richard, The Pinocchio Catalogue, New York: Greenwood, 1988.

COLONIAL LITERATURE A milestone of Italian colonial literature was the speech ‘‘La grande proletaria s’e` mossa’’ (The Great Proletarian Has Set Off ) by Giovanni Pascoli in Florence in November 1911 and later published in his 1912 collection of writings Limpido rivo (Clear Stream). With it, Pascoli intervened in the complex public discussion on Italian colonial policy. After unification, the Italian government believed that founding some colonies could be

very useful to the new state, although this was by no means a generally held view. Already in 1897, for instance, Emilio Salgari had called colonial policy a crime in his novel Le stragi delle Filippine (The Slaughters of the Philippines). A number of articles published in 1911 in the periodical La Voce criticized the basis of Italian colonialism, arguing that the idea that the countries to be conquered were rich and represented a solution to Italian

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COLONIAL LITERATURE social problems was only propaganda. In ‘‘La guerra’’ (The War) published in La Voce on 15 June 1911, Giovanni Amendola, presented the war against Libya as an affirmation of national will, in which Italians would have the feeling of being part of a great nation. On 8 October 1911, the newspaper Il corriere della sera published a long poem by Gabriele D’Annunzio, ‘‘La canzone d’oltremare’’ (The Song of Overseas), the first of a number of poems that celebrated the Italian expedition as ‘‘la meravigliosa visione di preti benedicenti le chiese in cui giacciono le bandiere degli infedeli’’ (the wonderful view of the priests blessing the churches in which lie the flags of the infidels). In Pascoli’s speech, Italy was a poor nation compared to the other European countries, from which many had to emigrate in order to earn a living. This was an unbearable situation, and, in Pascoli’s opinion, the only solution was the foundation of one or more colonies where Italians could live and work not as modern slaves but as citizens. Their colonial enterprise would be the colonial enterprise of workers and peasants, not of soldiers and warriors. The Italian presence would be, in Pascoli’s words, the presence of conscientious men like Marco Polo or the Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), who lived in China, where he taught mathematics and European culture and history, and died in Beijing. Previously, in his work ‘‘L’Avvento’’ (The Advent, 1901), Pascoli had described his age as ‘‘il tempo dell’orribile guerra universale’’ (the time of horrible universal war), producing an interesting synthesis of socialism, pacifism, and Christianity into a philosophy based on the ideals of justice and charity. Moreover, he had bitterly criticized the first Italian colonialism of the 1880s and 1890s in poems such as ‘‘La favola del disarmo’’ (The Fable of Disarmament), ‘‘Pace!’’ (Peace!), and ‘‘Il ritorno di Colombo’’ (Columbus’s Return), collected in his Odi e Inni (Odes and Hymns, 1906). In 1885, Italy occupied Massaua, on the Red Sea, but the Italian Army was defeated at Dogali in 1887, with the death of 500 Italian soldiers. In 1892, Italy gained control of Somalia. In 1896 the news of another ruinous defeat at Adua, where 18,000 Italians soldiers died, was a shock, and Prime Minister Francesco Crispi was forced to resign. This dramatic event resulted in a trauma in the imagination of the country, almost a neurotic excuse, which became the primary reason for future colonial initiatives. The humiliating rout of the Italian Army caused serious popular insurrections in many Italian cities, while some socialist newspapers such as La scopa and L’asino published an 488

ode dedicated to Menelik, the Ethiopian leader. The satirical writer Lorenzo Stecchetti (pseudonym of Olindo Guerrini, 1845–1916) published a number of poems defining Italian colonial policy as a market of lies and the art of Punchinello. In the poem ‘‘Africa, mentre partono’’ (Africa, While They Leave, 1900), he says to a dead Italian soldier: ‘‘che tu sia benedetto, figlio, non soffrirai piu` la fame’’ (Bless you, poor son, you’ll never suffer from hunger again). The Italian defeat at Adua was the result of an erroneous sense of superiority and of lack of preparation on the part of the soldiers and the commanders. It was also true that the colonial policy was a way of escaping from the problems of the country and that therefore the nation was unprepared to face a military campaign. The Italian government attempted to forget the events of Adua. As Silvana Palma reports, Prime Minister Antonio Starabba De Rudinı` refused to pay a ransom for the prisoners, declaring: ‘‘non importa se il mio rifiuto sara` causa di sofferenze per loro: il mio dovere e` rifiutare ogni accordo, il loro di morire per la patria’’ (It doesn’t matter if my refusal will cause them sufferings; my duty is to refuse any agreement, their duty is to die for the motherland) (L’Italia coloniale, 1999) The survivors were received in Italy as traitors and were forbidden to publish memoirs or to talk to journalists. In the public debate, the peaceful peasant-colonist described by Pascoli soon became the heir of the Roman Empire, who would bring culture, health, and education to primitive countries. Italy was still working on its unification: The country and the ruling classes were looking for useful public myths, and the myth of the Roman Empire was perfect. This myth was the basis for the notion of the civic and moral primacy of Italians: In establishing a new colonial empire, Italy was in fact taking back its old Roman colonies. As D’Annunzio states in Laudi del cielo del mare della terra e degli eroi (Hymns in Praise of Sky, Sea, Earth and Heroes, 1903), Italian colonialism was a quest in the name of the Latin sea, based on the four ‘‘deita` operose’’ (active goddesses): Volonta`, Volutta`, Orgoglio, Istinto (Will, Voluptuousness, Pride, Instinct). In 1912, D’Annunzio wrote the intertitles for the first ‘‘colonial’’ Italian film, the monumental Cabiria (1914), directed by Giovanni Pastrone. The main character is a Latin nobleman who, with his faithful servant, the ‘‘good primitive’’ Maciste, tries to civilize the barbaric Africans, who are represented as violent and irrational and who immolate their sons to the god Moloch. This popular film contributed to establishing the principles and ideas of the public

COLONIAL LITERATURE debate on colonialism, becoming a model for colonial cinema. During the 1930s, Benito Mussolini promoted a military expedition to Ethiopia, to avenge the defeat of Adua. Italy, for Mussolini, should follow the Latin tradition of power and empire, and Africa was its future. The natives were in any case considered as inferior beings who lived like animals. Ethiopia was invaded again in 1935, and this time the Italian Army was ready to use any means to conquer the country, from the bombing of civilians to the use of chemical warfare. In his 1937 reportages for Il corriere della sera, the journalist Tommaso Besozzi (1903–1964) described African everyday life through comic vignettes: the ridiculous head of the village who sports a uniform of the Italian carabinieri with a great sense of importance; the Somali sultan with 203 wives; the corrupted, lascivious and tricky natives, who are always trying to cheat the Italian workers. Fascist propaganda used the reports of Italian travellers and explorers—among them Carlo Piaggia, Antonio Miani, Gaetano Casati, Romolo Gessi, Vittorio Bottego, and Edmondo De Amicis—as documents of the inferiority of the natives and their necessity of a European guide. During the Fascist period, the Italian colonies were also a site where some intellectuals confronted the brutality of the regime and began to develop a democratic conscience. In the collection of poems Diario d’Algeria (A Journal of Algeria, 1947), written by Vittorio Sereni during his imprisonment in Algeria between 1943 and 1945, the end of the tragedy of Fascism in Italy and Germany is seen as the hope for a new Europe, and the period spent in Africa is lived as a deep human experience. The same feeling is described by Renzo Biason in his autobiographical stories Sagapo` (1953), which describe the events lived by a number of Italian soldiers during the occupation of Greece. Mario Tobino’s Il deserto della Libia (The Desert of Libya, 1952) recounts his dramatic experience as a young soldier in Libya—an experience of moral awakening. Ennio Flaiano’s Tempo di uccidere (Time for Killing, 1947) is the dramatic description of the war crimes perpetrated by the Italian Fascist army in Etiopia. After the fall of the Fascism and the end of World War II, Italy obtained from the United Nations the Protectorate of Somalia, which lasted until 1960. Pier Paolo Pasolini, in his unfinished novel Petrolio (Oil), posthumously published in 1992, describes the dictatorial way in which the Italians of the 1960s—including the intellectuals— dealt with people in the so-called Third World

countries. More generally, recent historiography has demonstrated the extent in which both high and popular literature, from Pascoli to Salgari, contributed to the formation of the image of the good Italian solider in Africa. Indeed, Fascist rhetoric merely recycled this ideological tradition. The reality was quite different: In 1935 and 1936 in Ethiopia, the Italian army was the first to use gases against civilians. STEFANO ADAMI

Further Reading Aristarco, Guido, Il cinema fascista: Il prima e il dopo, Bari: Dedalo, 1996. Battaglia, Roberto, La prima guerra d’Africa, Turin: Einaudi, 1958. Bono, Salvatore, Morire per questi deserti: Lettere di soldati Italiani dal fronte libico, 1911–1912, Catanzaro: Abramo, 1992. Borruso, Massimo (editor), Il mito infranto: la fine del ‘sogno africano’ negli appunti e nelle immagini di Massimo Borruso, funzionario coloniale in Etiopia (1937– 1946), Manduria: Lacaita, 1997. Brunetta, Gian Piero, Cinema Italiano tra le due guerre, Milan: Mursia, 1975. Calchi Novati, Giampaolo, Fra Mediterraneo e Mar Rosso: momenti di politica Italiana in Africa attraverso il colonialismo, Rome: Istituto Italo Africano, 1992. Del Boca, Angelo, Gli Italiani in Africa orientale, 4 volumes: Vol. 1, Dall’unita` alla marcia su Roma (1976); Vol. 2, La conquista dell’Impero (1980), Rome-Bari: Laterza. Del Boca, Angelo, Gli Italiani in Libia: Tripoli bel suol d’amore: 1860–1922, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1986. Del Boca, Angelo, I gas di Mussolini, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1996. Isnenghi, Mario, Il mito della grande guerra, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002. Isnenghi, Mario, and Rochat, Giorgio, La Grande Guerra 1914–1918, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 2000. Labanca, Nicola, Una guerra per l’Impero, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2005. Maggi, Stefano, Colonialismo e comunicazioni: Le strade ferrate nell’Africa Italiana, 1887–1943, Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1996. Negash, Tekeste, Italian Colonialism in Eritrea, 1882–1941: Policies, Praxis and Impact, Uppsala: Uppsala University, 1987. Palma, Silvana, L’Italia coloniale, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1999. Pascoli, Giovanni, ‘‘La grande proletaria s’e` mossa,’’ Limpido rivo, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1912. Taddia, Irma, Autobiografie africane: Il colonialismo nelle memorie orali, Milan: Franco Angeli, 1996. Taddia, Irma, L’Eritrea-colonia 1890–1952: Paesaggi, strutture, uomini del colonialismo, Milan: Franco Angeli, 1986. Tomasello, Giovanna, La letteratura coloniale Italiana dalle avanguardie al fascismo, Palermo: Sellerio, 1984.

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FRANCESCO COLONNA

FRANCESCO COLONNA (CA. 1433/34–1527) Probably one of the most enigmatic figures of fifteenth-century Italian Humanism, Francesco Colonna is traditionally considered the author of an anonymous book printed in Venice by Aldo Manuzio in 1499, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (The Strife of Love in a Dream). Francesco Colonna’s identity, however, is still uncertain. Some critics, such as Maurizio Calvesi, have identified the author as Francesco Colonna, Lord of Palestrina, a town in the environs of Rome (‘‘Hypneratomachia Poliphili,’’ 1987). Other scholars (for example, Giovanni Pozzi) have identified Colonna as a friar connected to the Humanist environment of Treviso and the Dominican Convent of SS. Giovanni e Paolo in Venice. Colonna’s unsolved biography reflects his mysterious work, which is also considered the masterpiece of fifteenth-century Venetian printing. As stated in the foreword of his book, hypnerotomachia is a Greek expression (greco vocabulo) that the narrator, named Poliphilo (Polia’s lover), adopts to define the subject of his narrative, a ‘‘pugna d’amor in sonno’’ (strife of love in a dream). The actual identity of Polia’s lover is revealed by an acrostic, as the initial letters of the book’s 38 chapters form the Latin sentence: Poliam frater Franciscus Columna peramavit (Brother Francesco Colonna did love Polia). Hence, the reader is encouraged to consider the author and the narrator as the same person. Poliphilo’s dream frames a long narrative divided into two main sections. In the first, Poliphilo tells the story of his voyage from a dark forest, through many different dangers, encounters, and trials, to a beautiful town where he meets his beloved Polia. Then, the two lovers travel to the sacred island of Cytera, where they visit Adonis’s grave and contemplate the statue of Venus suckling Cupid. In the second section, Polia is asked by a group of nymphs to recount the love story of a girl pledged to Diana in the town of Treviso. Though hindered by the girl’s vow, the love story has a happy ending. Finally, when Poliphilo wakes up, the dream ends. The sequence of events also includes digressions in which descriptions 490

of antiquities such as buildings, monuments, and crafts document the author’s antiquarian expertise and his contemplative approach to classical culture, as well as his knowledge of philosophy, iconology, and the hermetic sciences. Poliphilo’s dream is probably an allegory of human life that contains autobiographical components. According to Giovanni Pozzi’s allegorical interpretation in his critical edition of the work (1980), the dark forest and the symbolic monuments of the first section (for example, the elephant that hides the graves dedicated to men and women or the horse that bears babies) may represent the human being’s prenatal confusion. The five nymphs that the protagonist encounters can be interpreted as an allegory of the five senses and the first form of knowledge. Poliphilo’s choice between Love and Glory may have a pedagogic function, since love and marriage, according to the author, are the accomplishment of a perfect life. The autobiographical elements probably include Polia’s account of a personal love story prevented by a vow of chastity, which may be connected to the writer’s own world and indicate a nun involved in a romantic affair. The genre and language of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili are problematic. The story is most certainly modelled on fourteenth-century vernacular works such as Boccaccio’s Ninfale fiesolano (The Nymphs of Fiesole, ca. 1344–1346) and Filocolo (ca. 1334–1336); the dream that frames the story is probably an imitation of Petrarch’s Triumphi (Triumphs, ca. 1354–1374); the vision of the dark forest is probably modelled on Dante’s Comedia (Divine Comedy, ca. 1305–1321). Though Colonna imitated his predecessors, his masterpiece is absolutely unique and original. First, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili combines visual and verbal language, and the text is constantly surrounded by images that describe, narrate, and comment on the protagonist’s dream, thus engaging the reader in a complex process of reception. Second, the verbal sections are written in a unique literary language, invented by the author, which is a rather ordinary example

VITTORIA COLONNA of northern Italian vernacular, imitating Tuscan models at the level of phonology and morphology, but is characterized by a sophisticated Latin vocabulary adapted to vernacular structures. Colonna’s experimentation thus reflects the encounter of two different cultural traditions. On the one hand, the author’s mastery of visual and manual arts such as gold casting, architecture, sculpture, and painting demonstrates his acquaintance with the world of workshops and craftsmen, and the Hypneratomachia Poliphili was therefore intended as an artistic object. Francesco Colonna was proficient in ancient Greek and Latin and well versed in philosophy and literature and encompassed an encyclopaedic notion of culture. Hence, his literary effort is also the work of a talented Humanist.

Biography Francesco Colonna was probably born in Venice in 1433 or 1434. He became a Dominican friar and lived in Venice at the Covent of SS Giovanni e Paolo. He moved to Treviso, 1462–1467, and returned to Venice, 1471. He was awarded a bachelor’s degree in theology in Padua, 1473–1474, and a doctoral degree in Padua, 1481. He became involved in a scandal (details unknown) and was expelled from his convent and threatened with excommunication. In the meanwhile, Colonna became popular as an expert preacher, 1482–1500. He lived on the fringes of the Dominican Order, probably in Venice, 1500–1515. He lived in Treviso for three years, 1515–1518. He was readmitted to the convent of Venice, 1518, where he died, in October 1527. MATTEO SORANZO

Selected Works Hypneratomachia Poliphili, 1499; critical edition by Giovanni Pozzi and Lucia A. Ciapponi, 1980; as Hypnerotomachia: The Strife of Love in a Dreame (1592), translated by Robert Dullington, edited by Lucy Gent, 1973; as Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. The Strife of Love in a Dream, translated by Joscelyn Godwin, 2003.

Further Reading Barolini, Helen, Aldus and His Dream Book, New York: Italica Press, 1992. Borsi, Stefano, Polifilo architetto: cultura architettonica e teoria artistica nell’Hypnerotomachia Poliphili di Francesco Colonna (1499), Rome: Officina, 1995. Calvesi, Maurizio, ‘‘Hypneratomachia Poliphili. Nuovi riscontri e nuove evidenze documentarie per Francesco Colonna signore di Preneste,’’ Storia dell’Arte, 9 (1987), 85–136. Calvesi, Maurizio, La pugna d’amore in sogno di Francesco Colonna romano, Rome: Lithos, 1996. Calvesi, Maurizio, Il sogno di Polifilo prenestino, Rome: Officina Edizioni, 1980. Casella, Maria Teresa, and Giovanni Pozzi, Francesco Colonna: biografia e opere, 2 vols., Padua: Antenore, 1959. Cheney, Liana de Girolami, ‘‘Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: A Garden of Neoplatonic Love,’’ Discoveries. South-Central Renaissance Conference News and Notes, 21:1(2004), 12–17. Fierz-David, Linda, The Dream of Poliphilo, foreword by C. G. Jung, New York: Pantheon, 1950. Pelosi, Olimpia, Il sogno di Polifilo: una queˆte dell’umanesimo, Salerno: Edisud, 1988. Pozzi, Giovanni, ‘‘Il ‘Polifilo’ nella storia del libro illustrato veneziano,’’ in Giorgione e l’Umanesimo veneziano, edited by Rodolfo Pallucchini, Florence: Olschki, 1981. Pozzi, Giovanni, and Giulia Gianella, ‘‘Scienza Antiquaria e Letteratura. Il Feliciano. Il Colonna,’’ in Storia della Cultura Veneta, edited by Giorgio Arnaldi and Manlio Pastore Stocchi, vol. 3, Vicenza: Neri Pozza Editore, 1980.

VITTORIA COLONNA (1490–1547) In her own day, Vittoria Colonna, Marchesa of Pescara, was a celebrity due only in part to her prestigious social standing and talent. As the focus of considerable public scrutiny, the Marchesa projected an upright character and faultless behavior, which led to universal acclaim for her as a woman and as a writer. Her life was considered

beyond reproach during both her marriage and her long widowhood, and many of her contemporaries saw in her the embodiment of their culture’s ideal of noble femininity. She was viewed as a living paragon: intelligent, gifted, devout, virtuous, charming, and chaste. In the guise of exemplary figure, Colonna was often extolled as the model 491

VITTORIA COLONNA to imitate, although proclaimed inimitable. This ringing endorsement of the woman easily transferred to her verse. The most famous panegyric appears in Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (1532), when the author chooses the Marchesa to represent the growing number of modern women writers in Canto 37. Having praised Colonna for ‘‘a sweet style that has not been surpassed,’’ filled with ‘‘lofty words,’’ Ariosto goes on to compliment her verse as a chaste wife’s fitting tribute to her deceased spouse. This convergence of writing, character, and biography is typical of much scholarship dedicated to Colonna who, for centuries, was considered Italy’s most famous woman writer. In his seminal study of The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), historian Jakob Burckhardt established the modern perception of Colonna as the female poet who not only ‘‘made [herself] famous’’ through her writing but ‘‘may be called immortal.’’ Today, Vittoria Colonna continues to be judged one of Italy’s foremost female poets and a major poet of the sixteenth century. Like other aristocratic daughters, Colonna was taught the humanities at an early age, including the study of literature. She probably began composing verse in the context of social exchange, that is to say, as an integral part of the fabric of courtly entertainment. The composition and appreciation of poetry was a common avocation in the salons and courts of her time, and poems were often employed as instruments for communication and compliment, as can be seen in Colonna’s own occasional verse, which is addressed to notable individuals of her day. Like many Renaissance poets, the Marchesa began her literary apprenticeship with the study and assimilation of classical works, the foundation of a humanistic education. The imitation of Petrarchan verse followed, forming the stylistic and thematic model for her rime amorose (love rhymes). Like most Renaissance poets, Colonna shared her endeavors with her limited circle of friends and other versifiers. Notwithstanding her celebrity status and the insistence of admirers, she did not wish to have her poems published, not seeking the recognition or judgment of an unknown audience. Nevertheless, a handful of poems were printed in 1535 and 1536 in anthologies, and the first publication of her collected poetry appeared in 1538, without her consent or involvement. The fact that some 20 editions of the Rime (Rhymes) were issued in the sixteenth century alone bears witness to her popularity and appeal. In 1558, a decade after her death, Rinaldo Corso prepared the first major edition of Vittoria 492

Colonna’s Rime, which includes a critical commentary and supplies variants of the poems. Like later editions, it divides the poetry into two sections, love poems and sacred works. In 1760, Giambattista Rota gathered all Colonna’s known verse into one volume for the first time. Two editions are essential for serious study of Colonna’s verse, the critical editions prepared by Pietro Ercole Visconti in 1840 and Alan Bullock in 1982. The latter provides extensive commentary, bibliographical data, synoptic tables, comparisons of manuscript versions and published sources, as well as variants. Some 400 poems are included in Bullock’s edition of the Rime, a considerable creative output. Colonna’s love poetry focuses on the memory of her dead mate, Ferrante Francesco d’Avalos, who is transformed into a spiritual guide for the grieving lover in the manner of Francesco Petrarch’s fourteenth-century commemorations of the deceased Laura. Colonna adheres to the imagery and language of Petrarch’s Canzoniere or, as it was known in the sixteenth century, the Rime. The Marchesa’s strong faith and ethical character emerge in the elevated and dignified tone of the compositions. As time progressed, her verse took on a more devout tone, as the subject matter shifted from earthly to divine love, from d’Avalos to Jesus. The Rime also includes assorted epistolary verse addressed to various friends, acquaintances, and public figures, which is of cultural but not necessarily artistic interest. The immediate popularity of Colonna’s poetry in her own day was due in large measure to her social identity: the writing of a celebrated icon of the highest echelon of society inevitably fascinated the general reading public. But it was Colonna’s adherence to the conventions of Petrarchism, the reigning standard for all serious love poetry, that carried an innate aesthetic mark of approval. The emulator’s text was considered enriched, not diminished, by the overt presence of the canonical subtext. Moreover, the philosophical and theological underpinnings of both the amatory and sacred poetry utilize the discourse of Christian neo-Platonism, also a mainstream model suitable for adoption by a female writer. As both woman and poet, Vittoria Colonna ideally reflected the taste and values of her society. Predominantly sonnets, the Rime’s hundreds of compositions are connected stylistically and metaphorically by their adherence to Petrarchan prosody interpreted through the prism of Pietro Bembo’s teachings. The major proponent of imitation as a literary norm, Bembo was also a personal friend and literary mentor to the Marchesa. The surviving

VITTORIA COLONNA love poetry was modeled on the second section of the Canzoniere. In both texts, the lost beloved, devoid of their physical beings, have ascended to their new role of heavenly beacon or guide. They are idealized and spiritualized, projecting all that is good and holy. Colonna’s rime amorose move between the description of grief and loss and the exalted praise of the virtues and person of the beloved. As a female writer operating in a male discourse, Colonna was at a disadvantage. To counter this disequilibrium, she emphasized the beloved’s maleness, stressing the virile qualities of the dead spouse, which contrast to her yearning fragility and suffering femininity. The emerging portrait is more idol than man. Eventually the lyric D’Avalos attains apotheosis, transformed into a shining sun that lightens the darkness of her grief. Colonna’s selfrepresentation as the mournful widow mirrors her culture’s expectations of exemplary femininity: faithful even in death, honorable in her behavior and thought, and pious. Colonna’s love lyrics emphasize the Christian and spiritualized version of Petrarchan love and function as high-minded tributes to the departed. However, sixteenth-century sources mention earlier poems directed to the living d’Avalos, which have been lost. Only one ‘‘Epistola’’ (Epistle, 1512) survives. Titled ‘‘Excelso mio signor’’ (My Great Lord), this letter in verse was addressed to her husband after his capture in the Battle of Ravenna. Joseph Gibaldi connected the style of this composition to Colonna’s early classical period and noted its debt to Ovid’s Heroides: The ‘‘Epistola’’ offers an atypical representation of d’Avalos, highlighting the suffering and solitude inflicted on the Marchesa by his ambition and penchant for war (‘‘Vittoria Colonna: Child, Woman and Poet,’’ 1987). In the long poems of the Heroides, the narrators are women; thus, Colonna might have found a prototype for a feminine discourse before turning to the Petrarchan model. Some feminist critics, such as Luciana Borsetto, consider Colonna’s tendency to lift lines, imagery, and metaphors directly from Petrarch as a female reproduction of the male canon (‘‘Narciso ed Eco,’’ 1983). However, even when employing the codified language of Petrarchism, Colonna was able to convey deep feeling and individuality in her best verse. Vittoria Colonna’s consolatory poems laid the foundation for her meditations on faith, as her attention shifted from man to God, and she gradually embraced militant evangelical Christianity. Human love became a spiritual quest for moral elevation, a motif present in Petrarch and revisited

by Colonna in a neo-Platonic context. Borrowing the imagery from the Renaissance neo-Platonic notion of man’s intermediate position between immanence and transcendence, the poet visualized her Ferrante as a rung on the ladder leading to God. In such sacred love, the union of purified souls is realized, as the material self is no longer central. In her devotional verse, Colonna transformed her beloved into the celestial body of Christ. But the new sun of her religious verse was the Savior: Jesus, like d’Avalos before him, was the solid rock to which the poet secured her Petrarchan ‘‘frail bark,’’ safe from the storm. As early as 1538, she disclosed a poetics of faith in several sonnets that posit the crucified Christ as her primary source of artistic inspiration; an instrument for exploring the relationship of the soul to the Creator, the anguish of spiritual uncertainty, and the need for divine forgiveness. The aging Colonna was captivated by the figure of the Savior who died to redeem sinful humanity. Some of her religious poems are considered too intellectual or doctrinaire, lacking passion and an individual voice, but they are relevant to understanding her theological beliefs on controversial issues of dogma, such as the nature of salvation and redemption by faith alone. In the 1530s, Colonna befriended Michelangelo Buonarotti, in whom she discovered a kinship of spirit that grew into a powerful platonic love. Spiritually attracted to ascetic reformist ideals, she was challenged as possibly heretical by the Catholic hierarchy during the 1540s. She died before she could be formally investigated by the Inquisition. Scholars interested in the religious history of the Counter-Reformation in Italy value both the Rime and Colonna’s correspondence as important historical documents. The Marchesa’s Carteggio (Correspondence, 1889) provides a window to her spirit, thoughts, and ethos, while depicting the taste, expectations, and concerns of her class. But it is Vittoria Colonna’s poetry that remains her greatest contribution to literary studies.

Biography Born in Marino (Rome) in 1490, Vittoria Colonna was the daughter of Fabrizio and Agnese of Montefeltro. As an aristocrat, she received a solid humanistic education; she entered an arranged marriage to Neapolitan Ferrante Francesco d’Avalos, the Marquis of Pescara, in 1509. A distinguished military leader, d’Avalos was often away fighting for Pope Paul III or for Emperor Charles V. At their estate on the island of Ischia, she opened her court 493

VITTORIA COLONNA to artists and intellectuals, including poets Jacopo Sannazaro, Bernardo Tasso, and Cariteo. Childless, the Marchesa raised an orphaned cousin, Alfonso d’Avalos del Vasto. The Marquis died of wounds sustained in the battle of Pavia, 1525. The Marquesa left Naples for Rome and entered the convent of San Silvestro but did not take vows. She initiated Sunday gatherings focused on theological study and discussion as well as the arts and was involved with religious reformers such as Juan Valde`s, Reginald Pole, Cardinal Contarini, and Bernardino Ochino. In poor health and grieving the loss of her adopted son, she suffered a debilitating illness while residing in Viterbo in 1543. Vittoria Colonna died in the Benedictine convent of Sant’Anna in Rome, 25 February 1547, Michelangelo at her side. FIORA A. BASSANESE Selected Works Poetry ‘‘Rime de la Divina Vittoria Colonna Marchesa di Pescara, nuovamente stampate,’’ 1538. ‘‘Tutte le Rime della illustrissima ed eccellentissima Signora Vittoria Colonna marchesa di Pescara, con l’esposizione del Signor Rinaldo Corso nuovamente mandate in luce da Girolamo Ruscelli,’’ 1558. ‘‘Rime di Vittoria Colonna marchesana di Pescara corrette ed illustrate con la vita della medesima scritta da G.B. Rota,’’ 1760. ‘‘Le Rime di Vittoria Colonna corrette su i testi a penna e pubblicate con la vita della medesima dal cavaliere P. E. Visconti: Si aggiungono le poesie omesse nelle precedenti edizioni e le inedite,’’ 1840. ‘‘Rime e Lettere di Vittoria Colonna,’’ edited by Guglielmo Enrico Saltini, 1860. ‘‘Rime,’’ edited by Alan Bullock, 1982. ‘‘Sonetti: In morte di Francesco Ferrante d’Avalos marchese di Pescara,’’ edited by Tobia R. Toscano, 1998. ‘‘Sonnets for Michelangelo: A Bilingual Edition,’’ edited and translated by Abigail Brundin, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Other Carteggio, edited by Ermanno Ferrero and Giuseppe Mu¨ller, 1889; enlarged edition with Domenico Tondi, 1892.

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Further Reading Bainton, Roland H., Women of the Reformation in Germany and Italy, Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1971. Borsetto, Luciana, ‘‘Narciso ed Eco: Figura e scrittura nella lirica femminile del Cinquecento: Esemplificazioni ed appunti,’’ in Nel cerchio della luna: Figure di donna in alcuni testi del XVI secolo, edited by Marina Zancan, Venice: Marsilio, l983. Burckhardt, Jacob, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, New York: Macmillan, 1890. De Blasi, Jolanda, Le scrittrici italiane dalle origini al 1800, Florence: Nemi, 1930. Gibaldi, Joseph, ‘‘Vittoria Colonna: Child, Woman and Poet,’’ in Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation, edited by Katharina M. Wilson, AthensLondon: University of Georgia Press, 1987 (includes translations of some poetry). Jerrold, Maud F., Vittoria Colonna, with Some Account of her Friends and her Times, London: Dent-New York: Dutton, 1906. Jung, Eva-Maria, ‘‘Vittoria Colonna: Between Reformation and Counter-Reformation,’’ Review of Religion, 15 (1950–1951): 144–159. Mazzetti, Mila, ‘‘La poesia come vocazione morale: Vittoria Colonna,’’ Rassegna della letteratura italiana, 77 (1973): 58–99. Mazzone, Rocco, Vittoria Colonna e il suo canzoniere, Marsala: Martoglio, 1897. McAuliffe, Dennis J., ‘‘The Language of Spiritual Renewal in the Poetry of Pre-Tridentine Rome: The Case of Vittoria Colonna as Advocate for Reform,’’ Veltro: Rivista della civilta` italiana, 40(1996): 196–199. McAuliffe, Dennis J., ‘‘Neoplatonism in Vittoria Colonna’s Poetry: From the Secular to the Divine,’’ in Ficino and Renaissance Neoplatonism, edited by Konrad Eisenbichler and Olga Zorzi, Pugliese, Toronto: Dovehouse, 1986. McAuliffe, Dennis J., ‘‘Vittoria Colonna and Renaissance Poetics: Convention and Society,’’ in Il Rinascimento: Aspetti e problemi attuali, edited by Vittore Branca et al., Florence: Olschki, 1982. Rabitti, Giovanna, ‘‘Vittoria Colonna, Bembo e Firenze: Un caso di recezione e qualche postilla,’’ Studi e problemi di critica testuale, 44(1992): 127–155. Russell, Rinaldina, ‘‘The Mind’s Pursuit of the Divine: A Survey of Secular and Religious Themes in Vittoria Colonna’s Sonnets,’’ 26:1(Spring 1992): 14–27. Therault, Suzanne, Un Ce´nacle humaniste de la Renaissance autour de Vittoria Colonna chatelaine d’Ischia, ParisFlorence: Didier-Sansoni Antiquariato, 1968.

GIOVANNI COMISSO

COMIC MYSTERIES See Mistero Buffo (Work by Dario Fo)

GIOVANNI COMISSO (1895–1969) Giovanni Comisso represents an exceptional case in the history of early-twentieth-century Italian fiction. Because of his irregular education, his style has always been difficult to define and classify. Although many critics initially welcomed his first works for their youthful novelty, they later modified or repudiated their initial enthusiasm. At the beginning of his literary career, Comisso was frequently compared to Gabriele D’Annunzio. There were superficial similarities in their prose style, and both seemed to embody the myth of the writer who drew on his life experiences for his subject matter. While serving in the army during World War I, Comisso wrote some verses published as Poesie (Poems, 1916). His first prose work was Il porto dell’amore (The Seaport of Love, 1924), a collection of short stories that closely reflected his experiences with D’Annunzio’s legionaries during the occupation of Fiume in 1919, undertaken to protest the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles, which had not given Italy that Dalmatian city. These stories, along with Giorni di guerra (War Days, 1930), based on notebooks and a journal written during the war, seek to express life in a direct and immediate way, especially in relation to nature. For Comisso, the immediacy of life, the events of the war, and the adventure of Fiume were vivid enough constitute literature in themselves; they only need to be transcribed. Giorni di guerra is in fact a sort of diary about a group of soldiers crossing the Veneto countryside after the Caporetto defeat. This directness is found also in Gente di mare (People of the Sea, 1928), a collection of short stories in a veristic style about the everyday life of people living on the Veneto coast.

Comisso had a rare aptitude for choosing the simplest and easiest and yet sharpest and most appropriate words to describe any fact or situation. However, it would be wrong to consider his prose as merely reproducing simple sensations. Comisso’s directness is associated with his profound relationship with the culture and language of the Veneto. Although he never wrote dialect literature, his language and his grammar are best understood in the Venetian cultural context. Although the atmosphere of the Veneto region molded him, Comisso always kept his own identity. He certainly had a strong literary instinct, but this instinct was nurtured by an education that, however irregular, played an important role in his formation. Thus, in opposition to earlier critical judgments, recently scholars have begun to recognize the presence of literary techniques in his work and the importance of his readings of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Nietzsche. It would also be simplistic to consider Comisso’s political beliefs as hovering on the margins of official Fascism. His collaborations with Fascist newspapers like Camicia nera and his nationalistic positions might lead to this conclusion, but Comisso is better understood as a strongly individualistic writer who took an aesthetic approach to events. The fiction of the 1940s, and in particular the novels Un inganno d’amore (A Deceit of Love, 1942), Capriccio e illusione (Caprice and Illusion, 1947) and Gioventu` che muore (Dying Youth, 1949), treat a theme with profound autobiographical importance for Comisso—that of the older man or woman who falls in love with a much younger person. Although they observe the form of a 495

GIOVANNI COMISSO heterosexual romance, these works were in fact inspired by Comisso’s own passions, first for his young house servant Bruno and then for the 16year-old poet Guido Bottegal, who was killed by partisans during the war. Capriccio e illusione in particular is a moving story about the conflict between human emotions and the harsh historical reality in which the two protagonists, the mature Adele and the young Guido, find themselves caught. This autobiographical element is also found in Comisso’s last works, such as Le mie stagioni (My Seasons, 1951), a memoir-like narrative in which the author recollected the salient moments of his life, and La mia casa in campagna (My Home in the Country, 1958), which celebrates the peace of his home in Conche di Zero Branco, in the countryside near Treviso. Several of Comisso’s works belong to the genre of travel literature: Cina-Giappone (China-Japan, 1932) and Amori d’Oriente (Loves of the Orient, 1949), about the Far East; L’italiano errante per l’Italia (An Italian Roaming Italy, 1937) and La Sicilia (Sicily, 1953) about Italy; and finally Questa e` Parigi (This Is Paris, 1931), Viaggi felici (Happy Journeys, 1949), and Approdo in Grecia (Landing in Greece, 1954), about Europe. These works were, for the most part, the result of commissioned articles that the author, who traveled widely, sent to several Italian newspapers. Journalism offered him the opportunity to learn a new form of writing that was to play an important role in his later works. However, it would be difficult to find a real development in Comisso’s style throughout his life. Although it is difficult to classify his work or assign it to any particular genre, he cannot be considered an experimental writer. His prose expresses a strict connection between words and facts. Although very few of his works have been translated, in June 1930 Samuel Beckett did publish an English version of a tale from Giorni di guerra under the title ‘‘The Homecomings’’ in the journal This Quarter.

Biography Giovanni Comisso was born in Treviso on October 3, 1895, son of Antonio, a wealthy merchant, and Claudia Salsa. In 1914, having failed his secondaryschool graduation exam, he enlisted as a volunteer in the army. His service lasted six years, during which he took part enthusiastically in World War I. He participated in the occupation of Fiume together with D’Annunzio’s legionaries, 496

1919. Although he collaborated with newspapers and periodicals of Fascist tendency, he did not enroll in any political party because of his strong individualism. He earned a law degree at the University of Siena, 1924, but never practiced law. He was awarded the Bagutta Prize for Gente di mare, 1929. Comisso traveled extensively in Europe and North Africa, writing reportage for the Gazzetta del popolo and other newspapers, including La stampa, Il corriere della sera, and Il messaggero. He visited China, Japan, and Russia, 1930. He remained tied to the Veneto countryside for most of his life. Despite several friends in the Fascist party, in 1935 he had problems with censorship. He was awarded the Strega Prize for the short stories Un gatto che attraversa la strada, 1954, and the Motefeltro Prize for career achievement, 1964. In September 1968 he was hospitalized in Treviso, where he died on January 21, 1969. NICOLA FUOCHI Selected Works Collections Opere, edited by Rolando Damiani and Nico Naldini, Milan: Mondadori, 2002.

Poetry ‘‘Poesie,’’ 1916.

Fiction Il porto dell’amore, 1924; revised as Al vento dell’Adriatico, 1928; definitive edition as Il porto dell’amore, 1959. Gente di mare, 1928. Giorni di guerra, 1930 Il delitto di Fausto Diamante, 1933. Storia di un patrimonio, 1933. Felicita` dopo la noia, 1940. Un inganno d’amore, 1942. Capriccio e illusione, 1947 Gioventu` che muore, 1949. Una donna al giorno, 1949. Le mie stagioni, 1951. Capricci italiani, 1952. Un gatto attraversa la strada, 1954. La mia casa di campagna, 1958. Satire italiane, 1960. Gioco d’infanzia, edited by Nico Naldini, 1987. Solstizio metafisico, edited by Annalisa Colusso, 1999.

Travel Writing Questa e` Parigi, 1931. Cina-Giappone, 1932; revised as Donne gentili, 1958. L’italiano errante per l’Italia, 1937. Amori d’Oriente, 1949. Viaggi felici, 1949. La Sicilia, 1953. Approdo in Grecia, 1954.

COMMEDIA DELL’ARTE Memoir Diario 1951–1964, 1969.

Letters Trecento lettere di Giovanni Comisso a Maria e Natale Mazzola`: 1925–1968, edited by Enzo Dematte´, 1972. Caro Toni, 1983. Il giovane Comisso e le sue lettere a casa, 1914–1920, edited by Luigi Urettini, 1985. Vita nel tempo: lettere, 1905–1968, edited by Nico Naldini, 1989.

Further Reading Accame Bobbio, Aurelia, Giovanni Comisso, Milan: Mursia, 1973. Bertacchini, Renato, ‘‘Comisso, e Pisis e il dannunzianesimo,’’ in Figure e problemi di narrativa contemporanea, Bologna: Cappelli, 1960.

Bertacchini, Renato, ‘‘Giovanni Comisso,’’ in Letteratura italiana. Novecento. I contemporanei, vol. 6, Milan: Marzorati, 1979. Duncan, Derek, ‘‘The Queerness of Colonial Space: Giovanni Comisso’s Travels with Fascism,’’ in In a Queer Place: Sexuality and Belonging in British and European Contexts, edited by Kaye Chedgzoy et al., Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002. Naldini, Nico, Vita di Giovanni Comisso, Turin: Einaudi, 1985. Naldini, Nico, and Cino Boccazzi (editors), Album Comisso, Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1995. Pullini, Giorgio, Comisso, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1969. Pullini, Giorgio (editor), Giovanni Comisso, Florence: Olschki, 1983. Ricorda, Ricciarda, ‘‘Rassegna Comissiana (1969–1989),’’ Quaderni Veneti, 11(1990), 189–229.

COMMEDIA DELL’ARTE Commedia dell’arte is the ambiguous but common designation for the type of theater, featuring masked characters and schematic plots (a canovaccio), that arose in Italy between the mid-sixteenth and mid-eighteenth centuries and became widespread in France and throughout Europe. It is also a genre that inspired the most diverse theatrical experiences. The term, initially part of actors’ jargon, first appears in written literature in the eighteenth century controversy between Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi, between the ‘‘reformed’’ authors’ theater and the traditional actors’ theater. Goldoni’s Il teatro comico (The Comic Theater, 1750) offers the first full discussion of the old commedia dell’arte. Goldoni is followed by Giuseppe Baretti, commenting on the teatro comico and Gozzi’s Il teatro comico all’osteria del Pellegrino (The Comic Theater in the Pilgrim’s Tavern, 1760). Yet none of these works consider commedia dell’arte as a ‘‘genre.’’ Goldoni helps extend the meaning of the term when he translates it into French in his Me´moires (1784). In addition to its accepted meanings (like ‘‘les come´dies de l’art,’’ ‘‘une come´die de l’art’’) and synonyms (‘‘come´die a` l’impromptu,’’ ‘‘des masques,’’ ‘‘a` l’italienne’’), Goldoni speaks of a tradition of the ‘‘come´die de l’art’’ in the singular.

It is in this particular French usage that commedia becomes almost synonymous with theater: la Come´die Franc¸aise, la Come´die Italienne; la come´die humaine. George and Maurice Sand invested the term with the romantic sense of the theatrical art (for example, the art dramatique of The´ophile Gautier or the art ignoble defended by Jules Janin [Masques et bouffons, 1860]): Nous avons entrepris d’esquisser l’histoire d’un genre de repre´sentation sce´nique qui n’existe plus en France, et qui n’y a meˆme jamais porte´ son nom propre. En effet, ce genre s’est appele´ chez nous come´die a` l’impromptu, come´die improvise´e, come´die sur canevas. Aucune de ces de´nominations n’exprime suffisamment ce que les Italiens ont appele´ comedia dell’arte, c’est-a`-dire, litte´ralement, come´die de l’art, et, par extension, la come´die parfaite, le nec plus ultra de l’art. Nous prions donc le lecteur franc¸ais d’accepter, une fois pour toutes, ce titre italien, que rien ne saurait remplacer avec avantage, la comedia dell’arte We have attempted to sketch the history of a genre of scenic representation which no longer exists in France, and which has never even born its proper name there. In fact we call this genre impromptu comedy, improvised comedy, comedy on a schematic plot. None of these descriptions sufficiently expresses what the Italians have called comedia dell’arte, that is to say, literally, comedy of art, and, by extension, perfect comedy, the ne plus

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COMMEDIA DELL’ARTE ultra of art. We therefore ask the French reader to accept, once and for all, this Italian title, which nothing could replace to advantage, the comedia dell’arte.

Twentieth-century discussions of the lexical meaning of the expression, which seem limited in comparison, are divided between those who give it the meaning of ‘‘profession’’ (Benedetto Croce, Poesia popolare e poesia d’arte, 1932) and those who see it as a ‘‘singular talent’’ (Allardyce Nicoll, The World of Arlequin, 1962). For a long time the emergence of the commedia dell’arte was attributed to the first actors’ contract (Padua, 1545; year of the beginning of the Council of Trent). Today it is clear that the professional commedia was not born with the first commedia degli zanni (comedy of the zanies). The spread of stanze per la commedia (comedy rooms), suitable for companies to stage their performances, was also an important factor in the creation of a comedy circuit. The use of masks did not itself separate the commedia from the medieval theater, where underworld figures are often represented by masks. Ferdinando Taviani and Mirella Schino suggested that the commedia matured into a theatrical phenomenon only when, in addition to these three aspects (professionalism, circuit, mask) women also took part in productions. Women, especially cultured courtesans and poetesses, often brought to their comic characters a knowledge of the classic fabula of Plautus and Terence (Il segreto della commedia dell’arte, 1982). Among the most famous of these women were Lucretia Senese, the first woman to have a contract (1564), Vittoria Piissimi, Silvia Roncagli, Isabella Andreini, Vincenza Armani, Diana Ponti, and Virginia Ramponi. Beginning in the mid-sixteenth century, there are records of the first tourne´es of companies to Nordlingen, Nuremberg, Strasburg, Vienna, Munich, London, Poland, Spain (to Seville, Toledo, Guadalajara, and Madrid) and above all to France, where from 1570 onward, legendary visits by the Confidenti, the Gelosi, and the Accesi followed one after the other. It was in 1600, during one of these visits, that Tristano Martinelli made a great success of the maschera of Arlecchino. Arlechino, settling into the name and into costume of a pulp character from Nordic medieval legends, acquires the attributes (diabolical, jesterlike, and folkloric features) that make him the first paradoxical emblem of things ‘‘made in Italy.’’ The spread of the commedia throughout Europe led to the creation of permanent theaters in Madrid, Vienna, Dresden, and Warsaw, but above all in Paris, where the Ancien The´aˆtre 498

Italien was founded (1660–1697) by Domenico Locatelli (Trivellino), Domenico Biancolelli (Harlequin), Angelo Costantini (Mezetin), Evaristo Gherardi (Harlequin), and Tiberio Fiorilli (Scaramouche). For a considerable period, this company shared quarters at the Hotel de Bourgogne with Molie`re’s troupe. After the famous ‘‘expulsion’’ of the Italians (supposedly because they were censored, but actually because they were competition for the native French troupe), the theater was reborn as the Come´die Italienne (1716–1780; after 1762, directed by Goldoni) through the efforts of the chief comedy actor Luigi Riccoboni (Lelio), Antonio Tommaso Visentini (Harlequin), and later with the Pantaloons Antonio Collalto and Carlo Antonio Veronese, and the last Harlequin, Carlo Bertinazzi. The company by now consisted of naturalized Frenchmen (Ange Lazzari). It learned to live with the bonfires on which the French Revolutionaries burned maschera characters, which they regarded as emblems of a feudal and immovable society, in the public squares. The names of these pioneers and their creations become legends, with or without a maschera: in the sixteenth century, Alberto Naselli (Zan Ganassa), Tristano and Drusiano Martinelli (Harlequin), Flaminio Scala (Flavio), Adriano Valerini (Aurelio), Giulio Pasquati (Pantaloon), Giovanni Pellesini (Pedrolino), Giovanni Battista Amorevoli (Franceschina), Francesco Andreini (Capitan Spavento), Pier Maria Cecchini (Frittellino); in the seventeenth century, Silvio Fiorillo (Capitan Mattamoros and Pulcinella), Francesco Gabrielli (Scapino), Niccolo` Barbieri (Beltrame), Giovanni Battista Andreini (Lelio); in the eighteenth century, Attanasio Zannoni (Brighella) and Antonio Sacchi (Truffaldino). There is a vast, local literature on these figures and, today, a renewed interest in their biographies as a means of understanding the commedia. The actors skillfully promoted these historic companies (Uniti, Desiosi, Fedeli, and Cortesi), publicizing their famous battles against censorship and above all publishing their productions, from the burlesque—Tristano Martinelli, Compositions de Rhe´torique (Compositions of Rhetoric, 1601), to the first collections of texts—Francesco Andreini, Le bravure del Capitano Spavento (The Courageous Deeds of Capitano Spavento, 1607)— and schematic plots—Flaminio Scala, Il teatro delle favole rappresentative (The Theater of Representative Tales, 1611)—up to the first theoretical elaborations of the commedia in Pier Maria Cecchini, Brevi discorsi intorno alla Comedia

COMMEDIA DELL’ARTE (Brief Discourses on Comedy, 1616), and Niccolo` Barbieri, La supplica (The Plea, 1634). Of particular interest, especially in light of avant-garde recuperations of the commedia, is the characteristic way of producing shows that combine the maschera and canovaccio. The maschera (the more ancient heritage) ensured great visibility and immediate recognition, even in situations en plein air; furthermore, the mask enabled the actor to improvise easily within a given structure. The schematic plot of the canovaccio, a development of the mature commedia dell’arte, described the ‘‘actions’’ and intrigues of the character. It staged entrances and exits, the variety of types and their opposition to each other, and comic and dramatic progressions with spectacular effects. In combining maschera and canovaccio, the first companies were able to produce shows more quickly and to keep more of them in their repertory for a longer time. Even during the long tourne´es, they were able to adapt themselves to open and closed spaces, to a popular or a refined public, to Italians and foreigners. At this stage, the first inventories of schematic plots came primarily from Anglo-Saxon historiography: Nicoll was the first to list 760 titles, followed by Lea, who collected around 700. Pandolfi published a slightly more extensive list, providing, with few exceptions, a summary of each plot with brief comments. Heck, in the most extensive bibliography of the commedia dell’arte up to the present day, listed the names and place of origin of 820 titles. Zorzi left his transcription of the main Italian collections in existence incomplete in order to pursue a comparative analysis of the plots. The commedia as a genre, indeed as an archetype, can be traced from romantic confusion perpetuated by the Sands, who in their first ‘‘encyclopedia’’ of the commedia dell’arte annexed the French foires to the phenomenon, through the Ope´ra Comique, Goldoni, Gozzi, and Ruzzante; the French pantomime; the English arlequinade; and some fixed Italian types (the Milanese meneghino of Carlo Maria Maggi, 1697; the stenterello of Luigi Del Buono, 1776, to the nineteenth-century Pulcinellas of the Cammaranos and the Petitos). It was transformed by the avant-garde in the first quarter of the twentieth century. At first the mask and the image of the tumbler as a solitary, acrobatic artist were adopted, as Jean Starobinski stated, by the figurative arts: James Ensor, George Rouault, and Pablo Picasso, the Futurists, and even by abstractionism (Portrait de l’artiste en saltimbanque, 1970). The commedia then exerted a strong influence on dancing, on the creations

of Mikhail Fokine (Arlequinade, 1905; Carnaval, 1910; Adventures of Harlequin, 1922; The Immortal Pierrot, 1925), of Leonid Myasin (Petruska, 1916; Pulcinella, 1921), and above all on the Russian ballets of Sergei Diagilev. In 1917, these various strains of the European avant-garde converged in the extraordinary production of Parade (book by Jean Cocteau, music by Eric Satie, scenes and costumes by Picasso). The epic poem of the comedians and the romantic rhetoric of the performance that ‘‘must go on’’ were on the other hand preferred by opera: Le maschere (premie`re 1901) by Pietro Mascagni; Pierrot lunaire (premie`re 1912) by Arnold Scho¨nberg; Arlecchino e Turandot by Ferruccio Busoni (premie`re 1917). The Russians, with their formalistic taste, rediscovered the spectacular element and acrobatics of the commedia for modern theater. Vsevolod Mejerchol’d staged Balagancik (The Tumblers’ Hut, 1906) by Aleksa`ndr Blok, Sarf Kolombiny (Colombina’s Scarf, 1910) from the pantomime by Arthur Schnitzler, Arlekin chodataj svadeb (Harlequin Para Faun, 1910) by Vladimir Solov’ev. He founded a magazine, whose name was taken from Carlo Gozzi’s theatrical fable Ljubov’k trem apel’sinam (The Love of Three Oranges, 1914), in which he published essays, schematic plots, and debates. His collaborators included Konstantin Miklasevsij, noted for transposing elements drawn from iconography into the ‘‘biomechanics’’ of the actor; Nicolaj Evreinov, who staged his own Harlequin work Veselaja smert’ (The Joyous Death, 1909); Aleksa`ndr Tairov who staged two tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann (1920 and 1922); Solov’ev who wrote and managed Prodelki Smeral’diny (The Cunning Tricks of Smeraldina, 1921) from an Italian scenario; Evgenij Vachtangov, who staged a historic Turandot for which Konstantin Stanislavskij congratulated him. In France, Jacques Copeau moved to the country with a band of dreamers, destined to become the future Copiaus, in search of a new public and new conditions for the actor. Between 1924 and 1930, they produced Arlequin magicien (Harlequin the Magician), Les sottises de Gilles (The Follies of Gilles), Gilles cherche un me´tier (Gilles Looks for a Profession), and Jean Bourguignon. His entourage, Le´on Chancerel and Pierre Duchartre, Jean Daste´ and Michel SaintDenis produced essays, compositions, and shows that constituted popular theater in France. In the meantime, there was a renewed interest in the history of the commedia in Italy, thanks to the work of Luigi Rasi, Benedetto Croce, Ireneo Sanesi, and Gordon Craig, who founded a magazine in Florence, The Mask (1908), and in Europe, with the 499

COMMEDIA DELL’ARTE essays of Miklacˇevskij, who in 1914 summarized the discoveries that followed on the experiences of Mejerchol’d; and of Duchartre, who in 1925 summarized the research of Copeau and Chancerel. The symbolic closing of this great cycle of revivals of the commedia dell’arte was perhaps the 1934 Volta Convention in Rome, presided over by Luigi Pirandello, in which Renato Simoni accused the Russians of having turned the idea of the commedia into a fetish. While Tairov defended that great season, Stepan Mokul’skij, risking selfcriticism, confronted the directors and historians who had made a myth out of the commedia. Some productions by the Teatro di Regia remain memorable: two productions of Servitore di due padroni (Servant of Two Masters), one directed by Max Reinhardt, with Hermann Thimig as Harlequin (Vienna 1924), and the other by Giorgio Strehler, with Marcello Moretti (Milan 1947, since 1952 with the leather masks recuperated by Amleto Sartori). Other memorable productions were La commedia degli zanni (The Comedy of the Zanies, 1956) staged by Giovanni Poli, organizer of the Teatro A l’Avogaria; some performances by Ariane Mnouchkine, Le Capitaine Fracasse (The Captain Fracasse, 1964) and L’age d’or (The Golden Age, 1975), in which, as Copeau, he attempted to make the masks contemporary. Between the 1960s and 1970s, militant groups such as the San Francisco Mime Troupe, the Florentine Pupi e Fresedde, and the TAG Teatro in Venice, staged a succession of revivals that led to the 1er Festival International de Commedia dell’Arte in Val de Marne in 1983. The current heirs working in this ‘‘reinvented’’ tradition are yet to be determined: They may be the proselytes of French mime, from Jacques Lecoq to Marcel Marceau, the children of art like Peppe Barra, the actors coming from the experience of Strehler’s Servitore (Enrico Bonavera and Renzo Fabbris), or lone researchers, such as the female Harlequin Claudia Contin; or, above all, the marvelous, isolated case of Dario Fo, who relates his experience in Manuale minimo dell’attore (The Actor’s Minimum Manual, 1987). It can generally be said that the theater conserves intact the desire to decipher the commedia on stage. Recent work has been done of the iconography of the commedia by Jacques Callot, Claude Gillot, and Antoine Watteau. Attempts have also been made to conduct anthropological researches on the gestural meanings of the masks, comparing them to those in oriental theater. But the main source of interest today is, perhaps, the corpus of approximately 1,000 canovacci that have survived, 500

representing theatrical writing across many centuries. Flaminio Scala, in his prologue to Il finto marito (The Fake Husband, 1619) was the first to suggest that drama of real ‘‘actions’’ around which focused of the work of Stanislavski, Copeau, and Antonin Artaud. Pier Maria Cecchini, reflecting on the saying ‘‘canovacci lombardi, lazzi napoletani’’ (Northern plots, Southern gags), anticipated the twentieth-century problem of editing the commedia and understanding its effect on the public. The explosive theatrical effect of having ethnic, linguistic, and social opposites confront each other is explored in the theater of Jerzy Grotowski or Eugenio Barba. For this reason the vast corpus of surviving scenarios seems likely to be the next frontier for studies on the commedia dell’arte, helping us to penetrate the ‘‘secrets’’ of Italian theater and the fascination with its masks. ROBERTO CUPPONE

Further Reading Apollonio, Mario, Storia della commedia dell’arte, RomeMilan: Augustea, 1930. Attinger, Gustave, L’Esprit de la Commedia dell’Arte dans le The´aˆtre Franc¸ais, Paris-Neuchatel: Librairie The´atrale, 1950. Barbieri, Nicolo`, La supplica, discorso famigliare di Nicolo` Barbieri detto Beltrame diretto a coloro che scrivendo o parlando de’ comici trascurando i meriti delle azzioni virtuose. Lettera per que’ galantuomini che non sono in tutto critici ne´ affatto balordi, Venezia: M. Ginammi, 1634. Bartoli, Francesco Saverio, Notizie istoriche de’ comici italiani che fiorirono intorno all’anno MDC fino ai giorni presenti, 2 vols., Padua: Conzatti, 1782. Cecchini, Pier Maria, Brevi discorsi intorno alla Comedia, Comedianti & Spettatori di P. M. Cecchini Comico Acceso et Gentilhuomo di S. M. Cesarea dove si comprende quali rappresentationi si possino ascoltare e permettere, Naples: Roncagliolo, 1616. Cecchini, Pier Maria, Frutti delle moderne comedie et avvisi a chi le recita, Padua: Guareschi, 1628. Croce, Benedetto, Poesia popolare e poesia d’arte, Bari: Laterza, 1932. Cuppone, Roberto, CDA. Il mito della Commedia dell’Arte nell’Ottocento francese, Rome: Bulzoni, 1999. Duchartre, Pierre Louis, La Commedia dell’Arte et ses enfants, Paris: Editions d’Art et Industrie, 1955. Ferrone, Siro, Attori mercanti corsari. La commedia dell’arte in Europa tra Cinque e Seicento, Turin: Einaudi, 1993. Fo, Dario, Manuale minimo dell’attore, Turin: Einaudi, 1987. Gambelli, Delia, Arlecchino a Parigi. I: Dall’inferno alla corte del Re Sole, Rome: Bulzoni, 1993. Heck, Thomas, Commedia dell’Arte: A Guide to the Primary and Secondary Literature, New York-London: Garland, 1988.

COMMUNISM Lea, K. M., Italian Popular Comedy: A Study in the Commedia dell’Arte 1560–1630, with Special Reference to the English Stage, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934. Mariti, Luciano (editor), La Commedia dell’Arte. Alle origini del teatro moderno. Atti del convegno di studi. Pontedera 28–30 maggio 1976, Rome: Bulzoni, 1980. Marotti, Ferruccio, and Giovanna Romei, La commedia dell’arte e la societa` barocca: la professione del teatro, Rome: Bulzoni, 1991. Mic, Constant (Konstantin Miklasˇevskij), La Commedia dell’Arte, ou le the´aˆtre des come´diens italiens des XVIe, XVIle et XVIIIe sie`cles, Paris: Schiffrin, aux e´ditions de la Ple´iade, 1927. Molinari, Cesare, La Commedia dell’Arte, Milan: Mondadori, 1985. Nicoll, Allardyce, The World of Arlequin: A Critical Study of the Commedia dell’Arte, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1963. Pandolfi, Vito, La Commedia dell’Arte. Storia e testi, 6 vols., Florence: Sansoni, 1957–1961. Perrucci, Andrea, Dell’arte rappresentativa premeditata et all’improvviso. Parti due. Giovevole non solo a chi si diletta di rappresentare, ma a’ predicatori, oratori, accademici e curiosi, Naples: Mutio, 1699.

Riccoboni, Luigi, Discorso della Commedia all’improvviso e scenari inediti, edited by Irene Mamczarz, Milan: Il Polifilo, 1973. Riccoboni, Luigi, Histoire du The´aˆtre Italien depuis la de´cadence de la Come´die Latine, avec un catalogue des Trage´dies et Come´dies imprime´es depuis l’an 1500 jusqu’a` l’an 1600 et une dissertation sur la trage´die moderne, Paris: Delormel, 1728. Richards, Kenneth, and Laura Richards, The Commedia dell’arte: A Documentary History, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Sand, Maurice, Masques et bouffons. Come´die Italienne, textes et dessins par Maurice Sand, gravures par A. Manceau, pre´face par Georges Sand, 2 vols., Paris: Le´vy, 1860. Starobinski, Jean, Portrait de l’artiste en saltimbanque, Gene`ve: Slatkine, 1970. Taviani, Ferdinando, and Mirella Schino, Il segreto della commedia dell’arte. La memoria delle compagnie italiane del XVI, XVII e XVIII secolo, Florence: La Casa Usher, 1982. Tessari, Roberto, Commedia dell’Arte: la Maschera e l’Ombra, Milan: Mursia, 1981. Zorzi, Ludovico, L’attore, la commedia, il drammaturgo, Turin: Einaudi, 1990.

COMMUNISM Italian Communism owes its peculiar theoretical structure to Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), whose capital work Quaderni dal carcere (Prison Notebooks) was published in six volumes posthumously after World War II under the supervision of the secretary of the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI), Palmiro Togliatti (1893–1964). Gramsci’s original interpretation of Marxism—deeply influenced by Hegelian philosophy, and especially by the Hegelian concepts of dialectics and conscience—was based on the role of intellectuals in the social revolution. In his vision, intellectuals were the conscience of the proletariat, instead of being the ‘‘notary’’ of the status quo, as had been the case with the traditional intellectual (of which, for Gramsci, Benedetto Croce was a symbol). Thus, it would be impossible to have a Communist revolution in Italy comparable to that in Russia because each country and each society has its own laws of evolution: The Italian revolution would have a longer course, based on the development of a precise social and political awareness. For this reason, Gramsci was critical of the Russian way to Communism, based on violence and constraint.

He studied the process of formation of the modern state in Europe and the Italian Risorgimento as a failed revolution, and in a famous letter to Togliatti written on 14 October 1926, he articulated his critique of Russian Communism and Stalin’s rule, defining the Russian revolution as a revolution against Karl Marx’s Capital. For him, Communism was a form of education, a pedagogy, a critical vision of the world, and intellectuals played a central role in the evolution of a community and a state. The main problem in Italy was that the intellectual class had never been independent and autonomous. In this context, Communism was an important evolutionary factor, especially in literature. Italian contemporary literature should free itself from its tradition and its conventions and become a means of knowledge and awareness. Gramscian thought provided the basis for the Alleanza per la cultura, a movement in support of the Socialist and Communist electoral alliance in 1948. Founded in Florence under the leadership of Emilio Sereni (1907–1977), the man in charge for the cultural policy in the Partito Comunista Italiano, the Alleanza includes 501

COMMUNISM among its participants intellectuals and artists such as Sibilla Aleramo, Corrado Alvaro, Anna Banti, Giorgio Bassani, Carlo Bo, Alfonso Gatto, Mario Luzi, Alberto Moravia, Cesare Pavese, Umberto Saba, Vittorio Sereni, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Elio Vittorini, and Cesare Zavattini. In the 1950s, Italian writers were profoundly influenced by Gramsci’s vision, and Pier Paolo Pasolini dedicated to him one of his most important books of poetry, Le ceneri di Gramsci (Gramsci’s Ashes, 1957). In 1949, Edizioni Rinascita published Politica e cultura (Politics and Culture), a collection of essays written by the Russian ideologist and leader Andrei Zdanov (1896–1948), in which the author theorized the development of culture under the strict guidance of politics. However, after 1956, several Italian intellectuals began to move away from Communism as a result of the Krusciov Report on Stalinism and, above all, of the violent invasion of Hungary. Many, including Vittorini and Luca Canali (1925–), declared that the Russian invasion demonstrated that the Communist state was similar to a dictatorship, and they either left the party or were expelled from it. Calvino’s crisis was perfectly described in his novel Il cavaliere inesistente (The Nonexistent Knight, 1959), the symbolic story of a man whose life is reduced to a pure existential illusion. In 1961, Vittorini opened an important debate on the relationship between literature and industry in Il Menabo`, the literary review that he directed. He stressed the inability of Italian culture to describe and understand the new social transformations. A number of novels were in fact trying to portray the problems of industrial society, such as Ottiero Ottieri’s Donnarumma all’assalto (Donnarumma on the Assault, 1959), which describes the life in a factory in southern Italy; Paolo Volponi’s Memoriale (Memorandum, 1962), the story of a worker and the mental illness he contracts while working in an alienating factory environment; Luciano Bianciardi’s La vita agra (The Bitter Life, 1962), on a provincial intellectual who moves to Milan and finds a community deeply changed by the new economic conditions and deprived of its humanity and solidarity; and Lucio Mastronardi’s Il calzolaio di Vigevano (The Shoemaker of Vigevano, 1962), which describes the desire for money of the owner of a small shoe factory. In many of the ‘‘industrial novels’’ published between the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s, the despotic, dictatorial, and destructive aspects of capitalists and capitalism were extensively described and analysed. In the opinion of the Italian Communist leaders, however, 502

capitalism was only a necessary phase of transition toward Communist society: In this perspective, writers who presented a simple, personal, and individual escape from the problems of capitalist society were to be condemned. In this period Calvino published three influential essays, Il mare dell’oggettivita` (The Sea of Objectivity, 1960), La sfida al labirinto (The Challenge of the Labyrinth, 1962), and ‘‘L’antitesi operaia’’ (The Working Class Antithesis, 1964), in which he argued that literature must not be a pure acceptance of the objective world, but—in a Gramscian way—a place of knowledge and awareness. The aim of the literary work is to change the world. However, a new literary and political review founded in 1962, Quaderni piacentini, was very critical of the Partito Comunista Italiano and its cultural and political tradition. A totally new literary style and a totally new way of looking at the world were necessary to describe the new reality. This new style was illustrated by the anthology I Novissimi (The Newest, 1961), edited by Alfredo Giuliani, and by the postmodernist literary movement Gruppo 63, founded at a conference held in Palermo in 1963. Its main theoretical argument was that, since the world has been reduced to a commodity, the literary work has simply to reproduce and show the chaotic commodification of the world. In the late 1960s the student movement began with the idea of freeing Communism from the control of the Party and of bringing the imagination to power. For the generation of 1968, Communism was a personal achievement, obtained by rejecting the state and society and fighting against them. Likewise, the theatrical groups that operated outside the traditional circuits and the cooperatives linked to the far left, including Nuova Scena (in which Dario Fo participated at his most radical), accepted the negative myth of the supposed resigned surrender of social-democracy. During the 1970s, a part of the movement of the ‘‘New Left’’ degenerated, theorizing the necessity of political violence. This was the beginning of the terrorist group Brigate Rosse (Red Brigades), which declared itself the heir of the Resistance against Nazi-Fascism at the end of World War II and fought against the state and the intellectual middle class. On 16 March 1978, the Red Brigades abducted Prime Minister Aldo Moro in Rome and executed him after a 55-day imprisonment and a ‘‘trial’’ held by a self-styled ‘‘popular court.’’ Leonardo Sciascia dedicated a book, L’Affaire Moro (The Moro Affair, 1978), to the letters Moro wrote from his prison. According to many scholars, the terroristic strategy of the 1970s was so extremist

COMMUNISM that Italian intellectuals found it impossible to describe it in essays and novels. Sciascia published a satirical novel, Candido, ovvero un sogno fatto in Sicilia (Candide, or a Dream in Sicily, 1977) that criticized bitterly the 1968 generation and its schematism, ideology, and lack of realism. In order to reintroduce the Gramscian point of view in the public discussion on Communism, in 1975 the publisher Einaudi issued a new edition of Gramsci’s works, edited by the Communist scholar Valentino Gerratana. But for the 1968 movement, Communism was not so much a cultural and political strategy or an intellectual analysis of social and economic structures, but rather a way of life: the quotidian sharing of resources in illegally occupied buildings and the total rejection of society and its laws. Nanni Balestrini described the student and workers’ movement in Turin in his novel Vogliamo tutto (We Want Everything, 1971). Other novels on the movement include Nord e sud uniti nella lotta (North and South United in the Struggle, 1974) and La fabbrica dei pazzi (The Factory of Madmen, 1978), by Vincenzo Guerrazzi (1940–). Even in Umberto Eco’s first novel, Il nome della rosa (The Name of the Rose, 1980), the protagonist’s description of the heretical sects and of their struggle against the institutions (the Pope and the Vatican) during the thirteenth century can be interpreted as the description of the left-wing factions and their fights in Italy. In the 1980s, Communism was primarily considered as the analysis of the beginning of modern capitalism and of the development of neo-capitalism. After the appointment of Mikhail Gorbachev as Secretary of the Russian Communist Party in 1985, and his political and social reforms, the Soviet Union crumbled. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the Partito Comunista Italiano changed its name to Partito Democratico della Sinistra (PDS). A smaller and nostalgic party, Partito della Rifondazione Comunista, was founded in 1991, but it was clear that the history of Italian Communism was at its twilight.

Further Reading Aglietta, Adelaide, Diario di una giurata popolare al processo delle Brigate rosse, Milan: Milano Libri, 1979. Ajello, Nello, Intellettuali e Pci: 1944–1958, Bari: Laterza, 1979. Alicata, Mario, Scritti letterari, Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1968. Asor Rosa, Alberto, Intellettuali e classe operaia, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1973. Bobbio, Norberto, Politica e cultura, Turin: Einaudi, 1955. Cafagna, Lucio, C’era una volta...riflessioni sul comunismo italiano, Padua: Marsilio, 1991. Cammett, John, Antonio Gramsci and the Origins of Italian Communism, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967. Canfora, Luciano, Togliatti e i dilemmi della politica, Bari: Laterza, 1989. Fiori, Giuseppe, Vita di Enrico Berlinguer, Rome: Laterza, 1989. Fortini, Franco, Dieci inverni: 1947–1957, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1957. Galli, Giorgio, Storia del partito armato 1968–1982, Milan: Rizzoli, 1986. Garin, Eugenio, Intellettuali italiani del XX secolo, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1974. Gramsci, Antonio, Opere, Turin: Einaudi, 1948–1951. Lucia, Piero, Intellettuali italiani del secondo dopoguerra: impegno, crisi, speranza, Naples: Guida, 2003. Meade, Robert, The Red Brigades: The Story of Italian Terrorism, Houndmills: Macmillan, 1990. Medici, Rita, Giobbe e Prometeo: filosofia e politica nel pensiero di Gramsci, Florence: Alinea, 2000. Ostellino, Piero (editor), Gorbaciov e i suoi fratelli, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1991. Rosini, Emilio, L’ala dell’angelo: Itinerario di un comunista perplesso, Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2003. Scalia, Gianni, Critica, letteratura e ideologia: 1958–1963, Padua: Marsilio, 1968. Togliatti, Palmiro, I corsivi di Roderigo: interventi politicoculturali dal 1944 al 1964, Bari: De Donato, 1976. Togliatti, Palmiro, La politica culturale, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1974. Vittoria, Albertina, Togliatti e gli intellettuali, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1992. Vittorini, Elio, Gli anni del Politecnico, Turin: Einaudi, 1977. Wagner-Pacifici, Robin Erica, The Moro Morality Play: Terrorism as Social Drama, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.

STEFANO ADAMI See also: Socialism

503

DINO COMPAGNI

DINO COMPAGNI (CA. 1246/47–1324) The Florentine historian and Guelf politician Dino Compagni wrote his important, three-volume Cronica delle cose occorrenti ne’ tempi suoi (Chronicle of Events Occurring in His Times) between the years 1310 and 1312. This work, not published until 1726 in Ludovico Muratori’s Rerum italicarum scriptores (Volume IX), covers the history of Florence from 1280 to 1312. It thus differs from the history writing of its time in not going back to the origins of human civilization. Actually, it is an autobiographical book, a reflection on the social and political history of Florence written with indignation and sorrowful passion. In his precise descriptions of individuals and in reports of his own actions as a political figure and as a public administrator, Compagni dramatizes the conflict between his conscience, his love for his hometown, his Christianity, and the unscrupulous violence, the fraud, the treachery, the opportunism of the Florentine political leaders. In this light, Compagni’s major historical work demonstrates the same strong moral passion of Dante’s Divina Commedia. They both analyze the same period of Florentine history, the same characters, and the same events. They both pronounce, after their reflections, the same judgment about the moral decay and the mediocrity and hypocrisy of the Florentines. Dino Compagni’s political activity, the most important source for his Cronica, began in 1282, when, as a guelfo bianco (White Guelf ), he promoted the creation of a new institution, the Priorato delle Arti (Priorate of the Arts). He supported Giano della Bella (expelled in 1295), a leader of the popular classes who helped enact the Ordinamenti di Giustizia (Ordinances of Justice), a democratic constitution for the city government that prescribed that no man of noble family should be appointed Priore. In the year 1300 Compagni, along with Dante, also a white Guelf, was among the savi or wise men who suggested to the Priori that all the leaders of the fighting factions be banished from Florence. In Compagni’s opinion, the superbia (haughtiness) and the ambizione (ambition) of the powerful Florentine families gave birth to the civil conflict that had developed in a strong crescendo: from the division between Guelf and Ghibelline in 1215, to 504

the conflict between the Cerchi and Donati families, divided again between the Bianchi and Neri, who fought until Charles of Valois intervened and banished the Bianchi from Florence. Due to its inner violence, instability, and political immaturity, Florence was not able to rule itself and so had invited, in the most important episodes of its history, the intervention of outside powers. According to Compagni, the endemic conflicts were rooted in old resentments, and many political figures were using them for their own advantage. Compagni’s intelligent and acute description of Pope Bonifacio VIII, for instance, to whom he dedicated the first chapters of the second volume of his Cronica, is close to Dante’s own description. Compagni was both a witness and a participant in the conflicts he was representing, so that his account is less a history or chronicle than a personal diary, often lacking in objectivity, of the White Guelf defeat. As chronicler, Compagni hurls invective at his adversaries and hopes for the punitive intervention of the Emperor Henry VII, to whom he dedicates the last part of his work. According to Compagni’s interpretation, the ‘‘capital sin’’ of the city was the unethical political behavior of the ruling classes. The threat of the total destruction of the city after Montaperti should have taught them to rule only for the good of the city. But the powerful Florentine families persisted in using the political and social divisions, the aversions and hostilities of the city to their own advantage and for their own purposes. In the second part of the second volume of his chronicle, Compagni analyzes the misrule of the Neri in Florence and the various attempts of the exiles to return to their hometown and assume power. Like Dante, Compagni saw in the Emperor Henry VII a wise person, a figure of providential intervention, the repairer of all the city’s evils and conflicts. For him the recent and violent deaths of the Neri leaders were a clear sign of the coming of Divine justice. Compagni’s Cronica is a political history infused with a profound sense of drama and a deep rhetorical consciousness that is most evident in the chornicles’ descriptive parts: in the many pages dedicated to portraits, often very lively and picturesque,

COMPIUTA DONZELLA admonitions, invectives. A clear sample of this descriptive ability is the portrait of Messer Vieri de’ Cerchi, the leader of the Bianchi faction, a rich and generous nobleman, ‘‘senza malizia ne` buon parlare’’ (with neither malice nor good speech), as well as his portrait of Messer Corso Donati, the leader of the Neri, a ‘‘knight’’ similar to Catiline, cruel, skilful in oratory, beautiful, well dressed, ‘‘di mente sottile, sempre inteso a far cattive cose, superbo e per cio` detto Il Barone’’ (with a subtle mind, always intent on bad things, superb and for that reason called The Baron). The anonymous didactic and allegorical poem called ‘‘Intelligenza’’ (‘‘Lady Intelligence,’’ 1308–1309), published in 1850, is also attributed to Compagni. It is a poem in nona rima at whose center is a lady, symbol of the human intellect, whose splendid palace embodies the spirit of the literature of courtesy, the philosophy of Averroes and of medieval bestiaries.

Biography We do not have a clear document about the precise date of Compagni’s birth. According to the interpretation of the scholar Nicola Ottokar, he was born in Florence between 1246 and 1247; in the opinion of other scholars, the year of his birth was 1260 or even 1256/1257. Son to the rich merchant Compagno di Perino, he had a good traditional education in grammar and rhetoric. In 1269, we find him a member of the Silk Guild. In 1284 he took part to the Consiglio generale del Podesta`, acting as a counsellor to the various Consigli that ruled Florence in the following years. During the battle of Campaldino, he was Priore. In 1298 he was member—then captain—of the Confraternita

religiosa della Madonna di Or San Michele. Compagni died in Florence on 26 February 1324. STEFANO ADAMI Selected Works Poetry ‘‘L’Intelligenza,’’ 1850.

Historical Writing Cronica delle cose occorrenti ne’ tempi suoi, 1726, edited by Guido Bezzola, 1995; as Dino Compagni e la sua Cronica (includes poetry), edited by Isidoro Del Lungo, 3 vols., 1879–1887; critical edition by Davide Cappi, 2000; as Dino Compagni’s Chronicle of Florence, translated and edited by Daniel E. Bornstein, 1986.

Further Reading Cappi, Davide, Del Lungo editore di Dino Compagni, Rome: Palazzo Borromini, 1995. Ciccuto, Marcello, Il restauro de ‘‘L’Intelligenza’’ e altri studi dugenteschi, Pisa: Giardini, 1985. Folena, Franco, Filologia testuale e storia linguistica, Bologna: Commissione per i Testi di Lingua, 1961. Luzzatto, Gino, Dai servi della gleba agli albori del capitalismo. Saggi di storia economica, Bari: Laterza, 1966. Monaci, Ernesto (editor), Crestomazia italiana dei primi secoli, Rome-Naples: Societa` Editrice Dante Alighieri, 1955. Moro, Donato, Fonti e autonomia di stile nella Cronica di Dino Compagni, Galatina: Editrice Salentina, 1971. Palmarocchi, Roberto, Cronisti del Duecento, Milan: Rizzoli, 1935. Sapegno, Natalino, Rimatori del Trecento, Milano: Ricciardi, 1952. Vallone, Aldo, Percorsi danteschi, Florence: Le Lettere, 1991. Zanella, Giacomo (editor), Storici e storiografi del medioevo italiano, Bologna: Patron, 1984.

COMPIUTA DONZELLA To La Compiuta Donzella (literally, the accomplished damsel), the only female voice in vernacular poetry of the thirteenth century, the Canzoniere Vaticano (Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vaticano Lat. 3793) ascribes three sonnets, one of which is responsive in a tenzone with an

anonymous Tuscan poet. Nothing is known of the person behind the text: Although it appears in contemporary documentary sources, the name ‘‘Compiuta’’ is perhaps a pseudonym. Guittone d’Arezzo’s Epistle 5 is addressed to a woman by that name, but no reference is made there to her

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COMPIUTA DONZELLA activity as a poet; a sonnet by Torrigiano da Firenze is also addressed to a ‘‘donzella di trovare dotta’’ (a damsel skilled in writing poetry). Two main hypotheses have been formulated about this enigmatic signature: Either the author of the sonnets may be a real woman (which would make her the first woman writer in the Italian literature), or the pseudonym may hide a male poet ventriloquizing a feminine subject (not an isolated phenomenon in early vernacular poetry). The three sonnets, which one should avoid reading as indication of the author’s biography, present topical situations in Provencal and Sicilian poetry. The first, ‘‘A la stagion che ’l mondo foglia e fiora’’ (In that season when everywhere leaves and flowers appear, I.1) is a lament on an impending arranged marriage that is set against the background of springtime, the season that regenerates nature and rekindles love in the hearts of noble youths. The second, anticipating what will be a Dantean line of argumentation in the first stanza of the great moral canzone ‘‘Doglia mi reca ne lo core ardire’’ (Grief brings boldness to my heart, Rime 106), reiterates the author’s dislike for the idea of marriage, based on the disappearance from the world of the main courtly virtues: ‘‘Senno e cortesia ... e lo fin pregio e tutta la bontade’’ (Wisdom, nobility of soul ... as well as refined elegance and all of goodness, II.5–6). As radical alternative to marriage with an unworthy man, the text proposes the service of God. Using language reminiscent of the Bible, the first two lines read: ‘‘Lasciar vorria lo mondo e Dio servire / e dipartirmi d’ogne vanitate’’ (I would like to abandon this world and serve God / and leave behind all vanity, II.1–2). The central verb ‘‘to serve,’’ which in the first and possibly also nextto-last lines of the poem preserves its original association with Christ’s words, ‘‘nemo servus potest duobus dominis servire’’ (No servant can serve two masters, Luke 16:13), also resonates with the technical Ovidian (and courtly) meaning of ‘‘devotion in love’’ (cf. I.6). The resulting contamination of semantic fields had already been exploited in the Sicilian tradition, as in Giacomo da Lentini’s

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‘‘Io m’aggio posto in core a Dio servire’’ (I have set my mind to serve the Lord). The final text credited to Compiuta Donzella is a response to an invitation from an anonymous correspondent to become better acquainted and possibly to engage in a literary love story: ‘‘so che molto mi poria ’nantire / aver contı`a del vostro segnoraggio’’ (I know that it would advance me greatly / to have direct knowledge of your mastery; that is, to serve you, III.1.13–14). To the hyperbolic praises the sender lavishes upon her (in the tercets, she is compared to Morgana, the Damsel of the Lake, and Constance of Hauteville) as well as to his somewhat skeptical aside on her reputation as a learned woman, the author replies by deflating with modesty the latter and reaffirming only her ‘‘buon volere’’ (goodwill) to serve ‘‘a ciascun ch’ama sanza fallimento’’ (whoever loves without deception, III.2.13). SIMONE MARCHESI Selected Works Poeti del Duecento, edited by Gianfranco Contini, 2 vols., Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1960.

Further Reading Carrai, Stefano, ‘‘Il dittico della Compiuta Donzella,’’ Medioevo Romanzo, 17(1992): 207–213. Cherchi, Paolo, ‘‘The troubled existence of three women poets,’’ in The Voice of the Trobairitz: Perspectives on the Women Troubadours, edited by William D. Paden, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989. Crespo, Roberto, ‘‘La Compiuta Donzella,’’ Medioevo Romanzo, 13(1988): 203–222. Kleinhenz, Christopher, ‘‘ ‘Pulzelle e maritate’: Coming of Age, Rites of Passage, and the Question of Marriage in Some Early Italian Poems,’’ in Matrons and Marginal Women in Medieval Society, edited by Robert R. Edwards and Vickie Ziegler, Woodbridge, Suffolk, U.K., and Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 1995. Malpezzi Price, Paola, ‘‘Uncovering Women’s Writings: Two Early Italian Women Poets,’’ Journal of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association, 9(1988):1–15.

VINCENZO CONSOLO

CONFESSIONS OF ZENO See La Coscienza di Zeno (Work by Italo Svevo [Aron Hector Schmitz])

VINCENZO CONSOLO (1933–) Vincenzo Consolo’s youth is set against the cultural and geographical hinterland of his birthplace, Sant’Agata Militello in the province of Messina, Sicily. Without exception, his books focus on aspects of Sicilian history, leaving no period unconsidered. Of all recent writers of Sicilian descent, Consolo is probably the one who most systematically carries through the idea, stemming from Leonardo Sciascia—a personal friend and literary patron—of Sicily as an existential and literary metaphor: an image for a magnificent past and for a present of missed opportunities, both individual and collective. Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Norman, papal, Bourbon-Neapolitan, and, only recently, Italian cultural influences characterize Consolo’s environment, both during decisive years of learning and throughout a whole life of literary creation. Though profoundly interested in history and literature, he was pushed toward a law degree at the Catholic University of Milan. For a few years he practiced as a notary but was more attracted by the literary and historical archives of his native Sicily than by the land register. At 30, he published La ferita dell’aprile (April’s Wound, 1963) without much commercial success. The partly autobiographical story concerns the young first person narrator’s coming of age during his last year spent in the Catholic secondary school in his home village on the northeastern coast of Sicily. This first book was as much Consolo’s timely contribution to Italian literary neo-Realism as it was the author’s first illustration of an innovative technique of evoking historical and political moments through a stylistic mosaic of different languages and styles. Such a technique would become

his literary trademark. The pivot of La ferita dell’aprile, the ‘‘wound’’ the title refers to, is the defeat inflicted to the Christian Democrats and to Alcide De Gasperi in particular in the regional ballot held in Sicily on April 20, 1947. The assassination, one week later, by Salvatore Giuliano’s Mafia mob, of children and workers during the Labor Day celebrations, looms as a warning sign for Italian politics and society in the 1960s. Il sorriso dell’ ignoto marinaio (The Smile of the Unknown Mariner, 1976), published after more than ten years of literary silence, was immediately recognized by readers and reviewers as a masterpiece, setting new standards for the historical novel. This short but complex fictional tour de force carries the reader to the last stages of Italian national unity, Garibaldi’s landing on Sicilian soil in Marsala, May 1860, and the subsequent liberation of Sicily—annexation in the eyes of the separatist movement. The plot focuses on the revolutionary uprising of villani e pastori (villains and shepherds) at Alcara Li Fusi, a few days after Garibaldi’s landing, an uprising quelled by Garibaldi’s lieutenant. In Lunaria: Favola teatrale (Lunaria: A Theatrical Fable, 1985), linguistic pastiche, so forcefully elaborated in the Il sorriso dell’ ignoto marinaio, combines with modes of irony and the grotesque. In an allegorical development, the moon is pictured as the ultimate comfort in a world and historical time permeated by melancholy. The moon thus becomes an emblem for fiction, illusion, dream and fantasy, and ultimately for all forms of literary invention. When eventually the moon falls to earth—not far from Palermo, then still under the rule of the Vicere´—poets, scientists, priests, and 507

VINCENZO CONSOLO counselors gather to elucidate the mysterious and threatening event. In vain: No science or power can withstand the imaginative strength of the moon. Developing a well-known theme illustrated by poets like Giacomo Leopardi and Lucio Piccolo— another of his literary mentors in Sicily—Consolo provided a final Calderonesque turn to his theatrical fable: There is no such thing as reality since everything, including the Vicere´ himself, is earmarked as illusion and representation. Retablo (Retable, 1987) may be considered a highly elaborate literary ‘‘triptych.’’ In its central ‘‘panel,’’ Fabrizio Clerici—homonymous with the twentieth-century Milanese artist, in Consolo’s book a fictional nobleman and artist, Cesare Beccaria’s contemporary and rival in love—narrates an adventurous archaeological and art-historical journey in western Sicily. The encompassing story in the enclosing panels, the popular counterpart as it were of the central plot, depicts the erotic pursuit of Rosalia by a runaway monk, Fabrizio’s servant Isidoro. Both stories intertwine both thematically and linguistically. As much as Il sorriso dell’ ignoto marinaio, Retablo, due to its highly wrought composition and style, is at the root of Consolo’s reputation among critics as a neo-Baroque writer. Consolo himself qualifies his particular choice of language as an antidote to the oversimplified and flattening language of Italian media, especially television. Le pietre di Pantalica (Stones of Pantalica, 1988), a collection of short stories, was followed by a philosophical play Catarsi (Catharsis, 1989) in which Sicily’s glorious past is dramatically put in contrast with the moral and social degradation of the Italian south. In the 1990s, modern Italy and what is increasingly experienced by Consolo as its decay—moral, political, linguistic—was systematically brought into focus in his writings and put in a historical perspective. Since Leonardo Sciascia’s death in 1989, Consolo has been broadly considered his spiritual heir and a moral authority for the nation. The attention he paid to his own time from then on followed two different paths, the fictional and the nonfictional, with some interesting blending between the two. Nottetempo, casa per casa (At Night, One House at a Time, 1992) signaled Consolo’s return to his own times with the fictional depiction of the 1920s and the advent of Fascism in Messina province, thus filling the chronological gap between 1860 (Il sorriso dell’ ignoto marinaio) and 1947 (La ferita dell’aprile). At least as much as La ferita dell’aprile, Nottetempo, casa per casa is a bildungsroman that 508

picks up the destiny of the young man, Petro, more or less at the age in which Scavone leaves Don Sergio’s school in La ferita dell’aprile. Petro— reminiscent of Cesare Pavese’s compagno in the novel of that name—through instructive contacts with friends, direct experience of lasting feudalism, and even esoteric ventures—the fraudulent aspect of which can be read as a foreboding of the irrationality of looming Fascism—matures as a young intellectual attracted by anarchy but finally rejecting it and preparing himself to be an exiled writer. Significantly perhaps—in contrast with Elio Vittorini’s protagonist in Conversazione in Sicilia, who returns to Sicily with the aim of appeasing his ‘‘furor’’— Petro escapes from the island and sails to Tunis, underlining Consolo’s own growing anger. Nottetempo, casa per casa also clarifies Consolo’s underlying epic undertaking as a whole, highlighting a broad narrative design aiming at a novelistic cycle embracing major epochs and events in Italian and Sicilian history. With a return to a more genuine rereading of Vittorini and adopting a sort of docu-fictional mode, L’olivo e l’olivastro (The Olive Tree and the Oleaster, 1994), relates the impressions of a Sicilian migrant, Nicola, traveling from the north of Europe to his modern dehumanized homeland. The journey comes to an end with Nicola turned into a desperate spectator of a play representing the collective suicide of the zealots in Masada. This is a highly symbolical ending, since the theatrical representation takes place in Nicola’s birthplace, Gibellina, destroyed in the earthquake of 1968. In 1998 Consolo returned to fiction and to his ambition of completing a large historical cycle, with Lo Spasimo di Palermo (The Pangs of Palermo, 1998). Lo Spasimo di Palermo is the novel of a certain post–World War II generation of Italian intellectuals: Their fathers’ dream of a better future, ‘‘better’’ also in moral terms, is wrecked by the terrorist violence of the 1960s and 1970s, violence perpetrated by their own sons’ generation, producing a sense of failure and guilt. The novel’s complex plot focuses on a father-writer, Gioachino, who loses all creative strength and faith in fiction, swaying back and forth between two cities: Paris, where his revolutionary son finds refuge from prosecution, and Palermo, where memories and the present are filled with guilt and oppression. The father-writer, with no personal illusions left, afflicted by guilt, and a judge, his neighbor, Gioachino’s public counterpart and model of active moral integrity, for his dynamic involvement in Mafia trials, are both killed in the same bomb blast, devised by the Mafia.

VINCENZO CONSOLO A year later Consolo’s pessimism pervaded the essays of Di qua dal faro (This Side of the Lighthouse, 1999). The more Consolo’s writing focuses on the present time, the more violence and death emerge as metaphoric instances of the ill-fated island of Sicily, burning under its swaying palms.

Fuga dall’Etna, 1993. L’olivo e l’olivastro, 1994. Nero` Metallico`, 1994. Lo Spasimo di Palermo, 1998.

Play Catarsi, 1989.

Essays

Biography Vincenzo Consolo was born in Sant’Agata di Militello (Messina), 18 February 1933. His father was a shopkeeper. From 1951 to 1953, he studied at the Catholic University of Milan. In 1955 he served in the military in Orvieto. Consolo’s first short story, ‘‘Un sacco di magnolie,’’ was published in the Milanese journal La Parrucca in 1957. In 1956 he returned to Messina. He was awarded a degree at the University of Messina with thesis in philosophy of law on the crisis of human rights and the League of Nations in 1960. Between 1960 and 1967 he was a notary trainee and teacher in Sicily. In 1968 he began his collaboration with RAI (Italian National Television), in Milan. In 1977 Consolo became an editorial consultant for publisher Einaudi. He won the Pirandello prize in 1985 for Lunaria. He married Caterina Pilenga in 1986. In 1988 he won the Grinzane Cavour prize for Retablo; in 1992, the Strega prize for Nottetempo, casa per casa. In 1993 Consolo wrote the text for a requiem mass to honor Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, judges assassinated in 1992 by the Mafia; he then started his political opposition to Lega Nord, a separatist political party of the Po-area. In 1994 he won the Unione Latina prize for L’olivo e l’olivastro. In 1998 Consolo wrote the libretto for L’ape iblea: Elegia per Noto, with music by Francesco Pennisi, which was performed at Teatro Verdi in Florence. In 1999 he won the Flaiano prize, Brancati prize, and Fiano prize for Lo Spasimo di Palermo. Consolo lives now in Milan and Sicily. WALTER GEERTS Selected Works

’Nfernu veru (La letteratura dello Zolfo), 1985. La pesca del tonno in Sicilia, 1986. Il barocco in Sicilia, 1991. Veduta dello stretto di Messina, 1993. Di qua dal faro, 1999.

Other Oratorio (contains Catarsi and L’Ape iblea), 2002.

Further Reading Bouchard, Norma (editor), Risorgimento in Modern Italian Culture, Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004. Budor, Dominique (editor), Vincenzo Consolo: E´thique et e´criture, Paris: Presses de l’Universite´ de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2005. Ciccarelli, Andrea (editor), special issue on Vincenzo Consolo, Italica, 82:1(Spring 2005). Lavezzi, Gianfranca, Anna Modena, and Carla Riccardi, Lezioni sul Novecento, Pavia: Collegio Nuovo, 1991. Nuove effemeridi (Palermo) 29, 1995 (special issue on Vincenzo Consolo). Reichardt, Dagmar (editor), Sicilia letteraria, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2003. Schneider, Jane (editor), Italy’s ‘‘Southern Question,’’ Oxford-New York: Berg Press, 1989. Sciascia, Leopardo, Cruciverba, Turin: Einaudi, 1983. Zappulla Muscara`, Sara (editor), Narratori siciliani del secondo dopoguerra, Catania: Maimone, 1990.

IL SORRISO DELL’IGNOTO MARINAIO, 1976 Novel by Vincenzo Consolo

Fiction La Ferita dell’aprile, 1963. Il Sorriso dell’ ignoto marinaio, 1976; as The Smile of the Unknown Mariner, translated by Joseph Farrell, 1994. Lunaria: Favola teatrale, 1985. Retablo, 1987. Le Pietre di Pantalica, 1988. Nottetempo, casa per casa, 1992.

Il sorriso dell’ ignoto marinaio (The Smile of the Unknown Mariner) is Consolo’s contribution to the highly controversial question of Sicily’s incorporation into the Kingdom of Italy—made ‘‘in the 509

VINCENZO CONSOLO name of King Victor Emmanuel’’—following Giuseppe Garibaldi’s landing on the island in May 1860. The historical so-called ‘‘fatti di Bronte’’ (facts of Bronte)—the sanguinary repression in Bronte, a small town on the slopes of Mount Etna, exercised by Garibaldi’s lieutenant Nino Bixio, of the peasants’ equally bloodstained uprising against the local middle class of landowners—provide the factual background for Consolo’s highly innovative fictional project. With an implicit reference to the state of affairs in Italy more than one century later, when workers and intellectuals tried to join forces, Consolo turns the historical facts, located at Alcara Li Fusi, into the centerpiece of a conflict situated in the consciences of two men. Mandralisca, a nobleman and marine biologist, is completely absorbed by his study of molluscs, while his friend Interdonato is one of the agents of the exiled republican leader, Giuseppe Mazzini. The complex plot evolves in such a way that the first will become so deeply impressed by the suffering of the poor and the injustices produced by the legal system that he abandons all scientific interest, whereas the second, promoted interior minister of Sicily made a part of Italy, will be forced into political pragmatism and resign from his post. At the end Interdonato is called to try in court the insurgents of Alcara Li Fusi, one of the villages involved in the uprising. Consolo’s novel thus becomes an essential part of the debate on the political and ideological implications of one of the last stages of Italy’s unification. Through the ‘‘facts of Bronte’’ a deeper conflict is highlighted between alternative political options to be taken once Italy unified: a democratic option, with land reform, supported by Mazzini and his followers, or a conservative option, more in the line of Count Cavour’s aims. In Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s Il gattopardo (The Leopard, 1958), the suffering of Sicily’s peasants is presented as the ineluctable fate history has determined for this sun-dried island and its inhabitants. Il sorriso dell’ignoto marinaio breaks up this assumed cycle of fatality, showing how and why the legal system, built by the elite, favored the elite, illustrating how and why land reform, for instance, never took off in Sicily. In addition to this profound political message, Il sorriso dell’ignoto marinaio reformulates the rules for the historical novel itself at a moment in which the traditional novel in Italy was put into question by

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the neo-avanguardia (neo-avant-garde). Fact and fiction are intertwined, historical documents alternate with highly sophisticated inventions such as the events Consolo imaginatively weaves around Antonello da Messina’s painting, Ritratto d’ignoto—the title’s ‘‘ignoto marinaio.’’ The fine compositional structure of the novel is also illustrated by the use of various leitmotifs, the most striking of which is that of the snail, combining metaphorically both Mandralisca’s scientific interests and the inklike tortuous excretions of the invertebrate. Tortuosity is a familiar characteristic both for the scribbling of the clerks and for the obscure arabesques of the law. Throughout the novel, Consolo’s specific language can be heard, made up of archaisms, both real and invented, and local idiom, again real and invented. Masterly from this point of view is the series of graffiti the jailed insurgents of Alcara jot on the walls: Sicilian language, partly invented, political criticism, and symbolic imagination combine to turn these writings into the climax of the novel. WALTER GEERTS Editions Il sorriso dell’ ignoto marinaio, Turin: Einaudi, 1976. Il sorriso dell’ ignoto marinaio, Milan: Mondadori, 1995.

Translation The Smile of the Unknown Mariner, translated by Joseph Farrell, Manchester: Carcanet, 1994.

Further Reading Coassin, Flavia, ‘‘L’ordine delle somiglianze nel Sorriso dell’ignoto marinaio,’’ Spunti e ricerche, 17(2002), 97–108. Dombroski, Robert S., ‘‘Rewriting Sicily: Postmodern Perspectives,’’ in Italy’s ‘‘Southern Question,’’ edited by Jane Schneider, Oxford-New York: Berg, 1998. Farrell, Joseph, ‘‘Metaphors and False History,’’ in The New Italian Novel, edited by Zygmunt Baranski and Lino Pertile, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994. O’Neill, Tom, ‘‘Il Sorriso dell’ignoto marinaio di Vincenzo Consolo ovvero la riscrittura del Risorgimento in Sicilia,’’ in Literature and Film in the Historical Dimension, edited by J. D. Simmons, Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994. Sciascia, Leonardo, ‘‘L’ignoto marinaio,’’ in Cruciverba, Turin: Einaudi, 1983. Segre, Cesare, ‘‘La costruzione a chiocciola nel Sorriso dell’ignoto marinaio,’’ in Vincenzo Consolo, Il sorriso dell’ignoto marinaio, Milan: Mondadori, 1987.

SERGIO CORAZZINI

CONVERSATION IN SICILY See Conversazione in Sicilia (Work by Elio Vittorini)

SERGIO CORAZZINI (1886–1907) Sergio Corazzini’s poetic experience as well as his life was short but intense, because the poet died of tuberculosis at the age of 21. In his lifetime, he published five small poetry collections; two prose poems in the periodical Cronache Latine, ‘‘Soliloquio delle cose’’ (Soliloquy of Things, 1905) and ‘‘Esortazione al fratello’’ (Exhortation to His Brother, 1906); various pieces of criticism; and the play Il traguardo (The Goal, 1905), presented unsuccessfully on May 26, 1905, at the Teatro Metastasio in Rome. His earliest poems, in Italian or in Roman dialect, appeared in literary journals: For instance, his very first sonnet, ‘‘’Na bella idea’’ (A Good Idea, 1902), is dated May 17, 1902, and was published in Pasquino de Roma, a satirical and political magazine. In 1904, the young poet published his first volume, Dolcezze (Sweetness), which reflects Corazzini’s readings and interests at the time, first among them Rome and its environs at the turn of the century, which infused his poetry with a realistic perspective that the poet would never completely relinquish. His intellectual influences include not only the masters of twentiethcentury European literature but also contemporary symbolism, the lesson of which he quickly metabolized (he taught himself French so as to be able to read authors like Paul Bourget, Victor Hugo, Honore´ de Balzac, Guy de Maupassant, and Jules Laforgue). In Italy, the dominating presence of Gabriele D’Annunzio’s poetry affected him as it did most of his contemporaries; what struck Corazzini in particular, however, was rather the humble tone of a specific work that he felt close to his own—the Poema paradisiaco (Heavenly Poem, 1893). In addition, the poetics of humility and the

minimalism of Giovanni Pascoli became relevant in Corazzini’s poetic development. He also appreciated the works of colleagues who were making their debut in those years, and he became engaged in an intense correspondence with Aldo Palazzeschi, Corrado Govoni, Marino Moretti, and others, who in their turn were influenced by Corazzini’s charming, spontaneous, deeply passionate, and naı¨f poetry. Indeed, Moretti’s decision to visit him just before his death, in 1907, confirmed this sort of canonization of the poet. Corazzini’s works have usually been read in relation to the poetics of the so-called crepuscolarismo, a term coined by Giuseppe Antonio Borgese in 1910 and which has come to be identified at the most superficial level with a series of themes evoking a melancholic and at times slightly morbid atmosphere, as well as a whole array of images (hospitals, churches, organ-grinders, poor children, and so on) derived from shabby, quotidian experience and rather removed from the poetic mainstream. However, Corazzini’s poetic voice goes well beyond this repertoire. As a result of the heterogeneous cultural context in which he developed his poetic skills, the ‘‘sweet’’ sense of death and sickness and the delicate nostalgia for life that underlies much of his poetry are kept always under firm rhetorical control. The opening verses of Dolcezze summarize these characteristics: ‘‘il mio cuore e` una rossa / macchia di sangue dove / io bagno senza posa / la penna’’ (My heart is a red / spot of blood where / I endlessly dip / my pen). Thus, it may better to describe Corazzini’s poetry as both a struggle between and a communion of pathos and sadness, expressed by the figure of the 511

SERGIO CORAZZINI poet described in the work that came to be seen as his statement of poetics, ‘‘Desolazione del povero poeta sentimentale’’ (Desolation of the Poor Sentimental Poet), from Piccolo libro inutile (Little Useless Book, 1906): ‘‘Perche´ tu mi dici: poeta? / Io non sono un poeta. / Io non sono che un piccolo fanciullo che piange. / Vedi: io non ho che le lagrime da offrire al Silenzio’’ (Why do you call me: poet? / I am not a poet / I am only a small weeping child. / Look: I have only tears to offer to silence). If the notion of Corazzini’s poetry as the song of a dying body and soul may have become over time a simple way to catalogue him, it is in the structures and the metrical choices of his poems that can be traced his evolution as an artist. At the beginning, the presence of the poetic tradition clearly permeates his verses, although on some occasion they achieved surprising and original results, as in the early sonnet ‘‘Un bacio’’ (A Kiss). Written in 1902, when Corazzini was 16, the poem plays off the tune of an operetta, and its seven-syllable metrical scheme strikingly shows an already mature poetic consciousness. After the publication of Dolcezze, Corazzini began to contribute articles and reviews to several periodicals, including Roma Flamma and Cronache latine, both of which he cofounded, and Sancio Pancia. L’amaro calice (The Bitter Cup) is Corazzini’s second poetic work, dated 1905, but actually published in 1904, as a review appeared on 19 November 1904 in Il Fracassa. It is followed by Le aureole (The Halos, 1905). The question of vers libre became increasingly important, as over the three years of his poetic activity, Corazzini went through a radical crisis regarding traditional verse. The final result of this process is evident in his last work, Libro per la sera della domenica (Sunday Evening, 1906), in which, with rare exceptions, the poems do not follow any metrical pattern. In the end, Corazzini’s poetics defy simplifications: Although the suffering of his human experience suffuses his whole production, it was never used as a primary means of expression. Indeed, in his final poems the emotional charge of such a painful life always finds a formal balance that is the sign of true poetry.

Biography Sergio Corazzini was born in Rome on February 6, 1886. He attended Catholic school at the Oratorio di San Rocco, 1895. He then moved to Spoleto, where he attended the boarding school Collegio Nazionale Umberto I, 1895–1898. He abandoned secondary school because of family economic setbacks. 512

Corazzini worked for the insurance company ‘‘La Prussiana’’ in Rome, 1898. He frequented the intellectual circles that met at the Sartoris and Aragno cafe´s in Rome, along with Fausto Maria Martini and many other young Roman artists and writers, 1898–1905. He contributed to numerous periodicals, including Mamorfio, Rugantino, Capitan Fracassa, Gran mondo, Vita letteraria, Giornale d’arte, Tavola rotonda, and L’unione sarda, 1902. He cofounded Roma Flamma along with Corrado Govoni, Alfredo Tusti, and Biagio Chiara, 1904. The piece Il traguardo was performed at the Teatro Metastasio in Rome, 1905. There was a public reading of his verses in the Sala degli Autori Lirici e Drammatici at the Teatro Nazionale in Rome, 1905. He cofounded Cronache latine, 1905 (the journal folded after three issues, in 1906). He experienced the first symptoms of tuberculosis and had surgery, 1905. He moved to a sanatorium in Nocera Umbra, in 1906, then to the sanatorium of Padre Orsenigo dei Fatebenefratelli in Nettuno, 1907. Corazzini died in Rome on June 17, 1907. DIEGO BERTELLI See also: Crepuscolarismo Selected Works Collections Liriche, Naples: Ricciardi, 1909; expanded edition by Fausto Maria Martini, Naples: Ricciardi, 1922. Poesie edite e inedite, edited by Stefano Jacomuzzi, Turin: Einaudi, 1968. Opere: poesie e prose, edited by Angela Ida Villa, Pisa: Istituti editoriali e poligrafici internazionali, 1999.

Poetry ‘‘Dolcezze,’’ 1904. ‘‘L’amaro calice,’’ 1905. ‘‘Le aureole,’’ 1905. ‘‘Piccolo libro inutile,’’ 1906. ‘‘Libro per la sera della domenica,’’ 1906; as Sunday Evening: Selected Poems, translated and edited by Michael Palma, 1997.

Play Il traguardo, 1905.

Further Readings Baldacci, Luigi, I crepuscolari, Turin: ERI, 1961. Benevento, Aurelio, Sergio Corazzini: saggi e ricerche, Naples: Loffredo, 1980. Donini, Filippo, Vita e poesia di Sergio Corazzini, Turin: De Silva, 1948. Jacomuzzi, Stefano, Sergio Corazzini, Milan: Mursia, 1963. Livi, Franc¸ois, Dai simbolisti ai crepuscolari, Milan: Istituto propaganda libraria, 1974.

MARIA CORTI Livi, Franc¸ois, La parola crepuscolare. Corazzini, Gozzano, Moretti, Milan: Istituto propaganda libraria, 1986. Livi, Franc¸ois, and Alexandra Zingone (editors), Io non sono un poeta: Sergio Corazzini, 1886–1907, Rome: Bulzoni-Nancy: Press universitaires de Nancy, 1989. Martini, Fausto Maria, Si sbarca a New York, Milan: Mondadori, 1930. Papini, Maria Carla, Corazzini, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1977. Petronio, Giuseppe, Poeti del nostro secolo: i crepuscolari, Florence: Sansoni, 1937.

Porcelli, Bruno, Momenti dell’antinaturalismo. Fogazzaro, Svevo, Corazzini, Ravenna: Longo, 1975. Pupino, Angelo R., L’astrazione e le cose nella lirica di Sergio Corazzini, Bari: Adriatica, 1969. Savoca, Giuseppe, Concordanza di tutte le poesie di Sergio Corazzini, Florence: Olschki, 1987. Villa, Angela Ida, Neoidealismo e rinascenza latina tra Otto e Novecento: la cerchia di Sergio Corazzini: poeti dimenticati e riviste del crepuscolarismo romano, 1903–1907, Milan: LED, 1999.

CORRUPTION AT THE COURTHOUSE See Corruzione al Palazzo di giustizia (Work by Ugo Betti)

MARIA CORTI (1915–2002) Maria Corti was known primarily for her scholarly production, but she wrote fiction from a very young age and continued to do so until her death. She was a firm believer in the synergy of creative and scholarly writing, a tradition with deep roots in the Italian humanistic tradition, as the case of Dante clearly shows. From the medieval period in which the ‘‘father of the Italian language’’ lived and wrote his treatises and the great poem, the Divine Comedy, that has given him immortality, through the Renaissance and into modern and postmodern times, Italian writers have rarely not had an academic as well as a creative bent, and Maria Corti fit perfectly into this line. Her fictional works are imbued with learning, yet they are also often autobiographical and deeply personal accounts of experiences and insights that, while always in some way tied to her commitment to the life of the mind, also express aspects of Corti’s thoughts and feelings that she could not fully explore through her rich and always impeccable scholarship.

As a student and young teacher, Maria Corti often traveled on trains, sharing third-class compartments with commuting workmen. She wrote her first novel, originally entitled in its unpublished form Il trenino della pazienza (The Train of Patience) at an early age, and in it she described these daily trips. The novel was not published until 1981, with the title Cantare nel buio (Singing in the Dark), after Corti had extensively revised it. However, she had begun to publish fiction as early as 1962 when L’ora di tutti (translated as Otranto by Jessie Bright) appeared; for this debut prose fiction work she won the Crotone Literary Prize in 1963. It recounts the true story in fictional form of a southern Italian community in the fifteenth century that is put to the test when it is invaded by the Turks. In 1966, Corti published Il ballo dei sapienti (The Dance of the Wise), a novel set in the contemporary academic world of the 1960s. In it, she painted a vivid picture of academia’s conventions and hypocrisies.

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MARIA CORTI The decades of the 1970s and 1980s were years of prolific scholarly production for Corti, as she became involved in the then-burgeoning field of semiotics; she also continued her work as a historian of the Italian language and as a textual editor. Her dual loves of medieval and modern literature resulted in important books on Dante, Guido Cavalcanti, Beppe Fenoglio, neo-Realism and neoexperimentalism and essays on Calvino and other contemporary writers who were also her personal friends, such as Eugenio Montale and Luigi Malerba. She did not relinquish her creative work, however, and in 1986 Voci dal Nord Est: Taccuino Americano (Voices from the Northeast: American Notebook) appeared. This work is a fictionalized travel diary in which Corti recounted her experiences and observations during a trip to the United States when she taught at Brown University, gave lectures at other Eastern universities, and visited Chicago. She provided a running commentary not only on her personal adventures, including the terrible mugging that left her injured and deeply shaken, but also on American colleagues and students, styles of life in the United States, and the differences that distinguish the cultures of Italy and America. The book ends up being something midway between fiction and social critique, all of it presented not in a dry documentaristic style but in subjective, meditative prose that captures well the strong personal opinions and ideological convictions of its author. Other stories and fictional pieces of diverse kind continued to appear in the later years of Corti’s career, just as her scholarly work continued in an uninterrupted flow. An openly autobiographical vein opened out onto Corti’s eventful life as a cultural mentor and intellectual leader in works such as the book-length interview with Cristina Nesi, Dialogo in pubblico (Dialogue in Public, 1995) and Ombre dal fondo (Shadows from the Depths, 1997), the title of which alludes to the important Fondo, or Foundation, for modern and contemporary writers’ manuscripts that Corti established at the University of Pavia, her home institution for many years. Beginning with autograph materials given to her by her long-standing friend, the Nobel Prize–winning poet Eugenio Montale, Corti built an amazing repository and resource of materials for scholars of twentieth-century Italian literature, and the book recounts the complex process by which she achieved this admirable goal. Perhaps her best fictional work, Il canto delle sirene (The Sirens’ Song) was published in 1989. Again autobiographical in essence, it combines scholarly 514

erudition with very personal narrative, telling the story of a young woman who is torn between the life of the mind and creative writing, as well as between two very different men and the sort of shared life each would represent for her. Corti uses the myth of the sirens, who are most commonly seen as seductresses seeking to lure men from their dutiful paths, as representative instead of the endless human thirst for knowledge and wisdom. As in so many of her scholarly and creative works, here too the metaphor of the journey of life conditions the shape and tone of the book. This novel is philosophical in essence, and it dovetails nicely with Corti’s work on Ulysses, specifically as this emblematic voyager and seeker functions in Dante’s imaginative and scholarly explorations of knowledge and transcendence, which Corti also studied in great depth. Corti’s creative writing may be seen as an essential adjunct to her production as one of contemporary Italy’s most important scholars. In an interview published on April 26, 1986, in the newspaper La stampa, Corti declared her sustained belief in the interrelationship of scholarly and creative writing: ‘‘The best critics are also writers. I am thinking of Vale´ry, of Baudelaire....Creative writing gives a certain humility to the critic, who must understand but not judge.’’ Corti’s long career reflected her constant search for understanding—of texts, cultures, language, and herself—as well as her unique ability to personalize erudition and to share it with academic and general readers alike. Her legacy includes well-crafted fictional works that, like her learned studies, are invaluable contributions to modern Italian letters.

Biography Maria Corti was born in Milan, 7 September 1915. Her mother died young, and Corti lived her youth in boarding schools in and around Milan while her father, an engineer, worked in Puglia. She studied for degrees in literature and philosophy at the University of Milan, under the tutelage of the important scholars Benvenuto Terracini, a professor of the history of language, and Antonio Banfi, a professor of philosophy. Corti was first employed as a high school teacher in and around Como and Milan. She worked with anti-Fascist groups during and after World War II. She was appointed as a professor at the University of Pavia in 1972, where her work on the history of the Italian language and on semiotics helped to found the so-called school of

MARIA CORTI Pavia and where she established the Fondo Manoscritti degli Autori Moderni e Contemporanei. She remained at Pavia until her death. Corti was cofounder or founder of the journals Autografo, Alfabeta, and Strumenti critici, and a frequent contributor to the cultural page of the newspaper La repubblica. She was elected a member of many academies, including the Accademia della Crusca, and was awarded many prizes for her scholarly and creative writing, including the prestigious Campiello Prize for her entire production. Corti died in Milan on 22 February 2002. REBECCA WEST See also: the extensive bibliography of writings about Maria Corti in Dialogo in pubblico, 1995.

Nuovi metodi e fantasmi, 2001. I vuoti del tempo, edited by Francesca Caputo and Anna Longoni, 2003.

Edited Works Pietro Jacopo De Jennaro, Rime e lettere, 1956. Vita di San Petronio, con un’appendice di testi inediti dei secoli XIII e XIV, 1962. Giacomo Leopardi, ‘‘Entro dipinta gabbia’’: Tutti gli scritti inediti, rari e editi 1809–1810, 1972. Elio Vittorini, Le opere narrative, 1974. Autografi di Montale, with Maria Antonietta Grignani, 1976. Beppe Fenoglio, Opere, 1978. Ennio Flaiano, Frasario essenziale per passare inosservati in societa`, 1986. Ennio Flaiano, Opere, with Anna Longoni, 1988. Alda Merini, Vuoto d’amore, 1991. Gesualdo Bufalino, Opere 1981–1988, with Francesca Caputo, 1992. Alda Merini, Fiore di poesia: 1951–1997, 1998.

Fiction

Selected Works Nonfiction Studi sulla latinita` merovingia in testi agiografici minori, 1939. Studi sulla sintassi della lingua poetica avanti lo Stilnovo, 1953. Metodi e fantasmi, 1969. I metodi attuali della critica in Italia, with Cesare Segre, 1970. Principi della comunicazione letterararia, 1976; as An Introduction to Literary Semiotics, translated by Margherita Bogat and Allen Mandelbaum, 1978. Il viaggio testuale: Le ideologie e le strutture semiotiche, 1978. Una lingua di tutti: Pratica, storia e grammatica della lingua italiana, 1979. Beppe Fenoglio: Storia di un ‘‘continuum’’ narrativo, 1980. Dante a un nuovo crocevia, 1981. La felicita` mentale: Nuove prospettive su Cavalcanti, 1983. Il cammino della lettura: Come leggere un testo letterario, 1993. Percorsi dell’invenzione: Il linguaggio poetico e Dante, 1993. Dialogo in pubblico, 1995. Ombre dal fondo, 1997.

L’ora di tutti, 1962; as Otranto, translated by Jessie Bright, 1993. Il ballo dei sapienti, 1966. Cantare nel buio, 1981. Il canto delle sirene, 1989. Voci dal Nordest: Taccuino americano, 1986. Catasto magico, 1999. Storie, 2000. Pietre verbali, 2001.

Further Reading ‘‘Autointervista,’’ Annali d’Italianistica, 7(1989): 423–429. Dizionario della letteratura italiana contemporanea, Florence: Vallecchi, 1973. Guerra, Giorgia, Maria Corti: Voci, canti, catasti, Novara: Interlinea, 2000. Kirschenbaum, Blossom, ‘‘Maria Corti’s Discovery of America,’’ in Italian Americans in a Multicultural Society, Stony Brook, NY: Forum Italicum, 1994. Scorrano, Luigi, Carte inquiete: Maria Corti, Biagia Marniti, Antonia Pozzi, Ravenna: Longo, 2002. West, Rebecca, ‘‘Maria Corti,’’ Encyclopedia of Continental Women Writers, edited by Katharina M. Wilson, New York: Garland, 1991.

COSMICOMICS See Le Cosmicomiche (Work by Italo Calvino)

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COURTS AND PATRONAGE

THE COURTESAN See La Cortigiana (Work by Pietro Aretino)

COURTS AND PATRONAGE The relationship between patrons and clients and the correlated phenomena of patronage and clientage offer the most viable approach to the intricate question of the Italian courts and their culture in the period between the fourteenth and the eighteenth centuries. The complexity of the question dates back to an old view of the late medieval and early modern periods, a view haunted by the legend of the rise of the Italian middle class, once seen as the pivotal factor in the development of the modern liberal state. Neglected by political and social historians, who excluded the courts from this historical itinerary, the undeniable and almost disturbing presence of the courts spawned a form of descriptive history among intellectual and cultural historians chiefly interested in portraying the ceremonial splendor of Italian courtly life. This resulted in an artificial dichotomy between two separate forms of institutions, in which the political concept of state was favored over the cultural concept of court, the modern idea of bureaucratic administration over the archaic idea of personal cult, and the rational implementation of economic policies over the passionate dimension of luxury. From this perspective, the differing concepts of state and of court seemed utterly irreconcilable: The state came to identify a positive pole in the institutional development of European history, associated as it was with a strong and shared claim to modernity; the court represented instead a negative pole, doomed as it was to irrationality, waste, and corruption. This old dichotomy, and the concomitant devaluation of the court, was overturned by a set of groundbreaking studies, pioneered outside the field of history by sociologist Norbert Elias (The 516

Court Society, 1983) and anthropologist Clifford Geertz (Negara: The Theatre State in NineteenthCentury Bali, 1980). These studies made historians aware of the complex web of public and private relations deeply ingrained in princely governance and of the ritual, sacred, and symbolic aspects that informed the very idea of princely power. As synthetically affirmed by British historian Trevor Dean, ‘‘court and state are now seen as complementary, confused, or identical, and no longer as separate worlds’’ (‘‘The Courts,’’ 1995). Courtly patronage, whether in the arts, government, academies, or business, is currently regarded as a fundamental, if not an unreservedly necessary, dynamic component in the gradual process of centralization of power that characterized the various forms of rulership in pre-industrial Europe. The unique patron–client relationship certainly involved idiosyncratic favoritism, self-interested nepotism, and the tribal preferment of friends, prote´ge´s, and other acolytes active within the princely sphere of influence. But it also enabled the emergence of a new class of court managers, carefully chosen on the basis of their merit and competence, to recast in cultural and political terms the prestige and authority of the prince and his family. It is still a matter of debate whether the activity of these courtly operators ought to be interpreted as a strategic maneuver to domesticate and integrate nobility into a composite ruling class, as Elias had influentially purported, or, conversely, as a way to allow members of the aristocratic elites to gain influence and status within the court, as suggested by Ronald G. Asch and Adolf M. Birke, in their introduction to Princes, Patronage, and the Nobility (1991). There

COURTS AND PATRONAGE is no doubt, however, that the study of the way systems of patronage operated, their aims and procedures, their cultural ramifications and social stratification, and their aesthetic and ideological influence on the actual production of culture constitute an important and vibrant branch of historical investigation. If it is true that patronage studies and court studies converge on numerous issues, their respective domains do not entirely coincide. Patronage, broadly defined as the patron’s act of supporting and protecting a given client in exchange for a given service, is not limited only to the courtly context; it also comprises the sponsoring activity of several corporations not necessarily connected to a prince or to members of his family, such as religious confraternities, civic organizations, oligarchic republics, learned academies, independent presses, or professional guilds. The distinction between courtly patronage and other forms of corporate patronage can be heuristically described by means of what anthropologists have termed the ‘‘Big Man’’ system, in which historians have recognized several key features of the courtly institution. This comparison has allowed scholars to portray the court as a hierarchical institution resembling certain tribal societies characterized by the accumulation of power in the hands of one political leader; by the development of patterns of reverence and benefaction governing exchanges between the leader and his or her subordinates; by competition between rivals and their client groups, both in politics and the arts. To be applied to the courtly system, this model needs some further refinement. The institutional figure of the leader entails not only ‘‘Big Men’’ but also ‘‘Big Women,’’ at the center of a complex system of relations that includes members of their families, their extended household, and the local aristocratic establishment, all deeply entangled in a web of self-interest, personal relationships, and political allegiances, both private and public. A paramount example of the gendered dimension of the courtly system is provided by Mantua, ruled by the marquis Ludovico Gonzaga (1412–1478) and his influential wife Barbara Hohenzollern of Brandenburg (1422–1481), whose international connections and political intelligence assured the small city-state of northern Italy European renown and prestige, well before the reign of Francesco Gonzaga (1466–1519) and his famous wife Isabella d’Este (1474–1539), eager collectors of art, avid readers of chivalric literature, and sensitive patrons of humanists and poets. The system of reverence

and worship that governs the highly ritualized discourse of the client toward the patron entails a progressive differentiation of the leader’s entourage from the rest of the aristocratic entourage, a differentiation that depicts the leader, whether man or woman, as a distant and sacred entity. This becomes evident in the proliferation of panegyric orations, where the leaders are portrayed as godlike entities, heavenly creatures, or divine rulers, but affects also the conventions of regular epistolary exchanges, where the princes are addressed as dei (gods), semidei (demigods), celsitudini (celestial entities), and so on. Patrons seek to assert and confirm their political and cultural supremacy within a given territory; clients provide them with a highly discerning discourse with which to manage and control, but also justify and legitimize, their power. The relationship between patrons and clients involves a complex system of procedures through which notions of merit, competence, and efficiency, whether within the realms of diplomacy, politics, medicine, or the arts, are sophisticatedly elaborated and consciously implemented in a web of reciprocal exchanges and interdependences. In the case of Italy, the study of courtly culture is further complicated by the geographical distribution of different forms of power, government, and dynastic traditions within the sociopolitical mosaic of the peninsula, which make it almost impossible to discern a unified rationale for investigating the phenomenon from a national perspective. During the fifteenth century, cities with strong municipal or oligarchic traditions, such as Florence, Venice, or Siena, tended to produce a quite different culture from the one produced in territories traditionally subjected to aristocratic families, such as Ferrara, Mantua, Milan, and Naples. Equally different was the culture produced in centers within the papal state and in centers governed by imperial feudatories, not to mention those hybrid cases, such as the court of the Estensi, where the rulers were feudatories of both the pope and the emperor. Similar discrepancies are also to be found between courts ruled by families descending from ancient aristocratic stocks, such as the Gonzaga, the Visconti, the Este, and those, such as the Medici and the Sforza, descending from bourgeois origins or more recent nobility. The flourishing of lyric poetry during the second half of the fifteenth century, to name just one prominent example, is less pronounced in Florence and Venice than in cities hosting major courts, such as Milan, Naples, Ferrara, and Mantua; similar differences could be found by studying the distribution of other emblematic 517

COURTS AND PATRONAGE genres, such as chivalric or pastoral poems. All these complexities and regional differences have so far prevented a more general study of at least one single court from its medieval origins to its modern eclipse—a study that must also take into account from a political point of view, the increasing presence in Italy of foreign powers and from a cultural point of view, the emergence of other forms of institutional patrons, both private and public, such as learned academies, presses, theaters, religious orders, prominent religious figures, professional associations, and even banks (the famous Pietro Aretino started his career at the service of the prominent banker Agostino Chigi). A further distinction should be advanced, at least heuristically, between forms of political patronage and forms of cultural patronage active within the court. A corresponding divergence exists between historians who tend to concentrate on the administrative relations between court and household, as well as between court and state, and historians who instead consider the court a microcosm of intrinsic political, social, and economic forces that converged in shaping the main subject of their inquiry, namely courtly culture. If the first approach mainly characterizes the kind of history practiced outside of Italy, and to some extent outside the field offered by the Italian courts, privileging instead the courts of France, Burgundy, England, and Germany, the second approach, ambitiously endorsed by the Centro Studi ‘‘Europa delle corti,’’ active since the late 1970s, is predominantly concerned with the study of the Italian courts, especially those that flourished in the northern part of the peninsula from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century. In the first phase of this interdisciplinary project, the center sponsored a wide range of conferences and studies primarily focused on the literary, artistic, and more generally cultural legacy of Baldassare Castiglione’s Il libro del Cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier, 1528), seen as the epitome of the intricate system of values, beliefs, and forms of life that informed the courtly culture in Italy primarily during the sixteenth century. The goal of this initial approach was to elicit a discursive vocabulary, both verbal and gestural, through which to understand and appreciate the way in which the highly differentiated courtly operators staged their existence in theoretical and conceptual terms. In the second, current phase of the project, focussing on the rather abstract ‘‘grammar’’ that helped to define the court as a labyrinthine, self-enclosed, and highly symbolical space of action, the center turned its attention to the 518

ways in which various categories such as adroitness (accortezza), discretion (discrezione), dissimulation (dissimulazione), favor (beneficio), gracefulness (grazia), honor (onore), magnificence (magnificenza), nonchalance (sprezzatura), politeness (politezza), as well as their various synonyms and antonyms, were part of a tangible system of political references and social conditions that allowed Italian courtiers to act, feel, and think accordingly. In this vein Stefano Guazzo’s La civil conversazione (The Art of Conversation, 1574) is read as an arbor textualis (textual tree) defining a complex code of behaviors that deeply informed courtly life (Amedeo Quondam, ‘‘Introduction,’’ 1993). From a literary and cultural perspective, this approach has made possible the reevaluation of a different canon of works, hitherto confined to an archaic repertory of unprofitable and unavailing books by certain modernist interpretations of the Renaissance. Besides authentic best sellers, such as Castiglione’s Il libro del Cortegiano, Giovanni Della Casa’s Galateo, overo de’ costumi (Galateo, 1558), and Stefano Guazzo’s La civil conversazione, the references used by contemporary cultural historians to explore the phenomenon of the courts also include once-neglected treatises and repertories such as Paolo Cortesi’s De Cardinalatu (On Cardinalship, 1510), Francesco Alunno’s La fabrica del mondo (The Edifice of the World, 1548), Giulio Camillo Delminio’s L’idea del teatro (The Idea of Theatre, 1550), Tommaso Garzoni’s La piazza universale di tutte le professioni del mondo (The Universal Square of All the Professions of the World, 1585), or Torquato Accetto’s Della dissimulazione onesta (On Honest Dissimulation, 1641). Dynastic poems and princely treatises, such as Catone Sacco’s Semideus (Demigod, 1438), written for Filippo Maria Visconti (1392–1447); Francesco Filelfo’s Sforziade (1450) for Francesco Sforza (1401–1466); Tito Vespasiano Strozzi’s Borsias for Borso d’Este (1413–1471); Giovan Mario Filelfo’s Martiados for Federico da Montefeltro (1422– 1482); and Laurentias for Lorenzo de’ Medici (1449–1492), to name but a few, are also being studied seriously for the first time. Together with encomiastic, nuptial, and funeral oratory performances, these works form the cultural background for a different appreciation of already canonical works, such as Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato (Orlando in Love, 1482–1483), Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (The Frenzy of Orlando, 1532), Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem Delivered, 1580), as well as

COURTS AND PATRONAGE famous pictorial cycles, such as those exemplified in Mantua by Andrea Mantegna’s Camera picta for Ludovico Gonzaga (1414–1478), the ‘‘studiolo’’ for Isabella d’Este (1474–1539), and the sumptuous Palazzo Te, built and decorated by Giulio Romano for Federico Gonzaga (1500–1540). This new body of texts, sometimes available in accurate critical editions but often still unedited, allows for a better comprehension of those works traditionally labelled as anticourtly literature (notably those of Pietro Aretino, whom Ariosto used to call by the nickname of ‘‘flagello dei principi’’ or ‘‘scourge of princes’’), away from the partisan and sometimes instrumental readings of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which promoted these titles as documents of the degeneration of courtly culture, toward a more dynamic and dialectical understanding of the phenomenon. The vast number of scattered studies sponsored and produced under the aegis of the Centro Studi ‘‘Europa delle corti’’ has been sharply criticized by social and political historians active outside of Italy, who blame them for the excessive attention initially paid to the symbolic, textual, and totalizing dimension of the court, viewed primarily as an ‘‘epiphany of power,’’ to use Carlo Ossola’s expression (‘‘Il ‘luogo’ della corte,’’ 1978), at the expense of different typological varieties, political-dynastic variables, and historical realities. As Trevor Dean bluntly expressed, the ‘‘study of the grammar and rules of court society has not only questionably elevated the court as a closed system but has also neglected the study of relations between court and society (whether the material support of the court or its political support through patronage networks and faction)’’ (‘‘The Courts,’’ 1995). The polemical note called for a greater scrutiny of the mechanisms of patronage and clientage in relation to the ascendancy of princely power and to the hierarchies of skilled officers. This system of relationships gradually transformed the traditional retinue of courtiers into a prebureaucratic system of political and administrative professionals. For British historians, writes David Starkey, ‘‘the history of the court is the history of those who enjoyed access to the king’’ (‘‘Introduction: Court History in Perspective,’’ 1987); for Italians, the same history tends to be approached as a formulaic vocabulary, a symbolic labyrinth, a stage for a graceful and highly idealized conversation, viewed as an institutional system that shaped the culture of the Italian ancien re´gime. This methodological divergence, motivated also by the considerable typological diversity of the Italian courtly mosaic, has been fruitfully resolved

in the groundbreaking studies edited or written by Cesare Mozzarelli such as, for instance, ‘‘Prince and Court: Why and How Should the Court Be Studied Today?’’ (1989) and La corte nella cultura e nella storiografia (1983), and in a set of recent Italian publications sponsored by various institutions, such as the well-established Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo and the newly founded Centro Studi ‘‘Matteo Maria Boiardo.’’ In these studies, the combination of different disciplines and different methodologies constitutes an innovative field of scholarly inquiry in which to define, in new terms and new perspectives, the culture of what was once called the Italian Renaissance. STEFANO CRACOLICI See also: Renaissance Further Reading Asch, Ronald G., and Adolf M. Birke, ‘‘Introduction: Court and Household from the Fifteenth to the Seventeenth Centuries,’’ in Princes, Patronage, and the Nobility: The Court at the Beginning of the Modern Age, c. 1450–1650, edited by Ronald G. Asch and Adolf M. Birke, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Biow, Douglas, Doctors, Ambassadors, Secretaries: Humanism and Professions in Renaissance Italy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Bourdua, Louise, The Franciscans and Art Patronage in Late Medieval Italy, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Burke, Jill, Changing Patrons: Social Identity and the Visual Arts in Renaissance Florence, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004. Burke, Peter, The Fortunes of the Courtier: The European Reception of Castiglione’s ‘‘Cortegiano,’’ Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995. Chittolini, Giorgio, Anthony Molho, and Pierangelo Schiera (editors), Origini dello Stato: Processi di formazione statale in Italia fra medioevo ed eta` moderna, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1994. Cummings, A. M., The Maecenas and the Madrigalist: Patrons, Patronage, and the Origins of the Italian Madrigal, Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2004. Dean, Trevor, ‘‘The Courts,’’ The Journal of Modern History, 67(1995), 136–351. Droste, Heiko, ‘‘Patronage in der fru¨hen Neuzeit—Institution und Kulturform,’’ Zeitschrift fu¨r Historische Forschung, 30:4(2003), 555–590. Elias, Norbert, The Court Society, translated by Edmund Jephcott, Oxford: Blackwell, 1983. Gallo, F. Alberto, Music in the Castle: Troubadours, Books, and Orators in Italian Courts of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Centuries, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Geertz, Clifford, Negara: The Theatre State in NineteenthCentury Bali, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980.

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COURTS AND PATRONAGE Gundersheimer, Werner L., ‘‘Patronage in the Renaissance: An Exploratory Approach,’’ in Patronage in the Renaissance, edited by Guy F. Lytle and Stephen Orgel, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981. Kent, Francis W., and Patricia Simons, ‘‘Renaissance Patronage: An Introduction Essay,’’ in Patronage, Art, and Society in Renaissance Italy, edited by Francis W. Kent and Patricia Simons, Canberra: Humanities Research Centre Australia–New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. King, Catherine, Renaissance Women Patrons: Wives and Widows in Italy c. 1300–c. 1550, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1998. Korshin, Paul J., ‘‘Types of Eighteenth-Century Literary Patronage,’’ Eighteenth-Century Studies, 7:4(1974), 453–473. Lazzarini, Isabella, Fra un principe e altri Stati: Relazioni di potere e forme di servizio a Mantova nell’eta` di Ludovico Gonzaga, Rome: Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo, 1996. Matarrese, Tina, and Cristina Montagnani (editors), Il principe e la storia, Novara: Interlinea, 2005.

Mozzarelli, Cesare (editor), ‘‘Familia’’ del principe e famiglia aristocratica, 2 vols., Rome: Bulzoni, 1988. Mozzarelli, Cesare, ‘‘Prince and Court: Why and How Should the Court Be Studied Today?’’ Schifanoia, 8 (1989), 33–36. Mozzarelli, Cesare, and Giuseppe Olmi (editors), La corte nella cultura e nella storiografia: Immagini e posizioni tra Otto e Novecento, Rome: Bulzoni, 1983. Ossola, Carlo, ‘‘Il ‘luogo’ della corte,’’ in Le Corti farnesiane di Parma e Piacenza (1545–1622), edited by Marzio A. Romani and Amedeo Quondam, vol. 1, Rome: Bulzoni, 1978. Quondam, Amedeo, Introduction to Stefano Guazzo, La civil conversazione, vol. 1, Ferrara: Panini, 1993. Santagata, Marco, and Stefano Carrai, La lirica di corte nell’Italia del Quattrocento, Milan: FrancoAngeli, 1993. Starkey, David, ‘‘Introduction: Court History in Perspective,’’ in The English Court from the Wars of the Roses to the Civil War, edited by David Starkey, London: Longman, 1987.

CREPUSCOLARISMO The term crepuscolarismo (from crepuscolo, twilight) was introduced by Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, a critic who later gained celebrity for the originality of his literary production and for his opposition to the Fascist regime. He coined the expedient label in an article published on 10 September 1910 in the Turin newspaper La Stampa, thereby baptizing what could not, until the moment of his naming, be properly understood as a poetic movement. For the poets in question did not themselves forge any poetic manifesto or define a set of tenets in the pages of any single literary journal. It is instead at the hands of critics that, for their similarly but independently gained conceptions of life and poetry, they have come to be understood under the single title of crepuscolari. In his seminal article, predictably entitled ‘‘Poesia crepuscolare’’ (Crepuscular Poetry), Borgese simultaneously reviewed Marino Moretti’s Poesie scritte col lapis (Poems Written in Pencil, 1910), Fausto Maria Martini’s Poesie provinciali (Provincial Poems, 1910), and Carlo Chiaves’ Sogno e ironia (Dream and Irony, 1910). He warned: 520

A interrogare i critici, che distribuiscono ogni anno eque razioni di lodi fra cinquanta o sessanta volumi di versi, si direbbe che Apollo musagete tenga fermo il suo carro di fuoco sullo Zenith del nostro cielo. A interrogare il gran pubblico si direbbe invece che, dopo le Laudi e i Poemetti, la poesia italiana si sia spenta. Si spegne, infatti, ma in un tenue e lunghissimo crepuscolo, cui forse non seguira` la notte If one asks the critics, who annually distribute equal portions of praise among fifty to sixty volumes of verse, one is told that Apollo holds firm his chariot of fire on the zenith of our sky. If one asks the common reader one is told that, to the contrary, after the Laudi and the Poemetti, the sun of Italian poetry has set. In fact, that sun is still setting through a long and gentle twilight, and it is by no means clear that utter night will fall.

In the wake of this suggestive metaphor, Borgese situated the crepuscular poets within the contemporary literary landscape: ...poiche´ il gran campo della nostra letteratura e` stato mietuto con falci d’oro, essi indugiano sui margini delle vie spigolando i residui del romanticismo e le scorie del classicismo e accontentandosi di capire in Pascoli la balbuzie, in D’Annunzio il Poema paradisiaco

CREPUSCOLARISMO ...Since the great field of our literature was harvested with golden sickles, [the crepusculars] linger by the roadside gleaning the residue of Romanticism and the remnants of Classicism, content in their understanding of Pascoli’s stutter and of D’Annunzio’s Poema paradisiaco.

As has been the case for other artistic movements of modernity, the definition is cast in negative terms, framed in Hegelian theories about the end of art: Borgese intended to make evident the limits of the poets in question and certainly not to eulogize them. If the definition has taken hold, it is because poets of different geographic, social, and cultural backgrounds came to share, despite their circumstantial differences, a radical refutation of the social and civil role of poetry established by the great poets of the nineteenth century. As a consequence, a major feature of crepuscular poetry is the circumscription of the poet within a highly marginalized, private function. The literary map indicates that the movement developed in distinct geographical areas: Turin, where Guido Gozzano, Carlo Vallini, Nino Oxilia, and Carlo Chiaves lived and worked; Rome, where the group led by Sergio Corazzini, including Fausto Maria Martini, Alberto Tarchiani, and Guelfo Civinini, was based; and the area between Emilia and Romagna, whose writers mainly moved to and worked in Florence, like Corrado Govoni and Marino Moretti, to whom should be added the name of Aldo Palazzeschi, who never took part in the movement but maintained a long and fruitful friendship with the crepuscular poets, especially with Moretti. The season of crepuscular poetry was ephemeral: We may locate its inauguration in Govoni’s books Le fiale (The Phials, 1903) and Armonie in grigio et in silenzio (Harmonies in Gray and in Silence, 1903) and its conclusion in Guido Gozzano’s 1911 masterpiece, I colloqui (The Colloquies). Between these dates Corazzini wrote and published Piccolo libro inutile (Small Useless Book, 1906), Elegia (Elegy, 1906), and Libro per la sera della domenica (Book for Sunday Evening, 1906); Moretti wrote Poesie scritte col lapis and Poesie di tutti i giorni (Poems for Every Day, 1911); Chiaves published his only book, Sogno e ironia, in 1910; between 1906 and 1910 Fausto Maria Martini published Le piccole morte (Little Dead Things, 1906), Panem nostrum (Our Bread, 1907), and Poesie provinciali; Nino Oxilia published his Canti brevi (Short Cantos, 1909); Carlo Vallini published his La rinunzia (The Sacrifice, 1907) and Un giorno (A Day, 1907). But by 1907, Corazzini had already died, rather prematurely, of tuberculosis, and Govoni and Palazzeschi would soon desert the

movement, for the opposing camp of the Futurists: In short, well before the outbreak of World War I, the creative drive of the crepuscular movement was definitely exhausted. The founder of crepuscular poetry, chronologically speaking, was Corrado Govoni: In his first collections, all the themes that would later become definitive of the movement are already present. In a 1914 unpublished letter from Govoni to Gian Piero Lucini, there is a list of the most famous elements of crepuscular poetry: Ho sempre amato le cose tristi, la musica girovaga, i canti d’amore cantati dai vecchi nelle osterie, le preghiere delle suore, i mendicanti pittorescamente stracciati e malati, i convalescenti, gli autunni melanconici pieni di addii, le primavere nei collegi quasi timorose, le campagne magnetiche, le chiese dove piangono indifferentemente i ceri, le rose che si sfogliano sugli altarini nei canti delle vie deserte in cui cresce l’erba, tutte le cose tristi della religione, le cose tristi dell’amore, le cose tristi del lavoro, le cose tristi delle miserie I’ve always had a love for sad things, gypsy music, love songs sung by old men in taverns, nuns’ prayers, sick beggars in quaint dress, convalescents, melancholy autumns full of goodbyes, hesitating springtimes at boarding schools, magnetic countrysides, churches where candles weep indifferently, roses dropping theirs petals on the altars of deserted streets in which grass is growing, all the sad things of religion, the sad things of love, the sad things of work, the sad things of miseries (cited in Giacinto Spagnoletti, Storia della letteratura del Novecento, 1994)

Corazzini and Gozzano, respectively in Rome and Turin, acted as poles of attraction to which other young poets, sharing an interest in lyrics characterized by the simple tones and humble subjects of daily life, were drawn. The crepuscolari refused to play the role of laureate poets, to celebrate bourgeois pomp and convention, as Giosue` Carducci did for his poetpioneer: ‘‘Il poeta e` un grande artiere, / che al mestiere, fece i muscoli d’acciaio: / capo fier, collo robusto / nudo il busto, duro il braccio, e l’occhio gaio’’ (The poet is a great pioneer, / whose craft has gained him muscles of steel/ a proud head, a strong neck / a bared chest, hard arms, and a gay eye; ‘‘Congedo’’). Thus Moretti portrays the poet as a clown: ‘‘ma voglio che questa nostra / grande famiglia discreta / mi guardi e dica: il poeta, / il poeta su la giostra, / e rida rida perche´ / il poeta che si mostra / su un cavallo della giostra / sembra il pagliaccio che egli e`’’ (but I want this / large family of ours / to look at me and say: a poet / a poet on a merry-goround / and to laugh, to laugh because / the poet 521

CREPUSCOLARISMO who shows himself / on the merry-go-round’s horse / looks like the clown that he is; ‘‘La giostra’’). Often the function of the poet is negatively described, as in Corazzini: ‘‘Perche´ tu mi dici: poeta? / Io non sono un poeta. / Io non sono che un piccolo fanciullo che piange’’ (Why do you say to me: poet? / I am not a poet. / I am but a child who cries; ‘‘Descrizione del povero poeta sentimentale’’); or in Gozzano: ‘‘Io mi vergogno, / sı`, mi vergogno d’essere un poeta!’’ (I am ashamed, / yes, I am ashamed of being a poet!; ‘‘La signorina Felicita’’); and Palazzeschi: ‘‘Infine, / io ho pienamente ragione, / I tempi sono cambiati, / gli uomini non domandano piu` nulla / dai poeti: / e lasciatemi divertire!’’ (At last, / I am entirely right, / times have changed;/ the men no longer ask anything / of poets: / so let me have fun; ‘‘Lasciatemi divertire’’). This refusal appears to be an act of insubordination, a gesture of rebellion against the establishment. Indeed the crepuscolari endorsed a mode of writing that opposed tradition and chose a language that would neither falsify the ontological experience nor dissemble it through empty rhetorical terms. There is a certain nonchalance toward the technical perfection of verse, what Eugenio Montale called a clash between the aulic and the prosaic (Sulla poesia, 1976). Also in La letteratura dell’italia unita (1968), Gianfranco Contini noted that a frequent unintentional fluctuation in the count of syllables (that he called anisosillabismo) is to be found in both Corazzini’s and Gozzano’s poems. This tendency speaks not to any technical incompetence on the part of the authors but rather to a conscious espousal of prosaic modes of expression. Along with the veristi, the crepuscolari reacted to the political, social, and economic crisis that followed the unification of Italy. But, unlike the more polemical Giovanni Verga, they avoided any explicit critical analysis of the world, as well as any constructive engagement with the future. Poised on the threshold of the twentieth century, the crepuscular movement bridged two very different and yet very similar worlds. Thus critics consider crepuscolarismo either as the final product of decadentismo (the epigone of an already expired mode of poetry) or as the beginning of twentiethcentury lyricism. On the one hand, after Borgese and De Robertis, some view the crepuscolari as minor authors of late nineteenth century, linking them to Pascoli and to the realistic tradition of decadent poetry. But on the other hand, their work appears to be innovative, the inaugural moment of an entirely modern way of conceiving poetry and its relationship to society. The penchant for worn-out 522

things, for the individual existential malaise, for a poetry playing on irony and understatement, on the contrast between form and content, might be interpreted as signs of a break with the past; a break free of the flamboyance and revolutionary fervor that marked the development of other -isms of the same period, but equally effective. Crepuscular verse attests to the rise of a consciousness concerning the fracture between the poet’s personal world and social and national myths. These aspects of the movement have led critics (such as Edoardo Sanguineti) to interpret crepuscolarismo as a major current in twentieth-century Italian literature. In this perspective, D’Annunzio’s Poema Paradisiaco (Paradisiac Poem, 1893), Sbarbaro’s Pianissimo (1914), and Montale’s Accordi (Chords, 1922) would be considered within the crepuscular mode. GIUSEPPE GAZZOLA See also: Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, Sergio Corazzini, Guido Gozzano, Marino Moretti, Aldo Palazzeschi Further Reading Baldacci, Luigi, I crepuscolari, Turin: ERI, 1961. Ba`rberi Squarotti, Giorgio, Poesia e ideologia borghese, Naples: Liguori, 1976. Borgese, Giuseppe Antonio, ‘‘Poesia crepuscolare,’’ La Stampa, 10 September 1910. Contini, Gianfranco, La letteratura dell’italia unita, Florence: Sansoni, 1968. De Robertis, Giuseppe, Scrittori del Novecento, Florence: Le Monnier, 1958. Fantasia, Rita, and Gennaro Tallini, Poesia e rivoluzione: simbolismo, crepuscolarismo, futurismo, Milan: Franco Angeli, 2004. Guglielminetti, Marziano, La ‘‘scuola dell’ironia’’: Gozzano e i viciniori, Florence: Olschki, 1984. Livi, Franc¸ois, La parola crepuscolare. Corazzini, Gozzano, Moretti, Milan: IPL, 1986. Livi, Franc¸ois, Tra crepuscolarismo e futurismo: Govoni e Palazzeschi, Milan: IPL, 1980. Montale, Eugenio, Sulla poesia, Milan: Mondadori, 1976. Quatela, Antonio, Invito a conoscere il crepuscolarismo, Milan: Mursia, 1988. Sanguineti, Edoardo, Tra liberty e crepuscolarismo, Milan: Mursia, 1970. Savoca, Giuseppe, I crepuscolari e Guido Gozzano, Bari: Laterza, 1976. Slataper, Scipio, ‘‘Perplessita` crepuscolare,’’ in Scritti letterari e critici, Milan: Mondadori, 1956. Spagnoletti, Giacinto, Storia della letteratura del Novecento, Rome: Newton, 1994. Tedesco, Natale, La condizione crepusculare: saggi sulla poesia italiana del Novecento, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1970. Villa, Angela, Neoidealismo e rinascenza latina tra Otto e Novecento. La cerchia di Sergio Corazzini, Milan: LED, 1999.

BENEDETTO CROCE

CRIME ON GOAT ISLAND See Delitto all’isola delle capre (Work by Ugo Betti)

BENEDETTO CROCE (1866–1952) The philosophical and critical work of Benedetto Croce established itself as a dominant cultural model on the Italian intellectual scene in the first half of the twentieth century. The influence exercised by his thought up until the 1950s was so considerable that we can speak of a true hegemony in several fields of knowledge. One of the determining features of his activity was his methodical, daily involvement in cultural work, understood as a mediation between the individual and his conscience, and the larger movement of the human spirit, the course of history, within the framework of a constant search for balance and morality. The philosopher’s early development was in the field of historical studies, from which he derived a capacity for the minute analysis of facts, a capacity that also characterized his subsequent activity. This period saw the beginnings of his research on history, popular traditions, and the affairs of southern Italy, such as his contributions on the revolution of 1799 in Naples, Studi storici sulla rivoluzione napoletana del 1799 (Historical Studies of the Neapolitan Revolution of 1799, 1897) or on I teatri di Napoli: secolo 15–18 (The Theaters of Naples: From the 15th to the 18th Century, 1891) and many of the Storie e leggende napoletane (Neapolitan Histories and Legends, 1919). An interest in history and literature led Croce to try his hand early on at questions of method. In the essay La storia ridotta sotto il concetto generale dell’arte (History Reduced to the General Concept of Art, 1893), he confronted, through a wide range of cultural and philosophical references, the problem of history, distinguishing it from science and bringing it within the field of individual knowledge.

In La critica letteraria: questioni teoriche (Literary Criticism: Theoretical Questions, 1894), he discussed the status of criticism and suggested aesthetic judgment as a privileged form of approach to the literary work. His knowledge of Marxism and his reading of Francesco De Sanctis were also decisive for the maturation of his thought. After an initial appreciation, he adopted a critical position toward Marxism, which he approached through the mediation of Antonio Labriola, attested to by the essays of Materialismo storico ed economia marxistica (Historical Materialism and the Economics of Karl Marx, 1900), but he also took from it an awareness of the importance of economic factors and of the concreteness of historical change. His engagement with De Sanctis pushed him to meditate on the problem of art and poetry in their relations with the other activities of the spirit. This first phase of reflection on history, philosophy, and art had its end point in the fundamental volume of 1902, Estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale (The Aesthetic as the Science of Expression and of the Linguistic in General), which contains the first, decisive assertion of the autonomy of art, understood as a cognitive activity founded on intuition and which was destined to be identified, in the artistic synthesis, with expression. As the philosopher himself clarified in his suggestive autobiographical work Contributo alla critica di me stesso (Benedetto Croce: An Autobiography, 1918), the Estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale contains a kind of ‘‘program’’ that is taken up again in the theoretical and historical writings on the other forms of the spirit and tested at 523

BENEDETTO CROCE the level of concrete research. As early as 1902, a consequence was the idea for a journal, La critica, which was intended to illustrate Italian intellectual life from the birth of the unified state; meanwhile, his philosophical reflection was further enriched by his fundamental studies of Hegel, Cio` che e` vivo e cio` che e` morto nella filosofia di Hegel (What Is Living and What Is Dead in the Philosophy of Hegel, 1907) and of Vico, La filosofia di Giambattista Vico (The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico, 1911). His rethinking of the Hegelian positions led Croce to deepening of his idealist perspective, with the elaboration of the system of the ‘‘Filosofia dello Spirito’’ (Philosophy of the Spirit), which is divided into four parts, corresponding to the forms of the spirit: logic, discussed in Logica come scienza del concetto puro (Logic as the Science of the Pure Concept, 1909); economics and ethics, studied in Filosofia della pratica: Economia ed etica (Philosophy of the Practical: Economics and Ethics, 1909); and aesthetics. Among the four forms of the spirit, there is not an opposition but rather a distinction, which is based on a double difference: between theoretical activity and practical activity and between the individual and the universal. Thus, art is knowledge of the individual, and logic of the universal; both constitute the ‘‘theoretical’’ forms of the spirit. Economics, desire for the particular, and ethics, desire for the universal, represent the two ‘‘practical’’ forms. On the other hand, opposition is produced within each form between a value and the corresponding countervalue: beautiful and ugly in art, true and false in logic, useful and useless in economics, good and bad in the moral realm. Positive and negative elements coexist, finding themselves in a dialectical relationship: One error of Hegel, according to Croce, is that of attributing the dialectical relation to distinct phenomena rather than to opposites. At the center of Logica come scienza del concetto puro is the definition of the ‘‘pure concept,’’ the principal characteristics of which are expressiveness, universality, and concreteness. The ‘‘pure concept’’ must be distinguished from the ‘‘pseudo-concept,’’ which is empirical and abstract; on pseudo-concepts, according to Croce, are based the natural and mathematical sciences, whose constructions can have a practical value but cannot lead to universal knowledge. The Filosofia della pratica takes on the analysis of the ‘‘practical’’ forms of the spirit, economics (and politics) and morality, which make up its modes of action in reality. Here, a crucial distinction is that between ‘‘action,’’ a work of the lone individual, 524

and ‘‘event,’’ a sum of all actions, a moment of the eternal evolution of the spirit. At this point, the question of history becomes crucial, and Croce returned to it in Teoria e storia della storiografia (Theory and History of Historiography, 1917), the last of the series of works of ‘‘Filosofia dello Spirito’’: The relationship among the various forms of knowledge is a historical relationship, a circulation of experiences in the development of the spirit. History and philosophy thus come to be identified, philosophy arising as a methodological moment of historiography, as a clarification of the controlling concepts of historical interpretation. Every history, the philosopher maintained, is contemporary history, insofar as it is conceived in relation to the moral and intellectual needs of the present, to the demands of life at that moment. This position, as well as the denial of the possibility of a universal history, excludes the intervention of a transcendent power. History is immanent rationality, which is realized in the circularity of the spirit, the sole reality on which philosophy continually reflects, without ever reaching a definitive truth but developing itself before new problems that appear along the way. Here, then, Croce’s thought gave birth to a great many essays and articles that take up particular problems and questions. At the very least we should mention La storia come pensiero e come azione (History as Thought and as Action, 1938), which offers a synthesis of Crocean historicism and in which the concept of freedom is central: If historical development unfolds according to an immanent rationality, human history always arises as a ‘‘history of liberty,’’ notwithstanding the seeming disappearance of liberty itself in decisive moments of the life of nations. Fundamental for the clarification of Croce’s ethical and political historiography are the great historical works written between 1925 and 1932, which also attest to an evolution of his political position. Known for his liberal conservatism in the years before the war, the philosopher initially suspended judgment toward Fascism, from which he expected a conservative restoration of the institutions of the state, but gradually he developed an attitude of mounting criticism that turned into the most clear-cut opposition. His historical research was also influenced by the new demands of moral conscience, within the perspective of a secular ‘‘religion of liberty.’’ Thus, in Storia del regno di Napoli (History of the Kingdom of Naples, 1925), which recounts the affairs of the Neapolitan kingdom up to 1860, and in Storia dell’eta` barocca in

BENEDETTO CROCE Italia (History of the Baroque Age in Italy, 1928), a grand portrait of seventeenth-century Italy, the attention to the moral commitment of humanity is central. The Storia d’Italia dal 1871 al 1915 (A History of Italy, 1871–1915, 1928) is constructed as an homage to postunification, liberal Italy, and, analogously, the Storia d’Europa nel secolo decimonono (A History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century, 1932) is based on an appreciation of the bourgeois and liberal nineteenth century, which is seen as the century of the affirmation of the ideal of liberty, destined to establish itself once more in European history. In the essay ‘‘Principio, ideale, teoria. A proposito della teoria filosofica della liberta`’’ (Principle, Ideal, Theory: On the Philosophical Theory of Freedom) included in the volume Il carattere della filosofia moderna (The Character of Modern Philosophy, 1941), Croce took up the problem of liberty again at the philosophical level. He distinguished its roots not in a particular political or economic order, but in the moral conscience. Liberalism, therefore, is configured as an eternal moment of the spirit but also as a modern awareness of the value of liberty: an ethical perspective destined to gather around the philosopher the greatest cultural forces of anti-Fascism. The aspect of Croce’s philosophical system destined to have the greatest resonance is his aesthetics, and the field in which his influence turns out to be decisive is literary criticism. The positions expressed in his Estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale are full of integrations and openings: His lecture of 1908, ‘‘L’intuizione pura e il carattere lirico dell’arte’’ (Pure Intuition and the Lyrical Character of Art) published in Problemi di estetica e contributi alla storia dell’estetica italiana (Problems in Aesthetics and Contributions to the History of Italian Aesthetics, 1910), confronts the problem of the relationship between poetry and feeling. Feeling is the center of attention as well in Breviario di estetica (Guide to Aesthetics, 1913): Pure intuition is art when it is animated by a vital principle, when it is a clear representation of a feeling. In the lucid lectures collected in this volume, the principle of the autonomy of art is articulated through a series of distinctions that establish, simultaneously, an equal number of relationships between art itself and the other activities of the spirit. Croce also dealt with concepts that he judged to be prejudices regarding art, but to which he found himself repeatedly returning, such as the distinction between content and form, which art instead ought to synthesize; the distinction between the image and its physical translation, or between

‘‘art’’ and ‘‘technique,’’ which always tends to be undervalued; the possibility of distinguishing between various forms of art, presupposed by the theory of literary and artistic genres, a theory whose validity he does not recognize. Finally, Croce treated the status of literary and art criticism, a status condensed into the definition of the critic as a philosophus additus artifice (a philosopher added to the artist), who, in his judgment, calls upon thought as well. A further deepening of Croce’s aesthetics comes with his acquisition of the notion of cosmicita` (cosmicness) expressed in an essay of 1918, ‘‘Il carattere di totalita` dell’espressione artistica’’ (The Character of the Totality of Artistic Expression) collected in Nuovi saggi di estetica (New Essays on Aesthetics, 1920). As he explained, art is indeed intuition, not of the individual, but of the universal: It embraces in itself the entire human being, life in its totality. The notion of totality and of cosmicita` also leads to the reintroduction of morality into the field of aesthetics. The concept of personality takes on significance in the artistic work and comes to indicate no longer the single artist in his or her individuality, but the poetic work in its universality. From this derives a new conception of literary and artistic historiography that is articulated in monographs that respect the autonomy of the work of art and try to detect its prevailing sentiment. The end point of Croce’s thought in the field of aesthetics is La poesia. Introduzione alla critica e storia della poesia e della letteratura (Poetry: An Introduction to the Criticism and History of Poetry and Literature, 1936). Poetry, an eternal, ahistorical spiritual category, is distinct from literature, which comprises a wide range of forms and works—sentimental and effusive, rhetorical, didactic, entertaining. Criticism must distinguish between poetry and nonpoetry, the beautiful and the ugly, but also proceed to characterization, that is the detection of the generating motive of the art work. With his deepened theoretical reflection, Croce undertook a vast work of interpretive practice, examining aspects, problems, and authors of Italian and European literature and engaging in a thorough examination of the most recent literary production in the essays that he publishes in La critica between 1903 and 1914 and then collected between 1914 and 1915 in the four volumes of Letteratura della nuova Italia (Literature of the New Italy), to which another two volumes were added between 1938 and 1940. From these essays there emerges (also thanks to the suggestive style of Croce’s writing) a series of polemical objectives and 525

BENEDETTO CROCE proposals for teachers and cultural models, against the backdrop of a well-defined aesthetic canon and the concept of art as intuition, which is suited to explain Croce’s choices and rejections. On the polemical front he took on (along with positivist thought, which he considered incapable in its determinism of accounting for the complexity of the spiritual life), verismo and the erudition of the scholars of the ‘‘historical school.’’ He was even sharper is his condemnation of the aestheticism, decadence, and irrationalism of the beginning of the century, a condemnation that concerned not only the domain of art but also that of morality. From this ensued a precise table of values that had at its apex Giosue` Carducci, offered as a model at the ideological, moral, and stylistic levels and contrasted, as a ‘‘sano’’ (healthy) man, to the ‘‘malati’’ (sick) Giovanni Pascoli, Antonio Fogazzaro, and Gabriele D’Annunzio. In the studies dedicated to the latter, we see a transition from a certain cautious initial recognition, with an admission of the value of poetic form, which is able to compensate for the moral uneasiness generated by the content, to the increasingly decisive condemnation of the growing success of the school of D’Annunzio on Italian culture. After his thorough traversal of the literature of the ‘‘new Italy,’’ seen as a kind of cultural duty that brought him to review analytically contemporary literary productions, including minor and negligible writers, Croce became engaged both with the broader European context and with that of other centuries. The results were the monographs on Goethe (1919), who, in the postwar climate, was offered as a model of the universal poet and as a master of formal harmony; on Ariosto in Ariosto, Shakespeare, e Corneille (1920), and on Dante in La poesia di Dante (The Poetry of Dante, 1921), with the clear-cut and much-discussed distinction between the poetic aspects and the ‘‘structural’’ aspects of the Comedia (Divine Comedy, ca. 1305–1321). The criterion of the contrast between moments of works that can be ascribed to the realm of poetry and those that are nonpoetic seems operative as well in the essays devoted to European authors of the nineteenth century, collected in the volume Poesia e non poesia. Note sulla letteratura europea del secolo decimonono (European Literature in the Nineteenth Century, 1923). This criterion, even though it is meted out cautiously, leads to some grave misunderstandings. Croce’s studies of Italian literature, which proceed with essays devoted to Italian poetry from the fourteenth century to the Renaissance, the baroque age and 526

the seventeenth century, to the Arcadia and eighteenth-century culture, are matched as well by his painstaking work in publishing and his close association with the publisher Laterza, for which he devised the series ‘‘Writers of Italy.’’ Croce’s tireless productivity entails a series of positive aspects: the claim for the philosophical basis of criticism, a great intellectual curiosity, the solidity of the factual basis of his analysis, the reliability of his investigations, his European openness. While his critical make-up seems, on careful inspection, to have been less rigid than has often been thought (partly as a result of the application of his methodology by his less gifted followers) it must be acknowledged, however, that his search for clarity, good sense, and classicality, his essential cultural conservatism, did not allow him to engage fully with the art of modernity. Such limitations, along with the spread of new philosophical and historical orientations and new literary methodologies, led in the 1950s to the beginning of the decline of Croce’s fortune. Between the end of 1980 and 1990, there was a renewal of interest, attested to by the republication of several of Croce’s works by the publishing house Adelphi and by the beginning of a national edition by the Neapolitan publisher Bibliopolis. Alongside a commitment at the level of publishing, there has also been a reemergence of critical studies that are gradually restoring a revised portrait of Croce, composed of lights and shadows and evaluated, in the end, without regard for preformed opinions. Thus, for example, we are by now definitively beyond a dependence on his critical positions, which are on various occasions at the root of misunderstandings and harsh criticisms, as in the case of his severe reaction to Luigi Pirandello’s essay on L’umorismo (On Humor, 1908). On the other hand, his research on specific historical and literary subjects, such as his studies of local history, which are also supported by a robust narrative structure, and his pages on literature and poetry in dialect remain of great interest.

Biography Benedetto Croce was born on February 25, 1866 in Pescasseroli (L’Aquila), in Abruzzo, to a family of landowners. He completed his studies in Naples at the Collegio della Carita` and then at the Genovesi secondary school; he lost his parents and sister in the earthquake of Casamicciola, on the island of

BENEDETTO CROCE Ischia, 1883. He then moved to Rome, into the house of his uncle, Silvio Spaventa, and enrolled at the law school but preferred to spend time in the libraries. In 1886, no longer thinking of a degree, which he never received, Croce returned to Naples and undertook learned inquiries. With Salvatore Di Giacomo, he founded the journal Napoli nobilissima, 1892. He founded the journal La critica, 1903. On a proposal of the minister Sonnino, he was nominated senator of the realm, 1910; he also participated in the local administrative world in various positions. Angelina Zampanelli, his companion of many years, died, September 1913. He married the young Adele Rossi, 1914, with whom, in addition to Giulio, who died as an infant, he had four daughters: Elena, destined to participate actively in Italian cultural life; Alda; Lidia; and Silvia. He served as Minister of Public Education in the last government of Giolitti, 1920, at the end of which he returned to his life as a scholar. His opposition to Fascism grew, particularly in the wake of the murder of Giacomo Matteotti, 1924. He published the Manifesto degli intelletuali antifascisti, 1925. During the Fascist regime, he remained in the Senate, exercising his function as a member of the opposition; for the importance of his cultural figure and the prestige he enjoyed abroad, his activity was tolerated by Fascism. When the regime collapsed, he engaged in energetic political activity; he supported the new liberal party, played a part in several governments, and participated in the Constituent Assembly of the Republic. In 1947, in Naples, he inaugurated the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici in the Palazzo Filomarino, its headquarters. In 1950, he was struck by paralysis, which did not affect his mental lucidity; he died in Naples on November 20, 1952. RICCIARDA RICORDA See also: Historiography; Philosophy and Literature Selected Works Collections Opere complete, 74 vols., Bari: Laterza, 1908–1952. My Philosophy and Other Essays on the Moral and Political Problems of Our Time, edited by R. Klibansky, translated by E. F. Carritt, London: Allen & Unwin, 1949. Essays on Literature and Literary Criticism, edited and translated by M. E. Moss, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990. Edizione nazionale delle opere di Benedetto Croce, Naples: Bibliopolis, 1991.

Philosophical, Historical, and Literary Essays I teatri di Napoli: secolo 15–18, 1891; new edition as I teatri di Napoli dal Rinascimento alla fine del secolo decimottavo, 1916. La storia ridotta sotto il concetto generale dell’arte, 1893. La critica letteraria: questioni teoriche, 1894. Studi storici sulla rivoluzione napoletana del 1799, 1897; new edition as La rivoluzione napoletana del 1799: biografie, racconti, ricerche, 1912. Materialismo storico ed economia marxistica, 1900; as Historical Materialism and the Economics of Karl Marx, translated by Christabel M. Meredith, 1914. Tesi fondamentali di un’estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale, 1900. Estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale, 1902; as Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic, translated by Douglas Ainslie, 1909; as The Aesthetic as the Science of Expression and of the Linguistic in General, translated by Colin Lyas, 1992. Cio` che e` vivo e cio` che e` morto nella filosofia di Hegel, 1907; new edition as Saggio sullo Hegel, 1913; as Estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale, translated by Douglas Ainslie, 1915. Filosofia della pratica. Economia ed etica, 1909; Philosophy of the Practical. Economic and Ethic, translated by Douglas Ainslie, 1913. Logica come scienza del concetto puro, 1909; as Logic as the Science of the Pure Concept, translated by Douglas Ainslie, 1917. Problemi di estetica e contributi alla storia dell’estetica italiana, 1910. Saggi sulla letteratura italiana del Seicento, 1911. La filosofia di Giambattista Vico, 1911; as The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico, translated by R. G. Collingwood, 1913. Breviario di estetica, 1913; as The Essence of Aesthetic, translated by Douglas Ainslie, 1921; as Guide to Aesthetics, translated by Patrick Romanell, 1965. La letteratura della nuova Italia, 6 vols., 1914–1940. Teoria e storia della storiografia, 1917; as Theory and History of Historiography, translated by Douglas Ainslie, 1921. Una famiglia di patrioti ed altri saggi storici e critici, 1919. Goethe, 1919; as Goethe, translated by Douglas Ainslie, 1923. Ariosto, Shakespeare e Corneille, 1920; as Ariosto, Shakespeare and Corneille, translated by Douglas Ainslie, 1920. Nuovi saggi di estetica, 1920. Storia della storiografia italiana nel secolo decimonono, 1921. La poesia di Dante, 1921; as The Poetry of Dante, translated by Douglas Ainslie, 1922. Poesia e non poesia. Note sulla letteratura europea del secolo decimonono, 1923; as European Literature in the Nineteenth Century, translated by Douglas Ainslie, Storia del regno di Napoli, 1925; as History of the Kingdom of Naples, translated by Frances Frenaye, 1970. Storia dell’eta` barocca in Italia, 1928. Storia d’Italia dal 1871 al 1915, 1928; as A History of Italy, 1871–1915, translated by Cecilia M. Ady, 1929. Aesthetica in nuce, 1929; ‘‘Aesthetics,’’ in Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. 14, 1929. Etica e politica, 1931.

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BENEDETTO CROCE Storia d’Europa nel secolo decimonono, 1932; as History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century, translated by Henry Furst, 1933. Poesia popolare e poesia d’arte. Studi sulla poesia italiana dal Tre al Cinquecento, 1933. Ultimi saggi, 1935. La poesia. Introduzione alla critica e storia della poesia e della letteratura, 1936. La storia come pensiero e come azione, 1938; as History as the Story of Liberty, translated by Sylvia Sprigge, 1941. Il carattere della filosofia moderna, 1941. Aneddoti di varia letteratura, 3 vols., 1942. La letteratura italiana del Settecento: note critiche, 1949.

Other Writings Contributo alla critica di me stesso, 1918; as Benedetto Croce. An Autobiography, translated by Robin G. Collingwood, 1927. Conversazioni critiche, 5 vols., 1918–1939. Pagine sparse, 4 vols., 1919–1927. Storie e leggende napoletane, 1919. Vite di avventure, di fede e di passione, 1936. Nuove pagine sparse, 2 vols., 1948. Scritti e discorsi politici (1943–1947), 2 vols., 1963. Taccuini di lavoro, 6 vols., 1987. Taccuini di guerra (1943–1945), edited by Cinzia Cassani, 2004.

Letters Carteggio Croce-Vossler: 1899–1949, edited by Vittorio De Caprariis, 1951. Scelta di lettere curate dall’autore: 1914–1935, 1967. Lettere ad Alessandro Casati: 1907–1925, 1969. Carteggio Croce-Valgimigli, edited by Marcello Gigante, 1976 Lettere a Vittorio Enzo Alfieri (1925–1952), 1976. Carteggio Croce-Omodeo, edited by Marcello Gigante, 1978. Lettere a Giovanni Gentile. 1896–1924, edited by Alda Croce, 1991. Carteggio Croce-Amendola, edited by Roberto Pertici, 1982. Carteggio: 1902–1953, with Luigi Einaudi, edited by Luigi Firpo, 1988. Carteggio Croce-Prezzolini, edited by di Emma Giammattei, 2 vols., 1990. Lettere 1930–36, with Thomas Mann, 1991.

Contini, Gianfranco, La parte di Benedetto Croce nella cultura italiana, Milan and Naples: Ricciardi, 1967. Cotroneo, Girolamo, Questioni crociane e post-crociane, Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1994. D’Amico, Jack, Dain A. Trafton, and Massimo Verdicchio, The Legacy of Benedetto Croce: Contemporary Critical Views, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. D’Angelo, Paolo, L’estetica di Benedetto Croce, Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1982. Franchini, Raffaello, Giancarlo Lunati, and Fulvio Tessitore, Il ritorno di Croce nella cultura italiana, Milan: Rusconi, 1990. Giammattei, Emma, Retorica e idealismo: Croce nel primo Novecento, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1987. Giordano Orsini, Gian Napoleone, Benedetto Croce. Philosopher of Art and Literary Critic, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1961. Lamanna, Emilio Paolo, Introduzione alla lettura di Croce, Florence: Le Monnier, 1969. Leone De Castris, Arcangelo, Estetica e politica. Croce e Gramsci, Milan: Angeli, 1989. Maggi, Michele, La filosofia di Benedetto Croce, Florence: Il Ponte alle Grazie, 1989. Nicolini, Fausto, Benedetto Croce, Turin: Utet, 1962. Ocone, Corrado, Bibliografia ragionata degli scritti su Benedetto Croce, Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1993. Parente, Alfredo, Croce per lumi sparsi: problemi e ricordi, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1975. Puppo, Mario, Il metodo e la critica di Benedetto Croce, Milan: Mursia, 1964. Sasso, Gennaro, Benedetto Croce: la ricerca della dialettica, Naples: Morano, 1975. Sasso, Gennaro, Filosofia e idealismo, vol. 1. Benedetto Croce, Naples: Bibliopolis, 1994. Sasso, Gennaro, Per invigilare me stesso: i taccuini di lavoro di Benedetto Croce, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1989. Stella, Vittorio, Il giudizio su Croce: momenti per una storia dell’interpretazione, Pescara: Trimestre, 1971. Stella, Vittorio, La trasparenza del valore: saggi su Benedetto Croce, Naples: Bibliopolis, 1998. Tessitore, Fulvio (editor), L’eredita` di Croce, Naples: Guida, 1985.

Further Reading Boncompagni, Mauro, Ermeneutica dell’arte in Benedetto Croce, Naples: Loffredo, 1980. Bonetti, Paolo, Introduzione a Croce, Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1984. Bonetti, Paolo (editor), Per conoscere Croce, Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1998. Borsari, Silvano (editor), L’opera di Benedetto Croce: bibliografia, Naples: Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici, 1964. Bruno, Raffaele (a cura di), Per Croce. Estetica, etica, storia, Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1995. Caponigri, A. Robert, History and Liberty: Historical Writings of Benedetto Croce, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955. Cingari, Salvatore, Benedetto Croce e la crisi della civilta` europea, 2 vols., Soveria Mannelli (Catanzaro): Rubbettino, 2003.

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ESTETICA, 1902 Essay by Benedetto Croce

The publication of Estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale (The Aesthetic as the Science of Expression and of the Linguistic in General) marked Croce’s establishment on the

BENEDETTO CROCE cultural scene, and not merely in Italy. It displays a complex structure of thought that, beginning from the aesthetic, articulates itself in the wake of the various forms of the ‘‘Filosofia dello Spirito’’ (Philosophy of the Spirit). As the philosopher recalled in the pages of his Contributo alla critica di me stesso (Benedetto Croce: An Autobiography, 1918), the idea of composing a treatise and a history of aesthetics occurred to him in the autumn of 1898. One of the results of a first phase of research was the lecture Tesi fondamentali di un’estetica come scienze dell’espressione (Fundamental Theses of an Aesthetic as a Science of Expression, 1900), delivered at the Accademia Pontaniana in Naples in 1900, in which there already appears the theoretical core at the center of Estetica, which came out in April of 1902. The book is composed of two parts: The first, in 18 chapters, is of a theoretical character; and the second, which takes up 19 chapters, but more than twice the pages of the first, contains a broad historical analysis of aesthetic thought, from antiquity to the most recent tendencies. Already in the first pages, the philosopher announced his fundamental thesis: Art is intuition, and intuiting coincides with expressing. He distinguished, therefore, intuitive knowledge, which is knowledge of the individual and the producer of images, from logical knowledge, which is knowledge of the universal and the producer of concepts, and he differentiated intuition both from perception and from sensation. Art and philosophy, even though they are distinct, are, however, indissolubly tied together. There follows, in the treatise, a pars destruens in which Croce pointed out the errors that derive from the inadequate consideration of this aspect and also from the confusion between the two forms of knowledge and the mistaken attribution of characteristics of one to the other. This procedure, which alternates the critique of prejudices and errors with the exposition of philosophical subjects, characterizes all of Croce’s work and confers on his writing its characteristic, vigorous polemical thrust. Aesthetic activity is then placed in relation to the other forms of the spirit, economics and ethics, which belong to the practical sphere. The author discussed some corollaries, such as the impossibility of translation and the critique of the categories of rhetoric, related to the definition of art as intuition, which makes it impossible to attribute to art various modes or grades of expression. He then confronted the question of the relation between theory and practice and deepened his

analysis of the concept of feeling. He continued, in parallel fashion, to clear the field of prejudices relating to the problems he took on along the way: He critiqued the aesthetic that confuses the beautiful with the pleasurable, the resort to psychological concepts in the aesthetic field, the division of the arts, the confusion between the physical fact and the artistic vision; finally, he proposed an inquiry into the methodology of artistic and literary history. Once the aesthetic act is considered ‘‘in se´ medesimo e nelle sue relazioni con le altre attivita` spirituali, col sentimento del piacere e del dolore, coi fatti che si dicono fisici, con la memoria e con la elaborazione storica’’ (in itself and in its relations with the other spiritual activities, with the feeling of pleasure and pain, with the facts that we call physical, with memory and historical elaboration), it remains for Croce to justify the subtitle of the work, which postulates the identification of aesthetic and the linguistic in general. If intuition is such only insofar as it is objectified in an expression, art cannot help but be language: A philosophy of one and a philosophy of the other ought to coincide, and the linguistic ought to be identified with the aesthetic. At the beginning of the second part of the work, the history, Croce asked whether aesthetics was born in the eighteenth century or whether it was already formed in antiquity: If it is considered a ‘‘scienza dell’attivita` espressiva’’ (science of expressive activity), we see it emerge only when the nature of expression is determined, and hence in modernity. On the other hand, the Greco-Roman world presented, in his mind, a series of ‘‘deviations’’ and erroneous attempts, which derived essentially from the failed recognition of the autonomy of art, from its submission to a hedonistic, moralistic, or mystical end. In the medieval period, the philosopher pointed out the recovery of the directions of ancient aesthetics, with an emphasis on mystical and pedagogical aspects and the superimposing of moral and religious allegory on the artwork. He held that not even the Renaissance, despite the great passion of scholars, elaborated any new fundamental ideas in this field: Nevertheless, as demonstrated by the major literary polemics of the sixteenth century on poetic truth and on verisimilitude, the ‘‘moto del pensiero estetico’’ (movement of aesthetic thought) appears to have been reactivated. It would fall to the next century to resume inquiries with renewed interest and intensity, with the circulation of new words and new concepts like genius, taste, imagination, feeling: 529

BENEDETTO CROCE Here is the beginning of the great age of aesthetics, which Croce covered in the various regions of European philosophy, from Shaftesbury’s England to the Germany of Baumgarten, important but not quite a true innovator, to the Italy of the revolutionary Giambattista Vico, to whom he attributes the merit of discovering ‘‘la scienza estetica’’ (the aesthetic science) and sanctioning its autonomy. In order to find a temperament as highly speculative in European thought, it was necessary to wait for Kant, in whom Croce recognized depth of knowledge and reflective seriousness, but not systematic and unified thought. Nor was Hegel, to whom he returned in greater depth some years later, spared from criticism, for his idea of placing art on a lower level than pure thought. With equal argumentative power and polemical vis, Croce retraced the path of aesthetics along the entire arc of the nineteenth century, restoring an analytic picture of it. An important chapter is devoted to the master Francesco De Sanctis, while there is a strongly critical view of the positivists and naturalists, who, with their disdain of history, are guilty of severing ties with the thinkers of the past and of nourishing a kind of superstition toward the natural sciences. The treatise closes with the most recent tendencies of thought, moving from neocriticism and empiricism up through Nietzsche, Tolstoy, and Bergson. The solid idealist underpinning, at the time of a pronounced crisis for positivism, along with the breadth of the positions presented, accounts for the great resonance achieved in Estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale, which was also attested to by the numerous translations that appeared quickly in the wake of the first edition. Croce’s positions were destined to generate, in time, a wide critical debate: To cite only one significant aspect in Italian circles, we should mention Piero Gobetti, who, although he called for an aesthetic able to give a better account of the creative process as a process of criticism, always found in Croce a privileged point of reference, and Antonio Gramsci, who was perpetually in conflict with Croce’s positions. However, it was Galvano Della Volpe who subjected Croce’s structure to a bitter critique, making a claim for the rational character

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of the artwork and for the intellectual nature of poetry. RICCIARDA RICORDA Editions First edition: Estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale, Milan, Palermo, and Naples: Sandron, 1902; revised edition as Estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale. Teoria e storia, Bari: Laterza, 1908; newly revised edtion as Estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale. Teoria e storia, Bari, Laterza, 1941. Other editions: Estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale. Teoria e storia, edited by Giuseppe Galasso, Milan: Adelphi, 1900. Translations: as Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic, translated by Douglas Ainslie, London: Macmillan & Co, 1909; revised edition, London: Macmillan, 1922; revised edition, New York: Noonday, 1953; as The Aesthetic as the Science of Expression and of the Linguistic in General, translated by Colin Lyas, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Futher Reading Antoni, Carlo, Chiose all’estetica, Rome: Opere nuove, 1960. Assunto, Rosario, ‘‘La revisione critica del pensiero crociano e il problema della categoria estetica,’’ in Interpretazioni crociane, Bari: Adriatica, 1965. Bruno, Raffaele (editor), Per Croce. Estetica, etica, storia, Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1995. Colorni, Eugenio, L’estetica di Benedetto Croce, Milan: La Cultura, 1932. Cordie`, Carlo, ‘‘Per la storia della fortuna dell’Estetica di Croce,’’ Rivista di studi crociani, 4(1967), 450–476. D’Angelo, Paolo, L’estetica di Benedetto Croce, Bari: Laterza, 1982. D’Angelo, Paolo, ‘‘L’estetica di Benedetto Croce,’’ in L’estetica italiana del Novecento, Bari: Laterza, 1997. D’Angelo, Paolo, ‘‘One Hundred Years Later: Croce’s Estetica, 1902–2002,’’ Rivista di Studi Italiani, 20:2(2002), 95–105. Jacobitti, Edmund E., ‘‘The Impact of Croce’s Aesthetic of 1902 and Today’s Revolt against Modernity,’’ in The Legacy of Benedetto Croce: Contemporary Critical Views, edited by Jack D’Amico, Dain A. Trafton, and Massimo Verdicchio, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. Sasso, Gennaro, ‘‘L’Estetica di Benedetto Croce,’’ in Letteratura italiana. Le Opere, vol. 4, Il Novecento, part 1, L’eta` della crisi, edited by Alberto Asor Rosa, Turin: Einaudi, 1995.

BENEDETTO CROCE

STORIA DEL REGNO DI NAPOLI, 1925 Essay by Benedetto Croce

Benedetto Croce’s sensitivity to problems of the historical and political order was heightened in the wake of the experience of World War I. He confronted the theoretical problems of historiography and, in various essays later collected in Etica e politica (Ethics and Politics, 1931), he offered a new model, a ‘‘storiografia etico-politica’’ (ethicalpolitical historiography), which was meant to integrate mere ‘‘political’’ history with the history of culture and of civilization. The Storia del Regno di Napoli (History of the Kingdom of Naples), then, was born from the convergence of his growing interest in contemporary politics, particularly in the contested question of the south, and this new conception of history, one driving thought of which is precisely the intention of restoring to Neapolitan history the hegemony of intellectual and moral life. The first scheme for an essay on the history of southern Italy dates to the end of 1922. In 1923, Croce anticipated its publication in installments in La critica, then collected them in one volume, adding two ‘‘piccole monografie di storia locale’’ (short monographs of local history), an homage to the ‘‘paeselli’’ (small villages) of his native Abruzzo, Montenerodomo, and Pescasseroli. In the introduction, Croce reiterated that the true history of a people is not legal-social history, but ‘‘solamente quella etica o morale e, in alto senso, politica’’ (only ethical or moral and, in a high sense, political) and that ‘‘promotori di siffata storia sono i ceti e i gruppi che si chiamano dirigenti, e gl’individui che si dicono politici e uomini di stato’’ (promoters of such history are the classes and groups defined as ruling, and the individuals who are called politicians and men of state). He therefore retraced Neapolitan history by following the formation of a ruling class. His point of departure is not the epic of the Norman-Swabian kingdom but the moment that Croce considered as marking the true constitution of a kingdom of southern Italy, with the

separation from Sicily after the Sicilian Vespers and the definitive nomination of Naples as the Angevin capital. The first chapter is devoted to the period of the ‘‘Kingdom,’’ between Angevins and Aragonese: At its center is always the ‘‘storia della nazione napoletana, degli abitatori dell’Italia meridionale e della parte attiva, quale che fosse, molta o poca, che dispiegarono nella politica e nella civilta`’’ (history of the Neapolitan nation, of the inhabitants of southern Italy and of the active part, whatever it may have been, great or small, that they played in politics and in civilization). The next chapter concerns the years of the Spanish domination, which is granted the merit of defending the territory from external dangers and from subjection to the baronage. The development of a new culture is described beginning from its first signs in the later seventeenth century up through its full unfolding in the century of reform, in which the French Revolution erupts, followed by the great upheavals destined to last until the Risorgimento, when the kingdom of Naples disappears by joining the Italian nation. In the face of the emergence, in a united Italy, of a ‘‘questione meridionale’’ (southern question), one task of the historian is demonstrating that the conditions of the Mezzogiorno do not derive from an unchangeable state of nature, but that, on the contrary, each practical and political problem is a moral and spiritual one, which entails the responsibility of the individual. For the breadth of the total picture it proposes, Croce’s volume marks a turning point in southern historiography, which it strongly influenced. Contemporary scholars point out its limitations, in the first place the absolute importance given to the ruling class, within a perspective that isolates it from the other classes, contrasting its affairs with the social history of the rest of the country. Nevertheless, the work continues to be considered a point of reference that it is necessary to confront. RICCIARDA RICORDA

Editions First edition: Storia del Regno di Napoli, Bari: Laterza, 1925; revised edition as Storia del Regno di Napoli, Bari: Laterza, 1931 and 1944. Other editions: Storia del Regno di Napoli, edited by Giuseppe Galasso, Milan: Adelphi, 1992. Translation: as History of the Kingdom of Naples, translated by Frances Frenaye, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970.

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BENEDETTO CROCE Futher Reading Catalano, Franco, ‘‘Croce storico,’’ L’Osservatore politico letterario, 9(1966), 17–68. Chabod, Federico, ‘‘Croce storico,’’ in Lezioni di metodo storico, edited by Luigi Firpo, Bari: Laterza, 1969. Galasso, Giuseppe, ‘‘Considerazioni intorno alla storia del Mezzogiorno d’Italia,’’ in Mezzogiorno medievale e moderno, Turin: Einaudi, 1965. Galasso, Giuseppe, Croce e lo spirito del suo tempo, Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1990. Giarrizzo, Giuseppe, ‘‘Croce e la storiografia contemporanea,’’ in La scienza della storia. Interpreti e problemi, Naples: Liguori, 1999.

Macera, Guido, ‘‘Croce storico del Regno di Napoli,’’ in L’eredita` di Croce, edited by Fulvio Tessitore, Naples: Guida, 1985. Musi, Aurelio, ‘‘Dimenticare Croce?’’ in Dimenticare Croce? Studi e orientamenti di storia del Mezzogiorno, edited by Aurelio Masi, Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1991. Trafton, Dain A., ‘‘Political Doctrine in Croce’s History of the Kingdom of Naples,’’ in The Legacy of Benedetto Croce: Contemporary Critical Views, edited by Jack D’Amico, Dain A. Trafton, and Massimo Verdicchio, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. Villani, Pasquale, ‘‘Croce storico del Mezzogiorno,’’ in L’eredita` di Croce, edited by Fulvio Tessitore, Naples: Guida, 1985.

GIULIO CESARE CROCE (1550–1609) More than 400 works are ascribed to the popular poet Giulio Cesare Croce. Many of them, written in Italian or in the Bolognese dialect, are ironic and witty descriptions of the life, jokes, sayings, and moralities of the poor. Among the best (many of Croce’s works remain unedited) is an autobiography in verse, Descrizione della vita del Croce (A Description of the Life of Croce). Croce’s style is at its best in the brilliant, sharp, and fierce dialogues and in the acuteness of the farcical comedies he published in the 1590s. His comedies feature typical situations and characters of the commedia dell’arte: Il tesoro (The Treasure), Sandrone astuto (Sandrone the Cunning), La Farinella (Farinella), and the original tragic-comedy Il dialogo del banchetto de’ malcibati (The Dialogue of the Banquet of the Badly Fed Men), a grotesque representation of the great famine of 1590. Croce also published the Ventisette mascherate piacevolissime (Twenty-Seven Very Pleasant Masquerades, 1603), creating new dialogues and plots for popular characters and maschere. His most popular work, however, was Le sottilissime astuzie di Bertoldo (The Sharpest Stratagems of Bertoldo, 1606), which carried the subtitle ‘‘Dove si scorge un Villano accorto e sagace il quale dopo vari e strani accidenti a lui intervenuti, alla fine per il suo ingegno raro e acuto vien fatto huomo di Corte e Regio Consigliero. Opera nuova e di gratissimo gusto’’ (Where Is Seen a Peasant 532

Discerning and Astute Who After Various and Strange Accidents Happened to Him Is Finally Made, on Account of His Rare and Acute Ingenuity, a Man of Court and Councellor to the King. A New and Most Pleasing Work). The book is a reworking of the popular medieval legend known as Dialogus Salomonis et Marcolphi (Dialogue of Solomon and Marcolfus). Here the traditions of the commedia dell’arte are explicitly invoked in the carnivalesque pairing of the learned man and the worldly peasant, a pairing that plays to his antipedantic strategy. His plots involve, on the one hand, the great hunger of the poor, and on the other hand, the epic cunning of the peasant in outwitting the arrogance of power, dramatic perspectives destined to be recuperated in a heightened key in the work of Dario Fo. Le sottilissime astuzie di Bertoldo is about the adventures of the ugly and cunning peasant Bertoldo, who is invited to the court of the Lombard King Alboino. He is loved by the king for the wit, honesty, and frankness of his speech but is hated by the queen for the same reasons: He is not respectful and refuses to share the opinion of the powerful figures of his age. Alboino is persuaded by his wife to sentence Bertoldo to death, but the peasant obtains from the king the right to choose the tree from which he will be hanged. The hangmen must follow him in a long search for the right tree which, of course, will never be found. Alboino appreciates

GIULIO CESARE CROCE the trick and appoints Bertoldo as a personal counsellor. Bertoldo ultimately dies, however, because he cannot survive on the sophisticated food of the court, which is ‘‘troppo fino per il suo gusto’’ (too fine for his taste). The structure of the book is irregular. Its shape derives from the popular form of the centone; it piles up episodes consisting of short and vivid descriptions and dialogues in which Bertoldo shows the dignity and the value of his world. The style of the composition is taken from the technique of the street singers, who recited rhyming stories in response to the images of posters or banners. Croce himself had a gift for improvisation, singing his songs and accompanying himself on his lyre. Especially remarkable are Bertoldo’s answers to the questions of Alboino: When the king asks him who are his ancestors, the peasant says they are the beans that, boiling in the pot, gave him life. In answer to the question, what is the fastest thing in life, Bertoldo replies ‘‘il pensiero’’ (the thought). And, of course, for Bertoldo, the most tasty wine is the one we drink in other people’s houses; the unending sea is the greed of the miser; the craziest man in the world is the one who considers himself to be the wisest; and, to the capital question ‘‘chi sei?’’ (who are you?), Bertoldo says ‘‘sono un uomo e il mio paese e` il mondo’’ (I am a man and the world is my country). Even though Bertoldo dies in the book, his story became so popular that Croce published a sequel, Le piacevoli e ridicolose simplicita` di Bertoldino, figlio del gia` astuto Bertoldo (The Pleasant and Ridiculous Simplicity of Bertoldino, Son to the Late Astute Bertoldo, 1608). After Bertoldo’s death, a sad Alboino calls Bertoldo’s family, his clever wife Marcolfa and their son Bertoldino, who is a dupe, to his court. Marcolfa’s dialogues with the king are as witty as her husband’s, but everyone in the court laughs at Bertoldino’s foolishness. Finally, hating the artificial life of the court, Marcolfa asks Alboino for permission to return to her hut. Several critics, including Piero Camporesi in his La maschera di Bertoldo (1976), have considered this novel a sign of the sad, pessimistic view of the old Croce: His hero Bertoldo was able to speak his mind freely in front of a king, showing him the world was wider than his court. He thus becomes a respected figure, but his son Bertoldino returns to the original positon of a poor and confused peasant with no clear vision of the world. Croce’s story became so well known that in 1621 a Bolognese abbot and composer, Adriano Banchieri (1568–1634), using the pseudonym Camillo Scaligeri della Fratta,

wrote a celebrated sequel, Novella di Cacasenno figlio del semplice Bertoldino (Story of Cacasenno, Son of the Simple Betoldino), in which he creates a son for Bertoldino named Cacasenno.

Biography Guilio Cesare Croce was born in San Giovanni in Persiceto (Bologna), son to a poor family, ‘‘the day of carnival’’ 1550. He worked as a blacksmith and as a popular street singer until 1575; then he gave up his father’s trade in order to be a full-time street singer working in the local markets. Croce died in Bologna, 12 January 1609. STEFANO ADAMI Selected Works Collections Le sottilissime astuzie di Bertoldo. Le piacevoli e ridicolose simplicita` di Bertoldino. Col ’Dialogus Salomonis et Marcolphi’ e il suo primo volgarizzamento a stampa, edited by Piero Camporesi, Milan: Garzanti, 1977. Due commedie bolognesi del cinquecento, edited by Fabio Foresti, Bologna: CLUEB, 1990.

Plays Il tesoro, 1590. Sandrone astuto, 1591. La Farinella, 1591. Il dialogo del banchetto de’ malcibati, 1591. Ventisette mascherate piacevolissime, 1603.

Fiction Le sottilissime astuzie di Bertoldo, 1606. Le piacevoli e ridicolose simplicita` di Bertoldino, figlio del gia` astuto Bertoldo, 1608.

Further Reading Bellettini, Pierangelo, Rosaria Campioni, and Rita Zanardi (editors), Una citta` in piazza. Comunicazione e vita quotidiana a Bologna tra Cinque e Seicento, Bologna: Editrice Compositori, 2000. Bruni, Roberto, Rosaria Campioni, and Diego Zancani (editors), Giulio Cesare Croce dall’Emilia all’Inghilterra. Cataloghi, biblioteche e testi, Florence: Olschki, 1991. Camporesi, Piero, La maschera di Bertoldo. Giulio Cesare Croce e la letteratura carnevalesca, Turin: Einaudi, 1976. Camporesi, Piero, Il palazzo e il saltimbanco, Milan: Garzanti, 1994. Casali, Elide, and Bruno Capaci (editors), La festa del mondo rovesciato. Giulio Cesare Croce e il carnevalesco, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002.

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GIULIO CESARE CROCE Dursi, Massimo (editor), Affanni e canzoni del padre di Bertoldo, Bologna: Alfa, 1966. Guerrini, Olindo, La vita e le opere di Giulio Cesare Croce, Bologna: Forni, 1879. Marini, Quinto, Bertoldo, Bertoldino, Marcolfo, Casale Monferrato: Marietti, 1986.

Rouch, Monique, Storie di vita popolare nelle canzoni di Piazza di Giulio Cesare Croce, Fame, fatica e mascherate nel ’500, Bologna: CLUEB, 1982. Rouch, Monique (editor), Varii al mondo son gli umori, ovvero La gran pazzia nelle poesie di Giulio Cesare Croce, Bologna: CLUEB, 2001.

MARIA ROSA CUTRUFELLI (1946–) The versatility and skill of novelist Maria Rosa Cutrufelli have their roots in her unconventional apprenticeship. From 1974 to the 1990s, Cutrufelli wrote essays about the little-explored universe of blue-collar women’s working lives. Those essays comprise sociological analyses and interviews. The women’s speech is filtered through the written medium of the interviewer, yet Cutrufelli’s ‘‘translation’’ does not alter the authenticity and flavor of the women’s voices. One of this period’s most original sociological investigations is Il cliente. Inchiesta sulla domanda di prostituzione (The Costumer: An Inquiry on Prostitution, 1981). Cutrufelli’s metaphor for male sexuality is the iceberg, a hidden and mute presence. The interviews challenge a pattern of silence, a sort of cultural omerta`; They become first-person monologues, which she calls ‘‘testimonials,’’ the first step in a process of discovery. As is the case with many contemporary Italian women writers, Cutrufelli consistently crosses the boundaries of genres. Her first novel, La briganta (The Woman Outlaw, 1990), evokes historical events but is also a memoir. It takes place in Sicily during the 1860s, when Garibaldi and his volunteers fueled the hopes of those Sicilians who felt most oppressed by the Bourbon monarchy and the big landowners. The female protagonist transgresses all the rules imposed on her sex in that time and place by murdering a man and then joining a band of outlaws. As she perused dry trial records, Cutrufelli imagined the lives of women outlaws, the ambiguities of their position inside emphatically masculine societies, and the hardships they endured in their efforts to define their own identities. Ultimately, writing is the greater transgression for Margherita, the protagonist, and through it she attains true freedom. 534

The story of Canto al deserto. Storia di Tina, soldato di mafia (A Song to the Desert: The Story of Tina, a Mafia Foot-Soldier, 1994) also revolves around a Sicilian theme and locale. The protagonist is a young woman of today and the narrator a journalist. A contemporary phenomenon, women’s entrance into male domains, provides the background. Women used to have passive roles in organized crime, but in recent times they have become active participants. Tina, the story’s protagonist, is an enterprising girl who succeeds in becoming a Mafia foot soldier. However, when she attempts to join the ranks of Mafia leaders she is blocked and destroyed. Only a written record, the reporter’s account of her life and death, will insure the survival of her memory. Cutrufelli’s previous novel, Complice il dubbio (Doubt as the Accomplice, 1992), opens a new narrative path. It is an unconventional mystery novel and a psychological study that includes a sexual encounter, a violent death, fear, and suspense; but its focus is the solitude of women’s lives in a European metropolis and the complexities of human relationships. A magnificently evoked contemporary Rome is one of the novel’s most impressive ‘‘characters.’’ Ominous signs and a Roman summer’s suffocating heat are forebodings of the tragedies that involve human beings and environment. Yet, it is Rome’s natural/urban landscape that ultimately provides relief and the promise of human connection. Through the years Cutrufelli has also perfected a narrative that blends imagination with travel reportage, biography, autobiography, and social commentary. She brings to life the realities of remote peoples, landscapes, and atmospheres and the intense emotions they evoke: Donna perche´ piangii? La condizione femminile in Africa Nera (Women of Africa: Roots of Oppression, 1976), a factual essay;

MARIA ROSA CUTRUFELLI and Mama Africa. Storia di donne e di utopie (Mama Africa: Stories of Women and Utopias, 1989), a personal reflection based on notes she took during her travels as a journalist in Angola and Zaire. The novel Giorni d’ acqua corrente (The Days of Running Water, 2002) follows the narrator’s journey to locations in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, where people struggle against injustice and manage to survive against all odds, while Il paese dei figli perduti (The Land of the Lost Children, 1999) explores the familiar theme of a young person’s sudden impulse to find out more about a lost parent. It is the story of a father’s desertion, a woman’s discovery of a faraway continent, Australia, and a journey of self-discovery. Cutrufelli’s latest narrative, La donna che visse per un sogno (The Woman Who Lived for a Dream, 2004), again brings to life a historical episode, the memory of women’s voices, and the violence that attempted to silence them. During the bloodiest months of the French Revolution several women of various ages and from different social strata speak about their experiences. Among them, most striking of all, is the voice of the ‘‘woman who lived for a dream,’’ Olympe de Gouges, the tragic champion of women’s rights. The voices, with their choral interweaving, provide a multiplicity of perspectives and unveil the unseen facets of a founding event that looms, remote and monolithic, in the annals of history. Once again fiction and fact, first-person narrative and biography blend in a compelling and original way.

Biography Maria Rosa Cutrufelli was born in Messina, 26 January 1946. She graduated from the University of Bologna with a dissertation in aesthetics on the Russian Formalists, which was directed by Luciano Anceschi. She moved to Rome and began her career as a journalist and a writer of fiction. In the late 1970s and early 1980s she was in Africa for the first time and published two volumes about that experience. All through the years, Cutrufelli has been a contributor to the Italian daily press. In 1990 she founded a periodical focusing on women’s writing, Tuttestorie (1990–2000). Several of its issues have become fundamental texts in women’s literature: Il pozzo segreto (1993), Nella citta` proibita (1997), and the June 2000 issue, which was entirely devoted to Italian-American women’s writing. Cutrufelli teaches Theory and Practice of Creative Writing at the University of Rome, ‘‘La

Sapienza.’’ La donna che visse per un sogno was a finalist for the Premio Strega in 2004. ANGELA M. JEANNET Selected Works Fiction La briganta, 1990; as The Woman Outlaw, translated by Angela M. Jeannet, 2004. Complice il dubbio, 1992. Canto al deserto. Storia di Tina, soldato di mafia, 1994. Il paese dei figli perduti, 1999. Giorni d’acqua corrente, 2002. La donna che visse per un sogno, 2004.

Nonfiction L’invenzione della donna. Miti e tecniche di uno sfruttamento, 1974. L’unita` d’Italia: guerra contadina e nascita del sottosviluppo del Sud, 1974. Disoccupata con onore. Lavoro e condizione della donna, 1975. Operaie senza fabbrica. Inchiesta sul lavoro a domicilio, 1977. Economia e politica dei sentimenti. La ‘‘produzione’’ femminile, 1980. Il cliente. Inchiesta sulla domanda di prostituzione, 1981; reprinted as Il denaro in corpo, 1996. Donna, perche´ piangi? La condizione femminile in Africa Nera, 1976; translated as Women of Africa: Roots of Oppression, 1983. Mama Africa. Storia di donne e di utopie, 1989; reprinted, 1993.

Edited Work Le donne protagoniste nel movimento cooperativo. La questione femminile in un’organizzazione produttiva democratica, 1978. Il pozzo segreto, 1993. Nella citta` proibita, 1997; as In the Forbidden City, translated by Vincent J. Bertolini, 2000.

Further Reading Amoruso, Giuseppe, Il cenacolo degli specchi. Narrativa italiana 1993–1995, Caltanissetta: Sciascia, 1997. De Giovanni, Neria, Scrittrici italiane dell’ultimo Novecento, Rome: Dipartimento per l’informazione e per l’editoria della Presidenza del Consiglio, 2003. Giunta, Edvige, ‘‘Sicilian Lives at the Crossroads: Reading Maria Rosa Cutrufelli,’’ Academic Forum, 10(2002), 44–48. Jeannet, Angela M., ‘‘Between Document and Fiction: Maria Rosa Cutrufelli’s Voices,’’ Italian Culture, 16 (1998), 129–141. Lazzaro-Weis, Carol, From Margins to Mainstream: Feminism and Fictional Modes in Italian Women’s Writing 1968–1990, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993.

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MARIA ROSA CUTRUFELLI MacCarthy, Ita, ‘‘Mobility and Subjectivity in Maria Rosa Cutrufelli’s Il paese dei figli perduti,’’ in Cross-Cultural Travel: Papers from the Royal Irish Academy Symposium on Literature and Travel, edited by Jane Conroy, New York: Peter Lang, 2003. Marotti, Maria Ornella, and Gabriella Brooke (editors), Gendering Italian Fiction: Feminist Revisions of Italian History, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999.

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Parati, Graziella, ‘‘The Impossible Return: Women, Violence, and Exile,’’ VIA: Voices in Italian-Americana, 7 (1996), 257–262. Sanguinetti Katz, Giuliana, ‘‘Maria Rosa Cutrufelli e il suo punto di vista sulla sessualita` femminile,’’ in Cultura e societa` alla fine del secondo millennio: Italia e Ungheria, Budapest: ELTE, 1999.

D DANCE AND LITERATURE ballet—the planimetric formation of figures to be read as though from above. Within this visionary evocation, there is everything that founds the Western conception of cultured dance: the quest for an inscribed sign within the subject, the cartography of a ‘‘text.’’ Indeed, among the numerous dance librettos composed in the first half of the seventeenth century by the Marinist Bernardo Morando (1589–1656), we should mention the ballet Victoria d’Amore (Victory of Love, 1641), set to music by Claudio Monteverdi (though the libretto indicates, for one of the two projected ballets, an ‘‘aria leggiadrissima, inventata di nuovo dal Prevosto Aschieri’’ (a very light aria, invented anew by Prevosto Aschieri), and perhaps choreographed by Pompeo Ugo Ballarino, with a commission by the duke Odoardo Farnese in order to celebrate in Piacenza the birth of his seventh child, Ottavio. This ballet, with narrative sections that are sung, pits the chaste Diana, who calls for a ballet that reproduces in song and visualizes ‘‘ne I Balli istessi’’ (in the dances themselves) the sentence ‘‘AMOR FUGGIAMO’’ (we flee from love), against an indignant Cupid, who, as proof of his undisputed power, draws from the sky an ‘‘inusitate e dilettosa Pioggia, o Tempesta, di freschissimi et odorati Fiori’’ (unusual and delightful rain, or Storm, of fresh, scented flowers), producing, through dance, an actual text of bodies that is self-sufficient and able to contain and reveal, at the same time, an unprecedented performative idea of the body.

After making a preliminary, generic distinction between writing for dance and writing about dance, we should consider the literary evidence from a double perspective. It should be able to distinguish the quality of the literary sources used for dance compositions (dance librettos in verse and in prose) and the quality of other sources that can be used as textual witnesses on aesthetic and also historical questions concerning the practice and social world of dance (poetic and dramatic texts, novels and short stories, letters) from the normative nature of texts usually examined from a historiographic perspective (academic treatises, normative poetics in all genres, collections of dances with scant literary value). In Italy, before the emergence of a dance culture (in accordance with treatises and schools) from within the Renaissance Courts, the Neoplatonic idea of dance as a metaphor for the harmony of the universe and the motion of the stars survives particularly in poetry. This idea is dominated by the Pythagorean ideal, which is clearly felt, as Alessandro Arcangeli notes, in the numerical symbolism that, between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, suffuses theoretical reflection on art as much as choreographic praxis (Davide o Salome`?, 2000). In Dante’s Paradiso (Canto XVIII, vv. 73–81), it is possible to contemplate the spectacle of some blessed souls that are splayed out across the sky, dancing and singing in flight, and finally forming a sequence of several letters of the alphabet, thus anticipating a typical procedure of the Baroque 537

DANCE AND LITERATURE But it is with L’Adone (Adonis, 1623) by Giovanbattista Marino, the most enduring figure of the Italian literary Baroque, that the decisive encounter between dance and poetry seems to take place. In the poem’s final canto, the 20th, amid the festive celebrations of the games of Adonis, dedicated to the young, mortal shepherd loved by Venus and who is killed by a wild boar, there is a long series of octaves (43) dedicated to several important exhibitions of dance. The considerable number of references to orchestration, the transferring of the game of the dancing variations into verse (it mentions 12 different types of dances), the emphasis placed on the athletic qualities of the male dancers, the reflection on the expectant reactions of the spectator, even the censuring of the maledancer, all these tell us that we are already at the dawn—well before the critical enterprise of The´ophile Gautier (1811–1872)—of what we recognize today as dance criticism. L’Adone conveys an idea of dance as an art and not as a mere spectacle, as the grace of an interior feeling and not as an exhibitory triumph of the physical, athletic, and acrobatic power of the performers. It is Ugo Foscolo, on the other hand, who in a celebrated episode of his unfinished poem, Le Grazie (The Graces), experiments through language, in verse, with the vehement enthusiasm of a dancer’s art, beginning with a range of variations that are hardly transformed into a definitive lesson, and are admirably illustrated by Giorgio Orelli in his Foscolo e la danzatrice (1992), as though the correlation and interweaving with the movement of this art that eludes thought might introduce the design of poetry to new and still unfinished questions. But the greatest result of dance’s quest for literary dignity, after the adoption of a well-structured plot with recognizable characters capable of eloquent gestures, suggested by John Weaver (1673–1760) and reinforced through the ballet d’action up through Jean-Georges Noverre (1727–1810) and Gaspare Angiolini (1731–1803), is summed up exemplarily in the libretto of Prometeo (Prometheus), a famous ballet at La Scala in Milan by the celebrated ‘‘poeta muto’’ (mute poet) Salvatore Vigano` (1769–1821), probably composed with the discreet collaboration of the scholar and poet Giovanni Gherardini (1778–1861), who is also the first Italian translator of A.W. Schlegel’s History of Dramatic Literature. Carlo Porta himself recounts in a parody the immense reverberation of Vigano`’s ballet. Vigano` and Gherardini’s writing experiment remains exemplary, however, of an entire preRomantic ambience in Milan, led by the figures of 538

Ermes Visconti and Alessandro Manzoni. In the ballet’s libretto, the widespread and explicit presence of the auctoritates of Italian literature—from Petrarch to Marino and Monti—signals an attempt to promote the genre in accordance with its own cultural autonomy and literary dignity. In the twentieth century, when the reclaiming of the nonverbal marks the frontier between the mimesis of ancient theater and dance in the West, and the modern age, Gian Pietro Lucini, perhaps as a tribute to Loie Fuller’s time in Milan in 1902, publishes in Marinetti’s journal, Poesia, a long poem, ‘‘La Danza Sacra’’ (The Sacred Dance, 1908), which is dedicated to her, and which is an entire critical edition of the Hermetic themes so important for the ‘‘technological’’ dance of the dancer from Illinois. In the union of the theme of the production of the future with the irrational as the scene of its realization, Lucini highlights the intuition of the value of the true otherness of the new free dance, pervaded at all levels by emotion, the realm of the feminine, and by a rediscovery of the interior values of movement, as compared to the technological and progressivist modernity of the masculine dominion of reason. And it is intuition in the poetry of a dance that reclaims the prerogatives of the body and of the feminine in the allegorical figure, both unreal and disturbing, of the androgyne. Even Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, in his Manifesto della danza futurista (Manifesto of Futurist Dance) issued on July 8, 1917, recognizes in the mechanical and lighting-technical evolutions of Fuller’s dance ‘‘quell’ideale corpo moltiplicato’’ (that ideal multiplied body), which is able to ‘‘superare le possibilita` muscolari’’ (go beyond muscular possibilities): the heroic expansion of the soul through the sublimation of the vile mecanico as an aesthetic joining with the imminent ‘‘metallismo della danza futurista’’ (metallism of futurist dance), and opposing, on the other hand, couple dances like the waltz and the tango. Finally, after the decline of the image of the nineteenth-century ballerina in the gloomy theaters and cabarets of the verist Italy (described, for example, in many novels by Giovanni Verga) the dimension of eloquent silence as the sole and most authentic horizon of meaning for a poetics of gesture and movement capable of marking the difference between body and word, is perhaps exemplary in the romantic relationship (with notable reverberations in his poetry and letters) between Salvatore Quasimodo and the dancer Maria Cumani, to whom the poet writes in 1937: ‘‘canto e` anche la

GABRIELE D’ANNUNZIO danza come la poesia (...) anche tu traducevi in sillaba qualche ritmo che poi doveva mutarsi in gesto perche´ cosı` voleva la tua musa’’ (like poetry, dance is also song...you also translate into syllables a certain rhythm which you then must transform into gesture because your muse desired it). STEFANO TOMASSINI Further Reading Arcangeli, Alessandro, Davide o Salome`? Il dibattito europeo sulla danza nella prima eta` moderna, TrevisoRome: Edizioni Fondazione Benetton Studi Ricerche/Viella, 2000. Cumani, Maria, and Salvatore Quasimodo, L’arte del silenzio: La danza, la poesia, l’immagine, edited by Delfina Provenzali, Milan: Spirali/Vel, 1995. Cumani, Maria, ‘‘O forse tutto non e` stato,’’ Rovereto (Trento): Nicolodi, 2003. Delfini, Laura, et al. (editors), Danza e Poesia, Bologna: Des, 2004. Franko, Mark, Dance as Text. Ideologies of the Baroque Body, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Goellner, Ellen W., and Jacqueline Shea Murphy (editors), Bodies of the Text: Dance as Theory, Literature as Dance, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995. Guglielmo Ebreo of Pesaro, On the Practice or Art of Dancing, edited by Barbara Sparti, New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Lo Iacono, Concetta, ‘‘Il tramonto di Venere: L’immagine della ballerina nell’eta` umbertina,’’ in In cerca di danza: Riflessioni sulla danza moderna, edited by Cristian Muscelli, Ancona and Milan: Costa & Nolan, 1999. Lombardi, Carmela (editor), Il ballo pantomimo: Lettere, saggi e libelli sulla danza (1773–1785), Turin: Paravia, 1998. Louppe, Laurence, ‘‘Les imperfections du papier,’’ in Danses trace´es: Dessins et Notation des Chore´graphes, Paris: Editions Dis Voir, 1991. Louppe, Laurence, ‘‘E´criture litte´raire, e´criture chore´graphique au XXe sie`cle: une double re´volution,’’ in La litte´rature et la danse (nume´ro monographique), Litte´rature, 112, de´cembre 1998, Paris: Larousse, 1998. Milloss, Aurel M., Coreosofia: Scritti sulla danza, edited by Stefano Tomassini, Florence: Olschki, 2001. Morris, Gay (editor), Moving Words: Re-Writing Dance, London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Orelli, Giorgio, Foscolo e la danzatrice: Un episodio delle Grazie, Parma: Pratiche, 1992. Raimondi, Ezio (editor), Il sogno del coreodramma: Salvatore Vigano`, poeta muto, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1984. Tomassini, Stefano, ‘‘Danza & scrittura. Corpo e modernita` nella cultura del primo Novecento,’’ in Il castello di Elsinore, 15 (2002): 23–34. Tomassini, Stefano, ‘‘Melodramma, musica e danza,’’ in Il Teatro Municipale di Piacenza: Nel bicentenario di fondazione 1804–2004, edited by Stefano Pronti, Piacenza: Tipografia Le.Co., 2004. Vigano`, Salvatore, Il Prometeo: libretto del ballo. Con i testi della polemica, edited by Stefano Tomassini, Turin: Legenda, 1999.

GABRIELE D’ANNUNZIO (1863–1938) Gabriele D’Annunzio is one of the most influential and prolific writers of twentieth-century Italy. Albeit often controversial, his works, which include poetry, short stories, novels, plays, memoirs, political and other prose writings, were widely applauded in his times and translated into several languages. Admired also outside Italy for the innovative and aesthetic value of his works, by prominent writers like D.H. Lawrence, W. B. Yeats, Henry James and the young James Joyce, D’Annunzio leaves a farreaching and lasting legacy with his literary production,which influences generations of Italian writers in different ways. Never quite comfortable with any of the literary trends that affected European literature during his lifetime, such as naturalism, its Italian variant Verismo, symbolism, Expressionism, Decadentism, avant-garde movements and

Modernism, he experiments widely with them in a constant search for new forms of artistic expression that would still retain his own personal imprint. D’Annunzio is a larger-than-life protagonist of the literary, political, and intellectual scene of Italy for most of his long and transgressive life. Yet, after World War II and the demise of Fascism, his works are ignored or stigmatized on political and moralistic grounds for what are perceived as his compromising connection with Mussolini, his scandalous lifestyle and his immoral works. Although many prejudices still exist against D’Annunzio, the revival of scholarly interest in his work since the 1970s has finally addressed the most flagrant misconceptions propagated by previous literary criticism. The reappraisal of his life and oeuvre, which is now taking place both in Italy and 539

GABRIELE D’ANNUNZIO elsewhere, has finally brought to light his major contribution to European literary modernity. D’Annunzio publishes his first volume of poems, Primo vere (First Spring, 1879) at the age of 16. This small collection of 30 lyric poems deals vividly with the Abruzzi and Tuscan landscapes and romantic love. It is modeled on Giosue` Carducci’s Odi barbare (Barbarian Odes, 1887), which break away from Italian versification in favor of new meters inspired by Greek and Latin poetry. Although it is an early and immature work by an adolescent poet, the collection is favorably reviewed in the prestigious literary journal Fanfulla della Domenica and warmly received in literary circles. In 1880, D’Annunzio meets the photographer and painter Francesco Paolo Michetti (1851–1929) and is subsequently introduced to his Cenacolo. This is a closely knit group of artists, including the sculptor Costantino Barbella (1852–1925), musicians Francesco Paolo Tosti (1846–1916) and Paolo De Cecco (1843–1922), and the ethnologist Gennaro Finamore (1836–1923), who share the same love for their region, the Abruzzi, and a theoretical approach to art that favors the meaningful fusion of all artistic forms of expression. The fruitful and prolonged interaction with Michetti’s group over the years plays a fundamental role in the formulation of D’Annunzio’s poetics and makes him more susceptible to the innovations of symbolism and other experimental art forms later on. By the time he is 19 years old, D’Annunzio has three more publications to his name: In memoriam (In Memory, 1880), poems in memory of his grandmother, Rita Lolli, who had recently passed away, Canto novo (New Song, 1882), his second major book of poetry, and Terra vergine (Virgin Land, 1882), his first collection of short stories. The inspired portrayal of nature’s beauty, of sensual pleasure and physical exuberance in Canto novo already shows signs of what will be D’Annunzio’s distinctive trait in most of his later works. The book creates a stir as it seems to defy the conventional morality of the bourgeois society of the time. The short stories of Terra vergine are set in the primitive and often violent rural environment of the Abruzzi and are narrated in the then fashionable naturalistic style that lays bare the dehumanizing effects of poverty and ignorance on simple people in their struggle for survival. In 1881, D’Annunzio plunges himself in the mundane life of Rome where he meets influential artists and other personalities. Here he starts his journalistic career writing for several important periodicals and newspapers, among them Capitan 540

Fracassa, Tribuna, Il Fanfulla, and Cronaca bizantina, owned by innovative publisher Angelo Sommaruga. In just over a decade he produces several works, among which are various novels, four collections of poetry—Intermezzo di rime (Poetic Interlude, 1883), Isaotta Guttadauro (1886), Elegie romane (Roman Elegies, 1892), Poema paradisiaco (Heavenly Poem, 1893)—and two volumes of short stories—Il libro delle vergini (The Book of the Virgins, 1883) and San Pantaleone (1886). The way in which D’Annunzio mingles his personal life with his writing and explicitly alludes to his sexual experiences in some of the poems contained in Intermezzo di rime causes great scandal and his rejection by some of his previous supporters like Giuseppe Chiarini (1833–1908) and Giosue` Carducci. The scandal, however, places the author and his work at the center of attention, thus contributing to his success. Much interest is generated by his first novel, Il piacere (The Pleasure, 1889), set in the refined and aristocratic society of Rome and written in a lyrical and poetic style. It is the first book of the trilogy I romanzi della Rosa (The Novels of the Rose), which includes L’Innocente (The Victim, 1892) and Trionfo della morte (The Triumph of Death, 1894). The publication of both novels in France in the translation by Georges He´relle (1835–1848) soon after their appearance in Italy contributes greatly to D’Annunzio’s international fame. Although these novels deal with very different themes and settings, they all have in common a male character who is seeking spiritual renewal after a dissipated life and who wants to affirm his intellectual superiority, which places him above the average man and outside the suffocating and hypocritical conventions of bourgeois morality. This portrait of a potential Dannunzian superman ¨ bermensch. only partially echoes the Nietzschean U D’Annunzio’s hero is invariably bound to fail. His search for sensual pleasure ends in tragedy. A very avid reader open to the suggestions of the European avant-garde, D’Annunzio over the years develops ideas that converge with those of other prominent intellectuals and writers, such as Paul Bourget, Maurice Barre`s, The´odor de Wyzewa and Hippolyte-Adolphe Taine, whose writings contributed substantially to the debates on the renovation of art in the new century. D’Annunzio’s experimentation with prose, from his earlier naturalistic short stories to the subsequently refined aestheticism and psychological depth of Il Piacere takes the novel as a genre into a new expressive direction. While the short novel Giovanni Episcopo (Episcopo & Company, 1892) is influenced in its themes of

GABRIELE D’ANNUNZIO victimization, guilt and redemption and in its more prosaic style by the Russian masters, especially Leo Tolstoy and Feodor Dostoyevsky, the other novels of this period, L’Innocente, Trionfo della Morte and Le vergini delle rocce (The Maidens of the Rocks, 1895), show an increased ideological shift toward a more aggressive affirmation of the Dannunzian hero, the extraordinary individual inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche’s Jenseits von Gut und Bo¨se (Beyond Good and Evil). This figure will become also the protagonist of many of his future plays. In Trionfo della Morte, D’Annunzio perfects his poetic prose, which, in the dedicatory letter to Michetti he calls ‘‘prosa plastica e sinfonica, ricca d’imagini e di musiche’’ (a plastic and symphonic prose, full of images and music), in line with the aesthetic ideal he embraced years before when he joined Michetti’s Cenacolo. The turn of the century sees D’Annunzio’s art reach its peak with the composition of his major poetic works, the three books of the Laudi (Lauds): Maia (1903), and Elettra and Alcyone (Halcyon, 1904) and the beginning of his career as a playwright. Of fundamental importance to his theatrical works are the three ‘‘encounters’’ with the most influential personalities of his time: a philosopherpoet, Nietzsche, a musician, Richard Wagner, and an actress, Eleonora Duse (1858–1924). Nietzsche’s notion of the ‘‘will to power’’ embodied by the ¨ bermensch entails the superiority of all that U affirms itself and the full and enthusiastic acceptance of life, hence also the affirmation of the supreme value of art as an expression of such an adherence to life. In an article on Tribuna of 2 August 1897, La Rinascenza della tragedia (The Renaissance of Tragedy), D’Annunzio links the Nietzschean aesthetic notion derived from Die Geburt der Trago¨die (The Birth of Tragedy) to the Hellenic inspiration of his own drama, La citta` morta (The Dead City, 1898). His aesthetic manifesto is written into the novel, Il fuoco (The Flame, 1900) which, although published after the tragedy, is conceived at the same time. In an attempt to create the Latin counterpart to the Wagnerian Bayreuth Theatre and to provide a suitable venue for his Teatro d’Arte, D’Annunzio dreams of building a great open-air theater on the banks of Lake Albano near Rome. The project receives the support of Duse and several other sponsors, among them Gordon Bennet, the owner of the New York Herald. However, it never takes off. Over the next 18 years D’Annunzio, besides completing the fourth book of the Laudi, Merope (1912) and another novel, Forse che sı` forse che no

(Perhaps Yes, Perhaps No, 1910), devotes most of his writing to the theater. The lukewarm reception that La citta` morta receives in Paris, in spite of having Sarah Bernhardt in the leading role, does not bode well for the success of the other plays written for Duse in rapid succession, Sogno d’un mattino di primavera (Dream of a Spring Morning, 1897), Sogno d’un tramonto d’autunno (Dream of an Autumn Sunset, 1898), La Gioconda (Gioconda, 1899) and La gloria (Glory, 1899). The complexity of language and themes, and a predilection for cruel eroticism, madness and murder, may explain the poor reception of these plays. However, Duse’s international reputation and D’Annunzio’s departure from the prevailing conventions of bourgeois drama bring his work to the attention of even larger audiences with performances on the most important stages of Europe, the United States and South America. His next three plays, Francesca da Rimini (1902), La figlia di Iorio (The Daughter of Jorio, 1904), his masterpiece, and La fiaccola sotto il moggio (The Light under the Bushel, 1905) are his best known and they are still performed in Italian theaters. Set in medieval times, Francesca da Rimini takes its title and plot from Canto 5 of Dante’s Inferno. It marks D’Annunzio’s new approach to drama, which he now writes in verse, and it is visually spectacular, with its magnificent settings and costumes. In the other two tragedies, D’Annunzio’s native region of the Abruzzi is once again re-created with all its primitive passions that lead to tragic endings. His other Italian tragedies, including Piu` che l’amore (More than Love, 1907) and Fedra (Phaedra, 1909), do not enjoy much success, nor do his French plays written in the course of his stay in that country between 1910 and 1915, Le Martyre de Saint Se´bastien (The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, 1911), La Pisanelle ou la mort parfume´e (Pisanella or Perfumed Death, 1914) and La Che`vrefeuille (Honeysuckle, 1914), which is also performed in Italian as Il ferro (The Weapon, 1914). The only exception is La nave (The Ship, 1908), which is performed on its opening night before the king and queen of Italy in Rome and receives enthusiastic applause, as it responds to the country’s growing nationalist and imperialist ambitions. D’Annunzio’s impact on the performing arts extends well beyond drama. Several of his plays are made into operas or put to music by leading composers such as Ildebrando Pizzetti (1880–1968), Pietro Mascagni (1863–1945) and Riccardo Zandonai (1883–1944). Claude Debussy composes the music for the mystery play, Le Martyre de Saint Se´bastien. D’Annunzio is also a 541

GABRIELE D’ANNUNZIO pioneer in cinema and writes the screenplay for the silent film Cabiria (1914), contributing greatly to its success. Following the political adventure of the occupation of Fiume, D’Annunzio withdraws in the voluntary confinement of Il Vittoriale, the villa where he lives until his death. His later literary production is mostly of a memorialistic nature. Notturno (Nocturne, 1921) is a collection of autobiographical prose and poetry narrated in the first person, written mostly in the present tense and in total darkness. The poet is convalescent and temporarily blinded following a forced landing of his plane during the war in 1916. Besides the extraordinary circumstances of its composition, the work is highly innovative for its fragmented and subdued style that aptly describes the poet’s inner life: war memories, reminiscences from the recent and distant past, reflections and descriptions of the sensations heightened by the darkness of his present condition. Very well received by readers, who are enthralled by D’Annunzio’s prowess in war and in his expedition to Fiume, the book will have a profound influence on Italian Modernism. The two volumes of Le faville del maglio (Sparks from the Hammer, 1924 and 1928) contain essays on episodes from his childhood and youth, his visits to Egypt and Greece, the fervent period spent at his Capponcina residence in Florence and the loss of all his possessions to his creditors, his years of ‘‘exile’’ in France, his ideas on art and on himself as an artist. Some of the essays, dating back to 1911–1915, are a re-elaboration of prose compositions that had appeared in the Milanese newspaper Corriere della sera during his prolonged stay in France. The striking novelty of the Faville is both in the tone, which is at times nostalgic and melancholic, and in the refined and dry style, far remote from the magniloquence that characterized his earlier works. His last work of note, published three years before his death, is Cento e cento e cento e cento pagine del libro segreto di Gabriele D’Annunzio tentato di morire, better known as the Libro segreto (A Hundred and a Hundred and a Hundred and a Hundred Pages from the Secret Book of Gabriele D’Annunzio Tempted to Die, 1935), which continues in the memorialistic vein of the two previous collections. Fragments of recollections, dreams and reflections in prose and poetry on different autobiographic topics alternate with pieces of deep introspection in which the aged poet ponders on the meaning of life and the elusive quality of all that matters most, which makes it impossible even for the greatest artist to fully 542

express it and transpose it into art form. One of the last thoughts with which this most skillful and brilliant master of artistic expression leaves his readers regards the painful awareness of the limits of language. In the author’s own words: ‘‘Le piu` arcane comunicanze dell’anima con le cose...sono le parole del silenzio’’ (The soul’s most secret communication with things...are the words of silence) (Libro segreto).

Biography Born in Pescara, 12 March 1863; completed his schooling at the Reale Collegio Cicognini, 1881; moved to Rome and began his journalistic activity; married Duchess Maria Hardouin di Gallese, 1883; became editor of Cronaca bizantina, 1885–1886; a son, Mario, is born, 1884, followed by Gabriellino, 1886, and Veniero, 1887; a daughter, Renata, is born out of wedlock, 1893; met and initiated a fruitful artistic cooperation and liaison with Eleonora Duse, 1894–1904; elected to Parliament as one of the representatives of the right, 1897, then crossed over to the left, 1900; moved to Capponcina, a Renaissance villa in Settignano (Florence), 1898; moved to France due to severe financial difficulties, 1910–1915; returned to Italy and left for the front at the break of World War I, 1915; occupied and held Fiume with a small army of Italian volunteers, 1919–1920; took up residence in Gardone in the villa ‘‘Il Vittoriale,’’ 1921; his residence in Gardone, now called Il Vittoriale degli Italiani, is made into national monument, 1923; named prince of Montenevoso, 1924; appointed as president of the Italian Academy, 1937; died from a cerebral hemorrhage, 1 March 1938. ANNA MEDA Selected Works Collections Opera Omnia, 48 vols. and 1 vol. of indices, Milan: Mondadori, 1927–1936. Tutte le opere di Gabriele D’Annunzio, edited by Egidio Bianchetti, 11 vols., Milan: Mondadori, 1939–1976. Versi d’amore e di gloria, edited by Annamaria Andreoli and Niva Lorenzini, 2 vols., Milano: Mondadori, 1982–1984. Prose di romanzi, edited by Annamaria Andreoli, 2 vols., Milan: Mondadori, 1988–1989. Tutte le novelle, edited by Annamaria Andreoli e Marina De Marco, Milan: Mondadori, 1992. Scritti giornalistici 1882–1888, edited by Annamaria Andreoli, Milano: Mondadori, 1996.

GABRIELE D’ANNUNZIO Fiction Terra vergine, 1882. Il libro delle vergini, 1883; as The Book of the Virgins, translated by J. G. Nichols, 2003. San Pantaleone, 1886. Il piacere, 1889; as The Child of Pleasure, translated by Georgina Harding, 1898; as The Pleasure, translated by Virginia S. Caporale, 2000. L’innocente, 1892; as The Victim, translated by Georgina Harding, 1991. Giovanni Episcopo, 1892; as Episcopo & Company, translated by Myrta Leonora Jones, 1896. Trionfo della morte, 1894; as The Triumph of Death, translated by Arthur Hornblow, 1896. Le vergini delle rocce, 1895; as The Maidens of the Rocks, translated by Annetta Halliday-Antona and Giuseppe Antona, 1898. Il fuoco, 1900; as The Flame, translated by Susan Bassnet, London: Quartet Books, 1991. Le novelle della Pescara, 1902; as Tales of My Native Town, translated by Rafael Mantellini, 1920. Forse che sı` forse che no, 1910. La Leda senza cigno, 1916.

Poetry ‘‘Primo vere,’’ 1879. ‘‘In memoriam,’’ 1880. ‘‘Canto novo,’’ 1882. ‘‘Intermezzo di rime,’’ 1883. ‘‘Isaotta Guttadauro,’’ 1886. ‘‘L’Isotteo. La Chimera,’’ 1890. ‘‘Elegie romane,’’ 1892. ‘‘Odi navali,’’ 1892. ‘‘Poema paradisiaco,’’ 1893. ‘‘Maia,’’ 1903. ‘‘Elettra,’’ 1904. ‘‘Alcyone,’’ 1904; as Halcyon, translated by J. G. Nichols, 1988. ‘‘Merope,’’ 1912.

Plays Sogno d’un mattino di primavera, 1897. La citta` morta, 1898. Sogno di un tramonto d’autunno, 1898. La Gioconda, 1899; as Gioconda, translated by Arthur Symons, 1902. La Gloria, 1899. Francesca da Rimini, 1902; as Francesca da Rimini, translated by Arthur Symons, 1902. La figlia di Iorio, 1904; as The Daughter of Jorio, translated by Charlotte Porter, Pietro Isola, and Alice Henry, 1907. La fiaccola sotto il moggio, 1905. Piu` che l’amore, 1907. La nave, 1908. Fedra, 1909. Le Martyre de Saint Se´bastien, 1911. Parisina, 1913. La Pisanelle ou la mort parfume´e, 1914. La Che`vrefeuille, 1914. Il ferro, 1914.

Other Contemplazione della morte, 1912. Notturno, 1921; as Nocturne, translated by Raymond Rosenthal.

Le faville del maglio, vol. 1, 1924; vol. 2, 1928. Cento e cento e cento e cento pagine del libro segreto di Gabriele D’Annunzio tentato di morire, 1935.

Further Readings Alatri, Paolo, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Turin: UTET, 1983. Andreoli, Annamaria, Il vivere inimitabile. Vita di Gabriele D’Annunzio, Milan: Mondadori, 2000. Andreoli, Annamaria, D’Annunzio, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2004. Ba`rberi Squarotti, Giorgio, II gesto improbabile: Tre saggi su Gabriele D’Annunzi, Palermo: Flaccovio, 1971. Ba`rberi Squarotti, Giorgio, La scrittura verso il nulla: D’Annunzio, Turin: Genesi Editrice, 1992. Gibellini, Pietro, Logos e Mythos: Studi du Gabriele D’Annunzio, Florence: Olschki, 1985. Gibellini, Pietro, D’Annunzio dal gesto al testo, Milan: Mursia, 1995. Granatella, Laura, Arrestate l’autore! D’Annunzio in scena, Rome: Bulzoni, 1993. Griffin, Gerald, Gabriele D’Annunzio: The Warrior Bard, London: J. Long, 1935. Klopp, Charles, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Boston: Twayne, 1988. La dimora di D’Annunzio: Il Vittoriale, Palermo: Novecento Editrice, 1980. Lorenzini, Niva, D’Annunzio, Palermo: Palumbo, 1993. Luti, Giorgio, La cenere dei sogni: studi dannunziani, Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1973. Marabini Moevs, Maria Teresa, Gabriele D’Annunzio e le estetiche della fine del secolo, L’Aquila: L. U. Japadre, 1976. Mariano, Emilio, Sentimento del vivere, ovvero Gabriele D’Annunzio, Milan: Mondadori, 1962. Perfetti, Francesco (editor), D’Annunzio e il suo tempo, Genoa: Sagep, 1992. Pistelli, Maurizio, II ‘divino testimonio’: D’Annunzio e il mito dell eroica Rinascenza, Modena: Mucchi, 1995. Raimondi, Ezio, II silenzio della Gorgone, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1980. Tiboni, Edoardo (editor), D’Annunzio giornalista, Pescara: Fabiani, 1984 Tiboni, Edoardo (editor), Verso l’Ellade, Pescara: Ediars, 1995. Valesio, Paolo, Gabriele D’Annunzio. The Dark Flame. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992. Woodhouse, John, Gabriele D’Annunzio. Defiant Archangel, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998.

ALCYONE, 1904 Poetry by Gabriele D’Annunzio

Alcyone is the third book of the Laudi del cielo del mare della terra e degli eroi (Hymns in Praise of Sky, Sea, Earth and Heroes) and is considered 543

GABRIELE D’ANNUNZIO D’Annunzio’s highest achievement in lyric poetry. Originally he had planned seven books of Laudi, each taking its title from the name of one of the seven stars that form the Pleiades in the constellation of Taurus. However, he only wrote five: Maia (1903), Elettra (1904), and Alcyone over the period 1899–1903, then Merope (1912) and Asterope (Canti della guerra latina) (Songs of the Latin War, 1933). Maia consists of one long poem, ‘‘Laus vitae’’ (In Praise of Life) celebrating the Greek and Latin roots of Western civilization and the accomplishments of the Italian Renaissance. Elettra is devoted to the praises of heroes, great men, and cities of the past that can inspire modern Italians to reach even greater achievements. Merope and Asterope are different in tone and celebrate the Italian war in Lybia and Italy’s participation in World War I, respectively. Whereas in Maia and Elettra heroic and political themes are predominant, in Alcyone, nature in all its beauty takes central stage, as a source of regeneration and inspiration. The Tuscan countryside and shore in their summer splendour become the perfect setting for D’Annunzio’s poetic message. Written in a highly evocative style, the book presents a wide spectrum of themes and poetic forms. It is divided in five sections separated by four dithyrambs that mark the different stages of the season and the changing moods of the poet as summer comes, then triumphantly explodes and finally draws to a melancholic end with the approach of autumn. The opening poem, ‘‘La tregua’’ (The Respite), sets the mood and the tone for the whole collection. After the hectic activities of his political campaigns, the intense touring and staging of his plays during the previous five years and the poetic labours of writing another two books, the poet needs a break from the ‘‘Despot,’’ his despotic creative demon who dictates and drives him, so that he may be young again. Also of particular interest as a sort of poetic manifesto for Alcyone is the second poem, ‘‘Il fanciullo’’ (The Boy), consisting of seven ballads that evoke the orphic image of a young boy playing the flute and charming all the creatures who listen to the melody of his music. The boy is the child of the Cicada, sacred to Apollo, the god of poetry and symbol of the free expression of instinctual inspiration, and of the olive tree, sacred to Athena, the goddess of knowledge and culture, possibly representing artistic labour and technique. Figuratively, the boy represents the two complementary components of D’Annunzio’s poetry: nature and art. A mythic atmosphere pervades most of the poems in the 544

collection. The sudden appearance of a stag in the forest, the changeable shapes and rhythms of the waves in the sea, the powerful flight of a vulture in the sky are seen through pristine eyes of wonder and are transformed into the wondrous creatures of classical mythology. Under the visionary gaze of the poet, everything undergoes a metamorphosis whereby the difference between plants, animals, and humans is constantly blurred: a galloping stag acquires the shape of a centaur, a mythical being half-man and half-horse in ‘‘La morte del centauro’’ (The Death of the Centaur); summer is a beautiful woman to be chased and possessed in ‘‘Stabat nuda aestas’’ (Summer Stood Naked); the poet lying on the beach becomes godlike, one with the sand and the seawater, in ‘‘Meriggio’’ (Noontide); a nymph breaks out of a tree in the woods and tempts the poet with promises of erotic pleasure and good hunting in exchange for a basket full of peaches in ‘‘Versilia.’’ The 88 poems in Alcyone vary greatly in form and metre, ranging from sonnets and madrigals to ballads and several other types of lyrical compositions. They all share the same unparalleled use of language that seems to dissolve into music in its sensuous adherence to nature in all its manifestations. ANNA MEDA Editions First edition: in Laudi del cielo del mare della terra e degli eroi, vol. 2: Elettra - Alcione, Milan: Fratelli Treves Editori, 1904. Critical editions: in Versi d’amore e di gloria, vol. 2, edited by Annamaria Andreoli and Niva Lorenzini, Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1984. Alcyone, edited by Federico Roncoroni, Milan: Mondadori, 1995. Translation: Halcyon, translated by J. G. Nichols, Manchester: Carcanet, 1988.

Further Readings Alvino, Luca, Il poema della leggerezza. Gnoseologia della metamorfosi nell’ ‘‘Alcyone’’ di Gabriele D’Annunzio, Rome: Bulzoni, 1998. Benussi, Cristina, ‘‘«L’anima si fa pelago». Simbologia equorea nell’Alcyone,’’ in Rivista di letteratura italiana, 2 (2002): 107–123. Diano, Carlo, ‘‘D’Annunzio e l’Ellade,’’ in L’arte di Gabriele D’Annunzio, edited by Emilio Mariano, Milan: Mondadori, 1968. Gibellini, Pietro, D’Annunzio dal gesto al testo, Milan: Mursia, 1995. Marabini Moevs, Maria Teresa, Gabriele D’Annunzio e le estetiche della fine del secolo, L’Aquila: L. U. Japadre, 1976. Tiboni, Edoardo (editor), Da Foscarina a Ermione. Alcyone: prodromi, officina, poesia, fortuna, Pescara: Ediars, 2000.

GABRIELE D’ANNUNZIO

IL FUOCO, 1900 Novel by Gabriele D’Annunzio

In D’Annunzio’s original plan, Il fuoco (The Flame) was supposed to be the first book of the trilogy of the Romanzi del Melograno (The Novels of the Pomegranate). Although the other two novels, La vittoria dell’uomo (Man’s Victory) and Trionfo della vita (Triumph of Life) were never written, the complex symbolic value and mythical reference of the pomegranate that gives the trilogy its name serves as a key to a deeper understanding of the novel. The pomegranate stands for abundance, regality, joy. As stated by D’Annunzio’s alter ego in the novel, the protagonist Stelio Effrena, himself a writer and composer, it is the symbolic representation of his desire for ‘‘una vita ricca e ardente’’ (a richer and more ardent life). Set against the backdrop of an enchanted Venice in 1883, the novel tells the story of a young artist, Stelio, and his muse, Foscarina, an aging actress (clearly modeled on Eleonora Duse, who was then at the peak of her career and international renown and who had been D’Annunzio’s lover since 1895). Aside from the morbid interest in the love story (especially keen in its contemporaries), with all the crude details of the actress’s physical decadence, the novel is particularly significant as it represents D’Annunzio’s true theoretical manifesto on art and the role of the artist in the renewal of Italian drama and the promotion of a Latin Renaissance parallel to the one brought about in Germany by great thinkers and artists like Nietzsche and Wagner. Influenced by the former’s revisitation of the Hellenic concept of drama as a form of Dionysian art, D’Annunzio seeks to bring modern drama to the same heights as ancient tragedy. Tragedy is the art form in which the duality of the opposite principles of the Apollonian and Dionysian is overcome. The new drama, in D’Annunzio’s view, needs to regain the solemnity and ritualism of a sacred representation in order to bring about ‘‘una ideale trasfigurazione della vita’’ (an ideal transfiguration of life, Il fuoco). A revelation of beauty thus takes place before a silent multitude like in an ancient temple. In order for this inner transformation to happen, music, dance, the figurative arts and the poet’s

words must work together to create a ‘‘total drama’’ along similar lines to the Wagnerian ‘‘Wort-ton-drama’’(Poetry-Music-Drama). Wagner, whose Tristan und Isolde had already influenced the structure of D’Annunzio’s Trionfo della morte (1894), in this later novel appears as a Titan, the ‘‘Rivelatore che aveva trasformato in infinito canto per la religione degli uomini le essenze dell’Universo’’ (Revealing One who had transformed into infinite songs the essences of the Universe for the religion of men). While in Wagner’s operas, D’Annunzio finds inspiration for his own drama, in Foscarina/ Duse, Effrena/D’Annunzio recognizes the living manifestation of the Dionysian woman, ‘‘lo strumento mirabile dell’arte novella...quella che doveva incarnare nella sua persona mutevole le future finzioni di bellezza’’ (the marvelous instrument of his new art...who would incarnate in her changeable being his future imaginings of beauty). The new drama is not only the tragedy La vittoria dell’uomo (The Victory of Man) that Effrena is busy writing in the fictional setting of Il fuoco, but also D’Annunzio’s first work for the theater, La citta` morta, performed in Paris in 1898. Thus D’Annunzio’s vision in the novel of a new drama celebrating the transformational power of tragic beauty finds its realization in the play he had already written by the time Il fuoco was published. ANNA MEDA Editions First edition: Il fuoco, Milan: Fratelli Treves Editori, 1900. Critical edition: in Prose di romanzi, vol. 2, edited by Annamaria Andreoli and Niva Lorenzini, Milan: Mondadori, 1989. Il fuoco, edited by Niva Lorenzini, Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1996. Translation: as The Flame, translated by Susan Bassnett, London: Quartet Books, 1991.

Further Reading Artioli, Umberto, Il combattimento invisibile. D’Annunzio tra romanzo e teatro, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1995. Giacon, Mariarosa, ‘‘Da Venezia all’Iˆle-de-France: per una ricognizione delle fonti «pittoriche» del Fuoco,’’ in Nuovi Quaderni del Vittoriale, 2 (1995): 73–92. Jacomuzzi, Stefano, ‘‘La citta` anadiomene e il dio magnifico: la Grecia nelle pagine del Fuoco,’’ in Verso l’Ellade dalla Citta` morta a Maia, edited by Edoardo Tiboni, Pescara: Ediars, 1995. Lucente, Gregory L., ‘‘D’Annunzio’s Il fuoco and Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist: From Allegory to Irony,’’ in Italica, 57 (1980): 19–33.

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GABRIELE D’ANNUNZIO Paratore, Ettore, ‘‘D’Annunzio e Wagner,’’ in D’Annunzio e la cultura germanica,’’ Pescara: Centro Nazionale di Studi Dannunziani, 1985. Paratore, Ettore, ‘‘Il Fuoco,’’ in D’Annunzio a cinquant’anni dalla morte,’’ vol. 1, edited by Edoardo Tiboni, Pescara: Centro Nazionale di Studi Dannunziani, 1989. Piga, Francesco, Il mito del superuomo in Nietzsche e D’Annunzio, Florence: Vallecchi, 1979.

LA FIGLIA DI IORIO, 1904 Play by Gabriele D’Annunzio

Written in only 33 days during the same period of extraordinary creativity as Alcyone in the summer of 1903, La figlia di Iorio (The Daughter of Jorio) has been hailed as D’Annunzio’s masterpiece and is still performed successfully in contemporary Italian theaters. The play was premiered at the Teatro Lirico in Milan in 1904 with Irma Grammatica in the leading role and was set to music twice by Alberto Franchetti in 1906 and Ildebrando Pizzetti in 1954. Roberto Hazon adapted it for ballet in 1976. The play is set in rural and primitive Abruzzi in archaic times. The young and beautiful Mila di Codra is Iorio’s outcast daughter. She seeks refuge in Aligi’s family home from a mob of harvesters crazed with drink and the heat when the family is celebrating his marriage to Vienda. Aligi, a young shepherd, has come down from the mountain where he lives to marry a woman he does not even know, chosen for him by his parents, as was customary. He finally yields to Mila’s desperate cries for help and gives her sanctuary at the sacred hearth in spite of the pressure from his family to throw her back to the mob of lecherous men. The marriage rite is thus profaned and Aligi goes back to his mountain where he is later joined by Mila. There they live chastely together while Aligi prepares to go to Rome to seek the annulment of his unconsummated marriage from the pope in order to marry Mila. Aligi’s father suddenly turns up at the cave and tries to rape the girl. In the fight that 546

ensues, Aligi kills his father to protect Mila. He is condemned to death and given a customary drink of drugged wine before his execution. Mila, however, takes the blame for having bewitched Aligi and for murdering his father. She is then taken away to be burned alive as a witch, while Aligi, now under the influence of the drugged potion, curses her. In a state of ecstatic exaltation, caused by her will for redemption and self-sacrifice, Mila burns at the stake crying out ‘‘La fiamma e` bella’’ (The flame is beautiful) amongst the curses and yells of the crowd. The tragedy is written in verse and in a language that blends the Abruzzi dialect forms with an old Tuscan variety of Italian and adapts popular rhymes, ritual formulas and proverbs in its dialogues. Costumes and settings are meticulously researched by the author to create an aura of authenticity. D’Annunzio’s Abruzzi is an archaic and primitive world where the conflagration of archetypal conflicts takes on a primordial dimension. Although plot and characters are placed in a specific geographical and cultural context, La figlia di Iorio possesses a timeless mythical dimension. By giving her life for the man she loves, Mila places her faith completely in the redeeming power of love. In death, she overcomes the conflicts created by a society driven by blind hatred and prejudice. Mila embodies a kind of heroism that manifests itself in the acceptance of her own destiny in the name of love, without resisting or challenging it. One of the fundamental traits of D’Annunzio’s drama appears in this tragedy: the failure of the male hero, overshadowed by the prominence of the female character. In this tragedy, D’Annunzio deals with the affirmation of individuality, as manifested in Aligi’s and Mila’s life events. This affirmation is abortive in Aligi, as he regresses back to the undifferentiated state of mystical participation with the collective values of his clan; on the contrary, Mila undergoes spiritual rebirth through fire like the mythical phoenix. ANNA MEDA Editions First edition: La figlia di Iorio, Milan: Fratelli Treves Editori, 1904. Critical editions: in Tragedie, sogni e misteri, vol. 2, edited by Egidio Bianchetti, Milan: Mondadori, 1968. La figlia di Iorio, edited by Pietro Gibellini and Raffaella Bertazzoli, Milan: Garzanti, 1995. La figlia di Iorio, edited by Milva Maria Cappellini, Milan: Mondadori, 1995;

DANTE ALIGHIERI La figlia di Iorio, edited by Raffaella Bertazzoli, Gardone Riviera (Brescia): Il Vittoriale degli Italiani, 2004. Translation: The Daughter of Jorio, translated by Charlotte Porter, Pietro Isola, and Alice Henry, Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1907.

Further Reading Alonge, Roberto, Donne terrifiche e fragili maschi. La linea teatrale D’Annunzio-Pirandello, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2004. Ba`rberi Squarotti, Giorgio, ‘‘I miti de La figlia di Iorio,’’ in Critica letteraria, 90–93 (1996): 57–90. Bertazzoli, Raffaella, ‘‘L’elaborazione della Figlia di Iorio dal ‘naturale’ al ‘mitico,’’’ in Otto-Novecento, 5–6 (1981): 163–181. Bertazzoli, Raffaella, ‘‘La figlia di Iorio da Michetti a D’Annunzio,’’ in Annali d’Italianistica, 5 (1987): 161–177.

Gunzberg, Lynn M., ‘‘La figlia di Iorio, La lupa and the Locus of Patriarchy,’’ in Annali d’Italianistica, 5 (1987): 60–73. Isgro`, Giovanni, D’Annunzio e la mise en sce`ne, Palermo: Palumbo, 1993. Kibler, Louis, ‘‘Myth and Meaning in D’Annunzio’s La figlia di Iorio,’’ in Annali d’Italianistica, 5 (1987): 178–187. Lorenzini, Niva, ‘‘Il mito della parola. Riflessioni in margine alla Figlia di Iorio,’’ in Lingua e stile, 32.3 (1997): 505–517. Meda, Anna, Bianche statue contro il nero abisso. Il teatro dei miti in D’Annunzio e Pirandello, Ravenna: Longo Editore, 1993. Puppa, Paolo, La parola alta. Sul teatro di Pirandello e D’Annunzio, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1993. Rosina, Tito, Mezzo secolo de La figlia di Iorio, Genoa: Principato, 1955. Tiboni, Edoardo (editor), La figlia di Iorio. Pescara: Centro Nazionale StudiDannunziani, 1986.

DANTE ALIGHIERI (1265–1321) Dante has long been acknowledged as the supreme Italian author, as the founder of the Italian literary language and history, and possibly as the highest narrative poet in Western tradition. His general appeal nowadays rests almost entirely on a single work, the Comedia, a visionary poem of uncommon beauty and depth. For all its power to surprise and unsettle the reader with its inventiveness, the central metaphor sustaining the narrative is not unusual: Life is a journey. The conceit is the point of departure for the telling of Dante’s own providential journey, on Good Friday of the year 1300, across the three realms of the beyond, Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, which culminates in the wayfarer’s vision of God face to face. The motif of the journey belongs to a long literary tradition. The soul’s exile and spiritual quest that variously lead to the palace of wisdom, to the promised land, or to the place where God is to be found has constantly been the true field of the epic genre, philosophy, biblical revelation, and theology. The travel stories of Ulysses and Aeneas have never been understood as merely entertaining fictions. They have been allegorized as spiritual ciphers akin to the Platonic ascents of the mind. Similarly, by directing their gaze inwardly, the

Fathers of the Church—say, St. Augustine and St. Bonaventure—traced the path of the mind’s ascent to God through the intermediate steps of sense knowledge, understanding, reason, and through the soul’s sources of light. At every juncture of his poem, Dante casts a different light on this venerable tradition. Like his patristic predecessors, he seeks transcendent Christian values to guide him and the world. But more than anybody else before him, Dante awakens an absolutely unique way of thinking and feeling that would bring him (and us) beyond the ordinary reaches of the mind. To discuss and to articulate the whole spectrum of the intellectual and moral reality, as he means to do, to chart the vast spaces of God’s creation in its unity and gradations, a new journey and a shift in perspective were needed. The Comedia comes through as a poetic journey in search of a new way of seeing the world. Dante finds and delivers this. He does so, first of all, by retrieving and redefining the layers and folds of the cultural sediments of the Middle Ages. An emblem and, at the same time, a genuine historical source of information for the complex and hybrid understanding of culture at the time 547

DANTE ALIGHIERI was the encyclopedic tradition. Historically, this repertory of knowledge extended from Isidore of Seville to Vincent of Beauvais and Brunetto Latini, some of the most notable names steeped in the practice of the genre. Dante delves into this tradition, rewrites and reinvents it, and makes it the sinew of his poem. His reason is to show that poetry, which in earlier years was generally dismissed as a frivolous courtly and worldly game, in fact, gathers all doctrines and claims to contain all possible knowledge. By yoking together this new understanding of poetry and the encyclopedic tradition, he unveils the necessary correlation of all the arts and sciences: Poetry joins together theology, politics, ethics, and philosophy (a term that in the Middle Ages defined the domain of the sciences) and, thereby, it is singularly equipped to inquire into the knot unfolding into the multiplicity of phenomena. The poetic encyclopedia he forges opens to him unsuspected intellectual vistas. He sees the conversation of the arts and sciences—as well as the conversation among the great figures of the past and between the past and the future—as nothing less than an educational adventure through the spiritual and political crisis of his age. There is in Dante’s life and thought an extraordinary openness to the public and private challenges mounting on all sides. Such openness is made apparent by his tendency to see his life as an uninterrupted, ongoing learning process. The journey of education lies at the heart of the Comedia. In true medieval fashion toward the authority of tradition, the protagonist opens himself to the teachings and authority of great thinkers: Virgil, Boethius, St. Augustine, Guido Cavalcanti, Brunetto Latini, Guido Guinizelli, Aristotle, Cicero, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Bonaventure, and St. Bernard of Clairvaux, not to mention political theorists, rhetoricians, grammarians, jurists, painters, etc. Even his beloved Beatrice becomes a teacher of desire for God, for the journey Dante undertakes is more than an intellectual experience. Rather, it takes place through the thick reality of history and under the compulsions of love. In a well-known encyclopedic compendium of the twelfth century, Honorius of Autun characterizes learning as the path the soul travels to its divine homeland. For Dante, who is always restlessly seeking and is always underway, and who sees life itself as a journey, the way, with its bends and turns, is given to him. It is the way of tradition. This sense of the past, however, does not hamper his subjectivity. Rather, it provides the foundation for his growth and enables him to carve his own 548

unique path. On this path he could go astray, and when he does he is rescued by supernatural mediators and messengers (Beatrice, Lucy, the Virgin Mary) who beckon him out of the depths and show him his true destination. And he is rescued from the land of the dead by his listening to, responding and contesting the lesson of his teachers such as Virgil. As a matter of fact, Dante is singularly unencumbered by the weight of the wisdom of the classical and medieval past, and he insists on seeing the world for himself, on the terms of his irreducible individuality, not because, as we Moderns might say, the self guarantees the existence of the world. He chooses to walk his own way in the conviction that to know coincides with seeking and that, by finding out anew the answer to life’s ancient riddles, he can bear witness to the knowledge that tradition has handed down. This mixture of reverence for the wisdom of the past and iconoclasm (or need for a shift in direction of history) is not for Dante a purely intellectual posture. It is nothing less than his way of being. It is rooted in the concrete realities of his times and in the experiences with which he constantly comes face to face. Like many of his contemporaries, Dante is only too aware of the moral temper of his times. He witnesses all around him the spiritual crisis enveloping the church. And later in his life he will not hesitate to take to task the claims of the church’s absolute supremacy advanced by the popes and their hierocrats. He sees the political storms in which the empire was floundering and he has firsthand knowledge of the abyss of civil war between the Guelfs and Ghibellines (or White Guelfs and Black Guelfs) into which his own city of Florence was sinking. He had learned from his teachers at the philosophical schools of the Franciscans and the Dominicans he attended in Florence around 1292 about the fierce philosophical debates at the universities of Paris and Oxford, which culminated in 1277 in the condemnation of 219 propositions by the bishop of Paris, Etienne Tempier. Dante even knew the details of the doctrinal dissent represented by the followers of the so-called ‘‘Latin Averroism,’’ Siger of Brabant among them. He lived in the midst of the apocalyptic ferments and longings of the Joachists and Spiritual Franciscans, including Jean Pierre Olivi, who preached for years in Santa Croce. Nor was the violence of and against the heretical movements neglected, if one is to judge by the way he faces the events unfolding in his own days and by the audacious way he looks ahead into what he thinks the future will deliver. In

DANTE ALIGHIERI short, he stands within his own era and brings it into his poetry. But, prophet-like, he feels like a stranger in it. Such an ambivalent attitude thoroughly permeates his moral stance in the Comedia. This attitude is also visible from the very beginning of his career in his questions and reflections about poetry, language, love, politics, and philosophy. The first work he writes, the Vita nova (New Life, 1294), can legitimately be thought of as an autobiography-in-progress: It relates the story of a love epiphany, of the sudden appearance of Beatrice to a 9-year-old boy and later to an 18year-old young man, Dante. The question about the sense Beatrice acquires in Dante’s mind multiplies into a series of mutually implicated themes in the Vita nova. These are questions of love, memory, friendship, poetry, the self, death, forgetfulness of the dead beloved, fraud in love, and they include hope, the future, and the immortality of Beatrice. Dante raises these questions through the very structure of the ‘‘libello’’ (little book), a mixture of poetry and prose-commentary or self-interpretation. Together they relate a double apprenticeship mirroring each other: a sentimental education and a poetic growth. His poetry is written as his love experience unfolds. Dante thoroughly absorbed the strains of the lyrical tradition: the poetry of the Provenc¸al troubadours, the Sicilian school, Guittone d’Arezzo, and the Sweet New Style, which recognized as its founder Guido Guinizzelli and counted in its ranks practitioners such as Cino da Pistoia, Lapo Gianni, Gianni Alfani, and Dino Frescobaldi. Although he learns from all these conventions, Dante engages mainly the aesthetics of the Sweet New Style and finds his interlocutors in the circle of its practitioners. With them he partakes in the ongoing redefinition of the erotic and moral vocabulary of past poetic modes (nobility, gentleness, virtue, passion, love, etc.). He retraces their insights and understands himself through the language of this modern form of poetry. One interlocutor Dante privileges in the Vita nova: Guido Cavalcanti, hailed as his ‘‘first friend.’’ His road to an original poetic vision passes through the teachings of Guinizzelli (in which he ‘‘localizes’’ himself) and, above all, through the probably daily contacts with the poetic-philosophical reflections of Cavalcanti. In his classical poem, ‘‘Donna me prega’’ (A Woman Begs Me), Cavalcanti had articulated his radical views about the ontology of love, its essence, and its effects on the mind (and not just on the body, as one finds in the phenomenology of love as passion celebrated by the troubadours). In

Cavalcanti’s metaphysics, love is a dark experience shattering the mind, robbing the self of any rationality, and never inducing transcendent knowledge. Dante echoes and responds critically to these radical views. He argues in his Vita nova that love is neither a passion ravaging the mind nor a physics of bodies. It belongs to the horizon of time and, thus, reveals the temporality of existence. And he brings the debate with his friend on to the terrain of poetic language. To grasp the core and significance of love, Dante takes the path of poetry he must inquire into the structure of metaphorical language. In chapter XXV of Vita nova, in an overt dialogue with Guido Cavalcanti, he etches his personal aesthetic conception that redefines both poetry and love. As befits a text self-consciously constructed to reflect on one’s poetic education, the Vita nova had embarked on technical considerations on personification, allegory, process of composition of sonnets, poetic inspiration, and general craft of writing. In chapter XXV, he faces squarely the question of poetry and of his own self-understanding as a poet. He claims originality for the poetry of his times (poets of antiquity did not, he says, take the theme of love as a subject for verses). He goes on to say that, from a rhetorical standpoint, the poetry of his time—especially his own—does not differ from that of the past. He adds a twist to his sense of tradition: Poetry is for him an orphic art that animates the world of inanimate entities and the world of the dead. He also asserts that writing poetry is and ought to be a conscious, rational practice: If a poet is asked why he introduces a rhetorical argument, he ought to be able to divest his words of their fabulous coverings and reveal their inner meaning. Rationality pivots poetry’s visionary impulse. With the death of Beatrice, the crucial event of the Vita nova, the boldness of Dante’s imagination comes to the fore. Absence of the beloved ushers in an awareness of the finiteness of the empirical world. By a thrust of the imagination, which is no longer merely empirical but visionary, he goes beyond the boundaries of time and death—he sees Beatrice sitting at the foot of God’s majesty—and rejects any notion of closure for his narrative. In its open-endedness, the last paragraph of the Vita nova reverses the rhetorical structure of the ‘‘libello’’: It began as a book of memory and turns into a vision of the future: It promises a work to come so that Beatrice can be properly praised. By this visionary openness, Dante distances himself from the circumscribed, contracted representations 549

DANTE ALIGHIERI of Cavalcanti’s world, made of separate domains such as love and knowledge that are never allowed to interact. Dante wills to bridge the gap yawning in his friend’s thinking. Beatrice’s death (June 1290) marks a new departure in Dante’s life and attitude. For about 30 months, as his philosophical Convivio (The Banquet, 1304–1307) makes clear, while he attends the schools of theology and philosophy with the Dominicans at Santa Maria Novella and the Franciscans at Santa Croce, he stands at the threshold of new intellectual discoveries. The teachings he receives from the friars make the political-rhetorical education Brunetto Latini imparted appear in a new light. A decisive turning is about to take place. That which gives coherence to the domain of politics is not the Ciceronian principle of rhetoric and order, as Brunetto Latini’s ancient classical models had argued. The Dominicans and the Franciscans, who transposed their ideas of church reform, imminent apocalyptic ending of history, need of spiritual conversion, evangelical poverty, and rational order into practical discourse, provide Dante with a universalizing perspective in the understanding of the ‘‘political.’’ The narrow focus of the city requires a transcendent dimension. Or, to say it differently, politics entails a theology. Under the impact of the philosophical-theological training that lays the foundations of his culture, Dante writes a series of doctrinal poems (including the brilliant ‘‘Stony Rhymes’’) while entering political life. He brackets the purely poetic dimension of his life (displayed in the Vita nova), enrolls in the guild of physicians and apothecaries, and serves in a number of posts (member of the council, supervisor of public works, ambassador, and prior of the city). Political involvement for Dante is not sudden. In 1289, he fought the Aretines at the battle of Campaldino and at the Siege of Caprona. He lives within the world and believes that he can bring about changes in the world through action and civic engagement. He actively opposes, as the Franciscans did, the drive to power of the authoritarian Pope Boniface VIII, his unholy alliance with the bankers and designs over Florence, as well as his dealings with the French royal house of Valois. Yet, not only did Dante fail to bring about historical change, he was led into a desperate predicament. In the winter of 1302, he is sentenced to exile from Florence, and lives as an exile until his death in 1321. For all its harshness, exile turns out to be a blessing in disguise, nothing less than the central experience of his life. His texts always speak of exile as a 550

darkening time and a ‘‘ravage of the spirit.’’ But he also accepts that exile should not be construed as a hopeless condition. Instead it affords him with the possibility of recognizing the necessity to transcend the particularisms of local Florentine history and to occupy a universal standpoint. In the initial stage of his nomadic existence, he undertakes to write the Convivio and the De vulgari eloquentia (Eloquence in the Vulgar Tongue, 1304–1305), both of which he leaves unfinished and both of which create a vantage point from which the world—as a human world—can be constructed and grasped. Both texts reaffirm the moral and theological truths that constitute the framework of his Christian vision, while granting legitimacy to the historical world as the product of human language and thinking. That Dante works by a contrapuntal practice is made evident by the symmetry between the two discursive tracts. The De vulgari eloquentia, written in Latin, argues for the dignity of Italian, and proposes rules to stem the anarchic, arbitrary corruption of the vernacular so that it can serve as the ‘‘illustrious,’’ ‘‘courtly,’’ ‘‘curial,’’ and ‘‘cardinal’’ language of Italy. The Convivio, in contrast, is written in Italian, but it asserts the superiority of Latin. The De vulgari eloquentia begins as a study of grammar, expatiates on the origin of language as a divine gift, refers to philosophical speculations about universal language, narrates the confusion of tongues, maps the geography of Romance languages, and ends up as a treatise on poetry and rhetoric. In the second book, it takes on the status of a poetics that recalls and broadens the concerns put forth in the Vita nova. Poetry is now defined as ‘‘nothing else but a rhetorical fiction set to music.’’ In keeping with this musical understanding of poetry as voice, sound, and harmony, Dante proceeds to discuss theories of style (the hierarchy of tragic, comic, and elegiac modes of representation); he delves into the intricate structure of the song; and he chooses the words best capable of generating the musical order he pursues. The Convivio, on the other hand, by explicitly turning to a discussion of moral philosophy, makes good the teachings he had received some ten years earlier by the Franciscans and the Dominicans. The underlying, sustaining issue of the four books Dante completes is the age-old interplay between philosophy and theology. Yet the Convivio is not a ‘‘Pelagian’’ text (Pelagius was one of the philosophers condemned in Bishop Tempier’s 219 propositions). Under the impact of Boethius’ figuration

DANTE ALIGHIERI of Philosophy as a woman in De consolatione philosophiae (from which Dante takes the initial impulse to philosophize), he deploys the Aristotelian conceit of the erotics of knowledge: He has fallen in love with a beautiful woman, whom Pythagoras named Philosophy. She is the ‘‘donna gentile,’’ whom he first met in the Vita nova and who provisionally replaces Beatrice. The nourishment the Convivio administers (a metaphor faintly recalling the eerie food of love consumed in the Vita nova) ranges from the cardinal virtues (justice, fortitude) to the virtues discussed in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics as well as in St. Thomas Aquinas’ commentary on it: the nature of true nobility and magnanimity, the value of authority, the relation between philosophy and politics (the authority of the philosopher vs. the authority of the emperor), the mechanism of allegorical language, the power of the author’s self-hermeneutics, etc. Since ethics is the branch of philosophy bound up with the conduct of life in this world, Dante’s philosophical project expresses itself as the desire to provide the grounds for authority, his own included. He adheres to the view that philosophy is capable of giving a comprehensive account of the highest principles of human affairs. But although the Convivio presents philosophy as the love and quest of wisdom, and philosophy enjoys autonomy from theology, a link exists between the two. At several key points of this text (IV, xxviii), Dante asserts that philosophy, far from appearing as a self-enclosed discipline, leads to theology. His concerns for the philosophical good life and for the practice of the moral virtues (chief, among them, justice) is underlined by the close attention with which he follows the events unfolding on the political scene in both the secular and ecclesiastical domains. In 1310, Henry VII of Luxembourg’s visit to Italy revives the poet’s hopes for peace. In 1313, he excoriates in a Latin epistle (VI) the ‘‘most wicked Florentines.’’ He writes letters on behalf of the exiled White Guelfs as well as to Henry VII urging him to bring peace to the warring Italian factions. In July 1314, Dante even addresses a blistering letter (Ep. XI) to the Italian cardinals meeting in conclave at Carpentras and bickering over the choice of a successor to the deceased Clement V. He urges the election of an Italian pope who would free the Avignonese Church from its bondage to French national interests. This moral and political commitment sustaining Dante’s public acts during the years of his exile is not disconnected and occasional. Late in his life, possibly in 1317, after years of ruminations, in spite

of so many personal defeats and dashed hopes (maybe just because of them), Dante proceeds to construct a complex, concise system of political philosophy, Monarchia (Monarchy, 1317), to advance the end of happiness in this life as distinct from the happiness of eternal life. Monarchia argues that human beings arrive at the first goal through the teachings of philosophy, whereas they arrive at the second through spiritual teachings, which transcend human reason. Monarchia’s central argument—the necessary separation and equal dignity of the ‘‘two luminaries,’’ church and empire—recalls the treatise by the Dominican John of Paris (also known as Jean Quidort), who, at the time of the quarrel between Boniface VIII and Philip the Fair, wrote De potestate regia et papali (On Kingly and Papal Power, ca. 1302). The distinction of the two powers (or of the order of nature and grace) was theorized by Aquinas in his treatise De regimine principum (On Kingship). In the wake of Aquinas, John challenges the claims made by an Augustinian, who had studied under Aquinas in Paris, Giles of Rome (Aegidius Romanus). In his De ecclesiastica potestate (On Ecclesiastical Power, 1302–1303), he mounts a spiritual defense of the pope’s supremacy over and jurisdiction in all things of life. Like John of Paris, Dante refutes in his Monarchia the contention—made by the hierocrats—that priesthood is superior to kingship in all areas. Dante similarly holds that neither power derives from the other. Yet the radical quality of Monarchia—that which possibly accounts for the fact that in 1327 it triggered an attack by Guido Vernani (De Reprobatione Monarchia) and in 1329 the book was burned as heretical in Bologna—lies elsewhere. It has long been alleged that in writing Monarchia Dante espouses the Averroist doctrine of the ‘‘double truth.’’ This notion rested on Dante’s use and citation of Averroes’ theory of the ‘‘possible intellect’’ in his commentary ‘‘On the Soul’’ (Monarchia I, 3–4) to describe the universal form of the intellect whereby the unity of the human race could be actualized. But Monarchia does not argue in favor of an Averroist political theory. If anything, to stave off the moral corruption of the church and preserve its genuinely spiritual mission (severely compromised by the politics of the Avignonese court), Dante upholds the distinction between these two beatitudes and guides in human life. The political unity and peace of mankind is not an immutable given: It can be constructed now, just as it was constructed when Rome, under Emperor Augustus, providentially unified the whole 551

DANTE ALIGHIERI world under its laws. The basically anti-Augustinian argument (as St. Augustine puts forth in De civitate Dei with its critique of Rome) in favor of the dignity of empire and temporal life was bound to unsettle the theorists of absolute papal power. All these reflections on language, love, ethics, poetics, history and political philosophy mark Dante’s whole career (with the possible exception of the brief interlude into public service) and flow into the writing of the Comedia. He transposes these debates and experiences into the poetic-theological context of the poem and discovers the complex, inextricably intertwined links between these disparate topics. This consistent strategy in drafting his poem is evident in seemingly academic, innocuous questions he treated on various occasions that are salvaged and imaginatively redeployed. Between 1319 and 1320, Dante writes two Latin eclogues in the form of epistles to a Bolognese university professor, Giovanni del Virgilio. Giovanni had written to Dante, who was by now living in nearby Ravenna, inviting him to write Latin verse worthy of the learned. Dante, fully aware of his own ‘‘untimeliness’’ as a poet in the vernacular, resists the academician’s call to follow the Humanists’ vogue of reviving Virgilian pastoral poetry. Nonetheless, an echo of this polite exchange figures in Dante’s exordium in canto XXV in Paradiso. By the same token, on January 1320, Dante presents in Verona, in the presence of the city’s theologians, a lecture, Questio de aqua et terra (Question of the Water and of the Land) on whether land is heavier or lighter than water. Written in the mode of a medieval university exposition, the text provides a picture of the Earth standing at the center of the cosmos (as does Inferno XXXIV with its account of the emersion of the landmass), going exactly contrary to the view of the Earth as a little globe in the vastness of space articulated in Paradiso XXII. One self-same issue became for Dante the source of questions to be answered by science, theology, and poetry. Finally, even the Il fiore (The Flower), whose authorship is contested, but believed to have been adapted by Dante from the Roman de la rose in 1286, is recuperated. The sonnet sequence (possibly compiled when the poet was under the tutelage of the ‘‘French’’ author Brunetto Latini and when the French Franciscan Olivi taught in Santa Croce) is retrieved in the lexicon of lower Hell. In short, the Comedia, which Dante drafts from 1305 to the year of his death in 1321, is a poetic encyclopedia that transcribes and contains his 552

intellectual and personal experiences as well as notions drawn from the most disparate sciences. It is impossible to give a full inventory of the poem’s rubrics. Nonetheless, it is clear that Dante absorbs the fund of knowledge available in medieval lapidaries, bestiaries, optics, apocalyptics, astronomy, medieval romances, cosmology, angelology, mythology, historical chronicles of contemporary events, pagan Roman and church history, ethics, patristics, medieval scholastic philosophy, theology, geography, Provenc¸al and early Italian literary history, classical epic and lyrical poetry, Victorine aesthetics and symbolism, etc. But an encyclopedic inventory, even if possible, could not begin to explain the essence of Dante’s poetic vision in the Comedia. What rescues the poem from being a mere reliquary of erudite scraps is the power of an imagination capable of forging subtle connections and resources between scenes, words, and cantos. It is also the poet’s will to install himself imperiously in the midst of the most complex intellectual and political debates of his time and to make them the burning center of his intense questioning. He responds to the twelfth-century reinterpretation of Plato as well as to the twelfthcentury philosophical debates over Aristotle’s most problematical theses: the immortality of the soul, the existence of free will, the relationship between will and intellect, etc. Around those propositions, thinkers such as Averroes, Siger of Brabant, Aquinas, and Bonaventure had long staked their polemical positions. Further, what distinguishes the Comedia from a technical encyclopedia (such as Brunetto Latini’s Tresor) is the central fact that the poem recounts the spiritual and moral education of a historical agent, Dante himself. He is the pilgrim who, impelled by love, engages in an itinerary of self-knowledge, and it ends in the objects of his love quest, Beatrice and God. He inserts the historicity of his own life within the larger pattern of creation and thus contradicts the idea of a merely objective, forever fixed and abstract knowledge. Finally, Dante gives the Comedia the shape of a visionary poem. As such, it shows the limitations of traditional theological discursiveness and takes the reader beyond the horizon and representation of rational theology. A most eloquent introduction to the radical claims made for Dante’s poetry is available in the letter written to Cangrande della Scala to introduce Paradiso (Ep. XIII). First, the letter, which I take to be Dante’s, inscribes the whole of the Comedia within the branch of moral philosophy or ethics, (‘‘insomuch as the whole and the part have been

DANTE ALIGHIERI conceived for the sake of practical results’’). The ethical finality is stressed by an assertion that, taken literally, the subject of the whole work is the state of souls after death: (‘‘if the work is to be understood allegorically, the subject is man, as he is liable to rewording or punishing justice, according as he is worthy or unworthy in the exercise of the freedom of the will’’) (Paragraph 8). The figure sustaining the literal and allegorical dimensions of the narrative is identified as the story of the biblical exodus, the narrative of the Jews who leave Egypt behind and journey toward the Promised Land. Exodus does not afford a merely liturgical framework. It crystallizes Dante’s own exile, which for him is the Christian mode of being on Earth. Second, the letter outlines and evokes the array of visionary analogues he deploys in Paradiso: prophetic visions from the Old Testament, ecstatic raptures from the New Testament, patristic treatises of mystical and contemplative theology, which depend on St. Paul’s account of his rapture to the Third Heaven (II Corinthians 12:2–5). Third, the letter acknowledges the metaphorical mode of narration. In short, the epistle to Cangrande articulates an inventory of the apparently incongruous elements gathered in the Comedia: poetry, allegory, Biblical history, philosophy, prophecy, and visionariness. These elements embrace the whole of knowledge and make up an imaginative world where the poet’s art brings to light the encounter between poetry and faith. This road sign shows the way to the depths of the divine. It is small wonder that Dante over the years has been increasingly acknowledged as the very voice of Western spirituality.

Biography Born in Florence in May/June 1265 under the sign of Gemini to Alighiero, who in 1277 arranges the son’s marriage contract to Gemma Donati and who dies in 1283. In 1283, Dante meets for the second time Beatrice, whom he had first met in 1274. In 1285, Dante marries Gemma, with whom he will have four children (Jacopo, Pietro, Giovanni, and Antonia). On June 11, 1289, Dante takes part in the Battle of Campaldino against the Ghibellines of Arezzo. On August 16 of the same year, he is present at the siege of the Fortress of Caprona. On June 8, 1290, Beatrice dies. From 1291 to 1294, Dante, who had studied under Brunetto Latini, goes to schools of philosophy and theology with the Dominicans at Santa Maria Novella (where Remigio de’ Girolami, Aquinas’ disciple in Paris,

taught) and the Franciscans at Santa Croce. In 1294, the year Brunetto Latini dies, Dante composes his Vita nova. In 1295, he enters political life and enrolls in the guild of ‘‘Physicians and Apothecaries.’’ Between 1295 and 1300, he serves in the city government in various capacities (councilman, ambassador, and prior). On October 1301, he is sent as a member of an embassy to Pope Boniface VIII, who was backing Charles of Valois’ plans to control Florence. On January 27, 1302, the Black Guelfs banish from the city a number of prominent White Guelfs. Dante, one of them, goes into exile until his death in Ravenna on September 13–14 of 1321. Between 1303 and 1306, while living in Verona, Treviso, Padua, and Lunigiana, he writes Convivio and De vulgari eloquentia. From 1307 to 1321, while he was a guest of Cangrande della Scala in Verona, and in Ravenna of Guido Novello da Polenta, he wrote the Comedia. In September 1321, the malarial fever contracted while he was on a mission to Venice brought about his death. GIUSEPPE MAZZOTTA Selected Works Works in Vernacular Il fiore, ca. 1280–1320; as The Fiore, translated by Christopher Kleinhenz and Santa Casciani, 2000; as Il Fiore, translated by John Took, 2004. Rime, ca. 1283–1307; as Dante’s Rime, translated by Patrick S. Diehl, 1979. Vita nova, ca. 1294; as Dante’s Vita Nuova, translated by Mark Musa, 1973. Convivio, ca. 1304–1307; as The Banquet, translated by Christopher Ryan, 1989; Dante’s Il Convivio, translated by Richard H. Lansing, 1990. Epistole, 1304–1310. Comedia, ca. 1305–1321; as The Divine Comedy, translated by John D. Sinclair, 1939–1948; as The Divine Comedy, translated by Charles S. Singleton, 1970–1975.

Works in Latin De vulgari eloquentia, ca. 1304–1305; De vulgari eloquentia, translated by Steven Botterill, 1996. Monarchia, ca. 1317; as Monarchy, translated by Prue Shaw, 1996; Dante’s Monarchia, translated by Richard Kay, 1998. Questio de aqua et terra, 1320; as Question of the Water and of the Land, translated by Charles Hamilton Bromby, 2004.

Further Reading Auerbach, Eric, ‘‘Figura,’’ in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature: Six Essays, New York: Meridian Books, 1979.

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DANTE ALIGHIERI Baranski, Zygmunt G., ‘‘Sole nuovo, luce nuova’’: saggi sul rinnovamento culturale in Dante, Turin: Scriptorium, 1996. Barolini, Teodolinda, and H. Wayne Storey (editors), Dante for the New Millenium, New York: Fordham University Press, 2003. Boyde, Patrick, Dante, Philomythes and Philosopher: Man in the Cosmos, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Enciclopedia dantesca, 6 vols., Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 1970–1978. Foster, Kenelm, The Two Dantes and Other Studies, London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1977. Franco, Charles, and Leslie Morgan (editors), Dante: Summa Medievalis, Stony Brook, NY: Forum Italicum, 1995. Freccero, John, Dante: The Poetics of Conversion, edited by Rachel Jacoff, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986. Gilson, Etienne, Dante the Philosopher, translated by David Moore, London: Sheed and Ward, 1948. Gilson, Simon, Medieval Optics and Theories of Light in the Works of Dante, Lewiston, NY: Mellen Press, 2000. Jacoff, Rachel (editor), The Cambridge Companion to Dante, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Mazzotta, Giuseppe, Dante, Poet of the Desert: History and Allegory in the Divine Comedy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979. Nardi, Bruno, Nel mondo di Dante, Rome: Istituto Grafico Tiberino, 1944. Scott, John A., Understanding Dante, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004. Singleton, Charles S., Dante’s ‘‘Commedia’’: Elements of Structure, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977.

COMEDIA, CA. 1305–1321 Poem by Dante Alighieri

The Comedia (Divine Comedy) tells the story of a providential journey that a man, Dante himself, takes while still alive, across the three realms of the beyond—Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. In this sense, it is essentially the narrative of a spiritual conversion. By playing out the implication of the central conceit of life as a journey, the protagonist at the beginning of his adventure casts himself as a wayfarer who, ‘‘nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita’’ (in the middle of the journey of our life), loses his 554

path in the wilderness and finally, under the guidance of Virgil, Beatrice, and St. Bernard of Clairvaux, reaches the beatific vision. The pilgrim’s journey takes place during the Eastertide of the year 1300 and is, thus, patterned on the Good Friday Passion and Sunday Resurrection of Christ, an event which in turn is rooted in the fundamental, paradigmatic figure of conversion: the biblical Exodus. The epic narrative of the Jews, who leave the house of bondage in Egypt, travel through the desert and reach the Promised Land, organizes the pilgrim’s dramatic experience. It stands behind its poetic representation as the basis of the theological allegory or figura (as Charles S. Singleton and Erich Auerbach have shown) of the human soul’s exile and passage from sin to redemption, from time to eternity. As a ‘‘story,’’ the Comedia is the recollective account of Dante’s extraordinary experience of his journey to God. The narrative, told from the standpoint of the final vision, unfolds over 100 cantos, which in turn are divided into three canticles and are arranged in terza rima. The general ternary structure reflects Dante’s Trinitarian understanding of the divinity. It also signals that the symbolic numerical harmony ordering the poem alludes to a biblical aesthetic principle available in the Book of Wisdom: God has created everything according to measure, weight, and number. Dante calls his narrative a ‘‘comedy’’ for a number of reasons. The trajectory of the story, from wilderness to God, satisfies one fundamental requirement of the genre. According to the poetic conventions of antiquity (Horace), comedy describes a narrative movement from an initial chaos to a happy ending. Rhetorically, as Dante himself has it in De vulgari eloquentia, comedy entails a low, humble style: His use of the Italian vernacular acknowledges the plain, Christian impulse of his ‘‘comic’’ representation. But since his humble experience is in fact sublime, by calling it a ‘‘comedy’’ he manages to unsettle the rigid hierarchy of styles prescribed by classical poetics and ushers in a new moral world where the low is high and the high is low. Dante’s narrative strategy reaches even further. He posits a necessary disjunction between the journey and the telling of it. Such a disjunction accounts for the ‘‘poetics of conversion’’ (as John Freccero put it) that Dante dramatizes in the form of an ironic discrepancy between the pilgrim, who dwells in the shadows of time and is caught in the predicament of uncertain knowledge, and the transcendent, synoptic vision of the poet.

DANTE ALIGHIERI The dialectics between the two modes of knowledge of the pilgrim and the poet describes the Pauline process of the ‘‘old man’’ becoming the ‘‘new man,’’ which culminates in the convergence, at the end of the poem, of their perspectives. Yet, the disjunction between the journey and its metaphoric account expresses other radical concerns of Dante’s poetic thought. The poem itself, more than a mere retrospective retelling of a past experience, is itself a journey, fraught with temptations and errors, to which the poet yields and during which his guide, the poet Virgil, falters. From this standpoint, the poem constitutes a way to make God accessible to human beings but, at the same time, is marked with risks, questions, progress and steps backward that are meant to reveal the quest for God as the horizon of human history. The circle of all knowledge Dante evokes especially in Paradiso (whereby knowledge is a ladder to the divine) is drawn within the overarching concern of making knowledge a quest and a question: It is a question that lies at the source of science, philosophy, and decisions in one’s own life. The idea of poetry as a quest and a question is rooted in the acknowledgment of man’s exile and the homelessness of the human condition. For Dante, exile entails both a longing for Heaven and for a place on Earth, and it coincides with the deeply religious consciousness that one is forever out of place. Inferno (1305–1308) The opening canto of Inferno features two journeys. The pilgrim, finding himself lost in a frightening wilderness, tries to escape by climbing a hill and following the route and direction of the sunlight. If Dante’s journey were a mere abstract journey of the mind, such as those related by Neoplatonic interpretations of the epic voyages of Ulysses and Aeneas, he would be safe. Dante’s turning to the light captures sufficiently the requisites of an intellectual or philosophical conversion. But such a journey, prevalent in classical antiquity, proves inadequate because the protagonist’s failings are not of the mind. They involve his will, which is wounded and must be healed by a descent into humility. His humility expresses itself through the wayfarer’s yielding to a guide, Virgil, who will literally show him the way down into the depths of Hell as the precondition for ascending into Purgatory and beyond. The way down under the guidance of Virgil, the ‘‘author’’ of the Aeneid, the poem of Rome and history, will take the pilgrim through the circles of incontinence, violence, and fraud, which constitute the moral topography of Hell.

The emphasis on Virgil and on the Aeneid as the poem of Rome marks Dante’s deliberate shift from abstract poetic allegories to the world of history (and to an allegory based on history). In the Convivio (IV, xxiv, 1–10), in the wake of commentators such as Bernard Silvester and John of Salisbury, Dante understands Aeneas’ journey from Troy to the shores of Italy as the philosophical allegory of human life. In Inferno, Dante abandons this view of the Aeneid. Under the impact of St. Augustine’s De civitate Dei, he views it as the poem of history. St. Augustine entertains few doubts about the political value of the Virgilian epic: The Aeneid provides the justification of the imperial ideology of Rome. He adds that the Roman Empire, far from being providential, represents another tragic, lamentable episode in a succession of violence, an emblem of the libido dominandi, which characterizes the secular economy of history. Dante disagrees with St. Augustine’s assessment. He views Virgil and the Roman Empire as aspects of God’s providentiality. The initial polemics with St. Augustine’s view of Rome prepares the extended reflection on secular and church politics, on the ambiguous judgment of the classical world, and on the uses and abuses of literature, which constitute the major thematic lines of force running through Inferno. More than the empire, Dante steadily evokes in Inferno the tragic reality of civil wars. Such a concern figures also elsewhere in the poem (for instance, in the reference to Cato in Purgatorio I), but its awareness is unmitigated in the early going. In the explicitly political cantos of Inferno, VI, X, XIII, XV, and XXXIII, the focus falls not on the empire, which is a distant and, as it were, absent model of order, but on the sinister reciprocity of injustice within Italian cities. In Inferno VI, the canto where gluttony is punished, the deformities of the body politic are sharply drawn as Ciacco’s devouring is masked as a politics of taste: The canto’s language is punctuated by allusions to what is sweet and bitter. In Inferno X—the canto of those (such as Epicurus) who do not believe in the immortality of the soul—Dante re-enacts the quarrels between Guelfs and Ghibellines in Florence: the soulless city has split apart into unrelated parts and each figure thrusts his own partisan will as the universal will. In Inferno XV and XXXIII, Dante stages, respectively, the sparks of evil inflaming Florence and the tragic confusion of all values (hatred appears as love, redemption or violence, etc.) in the encounter with Ugolino. Inferno XIII, the canto of the suicide of Pier delle Vigne, 555

DANTE ALIGHIERI the secretary of Frederick II, evokes the world of the imperial court as a den of envy and injustice. By the same token, Inferno XIX, the canto where simony is punished, shows the church, from the beginning of her history, engaged in idolatrous commerce of the ‘‘sacred,’’ as if what descends from God’s grace could be bought and sold at a price. This impure mixture of the sacred and the secular is crystallized by the Donation of Constantine, an act by which the church has contaminated her spiritual essence. Such is the magnitude of the moral crisis enveloping the contemporary world that Dante deliberately seeks to retrieve and to question the legacy of the classical world as if to recover the foundations on which the world can be rebuilt. His encounter with his own teacher, Brunetto Latini (canto XV), who adapted Cicero’s rhetorical work to the needs of contemporary Florence, belongs to this wide orbit of concerns about the power of the past to shape the present. His choice of Virgil, who dwells in Limbo (the moral area at the edge of Hell) but who also wrote the messianic IV Eclogue (or so was it understood by patristic literature) also signals the bent of Dante’s thought. Virgil and Rome are viewed as sources of redemption in history. But Dante’s endorsement of the classical world is not unequivocal. Its representation in Limbo (Inferno IV)—where Greek and Roman intellectuals are enumerated and, ironically, are also shown to dwell side by side with unbaptized infants—shows the limits of classical wisdom. The powerful story of Ulysses, moreover, dramatizes the classical degradation of philosophical wisdom into fraudulent rhetoric. The concern with the Greek hero’s language brings to a climax another crucial dimension of Inferno: the world of literature, its power to affect the phantasms of the imagination, its seductiveness and its proneness to deception and selfdeception. Inferno V, the canto of Paolo and Francesca—of the sinners who subject reason to desire—explicitly evokes the pleasurable medieval world of romances. Francesca and Paolo read of Lancelot and Guinevere; she cites the poetry of the Sweet New Style, and the act of reading displays her aesthetic voluntarism, her way of reducing the world to images, abiding in it, and making it the projection of her will. All of these concerns (to which we can add the question of the contrapasso, the recall of Dante’s other works, such as the De vulgari eloquentia, etc.) are judged from the standpoint of the moral order articulated by Aristotle’s Ethics and Physics as well as St. Thomas Aquinas’ commentaries on them. 556

Purgatorio (1308–1314) It is Easter Sunday morning, and the pilgrim and his guide emerge from the eternal night of Hell to the light of Purgatory. An austere old man, drawn from the republican history of Rome, Cato of Utica, tries to stop them. The startling presence of Cato, the hero of Lucan’s Pharsalia (a poem about the Roman civil war), a pagan, a suicide, and an enemy of Caesar gives an idea of Dante’s complex conception of Purgatory. It is the place of purification of souls. It is also the place where Dante’s own moral education is continued and will be perfected when he reaches the Garden of Eden at the top of the mountain. Above all, the island of Purgatory, though rising in the Southern hemisphere and inaccessible to human beings in this life, comes through as a symbolic extension of this life. More than the other two canticles, which belong to the realm of eternity, Purgatory is shown with the temporal characteristics of this world and it stages the world’s temptations. The first temptation takes place in Purgatorio II and it involves the pilgrim himself. He has met an old friend, the musician Casella, who, to relieve the pain and loneliness of the desert shore, sings to Dante a poem from his Convivio: ‘‘Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona’’ (Love that discourses in my mind) (l. 112). For both penitents and pilgrim the song evokes nostalgia for the sweetness of the earth as well as forgetfulness of the supernatural goal to which they are directed. The ambiguity staged by the scene enacts the specific temptation of nostalgia and of aesthetic delight diverting the mind from its moral goal. All thoughts of moral ascent are here provisionally bracketed. This dramatic ambiguity—the disjunction between the ethical and the aesthetic pulls—recalls the moral conflict lying at the heart of the story of Exodus, which is unveiled here (Purgatorio II, 45) as the fundamental structure of the narrative. Just as Exodus placed the Jews in the desert, the ambivalent space where the law is given and idolatry is committed (the worship of the golden calf, which is the Jews’ nostalgia for Egypt), so does Purgatorio place the pilgrim in a middle area where past and future are implicated. Another specific temptation of the past occurs in the exordium of Purgatorio VIII, to say nothing of the Dream of the Siren (XIX, 1–33). The focus on the pilgrim’s moral and existential drama in the opening two cantos suggests that in this second canticle the pilgrim’s subjectivity emerges as its central unifying theme. It is in Purgatory that Dante’s own name is registered for the first and only time in the poem (XXX, 55). The

DANTE ALIGHIERI focus on subjectivity is made plain by the pilgrim’s encounter with Beatrice and his confession to her (Purgatorio XXX-XXXI). So marked is the textual insistence on the self that the epic narrative edges toward taking on the form of a novel of the self. At the heart of the novelistic structure lies the education of the self in all its tentativeness. The protagonist moves across the ledges of Purgatory, where pride, envy, wrath, sloth, avarice, gluttony, and lasciviousness are purified; yet, throughout, he is engaged in his own moral-spiritual education about doctrinal issues of love, free will, imagination, and choice. The emphasis on the pilgrim’s self removes the abstractions inherent in these questions and draws them within the concreteness and historicity of his lived life. In an overt extension of this existential dimension, the reader is allowed to glimpse at the domain of the pilgrim’s interiority and dream world (see especially the Dream of the Siren in Purgatorio XIX). The thematics of self reaches its climax in the scene of self-confrontation of Purgatorio XXXI. Here the pilgrim is engaged in a moral and Augustinian confession, which amounts to a spiritual conversion or a taking stock of his past life in view of his ascent to the realm of Paradise. But the conversion is not final. It is a process that continues as long as one lives. The pilgrim is told by Beatrice to prepare himself for a possible future encounter with the Siren. The reference to the future gives more than a hint about the implications of a novel of the self: The temptations of the past are not neutralized once and for all. The pilgrim lives in time, and he experiences time in all its problematical and authentic essence. No foreclosure is possible. In time, he will face other temptations and dangers. The focus on the self of the pilgrim invests also the poet, who speaks in different voices. The Casella episode, with its display of indulgence in poetic self-recognition by a pilgrim who, on the shore of Purgatory, finds himself as if in a foreign land, is a case in point. In Purgatorio VI, after witnessing the embrace between two Mantuan poets, Virgil and Sordello, Dante literally ‘‘steps out’’ of his narrative and prophetically denounces the lawlessness rampant in Italy (the symmetry to the corresponding political cantos of Inferno and Purgatorio is transparent). Finally, the long segment on the poets (Purgatorio XXI–XXVI)—that ranges from the recognition scene between Virgil and Statius, the reunion between Dante and Forese, the debate with Bonagiunta on the Sweet New Style (Purgatorio XXIV), to the homage Dante pays to Guido Guinizzelli and, indirectly, to the Provenc¸al poet

Arnaut Daniel—places Dante at the center of his construction of literary history. It would be a gross distortion, however, if one were to suggest that the question of self eclipses other concerns dramatized over these cantos, such as Dante’s consciousness about the relationship existing between poetry and belief, poetry and food, and poetry and love. These issues were treated earlier in the Comedia and in his other works. The other long segment of Purgatorio is devoted to the pastoral scene at the top of the mountain (from canto XXVII to XXXIII). It shows Dante’s poetics of this canticle. He rewrites the bucolic convention of the classical tradition as he collates it with the biblical imagination of the Earthly Paradise. In his handling, Purgatory’s Garden of Eden appears as the imaginative locus of ambivalences and contrasts. It marks a point of arrival for the pilgrim, who is ‘‘crowned’’ by Virgil and attains the state where his will is free. It also figures the point for a new departure to the garden-city of Heavenly Jerusalem and beyond in Paradiso. In addition, it represents the moral space where Virgil vanishes and Beatrice arrives (canto XXX—and she will be present for 33 cantos, symmetrically until Paradiso XXX). It evokes a prelapsarian order, yet the pilgrim’s residual erotic desires linger (as the encounter with Matelda, which makes this into a garden of love, exemplifies). Above all, in the Earthly Paradise nature and history converge. Here Beatrice utters the enigmatic prophecy of 515. Couched in Joachistic language, and to be linked with the prophecy of the ‘‘Veltro’’ in Inferno, the prophecy does not announce—as Joachim of Flora does— the imminent apocalyptic end of the world. It announces the messianic advent occurring at an unspecified end of history. For Dante’s exilic poetic imagination, the pastoral world cannot be reduced to a picture of idyllic oasis. As Virgil had done in both the Bucolics and in the Aeneid, Dante draws the pastoral tradition into the world of history. Paradiso (1317–1321) The subject matter of this last canticle, the journey to see God face to face, is announced in its first tercet: ‘‘La gloria di colui che tutto move / per l’universo penetra e risplende / in una parte piu` e meno altrove’’ (The glory of Him who moves all things / penetrates and shines throughout the universe / in one part more and in another less) (Paradiso I, 1–3). The reader glimpses at what the pilgrim saw: the Kingdom of glory, and glory is to be understood as the light of God. More importantly, the tercet casts 557

DANTE ALIGHIERI God in the cosmological role of the Aristotelian Prime Mover, while creation is described through the Neoplatonic principle of plenitude as a hierarchical distribution of light. The next few tercets of Paradiso I (lines 4–20) shift the narrative focus on the specific drama of the poet. He cannot remember what he saw. He prays to Apollo, the god, who, challenged by the satyr Marsyas to a musical contest, defeated and punished him. Fear flanks Dante, fear of a poetic hybris as the boat of his poetry sails over unmapped waters. He is not Marsyas, who violates the boundaries dividing the human from the divine, nor is he St. Paul, alluding to 2 Corinthians 12:2, where Paul writes of being rapt to the third Heaven (meaning the highest mode of vision). Out of fear of violating the divinity, Paul observes silence. Dante, caught between love and fear of God, steers clear of (and possibly re-enacts) Marsyas’ pride and Paul’s silence as he proceeds, in this most intellectual of canticles, to describe the beauty and order of creation. Without a doubt, Dante’s primary concern in Paradiso is to show the link between beauty and the divine. Beauty is the face of the divine. As Joseph Mazzeo has eloquently argued, in Paradiso we witness the interplay of beauty and light. This means that aesthetics, which here appears as the conjunction of the good and the beautiful, plays a decisive role in the structure of Dante’s experience. Issues, such as poetic ineffability, the yoking of memory and forgetfulness, the metaphoricity of Paradiso (a poetics of adaptation or accommodation of the souls to the pilgrim’s limited perception), vision and optics, etc., hinge on aesthetics and show Dante’s sense of its epistemological value. If aesthetics is the principle that unifies Paradiso’s representation of the cosmos, its specific structure depends on the model of Ptolemaic astronomy (with the Earth at the center of the universe and the ‘‘heavens’’ revolving around it). Beyond them lie both the sphere of the fixed stars and the crystalline or primum mobile. It is a singular feature of Dante’s imagination to combine each sphere with each of the liberal arts (the moon and grammar, Mercury and dialectics, etc.). The arts and sciences are the ladders of the pilgrim’s intellectual illumination as he approaches the beatific vision. The several doctrinal questions debated in the unfolding of Paradiso (the relation between the realm of unity and the multiplicity in the world of time, the probing of a number of complex philosophical, scientific and theological questions, such as the nature of light and materiality, degrees of beatitude, the relation between beatitude and the souls, place 558

in the rank ordering of Paradiso, the role of the will in knowledge, relation between the intellect and the world of contingency, the salvation of pagans, theories of creation and separate substances, astronomy and vision, etc.) belong to the domain of the pilgrim’s intellectual education since his moral education was achieved in Purgatorio. The insistence on the philosophical, theological, and scientific discussion in this canticle should not be construed as a sign that Paradiso ultimately points to Dante’s forgetfulness of the Earth. The canticle, indeed, comes forth as a prayer, to put in terms of De vulgari eloquentia as human language’s own journey to God, but it is not a mystical escape from the exigencies of history and time. Quite to the contrary, it can be understood as a celebration of mankind’s best efforts to live in love and in the pursuit of the good. Figures who have little of the conventional hagiographies in them, such as Piccarda, the Emperor Justinian, the unforgettable Cunizza, Francis, Dominic, Cacciaguida, Benedict, Bernard and, of course, Beatrice, together dramatize Dante’s daring vision that in the most distant reaches of the universe lies man’s true home. For the exiled poet, who is reminded until the end of the bitter experiences awaiting him in the world of history, such a grand vision is the strongest assertion of man’s divine call. GIUSEPPE MAZZOTTA Editions Early editions: editio princeps, Foligno: Johann Numeister and Evangelista, 1472. Critical editions: Divina Commedia, edited by Emilio Pasquini and Antonio Quaglio, 3 vols., Milan: Garzanti, 1988; La Commedia secondo l’antica vulgata, edited by Giorgio Petrocchi, rev. ed., 4 vols., Florence: Le Lettere, 1994; Commedia, edited by Chiavacci Leonardi and Anna Maria, 3 vols., Milan: Mondadori, 1991–1997; Dantis Alagherii Comedia, edited by Federico Sanguineti, Florence: Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2001. Translations: The Divine Comedy, translated by John D. Sinclair, 3 vols., London: J. Lane, 1939–1948; The Divine Comedy, translated by Charles S. Singleton, 6 vols., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970–1975; Inferno. Purgatory. Paradise, 3 vols., translated by Anthony Esolen, New York: The Modern Library, 2002–2004; Inferno, translated by Robert and Jean Hollander, New York-London: Doubleday, 2000; Purgatorio, translated by Robert and Jean Hollander, New York-London: Doubleday, 2003

Further Reading Auerbach, Eric, Dante Poet of the Secular World, translated by Ralph Manheim, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1961.

DANTE ALIGHIERI Barolini, Teodolinda, Dante’s Poets: Textuality and Truth in the Comedy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. Boyde, Patrick, Dante Philomythes and Philosopher: Man in the Cosmos, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Brandeis, Irma, The Ladder of Vision: A Study of Dante’s ‘‘Comedy,’’ London: Chatto and Windus, 1960. Cachey, Theodore J., Jr. (editor), Dante Now: Current Trends in Dante Studies, Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame, 1995. Cestaro, Gary, Dante and the Grammar of the Nursing Body, Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame, 2003. Charity, Alan C., Events and Their Afterlife: The Dialectics of Christian Typology in the Bible and Dante, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966. Cornish, Alison, Reading Dante’s Stars, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. Freccero, John, Dante, The Poetics of Conversion, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986. Ginsberg, Warren, Dante’s Esthetics of Being, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999. Hawkins, Peter S., Dante’s Testaments: Essays in Scriptural Imagination, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Hollander, Robert, Allegory in Dante’s ‘‘Commedia,’’ Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969. Mazzeo, Joseph, Structure and Thought in the Paradiso, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1958. Mazzotta, Giuseppe, Dante Poet of the Desert: History and Allegory in the Divine Comedy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979. Mazzotta, Giuseppe, Dante’s Vision and the Circle of Knowledge, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Moevs, Christian, The Metaphysics of Dante’s Comedy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pertile, Lino, La Punta del Disio: Semantica del desiderio nella Commedia, Fiesole: Cadmo, 2005. Raffa, Guy P., Divine Dialectic: Dante’s Incarnational Poetry, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. Singleton, Charles S., Dante Studies 1. Commedia: Elements of Structure, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954.

COMMENTARIES In the history of Western literature, few other texts have drawn as widespread scholarly interest as has the Comedia. The tradition of commentaries and erudite glosses on the poem has become a substantial chapter of Italian literary history, which in Italy has come to be known as la fortuna di Dante. Such a tradition begins with the poet himself, who

penned the epistle to Cangrande della Scala. Scholars have periodically entertained doubts about Dante’s authorship of this letter, which was written as an introduction to Paradiso and makes a number of key claims about the deeper meaning and structure of the poem. It points out the poem’s polysemous allegory by focusing on the lyrical reflection on Exodus in Psalm 113: ‘‘in exitu Israel de Aegypto’’ (when Israel went out of Egypt); it places the poem within the visionary-contemplative tradition of St. Bernard, Richard of St. Victor, and St. Augustine; it addresses the poem’s rhetorical status—both its ‘‘comical’’ style/genre and its metaphoricity; and it assigns the poem to the branch of philosophy known as ethics. In effect, the epistle faces the encyclopedic facets of the poem and, in many ways, crystallizes the shape of further debates. The barest outline of the commentary tradition in the years immediately following Dante’s death bears the mark of the epistle’s critical influence. Beginning with the glosses by the poet’s son, Jacopo Alighieri (1322), with their emphasis on the various levels of style (tragic, comical, elegiac) and genre, through the comments by Graziolo de’ Bambaglioni (1324), with their stress on the poem’s moral allegory, the debts to the epistle are evident. In the fourteenth century, two commentaries are particularly noteworthy, the ones by Guido da Pisa and Giovanni Boccaccio. The Expositiones et Glose Super Comediam Dantis (known as Commentary on Dante’s Inferno) by a Carmelite monk, Guido da Pisa, was written in 1333. Guido, who may have met Dante in Pisa, both acknowledges the poem’s theological, visionary allegory and pays close attention to its rhetorical form. The special importance of the commentary, however, depends on the fact that Guido, deeply knowledgeable in medieval philosophy, theology, and literature, knows and refers to all of Dante’s works in an effort to capture a global view of the poet’s convictions. In exegetical terms, moreover, a new perspective is developed for the accessus to the poem: Guido da Pisa treats the self of the poet as a central thematic element of the narrative, and he gives a radical turn to the question of poetic theology. He understands better than any other critic that for Dante poetry can do what theology cannot do. Guido’s insights, which were to influence Francesco de Buti’s glosses, show traces of the comments by Jacopo Alighieri and Jacopo della Lana. Guido da Pisa’s brilliant commentary touches a problematical core of Dante’s poem in a way that Boccaccio’s commentary does not. In the public 559

DANTE ALIGHIERI lectures he gives in the church of Santo Stefano in Badia, Florence, starting on Oct. 23, 1373 (they break off at Inferno VII), Boccaccio considers Dante a poet and, hence, a theologian. The public occasion and the large audience signal the recognition of Dante as both a popular poet and a classic. More substantively, Boccaccio’s insights, which flow into and shape the humanistic thrust of Benvenuto da Imola’s commentary, retrieve Pietro di Dante’s reading (1340). More than Pietro does, both Boccaccio and Benvenuto insert concrete references to the life and history of Dante’s times: papacy and empire, the crisis of the cities, and the devastation caused by civil wars. By the end of the fourteenth century and the beginning of the fifteenth century, thanks to Leonardo Bruni’s biography of Dante, the world of Dante is viewed essentially in the political terms of Florence’s cultural prestige. At the court of the Medici in the later part of the fifteenth century, the Comedia came to enjoy a renewed prestige and a renewed centrality in intellectual debates. In the context of Ficino’s Neoplatonic discourse, Cristoforo Landino’s commentary (1481) platonizes Dante. Landino discards the Aristotelian universe of reference (to which Benvenuto da Imola subscribes) and brackets the scholastic system of doctrine and the four levels of exegesis in favor of a generalized philosophicalorphic allegory. Nonetheless, this commentary opens Dante’s poem to the fierce quarrels that characterize the intellectual life of the Renaissance. The impact of Aristotle’s Poetics on all literary arguments and the concern with the questione della lingua account, first, for the Aristotelian reaction by the Florentine Academy (instituted in 1540) and, second, for the emergence of linguistic discussions on the poem. The annotation by Trifone Gabriele (1525–1540) and the commentary by his disciple Bernardino Daniello (1568), Ludovico Castelvetro (1570), especially the commentaries by Jacopo Mazzoni, and above all, Benedetto Varchi, mark a shift in the history of the reception of the poem. For Varchi, the unifying principle of the poem resides in philosophy rather than theology. Such philosophy includes Plato, but it is eminently embodied by Aristotle. Dante is viewed as the thinker who harmonizes disparate philosophical traditions (Aristotle, Aquinas, Avicenna, Galen, Averroes, etc.). It was not until the beginning of the eighteenth century that, thanks to Giambattista Vico, the direction in the interpretation of the poem changed. In reaction to the neoclassical theories of Gian 560

Vincenzo Gravina, Vico, the philosopher of the poetic imagination, casts Dante as a sublime poet who grasps the extent to which all rational practices are encroached upon by the poet’s visions. His poetry is both history and divination. Indeed, it is the foundation of all knowledge. Such a view shapes Francesco De Sanctis’ Romantic reading of the poem, which is said to convey the spiritual form of life. This theory, which downplays the importance of theological and philosophical discourses, was harshly contested by the positivist commentators and philologists of the later part of the nineteenth century, such as Giovanni Andrea Scartazzini (1874), Giuseppe Vandelli (1903), and, in the twentieth century by Michele Barbi. With the twentieth century, however, we reach a time in which Dante commentaries flourish both in Italy and abroad. In Italy, the works by Siro A. Chimenz (1962), Emilio Pasquini-Enzo Quaglio (1982), and Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi (1991–2001) are truly extraordinary. In Germany, Hermann Gmelin’s commentary (1954) brings together with rare acumen the literary, theological, and scientific conspectus of Dante’s culture, while in France Andre´ Pezard’s commentary (1965) and subsequent translation of the Comedia succeed in reproposing to the attention of the reader the poem in all its energy and inventiveness. In the United States, finally, the translation and commentary of Charles Singleton have become the point of departure for a number of ongoing commentaries, notably by Robert Durling, Ronald Martinez, and Robert Hollander. By drawing on the exegetical labors of many and on the existing annotations of past scholars (H.W. Longfellow, C.H. Grandgent, Dorothy Sayers, John Sinclair, Hermann Gmelin etc.), they contribute to making the Comedia a vital classic for years to come. GIUSEPPE MAZZOTTA Select Commentaries Landino, Cristoforo, Comento sopra la Comedia, 1481, edited by Paolo Procaccioli, Rome: Salerno, 2001. Daniello da Lucca, Bernardino, L’espositione di Benardino Daniello da Lucca sopra la Comedia di Dante, 1568, edited by Robert Hollander and Jeffrey Schnapp, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1989. Boccaccio, Giovanni, Esposizioni sopra la Comedia di Dante, edited by Giorgio Padoan, Milan: Mondadori, 1965. Da Pisa, Guido, Guido Da Pisa’s Expositiones et Glose super Comedian Dantis or Commentary on Dante’s Inferno, edited by Vincenzo Cioffari, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1974.

DANTE ALIGHIERI Alighieri, Pietro, Comentum super poema Comedie Dantis: A Critical Edition of the Third and Final Draft of Pietro Alighieri’s Commentary On Dante’s The Divine Comedy, critical edition by Massimiliano Chiamenti, Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2002.

Further Reading Baranski, Zygmunt G., ‘‘Reflecting on Dante in America: 1949–1990,’’ in Annali d’Italianistica, 8 (1990): 58–86. Dartmouth Dante Project, edited by Robert Hollander, 1999, telnet: library.dartmouth.edu. Guerri, Domenico, Il commento del Boccaccio a Dante. Limiti della sua autenticita` e questioni critiche che n’emergono, Bari: Laterza, 1926. Hollander, Robert, ‘‘Dante and His Commentators,’’ in The Cambridge Companion to Dante, edited by Rachel Jacoff, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Jenaro-MacLennan, L., The Trecento Commentaries on the Divina Commedia and the Epistle to Cangrande, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974. Mazzoni, Francesco, ‘‘Guido da Pisa interprete di Dante e la sua fortuna presso il Boccaccio,’’ in Studi Danteschi, 35 (1958): 20–128. Mazzotta, Giuseppe (editor), Critical Essays on Dante, Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1991.

CONVIVIO, CA. 1304–1307 Treatise by Dante Alighieri

Written in the early years of Dante’s exile and left unfinished, Convivio (The Banquet) is a book of philosophy, specifically of ethics or moral philosophy. It is organized as a commentary on Dante’s own doctrinal poems written during the period of his philosophical training soon after the death of Beatrice. The 30 months during which he attended the Franciscan and Dominican schools in Florence is not, after all, fruitless or remote. Dante recalls Beatrice’s death as well as those years of philosophical study as he embarks on a philosophicalpoetic path of thought: his writing a major opus, originally conceived in 14 books. He himself recalls that death, his philosophical training, and the predicament of his exile for three interrelated reasons.

One is personal: He aspires to a role possibly as an advisor to the emperor. One is intellectual: He intends to provide a comprehensive framework of meaning for a philosophy of life. The third is existential: He plans to bring new light to his own life, which is disanchored from his homeland and drifting. Subjectivity and philosophy (hardly what the neo-Aristotelians of all stripes indulged in) are the two foci of his philosophical project. At the very start, Dante retrieves Aristotle’s Metaphysics as the historical foundation of his philosophical investigations. The opening sentence stresses a peculiar trait of Aristotle’s impulse to philosophize: As the ‘‘philosopher’’ says at the beginning of the First Philosophy, ‘‘all men naturally desire to know’’ (Convivio I, i, 1). The implied erotics of knowledge lead Dante to invest philosophy with feminine attributes and to devise her feminine personification (in the wake of Boethius’ Lady Philosophy). It accounts for the love and quest of wisdom permeating Dante’s rhetoric. More fundamentally, the principle of desire for knowledge ends up illustrating Dante’s overarching purpose: the needed yoking together of intellect and will, virtue and knowledge, philosophy and poetry, self and world, which neo-Aristotelian metaphysics invariably forgets and which he steadily pursues. In the context of redefinition of the philosophy of the schoolmen, the reasons for Dante’s retrieval of two authors, St. Augustine and Boethius, can be grasped. Their autobiographical works laid the groundwork for the representation of his ‘‘self.’’ The Confessiones and the De consolatione philosophiae, from which Dante’s thinking springs, cast the self as a norm of conduct. Dante also acknowledges his debt to Cicero’s De Amicitia. At the death of Beatrice, Dante had read these books in the persuasion that philosophy provides consolation for the finiteness of life and the grief at the loss of the beloved. Convivio, however, proceeds to bracket the shrine of death his grief had erected and makes life the horizon of his thinking: Ethics, as a matter of fact, is the art of living. Violating the traditional medieval rank ordering of the arts and sciences that culminates in metaphysics, Dante defines ethics as the proper goal of all knowledge. The discussion of the moral and intellectual virtues—nobility, magnanimity, justice, prudence, knowledge and counsel—which is scattered throughout, never neglects the question of the subject. Dante’s defense of the Italian language as the apt medium for philosophical thinking, the deployment 561

DANTE ALIGHIERI of his own doctrinal poems, such as ‘‘Voi chi’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete’’ (You who understanding move the third sky), which opens Convivio II, references to his exile, the differentiation between the allegory of poets and of theologians and the consequent self-commentaries on the poems are all elements contributing to the view of philosophy not as an enclosed function of the intellect and an already achieved field of knowledge, but rather as an unveiling of and a making explicit the ambiguities of poetic language and language as such. Dante’s ongoing, relentless self-questioning edges toward self-knowledge but, unsurprisingly given the fragmentary quality of the text, never attains it. This hybrid characteristic of Convivio—its very radicality in linking together the polarities of self and philosophy, poetry and hermeneutics, philosophy and science, and, finally, philosophy and politics— may actually account for the ultimately inevitable incompleteness of the treatise. The artifice of blending diverse modes and cultural traditions was the distinctive trait of Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae. Convivio pushes for four books the synthesis of styles of thought available in the Consolatione even further. But the Boethian synthesis could not have been duplicated on account of a contradiction inherent in the conception of Convivio. The contradiction in Convivio is highly productive and it can be quickly made intelligible. The treatise is written as a vindication of the luminosity of reason and, generally, the dignity of philosophy. The text’s unfolding is governed by the assumption that everything can be explained (angels, immortality, the heavens, doctrinal allegories, etc.). So thorough is Dante’s commitment to the epistemological power of philosophy in its secular extension that Convivio has often been defined as ‘‘Pelagian,’’ from the teachings of Pelagius, who held that human beings are morally free to do right or wrong and can reach truth entirely on their own and without any supernatural aid. (The view was specifically condemned by Etienne Tempier in 1279.) But the Convivio is not a Pelagian text. It preserves the dignity and autonomy of philosophy and it steadily acknowledges its role as a stepping stone to theology. The asserted value of a general philosophical-ethical discourse jars, however, with Dante’s explicit focus on the historicity of the self. The notion of the self, who is on the way in his quest for knowledge, makes all the claims of general knowledge problematical. The historicity of the self, with which the treatise begins, ends up in Book IV as a discussion of history and politics. In 562

defending the authority of the philosophers’ knowledge, Dante turns to the history of the Roman Empire and its centrality in world history. It also turns to the traditional allegorical interpretation of the Aeneid. Aeneas’ voyage from Troy to the shores of Latium figures, so are we reminded, the stages in everyman’s journey of life, from birth to maturity. In effect, the philosophical allegory of the Virgilian poem (which echoes the allegories of Bernard Silvester) runs the risk of dissolving the particularities of poetry into a generalized form of discourse: Making promises supposedly valid for all, the generalized allegorical interpretation of the Roman epic eschews the contingencies of the text as well as the particularities of each individual life. Thus, Dante grasps that his reflections, rooted in the historicity of his exile and his unique predicament, have reached an impasse. He stops his project and he cannot but turn to another rhetorical mode, one that combines the dimension of subjectivity, history, politics, etc. That mode is found in the poetry of the Comedia. GIUSEPPE MAZZOTTA Editions Early editions: editio princeps, Florence: F. Bonaccorsi, 1490. Critical editions: Il Convivio, edited by Giovanni Busnelli and G. Vandelli, in Opere di Dante, 2nd ed., Florence: Le Monnier, 1964; Convivio, edited by Cesare Vasoli, in La letteratura italiana: storia e testi, vol. 5, tome I, part 2, Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1988; edited by Franca Brambilla Ageno, 3 vols., Florence: Le Lettere, 1995. Translations: The Banquet, translated by Christopher Ryan, Saratoga, CA: ANMA Libri, 1989; Il Convivio, translated by Richard H. Lansing, New York: Garland, 1990.

Further Reading Ascoli, Albert R., ‘‘The Unfinished Author: Dante’s Rhetoric of Authority in Convivio and De vulgari eloquentia,’’ in The Cambridge Companion to Dante, edited by Rachel Jacoff, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Corti, Maria, La felicita` mentale: nuove prospettive per Cavalcanti e Dante, Turin: Einaudi, 1983. Gilson, Etienne, Dante and Philosophy, translated by D. Moore, New York: Harper Torchbook, 1963. Leo, Ulrich, ‘‘The Unfinished Convivio and Dante’s Rereading of the Aeneid,’’ in Medieval Studies, 13 (1951): 41–64. Mazzeo, Joseph, Medieval Cultural Tradition in Dante’s Comedy, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1960. Nardi, Bruno, Saggi di filosofia dantesca, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1967.

DANTE ALIGHIERI

DE VULGARI ELOQUENTIA, CA. 1304–1305 Latin Treatise by Dante Alighieri

Written while in exile, this unfinished Latin treatise on behalf of the Italian vernacular turns to a historical analysis of language, its origin in God’s gift to Adam in the Garden of Eden, its vicissitudes crystallized by Nimrod’s building of the Tower of Babel, its mutability in time and differences in space. Dante’s focus, however, falls first on the specificity of ‘‘our own language’’: the languages of Italy, France, and Spain. Their common origin lingers in the word amor (love), as the poets of those countries (Giraut de Bornelh, Thibaut of Champagne, and Guido Guinizelli) make clear. Second, Dante draws the map of the 14 major dialect areas of Italy with the aim of ‘‘hunting’’ for the ‘‘panther’’ of Italy’s ‘‘illustrious’’ vernacular in the forest of the dialects. In this pursuit of language and art, the pride of place in Dante’s construction of the vernacular is given to the Sicilians on account of the ‘‘weighty poems’’ written by the poets in the court of Frederick II. But the new language Dante envisions eschews specific regional dialects. Its qualities—‘‘illustrious,’’ ‘‘cardinal,’’ ‘‘aulic,’’ and ‘‘curial’’ (DVE I, XVI, 6)—are drawn from all dialects and they signal Dante’s deeper purpose: the formation of a language that could be used in the emperor’s hall and in the courts of law, a language that would cast the light of glory on its speakers and would act as a hinge for all other cultural activities. If Book 1 avowedly drafts a grammar for the Italian language, Book 2 comes forth as a short and yet pithy treatise on poetic art. From this perspective, its antecedents are identifiable with Boncompagno da Signa, Guido Fava, and, to some extent, Horace and the medieval treatises of poetics by Geoffrey of Vinsauf and John of Garland. But Dante does not argue his case in merely speculative terms. Quite to the contrary, the thrust of De vulgari eloquentia is practical. He chooses the canzone (song) as the most exalted poetic form in the vernacular because of the sweet harmony it

conveys. Poetry, in fact, is defined as a ‘‘rhetorical fiction fashioned by music,’’ (DVE II, iv): the definition casts poetry as an art of making (fictio), which follows rhetorical rules and brings out the music inherent in language. The formulation seals the divorce between music and poetry that had emerged with the poetry of the Sicilians and acknowledges poetic language’s own musical powers. Further, the canzone’s high, tragic style (as opposed to the elegiac and low), its lexicon, themes (love, virtue, and arms), stanza, verse forms (with a preference for a combination of lines with seven and 11 syllables), and rhyme patterns are discussed. Throughout, Dante exemplifies his choice with citations of poems taken from Provenc¸al, French, and Italian tradition (Guido Guinizelli, Cino da Pistoia, Guido Cavalcanti, Dante himself, as well as Bertran de Born, Arnaud Daniel and Giraut de Bornelh). They are recognized as models of truly great art by which Dante reaffirms his faith in the power of language at a time when the drama of his exile unavoidably seemed to envelop his life in solitude without a future. GIUSEPPE MAZZOTTA Editions Early editions: editio princeps, edited by Iacopo Cobinelli, Paris: J. Corbon, 1577. Critical edition: De vulgari eloquentia, edited by Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo, in La letteratura italiana: storia e testi, vol. 5, tome 2, Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1979. Translation: De vulgari eloquentia, edited and translated by Steven Botterill, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Further Reading Ascoli, Albert R., ‘‘‘Neminem ante nos’: History and Authority in the De Vulgari eloquentia,’’ in Annali d’Italianistica, 8 (1990): 186–231. Ascoli, Albert R., ‘‘The Unfinished Author: Dante’s Rhetoric of Authority in Convivio and De vulgari eloquentia,’’ in The Cambridge Companion to Dante, edited by Rachel Jacoff, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Corti, Maria, Dante a un nuovo crocevia, Florence: Sansoni, 1981. Mazzotta, Giuseppe, ‘‘Inferno: The Language of Fraud in Lower Hell,’’ in Patterns in Dante: Nine Literary Essays, edited by Cormac O Cuilleanain and Jennifer Petrie, Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005. Menocal, Maria Rosa, Shards of Love: Exile and the Origins of the Lyric, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1994. Pagani, Ileana, La teoria linguistica di Dante: De Vulgari eloquentia, discussioni, scelte, proposte, Naples: Liguori, 1982. Shapiro, Marianne, De vulgari eloquentia: Dante’s Book of Exile, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990.

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DANTE ALIGHIERI

MONARCHIA, CA. 1317 Latin Treatise by Dante Alighieri

Throughout his life, Dante displays a persistent involvement with the ‘‘political.’’ His earlier burgeoning career as a city official and, later during the years of his exile, his epistles to the Italian cardinals and to Henry VII of Luxembourg show his resolve to participate and impart a direction to the conduct of the two public and religious institutions, church and empire. The ‘‘political’’ for Dante, quite clearly, is never the domain of mere theoretical speculation. Much less is it simply the area where the ideal models of the body politic and the mystical body are displaced into practice. He is all too aware that in such transposition of models of order into the reality of history the ‘‘political’’ turns into the site where theology, politics, speech, and action intermingle and become confused, where technically distinct fields of power (that of the church and the empire) get blurred. Such a blurring of disciplines results in outright confusion: the donation of Constantine, which eventually Lorenzo Valla will unmask as a forgery, is for Dante an illegal operation by which the emperor alienates the lands of the empire to the church. Monarchia (Monarchy), written at the height of the church’s bondage to French imperial policies, which is also both a time of crisis for the Holy Roman Empire and one of Dante’s deepening disappointment with the factionalism rampant in the Italian cities, seeks to reverse the all too real confusion between the empire’s and the church’s orbits of jurisdiction and power. Over the three books that compose it, Monarchia presents three interrelated arguments that Dante, with the voice and authority of a moral philosopher steeped into the technicalities of medieval dialectics and jurisprudence, marshals. By tracing, following the method of logic, the classical philosophical question of the relation of the many to the one, he argues for the necessity of one world government for the well-being of the whole mankind. He exemplifies the feasibility of such a project by turning to the history of the Roman Empire, under whose providential 564

universal jurisdiction the Incarnation took place, and peace and justice reigned on Earth. Finally, by refuting the claims of the supreme authority of the church in all affairs of life that had been advanced by Boniface VIII’s bull Unam Sanctam (1302) and by the hierocrats, Dante maintains the principle of equality and separateness of empire and church. The authority of both descends directly from God: The empire, ruled by human reason and in the light of philosophy, was established to lead mankind to temporal beatitude; the church, founded on divine revelation, must lead mankind to the goal of eternal happiness. Monarchia’s central thesis of the complementary and yet separate nature of the empire and the church (which Thomas Aquinas and his disciples such as John of Paris and, in Florence, Remigio de’ Girolami had articulated) is based on the distinction and ordering between philosophy and theology. But Dante does not espouse the Averroist doctrine of the ‘‘one single intellect in all man’’ to which he refers (Mon. I, iv). A Dominican friar, Guido Vernani, wrote his De reprobatione Monarchiae in 1329 exactly on the ground that Dante follows Averroes’ doctrine. The refutation may have to do with Vernani’s desire to take his distance from Averroes and from the charges of Averroism to which the Dominicans were liable. For Dante, the empire does not simply realize the unity of the possible intellect nor is it only a rational entity (which is the premise of the Averroistic theory). The construction of the empire also requires, as Virgil and St. Augustine grasp, whom Dante lavishly cites in this treatise, the exercise of the will. GIUSEPPE MAZZOTTA Editions Early editions: editio princeps, De Monarchia libri tres, in A. Alciato De formula romanii imperii, Basel: G. Oporino, 1559. Critical editions: Monarchia, edited by Bruno Nardi, in La letteratura italiana: storia e testi, vol. 5, tome 2, MilanNaples: Riccardo Ricciardi, 1979. Translations: Monarchy and Three Political Letters, translated by Donald Nicholl and Colin Hardie, 1947, Westport, CT: Hyperion Press, 1979; Monarchy, edited and translated by Prue Shaw, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996; Dante’s Monarchia, translated by Richard Kay, Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1998.

Further Reading Davis, Charles Till, Dante and the Idea of Rome, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957.

DANTE ALIGHIERI Morghen, Raffaello, Dante profeta: tra la storia e l’eterno, Milan: Jaca Book, 1983. Nardi, Bruno, Dal Convivio alla Commedia: sei saggi danteschi, Rome: Istituto storico italiano per il Medio Evo, 1960. Passerin d’Entreves, A., Dante as a Political Thinker, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965. Vasoli, Cesare, La filosofia medievale, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1961.

VITA NOVA, CA. 1294 Lyric Poems by Dante Alighieri

In the history of literature, rarely, if ever, does a first book establish its author as an unimpeachably major, original voice. The Vita Nova (New Life), Dante’s first book, is an exception. This astonishing autobiographical tale presents Dante as both protagonist and author who in the past fell in love with Beatrice and wrote poetry about that love, and who now simultaneously reflects on his love and on his growth as a poet. The work bears, in the delicate relationships that sustain the double thematic focus of the narrative, the sure signs of an authentic masterpiece. It is consciously cast as a first book, as a beginner’s work in every sense, the beginning of love and of poetry. From a formal viewpoint, the Vita Nova begins ambiguously, in the sense that it begins twice, both at the end and at the beginning of the narrative. At the start, it gives itself as a ‘‘book of memory,’’ as a retrospective account of an original love experience whose outcome could not be known and whose implications only later could be drawn. The author transcribes the ciphers of his memory in the desire to make sense of his past experience. The transcription, which can be called a self-hermeneutics, gets going quite self-consciously with the phrase ‘‘incipit vita nova,’’ as the protagonist casts his gaze on his childhood, which is when at the age of 9 he first saw Beatrice. Nine years later, he sees her again and discovers the wondrous world of love. At the beginning there is love, and at first Dante’s love is a disorienting experience that triggers deliriums and morbid fantasies as the lover is touched and

absorbed by the apparition of this young woman who does not seem to belong to the world of reality but to the realm of the imaginary. Both the poetry and the hermeneutics of those past events stem from this love. In the past, the young lover withdraws into himself and begins to write poetry in the effort to grasp the depth of Beatrice’s enigmatic appearance—of which the number nine is a symbolic sign—as well as the vast extent of his passion for her. The 31 poems that make up the lyrical substance of the Vita Nova recount the inner revelations this love brings: In this confessional self-analysis (with shadows of St. Augustine’s Confessiones) the lover exposes his dreams, grief, obsessive love thoughts and fantasies, sense of being an absolute object to mocking women, his straying from love, fear of being unacknowledged by Beatrice, who denies him her greetings, joy at seeing her, excitement at finding the right words for celebrating his love, dread in the face of death, a shattered world at the death of Beatrice, etc. But there are poems that are not merely narratives of states of mind or exposures of one’s being. Some poems are themselves events, such as when he discovers ‘‘praise’’ as the genuine language of his love for Beatrice (Ch. XIX). Poems, thus, become occurrences, which create a space where the lover’s experiences become intelligible and where love and poetry both share in and unveil their reciprocal secrets. The narrative of the lover’s sentimental education and the poet’s apprenticeship in the art of poetry presents the protagonist as a character who at the start knows very little about either, but slowly grows in his understanding. He does not know if the love he feels is a physical impulse, as the physician Dante da Maiano writes to him, or a rhetorical way of speaking, or the sign of a divine election and a special grace. Gradually, the lover receives a final revelation when, after Beatrice’s death, he has a vision of her sitting at the foot of God’s majesty. At this point, all the disappointments he had suffered, the betrayals of her memory he had perpetrated, and the illusions and simulations under which he had frequently sought shelter vanish. His visionary experience (Ch. XLI) yields to the resolution and hope to write about Beatrice as has never been written in rhyme of any woman: ‘‘spero di dicer di lei quello che mai non fue detto d’alcuna’’ (I hope to write of her that which has never been written of any other woman). The Vita Nova, which had begun as a book of memory and as the interrogation of the past, turns at the end into an open-ended promise of a future 565

DANTE ALIGHIERI book that will lead to unpredictable places of thought. It ends with the project for a new beginning along the path of visionary poetry. This specifically poetic dimension—which mirrors, triggers and is in turn impelled by the love apprenticeship— brings to a climax a quest into the secrets of poetry that had started at the very beginning. At the inception of the story the lover, who understood love in its objective content of a physical phenomenon, writes his first sonnet about a frightening dream in which love appears to cannibalize the lover’s heart. The love dream is also the dream of poetry. Dante sends his poem out and enters the circle of the city’s poets. Guido Cavalcanti, to whom the Vita Nova will be dedicated and who is acknowledged as Dante’s ‘‘first friend,’’ responds urging the lover to abandon the meanders of deceptive passions and to turn to the clarity of intellectual ideas. Dante da Maiano, who is a physician, answers with a sonnet that resembles a clinical analysis of Dante’s pathology and an imbalance of humors. In effect, from the very start the Vita Nova stages a specifically poetic drama, which to some extent is independent from, and yet sheds light on the lover’s quandary. The conflict the poet faces is clear: To the pair of poetry and love, his correspondents juxtapose the pair of philosophy and friendship. This conflict is dramatized by the rhetorical structure of the text: a mixture of poetry and commentary in the tradition of texts, such as Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae. Dante’s prose commentary on his love and on his poetry signals his will to reduce the two experiences within the parameters of rational sense. As chapter XXV of the Vita Nova states, the practice of poetry must be grounded in the poet’s full consciousness of his intentions. But Dante’s last two paragraphs of his text widen the rational focus of Guido Cavalcanti’s rational understanding of poetry. The grieving lover/poet plunges into a visionary experience of the dead Beatrice sitting in glory. A new beginning opens up for the lover and for the poet: He discovers that love is an experience that, because it is unwilled, is more profound than any philosophical friendship; he reaches the concomitant conclusion that visionary poetry is a mode capable of opening up spaces of the imagination unsuspected by the rational analysis of the philosophers.

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From this standpoint, the Vita Nova can be understood as a retrospective summary of Dante’s poetic experiences as a young man. He represents his love for Beatrice by variously adopting the styles of the Provenc¸al poets, the Sicilian poets, Guittone d’Arezzo, and Guinizzelli. He dialogues with Cavalcanti, who is his privileged interlocutor, and the other poets of the Sweet New Style. But he realizes that if Beatrice is to be a unique, irreplaceable figure of love, the poetry that sings of her must also be a unique form of poetry. The adumbration of a great book to come, the Comedia, could not have been more eloquently stated. The Vita Nova can be rightly called the first great novel of the ongoing, unending process of education in modern literature. GIUSEPPE MAZZOTTA Editions Early editions: editio princeps, edited by Niccolo` Carducci, Florence: B. Sermartelli, 1576. Critical editions: Vita Nuova, edited by Domenico De Robertis, La letteratura italiana: storia e testi, vol. 5, tome 1, part 1, 1–247, Milan-Naples: Riccardo Ricciardi, 1974; Vita Nova, edited by Guglielmo Gorni, Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 1996. Translations: Dante’s Vita Nuova, translated by Mark Musa, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973.

Further Reading Boyde, Patrick, Dante’s Style in His Lyric Poetry, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971. Colombo, Manuela, Dai mistici a Dante: Il linguaggio dell’ineffabilita`, Florence: La Nuova Italia Editrice, 1987. De Robertis, Domenico, Il libro della ‘‘Vita Nuova,’’ Florence: Sansoni, 1961. Durling, Robert M., and Ronald L. Martinez, Time and the Crystal: Studies in Dante’s ‘‘Rime Petrose,’’ Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Gorni, Guglielmo, Dante Prima della Commedia, Fiesole: Cadmo, 1994. Harrison, Robert Pogue, The Body of Beatrice, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988. Mazzotta, Giuseppe, ‘‘The Language of Poetry in the Vita Nuova,’’ in Rivista di Studi Italiani, 1.1 (1983): 3–14. Singleton, Charles S., An Essay on the ‘‘Vita Nuova,’’ Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1949. Wehle, Winfried, Dichtung u¨ber Dichtung: Dantes Vita nuova, die Aufhebung des Minnesangs im Epos, Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1986.

LORENZO DA PONTE

THE DAUGHTER OF IORIO See La Figlia di Iorio (Work by Gabriele D’Annunzio)

LORENZO DA PONTE (1749–1838) The fame of Lorenzo Da Ponte, whose works were set to music by some of the greatest musicians of his time, is tied to the numerous librettos written during his stay in Vienna (1784–1790). He wrote his three masterpieces for Mozart: Le nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro, 1786), Il dissoluto punito ossia Don Giovanni (The Punished Libertine or Don Giovanni, 1787) and Cosı` fan tutte (Women Are Like That, 1790). After the failure of his first libretto of the Viennese period, Il ricco di un giorno (Rich Man for a Day, 1783), which was set to music by Antonio Salieri (1750–1825) and performed on 6 December 1784, Da Ponte waited a year before he wrote the Il burbero di buon cuore (The Gruff One of Good Heart, 1786), a bourgeois comedy after Goldoni’s Le bourru bienfaisant (1771), in which Da Ponte did away with the distinction between serious and comic characters to create a more realistic art. In this phase of his career, Da Ponte’s works were revisions of famous works. He skillfully translated the melodramatic pie`ces originally composed for the theater: for instance, Il finto cieco (The False Blind, 1786), a comedy of errors, in which the protagonist Sempronio discovers the deceptions of his promised bride, Elisa. The comic element makes use of traditional mechanisms from the farcical theater. The Demogorgone (1786) is a traditional piece, in which the protagonist, Demogorgone, is a ridiculous, hypocritical character who despises women. Gli equivoci (The Misunderstandings, 1786) has a political theme that Da Ponte would develop in his greatest librettos: the conflict between masters and servants. In this case, Da Ponte

expressed an ideology that motivated the French Revolution. The librettos of Da Ponte are quite diverse in plot and content. The comic opera is the most prevalent genre in his works, but he also wrote pastoral comedy and plays with bourgeois subjects. An example is the playful play L’arbore di Diana (The Tree of Diana), performed on 1 October 1787. The protagonist of the work is the goddess Diana, who, by the end of the play, falls in love with Endimione and loses her chastity. Da Ponte makes the refusal of chastity a central motif, celebrating the hedonist spirit of the Viennese court of Joseph II. In January 8, 1788, he composed the libretto Axur re d’Ormus (Axur, King of Ormus), based on Beaumarchais’ play, Tarare (1787) and set to music by Salieri. The opera is set in a fantastic eastern locale. In this work, which was destined for the courts of Europe, he tempers the polemical tone of the original French play from which it was derived. Da Ponte’s masterpieces are his collaborations with Mozart, in which the themes of Eros and social pretensions are fundamental. His librettos reflect his sensibility, the sensibility of a libertine and adventurer in the eighteenth-century manner (as, for instance, Giacomo Casanova). Le nozze di Figaro plays down the political themes central to the comedy of Beaumarchais and concentrates on the attempted seduction of Susan by the Count of Almaviva and the conquest of the countess by Cherubino. Da Ponte reduced the number of characters, eliminated the third act of the French comedy, and raised the importance of Figaro’s role.

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LORENZO DA PONTE The libretto became a game of seduction, in which the protagonists indulge in a series of disguises and equivocations before the happy ending: the marriage of Figaro and the restoration of peace between the Count of Almaviva and the countess. The return of order does not succeed in convincing the audience, however. It appears provisional and does not subdue or dispel the erotic forces that propelled characters. The opera Don Giovanni was performed with great success in Prague on 29 October 1787. This was Da Ponte’s most important libretto. He did not limit himself to the treatments of Tirso de Molina (1584–1648) or of Molie`re, but also called upon Il convitato di pietra (The Guest of Stone, 1787) of Giovanni Bertati (1735–1815). Da Ponte created nonetheless a highly original work. He introduced sweeping stylistic themes, notably enhanced by Mozart’s music. Written in two acts, the libretto features Don Giovanni, himself seduced by the continuous search for the next love conquest. By his side is the servant Leporello, who ‘‘catalogs’’ Giovanni’s conquests; characters include his betrayed wife, Donna Elvira; Donna Anna, who tries to seduce him and who kills his father; Don Ottavio; and the peasants, Masetto and Zerlina. All suffer from his seductive charms, and when Giovanni dies, dragged to hell by the ghost of the commander, one understands that none of the characters can continue to live as before. In Enten Eller (Either/Or, 1941) the philosopher Kirkegaard sees Don Giovanni as the emblem of the desire to dedicate life to the conquest of women and the satisfaction of carnal desires. In Cosı` fan tutte, the theme of eros and seduction remain paramount. In Naples, two sisters, Fiordiligi and Dorabella, love Guglielmo and Ferrando. They bet with Don Alfonso that their fiance´es can never betray them. Don Alfonso organizes a trick with the help of the maid, Despina: Guglielmo and Ferrando pretend to leave Naples only to present themselves again disguised as two Albanian soldiers. They each succeed in charming Fiordiligi and Dorabella and, after a false marriage, they reveal their true identities. The seduction discloses the weakness of reason and the uncontrollable strength of passions: No woman can resist and Da Ponte ironically jokes about the pretensions of eternal love. Da Ponte’s works show a constant drive to experiment. He changed his way of writing according to different circumstances and, above all, in accordance with the different musicians with whom he collaborated. Besides Martin y Soler, he achieved 568

his most innovative results in his collaborations with Mozart. He freed himself of the rigid classicist mode of distinguishing characters as either comic or tragic figures, creating a realistic opera built around characters who can be both comic and tragic. Da Ponte did away with the formal distinctions encoded within the work of earlier librettists, such as Pietro Metastasio, who were limited by the alternation of recitatives, aria, and orchestral accompaniment. This allowed him to create genuine characters, skilled in reciting comedies full of pretence and ambiguity, where the theme of love and seduction serves as the actual protagonist. During the years he spent in the United States, Da Ponte became an important and intensely active teacher of Italian literature and culture and eventually became a professor of Italian at Columbia College. In 1832, he organized and promoted an opera season for the company of James Montresor, which performed operas by Gioacchino Rossini and Lorenzo Bellini. The following year he dedicated himself to the creation of an Italian opera house in New York City, where his masterpieces by Mozart were performed. His artistic activity is detailed in full in Memories (Memoirs, 1823–1827).

Biography Born in Ce´neda (now Vittorio Veneto), 10 March 1749; birth name Emanuele Conegliano, of Jewish descent. August 29, 1763, he was baptised after his father’s conversion to Christianity and assumed the name of the bishop that baptized him (Da Ponte). Studied (1764–1767) in the seminar of Ce´neda and Portogruaro. March 27, 1773, entered a seminary. In 1774, taught rhetoric in Treviso. Returned to Venice in 1776; banished from the seminary and from the schools of Veneto for his libertine behaviour; in 1779, he was tried for seducing a woman. Between 1779 and 1780, lived in Dresden and Gorizia; arrived in Vienna, for the first time, in 1779. At the end of 1781, settled in Vienna, where he stayed until 1791. In 1783, met Mozart and became poet of the imperial theater. In 1792, traveled to Paris, then to London. Arrived in New York, where he devoted himself to commerce and teaching, in 1805. In 1825, became teacher of Italian at the Columbia College. Died in New York City, 17 August 1838. ALFREDO SGROI See also: Librettos

STEFANO D’ARRIGO Selected Works Collections Tre libretti per Mozart, edited by P. Lecaldano, Milan: 1956. Memorie e altri scritti, edited by Cesare Pagnini, Milan: Longanesi, 1971. Memorie: I libretti mozartiani, edited by Giuseppe Armani, Milan: Garzanti, 1990. Libretti viennesi, edited by Lorenzo Della Cha`, Parma: Guanda, 1999.

Librettos Il ricco di un giorno, 1783. Le nozze di Figaro, 1786. Il burbero di buon cuore, 1786. Il finto cieco, 1786. Una cosa rara, o sia bellezza ed onesta`, 1786. Gli equivoci, 1786. Demogorgone, 1786. L’arbore di Diana, 1787. Don Giovanni, 1787. Axur re d’Ormus, 1788. Cosı` fan tutte, 1790.

Plays Il Mezenzio, 1834; as Il Mezenzio: tragedia nuovissima in cinque atti, edited by Lorenzo della Cha, 2000.

Letters Lettere di Lorenzo da Ponte a Giacomo Casanova, 1791–1795, edited by Giampaolo Zagonel, 1988. Lettere, epistole in versi, dedicatorie e lettere ai fratelli, edited by Giampaolo Zagonel, 1995.

Other Storia compendiosa della vita di Lorenzo Da Ponte scritta da lui medesimo, 1807. Memorie di Lorenzo Da Ponte da Ceneda, 4 vols., 1823–1827; 3 vols., 1829–1830; as Memoirs of Lorenzo Da Ponte, translated by Elisabeth Abbott, 1959; rpt. edited by Arthur Livingston, 2000. Saggio di traduzione libera di ‘‘Gil Blas,’’ edited by Lorenzo Della Cha`, 2002.

Further Reading Brizi, Bruno, Il ritorno di Lorenzo Da Ponte, Vittorio Veneto: Citta` di Vittorio Veneto, 1993. Du Mont, Mary, The Mozart-Da Ponte Operas: An Annotated Bibliography, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000. Fitzlyon, April, The Libertines Librettist, London: John Calder, 1955. Fitzlyon, April, Lorenzo Da Ponte: A Biography of Mozart’s Librettist, New York: Riverrun Press, 1982. Garlick, Richard C., Italy and the Italians in Washington’s Time, New York: Arno Press, 1933. Goldin, Daniela, ‘‘Mozart, Da Ponte e il linguaggio dell’opera buffa,’’ in La vera Fenice: Librettisti e libretti tra Sette e Ottocento, Turin: Einaudi, 1985. Hodges, Sheila, Lorenzo Da Ponte: The Life and Times of Mozart’s Librettist, New York: Universe Books, 1985. Hodges, Sheila, Lorenzo Da Ponte: The Life and Times of Mozart’s Librettist, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002. Lanapoppi, Aleramo, Lorenzo Da Ponte: Realta` e leggenda nella vita del librettista di Mozart, Venice: Marsilio, 1992. Macchia, Giovanni, Vita, avventure e morte di Don Giovanni, Bari: Laterza, 1966. Mandel, Oscar (editor), The Theatre of Don Juan: A Collection of Plays and Views, 1630–1963, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963. Nicastro, Guido, Letteratura e musica, Rovito (Cosenza): Marra, 1992. Nicastro, Guido, Sogni e favole io fingo, Cosenza: Rubbettino, 2004. Pirrotta, Nino, Don Giovanni in musica, Venice: Marsilio, 1991. Rescigno, Eduardo, Da Ponte: poeta e libertino tra Mozart e il nuovo mondo, Milan: Bompiani, 1989. Russo, Joseph Louis, Lorenzo Da Ponte: Poet and Adventurer, New York: Columbia University Press, 1922. Spedicato, Paolo, La sindrome di Sherazade: Intertestualita` lavoro in Lorenzo Da Ponte, Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 2000.

STEFANO D’ARRIGO (1919–1992) The journalist and art critic Stefano D’Arrigo is best known in contemporary Italian literature for one work, the massive and expansive Horcynus Orca, described by Italo Calvino as the Italian Ulysses (I libri degli altri, 1991). Although it was published only in 1975, the book had a long gestation. Already in 1950, in a letter to his wife, Jutta

Bruto, D’Arrigo announced that he intended to write an important literary work. The theme of the hard life of Sicilian fishermen (the ‘‘ulissidi’’ or descendants of Ulysses, as he calls them), which would be central to this project, also inspired his collection of poetry Codice siciliano (Sicilian Code, 1957). Between 1956 and 1957, he wrote 569

STEFANO D’ARRIGO the first draft, entitled La testa del delfino (The Dolphin’s Head). This novel, still unpublished, is characterized by a stylistic pastiche of Sicilian dialects, cultivated Italian, and neologisms that form a kind of ‘‘hyper-language.’’ It is the symbolic and epic story of the young seaman ‘Ndrja Cambrı`a who, over eight days in autumn 1943, returns to his birthplace in Sicily. On his way home, he meets strange creatures and Signor Cama, who shows him a book on cetaceans similar to the one Herman Melville describes in chapter 32 of Moby Dick (1851). After a mythical encounter with his father, ‘Ndrja returns to his group of fishermen, impoverished by the war. He dreams of buying a new ship, and he works for that purpose, but is killed by an English sentry while rowing into the port at night. At the heart of the protagonist’s experience is the apocalyptic, endless duel between the Orca—a symbol of Death—and the dolphins, the fere (beasts). La testa del delfino was the beginning of a complex work of rewriting on which D’Arrigo labored for nearly 20 years. In 1959, Elio Vittorini, fascinated by the text, asked him to publish it in Il Menabo`, the journal he edited with Calvino, and indeed, two chapters appeared in 1960 with the title ‘‘I giorni della fera’’ (The Days of the Beast). In 1961, D’Arrigo began editing the proofs of the novel to be published by Einaudi as I fatti della fera (The Facts of the Beast), but this ‘‘editing’’ would last a lifetime. Working up to 14 hours a day, he tried to re-create the particular language spoken in Messina during his childhood, and even when the novel was published in 1975, the author was unhappy with it. In its final form, it is divided into three sections: the first describes the sailor ‘Ndrja’s voyage from Naples to the Paese delle Femmine in Calabria; the second focuses the protagonist’s encounter in Sicily with his father and his father’s poetic tale about Carybdis; the third is imbued by the haunting presence of the murderous monster, the Orca, found in the Straight of Messina, and climaxes with ‘Ndrja’s long monologue in front of the fearful dying Orca and with his preparations for the regatta and his eventual death. The vast narrative structure in a sophisticated style (very long sentences, alternating direct and indirect discourse, flashbacks and digressions) reflects the constant movement of the sea generated by the tides and the streams. In ‘Ndrja’s monologue, the protagonist appears as the Messiah who redeems mankind from the monster, re-establishing communion with God. 570

In 1985, D’Arrigo published his second novel, Cima delle nobildonne (Peak of the Noblewomen). Less ambitious in its structure, it is the story of a group of doctors who, while preparing an exhibition on the human placenta, discover that the murderous instinct is genetic in human beings. Here, the domain of the mythical meets with that of science. Oneiric passages alternate with inner monologues, and ancient Egyptian practices intertwine with modern medical techniques. Also the result of a tormented and difficult production, Cima delle nobildonne confirmed D’Arrigo’s image as a controversial writer. Indeed, critics remain divided about D’Arrigo’s work, and his masterpiece in particular. For some, Horcynus Orca is exorbitant in its structure and requires specialized readers in dialectology and anthropology. For others, the work exalts the metatemporal motifs of classical journeys, of water and of death itself, in the Mediterranean Sea, which evokes by definition the realm of myth.

Biography Born in Alı` Terme (Messina), 15 October 1919. After his birth, his father, Giuseppe, immigrates to the United States to work. Graduates from the University of Messina with a thesis on Ho¨lderlin, 1942. During the war, serves in the Italian Army in northern Italy, then in Palermo. Moves to Rome in 1946, where he works as an art critic and journalist for newspapers and journals such as Tempo, Il giornale d’Italia, Vie Nuove. Marries Jutta Brutto, January 1948. Codice siciliano is awarded the Crotone literary prize by Giuseppe Ungaretti and Carlo Emilio Gadda, 1958; two unpublished chapters of La testa del delfino are awarded the Premio Cino del Duca by Elio Vittorini, 1959; stars as the judge in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film Accattone, 1961; writes a theater adaptation of Horcynus Orca, staged by Roberto Guicciardini at the Festival di Taormina, 1989. Died in Rome, 2 May 1992. STEFANO ADAMI Selected Works Fiction Horcynus Orca, 1975. Cima delle nobildonne, 1985. I fatti della fera, edited by Andrea Cedola and Siriana Sgavicchia, 2000.

Poetry ‘‘Codice siciliano,’’ 1957.

CHIARO DAVANZATI Further Reading Alfano, Guido, Gli effetti della guerra. Su Horcynus Orca di Stefano d’Arrigo, Rome: Luca Sossella, 2000. Calvino, Italo, I libri degli altri: lettere 1947–1981, edited by Giovanni Tesio, Turin: Einaudi, 1991. Contini, Gianfranco, Schedario di scrittori italiani moderni e contemporanei, Florence: Sansoni, 1978. Gatta, Francesca (editor), Il mare di sangue pestato. Studi su Stefano D’Arrigo, Catanzaro: Rubbettino, 2002. Giordano, Enrico, Horcynus Orca: il viaggio e la morte, Naples: E.S.I., 1984.

Giordano, Enrico, Cima delle nobildonne o della metafora infinita. Saggio sull’ultimo D’Arrigo, Salerno: Edisud, 1989. Gramigna, Giuliano, Interventi sulla narrativa italiana contemporanea, 1973–1975, Treviso: Matteo, 1976. Marabini, Claudio, Lettura di D’Arrigo, Milan: Mondadori, 1977. Pedulla`, Walter, Miti, finzioni e buone maniere di fine millennio, Milan: Rusconi, 1983. Titone, Virgilio, ‘‘Il populismo e D’Arrigo,’’ in Saggi di letteratura italiana contemporanea, Palermo: Novecento, 1998.

CHIARO DAVANZATI (CA. 1235–1303/1304) After Guittone D’Arezzo, Chiaro Davanzati is the most productive Italian poet of the thirteenth century. In the Vatican Codex 3793, which, as far as we know, has preserved the majority of his works, we find a total of 61 canzoni and over 120 sonnets, to which may be added another 18 sonnets of uncertain attribution. His productivity makes him the most representative Florentine poet prior to the advent of the dolce stil novo (the Sweet New Style) and Dante. Despite his prolific writing and a certain notoriety during his lifetime, Davanzati seems to have had little or no influence on the following generations of poets. If Dante, or any of the stilnovisti, read his work, corresponded with him, or knew him personally, they certainly made no mention of him. Critical tradition has distinguished three phases in Davanzati’s varied and vast thematic repertory. His poetic development is, first and foremost, influenced by the lessons of the Provenc¸al troubadours, and the scuola siciliana (the Sicilian school of poetry), through which he became interested in the tradition of the love song; secondly, by Guittone D’Arezzo, who most likely inspired his treatment of political and moral themes (though he was never a follower of the friar from Arezzo); lastly, Davanzati’s verse has been likened to the early love language of the stilnovisti. Furthermore, the textual restoration of Davanzati’s poetic production has allowed us to better understand the limits of Guittone D’Arezzo’s debt on this versatile poet. To

Guittone’s stylistic virtuosity, Davanzati offers a formally less complex lyric mode; and to Guittone’s didactic sententiousness and spiritual urgings, he responds with a more modern, lay vision that is better suited to the Florentine cultural establishment. Indeed, as a result, Chiaro Davanzati, who is well-versed in the love poetry and models pursued at the court of Frederick II in Sicily, who is attracted by the emerging new voices of the Tuscan stilnovo, and who also aims at diffusing Guittone’s harsh doctrinarian preaching, shows innovative skills in handling all of these poetic influences and traditional motifs. Davanzati’s most famous compositions include his serventese ‘‘Ai dolze e gaia terra fiorentina’’ (Oh sweet and happy Florentine land), and a group of sonnets where he makes extensive use of animal metaphors. ‘‘Ai dolze e gaia terra fiorentina,’’ which was written in 1267 in praise of Florence at a time when the Guelphs had made an offer to Charles of Anjou, King of Naples and an ally of the pope, to assume the signoria of the city. In this song, reminiscent of Guittone D’Arezzo’s ‘‘O dolce terra aretina’’ (O sweet land of Arezzo), and in ‘‘Ahi lasso, or e` stagion de doler tanto’’ (Alas, now is the season of great suffering), on the Montaperti defeat, the poet evokes the glory of Florentine history, from its Roman origins blessed by the will of God, to its reputation as a powerful bearer of freedom and honesty, only to conclude that this is the past and that the present historical reality is 571

CHIARO DAVANZATI sadly conflictual. For Davanzati, Florence is now debased, dishonest and disgraced. This violent invective is truly directed to the heated political climate and the bloody fights between Guelphs and Ghibellines for the control of the city. Instead, the sonnets inspired by medieval bestiaries introduce the reader to a zoological lore, with fabulous animals endowed with magical virtues and powers. Davanzati draws his motifs and images from various collections of bestiaries and from medieval encyclopedic literature, such as the fourth-century Physiologus (a Latin version of a Greek original that is work of a popular theological type, describing animals in an allegorical fashion), and from the troubadour Rigaut de Berbezilh. Notably, in the last phase of his poetic experimentation, Davanzati’s preferences remind us of the Bolognese Guido Guinizzelli, a seminal poet of the dolce stil novo, and of troubadours such as Guilhem de Montanhagol. For example, in the sonnet ‘‘Non me ne maraviglio, donna fina’’ (It does not surprise me, sweet lady), Davanzati not only exalts the beauty and virtue of his lady but also portrays his beloved as an angelic being—a theme brought to fruition by the subsequent generation of Florentine love poets. A controversial sonnet, ‘‘Di penne di paone’’ (The Peacock’s Feathers), which accuses the poet Bonagiunta da Lucca of plagiarizing Giacomo da Lentini, has commonly been ascribed to him. Chiaro Davanzati’s canzoniere, preserved in a single manuscript, is coherent and unified. Aside from his brief ventures into political poetry and his technical experimentations with new verse forms, Davanzati is considered a traditional poet, in adherence to the Provenc¸al-Sicilian school of love poetry.

Biography Although there has been some confusion in identifying Chiaro Davanzati with certainty due to the

presence in Florence in the second half of the thirteenth century of two individuals by the same name, scholars such as Gianfranco Contini, Giacomo Debenedetti, and Frede Jensen claim that he is a certain Clarus F. Davanzati Banbakai from the quarter of San Frediano. He probably had two sons, Lapo and Bartolo, and a daughter, Bionda. In 1260, he fought at the Battle of Montaperti, where the Florentines suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of the Siennese army. In 1294, Davanzati becomes captain of Or San Michele. He corresponded with Monte Andrea, Dante da Maiano and another Dante of uncertain identification who could be the young Alighieri. We know that Davanzati was still alive in August of 1303, but died before May of 1304. PAOLO A. GIORDANO

Selected Works Collections Rime, critical edition by Aldo Menichetti, Bologna: Commissione per i testi di lingua, 1965. Canzoni e sonetti, edited by Aldo Menechetti, Turin: Einaudi, 2004.

Further Reading Contini, Gianfranco (editor), Poeti del Duecento, 2 vols., Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1955. De Lollis, Cesare, ‘‘Sul canzoniere di Chiaro Davanzati,’’ in Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 1 (1898): 27–117. Goldin, Frederick, German and Italian Lyrics of the Middle Ages, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1973. Jensen, Frede (editor), Tuscan Poetry of the Duecento, New York: Garland Publishing, 1994. Mascetta-Caracci, Corrado, La poesia politica di Chiaro Davanzati, Naples: Tipografia delgi Artigianelli, 1925. Palmieri, Ruggero, La poesia politica di Chiaro Davanzati, Ravenna: F. Lavagna, 1913. Salinari, Carlo (editor), La poesia lirica del duecento, Turin: UTET, 1968.

THE DAY See Il Giorno (Work by Giuseppe Parini) 572

MASSIMO TAPARELLI D’AZEGLIO

MASSIMO TAPARELLI D’AZEGLIO (1798–1866) As a scholar and a writer, Massimo Taparelli D’Azeglio was deeply attracted to the European historical novel as a form that called upon philology and philosophy as well as narrative to represent the history of a country and a culture. In particular, D’Azeglio felt indebted to the works of Walter Scott and to Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi (The Betrothed, 1827, 1840–1842). D’Azeglio came of age under the influence of scholars and historians like the Turinese liberal politician Cesare Balbo (1789–1853), author of the important essay Sommario della storia d’Italia (Summary of Italian History, 1846), and the Neapolitan Neo-Guelf exiled patriot Carlo Troya (1784–1858), the author of Storia d’Italia nel medioevo (History of Italy during the Middle Ages, 1815) and Del Veltro allegorico in Dante (On the Allegorical Hound in Dante, 1826). Like many of his models, D’Azeglio considered the Middle Ages an important period in the formation of Italian culture. Thus, D’Azeglio’s first and most famous novel, Ettore Fieramosca o la Disfida di Barletta (Ettore Fieramosca, or The Challenge of Barletta, 1833), written during the Risorgimento when Italy was geographically divided, is concerned with demonstrating the profound spiritual and moral unity of the Italians. It is important to note that D’Azeglio, an accomplished landscape painter, had already made the Barletta episode the subject of an important painting before he wrote the novel. D’Azeglio was looking for an episode that could assume the status of myth for his readers. He found his central episode in the documented disfida between 13 Italian knights and 13 French knights that took place in Barletta in 1503, when France and Spain were warring over Naples. A French soldier insulted the Italian knights who served in the Spanish army, accusing them of cowardice. The Italians took offence at this insult to their honour, a reaction that D’Azeglio interprets as a sign of their deep spiritual unity. The Italian knights are led by Ettore Fieramosca, who is represented as a romantic hero, bold, patriotic, loyal, incorruptible, full of love for his friends and for his horse Airone. Fieramosca is also engaged in an unhappy love

affair with Ginevra, the wife of an Italian fighting for the French. Ginevra is ravished by the infamous Duke Valentino (Cesare Borgia) and dies soon after, tormented by her suspicions that her lover has been unfaithful. Devastated by her death, Fieramosca commits suicide. The novel is filled with vivid and detailed descriptions of places and characters, but also with grotesque and comic passages that tend to muffle the dramatic force of certain sequences. The novel’s various characters are independent and autonomous: among them, the absent-minded, idiosyncratic and easygoing Fanfulla da Lodi; the immoral mercenary Brancaleone, husband to Ginevra; the pompous, scornful and boastful leader of the French knights, Guy de la Mothe. The dynamic interweaving of the novel’s various stories creates the effect of alternating montage, reminiscent of the double plotting of Shakespearean drama. D’Azeglio’s second novel, Niccolo` de’ Lapi ovvero i Palleschi e i Piagnoni (Niccolo` dei Lapi, or the Palleschi and the Piagnoni, 1841), is set in the sixteenth century and concerns the Florentine resistance to Spanish forces. In the mid-1850s, D’Azeglio was writing a third novel, La Lega Lombarda (The Lombard League), which he left unfinished due to his political appointments, including prime minister of Piedmont in 1849. He decided to give up writing, having now the opportunity to act more directly in the making of history. His principal aims were to obtain peace with Austria, to reach an agreement with England and France, and to defend the Constitution. He resigned in 1852, but returned to political life again in 1859, when he opposed Cavour’s idea that Rome should be the capital of a united Italy. In 1863, he began to write an autobiography, entitled I miei ricordi (Things I Remember), that was published posthumously in 1867. These memoirs, written in the Manzonian style of I promessi sposi, not only show the inner life of the author as a moderate liberal, convinced of the necessity of the cooperation of all the nations, but also are a rich source of historical information from the early Risorgimento period. D’Azeglio summed up his views on cultural 573

MASSIMO TAPARELLI D’AZEGLIO and political reforms in his essay Degli ultimi casi di Romagna (The Last Cases of Romagna, 1846), in which he opposed Mazzini’s revolutionary republicanism and suggests unification through peaceful means.

Historical Novels

Biography

Other

Born in Turin on 24 October 1798, of a noble family of French origin. During the French occupation of Piedmont, he was in Florence, where he was educated, returning to Turin in 1805 after Napoleon obliged the aristocracy to swear an oath of allegiance. He began to study painting and to associate with liberal groups. Enrolled at the University of Turin in 1816, but his university career ended in 1822 when he enlisted as a civil guard of the city. He served as a lieutenant in the regiment Piemonte Reale during the First War of Independence in 1848. In 1831, he married Giulia, the eldest daughter of Alessandro Manzoni. After Giulia’s death in 1834, he remarried. Appointed prime minister, 7 May 1849. Resigned in 1852, and was replaced by Camillo Cavour. Died in Cannero (Novara) on 15 January 1886. STEFANO ADAMI See also: Autobiography Selected Works Collections Tutte le opere letterarie, edited by Alberto Maria Ghisalberti, 2 vols., Milan: Mursia, 1966.

Ettore Fieramosca o la Disfida di Barletta, 1833; as Ettore Fieramosca, or The Challenge of Barletta, translated by C. Edwards Lester, 1854. Niccolo` de’ Lapi ovvero i Palleschi e i Piagnoni, 1841; as Niccolo` dei Lapi, translated by H. Hallet, 1850.

Gli ultimi casi di Romagna, 1848. I miei ricordi, 1867; as Things I Remember, translated by E. R. Vincent, 1966.

Further Reading Bertone, Virginia (editor), Massimo d’Azeglio e l’invenzione del paesaggio istoriato, Turin: GAM, 2002. Columni Camerino, Marinella, ‘‘Il narratore dimezzato. Legittimazioni del racconto nel romanzo storico italiano,’’ in Storie su storie. Indagine sui romanzi storici (1814–1840), edited by Enrica Villari et al., Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1985. Corgnati, Martina (editor), Massimo d’Azeglio pittore, Milan: Mazzotta, 1999. Ghisalberti, Alberto M., ‘‘Introduction to Massimo D’Azeglio,’’ in Tutte le opere letterarie, vol. 1, Milan: Mursia, 1966. Marshall, Ronald, Massimo D’Azeglio: An Artist in Politics, 1798–1866, London: Oxford University Press, 1966. Quazza, Romolo, Pio IX e Massimo D’Azeglio nelle vicende romane del 1847, Modena: STEM, 1954. Romagnoli, Sergio, Manzoni e is uoi colleghi, Florence: Sansoni, 1984. Tellini, Gino, Il romanzo italiano dell’Ottocento e Novecento, Milan: Mondadori, 1998. Tenca, Carlo, Saggi critici, di una storia della letteratura italiana e altri saggi, Florence: Sansoni, 1968. Tessari, Roberto, ‘‘Il Risorgimento e la crisi di meta` secolo,’’ in Letteratura italiana, vol. 1, Il letterato e le istituzioni, Turin: Einaudi, 1982.

EDMONDO DE AMICIS (1846–1908) Edmondo De Amicis began his literary career in 1866 while serving in the Piedmontese Army during the Third War of Independence and fighting in the Battle of Custoza. The young De Amicis wrote a series of ironic Bozzetti di vita militare (Sketches from Military Life, 1868), in which he mixed vivid and fascinating descriptions of military life with passages addressing the ‘‘ethical’’ aim of the Risorgimento. The sketches, which appeared to great 574

acclaim in the Florentine review Italia militare, were collected later that year in a book entitled La vita militare (Military Life). This first book displays all the hallmarks of De Amicis’ distinctive style: his precise descriptions of places and characters and, above all, his ‘‘didactic’’ vision of literature as a means for educating his readers. In 1870, De Amicis began to write a series of entertaining and informative travel reports for the newspaper La Nazione.

EDMONDO DE AMICIS These pieces were highly popular and immediately collected into individual volumes: Spagna (Spain and the Spaniards, 1873), Olanda (Holland and Its People, 1874), Ricordi di Londra (Recollections of London, 1874), Ricordi di Parigi (Studies of Paris, 1875), Marocco (Morocco and Its People and Places, 1876), Costantinopoli (Constantinople, 1878), Sull’ Oceano (On the Ocean, 1889). On the Ocean, which is now considered one of his best works, is the detailed chronicle of a journey to the United States De Amicis took with Italian emigrants. Reflecting his conversion to socialism, it offers a sympathetic treatment of the terrible conditions the immigrants faced. During the 1870s, De Amicis not only wrote nonfiction, but creative works and literary essays as well: a collection of Novelle (Short Stories, 1872), a book of Poesie (Poems, 1880), and literary essays, Ritratti letterari (Literary Portraits, 1881). It was during this period that De Amicis read Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield (probably in a French translation), who thereafter becomes one of his literary models. When De Amicis visited London in 1873 he saw and described himself as a sort of Pip, the young and naı¨ve protagonist of Great Expectations. Wandering in the labyrinth of the metropolis without a word of English, he eventually finds himself in the poorest slums, a dark urban landscape he describes in the same dark tones of Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend. In 1878, De Amicis began to write what became his most popular book: Cuore: Storia di un anno scolastico, scritta da un alunno di terza di una scuola municipale d’Italia (Heart: Story of a School Year, Written by a Third Year Italian Pupil, 1886). The story takes the form of a journal of one school year written by a boy—Enrico—who is in his third year of the elementary school. The boyish point of view infuses the entire narrative with a feeling of astonishment and almost painful good nature. Enrico, a normal boy in a normal school, is a representative figure according to the naturalist aesthetic of Zola’s new roman experimental. With the simple, Manichean outlook of the young, Enrico describes his class as a small society composed of positive and negative heroes whose moral characters are correlated to their physical qualities: The narrator himself is a quiet middleclass boy, who is lazy at first and learns the value of work during the year; Garrone, the symbol of the simple and genuine goodness of the lower classes; Franti, the sinner and the outcast, who scorns everything and is finally expelled from the school; the gentle aristocrat Derossi; the snobbish and formal Nobis; the envious Votini; and the teacher Perboni

who is supposedly a model for the students. In fact, all the social classes are represented. The novel’s interpersonal dynamics reflect a somewhat ingenuous philanthropic hope for conflict-free harmony among all social classes. De Amici, who joined the newly established Socialist Party in 1891, was a reformist intent on advancing his conciliatory view in the post-Risorgimento Italy of Umberto I (1878–1900). The language of the novel aspires to a transparency advocated in the sustained argument of L’idioma gentile (The Noble Idiom, 1905) a work indebted to Manzoni’s views on the language question. The pages of the young boy’s journal are interspersed with notes and letters written by his father, mother and sister, which narratively help specify the boy’s life and feelings and put them into a larger context. Moreover, the narrative is complicated by nine stories that appear within the journal, stories dictated every month to the class by the teacher: stories of hard life as ‘‘Il piccolo patriota padovano’’ (The little paduan patriot); ‘‘Il piccolo scrivano fiorentino’’ (The Little Fiorentine Copyist); ‘‘L’infermiere di Tata’’ (Tata’s Nurse); ‘‘Sangue romagnolo’’ (Blood of Romagna); ‘‘Valore civile’’ (Civil Value); ‘‘Dagli Apennini alle Ande’’ (From the Apennines to the Andes); and ‘‘Naufragio’’ (Shipwreck). The leading character of every story is always a boy of the same age as the young students, coming from a different region of the new Regno d’Italia: Their actions are acts of self-denial and heroism, performed in defence of their country, their family, or of absolute values as honesty, sense of duty, obedience, respect and unselfishness. The structure of the narrative thus has a strong choral resonance and texture: Every concept, feeling and idea introduced and discussed in the pages of the boy’s journal is taken up and discussed from a different level perspective in the family letters and in the teacher’s stories. There are many passages of exhortation in which the young boys are called, in a hyperbolic tone, to act as sons of the heroes who died for the Italian Unification. Some of the stories told by the schoolmaster describe the heroes of the Risorgimento (King Vittorio Emanuele, Cavour, Mazzini, Garibaldi). These exemplary stories reflect De Amicis’ own moderate liberal beliefs in the policies supported by Cavour: a free church in a free state. The book in fact lacks any religious, Catholic dimension. We can note once again the deep influence of the Dickens style on De Amicis’ use of sentimentality and dramatic effects for didactic purposes. Cuore is an ideological work aimed at promoting the values 575

EDMONDO DE AMICIS of the new kingdom and the political vision of Cavour. The book was precisely what a unified Italy was waiting for: It was published in 1886 and in only three years it ran to 98 editions. The protagonist of the book may be said to be not a character but the idea of schooling itself, a significant subject in a country where the rate of illiteracy was one of the highest in Europe. The first letter Enrico’s father writes in the novel in fact ends with a powerful vision in which all the children of the world go to school in an ‘‘immense movement to learn.’’ De Amicis’ succeeding novels confirm his interest in the school as a privileged setting: Il romanzo di un maestro (The Romance of a Schoolmaster, 1890), which presents the school this time from the point of view of an instructor; a collection of short stories, Fra scuola e casa (Between School and Home, 1892); Amore e ginnastica (Love and Gymnastics, 1892), a tale that presents school in a realistic and mocking manner; and the unfinished Primo Maggio (First of May), written in 1893, clearly inspired by David Copperfield and Hard Times. The novel’s hero, Alberto Bianchini, is a middle-class schoolmaster in Turin who is writing a book on the exploitation of factory children. But he is wounded and killed on the first of May by the carabinieri during an uprising. DeAmicis’ final years are a time of reflection: In 1899, he publishes his autobiographical Memorie (Memoirs), the heart of which is the story of his son Furio’s suicide. His son’s death was a blow to the man whose patriotic educational zeal had made him the educator of an entire country.

Biography Born in the town of Oneglia (now Imperia) in 1846. His family moved to Cuneo in 1848; studied in the Collegio Candellero in Turin, 1861, and in the Military Academy in Modena, 1863–1866. Took part in the Third War of Independence, in the campaign against Austria, 1866. Collaborated to create La Nazione, 1870. Moved to Turin in 1875 to marry. He had two sons. He died in Bordighera (Imperia) March 11, 1908. STEFANO ADAMI Selected Works Collections Opere complete, 2 vols., edited by Antonio Baldini, Milan: Garzanti, 1948.

576

Opere scelte, edited by Folco Portinari and Giusi Baldissone, Milan: Mondadori, 1996.

Fiction Bozzetti di vita militare, 1868; as Military Life in Italy, translated by W. C. Cady, 1882. Novelle, 1872. Cuore, 1886; as Heart: A School Boy’s Journal, translated by Isabel Hapgood, 1922. Il re delle bambole, 1890. Amore e ginnastica, 1892; edited by Italo Calvino, 1971. Primo Maggio 1893. La carrozza di tutti, 1899.

Poetry ‘‘Poesie,’’ 1880.

Travel Writings Spagna, 1873; as Spain and the Spaniards, translated by Stanley Rhoads Yarnall, 1895. Olanda, 1874; as Holland and Its People, translated by Caroline Tilton, 1890. Ricordi di Londra, 1874. Ricordi di Parigi, 1875; as Studies of Paris, translated by W. W. Cady, 1887. Marocco, 1876; as Morocco and Its People and Places, translated by Maria Hornor Lansdale, 1897. Costantinopoli, 1878; as Constantinople, translated by Stephen Parkin, 2005. Sull’Oceano, 1889.

Other Gli effetti psicologici del vino, 1881. Ritratti letterari, 1881. Memorie, 1899. L’idioma gentile, 1905; new rev. ed., 1906. Nel giardino della follia, 1920.

Further Reading Asor Rosa, Alberto, Scrittori e popolo, Turin: Einaudi, 1965. Bacchetti, Flavia, I viaggi ‘‘en touriste’’ di De Amicis. Raccontare ai borghesi, Tirrenia: Del Cerro, 2001. Bigazzi, Roberto, I colori del vero, Pisa: Nistri-lischi, 1975. Brambilla, Antonio, De Amicis, paragrafi eterodossi, Modena: Mucchi, 1992. Contorbia, Franco (editor), Edmondo De Amicis, Atti del convegno nazionale di studi, Imperia 30 aprile-3 maggio 1981, Milan: Garzanti, 1985. Danna, Bianca, Dal taccuino alla lanterna magica: De Amicis reporter e scrittore di viaggi, Florence: Olschki, 2000. Marini, Carlo, Cuore nella letteratura per l’infanzia, Urbino: Quattro Venti, 2004. Praz, Mario, Gusto Neoclassico, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1996. Santagata, Marco, Quella celeste naturalezza, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1998. Tellini, Gino, Il romanzo italiano dell’Ottocento, Florence: Sansoni, 1999. Tosto, Eugenio, Edmondo De Amicis e la lingua italiana, Florence: Olschki, 2003.

GIACOMO DEBENEDETTI

GIACOMO DEBENEDETTI (1901–1967) A literary critic of immense knowledge, defined by Gianfranco Contini as ‘‘the last writer-critic in our literary history’’ (La letteratura italiana, 1974), Giacomo Debenedetti belongs to that lineage of eminent intellectuals that includes Sainte-Beuve, Emilio Cecchi, and Roberto Longhi. His rich critical thought brought together the influences of several generations, from idealism to Marxism, from anthropology to psychoanalysis, and cannot be defined in terms of a single critical method. In fact, his method, if so it can be called, consists in naturally adopting the point of view of the most important cultural tendencies of Europe, especially in the sciences and philosophy. His controlled style of writing, his critical depth, and his militant passion rank Debenedetti among the first in the production of twentieth-century literary prose. The narrative clarity and the underlying tragic vocation of his writing are other characteristics that set Debenedetti apart in the landscape of modern criticism. The long parabola of his Saggi critici (Critical Essays, 1929), of which he published also a second and third series in 1945 and 1959 respectively, begins with Gabriele D’Annunzio and Benedetto Croce. Debenedetti felt a cold admiration toward D’Annunzio, even though he did not share his poetics. On the other hand, in spite of being closely involved with Croce’s thought, he analyzed his works quite critically, as he perceived in them a distance from their subject and from the flow of life as a result of the philosopher’s pretended objectivity. Debenedetti was also opposed to Carlo Michelstaedter’s rejection of life as well as to Giovanni Boine’s complex modernism. The authors for whom he felt affinity were especially Marcel Proust and Umberto Saba, on the common ground of the ‘‘internal chronicle’’ that constitutes the strategy through which the two authors recount modernity, in a play of memories and shadows, as if the inquiry into the life of the works and of their authors entailed also a personal question of life, a research for a narrative possibility beyond style. Furthermore, during the period of the German military occupation in 1944, Debenedetti’s meditation on the issues of freedom and tyranny led him both to the study of Vittorio Alfieri’s tragedies and to a personal militancy in the partisan Resistance.

The problems of modernity, on the other hand, are repeatedly investigated in the works of Luigi Pirandello and Italo Svevo. According to Debenedetti, Svevo’s loyalty to the novel (although he criticized the writer for the unresolved psychic formation of the Jewish soul of his characters), and the originality of Pirandello’s ‘‘characters on strike’’ (‘‘sciopero dei personaggi’’) are experiences that can renew the present from a gnoseological point of view and preserve the form of the novel in its relation with the nineteenth century and, therefore, with history, against the metaliterary tensions of the experimental research, particularly intense in the second half of the twentieth century. Not by chance, the most nostalgic evidence of his struggle with a cultural moment that changes the laws of the art of making images, from James Joyce and Alain Robbe-Grillet to Samuel Beckett and Michelangelo Antonioni, is the essay ‘‘Commemorazione provvisoria del personaggio-uomo’’ (A Provisional Commemoration of the Character-Man, 1965), published in the journal Paragone, where Debenedetti definitely took leave from what he considered a disloyal attitude of the present toward literature, ‘‘in un mondo abbandonato anche dal demonio’’ (in a world abandoned even by the devil). However, Debenedetti’s stylistically sophisticated criticism cannot be confined to the category of what Edoardo Sanguineti called the ‘‘critical tale’’ (‘‘Il ‘racconto critico’ di Debenedetti,’’ 1969). Indeed, he was also a great speaker and educator, as demonstrated by his university seminars collected in the posthumous volumes on twentieth-century fiction and poetry. His comparative perspective, grounded in his Jewish cosmopolitan culture, led him to translate his beloved Proust, among others. His identity as critic-narrator was complemented by a series of short works including the collection Amedeo e altri racconti (Amedeo and Other Tales, 1926), and culminating with the testimonial on the raid of SS Obersturmbannfu¨hrer Herbert Kappler on the ghetto of Rome as a result of which more than 1,000 Jews were deported to concentration camps. 16 ottobre 1943 (October 16, 1943, 1945) is the account of that event, in which the documentary details combine with an effective style capable of 577

GIACOMO DEBENEDETTI describing the horror of such a discreet, ‘‘quasi umano’’ (almost human) job; indeed, German brutality was merely a technique, never a perversion. Otto ebrei (Eight Jews, 1944), written in September 1944, is also based on historical events and addressed the question of anti-Semitism and Jewishness. Accused of being responsible for the massacre of the Fosse Ardeatine, in which the Nazis murdered in cold blood 335 civilians as a reprisal against partisan actions, a police officer justifies himself by declaring that he deleted eight Jews from an initial list of victims. Debenedetti demonstrates the officer’s false pietism and criticizes, as Theodor W. Adorno did in the same years, the slogans and techniques of persuasion of which the officer is still prey even after the war. Finally, Debenedetti claims for the Jews both freedom and the ‘‘onore di soffrire’’ (honor of suffering).

Biography

Amedeo e altri racconti, 1926. Otto ebrei, 1944; as Eight Jews, translated by Estelle Gilson, 2001. 16 ottobre 1943, 1945; as The Sixteenth of October 1943, translated by Judith Woolf, 1996; as October 16, 1943, translated together with Eight Jews by Estelle Gilson, 2001.

Essays Saggi critici, 1929; expanded edition, 1952. Saggi critici: nuova serie, 1945; expanded edition, 1955. Saggi critici: terza serie, 1959. Intermezzo, 1963. Il personaggio-uomo, 1970. Il romanzo del Novecento, 1971. Tommaseo, 1973. Poesia italiana del Novecento, 1974. Verga e il Naturalismo, 1976. Pascoli: la ‘‘rivoluzione inconsapevole,’’ 1979. Rileggere Proust e altri saggi proustiani, 1982. Al cinema, edited by Lino Micciche´, 1983. Quaderni di Montaigne, 1986. Italiani del Novecento, 1995.

Translations

Born in Biella (Vercelli), on 25 July 1901. Received a degree in law in 1921 and in literature in 1927 with a thesis on D’Annunzio. Founded the journal Primo tempo, 1922–1923. Worked for many periodicals, including Solaria, Circoli and Il Meridiano di Roma, and publishers, such as Il Saggiatore. After 1932 worked for the cinema and wrote scripts and reviews. Married Maria Renata Orengo, 1930, with whom he had two children, Elisa, 1933, and Antonio, 1937. During the war participated actively in the partisan Resistance. Taught at the University of Messina, 1950–1958; then at the University of Rome, 1958. Died in Rome on 20 January 1967. STEFANO TOMASSINI

Selected Works Collections Opere di Giacomo Debenedetti, edited by Cesare Garboli and Renata Debenedetti, 4 vols., Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1969–1973. Saggi, edited by Alfonso Berardinelli, Milan: Mondadori, 1999.

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Fiction

George Eliot, Il mulino sulla Floss, 1940. Marcel Proust, Un amore di Swann, 1948. Katherine Mansfield, Felicita`: Qualcosa di infantile ma di molto naturale, 1959. Henry Miller, Il tempo degli assassini, 1966.

Further Reading Berardinelli, Alfonso, ‘‘Giacomo Debenedetti: il libertino devoto,’’ in Giacomo Debenedetti, Saggi, Milan: Mondadori, 1999. Bertacchini, Renato, ‘‘Giacomo Debenedetti,’’ in Letteratura italiana. I critici, Milan: Marzorati, 1969. Contini, Gianfranco, La letteratura italiana: OttoNovecento, Florence: Sansoni, 1974. Debenedetti, Antonio, Giacomino, Milan: Rizzoli, 1994. Fortini, Franco, ‘‘Giacomo Debenedetti,’’ in Enciclopedia europea, vol. 3, Milan: Garzanti, 1977. Garboli, Cesare (editor), Giacomo Debenedetti 1901–1967, Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1968. Jona, Emilio, and Vanni Scheiwiller (editors), Giacomo Debenedetti: l’arte del leggere, Milan: Scheiwiller, 2001. Pasolini, Pier Paolo, Introduction to Giacomo Debenedetti, Poesia italiana del Novecento, Milan: Garzanti, 1974. Sanguineti, Edoardo, ‘‘Il ‘racconto critico’ di Debenedetti,’’ in Letteratura italiana. I critici, Milan: Marzorati, 1969. Tordi, Rosita (editor), Il Novecento di Debenedetti, Milan: Fondazione Alberto e Arnoldo Mondadori, 1991.

DECADENTISMO

DECADENTISMO Decadentismo can be seen as a proper literary movement only during the 1880s in France; apart from this historical framing, the term can be used to define both a particular taste that spread throughout Europe in the late nineteenth century, and a historiographical category that has enjoyed a long-term critical success, especially in Italy. Therefore, the notion of Decadentismo must be perceived as a cultural and historiographical category, rather than an epistemological one. Whereas it has affinities with Futurism, the psychological novel, and writers such as Pirandello, literary Decadentismo is defined by two complementary perspectives: the presence of a particular taste and topical structures usually referred to as ‘‘decadent’’ within a literary work or poetic; and, conversely, the historical reasons and modes of the critical reading of a work or poetic as decadent. Italian Decadentismo is basically an imported phenomenon: The influence of contemporary European artistic experiences (mainly French) acted on the basis of Italian Romantic tradition, thus developing trends that were similar to the foreign poetics. The Italian tradition lacked the conditions either to produce a self-autonomous movement or to fully absorb an imported one. Romanticism had been strongly oriented by the ‘‘practical’’ need to support the process of national unification: The historical-political novel and patriotic poetry were not an ideal ground to nurture those Romantic components that elsewhere evolved into decadent modes. In this sense, the principle of the autonomy of art, which was at the core of decadent ideology, was incompatible with the idea of a moral and social function of art, which was at the basis of Italian Romanticism. Decadent atmospheres and topics (exoticism and Byzantium, neurosis and illness, melancholy and death drive, morbid sensuality and the femme fatale) as well as certain stylistic devices (musicality, free verse, neo-Stilnovo, synesthesia) inspired reservations about the immorality and the obscurity of decadent works. This moral prejudice strongly affected most critics who, faithful to the ideal of a sanita` italiana (Italian soundness), expected transparency and clarity from the work of art, which had to be classically rational and comprehensible for the masses. Consequently,

Decadentismo lost much of the polemical and revolutionary e´lan that characterized its European fin-de-sie`cle counterparts. The first Italian avant-garde movement, which came in the wake of unification, is found between 1860 and 1870 in Milan, the only industrial metropolis with the ideal characteristics and geographical position to bridge Italy with the great European capitals. Milan was also the centre of the editorial industry, and could provide a consistent, wide audience. Thus, the spreading of the decadent taste passed mainly through literary journals, which regularly offered translations of foreign authors and artistic debates. A leading role was played by Fanfulla della domenica, Domenica letteraria, Capitan Fracassa, Ariel, and La tribuna. As a result, the professional man of letters emerged for the first time as a powerful figure (molded after the French model); but with him came the strained relations between artists and readers. In this sense, the Milanese Scapigliatura is the first example of the breach of the artist with bourgeois society. The Italian term decadenza first appeared in the writings of the Scapigliati, a composite and looseknit group of writers, artists, and journalists who rejected patriotic oratory and sought inspiration in contemporary European authors (Gautier, Hoffmann, Baudelaire), as well as graveyard poetry and Impressionist paintings. Their defence of ‘‘sick’’ and ‘‘decadent’’ art appeared in the journal Il figaro, founded by Emilio Praga and Arrigo Boito in 1864. The Scapigliati, however, did not develop an independent and organic poetic, but rather a repertory of topics and a new taste, which widened the spectrum of the available artistic attitudes. At this time, Decadentismo is viewed as a degeneration of Romanticism. Among the first critics to address decadent and symbolist writers were Vittorio Pica, who introduced the notion of Decadentismo in several articles written for La gazzetta letteraria (Turin), Enrico Panzacchi, and Arturo Graf. In the 1890s, two important publications, which condemned decadent poetics and works, achieved an unusual success and were translated into Italian respectively in 1893–1894 and 1899: Max Nordau’s Entartung (Degeneration, 1892–1893), a Lombrosian 579

DECADENTISMO case study of ‘‘degenerate’’ fin-de-sie`cle artists, and Tolstoy’s What Is Art? (1897), which attacked aestheticism. The French symbolists were the main target of these attacks, since they did not allow any compromises between ‘‘aristocratic’’ and ‘‘popular’’ art, a distinction that animated all Italian debates about literature. Meanwhile, the propulsive centre of decadent taste moved to Rome, which in 1871, after centuries of immobility and provincialism, had become a busy capital and the meeting place for aristocrats, bourgeois intellectuals, artists, and journalists. During the 1880s the myth of ‘‘Byzantine’’ Rome was born: a corrupt and decaying city, the perfect backdrop for an adventurous decadent hero, as in Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Il piacere (The Child of Pleasure, 1889). Some journals and their editors also played an important role in promoting the new taste: Cronaca bizantina (1882–1886) edited by Angelo Sommaruga (1857–1941), and Convito (1895–1896) founded by Adolfo De Bosis (1863–1924). The young D’Annunzio was a tireless collaborator of both journals, which enlisted among others Enrico Nencioni (1837–1896), Contessa Lara (1849–1896), Edoardo Scarfoglio (1860–1917), Giulio Salvadori (1862–1928), and Panzacchi (1840–1904). The history of these editorial enterprises exemplifies the evolution of the Byzantine current in Italy. For example, Cronaca bizantina imported the Parnassian taste and writers such as Gautier, Leconte de Lisle, The´odore de Banville. It was inspired by Baudelaire, Flaubert, and their exotic atmospheres. Eventually, due primarily to the influence of D’Annunzio, English aestheticism (Swinburne and the Pre-Raphaelites) became the main literary trend in Convito. Apart from the Roman Byzantine group, there are quite a few writers difficult to label, and commonly associated either with Scapigliatura, Verismo, generic fin-de-sie`cle trends, or indeed with Decadentismo. Among those who contributed to the dissolution of the nineteenth-century novel are Edoardo Calandra (1852–1911), Camillo Boito (1836–1914), and Luigi Gualdo (1847–1898), whose main novel was entitled Decadenza (Decadence, 1892). These novelists study pathological states of mind and psychological diseases (typical of Scapigliatura); others, such as Carlo Dossi (1849–1910), Giovanni Faldella (1846–1928), and Achille Giovanni Cagna (1847– 1931), are mostly concerned with the regeneration of literary style and language. On the other hand, poets such as Domenico Gnoli (1838–1915), Giovanni Camerana (1845–1905), Arturo Graf (1848– 1913), Remigio Zena (1850–1917), and Vittoria 580

Aganoor Pompilij (1855–1910), either reacted to Dannunzian aestheticism by seeking inspiration in the European symbolists, or applied a sort of ‘‘poetica della sincerita`’’ (poetics of sincerity) that anticipated some registers and metric forms of Crepuscolarismo. In other words, they are decadents in a knowingly minor key. By this time, a rupture between the artist and bourgeois society, i.e., between the writer and his audience, was widely acknowledged. While a content middle class still believed in the myths of scientific positivism and progress, fin-de-sie`cle intellectuals foreshadowed the oncoming crisis: They were to found the ultimate portrait of the decadent artist in a novel by Huysmans, A rebours (1884), and in a play by Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Axel (1890). Both works portray the retreat of the artist in an ivory tower in order to cherish his art and neurosis. At the opposite pole, there is Rimbaud, whose personal frustrations and impossibility of social interaction led to escapism, exoticism, loss of control, and a death drive. Isolation from a materialist society easily evolved into mystical and irrational withdrawal, generating comforting personal myths. The most emblematic outcomes, as shown by Carlo Salinari in Miti e coscienza del decadentismo italiano (1960), overlap with the most important writers of the time: the Superman in D’Annunzio, the fanciullino (or child-like poetic sensibility) in Pascoli, and the saint in Fogazzaro. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Benedetto Croce became the spokesperson for the moralistic vision of Decadentismo, by interpreting the phenomenon as an expression of the general crisis of modern institutions. In Croce’s perspective, it was purely a ‘‘spiritual condition.’’ The critic acknowledged, in contemporary literature, the presence of a ‘‘spiritual subtlety’’ but also a lack of clarity and sincerity: Decadentismo was nothing more than ‘‘the great industry of the void’’ (‘‘Di un carattere della piu` recente letteratura italiana,’’ 1907). Subsequent discussions were indebted to Croce’s strong argument, and mainly focussed on the contents and the moral aspects of decadent works. In the first historical study of Decadentismo, Walter Binni claimed the originality of decadent poetics against Croce’s moralistic polemics. For Binni, Decadentismo was distinctly separate from the generic notion of ‘‘decadence’’ (La poetica del decadentismo italiano, 1936). The term defined the historical period following Romanticism and naturalism, and, by resuming some aspects of Romantic poetics, it produced symbolism and the ideal of art for art’s sake. A few years before, Mario Praz’s La

´ SPEDES ALBA DE CE carne, la morte e il diavlo nella letteratura romantica (1930) elegantly analysed decadent imagination, topical structures, and neuroses—even if the only Italian writer taken into serious consideration was D’Annunzio. After World War II, Binni’s perspective prevails and Decadentismo is viewed as the first document of the twentieth century’s ‘‘literature of crisis.’’ Current usage and interpretations are inclined to employ the term on a morally neutral ground, even though the negative labels stemming from Croce have yet to vanish. Decadentismo should be considered a historiographical concept—a concept that defines a group of writers, artists, and their works better understood within the more suitable category of Modernism. SIMONA MICALI Further Reading Anceschi, Luciano, Le poetiche del Novecento in Italia, Turin: Paravia, 1973. Binni, Walter, La poetica del decadentismo italiano, Florence: Sansoni, 1968. Bobbio, Norberto, La filosofia del Decadentismo, Turin: Chiantore, 1944. Ceserani, Remo, ‘‘Letteratura e cultura di fine secolo e del primo Novecento,’’ in Storia della letteratura italiana—Tra l’Otto e il Novecento, vol. 8, edited by E. Malato, Rome: Salerno, 1999. Constable, Liz et alia (editors), Perennial Decay: On the Aesthetics and Politics of Decadence, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. Croce, Benedetto, ‘‘Di un carattere della piu` recente letteratura italiana,’’ in Letteratura della nuova Italia, vol. 4, Bari: Laterza, 1929. Flora, Francesco, Dal romanticismo al futurismo, Milan: Mondadori, 1925.

Ghidetti, Enrico, Malattia, coscienza e destino: Per una mitografia del Decadentismo, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1993. Gilman, Richard, Decadence: The Strange Life of an Epithet, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975. Gioanola, Elio, Il decadentismo, Rome: Studium, 1972. Graf, Arturo, La crisi letteraria, Turin: Loescher, 1888. Leone de Castris, Arcangelo, Il Decadentismo italiano (Svevo, Pirandello, D’Annunzio), Bari: De Donato, 1974. Luka´cs, Georg, ‘‘Healthy or Sick Art?’’ in Writer and Critic, London: Merlin Press, 1978. Luperini, Romano, Letteratura e ideologia nel primo Novecento italiano, Pisa: Pacini, 1973. Marcazzan, Mario, ‘‘Dal Romanticismo al Decadentismo,’’ in G. Grana (editor), Letteratura italiana—Le correnti, Milan: Marzorati, 1956. Nordau, Max, Degeneration, 1892–1893, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993. Panzacchi, Enrico, ‘‘I decadenti,’’ in Lettere ed arti, 9 February 1889. Pica, Vittorio, Letteratura d’eccezione, 1st ed. 1899, Genoa: Costa & Nolan, 1987. Praz, Mario, La carne, la morte e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica, 1st ed. 1930, Florence: Sansoni, 1948. Salinari, Carlo, Miti e coscienza del decadentismo italiano: D’Annunzio, Pascoli, Fogazzaro e Pirandello, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1960. Scarano, Emanuella, Dalla ‘‘Cronaca bizantina’’ al ‘‘Convito,’’ Florence: Vallecchi, 1970. Scrivano, Riccardo, Il decadentismo e la critica, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1963. Somigli, Luca, and Mario Moroni, Italian Modernism, Toronto-Buffalo-London: University of Toronto Press, 2004. Sormani, Elsa, Bizantini e decadenti nell’Italia umbertina, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1971. Spackman, Barbara, Decadent Genealogies: The Rhetoric of Sickness from Baudelaire to D’Annunzio, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1989. Tolstoy, Leo, What Is Art?, 1st ed. 1897, New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1960.

ALBA DE CE´SPEDES (1911–1997) Novelist and poet, Alba de Ce´spedes began her career as a journalist for Il messaggero in the early 1930s. She published her first collection of short stories, L’anima degli altri (The Soul of Others) and a novel, Io, suo padre: Romanzo sportivo (I, His Father: A Sports Novel) in 1935. The latter, which portrays the transfer of allegiance of a

boxing champion son from his father to the new Italian Fascist state, was chosen to represent Italian literature at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. A second collection of short stories, Concerto (Concert), appeared in 1937. These earlier works pay lip service to Fascist rhetoric, reflecting the ideological pressure placed by the regime’s expectations on 581

´ SPEDES ALBA DE CE women who, like de Ce´spedes, wished to establish themselves as writers and journalists. Beginning with Nessuno torna indietro (There’s No Turning Back, 1938), de Ce´spedes’ works focus on women and often have feminist implications, though they are written in a style that, while spare and unadorned, verges on romantic melodrama, and may recall that of popular fiction. Her female protagonists struggle with the paradoxes they experience as they attempt to affirm their identity and autonomy under Fascism and, later, corrupt Italian postwar governments and a culture that was still largely gender-biased and discriminatory. Nessuno torna indietro is the story of the lives of eight young women of different backgrounds and social classes housed in Rome in 1934–1936 at the Pensione Grimaldi, run by Catholic nuns. In the boarding house, away from their families, these women are free to share their dreams and goals with one another and to forge intimate, even illicit relationships as they pursue (with one exception) a university education that was supposedly encouraged by the state. However, the boarding house becomes the space where the female protagonists construct their own personal histories and identities away from the usual constraints of Fascist engineering politics. The novel explores the themes of female friendships among women from different classes and geographical areas and the contradictory expectations faced by women on the path either to emancipation or conformity. Nessuno torna indietro was translated into 24 languages and brought the author worldwide recognition. For its allusions to contraception, abortion, and female homosexuality, it was banned in late 1940 because it did not reflect Fascist morality. Within one year, another of her works, the short story collection entitled Fuga (The Flight, 1940), was censored. De Ce´spedes also collaborated to the screenplay of the rather tame cinematic adaptation of the novel directed by Alessandro Blasetti in 1943. During the Republic of Salo` and the German occupation of Italy (1943–1945), de Ce´spedes worked for Radio partigiana in Bari under the code name of Clorinda and was imprisoned for these activities. In 1944, she founded the literary magazine Mercurio, which published works by contemporary writers, among others Alberto Moravia, Eugenio Montale and Elio Vittorini. After World War II, de Ce´spedes’ novels, due in part to their highly readable, straightforward and unpretentious style, continued to garner critical acclaim at home and abroad through their translations into many languages. de Ce´spedes portrays a 582

large variety of female types who struggle to overcome the paradoxes imposed upon them and their own contradictory aspirations as they seek autonomy and self-awareness. In her works, one finds an array of psychological and unidealized portraits of women and their means of dealing with society. Her experiences during wartime inspired Dalla parte di lei (The Best of Husbands, 1949), a memoir of a disappointed and frustrated woman, Alessandra, who is driven to kill her husband. The novel is a probing inquiry of the rights of women within matrimonial boundaries and a compelling analysis of the social motivations that brought the protagonist to commit murder. De Ce´spedes also wrote a theatrical adaptation. In the 1950s, the author established her residence in Paris, but she continued to write primarily in Italian. In Quaderno proibito (The Secret, 1952), Valeria, a housewife, fails in her attempt to escape from her traditional role as mother and wife. She has two grown and self-centered children, Riccardo and Mirella, and a career-oriented husband who works in a bank. Valeria, instead, works in an office and dreams of eloping with Guido, her manager. In the end she burns her diary, symbol and record of her revolt, and resumes the expected role of housewife and mother. Quaderno proibito was adapted as a play in 1962 and a television drama in 1980. Valeria’s attempt to express herself through writing is unsuccessful, however, in the novel Prima e dopo (Between Then and Now, 1955). The female protagonist, who participated in the Resistance (an event that changed her life) decides to become a writer after the war. The female characters in Prima e dopo aspire to live on their own terms in spite of family expectations, but they also recognize that life might be easier with a husband who pays the bills. Il remorse (Remorse, 1963) is an epistolary novel in which three women exchange letters concerning their experiences in both the private and public spheres. One of them, Francesca, accepts the solitude imposed upon a woman who aspires to be a writer, and she chooses to leave her husband in order to continue her artistic career. This novel, a compelling critical portrait of the postwar intelligentsia and Italian political scene, reminds us of Simone De Beauvoir’s depiction of the leftist intellectuals in Les Mandarins. In her final novels, de Ce´spedes takes on a more critical view of female attempts at empowerment through cunning and deception. La bambalona (La Bambolona, 1969), set in Rome, is the story of a bachelor attorney with a roving eye for beautiful women. He courts a 17-year-old student who

´ SPEDES ALBA DE CE skillfully manipulates him by withholding affection and feigning pregnancy. However, this portrayal of corruption and greed as well as the protagonist’s resistance to her seducer still combines gender and social issues provocatively. The film La bambalona, directed by Franco Giraldi, with Ugo Tognazzi and Isabelli Rei, was released the same year. De Ce´spedes’ last novel, Nel buio della notte (In the Darkness of the Night, 1973), tells the story of a series of drug-related events that happen to diverse characters one night in Paris. In the 1950s and 1960s, de Ce´spedes collaborated on several screenplays, most notably Michelangelo Antonioni’s Le amiche (1955). Although well known to the Italian reading public, de Ce´spedes’ novels received little, if any, critical attention from the 1970s to the 1990s, and they were commonly dismissed as popular romances or melodramas. Alba de Ce´spedes is now recognized as a female intellectual and writer whose works provide a valuable commentary on the interplay of gender and the Italian cultural and political life.

Biography Born in Rome on March 11, 1911. Daughter of the Cuban ambassador to Italy and granddaughter of the first president of the Cuban Republic. Journalist for the Il messaggero 1934–1935. Radio announcer for Radio partigiana after 1943. Founded Mercurio, the first journal of politics, arts and sciences to be published after the liberation in 1944. Married the diplomat Francesco Bounous on April 18, 1945. After Mercurio ceased publication in 1948, she continued to write for Epoca and La stampa. Resided primarily in Paris after 1950. Served as the first woman president of Confederation internationale d’auteurs litte´raires (CIAL) in the 1970s. She died in Paris on November 14, 1997. She donated her archives to Archivi Riuniti delle Donne di Milano. Her novels have been translated into over 35 languages. CAROL LAZZARO-WEIS Selected Works Novels Io, suo padre: Romanzo sportivo, 1935. Nessuno torna indietro, 1938; as There’s No Turning Back, translated by Jan Noble, 1941. Dalla parte di lei, 1949; as The Best of Husbands, translated by Frances Frenaye, 1952.

Quaderno proibito, 1952; as The Secret, translated by Isabel Quigley, 1957; rpt. 1958. Prima e dopo, 1955; as Between Then and Now, translated by Isabel Quigley, 1959; rpt. 1960. Il remorse, 1963; as Remorse, translated by William Weaver, 1967. La bambalona, 1967; as La Bambalona, translated by Isabel Quigley, 1969. Nel buio della notte, 1976.

Short Stories ‘‘L’anima degli altri,’’ 1935. ‘‘Concerto,’’ 1937. ‘‘Fuga,’’ 1941. ‘‘Invito a pranzo,’’ 1955.

Poetry ‘‘Prigionie: Liriche,’’ 1936. ‘‘Chanson des filles de mai,’’ 1968.

Further Reading Benco, Silvio, ‘‘Una romanziera,’’ in Il piccolo della sera, 15 December 1938, p. 3. Bianchini, Angela, ‘‘Alba, romanzi in battaglia,’’ in La stampa, 19 November 1997, p. 21. Carroli, Piera, Esperienza e narrazione nella scrittura di Alba de Ce´spedes, Ravenna: Longo, 1993. De Giovanni, Neria, and Assunta Mana Parsani, Femminile a confronto: Tre realta` della narrativa contemporanea: Alba de Ce´spedes, Fausta Cialente, Gianna Manzini, Rome-Bari: Lacaita, 1984. Gala, Candelas, ‘‘Identity and Writing: A Lacanian reading of Alba de Ce´spedes’ Quaderno proibito and Dacia Maraini’s Donna in Guerra,’’ in Forum Italicum, 37, no. 1 (2003): 147–160. Gallucci, Carole, ‘‘Alba de Ce´spedes’s There’s No Turning Back: Challenging the New Women’s Future,’’ in Mothers of Invention: Women. Italian Fascism and Culture, edited by Robin Pickering-Iazzi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. Gallucci, Carole, and Ellen Nerenberg (editors), Writing Beyond Fascism: Cultural Resistance in the Life and Works of Alba de Ce´spedes, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000. Lombardi, Giancarlo, Rooms With a View: Feminist Diary Fiction: 1952–1999, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002. Merry, Bruce, Women In Italian Literature. Four Studies Based on the Work of Grazia Deledda, Alba de Ce´spedes, Natalia Ginzburg and Dacia Maraini, Townsville, Australia: James Cook University Press, 1990. Paulicelli, Eugenia, ‘‘Fashion Writing under the Fascist Regime: An Italian Dictionary and Commentary of Fashion by Cesare Meano, and Short Stories by Gianna Manzini, and Alba De Ce´spedes,’’ in Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, 8, no. 1 (2004): 3–34. Pickering-Iazzi, Robin, Politics of the Visible: Writing Women, Culture, and Fascism, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Zancan, Marina (editor), Scrittrici intellettuali del Novecento: Alba de Ce´spedes, Milan: Mondadori, 2005.

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EDUARDO DE FILIPPO

ANDREA DE CHIRICO See Alberto Savinio

ANTONIO DE CURTIS See Toto`

EDUARDO DE FILIPPO (1900–1984) Eduardo De Filippo, one of the twentieth century’s greatest playwrights, was also an original interpreter of his plays and a cinema actor as well. His plays mirrored the historical-social condition of Italy from the 1920s through the rise of Fascism and through World War II into the second postwar period and the economic recovery. De Filippo mastered the art of comedy from his natural father, the actor-author Eduardo Scarpetta (1853–1925), who encouraged him to perform at an early age. De Filippo learned to write by recopying the texts of his father’s comedies, an exercise that helped him assimilate the techniques of drama. Unlike his brother Peppino (1903–1980), who bitterly denounced his father in his autobiography Una famiglia difficile (A Difficult Family, 1977), he defended Scarpetta’s behavior. The staging of Miseria e nobilta` (Poverty and Nobility) in 1953, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Scarpetta’s birth, confirmed Eduardo’s affection for his father. Indeed the fame of Scarpetta perhaps rests on this 1888 drama, written in both dialect and Italian, in which he is still casting his well-known character of the empty-headed Felice, now living in squalor and destitution. 584

Like many actors’ children, he started acting at the age of 4 in his father’s work La geisha at the Teatro Valle in Rome. In 1913, he made his official debut in Babilonia (Babylon), a musical review by Rocco Galdieri. Under Scarpetta’s guidance, he learned the skills of improvised action and dialogue, and how to interact with other actors. His great success as a performer might have helped his greatness as a writer, as it did Raffaele Viviani (1888–1950) and Peppino De Filippo. His first one-act play, Farmacia di turno (The Pharmacy, 1931) was written for his half-brother Vincenzo Scarpetta (1876–1952), but it was not approved by the manager, who thought it inappropriate for the company’s repertoire. The play appeared too heavily influenced by the early Viviani’s dramaturgy: Situations and characters followed or alternated one another without being related to a single plot, a looseness that often allowed minor characters to take on central roles. This play, like many from this early period, underwent several rewritings and revisions. His first three-act comedy was Uomo e galantuomo (Man and Gentleman, 1933), the original title of which was Ho fatto il

EDUARDO DE FILIPPO guaio? Riparero` (Have I Made Trouble? I Will Make Amends, 1926). De Filippo, while perceiving the limits of the old repertoire, from this point on kept working in a traditional vein. Nevertheless, he was attracted by the art theater of Salvatore Di Giacomo, Roberto Bracco and Raffaele Viviani, from which he would stray definitively afterward. His first plays, Ditegli sempre di sı` (Always Say Yes, 1927) and Chi e` cchiu` felice ’e me? (Who’s Happier than Me?, 1932), were modeled after his father’s dramatic techniques. He overcame the contents, form, and style of his father’s plays, but did not repudiate them. The original adaptation of Scarpetta’s comedy Cani e gatti (Dogs and Cats) confirmed that. In Ditegli sempre di sı` the protagonist is a madman obsessed with words. In Uomo e galantuomo, the madness is simulated by the protagonist, while in Ditegli sempre di sı` it is real. The very fact that insanity is not immediately recognized, but mistaken for sanity, produces a series of misunderstandings. The confusion between sanity and insanity, already a theme in the dialect, the grotesque, and the Pirandellian theater, has a long tradition in the history of the Neapolitan theater, from Antonio Petito to contemporary authors. De Filippo was influenced by Scarpetta’s ’O miedeco d’ ’e pazze (The Madmen’s Doctor, 1947), especially in the character of Luigi Strada, who is mad for the theater and is finally considered mad indeed. In Chi e` cchiu` felice ’e me the theme of cuckoldry was approached in a completely original manner: The play dramatizes the impossibility of protecting oneself from fate and unforeseen events. Vincenzo, the protagonist, thinks he can protect his life against risk, but finally recognizes the unequivocal unfaithfulness of his wife. Vincenzo is a dreamer like other ‘‘bitter’’ characters of De Filippo’s dramaturgy: Luca in Natale in casa Cupiello (The Nativity Scene, 1943), Gennaro Jovine in Napoli milionaria! (Millionaire Naples!, 1945), Pasquale Lojacono in Questi fantasmi! (Oh These Ghosts!, 1946). In these characters, the comic and tragic fuse in a manner valued and often imitated by succeeding playwrights. The character of Ferdinando Quagliuolo in Non ti pago (I Won’t Pay You, 1940) represents the most obvious example of the ‘‘Eduardian hero,’’ a tragic character in a comic context. The play revolves around the clash between two characters, the lucky Mario Bertolini and the unlucky Ferdinando, who happens to be the manager of a lottery office, an inveterate gambler. Bertolini is his employee, a player as well, but a fortunate one. With his winnings, he is able to

close the social gap that separates him from his employer and aspire to become his son-in-law. Bertolini wins after playing numbers given to him by Ferdinando’s father in a dream, but the latter does not want to pay him, rebelling against the injustice of fortune. The play was described by the author himself as filled with comedy and, at the same time, with tragedy. Notwithstanding these examples, the ironic, playful, and comic features of De Filippo’s theater should not be underestimated. It has roots in the variety show, a very successful genre of those years (the 1930s) when De Filippo, along with Peppino and their sister Titina (1898–1963), created La Ribalta Gaia (The Gay Footlights), which met with great acclaim. He was the coauthor of Pulcinella principe in sogno (Punch Prince in Dream) by Mario Mangini, called Kokasse, and wrote the one-act play Sik Sik, l’artefice magico (Sik Sik, The Masterful Magician, 1930). These two works confirmed De Filippo’s interest in the tradition and the mask of Pulcinella, a stock character from commedia dell’arte (who became the English Punch), which frequently appeared in his subsequent plays. In this early play and others, especially in the later, more dramatic texts, Pulcinella plays an autonomous, incontestable role, as evidenced by Sabato, domenica e lunedı` (Saturday, Sunday, Monday, 1959), one of his most successful plays dealing with uneasiness within a family. Sik Sik, l’artefice magico was De Filippo’s first great comic success. The figure of the mesmerizer, drawn from Viviani’s one-act play ’Mmiez ’a Ferrovia (At the Railway Station, 1918), is a charlatan who pretends he can hypnotize his partner, who is also his wife, so that she can foretell the future. Her prophecies, obviously, are bogus. This becomes obvious when Sik Sik is shown to be a dreamer whose job is his reason for living. He speaks to the audience, which does not answer, while his two ‘‘stooges,’’ Raffaele and Nicola, answer. The play also shows, with Napoli milionaria! and Filumena Marturano (1946), the human and leprous world of suffering Naples. Following a series of successes, in 1931, Eduardo, together with Peppino and Titina, established the company Teatro Umoristico I De Filippo. The company’s repertoire regularly included plays by Peppino and Titina, Ernesto Murolo, Luigi Antonelli, F. M. Martini, and Ugo Betti. However, he was faced, as other theater actors and authors were, with censorship under the Fascist regime, which had adopted a xenophobic policy limiting the dialects companies could use. It 585

EDUARDO DE FILIPPO was particularly hard to attract critical attention to the texts of the comic actors who preferred dialect and social satire. In protest, De Filippo wrote an open letter to fellow playwright and editor Luigi Antonelli, which was published in Il Giornale d’Italia on 19 March 1939, affirming that the dialectic theater deserved to be written about and published; if not, he argued, it would soon disappear. In those years, De Filippo continued to write one-act plays, among which was one of his most successful works, Natale in casa Cupiello (Christmas in the Cupiello Household, 1931), subsequently developed in three acts (1934), in which a sentimental triangle unfolds. Eduardo’s great success was also sustained by the admiration of Luigi Pirandello, who granted the De Filippos the right to translate his Liola` (1917) into the Neapolitan dialect in 1933. They also produced his 1918 Il berretto a sonagli (Cap and Bells) and, some years later L’abito nuovo (The New Suit), taken from Pirandello’s short story of that title and adapted into three acts by Eduardo. Pirandello’s respect and fellowship confirmed De Filippo’s theatrical successes, which had been secured by frequent performances of comedies like Sik-Sik, Ditegli sempre di sı`, Chi e` cchiu` felice ’e me? and Natale in casa Cupiello. Italy’s participation in World War II marked a turning point in De Filippo’s dramatic work. He completed the Cantata dei giorni pari (Cantata of the Even-numbered Days, 1959), serene texts recalling the days of his youth, and began the Cantata dei giorni dispari (Cantata of the Odd-numbered Days, 1951–1966), which were comedies that described the sufferings brought on by the war. Influenced by the regime’s censorship of dialect theater, De Filippo wrote two works in those years: Uno coi capelli bianchi (A White-haired Man, 1938), in which the character of Battista Grossi is a malignant and arrogant householder, and Io, l’erede (The Heir, 1942), perhaps De Filippo’s most ‘‘Pirandellian’’ play. Io, l’erede, a story about inheritance with a bourgeois setting and low comedy elements, is written more in the Italian language than dialect. Of all Neapolitan playwrights, Eduardo was the only one who took his place among the European dramatists because he drew his inspiration from multiple sources. His works are set in his native city, and depict a wide spectrum of characters mainly from a lower-middle class background. Compared to his brother Peppino, he undertook a more safe and determined course. Compared to 586

Viviani, he offered more social certainties, fewer contentious themes and a more direct message. He did so by providing the audience with a varied theatrical idiom, a mixture of dialect and Italian. This coincided with his determination to adhere to spoken language and to escape from literary language. Compared to his contemporaries, he overcame most stock subjects. After the break with his brother Peppino in 1944, due to artistic differences, Eduardo formed another company with Titina, Il Teatro di Eduardo (1945). For many years the two brothers had played memorable zanni: one the shrewd servant type, the other the blundering fool. Eduardo remained largely faithful to the vernacular, and with his new company staged two unforgettable plays: Napoli milionaria! and Questi fantasmi!, the latter less successful than the former. Napoli milionaria! presented through the experiences of one family the sufferings and dilemmas of occupied Naples. Gennaro, played by Eduardo himself, is initially viewed with contempt by his own family, but after being captured and taken to Germany as part of a slave labour camp, returns to Naples as the judge of the degeneration and opportunism of his family who, in order to survive, yields to corruption and forgets its values of honesty and respect. At the end of Act III, Gennaro recited the last line, which became famous: ‘‘ha da passa` ‘a nuttata’’ (the night must pass). Questi fantasmi! follows the fortunes of Pasquale Lojacono, a pathetic, impoverished husband and father, who may or may not know that his wife is being unfaithful to him. He rents a house believed to be haunted to make the money indispensable to the dignity he craves. De Filippo’s social denunciation continued with the extraordinary success of Filumena Marturano, played by his sister Titina and even performed before Pope Pio XII. This play represented the desire and hope of starting anew: Filumena, a ‘‘kept woman,’’ tries to form a family and to give her three sons a father. Once again, the theme of the family is central. The following plays include Le bugie con le gambe lunghe (Lies Don’t Travel Far, 1948), La grande magia (Grand Magic, 1948), Le voci di dentro (Inner Voices, 1948), which belong to the fantastic, and La paura numero uno (The Number One Fear, 1950). These works reflected new trends in the European theater, especially the theater of the absurd. De Filippo almost completely gave up the Neapolitan dialect in the work that followed; he confronted fiction and realism, illusion and truth,

EDUARDO DE FILIPPO as seen in the comedy De Pretore Vincenzo (1957). Here the protagonist is a foundling who becomes a thief, but makes an agreement with Saint Joseph: If he steals only from the rich, he will be under the saint’s protection. Regardless, he is shot by one of his victims and, in his dying delirium, De Pretore protests but is nevertheless welcomed in Heaven. He dies with the aid of Ninuccia, a poor girl who always loved him. The play’s fantastic element contrasts to the realistic language of Il Sindaco del Rione Sanita` (The Local Authority, 1960), in which De Filippo dealt with the thorny problem of the Neapolitan Camorra. In the play, Antonio Barracano, the mayor, is a strong man in touch with his community who makes decisions and acts on them, serving as a father figure of sorts. The drama revolves around the conflict between Antonio’s sense of what justice should be and with what justice is, which essentially becomes a justice of his own. In the 1950s, Eduardo devoted himself to the cinema, as an actor, director and also wrote several screenplays. Among his credits: Napoli Milionaria (1950), Filumena Marturano (1951), Ragazza da marito (1952), Questi fantasmi (1954), and Vittorio De Sica’s L’oro di Napoli (1954). He assigned his profits to the reconstruction of the Teatro San Ferdinando, called ‘‘Il Teatro di Eduardo.’’ In 1954, draped in the garb of Pulcinella, he inaugurated the San Ferdinando, with a farce by Antonio Petito, Palummella zompa e vola (Palummella Leaps and Flies). The symbolism of play, the dedication to the traditions of Naples were unmistakable. By the mid-1970s, high taxes forced him to sell the theater and to concentrate on cinema and television. After his retirement from the stage in 1981, his son Luca formed the Compagnia di Teatro Luca De Filippo, whose first production was Vincenzo Scarpetta’s La donna e` mobile, directed by Eduardo. In the early 1960s, De Filippo composed L’arte della commedia (The Art Of Comedy, 1965), which, like Goldoni’s Il teatro comico (The Comic Theatre, 1750) and Pirandello’s Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore (Six Characters In Search of an Author, 1921), was a text of reflecting on the art of theater. Here, as in Uomo e galantuomo, Eduardo addressed the old question of the relationship between theater and power. In 1981, De Filippo gave a series of theater lectures at the University of Rome ‘‘La Sapienza,’’ later published as Lezioni di teatro in 1986. Reviewing his career as an actor and playwright, he stressed the importance of texts and of

their preservation. He discussed his work in a charming, antiacademic language, which was made more poignant by his interpretative power and his peculiar silences and pauses. Eduardo’s own life was lived completely in theater. Eduardo continued the old tradition of Neapolitan popular comedy, but the theatrical figures he created were more universal than the traditional masks. He defined humor as the bitter side of laughter originating not from everyday life, but from the disappointments of man, who by nature is an optimist. He succeeded in developing roles that turn to advantage the inherent weaknesses of commedia dell’arte, and in forging a form of theater that holds a mirror to the lives of contemporary audiences. Eduardo’s art is deeply rooted in human suffering, rather than in the virtuosity of performance and verbal dexterity.

Biography Born in Naples on 24 May 1900, the natural son of Eduardo Scarpetta and Luisa De Filippo. Selftaught. Debuted in the company of his father playing his comedies, 1904; wrote his first comedy: Uomo e galantuomo, 1922; joined the ‘‘Molinari’’ company, together with his brother Peppino and his sister Titina, 1929; with them founded the Compagnia del Teatro umoristico ‘‘I De Filippo,’’ 1931; married Thea Prandi, with whom had two children, Luca and Luisella, 1954; awarded the Feltrinelli prize by the Accademia dei Lincei, 1972; at the Old Vic in London, Sabato, Domenica e Lunedı` was staged by Franco Zeffirelli, with Laurence Olivier, 1973; after the death of Prandi, became attached to Isabella Quarantotti, married in 1977; honorary degrees from the University of Birmingham (1977) and the University of Rome (1980); retired from the stage, 1981; appointed senator for life, 1981. Died in Rome, 31 October 1984. ANTONIA LEZZA See also: Commedia dell’arte Selected Works Collections I capolavori di Eduardo, 2 vols., Turin: Einaudi, 1950. Cantata dei giorni dispari, edited by Anna Barsotti, 3 vols., Turin: Einaudi, 1951–1966. Cantata dei giorni pari, edited by Anna Barsotti, Turin: Einaudi, 1959. Teatro, edited by Guido Davico Bonino, Milan: CDE, 1985.

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EDUARDO DE FILIPPO Four Plays (The Local Authority, Grand Magic, Filumena Marturano, Napoli milionaria), translated by Carlo Ardito, London: Methuen, 1992. Teatro. Cantata dei giorni pari, edited by Nicola De Blasi and Paola Quarenghi, Milan: Mondadori, 2000. Theater Neapolitan Style: Five One-act Plays (Gennareniello, So Long Fifth Floor, The Part of Hamlet, Dead People Aren’t Scary), translated and introduced by Mimi Gisolfi D’Aponte, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004. Teatro. Cantata dei giorni dispari, edited by Nicola De Blasi and Paola Quarenghi, Milan: Mondadori, 2005.

Plays Ditegli sempre di sı`, 1927. Sik Sik, l’artefice magico, 1930; as Sik-Sik, The Masterful Magician, translated by Robert G. Bender, in Italian Quarterly, 11 (1967). Farmacia di turno, 1931. Chi e` cchiu` felice ’e me?, 1932. Uomo e galantuomo, 1933. Uno coi capelli bianchi, 1938. Non ti pago, 1940. Io, l’erede, 1942. Natale in casa Cupiello, 1943; as The Nativity Scene, translated by Anthony Molino and Paul Feinberg, in Twentieth-Century Italian Drama, edited by Jane House and Antonio Attisani, 1995. Napoli milionaria!, 1945. Questi fantasmi!, 1946; as Oh These Ghosts!, translated by Marguerita Carra` and Louise H. Warner, in Tulane Drama Review, 8, 1964. Filumena Marturano, 1946; as Filumena Marturano, translated by Eric Bentley, in The Genius of the Italian Theatre, 1964; as Filumena, translated by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall, 1978. Le bugie con le gambe lunghe, 1948. La grande magia, 1948. Le voci di dentro, 1948; as The Inner Voices, translated by N.F. Simpson, 1983. La paura numero uno, 1950. De Pretore Vincenzo, 1957. Sabato, domenica e lunedı`, 1959; as Saturday, Sunday, Monday, translated by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall, 1974. Il Sindaco del Rione Sanita`, 1960. L’arte della commedia, 1965. Tre adattamenti teatrali: Sogno di una notte di mezza sbornia, La monaca fauza, Cani e gatti, 1999.

Poetry ‘‘Il paese di Pulcinella,’’ 1951. ‘‘’O canisto,’’ 1971. ‘‘Le poesie di Eduardo,’’ 1975; rpt. 1989. ‘‘’O penziero e altre poesie di Eduardo,’’ 1985; as Bare Thoughts: Poems, translated by Frank Palescandolo, 2002.

Other Colloquio con Pirandello, 1937. Lettera al Ministro dello Spettacolo, 1961. Lezioni di teatro, 1986. Serata d’onore, 2000.

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Further Reading Angelini, Franca, ‘‘Eduardo negli anni Trenta: abiti vecchi e nuovi,’’ in Rasoi. Teatri napoletani del Novecento, Rome: Bulzoni, 2003. Barsotti, Anna, Eduardo drammaturgo (fra mondo del teatro e teatro del mondo), Rome: Bulzoni, 1988; 1995. Barsotti, Anna, Introduzione a Eduardo, Bari: Laterza, 1992. Barsotti, Anna, Eduardo, Turin: Einaudi, 2003 (with videotape Eduardo racconta Eduardo, edited by Maurizio Giammusso and Nello Pepe). Bender, Robert G., ‘‘Pulcinella, Pirandello, and Other Influences on De Filippo’s Dramaturgy,’’ in Italian Quarterly, 12 (1968): 39–71. De Filippo, Peppino, Una famiglia difficile, Naples: Marotta, 1977. Di Franco, Fiorenza, Il teatro di Eduardo, Bari: Laterza, 1975. Esposito, Edoardo, Repe`res culturels dans le the´aˆtre ´ ditions Universid’Eduardo De Filippo, Toulouse: E taires du Sud, 2002. Fiorino, Tonia, and Franco Carmelo Greco (editors), Eduardo 2000, Naples: ESI, 2000. Frascani, Federico, Eduardo segreto, Naples: Edizioni del Delfino, 1982. Frascani, Federico, Ricordando Eduardo, Naples: Colonnese, 2000. Giammattei, Emma, Eduardo De Filippo, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1982. Giammusso, Maurizio, Vita di Eduardo, Rome: Elleu, 2004. Greco, Franco Carmelo (editor), Eduardo e Napoli. Eduardo e l’Europa, Naples: ESI, 1993. Lezza, Antonia, ‘‘Lo spazio (dei testi),’’ in Eduardo De Filippo scrittore, edited by Nicola De Blasi and Tonia Fiorino, Naples: Dante & Descartes, 2004. Lombardo, Agostino, Eduardo e Shakespeare, Rome: Bulzoni, 2004. Mignone, Mario B., Eduardo De Filippo, Boston: Twayne, 1984. Ottai, Antonella, Come a concerto. Il Teatro Umoristico nelle scene degli anni Trenta, Rome: Bulzoni, 2002. Puppa, Paolo, Il teatro dei testi, Turin: UTET, 2003. Quarantotti De Filippo, Isabella (editor), Eduardo. Polemiche, pensieri, pagine inedite, Milan: Bompiani, 1985. Quarenghi, Paola, Lo spettatore col binocolo. Eduardo De Filippo dalla scena allo schermo, Rome: Kappa, 1995. Scafoglio, Domenico, and Luigi M. Lombardi Satriani, Pulcinella. Il mito e la storia, Milan: Leonardo, 1990. Taviani, Ferdinando, ‘‘Eduardo De Filippo e Dario Fo,’’ in Uomini di scena, uomini di libro, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1995. Viviani, Vittorio, ‘‘Eduardo De Filippo,’’ in Storia del teatro napoletano, Naples: Guida, 1969; enlarged edition, 1992.

EDUARDO DE FILIPPO

FILUMENA MARTURANO, 1946 Play by Eduardo De Filippo

Filumena Marturano, a comedy in three acts based on a news item, was De Filippo’s tribute to his sister Titina. For the first time, he gave up his role as main protagonist. The drama centers on Filumena Marturano, a former prostitute who lives with Domenico Soriano, whose pastry shop she runs. Having learned that Domenico has decided to marry the young Diana, she pretends to be dying and gets married in extremis. Filumena later reveals the motive for her deception: to give a surname to her three children, whose existence she has always concealed. When a furious Domenico decides to undo the imposed marriage, Filumena refuses to tell him which of the three boys is his own son. Domenico finally yields to her and chooses to celebrate their wedding and recognize all three boys as his legitimate children. The play is dominated by the character of Filumena, who embodies woman in her different roles as prostitute, lover, wife, and mother. She is proud and ironic, cunning and brave. Unlike the heroines of Raffaele Viviani’s theater, Filumena is singleminded in pursuing her goal: the establishment of a real ‘‘family.’’ She loves Domenico; she is in some ways a tragic character, but unlike other female characters of Southern Italian dramaturgy, she never adopts a melodramatic tone. In fact, the key phrase of the text ‘‘’E figlie so’ ffiglie’’ (Children are children), pronounced by Filumena and repeated by Domenico as his closing line, must be ‘‘said’’ in the right tone. The comedy was first performed on 7 November 1946 at the Teatro Politeama in Naples. It opened to critical acclaim, but was poorly received by the general audience. In 1951, De Filippo made a film version that starred Titinia in the title role. In 1964, Vittorio De Sica turned the play into a film, Matrimonio all’italiana (Marriage, Italian-Style),

with Sofia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni: It was a commercial success, but De Filippo himself did not like it. On the occasion of the centenary of Eduardo’s birth, in the year 2000, the Compagnia degli Ipocriti presented a new staging of the play directed by Cristina Pezzoli, which was well-received. Unforgettable in the roles of Filumena and Domenico were Isa Danieli and Antonio Casagrande. The stage designed by Bruno Buonincontri and the music by Pasquale Scialo` were exceptionally good. Filumena Marturano is, indeed, one of the most widely translated Italian comedies and one of the most widely performed abroad. ANTONIA LEZZA Editions First edition: Filumena Marturano, in I capolavori di Eduardo, Turin: Einaudi, 1950. Other editions: in Cantata dei giorni dispari, Turin: Einaudi, 1951; in Cantata dei giorni dispari, edited by Anna Barsotti, Turin: Einaudi, 1995.

Translations As Filumena Marturano in The Genius of the Italian Theatre, edited and translated by Eric Bentley, New York: American Library, Mentor, 1964; in Masterpieces of Modern Italian Theatre, edited by Robert W. Corrigan, translated by Eric Bentley, New York: First Collier Books, 1967; as Filumena, translated by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall, London: French, 1978; in Four Plays, translated by Carlo Ardito, London: Methuen, 1992.

Further Reading Barsotti, Anna, ‘‘Nota storico-critica a Filumena Marturano,’’ in E. De Filippo, Cantata dei giorni dispari, Turin: Einaudi, 1995. Barsotti, Anna, ‘‘La Filumena della Pezzoli: interni in esterno,’’ in Il Castello di Elsinore, 41 (2001): 53–56. De Miro D’Ajeta, Barbara, La figura della donna nel teatro di Eduardo De Filippo, Naples: Liguori, 2002. Frascani, Federico, Eduardo segreto, Naples: Edizioni del Delfino, 1982. Ottai, Antonella (editor), Eduardo, l’arte del Teatro in televisione, Rome: Rai Eri, 2000. Valoroso, Antonella, ‘‘Quante storie per donna Filomena. Filumena Maturano fra teatro, cinema e mito,’’ in Eduardo De Filippo scrittore, edited by Nicola De Blasi and Tonia Fiorino, Naples: Dante & Descartes, 2004.

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EDUARDO DE FILIPPO

NATALE IN CASA CUPIELLO, 1943 Play by Eduardo De Filippo

Natale in casa Cupiello (The Nativity Scene) has the most complex compositional history of any of Eduardo De Filippo’s plays. Written in 1931 as a one-act play, it became a two-act comedy around 1932–1933 and was fully developed in 1943 with the addition of the third act. The play was written during a period when Eduardo had given up variety theater and invented a new author-actor’s way of playwriting that allowed for improvisation performance. On Christmas Day 1931, the newly founded company Teatro Umoristico I De Filippo staged Eduardo’s one-act play at the Cinema Kursaal In Naples. Their engagement, originally scheduled for one week, was extended until May 1932. The play’s main character is Luca Cupiello, whose annual preparation of the Nativity scene is met with indifference by his wife Concetta and his son Tommasino, who, out of spite, always says he does not like the crib. Domestic peace is broken by the daughter Ninuccia, who tells her mother that she has decided to leave her husband Nicolino for Vittorio, and to send him a parting letter. Concetta, in despair, manages to get the letter from her daughter but it falls into the hands of Luca. Oblivious to its contents, Luca gives the letter to his son-in-law, who then learns about his wife’s adultery. During Christmas Eve dinner, the two rivals (Nicolino and Vittorio) quarrel violently. Nicolino abandons his wife, and Luca, realizing the situation, collapses. In his final delirium, Luca mistakes Vittorio for his son-in-law and, paradoxically, brings about the two lovers’ reconciliation. Tommasino finally concedes that he likes the crib. Natale in casa Cupiello is one of De Filippo’s few early works that features a bedroom setting, foreshadowing the famous scene of Napoli milionaria! (Millionaire Naples, 1945), in which Gennario Jovine fakes his own death to save his wife Amalia from trafficking charges. The main setting of the play, however, is the dining room where the Christmas dinner takes place. The crib itself symbolises Luca Cupiello’s isolation, loneliness and will. 590

Each of the three acts represents a stage in Luca’s existential journey, which is condensed in a few, meaningful days: the day before Christmas Eve, Christmas Eve, and the three days after Christmas. The first and the third act form the prologue and the epilogue of the microtragedy of the antihero, Luca Cupiello, who until his death holds on tenaciously to the family ritual of the crib. In the play, the crib has a distinct symbolic value: To Luca, it is a refuge from his family’s anxieties and troubles, but to others it is a way to keep him from learning or confronting uncomfortable truths. The famous line concerning the crib at the end of Act 3— ‘‘Tommasi’, te piace o’ Presebbio’’ (Tommasi’, do you like the crib?)—symbolises the generation gap between Luca and his son. The utopian ideology of the father, who loves the crib, is set against the realism of the son, who loves ‘‘ ’a zuppa ’e latte’’ (a bowl of milk for dunking). The family remains the focus of Eduardo’s compassionate vision, and the family ties are singled out as the only thread of very lonely individuals: ‘‘Vi dovete voler bene’’ (You must love one another), utters a dying Luca. Natale in casa Cupiello has been hugely successful and has been widely broadcast for television and radio. Its success is primarily due to De Filippo’s unique way of describing unhappy things with a sad smile, of presenting disappointment and pain through a veil of comedy. ANTONIA LEZZA Editions First edition: ‘‘Natale in casa Cupiello,’’ in Il Dramma, 397–398 (1943): 72–86. Other editions: Natale in casa Cupiello, Turin: Einaudi, 1950; in Cantata dei giorni pari, edited by Anna Barsotti, Turin: Einaudi, 1998; in Teatro. Cantata dei giorni pari, edited by Nicola De Blasi and Paola Quarenghi, Milan: Mondadori, 2000. Translations: The Nativity Scene, translated by Anthony Molino and Paul Feinberg, in Twentieth-Century of Italian Drama, edited by Jane House and Antonio Attisani, New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.

Further Reading Angelini, Franca, ‘‘Natale in casa Cupiello’’ di Eduardo De Filippo,’’ in Letteratura italiana. Le opere, vol. 3, Turin: Einaudi, 1995. Barsotti, Anna, ‘‘Nota storico-critica a Natale in casa Cupiello,’’ in E. De Filippo, Cantata dei giorni pari, Turin: Einaudi, 1998. De Blasi, Nicola, ‘‘Nota filologico-linguistica a Natale in casa Cupiello,’’ in E. De Filippo, Teatro. Cantata dei giorni pari, Milan: Mondadori, 2000.

GRAZIA DELEDDA De Matteis, Stefano, ‘‘Storia di Natale,’’ in Lo specchio della vita. Napoli: antropologia della citta` del teatro, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1991. Puglisi, Angelo, In casa Cupiello. Eduardo critico del populismo, Rome: Donzelli, 2001.

Quarenghi, Paola, Lo spettatore col binocolo. Eduardo De Filippo dalla scena allo schermo, Rome: Kappa, 1995. Quarenghi, Paola, ‘‘Nota storico-critica a Natale in casa Cupiello,’’ in E. De Filippo, Teatro. Cantata dei giorni pari, Milan: Mondadori, 2000.

GRAZIA DELEDDA (1871–1936) Grazia Deledda was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1926. She was the second Italian to receive this honour after Giosue` Carducci, who had been given the prize in 1906, and the second woman after the Swedish Selma Lagerlo¨f, who had received the Nobel in 1909. According to Henrick Schu¨ck, member of the Swedish Academy who spoke about Deledda’s works on this occasion, her great merit was having discovered her own native island of Sardinia and making it known in her writings (Discorso ufficiale alla consegna del Nobel, 1959). She described the ancient traditions of her people and endowed her characters with a simple, primitive way of thinking that made them seem at once realistic characters and Old Testament figures. Similarly, she portrayed nature with a majesty and grandeur that reflected the feelings and habits of the Sardinian people. Finally, according to Schu¨ck, Deledda’s writing was sad but not pessimistic. Her work expressed a fundamental faith in life and in the triumph of good over evil. These were also the reasons that made her works very popular in her time. She published no fewer than 50 works of fiction as well as poems, plays, and essays. They primarily revolve around the transgression of some ancestral codes and develop the conflicts that ensue. While the public read her books with enthusiasm, contemporary critics oscillated between appreciation and condemnation of her work and were mainly concerned with placing Deledda within one of the literary currents of the time: verismo and decadentismo. Among her admirers, we find Luigi Capuana, Giovanni Verga, G.A. Borgese, and D.H. Lawrence. It is for instance Capuana’s positive review of her novel Anime oneste (Honest People, 1885) that ensured her fame. And it is D.H. Lawrence’s foreword to the 1923 English edition of La madre (The Mother, 1920) that seals her narrative boundaries. Indeed he highlights Deledda’s

vivid representation of ‘‘an island of rigid conventions, the rigid conventional of barbarians, and at the same time, the fierce violence of their instinctive passions.’’ After World War II new studies on Deledda appeared that looked at her work not only from a literary and mythical perspective, but also from an ethnic, anthropological, philosophical and psychoanalytic point of view. As a result of a strong interest in women writers that began in the 1970s, there arose a new appreciation of Deledda’s struggle to assert herself as a woman writer within a patriarchal society. Her letters were published, which proved very useful in studying her development as a prolific and important novelist. Deledda, who only attended elementary school, was mainly self-taught. At 12 she was already writing poetry, and at 16 she began her long series of publications with the short story ‘‘Sangue sardo’’ (Sardinian Blood, 1888). She persevered in her writing, despite the disapproval of her family, which thought it scandalous that a young woman should write passionate love stories. Most of her early stories were published in the review L’ultima moda and were later collected in Nell’azzurro (In the Blue, 1890) The main themes present in Deledda’s novels—many of which were serialized in periodicals such as Nuova Antologia and L’Illustrazione Italiana—are summed up in her last, largely autobiographical work Cosima (1937), published posthumously. In this book, written while she was dying of cancer, Deledda remembers her childhood, adolescence, and youth. She celebrates art, love, and, in particular, her own life as a woman and an artist. The novel begins with a description of Cosima’s house, built by her father to house his seven children, with its simple, traditional rooms, its rough, archaic objects and furniture, and its beautiful view of Nuoro’s landscape. This is the place of safety and comfort that Deledda 591

GRAZIA DELEDDA abandoned in her later years, when she moved to Rome, but to which she always returned in her memories and in her books. In the same way, she fondly describes the ritual festivities of Nuoro, which combined Christian with pagan elements, and their legends about fairies, giants and lost treasures, and the mountainous landscapes around her house. Similarly detailed descriptions are commonly found in her novels on Sardinian life, amongst which the most famous are Elias Portolu (1903), Cenere (Ashes, 1904) and Canne al vento (Reeds in the Wind, 1913). The first pages of Cosima not only introduce the main points of the book, but also recapitulate the themes of previous novels, which have much more than regional interest, even if they depict the archaic society of early twentieth-century Sardinia, with the intensity of the best Italian veristi. For example, the scene in which 5-year-old Cosima emerges at dawn from her house to announce the birth of a baby brother to the neighbourhood represents the need of all of Deledda’s characters to grow, mature, learn the secrets of sexuality, and find their own individuality apart and away from the protective and suffocating enclosure of their family home. Cosima’s admiration for the carved furniture in the guest room and for the artistic cups and plates kept in a special cupboard, her curiosity about her brother’s books, and her ecstatic contemplation of her beloved mountains from one of the windows, show her sensitivity to art and nature and her need to explore, learn, taste, and experience life. In contrast to these enthusiastic descriptions is the scene in which Cosima’s father takes her to see her mother and the newborn baby. The baby’s face is red and he is ready to cry, while the mother, pale and prematurely old, shows her usual impassive, almost enigmatic countenance. The mother, who is much younger than her husband and had married him out of duty, appears crushed by having to bear and rear one child after the other. Two different models of life for both men and women appear constantly in Deledda’s fiction. One model involves the self-sacrificing individual who respects the traditional familial roles in Sardinian patriarchal society, looks out for the family’s interests and marries according to prescribed economic and class conventions rather than out of personal feeling. The other model is the creative individual who leaves behind the traditional family life and moves to new lands. Individual sacrifice for the good of the family and community account for the many loveless marriages between young women and wealthy husbands, for instance in 592

Colombi e sparvieri (Doves and Hawks, 1912) and L’incendio nell’oliveto (The Fire in the Olive Grove, 1918). It is seen also in the old men and women who let themselves die to save and protect the family to which they belong: Efix, the old servant, in Canne al vento, and the mother of the young priest led into sin, in La madre. Another recurrent theme in Deledda’s fiction is the close, incestuous ties that develop among the members of the family. In the tightly knit Sardinian family, where women stay mostly indoors, parents establish strong bonds with their children and girls look up to the boys and men of their family as models of love and desire. Such incestuous love is felt by Elias Portolu for his sister-in-law, by Ananias for his mother Olı´ in Cenere, and by Noemi for her nephew Giacinto in Canne al vento. Cosima not only idealizes her father and her uncle Sebastiano, but admires her older brothers Santus and Andrea. The former is cool, refined, ascetic, effeminate, and completely devoted to his studies, but later becomes an alcoholic and a tramp; the latter is primitive, rough, sensual, violent, and as a young shepherd he takes his little sister Cosima with him on horseback. When she grows up, he watches jealously over her and encourages her to become a writer. These two types of men recur in Deledda’s novels and represent two sides of her personality, the creative and intellectual, the one who yearns for freedom and feels the need to escape and the one tied to Sardinian traditions, forever guilty for leaving family and friends behind. Finally, Deledda often represents the progressive decline of the Sardinian middle and lower classes toward the end of the nineteenth century. Laws were passed by a new Italian government largely unaware of Sardinian economy and society. These laws, which privatized lands, deprived shepherds and peasants of their previous rights of grazing and gleaning on the large common lands. The rich bourgeois who could afford to buy land invested in large estates, which they did not know how to cultivate. As a result many of the shepherds, reduced to poverty, took to brigandage out of despair. Deledda often portrayed landowners who lose their lands and shepherds who became servants. She introduced the figure of the bandit, to whom she gave a romantic aura and whom she presented as a free and courageous man. The theme of impoverishment is seen for instance in L’edera (The Ivy, 1906), in which the noble family Decherchi are near ruin, and in Canne al vento, where the Pintor ladies are reduced to extreme poverty. The figure of the bandit is fully developed

GRAZIA DELEDDA in Marianna Sirca (Marianna Sirca, 1915), in which Marianna develops a passion for the handsome Simone, who becomes a bandit to help his starving family. While Cosima manages to assert herself as a woman and a writer, to marry and leave her native island (as Deledda did), other novels show characters who fight in vain against their destiny and the force of tradition. They are sacrificed to the laws and economic needs of the family and to the class structure of Sardinian society. In Colombi e sparvieri, Jorgj Nieddu, an impecunious student in the village of Oronou, is unjustly accused of having stolen the treasure of his fiance´e’s grandfather. He becomes partially paralysed, a symptom of his emotional paralysis and entrapment in the past. He is rescued by the miraculous appearance of Mariana, a foreign woman born in Switzerland, who brings Jorgj precious gifts, shares his passion for poetry, and reminds him of the splendour of nature. Unlike Mariana, who is a free spirit, a creature of the light who is not tied to the conventions of the village, Jorgj’s ex-fiance´e Columba remains in the darkness of her house and though still in love with Jorgj, obeys her family and marries a rich widower. Her wedding cart became her funeral cart. She lies tired and silent with her grandfather’s black chest, in which his treasure was kept, which becomes her coffin. Far more tragic is L’incendio nell’uliveto, in which the young and beautiful Annarosa, a creature of nature connected with images of freedom, light, water and fertility, is in love with Gioele, a lower-class student and troubadour who plays the guitar and writes poems. However, Annarosa cannot escape from the dark house of her grandmother, Agostina, the matriarch of the family, and is destined to marry her wealthy relative, Stefano, in order to save the family property. In vain are Annarosa’s true feelings toward Gioele and Stefano’s love for Annarosa’s stepmother revealed by Juanniccu, Agostina’s son, a simpleton and an alcoholic, who is the only one who understands people’s hidden feelings and speaks on their behalf. In the end the values of tradition triumph, represented by the paralysed grandmother, who, like a domestic idol, sits motionless on her chair and watches over the domestic hearth. Indeed, in Deledda’s works the tensions between the old and the new, between tradition and change, usually are resolved by the triumph of old values. Her characters are alienated beings, at odds with ancestral laws. At best, they escape in conventional religion. Love, often violent, leads to self-punishment and isolation. However, it is the

clash between these different ways of life and the passions felt by all the characters that make her books always modern and fascinating.

Biography Born in Nuoro, 27 September 1871; father, Giovanni Antonio Deledda, was a landowner; mother, Francesca Cambosu, much younger than her husband. Of Deledda’s siblings (five sisters and two brothers) two of the sisters died prematurely, while one of her brothers became an alcoholic and the other ended up in prison for theft. Deledda only attended elementary school, as was customary for girls at the time. At 12 she was already writing poetry. She assiduously corresponded with publishers and scholars to ensure that her writings would be published. In 1899, she went to Cagliari and met Palmiro Madesani, an employee of the Office of Financial Administration. Married Madesani, 1900. Left Sardinia and settled with him in Rome, 1902. They had two sons, Sardus born in 1900 and Francesco in 1903. In Rome, Deledda divided her time between caring for her family and her literary work. Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, 1926. Died of breast cancer in Rome on 15 August 1936. GIULIANA SANGUINETTI KATZ See also: Decadentismo Verismo Selected Works Collections Romanzi e novelle, 5 vols., edited by Emilio Cecchi, Milan: Mondadori, 1941–1969. Opere scelte, 2 vols., edited by Eurialo de Michelis, Milan: Mondadori, 1964. Romanzi e novelle, edited by Natalino Sapegno, Milan: Mondadori, 1971. Romanzi sardi, edited by Vittorio Spinazzola, Milan: Mondadori, 1981.

Fiction Nell’azzurro, 1890. Amore regale, 1891. Amori fatali, 1892. Anime oneste, 1895. La via del male, 1896. Il vecchio della montagna, 1900. Dopo il divorzio, 1902; rpt. as Naufraghi in porto, 1920; as After the Divorce, translated by Susan Ashe, 1985. La regina delle tenebre, 1902. Elias Portolu, 1903; as Elias Portolu, translated by Martha King, 1992. Cenere, 1904; as Ashes, translated by Janice M. Kozma, 2004.

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GRAZIA DELEDDA L’edera, 1906. Il nostro padrone, 1910. Sino al confine, 1911. Colombi e sparvieri, 1912. Chiaroscuro, 1912; as Chiaroscuro and Other Stories, translated by Martha King, 1994. Canne al vento, 1913; as Reeds in the Wind, translated by Martha King, 1999. Le colpe altrui, 1914. Marianna Sirca, 1915. Il fanciullo nascosto, 1916. L’incendio nell’oliveto, 1918. La madre, 1920; as The Woman and the Priest, or, The Mother, translated by Mary G. Steegman, Forward by D. H. Lawrence, 1923; rpt. 1928 and 1987. Cattive compagne, 1921. Il dio dei viventi, 1922. Il flauto nel bosco, 1923. I vecchi e i fanciulli, 1928. Il dono di Natale, 1930. La vigna sul mare, 1932. La chiesa della solitudine, 1936; as The Church of Solitude, translated by E. Ann Matter, 2002. Cosima, 1937; as Cosima, translated by Martha King, 1988.

Poetry ‘‘Paesaggi sardi,’’ 1896.

Plays Odio vince, 1912. La grazia, 1921 (with G. Guastalla and V. Michetti). A sinistra, 1924.

Children’s Books Giaffah, 1899. I tre talismani, 1899.

Other Versi e prose giovanili, edited by Antonio Scano, 1938. Lettere di Grazia Deledda a Marino Moretti (1913–1923), 1959. Grazia Deledda, premio Nobel per la letteratura 1926, edited by Francesco Di Pilla, 1966. Lettere inedite di Grazia Deledda ad Arturo Giordano, direttore della Rivista letteraria, edited by Neria De Giovanni, 2004.

Further Reading Balducci, Carolyn, A Self-Made Woman, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975. Branca, Remo (editor), Atti del Convegno Nazionale di Studi Deleddiani, Nuoro, 30 settembre 1972, Cagliari: Fossataro, 1974. Capuana, Luigi, ‘‘Grazia Deledda,’’ in Gli ismi contemporanei, 1878; rpt. Milan: Fabbri, 1973. Collu, Ugo (editor), Grazia Deledda nelle culture contemporanee, 2 vols., Nuoro: Consorzio per la pubblica lettura ‘‘Salvatore Satta,’’ 1992. De Giovanni, Neria, Il peso dell’eros. Mito ed Eros nella Sardegna di Grazia Deledda, Alghero: Nemapress, 2001. Dolfi, Anna, Grazia Deledda, Milan: Mursia, 1979. Dolfi, Anna, et al. (editors), Grazia Deledda: Biografia e romanzo, Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 1987.

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Gunzberg, Lynn M., ‘‘Ruralism, Folklore, and Grazia Deledda’s Novels,’’ in Modern Language Review, 13, no. 3 (1983): 112–122. Heyer-Caput, Margherita, ‘‘Per svelare Il segreto dell’uomo solitario di Grazia Deledda,’’ in Quaderni d’italianistica, 22, no. 2 (2001): 121–138. King, Martha, Grazia Deledda: A Legendary Life, Leicester, UK: Troubador, 2005. Lawrence, D.H., foreword to Grazia Deledda, The Mother, translated by Mary G. Steegman, London-DedalusNew York: Hippocrene, 1987. Lombardi, Olga, Invito alla lettura di Grazia Deledda, Milan: Mursia, 1979. Olla, Gianni, Scenari sardi: Grazia Deledda tra cinema e televisione, Cagliari: Aipsa, 2001. Pellegrino, Angelo (editor), Metafora e biografia nell’opera di Grazia Deledda, Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1990. Rasy, Elisabetta, Ritratti di signora, Milan: Rizzoli, 1995. Sanguinetti Katz, Giuliana, ‘‘La scoperta dell’identita` femminile nel romanzo Cosima di Grazia Deledda,’’ in Rivista di Studi italiani, 12, no. 1 (1994): 55–73. Schu¨ck, Henrick, ‘‘Discorso ufficiale alla consegna del Nobel,’’ in Onoranze a Grazia Deledda, edited by Mario Ciusa Romagna, Cagliari: Societa` Poligrafica Sarda, 1959. Tanda, Nicola, Dal mito dell’isola all’isola del mito: Deledda e dintorni, Rome: Bulzoni, 1992. Testaferri, Ada, ‘‘Infrazione all’Eros proibito come processo d’individuazione in La Madre di Grazia Deledda,’’ in Donna. Women in Italian Culture, Toronto: Dovehouse, 1989. Zambon, Patrizia, ‘‘Leggere per scrivere. La formazione autodidattica delle scrittrici tra Otto e Novecento: Neera, Ada Negri, Grazia Deledda, Sibilla Aleramo,’’ in Studi Novecenteschi 16, no. 38 (1989): 287–324.

CANNE AL VENTO, 1913 Novel by Grazia Deledda

Canne al vento (Reeds in the Wind), considered by critics as one of Deledda’s best works, was the novel dearest to her heart. The story, set in Sardinia at the time of the Libyan War of 1912, contains many of the themes common to Deledda’s writing: the poverty of the island and the decay of its noble families, forbidden (incestuous) love with its attendant guilt and punishment, and detailed descriptions of Sardinian landscapes, religious festivals

GRAZIA DELEDDA and folklore. The novel takes place in the town of Galte in the region of Baronia afflicted by malaria and floods. It tells the story of the old and faithful servant Efix, a tenant farmer, who looks after the Pintor ladies, decayed noble women, as atonement for his past sins. Many years before he had fallen in love with Lia Pintor and helped her run away from her tyrannical father. In self-defence he killed the father who was pursuing them. Efix’s trials and tribulations are mingled with the stories of Noemi and Giacinto. Noemi, the youngest and most attractive of the Pintor ladies, is locked in disdainful isolation by her poverty and the disgrace of Lia’s escape. She is tormented by the guilt of her forbidden love for her nephew Giacinto, Lia’s son, who is also attracted to her. He is, moreover, a thief and a forger who falsified his Aunt Ester’s signature to borrow money from an usurer. His crime caused the death of his oldest aunt, Ruth, which forced the Pintor ladies into complete poverty. In the end, Noemi’s marriage to her wealthy cousin Predu and Giacinto’s imminent marriage to the young peasant Grixenda put an end to their sinful love and restored the fortunes of the Pintor family, leaving Efix to die in peace. The multiple symbolisms of the ‘‘reeds’’ (canne) of the title render the many meanings of the novel. The reeds have a maternal quality in the first chapter. They watch over the already very swollen river and put Efix to sleep by whispering a prayer that comes from the earth. At the end of the book, the reeds, broken by the wind, represent human beings destroyed by a fate they cannot control. This sense of loss and need for a nurturing mother pervade the entire narrative. As Neria De Giovanni pointed out, Noemi’s love for Giacinto echoes the forbidden love of Efix for Lia and is of a narcissistic nature (Come leggere Canne al vento di Grazia Deledda, 1993). Noemi recognizes herself in Giacinto when he embraces her and in a vision sees herself both lying at the bottom of a spring and leaning forward to drink from it. The vision symbolizes her desire to return to the womb and to be breast-fed by her mother. The novel’s loving descriptions of Sardinian landscapes and festivals is an expression of Deledda’s longing for her mother country and for her childhood. GIULIANA SANGUINETTI KATZ Editions First edition: Canne al vento, Milan: Treves, 1913. Critical editions: in Opere scelte, edited by Eurialo De Michelis, Milan: Mondadori, 1964; in Romanzi

e novelle, edited by Natalino Sapegno, Milan: Mondadori, 1971. Translation: Reeds in the Wind, translated by Martha King, New York: Italica Press, 1999.

Further Reading Agus, Serafino, Ipotesi di lettura di Grazia Deledda, Dolianova: Grafica del Parteolla, 1999. De Giovanni, Neria, Come leggere Canne al vento di Grazia Deledda, Milan: Mursia, 1993. Fuller, Peter J., ‘‘Regional Identity in Sardinian Writing of the Twentieth Century: The Work of Grazia Deledda and Giuseppe Dessı`,’’ in The Italianist, 20 (2000): 58–97. Gioanola, Elio, ‘‘Trasgressione e colpa nei romanzi sardi di Grazia Deledda,’’ in Metafora e biografia nell’opera di Grazia Deledda, edited by Angelo Pellegrino, Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1990. Massaiu, Mario, Sardegnamara: una donna un canto, Milan: IPL, 1983. Sole, Leonardo, ‘‘La semiosi iconica di Grazia Deledda. L’immagine e il suono,’’ in Grazia Deledda nella cultura contemporanea, edited by Ugo Collu, vol. 1, Nuoro: Consorzio per la pubblica lettura ‘‘Salvatore Satta,’’ 1992.

CENERE, 1904 Novel by Grazia Deledda

Cenere (Ashes) was written by Grazia Deledda in 1903 in Rome, at the beginning of the most prolific period of her career (19 novels published between 1902 and 1925), and was first serialized in Nuova Antologia before its publication the following year. Like most of Deledda’s novels, Cenere is set in Sardinia at the turn of the century, and deals with the archaic laws of family and society, with guilt, punishment and redemption and most especially with the ambivalent feelings of a son toward his mother. The novel tells the story of Anania, an illegitimate child abandoned by his mother, Olı`, because of her extreme poverty. Brought up by his father, a miller in Nuoro, he becomes a handsome and spoiled youth and a brilliant student. He is expected to marry the beautiful daughter of Carbone, the miller’s boss, who is paying for his education in Cagliari and Rome. What seems to be the story of Anania’s successful ascent into the middle class, where he will attain a lawyer’s position and a 595

GRAZIA DELEDDA happy marriage with a girl of good family, turns into tragedy when Anania cannot overcome his haunting desire to find his mother and to rescue her from her life of prostitution. Anania’s obsession stems from his longing for the beautiful woman he remembers and his anger at having been left by her and dishonored by her life of sin. When he finally meets her, prematurely old, haggard and sick, in his native village of Fonni, he treats her with great harshness. He wants to lock her up to prevent her from prostituting herself, but only succeeds in driving her to suicide. Olı`, wanting to free herself and her son from the past, cuts her throat and leaves Anania to contemplate the amulet she had given him as a parting gift: a little cloth bag filled with ashes and a stone. Anania, feeling that the amulet puts him in touch with himself, hopes to be reborn from those ashes. Some critics give particular attention to the realism of the story, such as its account of the crumbling houses of Fonni and the miserable people who frequent Anania’s mill as well as its descriptions of traditional Sardinian life. Other critics however, give more importance to the mythical, psychological and psychoanalytic elements in the novel. For instance, Anna Dolfi (Grazia Deledda, 1979) stresses the incest motif that typifies most of Deledda’s characters and Janice Kozma (Grazia Deledda and the Pathology of Arrested Maturation, 2002) points out the arrested adolescence of Deledda’s young men. In fact, Anania is emotionally aloof, lost in his fantasies and not caring for the women who love him, searching obsessively for his mother. He suffers from an unresolved Oedipal attachment and vainly hopes to recapture his union with his mother. Only her violent death brings him out of his world of dreams, compelling him to face reality and assume his responsibilities within the community. As is customary in ancient religions, a victim is sacrificed so that society may

be redeemed for its sins and life could begin anew. The ‘‘ashes’’ in the title symbolise death as well as expiation. In 1916, Febo Mari directed a 30-minute film adapted from Cenere, starring the famous Eleonora Duse in the role of Rosalia, the self-sacrificing mother. Cenere is the only cinematic performance of Duse, who is also credited for the screenplay. GIULIANA SANGUINETTI-KATZ Editions First edition: Cenere, Rome: Ripamonti and Colombo, 1904. Critical editions: in Romanzi e novelle, vol. 2, edited by Emilio Cecchi, Verona: Mondadori, 1945; in Romanzi sardi, edited by Vittorio Spinazzola, Milan: Mondadori, 1981. Translations: as Ashes, translated by Helen Colvill, New York: John Lane, 1908; as Ashes, translated by Janice M. Kosma, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004.

Further Reading Ba`rberi Squarotti, Giorgio, ‘‘La tecnica e la struttura del romanzo deleddiano,’’ in Atti del Convegno Nazionale di Studi Deleddiani, Nuoro 30 settembre 1972, edited by Remo Branca, Cagliari: Fossataro, 1974. Dolfi, Anna, Grazia Deledda, Milan: Mursia, 1979. Kozma, Janice, Grazia Deledda’s Eternal Adolescents: The Pathology of Arrested Maturation, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002. Migiel, Marilyn, ‘‘The Devil and the Phoenix: a Reading of Grazia Deledda’s Cenere,’’ in Stanford Italian Review, 5, no. 1 (1985): 55–73. Piano, Maria Giovanna, Onora la madre: autorita` femminile nella narrativa di Grazia Deledda, Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1998. Piromalli, Antonio, Grazia Deledda, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1968. Wood, Sharon, ‘‘Taboo and Transgression in Grazia Deledda,’’ in Italian Women’s Writing 1860–1994, London: Athlone, 1995.

ANTONIO DELFINI (1907–1963) Irregular, anarchic, and bizarre are some of the adjectives frequently used to define Antonio Delfini. Indeed, his works cannot be easily categorized in any of the mainstream movements or schools 596

of the twentieth century, as his eclectic and multiple interests materialized into a variety of writings belonging to different genres and not easily classified according to a particular label. His

ANTONIO DELFINI collection La Rosina perduta (The Lost Rosina, 1957) is emblematic, and includes short stories, memories, dialogues, calembours, documents, radio talks, and ‘‘automatic’’ texts, all written in different moments of his life. Delfini is anomalous according to various points of view. He was mainly self-taught, which gave him absolute freedom but also a sort of isolation because he did not belong to any school of thought, and he was seen as a literary dilettante. He was an anomaly because he was in perpetual conflict with the literary establishment, an eternal rebel against any literary convention or intellectual system. He was also an anomaly because he was an aristocrat from Modena, a small city in the Emilia Romagna region, therefore provincial with regard to the Italian intellectual capitals of the time. Yet it is difficult to separate in his biography the real from the character ‘‘Antonio Delfini’’ whom he himself helped create, a dandy, a giovinsignore of another era, always undecided on the position and the role to assume. In his youth, he first supported Fascism, then he became critical of the regime and antiFascist. He was monarchic at the referendum in 1946, and then published a Manifesto per un partito conservatore e comunista (Manifesto for a Conservative Communist Party, 1951) in which he proclaimed the need for a conservative politics for administrating land, but a Communist approach to industry. The turning point in his literary career was a brief sojourn in Paris in 1932 where he had contact with the surrealist movement; once back in Modena he experimented with ‘‘automatic writing.’’ Yet his version of surrealism represented a personal interpretation of the movement, and his automatic writing, which generated Il fanalino della Battimonda (The Lamp of Battimonda, 1940), was rather heterodox. For the surrealists, automatic writing was a mechanical form of thinking that replaced human thought; for Delfini, it was instead a way to become aware of his thinking and of his writing, freeing it from preconstituted literary schemes. Moreover, Il fanalino della Battimonda lacked the oneiric dimension typical of surrealism. Nonetheless this experiment was pivotal in Delfini’s work. It was not only the opportunity for a spontaneous writing out of the conventional literary forms, but it also created characters and narratives that returned in other Delfini works, in particular in the stories of Il ricordo della Basca (The Memory of Basca, 1938). Delfini had previously made a concession to the establishment with the poetic prose of Ritorno in citta´ (Return to the City, 1931). But the lyrical

scheme fashionable at the time did not apply to this irreverent writer. It was in the short stories of Il ricordo della Basca that Delfini expressed his real narrative vein. The collection was first published in 1938, and then reissued in 1956 with a long introduction by the author on the source of inspiration for the stories, a half-fictitious autobiographical narration that can be considered a story in itself. The last edition (1982) included the first chapter of an uncompleted historical novel entitled ‘‘Il 10 giugno 1918’’ (The 10th of June, 1918). In Il ricordo della Basca a few themes recur, including provincial life, the idealized woman, the romantic encounter, and the city of Modena. In Delfini’s treatment of these themes emerged his isolation from contemporary reality, his absence from the historical present. In his stories there was no present; there existed only the memory of the past and the dream of the future. Hence, the core of the narration, the traumatic event was not within the story; it was evoked either in memory or in dream, leaving space for details, for that which appeared futile and insignificant. The structure was not linear, progressive; it was circular, although it returned full circle but to a different point. Similar motifs also appeared in Delfini’s poetic works. If Poesie del quaderno n. 1 (Poems From Notebook No. 1, 1932) were mainly influenced by the models of the time, particularly crepuscular poetry, re-elaborating the usual themes of nostalgia and melancholy, a distinctive, rebellious, and subversive vein already surfaced in the paradoxical, nonconformist nuances of his work. His distinctive characteristics became evident in Poesie della fine del mondo (Poetry from the End of the World, 1961), a collection of ‘‘mala poesia’’ (bad poetry) according to the author himself. It was ‘‘bad poetry’’ because it lacked lyricism and delicacy, and it was full of invectives, maledictions, curses directed at a consumerist society of notaries, attorneys and politicians; at the beloved woman, now only a prostitute; and at the city of Parma that gave birth to that woman. Delfini’s unreciprocated, heartbreaking love for the mysterious Luisa B from Parma was not only documented in 39 love letters published after his death, but also in Modena 1831 citta` della Chartreuse (Modena 1831 City of the Chartreuse, 1962), a fictitious historical essay in which Delfini tried to demonstrate that the qualities Stendhal attributed to Parma were actually to be referred to Modena. After his death, due to Cesare Garboli, Delfini’s works have received renewed attention and appreciation. 597

ANTONIO DELFINI

Biography

Fiction

Born in Modena on June 10, 1907, in one of the richest and oldest families of Modena. Father died in 1908. Abandoned regular school after the second year of high school; self-taught. Joined the Fascist Party and participated in the March on Rome, 1922. Friend of future editor Ugo Guandalini with whom he published the review L’Ariete-Riforma in 1927, and Lo spettatore Italiano in 1928–1929. In spring 1932, traveled to Paris with Mario Pannunzio. In 1933, founded the magazine Oggi with Pannunzio, Eurialo De Michelis, and Guglielmo Serafini. In spring 1935, the Modena house was sold and mother and sister moved to villa of Cavezzo. Delfini moved to Florence. With Pannunzio, founded Caratteri in 1935. Contributed short stories and articles to Letteratura, Rivoluzione, La riforma letteraria, Corrente, Il selvaggio, Campo di Marte. Had a daughter, Giovanna, with Donatella Carena. In 1946, moved to Viareggio where he lived until 1953. In 1953, upon request of Pier Paolo Pasolini, was candidate for Popular Unity Party. In 1953, founded Il Liberale. He then wandered with no fixed abode between Rome and Milan, stopping in Modena and Parma, and sometimes in Viareggio. Awarded the International Prize for Free Press in Lugano for Misa Bovetti e altre cronache, 1960; and the Viareggio Prize for I racconti, 1964. Died of heart failure on February 23, 1963, in Modena. BARBARA GARBIN Selected Works Poetry ‘‘Poesie del quaderno n. 1,’’ 1932. ‘‘Poesie della fine del mondo,’’ 1961.

Ritorno in citta`, 1931. Il ricordo della Basca, 1938; revised as I racconti, 1963; new edition as Il ricordo della Basca, 1982. Il fanalino della Battimonda, 1940. La Rosina perduta, 1957. Misa Bovetti e altre cronache, 1960. Modena 1831 citta` della Chartreuse, 1962.

Other Tabella delle piu` significative opere della letteratura italiana uscite fra le due Grandi Guerre, 1918–1940 (with the pseudonym Franco Franchini), 1943. Manifesto per un partito conservatore e comunista in Italia, 1951. Diari 1927–1961, edited by Giovanna Delfini and Natalia Ginzburg, 1982. Note di uno sconosciuto, inediti e altri scritti, 1990. Manifesto per un partito conservatore e comunista e altri scritti, edited by Cesare Garboli, 1997.

Letters Lettere d’amore, edited by Giacinto Spagnoletti, 1963.

Edited L’Almanacco del Pesce d’Oro 1960 (with Ennio Flaiano and Gaio Fratini), 1959.

Further Reading Casari, Umberto, Antonio Delfini e altri intellettuali nella societa` modenese del Novecento, Verona: Fiorini, 2003. Cenati, Giuliano, ‘‘Antonio Delfini cronachista immaginario,’’ Acme (Milan), 53, no. 2 (2000): 183–214. Palazzi, Andrea, and Marco Belpoliti, Antonio Delfini, Milan: Marcos y Marcos, 1994. Palazzi, Andrea, and Cinzia Pollicelli, Antonio Delfini, Modena 1907–1963: immagini e documenti, Milan: Libri Scheiwiller, 1983. Pollicelli, Cinzia (editor), Antonio Delfini: testimonianze e saggi, Modena: Mucchi, 1990. Somigli, Luca, ‘‘Antonio Delfini tra nostalgia e satira,’’ in Studi d’Italianistica nell’Africa Australe/Italian Studies in Southern Africa, 14, no. 1 (2001): 20–35. Ungarelli, Giulio, Antonio Delfini fra memoria e sogno. Prove di lettura, Rome: Bulzoni, 1973.

DANIELE DEL GIUDICE (1949–) Along with Andrea De Carlo, Daniele Del Giudice is considered one of Italo Calvino’s most prominent disciples. Calvino, who launched their careers by writing an editorial note for the cover of their 598

first novels, recognized his literary legacy in their work. However, unlike De Carlo, who has been very prolific, Del Giudice has published few novels and short stories. He came to prominence with Lo

DANIELE DEL GIUDICE stadio di Wimbledon (Wimbledon Court, 1983), his debut novel, which takes up Calvino’s theme of visibilita` (visibility), or the quest for knowledge. The young unnamed protagonist tries to reconstruct the figure of a mysterious writer who left a small number of literary works—Roberto Bazlen (1902–1965), an eccentric Triestine intellectual of Jewish origins with a wide range of interests (including psychoanalysis) and a friend of Musil, Umberto Saba and Eugenio Montale. The protagonist’s search starts in Trieste and ends in London. He does not find the answer to his question in the rare manuscripts he comes across but in meetings with a very close friend of Bazlen’s. By reconstructing Bazlen’s (literary) identity, the young man also finds himself. A similar quest for knowledge is at the heart of Del Giudice’s second novel, Atlante occidentale (Lines of Light, 1985), which focuses on the complex relationship between a famous writer and a young scientist. The names of the two protagonists Brahe and Epstein evoke other artists and scientists. As they gradually come to understand that their own approach to reality is too exclusive (their only shared interest is a passion for flying), they become aware of their complementarity, and, in accordance with Democritus’ theory of atoms, explore reality and its possible worlds. Del Giudice was a passionate traveler. Taccuino australe (Southern Notebook), an account of his journey over Patagonia to Antarctica, was published in 1997 as a six-part newspaper serial in Il corriere della sera and Frankfurter Allgemeine. Del Giudice’s other passion, flying, is the leitmotiv of Staccando l’ombra da terra (Takeoff: The Pilot’s Lore, 1994), his first collection of short stories. The protagonists are less agents in the stories than observers or (in)direct witnesses. Their remoteness is counterbalanced by a subtle use of the familiar pronoun ‘‘tu’’ with which the narrator addresses himself, the protagonist, the other characters and the reader, sometimes simultaneously. The central theme of Staccando l’ombra da terra is death. This is probably most strikingly exemplified in ‘‘Unreported inbound Palermo’’ (in English in the original), a story that recreates the last minutes of the DC9 Alitalia crash on 27 June 1980 near the Sicilian island of Ustica, in which all passengers and crew members perished. ‘‘Unreported inbound Palermo’’ served as a basis for I-Tigi. Canto per Ustica (I-Tigi: Song for Ustica, 2001), a theater performance in which Del Giudice collaborated with the actor and playwright Marco Paolini. The performance piece alternates short textual fragments with

interludes, reconstructing both the disaster itself and the search for the true cause of the disaster. This truth was revealed only a decade later, thwarting the authorities’ attempt to conceal the fact that the plane was shot down during a NATO secret military exercise. Nel museo di Reims (In the Museum of Reims, 1983) questions the distinction between truth and lies in a different way. Set in the fine arts museum of Reims, the narrative consists of a dialogue between a young woman and a former pilot whose eyesight is deteriorating. The young woman proposes to describe the paintings to him, while in fact she is making things up. The pilot, who has seen the paintings she describes, knows she is deceiving him. Yet he plays along, which she senses in turn, so that the deceit is one they both participate in. Nereo Rotelli’s drawings, which play on a disconnection between form and content, are an integral part of the work, although they do not seem to relate to the text in any specific way. Critics have found it difficult to classify Nel museo di Reims as a novel or as a (long) short story. Critics do generally agree, however, that the short story is better suited to Del Giudice’s imagination. His work, Mania (Mania, 1997), a collection of short stories, has been widely praised for its stylistic qualities. Each of the six stories revolves around one ‘‘mania,’’ one obsession that inevitably leads to a surprising death. In the first story, ‘‘L’orecchio assoluto’’ (Perfect Pitch), the victim dies but not at the hands of his potential murderer. In ‘‘Evil Live,’’ a death occurs during a fight but the reader cannot be certain on what level of the story the character actually dies: It could be a virtual death since the characters are communicating via e-mail. A number of Calvino’s elements can be found in this collection, such as references to the theory of atoms, to mind mapping and the meaning of words (what Calvino called esattezza). These elements prove indeed to be constants in Del Giudice’s literary writings.

Biography Born in Rome, 11 July 1949. In the 1970s, worked with the alternative theater group of Grotowsky and the Nuova Scena. Since 1998, coordinator of Fondamenta. Venezia, citta` dei lettori, an annual literary event. He teaches Italian literature at the University of Venice. Contributed to various newspapers and journals, particularly Il corriere della sera. Has written on Zweig, Svevo, Stevenson, and Primo Levi. In 2002, the composer Alessandro Melchiorre adapted Del Giudice’s Atlante occidentale 599

DANIELE DEL GIUDICE into a radio play for RaiTre. He is a licensed pilot. He now lives mainly in Venice. INGE LANSLOTS Selected Works Fiction Lo stadio di Wimbledon, 1983. Atlante occidentale, 1985; as Lines of Light, translated by Norman MacAfee and Luigi Fontanella, 1998. Nel museo di Reims, 1988. Staccando l’ombra da terra, 1994; as Takeoff, translated by Joseph Farrell; rpt. as Takeoff: The Pilot’s Lore, translated by Joseph Farrell, 1997. Mania, 1997.

Other I-Tigi. Canto per Ustica (with Marco Paolini), 2001. Nel segno della parola, edited by Ivano Dionigi, 2005.

Further Reading Ammirati, Maria Pia, Il vizio di scrivere: Letture su Busi, De Carlo, Del Giudice, Pazzi, Tabucchi, Soveria Mannelli: Rubettino, 1991. Camerino, Marinella Colummi, ‘‘Daniele Del Giudice: Narrazione del luogo, percezione della spazio,’’ in South Carolina Review, 14, no. 1 (1999): 61–81. Dolfi, Anna, and Peter Brand, ‘‘Daniele Del Giudice: Planimetry of Sight/Vision in Three Books,’’ in The New Italian Novel, edited by Zygmunt Baranski and Lino Pertile, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993. Lanslots, Inge, ‘‘Le invasioni: una rivisitazione,’’ in Narrativa, 23 (2002): 167–176. Pireddu, Nicoletta, ‘‘Towards a Poet(h)ics of Techne: Primo Levi and Daniele Del Giudice,’’ in Annali d’Italianistica, 19 (2001): 189–214. Ricci, Franco, ‘‘Atlante occidentale: Daniele Del Giudice’s New Atlantis,’’ in Mosaic, 23, no. 1 (1990): 45–53. Tani, Stefano, Il romanzo del ritorno. Dal romanzo medio degli anni sessanta alla giovane narrativa degli anni ottanta, Milan: Mursia, 1990.

GIOVANNI DELLA CASA (1503–1556) Despite his prominent political and ecclesiastical career, Monsignor Giovanni Della Casa owes his fame to his literary works, which, thanks to his innate, exacting sensibility, he chooses not to publish during his lifetime. Della Casa’s writing is published by his secretary Erasmo Gemini and by his beloved nephew Annibale Rucellai. As a result, the dating and authenticity of many works is problematic, and some critics have recently called into question the attribution of large parts of his literary production. The first Venetian edition of Rime e prose (Lyric Poems and Prose, 1558) includes the Rime, the Orazione [...] scritta a Carlo V imperadore intorno alla restitutione della citta` di Piacenza (Oration [...] for Charles V, Emperor, in the Event of the Restoration of the City of Piacenza) and the Galateo (Galateo, A Renaissance Treatise on Manners). There follow various other publications, leading finally to the publication of his Opere in Naples in 1733; these six volumes represent the most complete collection of the author’s work. Among the works of Della Casa, the Galateo acquires, from the moment of its publication, unparalleled fame and fortune. The treatise is accompanied by works that explore the potentials of 600

various literary genres: composed in Latin and in the vernacular, in verse and in prose, these various endeavors are consistently approached with originality and a passion for experimentation. His vernacular works reflect the influence of classical literature; his didactic ones, the burlesque, creating a network of erudite references whose principal sources can be traced to the Ciceronian model, the humanistic rediscovery of the classics, and the Petrarchism of Pietro Bembo. Bembo is most likely the intermediary between Della Casa and the literary circle of Alvise Cornaro, a Venetian man of letters. The works produced by Cornaro’s group reflect a different yet analogous epicurean strategy, also markedly Petrarchist. Della Casa’s relationship with the Florentine Giovan Battista Gelli, author of the dialogues I capricci del bottaio (The Cooper’s Caprices, 1546) and the Circe (1549), is marked by a pedagogical spirit that is both shrewd and anticonformist. Some of Della Casa’s compositions, written during the unconventional period of his youth spent at the Accademia dei Vignaioli and inspired by the playful rhyming doggerel verse of Francesco Berni, have burlesque tones. These works include Sopra il

GIOVANNI DELLA CASA nome suo (On His Name), Del martello (On Hammers), Della stizza (On Anger), Del bacio (On the Kiss), and Sopra il forno (On the Oven), a metaphor for the female sexual organ. However, the first three were attributed to Mauro and published in Capitoli del Mauro et del Bernia et altri authori (1537); the others were instead published in Terze rime de M. Giovanni Della Casa di M. Bino et d’altri (1538). Most likely written between 1532 and 1537, these compositions are eventually repudiated by the author, who, referring to his years of bohemian life defines himself a poetuzzo di dozzina (a little poet of little importance) (‘‘Lettera di Casotti,’’ in Opere, 1733). The irreverence of these early works risks compromising the author’s prospects for an ecclesiastical career, and as a result they are definitively excluded from the body of the Rime. His lexical experimentation with a humble, allusive language and his exploration of the grotesque and subjects of low register exert an influence on later writings, from the vivid scenes that punctuate the Galateo to the everyday style that characterizes it. In spite of the presence of an undercurrent of dissent, the sixteenth century is above all the century of tutors and of the counterrevolution of the nobility. Didactic literature becomes ever more literary and specialized, a profound change from the preceding century; these changes lead to the elaboration of codes of secular behavior. Della Casa’s works are frequently marked by a distinctly didactic vein, with various connotations and ends. The didactic style often takes the form of an educational discourse addressed, for example, to the ‘‘young man’’ of the Galateo, to the ‘‘children’’ of the unfinished Trattato delle tre lingue, greca latina e toscana (Treatise on Three Languages, Greek, Latin, and Tuscan, 1728), or to the ‘‘adolescents’’ of An uxor sit ducenda (On Whether to Command One’s Wife). This last, an early misogynistic treatise in dialogue form, was first published in Naples in 1733. It explores one of the classic themes of Latin and Greek treatise writing, a theme investigated by Petrarch in An ducenda uxor et qualis (1362), and touched upon in markedly misogynist vernacular works like the Corbaccio (ca. 1356) by Boccaccio. These treatises for and against the female sex at times bear the author’s signature, thus revealing their purely rhetorical nature. Fully versed in the works of his illustrious predecessors, Della Casa’s An uxor sit ducenda adopts a thoroughly new approach to the theme, choosing a pleasing and subtly ironic tone and a conversational, facetious style. He concludes that marriage is a hindrance to those who intend to launch a

public career or engage in literary studies, according to a logic that favors the pre-eminence of the public over the private. This logic has important personal consequences for the author. On 12 March 1537, a week after the date deliberately given for the manuscript’s conclusion, Della Casa definitively embarks upon his ecclesiastical career and is named clergyman of the Camera Apostolica. The treatise thus takes the tone of a leave-taking and constitutes a retraction of the reckless life conducted in his youth. Its sporadic misogyny recalls the cruelty of certain of his early rhymes that describe the castrating power of the female figure; it also anticipates, however, some of the themes that will appear in the Galateo, such as the exaltation of friendship in contraposition to love. In more general terms, Della Casa begins to delineate the theme of the correct rapport between the Renaissance-era individual and his community by explaining certain rules of social interaction. The Trattato degli uffici communi (Treatise on Common Duty, 1559) is the vernacular translation of De officiis inter potentiores et tenuiores amicos. This work, inspired by Cicero’s De officiis, was probably written between 1537 and 1543 during the years of Della Casa’s most intense political engagement, although it was published for the first time in 1564. It attempts to furnish the reader with practical instructions on the correct way of commanding and serving and thus to harmoniously develop power relations. The treatise also brings to light the new values of bourgeois society, such as the functional differentiation of roles and the affirmation of the medium of money, an intervention against the ancient feudal systems. The Rime, published posthumously in Venice in 1558, consists of 70 sonnets and four canzoni. Benedetto Croce considers Della Casa’s Rime the most beautiful canzoniere of the sixteenth century, and Carlo Dionisotti calls it the most significant poetry to emerge between Ariosto and Tasso. In the Rime, there appear compositions of varying nature and inspiration. The poems in Latin are accompanied by poetry in the vernacular, written in the same years, in an attempt to equalize the Italian language and the expressive possibilities of Latin. Between echoes of vernacular poets (Jacopo Sannazaro, Giusto de’ Conti, Ludovico Ariosto, Lorenzo de’ Medici) and elegant classical influences, Della Casa uses stylistic elements, themes, and Petrarchan resonances to express a profound subjective restlessness, without abdicating rigorous formal elegance. The rhythm of Renaissance meter shatters in the face of expressive urgency, a 601

GIOVANNI DELLA CASA technique that anticipates important developments in Baroque literature. Over time, critical discussion of the Rime lingers ever more often on the sense of the crisis of an author defeated in his political and ecclesiastical career. To the Petrarchan model there is opposed the majesty of Pietro Bembo, of whom Della Casa is a favorite student. The influence of the former can be felt in the stylistic and lexical choices of the latter, and the axis of the work displaces itself toward less elegiac themes such as fame, ambition, and virtue. Della Casa also dedicates Petri Bembi Vita (Life of Pietro Bembo, 1564) to Bembo, and the biography of the master becomes a literary expedient by which to introduce themes of a markedly autobiographic nature. Another current of Della Casa’s work is represented by the oratory. This includes the Orazione seconda per la Lega (The Second Oration for the Lega), composed during a mission as papal nuncio to Venice to convince the Republic to adhere to the alliance with the Farnese family and Henry II of France against Charles V; another example is the Orazione [...] scritta a Carlo V imperadore intorno alla restitutione della citta` di Piacenza, written after the failure of the previous project in the hopes of restoring the ties between Rome and France. These works are practically contemporary, dated 1547–1548 and 1548 respectively, and probably represent literary transpositions of speeches that were actually delivered. The classical stylistic elements of Ciceronian oratory are used, translated into the vernacular. Beyond the rhetorical exercise there emerges the author’s evident desire for political success: the reason of state and Della Casa’s personal political ends are veiled behind artificial moral precepts that frequently contradict one another. The didactic vein becomes manifest in his masterpiece, the Galateo, composed between 1551 and 1554. The work addresses itself to the youth of the upper classes, to whom it intends to furnish the necessary means for obtaining success. In the spirit of modernity, Della Casa describes morality as merely a reflection of society, an instrument to safeguard its insurmountable social hierarchies. The same didactic intent animates the Lettere (Letters, 1728–1729) to Annibale and Pandolfo Rucellai, written in affable, familiar tones. The eminently literary character of the correspondence is made evident by the lack of missives received in response to Della Casa’s letters, and by the asymmetry between the sender and the receiver. Notwithstanding this fact, the last letter, composed when Annibale had already declared his own autonomy, veers 602

toward a less rhetorical, more eloquent style. The Oratio funebris, written for the death of Prevesa, is also worthy of note, as is the Dissertatio adversus Paulum Vergerium (Discourse Against Paolo Vergerio), written by Della Casa after 1553 in order to prove himself innocent of the accusations waged against him by Paolo Vergerio, bishop of Capodistria, during his fight against the heretics. In the same years he composes the Gaspari Contareni Vita (1564), a laudatory biography of his friend, Gaspare Contarini, patrician and man of letters. In this work, Della Casa delineates the multifaceted personality of a diplomat dedicated to the cause of Rome, consistent with his own ideals and the political action as a defender of the papacy against heretics and protests.

Biography Born in Florence or in the Mugello, 28 June 1503; studied in Florence with Ubaldino Bandinelli, and later in Bologna, where he entered the Goliardic circles and met Pietro Bembo. Moved to Rome in 1534, where he frequented the Accademia dei Vignaioli, through which he met Francesco Berni and Agnolo Firenzuola. On the recommendation of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, his protector, embarked on an ecclesiastical career as cleric of the Camera Apostolica; took orders in 1551. In 1554, Farnese, by then Pope Paolo III, named him archbishop of Benevento and sent him as papal nuncio to Venice. In this period, Della Casa played an intensely repressive role as a representative of the tribunal of the Inquisition in Veneto and styled the Catalogo dei libri proibiti (of which he would later be a victim). The new Pope Giulio III did not grant him his favor; withdrew to a private life in Venice, and moved to the Abbey of Nervesa, near Treviso, 1553. Paolo IV Carafa called him to Rome to serve as secretary of state, but did not make him cardinal, 1555. Died 14 November 1556 in Montepulciano or Rome. ALESSANDRA MELDOLESI Selected Works Collections Capitoli del Mauro et del Bernia et altri autori, Venice: Curtio Navo`, 1537. Tutte le opere del Bernia in terza rima, nuovamente con somma diligentia stampate, Venice: Curtio Navo`, 1538; as Terze rime de M. Giovanni Della Casa di M. Bino et d’altri; as Fifteen Fourteeners, edited and translated by Rudolf B. Gottfried, Bloomington: Gottfried,

GIOVANNI DELLA CASA 1979; as Giovanni Della Casa’s Poem Book: Ioannis Casae carminum liber, edited and translated by John B. Van Sickle, Tempe, AZ: Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1999. Rime e prose, Venice: Nicolo` Bevilacqua, 1558 (includes Rime, Orazione [...] scritta a Carlo V imperadore intorno alla restitutione della citta` di Piacenza, Galateo). Latina Monimenta, Florence: Giunta, 1564 (includes Petri Bembi vita, De officiis inter potentiores et tenuiores amicos, Gaspari Contareni Vita). Latina monimenta, Florence: Bernardo Giunta, 1567. Prose, edited by Gilles Me´nage, Paris: Tomaso Iolly, 1667 (includes Orazione seconda per la Lega). Opere, 5 vols., Venice: Pasinello, 1728–1729 (includes letters to Annibale and Pandolfo Rucellai). Opere, 6 vols., Naples, 1733 (includes An Uxor sit ducenda); edited by Giuseppe Prezzolini, Milan-Rome: Rizzoli, 1937. Prose scelte e annotate, edited by Severino Ferrari, Florence: Sansoni, 1900. Rime, edited by Daniele Ponchiroli, Turin: Einaudi, 1967. Prose di Giovanni della Casa e altri trattatisti cinquecenteschi del Comportamento; edited by Arnaldo Di Benedetto, Turin: UTET, 1970. Rime. Appendice: Frammento sulle lingue, edited by Roberto Fedi, Milan: Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli, 1993. Rime, edited by Giuliano Tanturli, Milan: Fondazione Pietro Bembo, 2001. Rime, edited by Stefano Carrai, Turin: Einaudi, 2003.

Bullock, W. L., ‘‘The Lyric Innovations of G. Della Casa,’’ in PLMA, vol. 41 (1926): 82–90. Caretti, Lanfranco, ‘‘Della Casa, uomo politico e scrittore,’’ in Filologia e critica: Studi di letteratura italiana, Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1955. Croce, Benedetto, Poesia popolare e poesia d’arte: considerazioni teorico-storiche, Bari: Laterza, 1929. Dionisotti, Carlo (editor), Pietro Bembo, Prose e rime, Turin: UTET, 1960. Romei, Danilo, Berni e i berneschi del Cinquecento, Florence: Edizioni Centro 2P, 1984. Santosuosso, Antonio, The Bibliography of Giovanni Della Casa: Books, Readers and Critics, 1537–1975, Florence: Olschki, 1979. Santosuosso, Antonio, Vita di Giovanni Della Casa, Rome: Bulzoni, 1979. Sole, Antonino, Cognizione del reale e letteratura in Giovanni Della Casa, Rome: Bulzoni, 1981.

GALATEO, 1558 Treatise by Giovanni Della Casa

Treatises Galateo, 1558; as Galateo, a Renaissance Treatise on Manners, translated by Konrad Eisenbichler and Kenneth R. Bartlett, Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 1986; as Galateo of Manners and Behaviours, translated by Robert Peterson, Bari: Adriatica Editrice, 1997. Trattato degli uffici communi, 1559 (vernacular edition of De officiis inter potentiores et tenuiores amicos). An uxor sit ducenda, 1564.

Letters Lettere, 1728–1729. Lettere di Monsig. Giovanni della Casa arcivescovo di Benevento a Carlo Gualteruzzi da Fano cavate da un manoscritto originale barberino e pubblicate la prima volta per la stampa da Luigi Maria Rezzi, 1824. Corrispondenza Giovanni Della Casa-Carlo Gualteruzzi, edited by Ornella Moroni, 1987.

Other Petri Bembi Vita, 1564. Orazioni scelte del secolo XVI, 1897. A Vittorio Cian i suoi scolari dell’Universita` di Pisa, Pisa: Mariotti, 1909 (includes Istruzione al Cardinale Scipione Rebida, legato a Carlo V e Filippo II per indurli alla pace con Enrico II, scritta in nome di Paolo IV ).

Further Reading Barbarisi, Gennaro, and Claudia Berra (editors), Per Giovanni Della Casa, Bologna: Cisalpino, 1997. Braudel, Fernand, Me´diterrane´e et le monde me´diterrane´en a` l’e´poque de Philippe II, Paris: Colin, 1949.

The Galateo was composed between 1551 and 1554, first in Venice and later at the Abbey of Nervesa sul Montello (Treviso), to which Della Casa retired after having failed to attain the purple robes of cardinal. However, the treatise was only published posthumously in 1558 in Venice in the volume Rime e prose, and according to some critics its abrupt ending suggests that it is incomplete. The Galateo presents itself as a series of lessons furnished by an ‘‘old idiot,’’ an illiterate man, to a young disciple, in whom is probably concealed the figure of the author’s nephew, Annibale Rucellai. The work is dedicated to and titled for the bishop of Aquino, Galeazzo Florimonte (in Latin Galatheus), who suggested that Della Casa compose a treatise on good manners. This literary fictional framework serves as a background for 30 chapters, in which the author reviews examples (mostly practical) of behaviors that are acceptable or contemptible. In the spirit of modernity, the author examines for the first time minute, ordinary actions and modes of behavior, such as dress, conversation, ceremonies, witticisms, education, behavior at the table, and bodily expressions, from yawning to singing. The exposition follows the ascending canonical model, from behaviors that 603

GIOVANNI DELLA CASA offend the body to those against morals and reason. Good manners have profoundly ethical implications, because they are equivalent or analogous to virtues, but they also reflect the fate of individuals and can lead to fortune. The rules enumerated by Della Casa are immediately understandable and usable and represent an original contribution to the didactic literature of the day: His treatise is no longer addressed to the closed world of the court, as is the Cortegiano of Baldassarre Castiglione, but rather to a wider community, a sort of cheerful company regulated by a harmonious collective life. The social openness of the discourse is reflected in the literary expedient of the old illiterate man who teaches the young ignorant man, a paradigm of the transmission between classes of savoir-faire, a valuable instrument of affirmation in the world of social competition. The rules are marked by the Renaissance ideal of measure, which lies at the base of concepts of good and beauty; they are equivalent, in practical terms, to fare le cose mezzanamente, (doing things with measure) against the excesses of individualism, greediness, and the affectation of the ceremonious. From the world of ideas, morality is transported into the everyday life of the streets: The humanist ideal of perfection gives way instead to the abomination of boredom and the minimalism of the ‘‘standard of repugnance’’ (Norbert Elias, La Civilisation des moeurs, 1973). Among the reasons for the Galateo’s success is its agile and varied style, in which there alternate low and high registers, philosophical considerations and sketches. The treatise was composed in a lighthearted and private key: a pleasing colloquial style, elegantly fluid, which restored Tuscany’s linguistic primacy. The discourse is enlivened by vivid caricature-like portraits, which stigmatize, by means of hyperbole, certain reprehensible behaviors. The cultured substratum is hidden under a veil of modesty and irony, which ably uses the playful mask of the ‘‘old idiot.’’ Thanks to this expedient, Della Casa is able to give a new perspective to the conversation, establishing a dynamic of alienation between narrator and author. Aside from stylistic license, this perspective also explains a certain structural weakness and the imprecision of certain discursive junctions, which seem to ignore the canonical rules of dialectics and rhetoric. The work is above all indebted to Cicero’s De officiis for its general foundation, and to Boccaccio’s Decameron, to which the author often implicitly refers, especially with reference to the frame 604

and to the so-called novelle cortesi, the novellas that deal with good manners. The Florentine writer is a master also of style for his attempt to reassemble the fracture between the oral and the written. The work’s fortune was immediate and proverbial: The Galateo entered rapidly into collective tradition and became the foundation for a revived literary genre. The treatise was edited 38 times before the end of the century and already in the sixteenth century was translated into numerous European languages. Benedetto Croce considers it a fundamental book that Italy gave to the rest of the world, while Giacomo Leopardi connects it to the Decameron. Norbert Elias, Giovanni Della Casa, and Niccolo` Machiavelli are among the protagonists of the process of civilization that is the background for the state-making process of the first modern age, founded on the dialectic between civil reason and political reason, authority and moderation. ALESSANDRA MELDOLESI Editions First edition: in Rime et prose, Venice: Nicolo` Bevilacqua, 1558. Critical editions: in Opere: Baldassar Castiglione, Giovanni Della Casa, edited by Giuseppe Prezzolini, MilanRome: Rizzoli, 1937; as Galateo, ovvero de’ costumi, edited by Bruno Maier, Milan: Mursia, 1971; as Galateo, overo De’ costumi, edited by Emanuela Scarza, Modena: Panini, 1990; as Galateo, edited by Gennaro Barbarisi, Venice: Barbarisi, 1991; edited by Carlo Ossola, Turin: Einaudi, 1994. Translations: as Galateo, translated by Robert Peterson, London: Raufe Newbery, 1576; as Galateo; or, A Treatise on Politeness and Delicacy of Manners: From the Italian of Monsig. Giovanni de la Casa...also, The Honours of the Table, with the Whole Art of Carving, Illustrated with a Variety of Cuts, Baltimore, MD: G. Hill, 1811; as Galateo, A Renaissance Treatise on Manners, translated by Konrad Eisenbichler and Kenneth R. Bartlett, Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 1986; as Galateo of Manners and Behaviours, translated by Robert Peterson, Bari: Adriatica Editrice, 1997.

Further Reading Berger, Harry, The Absence of Grace, Sprezzatura and Suspicion in Two Renaissance Courtesy Books, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Bertelli, Sergio, and Giuliano Crifo` (editors), Rituale, cerimoniale, etichetta, Milan: Bompiani, 1985. Cortini, Maria Antonietta, Et in udendo il silentio: Una lettura del Galateo, Rome: Bulzoni, 2004. Croce, Benedetto, Poesia popolare e poesia d’arte: considerazioni teorico-storiche, Bari: Laterza, 1929.

GIAMBATTISTA DELLA PORTA Elias, Norbert, La Civilisation des moeurs, Paris: ColmannLe´vy, 1973. Flandrin, Jean-Louis, and Montanari Massimo (editors), Storia dell’alimentazione, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1997. Garin, Eugenio, Il pensiero pedagogico dell’Umanesimo, Florence: Sansoni, 1958. Leopardi, Giacomo, Crestomazia italiana, Milan: Stella, 1827.

Macchia, Giovanni, ‘‘L’amara scienza,’’ in Saggi italiani, Milan: Mondadori, 1983. Ossola, Carlo (editor), ‘‘Introduzione’’ to G. Della Casa, in Galateo, Turin: Einaudi, 1994. Tinivella, Giovanni, Il Galateo di Mons. Giovanni della Casa e il suo significato filosofico- pedagogico nell’eta` del Rinascimento, con la riproduzione del testo, Milan: Hoepli, 1949.

GIAMBATTISTA DELLA PORTA (1535–1615) Giambattista Della Porta was a scientist and man of letters who wrote a great number of studies on magnetism, astrology, zoology, botany, and above all alchemy and magic. Particularly important are his studies and experiments in optics: He created a system of lenses for the camera obscura that can be considered a prototype for the camera. He was also a pioneer in the use of several lenses working together. He declared himself the inventor of the telescope, engaging in controversy with the much better known Italian physicist and astronomer Galileo Galilei. Among the many who supported him was the German astronomer Johannes Kepler. In his research, Della Porta was always attracted to unusual and prodigious facts. His peculiar approach to science resulted in a series of works that Luisa Muraro has called ‘‘scienza dell’esagerazione’’ or exaggeration science (Giambattista Della Porta mago e scienziato, 1978). In line with his philosophical thought and alchemic activity, Della Porta considered nature as a harmonious balance between heavenly and earthly forces, between the cosmos and microcosm. These beliefs caused problems with the church. The Accademia dei Segreti, founded by Della Porta to discuss the secrets of nature, was suppressed by the Roman Inquisition in 1578. In one of his major works, Magiae naturalis, sive de miraculis rerum naturalium (Natural Magic, or on the Miracles of Nature), published in 1558 in four volumes and then re-edited in 1589, he describes astonishing natural manifestations as phenomena that are controlled by a rational order and thus can be influenced and manipulated by philosophical

thought. These views strongly influenced his literary production, and in fact his texts are frequently imbued with a Neoplatonic conception of the world. He was certainly in contact with Giordano Bruno, and although it cannot be proven that he ever had direct relations with Marsilio Ficino’s Neoplatonic Academy (even though he did have connections with the Florentine cultural environment), there are convergences and similarities in their philosophical thought. In 1610, Della Porta also took part in the reconstitution of the Accademia dei Lincei, and in 1611 he established in Naples the Accademia degli Oziosi, another literary society. In literature, the name of Della Porta is associated mostly with an interesting and extensive series of comedies, of which only 14 of 29 survive. Most of these works were written between 1589 and 1614, but they were never staged because they were prohibited by the Inquisition. Although often hailed as a brilliant playwright, Della Porta is also accused of being disorganized and coarse, probably because his comedies cannot be classified within a well-codified genre and because of their compromises with the conventions of the Commedia dell’arte. Moreover, his comic plots (generally limited in invention and often borrowed from Plautus or from the novelistic tradition) rely more on stage effects and mechanisms than on dramatic logic. It has therefore been easy to dismiss the comedies, in line with the opinion of the author himself, who defined them as youthful games. While they may be not quite as interesting as Della Porta’s works on physics and magic, they reflect a relationship between the two aspects of Della Porta’s literary and 605

GIAMBATTISTA DELLA PORTA scientific production. For example, La fantesca (The Maid, 1592) is a very complicated play, involving equivocations, misunderstandings, and disguises, whose plot developments cannot be understood apart from an alchemical theory of feelings. The comedy does not denounce certain social classes or cast an ironic eye upon them, as do similar works of the same period; instead their attention is focused upon the sentiments of the protagonist. La fantesca is the story of Essandro, a young boy who courts Cleria when he is dressed as a man, but disguised as a girl and pretending to be Cleria’s maid, he plays the role of messenger and mediator between Cleria and Essandro, that is, himself. The complicated plots in Della Porta’s theater are also enhanced by the extraordinary eloquence of his characters, especially the women. In the Tuscan tradition of the time, female characters were generally given very small parts. That said, the passions and their alchemy are the real hinge of the plays, and as such the characters’ rhetorical skills are used to further express this central theme. Among the comedies, the best known is probably L’Olimpia (Olympia, 1589). It has many of the characteristics of La fantesca, relying as it does on equivocations and disguises: Teodosio and his son Eugenio, after a long period of imprisonment by the Turks, are engaged to impersonate themselves in their house. Della Porta is also the author of a few tragedies, including La Penelope (1591) and Il Georgio (1611), a play on a religious subject, but these are considered less interesting than his comic work. The interest of Della Porta’s comedies in fact lies not only in the influence they exerted on the tradition of the Commedia dell’arte and even on Molie`re and Goldoni, but also in his skill in mixing the style and the techniques of the Commedia dell’arte with the structures of literary comedy and with models from the Roman tradition. This blending of different genres, already tried during the sixteenth century by other dramatists, was the way chosen by many contemporary playwrights to renew the dramaturgy and the theatrical techniques of the time.

Biography Born in Naples on November 15, 1535, to a noble family. Traveled widely in Italy, France, and Spain, but remained firmly rooted in Naples. Little is known about his education, but was probably self-taught. The Inquisition examined him and forced him to disband his Accademia dei Segreti, 1578. Cardinal Luigi d’Este invited Della Porta to 606

join his household in Rome, where he wrote several comedies, 1579. Moved to Venice, to Ferrara, and, in 1581, back to Naples. Joined the Jesuit order, 1585. In 1592, further publications of his works were prohibited, even though the restriction seems not to have included his literary works; the ban was lifted in 1598. Member of the Accademia dei Lincei, 1610. Died in Naples on February 4, 1615. NICOLA FUOCHI Selected Works Collections Le commedie, edited by Vincenzo Spampanato, 2 vols., Bari: Laterza, 1910–1911. Teatro, edited by Raffaele Sirri, 2 vols., Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1980–1985. Edizione nazionale delle opere di Giovan Battista Della Porta, Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1996–.

Plays L’Olimpia, 1589. La Penelope, 1591. La fantesca, 1592. La trappolaria, 1596. La carbonaria, 1601. La Cintia, 1601. Gli duoi fratelli rivali, 1601; as The Two Rival Brothers, translated by Louise G. Clubb, 1980. La sorella, 1604; as The Sister, translated by Donald Beecher and Bruno Ferraro, 2005. La turca, 1606. Lo Astrologo, 1606. Il Moro, 1607. La chiapparina, 1609. La furiosa, 1609. Il Georgio, 1611. I duo fratelli simili, 1614. La tabernaria, 1616.

Treatises Magiae naturalis, sive de miraculis rerum naturalium, 4 vols., 1558; expanded edition, 20 vols., 1589. De furtivis literarum notis, vulgo` De ziferis, 1563. L’arte del ricordare, 1566. De humana physiognomonia, 1586. De refractione optices parte, 1593. Coelestis physiognomonia, 1603; critical edition by Alfonso Paolella, 1996. De distillatione, 1608. De aeris transmutationaibus, 1610; critical edition by Alfonso Paolella, 2000.

Further Reading Balbiani, Laura, La Magia naturalis di Giovan Battista Della Porta: lingua, cultura e scienza in Europa all’inizio dell’eta` moderna, New York: Lang, 2001. Borsellino, Nino, Introduction to Commedie del Cinquecento, vol. 1, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1962.

FEDERICO DELLA VALLE Clubb, Louise G., Giambattista Della Porta, Dramatist, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965. De Martino, Ernesto (editor), Magia e civilta`, Milan: Garzanti, 1962. Magli, Patrizia, Il volto e l’anima, Milan: Bompiani, 1995. Montanile, Milena (editor), L’Edizione nazionale del teatro e l’opera di G.B. Della Porta: atti del convegno, Salerno, 23 maggio 2002, Pisa: Istituti editoriali e poligrafici internazionali, 2004.

Muraro, Luisa, Giambattista Della Porta mago e scienziato, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1978. Plaisance, Michel, ‘‘Dal Candelaio di Giordano Bruno a Lo Astrologo di Giovan Battista Della Porta,’’ in Teatri barocchi: Tragedie, commedie, pastorali nella drammaturgia europea fra ‘500 e ‘600, edited by Silvia Carandini, Rome: Bulzoni, 2000. Rosen, Edward, The Naming of the Telescope, New York: Henry Schuman, 1947.

FEDERICO DELLA VALLE (CA. 1560–1628) The literary activity of Federico Della Valle, considered to be the greatest Italian tragedian of the seventeenth century, is summed up by the four plays that he wrote for the courtly theater, as the rest of his production was limited to a few verses composed for royal weddings and other official events or to honor prelates and members of the nobility, and to some occasional orations. Indeed, even his theatrical works were in fact completely forgotten for about three centuries, and were rediscovered only in 1929 by Benedetto Croce. Della Valle’s first tragicomedy Adelonda di Frigia (Adelonda of Phrygia), staged in 1595 but published posthumously in 1629, is a reworking in blank verse of Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris. Along with the later tragedies Judit (Judith) and Ester (Esther), based on biblical subjects and published together in 1627, and La Reina di Scozia (The Queen of Scotland, 1628) assured him a pre-eminent position as a beloved dramatist of the Counter-Reformation. Della Valle’s importance lies in his cleverness in fulfilling the needs of the courts of this period. Throughout the sixteenth century the production of new tragedies had been in a profound crisis, but Della Valle, who interpreted the reform and theoretical ideas formulated by Giambattista Giraldi Cinzio in his Discorso ovvero lettera intorno al comporre delle comedie e delle tragedie (On the Composition of Comedies and Tragedies, 1554), was able to adapt the genre to the tastes of the Baroque period. He restored some of the characteristics of classical Roman tragedy, and chose Seneca in particular as his model. As a result, his tragedies are all

characterized by an almost morbid insistence on cruel scenes, blood, violence and sometimes, as in Judit, by an atmosphere of turbid sensuality. As Ester in the eponymous tragedy, Judit is a heroine viewed as an instrument of divine ineluctable forces. The contemplation of death is a central motif, in accordance to the guidelines of Baroque tragic theater as a whole. Indeed, death is analyzed in its different manifestations: the glorifying death, as well as the redeeming or sacrificial death, according to the principle that the more the scene insists on it, showing it in great detail, the stronger the cathartic effect will be. Certain other themes can be easily recognized in Della Valle’s tragic production: the observation of any situation from a religious perspective and human beings often pitted against the inscrutable powers of divine will; the precariousness of life; and generally the absence of feelings of hope and trust. Moreover, this sense of the precariousness of individual life is related to another motif, that of power and its demands, which is expressed in the conflict between the individual and politics or the superior interests of the reason of state. This particular point relates Della Valle to his contemporaries in two ways: On the one hand, Baroque culture (tragedies written for the courts) often dealt with these same matters; on the other, tragedies show direct or indirect references to the facts of the period. For example, La Reina di Scozia, originally written in 1591 and redrafted in 1595 before its definite version of 1628, stages the final hours of Mary Stuart before being beheaded in 1587 upon orders by 607

FEDERICO DELLA VALLE Elizabeth I. The last day in prison of the Catholic Queen of Scots is represented as a preparation to martyrdom, in which Mary’s fragile humanity is brought out to great effect. Through the alternation of seven-syllable and 11-syllable live, Della Valle captures the progression of the queen’s emotions, offering a psychological portrayal of the inner dynamics at work between the historical milieu and Christian faith. Della Valle’s tragedies often focus on women protagonists. The plots are most commonly structured around the figure of the oxymoron, in which two characters embody the opposite forces that govern them and over which they have no control. There is often little psychological introspection and the unfolding of the events is rather driven by this opposition. However, in their climactic scenes, characters are choreographed on the stage in a very visual way. Both La Reina di Scozia and Judit are overtly connected with the paintings of the times, another element that stresses how Della Valle belonged to Baroque culture, which emphasizes the visual arts. Della Valle’s theater is predominantly spectacular, and the author sometimes appears to take pleasure in exposing the suffering bodies of his heroines, while simultaneously idealizing their beauty. The signs of such a strong pictorial influence can also be traced in the selection of tragic themes, such as the sensual eroticism that inspires the plot of Judit: The scene, when the minister of the Assyrian general Holofernes spies on the naked Judit, is clearly indebted to the iconography of the biblical story of ‘‘Susan at the bath,’’ with its exotic setting, Oriental furniture and ornaments. The heroine, who will seduce and kill Holofernes in order to save her village, becomes the instrument of a positive strength and of a divine plan of redemption.

Biography Little is known about Federico Della Valle’s life, and even the dates of birth and death are uncertain. Born in Langhe, near Asti, ca. 1560. From 1587 spent several years in Turin, but despite the fact that he served Duchess Caterina of Savoy, wife of Carlo Emanuele I, he never became a true courtier.

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Moved to Milan, where he was employed by the Spanish governor, 1608. Died probably in Milan, in 1628. NICOLA FUOCHI Selected Works Collections Prose, edited by Luigi Firpo, Bologna: Commissione per i testi di lingua, 1964. Tragedie, edited by Andrea Gareffi, Milan: Mursia, 1988. Opere, edited by Maria Gabriella Stassi, Turin: UTET, 1995. Opere, edited by Matteo Durante, 2 vols., Messina: Sicania, 2000–2005.

Tragedies Ester et Judit, 1627. La Reina di Scozia, 1628. Adelonda di Frigia (1595), 1629.

Orations Nelle essequie di Filippo III, 1621. Nelle essequie della Duchessa di Feria, 1623.

Further Reading Bianchi, Alessandro, ‘‘Il dolore che uccide e la femminilita` pericolosa nell’’Adelonda di Frigia’ di Federico Della Valle,’’ in Lettere Italiane, 54, no. 2 (2002): 242–261. Croce, Benedetto, ‘‘Le tragedie di Federigo della Valle di Asti,’’ in La critica, 27 (1929): 377–397. Croce, Franco, Federico della Valle, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1965. Doglio, Federico, Teatro tragico italiano, Parma: Guanda, 1972. Doglio, Federico (editor), Il teatro e la Bibbia, Roma: Garamond, 1995. Gasparini, Giammaria (editor), La tragedia classica dalle origini al Maffei, Turin: UTET, 1963. Phillips, James E., Images of a Queen: Mary Stuart in Sixteenth Century Literature, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964. Raffaelli, Sergio, Semantica tragica di Federico Della Valle, Padua: Liviana, 1973. Raffaelli, Sergio, Aspetti della lingua e dello stile in Federico Della Valle, Rome: Bulzoni, 1974. Sanguineti White, Laura, Dal detto alla figura. Le tragedie di Federico Della Valle, Florence: Olschki, 1992. Tessari, Roberto, ‘‘La Iudit di Della Valle: pitture di ‘sperati diletti,’’’ in Teatro barocchi, edited by Silvia Carandini, Rome: Bulzoni, 2000.

ERRI DE LUCA

ERRI DE LUCA (1950–) An outsider in contemporary Italian literature, Erri De Luca has deliberately kept his distance from the literary scene, with which he feels little or no affinity. Unlike many of his colleagues who combine their literary activity with a teaching post in secondary education or at the university, he divided his time until his retirement between writing and various forms of manual labor, including working for car manufacturer Fiat, as a bricklayer, and as a truck driver. De Luca is self-taught in various languages, among them Yiddish and Hebrew, which he learned in order to read the Old Testament in the original (an activity that he does daily for about an hour). Although he is not a religious man, since 1994 he has shared his reading experience by translating several books of the Bible into Italian. For him, the translation of sacred texts requires a strictly literal rendering of the words into the target language, without overlaying his interpretation upon it. He has also written several essays based on his work on the Bible, including Una nuvola come tappeto (A Cloud as Carpet, 1991), widely acclaimed for its innovative approach by laymen and scholars alike, and Nocciolo d’oliva (Olive Pit, 2002). De Luca ended his formal education as a result of the political situation at the end of the 1960s. Feeling that it was his duty to participate actively in the workers’ struggle for better working conditions, the so-called operaismo, he joined the leftwing movement Lotta continua in 1968. This experience is central to his current literary activity. For instance, he has regularly participated in the ongoing debate on the imprisonment of the historic leader of Lotta continua, Adriano Sofri, with articles that have been controversial. Aceto, arcobaleno (Vinegar, Rainbow, 1992), a collection of short stories, also draws upon De Luca’s political past. As the main characters look back on the events of the 1960s and 1970s and try to establish the role that they played, one of them declares that he feels no regrets for the murders he committed since he cannot undo the harm. De Luca strongly believes in the irreversibility of actions or deeds and the irrelevance of regret. At best, one can only learn lessons for the future from one’s experiences. The theme of the intertwining of personal life and the larger canvas of historical events is central to many

of De Luca’s works of fiction, including the novel Tu, mio (Sea of Memory, 1998), the protagonist of which is an adolescent who decides to avenge the innocent victims of the Holocaust. However, he does not immediately realize the impact of history on individual existences because he lacks the means to understand it. These means are offered to him by an old fisherman and a Jewish girl with whom he falls in love, and consist of words and stories, as well as signs and traces signaling the unspoken, imprints of what is no longer there. The most striking example is a scar left by a fish bite that assumes the form of the first letter of the Hebrew word for ‘‘sign’’ and ‘‘father’’ and brings to life the girl’s father and his story. The mark thus unites two temporal dimensions, present and past, and must be read on a metonymic and metaphoric level. Reading signs is not the only way in which questions are resolved in De Luca’s fiction. The characters—and with them the reader—have to interpret the silence of the protagonists who are affected by an incapacity to communicate, often epitomized by a physical speech defect. Whereas in his poetry De Luca occasionally venerates the mother figure, as in the poem that opens the collection of short stories Il contrario di uno (The Opposite of One, 2003), in the fiction the protagonists’ relationship with their parents is usually highly problematic and a symptom of a greater existential incommunicability and solitude. In his first novel, the autobiographical Non ora, non qui (Not Here, Not Now, 1989), the mother silences the already silent son whenever he tries to reach out for her. No contact seems possible during mortal life, and it is only a visual sign, a photograph, that can bring back the woman after her death. His dense and highly refined style is as cryptic as the content of the novels, while their epigraphs and titles are selected with great care. The deciphering process could be compared to the reading of a text in Hebrew, whose written form lacks symbols for vowels. His 2005 work, Sulla traccia di Nives (On Nives’ Trail, 2005), is a dialogue between Nives Meroi (1961–), the well-known Italian alpinist who climbs with no oxygen equipment in order to maintain and develop a pure relationship with nature, and 609

ERRI DE LUCA the author, a passionate alpinist himself. Their conversation, barely interrupted by short fragments, does not focus so much on Meroi’s astonishing achievements as on her passion for climbing, on the challenges and difficulties of the pure form of alpinism to which she adheres, and on life in general. Her thoughts alternate with Erri De Luca’s own observations, in a fragmented and autobiographical text that, like many of the author’s works, crosses and blurs genre boundaries and defies simple definitions.

Biography Born in Naples in 1950 in a middle-class family. Studied classics at secondary school. Abandoned school to join the left-wing movement Lotta continua, 1968. Involved in the occupation of the Fiat Mirafiori factory in Turin, as a result of which he lost his job at Fiat, 1980. Held several manual jobs in Italy, France, and Africa, where he spent some time as a volunteer in Tanzania and contracted malaria. During the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, he volunteered to drive goods into the Bosnian war zone. Works for Il Manifesto and other newspapers. Currently resides in Rome. INGE LANSLOTS Selected Works Fiction Non ora non qui, 1989. Aceto, arcobaleno, 1992. I colpi dei sensi, 1993. In alto e sinistra, 1994. Tu, mio, 1998; as Sea of Memory, translated by Beth Archer Brombert, 1999. Tre cavalli, 1999; as Three Horses, translated by Michael Moore, 2003. Montedidio, 2001; as God’s Mountain, translated by Michael Moore, 2002. Il contrario di uno, 2003. Morso di luna nuova: Racconto per voci in tre stanze, 2005. Sulle tracce di Nives, 2005.

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Poetry ‘‘Opera sull’acqua e altre poesie,’’ 2002. ‘‘Solo andata. Righe che vanno troppo spesso a capo,’’ 2005.

Theater L’ultimo viaggio di Sinbad, 2003.

Nonfiction Una nuvola come tappeto, 1991. Alzaia, 1997. Come noi coi fantasmi: lettere sull’anno sessantottesimo del secolo tra due che erano giovani in tempo, with Angelo Bolaffi, 1998. Un papavero rosso all’occhiello senza coglierne il fiore, 2000. Altre prove di risposta, 2000. Lettere da una citta` bruciata, 2002. Nocciolo d’oliva, 2002. Mestieri all’aria aperta: pastori e pescatori nell’Antico e nel Nuovo Testamento, 2004.

Translations Esodo/Nomi, 1994. Giona/Iona`, 1995. Kohe`let/Ecclesiaste, 1996. Libro di Rut, 1999. Vita di Sansone: dal libro Giudici/Shoftı`m, capitoli 13, 14, 15, 16, 2002. Vita di Noe`/No`ah: il salvagente: dal libro Genesi/Bereshit, 2004.

Further Reading Contarini, Silvia, ‘‘Narrare Napoli, anni Cinquanta: Domenico Rea, Anna Maria Ortese, Raffaele La Capria, Erri De Luca,’’ in Narrativa, 24 (2003): 159–172. Lanslots, Inge, ‘‘Il silenzio in Erri De Luca: spazio e tempo differiti,’’ in Nuove tendenze della letteratura italiana, edited by Marie-He´le`ne Caspar, Paris: Universite´ Paris X-Nanterre, 1996. Scuderi, Attilio, Erri De Luca, Fiesole: Cadmo, 2002. Spunta, Marina, ‘‘Struck by Silence: A Reading of Erri de Luca’s I colpi dei sensi,’’ in Italica, 78, no. 3 (2001): 367–386. Spunta, Marina, ‘‘A Balanced Displacement: Images of Vision and Silence in Erri De Luca’s Non ora, non qui,’’ in Forum Italicum, 35, no. 2 (2001): 383–402. Spunta, Marina, ‘‘Embodying the Past: Vocal Transubstantiation in Erri De Luca’s Tu, Mio,’’ in The Poetics of Transubstantiation: From Theology to Metaphor, edited by Douglas Burnham and Enrico Giaccherini, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. Swennen Ruthenberg, Myriam (editor), Scrivere sulla polvere: saggi su Erri De Luca, Pisa: ETS, 2005.

EMILIO DE MARCHI

EMILIO DE MARCHI (1851–1901) The conflict between writing as a vocational mission and the emerging trends in the cultural industry divided the intellectuals at the end of the nineteenth century. In his novels, published first as serials in the literary magazines and daily newspapers for which he wrote throughout his life, Milanese Emilio De Marchi tried to reconcile an educational message with the successful structure of the feuilleton. Among his best known works, Il cappello del prete (The Priest’s Hat, 1888) utilizes the techniques of popular fiction and of the burgeoning mystery novels to hold the reader’s interest. Set in Naples, it tells the story of the murder of Father Cirillo committed by a petty aristocrat, the Baron of Santafusca, who seems beyond reproach. However, racked with remorse, he confesses to the crime before killing himself. This novel is also important in Italian publishing history, as its publication was preceded by a sophisticated and unprecedented advertising campaign in which huge posters featuring an enormous mysterious hat were plastered all over Milan. De Marchi’s narratives focus on poor individuals who are unable to realize their dreams and end up defeated in a depraved society. The works of Alessandro Manzoni and the literary tradition of Lombardy form the background of Demetrio Pianelli (1890), set in a bleak, cruel Milan soaked in rain and injustice. Cesarino Pianelli, a clerk, steals money from his office to provide his beloved wife, the beautiful but vain Beatrice, with the lively social life that he wants her to live. Unable to put the money back, he saves his honor by hanging himself and leaving his family in the care of his half-brother Demetrio. A clerk himself, dedicated to work, decency and humility, soon Demetrio falls in love with Beatrice and ruins himself to save her and her children. Just as he starts packing his humble things to leave Milan forever, Beatrice marries a rich farmer. The themes of the femme fatale, honor, and suicide enabled De Marchi to keep his audience eagerly reading, especially when the novel was first serialized as La bella pigotta (The Beautiful Doll) in the magazine L’Italia in 1888. However, the general atmosphere pervading the novel is one of grayness and unspoken despair, and the protagonist loses everything in spite—or more likely because—of his goodness.

Another doomed figure is the title character of Arabella (1893), the story of Beatrice’s daughter and Demetrio’s niece. Tormented by the memory and pain of her father’s suicide, Arabella decides to become a nun and rescue Cesarino’s lost soul, but the financial distress of her mother’s new family forces her to marry the debauched Lorenzo, son of the ruthless businessman Tonino Maccagno, who shows her an ambiguous fatherly love. Arabella, too, is the victim of another man’s crime: She first loses the baby that she is expecting and then dies as a consequence of Maccagno’s actions. Even more than in Demetrio Pianelli, in Arabella De Marchi’s descriptions of minor characters demonstrate the influence of the theater in Milanese dialectic of his times. In 1894, De Marchi serialized Redivivo (Reborn), which he later rejected (it would be published in a volume only posthumously in 1909). The novel, however, is important because it inspired Luigi Pirandello’s Il fu Mattia Pascal (The Late Mattia Pascal, 1904). He then returned to the theme of the hapless victim with Giacomo l’idealista (Giacomo the Idealist, 1897), the protagonist of which is an intellectual, a philosopher who believes in the strength and power of the ideal. Soon life provides him with the real when his fiance´e, raped by a nobleman and pregnant as a result, dies from the shame and pain. Giacomo’s failed beliefs and betrayed hopes reflect those of contemporary Italian intellectuals. It is not a coincidence that throughout De Marchi’s main novels, and in Giacomo l’idealista in particular, the voice of the narrator is overtly present, commenting on the events and guiding the reader. As much as De Marchi’s narrative is pessimistic and hopeless, his educational and pedagogical writings are full of nineteenth-century optimism and trust in progress, and their aim is the education and improvement of the lower classes. Among other activities, he directed between 1898 and 1900 the series La buona parola for the Vallardi publishing house, in which he published anonymous pamphlets such as Bestemmie, canzonacce e parolaccie (Curses, Obscene Songs, Swearwords, 1899) or Quella maledetta osteria (That Damned Tavern, 1899) intended to be an effective daily helping guide for the people. The moderately conservative De 611

EMILIO DE MARCHI Marchi did not believe much in rebellion and revolution, but rather in changing human beings first so that society would change as a consequence. Of his poetic production, the posthumously published collection of poetic prose pieces Milanin Milanon (1902) is a loving homage paid to his city, in its way a response to the contemporary trend of morbid and controversial explorations of the city’s dark side such as Paolo Valera’s Il ventre di Milano (The Underbelly of Milan, 1888). Instead of exhibiting the criminal and the exotic, what predominates here is a sense of nostalgia for the old Milan, the city of little streets and little people, now hiding their rags and their pains under the new and shining facade of the metropolis built in the name of progress.

Demetrio Pianelli, 1890. Arabella, 1893. Giacomo l’idealista, 1897. Col fuoco non si scherza, 1901. Redivivo, 1909.

Short Stories ‘‘Sotto gli alberi,’’ 1882. ‘‘Storie di ogni colore,’’ 1885. ‘‘Racconti,’’ 1889. ‘‘Nuove storie di ogni colore,’’ 1895.

Poetry ‘‘Poesie,’’ 1875. ‘‘Sonetti,’’ 1877. ‘‘Vecchie cadenze e nuove,’’ 1899. ‘‘Milanin Milanon,’’ 1902.

Plays Oggi si recita in casa dello zio Emilio, 1910.

Biography

Essays

Born in Milan in 31 July 1851 to a lower middleclass family, soon in financial distress because of the father’s death in 1860. Degree in literature from the Accademia Scientifico-Letteraria of Milan, 1874, after which he became a teacher. Cofounded the literary magazine La Vita Nuova, 1877. Married Lina Martelli, 1880, with whom he had two children, Cesarina and Marco. Taught stylistics at the Accademia Scientifico-Letteraria, 1896– 1900. Died on 6 February 1901 in Milan, after a long illness. TERESA ZOPPELLO Selected Works Collections Tutte le opere, edited and introduced by Giansiro Ferrata, 3 vols., Milan: Mondadori, 1959

Novels Il cappello del prete, 1888.

Lettere e letterati del secolo XVIII, 1882. La letteratura, 1883. Carlo Maria Maggi, 1885. L’eta` preziosa, 1888.

Further Reading Branca, Vittore, Emilio De Marchi, Brescia: Morcelliana, 1946. Briganti, Alessandra, Introduzione a De Marchi, Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1992. Lacchini, Angelo, Rileggendo il Demetrio: il laboratorio narrativo di Emilio De Marchi, Pesaro: Metauro, 2002. Madrignani, Carlo A., ‘‘L’eredita` manzoniana (Rovani-De Marchi-De Amicis),’’ in La Letteratura italiana. Storia e testi, vol. 8, Il secondo Ottocento, Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1975. Monteverdi, Mario, Emilio De Marchi romanziere, Milan: Gastaldi, 1963. Spinazzola, Vittorio, Emilio De Marchi romanziere popolare, Milan: Edizioni di Comunita´, 1971. Trotta, Nicoletta (editor), Emilio De Marchi, (1851–1901): documenti, immagini, manoscritti, Milan: Biblioteca Trivulziana, 2001.

FEDERICO DE ROBERTO (1861–1927) Federico De Roberto presented a series of recurrent themes throughout his narrative, first among them Sicily, which serves as a nearly mythical landscape populated by noblemen and common people. 612

Drawing his characters from the nobility of the city of Catania, who live a life of ease while they exercise corrupt power, De Roberto gave life to a gallery of puppet-like characters, crushed by their lack

FEDERICO DE ROBERTO of will, in a world in which traditional values are undergoing a devastating crisis. This dissolute and corrupt society already emerges in the short stories collected in La sorte (Fate, 1887). In ‘‘La disdetta’’ (The Misfortune), for example, the princess of Roccasciano dissipates her fortune and her life gambling at cards. She is surrounded by grotesque characters from all social stations, from greedy priests and penniless nobles, to parasites and hysterical women through whom De Roberto paints the portrait of a rapidly decaying world. However, not even the popular characters are immune from the general corruption, as in the case of Alfio Balsamo, the protagonist of ‘‘Ragazzinaccio’’ (Bad Old Boy), and the author does not display any sentimentality in the representation of common people. Much of De Roberto’s fiction contains references to the events of his own life. In particular, the frequent representation of the machine as a monster is a theme that alludes to the death of De Roberto’s father, also named Federico, in a train accident in Piacenza. An examination of the author’s unpublished correspondence, starting with the letters to his lovers Renata Ribera and Pia Vigada, confirms the close connection between this tragic event and elements in his work, and the loss of the father is thematized in, among other works, the story Il paradiso perduto (Paradise Lost), from L’albero della scienza (The Tree of Science, 1890). An obsessive fear of the lost father torments the writer as much as the suffocating presence of his mother. Catania, a patrician and business-like city, is also viewed as a mechanical monstrosity, very far from the writer’s beloved Milan, where he involved himself in intrigues and extemporaneous love affairs and which, after he was forced to leave it to return to Catania, was often seen through the lens of nostalgia. His unpublished Giornale di bordo (Log Book) faithfully records the stages of an erotic relationship in Milan that totally consumed De Roberto’s psychic energies. De Roberto was what might be called a heretical realist, who filled his pages with his obsessions and nightmares, and created works that are quite removed from the presumed realism traditionally attributed to his art. Indeed, his peculiarly eclectic and experimental writing was influenced not only by the masters of the realist tradition, from Gustave Flaubert to Emile Zola, but also by the music of Richard Wagner and by the psychological fiction of his friend, the French novelist Paul Bourget. His first novel, Ermanno Raeli (1889), largely autobiographical, displays many of these diverse elements.

The central theme is love, treated from a psychological perspective. The main character is the young, refined Ermanno who tries to seduce the beautiful Massimiliana. The story ends with the man’s tragic suicide, the logical result of an inability to live life: Ermanno thus represents the model of the inept, a figure destined to enjoy great fortune in decadent narrative. Additional decadent motifs are found in short stories such as ‘‘Donato del Piano’’ from the collection Documenti umani (Human Documents, 1888), which details the psychological workings of an unknown person who commits suicide. Full of references to the Wagnerian movement and to the music of the German composer, it demonstrates De Roberto’s fascination with the art that he placed above all form of artistic expressions. De Roberto’s versatility is also demonstrated by his ability to produce several works of quality that are very different from each other. The most famous example of this versatility is to be found in the two collections Processi verbali (Verbal Processes, 1890) and L’albero della scienza, both published the same year but representative of completely different styles. In the first, a realistic influence prevails, made explicit in the preface where the author discusses the impersonality of art, an aesthetic canon derived from Giovanni Verga and according to which the writer’s voice disappears and the characters act as if they have a life of their own. Impersonality also requires that a story have a dialogical structure similar to that of a play, and indeed in this collection De Roberto pushes to its extreme consequence the quest for objectivity, with stories such as ‘‘Il rosario’’ (The Rosary) or ‘‘I vecchi’’ (The Old Men) that assume the form of pure dialogue. In Processi verbali, De Roberto makes it clear that this form of realism is incompatible with the psychological analysis of characters, for which the presence of the writer is crucial. This analysis is, on the contrary, central to L’albero della scienza, a series of psychological studies on the themes of love and erotic obsessions in which De Roberto, oscillating between Bourget and Gabriele D’Annunzio, approaches the subject of femininity by observing the sensual as well as the emotional complexity of women. Adriana, published only in 1998, is another extraordinary example of this approach, in which the feminine world is described as explosive and erotic, while the male world is often grotesque and populated with improbable rakish figures. De Roberto’s masterpiece is the historical novel I Vicere´ (The Viceroys), published in Milan in 613

FEDERICO DE ROBERTO 1894, which deals with the vicissitudes of the Uzedas, a noble family from Catania and the last descendents of an ancient, rapacious Spanish line of nobility who came to Sicily in the fifteenth century. Set in 1855 and 1882, the time of the narrative witnessed the transition from the Bourbon ruling to the Italian unification, throughout which the Uzedas are only concerned with how to adapt themselves to the new political reality. In fact, the expected changes will turn out to be more an illusion than reality. In the Sicily portrayed by De Roberto nothing ever changes, the nobility continue to exercise its ancient privileges over those beneath it, and public and private affairs intertwine continuously. Conflicts over power and family wealth explode among the many characters in the novel, and the starting point of the action, its persistent leitmotiv and essential characteristic, is the desire to dominate. Everything happens through complex political maneuvers that allow the Uzeda family to install itself within the new liberal regime. All the characters have strong eccentric personalities, fed by the old conviction that they are superior to the masses. Their superiority echoes and parodies the contemporary doctrine of the superman put forward by Friedrich Nietzsche and which De Roberto knew well, as demonstrated by an article published in the newspaper Il corriere della sera on 25 February 1899, Il superuomo (The Superman) that became part of the collection of essays Il colore del tempo (The Colour of Time, 1900). Inspired by real facts and events, and in particular by the political rise of the Marquis of St. Giuliano, an illustrious politician from Catania whose opportunism had been denounced by De Roberto in numerous articles from 1882 and after whom the character of Prince Consalvo is patterned, I Vicere´ is a polycentric novel based on the mixed presence of many conflicting situations, but its homogeneous theme is the representation of a dark reality marked on the one hand by the profound crisis of traditional values and on the other by the inability of the Risorgimento to live up to its promises. The writer projects this crisis into the new century, but also attempts to harness the perspective of science to infuse art with dynamism and to oppose it against the static condition of tradition. This polyphony of accents is unified, however, by the consistent style of the novel. Somber descriptions of macabre settings, vicious parodies, and a bitter anticlericalism alternate with expressive elements and ironic portraits of a world empty of ideals. Time flows in a linear way and the writer follows 614

the existential stories of the numerous characters. In fact, De Roberto had planned a sequel to I Vicere`, a novel set in Rome that denounced the intrigues and opportunism of Italian politics at the end of the nineteenth century, seen through the life of the reactionary Prince Consalvo (who at the conclusion of I Vicere` was elected to Parliament). It remained incomplete and was published only posthumously in 1929 as L’imperio (The Command). In an 1894 interview with Ugo Ojetti published in Alla scoperta dei letterati (Discovering the Literati, 1895), De Roberto had defined the theater as an inferior form of art, but the perspective of greater public success led him to try his hand at composing some plays later in his life. His first attempt, a libretto for Giacomo Puccini in collaboration with Verga and based on the latter’s play La Lupa (The She-wolf, 1896), failed (it was published in 1919). It was followed by La tormenta (The Storm, 1918), the theatrical version of his own novel Spasimo (Anguish, 1897) and other plays that however had limited success.

Biography Born on 16 January 1861 in Naples; his father was a Neapolitan officer in the Bourbon army, his mother, donna Marianna degli Asmundo, belonged to the lower nobility. After the death of his father, his family moved to Catania, 1870. Enrolled at the university to study natural sciences, 1879, but never took his degree, preferring the activity of writer, journalist, and essayist. Made his de´but with an article dedicated to the music of Sicilian composer Vincenzo Bellini. Founded the literary magazine Don Chisciotte, 1881–1883. Edited the series Semprevivi for the publisher Giannotta, through which he met Giovanni Verga and Luigi Capuana, who become close friends. Traveled to Milan, where Verga introduced him to Marco Praga, Arrigo Boito, and other writers, 1890. Had an affair with Renata Ribera, the wife of a lawyer in Milan. Moved to Rome, 1908, then returned to Catania, 1913, to assist his ailing mother. Collaborated with numerous periodicals, including La domenica letteraria, Il Capitan cortese, Nuova Antologia, Il corriere della sera and Giornale d’Italia. Lived in Catania until his death on 26 July 1927. ALFREDO SGROI See also: Verismo

FRANCESCO DE SANCTIS Selected Works Collections Teatro (Il rosario, Il cane della favola, La strada maestra, La tormenta), edited by Natale Tedesco, Milan: Mondadori, 1981. Romanzi, novelle e saggi, edited by Carlo Alberto Madrignani, Milan: Mondadori, 1984.

Novels Ermanno Raeli, 1889. L’illusione, 1891. I Vicere´, 1894; as The Viceroys, translated by Archibald Colquhoun, 1962. Spasimo, 1897. L’imperio, 1929.

Short Stories ‘‘La sorte,’’ 1887. ‘‘Documenti umani,’’ 1888. ‘‘Processi verbali,’’ 1889. ‘‘L’albero della scienza,’’ 1890. ‘‘La messa di nozze. Un sogno. La bella morte,’’ 1911. ‘‘La ‘Cocotte,’’’ 1920. ‘‘Ironie,’’ 1920. ‘‘Adriana: un racconto inedito e altri ‘‘studi di donna,’’ edited by Rosario Castelli, 1998.

Plays La tormenta, in Secolo XX, January–March, 1918. La lupa, with Giovanni Verga, 1919.

Poetry ‘‘Enceladoz,’’ 1887.

Essays Giosue` Carducci e Mario Rapisardi. Polemica, 1881. Arabeschi, 1883. La morte dell’amore, 1892. Il colore del tempo, 1900. L’arte, 1901. Catania, 1907. Al rombo del cannone, 1919. All’ombra dell’ulivo, 1920. Cronache per il Fanfulla, edited by Giovanna Finocchiaro Chimirri, 1973.

Letters Lettere a donna Marianna degli Asmundo, edited by Sarah Zappulla Muscara`, 1978.

Federico De Roberto a Luigi Albertini: lettere del critico al direttore del Corriere della sera, edited by Sarah Zappulla Muscara`, 1979.

Further Reading Borri, Giancarlo, Invito alla lettura di Federico De Roberto, Milan: Mursia, 1987. Brancati, Vitaliano, De Roberto e dintorni, edited by Rita Verdirame, Catania: Tringale, 1988. Branciforte, Francesco (editor), Gli inganni del romanzo: I vicere´ tra storia e finzione letteraria, Catania: Fondazione Verga, 1998. Cavalli Pasini, Annamaria, De Roberto, Palermo: Palumbo, 1996. Cincotta, Vincent J., Federico De Roberto commediografo: dalle lettere all’amico Sabatino Lopez, Catania: Tringale, 1980. De Nola, Jean Paul, Federico de Roberto et la France, Paris: Didier, 1975. Di Grado, Antonio, Federico De Roberto e la ‘‘scuola antropologica’’: positivismo, verismo, leopardismo, Bologna: Pa`tron, 1982. Di Grado, Antonio, La vita, le carte, i turbamenti di Federico De Roberto, gentiluomo, Catania: Fondazione Verga, 1998. Grana, Gianni, ‘‘I vicere´’’ e la patologia del reale: discussione e analisi storica delle strutture del romanzo, Milan: Marzorati, 1982. Madrignani, Carlo Alberto, Illusione e realta` nell’opera di Federico De Roberto. Saggio su ideologia e tecniche narrative, Bari: De Donato, 1972. Nemiz, Andrea, Capuana, Verga, De Roberto: fotografi, Palermo: Edikronos, 1982. Ojetti, Ugo, Alla scoperta dei letterati, Milan: Dumolard, 1895. Sarno, Emilia, I romanzi di Federico De Roberto tra primo e secondo sperimentalismo, Salerno: Ripostes, 1985. Sipala, Paolo Mario, Introduzione a De Roberto, Rome: Laterza, 1988. Spinazzola, Vittorio, Federico de Roberto e il verismo, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1961. Stasi, Beatrice, Apologie della letteratura: Leopardi tra De Roberto e Pirandello, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1995. Tedesco, Natale, La norma del negativo: De Roberto e il realismo analitico, Palermo: Sellerio, 1981. Zappulla Muscara`, Sarah (editor), Federico De Roberto, Palermo: Palumbo, 1984. Zappulla Muscara`, Sarah, Federico De Roberto, Catania: C. U.E.C.M., 1988.

FRANCESCO DE SANCTIS (1817–1883) Francesco De Sanctis has long been recognized as Italy’s greatest literary critic and historian of literature. However, since he wrote during the turbulent

years of the making of the Italian nation-state, and the rise of the ‘‘historical school’’ in the postRisorgimento period, his posthumous recognition is 615

FRANCESCO DE SANCTIS indebted to Benedetto Croce, who placed him in the pantheon of the maestri of criticism at the beginning of the twentieth century. De Sanctis’ adaptation of Hegelian aesthetic to the Italian tradition, his capacity to interpret the mind and spirit of the authors he dealt with, his emphasis on form as autonomous yet inseparable from content in poetry, as well as his conviction that Italian literature and society are inextricably connected and reflect the moral history of the Italian people, show a range and depth that has been unequaled in succeeding generations. De Sanctis grew up amongst the debates on Romanticism in a country still divided in small states and under foreign occupation. His formative years in Naples were under the influence of the French encyclopaedists and the German idealists. He set himself free from the grammatical purismo of his teacher Basilio Puoti and from the cultural purism of Antonio Cesari and Pietro Giordani, who discarded neologisms and foreign borrowings— though of the latter he retained the fierce anticlericalism. He argued against the dry normative literariness of a belated neoclassicism in favor of a ‘‘philosophical grammar,’’ and developed a notion of the proprieta` or specificity of style. Thus, rhetoric was conceived as a ‘‘relation among things’’ and style as bound to the ‘‘situation’’ of what he called the ‘‘world’’ of a given author. A sympathizer of Giuseppe Mazzini’s democratic ideals, he participated in the insurrection against the Bourbons in 1848. After the rebellion was crushed he moved to Cosenza for a year, during which period he wrote on Giacomo Leopardi and Friedrich Schiller. In 1850, he was arrested and held without trial for two and a half years. During this time he read Saint-Simon, Goethe, Karl Rosenkranz, translated Hegel’s Logic, develops a secular faith, and began to envision a dialectical historicism, which will be applied to his interpretation of literature as social process. Released in 1853 and condemned to exile to the United States, he escaped to Turin, where he joined a growing cadre of exiled patriots, among them Bernardo Spaventa and Camillo De Meis. Here he began an intense collaboration with journals and newspapers, publishing some of the articles later collected as Saggi critici (Critical Essays, 1866). During these years he focused primarily on nineteenth-century authors and investigates the connections between literary form and sociocultural context. In 1856, De Sanctis moved to Zurich, where he taught Italian literature at the Polytechnic Institute. 616

The years in Switzerland are crucial. He met other political expatriates (Jacob Moleschott, Gianbattista Passerini, Paolo Ceroni), Friedrich T. Vischer and Jakob Burckhardt, and he was introduced to new thinkers (Edgar Quinet, PierreJoseph Proudhon, Arthur Schopenhauer, Heinrich Heine). In this European milieu, De Sanctis began to understand the crisis of liberal culture and moves toward a more materialist, or in his words a ‘‘realist,’’ conception of literary poetics. During this period, he wrote on Petrarca, Ariosto, Manzoni, Leopardi, and planned a book on Dante (which he never completes), fascinated by the dynamic coexistence of poetry and poetics in the Comedia. His magisterial studies on Petrarca, which are essential to understanding De Sanctis’ aesthetic theory, were later published as Saggio critico sul Petrarca (Critical Essay on Petrarch, 1869). In 1860, De Sanctis returned to Naples, shortly before Giuseppe Garibaldi entered the city. He is credited to have convinced the great liberator not to go to Rome, and to wait for the arrival of the new king, Victor Emanuel II. A year later, he was nominated Minister of Education and was the first to propose a mandatory general education for all citizens of the reign. In post-United Italy, De Sanctis ran into opposition with a series of prime ministers for championing a secular, somewhat leftist yet democratic political ideology. For example, in 1867, he signed the Manifesto dell’opposizione parlamentare (Manifesto of the Parliamentary Opposition); in 1869, he supported the unsuccessful repeal of the mill tax, which had devastating economic effects; and in 1870, he favored the annexation of Rome, which then became the capital of the kingdom. As he states in his memoirs, La giovinezza (Youth), posthumously published in 1889, there were two pages to his own life, one political, one literary. De Sanctis, the tireless critic, contributed important reviews on two literary histories: Luigi Settembrini’s Lezioni di letteratura italiana (Lessons on Italian Literature, 1866–1872) and Cesare Cantu`’s Storia universale (Universal History, 1838– 1847), which distanced him from the ‘‘Ghibelline’’ position of the former and the ‘‘Catholic’’ ideology of the latter. In 1868, he began writing for the Neapolitan publisher Morano his celebrated Storia della letteratura italiana (History of Italian Literature, 1870–1871), designed for high schools in an effort to provide a unitary, organic view of the development of national literature. Appointed professor of comparative literature at the University of

FRANCESCO DE SANCTIS Naples, De Sanctis taught and published four key texts on Alessandro Manzoni, whom, against his earlier admiration, he now saw as a detached and calculating artist. He also assembled various writings for his Nuovi saggi critici (New Critical Essays, 1872) and saw the Storia della letteratura italiana through a second edition (1873). In 1876, he resumed his work on Leopardi, whom he considered to be the greatest Italian poet of the nineteenthcentury, indeed a major European voice. De Sanctis’ theory of literature was new and complex. He dismissed previous literary histories of the likes of Girolamo Tiraboschi, Camillo Ugoni and Giuseppe Maffei, as chiacchiere or idle talk. He believed that a history of Italian literature would have to be a history of Italy. Noteworthy efforts by such contemporaries as Paolo Emiliani Giudici and Francesco Ambrosoli were labeled mere compilations, because they drew distinctions between form and content, the beautiful and the ugly, or otherwise showed moralizing biases. For De Sanctis, the relevance and morality of content are external to literature, which has in itself its end and value. He opposed critical approaches that centered solely on the author’s style, that were descriptive and strictly linguistic, formalistic and aesthetically idealizing. Yet he believed that a judgment must be passed. The critic ought to ask: given specific contexts, dominant ideas and particular artistic inclinations, in what ways is this material worked upon by the poet, in what ways is that specific reality transmuted into poetry? Thus arises the notion of form-content, the dialectical relationship between the materials and the emotions that are the substrate pre-existing the conception of the work. The work of art is autonomous, independent of any contingent factors, and yet rooted in its sociohistorical context. Consequently, the artwork is not defined solely by its ‘‘content,’’ which would imply that its form is ancillary and instrumental; nor is the artwork mere ‘‘form,’’ with its subject matter abstracted from a concrete reality and in a sense made irrelevant. Within this perspective, De Sanctis identifies artists who fit his supreme synthesis, and differentiates between true ‘‘poets’’ (the ‘‘man’’ is enwrapped indissolubly into the created work) and ‘‘artists’’ (form dominates and the relationship to reality is aestheticized). In Storia della letteratura italiana, as well as in the specific critical essays, we learn that Dante, Ariosto, Niccolo´ Machiavelli, Giuseppe Parini, and Leopardi are poets, whereas Petrarca, Angelo Poliziano, Francesco Guicciardini,

Giovanbattista Marino, and Manzoni are artists. In the same vein, De Sanctis observes that form is the guiding factor in lifting the artwork above the man and the sociohistorical milieu that produced it: ‘‘Gli Dei d’Omero sono morti: l’Iliade e` rimasta. Puo´ morire l’Italia, ed ogni memoria di Guelfi e Ghibellini: rimarra` la Divina Commedia. Il contenuto e` sottoposto a tutte le vicende della storia; nasce e muore: la forma e` immortale.’’ (Homer’s Gods are dead, yet the Iliad remains. Italy can die, and with it all memory of Guelphs and Ghibellines, but the Divine Comedy will remain. Content is subject to all the vicissitudes of history: It comes to life and it dies, but Form is immortal) (Saggi critici, 1866). Here the critic departs from his Hegelian roots, as for the philosopher, art must be ultimately overcome into a higher form of consciousness. At the same time, however, focusing on the content-become-form is the only path the critic must travel in order to grasp the true implications of those materials (ideas, symbols, concrete events), which were natural and abstract before they were molded into an artistic whole. De Sanctis does not believe in authorial intentions, since that phrase was employed at the time by hermeneutic interpretations; he would rather look into the author’s ‘‘world,’’ in a sense attributing to individual artists the catalyst role of interacting forces and values: Through a particular work of art we are ushered into a historical epoch. In this idea of a transcendent ‘‘form’’ in which the classical concepts of form/content are synthesized, De Sanctis’ Hegelianism represents a sort of deep structure or, better yet, the underlying dynamic of La storia della letteratura italiana. As he draws a complete picture of eight centuries of Italian literature, De Sanctis poses for the first time difficult questions, which have besieged critics and historians ever since: Why has there been no major theater in Italy? How and why was the chivalric epic ‘‘imported’’? What is the meaning of the excessive formalism of the Baroque? How can a country possess a world literature and a provincial society? In providing a ‘‘living’’ literary history, teleological though it may be, Francesco De Sanctis has shaped an immortal form of critical thinking.

Biography Born in Morra Irpina (Avellino), 28 March 1817, son of Alessandro and Maria Agnese Manzi, both small landowners. In 1826, he is sent to Naples to live with his uncle Carlo Maria, and by 1833 he 617

FRANCESCO DE SANCTIS completes his secondary education. He soon begins to teach as an instructor at his uncle’s school, where one day he meets Giacomo Leopardi. Between 1841 and 1848 he is employed in different schools, studying and teaching literature, aesthetics, drama theory, history of criticism. In February 1848, he joins the uprisings for independence; in 1850, is arrested and jailed for 30 months in Castel dell’Ovo. Exiled in 1853, he lives in Turin, where he finds a job as a teacher at an all-girls college. From 1856 to 1859 he teaches at the Zurich Polytechnic. Back in Naples by 1860, for brief periods he is governor of Avellino, member of a commission to restructure the University of Naples. In 1961, is elected to the Parliament, and appointed to the Ministry of Education. Though not re-elected in 1865, his political activity continued with interruptions through the years; in 1863, he marries Maria Testa-Arenaprimo. In 1868, he begins work on his Storia della letteratura italiana. In 1871, he is appointed professor of comparative literature at the University of Naples, retiring in 1880. He dies in Naples on 29 December 1883. PETER CARRAVETTA See also: Literary History Selected Works Collections Opere complete, edited by Nino Cortese, 14 vols., Naples: Morano, 1930–1940. Opere complete, edited by Carlo Muscetta, 23 vols., Turin: Einaudi, 1951–1993. Opere, edited by Niccolo` Gallo, Milan: Ricciardi, 1961.

Critical Writing Saggi critici, 1866; 2nd ed. 1869; 3rd ed. 1874; edited by Luigi Russo, 3 vols., 1965. Saggio critico sul Petrarca, 1869. Storia della letteratura italiana, 1870–1871; edited by Nicola Gallo, 1971; as History of Italian Literature, translated by Joan Redfern, 2 vols., 1931; rpt. 1959. Nuovi saggi critici, 1872; rev. ed. 1879. Studio su Giacomo Leopardi, edited by R. Bonari, 1885. La letteratura italiana del secolo XIX, preface by Benedetto Croce, 1897.

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Scritti vari inediti o rari, preface by Benedetto Croce, 1898. Two Essays: Giuseppe Parini, Ugo Foscolo, edited with introduction and notes by Piero Rebora, 1920. De Sanctis on Dante, edited and translated by Joseph Rossi and Alfred Galpin, 1957. L’arte, la scienza e la vita: Nuovi saggi critici, conferenze e scritti vari, edited by Maria Teresa Lanza, 1972. Purismo, illuminismo, storicismo, edited by Attilio Marinari, 2 vols., 1975.

Other Un viaggio elettorale, 1876; edited by Aldo Marinari, 1983. La giovinezza di Francesco De Sanctis, edited by Pasquale Villari, 1889; edited by Aldo Marinari, 1983.

Further Reading Antonetti, Pierre, Francesco De Sanctis: Son e´volution intellectuelle, son esthe´tique et sa critique, Aix-en-Provence: Publication des Annales de la Faculte´ des Lettres, 1963. Barbuto, Gennaro Maria, Ambivalenze del moderno: De Sanctis e le tradizioni politiche italiane, Naples: Liguori, 2000. Corece, Elena and Alda, Francesco De Sanctis, Turin: UTET, 1964. Croce, Benedetto, Gli scritti di Francesco De Sanctis e la loro varia fortuna, Bari: Laterza, 1917. Dell’Aquila, Michele, and Nicola Longo, Il ‘‘ritorno’’ di De Sanctis: Storia, ideologia, mistificazione, Rome: Bulzoni, 1980. Della Terza, Dante, Tradizione e innovazione: Studi su De Sanctis, Croce e Pirandello, Naples: Liguori, 1999. Landucci, Sergio, Cultura e ideologia in Francesco De Sanctis, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1977. Luciani, Paola, L’estetica applicata di Francesco De Sanctis, Florence: Olschki, 1983. Mack Smith, Denis, ‘‘Francesco De Sanctis: The Politics of a Literary Critic,’’ in Society and Politics in the Age of the Risorgimento, edited by John A. Davis and Paul Ginsborg, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Marinari, Aldo (editor), Francesco De Sanctis: Un secolo dopo. Atti del Convegno Internazionale del Centenario—1983, Bari: Laterza, 1985. Muscetta, Carlo, Francesco De Sanctis, Bari: Laterza, 1978. Romagnoli, Sergio, Per una storia della critica italiana: Dal De Sanctis al Novecento, Florence: Le Lettere, 1993. Tedeschi Muscetta, Marcella (editor), Per leggere De Sanctis, Rome: Bonacci, 1983. Valitutti, Salvatore, La riforma di Francesco De Sanctis, Naples: Bibliopolis, 1988. Wellek, Rene´, ‘‘Francesco De Sanctis,’’ in History of Modern Criticism, vol. 3, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965.

GIUSEPPE DE SANTIS

GIUSEPPE DE SANTIS (1917–1997) Unlike many up-and-coming filmmakers of his time, Giuseppe De Santis’ cinematic career began when his name was already well-known and under the auspices of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), one of the most influential cultural forces in postwar Italy. Namely he had experience, authority, and a talent that had matured in years of apprenticeship, in particular with Luchino Visconti. He also relied on a team of the most gifted collaborators (Cesare Zavattini, Umberto Barbaro, Carlo Lizzani, Mario Serandrei, Gianni Di Venanzo). De Santis conceived of cinema as a means of giving voice to the lower classes, workers, peasants, and the humble—people at the margins of society, victims of exploitation. With his debut as director of Caccia tragica (Tragic Pursuit, 1947), a story about the struggle of peasants to regain control of land devastated by the war, he became a significant force in the neorealist movement, distinguishing himself as a staunch filmmaker who would create a populist version of cinema with the scope of changing and shaping society. With his second film; Riso amaro (Bitter Rice, 1949) he achieved world recognition with a nomination for an Academy Award for best original story in 1950. Riso amaro was also the fifth most profitable film released in Italy in the 1949–1950 season and was distributed internationally, including to the former Socialist bloc. Its commercial success surpassed even Roberto Rossellini’s Paisa` (Paisan, 1946). The film’s melodramatic aspects and the physical glamour of the young actress, Silvana Mangano, overshadowed the political messages of the film, which were dismissed by dogmatic critics and by the moralistic judgments of the Vatican. Mangano’s provocative sensuality and her rise to stardom have contributed to the misleading association between her role in De Santis’ film and that performed by the so-called maggiorate fisiche (naturally endowed actresses), which marked the return to the diva, the femme fatale of Italian cinema in the 1950s. The rice farm worker Silvana becomes a prototype of the diabolical seductress who destroys any man who falls prey to her charm. She loves American movies and dances the boogie-woogie, but behind her story there is the one of the many women slaving all day long in the

knee-deep water of the rice fields of Northern Italy, with small wages and a poor life. De Santis’ condemnation of injustices is clearer with Non c’ e` pace tra gli ulivi (No Peace Among the Olive Trees, 1950) and Roma ore 11 (Rome, 11 O’clock, 1952). When the two films were released right-wing critics carried out a defamatory campaign against De Santis, and for the latter film the Parliament proposed investigating possible illegal funds from enemy Communist countries. De Santis’ position would worsen during the apogee of the Cold War when the Italian film industry created an unofficial blacklist, following the model of the House Committee for Un-American Activities for Hollywood artists suspected of Communist association. The newly reconstructed Italian film industry depended on state funding that demanded a more optimistic type of film with milder sociopolitical criticisms. In this hostile milieu, De Santis opted for Un marito per Anna Zaccheo (A Husband for Anna Zaccheo, 1953) and Giorni d’amore (Days of Love, 1954), two love stories instead of his projects on the peasants’ land occupation in Southern Italy and on the massacre of unarmed peasants by Salvatore Giuliano’s gang at Portella della Ginestra in Sicily in 1947. In 1956, he made Uomini e lupi (Men and Wolves), a cinematic fable on mythological figures of a vanishing rural world, but in order to continue his films on Southern Italian underdevelopment and unemployment he went to the former Yugoslavia to film; Cesta Duga Godinu Dana/La strada lunga un anno (The One-Year Long Road, 1958), which ironically received an Academy Award nomination as a Yugoslavian film. His return to filmmaking in Italy produced La garconnie`re (The Love Nest, 1960) and Un apprezzato professionista di sicuro avvenire (A Respected Professional with a Bright Future, 1972), which marked De Santis’ retirement from cinema. The new international collaboration between the ex-USSR and the USA allowed De Santis to film in the Ukraine, Italiani, brava gente (March On or Die, 1964), on the army sent by Benito Mussolini to invade Russia as Hitler’s ally. De Santis’ films fall within the two main categories of postwar Italian cinema. In one the 619

GIUSEPPE DE SANTIS attempt to document everyday life or past events dominates, in the other, adept showmanship seeks to dramatize reality. Although closer to the second category, De Santis’ films never give up the ideal of cinema as a vehicle for and an expression of social and political loyalty. His final goal was to create cinematic spectacles that would prompt or propose forms of social behavior based on human and class solidarity by denouncing inequities. His artistic and sociopolitical concerns were integral to his effort to heighten the artistic awareness of the uneducated masses. In his films, he tried to develop simple passions using uncomplicated metaphors to stimulate the spectators’ reaction. His dream was to create a national cinema that could introduce elements of higher culture in a popular media to fill the cultural vacuum left by elitist Italian traditional culture and also to limit the American cultural hegemony. De Santis did not compromise his principles or political agenda even during the 1960s when it became hard for him to find producers willing to finance his populist stories. The audience, once accustomed to realist stories on hunger or on how to secure temporary jobs, wanted films on the new problems of a modern nation with rising living standards. And De Santis tried to make films in the new spaghetti western style under the pseudonym Joe Santos but refused the producers’ demand that he use his real name. He wanted his name to remain associated with a genuine neorealist narrative style that had at one time attracted a mass audience with moving plots, epic breadth, and popular themes. In spite of this contribution, he is often remembered as one of the first postwar directors to have restored the star system in the Italian film industry. His films are plagued by criticisms of his heterodoxic approach to neorealism, which juxtaposed committed political subject matter, flamboyant eroticism, and a Baroque decadent style combined with a Hollywood-inspired mise-en-sce`ne. Nonetheless they show an outstanding technical ability and a passion for formalized beauty and sensuality. For De Santis, neorealism was the result of a specific historical moment, the Resistance, in which the working class entered as protagonist of its own destiny to win freedom and to demand the right to its own aspirations. These historical events captured by various directors changed cinema, making it no longer a medium for the middle class but a medium of the people. He also focused on the role of the medium itself as a mean of mass communication and as repository of collective imagination. 620

De Santis’ project was to continue this type of cinema and to create a national cinema in which the transfiguration of reality was more than the simple reproduction of facts and events. His films feature common people in conflict with the power structure, and the story lines are embellished with continual intertextual references to pop culture and literary sources, features that make his films the most self-conscious works of neorealism.

Biography Born in Fondi (Latina), a small town in the southern part of the Latium region, on 11 February 1917. At the age of 17 was sent to a Catholic boarding school in Rome. A year later attended the Liceo Classico Giulio Cesare. After graduation, enrolled at the University of Rome to study humanities and then, without finishing his degree, enrolled in the Italian film school, Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, where he studied with professors Umberto Barbaro, Luigi Chiarini, and German critic Rudolf Arnheim. Graduated in 1942 with a short film La gatta based on a story that he had written. That same year, with the help of Gianni Puccini, started to write film reviews and became one of the promoters of the renewal of Italian cinema. In his writings for the prestigious journal Cinema, he called for realism not as a passive obeisance to a static and objective truth but as a creative force. The experience with the journal culminated in the making of Ossessione (1942), directed by Luchino Visconti, one of the leaders of the group, as one of his assistant directors. In 1944, joined the Resistance fight against Nazi-Fascism and after liberation, worked as assistant director on the first films on the Italian Resistance with Aldo Vergano, Il sole sorge ancora (1946) and Scalo merci (1943), started by Roberto Rossellini and finished by Marcello Pagliero under the new title Desiderio. In 1944, shot two documentary films on the Resistance: Giorni di gloria and La nostra guerra. The former is a collaboration among Marcello Pagliero, Luchino Visconti, Mario Serandei, and De Santis with the commentary written by critic Umberto Barbaro. The latter consists of three episodes that recount the trial of Pietro Caruso, police chief of Rome during the German occupation, and his subsequent trial and execution along with Pietro Roch, his collaborator. It ends with the reconstruction of Italy by the progressive forces. In the 1980s, taught film directing at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome. In 1989, his first tour in the United States of America. In the summer of

VITTORIO DE SICA 1990 taught filmmaking at Middlebury College. Died of a heart attack in a Roman hospital on 16 May 1997. ANTONIO VITTI Selected Works Films Caccia tragica, 1947. Riso amaro (Bitter Rice), 1949. Non c’e` pace tra gli ulivi, 1950. Roma ore 11, 1952. Un marito per Anna Zaccheo, 1953. Giorni d’amore, 1954. Uomini e lupi, 1956. La strada lunga un anno, 1958. La garconnie`re, 1960. Italiani brava gente (March On or Die), 1964. Un apprezzato professionista di sicuro avvenire, 1972.

Screenplays Caccia tragica. Un inizio strepitoso, edited by Marco Grossi and Virginio Palazzo, Fondi: Quaderni dell’Associazione Giuseppe De Santis, 2000. Non c’e` pace tra gli ulivi. Un neorealismo postmoderno, edited by Vito Zagarrio, Rome: Scuola Nazionale di Cinema—Associazione Giuseppe De Santis, Quaderni della Cineteca, 2002. Riso amaro nel fuoco delle polemiche, edited by Marco Grossi and Virginio Palazzo, Fondi: Quaderni dell’Associazione Giuseppe De Santis, 2003.

Giorni d’amore. Un film di Giuseppe De Santis tra impegno e commedia, edited by Giovanni Spagnoletti and Marco Grossi, Turin: Lindau—Associazione Giuseppe De Santis, 2004.

Further Reading Camerino, Vincenzo, Il cinema di Giuseppe De Santis, Lecce: Elle Edizione, 1987. Farassino, Alberto, Giuseppe De Santis, Milano: Moizzi Editore, 1978. Giampiero, Cleopazzo, Il neorealismo di Giuseppe De Santis, Galantina: Editrice Salentina, 1980. Grossi, Marco, and Giovanni Spagnoletti (editors), Dossier: Giuseppe De Santis— l’escluso, in Close-Up, Anno 1 – n. 2—settembre 1997. Cinema di Venezia. Lizzani, Carlo, Riso amaro: un film diretto da Giuseppe De Santis, Roma: Edizioni Officina, 1978. Marcus, Millicent, De Santis’ ‘‘Bitter Rice’’: A Neorealist Hybrid, in Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism, Princeton, NJ: University Press, 1986. Masi, Stefano, Giuseppe De Santis, Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 1982. Micciche´, Lino, De Santis e la ‘‘trilogia della terra,’’ in La ragione e lo sguardo, Cosenza: Lerici, 1979. Parisi, Antonio, Il cinema di Giuseppe De Santis tra passione e ideologia, Roma: Cadmo Editore, 1983. Vitti, Antonio, Giuseppe De Santis and Postwar Italian Cinema, Toronto: UPT, 1996. Wagner, Jean, Giuseppe De Santis, Dossiers du cine´ma, in Cine´astes II, Bruxelles: Casterman, 1971.

VITTORIO DE SICA (1902–1974) Vittorio De Sica is among the most internationally known of Italian filmmakers, as well as an actor of some esteem. He directed 28 feature-length films, winning Academy Awards for Sciuscia´ (Shoeshine, 1946), Ladri di biciclette (The Bicycle Thief, 1948), La ciociara (Two Women, 1960), Ieri, oggi e domani (Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, 1963), and Il giardino dei Finzi Contini (The Garden of Finzi Continis, 1970). His groundbreaking postwar films were part of a new cinematic style called neorealism, which was to influence every generation of filmmaker to come. De Sica’s work as a director was the latter part of an illustrious career that started with acting when he was just 15. He began in the theater,

establishing a reputation as the Italian Maurice Chevalier, and went on to appear in 150 movies, mostly sentimental comedies in which he usually played the Latin lover. Mario Camerini made him a star when he cast the young actor in his comedy, Gli uomini che mascalzoni... (Men What Rascals, 1932). De Sica played the role of a chauffeur who, in order to impress his girlfriend, poses as the owner of his boss’s automobile, and his suave rendition of Cesare Bixio’s song, ‘‘Parlami d’amore Mariu`’’ marks a defining moment in Italian cinema. Along with his costar, Assia Noris (Camerini’s wife), he appeared in two more of Camerini’s films: Il signor Max (Mr. Max, 1937) and I grandi magazzini (Department Stores, 1939). These romantic 621

VITTORIO DE SICA comedies mostly captured the euphoria of the period preceding World War II (1931–1937). Nevertheless, the sociological undercurrents of Camerini’s work suggested how moral integrity mostly belonged to the working classes, who are betrayed by the hypocrisies and greed of the upper classes. On screen in the 1950s, De Sica remained faithful to his role of the elegant enchanter. His performances as Maresciallo Carotenuto in Luigi Comencini’s comedies Pane, amore e fantasia (Bread, Love and Dreams, 1953), Pane, amore e gelosia (Bread, Love and Jealousy, 1954), with Gina Lollobrigida, brought him renewed success as an accomplished comedian at this later stage in his life. De Sica the actor appeared in numerous films indiscriminately, accepting all kinds of new roles in an effort to fund his own films and to repay his considerable gambling debts. De Sica’s comedic roots, and his collaboration with Camerini, influenced his directorial debut with Rose scarlatte (Red Roses, 1940), which was followed by Maddalena...zero in condotta (Maddalena Zero for Conduct, 1940), Teresa Venerdı` (1941), and Un garabaldino al convento (A Garibaldine at the Convent, 1942), comedies about the coming of age of young girls using the double identity plot. His acting experience also inspired his directorial techniques. At the beginning, he chose to work with amateur rather than professional actors (a practice often adopted by the neorealist filmmakers), whom he shaped and molded to fit his production needs. For instance, his casting of Enzo Stajola for the role of the young Bruno in Ladri di biciclette was determined by the boy’s particular physical attributes—namely, his interesting and expressive face—as well as his ability to keep up with the long, swift strides of Lamberto Maggiorana, who played the boy’s father. A distinctive trait of Ladri di biciclette is that illusion of reality in which all of the film’s events seem to obey the law of chance, and the actions of the characters seem spontaneous and true. This deliberately manufactured effect was achieved through a carefully constructed mise en sce`ne as well as thorough attention to the script. These are among the hallmarks of De Sica’s neorealism. De Sica, along with Roberto Rossellini and Luchino Visconti, is considered one of the founding fathers of that innovative cinematic style. The term ‘‘neorealism’’ was first used in reference to the Russian social realism of the 1920s, a definition applied primarily to the aesthetic of literature and cinema. ‘‘Neorealism’’ soon appealed to European 622

artists from different fields (especially theater) who saw how far the new style broke ideologically and linguistically with tradition. Through the use of natural settings and the application of current social content, Italian filmmakers were attempting to revive a national consciousness and inspire a sense of national solidarity. What they offered was an ethical aesthetic that portrayed in a realistic way the life of the oppressed and downtrodden, finally giving them a voice. But neorealism never had a formal program or cultural manifesto. Instead, it was interpreted differently by various filmmakers. Rossellini exploited the style’s minimalist aesthetics to undermine sentimentality, letting facts and events speak for themselves. Visconti understood reality as history and culture. For his part, De Sica transposed everyday reality into the realm of poetry. He used the neorealist style to express, above all, the emotional lives of his characters. As a result he was accused of overpopularizing and romanticizing this stripped-down aesthetic. And yet his characters disclose a deep pessimism toward human solidarity, emphasizing the loneliness of man in a society where institutions are either absent or failing them. After fighting strenuously against social injustice, they simply resign themselves to their destiny. Ironically, De Sica’s cinema provoked Marxist critics, who thought his characters lacked class consciousness, as well as Christian Democrats who attacked his ‘‘Communist’’ ideology. De Sica was a true Humanist who believed in the right of every man to achieve freedom and personal dignity. Any introduction to De Sica’s directorial career usually begins with his encounter with screenwriter Cesare Zavattini in 1935, on the set of Camerini’s Daro` un milione (I’ll Give a Million). Their artistic collaboration was one of the most fertile and successful in the history of cinema. Zavattini’s strong personality, distinct writing style, and theoretical approach to neorealism greatly influenced the creative process of the films he scripted for De Sica, and often belittled the director’s own contributions to the storyline. Yet it was De Sica’s interpretative expertise and masterful miseen-sce`ne for which the duo would ultimately be recognized. I bambini ci guardano (The Children Are Watching Us, 1943) is the first film in which Zavattini’s name is credited. Produced during the final years of the Fascist regime, the film transgressed the limits, stylistically and thematically, of the typically entertaining cinema produced under Fascism. In it, De Sica focuses on the problems of the couple and

VITTORIO DE SICA reveals a family crisis that ends with the mother’s separation from her son and the father’s suicide. Prico`, the protagonist of the film, is the first of De Sica’s child icons (followed by Pasquale and Giuseppe in Sciuscia´, and Bruno in Ladri di biciclette) who, innocent yet experienced, observes the decay and corruption of the adult world. Prico`’s burden is a self-imposed loneliness, the result of others’ inability to understand him. Such incomprehension between adult and child is a recurring theme in De Sica’s cinema. Unlike the well-established ‘‘telefoni bianchi’’ genre of the prewar period, I bambini ci guardano penetrates the high walls of middle-class conformity, shattering the Fascist ideal of the perfect Italian family. De Sica, relying on an objective camera, lets Prico`’s eyes do the talking, doing away with traditional discursive narrative cinema. In the years between 1946 and 1948, De Sica made two more films with Zavattini, both revolving around very young protagonists: Giuseppe and Pasquale in Sciuscia`; Bruno in Ladri di biciclette. These films epitomize the director’s bitter statement that little had changed in postwar Italy for the oppressed (among whom children played an important role as victims and rescuers of adults). Sciuscia` expresses a commonly shared feeling of disillusionment caused by the realization that the Americanled liberation of the country and the fall of Fascism did not transform Italy overnight: Dreams were incompatible with certain social conditions. Indeed the country continued to rely on an authoritarian penal code, and suffered from moral decay within the family and throughout society. De Sica’s idea for Sciuscia` was inspired by Scimmietta and Capellone, two real-life shoeshine boys, who, after work, spent part of their earnings riding horses in Villa Borghese in Rome. For De Sica, these children were the true measure of the country’s economic and moral demise. They had to grow up fast; they were compelled to support their families; they befriended and exploited American soldiers and favored the black market, thus effectively renouncing their childhood. Scimmietta and Capellone were transformed by Zavattini into two Roman shoe shiners who manage to save enough money to buy a white horse called Bersagliere. After getting tangled up in a robbery, they land in prison where their loyalty is tested by manipulative police officers (representing corrupt adult society), until the two boys manage to escape. Pasquale, realizing that Giuseppe has taken the horse, chases his friend down and accidentally causes his death. In the final scene, with Giuseppe weeping over his friend’s

body, the horse wanders away in the morning fog. De Sica’s elaborate mise en sce`ne, editing, and dramatic symbolism highlight the physical and moral entrapment of the two boys. Each shot includes a host of visual information. Low-angle tracking shots follow the galloping Bersagliere, and underline the boys’ freedom and moral superiority. Perhaps because of its melodramatic and convoluted structure, excessive symbolism, and mannered characters, Sciuscia` fails to reach the poetic level of De Sica’s subsequent films. Critics unanimously consider Ladri di biciclette De Sica’s masterpiece. The story of the attacchino (someone who glues advertising posters to city walls), whose bicycle is stolen and who wanders through Rome with his young son in search of it, is well-known around the world. But Ladri di biciclette is more than a touching human drama; it is a biting comment on an Italian society left desolate by the war. The camera mostly focuses on a new kind of protagonist—the streets of Rome and those who populate them—and in so doing presents the country’s economic status as one of the movie’s main themes. The desolation of the soul, we see, corresponds to the dilapidation of the city. This film did more than any other film to popularize Italian neorealism worldwide. Usually considered as the anomaly of neorealism, Miracolo a Milano (Miracle in Milan, 1951), an adaptation of Zavattini’s successful novel, Toto´ il buono, shocked critics and audiences alike with its rich surrealist imagery. It was through the use of allegory, metaphor, symbol, and fable that Zavattini and De Sica effectively accused Italy’s political elite of abuse of power. Its main character, Toto`, is a foundling raised by an old lady, Lolotta, endowed with magical powers. After her death he joins the poor people living in the outskirts of Milan. Mobbi and Brambi are two rich men who decide to buy this land occupied by a community of tramps. When they discover that the land is rich in oil they decide to evict their tenants. The tramps have nearly surrendered to a legally enforced eviction when the dead Lolotta descends from the sky to present her adoptive son with a miraculous dove that will allow him and his friends to remain on the land. But angels then take back the dove to re-establish order. When the police arrest the tramps, Lolotta again sends the dove to them, which sets them free. Because the message is sociological, this fantastical film remains nevertheless firmly rooted in neorealist terrain. The poor remain spiritually pure even as they are deprived of everything. They defend themselves against eager 623

VITTORIO DE SICA modern despots with imagination and poetry. The final escape of the tramps on broomsticks taken from the street cleaners of Piazza Duomo—to a place where ‘‘Good morning, really means good morning!’’—reinforces both the utopic and realistic features of the work. Umberto D. (1952), the last of De Sica’s neorealist films, written entirely by Zavattini, puts into practice his idea that the simplest story, portrayed realistically, can produce forceful drama. Umberto D. is centered on the banal daily existence of the retired (and impoverished) pensioner, Umberto Domenico Ferrari (played by a Florentine professor, Carlo Battisti), his dog Flick, and his interaction with the young maid, Maria. Alienation, aging, and poverty are treated matter-of-factly; indeed, Umberto, overwhelmed by his miserable solitude, cannot appreciate the desperation of others (like Maria who will soon lose her job). Again, De Sica shows us that men are unable to fulfill their humanitarian obligations even—especially—when they themselves are victims of such disinterest. The human desolation in Umberto D. is enhanced by a camera that pauses to record the slightest gestures, common objects, and simple aspects of everyday life. Such a technique respects, at its best, the ‘‘cinematographic duration’’ advocated by Cesare Zavattini. In his notion of realism, cinematographic narrative time and real time must coincide, minimizing dramatization and allowing the viewer to reflect upon the ‘‘reality’’ he is watching. Maria, for example, is shown washing dishes, and the camera stays with her for the entire duration of the act, and, in so doing, captures her desperation and misery more profoundly than any spectacular or dramatic sequence might. This formal rigor is accomplished with deep focus shots, calibrated camera angles, and tracking shots, and with the use of studio sets where the environment can be better controlled. As in Ladri di biciclette and Sciuscia`, De Sica underlined the emergence of a new middle class and the ambiguous morality fueled mostly by the desire to belong to that social class. To take one example, Umberto’s landlady fires the maid because she’s pregnant by an unknown soldier, but then rents Umberto’s room to prostitutes when he is not there. Unlike Ladri di biciclette, in which a note of optimism was struck by the young boy who represented Italy’s future, in Umberto D. everyone is doomed. The old man carries his bourgeois desperation and solitude with him wherever he goes. De Sica dedicated the movie to his father, a representative of the Italian bourgeoisie who felt the need to 624

uphold the de´cor of their class even in times of destitution. The neorealist phenomenon was short-lived, linked inextricably to the events of the war and its immediate aftermath. As Italy regained some degree of normalcy, film artists recognized the need to evolve their cinematic language. But it was a fitful transition for De Sica: both Stazione Termini (Indiscretion of an American Wife, 1953) and Il tetto (The Roof, 1956) attempted to revive his early neorealist style, but were commercial failures. It took De Sica four years to recapture his strong artistic voice. In 1960, he directed La ciociara (Two Women). Sophia Loren, who won an Academy Award for her performance, played the leading role of Cesira, a young widow who in 1943 abandons her shop in Rome to take shelter from the bombs. She goes with her 13-year-old daughter, Rosetta, to the mountain of Ciociarı`a. Less poetic than Ladri di biciclette and Sciuscia`, more melodramatic than the novel by Alberto Moravia from which it was adapted, the film offers some indelible scenes, like the freeze-frame close-up of Rosetta’s face after she and her mother had been raped by Moroccan soldiers. De Sica’s last success was an adaptation of Giorgio Bassani’s autobiographical novel Il giardino dei Finzi Contini. It tells the story of how a wealthy Jewish family from Ferrara, during the years just before the war, chose to align with the Fascists, only to become victims of Italy’s racial laws. The film fails to fully capture the dream-like atmosphere of Bassani’s fiction as it centers on the emotional turmoil of the adolescent protagonist in a period overshadowed by the impending war. But Il giardino dei Finzi Contini remains nevertheless a significant contribution to the cinematic repertoire as one rare film that faced the topic of Judaism in Italy. Toward the end of his life, the reality of Italy had improved, and De Sica found it difficult to reach the poetic heights or provide the penetrating social analysis of his neorealist films. After Il giardino dei Finzi Contini, he directed four more films, including Una breve vacanza (A Brief Vacation, 1973) and Il viaggio (The Voyage, 1974), his last work starring Sophia Loren and Richard Burton. On the other hand, Una breve vacanza is one of De Sica’s most cherished films, and attests to his lifelong commitment to represent the simple lives and dreams of the socially emarginated. It tells the story of a working-class woman, played by Florinda Bolkan, whose internment in a sanatorium is the only vacation she ever had.

VITTORIO DE SICA

Biography Born in Sora (Frosinone) 7 July 1901. Spent childhood in Naples. Began working as office clerk to support his family. Fascinated by acting very early in life and made his cinematic debut at age 16 in L’affare Clemenceau by Edoardo Bencivenga. Joined Tatiana Pavlova’s stage company in 1923; worked as actor in three films director by Mario Camerini (1932–1939); married Giuditta Rissone, 1933. Debuted as film director with Rose scarlatte (1940); started the long collaboration with screenwriter Cesare Zavattini with I bambini ci guardano (1943); first directorial successes were Sciuscia` and Ladri di biciclette, both winners of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, in 1946 and 1949 respectively. After the commercial flop of Umberto D., returned to directing lighter works and to acting. Luigi Comencini directed him in Pane, amore e fantasia and its sequels, (1953–1954); Roberto Rossellini directed him in Il generale della Rovere (1958). La ciociara (1960), Ieri, oggi e domani (1963), and Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini (1971) all won Academy Awards for Best Foreign Film. Divorced Giuditta Rissone in 1968. Married Maria Mercader that same year, with whom he had two children: Manuel and Christian. Died following the removal of a cyst from his lung at Neully (France) on November 13, 1974. GIOVANNA DE LUCA Selected Works Acting Roles Il processo Cle´manceu, 1917. La bellezza del mondo, 1927. La compagnia dei matti, 1928. La vecchia signora, 1932. Due cuori felici, 1932. Gli uomini, che mascalzoni, 1932. La segretaria per tutti, 1933. Un cattivo soggetto, 1933. La canzone del sole, 1933. Il signore desidera?, 1933. Tempo Massimo, 1934. Lisetta, 1934. Amo te sola, 1935. Daro´ un milione, 1935. Lohengrin, 1936. Non ti conosco piu´, 1936. Ma non e` una cosa seria, 1936. L’uomo che sorride, 1936. Questi ragazzi, 1937. Il signor Max, 1937. Napoli d’altri tempi, 1938. La mazurka di papa`, 1938. Hanno rapito un uomo, 1938.

Partire, 1938. L’orologio a cucu´, 1938. Le due madri, 1938. Castelli in aria, 1939. Ai vostri ordini, signora!, 1939. Grandi magazzini, 1939. Finisce sempre cosı`, 1939. Manon Lescaut, 1940. Pazza di gioia, 1940. La peccatrice, 1940. L’avventuriera del piano di sopra, 1941. La guardia del corpo, 1942. Se io fossi onesto, 1942. I nostri sogni, 1943. Nessuno torna indietro, 1943. L’ippocampo, 1943. Non sono superstizioso...ma!, 1944. Lo sbaglio di essere vivo, 1945. Il mondo vuole cosı`, 1945. Roma citta´ libera, 1946. Abbasso la ricchezza!, 1946. Sperduti nel buio, 1947. Natale al campo 119, 1947. Lo sconosciuto di San Marino, 1948. Cuore, 1948. Domani e` troppo tardi, 1950. Carriera bella presenza offresi..., 1951. Buongiorno, elefante!, 1952. Altri tempi, 1952. I gioielli di Madame de..., 1953. Pane, amore e fantasia, 1953. Villa Borghese, 1953. Cento anni d’amore, 1954. Tempi nostri, 1954. Pane amore e gelosia, 1954. Peccato che sia una canaglia, 1954. Il matrimonio, 1954. Gran varieta´, 1954. Il letto, 1954. Vergine moderna, 1954. L’allegro squadrone, 1954. La bella mugnaia, 1955. Gli ultimi cinque minuti, 1955. Il segno di Venere, 1955. Racconti romani, 1955. Il bigamo, 1955. Mio figlio Nerone, 1956. Tempo di villeggiatura, 1956. Montecarlo-The Montecarlo Story, 1956. I giorni piu´ belli, 1956. Noi siamo le colonne..., 1956. Il medico e lo stregone, 1957. Toto`, Vittorio e la dottoressa, 1957. Casino` de Paris-Casino de Paris, 1957. Padre e figli, 1957. I colpevoli, 1957. La donna che venne dal mare-Danae, 1957. Souvenir dI´talie, 1957. Vacanze a Ischia, 1957. Il conte Max, 1957. Amore e chiacchiere, 1957. Domenica e`sempre domenica, 1958. Ballerina e buon Dio, 1958. Pezzo, capopezzo e cannone-Kanonen Serenade, 1958.

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VITTORIO DE SICA La ragazza di San Pietro, 1958. Anna di Brooklyn, 1958. Gli zitelloni, 1958. Nel blu dipinto di blu, 1959. Pane, amore e Andalusia, 1959. La prima notte, 1959. Il nemico di mia moglie, 1959. Policarpo, ufficiale di scrittura, 1959. Vacanze d’inverno, 1959. Il moralista, 1959. Il generale della Rovere, 1959. Il mondo dei miracoli, 1959. Uomini e nobiluomini, 1959. Ferdinando I, re di Napoli, 1959. Gastone, 1960. Le tre ‘‘eccetera’’ del colonnello, 1960. Le pillole di Ercole, 1960. Napoleone di Austerlitz, 1960. La sposa bella, 1960. Un amore a Roma, 1960. La miliardaria (The Millionaires), 1961. La baia di Napoli (It Started in Naples), 1961. Gli attendenti, 1961. Le meraviglie di Aladino, 1961. L’onorata societa`, 1961. I celebri amori di Enrico IV (Vive Henry IV, vive l’amour!), 1961. La Fayette, una spada per due bandiere (La Fayette), 1961. Eva, 1962. Le avventure e gli amori di Moll Flanders, 1966. Gli altri, gli altri e noi, 1967. Un italiano in America, 1967. Colpo grosso alla napoletana (The Biggest Bundle of Them All), 1968. Caroline Cherie (Caroline Che`rie), 1968. L’uomo venuto dal Kremlino (The Shoes of the Fisherman), 1968. Se e` martedı`, deve essere il Belgio (If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium), 1969. Una su 13 (12+1), 1969. Cose di ‘‘Cosa nostra,’’ 1970. Trastevere, 1971. Io non vedo, tu non parli, lui non sente, 1971. L’odore delle belve (L’odeur des fauves), 1971. Grande slalom per una rapina (Snowjob), 1972. Ettore lo fusto, 1972. Siamo tutti in liberta´ provvisoria, 1972. Storia de fratelli e de cortelli, 1973. Il delitto Matteotti, 1973. Viaggia ragazza, viaggia, hai la musica nelle vene, 1974. Dracula cerca sangue di vergine e...morı` di sete!!! (Blood for Dracula), 1974. Intorno, 1974. C’eravamo tanto amati, 1974.

I bambini ci guardano (The Children Are Watching Us, based on the novel Prico´ by Giulio Viola), 1943. La porta del cielo (Gate of Heaven), 1944. Sciuscia` (Shoeshine), 1946. Ladri di biciclette (The Bicycle Thief, based on Luigi Bartolini’s novel), 1948. Miracolo a Milano (Miracle in Milan, based on the novel Toto` il buono by Cesare Zavattini), 1951. Umberto D., 1952. Stazione Termini (Indiscretion of an American Wife), 1953. L’oro di Napoli (The Gold of Naples, based on Giuseppe Marotta’s novel), 1954. Il tetto (The Roof), 1956. La ciociara (Two Women, adapted from Alberto Moravia’s novel), 1960. Il giudizio universale (The Last Judgement), 1961. Boccaccio 70 (Segment La riffa), 1962. I sequestrati di Altona (The Condemned of Altona, based on Jean Paul Sartre’s play), 1962. Il boom, 1963. Ieri, oggi e domani (Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow), 1963. Matrimonio all’italiana (Marriage Italian Style, based on the play Filumena Marturano by Eduardo De Filippo), 1964. Un mondo nuovo (Un monde nouveau), 1965. Caccia alla volpe (After the Fox, based on Neil Simon’s play), 1966. Le streghe (segment Una sera come le altre), 1967. Woman Seven Times, 1967. Amanti (A Place for Lovers, based on Brunello Rondi’s play), 1968. I girasoli (Sunflowers), 1970. Il giardino dei Finzi Contini (The Garden of the FinziContinis, based on Giorgio Bassani’s novel), 1970. Le coppie (segment Il leone), 1970. Lo chiameremo Andrea (We’ll Call Him Andrew), 1972. Una breve vacanza (A Brief vacation), 1973. Il viaggio (The Voyage, based on Luigi Pirandello’s short story), 1974.

Screenplays Zavattini, Cesare, Umberto D.: Dal soggetto alla sceneggiatura, Milan-Rome: Fratelli Bocca Editori, 1953. Il tetto, edited by Michele Gandin, Bologna: Cappelli, 1956. Il giardino universale, edited by Alberto Bevilacqua, Caltanissetta-Rome: Sciascia, 1961. Bicycle Thieves (with Cesare Zavattini), London-New York: Lorrimer, 1968. Miracle in Milan, New York: Grossman Publishers, 1968. Ladri di biciclette, edited by Ernesto Laura, Padua: Radar, 1969.

Other La porta del cielo: memorie 1901–1952, 2004.

Films

Further Readings

Rose scarlatte (based on the play Due dozzine di rose scarlatte by Aldo Di Benedetti), 1940. Maddalena...zero in condotta (Maddalena, Zero for Conduct, based on the play Magda´r Kicsapja´ by La´slo´ Ka´da´r), 1940. Teresa Venerdı´ (based on the novel Pe´ntek Re´zi by Rudolf To¨ro¨k), 1941. Un garibaldino al convento, 1942.

Agel, Henri, Vittorio De Sica, Paris: Editions Universitaires, 1964. Apra`, Adriano, and Patrizia Pistagnes (editors), ‘‘Vittorio De Sica (1901–1974),’’ in I Favolosi anni trenta. Cinema italiano 1929–1944, Milan: Electa, 1979. Argentieri, Mino, and Valentina Fortichiari (editors), Cesare Zavattini: Opere, Cinema, Diario cinematografico, Neorealismo ecc., Milan: Bompiani, 2002.

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VITTORIO DE SICA Aristarco, Guido, Antologia di ‘‘Cinema Nuovo,’’ 1952–58, vol. 1, Rimini-Florence: Guaraldi, 1975. Bazin, Andre´, ‘‘An Aesthetic of Reality: Cinematic Neorealism and the Italian School of Liberation, Vittorio De Sica: Metteur en Sce`ne, Umberto D: A Great Work,’’ in What Is Cinema? Volume II, edited and translated by Hugh Gray, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967. Bolzoni, Francesco, Quando De Sica era Mr. Brown, Turin: Edizioni ERI, 1985. Calderon, Orio (editor), Vittorio De Sica, Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo & Bizzarri, 1975. Cardullo, Bert, Vittorio De Sica: Director, Actor, Screenwriter, Jefferson: Mac Farland, 2002. Carpi, Fabio, ‘‘L’elegia populista di Vittorio De Sica,’’ in Cinema italiano del dopoguerra, Milan: Schwartz, 1958. Curle, Howard, and Stephen Snyder (editors), Vittorio De Sica: Contemporary Perspectives, Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2000. Leprohon, Pierre, Vittorio De Sica, Seghers: Paris, 1966. Micciche`, Lino, ‘‘De Sica e il neorealismo,’’ in La ragione e lo sguardo. Saggi e note sul cinema, Cosenza: Lerici, 1979. Micciche`, Lino (editor), De Sica: autore, regista, attore, Venice: Marsilio, 1992. Micciche´, Lino, Sciuscia´ di Vittorio De Sica. Letture, Documenti, Testimonianze, Turin: Lindau, 1994. Mida, Massimo, ‘‘Vittorio De Sica in quattro dimensioni,’’ in Compagni di viaggio. Colloqui con i maestri del cinema italiano, Turin: Eri, 1988. Moscati, Italo, Vittorio De Sica: vitalita`, passione e talento in un’Italia dolceamara, Rome: Ediesse and Rai-ERI, 2003. Oldrini, Guido, ‘‘Profilo di De Sica neorealista,’’ in Gli autori e la critica. Fatti e misfatti nel mondo del cinema, Bari: Dedalo, 1991. Pecori, Franco, Vittorio De Sica, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1980. Sala, Giuseppe, ‘‘Vittorio De Sica,’’ in Desolazione e speranza nel cinema italiano d’oggi, CaltanissettaRome: Salvatore Sciascia, 1963. Zavattini, Cesare, Diario cinematografico, Milan: Bompiani, 1979.

LADRI DI BICICLETTE, 1948 Film by Vittorio De Sica

When first released in 1948, critics and intellectuals all over the world praised Ladri di biciclette (The Bicycle Thief) as a cinematographic masterpiece.

But the Christian Democrats, then in power, along with the Catholic press, condemned the film, calling it an offence to the morality and religion of Italians. Angelo Rizzoli, the producer, and some of the film’s Italian distributors withdrew the film from the Italian theaters, but the impact of Ladri di biciclette on worldwide cinema could merely be delayed. The film soon enjoyed great success abroad, then later in Italy in the 1960s, and is consistently ranked as one of the best films ever made. The story takes place in Rome just after World War II. The opening scene portrays a group of men outside an unemployment office clamoring for work. After two years of joblessness, Antonio Ricci (Lamberto Maggiorani) is finally called for a job putting up advertisements, a job for which he is required to own a bicycle. To pay for it, his wife (Lianella Carell) pawns their only set of linens. The bike, then, signifies much more than common transportation—it represents the family’s primary source of income, its lifeline to society, its path into an uncertain future. When it is stolen the first day of Ricci’s new job, it becomes absolutely necessary to find it. The body of the film presents Ricci’s search, assisted by his capricious young son, Bruno (Enzo Stajola). Together they walk the streets of Rome, from Porta Portese to the Stadio Olimpico, during which the relationships between father and son, between church and society, between the individual and the state, and between social classes are revealed. When Ricci, desperate from the fruitless search, impulsively decides to steal a bike, the act represents his moral breakdown and, by extension, the moral corruption of society at large. It is young Bruno’s horrified reaction, and his instinctual rescue—both physical and emotional—of his father that serves to restore the family’s moral stature, illuminate the moral bankruptcy of postwar Italy, and provide a note of optimism to an otherwise dismal conclusion. The famous last scene shows father and son, hand in hand, walking toward a future in which only their love for one another, shared experience, and hard-earned understanding are sure. Freely adapted from the novel by Luigi Bartolini, Ladri di biciclette reinforced a collaboration between director Vittorio De Sica and screenwriter Cesare Zavattini, which began in the early 1940s with I bambini ci guardano (The Children Are Watching Us) and continued until Una breve vacanza (A Brief Vacation, 1973). The film has been described by the French critic Andre´ Bazin as one of the purest expressions of neorealism 627

VITTORIO DE SICA (What Is Cinema?, vol. 2, 1971). Like other neorealist films, its treatment of the postwar period was meant to reawaken a shell-shocked Italian public. On-location shooting, and the use of nonprofessional actors, hallmarks of neorealist cinema, are exemplified by Ladri di biciclette. But the film’s most distinctive attribute is the careful organization of the sequence of actions, so as to give the impression of a casual unfolding of events. Formally, this was realized by including cinematic ‘‘dead time,’’ which is the use of digression and the elimination of delineated cause-effect relationships. The emphasis on a limited time frame (three days) and the deliberately constructed mise-en-scene leave the viewer with the impression that the movie’s events are fluid yet random or accidental, an illusion emphasized by skillful editing. Through the camera’s ‘‘stalking’’ (pedinamento) of the characters (a neorealist technique suggested by Zavattini to give a more faithful representation of the interaction between man and his environment) the spectator enters in their phenomenological worlds and, like them, becomes emotionally susceptible to the sudden change of the events. Through form, then, De Sica created a perfect aesthetic illusion of reality that was to influence all cinema to come. The core of the film is defined by the father-son relationship. De Sica, by inverting their social roles, emphasizes the sense of alienation and loss of the adult man in postwar society and, consequentially, his altered role in the traditional patriarchal Italian family. Bruno is the only wage earner during his father’s unemployment (he works at a gas station). Ironically, it is the child who reassures the father, directs him during the search, and supports Ricci at the most humiliating moment of his life when he is caught with the stolen bike. Bruno also represents Ricci’s only hope for a better future. This strong relationship is reinforced visually by their placement among a disinterested crowd. Descriptive long and medium shots show the isolation of the characters among the throngs of people at Porta Portese, at the bus station, in the thief’s

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neighborhood, and outside the stadium. De Sica neither believes in human solidarity (especially among members of the same class) nor in the supporting presence of the state, as emblemized by Ricci’s futile report of the theft at the police station and the equally useless intervention of the policeman once Ricci finds the thief. Ricci’s dream of a better life is doomed (like so many others), and it is the long, slow upward tilt of the camera at the pawn shop where packages of linen are stored as high up as the eye can see that illustrates this terrible fact most acutely. De Sica suggests, therefore, that Ricci’s case is in the hands of fate, and that only the instinctive love for a son (and for family) can compensate for the broken equilibrium in society and the flawed nature of mankind. GIOVANNA DE LUCA

Further Readings Alonge, Giame, Vittorio De Sica: Ladri di biciclette, Turin: Lindau, 1997. Baldelli, Pio, ‘‘Ancora qualche parola a proposito di Ladri di biciclette,’’ in Rivista del cinema italiano, nos. 5–6 (May-June 1954): 15–30. Bazin, Andre´, What is Cinema?, edited and translated by Hugh Gray, vol. 2, Berkeley-Los Angeles-London: University of California Press, 1971. Carancini, Gaetano, ‘‘Ricci, Bruno e la bicicletta,’’ in Cinema, 15 June 1949, pp. 495–497. Fortini, Franco, ‘‘Ladri di biciclette,’’ in Dieci inverni 1947– 1957, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1957. Laura, Ernesto (editor), Ladri di biciclette, Padua: Radar, 1967. Marcus, Millicent, ‘‘De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves: Casting Shadow on a Visionary City,’’ in Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986. Thompson, Kristin, ‘‘Realism in the Cinema: Bicycle Thieves,’’ in Breaking the Glass Armor. Neoformalist Film Analysis, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. Tomasulo, Frank, ‘‘Bicycle Thieves: A Re-Reading,’’ in Cinema Journal, vol. 21, no. 2 (Spring 1982): 2–13.

GIUSEPPE DESSI`

GIUSEPPE DESSI` (1909–1977) More than any other writer except Grazia Deledda, Giuseppe Dessı` recounted Sardinia, its people, and their feelings, affections, hopes, and fears. In his prose, the island is constantly recalled as a place of myth and of history, as a memorial, legendary microcosm: It is a metaphor for a world that arduously attempts to promote mutual respect, justice, solidarity between people, family affections, even in the midst of stormy events that bring pain and civil and moral disorder. Dessı` communicated the anxiety and the urgency of conserving such values, fruit of an age-old wisdom, in the hopes that the recollections of this distant civilization might be an exemplar for modern development, a possible social model adapted to human aspirations and happiness. Dessı`’s characters as a result seem to be losers in the prevailing context of historical irrationality, but in reality they are not losers in terms of their conscience, which suggests instead a dream of a civil, firm, serene society. The themes of self-respect and respect for others, of self-determination, of sacred affection, of passion for nature and love for culture, of the mysterious sense of life and its religiosity, are first articulated in the anthropological knowledge buried deep in the island long ago. All of these motifs are already present in Dessı`’s first novel, San Silvano (The House at San Silvano, 1939), product of a literary period devoted to narrative lyricism, but which contains distinct characteristics. One such characteristic is its Proustian mould, rendered unique by the author’s existential (and not simply literary) form of engagement. In his successive works, Dessı` was in fact never again able to transmit such engagement. Another peculiar characteristic is the dimension of memory, which, besides giving an elegiac tone to the narrative thread, makes explicit a refined cultural awareness, via which the events narrated are not only persuasive for their lyricism, but also for their ethical, conscious counterpoint that is well-contextualized in the history of the Sardinian setting. Finally, the magical presence of the island landscape is alive, along with the feelings of a familiar microcosm deeply rooted in emotion and nostalgia, communicated with true poetic effectiveness. Dessı` (and not only in San Silvano) avoids portraying Sardinia in a stereotypical, folkloristic manner. His island is

rather jealous of its traditions and its troubled history, symbol not of a picturesque universe, but a radical way of living, marked by a sense of interiority, a profoundly affective measure of human relationships, a suffered ethical experience. In San Silvano, the writer demonstrates a noteworthy talent for narrative harmony, the capacity to make the narrative material swell with his delicate descriptive touch. Memory is activated: a memory of the soul, a fantastic motor that does not renounce a strong, coherent representative structure. The originality of the writing style of San Silvano and Dessı`’s intense concern with memory are considerable creative achievements in his next narrative as well: the novel Michele Boschino (Michele Boschino, 1942), which is subdivided into two parts; the ancient and patriarchal theater of I passeri (Sparrows, 1955), originally published in Il ponte in 1953, is a work in which the prominence of neorealism causes the author to engage more directly in the treatment of political themes; Introduzione alla vita di Giacomo Sgarbo (Introduction to the Life of Giacomo Sgarbo, 1959), a theoretical and personal ordering of the Proustian theme of the return to a life before fantastic existence; or finally, the passionate portrait of life and Sardinian environments of Paese d’ombre (The Forests of Norbio, 1972). This powerful portrayal of peasant life, essentially traditional in its diegetic structure, loosens a central knot of Dessı`’s narrative with its radical treatment of two moments: lyrical memory and the reality of a country in its historical becoming. These two threads find an effective junction in the character of the protagonist, Angelo Uras. The poor son of peasants, Uras rises on the social ladder to become mayor and entrepreneur, a symbol of the possibility of individual, familial, and collective liberation in a community oppressed by ancient and modern exploitation. Several theatrical texts are worthy of note: the collection Racconti drammatici (Dramatic Tales, 1959), and the dramas La trincea (The Trench, 1962) and Eleonora d’Arborea (Eleonora d’Arborea, 1964). The latter, reissued in 1995, is a historical drama, with lyrical passages in which the powerful portrait of Eleonora d’Arborea emerges distinctly. She is a noble, tragic figure of fourteenth-century 629

GIUSEPPE DESSI` Sardinia, who attempted to bring political and juridical unity to the Sardinian territory. The unfinished La scelta (The Choice) was published posthumously in 1978.

Biography Born in Villacidro in the province of Cagliari, 7 August 1909; father, Francesco, was a career officer, and his continual changes of residence prevented Giuseppe from following a regular academic career. He was forced to follow a difficult program of autodidacticism in his literary and philosophical studies, and to live his existence as a ‘‘continental’’ Sardinian, marked by a painful, nostalgic sense of up-rootedness. Graduated from high school Dottori di Cagliari in 1929–1930, thanks to attentions of Delio Cantimori, and graduated from University of Pisa with a degree in literature and a thesis on Manzoni. In the 1930s, contributed to the important journals Solaria and Letteratura and began career as teacher, reaching later the role of superintendent of schools. Established himself in Rome at the Accademia dei Lincei in that capacity in 1954. In the 1950s and 1960s, contributed to Il Ponte, La Stampa, Rinascita, L’Approdo, Il resto del carlino, L’Unita`. His literary work, completed in a solitary, secluded position with respect to the current fashions, was awarded important prizes, including the Salento prize for I passeri in 1955; the Bagutta for Il disertore in 1962; and the Strega for Paese d’ombre in 1972. Married to Luigia Babini, with whom he had one son. Contracted a grave illness in 1964; died in Rome, 6 July 1977. GIORGIO TAFFON Selected Works Fiction San Silvano, 1939; as The House at San Silvano, translated by Isabel Quigly, 1966. Michele Boschino, 1942.

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Racconti vecchi e nuovi, 1945. I passeri, 1955. L’isola dell’Angelo e altri racconti, 1957. La ballerina di carta, 1957. Introduzione alla vita di Giacomo Sgarbo, 1959. Racconti drammatici, 1959. Il disertore, 1962; as The Deserter, translated by Virginia Hathaway, 1962. Lei era l’acqua, 1966. Paese d’ombre, 1972; as The Forests of Norbio, translated by Frances Frenaye, 1975. La scelta, 1978, edited by Anna Dolfi.

Plays La trincea, 1962. Eleonora d’Arborea, 1964; revised ed. 1995.

Children’s Books Storia del principe Lui, 1949.

Other Scoperta della Sardegna, 1965. I diari (1926–1931), edited by Franca Lipari, 1993. I diari (1932–1948), edited by Franca Lipari, 1999. Lettere 1931–1977, edited by Marzia Stedile, 2002.

Further Reading Debenedetti, Giacomo, ‘‘Dessı` e il golfo mistico,’’ in Intermezzo, Milan: Mondadori, 1963. Dell’Aquila, Michele, I margini della scrittura, Fasano di Brindisi: Schena Editore, 1994. Dolfi, Anna, La parola e il tempo. Saggio su Giuseppe Dessı`, Florence: Vallecchi, 1977. Dolfi, Anna (editor), Una giornata per Giuseppe Dessı`, Rome: Bulzoni, 2005. Puppa, Paolo, ‘‘Giuseppe Dessı` a teatro,’’ in Quaderni del Teatro di Sardegna, 1 (1998): 7–43. Tanda, Nicola, Letteratura e lingue in Sardegna, Cagliari: Edes, 1984. Tanda, Nicola, Introduction to Giuseppe Dessı`, Eleonora d’Arborea, Sassari: Edes, 1995. Tondo, Michele, ‘‘Giuseppe Dessı`,’’ in Sondaggi e letture di contemporanei, Lecce: Milella, 1974. Varese, Claudio, ‘‘Giuseppe Dessı`,’’ in Occasioni e valori della letteratura contemporanea, Bologna: Cappelli, 1967.

DETECTIVE FICTION

DETECTIVE FICTION The emergence of a specifically Italian detective fiction in the 1930s was the result of a long gestation, over which Anglo-American and French models had a crucial influence. Historians have traced structural and thematic elements of detective fiction—urban settings, the theme of crime and punishment, and even certain primitive forms of detection—in late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury popular literature. The production of authors such as Matilde Serao or Carolina Invernizio has been related to the genre, and Luca Crovi has defined Emilio De Marchi’s 1887 novel Il cappello del prete (The Priest’s Hat) as ‘‘the true founder of what would become the Italian school of detective fiction’’ (Tutti i colori del giallo, 2002). However, in the works of these authors the process of detection is secondary to the more traditional adventurous and romantic twists of popular fiction, while it takes center stage in the earliest examples of mysteries, from Edgar Allan Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) to Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet (1887). A similar wavering between the feuilleton and the mystery is evident in works published at the beginning of the century, from Salvatore Farina’s Il segreto del nevaio (The Secret of the Snow-field, 1909), to the adventures of the various pulp heroes patterned on characters like Nick Carter or Joe Petrosino, quite popular in the 1910s and 1920s. In the same period, the increasing success of Anglo-American and French mystery authors in translation (Conan Doyle, Emile Gaboriau) resulted in the establishment of several dedicated series. Mondadori’s I libri gialli (The Yellow Books), thus named after the color of the book covers, was launched on 15 September 1929, and was immediately successful thanks to a careful selection of the major figures in international detective fiction. Quickly, the term giallo came to be identified with the genre, and to be used, as both a noun and an adjective, as a synonym for ‘‘mystery’’ or ‘‘detective novel,’’ especially in its classical form of puzzle-narrative. Il sette bello (The Seven of Diamonds, 1931) by Alessandro Varaldo (1876–1953) is considered the first example of classical detective fiction by an Italian writer. In his history of the genre, Loris Rambelli has noted that Varaldo’s novels already present certain features

peculiar to early Italian mysteries: a moderate amount of violence, the occasional retrieval of situations typical of the feuilleton, and a certain irony that foregrounds the ludic and conventional elements of the genre (Storia del ‘giallo’ italiano, 1979). In fact, many of the earliest writers of Italian detective fiction tread, and often quite consciously step over, the fine line between imitation and parody, as in the case of the Futurist Luciano Folgore (1888–1966), whose La trappola colorata (The Coloured Trap, 1934) is a devastating lampoon of the genre. The giallo also enjoyed great success as a theatrical and radio genre. Several well-known playwrights worked for both media, including Luigi Chiarelli (1884–1947), author of L’anello di Teodosio (Theodosius’s Ring, 1929), a radio drama that predates the ‘‘official’’ birth of Italian detective fiction; the Futurist Bruno Corra (1892–1976), and the populist politician Guglielmo Giannini (1891–1960). Among the novelists of the 1930s, two stand out for the quality and quantity of their production. Augusto De Angelis (1888–1944), the creator of the Inspector Carlo De Vincenzi, published 16 detective novels in a remarkable burst of creativity between 1935 and 1943. His fiction is characterized by an unusual degree of sophistication—in the course of his investigations De Vincenzi is fond of quoting Freud, certainly not an author dear to the Fascist authorities—and by great attention for the psychology and the motivations of the characters. Often set in interiors surrounded by a somber and crepuscular Milan, De Angelis’ novels deal with crime and punishment as a complex phenomenon and eschew the schematism of popular fiction or of the edicts of the Fascist regime. Ezio D’Errico (1892–1972), whose first giallo, Qualcuno ha bussato alla porta (Someone Knocked on the Door, 1936), chose instead a foreign setting, Paris, for the adventures of his Inspector Emilio Richard. Strongly influenced by Georges Simenon, D’Errico emphasizes the human and everyday nature of crime. Like Simenon’s Maigret, Richard moves in a petit bourgeois and lower-class world of small-time criminals and personal dramas, and he bases his investigative method more on his understanding of human nature and of what he calls the ‘‘environment’’ than on the iron-clad logic of the Holmesian sleuth. 631

DETECTIVE FICTION Initially, homemade detective fiction benefited from the autarchic policies of the Fascist government, which in 1931 enacted legislation requiring publishers to reserve at least 15% of any of their series to Italian authors. By the mid-1930s, however, detective fiction was the object of attacks by critics, generally hostile to popular fiction, and by Fascist censors, who considered the genre dangerous as a glorification of and incitement to crime, as a denial of the regime’s official image of a crime-free society, and finally as the vehicle, through translation, for representations of alternative forms of investigative and judicial systems. In 1937, the Ministry for Popular Culture (MinCulPop) dictated a series of restrictions, including the mandatory apprehension and punishment of the culprit who must not be an Italian character, thus severely limiting the narrative options for Italian novelists. In 1941, the MinCulPop prohibited the publication of detective fiction without the authorization from the ministry, and further ordered the pulping of any such novels still in stock in 1943. While some gialli managed to slip through censorship, these events and the war marked the end of the first phase of Italian detective fiction. In the postwar period, the great novelty for Italian audiences was the American hard-boiled school—Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Mickey Spillane, to name only the best-known authors—which introduced a more violent, realistic and morally ambiguous form of detective fiction. The late 1940s and 1950s were in general a difficult period for Italian giallisti, and the few who still worked in the genre often had to hide behind American-sounding pseudonyms. Such was the case of Franco Cannarozzo (1921–1990), a prolific writer whose multifaceted production, begun in 1946, is scattered under over a dozen of pen names. His ‘‘psychological’’ thrillers, as Loris Rambelli calls them (Storia del ‘giallo’ italiano, 1979), contributed to the renewal of the conventions of classical detective fiction. In the 1970s, as Franco Enna, the pseudonym by which he is best known, Cannarozzo traded the foreign locales of his previous production for the more realistic setting of Rome in the powerful Mamma lupara (Mother Shotgun, 1972) and in the series dedicated to the Inspector Sartori. In the 1950s, other authors attempted to work within subgenres of the giallo, with mixed results, from the semicomic adventures of the two tramps Tre Soldi e Boero, created by Giuseppe Ciabattini (1882–1962), to the forays into the underworld in the novels of Sergio Donati (1933–). Curiously, however, the best-known examples of 632

postwar detective fiction come from two authors for whom the genre serves mainly as a formal structure and who cannot be strictly defined giallisti. With Quer pasticciaccio brutto de Via Merulana (That Awful Mess on Via Merulana, 1946), Carlo Emilio Gadda represents, with his characteristic linguistic impasto, the moral ambiguities of the Italian bourgeoisie under Fascism, and, undermining the conventions of the genre, closes the novel before the climatic moment of the solution. Leonardo Sciascia’s first giallo, Il giorno della civetta (The Day of the Owl/Mafia Vendetta, 1963), uses the structure of popular fiction to denounce the pervasive presence of the mafia in Italian social and political life and to reflect on the construction and manipulation of truth in a mediatic society. The author who reinvented the Italian detective novel, however, was Giorgio Scerbanenco (1911– 1969), who in the 1960s returned to the genre in which he had debuted before the war. Set in Milan, Venere privata (Private Venus, 1966) introduces Duca Lamberti, a cynical and disenchanted physician expelled from the profession who makes a living as a consultant for the police. Influenced by the American noir, the novels in the Lamberti series present a morally shady and violent metropolis in which no one—including the detective— can escape the corrupting influence of modernity. The realism of Scerbanenco’s novels both established Italian cities as legitimate settings for detective fiction and demonstrated the effectiveness of the genre as a reflection of the dysfunctions of the contemporary world. Indeed, Scerbanenco paved the way for a type of detective fiction rooted in the reality of specific Italian environments: as Massimo Carloni has demonstrated in his L’Italia in giallo (1994), a strong regional identity remains one of the main characteristics of the contemporary giallo. By the 1970s, then, a specifically Italian detective fiction returned to be practicable, if not always popular. The success of Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini’s ironic portrayal of the bourgeoisie of Turin in La donna della Domenica (Sunday’s Woman, 1972) and of Umberto Eco’s neo-Gothic atmospheres and metaliterary playfulness in the medieval thriller Il nome della rosa (The Name of the Rose, 1980) is only the more evident sign of a much more pervasive phenomenon. Among the many authors to emerge in the 1970s, one of the most influential is Loriano Macchiavelli (1930–), best known for the series featuring the questurino (cop) Sarti Antonio, begun in 1974 with Le piste dell’attentato (The Trail of the Terrorist Attack).

DETECTIVE FICTION In his novels, Macchiavelli traces the transformations of his city, Bologna, and often sets his mysteries against the background of contemporary political events (he is also the author of novels on unsolved real-life mysteries such as the bombing of the Bologna train station in 1980). Furthermore, Macchiavelli has been involved in numerous initiatives to promote Italian detective fiction, including the formation of the ‘‘Gruppo 13’’ in 1991, which has played an important role in making Bologna a sort of capital of the contemporary giallo. In the 1970s and 1980s, the process of consolidation and expansion of the genre continued, with, among others, the gritty procedurals of Antonio Perria (1924–2004), the classical stories of detection of Renato Olivieri (1925–), the Neapolitan hard-boiled novels of Attilio Veraldi (1925–1999), or the mysteries set in ancient Rome of Danila Comastri Montanari (1948–). At the same time, the genre began to find critical recognition in Italy, with the appearance of historical (e.g., Rambelli) and theoretical (e.g., Eco) studies. After its advent in 1954, television gradually displaced the theater and the radio as the main medium of mass entertainment, and inherited the tradition of high-quality popular detective fiction that had characterized its predecessors. In 1959, Giallo Club, a quiz show centered on the solution of a televised crime, introduced the character of Ezechiele Sheridan, a lieutenant of the San Francisco police interpreted by Ubaldo Lay, who starred in numerous serials throughout the 1960s as well as in a series of novels and commercials, perhaps the first example of television spinoffs in Italy. The success of the adventures of Lieutenant Sheridan inspired the creation of numerous other series, often adapted from literary sources, all characterized by a very high production value and by the presence of some of the best film and theater actors of the period: Le inchieste del commissario Maigret (The Investigations of Inspector Maigret, 1964), starring Gino Cervi); Nero Wolfe (1969), with Dino Buazzelli as the detective created by Rex Stout; I racconti di padre Brown (The Tales of Father Brown, 1970), with the popular comedian Renato Rascel as G. K. Chesterton’s investigating priest; Il commissario De Vincenzi (1973), starring Paolo Stoppa. This tradition of television detective fiction continues throughout the 1980s, especially thanks to La piovra (The Octopus) with Michele Placido, a complex story about the conflict between the state and the mafia developed over ten serials broadcast between 1984 and 2001. The newfound status of the genre in the 1990s has

translated into a flourishing of television giallo: among the many examples, Un commissario a Roma (An Inspector in Rome, 1993) and Il maresciallo Rocca (Marshall Rocca, 1996) stand out for the excellence of their protagonists, respectively Nino Manfredi and Gigi Proietti. The publication, in 1994, of La forma dell’acqua (The Shape of Water) by the Sicilian writer Andrea Camilleri (1925–) was a true turning point for Italian detective fiction. The spectacular and for the most part unexpected success of this and the later adventures of the police inspector Salvo Montalbano— which regularly top the best-seller charts, a truly unprecedented feat for an Italian popular author— has demonstrated once and for all the maturity and viability of the genre. Camilleri’s novels are characterized by tightly constructed plots, vivid characters, a strong sense of irony, and a language that mixes with great expressive results Italian and dialect. Camilleri also rejects expected Sicilian themes such as the mafia in favor of narratives that highlight a variety of social and political problems. The success of his novels, which have also been adapted for television with Luca Zingaretti as Montalbano, has opened the floodgates for other giallisti: the 1990s were characterized by a veritable boom of the genre, in all its permutations and with a particular preference for the subgenres of the noir and of historical detective fiction. In the new generation of mystery authors, the best-known is Carlo Lucarelli (1960–), a versatile writer who debuted with a series of novels set between the twilight years of the Fascist regime and the immediate postwar period (the Fascist ventennium and the Resistance provide the background to works by several contemporary giallisti, such as Lucio Trevisan (1945–), Marcello Fois (1960–), Leonardo Gori (1957–), demonstrating that, in a period of intense revisionism, fiction has a crucial role to play in the debate on historical memory). Of Lucarelli’s novels on contemporary Italy, Almost Blue (1997), the story of the hunt for a serial killer by Grazia, a policewoman, with the help of the blind Simone, stands out for its original representation of Bologna as a mysterious and nocturnal city, and for the complex and sophisticated narrative structure. The recourse to the conventions and structures of detective fiction by many contemporary writers makes it increasingly difficult to distinguish between popular and ‘‘literary’’ narrative, and indeed, some of the most interesting figures in late twentiethcentury literature such as the so-called Cannibali have openly acknowledged their debt to genre literature. This is not merely the result of a more general 633

DETECTIVE FICTION ‘‘postmodern’’ tendency to blur the boundaries between high and low culture. Rather, writing about crime enables writers to represent figures and experiences marginalized or repressed in contemporary society: As a result, the giallo has become perhaps the most politically committed and socially critical genre in the Italian literary landscape. Massimo Carlotto (1956–), one of the more remarkable authors of the Italian noir whose first novel, La verita` dell’Alligatore (The Alligator’s Truth, 1995), is based on his own controversial conviction, has summarized this perspective by arguing that the task of genre literature in general is precisely that of ‘‘narrating reality,’’ and of doing so in real time—a sentiment shared by many of its practitioners. LUCA SOMIGLI Further Reading Bacchereti, Elisabetta, Carlo Lucarelli, Fiesole (Florence): Cadmo, 2004. Brunetti, Bruno, Augusto De Angelis: Uno studio in giallo, Bari: Edizioni Graphis, 1994. Capecchi, Giovanni, Andrea Camilleri, Fiesole (Florence): Cadmo, 2000. Carloni, Massimo, L’Italia in giallo: Geografia e storia del giallo italiano contemporaneo, Reggio Emilia: Diabasis, 1994. Carloni, Massimo, and Roberto Pirani, Loriano Macchiavelli: Un romanziere una citta`, Pontassieve (Florence): Pirani Bibliografica Editore, 2004.

Carlotto, Massimo, ‘‘I miei racconti radiografia della realta`,’’ interview with Sebastiano Giulisano, in Avvenimenti, no. 29 (2002): 30–31. Cremante, Renzo (editor), Le figure del delitto: Il libro poliziesco in Italia dalle origini ad oggi, Bologna: Graphis, 1989. Crotti, Ilaria, La ‘‘detection’’ della scrittura: Modello poliziesco edattualizzazioni allotropiche nel romanzo del Novecento, Padua: Antenore, 1982. Crovi, Luca, Tutti i colori del giallo: Il giallo italiano da de Marchi a Scerbanenco a Camilleri, Venice: Marsilio, 2002. Eco, Umberto, and T. A. Sebeok (editors), The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983. Milanesi, Claudio (editor), Subvertir les re`gles: Le roman policier Italien et latino-ame´ricain, Cahiers d’etudes romanes, n.s. 9 (2003). Padovani, Gisella, Franco Enna: Esperienze culturali e itinerari creativi di un maestro del ‘‘giallo’’ italiano, Enna: Papiro, 1995. Pirani, Roberto, Dizionario bibliografico del giallo: Collane e periodici gialli in Italia, 1895–1999, Pontassieve: Pirani Bibliografica Editore, 2000. Quazzolo, Paolo, Delitti in palcoscenico. La commedia poliziesca italiana dal 1927 al 1954, Pasian di Prato (Udine): Campanotto, 2001. Rambelli, Loris, Storia del ‘giallo’ italiano, Milan: Garzanti, 1979. Il romanzo poliziesco italiano da Gadda al Gruppo 13, special issue of Narrativa, 2 (1992). Tani, Stefano, The Doomed Detective: The Contribution of The Detective Novel to Postmodern American and Italian Fiction, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984. Trent’anni di giallo italiano, special issue of Narrativa, 26 (2004).

SALVATORE DI GIACOMO (1860–1934) Salvatore Di Giacomo was a poet, playwright, critic, musicologist, historiographer, and journalist. He first began writing for La Gazzetta letteraria of Turin, for which he worked both as a reporter and a short story writer. He went on to found the fortnightly Il Fantasio (1881) and contributed to the daily Il Pungolo. In 1881, he published his Sonetti (Sonnets, 1884) and, in March 1885, published the verse and music of ‘‘Marechiare’’ (1885), a bestseller, and, afterwards, ‘‘Era de maggio’’ (It Was May, 1885). He was soon valued as a refined poet who was also close to folk culture. The Sonetti, for example, written when music was flourishing in Naples, 634

became songs that met with great success. Among his musician collaborators were Pasquale Mario Costa, Enrico De Leva, Francesco Paolo Tosti and, then, Vincenzo Valente, Eduardo Di Capua, E. A. Mario, Gennaro and Jacopo Napoli. The year 1886 was important for his poetic activity. Di Giacomo published a collection of poems, ’O funneco verde (The Green Blind Alley, 1886), containing 15 sonnets, which, as Francesco Gaeta observes in his study, Salvatore Di Giacomo (1911), was meant as a reply to accusations by Neapolitan intellectuals that his poetry was ‘‘sentimental and tender’’ and did not reflect the people’s noisy,

SALVATORE DI GIACOMO cheerful, and teasing soul. Indeed, Di Giacomo’s writings, above all his poetry and drama, provoked lively debate, especially among the artists congregating at the Strasburgo Beerhouse in Piazza Municipio and in the cultural circles that gravitated to aristocratic Naples and the philosopher Benedetto Croce, who is a constant cultural reference for Di Giacomo. In 1907, Di Giacomo’s first complete collection of poems, Poesie (Poems), was published, with notes by Benedetto Croce and glossary by Francesco Gaeta. Croce himself regarded Di Giacomo as a cultured and refined writer and especially appreciated his first short stories that, Croce remarked, seemed to be inspired by Hoffmann or Erckmann-Chatrian. His first collection of short stories, Minuetto (Minuet, 1883), was a commercial success. Ten years later, he published another collection, Pipa e boccale (Pipe and Jug, 1893), with the subtitle, Racconti fantastici (Fantastic Stories). These stories concern extraordinary facts, the most original of which are of a scientific, especially medical nature. Scientific discoveries and research were, to Di Giacomo, synonyms of wonder and extraordinariness. Di Giacomo’s literary interest in blending magic and scientism represented an important importation of European fiction into Southern Italian culture of the late nineteenth century. The critics hailed Di Giacomo’s short stories as precious documents through which French culture from Maupassant to Baudelaire, Flaubert, the Goncourt brothers and Zola entered Neapolitan literature. Di Giacomo was strongly interested in European culture; he studied French and, in 1886, published his first translation from French, Suor Filomena, by J. De Goncourt, with a preface by E´mile Zola. Indeed, the figure of Suor Filomena was adumbrated in a short story by Di Giacomo, ‘‘Suor Carmelina,’’ and in a tale by Axel Munthe, ‘‘Soeur Philome`ne,’’ in which the heroine, offering her help to the victims of Naples’ 1884 cholera outbreak, dies in that terrible epidemic. Even in his children’s stories Perlina e Gobetta (1899) and La piccola ladra (The Little Thief, 1899), he betrayed a strong attraction to the fantastic, in the manner of Carlo Collodi and Edmondo De Amicis, the most popular writers of children’s books of the time. Di Giacomo was also an admirer of Giovanni Verga, with whom he conducted an intense correspondence. The themes of his stories are: death, existential defeat, and characters’ psychological mood. As a short story writer, Di Giacomo has not been sufficiently valued, while the artistic appeal of his poetry has been acknowledged since his

debut. Attracted to the theater since childhood, in 1887 he published a comic opera in verse, La Fiera (The Fair), with music by Nicola D’Arienzo. This work was greeted with great enthusiasm and was valued for its melodic structure and correct harmony. At the same time that La Fiera was enjoying its triumph at the Teatro Nuovo, Di Giacomo’s revue Na passiata pe Napule e pe fora (A Walk Through Naples and Outside, 1886) was enjoying an acclaimed run at the little Neapolitan theater La Fenice. Its libretto was written by Di Giacomo, in collaboration with Carlo Abeniacar and Ferdinando Russo, and set to music by D’Arienzo. These triumphs confirmed his versatility. Indeed, Di Giacomo’s entire literary production is marked by its double registers of song/folk music; short story/report; drama/opera. His three-act play Mala vita (Crime Life, 1889), then entitled ‘O voto (The Vow, 1894), adapted from the short story contained in the collection Rosa Bellavita (1888), illustrates his way of mixing genres (short story and drama). In his most important plays, ‘O mese mariano (The Month of Mary, 1900) and Assunta Spina (1910), the chorus has a central function and the protagonists are realized dramatically more in the comments of other characters than in the peculiarities of their psychology. ‘O mese mariano, inspired by the short story ‘‘Senza vederlo’’ (Without Seeing Him, 1884) dramatizes the story of a mother who, in a surge of love and remorse, goes to The Poor People’s Home to see her son Peppino. The play was staged for the first time at the Teatro San Ferdinando on 24 January 1900. Assunta Spina (1910), played by Adelina Magnetti, was staged first at the Teatro Nuovo in 1909. The most important Italian playwrights attended the first night, among them Marco Praga and the critic Renato Simoni. Theater historian Vittorio Viviani tells us that the premiere of Assunta Spina (with the appearance of Francesca Bertini, the future diva of the silent cinema) caused such an uproar that Di Giacomo was accused of depicting Naples as a city with no social evolution at a time when the local working class was organizing three memorable strikes (Storia del teatro napoletano, 1969). Assunta is an enigmatic woman whose lover, Michele Boccadifuoco, is imprisoned in Avellino, far from Naples. Assunta accepts a proposal by the chancellor Funelli, but ends up becoming attached to him. Assunta learns from Michele that Funelli is married and has two children. Feeling betrayed, Michele stabs Funelli, while Assunta charges herself with the murder. A study of 635

SALVATORE DI GIACOMO Neapolitan mores, the play, which uses a literary and never burlesque or banal language (the Neapolitan dialect) and whose characters are wellrealized, gives a predominant role to the chorus. Assunta Spina was a defining moment in the history of Neapolitan theater, and, as Andrea Bisicchia has argued in the introduction to his 1986 edition of the play, it can be considered a manifesto for the teatro d’arte (art theater). The influence of Salvatore Di Giacomo and his lyrical realism upon Eduardo De Filippo was decisive. Eduardo’s first major success as a young actor was performing as Tittariello in Assunta Spina with the Magnetti-Altieri Company at the Teatro Nuovo in 1909. Di Giacomo helped adapt a film from this play, directed by Gustavo Serena. It premiered at the Cinema Olympia of Rome on 29 October 1915, starring Francesca Bertini in the title role. Di Giacomo focused his attention on the city’s subproletariat. His dialect dramas are colorful studies of an old Naples, filled with criminals, beggars, prostitutes, and all sorts of degenerates. However, his naturalistic approach is somewhat tempered by a lyrical, compassionate vein. At the core of Di Giacomo’s work are ancient Naples and the figures of the recent past, who are upset and overwhelmed by modernity. From these preoccupations comes his predilection for art: Vincenzo Gemito: La vita e l’opera (Vincenzo Gemito: Life and Works, 1905) and Domenico Morelli, pittore (Domenico Morelli, Painter, 1905); and his interest in the fair, fascinating, and pleasure-loving eighteenth century (his studies on Casanova). Naples, his hometown, played a predominant role in his life and formation. In 1909, he supervised the publication of Napoli, a collection of scholarly writings illustrated by 190 photographs, many of which were taken by Di Giacomo himself. The city fascinated and charmed him, but often oppressed him, too. He often expressed his dissatisfaction with the reality surrounding him and with the profiteering and vain journalistic and literary world, against which he often complained bitterly. In his private life, Di Giacomo showed a neurasthenic streak, not without a touch of masochism, as in his Lettere a Elisa (Letters to Elisa, 1973), whose complexity was noticed by Pier Paolo Pasolini, who greatly esteemed Di Giacomo’s poetry.

Biography Born in Naples on 13 March 1860, son of Francesco Saverio, pediatrician, and Patricia Buongiorno, music teacher at the San Pietro a Maiella 636

Conservatory. After his father’s death from cholera in 1884, a recurring theme in his writings, his family suffered financially. Gave up medical studies, devoted self to journalist activity, writing for Il Corriere del Mattino, La Gazzetta letteraria, Capitan Fracassa, Pro Patria, Il Pungolo. In 1882, wrote his first song, Uocchie de suonno (Eyes Clogged with Sleep). As manager of the Lucchesi Palli theater and music section of the National Library of Naples, devoted self to publishing and scholarly studies. In 1916, married, after a long engagement, Elisa Avigliano. In 1929, appointed academician of Italy. Died in Naples, on 5 April 1934. ANTONIA LEZZA Selected Works Collections Teatro, Lanciano: Carabba, 1910 (including ‘O voto, ‘A San Francisco, ‘O mese mariano, Assunta Spina, Quand l’amour meurt); enlarged edition, 1920 (including ‘O voto, ‘A San Francisco, ‘O mese mariano, Assunta Spina, Quand l’amour meurt, L’abbe´ Pe`ru). Le poesie e le novelle. Il teatro e le cronache, edited by Francesco Flora and Mario Vinciguerra, Milan: Mondadori, 1967. Poesie e prose, edited by Elena Croce and Lanfranco Orsini, Milan: Mondadori, 1995; selections as The Naples of Salvatore Di Giacomo: Poems and a Play, translated by Frank J. Palescandolo, Stony Brook, NY: Forum Italicum Filibrary Series, 2000. Love Poems, translated by Frank J. Palescandolo, TorontoBuffalo: Guernica, 1999.

Poetry ‘‘Sonetti,’’ 1884. ‘‘‘O funneco verde,’’ 1886. ‘‘Canzoni napoletane,’’ 1891. ‘‘Fantasia,’’ 1898. ‘‘Napoli illustrata,’’ 1900. ‘‘Poesie,’’ 1907; enlarged edition, 1909; revised edition, 1927; as The Monastery and other Poems, translated by William De La Fald, 1914. ‘‘Canzoni e Ariette nove,’’ 1916.

Short Stories ‘‘Minuetto,’’ 1883. ‘‘Nennella,’’ 1884. ‘‘Mattinate napoletane,’’ 1886. ‘‘Rosa Bellavita,’’ 1888. ‘‘Pipa e boccale: Racconti fantastici,’’ 1893. ‘‘La piccola ladra,’’ 1899. ‘‘Perlina e Gobetta: Racconto fantastico,’’ 1899; revised edition, 1921. ‘‘Nella vita,’’ 1903. ‘‘L’ignoto. Novelle,’’ 1920.

Theater Na passiata pe Napule e pe fora, 1886. La fiera, 1887. Mala vita. Scene popolari napoletane, 1889.

SALVATORE DI GIACOMO ‘O voto, 1894. ‘O mese mariano, 1900. Rosaura rapita, 1904. Settecento, 1907. Assunta Spina, 1910; edited by Andrea Bisicchia, 1986.

Translations by Salvatore Di Giacomo. Girardin, F., ‘‘Il racconto interrotto,’’ Il salotto, 1 (1885). De Goncourt, Edmond, Suor Filomena, Naples: Bideri, 1892. Casanova, Giacomo, Historia della mia fuga dalle prigioni dei Piombi, Milan: Alfieri & Lacroix, 1911.

Essays Cronaca del Teatro San Carlino. Contributo alla storia della scena dialettale, 1891; revised edition, 1918. La prostituzione in Napoli nei secoli XV–XVIII, 1899. Napoli d’oggi, 1900. Poesia dialettale napoletana, 1900. Il quarantotto: notizie, aneddoti, curiosita` intorno al 15 maggio 1848, 1903. Domenico Morelli, pittore, 1905. Vincenzo Gemito. La vita, l’opera, 1905; revised edition, 1923. Napoli: figure e paesi, 1909. Luci ed ombre napoletane, 1914. La storia del Teatro San Carlino, 1918. Catalogo generale delle opere musicali teoriche e pratiche di autori vissuti sino ai primi decenni del secolo XIX esistenti nelle biblioteche e negli archivi pubblici e privati d’Italia, 1918. Maestri di cappella, musici e istrumenti al Tesoro di San Gennaro nei secoli XVII e XVIII, 1920; revised edition, 1990. Edoardo Dalbono, 1921. Casanova a Napoli, 1922. Il Conservatorio di Sant’Onofrio a Capuana e quello di S. Maria della Pieta` dei Turchini, 1924. Il Conservatorio dei poveri di Gesu` Cristo e quello di Santa Maria di Loreto, 1928.

Letters Lettere a Elisa, 1973.

Further Reading Angelini, Franca, and Carlo Alberto Madrignani, Cultura, narrativa e teatro nell’eta` del Positivismo, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1975; 1996. Cecchi, Emilio, ‘‘Due poeti dialettali: Pascarella e Di Giacomo,’’ in Storia della Letteratura Italiana, directed by Emilio Cecchi and Natalino Sapegno, vol. 4, Il Novecento, Milan: Garzanti, 1969. Croce, Benedetto, ‘‘Salvatore Di Giacomo,’’ (1903), in La Letteratura della Nuova Italia, vol. 3, Bari: Laterza, 1915. Gaeta, Francesco, Salvatore Di Giacomo, Florence: Quattrini, 1911; rpt. in Prose, Bari: Laterza, 1928. Iermano, Toni, Il melanconico in dormiveglia. Salvatore Di Giacomo, Florence: Olschki, 1995. Infusino, Gianni, Lettere da Napoli, Naples: Liguori, 1987. Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo, Studi su Salvatore Di Giacomo, Naples: Liguori, 2003. Pasolini, Pier Paolo, ‘‘La poesia dialettale del Novecento,’’ in Passione e ideologia, Milan: Mondadori, 1999. Pasolini, Pier Paolo, ‘‘Gli uomini colti e la cultura popolare,’’ in Scritti corsari, Milan: Garzanti, 2001. Piscopo, Ugo, Salvatore Di Giacomo. Dialetto, impressionismo, anti-scetticismo, Naples: Cassitto, 1984. Schlitzer, Franco, Salvatore di Giacomo. Ricerche e note bibliografiche, Florence: Sansoni, 1966. Viviani, Vittorio, Storia del teatro napoletano, Naples: Guida, 1969.

` DIALOGUES WITH LEUCO See Dialoghi con Leuco` (Work by Cesare Pavese)

DIALOGUES See Ragionamenti (Work by Pietro Aretino) 637

LUDOVICO DOLCE

DISCOURSES See Discorsi Sopra la prima deca di tito Livio (Work by Niccolo` Machiaveli)

THE DIVINE COMEDY See Comedia (Work by Dante Alighieri)

LUDOVICO DOLCE (1508–1568) The life of Ludovico Dolce is scantily documented. Few chronological records survive other than the dates of publication of his works: Some sparse information can be derived from his letters, which depict an unhappy life harassed by illness and imprisonment. Dolce was a member of the Accademia della Fratta (Fratta Academy) of Rovigo, where he had as an interlocutor Girolamo Ruscelli, with whom he engaged in a long literary controversy. He was also a member of the Accademia dei Pellegrini (Pilgrims’ Academy) of Venice, which had among its members of distinction Anton Francesco Doni and Francesco Sansovino. Dolce was what may be termed ‘‘an all-purpose’’ man of letters, not particularly original in his own compositions but rather versatile in popularizing the works of major authors. Notwithstanding his own narrow limits as a writer, of which he was well aware, he endeavoured to exploit in full his cultural training in a recently instituted craft, that of the poligrafo or publisher’s editor. In fact, with the birth of printing, which was particularly flourishing in Venice, the necessity was felt of a new type of man of letters, as pioneered by Pietro Aretino, that would 638

dedicate himself to the preparation, care and correction of the works of other authors intended for publication. In this capacity, Dolce prepared a great number of translations, rewritings, redactions, together with compositions of his own. He carried out the greatest part of this intense activity in the workshop of Gabriel Giolito de’ Ferrari, but he collaborated also with other printers, all Venetians, whose names show how broadly interconnected was the network of his intellectual relations. Intending to promulgate humanistic culture among the nonspecialized public, he translated Euripides into the vernacular (availing himself of extant Latin versions), Seneca, Ovid, and Oratio; he edited and annotated Italian classics, as, for example, Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, to which he added a well-received Apologia (Apology, 1535), and Boccaccio’s Decameron, with explanatory notes for the more difficult words (1541), both printed by Matteo Pasini and Francesco Bindoni; Dante’s Commedia, to which he appended the adjective Divina (divine), thereby modifying definitively the title of the work (1555) and Petrarch’s Canzoniere (1557). Instead, these works were printed by Gabriel Giolito

LUDOVICO DOLCE de’ Ferrari. Dolce coedited, for the same printer, the successful miscellany Rime diverse di molti eccellentissimi auttori (Various Rhymes by Many Excellent Authors, 1545–1560), and in imitation of the Prose della volgar lingua (Prose on Vernacular Eloquence) by Pietro Bembo he wrote a grammar of literary Italian with the title of Osservationi nella volgar lingua...in quattro libri (Observations on Vernacular Tongue...in four books, 1550). His treatise Dialogo della pittura intitolato l’Aretino (Aretino: a Dialogue on Painting, 1557) not only gives a documentary evidence of the style informing art criticism in the sixteenth century, but also offers a tentative interpretation of Renaissance Venetian painting. Aretino, acting as Dolce’s mouthpiece, reports that in his Dialogo the superiority of Raphael over Michelangelo is asserted, and an enthusiastic portrait of Titian is given, the latter being considered as the only modern painter capable of combining dexterity in drawing with skill in the use of colour. Besides his work of an erudite figure, Dolce also composed rhymes in the style of Petrarch, such as Il sogno di Parnaso (The Dream of Parnassus, 1532) and epic poems like Il Palmerino (Palmerino, 1561), and Primaleone, figliuolo di Palmerino (Primaleone, Palmerino’s Son, 1562), which were printed by Giovanni Battista Sessa; and Le imprese del Conte Orlando (Count Roland’s Enterprises, 1572), published posthumously by Giolito. Moreover, Dolce tried his hand at playwriting. The tragedies he wrote were inspired by or summarized from the plays of Seneca and of other classical authors. They were published collectively again by Giolito in Tragedie: Giocasta, Medea, Didone, Ifigenia, Thieste, Hecuba e Marianna (Tragedies, 1560). Marianna is certainly the most original of them. Based on the Antiquitates judaeorum (Jewish Antiquities: XV, 3, 8–9) by the Greek historian Flavius Josephus, it recounts the Senecan tale of the wicked deeds perpetrated by the tyrant Herod the Great, caused by his jealousy of his wife Mariamne, whom he eventually butchered with her sons. The tragedy was staged in Venice with great success in 1565, the first time in Sebastiano Erizzo’s Palace, with no props, and a second time with a memorable setting in the duke of Ferrara’s palace. All of Dolce’s tragedies were marked by an ethical and pedagogical intent and once published were favourably received because of their flair for easygoing romance. Dolce’s comedies in prose and verse are, however, of a better quality. Il ragazzo (The Boy, 1541) and La Fabritia (Fabritia, 1549) are drawn from

common life events. The Boy, printed several times during the sixteenth century although it is unknown if it was ever performed, borrows its language and structure from Aretino, with echoes from Boccaccio, Machiavelli’s Clizia and Plautus. The others, notably Il capitano (The Captain, 1545), Il marito (The Husband, 1545), Il roffiano (The Pander, 1551), are essentially adapted or derived directly from Plautus. But they succeed in adding a tone of lively urbanity to contemporary erudite comedy.

Biography Born in Venice, in 1508, from a noble family that had fallen into decline. His father, Fantino, was a public officer under the Doge Leonardo Loredan. After his father’s death, Dolce went to study letters in Padua. When he returned to Venice, he began to work as editor and proofreader with the famous Venetian printer Gabriel Giolito de’ Ferrari, with whom he remained until his death. It is not known when and whom he married, but he had two sons, a boy and a girl. He died in Venice in 1568, and was buried in the church of San Luca Evangelista. PAOLA VENTRONE Selected Works Poetry ‘‘Il sogno di Parnaso, con alcune altre rime d’amore,’’ 1532. ‘‘Il Palmerino,’’ 1561. ‘‘Primaleone, Figliuolo di Palmerino,’’ 1562. ‘‘Le prime imprese del Conte Orlando,’’ 1572.

Treatises Dialogo della pittura intitolato l’Aretino, 1557; edited by Guido Battelli, 1910; as Aretino: a Dialogue on Painting, translated by W. Brown, 1970 (Facsimile of first edition, 1770). Dialogo di M. Lodouico Dolce, nel quale si ragiona del modo di accrescere, et conseruar la memoria, 1562; edited by Andrea Torre, 2001. Dialogo nel quale si ragiona della qualita`, diversita` e proprieta` dei colori, 1565; facsimile reprint, 1985.

Plays Il ragazzo, 1541; edited by Ireneo Sanesi, 1912. Il apitano, 1545. Didone, 1547; edited by Stefano Tomassini, 1996. La Fabritia, 1549. Giocasta, 1549. Le comedie di M. Lodouico Dolce. Cioe` Il ragazzo, Il capitano, Il marito, La Fabritia, Il roffiano, 1560. Le Tragedie di Seneca, tradotte da m. Lodouico Dolce, 1560. Marianna, 1565. Le tragedie di M. Lodouico Dolce. Cioe`, Giocasta, Didone, Thieste, Medea, Ifigenia, Hecuba, 1566.

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LUDOVICO DOLCE Other Orlando furioso di messer Lodouico Ariosto con la giunta, 1535. Il Petrarca, corretto da M. Lodovico Dolce, et alla sua integrita` ridotto, 1547. Il Decamerone di M. Giovanni Boccaccio; aggiuntoui separatamente un indice copiosissimo di uocaboli e delle materie composto da messer Lodouico Dolce, 1552. Le trasformationi di m. Lodouico Dolce, 1553 (from Ovidius’ Metamorphoses); Reprint of the 1568 ed. published by Francesco Sansovino in Venice; edited by Stephen Orgel, 1979. Il Petrarca nouissimamente reuisto, e corretto da messer Lodouico Dolce. Con alcuni dottiss. auertimenti di m. Giulio Camillo, et indici del Dolce de’ concetti e delle parole, che nel poeta si trouano, et in ultimo de gli epitteti; et vn vtile raccoglimento delle desinenze delle rime di tutto il canzoniere di esso poeta, 1554. La Diuina Comedia di Dante, di nuouo alla sua vera lettione ridotta [...] Con argomenti, et allegorie per ciascun Canto, & Apostille ne margine, edited by Lodovico Dolce, 1555. Le prose di M. Pietro Bembo, nelle quali si ragiona della volgar lingua, [...] Diuise in tre libri, et reuiste con somma diligenza da M. Lodouico Dolce, 1556. I dilettevoli Sermoni, altrimente Satire, e le morali Epistole di Horatio [...] insieme con la Poetica [...] Ridotte da Lodovico Dolce [...] in versi sciolti volgari, 1559.

Le Orationi di Marco Tullio Cicerone, tradotte da M. Lodouico Dolce [...] Con la uita dell’autore, con un breue discorso in materia di Rhetorica, et con le sue tauole per ciascuna parte, 1562. Il cortegiano del conte Baldessar Castiglione nuouamente con diligenza reuisto per M. Lodouico Dolce, secondo l’esemplare del proprio autore, 1564.

Further Reading Bertini, Ferruccio, ‘‘Le commedie plautine di Ludovico Dolce,’’ in Studi umanistici piceni, 17 (1997): 21–31. Gatto, Gaetano, L’ ‘‘Amphitruo’’ di Plauto e le imitazioni di Ludovico Dolce e Molie`re, Catania: Tipografia S. Monachini, 1921. Neuschafer, Anne, ‘‘Dall’Amphitruo al Marito: una commedia plautina ‘in abito moderno’ di Ludovico Dolce,’’ in Studi umanistici piceni, 17 (1997): 113–124. Neuschafer, Anne, ‘‘Ma vorrei sol dipingervi il mio core, E haver un stile che vi fosse grato’’: le commedie e le tragedie di Lodovico Dolce in lingua volgare, Venice: Centro tedesco di studi veneziani, 2001. Roskill, Mark W., Dolce’s ‘Aretino’ and Venetian Art Theory of the Cinquecento, Toronto-Buffalo-London: University of Toronto Press, 2000. Terpening, Ronnie H., Lodovico Dolce: Renaissance Man of Letters, Toronto-London: University of Toronto Press, 1997.

DOLCE STIL NOVO Much, if not most, of our understanding of the history of thirteenth-century poetry comes from Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) and, more specifically, from the Vita Nuova, the De vulgari eloquentia, and the Comedia. The earliest manuscripts containing the poetry of the duecento—Vatican Lat. 3793, Laurentian Rediano 9, and Banco Rari 217 (Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale)—present the lyrics of the various poets, ordered by metrical form (canzoni first, then ballate and sonnets), and give us some rough indications of groupings by ‘‘school’’ or poetic inclination. For example, the large and influential Vatican codex begins with the poets who were active at the imperial court of Frederick II Hohenstaufen (1194–1250) in Sicily and proceeds up the Italian peninsula with the verses of Bonagiunta da Lucca, Guittone d’Arezzo, Chiaro Davanzati, and other Tuscan poets of the mid- to late-thirteenth century (including one canzone by Dante, ‘‘Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore’’ ). The major codices for the poets of the 640

Dolce stil novo are the following: Vatican Chigiano L. VIII.305 (mid-fourteenth century), Vatican Barberiniano Lat. 3953 (1325–1335), and Escorial Cod. Latino e.III.23 (first third of the fourteenth century). Because of his poetic and critical pre-eminence, Dante’s pronouncements on earlier poets and poetry (his own included, as demonstrated by the inclusion of the incipit of some of his own canzoni in the Comedia) have become, rightly or wrongly, canonical. Nevertheless, his discussion of the Sicilian poets in his unfinished treatise on language and prosody, De vulgari eloquentia, recognizes their primacy in and contributions to the literary tradition. It is in the Comedia, however, that Dante offers the reader the well-known overview of thirteenthcentury Italian lyric poetry, as expressed in Canto 24 of the Purgatorio through the words of the Lucchese poet Bonagiunta (thirteenth century), who recognizes and identifies Dante as the author

DOLCE STIL NOVO of the first canzone in the Vita Nuova, ‘‘Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore’’: Ma dı` s’ i’ veggio qui colui che fore trasse le nove rime, cominciando Donne ch’ avete intelletto d’ amore. But, tell me if I see here the one who brought forth the new poems, beginning ‘‘Ladies who have intelligence of Love.’’

In his response to these words, Dante, as it were, provides the definition of his distinctive poetic voice by describing his sublime inspiration: E io a lui: I’ mi son un che, quando Amor mi spira, noto, e a quel modo ch’ e’ ditta dentro vo significando. I said to him: I am one who, when Love breathes into me, takes note and then sets forth what he in that way dictates within me.

Bonagiunta’s reaction to and commentary on what Dante says provide both the solution to and the problem of the ‘‘mystery’’ of the Dolce stil novo, for it is here, in these verses, that we find for the first—and only—time the famous three words: O frate, issa vegg’ io, diss’ elli, il nodo che ’l Notaro e Guittone e me ritenne di qua dal dolce stil novo ch’ i’ odo! Io veggio ben come le vostre penne di retro al dittator sen vanno strette, che de le nostre certo non avvenne; e qual piu` a gradire oltre si mette, non vede piu` da l’ uno a l’ altro stilo. My brother, now I see, he said, the knot that held the Notary and Guittone and me back from the sweet new style I hear! Now, I see very clearly how your pens follow directly after the one who dictates to you—this, certainly, did not happen with us; and whoever examines the two styles cannot see the difference between the two styles more clearly than this.

On the basis of this passage some critics argue that Bonagiunta is identifying a group of poets consisting of the following: Guido Guinizzelli (ca. 1230–1276), Guido Cavalcanti (ca. 1259–1300), Lapo Gianni (late thirteenth–early fourteenth), Gianni degli Alfani (ca. thirteenth–fourteenth), Dino Frescobaldi (ca. 1271–ca. 1316), Cino da Pistoia (ca. 1270–ca. 1336/1337), and Dante himself. Other scholars, however, prefer to read the passage in Purgatorio as a definition that Dante gives of his own particular poetics. On the one hand, then, the Dolce stil novo would indicate a ‘‘school of poets’’ and, on the other hand, a single poet, whose virtuosity and subject matter would far surpass all of the others. However this may be, we

may see in the words Dante puts into his character Bonagiunta’s mouth a retrospective ordering of thirteenth-century poetic production whereby Bonagiunta’s poetry and that of Giacomo da Lentini (the ‘‘Notary’’) and Guittone d’Arezzo are distinct, both stylistically and thematically, from the lyrics of this new ‘‘school.’’ Equally clear from this passage is the recognition both of Dante’s canzone, ‘‘Donne ch’avete,’’ as marking a major turning point in Dante’s poetic itinerary and of the new conception of the personified figure of Love as the ‘‘dittator’’ (the one who dictates). The identity of Love, not as Cupid, but as the Holy Spirit who provides the inspiration for a higher, more refined amorous poetry, then sets the stage for the theologizing of love and the woman, ideas that began with the poetics of praise of Guido Guinizzelli and that were elaborated and refined by Dante first in the Vita Nuova and then, in a definitive manner, in the Comedia. For his key role in the transformation and renewal of the Italian lyric tradition, Guido Guinizzelli was recognized by Dante as the ‘‘Father’’ of the Dolce stil novo (Vita Nuova 20 and Purgatorio 26:94–99). In many of his poems he engages in great and extensive praise of the lady’s divine beauty and miraculous qualities, and these will become the primary characteristics of the Stil Nuovo, such as the sonnets ‘‘Io voglio del ver la mia donna laudare’’ (I truly wish to praise my lady) and ‘‘Vedut’ ho la lucente stella diana’’ (I have seen the bright morning star). In his doctrinal canzone, ‘‘Al cor gentil rempaira sempre amore’’ (Love always has its home in the noble heart), Guinizzelli attempts— unsuccessfully—to resolve the difficult questions concerning the nature of human nobility (‘‘gentilezza’’), the role of the woman in the amorous relationship, and the purpose and meaning of earthly love. Despite his failure to reconcile human affection for woman and divine love for God, Guinizzelli clearly indicated a new direction in amorous poetry. One of the most distinctive poetic voices of the Dolce stil novo is the Florentine Guido Cavalcanti, whom Dante calls his ‘‘first friend’’ in the Vita Nuova, and who was an active participant in the factional strife that plagued his native city. Except for a few compositions—‘‘Avete ’n vo’ li fior’ e la verdura’’ (You resemble the flowers and the green foliage)—his lyrics do not follow the Guinizzellian model. Cavalcanti is obsessed with the psychology of love, and his poems represent and dramatize the inner struggle of the soul afflicted by contrasting emotions, personified as ‘‘spiritelli’’ (little spirits). The anguish and potentially tragic consequences of 641

DOLCE STIL NOVO love may be seen in sonnets such as ‘‘Li mie’ foll’occhi, che prima guardaro’’ (My foolish eyes that first looked upon), ‘‘Tu m’hai sı` piena di dolor la mente’’ (You have so filled my mind with sorrow), and ‘‘Voi, che per li occhi mi passaste ’l core’’ (You who because of my eyes pierced my heart). The intentionally asymmetrical rhyme scheme (ABBB BAAA CDD DCC) of one remarkable sonnet, ‘‘L’anima mia vilment’ e` sbigotita’’ (My soul suffers harsh anguish), marks a new development in the history of the form in its mirroring of the emotional disequilibrium and disordered state of the poet-lover’s existence brought about by love. Cavalcanti’s doctrinal canzone, ‘‘Donna me prega—per ch’io voglio dire’’ (A lady asks me, for which I desire to speak), is structured along the lines of a philosophical and scientific treatise and is intended to be a sort of scientific proof (a ‘‘natural dimostramento’’) that defines the origin, nature, and effects of love. The exact meaning and sources of the canzone are still the subject of much debate. Another major exponent of the Dolce stil novo is Cino da Pistoia, who was a good friend of Dante and a celebrated jurist and teacher of law. His lyric production is the largest of the stilnovisti and reflects virtually all of their major themes, images, and concepts. The sonnet ‘‘Tutto mi salva il dolce salutare’’ (The sweet greeting blesses me completely) plays on the notion of the ‘‘saluto salutifero’’ (the blessing that confers blessedness) and the miraculous qualities of the lady, just as the sonnet ‘‘Vedete, donne, bella creatura’’ (Ladies, behold the beautiful creature) focuses on the beauty of the woman that then reflects on those around her. In sonnets such as ‘‘Deh, non mi domandar perche´ sospiri’’ (Please, don’t ask me why I sigh) we see how the background of political events and exile conditions the intensely personal, almost confessional nature of the amorous lament. There is also a spatial orientation that underlines the power of a particular place to evoke a mood and generate ideas. Cino’s contribution to the development of lyric poetry lies both in his harmonizing of various themes and concepts and in his objective psychological realism. For these reasons, he is generally considered to be the bridge linking the ‘‘Sweet New Style’’ and Petrarch. The minor members of the Dolce stil novo reflect in diverse ways certain of its aspects: Dino Frescobaldi and Gianni degli Alfani followed the Cavalcantian tragic manner, and Lapo Gianni wrote highly refined ballate, which, reverting to the older tradition, earned the admiration of Dante (De vulgari eloquentia 1.13.4). 642

As the consummate poet of the Dolce stil novo, Dante announces his adherence to the Guinizzellian model when, in the Vita Nuova, he notes that his poetry, beginning with the canzone ‘‘Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore,’’ will have as its new subject the praise of Beatrice. His sonnet ‘‘Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare’’ (So noble and gracious seems) best summarizes the essence of the Dolce stil novo and, more particularly, of Dante’s own special contribution to the lyric tradition, with its flowing musical quality combined with the lofty theme of praise: Beatrice descends from Heaven to work miracles on Earth. The three words in the designation Dolce stil novo refer to the originality in concept and manner—the ‘‘newness’’ of the initiative (‘‘novo’’)—to the transformations wrought in the poetic style in terms of new themes and content (Stil), and to the audibly and intellectually pleasing quality of the verses (Dolce). The identifying traits of the Dolce stil novo are: 1) the theme of praise that transcends secular adoration of woman; 2) the presentation of the lady who has both the appearance and the role of an angel (to lead the poet to spiritual salvation); 3) the conception of love as a force that may bestow either supreme happiness and beatitude (Guinizzelli, Dante, Cino) or unbearable anguish and death (Cavalcanti, Gianni degli Alfani). In short, the poets of the Dolce stil novo radically changed the lyric tradition, by freeing poetry thematically from the events of daily life, by elevating it linguistically above the common parlance, and by forging a new poetic language based on those terms central to their new understanding of love and infusing the conventional vocabulary of love poetry with new life and meaning, words such as dolce, spirito, spirare, gentile, salute, virtu`, onesta`, mercede, valore, soave, and so on. Although each poet has his own special language and attitudes, together they represent with their refined lyricism, richness of poetic techniques, acute awareness and investigation of human psychology, and profound spiritual sensitivity, a major and decisive event in the history of Italian literature. CHRISTOPHER KLEINHENZ Further Reading Alighieri, Dante, Literary Criticism of Dante Alighieri, edited and translated by Robert S. Haller, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1973. Barolini, Teodolinda, Dante’s Poets: Textuality and Truth in the Comedy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984.

DANILO DOLCI Bertelli, Italo, La poesia di Guido Guinizzelli e la poetica del ‘‘dolce stil nuovo,’’ Florence: Le Monnier, 1983. Bertoni, Giulio, Il Duecento, Milan: Vallardi, 1910; 3rd ed. 1939; rpt. 1954, 1973. Bigi, Emilio, ‘‘Genesi di un concetto storiografico: ‘dolce stil novo,’ ’’ in Giiornale storico della letteratura italiana, 132 (1955): 333–371. Corti, Maria, La felicita` mentale: Nuove prospettive per Cavalcanti e Dante, Turin: Einaudi, 1983. Dronke, Peter, The Medieval Lyric, New York: Harper & Row, 1968, 2nd ed., 1977. Favati, Guido, Inchiesta sul Dolce stil nuovo, Florence: Le Monnier, 1975. Gorni, Guglielmo, Il nodo della lingua e il verbo d’amore: studi su Dante e altri duecentisti, Florence: Olschki, 1981. Kleinhenz, Christopher, The Early Italian Sonnet: The First Century (1220–1321), Lecce: Milella, 1986. Marti, Mario, Storia dello Stil Nuovo, 2 vols., Lecce: Milella, 1973. Pasquini, Emilio, and Antonio Enzo Quaglio, Lo stilnovo e la poesia religiosa, Bari: Laterza, 1971. Pertile, Lino, ‘‘Il nodo di Bonagiunta, le penne di Dante e il Dolce Stil Novo,’’ in Lettere italiane, 46 (1994): 44–75.

Petrocchi, Giorgio, ‘‘Il Dolce stil nuovo,’’ in Storia della letteratura italiana, edited by Emilio Cecchi and Natalino Sapegno, vol. 1, Le origini e il Duecento, Milan: Garzanti, 1965. Poeti del Dolce stil nuovo, edited by Mario Marti, Florence: Le Monnier, 1969. Poeti del Duecento, 2 vols., edited by Gianfranco Contini, Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1960. Rimatori del dolce stil novo, edited by Luigi di Benedetto, Bari: Laterza, 1939. Russell, Rinaldina, Tre versanti della poesia stilnovistica, Bari: Adriatica, 1973. Sapegno, Natalino, ‘‘Il ‘dolce stil nuovo,’’’ in Il Trecento: Storia letteraria d’Italia, 2nd ed., Milan: Vallardi, 1955. Shaw, James E., Guido Cavalcanti’s Theory of Love: The ‘‘Canzone d’Amore’’ and Other Related Problems, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1949. Valency, Maurice J., In Praise of Love. An Introduction to the Love-Poetry of the Renaissance, New York: Macmillan, 1958. Vallone, Aldo, Dante, Milan: Vallardi, 1971.

DANILO DOLCI (1924–1997) Danilo Dolci—social reformer, educationalist, antimafia activist, apostle of nonviolence, poet, visionary, critic of technological society—dramatized in his life related dilemmas that have tormented revolutionaries for centuries. Should reform of the structures of society have priority over reform of the inner life of the individual, and will the one produce the other? In his early life, in the 1950s and 1960s, Dolci campaigned for the reform of society, but later he dedicated himself to educational work and to efforts for individual enlightenment. In both phases, his actions and writings had the same reforming focus. Although he was born in Sesana, in modern Slovenia, Dolci worked all his life in Sicily, which he first visited in 1942 to further his studies in architecture. He discovered instead both the rich culture and the human poverty of the island. Between 1950–1952, he worked in Nomadelfia, a community for children orphaned by war, and when he went back to Sicily in 1952, he went as a committed social reformer. In October that year, in Trappeto, near Palermo, he saw a child die of hunger. This tragedy, to which he returned obsessively in his lectures and

writings, set the course of his life. To galvanize the authorities into action, he undertook the first of many hunger strikes. Dolci’s field of activity was the hinterland around Palermo. He devoted himself to active nonviolence in an area where violence from bandits and the mafia was commonplace. He set up a nursery for the children of the poor in Borgo, moved in 1958 to Partinico, where he established the Centro studi e iniziative per la piena occupazione, (Center for Study and Initiatives for Full Employment). He organized mass hunger strikes, marches, and civil disobedience to bring pressure to bear on local and national government. Dolci viewed banditry, then endemic to the area, as a result of poverty and considered the mafia to be one of the causes of both. The famous bandit Salvatore Giuliano (1922–1950) was active in the region at that time, and Dolci knew members of his gang. The lack of water represented an obstacle for agriculture, and in 1955, Dolci went on another hunger strike to give life to a campaign for the construction of a dam at San Giuseppe Iato. It was only in 1962, after sustained protests, that building 643

DANILO DOLCI work began. Dolci regarded this as his finest achievement, not only for its economic impact but for its validation of his methods and outlook. He believed that it gave the peasants proof that change was possible, that unity was essential and that peaceful action could be effective. His activism, however, enraged the authorities—political, judicial, ecclesiastical and criminal. A sciopero in rovescia (reverse strike) in 1956, when groups worked unpaid to restore a road in the countryside, was disrupted by the police, and Dolci spent two months in jail awaiting trial, at which he was acquitted. In 1965, Dolci denounced in a press conference the local mafia boss, Frank ‘‘Tre dita’’ (Three Fingers) Coppola, and his political ally, the minister, Bernardo Mattarella. For this act, he received a suspended jail sentence for defamation. By now, Dolci was an internationally known figure, who drew respectful tributes from men of the caliber of Jean Paul Sartre, Bertrand Russell, and Aldous Huxley, who referred to him as ‘‘a new Gandhi, a modern St. Francis’’ (‘‘Introduction’’ to D. Dolci, To Feed the Hungry, 1959). He also attracted the idealistic young from Europe and America to work alongside him. Although viewed by some as a secular saint, he was neither malleable nor accommodating, and there were several bitter splits among his followers. Perhaps his awareness of being an outsider in Sicily, forced to listen as the only means of integrating himself into a culture that he knew was not his, determined the centrality of the maieutic approach to his subsequent philosophy and conditioned the nature of his writing. His first works, like Banditi a Partinico (Bandits in Partinico, 1955) were inquiries into social conditions. The most successful was probably Spreco (Waste, 1960), where he created quasi-short stories that allowed local people to give voice and shape to their experiences. With Inventare il futuro (Inventing the Future, 1968), he changed direction to offer a vision rather than a description of the status quo. In 1970, he produced his finest book of poetry, Il limone lunare (The Lunar Lemon), with poems that were not manifestos in verse but brittle expressions of lived life. Danilo Dolci’s own interests shifted progressively toward education and the development of maieutics, a post-Socratic method of questioning and probing aimed at bringing out wisdom concealed in some depths of the mind. He faded from the public eye, and became an increasingly acerbic critic of technological society, criticizing ‘‘dominion’’ as the root of evil, questioning mass communication and denouncing the failure of science to 644

produce a more fulfilled humankind. Almost his last book was an ‘‘outline manifesto,’’ Comunicare, legge della vita (Communicating, the Law of Life, 1995).

Biography Born 28 June 1924 in Sesana, near Trieste, of an Italian father and Slav mother. Studies architecture in Milan. Arrested 1943 for anti-Fascist activity. 1950, leaves university to help in Nomadelfia, a community in Fossoli, Emilia Romagna, established by don Zeno Saltini, which gave shelter to war orphans. 1953, moves to Sicily. 1954, first book on Sicily, Fare presto (e bene) perche` si muore. 1954, marries the widow Vincenzina who has five children: fathers five children of his own with her. 1955, hunger strike to open campaign for dam on river Iato. 1956, ‘reverse strike’ in Partinico, to repair path in countryside around. 1962, project to build dam approved. 1964, leaves Vincenzina to live with Swedish journalist, Hellen Norman, by whom he has two more children. 1965, at press conference in Rome, denounces prominent politicians for mafia collusion. 1968, moves his activities to Belice after earthquake. 1970, encourages self-management of irrigation and fruit-growing work by peasants themselves. 1974, opening of Centro di Mirto, an experimental school. 1979, addresses UNESCO on education for next decades. During the 1980s and 1990s essentially private years, dedicated to seminars and writing. Died in Palermo, 30 December 1997. JOSEPH FARRELL See also: Questione meridionale Selected Works Social and Investigative Writing Fare presto (e bene) perche` si muore, 1954. Banditi a Partinico, 1955; as The Outlaws of Palermo, translated by R. Munroe, 1960; as Outlaws, translated by R. Munroe, 1961. Inchiesta a Palermo, 1956; as To Feed the Hungry, translated by P. D. Cummins, 1959, with introduction by Aldous Huxley; rpt. as Report from Palermo, 1959; rpt. as Poverty in Sicily, 1966. Spreco, 1960; as Waste, translated by R. Munroe, 1963. Conversazioni, 1962. Racconti siciliani, 1963. Chi gioca solo, 1966; as The Man Who Plays Alone, translated by Antonia Cowan, 1968. Ai piu` giovani, 1967; as For the Young, translated by Antonia Cowan, 1967. Inventare il futuro, 1968.

ANTON FRANCESCO DONI Chissa` se i pesci piangono: Documenti di un’esperienza educativa, 1973. Esperienze e riflessioni, 1974. Il dio della zecche, 1985. Nessi fra esperienza, etica e politica, 1992. Gente semplice, 1993. La legge come germe musicale, 1994. La comunicazione di massa non esiste, 1995. Comunicare, legge della vita: Bozza di manifesto, 1995. La struttura maieutica e l’evolversi, 1998.

Poetry ‘‘Poesie,’’ 1956. ‘‘Il limone lunare,’’ 1970. ‘‘Non sentite l’odore del fumo?,’’ 1971. ‘‘Poema umano,’’ 1974. ‘‘Creatura di creature: Poesie 1949–1978,’’ 1979, as Creature of Creatures, translated by Justin Vitiello, 1980; rpt. as The World Is a Creature, 1984. ‘‘Da bocca a bocca,’’ 1981; as From Mouth to Mouth, translated by Justin Vitiello, 1983. ‘‘Occhi ancora rimangono aperti,’’ 1987.

Anthologies of Selected Writing A New World in the Making, translated by Antonia Cowan, 1965.

Sicilian Lives, translated by Justin Vitiello, 1982.

Further Reading Barone, Giuseppe, Chi tace e` complice, Naples: Libreria Dante & Descartes, 2000. Capitini, Aldo, Danilo Dolci e noi, Manduria: Lacaita, 1958. Chemello, Adriana, La parola maieutica: Impegno civile e ricerca poetica nell’opera di daniclo Dolci, Florence: Vallecchi, 1988. Costantino, Salvatore (editor), Raccontare Danilo Dolci: L’immaginazione sociologica, il sottosviluppo, la costruzione della societa` civile, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 2003. Fontanelli, Giuseppe, Danilo Dolci, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1985. Huxley, Aldous, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in Danilo Dolci, To Feed the Hungry, translated by P. D. Cummins, London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1959. MacNeish, James, Fire Under the Ashes, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1965. Mangione, Jerre, A Passion for Sicilians: The World Around Danilo Dolci, New York: Morrow, 1968. Spagnoletti, Giacinto, Conversazioni con Danilo Dolci, Milan: Mondadori, 1977.

ANTON FRANCESCO DONI (1513–1574) Anton Francesco Doni is a many-sided figure. A writer, musician, painter, and publisher, he is also commonly considered the first Italian bibliographer, thanks to his two ‘‘librarie’’—La libraria del Doni fiorentino (The Book-Collection of Doni of Florence, 1550) and La seconda libraria (The Second Book Collection, 1551)—in which he lists, not always accurately, an extraordinary number of manuscripts or printed texts in the vernacular or translated into Italian, without neglecting musical publications, and, in the second volume, the works of academic writers. Judged harshly by literary critics—in his 1824 essay ‘‘Italian Periodical Literature,’’ Ugo Foscolo defined him as ‘‘a compound of ignorance, arrogance, and profligacy...the greatest, if not the most ancient among the patriarchs of venal literature,’’ and in his 1952 Compendio di storia della letteratura italiana, Natalino Sapegno placed him along with Pietro Aretino among the ‘‘adventurers of the pen’’—and perhaps considered with the greatest interest by musicologists, he is the

typical exponent of a quasijournalistic literature that is not without interest, wit, and vivacity. A Humanist intellectual with a myriad of interests, he was the author of a series of works, including volumes of letters, that form a cross-section of the culture of his age, and are rich in anecdotes and judgments on the arts and artists of the time. In a letter of 1543 to Cardinal Alessandro Farnese published in Tre Libri di lettere (Three Books of Letters, 1552), he describes himself not only as a writer, but also as ‘‘sonatore, cantore e dipintore’’ (performer, singer, and painter), and he was indeed in touch with numerous artists (his portrait may have been painted by Tintoretto himself ). His writings are not easy to classify. Consider for instance the subtitle of La zucca (The Pumpkin, 1552) that lists ‘‘chiacchiere, filastrocche, frappe, chimere, castelli in aria, [...] novelle, cicalecci, parabole, baie, proverbi, motti, umori ed altre giravolte e storie’’ (chitchat, rhymes, frapperies, chimeras, castles in the air, [...] tales, chatters, parables, jests, proverbs, 645

ANTON FRANCESCO DONI jokes, humor, and other twists and stories). He treated the most diverse themes and used the most assorted literary genres, from the theater, for instance with the comedy Lo stufaiolo (The Ovenworker, 1585), written after 1550, to the academic dialogue on the arts and philosophy, with Dialogo della musica (Dialogue on Music, 1544), Disegno (Drawing, 1549), and I mondi (The Worlds, 1552– 1553), to the written polemic with Il terremoto (The Earthquake, 1556), a ferocious attack against Pietro Aretino. In a letter of 7 February 1553 to the sculptor Giovan Angelo Fiorentino, Doni himself declared that he wrote ‘‘per non passar la vita malinconica piu` tosto che cercar fama, con cio` sia di che di tutte le cose che hanno fine terreno mi fo beffe, e ridomene come sono le mie carte’’ (in order not to spend my melancholic life seeking fame, as I laugh at all earthly things, as I do in my writings) (I mondi, vol. 2, 1553). I marmi (The Marbles, 1552) is considered to be among his greatest works: It is a series of dialogues on various themes set on the steps (the marbles) of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence. One chapter perhaps makes a reference to the poetic and musical activities of the Accademia Fiorentina, of which Doni was the secretary, and is interesting evidence of the practice of improvising poems and musical passages. Music is, in fact, a constant of the author’s entire literary output, and also of his activity as a publisher. His writings are scattered with references to it and with lively representations of the musical life of his time, attesting to the role of music in the intellectual circles of the time. Moreover, he is certainly the first to include musical editions in a printed bibliography. Doni’s most interesting work in this field is the Dialogo della musica, which is not a treatise, but a dialogue over the course of two evenings that features as its protagonists musicians and writers, some of them from real life, like the two well-known composers Perissone Cambio and Girolamo Parabosco, and Girolamo Gottifredi, secretary of the Accademia Ortolana, to which Doni belonged. In the course of their conversations, they offer judgments about ancient and new musicians, tell stories, as in Boccaccio’s Decameron (1373), and sing and play music. The most significant aspect of the Dialogo della musica is that it actually contains the music performed on the first and second evenings, 28 madrigals in all, by various composers, among whom are Doni himself and Adriano Willaert, Cipriano de Rore, Jacob Arcadelt, as well as Cambio and Parabosco. 646

In his variegated oeuvre, Doni also touched upon philosophical and political themes. For example, in I mondi, he includes a dialogue between two academicians, Il Savio (the wise man) and Il Pazzo (the madman), to whom Jove and Momus send the vision of a new world. The ideal city they describe is ruled by a communitarian utopia perhaps indebted to Thomas More, in which people are treated as ‘‘equals,’’ the fields are fertile and well-cultivated and all goods are shared equally. While always maintaining his light and satiric tone, Doni gives voice to a critique of his contemporary society and to the desire for peace and the greatest possible degree of social justice.

Biography Born in Florence on 16 May 1513, in a family of humble origins that, however, claimed as one of its ancestors the poet Salvino Doni, a contemporary and possibly friend of Dante. First a priest and then a friar, was expelled from the Monastero dei Servi in unclear circumstances and left Florence, 1540; wandered through Northern Italy, settling in Piacenza, 1543, where he studied law. Turned to literary studies and became part of the circle that founded the Accademia Ortolana; organized musical performances. Moved to Venice, 1544, where he entered in contact with the publisher Girolamo Scotto. Returned to Florence, 1545; elected official recorder, 1546, then secretary, of the Accademia Fiorentina. Published several texts connected to his activity as ‘‘ducal printer’’ for Cosimo I de’ Medici, 1546–1548, for whom he probably had compiled a manuscript collection of ten madrigals for publication. His publishing venture was not successful and he returned to Venice, 1549, where he was member of a little-known Accademia Pellegrina. After years of wandering, he retired in a hermitage in Monselice, near Padua. Died in Monselice in 1574. ANNA TEDESCO Selected Works Collections Scritti, Milan: Istituto editoriale italiano, 1916. Scritti scelti di Pietro Aretino e di Anton Francesco Doni, edited by Giuseppe Guido Ferrero, Turin: Utet, 1951. Le novelle, vol. 1, La moral filosofia, Trattati, edited by Patrizia Pellizzari, Rome: Salerno, 2002; vol. 2, La zucca, edited by Elena Pierazzo, Rome: Salerno, 2003.

CARLO DOSSI Dialogues Dialogo della musica, 1544; edited by Giovan Francesco Malipiero, 1965. Gli spiriti folletti, 1546. Disegno, 1549. I marmi, 1552; edited by Ezio Chio`boli, 2 vols., 1928. I mondi, 2 vols., 1552–1553.

Plays Lo stufaiolo, 1585.

Letters Lettere, 1544; expanded, 1545. Lettere del Doni. Libro secondo, 1547. Tre libri di pistolotti amorosi, 1552. Tre libri di lettere, 1552.

Other La libraria del Doni fiorentino, 1550; as La libraria, edited by Vanni Bramanti, 1972. La seconda libraria, 1551. La zucca, 1552; edited by Elena Pierazzo, 2003. La moral filosofia, 1552. Il terremoto, 1556. Umori e sentenze, edited by Vincenza Giri and Giorgio Masi, 1988.

Further Reading Cameron, Allan, ‘‘Doni’s Satirical Utopia,’’ in Renaissance Studies, 10, no. 4 (1996): 462–473.

Candela, Giuseppe, Manierismo e condizioni della scrittura in Anton Francesco Doni, New York: Lang, 1993. Delfino, Carla, ‘‘Tematica del Doni,’’ in Italianistica, 8 (1979): 227–245. Foscolo, Ugo, ‘‘Italian Periodical Literature,’’ in Edizione nazionale delle opere di Ugo Foscolo, vol. 11, part 2, Saggi di letteratura italiana, edited by Cesare Foligno, Florence: Le Monnier, 1958. Grendler, Paul F., Critics of the Italian World, 1530–1560: Anton Francesco Doni, Niccolo` Franco and Ortensio Lando, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969. Haar, James, ‘‘Notes on the Dialogo Della Musica of Antonfrancesco Doni,’’ in Music and Letters, 47, no. 3 (1966): 198–224. Haar, James, ‘‘A Gift of Madrigals to Cosimo I; The Ms. Florence, Bibl. Naz. Centrale, Magl. XIX, 130,’’ in The Science and Art of Renaissance Music, edited by Paul Corneilson, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. Monterosso Vacchelli, Anna Maria, L’opera musicale di Antonfrancesco Doni, Cremona: Athenaeum Cremonense, 1969. Ricottini Marsili-Libelli, Cecilia, Anton Francesco Doni scrittore e stampatore: bibliografia delle opere e della critica e annali tipografici, Florence: Sansoni Antiquariato, 1960. Rivoletti, Christian, Le metamorfosi dell’utopia: Anton Francesco Doni e l’immaginario utopico di meta` Cinquecento, Lucca: Pacini Fazzi, 2003. Sapegno, Natalino, Compendio di storia della letteratura italiana, vol. 2, Cinquecento, Seicento, Settecento, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1952.

CARLO DOSSI (1849–1910) In 1868, the appearance of L’altrieri. Nero su bianco (The Other Day: Black on White) marked the ‘‘official’’ debut of Carlo Dossi, one of the most eccentric novelists of the second half of the nineteenth century in Italy. The author, at the time barely 19 years old, had already written two volumes of stories (one in collaboration with Luigi Perelli) and founded, also with Perelli, the journal La palestra letteraria artistica scientifica (1867–1870). The young protagonist of L’altrieri recounts his infancy and his adolescence in the first person, moments of his life close to the time of the narration. The act of remembering is identified with the material act of composition, with white space subsumed to the black of writing: black on white,

just as the subtitle suggests. This first novel by Dossi (one that represents his most transgressive side) is characterized on a highly creative linguistic and stylistic mode by the intellectual inventiveness of the Scapigliatura movement. Dossi’s expressionistic resistance is effected through a mix of voices in dialect (essentially Lombard or in accord with Lombardisms), elevated or obsolete terms, Latinate modules, and neologisms. It was followed by Vita di Alberto Pisani (The Life of Alberto Pisani, 1870), a sort of parody of Romantic autobiography. The narrative strategies at work (in particular that of digression) recall one of Dossi’s preferred authors, Lawrence Sterne. The continuity of the plot is interrupted by an inverted chapter order (with the fourth chapter appearing before the first 647

CARLO DOSSI three), by brief stories that, fragmented within the main story, suspend the linearity of the narrative, and by frequent intrusions of the narrating voice. This voice directs the reader’s attention not only toward the story but also to the author’s writing strategies. As the protagonist grows, he nourishes his fervid sensibility with omnivorous readings. Encountering Claudia Salis at the theater, he decides to write a book for her; she reads it and communicates her desire to meet the author. Upon presenting himself at the appointment and discovering that Claudia is dead, Alberto takes her body and kills himself over it with the shot of a pistol. To understand this book profoundly it is opportune first of all to reflect on the title of the first edition, Vita di Alberto Pisani scritta da Carlo Dossi (Life of Alberto Pisani Written by Carlo Dossi). Keeping in mind the fact that Carlo Dossi, is the pseudonym of Carlo Alberto Pisani Dossi it becomes evident that the author doubles his identity in order to recount his own life. The ambivalence of the ties that unite the narrator to his double are complicated when Carlo Dossi cedes the beginning of the narration to Alberto Pisani who, with the pseudonym Guido Etelre`di, or the name of the narrating voice of L’altrieri, is presented as the author of the stories interpolated in the first story. Alberto Pisani’s style is fed by plurilinguistic Expressionism (Lombardisms and other dialects, personal forms, cultured or exceptional voices, Latinisms, etc.), and invites the reader to participate in the narrative. The style recalls, like a distorting mirror, the caricature of the Romantic mythologies on which Alberto syntonizes his existence and his artistic vocation. The complex play of doubles and metanarrative schemes in which ties to Flegeljahre, by the German writer Jean Paul, are recognizable, prevents the melodramatic suicide of Alberto from being fully tragic; it is instead the replica of a cultural archetype that can no longer be staged except in a distorting, humorous perspective. Carlo Dossi continues to play with autobiographic ‘‘fiction’’ via various genres and expressive registers, hiding himself, masking himself, revealing himself, doubling himself. Not by chance his later works, like the ‘‘elegy’’ Elvira (1872) and the ‘‘sermon’’ Il regno dei cieli (The Kingdom of Heaven, 1873), are published anonymously. Furthermore, he attributes his Cenno critico (Critical Note) on Giuseppe Rovani’s Giovinezza di Giulio Cesare (Julius Cesar’s Youth), also written in 1873) to his friend Luigi Perelli (who he also cites as editor of the Vita di Alberto Pisani), without 648

counting on the fact that he would reverse this position in Goccie d’inchiostro (Drops of Ink, 1880), this time, signing the stories of Alberto Pisani as Carlo Dossi. In 1905, the comedy written in Milanese dialect, Ona famiglia de cilapponi (A Family of Silly People) appears signed with the acronym Pisper, derived from the fusion of two half-identities, that of (Alberto) Pisani and that of (Luigi) Perelli. In the diary-notebook titled the Note azzurre (Blue Notes), published posthumously in 1912, Dossi uses the third person to designate himself, at times not citing his full name, but using a simple ‘‘D.’’ Then Dossi plans a cycle of Ritratti umani (Human Portraits), including amongst other titles the 12 prose works Dal calamajo di un medico (From the Pen of a Doctor, 1873), which attempt to offer a portrait of the contemporary society via the pen of a doctor-narrator. The misogynist polemical La desinenza in A, (The Ending in A, 1878), another work in this cycle, creates a desecrating gallery of multiple women portrayed in a ferocious satire. The setting in the theatrical genre is not only part of the external structure (the work is subdivided into three acts of ten scenes each) but also responsible for the prevalent dialogical structure of certain stories. The forms of the short story and the novel coexist with the theater. Dossi’s texts make use of the theories and the figurative practices of painter William Hogarth, one characteristic that confirms the composite nature of his work. Music also frequently appears in his compositions, in the form of such terms as ‘‘symphony,’’ ‘‘overture,’’ and ‘‘intermezzo,’’ in the depiction of an orchestra that the author-demiurge uses as a metaphor for the relationship with his literary production and with his readers, in the insertion of a real musical text. The paradoxical innovations of punctuation and accents are rhythmic and musical indications that constrain the reader to slow the ‘‘recitation’’ of the work (according to the specifications contained in the Ma`rgine that act as a preface to the second edition in 1884). After the first edition of La desinenza in A, during the 1880s Dossi produces only one new work, I mattoidi (The Odd Fellows, 1884), an inventory, pitiless and cruelly humorous, of the grotesque projects presented for ‘‘L’altare della patria’’ (The altar of the homeland), the monument for King Vittorio Emanuele II. At this point, having entered the orbit of the ingenious manager of the cultural industry, Angelo Sommaruga, and having thus at least apparently disposed himself to confront a decidedly more vast public of readers, Dossi

CARLO DOSSI dedicates himself to the editorial task of reworking his texts. This editorial work includes writing prefaces or afterwards in which he recounts himself, negating and multiplying himself at the same time. In 1887, Dossi leaves the world of literature by publishing, in an extremely refined typographic form, Amori (Love Stories). The work is a delicate and ironic survey of women he loved, organized along an itinerary modeled on the hierarchical scheme of the Dantean heavens.

Biography Carlo Alberto Pisani Dossi (in art, Carlo Dossi) was born in Zenevredo near Pavia on 27 March 1949 to an upper-middle class family. Classical studies in Milan and later studies of jurisprudence at the University of Pavia, from which he graduated in 1871. Moved to Rome in 1872, having won a competition for a place with the minister of foreign affairs, resigning, however, the next year. Returned to service in 1877, and in 1878 was named head of the Cabinet of Francesco Crispi’s government, becoming the leader’s right-hand man. Left his literary vocation entirely to dedicate himself to his new duties. Appointed undersecretary of state for foreign affairs. Accepted post as consul in Colombia. Before departing for Bogota` married Carlotta Borsani, with whom had three children. Stayed in Colombia briefly. In 1895, received nomination as minister in Athens. Returned to Italy in 1896 following Crispi’s demise after the Italian army defeat at Adua. Dedicated the last years of life to the construction of a magnificent villa Dosso Pisani in Cardina (Como) and to his passion for archeology. Died in Cardina, on 16 November 1910. ANTONIO SACCONE See also: Scapigliatura Selected Works Collections Opere, edited by G. P. Lucini and P. Levi, 5 vols., Milan: Treves, 1909–1927.

Opere scelte, edited by Foldo Portinari, Turin: Utet, 2004.

Fiction Giannetto prego` un dı` la mamma che il lasciasse andare a scuola (with Luigi Perelli), 1866. Per me si va tra la perduta gente, 1867. L’altrieri. Nero su bianco, 1868. Vita di Alberto Pisani, 1870. Elvira, 1872. Il regno dei cieli, 1873. Ritratti Umani. Dal calamaio di un me´dico, 1873. La colonia felice, 1874. La desinenza in A, 1878. Goccie d’inchiostro, 1880. Ritratti umani. Campionario (with Luigi Perelli), 1885. Amori, 1887. Autodiagnosiu quotidiana, edited by L. Barile, 1984. Due racconyti giovanili. Con un racconto di Luigi Perelli, edited by P. Montefoschi, 1994.

Plays Ona famiglia de cilapponi, giavanada in 5 att con musega de Pisper (Pisani-Perelli), 1905.

Nonfiction I mattoidi, 1884. Fricassea critica, 1906. Note azzurre, 1912. Rovaniana, edited by G. Nicodemi, 1946. Note azzurre, edited by Dante Isella, 1964.

Further Reading Avellini, L. (editor), La critica e Dossi, Bologna: Cappelli, 1978. Caputo, Francesco, Sintassi e dialogo nella narrativa di Carlo Dossi, Florence: Accademia della Crusca, 2000. Isella, Dante, La lingua e lo stile di Carlo Dossi, MilanNaples: Ricciardi, 1958. Isella, Dante, I lombardi in rivolta, Turin: Einaudi, 1984. Isella, Dante, L’idillio di Meulan, Turin: Einaudi, 1994. Lucini, Gian Piero, L’ora topica di Carlo Dossi. Saggio di critica integrale (1911), edited by T. Grandi, Milan: Ceschina, 1973. Saccone, Antonio, Carlo Dossi. La scrittura del margine, Naples: Liguori, 1995. Scannapieco, A., In tristia hilaris, in hilaritate tristis, Abano Terme: Francisci, 1984. Serri, M., Carlo Dossi e il ‘‘racconto,’’ Rome: Bulzoni, 1975. Spera, Francesco, Il principio della antiletteratura, Naples: Liguori, 1976.

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FRANCESCA DURANTI

FRANCESCA DURANTI (1935–) Francesca Duranti’s fiction examines the relationship between life and art; her protagonists are often involved in the literary world, and their artistic endeavors serve as a journey of self-discovery. Although her texts are rarely overtly feminist or political in theme, they do explore female experiences and their impact on female subjectivity. Duranti, a translator as well as novelist, employs a number of genres in her works, including the autobiographical bildungsroman, the thriller, the romance narrative, the psychological drama, and even metafiction that addresses the creation of her own literary production. Duranti’s earlier works are clearly based in her own life story. La bambina (The Child, 1976), although written in the third person, describes the childhood and adolescence of the author herself. Although the time period examined in the novel includes disturbing events such as World War II and the occupation and subsequent liberation of Italy, the narrator’s perspective is rooted in the more daily experiences of the young protagonist, Francesca Rossi, and her relationships with diverse family members. La casa sul lago della luna (The House on Moon Lake, 1984), Duranti’s third novel, moves away from the realm of autobiography to explore issues of artistic creation and self-discovery. Its lyric prose, fascinating narrative, and intriguing characters won the novel international acclaim and literary awards, including the Martinafranca and the Bagutta prizes. Its protagonist, Fabrizio Garrone, a penurious translator, finds financial and artistic success when he translates a little-known novel by a Viennese writer, Fritz Oberhofer, called La casa sul lago della luna. However, when Fabrizio attempts a commissioned biography of the author, he finds himself creating an imaginary love interest for Oberhofer. The line between reality and fantasy becomes increasingly blurred as the supposed granddaughter of the fictional woman enters the text and completely destabilizes both narrative and protagonist. Duranti takes on many themes familiar to the women’s movement in Effetti personali (Personal Effects, 1988). In this novel, the female protagonist undertakes a voyage of discovery after being abandoned by her husband of ten years. Valentina takes 650

up journalism and travels to an unspecified Eastern European country to write the life story of a famous novelist. Along the way, her evolving relationships with her mother, her lover (a poet), and her former husband serve as the vehicle for her own growth. The relationship between art and life— between a writer and her literary production—is explored in the novel Ultima stesura (Final Draft, 1991). The narrator, Teodora Francia, analyses eight of her short stories through the lenses of her own life story, which mirrors Duranti’s own. In the process of personal and literary analysis, Teodora examines how her own work reveals the tension between artistic creation and finding one’s place in the ‘‘real world.’’ Sogni mancini (Left-Handed Dreams, 1996) is a more lighthearted look at the creative process. Here New York University history professor Marina Satriano, newly arrived in Italy to care for her ailing mother, records her dreams in an attempt to work through a confused sense of identity. Many of these dreams are rooted in memories of meals, and the book’s format is divided into eight chapters, each corresponding to a specific dish. The novel, then, becomes part of a feminist tradition that uses domestic imagery and ritual as a means of defining and celebrating female culture. In 2003, Duranti reimagines the story of her great-grandmother’s life in L’ultimo viaggio della Canaria (The Last Journey of the Canaria, 2003), a novel that won the Premio Rapallo-Carige. Her ancestor believed that her husband, a sea captain, had not perished when his ship, the Canaria, was lost at sea, but rather had been stranded on some island in the Atlantic Ocean. Duranti creates a rich and compassionate inner life for her greatgrandmother, who spent her long adult life waiting for her missing husband. In the novel, the author also intertwines her family’s personal story with that of Italy’s political and cultural history. Other novels include Piazza mia bella piazza (Public Square, My Beautiful Public Square, 1978), which describes the breakup of Duranti’s second marriage after her husband refused to support her artistic aspirations; and Lieto fine (Happy Ending, 1987), which reimagines a traditional fairy tale narrative through its use of irony and a nonconventional ending. In Progetto Burlamacchi (1994), Duranti

FRANCESCA DURANTI examines the impact of historical events on the present day, as a computer science teacher in Lucca proposes a reworking of Tuscany’s past. Il comune senso delle proporzioni (The Common Sense of Proportions, 2000) is a thriller set in New York City that revises the genre’s conventions to examine the female protagonist’s existential crisis.

Biography Born 2 January 1935 in Genova, nee´ Rossi. Married Enrico Magnani, 1956. Separated from Magnani, 1960. Law degree from University of Pisa, 1960. Divorced from her second husband, Massimo Duranti, 1976. Has two children, Gregorio Magnani and Maddalena Duranti. La casa sul lago della luna awarded the Premio Martinafranca, 1984, and the Premio Bagutta, 1985. Effetti personali awarded the Premio Basilicata and Premio Hemingway, 1988, and the Premio Campiello, 1989. Sogni mancini awarded the Premio Rapallo, 1997. L’ultimo viaggio della Canaria awarded the Premio RapalloCarige, 2004. Her novels have been translated into 18 languages. LAURA SALSINI Selected Works Fiction La bambina, 1976. Piazza mia bella piazza, 1978. La casa sul lago della luna, 1984; as The House on Moon Lake, translated by Stephen Sartarelli, 1986.

Lieto fine, 1987; as Happy Ending, translated by Annapaola Cancogni, 1991. Effetti personali, 1988; as Personal Effects, translated by Stephen Sartarelli, 1993. Ultima stesura, 1991. Progetto Burlamacchi, 1994. Sogni mancini, 1996; as Left-handed Dreams, 2000. Il comune senso delle proporzioni: piccolo thriller da viaggio, 2000. L’ultimo viaggio della Canaria, 2003.

Further Reading Giobbi, Giuliana, ‘‘Know the Past: Know Thyself. Literary Pursuits and Quest for Identity in A.S. Byatt’s Possession and in F. Duranti’s Effetti personali,’’ in Journal of European Studies, 24 (1994): 41–54. Kozma, Jan, ‘‘Bio-fictive Conversations and the Uncentered Woman in Francesca Duranti’s Novels,’’ in Italianist, 16 (1996): 176–190. Lucamante, Stefania, ‘‘La geometria nel romanzo: I ‘grafici narrativi’ di Francesca Duranti,’’ in Forum Italicum, 29, no. 2 (1995): 313–323. Smith, Shirley, ‘‘Francesca Duranti and Metafiction,’’ in Quaderni d’italianistica, 18, no. 1 (1997): 101–111. Spunta, Marina, ‘‘A Balanced Language: Spoken and Dialogic Style in the Narrative of Francesca Duranti,’’ in The Modern Language Review, 95, no. 2 (2000): 374–388. Vinall, W. Shirley, ‘‘Francesca Duranti: Reflections and Inventions,’’ in The New Italian Novel, edited by Zygmunt G. Baranski and Lino Pertile, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993. Wilson, Rita, ‘‘The Split Self or Female Creativity: Francesca Duranti,’’ in Speculative Identities: Contemporary Italian Women’s Narrative, Leeds: Northern Universities Press, 2000. Wood, Sharon, ‘‘Seductions and Brazen Depictions: Two Recent Novels from Italy,’’ in Forum for Modern Language Studies, 28, no. 4 (1992): 349–362.

BERNARDO DOVIZI See Il Bibbiena

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ELEONORA DUSE

ELEONORA DUSE (1858–1924) As an actress, Eleonora Duse occupies a central position in the history of modern Italian and world theater. She developed a radically new style based on introspection and nuance whose influence extends to contemporary acting methods (Lee Strasberg was one of her keenest admirers). In addition to her acting, Duse’s profound impact on twentieth-century literary, theatrical, and social culture is due to her original and forceful approach to texts, her self-transformation into a diva with a mystique and international cult following of unprecedented proportions (among intellectual elites and popular audiences alike), and her intense, inspiring correspondence with writers and performers. As early as 1879, Duse began to be noticed for the subtlety and modernity of her acting. Although small and fragile-looking (and eventually debilitated by a chronic illness of the lungs), in her role as Vittorio Alfieri’s Electra she appeared on a par with the illustrious prima attrice, Giacinta Pezzana (who was also her teacher). Witnesses and critics largely agree on the main characteristics of Duse’s acting. She increasingly disregarded traditional acting typologies and even authors’ stylistic recommendations, and radically refashioned characters, as if they were emanations of her own inner being. She transformed them in her own image and made them new. This process is often referred to as interiorization. It had the uncanny effect of making Duse’s acting seem entirely natural, spontaneous, devoid of artifice and rhetoric, and at the same time artful, complex, meditated, and profound. Duse’s shunning of makeup, her preference for simple, ample and unrevealing costumes, her elimination of traditional theatrical poses and emphatic gestures contributed to the calculated effect of naturalness. She avoided grand entrances and occasionally placed herself in a corner at the back of the stage. Instead of imposingly striding toward the proscenium she tended to shuffle unassumingly. In place of stereotyped, recognizable gestures, Duse crafted her own language of barely perceptible body movements, subtle tremors of the hands, quivering of the lips and eyelids, blushing and, especially, pauses of silence and immobility. All demanded a new, concentrated, nearly spellbound attention by the spectator. She fascinated and inspired writers 652

as different as James Joyce, George Bernard Shaw, Rainer Maria Rilke, Sibilla Aleramo, Anton Chekhov and Hugo von Hoffmansthal, as well as at least two generations of actresses. In contrast to her rival Sarah Bernhardt, who excelled in sexually charged femme fatale roles and exploited the potential of luxurious, extravagant dress and makeup (as well as the erotic tension of the body artfully displayed), Duse, who studied Bernhardt carefully, sought to generate an effect of mystical spirituality and interiority even when interpreting rather vulgar characters, such as Zola’s The´re`se Raquin. Once penetrated and disclosed in her innermost intimate being and suffering, even Raquin became sublime in Duse’s hands. Increasingly, the impression she made through her acting was of reaching into and disclosing a dark area of the soul and consciousness. Her gestures, especially the silent dialogue of her face and hands, appeared to emerge from the depths of the unconscious itself. This quality developed all the more clearly when she was able to choose her repertory (Ibsen especially was her favorite) without the usual burden of financial and commercial constraints. Yet, she relentlessly experimented even with the most predictable characters that the crowds demanded of her again and again, for example the hugely popular Marguerite Gautier in Dumas’ The Lady of the Camelias. Duse always acted in Italian, even in France; her ability to communicate across languages through her expressions became legendary. The most familiar characters became new and strange through Duse’s modern interpretation—she gave them an unprecedented sense of depth and an ambiguity that occasionally shocked some spectators who saw her as the epitome of the modern hysterical and neurotic woman. Even when in charge of her own company and in a position to ask dramatists such as Dumas, Boito and D’Annunzio to write for her (from 1886 she effectively acted as her own producer as well as director and stage manager), Duse never quite abandoned the older commercial repertory, mostly because her financial position was always precarious and, in the D’Annunzio period, disastrous. A further, even deeper limit was her attachment to her own stardom. Duse declined to perform in any

ELEONORA DUSE work that she could not entirely control and that did not have a single, prominent female lead role. From the traditional Italian canon, she singled out Carlo Goldoni’s La locandiera (which intrigued her for the ambiguous, metatheatrical quality of Mirandolina’s character) and Pamela nubile, and she enthusiastically accepted to do Giovanni Verga’s controversial verista play, Cavalleria rusticana (her interpretation of Verga’s Santuzza was especially celebrated). On the other hand, she turned down Luigi Pirandello’s La vita che ti diedi, which he had written under her spell, but involved two female leads. Duse never stopped developing her characters. Responding to developments in her own life and in the cultural milieu, she transformed her interpretations through the years. For example, her Hedda Gabler went from a woman obsessed with motherhood as a palpable nightmare in 1898 to a more abstract, symbolic, and demonic character in 1904– 1905. Rather than behaving as ‘‘an actor,’’ she effectively was more like ‘‘an author’’ in her own right. It is not surprising therefore that Pirandello—the writer of Six Characters in Search of an Author—was obsessed by her while she instead resisted his modernism, which threatened to make her interpretive, analytical work redundant. Eager to contribute to the advent of a new theater, she was not content to shine in her best-loved roles by Dumas or Sardou, but, as her letters show, actively sought and encouraged the creation of new texts, though not always with the desired results. Just as her characters became for her an integral, personal and intimate part of her emotional life, so did some of her authors in whose work she saw promise—Arrigo Boito and especially Gabriele D’Annunzio. Boito (poet, dramatist, opera composer, and brilliant librettist of—among others— Verdi’s Otello and Falstaff ), became her mentor and principal interlocutor in the late 1880s and early 1890s, initiating her to Dante and Shakespeare and dialoguing with her about her art and the theater. Hundreds of letters testify to her extraordinary expressiveness and originality as a writer—albeit limited to the private sphere. Unfortunately the drama that Boito eventually wrote for her in 1898, Antonio e Cleopatra (an adaptation of the Shakespeare tragedy) was not up to her expectations and was a near failure. That in 1891 she decided to premiere A Doll’s House in Italy despite Boito’s objections to Ibsen is a measure of her disappointment and desire to move on. Nora was one of her most thrilling and memorable creations, and the play became one of her most cherished and

performed, as well as an inspiration for the Italian feminist movement, as testified by Sibilla Aleramo’s autobiographical novel Una donna. Duse was almost singly responsible for first inspiring D’Annunzio to write for the theater, and she played a key role in bringing his plays to the stage. Even though most of his dramatic texts turned out ironically not to be suited for her, they owed a lot to her (as did much of his other writing) in stylistic as well as poetic and dramatic terms. Ambiguity, interiorization, the disclosing of the characters’ unconscious and their dramatic inner turmoil were essential components of D’Annunzio’s theater. However, the overwritten, overwrought texts from Sogno d’un mattino di primavera to Francesca da Rimini made the actress’s work almost impossible. Most critics agree that D’Annunzio’s plays—with the exception of La figlia di Iorio—are made to be read rather than performed. Duse had to reinvent her acting style, her inflection and even her body language to bring the texts to life, but the results were painful to watch. Viewers remarked that the actress seemed paralyzed, deprived of her powers. The text had taken over the actress’ space and voice. When Duse in 1921 decided to resurrect La citta` morta, she made extensive cuts and even rewrote parts of the text (as she also did with other plays, replacing entire sentences with her own more concise lines). Duse’s and D’Annunzio’s love story became the basis for D’Annunzio’s Il fuoco (1900) which so inverted ‘‘the truth’’ (making the actress seem the passive receptacle of the writer’s outpouring of dramatic genius) that Duse, although intrigued by its aesthetic value, eventually ended the relationship with considerable bitterness, humiliated by the scandal and gossip that followed the novel’s publication. D’Annunzio, on the other hand, kept writing for her and always kept a cast of a marble head of Duse on his desk. In contrast to her triumph in 1896 (when she was honored at the White House), Duse’s 1902–1903 American tour with three D’Annunzio plays was a critical and financial disaster. Before her death in Pittsburgh while on tour in 1924, however, she obtained her biggest American triumph with—among other plays—the edited version of La citta` morta. Not only did Duse survive her relationship with D’Annunzio, but she went on after 1904 to yet another creative and experimental phase of her work. In 1906, she did Rosmersholm in Florence with Edward Gordon Craig, collaborating with him on the spare, daringly modern and avant-garde production design. In 1907–1909, she triumphantly toured Russia and other European countries, presenting 653

ELEONORA DUSE among other plays her memorable The Lady from the Sea. Feeling too ill, however, to go back on tour, and—at 51—too old for most of her usual roles, Duse was not seen on the stage from 1909 to 1921. Even so, her life was very active, even restless, and as nomadic as ever; she read voraciously in literature and philosophy, she forged friendships with many women (including young actresses and writers) and she kept corresponding with a wide network of artists and intellectuals while constantly searching for a playwright who could create new roles for her. In 1914, after years of planning and fund-raising, she was finally able to fulfill an old dream and inaugurated a library, cultural center, and refuge for actresses in Rome. Duse’s work before her return to the stage included codirecting and starring with Febo Mari in the 1916 silent film adaptation of Grazia Deledda’s novel Cenere (Ashes), which are the only surviving moving images of Duse, as well as plans for several other films. In exploring the new medium, Duse— an avid filmgoer—did not rely on theatrical devices, but rather experimented with film’s expressive possibilities, using shot-framing, point of view, lighting, painterly composition, editing and the compression of time to distill the gist of Deledda’s novel as she saw it. Her acting was understated, taking advantage to great effect of her natural silver hair and of simple motions like veiling and unveiling her face, seen mostly in profile. In 1921, when Duse finally returned to the stage with The Lady From the Sea in Turin (then ravaged by strikes and violence prior to the Fascist rise to power), she received a standing ovation after each act. The young Luchino Visconti saw her that evening and said he suddenly understood what true acting was all about. Yet her Rome opening in 1922 of Tommaso Gallarati Scotti’s allegorical modernist drama Cosı` sia (Thy Will Be Done)—a new play handpicked by Duse as a ‘‘prayer for Italy’’ and the inauguration of a new phase in her career, was booed by the same audience that had recently protested and shut down Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore. While Mussolini repeatedly contacted her and even met with her seeking to enlist her help in creating a Fascist theater, Duse declined, and instead started planning to leave Italy and go on the American tour that was to be her last.

Biography Born in Vigevano on 3 October 1858, Eleonora Duse leads a nomadic life with her parents, who 654

are traveling actors, and starts acting as a child. In 1879, she has her first important roles (Shakespeare, Alfieri, Zola, Sardou) at the Naples Teatro dei Fiorentini. She has an affair with the journalist Martino Cafiero and has a child from him who dies in infancy. In 1881, she marries Tebaldo Checchi, an actor. 1882, performs in La signora delle camelie in Florence; her daughter Enrichetta is born. Enrichetta will be educated in boarding schools and never allowed to go on tour with her mother or see her on the stage. Following Duse’s instructions, after her mother’s death, she destroys most of D’Annunzio’s letters to the actress. 1884, she performs in Verga’s Cavalleria rusticana in Turin, and La locandiera in Trieste. Duse meets Arrigo Boito, with whom she has a relationship for about ten years that he insists on keeping secret though promising to marry her and ‘‘free her’’ from the stage. 1888, she performs in Boito’s Antonio e Cleopatra in Milan. 1889, goes to Egypt on tour, later begins her several series of tours through Europe, Russia, and the United States. After separating from her husband, she starts her own company, the Compagnia drammatica della citta` di Roma, with Flavio Ando`. 1891, performs in Casa di bambola; 1893, in Heimat. In 1894, she meets D’Annunzio, starting a stormy relationship and partnership that will last nine years. 1898, performs in Hedda Gabler in Florence; 1901, in Francesca da Rimini in Rome; 1904, in Maeterlinck’s Monna Vanna in Milan; 1906, in Rosmersholm in Florence. She leaves the stage from 1909 to 1921. Starts the Libreria delle attrici in Rome in 1914. Stars in and directs the film Cenere in 1916. During the war, she keeps a correspondence with several soldiers at the front and works on a project to bring theater to the war zone. Returns to the stage in 1921 with The Lady of the Sea in Turin. Dies in Pittsburgh on 21 April, 1924. LUCIA RE

Selected Works Letters Carteggio d’Annunzio-Duse, edited by Piero Nardi, 1975. Eleonora Duse e Arrigo Boito: Lettere d’amore, edited by Raul Radice, 1979.

Other ‘‘Frammento autobiografico,’’ in Biblioteca Teatrale, 1996.

ELEONORA DUSE Further Reading Bassnett, Susan, ‘‘Eleonora Duse,’’ in John Stokes et al., Bernhardt, Terry, Duse: The Actress in Her Time, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Cara, Antonio, Cenere di Grazia Deledda nelle figurazioni di Eleonora Duse, Nuoro: Istituto Superiore Etnografico, 1984. Divina Eleonora: Eleonora Duse nella vita e nell’arte, Venice: Marsilio, 2001. Guerrieri, Gerardo, Eleonora Duse: Nove saggi, edited by Lina Vito, Rome: Bulzoni, 1993.

Pontiero, Giovanni, Eleonora Duse: In Life and Art, Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1986. Re, Lucia, ‘‘D’Annunzio, Duse, Wilde, Bernhardt: Author and Actress Between Decadence and Modernity,’’ in Italian Modernism: Italian Culture Between Decadentism and Avant-Garde, edited by Luca Somigli and Mario Moroni, Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2004. Sheehy, Helen, Eleonora Duse: A Biography, New York: Knopf, 2003. Weaver, William, Duse: A Biography, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1984.

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E 8½ See Otto e mezzo (Work by Federico Fellini)

THE EARTH TREMBLES See La Terra Trema (Work by Luchino Visconti)

UMBERTO ECO (1932–) theory. In an original argument, Eco maintained that the workings of scholastic philosophy had much in common with structuralism, an approach to literature that was popular at the time in Europe. His next major essay, Opera aperta: forma e indeterminazione nelle poetiche contemporanee (The Open Work, 1962) earned him renown and a succe´s de scandale by famously negative reviews from Eugenio Montale and Claude Le´vi-Strauss and set

One of the most prolific and influential of all essayists and novelists in the postwar period, Umberto Eco began what might have been an ordinary academic career with the publication of his dissertation, Il problema estetico in San Tommaso (The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, 1956), a work that not only foretold his vocation as a novelist of the Italian Middle Ages but also marks a step in the development of his mature postmodern literary 657

UMBERTO ECO up a much debated dichotomy of ‘‘open’’ or avantgarde works, such as Joyce’s Ulysses, Calder’s mobiles, or Luciano Berio’s music, as opposed to traditionally ‘‘closed’’ works of art. This important work of theory established Eco as Italy’s most distinguished interpreter of James Joyce (in fact a good deal of the book was devoted to the Irish novelist and was eventually published separately in English as The Aesthetics of Chaosmos: The Middle Ages of James Joyce in 1989). Thus, when Eco began writing what are aggressively postmodern works of fiction, he had a very clear notion of the boundaries of literary modernism. Eco then proceeded to a number of collections of essays dealing with popular culture, embracing critical theories that he felt were capable of addressing an aspect of contemporary culture most traditional Italian intellectuals generally ignored. He reached bestseller status with Diario minimo (Misreadings, 1963), witty parodies that treated such various topics as Michelangelo Antonioni’s cinema, the Frankfurt School, psychoanalysis, Roland Barthes. His cosmopolitan interest in everything from comic books to linguistic theory then produced a number of seminal books in what Eco himself calls his presemiotic period. Apocalittici e integrati: communicazioni di massa e teorie della cultura massa (Apocalypse Postponed, 1964) offered a brilliant analysis of two approaches to popular culture: The traditional European intellectual was defined as an ‘‘apocalyptic’’ and was generally opposed to the very notion of ‘‘popular’’ culture, while ‘‘integrated’’ intellectuals, often from the Anglo-Saxon tradition, embraced this phenomenon. This work produced often-anthologized essays on comics, such as Charles Schulz’s Peanuts, Superman, and Terry and the Pirates. Another subsequent collection, Il superuomo di massa: retorica e ideologia nel romanzo popolare (The Superman of the Masses: Rhetoric and Ideology in the Popular Novel, 1976), contained his single most famous essay on Ian Fleming’s first James Bond novel, Casino Royale, and its celebrated hero. Such works led Eco toward the methodology of semiotics, which he hoped would become a master discipline encompassing every form of human culture from bathroom graffiti to grand opera, from cartoons to film, without the theoretical need to divide culture into higher and lower forms. With Trattato di semiotica generale (A Theory of Semiotics, 1975), he championed the work of American philosopher Charles S. Peirce (1839–1914), preferring his use of the term ‘‘semiotics’’ over the ‘‘semiology’’ of Ferdinand de Saussure and Roland 658

Barthes. Eco embraced semiotics because it pointed toward a cultural theory that was neither purely literary nor devoted only to the analysis of highculture phenomena; and, like Barthes, Eco enjoyed writing about all sorts of subjects deriving from popular culture. He also believed semiotics could counter the Marxist tendency to condemn all forms of popular culture as merely part of the consumer society. In particular, Eco’s treatise emphasizes Peirce’s concept of unlimited semiosis, a theory that demonstrated how signification operated by a circularity of references from one sign to another and not to objective referents in reality, subjective mental states, or Platonic universals. Peirce’s unlimited semiosis also provided a firm theoretical basis for Eco’s own theories about the ‘‘open’’ work and would be influential in his future novels. Finally, Lector in fabula: la cooperazione interpretativa nei testi narrativi (The Reader in the Story, 1976) began the definition of the Model Reader, something every author must construct, a textual strategy establishing semantic correlations between the Model Reader, the Text, and the Author. Like other postmodern writers, Eco assumed that a text had many levels of meaning and that few of them were exhausted by the ‘‘intention’’ of the Author. Il nome della rosa (The Name of the Rose, 1980) and its subsequent Postille al Nome della rosa (Postscript to ‘‘The Name of the Rose,’’ 1983) combined all of Eco’s intellectual interests—the Middle Ages, popular culture, the detective novel, semiotics, literary theory—and won numerous literary prizes (including the prestigious Strega Prize), selling tens of millions of copies around the globe. It established the popularity of the postmodern novel in Italy and was widely regarded abroad as one of the best expressions of such a literary form. In his influential postscript to the work, Eco underlined the concepts of pastiche, parody, and revisiting the literary past as the essential concepts of postmodern: Books always speak of other books. For the mass-market reader, Eco provided a ‘‘whodunit’’ indebted to Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, a medieval monk-detective figure named William of Baskerville, who attempts to solve a series of brutal murders in a forbidding monastery with a labyrinth-like library holding all sorts of mysterious and dangerous books. For the academic critic or intellectual, this ‘‘whodunit’’ was filled with arcane historical references, Latin quotations, medieval philosophy, and anachronistic references to modern critical theory, semiotics, science, and literature.

UMBERTO ECO Eco’s next two novels could not hope to equal the popularity of his first work, but they are no less postmodernist in their reliance upon pastiche, and they combine learned forms of literary theory and arcane information on the past with the conventions of the mass-market thriller, adventure story, or detective novel. In Il pendolo di Foucault (Foucault’s Pendulum, 1988), Eco recounted the adventures of a group of friends working for publishers in Milan (a situation not unlike his own biography); they stumble upon what they think is a plot to take over the world that stretches back to the Templars, the Rosicrucians, and other apocalyptic fanatics. In the process, Eco also satirized the literary theory of deconstructionism and attacked the overinterpretation and paranoid views of critics who believe anything can be related to everything without regard for the standards of ordinary logic: Their motto would be ‘‘tout se tient’’ (everything is connected). This novel thus anticipates two theoretical books Eco published subsequently on the subject of interpretation: I limiti dell’interpretazione (The Limits of Interpretation, 1989) and the Tanner lectures Eco delivered at Cambridge University, published as Interpretation and Overinterpretation (1992). In these works, Eco demonstrated that in fact contemporary theories of deconstruction are actually forms of secondcentury hermetic theory and discussed what he called ‘‘hermetic drift’’ or the uncontrolled ability to shift from meaning to meaning and from a connection to another. In his second novel, a secret document supposedly proving the existence of this diabolic plot is revealed to be nothing more than an ancient laundry list! Eco’s third novel, L’isola del giorno prima (The Island of the Day Before, 1994) may best be read against the backdrop of Eco’s Norton Lectures at Harvard University in 1992–1993 and published as Six Walks in the Fictional Woods (1994). It is a tour de force of erudition about the seventeenth century, in which Eco juxtaposed the often foolish philosophical mistakes (as well as the many startling discoveries) made during the Baroque period by such scientists and literary figures as Kepler, Galileo, Tesauro, Donne, and Marino with many postmodernist theoretical concepts in the works of such thinkers as Barthes, Harold Bloom, Foucault, Peirce, and Derrida. Six Walks in the Fictional Woods reconsiders and revises, in some respects, Eco’s early negative views of such popular figures as Ian Fleming in the light of his own experience as a novelist. Baudolino (2000) returns to the Middle Ages that established Eco’s fame in Il nome della rosa. In

it Eco recounted the picaresque adventures of Baudolino (the namesake of the patron saint of his hometown of Alessandria in Piedmont) during the Third Crusade, who witnessed the sacking of Constantinople and the search for the legendary land of Prester John. Following earlier practice, this novel, too, has links to Eco’s theoretical essays: discussions of the semiotics of falsity found in a number of critical essays. Eco invented a nonerudite narrator who recounts his life story to Nicetas Choniates, a Byzantine historian, as well as his own particular form of language that demonstrated once again his prowess as a manipulator of language. His most recent novel, La misteriosa fiamma della regina Loana (The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, 2004) returns to a topic identified with Eco’s earliest essays on popular culture: comic strips and the popular culture of his youth. In a profusely illustrated text that recalls memories from his youth (advertising posters, comic strips, movies), Eco created a narrator who has forgotten everything about his life and must reconstruct these lost memories by consulting his schoolbooks, the magazines he read as a child, and anything else he can find to rekindle his memory. Eco’s fiction embodies the idea of the medieval palimpsest: His novels represent entertaining pastiches of other literary works or critical theories revised with irony and assembled with originality by a master craftsman. Though his novels and those of Italo Calvino, Italian narrative has entered the mainstream of contemporary postmodern fiction.

Biography Umberto Eco was born in Alessandria, 15 January 1932. An early activist in the Gioventu´ Italiana di Azione Cattolica, Eco became disillusioned with the conservative bent of the church around 1954 at about the same time he completed his university studies at Torino in philosophy, where he encountered the teachings of Nicola Abbagnano, Giovanni Getto, and Luigi Pareyson, the last of whom was most influential on his future career and with whom he did his thesis on Aquinas. Thereafter Eco worked for Italian state television (the RAI), one of the sources of his interest in popular culture, and for the Bompiani publishing house in Milan, where he would eventually become an important editor and bestselling author. After being appointed to a Chair of Visual Communication at the Faculty of Architecture in the University of Florence, Eco moved to the University of Bologna in 1971, where he occupied the first chair of 659

UMBERTO ECO semiotics in Italy within DAMS (Discipline dell’Arte, della Musica e dello Spettacolo) and remains today as one of that institution’s most famous scholars and lecturers. It was with the publication of his first novel, Il nome della rosa (1980), that Eco became internationally famous, surpassing the sales figures of any previous Italian literary work in the tens of millions of copies and enjoying translations in virtually every language in the world. Eco continues to work at the University of Bologna— since 1999, he has served as president of the Scuola Superiore di Studi Umanistici there—and remains a central force in contemporary Italian culture, combining polemical essays in magazines, numerous appearances on the media, scholarly articles in learned journals, editorial work in major Italian presses, and the writing of fiction. He has received numerous literary awards, including the Premio Strega (1981), the Prix Medicis Etranger (1982 and 2002), and the Austrian State Award for European Literature (2002), as well as more than 30 honorary doctorates from prestigious universities in Moscow, Berlin, Paris, Montre´al, Jerusalem, and Bloomington (Indiana). PETER BONDANELLA Selected Works Criticism Il problema estetico in San Tommaso, 1956; as The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas translated by Hugh Bredin, 1988. Opera aperta: forma e indeterminazione nelle poetiche contemporanee, 1962; as The Open Work translated by Anna Cancogni, 1989. Diario minimo, 1963; as Misreadings translated by William Weaver, 1993. Apocalittici e integrati: communicazioni di massa e teorie della cultura massa, 1964; as Apocalypse Postponed translated by Robert Lumley, 1994. Trattato di semiotica generale, 1975; as A Theory of Semiotics, 1976. Il superuomo di massa: retorica e ideologia nel romanzo popolare, 1976; partially translated in The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts, 1979. Lector in fabula: la cooperazione interpretativa nei testi narrativi, 1976; partially translated in The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts, 1979. The Aesthetics of Chaosmos: The Middle Ages of James Joyce, 1982; translated by Ellen Esrock. Postille al ‘‘Nome della rosa,’’ 1983; as Postscript to ‘‘The Name of the Rose,’’ translated by William Weaver, 1984. I limiti dell’interpretazione, 1989; as Limits of Interpretations, 1990; translated by Martin McLaughlin, 2004. Interpretation and Overinterpretation, 1992. Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, 1994. Sulla letteratura, 2002; as On Literature, translated by Martin McLaughlin, 2004.

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Fiction Il nome della rosa, 1980; as The Name of the Rose, translated by William Weaver, 1983. Il pendolo di Foucault, 1988; as Foucault’s Pendulum, translated by William Weaver, 1994. L’isola del giorno prima, 1994; as The Island of the Day Before, translated by William Weaver, 1995. Baudolino, 2000; as Baudolino, translated by William Weaver, 2002. La misteriosa fiamma della regina Loana, 2004; as The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, translated by Geoff Brock, 2005.

Further Reading Bondanella, Peter, Umberto Eco and the Open Text: Semiotics, Fiction, Popular Culture, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Bouchard, Norma, and Veronica Pravadelli (editors), Eco’s Alternative: The Politics of Culture and the Ambiguities of Interpretation, New York: Peter Lang, 1988. Caesar, Michael, Umberto Eco: Philosophy, Semiotics and the Work of Fiction, Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 1999. Cannon, JoAnn, Postmodern Italian Fiction: The Crisis of Reason in Calvino, Eco, Sciascia, Malerba, Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1989. Capozzi, Rocco (editor), Reading Eco, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. Forchetti, Franco, Il segno e la rosa: I segreti della narrativa di Umberto Eco, Rome: Castelvecchi, 2005. Le´vi-Strauss, Claude, Review of Opera aperta, Paese sera, 20 January 1967; reprinted in Conversazioni con Claude Le´vi-Strauss, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, edited by Paolo Caruso, Milan: Mursia, 1969. Montale, Eugenio, ‘‘Opere aperte,’’ in Auto da fe´, Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1966. Musarra, Franco, Bart Van den Bossche, et al. (editors), Eco in Fabula, Florence: Franco Cesati Editore, 2002. Petitot, Jean, and Paolo Fabbri (editors), Nel nome del senso: intorno all’opera di Umberto Eco, Milan: Sansoni, 2001. Ross, Charlotte, and Rochelle Sibley (editors), Illuminating Eco: On the Boundaries of Interpretation, Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004.

IL NOME DELLA ROSA, 1980 Novel by Umberto Eco

When Eco published his first work of prose fiction—a novel with a medieval setting—no one could have imagined its unparalleled international

UMBERTO ECO success. Critical approval of Eco’s Il nome della rosa (The Name of the Rose) grew with the award of the prestigious Premio Strega in 1981, but the book’s popularity abroad with tens of millions of copies sold in over 30 languages amazed even its author. In 1986, French director Jacques Annaud turned it into a film starring Sean Connery, and in less than a decade Eco became not merely an esteemed intellectual, semiotician, and academic but also Italy’s most famous literary figure. Indeed, on the dust jacket of the first Italian edition, Eco identified three very different target audiences for his book: the readers of best sellers who were attracted to complex plots; attentive readers interested in analogies between the present and the Middle Ages; and the sophisticated readers who rightly saw Il nome della rosa as a palimpsest of other books. Eco thus attempted to unite theory and practice with a novel that served both as entertainment and as a postmodernist manifesto. In so doing, he consciously rejected the older modernist suspicion of ‘‘popularity’’ that equated it with ‘‘lack of value’’—a view he himself shared when he was a member of the avant-garde Gruppo 63 and that had earlier caused him to dismiss such novelists as Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Giorgio Bassani, and Carlo Cassola. Eco set his novel in a northern Italian monastery in late November 1327. A Franciscan, William of Baskerville, and his Benedictine novice, Adso of Melk, reach the abbey sent by Louis IV of Bavaria to initiate negotiations between Pope John XXII and a group of Franciscans critical of the Church’s tolerance toward accumulated wealth and its neglect of the poverty of Christ. Upon his arrival, William is confronted by a number of violent deaths—two suicides and five murders—and the abbey is destroyed by a conflagration at the end of the book. Thus this novel embraces the traditional and popular genre of the detective story: William replaces Sherlock Holmes, Adso becomes his Watson (and is the naive narrative voice that recounts the story from the vantage point of his old age), and Holmes’ adversary Moriarty, the ‘‘Napoleon of crime,’’ is replaced by Jorge of Burgos, an old Spanish monk who is behind the evil doings in the monastery. In the course of William’s investigations of the Aedificium (the main structure of the monastery) and of its gigantic library built in the form of a Piranesi-like labyrinth (with secret passages, booby traps, and dark secrets), the reader learns about the church history

of the period, particularly the heretical movements, as well as a wealth of information about what might have been contained in such a monastic library in the early fourteenth century. Eco defined postmodern literature in a postscript to the novel as ‘‘ironia, gioco metalinguistico, enunciazione al quadrato’’ (irony, metalinguistic play, enunciation squared) (Postille a ‘‘Il nome della rosa,’’ 1983). He applied this aesthetic principle to his treatment of literary tradition in the novel, aiming at bridging the gap between the erudite, academic reader and the avid consumer of best-selling pulp fiction and detective stories. As mentioned above, William seems to be a medieval thinker modeled anachronistically on Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, but unlike Holmes (whose Victorian universe was the essence of order and precision), he uncovers chaos and lack of meaning. William solves the mystery behind the monastery’s crime entirely by accident and is himself responsible for burning down the monastery, losing in the process the only existing manuscript copy of Aristotle’s treatise on comedy. Comedy, as the reactionary Jorge of Burgos shows by concealing the existence of the manuscript, is a subversive force; it is mankind’s best weapon against intolerance, bigotry, and oppression. William’s intellectual stance (one shared by his creator Eco), on the other hand, accepts diversity and tolerance of controversial ideas. Il nome della rosa thus makes a convincing argument for intellectual freedom. PETER BONDANELLA Editions First Edition: Il nome della rosa, Milan: Bompiani, 1980. Translation: as The Name of the Rose, translated by William Weaver, San Diego: Harcourt Brace Janovich, 1983.

Further Reading Capozzi, Rocco, Lettura, interpretazione e interstualita`: Esercizi di commento a ‘‘Il nome della rosa,’’ Perugia: Guerra, 2001. Coletti, Theresa, Naming the Rose: Eco, Medieval Signs, and Modern Theory, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988. Eco, Umberto, Postille a ‘‘Il nome della rosa,’’ Milan: Bompiani, 1983. Giovannoli, Renato (editor), Saggi su ‘‘Il nome della rosa,’’ Milan: Bompiani, 1985. Haft, Adele, Jane G. White, and Robert J. White (editors). The Key to the Name of the Rose, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999.

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UMBERTO ECO Inge, Thomas M. (editor), Naming the Rose: Essays on Eco’s ‘‘The Name of the Rose,’’ Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1988. Pischedda, Bruno, Come leggere ‘‘Il nome della rosa’’ di Umberto Eco, Milan: Mursia, 1994.

Puletti, Ruggero, ‘‘Il nome della rosa’’: Struttura, forme e temi, Manduria: P. Lacaita, 1995. Testi, Marco, Il romanzo del passato: Medioevo e invenzione in tre autori contemporanei, Rome: Bulzoni, 1992.

ENLIGHTENMENT The Enlightenment is a European cultural movement that spread in Italy during the second half of the eighteenth century. The roots of this movement, whose literary ramifications are as relevant as its philosophical and scientific ones, lie in English and French culture. Enlightenment culture claims as its forebears the experimental philosophy of Francis Bacon; the most advanced scientific research of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (from Galileo Galilei to Isaac Newton); English empiricism; modern French culture (represented prominently by Voltaire, a diffuser of the knowledge of the English Enlightenment, by Montesquieu the novelist and political thinker, and by the practice and ideology of the Encyclope´die [1751–1772] of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond D’Alembert, which was quickly translated and printed in Italy); and the popularization of the notion of sensisme (the doctrine that reduces all the contents of knowledge and consciousness to sense impressions), such as those of John Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau. The features of this movement reveal a close interrelation among scientific, literary, artistic, and philosophical cultures; a particular concern for the question of education; and a specific attention to technological processes, skilled labor, the processes of production, and legal and economic problems. This culture also took a particular interest in the useful and practical aspects of a modern society that its proponents saw as developing only insofar as it could free itself from the shackles of prejudice, from the overbearing influence of preconstituted authority, and from the practice of imitating rigid traditional models. At the same time, great value was attached to experience, which was filtered by an exercise of the critical faculties, and by judgment freed from deference to usurping authority. In Italy, the diffusion of this culture coincided with a 662

tendency toward the secularization of culture and the acquisition of bourgeois characteristics. In La decadenza italiana nella storia europea (1971), Guido Quazza argued that it is not feasible to present the Italian eighteenth century as a continuous series of developments; rather he considered the beginning of the 1750s (after the peace of Aquisgrana in 1748) as an emblematic watershed. This juncture saw the emergence of intellectuals working toward a precise analysis of their situation (both economic and social) and acting as the bearers of a mandate that was widely representative of groups (and of the forces related to them), which could be realized in reforms accomplished by rulers. Antonio Genovesi’s Discorso sopra il vero fine delle lettere e delle scienze (Discourse on the True End of Letters and the Sciences; 1753) can be taken as a manifesto of the new Enlightenment culture. It is not only an exaltation of reason as the highest power possessed by humankind but claims for reason a role of transforming reality and removing prejudices and obstacles to ‘‘true knowledge.’’ The figure of the traditional intellectual is contrasted to that of the new intellectual, who will share his culture with others, socializing and animating it, taking the needs of society as its point departure and then embodying this culture in institutions that will improve the social fabric. This picture is one in which science assumes an important role and that asserts the value of new scholastic and scientific institutions that will act at various levels, from primary education to discussions among the highly educated. Although Italy remained an underdeveloped country during this period, its relations with great European powers—and the relatively long period of peace after Aquisgrana—fostered the convergence of the desire for reform of some rulers sensitive to

ENLIGHTENMENT Enlightenment principles with the interest in renewal on the part of intellectual groups tied to widespread tendencies of Enlightenment culture. The politics of reform, especially reform of the state (in both the administrative and economic sense) and its laws and legal institutions began to surface in various states, in particular in Lombardy, Tuscany, the duchies of Parma and Piacenza, and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. This movement toward reform was eased by the decrease in the jurisdictional control exercised by the Church. As a philosopher and an economist, Genovesi set up the programmatic strands of the new Enlightenment culture: faith in progress toward which humankind tends and that the intellectual promotes with the weapons of reason; an awareness of the close ties between intellectual activity, the mechanical arts, thought and technology, and the material well-being of humanity; a conviction that the modern cultural revolution is a European phenomenon; the affirmation of a secular and scientific culture that asserts control over nature based on the methodology of experience; the abandonment of the old professional concept of the ‘‘philosopher’’ and the assertion that it applies to everyone working in the realm of modern ‘‘reason,’’ promoter of progress, struggling against the obscurities of the past in order to spread of ‘‘light.’’ An important contribution by the Milanese Pietro Verri published in the first volume of short-lived but highly influential periodical Il Caffe`, ‘‘Pensieri sopra lo spirito della letteratura d’Italia’’ (Thoughts on the Spirit of Italy’s Literature, 1764–1765), reinforces the correlation between culture and civil society, rationality and sensibility, cultural activity and politics, along with a new relation between power and intellectual life. The work of the Italian illuministi is marked by the strong presence of writings on economic problems characterized by the close links between theoretical reflection and the response to concrete situations. Their works are more ‘‘militant’’ than ‘‘theoretical,’’ including Cesare Beccaria’s lectures on the Elementi di economia politica (The Elements of Political Economy, 1769–1770), Pietro Verri’s Meditazioni di economia politica (Meditations on Political Economy, 1771), the writings of Alfonso Longo on trusts and Gian Rinaldo Carli on the free trade, and Giambattista Vasco’s Felicita` pubblica considerata nei coltivatori di terre proprie (Public Happiness Considered for Those Who Cultivate Their Own Land, 1769). Tuscan economists reflected particularly on the subject of agriculture

and on the social foundations of the economy of states. Among them are included Giammaria Ortes on the national economy; Genovesi’s influential Lezioni di commercio o sia dell’economia civile (Lectures on Commerce or Civil Economy, 1757–1758), which combined an international approach with a free-market domestic agenda favoring middle-class productivity; and Ferdinando Galiani’s fundamental treatises Della moneta (On Currency, 1751) and Dialogues sur le commerce de ble´ (Dialogues on the Commerce of Wheat, 1770). These figures share a deep need to conduct concrete analyses and identify links between economic policy, and the political social sciences. The consideration of legal problems also provides a new definition of law and justice in relation to public well-being, sustaining a polemic against repressive legislation, torture, and the death penalty and in favor of a system of crime prevention. A fundamental point of reference for reformist movements became the treatise of Cesare Beccaria, Dei delitti e delle pene (Of Crimes and Punishments, 1764), which had a vast resonance throughout Europe and was soon translated into French. The problem of education, considered by Beccaria the most effective means to prevent crime, is at the center of the Neapolitan Gaetano Filangieri’s Scienza della legislazione (The Science of Legislation, 1780–1785), in which legal problems expand into a vast consideration of civil and social relations, confronting questions of property, divisions between the social classes, civil and penal legislation, religion, and public education and including a plan of national education to close the gap between the people and the elite. Indeed several projects addressed enlightened absolute monarchs. These projects concerned the education of the lower classes and of the lower- and middle-class bourgeoisie, as well as the universities, where up-to-date methodologies were advanced to reflect on the modern problems of the state. The history of the academies—with the polemic aimed against the worldly and frivolous customs of the Arcadia—also registers a rise of activity in agreement with the political reformers. Among them were the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Parma, supported by the French minister Guillaume Dutillot; the academies of agriculture; and the Florentine Societa` dei Georgofili, in which landowners from various states sponsored studies intended to provide information on new farming techniques. For an anti-academic spirit focusing on contemporary life, we enlist the Accademia dei Pugni, which began meeting in the Verri household (1761) and 663

ENLIGHTENMENT gathered those who would be the principal collaborators on Il Caffe`, the periodical established by the leading group of the Lombard Enlightenment (Pietro and Alessandro Verri, Cesare Beccaria, Gian Rinaldo Carli, Giovan Battista Biffi, Luigi Lambertenghi, Alfonso Longo, Pietro Secchi, and Giuseppe Visconti, among others). Il Caffe` advocated the Europeanization of Italian culture, and its very name served (in opposition to the salon) as an indication of a freer exchange of classes and ideas. And it was precisely a new journalism of opinion, based on English models (Addison’s The Spectator), that became one of the fundamental genres of the Enlightenment: Carlo Denina’s Parlamento Ottaviano (Lucca, 1769), Gasparo Gozzi’s writings for Gazzetta Veneta (1760–1761) and Osservatore Veneto (1761–1762), Giuseppe Baretti’s La frusta letteraria (Venice, 1763–1765), and Giornale Enciclopedico (Venice, 1774–1797), published by Elisabetta Caminer Turra, Giovanni Scola, and Alberto Foris. Along journals, the nonerudite pamphlets aimed at reaching a wide public, engaging in polemical theses written in a clear, modern style. The notion of literature, and the literary output of those years, was strongly influenced by the programs of this movement, with results and attitudes that varied according to the degree of their authors’ openness to embrace the new. For example, in his ‘‘Dei difetti della letteratura’’ (On the Defects of Literature), published in the second volume of Il Caffe` (1765–66), Alessandro Verri highlighted the need for a literature able to express things, ideas, and sentiments without pedantry. Culture should form men ‘‘amabili’’ (lovable), ‘‘buoni’’ (good), ‘‘dolci’’ (gentle), ‘‘semplici’’ (simple), and ‘‘di maniere. . .urbane e naturali’’ (of urbane and natural manners). This is a far cry from the traditional man of letters who always was ‘‘impacchettato in se stesso’’ (wrapped up in himself). Also Giuseppe Parini undertook a defense of a poetry of substance. In his Discorso sopra la poesia (Discourse on Poetry, 1761), he referred to the ‘‘spirito filosofico, che quasi genio felice sorto a dominare la letteratura di questo secolo’’ (philosophical spirit, which, like some happy genie, fated to dominate the literature of this century), which illuminated all of Europe ‘‘dissipando le dense tenebre de’ pregiudizi autorizzati dalla lunga eta` e dalle venerande barbe de’ nostri maggiori’’ (by dissipating the dense shadows of prejudices authorized by the age and venerable beards of our elders). By this he meant a poetry based on a balance between the ‘‘utile’’ (useful) and the ‘‘dilettevole’’ (delightful), rich in moral 664

purpose of ‘‘vantaggio considerevole della societa`’’ (considerable advantage of society). Such poetry, motivated by civic intentions, had a following in the literary culture of the early nineteenth century, as well as in that of Romanticism (consider the journal Il Conciliatore and the work of Alessandro Manzoni). Characteristics linked with the intellectual milieu of the Enlightenment—even though they were developed mainly at the level of literary polemic— may be found in the work of the Mantuan Jesuit Saverio Bettinelli, and, despite some conservative leanings on a number of issues, in Giuseppe Baretti’s stinging satire of current frivolous books. In particular, the gradual reform of ‘‘comedy’’ in support of a ‘‘serious genre,’’ or even of a ‘‘third genre’’ that was to be neither tragedy nor classical comedy, was influenced by the theoretical premises of Lessing and Diderot. Circumstances and characters of everyday life might be represented with dignity and naturalness: These are the same issues at the core of Carlo Goldoni’s reform of the theater, a reform accompanied by an increase in serious content and the development of characters who are more individually portrayed within social contexts. Furthermore, reflections of Enlightenment culture of varying depths may also be detected in the come´die larmoyante (tearful comedy) of Giovanni De Gamerra (1743–1803) and Camillo Federici (1749–1802), in the novels of the Venetian Pietro Chiari (1711–1785) and Antonio Piazza (1742–1825), in travel literature, and in several didactic, philosophical, and scientific poems. The reforming culture of the Enlightenment in Italy, as distinct from that of the French, which has more radical themes and achievements, provided years of polemical vitality in the collaboration between enlightened rulers and intellectuals and varied according to the different national contexts in which this collaboration was expressed. It formed the foundation for the development of society, history, and culture in the years to come. ELVIO GUAGNINI Further Reading Binni, Walter, ‘‘Il Settecento letterario,’’ in Il Settecento, Storia della letteratura italiana, vol. 6, edited by Emilio Cecchi and Natalino Sapegno, Milan: Garzanti, 1968. Branca, Vittore (editor), Sensibilita` e razionalita` nel Settecento, Florence: Sansoni, 1967. Carpanetto, Dino, and Giuseppe Ricuperati, Italy in the Age of Reason, 1685–1789, London-New York: Longman’s, 1987.

EPIC Casini, Paolo, Introduzione all’Illuminismo. Da Newton a Rousseau, Bari: Laterza, 1973. Cerruti, Marco, ‘‘Il Settecento,’’ in Storia della civilta` letteraria italiana, vol. 4, edited by Giorgio Ba`rberi Squarotti, Turin: UTET, 1992. Cerruti, Marco, La guerra e i Lumi, Turin: The´le`me, 2000. Cochrane, E. W., Tradition and Enlightenment in Tuscan Academies, 1690–1800, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961. Folena, Gianfranco, L’italiano in Europa. Esperienze linguistiche nel Settecento, Turin: Einaudi, 1983. Francovich, Carlo, Storia della Massomeria in Italia dalle origini alla Rivoluzione francese, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1974. Fubini, Mario (editor), La cultura dell’Illuminismo in Italia, Turin: Eri, 1964. Guagnini, Elvio, L’eta` dell’Illuminismo e l’eta` napoleonica, Palermo: Palumbo, 1979; reprinted, 1997. Lezioni sull’Illuminismo, Atti del seminario di studi organizzato dalla Provincia di Reggio Emilia, October 1978– February 1979, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1980. Malato, Enrico (editor), Il Settecento. Storia della letteratura italiana, vol. 6: Rome: Salerno, 1998. Moravia, Sergio, Filosofia e scienze umane nell’eta` dei Lumi, Florence: Sansoni, 1982. Muscetta, Carlo (editor), Il Settecento, in Letteratura italiana, 2 volumes, Bari-Roma: Laterza, 1974. Petronio, Giuseppe, Profilo di un’eta`: l’Illuminismo, Palermo: Palumbo, 1972.

Postigliola, Armando (editor), Un decennio di storiografia italiana sul secolo XVIII, Rome: L’officina tipografica, 1995. Quazza, Guido, La decadenza italiana nella storia europea, Turin: Einaudi, 1971. Romagnoli, Sergio (editor), Illuministi settentrionali, Milan: Rizzoli, 1972. Santucci, Antonio, Interpretazioni dell’Illuminismo, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1979. Scalia, Gianni, L’Illuminismo. Storia della critica, Palermo: Palumbo, 1966. Timpanaro, Sebastiano, Classicismo e Illuminismo nell’Ottocento, Pisa: Nistri Lischi, 1965. Venturi, Franco, Italy and the Enlightenment: Studies in a Cosmopolitan Century, London: Longman, 1972. Venturi, Franco, Settecento riformatore, 5 volumes, Turin: Einaudi, 1969–1990. Venturi, Franco, Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971. Venturi, Franco, et al. (editors), Illuministi italiani, 7 volumes, Milan-Naples, Ricciardi, 1965–1971. Woolf, Stuart J., A History of Italy 1700–1860: The Social Constraints and Political Change, London: Methuen, 1979. Woolf, Stuart J., ‘‘Le riforme e l’autorita`: Illuminismo e dispotismo (1750–1790),’’ in Storia d’Italia. Dal primo Settecento all’Unita`, vol. 3, Turin: Einaudi, 1973.

EPIC In Italy, the epic is a genre with a tortuous history. Caught between an imitation of the classics and medieval French models, between a culturally high diffusion and a popular circulation, between prose and verse, between conflicting definitions in opposition to novel and romance, epic is a hybrid genre, and its codification can only be achieved through processes of approximation and distinction. Throughout the centuries, texts with different generic features have deserved the definition of ‘‘epic.’’ Therefore, no one has ever attempted a comprehensive critical treatment of these texts, despite the monumental work by Pio Rajna (now collected in Scritti di filologia, 1998, and Due scritti inediti, 2004) and the repeated pleas by Carlo Dionisotti (now collected in Boiardo e altri studi cavallereschi, 2003). In particular, some time- and placespecific instances of ‘‘epic’’ have been neglected by Italian literary studies. This has been the case for

the Franco-Italian production or for the cantari and poemi cavallereschi, frequently considered subgenres. The parable of the Italian epic can be traced from the Middle Ages up through the sixteenth century, with sporadic instances in modern Italian literature. The development of the epic genre in Italy has been historically associated with the flourishing of the epic-chivalric poem during the Renaissance. The triumph of the genre with the works of Ludovico Ariosto and Torquato Tasso has monopolized critical attention and reduced the phenomenon of the epic to a very limited stretch of time between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In a global reconsideration of the history of Italian literature, it is possible to follow a chronological development of the epic through shifting definitions of the term and different cultural moments. The standard definition as the poetry of the ‘‘common past of a 665

EPIC people’’ is inherently connected to the concept of national identity. Thus, it cannot be applied to the situation of the Italian peninsula, where communities were not formed and represented in national, or nationalistic, terms until the movement for unification in the nineteenth century. Equally problematic is the definition of the epic in opposition to the novel or to romance (both romanzo in Italian). This distinction shows all its limitations in the Italian tradition, which often resorts to hybrid definitions such as ‘‘poesia epico-cavalleresca’’ (epic-chivalric poetry) or ‘‘romanzo cavalleresco’’ (chivalric romance), as epic and romance (or romanzo) mix and coexist in the Golden Age of the Italian epic tradition. If the decline of the epic has been connected, for explanatory purposes, to the rise of romance (Vinaver) or of the novel (Bakhtin), the Italian case shows that generic boundaries are extremely permeable and can be traced only by approximation. In the case of the epic, we can suggest ‘‘cycle’’ and ‘‘genealogy’’ as useful key terms for a possible definition. Epic production is always cyclical, insofar as it always presupposes the knowledge of other instances of the same narration; for the same reason, it is always genealogical both in form and in content. During the medieval period, the epic production in the Italian peninsula assumed peculiar qualities in comparison to the French or even to the Spanish tradition, and there was a tendency toward the adaptation of French legends and texts to specific regional contexts. The clearest example of this is the production in Franco-Italian, or franco-veneto, the linguistic medium found in texts from northern Italy, especially in and around the so-called ‘‘Trevisan March,’’ written between the thirteenth and the fifteenth centuries. The geographic area involved in this production comprises towns like Treviso, Padua, Venice, Verona, Mantua, and Ferrara. This linguistic form was not used in oral communication, and it cannot be considered a language or a dialect; rather, it is a formal construction, a written language, based on the written and oral French of the time and influenced by northern Italian dialects. The themes of this literary production were taken from Old French chansons de geste, in particular from the Carolingian cycle, recounting the deeds of Charlemagne and his knights. The study of these texts acquired vitality mainly during the 1980s, after centuries of neglect. The nationalistic character of literary criticism, especially during the nineteenth century, had marginalized these poems because they were written in a hybrid form and did not appear adaptable to any 666

national identity, either Italian or French. The process of rediscovery of the Franco-Italian production went hand-in-hand with a study of the adaptation of the French ‘‘originals’’ to the different northern Italian context. In particular, a very productive line of research, including the work of Henning Krauss (Epica feudale e pubblico borghese, 1980) and of Alberto Limentani, Marco Infurna, and Francesco Zambon (L’‘‘Entre´e d’Espagne’’ e i signori d’Italia, 1992), identified these poems with the emergence of a bourgeois public, as opposed to the feudal character of the Old French chansons de geste. The most interesting examples of this tradition were the Entre´e d’Espagne (Entrance into Spain) and the texts of the Carolingian cycle collected in the Manuscript Marciano XIII: Bueve de Han(s)tone, Berta de li grant pie´ (Big-Footed Berta), Karleto, Berte, Milun et Rolandin, Ogier li Danois (Ogier the Dane), and Macaire. The manuscript, copied around the middle of the fourteenth century, featured a series of epic cycles connected to the Carolingian matter. For this manuscript in particular, critics such as Krauss and Limentani claimed a bourgeois origin, linking its themes to the new values of an emerging anti-aristocratic view. Critics like Juliann Vitullo (The Chivalric Epic in Medieval Italy, 2000), on the other hand, tried to reconnect these cycles to their Old French counterparts and retraced similar patterns in the evolution of the genre in both cultural areas. The Entre´e d’Espagne, on the other hand, was the product of a clerical or courtly environment. Written between 1320 and 1340 by an anonymous writer from Padua, the poem recounts the adventures of Charlemagne’s knights and army before the events narrated in the Chanson de Roland and the campaign of Spain in particular. The main protagonist, Roland, is represented as the pious Christian knight. The text is incomplete, due to lacunae in the manuscript, and is followed by a continuation, titled Prise de Pampelune (Capture of Pamplona) by modern commentators. The last two extant poems that critics linked to the development of Franco-Italian epic were the Guerra d’Attila (Attila’s War) and the Aquilon de Bavie`re. Both have named authors, a fact that marked the distance of these two texts from the anonymous production, both in the Venetian March and across the peninsula. Nicola di Giovanni da Casola, a notary from Bologna, wrote the Guerra d’Attila between 1358 and 1368 and worked within the cultural orbit of the Este court. Nicola was probably the first to connect the Carolingian cycle with the encomiastic praise of the Este family, and he

EPIC paved the way for the future enterprises of Boiardo and Ariosto. The prose Aquilon de Bavie`re by Raffaele da Verona, composed according to the author himself between 1379 and 1407, consisted of seven books of adventures and encompassed different genres, languages, and meters. As a hybrid, the Aquilon de Bavie`re serves as a clear example of coexistence and collision of epic and novel. Since the classical distinction between the Iliad and the Odyssey, an alternative archetype of epic can be found in the narrative of a journey of self-discovery. According to this definition, Dante Alighieri’s Comedia (Divine Comedy, ca. 1305– 1321) can often be defined as an epic text. If we accept this formulation, it is possible to claim that the three most important authors of the Italian Middle Ages, Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch, all contributed to the history of the epic genre. Petrarch (1304–1374), with the incomplete poem Africa (begun in 1338), followed the Latin Virgilian model. The selection of the theme—the second Punic war—and of the meter and language (Latin exameters) situated this work in ideal continuity with the classical past. Boccaccio’s epic poem, the Teseida (The Book of Theseus, 1339–1341), was in stark contrast with Africa; an experimental poem, it combined classical models with the Arthurian and popular tradition. At this stage in the development of Italian ‘‘epic culture,’’ when Italy was not yet a unified nationstate, there existed already two clear traditions in place: an epic production in verse, mostly widespread in the north, centered on the French Carolingian tradition; and a prose production, circulating throughout the peninsula, more focused on the adventures of the Arthurian heroes. Among these texts, produced between the thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries, one could mention the Tavola ritonda (The Round Table), the Tristano Panciatichiano, the Tristano Riccardiano, and the Tristano corsiniano. In Tuscany, however, there were the first signs of a very popular and rich tradition, which continued to attract readers and listeners throughout the early modern period: the cantari and poemi cavallereschi. Tuscany saw the invention of a new metric form, called ottava rima (a stanza with rhyme scheme ABABABCC), and the new form lent itself immediately to epic and chivalric themes. Boccaccio himself may have been the inventor of the meter, since he used it in the Filostrato (1335–1336), a poem based on the French Roman de Troie, recounting the story of Troilus and Cressida. The introduction of octaves in the contemporary popular cantari, however, is of uncertain

attribution. At first, the ottava was used for Arthurian poems, and among the famous canterini, the Florentine Antonio Pucci (ca. 1310–1388) had a position of prestige. Andrea da Barberino (ca. 1370–ca. 1432) seemed to couple in his work the form of Tuscan rewritings of French epic (prose) and the matter of the Franco-Italian works (Carolingian themes). Given the scarcity of Carolingian texts belonging to the fourteenth century, Andrea’s work functioned as a pivotal turning point in the transition from Franco-Italian texts to the Italian Renaissance epic. His work presented itself as an effort at collecting and systematizing the epic production on the Carolingian cycle. His corpus includes I Reali di Francia, L’Aspramonte, I Nerbonesi, Guerrin Meschino, Ugone d’Alvernia, and Aiolfo del Barbicone. Along with Andrea’s prose texts, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries saw the increased popularity of the cantari, poems in octaves of variable length. Because of their hybrid nature, the cantari posed a further challenge to the stability of the definition of the epic. They were precariously positioned between low and high culture, between novella and epic poem; they were unstable texts, often anonymous and transmitted orally; they told the stories of the knights and ladies of the cycle of Charlemagne but also were centered on Arthurian, magical, or religious topics. Their wide circulation spanned the eras of manuscript and early print, and the incunabula became the privileged means of transmission of these texts. The most famous cantari focused on certain characters of the Carolingian saga, either known through the French predecessors or of Italian invention: the Cantari di Rinaldo retold the adventures of one of Charlemagne’s most famous knights and emphasized the traits that approximated him to the rebel baron tradition. The Spagna (Spain), which circulated also in prose versions, collected the adventures of the knights against the Moors. Along with characters like Fierabraccia, Mambrino, and Ogieri il Danese, the cantari featured female warriors and queens as their eponymous protagonists: Ancroia, Rovenza, and Bradiamonte were among the heroines who marked the centrality of the woman warrior to this genre. In the epic cantari, the monstrous, the grotesque, and the foreign ‘‘other’’ took a central place, as happened also in the better-known works of the Florentine Luigi Pulci (1432–1484) who, along with his brother Luca (1431–1470), worked in close connection with the House of the Medici, and with Lorenzo il Magnifico in particular. The Morgante (first 667

EPIC published in 1481 then, with the addition of five cantari, in 1483) and the Ciriffo Calvaneo (unfinished and continued by Bernardo Giambullari) both connected the epic cycle of Charlemagne to the destiny of the Florentine state and belonged at least in part to the history of dynastic epic. Their plots shared significant elements with the contemporary Latin poem by the humanist Ugolino Verino (1438–1516), the Carlias, also written for the Medici and completed in 1480. Pulci’s poems, however, can be considered a form of anti-epic, at least insofar as they prominently featured anti-epic heroes, like the converted giant Morgante or the half-giant Margutte. Not unlike his heroes, Pulci found himself at a crossroads in the landscape of Italian culture. His major poem coupled the dynastic needs of his patrons, who were not officially princes, and the heterodox tendencies of his own interpretation of the tradition. The instances of parody in the Morgante revived some popular aspects of the cantari tradition and brought them to the level of the learned poem. This experiment, however, remained isolated, and the Italian epic production, in the works of Boiardo and Ariosto, decisively followed the path of the dynastic poem. The encomiastic intent of these Tuscan poems connected them to analogous cultural trends of the Este court in Ferrara. The northern counterpart of Ugolino Verino’s Carlias was the Borsias by Tito Vespasiano Strozzi (1424–1505), written in honor of the Duke of Ferrara Borso d’Este. The combination of the two French traditions, the Carolingian and the Arthurian cycles, already developed by the cantari, was raised to the level of learned culture in the city of Ferrara. The lords of the town, the Este, gave impulse to epic production, imparting to it a specific feature: The epic poem became dynastic. The connection between the Este and the epic poem, also demonstrated by the presence of many such texts in the catalogues of their libraries, reached full maturity in the works of Matteo Maria Boiardo and Ludovico Ariosto. In addition to introducing the theme of love within the epic Carolingian adventures, Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Inamoramento de Orlando, better known by its later title Orlando innamorato (Orlando in Love, 1482–1483), established the characters of Ruggiero and Bradamante as the future founders of the Este dynasty. Ariosto followed this path when, a few years after Boiardo’s death, he started working on the continuation (‘‘la gionta’’) of his predecessor’s unfinished poem. Before Ariosto’s successful endeavor, other poets had tried to capitalize on 668

Boiardo’s fame: Niccolo` degli Agostini, in various installments (1505, 1514, 1521); Raffaele Valcieco da Verona, who continued Agostini’s continuation (1514); and Pierfrancesco de’ Conti da Camerino (1516). These serial products fully participated in the epic principle of cyclical development and testify both to an extraordinary diffusion of Boiardo’s poem and to the vitality of the genre at this stage. After Boiardo, the epic-chivalric poem fully emerged from anonymity; Francesco Cieco da Ferrara (died ca. 1506) or Evangelista Fossa stand as examples of the new epic author. Cieco’s poem, the Mambriano (1509), fully absorbed the lesson of Boiardo and originally re-elaborated its most advanced generic and structural solutions. Boiardo’s poem and the subsequent production have been completely overshadowed, within the critical debate, by the extraordinary fame of Ariosto’s poem, the Orlando furioso (The Frenzy of Orlando, 1516). Its linguistic mastery, its impeccable use of the entrelacement technique, its regeneration of epic themes and motifs made it an acclaimed masterpiece, an instant classic. This exceptional success gave rise to one of the first literary debates in early modern Italy: the debate over the heroic poem, in which intellectuals such as Giambattista Giraldi Cinzio (1504–1573) and Giovan Battista Nicolucci, called Pigna (1529–1575), claimed that the new authors, such as Boiardo and Ariosto, had founded a new genre. This new text form, called romanzo, gained independence from the classical epic models and established its own authority. The new theorization was part of a critical movement that sought to create an agonistic dichotomy between the two newly created genres, epic and romance. Trying to recover the Homeric epic model in opposition to the chivalric novelty, for instance, Gian Giorgio Trissino wrote La Italia liberata da’ Gothi (Italy Freed from the Goths, 1547–1548), which resulted in a total failure. Following Ariosto in a less constrained organization of facts and characters, Bernardo Tasso (1493–1569) wrote his poem Amadigi (1560). Both Giraldi Cinzio, author of the Ercole (Hercules, 1557), and Luigi Alamanni (1495–1556), with the Girone il cortese (Girone the Courtly, 1548) and the Avarchide (1570) demonstrate the flourishing of this hybrid genre in the intellectual circles. In the debate over epos and romance, Torquato Tasso assumed the position of champion of a renewed Christian and historical epos. He strove to restore Aristotelian unity to the core of the epic poem and, by choosing the crusade as the topic of

EPIC his poem, he attempted the refoundation of the epic on the basis of Christian orthodoxy, as opposed to the thematically and formally free poem imposed as a model by Ariosto. Tasso’s solution, however, was tormented, and his continuous and manic rewritings of the poem serve as a sign of the profound crisis of the genre, precisely at the moment when it seemed to have acquired a stable identity. Tasso’s final solution for the epic, his poem Gerusalemme Conquistata (Jerusalem Conquered), published in 1593 and considered by the author superior to his Gerusalemme Liberata (Jerusalem Delivered, 1580), marked, in a way, the death of the epic poem. From that moment, the epic was written only in the form of parody—among the most important examples, Teofilo Folengo’s Maccheronee, in particular the Baldus (1518), Alessandro Tassoni’s La secchia rapita (The Rape of the Bucket, 1622), and Lorenzo Lippi’s Il Malmantile racquistato (Malmantile Reconquered, 1676). Giambattista Marino’s L’Adone (Adonis, 1623) represented one of the most poignant signs of crisis of the epic genre, featuring a hero who refused power for love and an extreme example of generic hybridism. After a long silence, the last experiment in epic production was Tommaso Grossi’s I Lombardi alla prima crociata (The Lombards at the First Crusade, 1826), a failed attempt to revive a genre that, through various developments, had disappeared from the Italian cultural scene several centuries before. ELEONORA STOPPINO Further Reading Allaire, Gloria, Andrea da Barberino and the Language of Chivalry, Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997. Ascoli, Albert Russell, Ariosto’s Bitter Harmony: Crisis and Evasion in the Italian Renaissance, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987. Ascoli, Albert Russell, ‘‘Introduction’’ to Sergio Zatti, The Quest for Epic and Romance, translated by Sarah Hill and Dennis Looney, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. Bakhtin, Mikail, The Dialogic Imagination, edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Carol Emerson and Michael Holquist, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Bradley-Cromey, Nancy, Authority and Autonomy in L’Entre´e d’Espagne, New York: Garland, 1993. Cabani, Maria Cristina, Le forme del cantare epico-cavalleresco, Lucca: Pacini Fazzi, 1988. Cervigni, Dino (editor), The Italian Epic and Its International Context, Annali d’Italianistica, 12(1994).

Delcorno Branca, Daniela, I romanzi italiani di Tristano e la Tavola ritonda, Florence: Olschki, 1968. Delcorno Branca, Daniela, Il romanzo cavalleresco medievale, Florence: Sansoni, 1974. Delcorno Branca, Daniela, Tristano e Lancillotto in Italia: studi di letteratura arturiana, Ravenna: Longo, 1998. Dionisotti, Carlo, Boiardo e altri studi cavallereschi, edited by Giuseppe Anceschi and Antonia Tissoni Benvenuti, Novara: Interlinea, 2003. Durling, Robert M., The Figure of the Poet in Renaissance Epic, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965. Everson, Jane, The Italian Romance Epic in the Age of Humanism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Fichter, Andrew, Poets Historical: Dynastic Epic in the Renaissance, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982. Holtus, Gu¨nther, Henning Krauss, and Peter Wunderli (editors), Testi, cotesti e contesti del franco-italiano, Tu¨bingen: Niemeyer, 1989. Javitch, Daniel, Proclaiming a Classic: The Canonization of Orlando Furioso, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. Krauss, Henning, Epica feudale e pubblico borghese: per la storia poetica di Carlomagno in Italia, Padua: Liviana Editrice, 1980. Limentani, Alberto, L‘‘‘Entre´e d’Espagne’’ e i signori d’Italia, edited by Marco Infurna and Francesco Zambon, Padua: Antenore, 1992. Limentani, Alberto (editor), Dal Roman de Palamede´s ai Cantari di Febus-el-Forte: testi francesi e italiani del due e trecento, Bologna: Commissione per i testi di lingua, 1962. Limentani, Alberto, and Marco Infurna (editors), L’epica, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1986. Quint, David, ‘‘The Boat of Romance and Renaissance Epic,’’ in Romance: Generic Transformations from Chre´tien de Troyes to Cervantes, edited by Kevin Brownlee and Marina Scordilis Brownlee, Hanover: University Press of New England, 1985: 178–202. Quint, David, Epic and Empire. Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Rajna, Pio, Le origini dell’epopea francese, Florence: Sansoni, 1884. Rajna, Pio, Scritti di filologia e linguistica italiana e romanza, edited by Guido Lucchini, 3 vols., Rome: Salerno, 1998. Rajna, Pio, Due scritti inediti: Le leggende epiche dei Longobardi, Storia del romanzo cavalleresco in Italia, edited by Patrizia Gasparini, Rome: Salerno, 2004. Rozsnyo´i, Zsuzsanna, Dopo Ariosto. Tecniche narrative e discorsive nei poemi post-ariosteschi, Ravenna: Longo, 2000. Sherberg, Michael, Rinaldo: Character and Intertext in Ariosto and Tasso, Stanford: Anma Libri, 1993. Villoresi, Marco, La letteratura cavalleresca. Dai cicli medievali all’Ariosto, Rome: Carocci, 2000. Villoresi, Marco, La fabbrica dei cavalieri: cantari, poemi, romanzi in prosa fra Medioevo e Rinascimento, Rome: Salerno, 2005. Vinaver, Eugene, The Rise of Romance, Oxford: Clarendon Press-Oxford University Press, 1971.

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EPIC Vitullo, Juliann, The Chivalric Epic in Medieval Italy, Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000. Weinberg, Bernard, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961. Zatti, Sergio, Il Furioso tra epos e romanzo, Lucca: Pacini Fazzi, 1990.

Zatti, Sergio, L’ombra del Tasso. Epica e romanzo nel Cinquecento, Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 1996. Zatti, Sergio, The Quest for Epic and Romance, translated by Sarah Hill and Dennis Looney, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. Zatti, Sergio, L’uniforme cristiano e il multiforme pagano. Saggio sulla Gerusalemme liberata, Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1983.

EPISTOLARY NOVEL In Italy, the epistolary novel as a literary genre has not enjoyed the same popularity as it has in other European countries, such as, for example, England, France, and Germany. Not only has Italian literature produced a smaller number of novels written in the letter form, but it also began producing them later. As a result of this limited production, Italian literary criticism has focused more on specific works or authors rather than on the genre per se, while a larger number of studies on the epistolary novel appeared in France and in the Englishspeaking countries during the past two decades. More critical attention has been devoted in Italy, instead, to the study of literary correspondences, especially to those exchanged during the Renaissance and the nineteenth century. In the mid-eighteenth century, following the success reception in Italy of the epistolary works of Samuel Richardson and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Venetian Abbot Pietro Chiari (1771–1785) wrote several novels in the letter form, including La viaggiatrice (The Woman Traveler, 1760) and La donna che non si trova (The Woman Who Cannot Be Found, 1768). Chiari created a narrative of entertainment, infused with melodramatic tones, sentimental cliche´s, and realistic representations of daily life. His novels were very popular, especially among female readers, whom some critics would later identify as being a pivotal element in the rise and affirmation of the modern novel. The genre developed fully during the nineteenth century, and the history of the Italian epistolary novel traditionally begins with Ugo Foscolo’s Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis, partial ed. 1798), an autobiographical work in which the author described the political and amorous disappointments of a young patriot, who in the end commits suicide as a means of 670

liberation from the misery of a life in exile. During Foscolo’s lifetime, Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis enjoyed great popularity, especially among young readers, some of whom emulated the protagonist’s suicide, seen as a sublimation of their patriotic and sentimental ideals. The novel also provided a literary model for many writers of the nineteenth century, at a time when this narrative genre was still being experimented in Italy. Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi, Ippolito Nievo, Camillo Boito, and Matilde Serao, among others, all recognized the influence that Foscolo had on their work. Writers such as Angelica Bartolomei Palli (1798–1875) emulated Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis both at the thematic and structural level. In her Eleonora (1876), which is narrated with overriding romantic tones, Palli adopted Foscolo’s patriotic message, delivered this time by a female character. After the Unification in 1861, with the development of a national postal service, the letter became a common means of communication. A plethora of manuals on how to write letters were published; among them was Giuseppe Picci’s Guida alla studio delle Belle Lettere e al comporre con un manuale dello stile epistolare (Manual to the Study of Letters and to Composition in the Epistolary Style, 1883). Both journalism and literature featured the letter as a narrative strategy. Some critics regard the historical and social affirmation of the postal service as a driving force in the creation of epistolary fiction. Three late-nineteenth-century authors used the letter in their fiction: Giovanni Verga, Marchesa Colombi, and Serao. Verga’s Storia di una capinera (The Story of a Blackcap, 1871) speaks against forced religious vocations. Set amid the world of nuns and convents, a popular theme in epistolary fiction, it became Verga’s most popular work.

EPISTOLARY NOVEL The epistolary fiction published in the second half of the nineteenth century is embedded in sentimental and popular literary tradition. Marchesa Colombi’s Prima morire (To Die First, 1887), which was influenced by the French feuilletton and initially cowritten with Igino Ugo Tarchetti, tells the story of an illicit passion between Eva, an upper-middle-class married woman, and a young musician. The letters reveal the secret aspirations and virtues of the female protagonist, as well as the constraints dictated by social norms of female respectability. The sentimental discourse is also the framework for Serao’s Fior di passione (Passion Flower, 1888), Gli amanti (The Lovers, 1894), Lettere d’amore (Love Letters, 1901), Novelle sentimentali (Sentimental Stories, 1902), and Ella non rispose (She Did Not Answer, 1914), all revolving around the love intrigues of bourgeois women who engage in adulterous relationships in order to escape the dullness and emotional constraints imposed by their social and marital obligations. Serao’s and Marchesa Colombi’s epistolary fiction was connected to their work as journalists. Most of their novels first appeared in newspapers and did not differ stylistically from their journalistic writings. Both authors used similar narrative strategies in their fiction and journalism, including the letter, to enhance their relationship with their audience, on whom fame and livelihood ultimately depended. Benedetto Croce criticized Serao’s later literary production, including her letter fiction, for he found that the author’s intentional objectives undermined artistic accomplishment. More recently, scholars of popular fiction have expressed more positive evaluations of Serao’s sentimental fiction. Twentieth-century Italian writers also adopted the letter form. If in the nineteenth-century the letter was a symbol for communication, a vehicle through which the protagonist could express his or her inner realities, the twentieth-century epistolary novel conveyed the impossibility of such communication. With the exception of Guido Piovene’s Lettere di una novizia (Confession of a Novice, 1941), still rooted in tradition and thematically influenced by Verga’s narrative of convent life, the letter, as a literary strategy, signified fragmentation and miscommunication. Starting with the publication of Il rimorso (Regret, 1963) by Alba de Ce´spedes, indeed the letter form expressed a rupture rather than a bridge of communication. As theorized by Roland Barthes in the 1970s, it appeared to be a mere simulation, the expression of yet another lexicon in the modern vocabulary for affective solitude. Il rimorso, comprised of letters sent by Francesca,

the protagonist, to a friend, as well as by several other interlocutors, emerged as a fragmented narrative. The novel describes the impossibility for the characters to truly communicate in spite of the intense epistolary exchange. De Ce´spedes’s adoption of a traditional genre suggested a meditation on the role of literature and of the writer in society in connection to contemporary debates on literary experimentation and the future of Italian literature beyond neo-Realism. Later noteworthy Italian novels that made extensive use of the device include Natalia Ginzburg’s Caro Michele (Dear Michele, 1973) and La citta` e la casa (The City and the House, 1984). Both works constituted an exploration of the human condition in contemporary society, viewed from the perspective of a dysfunctional middle-class family. Through their correspondence, the characters attempt to create a communication they can never achieve in real life. Thus the letters become surrogates for genuine relationships and disclose Ginzburg’s pessimistic view of the state of the family unit in Italy, faced by social unrest and terrorism. Another novel in which the letter is a strategy signifying rupture and displacement was Lettera alla madre (Letter to My Mother, 1988) by Edith Bruck (1932–), a fictional translation of the author’s own experience of deportation to Nazi concentration camps. By using the device of a posthumous letter, Bruck developed a narrative based on a dialogue with an absent interlocutor (her mother), deceased in Auschwitz; she engaged in experimental techniques, addressing the question of self-identity in relation to her Holocaust experience. Namely, Bruck asked herself, and her readers, about the role Holocaust survivors and writers ought to play in society. Lettera alla madre also represents an example of experimentation with the literary conventions of Holocaust testimony, usually recorded as memoirs. Dacia Maraini has also produced epistolary novels. Her Lettere a Marina (Letters to Marina, 1981) and Dolce per se´ (Sweet for Itself, 1997) are rooted in the feminist poetics and activism of the 1970s and 1980s. Maraini aimed at creating alternative readings of the amorous discourse, a central theme in traditional epistolary fiction, by addressing respectively a lesbian relationship and a friendship between an older woman and a young girl. Despite the predominance of female authorship in recent Italian letter fiction and the traditional assumption that this genre is best suited to women, however, the epistolary novel has not exclusively pertained to women’s writings. For example, 671

EPISTOLARY NOVEL Antonio Tabucchi adopted the letter form in his Si sta facendo sempre piu` tardi (It Is Getting Later and Later, 2001). Composed of 18 letters, written by different characters seemingly connected by a common sense of regret for past mistakes and lost opportunities, Tabucchi’s novel emerged as a narrative with multiple voices. Each letter/voice is in fact presented like a disconnected piece in the puzzle of human solitude, echoing Jacques Derrida’s claim that a letter may never arrive at its destination, and that this ‘‘is not a misfortune, that’s life, living life, beaten down, tragedy, but the still surviving life’’ (La carte postale, 1980). Tabucchi’s postmodern approach to the epistolary novel provides a recent interpretation of the genre, as a kaleidoscopic representation of the feeble relationship that modern individuals engage with collective and personal history. Often considered a literary device belonging exclusively to the past, the epistolary genre has provided Italian writers with a viable narrative form for the expression of their poetics. GABRIELLA ROMANI Further Reading Altman, Janet Gurkin, Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form, Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 1982. Barthes, Roland, Fragments d’un discours amoureux, Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1977. Beebee, Thomas, Epistolary Fiction in Europe: 1500–1800, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Bisutti, Donatella, ‘‘L’artificio della lettera,’’ Letteratura italiana contemporanea, edited by Gaetano Mariani and Mario Petrucciani, appendix 6, Rome: Lucarini, 1979.

Derrida, Jacques, La Carte postale: de Socrate a` Freud et au-dela`, Paris: Flammarion, 1980. Di Fazio, Margherita, La lettera e il romanzo: Esempi di comunicazione epistolare nella narrativa, Roma: Nuova Amica Editrice, 1996. Duyfhuizen, Bernard, ‘‘Epistolary Narratives of Transmission and Transgression,’’ Comparative Literature, 37:1 (1985): 1–26. Favret, Mary, Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics and the Fiction of Letters, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Gagliardi, Elena, ‘‘Il rimorso di Alba De Ce´spedes: Ipotesi sul romanzo epistolare del Novecento,’’ Il lettore di provincia, 30:105(1999): 3–24. Gilroy, Amanda, and W. M. Verhoeven (editors), Epistolary Histories: Letters, Fiction, Culture, Charlottesville-London: University Press of Virginia, 2000. Kany, Charles, The Beginning of the Epistolary Novel in France, Italy, and Spain, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1939. Kauffman, Linda, Discourses of Desire: Gender, Genre, and Epistolary Fictions, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986. Kauffman, Linda, Special Delivery: Epistolary Modes in Modern Fiction, Chicago-London: Chicago University Press, 1992. Madrignagni, Carlo A., All’origine del romanzo in Italia: Il ‘‘celebre Abate Chiari,’’ Naples: Liguori, 2000. Moretti, Franco, Atlante del romanzo europeo 1800–1900, Turin: Einaudi, 1997. Perry, Ruth, Women, Letters, and the Novel, New York: AMS, 1980. Rousset, Jean, Forme and signification: Essais sur les structures litteraires de Corneille a` Claudelle, Paris: J. Corti, 1962. Versini, Laurent, Le roman e´pistolaire, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1979. Zaczek, Barbara Maria, Censored Sentiments: Letters and Censorship in Epistolary Novels and Conduct Material, Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997.

EDOARDO ERBA (1954–) Edoardo Erba is among the few playwrights of the new generation who is successfully performed outside Italy. Thanks to his apprenticeship in the media that are at the heart of the communication circuit, Erba brings a flexible and light rhythm to his dialogues. In his first play, Maratona di New York (Marathon, 1994), which premiered in Parma in 1993, Erba managed to stress the accelerations and pauses of two runners, Mario and Steve, who 672

transform jogging into a mutual confession of impulses and resentments, until the physical training begins to yield metaphysical results. Their relationship is not clear, similarly their personal traits, and identities, which progressively become confused. Finally even a brotherhood between them is suggested. The actors themselves get physically tired from the actual effort on stage, groping with the hypernaturalism of the performance and the

EDOARDO ERBA constant running. Some links could be especially drawn with Dino Buzzati for the shared treatment of ordinary themes progressively diluted in a surreal and fantastic dimension, prompting uncertainty between strange experience and magical hypothesis. The dryness and jazzy rhythm of the cues recall Harold Pinter’s and David Mamet’s work. Kafka and Du¨rrenmatt are brought to mind by the fatal slipping away of the characters’ destination, substituted by rarefied atmospheres. Erba’s ability to construct an alternating series of fast and slow paced lines also characterizes Curva cieca (Blind Bend, 1993), a play about Achille Varzi, the car racing champion who lived during the Fascist period. Varzi, in the cliche´ theme of cars and girls (and drugs) was overwhelmed by his love for a fatal Valkyrie. The same rhythm and colloquial style, marked by infrequent apertures to personal intimacy, is present in La notte di Picasso (Night of Picasso, 1993), staged in Rome in 1990. The play is set in a psychiatric ward, which is realistically evoked by a long corridor propped up on stage. The action unfolds around the neurotic interplay between two characters, Nero and Lorenzo, who obsessively play with a tape recorder, while spying on a roommate and dreaming about a film project. Cinematographic mythomanias, pervasive fairy tales, and phallic exhibitions turn the Beckett cue into a pathological Kammerspiel. In the late Romantic tradition, illness and sanity are indistinguishable. Political tension, uncommon in contemporary Italian theater, and ethical tendencies underlie Erba’s apologues, largely based on contemporary history, such as Venditori (Salesmen, 2002), which was staged in 1999 and addressed the issue of the loss of jobs through burlesque use of the marketing lingo. In Senza Hitler (Without Hitler, 2002), a surreal hypothesis on a different European scenario, the dictator never goes beyond his career as a wall painter. In De´ja` vu (2002), Erba incorporates themes like the denouncement of the present risk of an atomic Apocalypse with an intricate revival of the myth of Oedipus. A mature businesswoman and an ambitious young man find out, during episodic yet intense intercourse, that they are mother and son. Margaret is the widow of a man who died in a car accident; Andrea discovers that he was the unintentional cause of Margaret’s husband’s death, who also was his unknown father. In the hallucinatory finale, with fireworks and explosions, special effects for a new Sodom and Gomorra, the two lovers enter a graveyard. I muratori (The Masons, 2004) stages the encounter between a group of

blue-collar workers and Miss Giulia, a character borrowed from the play of Strindberg, an exchange of linguistic and ideological misunderstandings; an existential drama from the perspective of a disenchanted working class. Edoardo Erba’s work has been performed at various festivals, including the Venice Biennale in 1984 for the play Stella polare (The Pole-Star). He also writes dramas and situation comedies for radio and television.

Biography Edoardo Erba was born in Pavia, 11 March 1954. He attended the University of Pavia and graduated in Italian literature with a dissertation on the poetry of Cesare Pavese, 1977; after a year in the army (1977), he taught Italian language in high schools, including two years in the prison of Lodi (Milan), 1978–1986. Erba translated thrillers for Mondadori in Milan, where he moved in 1982; studied at the Piccolo Teatro in Milan, 1982–1984; and graduated in dramaturgy, 1984. In 1986 he began to work as a screenwriter in television for children fiction, 1986. Erba married Silvia Feraudi in 1987; they were divorced and he moved to Rome in 1992. He met the actress Maria Amelia Monti, 1994; they have two children, Marianna (1996) and Leonardo (1999). Erba is cofounder of the Teatro Civile, a cultural association that produced plays based on the acts of Silvio Berlusconi’s trials, 1992. He was awarded the Candoni Prize and Fringe Festival Edinburgh award for Maratona di New York, 1992, 1994; the Riccione Prize for Vizio di famiglia, 1993; and the the Idi (Istituto del Dramma Italiano) Prize for Il capodanno del secolo, 1995. PAOLO PUPPA Selected works Collections Maratona di New York e altri testi, Milan: Ubulibri, 2002 (includes Buone notizie, Venditori, De´ja` vu, Senza Hitler).

Plays La notte di Picasso, 1993. Curva cieca, 1993. Maratona di New York, 1994; as Marathon, translated by Colin Teevan, 1999. Vizio di famiglia, 1995. Muratori, 2004.

Other Una Topolino alle Mille Miglia, 2004.

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EDOARDO ERBA Further Reading De Matteis, Tiberia, Autori in scena: Sei drammaturgie italiane contemporanee, Rome: Bulzoni, 2004. Di Giammarco, Rodolfo, ‘‘Fiato. Grinta. Corsa. Sudore. Freddo. Incubo. Morte,’’ in E. Erba, Maratona di New York, Milan: Ricordi, 1994. Guardamagna, Dante, Preface to E. Erba, Vizio di Famiglia, Milan: Ricordi, 1994. Laura, Ernesto G., in E. Erba, Muratori. Rassegna di nuova dramaturgia: Inediti, Successi e Opere Prime, Palermo: Kal’s Art Contemporanea, 2004.

Pesce, Maria Dolores, ‘‘Maratona di New York e altri testi,’’ Ariel, 1(2003): 254–258. Puppa, Paolo, Il teatro dei testi: La drammaturgia italiana nel Novecento, Turin: Utet, 2003. Quadri, Franco, ‘‘Edoardo Erba con leggerezza nel mistero del quotidiano,’’ in E. Erba, Maratona di New York e altri testi, Milan: Ubulibri, 2002. Terruzzi, Giorgio, Preface to E. Erba, Curva cieca, Milan: Ricordi, 1993.

LUCIANO ERBA (1922–) In his anthology of twentieth-century poetry, Luciano Anceschi classifies Luciano Erba as belonging to the ‘‘Linea lombarda’’ (an association, Erba claims, that never particularly convinced him). Reserved and discreet by nature, Erba tries not to act as someone breaking from the poetry that preceded him. To him, poetry’s adversarial role is best kept by poets who are most cautious in the face of innovation; thus, he remains equally distant from experimentalism as from the Ermetismo school of ‘‘obscure’’ poetry. In so doing, he serves as a link between the more objective, less Orphean forms of Hermeticism and the anecdotal realism of the postwar period, developed in Lombardy in direct contrast to poets such as Pier Paolo Pasolini, Roberto Roversi, Maria Luisa Spaziani, and Andrea Zanzotto. From their very first experience with literature, these poets refused all attempts to define themselves in regional terms. Erba’s poetry proves that language can be renewed without sensational breaks but simply by way of small syntactic changes that eventually revitalize it. He has always refused manifestos, movements such as neo-Realism and neo-avant-garde, which appear not too particularly innovative to him. He acknowledges Vittorio Sereni as his inspiring teacher and an important reference point for the writers of his generation, while admitting that he was also influenced by Eugenio Montale and Giorgio Caproni. His poetry began with La linea K (Line K) published in 1951. The K, absent from the Italian alphabet, points to a nonexistent

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reality. In the following collections, Il bel paese (The Beautiful Country, 1955), which makes ironic allusions to Lombardy as it was in the past, and Il male minore (The Lesser Evil, 1960), Erba moved ‘‘between almost unreal puppets which are actually means of regretted images of the good past time in Gozzano style’’ (Romano, Luperini, ‘‘La poesia postermetica fra continuita` e dissolvimento,’’ 1981). These early poems are characterized by disenchantment; life appears ‘‘perduta per disattenzione’’ (lost through carelessness), and ‘‘l’ignoranza e` il male minore’’ (ignorance is the least of the problems) (Il male minore, 1960). Later on Erba focused his attention on autobiographical fragments, as in Il prato piu` verde (The Greener Meadow, 1977) and Il nastro di Moebius (The Moebius’s Strip, 1980), which contains all of his previous poems. The background remains that of a typically Lombardy landscape conceived as an essential moment of internal narration. Nevertheless, the poet’s geography is international, and Western cities like Milan, London, New York, and Paris alternate with exotic places like Sasebo (Japan) and Quelpart (Korea). His most defining poetic traits are a peculiar type of visual perception and an antirhetorical stance. Erba’s is a poetry of anecdotal objectivism, composed in a sort of minimal mode or through a touch of ironic mannerism (pictorial more than literary) mixed with an existential and somewhat tragic tone. He avoids the dangers of high language and works on the details of circumstantial existence The poet’s relationship with objects stems not from a

LUCIANO ERBA voluntary act but rather from a state of ‘‘passive waiting’’ that precedes the instant in which that very object chooses to reveal itself in its bareness, in its inner poetry. But in order to be able to catch the smallest things, the artist must to be free and receptive and use his body and mind as catalysts; thus something that was once lost and fragmented suddenly comes back to life. The poems collected in L’ippopotamo (The Hippopotamus, 1989) are marked by a blinding pessimism that leaves no room for joy, and even less for life, a kind of a cosmic restlessness reminiscent of Leopardi’s bleakness of tone. In Nella terra di mezzo (In the Middle Ground, 2000), published when Erba was close to 80, the poet reflected once again on his own life: ‘‘Questi ultimi anni avuti in premio / hanno a volte il gusto un poco sfatto / di certe scatolette di tonno’’ (These last years given as a reward / Have at times a cheap taste / like certain tins of tuna) (‘‘Questi ultimi anni’’). Signalling the point of equilibrium between possibilities, Erba’s latest poems, collected as L’altra meta` (The Other Half, 2004), continue to ponder on the delicate ironies of human life. Erba’s poetry is ultimately located at the boundary between indeterminate states (geographical, socio-historical, metaphysical). As Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo reminds us, Erba acts as a mediator in the passage between a more objective Hermeticism to a certain Lombard post war anecdotal realism (‘‘Luciano Erba,’’ 1978). Luciano Erba has produced one of the most original bodies of work in contemporary Italian poetry. Erba’s literary production also includes numerous critical essays, among them Magia e invenzione (Magic and Invention, 1967), which contains 13 studies on Cyrano de Bergerac and other contemporary French writers. In the opening essay, written on the occasion of the third centennial of de Bergerac’s death (1619–1655), Erba seemed somewhat perplexed by the critics’ silence about Cyrano’s ties to Italian Renaissance naturalism. He is also known for his translations of Blaise Cendrars, Henri Michaux, Francis Ponge, and other French and English poets. He edited with Piero Chiara Quarta generazione (The Fourth Generation, 1954), an anthology of postwar Italian poets.

to Switzerland after the 1943 armistice and stayed there until the end of the war. He graduated in 1947 from the Cattolica University in French literature and initially taught in high schools, only later becoming a professor at the Cattolica in Milan. Thanks to a scholarship, Erba lived in Paris from 1947 to 1950 and in the United States from 1963 to 1966. He contributed to several literary magazines, among them Il Verri, La fiera letteraria, and The Western Review. Erba received the Viareggio Prize in 1980 for Il prato piu` verde and Il nastro di Moebius. Il tranviere metafisic received the Bagutta Prize in 1988. L’ippopotamo won the MontaleLibrex Prize in 1989. L’ipotesi circense won the P.E.N. Club award in 1995. In 2002, Erba was awarded the Carducci and the Mondello prizes for his career. Luciano Erba lives in Milan.

Biography

Other

Luciano Erba was born in Milan on 18 September 1922. Though he has lived most of his life in his hometown, there have been extended periods spent abroad. During World War II, Erba went

MARIANO D’AMORA Selected Works Collections Poesie (1951–2001), Milan: Mondadori, 2004.

Poetry ‘‘Linea K,’’ 1951. ‘‘Il bel paese,’’ 1955. ‘‘Ippogrammi e metaippogrammidi Giovanola,’’ 1958. ‘‘Il prete di Ratana`,’’ 1959. ‘‘Il male minore,’’ 1960. ‘‘Il prato piu` verde,’’ 1977; as The Greener Meadow: Selected Poems, translated by Peter Robinson, 2006. ‘‘Il nastro di Moebius,’’ 1980. ‘‘Il cerchio aperto,’’ 1983. ‘‘Il tramviere metafisico,’’ 1987. ‘‘L’ippopotamo,’’ 1989; as The Hippopotamus, translated by Ann Snodgrass, 2003. ‘‘Come quando in Crimea,’’ 1992. ‘‘Soltanto segni,’’ 1992. ‘‘Verso Quasar,’’ 1992. ‘‘Variar del verde,’’ 1993. ‘‘L’ipotesi circense,’’ 1995. ‘‘Capodanno a Milano,’’ 1996. ‘‘Milano Sud-Ovest,’’ 1997. ‘‘Negli spazi intermedi,’’ 1998. ‘‘Nella terra di mezzo,’’ 2000. ‘‘L’altra meta`,’’ 2004.

Short Stories ‘‘Franc¸oise,’’ 1982. Quarta generazione, 1954 (with Piero Chiara). Magia e invenzione: Note e ricerche su Cyrano de Bergerac e altri autori del primo Seicento francese, 1967; reprinted, 2000. Si passano le stagioni: una scelta personale di autografi e inediti, 2002.

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LUCIANO ERBA Further Reading Agosti, Stefano, ‘‘Consuntivo su Erba,’’ in Poesia italiana contemporanea, Milan: Bompiani, 1995. Anceschi, Luciano, Linea lombarda: Sei poeti, Varese: Libreria Magenta Editrice, 1952. Ba´rberi Squarotti, Giorgio, Poesia e narrativa del secondo novecento, Milan: Mursia, 1978. Berardinelli, Alfonso, ‘‘Ultime tendenze,’’ in Storia della letteratura italiana, Milan: Garzanti, 2001. Di Benedetto, Alfredo, ‘‘Lettura in due tempi di Luciano Erba,’’ in Stile e Linguaggio: Saggi di analisi letteraria, Rome: Bonacci, 1974. Feldman, Ruth, and Brian Swann (editors), Italian Poetry Today: Currents and Trends, St. Paul, MN: New Rivers Press, 1979. Fortini, Franco, I poeti del novecento, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1977.

Luperini, Romano, ‘‘La poesia postermetica fra continuita` e dissolvimento,’’ in Il novecento, Turin: Loescher, 1981. Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo, ‘‘Luciano Erba,’’ in Poeti italiani del 900, Milan: Mondadori, 1978. Motta, Umberto, Il canto strozzato: Poesia italiana del novecento, Novara: Interlinea, 1995. Pappalardo La Rosa, Franco, Il filo e il labirinto: Gatto, Caproni, Erba, Turin: Tirrenia Stampatori, 1997. Prandi, Stefano, ‘‘Introduzione,’’ in L. Erba, Poesie (1951– 2001), Milan: Mondadori, 2004. Ramat, Silvio (editor), Omaggio a Luciano Erba, Novara: Interlinea, 2003. Sanguineti, Edoardo, Poesia italiana del 900, Turin: Einaudi, 1993.

EYES SHUT See Con gli occhi chiusi (Work by Federigo Tozzi)

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F DIEGO FABBRI (1911–1980) Fabbri’s poetic ideology, moral dilemmas can only lead to recognizing the truth of Providence, in a Manzonian sense. After his early plays, conceived only for male actors, Fabbri wrote Gli assenti (The Absent Ones, 1938) in collaboration with Guido Chiesa. This play takes the form of an inquiry that investigates generational disenchantment and general restlessness with the present. His drama borders on the chronicle in works such as in Miraggi (Mirages), composed in 1937 but revised in 1945, the story of the longings of two orphans. However, Fabbri’s realism and his Christian faith powerfully conjoin in the 1940s when Fabbri, along with Orazio Costa, Vito Pandolfi, and Gerardo Guerrieri, envision a theater capable of fulfilling a moral and social mission, signed the Manifesto per un teatro del popolo (Manifesto for a People’s Theatre) on 8 August 1943, just a few days after Benito Mussolini’s fall from power. This project brought together the revolutionary branches of the young theater culture of Rome, both Catholic and Marxist. Between 1946 and 1948, Fabbri wrote several works focusing on the intimacy of private relationships and on everyday redemption, themes that dramatized his view of love as a sacred mystery. These were the themes of such plays as the successful Paludi (Marshes, 1942), a re-elaboration of Il nodo; Orbite (Orbits, 1941), about the crisis in a couple’s relationship; La libreria del sole (The Bookshop of the Sun, 1943), a story of a lost, then found vocation; Rancore (The Grudge, 1950)

A playwright of deep religious feeling, Diego Fabbri started writing plays in his native Forlı` for parish recreation centers and amateur dramatic societies. After World War II, when Catholic intellectuals debated the pedagogical and didactic potential of drama, Fabbri honed and perfected his writing skills in the professional theater. He often adopted the so-called retorica del processo (rhetoric of the trial), that is, a structure in which a judicial procedure becomes a metaphor for the relationship between God and the contemporary ‘‘new man.’’ Thus, it has always been easy to recognize the ideological and religious import of his theatrical productions. His plays are characterized by a strong moral conviction that makes the nature of his works a probing inquiry into modern Christianity. This is already evident in I fiori del dolore (The Flowers of Grief, 1931), written when the author was only 19. In this intimate play, which is set in Russia before the Bolshevik revolution, love—embodied by two young people who trust in God—triumphs over evil, represented by the ‘‘orda comunista’’ (communist horde). Fabbri’s other recurrent themes include defeat and the sins of the fathers, as in Ritorno (Return, 1933); intentional loss and rejected redemption, as in I loro peccati (Their Sins, 1935); and Il nodo (The Knot, 1936), which was censored by the Fascists because of its pessimism. In this ‘‘sacerdotal,’’ deliberately nonaesthetic theater, which contains hints of the popular themes and structures typical of neorealism, the struggle between love and desire turns into a real conflict. According to 677

DIEGO FABBRI and finally Inquisizione (The Inquisition, 1950), a play characterized by a religious Humanism in the style of Franc¸ois Mauriac and Paul Claudel. His characters, too, move between two figures: the priest, a tempted and restless hero, and the woman, a protesting temptress. As Puppa remarks, ‘‘Fabbri’s universe is populated by creatures that smell of church, by languid countenances, by bodies hindered by secular clothes underneath which one can discern the priestly gown’’ (Itinerari nella drammaturgia del Novecento, 1987). Nevertheless, Fabbri also presented a less conformist vision of the family in Il seduttore (The Seducer, 1951), which the religious movement Azione Cattolica strongly criticized. Between 1953 and 1954, Fabbri responded to such criticism with the farce La bugiarda (The Lying Woman, 1956), in which a woman succeeds in keeping her husband’s love as well as her lover’s through lies. The play enjoyed great success in France. Fabbri’s family dramas include Processo de famiglia (The Family Trial, 1953), dealing with the case of a child who, though initially wanted, was later abandoned. In 1955, on 2 March, he staged Processo a Gesu` (Between Two Thieves), a play he had started in 1952, at Piccolo Teatro of Milan, directed by Orazio Costa. In this work, the trial is no longer of inferential nature but becomes part of the structure of the plot: The search for Jesus’ innocence is accompanied by the primordial existence of the characters (judges, magistrates, and lawyers) on the stage. Their inviolability dramatically opposes the dispersive and destructuring ideologies of modern thought, such as psychoanalysis and Marxism. Fabbri’s negative view of the contemporary world did not protect him from being censured by the traditionalist Alleanza Cattolica, which denounced the play before the Holy Office on 13 January 1956, arguing that it represented an offence against religion and an incitement to class hatred. Contemporary Christian themes are also at the center of Veglia d’armi (The Armed Wake, 1956), which Luchino Visconti staged after Il seduttore. The motif of the theater within the theater is found in Figli d’arte (Born into the Profession, 1959) and in Fabbri’s posthumous play Al Dio ignoto (To an Unknown God, 1980). In 1961, Pope John XXIII opened the Second Vatican Council, a turning point for which Fabbri had hoped and perhaps even foreshadowed for his audiences; in the same year, he wrote Ritratto d’ignoto (Portrait of an Unknown Man, 1962), which emphasizes the need for a Christian evangelization of souls given the unknowability of being. Fabbri was also very active 678

as a theater reviewer and as author of screenplays for film and television, including serials for the Italian broadcasting corporation RAI. Among his radio works, the most important is Trasmissione interrotta (Interrupted Broadcast, 1951), in which the radio itself becomes a character that helps an accused man broadcast his appeals to all those who could testify to his innocence. The limitations of Fabbri’s drama, which now appears outdated, must be acknowledged. His national-popular aesthetics of representation, through which he debated the spiritual problems of his age, never result in true invention, in a new form of theatricality. Fabbri’s religious convictions never seem troubled by crises or second thoughts.

Biography Born in Forlı` on 2 July 1911. Worked for the local newspaper Il Momento and for the publishing house Stella in Bagnocavallo, 1920–1930. Degree in economics at the University of Bologna, 1936. Married Giuliana Facciani, 29 December 1937, with whom he had seven children. Worked for the Roman publishing house A.V.E., 1939. Secretarygeneral of the Centro Cattolico Cinematografico, 1940–1950. Codirector, with Vincenzo Cardarelli, of La fiera letteraria, 1949–1967. Founded the Sindacato nazionale degli autori drammatici, 1945. Directed the Teatro La Cometa in Rome, 1960–1962. Head of the Confe´de´ration Internationale des Socie´te´s des Auteurs et des Compositeurs, 1973–1975. Assumed the directorship of the journal Il dramma, 1997. Awarded the Feltrinelli prize for theater, 1977. As a screenwriter, collaborated with numerous directors including De Sica, Blasetti, Germi, Clair, Rossellini, Antonioni, Bun˜uel. Died in Riccione on 14 August 1980. STEFANO TOMASSINI See also: Religion and Literature Selected Works Collections Teatro, 3 vols., Florence: Vallecchi, 1959–1964. Tutto il teatro di Diego Fabbri, 2 vols., Milan: Rusconi, 1984.

Plays I fiori del dolore, 1931. Ritorno, 1933. I loro peccati, 1935. Il nodo, 1936. Il fanciullo sconosciuto, 1936. Gli assenti, with Guido Chiesa, 1938.

GIOVANNI FALDELLA Orbite, 1941. Paludi, 1942. La libreria del sole, 1943. Miraggi, 1945. Inquisizione, 1950. Rancore, 1950. Il seduttore, 1951. Trasmissione interrotta (radio play), 1951. Processo di famiglia, 1953. Processo a Gesu`, 1955; as Between Two Thieves, translated and adapted by Warner LeRoy, 1959. La bugiarda, 1956. Veglia d’armi, 1956. Delirio, 1958. Figli d’arte, 1959. Lo scoiattolo, 1961. Ritratto d’ignoto, 1962. Il confidente, 1964. L’avvenimento, 1968. L’avventuriero, 1968. Non e` per scherzo che ti ho amato, 1971. Il cedro del Libano, 1972. Il vizio assurdo: drama e dibattito, with Davide Lajolo, 1974. Al Dio ignoto, 1980.

Librettos La leggenda del ritorno, 1966, music by Renzo Rossellini. L’avventuriero, 1967, music by Renzo Rossellini.

Further Reading Alessio, Antonio, Il teatro di Diego Fabbri, Savona: Sabatelli, 1970.

Cappelletti, Dante, ‘‘La ‘segreta’ realta` della vita nella divina mania del teatro,’’ in Diego Fabbri, Tutto il teatro, vol. 1, Milan: Rusconi, 1984. Cappello, Giovanni, Invito alla lettura di Diego Fabbri, Milan: Mursia, 1979. De Feo, Sandro, ‘‘Diego Fabbri: Il seduttore, La bugiarda, Ritratto di ignoto,’’ in In cerca di teatro, edited by Luciano Lucignani, vol. 2, Milan: Longanesi, 1972. Diego Fabbri, special issue of Sipario, 45, no. 502 (1990). Doglio, Federico and Wanda Raspolini (editors), Atti del Convegno internazionale Diego Fabbri, Rome: Il ventaglio, 1986. Lotti, Renato, Diego Fabbri: il giuoco della verita`, Rome: Rari nantes, 1989. Marchi, Giovanni, ‘‘Il teatro di Diego Fabbri,’’ in Nuova antologia, 507 (1969): 228–251. Pandolfi, Vito, Il teatro italiano del dopoguerra, Parma: Guanda, 1956. Pullini, Giorgio, Cinquant’anni di teatro in Italia, Bologna: Cappelli, 1960. Puppa, Paolo, ‘‘Itinerari nella drammaturgia del Novecento,’’ in Storia della letteratura italiana. Il Novecento, edited by Emilio Cecchi and Natalino Sapegno, vol. 2, Milan: Garzanti, 1987. Ronfani, Ugo, ‘‘Diego Fabbri o la verita` della parola recitata,’’ in Diego Fabbri, Tutto il teatro, vol. 1, Milan: Rusconi, 1984. Torresani, Sergio, ‘‘Diego Fabbri,’’ in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 43, Rome: Treccani, 1993. Veneziano, Gian Mario, ‘‘Ugo Betti, Diego Fabbri: tentativi di teatro religioso,’’ in La letteratura in scena: Il teatro del Novecento, edited by Giorgio Ba`rberi Squarotti, Turin: Tirrenia Stampatori, 1985.

GIOVANNI FALDELLA (1846–1928) Giovanni Faldella is considered the most important figure in the Turin Scapigliatura, the nineteenth-century literary movement. A writer and politician who, in his later years, crowned his quiet political career as an enlightened conservative with a Senate appointment, Faldella became first known as a creative journalist. He wrote travel diaries such as Un viaggio a Roma senza vedere il Papa (A Journey to Rome Without Seeing the Pope, 1880), in which his extremely inventive language overshadows the actual subject matter. In fiction, he made his debut with two novellas, Il male dell’arte (The Evil of Art, 1874), the story of an artist posing as an extreme aesthete, and Rovine (Ruins, 1879), inspired by the premature death of a Scapigliato friend.

As he himself said ironically at the end of the collection of articles published in Gazzetta Piemontese and entitled A Vienna: Gita col Lapis (To Vienna: A Trip with a Pencil, 1874), his style consists in tormenting ‘‘il dizionario come un cadavere, con la disperazione di dargli vita mediante il canto’’ (the dictionary as a corpse, desperately trying to give it life through song). Faldella mixes styles and genres, from the pathetic to the comic, invents words, and uses lexical deformations and linguistic oddities of all kinds, to the extent that Gianfranco Contini considers him a ‘‘rappresentante di quella eterna ‘funzione Gadda’ che va da Rabelais al Joyce di Finnegan’s Wake’’ (representative of that eternal ‘Gadda function’ that goes from Rabelais to the Joyce of Finnegan’s Wake) (Racconti della 679

GIOVANNI FALDELLA scapigliatura, 1953). Faldella always uses language extravagantly and expressively. He incorporates the Piedmontese dialect, and mixes it with Latinisms and technical terms. Indeed, in his stylistic deformations there is no anxiety, no hint of social criticism. On the contrary, Faldella’s expressive genius favours bucolic settings, the natural dimension of which is not naive, but filtered through the experience of positivism and literary verismo. Faldella is thus a transgressor in form, but a conservative in content. In his collection of country sketches called Figurine (Figurines, 1875) the writer reaches the peak of his linguistic experimentalism. However, the choice of subject matter, country life, suggests his detachment from the Scapigliati, who privileged modern metropolitan life. The Figurine are the protagonists of village tales in which Faldella exalts the simplicity of life in the provinces of Piedmont. From this stem lively sketches, such as the one in which a lovesick countryman emigrates, makes his fortune, and returns to his village bringing wealth and work, or the one about the electoral battle in a hamlet. Faldella’s precocious integration into the cultural industry favoured the progressive fossilization of the qualities of his style. Throughout his works, a linguistically acrobatic register can be perceived together with a more normal, middle-brow register that follows in the footsteps of the journalistic literature of his time. Faldella’s two trilogies, Un serpe (A Snake, 1881–1884) and Capricci per pianoforte (Piano Whims, 1887–1894), are set within a naturalistic context. However, the poetics of naturalism, founded on the construction of characters and the study of the social environment, is overturned by Faldella, who favours the ironic dimension, does not observe the rules of verisimilitude, and rather makes use of amplifications and digressions in order to give free rein to his exuberant linguistic inventions. His most noteworthy literary product, linked to his experience in Rome the year after his election to Parliament, is Roma borghese: Assaggiature (Bourgeois Rome: Samplings, 1882), which illustrates aspects of bourgeois (as opposed to clerical) Roman life immediately after Italian unification. Full of brilliant lexical innovations, this text is permeated with an ironic and affectionate impatience for his exile in the Eternal City. In Una serenata ai morti (A Serenade for the Dead, 1884), he reinvents the ‘‘fantastic macabre’’ of the Scapigliati. The novella Madonna di fuoco e Madonna di neve (The Fire Madonna and the Snow Madonna, 1888) is an amusing caricature of two 680

common women at war over the same man. Later Faldella published a strongly antisocialist historical novel, Sant’Isidoro: Commentarii di guerra rustica (Saint Isidore: Commentaries on a Rustic War, 1909), that can be considered his political and literary testament, and with which his original and creative phase comes to an end. Through the vicissitudes of two village lovers, a young lawyer and the daughter of a sharecropper, Faldella brings together many of the serious problems that afflicted postunification Italy: the agricultural crisis, the uncertainty of the ruling class, the careerism of the new bourgeois. However, he tries to overcome the historical disappointment that had followed the grandiose hopes of the Risorgimento through the utopia of science as a remedy against all evils and through the myth of the colonies and the empire. Faldella was and continues to be the object of very diverse critical assessments. Among his defenders, Giosue` Carducci admired his tension toward linguistic and literary renewal, although he held some reservations regarding his stylistic recklessness. While recognizing his originality, the intellectuals closer to the legacy of Alessandro Manzoni saw his experimentalism with suspicion and were substantially unable to understand it. His style, which could have effectively opposed the language of Manzoni, remains halfway between local colour and aestheticism and finally lacks ideological coherence.

Biography Born in Saluggia (province of Vercelli), 26 April 1846, the son of a doctor. Obtains law degree at the University of Turin, 1868; meets Salvatore Farina, Giuseppe Giacosa, Arrigo Boito, Giovanni Camerana; founds the literary review Il Velocipede, for which he writes under the pseudonym of Spartivento, 1869; contributes to numerous newspapers and periodicals in Rome, Piedmont, and Florence, including Il Fanfulla, Rivista Minima, La Gazzetta Piemontese, and writes under various pseudonyms; returns to Saluggia, 1871; works as a lawyer and begins political career as a provincial councillor; elected to the Lower House for the Left, 1881; moves toward increasingly more conservative and monarchist positions; appointed to the Senate, 1896; resigns as senator, 1908. Dies in Saluggia on 14 April 1928. ANDREA BOSELLO

ORIANA FALLACI Selected Works

Roma borghese: Assaggiature, 1882. A Parigi, viaggio di Geronimo e comp, 1887.

Fiction Il male dell’arte, 1874. Un amore in composta, 1874. Figurine, 1875; edited by Giansiro Ferrata, 1962. Le conquiste del male. Il male dell’arte. Variazioni sul tema, 1876. Rovine. Degna di morire. La laurea dell’amore, 1879. Un serpe, 3 vols. (Idillio a tavola, 1881; Un consulto medico, 1882; La giustizia del mondo, 1884). Amore architetto, 1884. Una serenata ai morti, 1884. Le litaniae della mamma, 1886. Capricci per pianoforte, 3 vols. (Tota Nerina, 1887; La contessa De Ritz, 1891; Nemesi, 1894). Madonna di fuoco e Madonna di neve, 1888. Sant’Isidoro: commentarii di guerra rustica, 1909; edited by Giorgio Luti, 1972.

Other A Vienna: Gita col lapis, 1874. Un viaggio a Roma senza vedere il Papa, 1880; edited by Gaetano Mariani, 1962. Salita a Montecitorio, 5 vols. (Il paese di Montecitorio: Guida alpina; I pezzi grossi: Scarpellate; Caporioni: Profili; Dai fratelli Bandiera alla dissidenza: Cronaca; I partiti: Osservazioni), 1878–1882.

Further Reading Contini, Gianfranco (editor), Racconti della scapigliatura, Turin: Einaudi, 1953. Croce, Benedetto, ‘‘Giovanni Faldella,’’ in Letteratura della nuova Italia, vol. 5, Bari: Laterza, 1939. Del Principe, David, Rebellion, Death and Aesthetics in Italy: The Demons of Scapigliatura, Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996. Mariani, Gaetano, Storia della Scapigliatura, CaltanissettaRome: Sciascia, 1967. Ragazzini, Giorgio, Giovanni Faldella: Viaggiatore e giornalista, Milan: Vita e pensiero, 1976. Rosa, Giovanna, La narrativa degli Scapigliati, Bari: Laterza, 1997. Sarasso, Terenzio, Giovanni Faldella scapigliato vercellese, Vercelli: La Sesia, 1959. Scotti Morgana, Silvia, La lingua di Giovanni Faldella, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1974. Spera, Francesco, Il principio dell’antiletteratura, Dossi, Faldella, Imbriani, Naples: Liguori, 1976. Tellini, Gino, Il romanzo italiano dell’Ottocento e Novecento, Milan: Mondadori, 1998. Tesio, Giovanni, Piemonte letterario dell’Otto-Novecento: da Giovanni Faldella a Primo Levi, Rome: Bulzoni, 1991.

ORIANA FALLACI (1930–2006) Fallaci challenges at least three major cultural divides: that between the literary and the journalistic or documentary; that between the ‘‘high’’ literary culture and the popular; and that between the literary (understood as disinterested, self-transcending creation) and projection of the author’s autobiographical persona. Even before Tom Wolfe and others were championing the New Journalism, Fallaci was applying novelistic techniques, including self-dramatization, in her reportage volumes I sette peccati di Hollywood (Hollywood’s Seven Deadly Sins, 1958) and Il sesso inutile: viaggio intorno alla donna (The Useless Sex, 1961). This was to be developed into an existential drama of indecision in Se il sole muore (If the Sun Dies, 1965), about the pros and cons of space exploration, cast as a debate between Oriana and her father in Florence, and, more impressively, in her Vietnam testimony,

Niente e cosı` sia (Nothing and So Be It, 1969). These works are structured largely around the quasidramatic form of the interview, and Fallaci has published two volumes of straight interviews (several of them sharply adversarial, some of them warmly sympathetic): the celebrity interviews of Gli antipatici (Egotists: Sixteen Surprising Interviews, 1963); and the political interviews of Intervista con la storia (Interview with History, 1974, extended and revised, 1977), each carrying a partly different selection in the Italian and English versions. Each interview is prefaced by a fascinating introductory portrait. This is a literary microgenre that comprises some of Fallaci’s best writing. The earlier Penelope alla guerra (Penelope at the War, 1962) is fictional but captures aspects of the New York scene in 1957, with Queen Elizabeth’s visit and the panic caused by the appearance of the 681

ORIANA FALLACI first artificial satellite, the Russian Sputnik, and weaves experiences from Oriana’s own girlhood in wartime Florence into those of her androgynous heroine Gio, who searches New York for her lost love Richard (who also turns out to be androgynous). The (somewhat melodramatically contrived) uncanny theme in this novel reveals itself in a domineering mother figure and an overwhelming polymorphously oriented supermale and drives Gio back to Florence, her identity threatened, to reconstitute herself by writing the novel that we are reading. This ambiguously gendered and not unworthily experimental psychodrama did not fit in with the experimentalism current in the novel-writing of the time, and Fallaci has always been remarkable in going her own way in inventing new novelistic forms. The brief but intense Lettera a un bambino mai nato (Letter to a Child Never Born, 1975), originally conceived as a reportage on the abortion debate, turned into a quasiautobiographical (often taken too straightforwardly as autobiographical) dialogue with the child in the womb, addressed throughout in the second person, who, right at the end of the text, turns out to have died at the text’s opening. The narrative of a death in the womb thus turns out to have been a death in the womb of narrative, in a reversal of the mother’s life-denying discourse, which, rather than having caused the death of the fetus has itself been caused by the death of the fetus, which has acted as the lifedenying toxin. That this enigmatic text could have been read as a rejection (or a defence) of abortion is an object lesson in the freedom of (mis)reading. The single mother-to-be, a successful but socially vulnerable career woman, is the site of convergence of all the conflicting societal discourses on childbearing. All these discourses are persuasively relayed in the text in a variety of modes, including scientific photoreportage, dreams, and memories recounted to the presumed child as fairy tales, and are finally recapitulated in a dream in which the mother is on trial accused of murdering her child, and all the actors— father, friend, mother’s parents, male and female doctors—appear and speak for or against her. Their hung verdict is then confirmed by the child himself, who finds her both guilty and not guilty. It is when the mother awakes from this nightmare that she learns that the fetus has been dead from an early stage and that she too may be dying. The considerable originality in presenting the child as a mental and verbal construct, and the emotional urgency conveyed by the rhythms of the speaking voice, won Fallaci a mass readership, 682

but were dismissed by the intelligentsia as self-dramatization by the author and stylistic kitsch. The same reactions greeted the far more straightforwardly biographical and autobiographical Un uomo (A Man, 1979), in which Fallaci, in her own person as both recollecting narrator and as a figure within the narrative, addresses her dead partner, the Greek freedom fighter Alekos Panagoulis, retelling the story of his capture and confinement and of his political activity after his release, culminating in what she interprets as the staged car accident that kills him. Here, too, in this parodistic inversion of the action thriller, as in Lettera a un bambino mai nato, the Fallaci-narrator presents herself as being duped by her other: only at Alekos’ funeral, proleptically presented at the start of the narrative, does she realize that his death resulting from an apparent vocation for self-destruction is really his triumph, and that the million-and-a-half mourners are no longer a mindless herd, but have realized their power as citizens to achieve political justice and freedom. Fallaci’s most ambitious docufiction, InsciAllah (InshAllah, 1990) opens with the massive truck bombs that destroy the United States and French military headquarters in Beirut on 23 October 1983 and then novelistically tracks the existential trajectories of a heterogeneous array of Italian peacekeepers in their relations with significant others as they daily expect a similar attack against themselves. Through a multiplicity of dialects, Fallaci constructs a composite Italianness set in implicit contrast to the dark unknowable heart of Shiite Islam. Fallaci’s other ‘‘Other’’ is homoeroticism, which she sublimates in the Italian, Martino, and demonises in the Amal militia leader, Rashid. Chaos is metanarratively plotted as necessity, and the narrator’s ‘‘little Iliad’’ climaxes in the frightful Christmas battle between Christians and Shiites, to end counterfactually with the Shiite commander, Rashid, blowing up the vessel carrying the departing Italian troops and the rape and butchery of the French nuns left behind. This counterfactual ending now reads like a prophecy of civilizational conflict subsequently symbolized in the destruction of the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, an event that prompted Fallaci into penning the astoundingly vituperative invective of La rabbia e l’orgoglio (The Rage and the Pride, 2001), mustering all her histrionic skills of direct address, self-dramatization, colloquial eloquence, and selective evidence to denounce and vilify Islamic militants, and, explicitly enough, Islam as a whole, as the enemy of human civilization,

ORIANA FALLACI dedicated to returning the world to religious barbarism. How civilization can deal with this return of the repressed within the Western world (as in Fallaci) and within the Islamic world has yet to be seen.

Se il sole muore, 1965; as If the Sun Dies, translated by Pamela Swinglehurst, 1966. Niente e cosı` sia, 1969; as Nothing and Amen, 1972, and as Nothing and So Be It, translated by Isabel Quigley, 1972. La rabbia e l’orgoglio, 2001; as The Rage and the Pride, version by Oriana Fallaci, 2002.

Biography

Fiction

Born in Florence, 29 June 1930; inherited a fierce libertarianism from her socialist father and anarchist mother, and from the age of 13 played an active part in the Florentine Resistance—an experience whose memory figures in many of her works. Inspired by reading Jack London, the young Oriana aspired to be a writer. Her journalist uncle Bruno Fallaci recommended a medical career as providing the experience of life necessary to a writer, but she soon abandoned the medical course to start as a reporter in Florence. Worked for the Christian Democrat Il mattino dell’Italia centrale, 1946–1952, when she rebelled against the newspaper’s political bias. Joined the illustrated weekly L’europeo in 1956, basing herself in Milan, and specialized in reporting on and interviewing celebrities. In 1968, she wrote frontline reportages on the Vietnam War, even going on a dive-bombing raid, and was also gunned down in Mexico City while reporting a mass demonstration. These experiences led her to report on many other conflict situations, from the India-Pakistan conflict to Beirut to the first Gulf War, and to interview the world’s leading political personalities. One of these was the Greek freedom fighter Alexandros Panagoulis, when he was released from solitary confinement in 1973. Panagoulis and Fallaci became partners until his death in a suspicious car accident in 1976. Diagnosed with cancer, 1990. The terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, elicited from Fallaci, who has had an apartment in Manhattan since the 1970s, a sensational blast against Islam, first in a massive article in Il corriere della sera then in a volume, both titled La rabbia e l’orgoglio, 2001. Her best-selling volumes have established Fallaci, both inside and outside Italy, as the most uncompromising of the adversaries of Islam. Passed away in Florence on 15 September 2006. JOHN GATT-RUTTER Selected Works Reportage I sette peccati di Hollywood, 1958. Il sesso inutile: viaggio intorno alla donna, 1961; as The Useless Sex, translated by Pamela Swinglehurst, 1964.

Penelope alla guerra, 1962; as Penelope at the War, translated by Pamela Swinglehurst, 1966. Un uomo, 1979; as A Man, translated by William Weaver, 1980; rpt. 1981. InsciAllah, 1990; as InshAllah, translated by Oriana Fallaci, from a translation by James Marcus, 1992.

Interviews Gli antipatici, 1963; as Limelighters, translated by Pamela Swinglehurst, 1967; as Egotists: Sixteen Surprising Interviews, translated by Oriana Fallaci, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Pamela Swinglehurst, 1968. Intervista con la storia, 1974; extended and revised, 1977; a different selection as Interview with History, translated by John Shepley, 1976. Oriana Fallaci intervista Oriana Fallaci, 2004.

Other Quel giorno sulla luna, edited for school students by Alberto Pozzolini, 1970. Lettera a un bambino mai nato, 1975, revised 1993; audio recording ‘‘Oriana Fallaci legge Lettera a un bambino mai nato,’’ 1993; as Letter to a Child Never Born, translated by John Shepley, 1975; rpt. 1976; revised translation, 1982. La forza della ragione, 2003.

Further Reading Arico`, Santo L., ‘‘Oriana Fallaci’s Journalistic Novel: Niente e cosı` sia,’’ in Contemporary Women Writers In Italy: A Modern Renaissance, edited by S. Arico`, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990. Arico`, Santo L., Oriana Fallaci: The Woman and the Myth, Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998. Bo, Carlo, ‘‘Il grande continente del dolore,’’ in L’europeo, 5 December 1975: 6–7. Crimi, Bruno, ‘‘Oriana Fallaci, in arte Liala,’’ in Panorama, 19 May 1980, p. 169. Gatt-Rutter, John, Oriana Fallaci: The Rhetoric of Freedom, Oxford-Washington, DC: Berg, 1996. Gatt-Rutter, John, ‘‘How many birds to shoot? Facts and fallacies in the reportage narratives of Oriana Fallaci,’’ in Convivio (Brisbane), 3, no. 2 (October 1997): 119–126. Gatt-Rutter, John, ‘‘Narrative ‘You’ and ‘I’ in the Opening of Oriana Fallaci’s Un uomo,’’ in Essays in Modern Italian and French Literature: In Recollection of Tom O’Neill, edited by Alastair Hurst and Tony Pagliaro, Melbourne: Spunti e Ricerche, La Trobe University, 2004. Gorlier, Claudio, ‘‘Insciallah, un romanzo popolare per raccontare il Caos,’’ in La stampa—Tuttolibri, 11 August 1990, p. 5. Maglie, Maria Giovanna, Oriana: Incontri e passioni di una grande italiana, Milan: Mondadori, 2002.

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ORIANA FALLACI Medail, Cesare, ‘‘I perche´ di un best-seller in libreria,’’ in Il corriere della sera, 22 March 1976, p. 3. Milani, Marisa, ‘‘La lingua ‘effimera’ di Oriana Fallaci,’’ in La Battana, 8, no. 25 (1971): 23–49. Pickering-Iazzi, Robin, ‘‘Designing Mothers: Images of Motherhood in Novels by Aleramo, Morante, Maraini and Fallaci,’’ in Annali d’Italianistica, 7 (1989): 325–340. Rosa, Giovanna, ‘‘Il nome di Oriana,’’ in Pubblico 1982: Produzione letteraria e mercato culturale, edited by

Vittorio Spinazzola, Milan: Milano Libri Edizioni, 1982; rpt. in V. Spinazzola (editor), Il successo letterario, Milan: Unicopli, 1985. Turoldo, Davide Maria, ‘‘Viaggio nel vulcano Insciallah,’’ in Il corriere della sera, 2 August 1990, p. 5. Zangrandi, Silvia, A servizio della realta`: Il reportage narrativo dalla Fallaci a Severgnigni, Milan: Unicopli, 2003.

FAMILY SAYINGS See Lessico famigliare (Work by Natalia Ginzburg)

FANTASTIC AND LITERATURE There is some confusion in the usage of the term ‘‘fantastic’’ in literary criticism. A number of critics, especially from the English-speaking countries, use it in connection with such terms as ‘‘fancy,’’ ‘‘imagination,’’ ‘‘fiction,’’ and go so far as to identify ‘‘fantastic’’ with ‘‘fictional’’ and to consider all creative literature a product of ‘‘fantasy’’ and therefore ‘‘fantastic.’’ Other critics, mainly based in France and especially after the publication of Tzvetan Todorov’s Introduction a` la litte´rature fantastique (1970), tended to restrict the term to a specific kind of text, produced in a particular historical period: the Romantic and post-Romantic times in the nineteenth century, first in Germany and France, then in other countries. The German and French practitioners of fantastic literature, although drawing from themes and procedures of the British eighteenth-century tradition of the Gothic novel, were aware of breaking new ground. The novelty of the stories that E. T. A. Hoffmann called Nachtstu¨cke (noctural pieces) or Phantasiestu¨cke (pieces of fantasy) and their French imitators The´ophile Gautier, Charles Nodier, and Guy de Maupassant called re´cits fantastiques (fantastic narratives), consisted 684

in the insertion of elements of supernatural origin (prodigies, apparitions, unexplainable events) in a perfectly natural, everyday world, thus engendering a reaction of fear and uneasiness, which Sigmund Freud would later name the experience of the Unheimliche, or the uncanny. Among the early practitioners of the fantastic, of which there are no prominent Italian writers, and even those who, in the late 1860s, started to imitate the French models, appeared not to have contributed in an original and notable way to the development of the genre. Such is the case of Iginio Ugo Tarchetti, who published his first collection of Racconti fantastici (Fantastic Tales) in 1869, and the brothers Arrigo and Camillo Boito, all belonging to the bohemian movement of the Scapigliatura in Milan. Arrigo was also a composer and a librettist for Verdi’s operas, while Camillo was an architect and a professor of fine arts. In 1992, Italo Calvino was asked to compile a collection of Racconti fantastici dell’Ottocento (Fantastic Tales of the Nineteenth Century). He decided to leave out the Italians, who seemed to him inferior to their European or American counterparts.

FANTASTIC AND LITERATURE Of the belated arrival of fantastic literature in Italy, there have been various explanations, the most popular being that Italy, like all other Mediterranean countries, from ancient Greece to modern Spain and France, was a sunlit and joyful nation. Northern ghosts could not inhabit their soil; the fantastic went against their ge´nie national (national genius), and even when writers attempted it, it was only an unfortunate imitation of Northern imagery. Heinrich Heine exclaimed in 1835: ‘‘und franzo¨sische Gespenster! Welch ein Widerspruch in den Worten!’’ (and French ghosts! What a contradiction in terms!) (‘‘Die Romantische Schule,’’ 1935). In a 1914 essay on Arrigo Boito, Benedetto Croce wrote: L’anima italiana tende, naturalmente, al definito e all’armonico. Bene invase e corse l’Italia, dopo il 1815, una nordica cavalcata di spettri, di vergini morenti, di angelidemoni, di disperati e cupi bestemmiatori, e si udirono scricchiolii di scheletri, e sospiri e pianti e sghignazzate di folli e deliri di febbricitanti. Ma tutto cio` fu moda e non poesia The Italian soul leans naturally toward the definite and harmonious. It is true that after 1815, Italy was invaded by a Northern cavalcade of ghosts, dying virgins, angeldemons, desperate and gloomy blasphemers and one could hear the creaking of skeletons, the sighing, weeping and guffaws of fools and delirious cries of feverish people. But all that was simply fashion, not poetry (La letteratura della Nuova Italia, 1947)

H. P. Lovecraft explained in 1927: ‘‘in the Latin races there is a touch of basic rationality which denies, to their strangest superstitions, many of the overtones of glamour so characteristic of our own forest-born and ice-fostered whisperings’’ (Supernatural Horror in Literature, 1927). Ethnic explanations of this kind do not pass a critical scrutiny. Ghosts, haunted houses, and supernatural events abound in the ancient and classical cultures of the Mediterranean, as attested to by Herodotus or Pliny. From those very cultures come sources of experience for the uncanny, or even, according to some scholars who believe in ethnic differences, a special type of Mediterranean fantastic, as opposed to the Northern one. Scholars who support this theory either mention the haunting presence of the god Pan in the Greek pastoral landscape, or the theory of melancholy (black humor) elaborated by the Greek medical school, or the torments inflicted to the early Christian fathers by noontide demons and desert temptations. Indeed the fantastic mode in literature does not belong exclusively to any specific cultural area (there are Northern or Southern ghosts in French

literature, in Russian literature, etc.), and in Italy, the belated arrival of the fantastic was accompanied by the inclusion of fantastic themes in Italian operas by Gaetano Donizetti (Lucia di Lammermoor, 1835), Giuseppe Verdi (Macbeth, 1847), Arrigo Boito (Mefistofele, 1875), Alfredo Catalani (Loreley, 1890), Antonio Smareglia (La falena, 1890), and Pietro Mascagni (Guglielmo Ratcliff, 1895). During the twentieth century, moreover, the dearth of good Italian fantastic literature has given way to a strong and original tradition of texts belonging to the genre. There is a striking difference between nineteenth-century Italian fantastic literature and that of the twentieth century: The first tends to be derivative, and is based on foreign models, while the second, even though appearing after the great age of fantastic literature in other countries, tends to be original and capable of creating new forms and exploiting new themes. The dependence of nineteenth-century Italian fantastic on foreign models is exemplified by the case of Tarchetti, who desperately tried to make a living by writing pieces for literary and musical journals and by translating novels. Melancholic by character, experimental in many of his works, Tarchetti (1839–1869) is the author of an antiwar novel, Una nobile follia (A Noble Folly, 1867), and Fosca (1869) on a morbid love affair between a young man and an emaciated, skeletal woman. In his tales, he uses many of the most common themes of the fantastic, depending heavily on his models: One story, published in Rivista minima in 1865 with the title of ‘‘Il mortale immortale (dall’inglese)’’ (The Mortal Immortal, from English) and later republished in Emporio pittoresco (1868) as ‘‘L’elixir dell’immortalita` (imitazione dall’inglese)’’ (The Elixir of Immortality, Imitation from English), was in reality an almost word-by-word translation of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s ‘‘The Mortal Immortal’’ (1833). ‘‘Un osso di morto’’ (A Dead Man’s Bone, 1869) takes its inspiration from a famous story by The´ophile Gautier, ‘‘Le pied de Momie’’ (The Mummy’s Foot, 1840), and is remarkable for its use of the typical fantastic device of the mediating object: A ghost comes at night to recover a missing bone from his skeleton that was stolen and taken home by an employee of a medical school. The following morning, when the man is asking himself if the visit from the ghost was a dream, he realizes that the bone has disappeared. Another story, ‘‘Uno spirito in un lampone’’ (A Spirit in a Raspberry, 1869), draws from ‘‘Le bourgmestre en bouteille’’ (The Burgomaster in a Bottle, 1862) by the Alsatian writers E´mile 685

FANTASTIC AND LITERATURE Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian; and ‘‘I fatali’’ (The Fated, 1869) derives from The´ophile Gautier’s ‘‘Jettatura’’ (‘‘The Evil Eye,’’ 1856), E. T. A. Hoffmann’s ‘‘Prinzessin Brambilla’’ (1820), and Petrus Borel’s ‘‘Madame Putip-her’’ (1839). Largely dependent on French models are also Luigi Gualdo’s Novelle (1868), while those written by the Neapolitan poet Salvatore di Giacomo recapture, in a vein of entertainment, the atmosphere of German social life, as it is shown already from the title: ‘‘Pipa e boccale’’ (Pipe and Tankard, 1893). Of some interest are Luigi Capuana’s ‘‘Storia fosca’’ (A Grim Story, 1883), Remigio Zena’s ‘‘Confessione postuma’’ (Posthumous Confession, 1897), and Antonio Fogazzaro’s opening pages of Malombra (The Woman, 1881). Though not numerous, the stories written by the brothers Arrigo and Camillo Boito are considered by many to be masterpieces of the genre. They are deftly written, dotted with well-chosen details, and show good insights into the social life of the time. Arrigo’s ‘‘L’alfier nero’’ (The Black Bishop, 1867) centers on a game of chess played in a luxurious Swiss hotel between an American professional player and an inexperienced black gentleman of Caribbean origin, who surprisingly wins, thus symbolically representing the fierce confrontation taking place at the time between white British colonists and black insurgents in Jamaica. ‘‘Il pugno chiuso’’ (The Clenched Fist, 1870) takes place in a Poland ravaged by poverty, contagious illnesses, and hatred of the Jews. In Camillo’s ‘‘Un corpo’’ (A Corpse, 1870), which is set in Vienna, a romantic painter and an anatomist search for the secret of feminine beauty in the corpse of a woman who had mysteriously died. As to the influence of the fantastic mode on Italian literature of the twentieth century, there are a number of Italian writers who were attracted to and made use of it. Alberto Savinio (1891–1952), a writer and painter (like his brother Giorgio De Chirico), was fully immersed in the culture of the French and European avant-garde and loosely connected with Andre´ Breton’s movement of surrealism. From an early age, he was acquainted with psychoanalysis and the writings of Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung. In his novel La casa ispirata (The Inspired House, 1925), the old fantastic theme of the haunted house takes a new form; the ghosts ( fantoˆmes) of popular superstition become projections of the psychic life of the characters and their unconscious fantasies ( fantasmes). In Savinio’s works, the fantastic is largely modified by the theories of Freud and psychoanalysis. 686

Tommaso Landolfi (1908–1979) is probably the most productive, articulate and self-critical practitioner of fantastic literature in Italy during the past century. His first collections of short stories, entitled Dialogo dei massimi sistemi (Dialogue Concerning the Chief World Systems, 1937), Il Mar delle Blatte e altre storie (The Sea of the Cockroaches and Other Stories, 1939), and La spada (The Sword, 1942) contain perfect examples of fantastic stories on the model of the classical authors of the nineteenth century. The same can be said of his three novels from the same period: La pietra lunare (The Moonstone, 1939), Racconto d’autunno (Autumn Story, 1947), and Cancroregina (Cancerqueen, 1950). After these literary beginnings, which remind us of the Argentinean writer Julio Corta´zar, Landolfi experiments with autobiographical and metafictional narratives. The fantastic dimension, sometimes reduced to a linguistic quirk, others completely interiorized, or even combined with other dimensions, continues to be present in later novels and collections of short stories: Ombre (Shadows, 1954), In societa` (In Society, 1962), Racconti impossibili (Impossible Tales, 1966), Un paniere di chiocciole (A Basket of Snails, 1968), which contains ‘‘Parole in agitazione’’ (Words in Commotion), Le labrene (The Labrenas, 1974), A caso (At Random, 1975), Del meno (Less, 1978), and Il gioco della torre (The Game of the Tower, 1987). Landolfi has skillfully renovated the Italian tradition of the fantastic, to which he returns with a kind of obsession, and takes it to the extreme. Primo Levi (1919–1987) perceptively analyzed what he considered to be the flaws and faults of the world in which we live, not only in his famous memoirs of survival from a Nazi concentration camp, but also in some of his short stories assembled in Storie naturali (Natural Stories, 1966), Vizio di forma (Defect of Form, 1971), and Lilı´t (1981). In these stories, viewed through the lens of science fiction, Levi discloses the faults in the order of things as observed in everyday life, the behavior of human beings, and the rational laws that govern nature. Thus, the fantastic continues to have a strong moral and cognitive motivation. Antonio Tabucchi (1943–) has often resorted to the fantastic mode, by writing such stories as ‘‘I pomeriggi del sabato’’ (Saturday Afternoons) in Il gioco del rovescio (Letter from Casablanca, 1983), ‘‘Gli incanti’’ (Spells) and ‘‘Anywhere Out of the World’’ (1985) in Piccoli equivoci senza importanza (Little Misunderstandings of No Importance, 1985). He has also introduced fantastic themes in his novels Notturno indiano (Indian

FANTASTIC AND LITERATURE Nocturne, 1984) Requiem, uma alucinac¸ao, written in Portuguese (Requiem: A Hallucination, 1991), and Si sta facendo sempre piu` tardi, romanzo in forma di lettere (It Is Always Becoming Later: A Novel in Form of Letters, 2001). Tabucchi is a postmodern writer, ironic and nostalgic, who draws from the fantastic in order to question the ontological basis of our experience and place in the world. Typically postmodern, for instance, is ‘‘Anywhere Out of the World,’’ with uncanny telephone calls to and from another world, and with Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris functioning as a subtext. Among the many Italian writers who practiced the fantastic, Giovanni Papini (1881–1956) wrote metaphysical stories that attracted the attention of Jorge Luis Borges. Some were collected in Tragico quotidiano (Everyday Tragedy, 1905) and Pilota cieco (Blind Pilot, 1906). Italo Svevo (1861–1928) wrote at least two stories that borrow on the fantastic: ‘‘Lo specifico del dottor Menghi’’ (‘‘Doctor Menghi’s Remedy,’’ before 1904) and ‘‘Il malocchio’’ (The Evil Eye), which was left incomplete. In his Novelle, Luigi Pirandello relies on strange, absurd, paradoxical incidents as well as real encounters with the supernatural. His last collection, Una giornata (One Day, 1937), introduces elements of the surreal and the fantastic. Also, Massimo Bontempelli (1878–1960), who launched the movement called realismo magico, emphasized the metaphysical and the irrational, leading to the surreal stories of Quasi d’amore (Almost of Love, 1926). Besides writing realistic stories on the life of the Italian (especially Roman) middle or lower classes, in I sogni del pigro (The Dreams of the Lazy One, 1940), Alberto Moravia explores the realms of the improbable and the strange. Dino Buzzati’s works rely on the imitation or remake of texts rooted in the tradition of the gothic, the fantastic, stories of vampires, and allegorical tales. His models remain Hoffmann, Poe, Oscar Wilde, and especially Kafka. Giorgio Manganelli, a connoisseur of the gothic and fantastic tradition spanning from Poe to Lovecraft, wrote fantastic stories assembled in Hilarotragoedia (1964) and Centuria (1979). He was also close to Borges and his idea of literary fiction. Italo Calvino’s interest in the fantastic enticed him into collecting the Racconti italiani dell’Ottocento (Fantastic Tales, 1983); however, none of his novels can be truly considered to be fantastic. The neorealist Anna Maria Ortese published a fantastic story, ‘‘L’infanta sepolta’’ (The Buried Infant, 1948), where she animates an in-animated object, and the collection In

sonno e in veglia (Sleeping and Waking, 1987), which comprises two stories on haunted houses: ‘‘Sulla terrazza sterminata’’ (On the Boundless Terrace) and ‘‘La casa del bosco’’ (The House in the Woods). In her last novel, Alonso e i visionari (Alonso and the Visionaries, 1996), Ortese includes elements of the fantastic, though other narrative modes prevail. Carlo Sgorlon experimented with the fantastic in La notte del ragno mannaro (The Night of the Were-Spider, 1990). Writers such as Federigo Tozzi, Arturo Loria, Elsa Morante, and Goffredo Parise, and others, have been influenced by the general fantastic trend, away from the spectacular, and toward more psychologically driven writing. REMO CESERANI Further Reading Albertazzi, Silvia, Il punto su: La letteratura fantastica, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1993. Amigoni, Ferdinando, Fantasmi nel Novecento, Turin: Bollati-Boringhieri, 2004. Bellotto, Silvia, Metamorfosi del fantastico: Immaginazione e linguaggio nel racconto surreale italiano del Novecento, Bologna: Pendragon, 2003. Bonifazi, Neuro, Teoria del fantastico e il racconto fantastico in Italia: Tarchetti- Pirandello-Buzzati, Ravenna: Longo, 1982. Borges, Jorge Luis (editor), Giovanni Papini, Lo specchio che fugge, Parma: F. M. Ricci, 1975. Borges, Jorge Luis (with Silvina Ocampo and A. Bioy Casares), Antologı´a de la literatura fanta´stica, Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamerica, 1980; as The Book of Fantasy, New York: Viking, 1988. Caillois, Roger, Au coeur du fantastique, Paris: Gallimard, 1963. Caillois, Roger, Les de´mons du midi, Saint-Cle´ment-LaRivie`re: Fata Morgana, 1991. Calvino, Italo (editor), Racconti fantastici dell’Ottocento, Milan: Mondadori, 1983. Calvino, Italo, ‘‘Definizioni di territori: Il fantastico,’’ and ‘‘Il fantastico nella letteratura italiana,’’ in Saggi 1945–1985, edited by Mario Barenghi, Milan: Mondadori, 1999. Ceserani, Remo, et alia, La narrazione fantastica, Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1983. Ceserani, Remo, Il fantastico, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1996. Contini, Gianfranco (editor), Italia magica: Racconti surreali novecenteschi scelti e presentati da Gianfranco Contini, Turin: Einaudi, 1988. Corsaro, Antonio (editor), ‘‘Profili del fantastico italiano del Novecento,’’ in Stazione di Posta, special issue, nos. 51–52 (1993). Croce, Benedetto, La letteratura della Nuova Italia, vol. 1, Bari: Laterza, 1947. D’Arcangelo, Lucio (editor), Enciclopedia fantastica italiana: Ventisette racconti da Leopardi a Moravia, Milan: Mondadori, 1993.

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FANTASTIC AND LITERATURE Desideri, Giovannella, ‘‘Il fantastico,’’ in Letteratura italiana: Storia e Geografia, edited by Alberto Asor Rosa, vol. 3, Turin: Einaudi, 1989. Di Fazio, Margherita, ‘‘Nei territori del ‘fantastico,’’’ in Interrogare la finzione: Testi narrativi ed esperienze di lettura, Rome: Edizioni associate, 2002. Farnetti, Monica, Il giuoco del maligno: Il racconto fantastico nella letteratura italiana tra Otto e Novecento, Florence: Vallecchi, 1988. Farnetti, Monica (editor), Racconti fantastici di scrittori veristi, Milan: Mursia, 1990. Farnetti, Monica, L’irruzione del vedere nel pensare: Saggi sul fantastico, Pasian di Prato: Campanotto, 1996. Finne´, Jacques (editor), L’Italie fantastique: De Boccaccio a` Landolfi, Verviers: Ge´rard, 2000. Finzi, Gilberto (editor), Racconti neri della Scapigliatura, Milan: Mondadori, 1980. Freud, Sigmund, ‘‘Das Unheimliche,’’ in special issue of Imago, vol. 5, nos. 5–6 (1917–1919); as The Uncanny, New York: Penguin Books, 2003. Galletti, Marina (editor), Le soglie del fantastico, Rome: Lithos, 1996. Ghidetti, Enrico, Il sogno della ragione: Dal racconto fantastico al romanzo popolare, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1984. Ghidetti, Enrico, and Leonardo Lattarulo (editors), Notturno italiano: Racconti fantastici del Novecento, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1984. Guarnieri Corazzo, Adriana, ‘‘Fantasmi, allucinazioni e seduttrici soprannaturali nell’opera italiana del secondo Ottocento,’’ in Desiderio e trasgressione nella letteratura fantastica, edited by Michela Vanon Alliata, Venice: Marsilio, 2002.

Guidi, Oretta, Sul fantastico e dintorni. Saggi sulla letteratura italiana del Novecento: Palazzeschi, Svevo, Landolfi, Moravia, Pisolini, Levi, Calvino, Perugina: Guerra, 2003. Heine, Heinrich, ‘‘Die romanische Schule,’’ in Sa¨mtliche Schriften, vol. 3, edited by K. Po¨rnbacher, Mu¨nchen: Carl Hanser, 1971. Lazzarin, Stefano, ‘‘‘Centuria’: Le sorti del fantastico nel Novecento,’’ in Studi novecenteschi, 24 (1997): 99–145. Lazzarin, Stefano, Il modo fantastico, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2000. Lovecraft, H. P., Supernatural Horror in Literature, (1st ed. 1927), edited by E. F. Bleiler, New York: Dover Publications, 1973. Pellini, Pierluigi, Il quadro animato: Tematiche artistiche e letteratura fantastica, Milan: Edizioni dell’Arco, 2001. Pilo, Gianni, and Sebastiano Fusco (editors), Fantasmi italiani, Rome: Newton Compton, 1994. Reim, Riccardo (editor), Da uno spiraglio: Racconti neri e fantastici dell’Ottocento italiano, Rome: Newton Compton, 1992. Roda, Vittorio, I fantasmi della ragione: Fantastico, scienza e fantascienza nella letteratura italiana fra Otto e Novecento, Naples: Liguori, 1996. Todorov, Tzvetan, Introduction a` la litte´rature fantastique, Paris: Seuil, 1970; as The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975. Venuti, Lawrence, ‘‘Dissidence,’’ in Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation, London-New York: Routledge, 1995.

SALVATORE FARINA (1846–1918) A prolific novelist, Salvatore Farina enjoyed great popularity in his lifetime, to the point that many critics referred to him as the ‘‘Italian Charles Dickens.’’ His novels and short stories portray aspects of the family life of the lower middle classes in Northern Italy, often with a consolatory happy ending. Indeed, as Farina himself wrote in a letter to his friend, the political journalist Ferdinando Petruccelli della Gattina (1815–1890), the aim of his work was that of ennobling and exalting the family as the fulcrum of society. The titles of his novels are in themselves eloquent and denote the tone of the books, which alternate between Romantic idealism and naturalism, thus changing in part the characteristics of both: his Romanticism is less passionate and his naturalism less forceful. 688

Among Farina’s narrative works, one of the most successful is Il tesoro di Donnina (Donnina’s Treasure, 1873), an intimate portrait of a petit bourgeois milieu centred on a series of love stories depicted with charm and equilibrium. Farina’s style is simple and lively, if, at times, somewhat careless. A good observer, he succeeds in capturing scenes and figures effectively and often with a fine sense of humour, although occasionally a sentimental vein somewhat diminishes the overall effect. In Mio figlio! (My Son!, 1877–1881), some of Farina’s weaknesses are less apparent and it undoubtedly represents his most authentic achievement. The novel consists of a series of recollections of the quiet, close-knit family of a young lawyer. In the first chapters, everything seems monotonous,

SALVATORE FARINA the characters hardly animated, their personalities merely sketched. Yet, the flowing, light prose is to some extent a harbinger of the narrative to come in the new century, as it reacts to the by now hackneyed romantic conventions and shows a distinctive awareness of the humble facts of daily life. The trilogy La mia giornata (My Day, 1910–1915), an autobiographical work, comprises in one book the whole day of an entire life. It is a nostalgic collection of the writer’s personal memories, the only survivor of a group of friends, for whom nothing remains except for reliving through simple prose his own grief. It also bears witness to the cultural climate of the time and to the generation of artists, writers, and musicians who had animated the scapigliatura, all of whom Farina knew even though he kept his distance from them. To their themes and linguistic experimentalism, he preferred the ‘‘sentimental’’ fiction that made him a favourite among readers of the period. In Dall’alba al meriggio (From Dawn to Noon, 1910), Farina recalls his childhood in Sardinia, the frightening cholera epidemic that struck Sassari, the death of his mother, and his father’s decision to let his own children choose their new mother. Later, the family moves to Piedmont, where he spends his reckless youth. In Care ombre (Dear Shadows, 1913), he re-evokes numerous friends and literary figures, including Giovanni Verga, Eugenio Torelli Viollier, the first director of the newspaper Il Corriere della sera, which Farina contributed to founding in 1876, and his dear friend Igino Ugo Tarchetti, whose unfinished novel Fosca (1869) he completed. Of particular interest are the lucid analyses of emotions and the powerful and effective descriptions of people. Farina is considered one of the most notable events in the literary fashion of 1870s and 1980s, as Gaetano Mariani puts it in his Storia della Scapigliatura (1967), because of the enormous success of his works among both critics and readers. Indeed, his fame rests on the skillful interweaving of his journalistic vocation with the new forms of popular narrative in the Italian novel of the period.

Biography Salvatore Farina was born in Sorso, in the Sassari province, on 10 January 1846. He attended the faculty of law in Pavia and Turin, where he moved with his family after many years spent in Sardinia with his father who, as a king’s procurator, was often forced to move. He was a great

sportsman and more passionate about billiards than about his law studies. In 1868, he obtained his degree in Turin. He then moved to Milan after his marriage with a poor widow, with whom he had two children. He only left the city for occasional trips. In Milan, he met some of the most important figures of the cultural world of Lombardy: Giovanni Verga, who in 1881 dedicated to him the introductory letter to the short story ‘‘L’amante del Gramigna,’’ Edmondo De Amicis, Giuseppe Giacosa, and Igino Ugo Tarchetti. He worked extensively as a journalist and novelist. He contributed to the journals Nuova Antologia, directed the Gazzetta Musicale and the Rivista Minima. In spite of a form of amnesia, which lasted for more than 15 years, his literary production was abundant and successful. He died in Milan on 15 December 1918. ANDREA BOSELLO Selected Works Fiction Cuore e blasone, 1864. Due amori, 1869. Un segreto, 1869. Frutti proibiti, 1870. Il romanzo di un vedovo, 1871. Il tesoro di Donnina, 1873. Fante di picche, 1874. Amore bendato, 1875. Capelli biondi, 1876. Dalla spuma del mare, 1876. Un tiranno ai bagni di mare: tre scene dal vivo, 1876. Oro nascosto. Scene di vita borghese, 1878. Mio figlio!, 1879–1881. L’intermezzo e la pagina nera, 1879. Il marito di Laurina, 1879. Fra le corde di un contrabbasso, 1879. Il Signor Io, 1882. Amore ha cent’occhi, 1883. Si muore: Caporal Silvestro, 1884. L’ultima battaglia di prete Agostino, 1886. Pe’ belli occhi della gloria, 1887. Per la vita e per la morte, 1891. Piu` forte dell’amore, 1891. Vivere per amare, 1893. Amore bugiardo, 1893. Carta bollata, 1894. Il numero tredici, 1895. Madonnina bianca (vanitas): Narrazione, 1897. Fino alla morte, 1902. Il segreto del nevaio, 1909. La mia giornata, vols. 3 (Dall’alba al meriggio, 1910; Care ombre, 1913; Dal meriggio al tramonto, 1915). Il libro degli amori, 1911. Il secondo libro degli amori, 1912. Il libro dei paesi incantati, 1914.

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SALVATORE FARINA Further Reading Adamo, Sergia, ‘‘Le lettere di Salvatore Farina ad Angelo de Gubernatis,’’ La grotta della vipera, 83 (1998): 5–22. Balestrazzi, Agostino, Il romanzo di Salvatore Farina, Pavia: Istituto Tecnico Bellani, 1933. Croce, Benedetto, in Letteratura della nuova Italia, vol. 1, Bari: Laterza, 1929. Dendi, Vittoria, Un romanziere dimenticato, Salvatore Farina. Pisa: Officina arti grafiche Folcheto, 1921.

Manca, Dino (editor), Salvatore Farina: la figura e il ruolo a 150 anni dalla nascita. Sassari: EDES, 2001. Mariani, Gaetano, Storia della Scapigliatura, CaltanissettaRome: Sciascia, 1967. Pischedda, Bruno, Il feuilleton umoristico di Salvatore Farina, Naples: Liguori, 1997. Zimbone, Croce, Luigi Capuana, Salvatore Farina, Arturo Graf, Ada Negri: segnalazioni critiche, Catania: Greco, 1981.

FASCISM AND LITERATURE Although the actual dates for Italian Fascism are rarely contested (1922–1943), the study of Fascism and culture, of which the relation between Fascism and literature is part, posits different historical parameters. Recent critical studies illustrate the improbability that Fascist cultural practices, however variegated, emerge ex novo at the beginning of the regime. The thrust of the recent scholarship on Italian Futurism, for example, explores that movement as ‘‘proto-Fascist’’ in nature, a sort of organic precursor to the ideological rhetoric of the regime. Indeed, we can consider the movement of Fascism, particularly in its beginnings, as the organic completion of certain ideological premises of Futurism, in its self-presentation as an avant-garde, in the myth of youth, in its bold interventionism, in its exasperated relationship with the masses, and in the identification of politics and spectacle. Fascism wished to move forward to a new world order and backward to reclaim the mythopoetic bases of Italy’s glorious and imperial past. This dual movement also mirrors language during the regime, which is also often contradictory in nature, as Barbara Spackman illustrated by way of an explication of Benito Mussolini’s political speeches in her Fascist Virilities (1996). The epistemological bases for Fascism antedate its taking political shape in Italy and endure after the fall of the regime on 25 July 1943, when the Duce was voted out of office by the Grand Council and arrested. The study of the ways in which cultural representations and ideology imbricate one with the other has expanded the understanding of how Fascist ideology operates. Much scholarship on ideology has focused on its nature and conception: It is either rationally conceived 690

and put into operation, as Zeev Sternhell and others believe, or it is formed and performed according to more psychosocial tenets. Critics of Marxist tendency have occupied the latter position, and have provided richer answers to the related questions of dominance and hegemony as they relate to cultural representations. Because Fascism lacked a coherent cultural program, its effect, or rather the degree to which Italian intellectual life was affected by it, is a topic of some scholarly debate. In Making of the Fascist Self (1997), political theorist Mabel Berezin, for example, wisely questioned the degree to which the state can project meaning or cultural identity onto its citizenry. Such prudence, however, would deny the state’s open attempts to do just that. In assessing the incursion of the political into cultural practices, what is required, Robert Dombroski observed in L’esistenza ubbidiente (1984), is precision as regards the terms of the imaginary and its malleability by rhetoric and cultural interpellation. Interpellation itself is not a rigid practice and, like the imaginary, subject to historical circumstance and change. And the studies of Mario Isnenghi (L’educazione dell’italiano, 1979) and Sergio Luzzatto (Il corpo del duce, 1998) have shown clearly how it is often into the Italian intellectual periphery that the regime’s teachings penetrate more fully, with the mobilization of schools and with the mythologization and deification of the Duce. What makes a cultural expression or practitioner Fascist? Is it the writer’s relationship to the regime? Is it the degree to which Fascist values and ideology are detectible in the text? Is it the writer’s intention with regard to representing that

FASCISM AND LITERATURE ideology? The economic relation between Fascism and cultural practitioners, for example, offers some tangible (and not solely discursive) evidence on the relation of the Fascist state to cultural expression. The Ministry of Popular Culture (MinCulPop) supported various projects and subsidized many playwrights, novelists, and practitioners of the plastic and performing arts during the ventennio, as the 20-year period of Fascism in Italy is known. This does not mean, however, that all cultural expressions born of this economic support were Fascist in nature. In fact, in recent years and with the opening to the public of the archives of the MinCulPop, there is evidence to the contrary. However, state subsidy of cultural undertakings demonstrates an interest on the part of the state in using them to foster acceptance and adherence to the type of society envisioned even by Fascism. The complexity of these issues can be better understood by analyzing the specific literary production of the period. Well before the march on Rome on 28 October 1922 and the taking of political power by the Fascists, Italian poetry was bent on fomenting a different, though related, revolution. The poetic revolution theorized, endorsed, and advanced by the Futurists beginning in 1909 presages in some ways the political upheaval that would result in the collapse of the Giovanni Giolitti government and in Mussolini’s taking power. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Futurism’s radical sloganeer, clamored for the fiery death of many accepted social conventions, a holocaust that could bring about a new, modern, and ‘‘Futurist’’ society. Numerous manifestoes and performance pieces attest to the Futurists’ iconoclasm, but Italian poetry and poetic language took the brunt of Futurist fury. But not all poetry from approximately 1910 until the end of World War II took as its aim the glorification of violence and power and the destruction of poetic convention or the legacy of Italian lyric poetry. On the contrary, one could see in the works of Eugenio Montale, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Umberto Saba—the putative ‘‘Hermetic’’ poets—a reaction against such maneuvers. Montale’s early poems, especially in his collection Ossi di seppia (Cuttlefish Bones, 1926), quietly desist from the furor over denominating and being, both evident tendencies in Futurist poems. This is not to suggest that Montale is an apologist for traditional poetic expression; poetry needs renewal and rejuvenation, it simply need not be violent or destructive. As regards prose fiction, the critical tradition on the relation between Fascism and literature usually takes as its starting point Gabriele D’Annunzio,

seen in this sense as a ‘‘proto-Fascist,’’ especially in his role as inventor of new strategies of communication, of gestures, and phonic expressions. For their interest in and promotion of nationalist ideals, as well as their cultivation of a godlike hero, D’Annunzio’s prose writings and his protocolonialist dramaturgy, from Piu` che l’amore (More than Love, 1906) to La nave (The Ship, 1908), can be seen as prefatory to the heightened imperialism characteristic of the consolidated regime (1929– 1943). The decadent heroes of D’Annunzio’s oeuvre seek an unrecoverable mythic past, a theme Fascism was not indifferent to in its reclamation of the ‘‘new’’ Italian empire, something largely achieved through its colonial efforts as well as its architectural innovation in urban planning. In addition to nationalistic inclinations, D’Annunzio’s novels feature also Ubermenschlich (Superman-like) figures, especially evident in Le vergini delle rocce (The Maidens of the Rocks, 1895). Its protagonist, Claudio Cantelmo, intends to choose one consort from the mythic triad of Anatolia, Massimilia, and Violante. To return the favor of his choice, the young woman will give birth to his superhuman son. In addition to the plot inspired by Nietzsche and tinged with Wagner, D’Annunzio’s language is at once antisocial, democratic, and antipopulist. Indeed, the author’s oratorical style would influence the Duce’s own political addresses. If D’Annunzio’s works provided literary antecedents to Fascism, his life, too, was mined as a stunningly vivid embodiment of things only imagined in literature. The second decade of the twentieth century particularly brings this to light, as in the wake of the war with Turkey that led to the conquest of Lybia (1911–1912), D’Annunzio wrote the screenplay for Giovanni Pastrone’s epic silent film, Cabiria (1914). Pastrone’s classic masterpiece tells the story of the Second Punic War in various episodes set around the Mediterranean, underscoring Italian colonial expansion. But nothing brings D’Annunzio closer to actual politics than his occupation, following the end of World War I, of Fiume, the spit of land past Istria long sought after by Irredentists wishing to unite the entire Italian peninsula. The poet and his fellow men conquered the city between 1919 and 1920 in what has been viewed as a rehearsal for Mussolini’s ‘‘March on Rome.’’ The dispute with Yugoslavia over Fiume was only settled in 1924. Not far from Fiume, in his native Trieste, Italo Svevo offered a different narrative for this period. Born Ettore Schmitz, Svevo’s choice of pen name (both Italian and Swabian) indicates his incomplete 691

FASCISM AND LITERATURE sense of cultural allegiance. Not surprisingly, his works are not the paeans to nationalism that are D’Annunzio’s, telling rather the story of inetti (inept) protagonists who are a far cry from exceptional Ubermenschen. Zeno Cosini, the protagonist of La coscienza di Zeno (Zeno’s Conscience, 1923), offers an excellent, early literary portrait of a neurotic in search of a cure. The failure of the middle class to guard against the ‘‘moral sickness’’ of Fascism is surely one of the more classic interpretations available of the rise of the movement in the postwar years. La coscienza di Zeno concludes with an apocalyptic vision of an explosion that will end the world and out of which a new, healthy (which is to say not neurotically paralyzed) world can emerge. Though this vision is vaguely reminiscent of the Futurists’ cries for purgative violence and warfare, it is radically muted and solemn in tone. At the end of the 1920s, Alberto Moravia relates the story of the Ardengo family in Gli indifferenti (The Time of Indifference, 1929), a remarkable portrait of bourgeois apathy. Though Moravia’s characters suffer more from moral than political lethargy, the author’s critique of contemporary Roman society is exemplary. The widow Mariagrazia Ardengo, mother of Michele and Carla, has hidden for years her liaison with Leo Merumeci, a wealthy family friend. The once affluent Ardengos are down on their economic luck and mortgage their villa to Leo. Carla ultimately accepts Leo’s advances, driving Michele to buy a gun and attempt to avenge his sister’s honor. But Michele, like Svevo’s Zeno, botches most of what he tries to accomplish and the novel ends with the ‘‘respectable’’ suturing of upper-class convention: the engagement of Leo and Carla. The apathy of these ‘‘indifferent’’ characters has been seen as a sort of ante litteram existentialism, but also as the precursor to the illness and deviance portrayed in Moravia’s later novel Il conformista (The Conformist, 1951), which depicts the breakdown of Fascist bourgeois identity and the contradictory legacy of Mussolini’s regime. The writings of Alba de Ce´spedes tell a different tale, not only for the way they voice women’s concerns, but also for the role that Fascist censorship played in their publication. Although the majority of her novels follow the fall of the regime, de Ce´spedes’ Nessuno torna indietro (There’s no Turning Back, 1938) is set in Rome of 1934–1936 and portrays the lives of eight young women, who board together in a religious institution. Through her characters, de Ce´spedes traces the many ways 692

in which the regime sought to instrumentalize sex and gender in the interests of sham consensus. Despite that it fell afoul of Fascist censorship, the novel was a bestseller, and within two years of publication was into its 19th edition. During the Fascist period, the leading figure in the theater was Luigi Pirandello, who received financial support from the regime. To say that the tension between the real and the fictional is an allegory for politics under Fascism would be reductive in the extreme and would miss the existential underpinnings (and enduring qualities) of Pirandello’s drama. The writer’s equivocal adherence to the regime in 1924, in the wake of the Matteotti murder, is motivated by the emphasis placed on the imperviousness of faith to any rational proof in his mythical dramaturgy, and the marked emphasis on the subject’s right to believe against all evidence. Nonetheless, there are sure instances of Pirandello distancing himself from Fascism—for instance in La nuova colonia (The New Colony, 1928) and La favola del figlio cambiato (The Fable of the Changed Child, 1934), and in the allegorical story ‘‘C’e` qualcuno che ride’’ (Someone’s Laughing)— which mark the progressive rupture between the Sicilian writer and Fascism. Just as Pirandello had been followed by young colleagues such as Massimo Bontempelli and Corrado Alvaro when he joined the Fascist party and broke off his relations with liberal intellectuals, so did his gradual estrangement anticipate a more general process among writers and artists. The case for the state’s explicit intervention into the workings of a performance to achieve a designated end, the glorification of the state itself, is much clearer in the case of a spectacle like 18BL: Teatro di masse per masse (Theater of the Masses for the Masses), staged in Florence’s Cascine Park in April 1934. This avant-garde pageant, which drew its title from the first truck mass-produced by Fiat, celebrated the Italian armed forces and was staged outdoors in something not unlike a military parade. Though the reviews were mixed, the aim of the spectacle was clearly to create support for the increased modernization and mechanization of the armed forces as well as underscore the need for the military in Italy’s colonial campaigns. In three acts, ‘‘18BL’’ narrates the history of Italy even before the first year of the regime (as 1922 was known): Act I celebrates the Italian efforts during World War I; Act II introduces the first years of Fascism; and Act III highlights the regime’s plans to drain the Pontine Marshes and to force national

FASCISM AND LITERATURE regeneration. In any case, the propaganda machine turned more toward new media, from the radio to the cinema to the large open-air parades, than to old literary genres, which are considered of little influence on and marginal to the formation of consensus. The response on the part of the more disparaged genres, that is the novel and drama, occurred along three perspectives. First was the formation of a lively high-bourgeois alliance, on the Hungarian model, between escapist fiction and boulevard theater, exemplified by the works of the Jewish writer Aldo De Benedetti (1892–1970), famous at the time for his popular Due dozzine di rose scarlatte (Two Dozen Red Roses, 1936). Second was the development of alternative models, such as the American society praised in the anthology Americana, which Elio Vittorini published in 1941 in an edition that was immediately seized by the censors. Finally came the surge of minimalist productions and depressing repertoires in the university theaters of the Gioventu` Universitaria Fascista (or GUF), occasioned by the anguish and terror of the looming military defeat and the collapse of the regime in 1943. The promulgation of the racial laws in 1938, which resulted among other things in the expulsion of Jews, both students and teachers, from the schools and from the most prestigious professions, provoked a kind of trauma in intellectual circles that, with the disappearance of any real consensus, paved the way to the counteroffensive of the Resistance a few years later. ELLEN NERENBERG Further Reading Adamson, Walter, ‘‘Modernism and Fascism: The Politics of Culture in Italy, 1903–1922,’’ in American Historical Review, 95, no. 2 (1990): 359–390. Belardelli, Giovanni, Il Ventennio degli intellettuali. Cultura, politica, ideologia nell’Italia fascista, Rome-Bari: 2005. Ben-Ghiat, Ruth, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922–1945, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Berezin, Mabel, Making of the Fascist Self: The Political Culture of Interwar Italy. Cornell: Cornell University Press, 1997. Cannistraro, Philip V., La fabbrica del consenso: Fascismo e mass media, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1975. Capristo, Annalisa, L’espulsione degli ebrei dalle accademie italiane, Turin: Zamorani, 2002. De Felice, Renzo, Interpretations of Fascism, translated by Brenda Huff, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977. De Felice, Renzo (editor), Futurismo, cultura, e politica, Turin: Edizioni della Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli, 1988.

De Grazia, Victoria, The Culture of Consent: The Organization of Mass Leisure in Fascist Italy, New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Dombroski, Robert, L’esistenza ubbidiente: Letterati italiani sotto il fascismo, Naples: Guida Editori, 1984. Fascism and Culture, special issues of Modernism and Modernity, 2, no. 3 (1995) and 3, no. 1 (1996). Forgacs, David (editor), Rethinking Italian Fascism: Capitalism, Populism, Culture, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1986. Gallucci, Carole and Ellen Nerenberg (editors), Writing Beyond Fascism: Cultural Resistance in the Life and Works of Alba de Ce´spedes, Cranbury, NJ: FairleighDickinson University Press, 2000. Golsan, Richard (editor), Fascism, Aesthetics and Culture, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1992. Isnenghi, Mario, L’educazione dell’italiano: il fascismo e l’organizzazione della cultura, Bologna: Cappelli, 1979. Laclau, Ernesto, ‘‘Fascism and Ideology,’’ in Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory: Capitalism, Fascism, and Populism. London: Verso, 1977. Luti, Giorgio, Cronache letterarie tra le due guerre 1920/40, Bari: Laterza, 1966. Luzzatto, Sergio, Il corpo del duce: un cadavere tra immaginazione, storia e memoria, Turin: Einaudi, 1998. Meldolesi, Claudio, ‘‘Atti di fede e polemiche al tramonto dei teatri del guf,’’ in Biblioteca teatrale, 21–22 (1978): 91–159. Parlare fascista: Lingua del fascismo, politica linguistica del fascismo, special issue of Movimento operaio e socialista, 7, no. 1 (1984). Pedulla`, Gianfranco, Il mercato delle ide´e: Giovanni Gentile e la Casa editrice Sansoni, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1986. Pedulla`, Gianfranco, Il teatro italiano nel tempo del fascismo, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1994. Pickering-Iazzi, Robin (editor), Mothers of Invention: Women, Italian Fascism, and Culture, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. Puppa, Paolo, ‘‘La commedia italiana tra rose scarlatte e littoriali,’’ in Il teatro dei testi. La drammaturgia italiana nel Novecento, Turin: Utet, 2003. Salaris, Claudia, Artecrazia: L’avanguardia futurista negli anni del fascismo. Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1992. Sarfatti, Michele, Mussolini contro gli ebrei: cronaca dell’elaborazione delle leggi del 1938, Turin: Zamorani, 1994. Scarpellini, Emanuela, Organizzazione teatrale e politica del teatro nell’Italia fascista, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1989. Schnapp, Jeffrey, Staging Fascism: 18BL and the Theater of the Masses for the Masses, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. Spackman, Barbara, Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy in Italy, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Sternhell, Zeev, Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France, translated by David Maisel, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Sternhell, Zeev, Mario Sznajder, and Maia Asheri, The Birth of Fascist Ideology, translated by David Maisel, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994.

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FASHION AND LITERATURE

FASHION AND LITERATURE Since the mid-1980s, fashion has become a multidisciplinary field of enquiry that has seen the publication of scholarly work from a variety of disciplines in the arts, humanities, and the social sciences. Beginning with the classical study Die Mode (1905), by Georg Simmel, fashion has been considered as a manifestation of the ‘‘newness’’ and modernity typically associated with the nineteenth century, the period of the triumph of capitalism. The textile industry, for example, was at the core of both the industrial revolution and colonialism, as well as of the struggle for independence from colonial rule, as in the case of India. We would, however, do well to expand the notion of the modern and the new in order to see how fashion manifested itself in the very early stages of capitalism, a period of deep social and economic transformations. Indeed, fashion lends itself as a signal of such transformations in the sphere not only of the economy, but also those of the world order and culture. In recent years, studies on the relationship between fashion and literature, such as those on authors like Henry James or Honore´ De Balzac and others that focus mainly on French or AngloAmerican writers, are gradually appearing. Although the vestimentary description is part and parcel of the description of the characters in the fiction, we do not yet have either a systematic study that addresses methodological issues regarding the general approach to fashion and literature, or any work in which Italian literature is represented. Even the recently published Encyclopedia of Clothing and Fashion (2004) does not contain a specific entry on this topic, listing only a number of authors (mainly French) whose writings had a bearing on fashion and modernity, such as Baudelaire, and clothing, appearance, class, taste, and social performance (Balzac, Proust, Mallarme´), whose work is relevant for an understanding of the worldly meanings of clothing in shaping identity, gender, and social class in the new urban space as well as the myriad of micro social spaces as the salon, the opera, or the department store. In the volume the reader finds entries on ‘‘fashion and music’’ or ‘‘fashion and cinema,’’ but not ‘‘fashion and literature.’’ Yet, interestingly enough, Italian literature, although unrepresented in the study on the subject as 694

a whole, can offer insights into understanding the formation of a discourse on fashion and dress during crucial phases in history. Indeed, if we view literary production and its links with visual and material culture through the lens of fashion, we arrive at a new understanding of the relationship between worldliness and the dressed body, as well as the personal and political intricacies embedded in their constant interplay. From such a perspective, it is possible to study the history of culture, while at the same time unpacking the intricacies of that culture in its relation to politics and aesthetics. However, in the case of Italy, interest in fashion does not develop in the nineteenth century, but much earlier, in the early modern period in which we can trace an awareness and theory of clothing of the dressed body that is inscribed in a system of both production and signification that only later would be called ‘‘fashion.’’ The term moda (fashion), in fact, first appears in the Italian lexicon with the publication of Agostino Lampugnani’s La carrozza da nolo (The Rented Carriage, 1645). If moda as a word does not appear to mean ‘‘la cosa degli habiti,’’ as Cesare Vecellio calls it in his Habiti antichi et moderni di tutto il mondo (Old and Modern Clothing of the all World, 1590), the term still has a central role in the economy, culture, and politics of European Renaissance courts and cities. Recent studies on consumption, luxury, the fashion industry, costume, and Italian conduct literature have offered a broader historical span and perspective in the analysis of fashion during the early stages of capitalism and show how fashion, appearance, and dress are not solely contemporary concerns. Fashion as a manifestation of ‘‘newness’’ and desire to ‘‘change’’ manifests itself during the early stages of capitalism in Europe, especially with the expansion and growth of urbanization in the Italian communes. It was in the Middle Ages that, with the gradual development of trade and production of cloth and luxury textiles, the tensions engendered by the ongoing economic and social transformation can be identified. With the gradual development of urban life, it was not only aristocrats who showed concern with their appearance in dress, but also and especially the merging mercantile classes.

FASHION AND LITERATURE These economic, social and cultural transformations engendered two opposite and yet complementary forces that sought to regulate social life, appearances, issues of morality, and decorum. On the one hand, the gradual and steady growth in availability of luxury goods like textiles and jewels, as well as the formation of an urban entrepreneurial middle class who could afford to dress in princely attire; on the other the moralists and state legislators who tried via the sumptuary laws and sermons to control the social body, class mobility, the desire for luxury goods, and any changes in dress, class and gender codes. The main concerns that drove the regulations emanated by local government or the church were of a class, gender, and economic nature. These laws, however, never completely succeeded in creating the order they aimed to establish or maintain. Not only were they not always observed literally, they were also at times creatively interpreted by women in such a way that new styles were invented. This was the case of Nicolosa Sanuti during the fifteenth century, who wrote a letter in response to the Bolognese sumptuary legislations in which she affirms that female dress and ornamentation do not diminish her virtue, but illustrate it. If not yet moda, clothing and dress were very much present as social, moral, political, and economic concerns. Luxurious attire and fabric, especially trains, were furiously condemned in the sermons of medieval preachers such as San Bernardino da Siena as being the earthly manifestation of the devil’s temptations. The texts of this type of legislation that was emanated in Italy and Europe have only recently begun to be studied. Together with the preachers’ sermons and epistolary reactions, as in the case of Sanuti and others, it can constitute an important historical and literary patrimony whose impact will inevitably re-envision the space and borders of the literary canon. In this light, canonical and classical literary texts could be fruitfully reread through the lens of fashion, revealing the social, political, and cultural transformation of the society in and for which it was written. Indeed, the first attempt in the West to theorize dress as an alteration and manipulation of the body was Baldassar Castiglione’s Libro del cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier, 1528). Castigione’s text is key to an understanding of fashion as a system of signification that works in conjunction with other rhetorical systems such as language. More precisely, clothing in Castiglione’s book is treated as a language and a translation that functions within the rhetoric of words and images and

gives form to a poetics and politics of the dressed self. Reading fashion in Castiglione’s text as the emblematic representation of the Italian bella figura would be limiting ourselves to a sort of stereotypical interpretation. It needs to be emphasized that although clothing plays only a small part in Castiglione’s treatise, it is through its links to language, art, management of the body, and love that, according to Castiglione, clothing becomes a semiotic device and system of signification. In this way, Castiglione’s treatise on conduct and manners can be viewed as a book on method that can be deployed not solely for an understanding of the Italian High Renaissance cultural production, but also to understand the mechanisms regulating dress, appearance, gender, and class in any given social and cultural space. The dynamics described in texts such as Castiglione’s illustrate, in fact, the twofold component of fashion, as was indicated by Roland Barthes in his Le Syste`me de la mode (1967) as being at one and the same time both system and process, institution and individual act, practice and discourse. Literary texts can beautifully represent such mechanisms where fashion acts both as a structure imposed from above or by an elite, and as an event, as Barthes called the personal use of clothing. The figure of the dandy and its different typologies, as in Charles Baudelaire, Thomas Carlyle, and in some instances for Gabriele D’Annunzio, could be interpreted as one of these individual acts that react against and resist the uniformity of fashion. Both fashion and literature deal with issues of translation from one language to another, from image to text. Dress as a material object acquires and enters into a system of signification and a process of communication via its narrative and linguistic articulation. It is through narrative that clothing is somehow spoken and whose aesthetic and ideological charge can communicate meaning/s. Again in the Italian cinquecento, one could think of how a volume like Vecellio’s Habiti antichi e moderni di tutto il mondo combines image and text, and how its interaction and articulation offers several insights to both the scholar of fashion and the scholar of literature. In offering a sort of encyclopedia of how dress works locally and globally, Vecellio also shows how the different languages of dress are translated into geographic and localized practices. He aimed to include in his costume books all the territories—from Europe to the newly discovered American continent. If in the Early Modern period in Italy a number of intellectuals wrote admiringly on what was to 695

FASHION AND LITERATURE become known as fashion, it is beginning with the Enlightenment that writers approach the topic in a far more critical vein. One of these is Giuseppe Parini. Fashion as a sort of both tyrannical and frivolous goddess appears in his Il giorno (1763, 1765, 1801), a text that bears a dedication to fashion. The author depicts the giovin signore, the protagonist, as a spineless aristocrat who is also a fashion victim. The text offers an eloquent and not so glamorous picture of the Milanese aristocracy and wealthy bourgeoisie’s capricious obsession with creating a distinctive taste. Fashion, in Parini’s text, means not just clothes, but furniture, ornaments, cosmetics, and make-up as well as the rituals associated with the toilette, the organization of time and space within noble houses, and fashionable Milanese salons. Parini aimed at showing the waste in time and luxury of a class mainly interested in appearance and social performance as opposed to the need of constructing a laborious bourgeoisie interested in social causes and justice. During the years of the Fascist regime (1922– 1943) language and its rhetorical organization assumed a very important role in conveying the meanings of fashion and its impact on nationalism and the construction of national identity. It is interesting to note the attempt to systematize the language and culture of Italian fashion, for political and propagandistic aims, made by Cesare Meano’s Commentario Dizionario della moda (Commentary Dictionary of Fashion, 1936), commissioned by the Ente Moda. Meano’s text takes as one of its main references the corpus of Italian literature spanning from Dante to Boccaccio, Firenzuola, Pascoli, Carducci, Leopardi, and others in order to make ‘‘visible’’ connections between the creation of an Italian fashion and the tradition of high culture and literature. Meano also eclectically tries to combine elements of popular culture, at the very early stages in Italy then, with those of high culture. Fashion and clothing become in the literary text imbricated in the creation of a discourse on subjectivities, their psyche as well as the social and political world to which they are inherent. One might think, for instance, on how key the description of clothing, uniforms, and dress are in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel, Il gattopardo (The Leopard, 1958). Through them the reader gathers a strong sense of the sartorial competence and expertise in etiquette of the aristocratic author. In addition, dress and uniforms, and even the rustling of women’s gowns, play an important part in the narrative of Il gattopardo and act as a clue to 696

the political and social transformations occurring in the complex process of Italy’s unification. The character of Don Calogero Sedara, epitomizing the new aspiring petit bourgeoisie eager to imitate the modes of dress and manners and therefore the culture of the fading aristocracy, is almost frozen in the act of entering Salina’s palace, described in the novel as being overdressed, and also to have wrongly chosen a local tailor instead of going to London as the aristocrats did for their suits. In Don Calogero’s clumsy manners and his imperfectly cut suit, Tomasi di Lampedusa aims at showing the nouveau riche’s lack of taste that money cannot buy. Another example that can illustrate the relationship between dress, worldliness, and the Italian version of the figure of the dandy is D’Annunzio’s prose. In novels such as Il piacere (The Child of Pleasure, 1889), as well as the letters and articles he published in several newspapers describing the cronaca mondana, D’Annunzio’s fascination with male and female clothing comes to the fore. In his journalistic writings, D’Annunzio painstakingly describes the clothes worn on each occasion (theater, wedding, races) focusing on details of color, fabric, ornamentation, and accessories, as well as on the manners that accompany the social display and their public performance. The description of fabrics and fur are used, for instance, in order to highlight the sensuality or the emotions they provoke on the wearer and the viewers on various occasions. The abundance of French and English terms in D’Annunzio’s descriptions testifies not only to the snobbish attitude of the author, but also of the hegemony of French and English tailoring for the aristocracy and the wealthy middle class. D’Annunzio’s decadent aesthetics epitomize the interaction between fashion and personal use of clothing and their imaginary charge. However, it was Giacomo Leopardi’s Dialogo tra la moda e la morte (‘‘Dialogue Between Fashion and Death,’’ 1824) that early on linked fashion to history. Leopardi’s text, in fact, with its witticisms, went furthest in problematizing the relationship between fashion and modernity and its apparent celebration of life and light. By recognizing its incredible power and the hold it had on people’s lives, Leopardi illustrated fashion’s inherent irrationality. At the same time, similarly to Parini, he extended the notion of fashion beyond clothes to body decoration, tattooing, and piercing. Literature too has its fashions, and here Leopardi quotes the case of Petrarch, considered to be the most in vogue by his contemporaries. Much more, however, is

FASHION AND LITERATURE happening in Leopardi’s dialogue in terms of philosophical investigation and his critique of nineteenth-century historicism and its celebration of progress: He exemplifies his critique through the lens of fashion. In linking fashion and death, he draws attention to the sense of their nonlinear time and narrative that questions the very notion of progress. This is why, in the section dedicated to fashion in his Das Passagen-Werk (The Arcade Project, 1932), Walter Benjamin uses Leopardi’s dialogue as one of the subtexts in his own project to debunk the quasireligious theories of progress and to elaborate analytical tools with which to see through the ‘‘glittering phantasmagoria’’ of capitalist society in full bloom. The use of clothing and fashion in contemporary Italian literature is so massive and all-pervasive as to make it impossible to give anything like a full list. Suffice it to say that many examples like that of Carla, one of the central characters in Alberto Moravia’s novel Gli indifferenti (The Time of Indifference, 1929), where the description of the length of her skirt and other details about her suggest her modernity and transgression (of both dress and behavior), could be cited. Among others, writer Clara Sereni (1946–) has mentioned in her journalistic writings how important the creation of an alternative language, such as that of dress and house decoration, has been for women throughout history. In her latest novel Le Merendanze (The Snackdances, 2004), she makes references to the girls’ game of ‘‘giocare a signore,’’ an activity that often bonds female friends together and always involves dressing up. Food also plays a major role in symbolizing human relationships. In conclusion, both the differences and the points of contact in fashioning dress and appearance as well as their history can reveal the specific mechanisms and their narratives of identity regulating a specific culture. Generally speaking, however, Italian authors have dealt more with the theoretical facets of the dressed body that interacted with the worldliness around them as well as remaining more elitist in their literary genre. Whereas French literature has offered a vivid representation of the social world and the psyche of the characters in the form of a very popular form: the novel. Fashion is a unique key with which to open doors onto the social, cultural, and political transformation of a given space (both public and private) at a given historical time whose rhetorical organization is richly embedded in the practices of the literary. EUGENIA PAULICELLI

Further Reading Barthes, Roland, Mythologie, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1957; as Mythologies, New York: Hill and Wang, 1972. Barthes, Roland, Le Syste`me de la mode, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1967; as The Fashion System, New York: Hill and Wang, 1983. Belfanti, Marco, and Fabio Giusberti (editors), Storia d’Italia: La moda, Turin: Einaudi, 2003. Boucher, Francois, and Philippe Bruneau (editors), Le Vetement chez Balzac, Paris: Extraits de la Comedie Humane l’Institut Francais de la Mode, 2001. Bourdieau, Pierre, Distinction: A social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984. Calefato, Patrizia, The Clothed Body, Oxford and New York: Berg, 2004. Carter, Michael, Fashion Classics: From Carlyle to Barthes, Oxford and New York: Berg, 2003. Davanzo Poli, Doretta, Abiti antichi e moderni dei veneziani, Venice: Neri Pozza, 2002. Entwistle, Joan, The Fashioned Body, Oxford and New York: Berg, 2002. Hollander, Anne, Seeing Through Clothes, Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1993. Jones, Ann Rosalind, and Peter Stallybrass (editors), Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Kovesi Killerby, Catherine, ‘‘‘Heralds of a Well-Instructed Mind’: Nicolosa Sanuti’s Defense of Women and their Clothes,’’ in Renaissance Studies, 13 (1999): Kovesi Killerby, Catherine, Sumptuary Law in Italy, 1200– 1500, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002. Lehmann, Ulrich, Tigersprung: Fashion and Modernity, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000. Muzzarelli, Giuseppina, Guardaroba Medievale: Vesti e societa dal XIII al XVI secolo, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1999. Paulicelli, Eugenia, ‘‘Fashion: Nation and Narration,’’ in The Cambridge Companion to Modern Italian Culture, edited by Zygmunt G. Baranski and Rebecca J. West, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Paulicelli, Eugenia, ‘‘Performing the Gendered Self in Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier and the Discourse on Fashion,’’ in Annalecta Husserliana, (2001): 237–248. Paulicelli, Eugenia, Fashion under Fascism: Beyond the Black Shirt, Oxford and New York: Berg, 2004. Paulicelli, Eugenia, ‘‘The Rhetoric and Politics of Appearance in the Italian Cinquecento,’’ in Medusa’s Gaze: Essays on Gender, Literature, and Aesthetics in the Italian Renaissance in Honor of Robert Rodini, edited by Jane Tylus, Paul Ferrara, and Eugenio Giusti, West Lafayette, IN: Bordighera Press, 2004. Purdy, Daniel L. (editor), The Rise of Fashion, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Schneider, Jane, and Annette Wiener (editors), Cloth and the Human Experience, Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution, 1989. Steele, Valerie, Paris Fashion: A Cultural History, Oxford and New York: Berg, 1998. Steele, Valerie, and J. Eicher (editors), Encyclopedia of Clothing and Fashion, New York: Scribner, 2004. Wilson, Elizabeth, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, London: Virago, 1985.

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CASSANDRA FEDELE (1465–1558) Widely celebrated by her quattrocento peers for her extraordinary intellect and erudition, Cassandra Fedele stands out today as one of the few women who actively vied for a career as a professional Humanist. Skilled in Latin rhetoric, classical literature, and moral philosophy, Fedele operated outside the traditional enclaves reserved for literati of her gender—the court or the cloister—and competed alongside male Humanists in the public arena. By the age of 23, she had lectured before the University of Padua, secured an invitation to join the Aragonese court of Queen Isabella of Spain, and established epistolary ties to some of the most powerful luminaries of her day. Though her book Ordo scientiarum (The Order of the Sciences) and reputed Latin poetry have vanished without a trace, Fedele’s acclaimed Oratio pro Bertucio Lamberto (Oration for Bertucio Lamberto) was published three times within her own lifetime, in Modena (1487), Venice (1488), and Nuremberg (1489). Like her early modern contemporary Laura Cereta (1469–1499), Fedele struggled with the limitations placed on female eloquence and, while her works are largely conventional products of a competent, albeit imitative Humanist, her entrance into the male-dominated world of letters nonetheless represents a singular chapter in the history of Renaissance culture. Little extraliterary material has surfaced pertaining to the life of Cassandra Fedele. Her collected works, presumably only an exemplary fraction of her original output, survive in a single posthumous volume edited by Jacopo Filippo Tomasini in 1636: Clarissimae Feminae Cassandrae Fedelis venetae. Epistolae et orationes (The Letters and Orations of the Illustrious Venetian Woman Cassandra Fedele). The edition contains 123 letters penned by Fedele and a handful of her distinguished admirers between 1487 and 1498, as well as three of her public orations. Part artist’s portfolio, part idealized autobiography, Cassandra’s epistolario paints the portrait of an ambitious courtier publicizing her professional abilities and connections. Her correspondents included prominent local Humanists such as Giovanni Aurelio Augurello, Bonifacio Bembo, and Niccolo` Leonico Tomeo, famed intellectuals from Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Florentine circle such as 698

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Angelo Poliziano, chancellor Bartolomeo Scala and his daughter Alessandra, as well as Beatrice d’Este and Lodovico Il Moro, Francesco Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua, Eleonora of Aragon, duchess of Ferrara, Beatrice, queen of Hungary, King Louis XII of France, and other royal personages. Perhaps as a result of Tomasini’s editorial license, the volume lacks any of the devotional poems, amorous verses, and affectionate letters to friends and family that abound in the works of her female contemporaries. In their place we find epistles praising and soliciting patrons for their support and scholars for their recognition—in substance the same sort of material contained in the letterbooks of her male peers. However, her self-consciously mannered style, deferential affectations, and frequent use of diminutives to convey humility and chastity set Fedele apart from other Humanists, betraying the unique challenges faced by an author circumscribed by her gender. Despite her uncommonly long life, Fedele’s career as a Humanist was short-lived. As a child she was schooled by her father, Angelo. By the age of 12 she was already an accomplished Latinist, and, with her father’s support, began to study Greek, rhetoric, philosophy, history, and theology. By 16, she appeared before groups of skeptical male intellectuals eager to test the young girl’s abilities. Now a local celebrity, she publicly engaged in philosophical debates with eminent Humanists associated with the University of Padua, many of whom maintained close epistolary contact with Fedele during the years that followed. The climax of these scholarly exchanges came with the speech delivered before the University of Padua’s academic senate in honor of her cousin Bertucio’s moral and intellectual achievements, the Oratio pro Bertucio Lamberto. Already in print the same year it was composed, the oration inaugurated an ephemeral career destined to last no more than a decade. Fedele’s encomium evinced many of the signature elements found in her letters and later orations. By and large it was a conventional example of humanistic epideictic, written in Ciceronian Latin and replete with classical references. It falls

CASSANDRA FEDELE under the rubric of moral philosophy and, in true Renaissance fashion, extolled the power of human reason, eloquence, and philosophical inquiry. The novelty, needless to say, lay in the orator’s gender. As perhaps the first woman ever to step up to the university’s podium, Fedele was eager to secure the goodwill of a male audience and dispel any misogynistic misgivings. Keenly aware of the association of female eloquence with moral laxity, Cassandra began with a self-conscious justification of her gendered presence. She assumed an apologetic tone, repeatedly stressed her virginal temerity and, with extreme deference, begged that her venerable interlocutors excuse the failings of her ‘‘weak’’ female mind. Nevertheless, for all of her alleged modesty, Fedele boldly forged ahead, in effect demonstrating a strength of intellect that her affected words seemed to deny. The publication of the Oratio pro Bertucio Lamberto and her ensuing international fame opened up windows of opportunities. Shortly thereafter, doge Agostino Barbarigo invited Fedele to speak before the Venetian Senate on the topic of education. In this second oration, De laudibus literarum (In Praise of Letters), Fedele again sung the praises of man’s rational faculty and the study of the liberal arts, this time, however, momentarily breaking away from hackneyed Humanist arguments to introduce the topic of female learning. As her reputation spread beyond Venice, so too did the prospects of finding patronage. Angelo Poliziano, who personally visited her home in 1491, recommended her to Lorenzo de’ Medici. Queen Isabella of Castile repeatedly entreated Fedele to join her Spanish court. However, unable to travel because of the threat of war or, as some would have it, forbidden by the doge to leave and deprive Venice of one of its most valued ornaments, Fedele’s career soon ground to a halt. Cassandra’s marriage to Giammaria Mapelli around 1497–1499 coincided with the end of her literary activity as we know it. Save for letters requesting monetary assistance addressed to popes Leo X (1521) and Paul III (1547), no mature work by Fedele survives. She waited in obscurity until 1556 when, at the age of 91, the Venetian doge finally beckoned her back into the spotlight to deliver a celebratory oration welcoming the queen of Poland, published by Tomasini as Pro adventu Serenissimae sarmaticae reginae (For the Arrival of Her Majesty of Poland). Standing once more in front of the Venetian Senate, Cassandra Fedele brought her incomparable career as a female Humanist to a close.

Biography Born in Venice to Barbara Leoni and Angelo Fedele, 1465; learned Latin from her father and soon acquired a prodigious command of classical languages and literature; at the age of 12, was sent to further her studies under the Servite monk and Humanist Gasparino Borro; at 22, addressed the academic senate of the University of Padua; some time after her first celebrated speech, Fedele spoke before the Venetian Doge and Senate extolling the benefits of higher education in De laudibus literarum. Corresponded with several prominent local Humanists, intellectuals from Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Florentine circle and numerous European rulers, 1487–1498. Married the physician Giammaria Mapelli, ca. 1497–1499); the union produced no children; after a five-year stay in Crete, returned with her husband to Venice only to lose most of her worldly possessions during a storm at sea and, later that same year, became a widow, ca. 1520; now destitute, she wrote an unanswered letter to Pope Leo X asking for help, 1521; after decades of poverty and poor health, Pope Paul III responded to Fedele’s plea for assistance by naming her the prioress of the orphanage of San Domenico di Castello in Venice, 1547; at the bequest of the doge Francesco Venier, at the age of 91 she delivered what would be her last public speech—an oration welcoming the queen of Poland, Bona Sforza, to Venice in 1556. Died March 24, 1558, and was given a state funeral by the Venetian Republic. SARA ELENA DIAZ Selected Works Oratio pro Bertucio Lamberto, 1487. De laudibus literarum (ca. 1488), in Clarissimae feminae Cassandrae Fidelis, venetae. Epistolae et orationes, edited by Jacopo Filippo Tomasini, 1636. Pro adventu Serenissimae sarmaticae reginae (1556), in Clarissimae feminae Cassandrae Fidelis, venetae. Epistolae et orationes, edited by Jacopo Filippo Tomasini, 1636. Letters and Orations, edited and translated by Diana Robin, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Further Reading Cavazzana, Cesira, Cassandra Fedele: erudita veneziana del Rinascimento, Venice: Tipografia Orfanotrofio di A. Pellizzato, 1907. Jardine, Lisa, ‘‘O Decus Italiae Virgo, or The Myth of the Learned Lady in the Renaissance,’’ in The Historical Journal, 28, no. 4 (1985): 799–819. King, Margaret L., ‘‘Book-Lined Cells: Women and Humanism in the Early Italian Renaissance,’’ in Beyond their Sex: Learned Women of the European Past, edited

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CASSANDRA FEDELE by Patricia H. Labalme, New York: New York University Press, 1980. Kristeller, Paul Oskar, ‘‘Learned Women of Early Modern Italy: Humanists and University Scholars,’’ in Beyond their Sex: Learned Women of the European Past, edited by Patricia H. Labalme, New York: New York University Press, 1980. Robin, Diana, ‘‘Cassandra Fedele (1465–1499),’’ in Italian Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook,

edited by Rinaldina Russell, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994. Robin, Diana, ‘‘Cassandra Fedele’s Epistolae (1488–1521): Biography as Effacement,’’ in The Rhetorics of LifeWriting in Early Modern Europe. Forms of Biography from Cassandra Fedele to Louis XIV, edited by Thomas Mayer and Daniel Woolf, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995.

FEELING FOR TIME See Sentimento del tempo (Work by Giuseppe Ungaretti)

FEDERICO FELLINI (1920–1993) After developing early skills as a cartoonist and sketch artist in provincial Rimini, his hometown, the young Fellini moved to Rome in 1939 and began work on the humor magazine Marc’Aurelio, a periodical with an enormous circulation that included many journalists working in the cinema. By writing comic gags, cartoons, serial narratives, and humorous vignettes for this popular magazine, Fellini was introduced to the social circles of Italian cinema and attracted a wide following for his humorous sketches. He also began to write similar material for the national radio network. He also published his first book, a brief narrative entitled Il mio amico Pasqualino (My Friend Pasqualino, 1943) that reflects a precocious reading of Franz Kafka long before that author was popular in Italy. In 1943, he married the actress Giulietta Masina, began scriptwriting in earnest, and befriended Roberto Rossellini, who hired Fellini as one of his scriptwriters for Roma citta` aperta (Open City, 1945), the international hit that announced the birth of Italian neorealism in the cinema and won for Fellini his first of many Oscar nominations (this one for best script). While he wrote a number of 700

important scripts, such as Il cammino della speranza (The Path of Hope, 1950) for Pietro Germi, Senza pieta` (Without Pity, 1948) for Alberto Lattuada, and Persiane chiuse (Drawn Shutters, 1951) for Luigi Comencini, his scripts for Rossellini are most important to the history of the Italian cinema. These include: Paisa` (Paisan, 1946), perhaps the purest example of Italian neorealism, for which he wrote the monastery sequence; Il miracolo (The Miracle, 1948), a controversial work on the meaning of sainthood, in which Fellini made his debut as an actor, and which was the subject of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that prohibited censorship of cinematic works on religious grounds; and Europa ’51 (Europe ’51, 1952), one of the first films in postwar Italy that began to move beyond the documentary realism of the neorealist period toward a concern with psychological problems and existentialist themes. Fellini began his career as film director in collaboration with Lattuada on Luci del varieta` (Variety Lights, 1951), initiating a trilogy of works dealing with provincial life including Lo sceicco bianco (The White Sheik, 1952) and I vitelloni (I Vitelloni, 1953),

FEDERICO FELLINI his first critically and commercially successful work. These films make up what may be called a ‘‘trilogy of character,’’ since they move beyond the neorealist protagonist defined by his or her economic or social environment and toward characters that are idiosyncratic rather than stereotypical and are formed more by their fantasies and daydreams than by their class or economic condition. In them, Fellini delights in showing how his protagonists wear a social mask that may be torn away at crucial moments in their lives to reveal their true, usually defective personalities underneath. I vitelloni was particularly important to the early films of other younger directors: Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973) owes a direct debt to it, as does Lina Wertmu¨ller’s I basilischi (The Lizards, 1963). Fellini reached international fame with a subsequent trilogy of grace, or salvation, treating the fate of innocence in a cruel and unsentimental world: La strada (La Strada, 1954); Il bidone (Il Bidone, 1955); and Le notti di Cabiria (The Nights of Cabiria, 1957). In La strada, Fellini employs an unforgettable performance by Giulietta Masina in an exploration of the meaning of love: a circus strongman (Anthony Quinn) fails to realize just how crucial the slightly daft Gelsomina is to his life until she dies, leaving him filled with remorse. Masina continues her masterful performances (earning her the title ‘‘the female Charlie Chaplin’’) in Le notti di Cabiria, where she portrays a plucky prostitute who never loses hope. This film inspired not only a very successful American musical, Sweet Charity, but also a film by Bob Fosse of the same name. La strada and Le notti di Cabiria aroused the ire of leftist critics in Italy (led by Marxist ideologue Guido Aristarco), who failed to understand that Fellini employed religious notions of conversion and grace for purely secular purposes. The polemical debates that ensued became known as the ‘‘crisis of neorealism,’’ since Fellini was attacked for betraying the principles of a movement for which he had written some of the greatest scripts, while his defenders viewed his departures from what they felt was socialist realism to be a natural development in his creative development. Decades after these films first appeared and the polemics are now footnotes to film history, Fellini’s trilogy of grace may be seen as outstanding examples of how Christian existentialist thought helped to shape the director’s worldview, although imagery and emotions, rather than philosophical arguments, were always Fellini’s trademark. In an abrupt shift in style and perspective, Fellini’s next feature film La dolce vita (La Dolce Vita,

1959) seemed to deny the very hope of changing one’s life that lay at the optimistic center of his second trilogy. La dolce vita also began his lifelong collaboration with actor Marcello Mastroianni and broke all European box-office records. Its very title became synonymous everywhere and in numerous languages with the society life depicted by Rome’s gossip-column photographers, or paparazzi, another word Fellini contributed to the English language. Compared by critics to the sweeping vision of Dante’s Comedy, the film still today has iconic status, and numerous sequences (especially the celebrated Trevi Fountain scene where Anita Ekberg wades into the water with Mastroianni) are constantly recalled in popular culture. Fellini’s vision of the world as devoid of meaningful beliefs and dominated by public relations and society photographers seems even more apt today than when it appeared. Fellini left behind any connection with Italian neorealism with La dolce vita’s Baroque imagery, picaresque plot structure, hundreds of protagonists, exotic sets constructed in the studio, and fanciful costumes. Film critics regard Otto e mezzo (8½, 1963) as Fellini’s masterpiece. It cast Mastroianni as a film director very much like Fellini. The high modernist aesthetics of Otto e mezzo became emblematic of the very notion of free, uninhibited artistic creativity to which European art film directors aspired, and it is no accident that this work has attracted the admiration and even imitation of numerous directors. In the wake of this film’s enduring critical success, Fellini’s name would become firmly linked to the vogue of the postwar European art film, even though he was one of the few non-American directors who could be counted upon by his producers to make money at the box office. When the popularity of that particular form of cinema waned, so, too, did Fellini’s critical reputation and commercial success. After Otto e mezzo, Fellini’s films move more and more toward a private fantasy world of his own invention. Beginning with Le tentazioni del Dottor Antonio (The Temptations of Doctor Antonio, 1962), one episode in Boccaccio ’70, and continuing with Toby Dammit (1968), one episode in Tre passi nel delirio (Spirits of the Dead), and Fellini Satyricon (Fellini’s Satyricon, 1969), the director combined a dream-like cinematic language with original uses of color photography. In Fellini Satyricon, he showed a particular talent for exploiting Italy’s most accomplished set designers in his oneiric version of the Latin classic by Petronius. Roma (Fellini’s Roma, 1971) provided a personal 701

FEDERICO FELLINI portrait of the Eternal City, including much autobiographical material; and it contains a number of unforgettable sequences, most notably an over-thetop ecclesiastical fashion parade. La dolce vita, Fellini Satyricon, and Roma may be seen as another trilogy in Fellini’s long career, this one dedicated to the mythology of Rome. Amarcord (Amarcord, 1973) created a nostalgic portrait of Fellini’s provincial adolescence during the Fascist ventennium. Nevertheless, its grotesque caricature of the kind of conformity that produced Fascism in Italy stands as one of the most trenchant indictments of that period, far more successful than many ideological attacks from a Marxist perspective, a point of view that was typical of other directors of the same period (Visconti, Pasolini, Bertolucci). Amarcord was Fellini’s last boxoffice hit and unanimously critically acclaimed work. The films he produced from that time until his death met with increasingly hostile resistance with both audiences and critics, although at the same time his cinema became the object of serious study in the academic world. Eventually, even Fellini had difficulty finding financing for his work. The sumptuous Casanova (Fellini’s Casanova, 1976), a neglected masterpiece, disappointed simple-minded viewers who expected pornography about the archetypal Latin Lover instead of a brooding, melancholy meditation on the meaning of sex and death. La citta` delle donne (The City of Women, 1980) was condemned by feminist critics even though the director himself accepted the crucial feminist objection to his films—that they projected his male fantasies upon female figures. Fellini believed that this was the film in which he employed the language of dreams most successfully. E la nave va (And the Ship Sails On, 1983) tackled an unusual subject in Fellini’s cinema, grand opera, and offered a humorous portrait of opera singers on an ocean voyage on a ship of fools. Ginger e Fred (Ginger and Fred, 1985) shows Fellini as a determined critic of commercial television and the imbecilic audiences for quiz shows and nonsense that it has created. The most successful of his late films, Intervista (Interview, 1987), returns to the subjects treated in Otto e mezzo: Fellini himself stars in this film about the nature of creativity in filmmaking. Fellini’s final feature film, La voce della luna (The Voice of the Moon, 1989), once again offers a critique of mass media. Fellini’s mature cinematic style treats a variety of postmodern topics: the relationship of music and creativity, the role of television in contemporary life, the nature of artistic creativity, and the growing homogenization of popular culture. 702

During the last years of his life, Fellini made three television commercials for Barilla pasta, Campari Soda, and the Banco di Roma. They are extraordinary lessons in cinematography and reveal not only his genius but also his grasp of popular culture. He also exhibited his sketches and cartoons, many of which were taken from his private dream notebooks, thus uncovering the source of much of his artistic creativity, the unconscious. Fellini received numerous honors during his lifetime. He garnered 23 nominations for Oscars in various categories (eight of which were successful); a special fifth Oscar for his career achievement (1993); the Golden Lion Career Award from the Venice Film Festival (1985), as well as a special lifetime achievement award in that same year from the Lincoln Center; and dozens of prizes from the world’s most prestigious film festivals. In 1992, a poll of international film directors conducted by Sight and Sound magazine ranked Fellini as the most significant film director of all time and cited two of Fellini’s works (La strada, Otto e mezzo) in a list of 10 masterpieces that had the most profound influence upon them and the history of the cinema. Fellini’s funeral in Rome was a national event, with throngs of people in attendance. Thousands filed by his coffin in the huge Studio 5 of his beloved Cinecitta`, renamed Studio Fellini in his honor. The Fondazione Federico Fellini has been established in Rimini to support the study and further dissemination of his work with a journal, Federico Fellini Amarcord. Fellini’s death was rightly seen by Italians as the end of a great era of artistic creativity in their national cinema. His works have influenced such very different directors as Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Greenaway, Ettore Scola, Lina Wertmu¨ller, Giuseppe Tornatore, Franc¸ois Trauffaut, Bob Fosse, Woody Allen, Nanni Moretti, and Spike Jonze. Film directors have always admired his works more than film critics, although during his long career Fellini had as his supporters some of the most distinguished essayists on the cinema, including Andre´ Bazin, Tullio Kezich, and numerous other seminal writers on the European art cinema. During his long professional career, Federico Fellini’s name came to be synonymous with cinematic creativity itself.

Biography Born in Rimini to Urbano Fellini, a traveling salesman, and Ida Barbiani, of middle-class extraction,

FEDERICO FELLINI 20 January 1920. Moved to Rome in 1939 to work as a journalist for several magazines, especially Marc’Aurelio, and begins scriptwriting. Marries actress Giulietta Masina 30 October 1943; their only child dies in 1945 after living only a few weeks. Begins film direction in 1951 and wins his first Oscar for La strada in 1956; subsequent Oscars awarded for Le notti di Cabiria (1957), Otto e mezzo (1964); and Amarcord (1974); with a fifth Oscar for his entire career (1993). Died of complications from a stroke in Rome, 31 October 1993. PETER BONDANELLA Selected Works Films Luci del varieta` (Variety Lights), 1951. Lo sceicco bianco (The White Sheik), 1952. I vitelloni (I Vitelloni, The Young and the Passionate, The Spivs), 1953. La strada (La Strada), 1954. Il bidone (Il Bidone, The Swindle), 1955. Le notti di Cabiria (The Nights of Cabiria), 1957. La dolce vita (La Dolce Vita), 1959. Otto e mezzo (8½), 1963. Giulietta degli spiriti (Juliet of the Spirits), 1965. Fellini Satyricon (Fellini’s Satyricon, based on Petronius), 1969. I clowns (The Clowns), 1970. Roma (Fellini’s Roma), 1972. Amarcord (Amarcord), 1973. Casanova (Fellini’s Casanova, based on Giacomo Casanova’s Storie della mia vita), 1976. Prova d’orchestra (Orchestra Rehearsal), 1979. La citta` delle donne (City of Women), 1980. E la nave va (And the Ship Sails On), 1983. Ginger e Fred (Ginger and Fred), 1985. Intervista (Interview), 1988. La voce della luna (The Voice of the Moon, based on the novel Il poema dei lunatici by Ermanno Cavazzoni), 1990.

Screenplays Le notti di Cabiria (with Ennio Flaiano and Tullio Pinelli), Bologna: Cappelli, 1957. Quattro film: I Vitelloni, La dolce vita, 8½, Giulietta degli spiriti, Turin: Einaudi, 1963. Fellini-Satyricon, Bologna: Cappelli, 1969. Fellini Tv: Block-notes di un regista, I clowns, Roma, Bologna: Cappelli, 1972. Il Casanova di Fellini (with Bernardino Zapponi), Turin: Einaudi, 1976; as Fellini’s Casanova, translated by Claudia Cremasco, 1997. Il primo Fellini: Lo sceicco bianco, I Vitelloni, La strada, Il bidone, edited by Renzo Renzi, Bologna: Cappelli, 1979. Prova d’orchestra, Milan: Garzanti, 1980. La citta` delle donne, Milan: Garzanti, 1980. E la nave va, Milan: Longanesi, 1983. Moraldo in the City & A Journey with Anita, edited and translated by John C. Stubbs, Urbana-Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1983.

Ginger and Fred, Milan: Garzanti, 1986. ‘‘8½’’: Federico Fellini, Director, edited by Charles Affron, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987. ‘‘La Strada’’: Federico Fellini, Director, edited by Peter Bondanella and Manuela Gieri, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987. La voce della luna, Turin: Einaudi, 1990.

Writings La mia Rimini, Bologna: Cappelli, 1967. Fare un film, Turin: Einaudi, 1980. Block-notes di un regista, Milan: Longanesi, 1987.

Further Reading Bertozzi, Marco (editor), BiblioFellini, vols. 3, Rimini: Fondazione Federico Fellini, 2002–2004. Bondanella, Peter (editor), Federico Fellini: Essays in Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. Bondanella, Peter, The Cinema of Federico Fellini, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992; as Il cinema di Federico Fellini, Rimini: Guaraldi Editore, 1994. Bondanella, Peter, and Cristina Degli-Esposti, (editors), Perspectives on Federico Fellini, New York: Macmillan, 1993. Burke, Frank, and Marguerite R. Waller (editors), Federico Fellini: Contemporary Perspectives, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Constantini, Costanzo (editor), Conversations with Fellini, San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1996. Grazzini, Giovanni (editor), Federico Fellini: Intervista sul cinema, Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1983. Kezich, Tullio, Federico: Fellini, la vita e i film, Milan: Feltrinelli, 2002. Rohdie, Sam, Fellini Lexicon, London: British Film Institute, 2002. Verdone, Mario, Federico Fellini, Milan: Editrice Il Castoro, 1994.

OTTO E MEZZO, 1963 A Film by Federico Fellini

Otto e mezzo (8½) is the benchmark film by Federico Fellini, the work that justifies his status as a master and continues to reward the spectator after numerous screenings. Besides a host of awards (including an Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1987), a panel of professionals from 18 European nations named Otto e mezzo the best European film ever 703

FEDERICO FELLINI made. The film occupies an important role in the director’s complete works, not only because of its autobiographical links to Fellini’s own life but also because it focuses upon the very nature of artistic creation in the cinema. Otto e mezzo explores a personal fantasy world that deals self-reflexively with cinema itself. Fellini’s black and white photography created by Gianni Di Venanzo, one of the greatest directors of photography, is an expressionistic black and white that captures the essence of the irrational quality of the dream state. The protagonist, a film director named Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni), has obvious affinities to Fellini himself. The film’s narrative focuses upon the complex fantasy life of Anselmi, who is in the midst of a crisis of inspiration and creativity, not unlike one Fellini himself experienced at the beginning of work on the film. Fellini has described the gestation of Otto e mezzo as a series of false starts, culminating in his writing of a letter to his producer to call off the entire project even while actors had been selected and crew members were constructing the sets. At that precise moment, one of the crew invited Fellini to share a bottle of champagne to celebrate the creation of what he predicts will become a ‘‘master piece.’’ Embarrassed by his insecurity and the responsibility of putting all these men out of work, Fellini thought of himself as a ship’s captain abandoning his crew. Suddenly, the inspiration came to him in a flash: The film would focus upon a director who no longer knows what film he is making. Otto e mezzo contains approximately 40 major episodes, numerous sequences, and more than 53 main characters (not counting the minor figures, including the entire crew shooting the film that appears in the film’s celebrated ending). Otto e mezzo was shot almost entirely inside a studio on huge and imaginative sets and combines innumerable episodes with a strict control of the overall narrative. Fellini avoids the traditional seamless storyline of the classic Hollywood film, his visual images held together by dream and fantasy sequences. The result is one of the most convincing stream-ofconsciousness narratives ever created, a storyline controlled by the subjective perspective of its director-protagonist that jumps quickly from the ‘‘real’’ world of a spa, where Guido has gone to take the cure for a failing inspiration to his dreams, to waking fantasies, and to memories of his past back to his childhood, an infancy characterized by a strict

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Catholic upbringing and a repression of sexual desire. It is most certainly not a film based upon improvisation: Only an ironclad script, as scriptwriter Tullio Pinelli once described it, could have brought such magnificent artistic order out of such a chaotic mix of diverse materials. The film Guido seems unable to make is a science fiction film about the launching of a rocket ship from earth after a thermonuclear holocaust destroys civilization. A huge rocket-launching pad that seems to have no purpose provides a concrete metaphor of Guido’s creative impasse. During the many encounters at the spa resort Guido has with his producer, his potential actors, and his production staff, he also finds time for a tryst with his mistress Carla (Sandro Milo), a marital crisis with his estranged wife (Anouk Aime´e), and a number of embarrassing exchanges with a French intellectual named Daumier (Jean Rougeul), who mercilessly attacks Guido for his artistic confusion, his puerile symbolism, his ideological incoherence, and his lack of any intellectual structure in the film Guido has proposed to make. In Otto e mezzo, Fellini makes no pronouncements, presents no theories about art, and avoids the heavy intellectualizing about the nature of the cinema that characterizes so much academic discussion in recent years. For Fellini, the cinema is a visual medium whose emotive power moves through light, not words. The unforgettable carousel that concludes Otto e mezzo is the perfect modernist image for Fellini’s major preoccupation: free artistic creativity. PETER BONDANELLA

Further Reading Bondanella, Peter, The Films of Federico Fellini, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Boyer, Deena, The Two Hundred Days of ‘‘8½,’’ New York: Garland, 1978. Fellini, Federico, ‘‘8½’’ di Federico Fellini, edited by Camilla Cederna, Bologna: Cappelli, 1975. Fellini, Federico, ‘‘8½’’: Federico Fellini, Director, edited by Charles Affron, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987. Perry, Ted, Filmguide to ‘‘8½,’’ Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975. Sesti, Mario, and Andrea Crozzoli (editors), ‘‘8½’’: Il viaggio di Fellini—Fotografie di Gideon Bachmann, Pordenone: Cinemazero, 2003.

FEMINIST THEORY AND CRITICISM

FEMINIST THEORY AND CRITICISM The year 1970 is considered the foundational year of Italian neofeminism. In Rome that year, Carla Lonzi, Carla Accardi, and Elvira Banotti gave life to Rivolta Femminile (Female Revolt) and Serena Castaldi created the group Anabasi in Milan. At the time there already existed groups such as Demau in Milan, founded by Daniela Pellegrini and Lia Cigarini in 1965 (the group’s name was formed by abbreviating ‘‘demistificatione autoritarismo patriarcale’’ (‘‘demystification of patriarchal authoritarianism’’); in Trentino, Il Cerchio Spezzato (The Broken Circle); and the group based in Turin, Collettivo delle Compagne (Collective of Women Comrades) of the Comunicazioni Rivoluzionarie (Revolutionary Communications). Indeed, in 1970, the idea of self-awareness was imposed: feminist practice aimed to change women’s relationships with the world, beginning with the self and with personal relationships between women, a practice already promoted by certain groups in the United States (Anabasi published some texts from the American movement in 1972 in Donna e` bello). The radical wing thus attempted to underline its novelty, while another type of feminism remained tied to the left (old and new) to the movements of 1968 and resulting social struggles. Nevertheless, beyond relationships of discontinuity/ continuity with those political situations, one cannot set aside the general climate of the end of the 1970s, which saw the emergence of a new, rebellious subject. This new subject’s ex novo birth was also perceived with respect to preceding history, including both female participation in the anti-Fascist Resistance and organizations like the Unione Donne Italiane (UDI) tied to the Communist Party, and the more distant history of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century feminism. Achievement of rights was considered not only insufficient but misleading with respect to the objectives of feminine freedom. This is a drastic judgment compared with the emancipationists of the past, although these figures will be revisited, thanks to the discovery of complex links between requests for equality and perception of difference, which exist in feminism from the beginning. In 1974, Carla Lonzi (1931–1982) published Sputiamo su Hegel (Let’s Spit on Hegel), the first

book of Italian feminism. Her work opened a breach in the ‘‘Marxist blackmail’’ of women and in the patriarchal foundation of politics, fully aware that ‘‘between woman and man is the basic difference in humanity.’’ The next step for feminism, strictly correlated to this first, involved the role that women develop in sexual relationships. The vaginal woman, complementary to man, is opposed to the clitoral woman, sexually and culturally autonomous. Self-awareness, which is at the heart of Rivolta Femminile throughout its history, considers to be inseparable life and thought, experience and writing, public and private, awareness of self and elaboration of a new vision of the world: The subject of the moment is understood without theoretical mediations that condition its meaning. For Carla Lonzi ‘‘the blockage must be forced one by one: This is the necessary passage for the birth of individuality, the presupposition for any change’’ (Marta Lonzi, Anna Jaquinta, and Carla Lonzi, La presenza dell’uomo nel femminismo, 1978). This point was made forcefully when Rivolta Femminile clarified its position in the feminist movement, taking an anti-ideological stance that refuted the short cuts of traditional politics, even when practiced by women, and considered individual self-awareness (necessary in order to live authentically) the true testing ground. Thus Lonzi’s diary, Taci, anzi parla (Be Quiet, No, Speak, 1979) can be read as a nonideological philosophical treatise, and as a drama of feminine awareness in the world. Vai pure (Go Ahead, 1980), which explains her romantic relationship with Pietro Consagra, shows the clash of two cultures: that of the woman who ‘‘vive se stessa nel rapporto’’ (lives herself within the relationship) but wants the ‘‘qualita` del suo sentire’’ (quality of her feeling) to be recognized, and that of man, whose life is centered around social productivity and his needs, demanding the privilege of being accompanied and encouraged by his female partner. Departing from the need to be more directly effective and to be recognized at the social and cultural level, some feminists of the Collettivo di via Cherubini (formed in 1972 to promote comparisons between self-knowledge groups), and in particular those of Group 4 (of which Lia Cigarini was 705

FEMINIST THEORY AND CRITICISM part), make the ‘‘pratica di fare tra donne’’ (practice of doing among women) central to their project. Thus in 1975 the Libreria delle donne (Women’s Bookstore) is born in Milan, with Luisa Muraro (1940–) as its primary point of reference. It becomes a place where the ‘‘Pensiero della differenza’’ (the theory that advocates ‘‘thinking sexual difference’’) was elaborated and from which such thought radiated, as in the magazine Sottosopra. At the same time that theories ‘‘reassuring on the topic of a ‘feminine difference,’’’ were affirmed, and selfknowledge, still central for Rivolta Femminile, was set aside, the ‘‘Pratica dell’inconscio’’ (‘‘Unconscious Practice’’) was being developed (Lea Melandri, Una visceralita` indicibile, 2000). Psychoanalytic practice between women is used as a revolutionary tool for treating sexuality and relationships, maternity, and lesbianism (in connection with the group Politique et Psycanalyse). At this point in feminist practice, it seems necessary to dig deep into the life of the individual in order to see what transpires and remains unsaid, and to deepen the relationship between unconscious and conscience without, however, isolating personal affairs from the rest of existence. Between 1976 and 1977, the group Sessualita` e Scrittura (Sexuality and Writing) is born around this belief, primarily at the initiative of Lea Melandri (1941–). Melandri had already taken part in the antiauthoritarian pedagogical experiment that developed around the magazine L’erba voglio directed by Elvio Fachinelli, and later the project of the so-called ‘‘150 Hours.’’ In this last, thanks to the recognition of workers’ right to 150 hours of instruction, feminist intellectuals offer courses for women workers and housewives on the themes of the body, health, the family, and working conditions, creating a profitable exchange of knowledge and experience. In 1977, Melandri wrote L’infamia originaria: Facciamola finita con il cuore e la politica (Original Infamy: Let’s Cut out Heart and Politics), one of the most important texts of Italian feminism. The text, as the subtitle explains, seeks to cut out the swing between heart (and the search for an absolute, dual fusion) and politics, symptom of an ‘‘original’’ action that neatly separated nature and culture, mind and body, personal and political. The search for a nonliterary, nonpsychoanalytical language with which to speak of interiority, of the body, of sexuality, of dreams, brings Melandri to direct interest toward ‘‘scritture d’esperienza’’ (writing about experience) as a way to get closer to oneself, different from literature as ‘‘forma del raccontare di se´’’ (a form of recounting oneself). 706

The original event of the sexes marks the lives of women and men in different ways: It is an underground world of dreams, drives, and images, preserved in its intimacy and far from the historical scene that connotes the imaginary. Nostalgia for these origins brings the daughter to dream of a harmonious reassembling with the other, a dream of love; the son, instead, establishes a relationship of domination over the sex that for him represents the place of origin. These nagging theoretical meditations and the need to again go over the feminist past (its history, its languages) bring Melandri to create, in collaboration with others, the Libera Universita` delle Donne di Milano (Free University of Women in Milan) and the journal Lapis: Percorsi della riflessione femminile (1987–1997); and, on a more personal level, to encounter the writing of Sibilla Aleramo. There is significant theoretical support for feminism that privileges social practice in some texts, above all in La coscienza di sfruttata (Awareness of Exploitation, 1972), born of the group Il Cerchio Spezzato. They sustain that through this awareness of exploitation, woman is able to identify in capitalism the final contradiction of that patriarchal system that relegated her to her caste, in which she lives ‘‘equal conditions across all classes, and maximum dispersion in all the classes,’’ excluded from the world and excluded from herself (Ferri Abba` et al., La coscienza di sfruttata, 1972). Maria Rosa Dalla Costa’s Potere femminile e sovversione sociale (Feminine Power and Social Subversion, 1973) conducts an in-depth analysis of domestic work as production and reproduction of the workforce, a theme taken up by Maria Rosa Cutrufelli (1946–), who in Disoccupata con onore (Unemployed with Honor, 1975) gives voice to the women of the south. Chiara Saraceno’s Dalla parte della donna (On Women’s Side, 1971) recognizes in the family the site of the specific contradiction lived by women and defines female existence in terms of social roles. In 1973, together with Laura Balbo (who is the president), Franca Bimbi, Marina Piazza, Simonetta Piccone Stella, Renate Siebert, Silvia Vegetti Finzi, and others found the Gruppo di Ricerca sulla Famiglia e la Condizione Femminile or Griff (Research Group on the Family and the Female Condition). Instead, the Gruppo Femminista per una Medicina delle Donne (Feminist Group for a Women’s Medicine) focused its analysis on the reproductive role of the female body and, with the pamphlet Anticoncezionali dalla parte della donna (Contraceptives on Women’s Side) responded to the need to know one’s own body and control

FEMINIST THEORY AND CRITICISM fertility. With the help of the Movimento di Liberazione della Donna or MLD (Women’s Liberation Movement), born in the Radical Party, antiviolence centers were established. There then emerged Piu` donne che uomini, published in Sottosopra (More Women Than Men, 1983), and Non credere di avere dei diritti (Sexual Difference: A Theory of Social-Symbolic Practice, 1987) collectively signed by the Libreria delle donne, which are amongst the most important theoretical texts of the Italian feminist movement and also amongst the most discussed. The philosophy of difference, inspired by the theoretical work of Luce Irigaray, considers being sexed differently to be an original, unavoidable fact, as a ‘‘common symbolic [that] allows the individuation of a feminine place in which, and only in which, differentiating between women makes sense and lends richness’’ (Adriana Cavarero, ‘‘Per una teoria della differenza sessuale,’’ 1987). One of the work’s main novelties and primary points of discussion is the affirmation of the theory of ‘‘affidamento’’ (entrustment), which refutes the egalitarian feminist convictions and ‘‘the social poverty of the feminine condition.’’ In fact, having ascertained that ‘‘feminine will to social existence fails for lack of an adequate and symbolic mediation,’’ they elaborate a new project that consists in ‘‘practicing inequality between women and entrusting herself to one like herself, in order to measure herself in the world.’’ The figure of the ‘‘symbolic mother’’ is central, redefining the mother-daughter relationship beyond the sphere of the ‘‘natural’’ and the individual: She is the origin, mediation, and horizon of sexual thought; she legitimates sexual difference and creates the conditions that allow conflicts provoked by inequality to transform them into conquests of freedom, thanks to the social pact stated between generations, between ‘‘the woman who wants and the woman who knows.’’ The Libreria delle donne defined itself as the ‘‘generation of female freedom,’’ and from this point of view reread the history of feminism from 1966 to 1986, giving an image of progress. In the introduction to the 1990 American edition of Non credere di avere dei diritti, Teresa De Lauretis defines ‘‘Pensiero della differenza’’ as original and audacious, but also identifies some contradictory or debatable points, including the definition of a unified subject, which fails to recognize racial difference or lesbianism; or that of an unbalanced maternal on the symbolic level, an image that works to the detriment of imaginary contents. On the other hand, Emma Baeri (1942–) has recently

underlined the paradox of thought that uses a lexicon taken from economics, refuting emancipationism, and hypothesizes a ‘‘feudal’’ model of relationships among women. In Piu` donne che uomini, there recur ‘‘words unfamiliar to our ears at the time: a significant dual rapport, unequal because it is formulated on mother/daughter relationships, and on the refinement of a desire to win in corporate society through the conquest of a visible ease, of which trust, an inevitably feudal word, was the means and the ends.’’ This represents the failure, on one hand, of the revolutionary tie instituted by neofeminism between politics and sexuality, and, on the other, of the original tie between feminism and democracy, in the disavowal of 200 years of struggle that began with the De´claration des droits de la femme et de la Citoyenne by Olympe de Gouges, in 1791 (Emma Baeri, Noi, utopia delle donne di ieri, memoria delle donne di domani, 2001). At the end of the 1970s and in the next decade, another change occurred. From the first phase of feminism, characterized by processes of coming of awareness and of wide-ranging theoretical reflection, as well as by significant political results (one might think of the fight for the legalization of abortion and for the penalization of those who commit sexual violence), a new phase was reached, defined as ‘‘femminismo diffuso’’ or defused feminism. It seems that the thought elaborated in the previous unrest is not oriented toward the development of new theories, but to the needs for critical conscience, memory, and transmission, needs that favor the birth or consolidation of instruments like publishing houses (from the largest, La Tartaruga, which publishes both essays and literary works, to the very small, such as Beatrix V.T., with its art books); periodicals, with many based in Rome, like Effe, Legendaria (originally connected to Noi donne), Orsaminore, Reti, and Quotidiano donna; political places: from the Roman center DWF to the Milanese Centro Studi Storici per il Movimento di Liberazione delle Donne in Italia (Center for Historical Studies of the Women’s Liberation Movement in Italy) founded by Elvira Badaracco; from Turin’s Produrre e Riprodurre (Produce and Reproduce) to the Centro Donna del Comune (Center for Women of the Commune) in Venice, to the Centro Studi Condizione della Donna (Center for Studies of the Condition of Women) in Naples. In Rome, in 1979, the Centro Culturale Virginia Woolf (Virginia Woolf Cultural Center) opened, a separatist space open to all, directed toward critical reflection on the dominant culture and the diffusion of feminist ideas with particular attention to 707

FEMINIST THEORY AND CRITICISM relationships between generations, but also introducing the figure of the teacher. In 1988, as Alessandra Bocchetti remarked, the ‘‘rift, which showed itself between a politics understood as a place of selfformation and self-promotion and a politics, instead, that believed in the changing powers of feminine subjectivity, manifests itself’’ clearly (Cosa vuole una donna, 1995). Monographic courses were substituted by research groups led by women whose theoretical work aimed to a ‘‘Pensiero della differenza’’ in a flexible space and open to various specializations, working closely with the Libreria delle donne and in dialectic with the Communists. Thus, Bocchetti explained the rift that will bring her to preside over the Centro Culturale Virginia Woolf B, while the Group A, with Francesca Molfino, proceeded along the original line of investigating women’s relationship with culture, taking as referent the body and as mode of knowledge separatism. In Bologna, a group of intellectuals with various skills, active within and outside of the university, united in the form of the Associazione Orlando, seeking to evidence in its name the value of metamorphosis. In 1984, it gave life to the Centro di Documentazione, Ricerca e Iniziativa delle Donne (Women’s Documentation, Research, and Initiative Center), a public women’s institution, tied by custom to the commune and presided over by Raffaella Lamberti. The center, taking Hannah Arendt’s concept that politics must deal with the issues of cohabiting among different groups as its own, defined itself as a space open to hospitality and to communication in all its forms (including virtual and mediatic). It focused on individual subjectivity and skills, but since the individual exists in oscillation between individuality and collectivity, it constructed an international network, both to promote exchanges between different feminist groups and to ‘‘visit difficult places,’’ where bloody conflicts are underway, and thus the very roots of survival and of convivial, collective life are in question. New issues and new cognitive demands born in neofeminism provoke the development of a sector of study that—moving from criticism to the epistemological foundations of the disciplines—brings concepts, methods, and interpretative paradigms into discussion and occupies itself with subjects neglected or treated without attention to difference. This began first in the separate spheres of women and, from the 1980s, within institutions, first and foremost in the universities, although there was a certain difficulty in institutionalizing these studies. In Anglo-Saxon terms, these are called women’s 708

studies, and they sustain that the feminist point of view constitutes a theoretical form of criticism and an alternative institution of knowledge. Rosi Braidotti (1954–) contributed definitively to the birth of this field of study, practically speaking, tied as she is to a strong engagement in the area of generational transmission, and with her reflections on the internationalism of woman as nomadic subject and (in our societies characterized by a series of foreign subcultures), a migrant one. Alongside the philosophical community Diotima, which elaborated the Pensiero della differenza, there appeared various other societies in Italy. The Societa` Italiana delle Storiche (Italian Association of Women Historians) was born in 1989, with two magazines at its back: DWF (an interdisciplinary publication) and Memoria: Rivista di storia delle donne that refers to women’s history in its subtitle. It was preceded by two significant conferences: In the first, the category of patronage was proposed as an instrument for the analysis of the power inequalities existent between the two sexes, revealing the inadequacy of the schema man-oppressor/woman-oppressed; in the second, participants took stock of Italian women’s production in various disciplinary contexts, from anthropology to economics, from psychoanalysis to social sciences. The Societa` deals primarily with the topic of the subjectivity of the historian and the relationship between the political practice of ‘‘partire da se´’’ (starting with oneself) and the methods of historiography. Amongst the women historians who have introduced important problematics into the feminist debate, several should be noted. Gianna Pomata defined the history of women as a ‘‘questione di confine’’ (question of borders) and analyzed the relationship between women and the disciplines of history and medicine; Luisa Passerini worked on subjectivity and memory in relation to political history; Annarita Buttafuoco and Anna Rossi-Doria studied emancipationism and suffragism with the emergence of the concept of feminine citizenship. This concept was confronted by the philosopher Maria Luisa Boccia in the context of neofeminism and the relationship between political and sexual rights. Adriana Cavarero (1947–) is notable in the philosophical realm for her original role as founder of the Diotima community, from which she distanced herself in 1990. As a scholar of Hannah Arendt, she brings to light the categories of birth, uniqueness, action, and narration. As a theorist of a sexual pensiero della differenza aimed at the deconstruction of Western texts, she counterposes the abstract

FEMINIST THEORY AND CRITICISM philosophical subject and the fragmented postmodern subject with the corporeal and sexed concreteness of the human being in her uniqueness and in her relationships; she confronts philosophically the themes of the body, of narration, of voice. As she writes in Corpo in figure (Stately Bodies, 1995), since antiquity, politics has driven the body away from its foundational categories but has figured its own order via the metaphor of the body. Pregnant examples include Sophocles’ Antigone, with the threatening figure of a body buried alive by the polis outside of its walls, and, passing into modernity, Shakespeare’s Ophelia, with her nonpolitical body substantiated by the water in which she drowns. In terms of narration, she responds to an insuppressible human need to recount and listen to stories (Who am I? Who are you?), contributing to the radical re-edification of ethics and politics. Vocal expression is also relational, communicating beyond the logocentric system of the word, and also communicating other things. Only in recent years has the theoretical contribution of lesbianism to feminism become visible. Three important moments are notable in a historical reconstruction of this past: Gli anni Settanta: Uscire Fuori! (The 1970s: Come Out!), referring to the monthly publication Fuori and to the organization of lesbians as such first within the homosexual movement, finally arriving at a separatist philosophy; Anni ’80: Dalla costola del femminismo (The 1980s: From the Rib of Feminism), indicating the emergence from clandestinity, the Carta dei diritti della Donna Lesbica (Bill of Rights of Lesbian Woman); Anni ’90: La settimana lesbica e il ritorno in piazza (The 1990s: The Lesbian Week and the Return to the Piazza), noting the moment when Arci Lesbica is born in 1996 and one talks of the new lesbian. This condition fuori campo, as outsider, finds its best expression in the thought of Teresa De Lauretis (1938–), a scholar of feminist writing and founder of the publishing house Estro. De Lauretis developed such key concepts as that of the ‘‘Eccentric Subject,’’ a form of subjectivity constructed via multiple practices of identification and difference (of race, ethnicity, class, age, and religion), and a conception of identity as a process of continual disidentification. Lesbianism, defined as ‘‘perverse desire’’ in a literal sense (taking another path), constitutes an autonomous space that, on the feminist horizon, invests the sociosymbolic sphere as well as the sexual one. It can thus realize a conception of queer, of revindicated nonnormality. Taking into account the fact that ‘‘if feminist lesbianism subsumes sexuality in

gender, queer subsumes gender in a broadened notion of sexuality, since it considers the production of hetero/homosexuality primary’’ (Liana Borghi, ‘‘Insegnare il queer,’’ 2000). An important theoretical contribution comes from the reflection on rights, based not on a logic of identity but based on many differences that characterize the actual world. Being subject to the law means in fact revindicating sexual autonomy without implying material and symbolic exclusion, allowing visibility and freedom of expression, access to resources and to power. Sexual discrimination, like other forms of discrimination, is a political problem: In this sense, the rights of lesbians are human rights, equal to those of migrants and the poor. This way of thinking has also stimulated a renewed discussion of the feminine and the masculine, demonstrating that gender is performance, masking. Analyzing and interpreting the apparatuses of technological and ideological production and the codes of representation, which create a large part of the social imagery, is also an important part of subjectivity, a necessary practice for marginal subjects, lesbian or otherwise. These practices are nourished by literature and nourish literature via both critical rereadings of the canon and other noncanonical works, and by way of new writings. The relationship with the theater, however, bears particular consideration, since it is marked by the status of actresses as protagonists. On the stage, the sex of actors and actresses and the sex of the character do not necessarily coincide, and gender is evidenced as a construct, while the ‘‘fare come se si fosse un’altra persona’’ (acting as if one were another person) implies a continuous process of disidentification and return to oneself in what becomes both a physical and mental nomadism (Laura Mariani, Sarah Bernhardt, Colette e l’arte del travestimento, 1996). The actress is historically a figure on the margins, ‘‘donna simile a donna’’ (a woman similar to a woman), who in practice pursues the overcoming of the body/mind dualism. She thus contributes to the elaboration of another language, both because of the centrality of her body and voice, and for the symbolic and experimental nature of the language of the stage. Various experiences favor theoretical reflection due to the transitive nature and the density of theatrical writing (somewhere between philosophy, literature, and words destined to become ‘‘incarnate’’ on the stage): from the pilot work of Dacia Maraini and the Teatro La Maddalena in Rome, to the Teatro del Guerriero in Bologna, to the research associations later formed in the context of 709

FEMINIST THEORY AND CRITICISM the theater. Thanks to the transitive nature and the density of theatrical writing (somewhere between philosophy, literature, and words destined to become ‘‘incarnate’’ on the stage), He´le`ne Cixous is an important point of reference, writer for Ariane Mnouchkine at The´aˆtre du Soleil. In the context of feminist film studies, which investigate the relationship between representation and sexual difference, Giuliana Bruno and Maria Nadotti’s Off Screen (1988) provokes a lively exchange with the United States. Cinema is a form of art and of consumerism that is founded on the pleasure of looking, but who is the subject of this gaze, and who is the dark object of desire? Since the gaze, in a patriarchal society, is constructed as masculine and active, while the object of the gaze is feminine and passive, the female observer is inclined to dress up, exploring her own forms of identity and those of others in a voyage on and off the cinematic screen. This interdependence, already identified by Lonzi regarding the visual arts, is present in the everyday proliferation of images of women produced by men. Giuliana Bruno took up and developed these themes in Streetwalking on a Ruined Map (1993), a theoretical investigation at the margin of various disciplines that seeks the lost and forgotten films of Elvira Notari, a pioneer of silent cinema. Bruno thus confirms the importance of these bridge-figures, figures who cross different cultures, to Italian feminism; she illuminates the individual roads that flourished in feminism, together with the renewed need for politics. In conclusion, as Rosy Braidotti remarks, ‘‘if the only constant at the dawn of the third millennium is change, then the challenge lies in thinking about processes, rather than concepts’’ (In metamorfosi, 2003). ANNA LAURA MARIANI See also: Women’s History, Lesbian and Gay Writing Further Reading Abba`, Luisa, et al., La coscienza di sfruttata, Milan: Mazzotta, 1972. Baeri, Emma, ‘‘Noi, utopia delle donne di ieri, memoria delle donne di domani,’’ in Inventari della memoria: L’esperienza del Coordinamento per l’Autodeterminazione della Donna a Catania (1980–1985), edited by E. Baeri and Sara Fichera, Milan: Franco Angeli, 2001. Bocchetti, Alessandra, Cosa vuole una donna: Storia, politica, teoria. Scritti 1981/1995, Milan: La Tartaruga, 1995. Boccia, Maria Luisa, La differenza politica: Donne e cittadinanza, Milan: Il Saggiatore, 2002.

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Borghi, Liana, ‘‘Insegnare il queer: Marginalita`, resistenza, trasgressione,’’ in Pro/posizioni: Interventi alla prima universita` gay e lesbica, edited by Gigi Malaroda and Massimo Piccione, Florence: Edifir, 2000. Braidotti, Rosi, Soggetto nomade: Femminismo e crisi della modernita`, Rome: Donzelli, 1994; as Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Braidotti, Rosi, In metamorfosi, Milan: Feltrinelli, 2003; as Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming, edited and translated by Maria Nadotti, Cambridge, UK, and Malden, MA: Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers, 2002. Bruno, Giuliana, Streetwalking on a Ruined Map: Cultural Theory and the City Films of Elvira Notari, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. Bruno, Giuliana, and Maria Nadotti (editors), Off Screen: Women and Film in Italy, London and New York: Routledge, 1988. Bruno, Giuliana, and Maria Nadotti (editors), Immagini allo schermo: La spettatrice e il cinema, Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1991. Buttafuoco, Annarita, Questioni di cittadinanza: Donne e diritti sociali nell’Italia liberale, Siena: Protagon Editori Toscani, 1995. Calabro`, Anna Rita, and Laura Grasso (editors), Dal movimento femminista al femminismo diffuso: Ricerca e documentazione nell’area lombarda, Milan: Franco Angeli, 1985. Cavarero, Adriana, ‘‘Per una teoria della differenza sessuale,’’ in Diotima, Il pensiero della differenza sessuale, Milan: La Tartaruga, 1987. Cavarero, Adriana, Corpo in figure: Filosofia e politica della corporeita`, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1995; as Stately Bodies: Literature, Philosophy, and the Question of Gender, translated by Robert De Lucca and Deanna Shemek, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. Cavarero, Adriana, Tu che mi guardi, tu che mi racconti: Filosofia della narrazione, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1997; as Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood, translated by Paul A. Kottman, London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Cavarero, Adriana, A piu` voci: Filosofia dell’espressione vocale, Milan: Feltrinelli, 2003; as For more than one voice: towards a philosophy of vocal expression, translated by Paul Kottman, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. Cutrufelli, Maria Rosa, Disoccupata con onore, Milan: Mazzotta, 1975. Dalla Costa, Maria Rosa, Potere femminile e sovversione sociale, Padua: Marsilio, 1972. Danna, Daniela, ‘‘Cronache recenti di lesbiche in movimento,’’ in I Quaderni Viola n. 4 (e l’ultima chiuda la porta), Milan: Nuove Edizioni Internazionali, 1995. De Lauretis, Teresa, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film and Fiction, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. De Lauretis, Teresa, ‘‘Eccentric Subjects: Feminist Theory and Historical Consciousness,’’ in Feminist Studies, 16, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 115–150. Diotima, Il pensiero della differenza sessuale, Milan: La Tartaruga, 1987.

BEPPE FENOGLIO Ferrante, Lucia, Maura Palazzi, and Gianna Pomata (editors), Ragnatele di rapporti: Patronage e reti di relazione nella storia delle donne, Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1988. Fraire, Manuela (editor), Lessico politico delle donne: Teorie del femminismo (1978), Milan: Fondazione Badaracco and Franco Angeli, 2002. Kreyder, Laura, et al., Lapis: Sezione aurea di una rivista, Rome: Manifestolibri, 1998. Lamberti, Raffaella, ‘‘Antigone nella citta`,’’ in Scuola di politica Hannah Arendt, Antigone nella citta`: Emozioni e politica, Bologna: Pitagora Editrice, 1998. Lazzaro-Weis, Carol, From the Margins to Mainstream: Feminism and Fictional Modes in Italian Women Writing 1968–1990, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993. Libreria delle Donne di Milano, ‘‘Piu` donne che uomini,’’ in Sottosopra, 1983; as ‘‘More Women than Men,’’ in Italian Feminist Thought: A Reader, edited by Paola Bono and Sandra Kemp, Oxford and Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1991. Libreria delle Donne di Milano, Non credere di avere dei diritti: La generazione della liberta` femminile nell’idea e nelle vicende di un gruppo di donne, Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1987; as Sexual Difference. A Theory of Social-Symbolic Practice, translated by Patricia Cicogna and Teresa De Lauretis, Introductory Essay by Teresa De Lauretis, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990. Lonzi, Carla, Sputiamo su Hegel. La donna clitoridea e la donna vaginale e altri scritti, Milan: Scritti di Rivolta Femminile, 1974. Lonzi, Carla, Taci, anzi parla: Diario di una femminista, Milan: Scritti di Rivolta Femminile, 1978. Lonzi, Carla, Vai pure: Dialogo con Pietro Consagra, Milan: Scritti di Rivolta Femminile, 1980. Lonzi, Marta, Anna Jaquinta, and Carla Lonzi, La presenza dell’uomo nel femminismo: Secondo manifesto di Rivolta Femminile «io dico io», Milan: Scritti di Rivolta Femminile, 1978.

Marcuzzo, Maria Cristina, and Anna Rossi-Doria (editors), La ricerca delle donne: Studi femministi in Italia, Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1987. Mariani, Laura, Sarah Bernhardt, Colette e l’arte del travestimento, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1996. Melandri, Lea, Come nasce il sogno d’amore, Milan: Rizzoli, 1988. Melandri, Lea, L’infamia originaria: Facciamola finita con il cuore e la politica, Milan: Edizioni L’Erba Voglio, 1977; rpt. 1997. Melandri, Lea, Una visceralita` indicibile: La pratica dell’inconscio nel movimento delle donne degli anni Settanta, Milan: Fondazione Badaracco and Franco Angeli, 2000. ‘‘Il movimento femminista negli anni ’70,’’ in Memoria: Rivista di storia delle donne, nos. 19–20 (1987), special issue. Muraro, Luisa, L’ordine simbolico della madre, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1991. Palazzi, Maura, and Ilaria Porciani, Storiche di ieri e di oggi: Dalle autrici dell’Ottocento alle riviste di storia delle donne, Rome: Viella, 2004. Passerini, Luisa, Storie di donne e femministe, Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1991. Pomata, Gianna, ‘‘La storia delle donne: Una questione di confine,’’ in Il Mondo Contemporaneo, vol. 10, Gli strumenti della ricerca, tomo 2, edited by Nicola Tranfaglia, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1983. Ribero, Aida, and Ferdinanda Vigliani (editors), 100 titoli: Guida ragionata al femminismo degli anni Settanta, Ferrara: Luciana Tufani editrice, 1998. Rossi-Doria, Anna (editor), La liberta` delle donne: Voci della tradizione politica suffragista, Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1990. Saraceno, Chiara, Dalla parte della donna, Bari: De Donato, 1971. Straub, Kristina, Sexual Suspects: Eighteenth-century Players and Sexual Ideology, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992.

BEPPE FENOGLIO (1922–1963) Beppe Fenoglio is considered the most successful and engaging writer among those who were inspired by the Resistance. Writing in the tradition of epics and the realistic novella, he faithfully portrays the historical and local realities of his native region, the Langhe hillside in Piedmont. His work, produced in the 15 years prior to his premature death in 1963, includes 40 short stories and six novels, as well as several translations and abridgements from classics of Anglo-American literature, including a much-praised version of Coleridge’s

The Ballad of the Ancient Mariner. As Mark Pietralunga poignantly remarks, Fenoglio’s lifelong professional involvement with English becomes a means of ‘‘revivifying the semantic and phonological aspects of an ‘anemic’ Italian language’’ (Beppe Fenoglio and English Literature, 1986). Fenoglio’s first published volume, I ventitre´ giorni della citta` di Alba (The Twenty-three Days of the City of Alba, 1952), a collection of short stories originally called Racconti della guerra civile (Tales of the Civil War), is structured in 12 stories, 711

BEPPE FENOGLIO partitioned in two thematic halves: six on the Resistance and six on peasant life in the Langhe countryside in Piedmont and postwar urban life. This structure is reminiscent of the 12-book, two-part Virgil’s The Aeneid. Several intertextual links with classic epics have been found in Fenoglio’s Resistance narratives, oftentimes in passages describing the heroic death of young partisans. However, he often parodies epics in order to denounce the shortcomings and presumptuousness of both sides involved in the Italian civil war (1943–1945). The title story, which begins with ‘‘Two thousand men took Alba on October 10 and two hundred lost it on November 2 in the year 1944,’’ exemplifies Fenoglio’s ironic rendering of the Resistance: While he recounts the historical facts, he lends ironic prominence to the symmetry in the number of partisans involved in the deed’s beginning and end. This story is a carnivalized (‘‘carnival’’ is repeatedly mentioned) epic: Fenoglio’s partisans are unprepared for the hardship of warfare. After the city’s conquest, the partisans revert to childish behavior, and their sloppy military practices (such as playing cards in the watch post) allow for an easy entrance of the Fascist troops into the city after only 23 days. The partisans are then dispersed: Just 10% of them go back to their bands on the hills to continue the fight against the Fascists. This story features protagonists and antagonists, partisans and Fascists, as groups (with a third group represented by Alba’s ordinary people, as bystanders), while individualized characters will emerge in the following stories. As in Boccaccio’s Decameron, these stories all start with a description of the well-known landscape, weather, daily gestures; then the out-of-the-ordinary war fact is narrated: the kidnapping of a Fascist officer by the partisans, who are in turn surprised by the Fascist cavalry; the execution of a Fascist by partisans; the execution of a partisan (thief ) by other partisans; the execution of partisans by Fascists. These stories on the Resistance present several combinatory possibilities of mutual killing among the groups involved in the civil war. There are a few exceptions, such as Gli inizi del partigiano Raoul (The Initiation of Raoul the Partisan), a miniaturized version of the later autobiographical novel with Johnny as protagonist. The first story in the second half of the book, ‘‘Ettore va al lavoro’’ (Ettore Goes to Work), is drawn from the first chapters of an early ‘‘neoveristic’’ (Fenoglio’s term) novel, La paga del sabato (Saturday Is Payday), published posthumously in 1969. Ettore is a former partisan who, after the 712

war, is unable to adapt to his workday routine as a clerk in a chocolate factory. He suffers from mental addiction to war actions. Having kept his gun from wartime, he turns to some kind of illegal smuggling, letting his mother believe he is not at risk. Peacetime stories such as this expose psychological reactions—either subjugation or rebellion— to overpowering parental ties both in the city and in the countryside alike, as a source of the immature behavior of the Italian males. They counteract the tragicomic Resistance events of the earlier stories, with all their absurd cruelties. In La malora (Ruin, 1954) Fenoglio is influenced by Giovanni Verga’s verismo and its blend of dialect and literary Italian. The short novel, set in the Langhe at the beginning of the twentieth century, focuses on the peasants’ struggles as well as on their ruinous obsession for the roba (goods or property). While lexicon and similes are rigorously drawn, like in Verga, from the peasants’ experiences, Fenoglio innovates the genre by introducing a first-person narrator, Agostino. A character by the same name is also featured in the eighth story of the 1952 collection, ‘‘Quell’antica ragazza’’ (That Ancient Girl). Even if Agostino is somewhat selfless, his love for a girl is sacrificed to the patriarchal mentality of family land acquisition. A particularly poignant effect is achieved by having Agostino endure this injustice without his being able to term it as such, as he tells his story and does not question the root cause of his suffering. The title refers to the gradual, yet unavoidable, ruin incurred by Agostino’s family, who owns a little piece of land: First the elder brother is drafted in the army and becomes an alcoholic upon his return, while the family contracts crushing debts and Agostino is sent to work at a sharecropper’s farm; then the father dies (an event proleptically presented in the novel’s prologue); and finally the younger brother dies of tuberculosis while studying to become a priest. Fenoglio wrote numerous short stories on life in the Langhe, but with a first-person narrator altogether different from Agostino. Such a first-person, nameless narrator appears for the first time in the last story of the 1952 collection, ‘‘Pioggia e la sposa’’ (Rain and the Bride). He is a more savvy, city-dweller type, who, remembering his childhood and adolescence, recounts memorable and less memorable facts that occurred in the circle of his countryside acquaintances and relatives. Fenoglio, who published some of these stories in literary journals, had intended to assemble them in book form under the title Racconti del parentado (Tales of the Kinsfolk).

BEPPE FENOGLIO Out of the several Resistance fiction projects Fenoglio undertook during the 1950s, only the novel Primavera di bellezza (Spring of Beauty, 1959) was published during his lifetime. Partly autobiographical, it recounts in the third person the adventures of a young man called Johnny (a nickname he was given in high school by his English language teacher) from the days he served in the army (first in Piedmont and then in Rome where he was transferred the day after the Allies landed in Sicily on 10 July 1943), to the fateful weeks following the armistice (8 September 1943). The central chapters are devoted to the absurd predicament of the Italian soldiers in Rome on and after September 8, the climax of a long-standing crisis in the Fascist government, which constitutes the novel’s main theme: the disastrous condition in which Mussolini’s reckless war efforts had plunged the Italian army. Fenoglio gives a vividly realistic cross-section of the Italian garrison, which for many respects works as a metaphor of the Italian nation under the Fascist regime. After four years at war, the young men preparing to become officers are both morally and physically in rags. Hence the irony of the novel’s title, a quotation from the famous Fascist song ‘‘Giovinezza,’’ where bellezza (beauty) is made to rhyme with giovinezza (youth). Throughout the many unpleasant facts of military life in disarray, Johnny maintains a dignified attitude, but his remarks and memories (flashbacks from the days in school) reveal a raging, wellthought-out anti-Fascist sentiment. A few days after the armistice, as German troops swarm into Rome, Johnny deserts, however reluctantly, and manages to return to Piedmont by train. A few miles from home, he is intercepted by a group of deserters who have started a counterarmy of their own. Johnny joins them, transitioning directly from the royal army to underground warfare, embracing his new life as a rebel, the only way of keeping his manly dignity intact. Just when the band’s members decide to disband and go back into hiding after the Germans have proven more numerous and powerful than expected, Johnny proposes to lay a final ambush to the last track of a German convoy, and dies in the attack. In an unrevised novel originally written in the late 1950s, L’imboscata (The Ambush, 1992), Fenoglio creates a new partisan character, Milton, tougher, less snobbish and sentimental than Johnny. In the short novel Una questione privata (A Private Matter, 1963), Milton is a partisan in love, whose thoughts and memories (flashbacks) of war are intercut with those of Fulvia, a character

inspired by a girl Fenoglio loved during his high school days. Eventually he abandons his political struggles to ascertain whether Fulvia is having an affair with friend and fellow partisan Giorgio. Italo Calvino singled out Una questione privata as ‘‘the crowning of a whole generation’s efforts to portray the Resistance,’’ the book where one could find ‘‘the Resistance just as it was’’ (Presentazione, 1964). Although Fenoglio’s literary reputation as Resistance writer is chiefly dependent on his posthumously published novel Il partigiano Johnny (Johnny the Partisan, 1968), Calvino’s homage to his recently deceased friend and fellow writer comes as an overdue vindication of the author’s literary legacy. In the postwar period, Fenoglio’s problematic view of the Resistance is seen as harmful to the Italian Communist Party’s political cause, and consequently attracted many unsympathetic reviewers. During the 1970s and 1980s, as more manuscripts were discovered and published, the philological debate among scholars such as Maria Corti and Edoardo Saccone (which aimed at dating Fenoglio’s works) somehow marginalized the study of the complex aspects of the author’s work. In the 1990s, Dante Isella’s revised edition of the Romanzi e racconti settled all philological disputes, and Lorenzo Mondo’s discovery of the earliest versions of the Resistance stories, Appunti partigiani (Partisans Notebooks, 1994) corroborated and completed Isella’s scholarly endeavor. Since then the literary debate on Beppe Fenoglio has bloomed and is still thriving.

Biography Born in Alba (Cuneo), 1 March 1922. Attended the Liceo Classico, 1932–1940; studied humanities at the Universita` di Torino, 1940–1942; drafted in the army, January 1943, and will never finish his degree; was in a garrison in Rome on armistice day, 8 September 1943; deserted shortly after, and managed to go back home; joined the partisans on the hills, January 1944–1945; acted as liaison officer between the partisans and the Allied forces during the last two months prior to the liberation, 1945; voted for the monarchy at the 1946 referendum; returned to live with his family in Alba and remained unemployed until he was hired as commercial translator by a local winery, 1947; kept this job for the rest of his life. Under pseudonym Giovanni Federico Biamonti, published the first Resistance story ‘‘Il trucco’’ in the journal Pesci 713

BEPPE FENOGLIO rossi, 1949; began a decade of intense creativity publishing with Einaudi, Garzanti, Edinidustria, and in literary journals such as Itinerari, Nuovi argomenti, Il caffe`, La fiera letteraria, Paragone; won the Prato prize for Primavera di bellezza, 1959; married, with civil rights, Luciana Bombardi, 1960; a daughter is born, 1962; awarded the Alpi Apuane prize for the short story ‘‘Ma il mio amore e` Paco,’’ 1962. He was diagnosed with lung cancer, and died in Turin, 18 February 1963. FEDERICA BRUNORI DEIGAN See also: Literature of Resistance Selected Works Collections Opere, 3 vols., critical edition directed by Maria Corti, 1978. Romanzi e racconti, edited by Dante Isella, 1992; revised edition, 2001. Appunti partigiani, edited by Lorenzo Mondo, 1994.

Fiction I ventitre´ giorni della citta` di Alba, 1952; as The Twenty-three Days of the City of Alba, translated by John Shepley, 2002. La malora, 1954; as Ruin, translated by John Shepley, 1992. Primavera di bellezza, 1959. Un giorno di fuoco, romanzo e altri racconti, edited by Lorenzo Mondo, 1963. Una questione privata, 1963; as A Private Matter, translated by Maria Grazia Di Paolo, 1988. Il partigiano Johnny, 1968; as Johnny the Partisan, translated by Stuart Hood, 1995. La paga del sabato, 1969. Racconti partigiani, 1976. L’affare dell’anima e altri racconti, 1978. Una crociera agli antipodi, 1980; as Una crociera agli antipodi e altri racconti fantastici, edited by Luca Bufano, 2003. L’imboscata, 1992.

Calvino, Italo, ‘‘Presentazione,’’ in Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno, Turin: Einaudi, 1964. De Nicola, Francesco, Introduzione a Fenoglio, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1989. Grignani, Maria Antonietta, Beppe Fenoglio, Florence: Le Monnier, 1981. Innocenti, Orsetta, La biblioteca inglese di Fenoglio: Percorsi romanzeschi in ‘‘Una questione privata,’’ Roma: Vecchiarelli, 2001. Ioli, Giovanna, Beppe Fenoglio oggi, Milan: Mursia, 1991. Isella, Dante, ‘‘Itinerario fenogliano,’’ in Beppe Fenoglio, Romanzi e racconti, Turin: Einaudi-Gallimard, 1992. Lagorio, Gina, Fenoglio, Milan: Mursia, 1972. Lajolo, Davide, Fenoglio, Milan: Rizzoli, 1978. Menzio, Pino (editor), Beppe Fenoglio, 1922–1997: Atti del Convegno, Alba, 15 marzo 1997, Milan: Electa, 1997. Milanini, Claudio, ‘‘Beppe Fenoglio: Lettere ritrovate e carte neglette,’’ in Belfagor, 57, nos. 4–6 (2002): 619–622. Pedulla`, Gabriele, La strada piu` lunga: Sulle tracce di Beppe Fenoglio, Roma: Donzelli, 2001. Pietralunga, Mark, Beppe Fenoglio and English Literature: A Study of the Writer as Translator, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Rondini, Andrea, ‘‘Dallo splendido isolamento al successo problematico: Fenoglio e la critica dell’ultimo decennio,’’ in Testo, 24, no. 45 (2003): 103–125. Saccone, Edoardo, Fenoglio: I testi, l’opera, Torino: Einaudi, 1986. Soletti, Elisabetta, Beppe Fenoglio, Milano: Mursia, 1987.

IL PARTIGIANO JOHNNY, 1968 Novel by Beppe Fenoglio

Translations Samuel Taylor Coleridge, La ballata del vecchio marinaio, in Itinerari, 1955, in book form, 1964. Kenneth Graham, Il vento nei salici, edited by John Meddemmen, 1982. Quaderno di traduzioni, edited by Mark Pietralunga, 2000.

Other La voce nella tempesta: Da ‘‘Cime tempestose’’ di Emily Bronte¨, edited by Francesco De Nicola, 1974. Lettere 1940–1962, edited by Luca Bufano, 2002.

Further Reading Bigazzi, Roberto, Fenoglio: Personaggi e narratori, Roma: Salerno Editrice, 1983. Bufano, Luca, Fenoglio e il racconto breve, Ravenna: Longo, 1999.

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Il partigiano Johnny (Johnny the Partisan) was found in two unassembled Italian versions and one partial English version among the writer’s papers at the time of his death in 1963. All editions are posthumous, resulting from philological work. According to Dante Isella’s chronology, the English version was written in 1955 or early 1956, and the Italian ones in 1956–1958. Il partigiano Johnny was initially conceived as a sequel to Primavera di bellezza (Spring of Beauty, 1959) in which the same main character, Johnny, is featured. Fenoglio worked simultaneously on the two books, but since he eventually decided to have Johnny die in Primavera di

BEPPE FENOGLIO bellezza, the manuscripts on Johnny and the partisan war were left unfinished. Johnny is a young man from a lower middleclass family of Alba, in Piedmont, who deserts the army after the armistice on 8 September 1943, spends some time in hiding, and eventually decides to join the armed Resistance against the newly formed Republic of Salo` (1943–1945). At first, he joins the Garibaldini, or the Red Communist bands, and then the Badogliani, or Azzurri, loyal to the king. In the section entitled ‘‘La citta`’’ (The City), Fenoglio recounts the partisan conquest of Alba in a longer version than in the title story of I ventitre´ giorni della citta` di Alba (The Twentythree Days of the City of Alba, 1952). Prior to the city’s conquest, which turns out to be a major setback for the partisans, Johnny expresses his dissent with the decision of the Azzurri’s commander, Nord, to go along with the Red partisans’ plan to conquer the city. Johnny criticizes all partisans, Red and Azzurri alike, for their attempts at mimicking a regular army in their strategy as well as in their course of action. Johnny believes that the anti-Fascist fight should be carried out with killand-run ambushes. Being one of the few who go back to the hills after the fall of Alba, Johnny survives both battles and the ordeals of the clandestine life during the winter 1944–1945. He dies in the Battle of Valdivilla, the last victory of the Fascists at the end of February, two months prior to the end of the war. In the English version of the novel, Johnny does not die in battle and ends up working as a liaison officer between the partisans and the Allied forces. The novel is largely autobiographical and reflects the events of local and national history. Critic Giovanni Falaschi considers Il partigiano Johnny as the most realistic of the Resistance novels (La resistenza armata nella letteratura italiana, 1976), and historian Claudio Pavone, among others, has used it as a source in his study on the Resistance (Una guerra civile, 1991). However, Johnny is a carefully crafted fictional character, the protagonist of a tragic bildungsroman narrated in the third person. Fenoglio enriches his character dimension by inserting the English language (adjectives, adverbs, or even whole incidental sentences) in the midst of Johnny’s refined Italian. Thus, Johnny is portrayed with a learned and sophisticated mind, as well as a fascination with the Anglo-American culture. After the November 1944 announcement by General Alexander, which asked the Italian partisans to stop fighting, go into

hiding, and wait for the spring offensive, Johnny has to confront his own motivation for remaining involved with the guerrillas. He discovers that he is driven not only by his deeply felt anti-Fascism, but also by his personal challenge to fate, a kind of contest with destiny and death, a perpetual testing of his survival instinct. In 2000, Guido Chiesa, who had produced with Davide Ferrario a compelling documentary on the Resistance (Materiale resistente, 1995), directed a film based on Fenoglio’s novel. FEDERICA BRUNORI DEIGAN Editions First edition: Il partigiano Johnny, edited by Lorenzo Mondo, Turin: Einaudi, 1968. Critical edition: Il partigiano Johnny, edited by Maria Antonietta Grignani, in Opere, vol. 1, part 2, Turin: Einaudi, 1978. Third edition: Il partigiano Johnny, in Romanzi e racconti, edited by Dante Isella, Turin: Einaudi-Gallimard, 1992. Translations: Johnny the Partisan, translated by Stuart Hood, London: Quartet Books, 1995.

Further Reading Alfano, Giancarlo, ‘‘Presente assoluto e campo della scrittura nel Partigiano Johnny,’’ in Testo, 24, no. 45 (2003): 9–38. Beccaria, Gian Luigi, La guerra e gli asfodeli: Romanzo e vocazione epica di Beppe Fenoglio, Milan: Serra e Riva, 1984. Bessi, Rossella, ‘‘Fenoglio e l’epica classica,’’ in Inventario, new series, 20, nos. 5–6 (1982): 169–189. Bufano, Luca, Beppe Fenoglio e la narrativa partigiana, Roma: Fandango, 2000. Casadei, Alberto, ‘‘Dagli Appunti partigiani al Partigiano Johnny,’’ Testo, 24, no. 45 (2003): 39–54. Cooke, Philip, Fenoglio’s Binoculars, Johnny’s Eyes, New York: Peter Lang, 2000. De Nicola, Francesco, Come leggere ‘‘Il partigiano Johnny’’ di Beppe Fenoglio, Milan: Mursia, 1985. Falaschi, Giovanni, La resistenza armata nella letteratura italiana, Turin: Einaudi, 1976. Fenocchio, Gabriella, ‘‘Tempo, natura e simboli nel Partigiano Johnny,’’ in Filologia e critica, 9, no. 3 (1984): 407–442. Isella, Dante, ‘‘La lingua del Partigiano Johnny,’’ in Beppe Fenoglio, Romanzi e racconti, Turin: Einaudi- Gallimard, 1992. Manetti, Andrea, ‘‘La vita e il suo rovescio: Dal partigiano Johnny al prigioniero Fenoglio,’’ in Lettere italiane, 52, no. 3 (2000): 400–428. Negri, Piero, et al. (editors), Il partigiano Fenoglio: Uno scrittore nella guerra civile, Roma: Fandango Libri, 2000. Pavone, Claudio, Una guerra civile: Saggio sulla moralita` nella Resistenza, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1991.

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FERRARA

FERRARA The cultural history of Ferrara—founded in the sixth century AD on the right bank of the Po delta and ruled by the Estensi from the end of the twelfth century onward—began in 1391, when Alberto V d’Este established the university with the permission of Pope Boniface IX. But it was especially during the years of Leonello d’Este (1441–1450) that Ferrara became a center of Humanism able to compete with the most famous courts of the time—particularly in the fields of art, architecture, urban design, entertainment, and music—by transforming itself into a city laboratory on a European level and an emblem of the innovation produced by the Italian Renaissance. Under Leonello, who was tutored by the great Humanist Guarino da Verona, there began a policy of prestige and magnificence through the transmission of culture that coincides with the leadership assumed by the university during the years of teaching by Guarino (1429–1460), whose private school claimed pupils from all over Italy and Europe. Guarino was the architect of an innovative pedagogy designed to form the new ruling class intellectually, as well as ethically and morally, with Greek and Latin texts playing a determining role in his ideals. The authors most often read, translated, and commented upon were Plato, Aristotle, Lucian, Plutarch, Cicero, Livy, Virgil, and Terence. Later, with the beginning of the theatrical experimentation promoted by Duke Ercole I, Plautus would be performed, in an utterly original manner, in the vernacular rather than in Latin, as the traditional schemes of Humanist erudition required. Along with Guarino, other learned teachers were Giovanni Aurispa and Angelo Decembrio, who received decisive support by the development of the most important court library of the period (the first inventory was taken in 1436). Along with classical authors, the shelves were filled with chivalric stories/histories belonging to medieval romance, which indicate a specific literary choice and determine the taste and the direction of the Ferrarese imagination that would culminate in Ludovico Ariosto. Within a code of behavior that placed the prince at the center of every artistic and cultural manifestation, the library assumed an emblematic role as the representation of power. The city became 716

an obligatory destination for intellectuals and artists, among whom were Leon Battista Alberti, Pisanello, Piero della Francesca, and Andrea Mantegna. There was a profusion of astrological, medical, and philosophical studies; Latin poetry flourished with Tito Vespasiano Strozzi; and, later, between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, there was the vernacular poetry of Antonio Tebaldeo. The 20 years of rule by Borso (1450–1471), who was less refined than his brother Leonello, are marked not so much by literary culture as by two great artistic undertakings conceived as a further confirmation of the image of power: the sumptuous Bible illustrated by Taddeo Crivelli and Franco de’ Rossi, and the staggering profane cycle of frescoes of the months in the hall of honor in the Palazzo Schifanoia, a work that involved the entire Ferrarese school of painting of the second half of the fifteenth century. These were the years of Cosme` Tura, Franscesco del Cossa, and Ercole de’ Roberti, but above all of the architect Biagio Rossetti, who, under a commission from Ercole I (1471–1505), achieved a development of roads and buildings (known as Addizione Erculea) that concretized the model of the new urban design of the Renaissance. Ercole I strengthened the project of politics nourished by culture, assuring his own celebration and the values of court through a venue of great resonance such as the theater. From 1486 on, the staging of Plautus and court festivals occurred repeatedly. Along with these performances, there were also inquiries into the space and the form of the theater through the interpretation of Vitruvius, culminating in the treatise Spectacula (On Spectacles, after 1501) by Pellegrino Prisciani (ca. 1435– 1518), a lecturer at the Studium Urbis, an archivist, the duke’s librarian, an astrologist, a poet, and a philosopher. The staging of Plautus marked the beginning of a modern theatricality that includes the performance of Niccolo` da Correggio’s Favola di Cefalo (The Fable of Cephalus, 1487) and the composition of the comedy Timone by Matteo Maria Boiardo on the occasion of the marriage of Alfonso d’Este and Anna Sforza in 1491. Above all, we owe to Boiardo the invention of the ‘‘romance’’ canon—nourished by the court library,

FERRARA humanistic ideals, and the reading of stories in French—first with the collection of poems Amoroum libri, and then with Orlando Innamorato. In the climate of cultural centrality that had by now been acquired under Ercole I, a new generation of intellectuals and poets took shape in Ferrara: Celio Calcagnini (1479–1541), a scholar of rhetoric, Giglio Gregorio Giraldi (1479–1552), an expert on mythology engaged in the controversy on the relation between the ancients and the moderns, as well as Ludovico Ariosto, who will undertake the majority of his intellectual work under the later duchy of Alfonso I (1505–1534), realizing the great undertaking of Orlando Furioso. The city’s fortunes changed radically during the years of Ercole II (1534–1559), which were marked by the religious debate. His French wife Renata, in fact, a staunch Calvinist, makes the court into a center of Protestant propaganda, compromising the already delicate relations with the church. The climate of ‘‘closeness’’ that followed was also reflected in culture, which was already far from the Renaissance utopia, but in reality, it is all of Italian civilization that was changing. The academies replaced the courts in cultural production and, with their role of political amplification at an end, theatrical performances unfolded in the enclosure of private palaces. No one, however, followed the path of comedy pointed out by Ariosto. Instead, a new genre was born—the pastoral fable— that characterized Ferrara’s entire culture in the second half of the sixteenth century. Its creator was Giambattista Giraldi Cinzio (1504–1573), who was also the author of Senecan tragedies that introduce horror onto the stage with a moralistic intent. But tragedy does not enjoy success, and the new Ferrarese theater blossomed only with the pastoral, which, after Giraldi Cinzio’s Egle (1545), influenced various texts, before culminating in Torquato Tasso’s Aminta (1573) and Battista Guarini’s Il pastor fido (The Faithful Shepherd, 1590). Under Ercole II, the Jewish community, present at least since 1275, consolidated itself: They were ‘‘learned merchants’’—among whom were intellectual academicians, doctors, jurists, and printers— who brought to Ferrara the culture of their countries of origin. Among the printers, the name Abraham Usque stands out; he published a famous Biblia en lengua espan˜ola (Spanish-Language Bible, 1555) that spread rapidly in the Sephardic world. In 1556, the rare privilege of opening a Jewish ‘‘university’’ was granted; the university was patronized by Salomone da Riva, who encouraged the exchange of ideas even with Christians. The

ghetto of Ferrara began to compete with the much more famous ones in Prague and other Italian cities. Jewish culture left an indelible mark that can still be felt in contemporary Ferrara through the labor of intellectuals, scientists, and writers (for example, Giorgio Bassani in the twentieth century), despite the deportations and the extermination suffered during World War II. Today, traces of this culture are preserved in the synagogue and in a small museum, and in a quiet cemetery that is defined as a ‘‘place for the soul.’’ The poet Torquato Tasso dominated the period of Alfonso II (1559–1597), the last duke of Ferrara, whose court became a haven for unorthodox religious figures such as Vittoria Colonna. But the Gerusalemme liberata represents the final stage of a cultural identity that was by then on the path to dissolution, despite the efforts to exalt power through spectacular forms and astonishing, grandiose musicals (especially theme tournaments with choreographic exhibitions and colossal settings). These were also the years when the commedia dell’arte made its appearance in Ferrara. Alfonso II died childless, and with the consequent ceding of Ferrara to the sovereignty of the church in 1598, the city entered a long period of obscurity. The classicism and mythology that had dominated the Estense civilization now earn Ferrara the accusation of paganism. The ‘‘places of delight’’ (Edenic, fantastical gardens) that represented its clearest symbol were progressively destroyed, and the Schifanoia frescoes were covered up in the eighteenth century by a layer of whitewash that damaged them almost irreparably. They were partially restored during the nineteenth century and masterfully interpreted in 1922 by Aby Warburg, who identified in them the astrological iconography of ancient Greece filtered through the succeeding Arabic, Indian, and Latin traditions, using a method of inquiry that initiates modern iconology. With the end of the duchy, and the shattering of the organic connection between the intellectual and the court, Ferrara’s cultural life closed in upon itself. The only relation with the past seemed to survive in the intense theatrical and musical activity that animated the various theaters built beginning in the middle of the seventeenth century in correspondence with the emergence of melodrama. Otherwise, few distinct personalities emerged within the general scene, and not all of these are easily ascribed to their experience of the city: There is, for instance, the Jesuit Daniello Bartoli (1608–1685), Ferrarese by birth but culturally tied to the Roman 717

FERRARA circles of the mid-seventeenth century; similarly, a century later it is only the youthful formation of the poet Vincenzo Monti (that can be attributed to Ferrara), before his move to Rome in 1778. Bartoli’s work, in particular the Istoria della Compagnia di Gesu` (The History of the Society of Jesus, 1673), represents, however, a model for the Ferrarese literati of the seventeenth century, when there emerged a learned, historical commitment to the conservation of the city’s memory (Girolamo Baruffaldi, Cesare Barotti, Cesare Cittadella, Antonio Frizzi). There was a renewed awareness of Ferrara’s Renaissance civilization, which was opposed to the obscurity of the ecclesiastical dominion, and cultural institutions were created and consolidated, beginning with the university, which in 1753 was endowed with an opulent library. Moreover, the Teatro Comunale, designed by Antonio Foschini with the participation of Cosimo Morelli, opened in 1798. After the brief revolutionary and Napoleonic surge, the intellectual climate changed and, during the years before unification, the Accademia delle Scienze and the Civica Pinacoteca at the Palazzo Diamanti were founded, while public education was increased. But throughout the entire nineteenth century literary activity was almost nonexistent, and the university was reduced to a small number of departments. The Ferrarese twentieth century is defined by two peculiarities: the political oppression, between the two world wars, of local Fascism, which extended into the definition of cultural questions as well; and the emigration of intellectuals and artists toward the major centers of production, Rome and Milan. An important example is the memorable exhibition in 1933 of Ferrara’s Renaissance painting. But even more emblematic is the daily Corriere Padano, founded by the powerful Fascist leader Italo Balbo, with its terza pagina sought after by the best Italian, and not merely local, intellectual talents (Giorgio Bassani, Michelangelo Antonioni, Giuseppe Dessı`, Natalino Sapegno, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Mario Soldati, Guido Aristarco, Luciano Anceschi, and many others). It is a page on culture that, during the years when Fascism reigned, paradoxically assumed the aspect of a place for the diffusion of innovative ideas, allowing the formation of the young intellectuals that will later be engaged in the democratic and anti-Fascist fight during the Resistance and the immediate postwar period. The tendency to escape from the provincial city—obligatory for the many youths who became involved with the cinema—was also a necessary step for writers and artists who only in circles of 718

ample breadth could give an impetus to their cultural activity. This was the case of the Futurist poet Corrado Govoni and of the ‘‘metaphysical’’ painters and writers Giorgio De Chirico, Filippo De Pisis, Alberto Savinio, and Carlo Carra`. Intellectuals such as Lanfranco Caretti, Claudio Varese, and Guido Fink ‘‘emigrated’’ to fill important university chairs elsewhere. But there was also Giorgio Bassani, whose literary activity remained tied indissolubly to the memory of his city, to its characters and settings, such as in the cycle of stories and novels Il romanzo di Ferrara (1956–1974). Just as the theater characterized the Ferrara of the Estensi, the main cultural manifestation of twentieth-century Ferrara was the cinema, to which the city contributed right from its beginnings: critics and theorists (Guido Aristarco and Guido Fink), directors (Michelangelo Antonioni, Florestano Vancini, Folco Quilici), and a production house for documentaries and short films established in 1949. Today, Ferrara abounds in cultural events and institutions, which are at times unable to achieve a dialogue or intellectual coordination. The Istituto di Studi Rinascimentali, created in the 1980s under the leadership of Amedeo Quondam, is emblematic, as an outpost in the Po Valley of the Center for the Study of the ‘‘Europe of the Courts’’ that brings together important scholars from various disciplines. The vast legacy produced in the course of 15 years (international conferences, books, a journal, archives supported by computer functionality) now appears caught between economic difficulties and a provincial mindset. From a similar perspective, we note the demise of a literary festival organized by the poet and novelist Roberto Pazzi, which attracts writers of international fame who are open to dialogue with the city and with the students. This is a truly ‘‘metaphysical’’ climate, in a city that harbors a university with eight schools and a population of more than 16,000 students, equal to approximately 12% of the city’s inhabitants. Ferrara’s policy of supporting ‘‘grand events’’ is tied above all to art exhibitions and an intense program of theater and music organized by the Teatro Comunale and by Ferrara Musica, an association that relies on the prestigious collaboration of the Maestro Claudio Abbado. But perhaps the image of contemporary Ferrara is that which Roberto Pazzi entrusts ironically to the pages of the novel La citta` volante (The Flying City, 1999): a city that remains suspended in the air, creating disquiet for citizens and administrators. DANIELE SERAGNOLI

MARSILIO FICINO Further Reading Bassi, Carlo, Perche´ Ferrara e` bella. Guida alla comprensione della citta`, Ferrara: Corbo, 1994. Bellonci, Maria, Lucrezia Borgia. La sua vita e i suoi tempi, Milan: Mondadori, 1939. Bertoni, Giulio, La biblioteca estense e la cultura ferrarese ai tempi del duca Ercole I (1471–1505), Turin: Loescher, 1903. Bertoni, Giulio, Guarino da Verona fra letterati e cortigiani a Ferrara, Ge´ne`ve: Olschki, 1921. Bocchi, Francesca, editor, Storia illustrata di Ferrara, 4 vols., Repubblica di San Marino: AIEP Editore, 1987–1989. Castelli, Patrizia, editor, La rinascita del sapere. Libri e maestri dello Studio ferrarese, Venice: Marsilio, 1991. Chiappini, Alessandra, ‘‘Immagini di vita ferrarese nel secolo XVII,’’ in La chiesa di San Giovanni Battista e la cultura ferrarese del Seicento, Milan: Electa, 1981. Chiappini, Luciano, Gli Estensi, Milan: Dall’Oglio, 1967; rpt. Ferrara: Corbo, 2001. Cruciani, Fabrizio, et al., ‘‘La sperimentazione a Ferrara negli anni di Ercole I e Ludovico Ariosto,’’ in Teatro e Storia, 16 (1994): 131–217. Fabbri, Paolo, editor, I teatri di Ferrara. Commedia, opera e ballo nel Sei e Settecento, 2 vols., Lucca: Libreria Musicale Italiana, 2002. Folli, Anna, editor, Vent’anni di cultura ferrarese: 1925– 1945. Antologia del ‘‘Corriere Padano,’’ Bologna: Patron, 1978. Gundersheimer, Werner L., Ferrara: The Style of a Renaissance Tradition, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973. Lockwood, Lewis, Music in Renaissance Ferrara, 1400– 1505: The Creation of a Musical Center in the Fifteenth Century, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984. Moretti, Walter, editor, Storia di Ferrara, 7: Il Rinascimento. La letteratura, Ferrara: Corbo, 1994.

Papagno, Giuseppe, and Amedeo Quondam, editors, La corte e lo spazio. Ferrara estense, vols. 3, Rome: Bulzoni, 1982. Prosperi, Adriano, editor, Storia di Ferrara: Il Rinascimento. Situazioni e personaggi, vol. 6, Ferrara: Corbo, 2000. Segre, Renata, ‘‘La formazione di una comunita` marrana: i portoghesi a Ferrara,’’ in Storia d’Italia. Annali 11. Gli ebrei in Italia, 1: Dall’alto Medioevo all’eta` dei ghetti, edited by Corrado Vivanti, Turin: Einaudi, 1996. Seragnoli, Daniele, and Barbara Di Pascale, ‘‘Il teatro a Ferrara da Ercole II alla Devoluzione estense (1534– 1598): linee e tendenze,’’ in Le stagioni del teatro. Le sedi storiche dello spettacolo in Emilia-Romagna, edited by Lidia Bortolotti, Bologna: Grafis, 1995. Varese, Ranieri, editor, Atlante di Schifanoia, Modena: Panini, 1989. Venturi, Gianni, editor, Torquato Tasso e la cultura estense, Atti del convegno di studi, Ferrara, 1995, Florence: Olschki, 1999. Venturi, Gianni, editor, L’eta` di Alfonso I e la pittura del Dosso, Atti del convegno internazionale di studi, Ferrara, 9–12 dicembre 1998, Modena: Panini, 2004. Waage Petersen, Lene, Marianne Pade, and Daniela Quaranta, editors, La corte di Ferrara e il suo mecenatismo, 1441–1598. The Court of Ferrara & its Patronage, Atti del Convegno internazionale, Copenhagen, maggio 1987, Modena: Panini, 1990. Warburg, Aby, ‘‘Arte italiana e astrologia internazionale nel Palazzo Schifanoia di Ferrara,’’ in La rinascita del paganesimo antico. Contributi alla storia della cultura, edited by Gertrud Bing, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1966. Zevi, Bruno, Saper vedere la citta`. Ferrara di Biagio Rossetti, la prima citta` moderna europea, Turin: Einaudi, 1971. Zorzi, Ludovico, ‘‘Ferrara: il sipario ducale,’’ in Zorzi, Ludovico, Il teatro e la citta`. Saggi sulla scena italiana, Torino: Einaudi, 1977.

MARSILIO FICINO (1433–1499) One of the most influential thinkers of his age, Marsilio Ficino was the prime mover in the Renaissance revival of Platonism, initially in Florence and subsequently throughout Italy and much of Europe. In the first half of the fifteenth century, there had been some interest in Plato from Humanists active in Florence, Milan, and Rome, and this received impetus from the presence of Byzantine emigre´s on Italian soil both before and after the Council of Union (1438–1439). Ficino’s achievement is nonetheless remarkable in that, by 1469, he had made the first Latin translation of the complete corpus of Plato’s writings. The translations

were to be later revised, with prefaces for each dialogue, and were printed in 1484 (a date selected for its propitious astrological significance) as the Platonis Opera Omnia (Complete Works of Plato). Ficino held a firm conviction in a prisca theologia or ‘‘ancient theology,’’ that is, the notion that all faiths have a single matrix and that pre-Christian thinkers (including Zoroaster, Hermes Trismegistus, and above all Plato) had received a revelation equivalent to that of Moses. Such beliefs led him to translate into Latin 14 Greek Hermetic texts attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, as well as various other Greek texts, including the Orphic Hymns, 719

MARSILIO FICINO Hesiod’s Theogony, Pythagorean works, and the Chaldean oracles. Trismegistus’ collection entitled Pimander (ca. 1463–1464) was dedicated to Cosimo de’ Medici under whose patronage Ficino had begun to study Greek in the late 1450s and who had provided him with Greek manuscripts of Plato. In addition to Latin translations of Greek philosophical, Hermetic, and literary texts, Ficino was an important force behind volgarizzamenti (‘‘vernacularizations’’) of Latin and Greek works in Florence in the 1460s. The Pimander, for example, was rapidly rendered into the vernacular by the merchant copyist and bibliophile, Tommaso Benci. Ficino also showed a keen interest in the vernacular, writing letters and other treatises in it, and making vernacularizations of his own Latin works. In 1468, he made an elegant vernacular version of Dante’s Monarchia (Dante’s thesis that temporal authority should be concentrated in a single secular ruler had especial resonance for the Medici regime at a time of conflict with the papacy under Paul II); the proemio celebrates Dante as a philosopho poeticho (poetic philosopher) who drank in deep draughts of Platonism through the cup furnished by Virgil’s Aeneid. In the 1470s, moreover, Ficino also addressed a wide vernacular audience in important apologetic texts, the De Christiana religione (On Christian Religion, 1474) and the De raptu Paulis (On the Rapture of Paul, 1476), which were composed in Latin and quickly made into vernacular versions. Ficino’s apologetics stressed the complementarity between religion and philosophy, and attempted to establish Plato as the primary philosophical authority for Christendom. In this decade, too, Ficino composed several independent philosophical works, including his masterpiece, the 18book Theologia platonica de immortalitate animarum (Platonic Theology, On the Immortality of the Soul, 1469–1474), which sets out a cosmology, metaphysics, and anthropology in which the human soul occupies the central place within the universe. In the 1480s, Ficino turned to Plotinus and—again for the first time in the West—he completed Latin translations of the Enneads in 1492, accompanied by an extensive commentary and notes. In 1489, he published the De vita coelitus comparanda (Three Books of Life), a three-book treatise on health replete with medical, pharmacological, and astrological lore; Book III deals with scholarly melancholy and raises heterodox issues concerning demonology and talismanic magic. In the final few years of his life, Ficino composed an important treatise on light and the sun, De sole et lumine (On the Sun and Light, 1493), translated and commented upon the works of 720

the Christian Platonist, the Pseudo-Dionysius (dedicated in 1492), and published translations of Neoplatonists (1499). His prolific output also included technical treatises in the vernacular on astrology and the plague, and he had a lifelong interest in musical theory and practice (contemporaries attest to his skill at improvising orphic hymns). As this overview suggests, as a thinker, Ficino is notable for the diversity of his intellectual interests, which are marked not only by Platonic, Hermetic, and Neoplatonic sources, but also by Aristotle, Arab, and medieval writers on medicine, astrology, and magic, and scholastic theologians (especially Thomas Aquinas). Translator, scholar, commentator, magus, mythographer, musician, physician, philosopher, and theologian, he does not fit easily into pre-established categories: He was influenced by the Humanists’ engagement with original texts and Greek culture, and he was patronized by four generations of the Medici family, but he maintained his autonomy from both the Humanist movement and the political world (his relationship with Lorenzo de’ Medici was not without tensions, especially in 1465–1466 and 1478–1480). The view that Ficino set up a so-called ‘‘Platonic Academy’’ at his house in Careggi and that this formed the center of Florentine intellectual life is now disputed by critics such as James Hankins (‘‘The Myth of the Platonic Academy,’’ 1991). Indeed, his attempt to re-establish the Christian religion with a renewed emphasis upon Plato was controversial at a time when Aristotle still dominated the intellectual world of Italian universities (Ficino viewed Aristotle and Plato as being in accord with one another, but with Aristotle serving as a propaedeutic for Platonic philosophy). Hankins has rightly spoken of Ficino as promoting a counterculture and of the Platonists as being an ‘‘embattled minority’’ within Florence (Plato in the Italian Renaissance, 1990, vol. 1). In spite of this, he came to exercise a powerful influence over intellectual and cultural life, both in Florence and outside. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Ficino is, for example, a notable presence in the work of philosophers, cosmologists, and scientists (Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Giordano Bruno, Francesco Patrizi, Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler), theologians and Humanists (Thomas More, Erasmus, John Colet), artists and architects (Botticelli, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, Du¨rer), and musicians. Several factors help to explain Ficino’s attraction and popularity: his innovation in making all of Plato and Neoplatonic commentators available for the first time; the patriotic zeal with which fellow Florentines celebrated

MARSILIO FICINO and popularized this latest innovation in the recovery of the ancient world; his engagement with the vernacular and attempts to reach out to a wider readership of merchants and politicians; his originality and capacity for synthesis (notable in the Theologia platonica); his cultivation of a Europewide correspondence with pupils, associates, and admirers; and his use of the printing press. As far as Italian literature is concerned, his most influential work was the De amore (On Love, 1469), a highly original commentary on Plato’s Symposium cast in the form of a literary dialogue in the villa of Lorenzo de’ Medici and with Ficino’s friends and patrons as the participants. Here, Ficino developed doctrines such as Platonic love—the belief that corporeal beauty was the first step in a movement toward the divine and that mutual affection between human beings (regardless of sex) was preparatory for properly spiritual love—and the Two Venuses—cosmological powers that pass sparks of beauty into matter and use these forms to awaken human eyes and activate the twin powers of the human soul to understand and procreate. Ficino also prepared a vernacular version of this work known as El libro dell’amore (Book of Love). In the 1470s and 1480s, Ficino’s presence is already marked in Florentine vernacular literature and literary criticism. Angelo Poliziano makes use of Ficinian classificatory schemes in his unfinished vernacular epyllion, the Stanze per la giostra di Giuliano de’ Medici (Stanze for the Joust of Giuliano de’ Medici, 1476). Lorenzo de’ Medici composes poetic works of philosophical inspiration such as L’altercazione (The Supreme Good, 1474), which refashions two letters by Ficino; and his philosophy of love in his Comento de’ miei sonetti (Commentary on My Own Sonnets) owes much to Ficino’s contemporary interpretation of Platonic doctrine. Ficino appears as a character in Cristoforo Landino’s Disputationes Camaldulenses (Camaldolese Disputations, 1474), which adapts his ideas not only in Books I–II on the relative merits of will and intellect but also in the exegesis of Virgil’s Aeneid found in Books III–IV. Landino also makes close use of Ficino in his celebrated Dante commentary, the Comento sopra la Comedia (Commentary on the Comedy, 1481): The prologue adopts Ficinian ideas on poetic fury in its sections on poetic theory and incorporates one of Ficino’s own Latin letters, written in extravagant praise of Dante (the letter is accompanied by a vernacular translation, possibly by Ficino himself); the main body of the commentary also draws upon Ficinian teachings for purposes of doctrinal

compilation and exegesis. The most notable verse popularization of Ficino’s love theory is found in Girolamo Benivieni’s Canzona d’amore (Love Song, 1486), which later received a polemical commentary by Pico della Mirandola. The sixteenth century in Italy sees the popularizing of Ficinian Platonism outside Florence and its emergence as a courtly vogue. For example, popular works such as Pietro Bembo’s Gli Asolani (1505) and Leone Ebreo’s Dialoghi d’amore (The Philosophy of Love, 1535) summarized and extended in dialogue form the role Ficino attributed to love as the means to divine understanding. And much of Book IV of Baldasar Castiglione’s Libro del Cortegiano (Book of the Courtier, 1428) is given over to an elegant popularization of the Platonic notion that human love is the viaticum to the divine.

Biography Born in Figline, Valdarno, 19 October 1433. The son of Cosimo de’ Medici’s physician; studied at the University of Florence without completing a degree. Cosimo de’ Medici gave him a house in Florence and a small farm at Careggi (Florence) in 1462, and provided him with manuscripts of Plato and Plotinus; was ordained a priest in 1473 and elected a canon of the Cathedral of Florence in 1487. Died at Careggi (Florence), 1 October 1499. SIMON A. GILSON See also: Neoplatonism Selected Works Collections Opera omnia, 2 vols., Basle: Heinrich Petri, 1576; edited by Mario Sancipriano, Turin: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1959; 1983. Supplementum Ficinianum, edited by Paul Oskar Kristeller, 2 vols., Florence: Olschki, 1937; reprint 1973.

Treatises Theologia platonica, 1469–1474; as Platonic Theology, translated by Michael J. B. Allen and John Warden, Latin text edited by James Hankins, 2001. Commentatium in Philebum (ca. 1469); as The Philebus Commentary, edited by Michael J. B. Allen, 1975; 1979; 2000. De amore, 1469; as Commentaire sur le Banquet de Platon, edited by Raymond Marcel, 1978; as Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love, translated by Jayne Sears, 2nd rev. ed., 1985. De vita coelitus comparanda (Liber De Vita/De Triplici Vita), 1489; as The Book of Life, translated by Charles

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MARSILIO FICINO Boer, 1980; as Three Books on Life, edited and translated by Carol V. Kaske and John R. Clark, 1989. Marsilio Ficino and the Phaedran Charioteer, edited by Michael J. B. Allen, 1981. Icastes: Marsilio Ficino’s Interpretation of Plato’s Sophist, edited and translated by Michael J. B. Allen, 1989. Nuptial Arithmetic: Marsilio Ficino’s Commentary on the Fatal Number in Book VIII of the Republic, edited by Michael J. B. Allen, 1994.

Letters Le Lettere I. Epistolarum familiarum liber I, edited by Sebastiano Gentile, 1990; as The Letters of Marsilio Ficino, 7 vols., London: Shepheard-Walwyn, 1975– 2003.

Works in Vernacular Vernacular version of Dante’s Monarchia, as ‘‘La versione ficiniana della Monarchia,’’ edited by Prue Shaw, in Studi danteschi, 51 (1978): 298–408. El Libro dell’Amore, edited by Sandra Niccoli, 1987.

Further Reading Allen, Michael J. B., The Platonism of Marsilio Ficino: A Study of His Phaedrus Commentary, Its Sources and Genesis, Berkeley-Los Angeles-London: University of California Press, 1984. Allen, Michael J. B., Valery Rees, and Martin Davies (editors), Marsilio Ficino: His Theology, His Philosophy, His Legacy, Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2002. Eisenbichler, Konrad, and Olga Zorzi Pugliese (editors), Ficino and Renaissance Platonism, Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 1986. Field, Arthur, The Origins of the Platonic Academy of Florence, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988. Fubini, Riccardo, ‘‘Ficino e i Medici all’avvento di Lorenzo il Magnifico,’’ in Rinascimento, 2nd series/24 (1984): 3–52. Fubini, Riccardo, ‘‘Ancora su Ficino e i Medici,’’ in Rinascimento, 2nd series/27 (1987): 275–292.

Garfagnini, Gian Carlo (editor), Marsilio Ficino e il ritorno di Platone. Studi e documenti, 2 vols., Florence: Olschki, 1986. Gentile, Sebastiano, ‘‘In margine all’Epistola De divino furore di Marsilio Ficino,’’ in Rinascimento, 23 (1983): 33–77. Gentile, Sebastiano, ‘‘Ficino e il platonismo di Lorenzo,’’ in Lorenzo de’ Medici: New Perspectives, edited by Bernardo Toscani, New York: Lang, 1993. Gilson, Simon A., ‘‘Plato, the platonici, and Marsilio Ficino in Cristoforo Landino’s Comento sopra la Comedia,’’ in The Italianist, 23 (2003): 5–53. Hankins, James, Plato in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols., Leiden-New York: E.J. Brill, 1990. Hankins, James, ‘‘The Myth of the Platonic Academy,’’ in Renaissance Quarterly, 44 (1991): 429–475. Kristeller, Paul Oskar, The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino, New York: Columbia University Press, 1943. Kristeller, Paul Oskar, ‘‘Marsilio Ficino as a Man of Letters and the Glosses Attributed to Him in the Caetani Codex of Dante,’’ in Renaissance Quarterly, 36 (1983): 1–47. Nelson, John Charles, Renaissance Theory of Love: The Context of Giordano Bruno’s ‘‘Eroici Furori,’’ New York: Columbia University Press, 1958. Raffini, Christine, Marsilio Ficino, Pietro Bembo, Baldassarre Castiglione: Philosophical, Aesthetic and Political Approaches in Renaissance Platonism, New York: Lang, 1998. Robb, Nesca, Neoplatonism of the Italian Renaissance, 1935; rpt. New York: Octagon, 1968. Vasoli, Cesare, ‘‘Note sul volgarizzamento ficiniano della Monarchia,’’ in Miscellanea di studi in onore di Vittore Branca, vol. 3, Florence: Olschki, 1983. Vasoli, Cesare, ‘‘Ficino, Marsilio,’’ in Dizionario biografico degli italiani, vol. 47, Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1997. Vasoli, Cesare, Quasi sit Deus. Studi su Marsilio Ficino, Lecce: Conti, 1999. Walker, D. P., Natural and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella, London: Warburg Institute, 1958.

FILM THEORY AND CRITICISM Considered as a distinct and full-fledged theoretical pursuit, Italian film theory began in the mid-1960s, aligned with parallel European endeavors, and under the influence of French structuralism and semiotics, Italian literary criticism, and national discussions around Marxism and the arts. Yet, a critical reflection on the film medium, singled out for its new artistic and communicative endowments, started in Italy in the silent period in a climate dominated by the aesthetic theories of 722

Benedetto Croce. It is important to consider the main traits of this earlier genealogy to grasp the later developments of a specific Italian approach to film theory. Since the turn of the twentieth century, early examples of Italian film criticism focused on the threats that films and mass moviegoing allegedly represented for traditional artistic and sociocultural hierarchies, for the survival of Italian theater and for the education of ordinary citizens. Inside and

FILM THEORY AND CRITICISM outside the emerging film industry, several cultural authorities and critics, from Giovanni Papini and Gualtiero Fabbri to Michele Mastropaolo and Arnaldo Monti, expressed both concern and interest for a number of issues related to the novelty of the film medium: unprecedented photographic realism, sensationalist immediacy, vast interclass popularity, mounting claims of artistic excellence and legitimacy, and extraordinary educational opportunities. Implicit in these early writings was an idealist, Crocean emphasis on the unique poetic autonomy of art as opposed to any other human practice. Between the 1910s and the 1920s, the growing praise of the expressivity of cinema muto (silent cinema) led to the acceptance of its artistic ambitions. Yet, such expressivity was not articulated as pure vision, but as a combination of visual motifs with music and silence. This ‘‘musical analogy,’’ as David Bordwell aptly defined the critical tendency to stress films’ formal structure and nonrepresentational qualities, aligned a number of major exponents of Italian theater and literature (‘‘The Musical Analogy,’’ 1980). Film and art critic Ricciotto Canudo (1877– 1923), born in Italy but educated and active in France, had included cinema among the most important arts in a famous essay titled La naissance d’un sixie`me Art (The Birth of a Sixth Art, 1911). Deeply influenced by Wagnerian theories of ‘‘total and synthetic art,’’ Canudo wrote about cinema as ‘‘painting and a Sculpture developing in Time [which] as in music and poetry [...] realize themselves by transforming air into rhythm for the duration of their execution.’’ Although still underestimated, Canudo’s influence on contemporaneous Italian film criticism, beginning with Gabriele D’Annunzio, was remarkable. On the eve of the release of Giovanni Pastrone’s Cabiria (1914), D’Annunzio published an essay-interview where he exposed a prototheory of film form. Describing the contemporary crisis of theater as a ‘‘crisis of the word,’’ D’Annunzio defined cinema as ‘‘a silent art, deep and musical like silence,’’ the realm of fantastic transfigurations and surprising metamorphoses that could visually articulate melodic waves and fascinate even the masses’ simplest minds (Del cinematografo considerato come uno strumento di liberazione e come arte di trasfigurazione, 1914). To epitomize his position, D’Annunzio coined the key expression arte muta, or silent art, which by 1915, together with teatro muto, scena muta, or dramma muto, was already commonly used to describe and designate films’ suggestive

musicality. This is most evident in two widely known public inquiries about films’ artistry conducted in 1913 by the Florentine daily newspaper Il Nuovo Giornale and the Turinese periodical La Vita Cinematografica as well as Piero Antonio Gariazzo’s theoretical treatise on film, significantly titled Il teatro muto (Silent Theatre, 1919). In the following years, Canudo and D’Annunzio’s position was furthered by musicologist Sebastiano Arturo Luciani. From his publications in 1913 to his last in 1942, Luciani was concerned with cinema’s artistic predicament, which he lucidly located in films’ antimimetic capacity to combine imaginary subject matters, mute yet eloquent acting styles, and musical rhythm. By 1916, he had started describing films with such complex locutions as ‘‘dramma mimico musicale moderno’’ (modern pantomimic musical drama). Through a symbolist vocabulary and common Wagnerian references, Luciani emphasized cinema’s unprecedented synthesis of musical rhythm and well-choreographed mise-en-sce`ne. The films that most emblematically captured this aesthetic discourse were operatic melodramas of patrician love and betrayal featuring Italian film divas. Termed dannunziano, for its explicit resonance with D’Annunzio’s literary works, this form of cinema embodied the tropes of musical transfigurations, pantomimic metamorphoses, and artistic evocativeness widely envisioned, by Luciani and others, as pure cinematic expressivity. Contemporary and analogous to Luciani’s earliest antirealism was Futurism’s fascination with cinema’s multisensorial antimimesis. Although cinema came quite late among the professed interests of the Italian avant-garde—especially due to F. M. Marinetti’s prejudices against photography—the movement developed a keen attraction to the musicality of moving pictures, defined by the succession and nonrealistic images, colors, and intertitles. In Il primo manifesto per la cinematografia futurista (The First Manifesto of Futurist Cinema, 1916), Futurists praised cinema’s fantastic transfigurations of reality (‘‘polyexpressive symphonies’’) and endorsed rhythmical and metaphorical editing, asynchronous musical (and noise) accompaniments, and abstract and unreal representations of the world and the human body. The only critic in tune with Futurists’ idea of cinema, working both on the threshold of the Italian avant-garde movement and within the established industrial cinema apparatus, was Anton Giulio Bragaglia (1890– 1960), a multitalented artist and critic whose interests spanned from archeology to photography, 723

FILM THEORY AND CRITICISM cinema, art, and theater. His major contribution to proto-Italian film theory came at the dawn of cinema’s transition to sound. In his 1929 Il film sonoro (Sound Film), Bragaglia polemically argued that if theater had the advantage and the curse of the spoken word, cinema had the aesthetic prerogative of visually reproducing music and songs—not just plain dialogue. Sound cinema’s verbose and ‘‘gross immediacy’’ contrasted with silent movies’ speechless and universal magic and compromised their artistic musicality and dream-like allure. Several proto film theorists shared this logophobic position; among them was Luigi Pirandello. In his novel Si gira! (Shoot!, 1915), which was later retitled Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore (The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematograph Operator, 1925), Pirandello had already spoken of cinema’s power to depersonalize characters, forcing them into an unsettling loss of corporeality. The late 1920s’ introduction of sound enhanced his formulation of cinema’s unique film poetics. Expanding on distinctions already articulated by Luciani and Bragaglia, Pirandello lucidly distinguished between film parlato (spoken cinema), paired to vulgar canned theater, and film sonoro (sound cinema) uniquely endowed with cinemelografia, or the ‘‘visual language of music’’ (‘‘Se il film parlante abolira` il teatro,’’ 1929). Hailing the inclusion of spoken and sung words as detrimental—they turned the most universal medium into a national form of theatrical melodrama—Pirandello praised silent film as a modern hymn, cryptic, but popular; aphasic, but eloquent. In the following decades, instead of fading away, the artistic praise for silent film poetics was renewed. It continued in the very personal work of Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti (1910–1987), who, like Canudo, but differently from Luciani, included cinema among the figurative arts. But it also resurfaced in works that appeared as late as the mid1960s. For instance, film critic Roberto Paolella defaulted to a rhetoric of pantomime, plasticity, and rhythm when wishing that the latest technical developments in music reproduction could rescue films’ sound score from the banality of everyday conversation and move it toward the musical intensities and symbolist poetry of silent cinema. The long dure´e of this Crocean critical strand should not eclipse the fact that in the 1930s another theoretical impetus, as politicized as the times required, began to emerge among Italian film critics and prototheorists, in correspondence with national literary debates around realism. 724

Under the influence of Soviet, German (Neue Sachlichkeit), and American new poetics, Italian theorists, but also novelists, filmmakers, writers, and critics, endeavored to articulate an Italian dimension to cinematic realism. That was a difficult challenge for a country fraught with the question whether a ‘‘national’’ reality was there to be captured (not just visually, but also aurally and linguistically) or somehow invented. The well-rehearsed election of vision (including ‘‘mute or musical vision’’) as privileged ground of direct aesthetic signification, at the expense of synchronized dialogue, continued in postwar realist theorizations. This time, however, Crocean notions of artistry founded on authorial aesthetic sensibility gave way to a celebration of the photographic immediacy of film. The latter was a critical taboo just a few decades earlier. The positions of two notable Marxist theorists, both arguing against Luciani’s position, need to be mentioned. Umberto Barbaro’s sophisticated notion of cinematic realism, while still embedded in the theoretical densities of Soviet montage (a silent film theoretical enterprise), and Luigi Chiarini’s concept of specifico filmico (film specificity) and pure film, looked at films’ indexical visual regime as the cipher of cinema’s structuring of reality at the expense of sound and words. The critical disregard for the serious problems posed in Italy by the encounter between cinema and orality, begun in the 1930s, lasted longer than the Fascist regime. Although the peculiar problematic of audiovisual address and communication for a nation of 100 dialects did not enter into a fullfledged discussion of film aesthetics, the question was nevertheless addressed by a few enlightened filmmakers. After World War II, Italian leftist film critics and poetically conscious directors made and kept yearning for a cinema capable of showing what for years the regime had intended to hide. Roberto Rossellini’s Paisa` (Paisan, 1946) revealed to all Italians the struggles of the liberation, but it did so by playing out the nation’s impressive diversity of geohistorical contexts and dialects. Likewise, Luchino Visconti’s La terra trema (The Earth Trembles, 1948) turned the daily and antique destitution of Sicilian fishermen, whose vernacular culture and idioms could hardly be nationalized, into a subtitled political allegory. Never divorced from historical and contemporary political commitments, debates during neorealism, particularly between 1948 and 1955, revolved around cinema’s poetic nature and mission. Rather than outlining theoretical positions, as

FILM THEORY AND CRITICISM they would be understood a few decades later, these reflections took the form of prescriptions of what cinema should have been, rather than speculations on films’ innermost nature. Neorealism’s chief practitioner-theorist, Cesare Zavattini (1902–1989), argued for a cinema that dismissed any obligation to fiction, scripts, and conventional genres, celebrated everyday reality and its antispectacular protagonists as the preferred means toward achieving national and interpersonal knowledge. Against this idea of cinema as simple ‘‘shadowing of reality,’’ Guido Aristarco (1918–1996), from the pages of the film periodical Cinema Nuovo, insisted on cinema’s poetic mediation, its capacity to reconstruct and shape reality, not just reflect it as is. Inspired by Gramsci and Luka´cs, whose works had recently begun to circulate, Aristarco’s famous defense of Visconti’s Senso (1954), formulated as ‘‘the passage from neorealism to realism,’’ recovered the plotting of narratives and the invention of characters as cinematic devices suitable to interpret critically the reality of history. These Italian debates, however, did not entertain a dialogue with contemporary reflections on realism developed by Andre´ Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer. In the postwar period, things had begun to change. A number of specialized film periodicals began to appear (La Rivista del Cinema Italiano, Cinema Nuovo, and Filmcritica), not to mention Guido Aristarco’s crucial works, L’arte del film (Film as Art, 1950) and Storia delle teoriche del cinema (A History of Film Theories, 1951). These venues of film criticism prepared the way for the ever more serious understanding of cinema as a cultural phenomenon and for its 1960s promotion to an academic discipline. Once taught in universities, film studies witnessed the emergence of a specific technical terminology and a more systematic internationalization of questions and debates. The emergence of semiotics, as a theory of the modes of production of signs and meanings, occurred in Italy in the context of an early embracing (and later critique) of structuralism and within a pervasive, but methodologically underutilized, Marxism. Furthermore, and differently from the neighboring French cultural context, at the time of the publication of Christian Metz’s Le cine´ma: Langue ou langage? (1964) and Roland Barthes’ Ele´ments de se´miologie (1968), Italian intellectuals were likely to be reading Marx, Hegel, Gramsci, and Luka´cs, but not Freud, Bachelard, Bataille, or Breton. In the long run, this resulted in Italian scholars overlooking the further developments of psychoanalytic film theory, which were inspiring,

for instance, formulations of cinematic apparatus and gender difference on film, or, in connection with the Marxist analyses of Louis Althusser, studies of cinema’s ideological regime. Within a semiotic epistemology, Metz’s question whether cinema could be paired to a linguistic system or simply to a nonsystematic, self-regulating discourse—the latter being Metz’s final contention— spurred a number of contributions. Particularly intense and articulate were the debates emerging at the international conferences on film language, held in Pesaro during the Mostra del Nuovo Cinema in 1965, 1966, and 1967. Indeed, the equation of cinema with a specific language had already begun in Italy with the anti-Crocean work of Galvano Della Volpe (1895–1968), engaged in rejecting Croce’s equation of art with lyric intuition and culminating in the notion of filmic verisimilitude (Il verosimile filmico, 1954). At the Pesaro meetings, however, Italian film theorists plugged into international debates in a more systematic fashion. Gianfranco Bettetini concurred with Metz that cinema lacked the double articulation of natural languages (the meaningful matching of units of sense, or morphemes, with units of sounds, or phonemes), but still contended that films presented their own form of iconic articulation. A similar position was shared by Umberto Garroni, who problematized the Metzian framework by positing a cinematic normative, although nonlinguistic, dimension. Relying more on Pierce than de Saussure, Umberto Eco argued for the binary, and thus digital nature of the iconic code, concluding with a triply articulated cinematic code (figures, semes, and cinemorphs) operating within the single shot. Also, by adding the figure of the interpretant to sign and object (not to mention the translation from hypostatized entities to functional positions), Eco’s triadic model allowed for a semiotic discussion of ideology, rooted in the historical determination of semiotic production, transmission, and interpretation. This passage was in tune with the increasingly politicized Italian context. Initially, in fact, film semiotics were welcomed as anti-idealist, scientific enterprises aimed at revealing and describing the most elementary formal components of filmic signification. Soon, however, recognizing the tautological idealism of the structuralist-informed semiotic project—positing a priori the structure it sought to expose—and in a post-1968 climate progressively more sensitive to issues of ideology, Italian semiotics focused also on the historically specific and thus ideologically prone and materially 725

FILM THEORY AND CRITICISM defined operations of sign and meaning production. Together with Bettetini, who distinguished between the material and signifying fabrication of the film text, Eco’s A Theory of Semiotics (1976) best embodied this sensibility in which signification and communication are described as historically and socially dependable, and thus intrinsically connected. A similar opening to reality and history was present in the unique and complex contributions of writer, public intellectual, and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–1975), who argued for the ideological self-evidence of filmic representations of reality, while still positing their semiotic encoding. Through its rhetorical transparency, cinema, as the language of actions (‘‘the written language of reality’’), communicates universally—differently from written or spoken systems. His early film works, from Accattone (1961) and Mamma Roma (1962) to La ricotta (1963), had accordingly emphasized cinema’s unique intimacy with life, by exploring the changes that modernity brought to the primeval culture and lives of a dying breed of Italy’s lumpenproletariat. His Gramscian attention to oral language, theorized in a famous 1969 essay Il cinema e la lingua orale (Cinema and Oral Language), was a refreshing departure from the traditional critical emphasis on vision—one that was to be more systematically explored by Gian Piero Brunetta (Forma e parola nel cinema, 1970). In the 1970s and 1980s, a large number of Italian practitioners made use of semiotics, narratology, and theories of enunciation in close contact with similar endeavors throughout Europe and North America. If narratology influenced the work of Roberto Campari, theories on the gaze and filmic point of view informed Elena Dagrada’s and Lorenzo Cuccu’s contributions. In the same years, enunciation, understood as the set of specific operations constituting a signifying act, were discussed by Bettetini in terms of an immanent, that is textual, conversation, and by Francesco Casetti in terms of a semiotic-pragmatic approach resulting in a whole inventory of textually constructed spectatorial positions. What Italian scholars hardly ever engaged with was the confluence of semiotics, psychoanalysis, and Marxism that instead one would find in the writings of Jean-Luis Comolli and Jean Narboni, and of the group of scholars who emerged around the British periodical Screen (Peter Wollen, Paul Willemen, Colin MacCabe, Stephen Heath, and Ben Brewster) and in their continuous reference to the theories of Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, 726

Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard, and Louis Althusser. Italian scholars rarely engaged with the French and Anglo-American contributions to feminist film theory (with the exception of Teresa de Lauretis and Giuliana Bruno, both working in the United States), cognitive film theory, cultural studies, and phenomenology—although regarding the latter, Giorgio Tinazzi and Edoardo Bruno addressed the issue of cinematic experience. The degree of absence of any of these references in several studies on the notion of modernity in film (e.g., Giorgio De Vincenti, Il concetto di modernita` nel cinema, 1993) is rather impressive. Instead a retooling of film criticism emerged in Italy. Implicitly following Tinazzi, who had argued for the importance of semiotics for film criticism, Italian film theory has slowly morphed into a sophisticated combination of textual analysis and cultural criticism, perhaps best exemplified by Maurizio Grande’s magnificent analysis of Italian comedy (Abiti nuziali e biglietti di banca, 1986) and recently explored by Lorenzo Pellizzari. Notable exceptions have been Lucilla Albano’s psychoanalytically informed work on the cinematic apparatus (La caverna dei giganti, 1992), Ruggero Eugeni’s study of the hypnosis as a textual, enunciative, and cultural metaphor for the cinematic expression (La relazione d’incanto, 2002), and Francesco Casetti’s semiopragmatic approach to the modernity of the figure of the spectator—not just filmic, but also televisual; both inside and outside the text (Communicative Negotiations in Cinema and Television, 2003). In general, the mid-1980s’ explosion of interest in early cinema and the crucial (yet still unexamined) role of film archives as powerful centers of scholarship, in close alliance with university centers and study programs, have produced a remarkable array of historical studies nearly eclipsing theoretical approaches. Dominant, although not exclusive, has been a philological approach to the film text(s), related to issues of censorship and representation, authorship, genres, color, and verbal signs (i.e., intertitles). Preferred venues for these explorations have been the periodicals Fotogenia, Cinegrafie, Cine´ma & Cie, and the proceedings of the Udine International Film Conferences. In a country where most film scholars and critics still openly admit their leftist political stance, these explorations have been the closest thing to a Marxist film criticism, understood as a mode of analysis interested in the materiality of film production encompassing such practices as screenwriting, art direction, music scoring, etc.

FILM THEORY AND CRITICISM Likewise, it may be a surprise that the often Marxist-inspired fabric of Anglo-American cultural studies has attracted in Italy suspicion of excessive methodological eclecticism. Instead, Italian film historians and critics, while openly declaring themselves leftist intellectuals, have readily embraced the work of David Bordwell, perhaps the most established and successful American maitre a` penser of film studies of the last three decades. His combination of idealist textual autarchy and newly renovated attention to the philological materiality of the film text has perhaps prevented the recognition of the cognitive and ideologically agnostic impetus of his remarkable scholarship. Perhaps ironically, therefore, the never-fading Crocean heritage of Italian film theory has continuously informed Italian film theory’s unique conceptual path, despite the various influences of international scholarship and despite itself. GIORGIO BERTELLINI Further Reading Albano, Lucilla, La caverna dei giganti: scritti sull’evoluzione del dispositivo cinematografico, Parma: Pratiche Editrice, 1992. Aristarco, Guido, Storia delle teoriche del film, Turin: Einaudi, 1951. Barbaro, Umberto, Il film e il risarcimento marxista dell’arte, edited by Lorenzo Quaglietti, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1960. Barbaro, Umberto, Servitu` e grandezza del cinema, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1961. Bettetini, Gianfranco, Cinema: lingua e scrittura, Milan: Bompiani, 1968; as The Language and Technique of the Film, The Hague: Mouton, 1973. Bettetini, Gianfranco, Produzione del senso e messa in scena, Milan: Bompiani, 1975. Bordwell, David, ‘‘The Musical Analogy,’’ in ‘‘Cinema Sound,’’ edited by Rick Altman, Yale French Studies, no. 60 (1980): 141–156. Bragaglia, Anton Giulio, Il film sonoro, Milan: Edizioni Corbaccio, 1929. Brunetta, Gian Piero, Forma e parola nel cinema, Padua: Liviana, 1970. Bruno, Edoardo, Film altro reale, Milan: Il Formichiere, 1978. Bruno, Giuliana, and Maria Nadotti (editors), Off Screen: Women & Film in Italy, New York: Routledge, 1988. Canudo, Ricciotto, ‘‘Naissance d’un sixie`me Art: Essai sur le Cine´matographe,’’ in Les Entretiens idealists, 25 October 1911; now in French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology,1907–1939. Volume I: 1907–1929, edited by Richard Abel, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988. Casetti, Francesco, Dentro lo sguardo: Il film e il suo spettatore, Milan: Bompiani, 1986; as Inside the Gaze: The Fiction Film and Its Spectator, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998.

Casetti, Francesco, Communicative Negotiations in Cinema and Television, Milan: Vita & Pensiero, 2003. Casetti, Francesco, L’occhio del Novecento: Cinema, esperienza, modernita`, Milan: Bompiani, 2005. Chiarini, Luigi, Il film nella battaglia delle idee, Milan and Rome: Bocca, 1954. Chiarini, Luigi, Arte e tecnica del film, Bari: Laterza, 1962. Dagrada, Elena, ‘‘Subjectivite´ et camera subjective,’’ in Actes Se´miotiques, 41 (1987): 24–29. Dagrada, Elena, La rappresentazione dello sguardo nel cinema delle origini in Europa: nascita della soggettiva, Bologna: CLUEB, 1998. D’Annunzio, Gabriele, ‘‘Del cinematografo considerato come uno strumento di liberazione e come arte di trasfigurazione,’’ in Il Corriere della Sera, 28 February 1914; now in Giovanni Pastrone: Gli anni d’oro del cinema a Torino, edited by Paolo Cherchi Usai Turin: UTET, 1986. De Lauretis, Teresa, ‘‘Semiotics, Theory, and Social Practice: A Critical History of Italian Semiotics,’’ in Cine´Tracts, 2, no. 1 (1978): 1–14. Della Volpe, Galvano, Il verosimile filmico e altri scritti di estetica, Rome: Edizioni di Filmcritica, 1954. De Vincenti, Giorgio, Il concetto di modernita` nel cinema, Parma: Pratiche, 1993. Eco, Umberto, La struttura assente, Milan: Bompiani, 1968. Eugeni, Ruggero, La relazione d’incanto: Studi su cinema e ipnosi, Milan: Vita & Pensiero, 2002. Gariazzo, Piero Antonio, Il teatro muto, Turin: Lattes, 1919. Garroni, Emilio, Semiotica ed estetica, Bari: Laterza, 1968. Grande, Maurizio, Abiti nuziali e biglietti di banca, Rome: Bulzoni, 1986. Luciani, Sebastiano Arturo, Verso una nuova arte. Il cinematografo, Rome: Casa Editrice Ausonia, 1920. Luciani, Sabastiano, L’Antiteatro: il Cinematografo come arte, Rome: La Voce Editrice, 1928. Luciani, Sebastiano, Il cinema e le arti, Siena: Ticci Editore, 1942. Paolella, Roberto, Storia del cinema muto, Naples: Giannini, 1956. Paolella, Roberto, Storia del cinema sonoro (1926–1939), Naples: Giannini, 1966. Pasolini, Pier Paolo, ‘‘Il cinema di poesia’’ and ‘‘Il cinema e la lingua orale,’’ in Empirismo Eretico, Milan: Garzanti, 1972; as ‘‘The Cinema of Poetry’’ and ‘‘Cinema and Oral Language,’’ in Heretical Empiricism, edited by Louise K. Barnett, translated by Ben Lawton and Louise K. Barnett, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. Pellizzari, Lorenzo, Critica alla critica: contributi a una storia della critica cinematografica Italiana, Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1999. Pirandello, Luigi, Si gira..., Milan: Treves, 1915; as Shoot! (Si Gira). The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematograph Operator, translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, New York: Dutton, 1926. Pirandello, Luigi, ‘‘Se il film parlante abolira` il teatro,’’ in Il Corriere della Sera, 16 June 1929; now in Pirandello e il cinema. Con una raccolta completa degli scritti teorici e creativi, edited by Francesco Ca`llari, Venice: Marsilio, 1991; as ‘‘Pirandello Views the ‘Talkies,’’’ in The New York Times Magazine, 28 July 1929, Section 5, pp. 1–2.

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FILM THEORY AND CRITICISM Ragghianti, Carlo Ludovico, Cinema arte figurativa, Turin: Einaudi, 1952. Tinazzi, Giorgio, La copia originale, Venice: Marsilio, 1983.

Zavattini, Cesare, Zavattini: Sequences from a Cinematic Life, translated by William Weaver, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970.

IL FIORE (CA. 1280–1320) An Italian version (in 232 sonnets) of the Old French Roman de la rose (Romance of the Rose), Il Fiore was composed sometime between 1280 to 1320 and is contained in a single manuscript: Codex H. 438 of the Bibliothe`que Universitaire (Montpellier, France). The identity of its author— referred to as ‘‘Durante’’ twice in the poem (sonnets 82 and 202)—is still an open question, although Dante Alighieri is a prime candidate. Composed in the thirteenth century by two poets (Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun), the allegorical Roman de la rose was very popular in Italy, as may be seen in the numerous manuscripts of the poem in Italian libraries. Significant differences exist between the Rose and the Fiore, not least of which is length: The 21,750 verses of the Old French text are reduced to the 3,245 verses of the Italian sonnets. While the journey of the Lover in the Italian text also culminates in the highly erotic description of the ‘‘plucking’’ of the flower, the Fiore makes no distinction between the first part of the Rose, written in the refined courtly verse of Guillaume de Lorris, and the second part composed in the didactic style of Jean de Meun. The Italian version also abandons the original courtly and didactic focus of the story in favor of a more relaxed comic style; indeed, the choice of the sonnet as the narrative vehicle suggests the author’s intent both to dissociate his work from the French text and to place it within a distinctively Italian poetic tradition. By eliminating Jean’s digressions, the author of the Fiore is able to concentrate on the art of love as highlighted in the first part of the Rose and to redirect the poem toward this end. This would, in effect, re-establish Guillaume’s intent in the text: Guillaume states that ‘‘it is the Romance of the Rose, in which the whole art of love is contained’’ (‘‘ce est li Romanz de la Rose, / ou l’art d’Amors est tote enclose,’’ vv. 37–38). The Italian author is also able to achieve Jean’s 728

principal objective, that of defining the Romance of the Rose as a ‘‘mirror for lovers’’ (Le Mirouer aus Amoureus, v. 10,651)—an encyclopedia for lovers. A summary of the content of Il Fiore is in order. In sonnet 1, Lover (Amante), while gazing at a flower in the Garden of Love is wounded by the God of Love. After pledging fealty to the God of Love, Lover tries to pick the flower in the garden of Jealousy (Gelosia), but is opposed by Resistance (Schifo) (sonnets 2–8). In sonnets 9–10, Reason (Ragione) tries to intervene, but Lover does not listen. Sonnets 11–12 contain the first dialogue with the Friend (Amico) who urges Lover to the quest. Then Mercy (Pieta`) and Sincerity (Franchezza) convince Resistance to allow Lover into the garden. Once there, he finally kisses the flower, but because of this offense he is banished from the garden of Jealousy (13–21). Chastity (Castita`) asks Jealousy to take strong precautions; then a fortified castle is built where Chastity and Jealousy imprison Fair Welcome (Bellacoglienza) under the surveillance of the Old Woman (La Vecchia). Resistance, Modesty (Vergogna), Fear (Paura), and Bad Mouth (Mala Bocca) guard the doors of the castle (22–32). In sonnets 33–34, we see Lover’s suffering, then Reason tries in vain to dissuade Lover from pursuing his amorous quest (35–46). Friend returns to the scene and advises Lover on the trickery of love: In order to conquer the Flower he must either use hypocrisy with Bad Mouth or follow the road of Extravagance (Troppo-Donare) controlled by Wealth (Ricchezza) (47–72). However, Wealth refuses Lover (73–76). The God of Love wants to reward Lover for his one-year resistance to all of his obstacles and summons the Barons of Love, Forced Abstinence (Costretta Astinenza), and False Seeming (Falsembiante) (77–81). Together they plan their strategy to conquer the castle (82–87). At this point, False Seeming appears dressed as a Dominican friar; he introduces himself and,

IL FIORE in a demonstration of ecclesiastical hypocrisy, assures faithfulness to the God of Love (88–127). False Seeming and Forced Abstinence betray and kill Bad Mouth (128–136). Once inside the castle, Lover strikes a deal with the Old Woman to convince Fair Welcome to yield (137–143). Then the Old Woman delivers a long monologue evoking her youthful errors, urging women to use deceit to betray and profit from men as well as to have several lovers simultaneously (144–197). Fair Welcome receives Lover, but the opposition mounted once again by Resistance requires a new strategy (194–205). The army of the God of Love attacks the castle, and amid battles and combats, there is large-scale slaughter, which continues until the God of Love calls a truce (206–214). Venus intervenes, setting fire to the castle and routing the enemy (215–225). Lady Courtesy persuades Fair Welcome to receive Lover (226–227), and Lover deflowers the Flower (228–230). Lover thanks his benefactors and rejoices at the successful accomplishment of his mission in the face of many obstacles (231–232). The author of Il Fiore demonstrates his indebtedness to the Old French poem and, at the same time, shows his independence: He removes the doctrinal passages and transforms the remainder into more accessible imagery, thus rewriting the text in a more popular vein that will be comprehensible to a different and wider audience. These actions might be interpreted as a form of rebellion against French literary conventions and, as such, would be intended to help the nascent Italian literary tradition assume its own (non-French) identity, despite the number of gallicisms in the text. The question of Il Fiore’s literary and/or historical intent remains unknown, although some critics have argued that its goal was merely to amuse and entertain. It discloses the work of a sophisticated author, one who evokes the metaphors, symbols, and erotic subject matter of the courtly tradition, as portrayed in the Romance of the Rose, but who also rewrites the poem using his own strategies and a new poetic style and vernacular. CHRISTOPHER KLEINHENZ Editions First edition: Il Fiore, poe`me italien du XIIIe sie`cle, en CCXXXII sonnets, imite´ du Roman de la Rose par Durante, edited by Ferdinand Castets, Paris: Maisonneuve et Cie, 1881. Other editions: Il Fiore e il Detto d’Amore, edited by E. G. Parodi, Florence: Bemporad, 1921; Il Fiore e il detto d’amore attribuiti a Dante Alighieri. Testo del XIII secolo, edited by Guido Mazzoni, Florence: Alinari,

1923; Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose, 3 vols., edited by Fe´lix Lecoy, Paris: Champion, 1965–1970; ‘‘Il Fiore’’ e ‘‘Il Detto d’Amore,’’ edited by Claudio Marchiori, Genoa: Tilgher, 1983; Dante Alighieri, Il Fiore e il Detto d’Amore attribuibili a Dante Alighieri, edited by Gianfranco Contini, Milan: Mondadori, 1984; Dante, Il Fiore— Detto d’Amore, edited by Luca Carlo Rossi, Milan: Mondadori, 1996. Translations: Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose, translated by Charles Dahlberg, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995; as The Fiore and the Detto d’Amore. A Late 13th-Century Italian Translation of the Roman de la Rose, Attributable to Dante Alighieri, translated with an introduction and notes by Christopher Kleinhenz and Santa Casciani, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000; Dante Alighieri, Il Fiore (The Flower), with introduction, translation and commentary by John Took, Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2004.

Further Reading Baranski, Zygmunt G., ‘‘Il Fiore e la tradizione delle translationes,’’ in Rassegna europea di letteratura italiana, 5–6 (1995): 31–41. Baranski, Zygmunt G., and Patrick Boyde (editors), The ‘‘Fiore’’ in Context: Dante, France, Tuscany, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997. Baranski, Zygmunt G., Patrick Boyde, and Lino Pertile (editors), Letture classensi 22: Lettura del ‘‘Fiore,’’ Ravenna: Longo Editore, 1993. Bernardo, Aldo S., ‘‘Sex and Salvation in the Middle Ages: From the Romance of the Rose to the Divine Comedy,’’ in Italica, 67 (1990): 305–318. Brownlee, Kevin, ‘‘The Practice of Cultural Authority: Italian Responses to French Cultural Dominance in Il Tesoretto, Il Fiore, and the Commedia,’’ in Forum for Modern Language Studies, 33 (1997): 258–269. Brownlee, Kevin, and Sylvia Huot (editors), Rethinking the ‘‘Romance of the Rose’’: Text, Image, Reception, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992. Cassata, Letterio, ‘‘Sul testo del Fiore,’’ in Studi danteschi, 58 (1986): 187–237. Contini, Gianfranco, ‘‘Un nodo della cultura medievale: la serie Roman de la Rose—Fiore—Divina Commedia,’’ in Lettere italiane, 25 (1973): 162–189. Dragonetti, Roger, ‘‘Specchi d’amore: il Romanzo della Rosa e il Fiore,’’ in Paragone, 374 (1981): 3–22. Huot, Sylvia, The Romance of the Rose and Its Medieval Readers: Interpretation, Reception, Manuscript Transmission, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Sebastio, Leonardo, Strutture narrative e dinamiche culturali in Dante e nel ‘‘Fiore,’’ Florence: Olschki, 1990. Took, John, ‘‘Towards an Interpretation of the Fiore,’’ in Speculum, 54 (1979): 500–527. Took, John, ‘‘Dante and the Roman de la Rose,’’ in Italian Studies, 37 (1982): 1–25. Vallone, Aldo, ‘‘Il Fiore come opera di Dante,’’ in Studi danteschi, 56 (1984): 141–167. Vanossi, Luigi, Dante e il ‘‘Roman de la Rose’’: saggio sul ‘‘Fiore,’’ Florence: Olschki, 1979.

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AGNOLO FIRENZUOLA

AGNOLO FIRENZUOLA (1493–1543) Known for his refined, almost decadent style and lifelong quest for balanced rhetorical elegance with popular parlance, Agnolo Firenzuola bears the distinction of being one of Italy’s foremost Humanists who wrote exclusively in the vernacular. He began his literary career by inserting himself into the much-debated contestation over the future of the Italian language, the questione della lingua, taking a polemical stance against the inclusion of Greek letters into the Latin alphabet proposed by Gian Giorgio Trissino. In the Discacciamento de le nuove lettere inutilmente aggiunte ne la lingua toscana (Expulsion of the New Letters Uselessly Added to the Tuscan Language, 1524), his only work published within his own lifetime, Firenzuola ironically refuted Gian Giorgio Trissino’s complicated orthographic reforms and pushed for grammatical and lexical simplicity. At the same time, the aspiring author introduced an element that remained a constant in all of his works—the quest to forge a closer relationship between the spoken and written word. Not entirely satisfied with Pietro Bembo’s finite Petrarchan and Boccaccian repertoire, Firenzuola aimed at expanding the national language with vocabulary culled from popular usage. Often called a minor Humanist, Firenzuola experimented with each of the major genres of the Renaissance literary canon. His next endeavor, the Ragionamenti (Discussions, 1552), written in 1525, was closely modeled after Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (ca. 1350–1352) and Pietro Bembo’s Gli Asolani (1505). Inspired by his love for a wise and virtuous lady known by the senhal Costanza Amaretta (Bitter Constance), the work united formal dialogues and short narratives or novelle. Of the projected six days, each intended to include six stories narrated by a noble group of three men and three women, Firenzuola completed only one full day and fragments of the second. In substance it was an amalgam fusing narrative tales to a Neoplatonic treatise on love. Poetry, comic and licentious escapades, and philosophical discussions shared the stage. However, having done away with Boccaccio’s cornice—the framing pretense for the whole—structural problems prevented Firenzuola from carrying the work to fruition. 730

After experimenting with burlesque verse in the style of Francesco Berni and penning in 1525 a treatise in defense of women addressed to Claudio Tolomei, the Epistole in lode delle donne (Epistles in Praise of Women), which was published posthumously in 1548, Firenzuola tried his hand at translating a Latin classic. His chosen material, Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, retitled Dell’asino d’oro (The Golden Ass, 1550), reflected his interests in stylistic innovation. Firenzuola transformed the second century original into an autobiographical narrative presented under the loose guise of allegory. He was attracted to more than just the content, as the sensuality of Apuleius’ ‘‘decadent’’ Latin style provided the model for his increasingly elegant and richly ornate vernacular prose. Echoes of Angelo Poliziano also resonated throughout the work and became even more frequent in his later endeavors. Most importantly, it is here that Firenzuola strove to maintain continuity between narrative and reflection. However, Firenzuola was ravaged by a virulent strain of syphilis and once again failed to complete the work, stopping short right before the final and most philosophically challenging chapter. His sole effort during the remainder of his Roman convalescence were tortured verses dealing with his malady, Intorno la sua malattia (Regarding his Infirmity, 1533), which, due to the frank treatment of his acute physical ailments, differed greatly from the contemporary vogue for poetry describing the anguish suffered by victims of love sickness. It was eventually published in his Rime (Poems, 1549). Back once more in his native Tuscany in the idyllic quiet of Prato, Firenzuola’s health was finally restored. Situated outside of Florence, he found renewed inspiration in the small salons of Prato’s cultured yet provincial mercantile bourgeoisie. In true Humanist form, Firenzuola opened the bucolic Accademia dell’Addiaccio (1540)—a literary society rooted in pastoral poetry that in some ways anticipated the seventeenth-century Roman Arcadia. He composed two plays, the Trinuzia (The Triple Marriage, 1549) and the Lucidi (1549) based on the Menaechmi of Plautus. The pie`ces, reprinted several times after his death, by and

AGNOLO FIRENZUOLA large conform to Renaissance standards for theatrical production while still displaying stylistic originality. Addressed to the city’s noble caste, the characters interact using plebeian speech rendered all the livelier by the regional dialect of Prato’s countryside. Thus, the spoken language of familiar popular usage breaks into the formally contrived comedies and attains the linguistic synthesis Firenzuola had originally envisioned in the Discacciamento de le nuove lettere inutilmente aggiunte ne la lingua toscana. The confluence of artificial elegance, vivacious narrative, and vernacular spontaneity found its most harmonious expression in his masterpiece, La prima veste dei discorsi degli animali (The First [Italian] Version of the Discourse of the Animals, 1548). This collection of fables written around 1540–1541 was again a loose adaptation into the Tuscan language, this time of the Indian Pan˜ciatantra, which he knew through a Spanish intermediary, Giovanni da Capua’s Exemplario contra los engan˜os y peligros del mundo (1493). The philosopher Tiabono presents a series of 25 animal fables and four novelle that are logically interconnected to one another and invested with a strong didactic charge. The protagonists are transformed into the narrators, alternating between surprisingly moral and highly entertaining burlesque tales. Ironic, hedonistic and ingeniously elegant, the work nonetheless stands as a monument to Firenzuola’s search for verbal simplicity based on contemporary usage. Due, in part, to the lessons learned while translating Dell’asino d’oro, the structural difficulties presented by the Boccaccian model in the Ragionamenti were now surpassed. Popular narrative and aulic rhetorical sophistication fluidly converged into his refined prose. During this period he also composed several Rime, which were published posthumously by his brother Gerolamo in 1549. Today, the Dialogo delle bellezze delle donne (Dialogue on the Beauty of Women, 1548) has become a favorite amongst art, cultural, and literary historians for its insights into cinquecento aesthetic criteria and gendered society. Part of a tradition of Platonic treatises establishing the ideals for perfect female beauty and grace, the dialogue disseminated the elite philosophical arguments dear to Latin Humanists to a new popular audience. The colloquial exchange between the protagonist, Celso, and his female interlocutors—women closely modeled after known citizens of Prato— articulated Firenzuola’s novel, almost egalitarian approach to Neoplatonic love as well as to the dialogic structure of philosophical disquisition.

Biography Originally baptized with the names Michelangelo and Gerolamo, Agnolo was born in Florence to the notary Bastiano Giovannini da Firenzuola and Lucrezia Braccesi, September 28, 1493; spent infancy in Florence and through his grandfather Alessandro Braccesi was introduced into the Florentine humanistic circles of the times; at 16, began his studies of jurisprudence at Siena, later completed at Perugia, 1516; took holy orders as a Vallambrosian monk and transferred to Rome, 1517; served as an advocate for his order in Rome and was influenced by the literary circles of popes Leo X and Clement VII, 1518–1522; during his Roman period, mingled with literati like Bembo, Molza, Aretino, and Della Casa and frequented the woman he identified as Costanza Amaretta (‘‘Bitter Constance’’); motivated by the as of yet unidentified lady, abandoned his ecclesiastical charge and dedicated himself entirely to literature; following the death of Costanza (1525), contracted a crippling form of syphilis and withdrew from his Vallabrosian vows, 1526; following the death of Clement VII, left Rome and returned to Tuscany, 1534; assumed the monastic cloth again and settled in Prato as the abbot of San Salvatore a Vaiano, 1538; due to his improved health and a new love for a lady named Selvaggia (roughly translated as ‘‘Wild Woman’’), resumed his literary activities and founded the Accademia dell’Addiaccio, 1540; during these years, composed numerous works, but his good fortune did not last long—once more impoverished, sick, and alone, died in Prato on June 27, 1543. SARA ELENA DIAZ See also: Novella Selected Works Collections Prose di M. Agnolo Firenzuola fiorentino, vols. 2, Florence: Bernardo Giunti, 1548. Le novelle, edited by Eugenio Ragni, Milan: Salerno, 1971. Opere, edited by Delmo Maestri, Turin: Utet, 1977.

Fiction La prima veste dei discorsi degli animali, 1548. Ragionamenti, partial 1548; 1552.

Poetry ‘‘Rime,’’ 1549.

Treatises Discacciamento de le nuove lettere inutilmente aggiunte ne la lingua toscana, 1524. Epistole in lode delle donne, 1548.

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AGNOLO FIRENZUOLA Dialogo delle bellezze delle donne, 1548; as On the Beauty of Women, translated by Konrad Eisenbichler and Jacqueline Murray, 1992.

Plays Trinuzia, 1549. I Lucidi, 1549.

Translations Apuleius, Dell’asino d’oro, 1550.

Further Reading Bettella, Patrizia, ‘‘Discourse of Resistance: The Parody of Feminine Beauty in Berni, Doni and Firenzuola,’’ in MLN, 113, no. 1 (1998): 192–203. Cerreta, Florindo, ‘‘Una canzone del Firenzuola e una vecchia teoria sulla paternita` degli Ingannati,’’ in Bibliofilia, 73 (1971): 151–163. Maestri, Delmo, ‘‘Le rime di Agnolo Firenzuola: proposta di ordinamento del testo e valutazione critica,’’ in Italianistica, 3 (1974): 78–96.

Maniscalco, Silvana, ‘‘Criteri e sensibilita` di Agnolo Firenzuola, traduttore di Apuleio,’’ in La rassegna della letteratura italiana, 82 (1978): 88–109. Murray, Jacqueline, ‘‘Agnolo Firenzuola on Female Sexuality and Women’s Equality,’’ in The Sixteenth Century Journal, 22, no. 2 (1991): 199–213. Riviello, Tonia Caterina, Agnolo Firenzuola: The Androgynous Vision, Rome: Bulzoni, 1986. Rogers, Mary, ‘‘The Decorum of Women’s Beauty: Trissino, Firenzuola, Luigini and the Representation of Women in Sixteenth-Century Painting,’’ in Renaissance Studies, 2, no. 1 (1988): 47–88. Scarci, Manuela, ‘‘Imitation and Subversion of Models in Agnolo Firenzuola’s I Ragionamenti,’’ in The Italian Novella: A Book of Essays, New York: Routledge, 2003. Scuderi, Ermanno, ‘‘Firenzuola e il suo ideale di bellezza femminile,’’ in Scrittori irregolari, Bologna, 1977. Thompson, Patricia, ‘‘Firenzuola, Surrey and Watson,’’ in Renaissance News, 18, no. 4 (1965): 295–298.

ENNIO FLAIANO (1910–1972) A versatile intellectual, Ennio Flaiano, who trained as an architect, worked first as a journalist, then as a film and theater critic. In 1939, he wrote film and theater reviews for Oggi, a weekly magazine. He also contributed to other magazines like Documento, Cine Illustrato, Mediterraneo, Star, Domenica, Il Mondo. His career as a scriptwriter, which started with Pastor Angelicus (1942), a documentary film on the life of Pope Pius XII, directed by Romolo Marcellini, paralleled, with equal success, his career as a writer. His first and only novel, Tempo di uccidere (The Short Cut), published in 1947, was described by many critics as ‘‘prophetic.’’ It was inspired by his own experiences as a young lieutenant during the Fascist campaign in Africa in 1935. Narrated from the protagonist’s point of view, the story takes place during the Italian campaign in Abyssinia. The protagonist, bothered by a toothache, leaves the front line in search of a dentist. While taking a short cut through a sinister valley, he loses his way and meets a native woman bathing in a stream. They spend a few days together, during which the woman, who apparently has fallen in love with him, devotes herself to him. One night he fires at what he imagines is an animal; the 732

bullet ricochets, hits the woman, and gravely wounds her. Uncertain of what to do or how to find help, he decides to shoot her while she lies sleeping. His crime will remain unpunished, but nonetheless it haunts the young lieutenant. Tempo di uccidere (which has been translated into English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Swedish, and Czech), dramatizes both the officer’s efforts to evade his responsibility for the crime and his misgivings about the violence perpetrated against other populations and cultures. Giuliano Montaldo based his film, Tempo di uccidere (Time To Kill, 1990), on the novel. Tempo di uccidere was followed by Diario notturno e altri scritti (Night Diary and Other Writings, 1956) and Una e una notte (One and One Night, 1959), two collections of satirical short stories. Un marziano a Roma (A Martian in Rome, 1960), Flaiano’s most important theatrical piece, which first appeared as an article in Il Mondo (November 2, 1954) and was later included in Diario notturno e altri scritti, tells the story of an alien in Rome, venerated first as a Messiah and then compelled to live by his wits. Flaiano shows his deep love-and-hate relationship with Rome, the

ENNIO FLAIANO caput mundi. The fascinating but tempting city, to which he moved in 1922, is depicted in a much more unforgiving light in the script of Federico Fellini’s La dolce vita (1959). After the fiasco of the first representation of Un marziano a Roma at the Teatro Lirico of Milan in November 1960, Flaiano, showing his resilient sense of humor, affirmed that the play was the most interesting failure of the 1960s. Il gioco e il massacro (The Game and the Massacre, 1970) and Le ombre bianche (The White Shadows, 1972) are among his most important subsequent narrative works. While his articles, which focus with ‘‘indiscreet lenses’’ on contemporary society, continued to appear in the pages of L’Europeo, La Voce Repubblicana e Il Corriere della Sera, Flaiano started to write screenplays. From the 1940s onward, he wrote or coauthored more than 60 screenplays. Among these were Roma citta` libera (Rome, Free City, 1946) directed by Marcello Pagliero, Guardie e ladri (Cops and Robbers, 1951) directed by Mario Monicelli, La romana (Woman of Rome, 1954) directed by Luigi Zampa, Le notti di Cabiria (Nights of Cabiria, 1957) and La dolce vita by Federico Fellini, La notte (1961) by Michelangelo Antonioni, and many others. Although Flaiano wrote for many directors, his longest, most intense and most fruitful collaboration was with Fellini, with whom he worked on many films from Luci del varieta` (Variety Lights, uncredited, 1950) to Giulietta degli spiriti (Juliet of the Spirits, 1965). Unarguably Flaiano’s lucid irony and his unforgiving satire contributed significantly to the success of many of Fellini’s films, from Lo sceicco bianco (The White Sheik, 1952) to La strada (The Road, 1954) to what many consider Fellini’s masterpiece Otto e mezzo (8½, 1963). Today, Flaiano is regarded as one of the writers (along with Sergio Amidei and Cesare Zavattini) who contributed significantly to the birth and development of neorealism in Italy. Despite the quantity and versatility of his work, Flaiano did not receive the recognition he deserved in his own lifetime. One of the most important intellectuals of twentieth-century Italy, he has often been left out of the official cultural histories of his era. One reason for this neglect was his audacity in challenging the established literary modes of the time. Language can be an extremely subversive tool, and this was the way Flaiano used it. Indeed, he used the Italian language, as Maria Corti states in her preface to Flaiano’s collected works (1988), in an idiosyncratic and antitraditional way: He always employed literary genres in a transgressive fashion. Another reason for his

marginalization was his political orientation. At a time in which Italian culture was all too frequently in the hands of either the Christian Democrats or the Communists, an intellectual such as Flaiano (who often proposed a terza via) was considered an outsider. Today his journalistic articles, his prose, and his theatrical works speak to audiences of all ages and cultures. Flaiano once wrote that the worst thing that can happen to a genius is to be understood in his own time. His point was welltaken. The time for recognizing Ennio Flaiano’s many contributions to film has finally come.

Biography Born in Pescara, March 5, 1910. Trained as an architect (never obtained a degree). Entered the circle of the Roman journal L’Occidente, 1933– 1934. Lieutenant in the Italian campaign in Africa, 1935. After returning to Italy from Ethiopia, met Rosetta Rota, 1936; they wed in 1940. Winner of several literary awards, including the Strega prize for Tempo di uccidere (1947) and the Campiello prize for Il gioco e il massacro (1970). Among cinema awards, with Federico Fellini and Tullio Pinelli, received Oscar nominations for Best Story and Screenplay for La strada (1954) and I vitelloni (1957). Along with Fellini, Pinelli, and Brunello Rondi, was nominated for Best Story and Screenplay for La dolce vita (1959), and 8½ (1963). Died in Rome November 20, 1972. Many of his works appeared posthumously. In 1973, the city of Pescara founded the ‘‘Premi Internazionali Flaiano’’ for outstanding achievement in literature, theater, television, and cinema. DANIELA ORLANDI Selected Works Collections Opere di Ennio Flaiano, edited by Giulio Cattaneo e Sergio Pautasso, vols. 10, Milan: Rizzoli, 1973–1983. Opere, edited by Maria Corti and Anna Longoni, vols. 2, Milan: Bompiani, 1988–1989.

Fiction Tempo di uccidere, 1947; as The Short Cut, translated by Stuart Hood, 1950. Diario notturno e altri scritti, 1956. Una e una notte, 1959. Il gioco e il massacro, 1970. Le ombre bianche, 1972. La solitudine del satiro, 1973; as The Via Veneto Papers, translated by John Satriano, 1992.

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ENNIO FLAIANO Autobiografia del blu di Prussia, 1974. Diario degli errori, edited by Gemma Giammattei, 1976. Storie inedite per film mai fatti, edited by Francesca Pino Pongolini, 1984. Frasario essenziale per passare inosservati in societa`, 1986. La notte porta consiglio e altri racconti cinematografici, edited by Diana Ru¨esch, 2001.

Plays Un marziano a Roma, 1960; expanded as Un marziano a Roma e altre farse, 1971.

Essays Lettere d’amore al cinema, edited by Cristina Bragaglia, 1978. Un film alla settimana: 55 critiche da Cine illustrato (1939– 1940), edited by Tullio Kezich, 1988. Nuove lettere d’amore al cinema, edited by Guido Fink, 1990. L’occhiale indiscreto, edited by Anna Longoni, 1995. Lo spettatore addormentato, edited by Simona Costa, 1996.

Screenplays Le notti di Cabiria, with Federico Fellini and Tullio Pinelli, 1957; rpt. 1981. La dolce vita, with Federico Fellini and Tullio Pinelli, 1963; rpt. 1981. I vitelloni e La strada: soggetto e sceneggiatura, with Federico Fellini and Tullio Pinelli, 1989. Progetto Proust: una sceneggiatura per La recherche du temps perdu, edited by Maria Sepa, 1989. Luci del varieta`, with Federico Fellini, Alberto Lattuada, and Tullio Pinelli, 1994.

Other L’uovo di Marx: epigrammi, satire, occasioni, edited by Anna Longoni and Vanni Scheiwiller, 1987. Soltanto le parole: lettere di e a Ennio Flaiano, 1933–1972, edited by Anna Longoni and Diana Ru¨esch, 1995.

Further Reading Bertelli, Gian Carlo, and Pier Marco De Santi (editors), Omaggio a Flaiano, Pisa: Giardini, 1986. Catalano, Ettore, L’esperienza del teatro: Savinio e Flaiano critici teatrali e altri interventi sul teatro meridionale, Bari: Levante, 1984. Esposito, Vittoriano, Vita e pensiero di Ennio Flaiano, Cerchio: Polla, 1993. Flaiano satirico: Convegno di studio: Pescara, 30–31 maggio 1997, Pescara: Ediars, 1997. Marchetti, Antonio, Pescara. Ennio Flaiano e la citta` parallela, Milan: Unicopli, 2004. Mesirca, Margherita, Le mille e una storie impossibili: indagine intorno ai racconti lunghi di Ennio Flaiano, Ravenna: Longo, 2003. Palermo, Antonio, and Emma Giammattei, Solitudine del moralista. Alvano e Flaiano, Naples: Liguori, 1986. Russo, Giovanni, Oh Flaiano!, Cava de’ Tirreni: Avagliano, 2001. Sergiacomo, Lucilla, Invito alla lettura di Ennio Flaiano, Milan: Mursia, 1996. Il teatro di Flaiano: convegno di studi: Pescara, 6–7 ottobre 1995, Pescara: Ediars, 1995. Tempo di uccidere: atti del convegno nazionale, Pescara, 27– 28 maggio 1994, Pescara: Ediars, 1994.

FLORENCE Florence was founded by the Romans in 187 AD, during the work to extend the Via Cassia. A walled city, Florentia consisted of two main roads, four towered gates, a central square, the Curia, and the Temple of the Capitoline Triad (Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva). The city had public works such as the Capitoline Baths, the Baths of Capaccio, the sewage system, and the Temple of Isis, but was not a relevant cultural and political center. Its distance from the center of political power was crucial for the internal life of the new city and its cultural relationship with Rome. Soon, some Etruscan noble families moved to Florence, taking part in the rule of the city. Commercial activity was strong, and merchants introduced to Florence Christianity and the Oriental cults of the deacon Lorenzo and 734

the Palestinian saint Felicita. The Longobards conquered northern and central Italy in the sixth century, and Florence fell under their domination. In the eighth century, Florence was integrated into the feudal system as a county of the Holy Roman Empire. By the year 1000, it also became a center in the cultural and philosophical struggle to eliminate secular interference in ecclesiastical affairs and to assert the independence of the papacy from imperial power. One of the leading figures in this debate was St. Giovanni Gualberto, the son of a Florentine knight. From now on, the conflict between the two factions, the propapal Guelphs and the proimperial Ghibellines, deeply marked the cultural history of the city. In 1055, Florence played host to a council between Emperor Henry III

FLORENCE and 120 bishops. Later, it became further embroiled in the struggle for investitures because Matilda, countess of Tuscany, was a supporter of the ideas of St. Gualberto, as well as of the most influential of the reformers, Ildebrando di Sovana, then Pope Gregory VII. She thus found herself in contrast with the emperor. After the episode of Canossa, Henry IV’s victory in 1081 led to the deposition of the countess, abandoned by all the Tuscan cities except Florence. After Countess Matilda’s death (1114), Florence constituted a commune, with three dominant social groups: the nobles, grouped into consorterie, the rising merchants, and the knights. The river Arno became an infrastructure within the city as a communications route, and a source of energy and of water for industries. In 1180, 35 towers were documented in Florence, but there were many more. With a population of 30,000 inhabitants, the commune experienced a period of peace and the city continued to expand, becoming an international economic center. New religious orders—the Franciscans, the Dominicans, and the Augustinians— established themselves in Florence, playing a leading role in its cultural life. The construction of the new cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore began in 1294. In 1250, the merchants and the artisans managed to usurp the power of the Ghibelline nobles. The Societas militum, an organization of the nobility, was abolished in the hope of allaying the arrogance of the aristocracy and of preventing it from returning to power. In 1255, construction began on the Palazzo del Popolo, now the Bargello, to house the Councils of the Commune. At the battle of Montaperti (1260), the Florentines were defeated by the Sienese. The city was covered with rubble, and palaces, houses, and towers were demolished. The Ghibelline leaders, fearing the people, accepted the services of Clemente IV as peacemaker. The pope favored the Guelphs, who thus succeeded in reconquering power and reintroduced the institutions abrogated by the Ghibellines. Two new parties began to shape up among the people: the Magnati or entrepreneurs (the noble Guelphs and the repatriated Ghibellines, owners of houses and lands) and the Popolani or workers (merchant and artisans organized in guilds). Soon the Magnati were prohibited from taking part in the political life. The confused social and political situation was discussed by Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), who had had a part in the civil life as a magistrate and a Priore (a type of governor). His position was strongly against the secular power of papacy, considering

the science of government unrelated to the pope’s authority. The secular power of the pope, in Dante’s view, was the origin of the corruption of the church. Following the example of Christ and of St. Francis of Assisi, the church should not own material property, and the authority of the pope should be only spiritual. In Dante’s opinion, the history of Florence had been too violent and sanguinary: As he wrote at the beginning of canto 36 of the Inferno, ‘‘Godi, Fiorenza, poi / che se’ sı` grande / che per mare e per terra batti l’ali / e per lo ’nferno tuo nome si spande!’’ (Be joyous, Florence, you are great indeed / for over sea and land you beat your wings / through every part of Hell your name extends!). After his exile, it was clear to him that the most important values for Florence should have been unity, harmony, understandings and peace. Dante’s stil nuovo is mainly a kind of poetry in which it is Love that speaks. Many passages in his Divina Commedia are a sad call to Florence to change its life. A totally renewed Florence could be a cultural model for the whole of Italy, in the same way the Florentine dialect is the ‘‘noble language’’ to be used in the country. By the end of the thirteenth century, Florentine culture was flourishing. In the art of Giotto (1267– 1337), Christ is not the metaphysical symbol of the Byzantine iconography, but the perfect model of man: exposed to obscurity and evil, leading a life of modesty and humility, based on his soul and heart, on the human community. In this perspective, as the philosopher Paolo Rossi points out, a distinguishing sign of the spirit of the city was the intense cultural and philosophical debate about the nature of power and Christianity, the identity and mission of Catholicism, the ethics of life, the foundation of secularism, the position of man in history (Storia e filosofia: saggi sulla storiografia filosofica, 1974). Dante’s reflections were the basis for the analysis of other Florentine historians in the mid-fourteenth century such as Dino Compagni (ca. 1255–1324) and Giovanni Villani (ca. 1280–1348). The entire literary and philosophical oeuvre of Francesco Petrarca (1304–1374), the son to a Florentine exiled in Arezzo, is dedicated to showing how human strength should aim at obtaining peace, equilibrium, and love. In spite of Dante’s reflections, the city decided to construct great buildings, symbols of arrogance, wealth, and power, such as the new cathedral and the Palazzo della Signoria, both designed by Arnolfo di Cambio (ca. 1245–ca. 1310). The contrasts between the popolo minuto (middle and lowermiddle classes) and the popolo grasso (wealthy 735

FLORENCE merchants) were accentuated. In 1378, new guilds were formed to represent the most humble activities. The rivalry between two noble families led to the formation of two antagonistic factions, the Neri (Black), led by the Donati family and closer to the landowning aristocracy and the papacy, and the Bianchi (White), led by the Cerchi family and closer to the petty aristocracy and the middle classes. The pope sent Charles of Valois, brother to the king of France, to broker a peace. He openly favored the Neri, arresting the Bianchi leaders and forcing those who were close to them, including Dante Alighieri, into exile. During the fourteenth century, internal strife and wars were aggravated by famine and epidemics, particularly by the deadly plague of 1348. This is the background to Decameron, by Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375), in which a number of Florentine young men and women live in the hills to save themselves from the plague and decide to tell each other stories to amuse themselves. Boccaccio’s influential lesson is that men—like the Florentine philosopher Guido Cavalcanti (ca. 1258–1300), described in the sixth story of the ninth day—should live in the light of Reason, Understanding, and Tolerance. In the fifteenth century, an oligarchic regime was established by the merchants. The faction excluded from power joined arms with the people and found a leader in Giovanni de’ Medici, establishing the Signoria. During the Medici rule, following Dante’s example, Florentine intellectuals studied the works of Plato and Aristotle, and Latin and Greek poetry, art, and philosophy. Thus, the city became the center in which Humanism was forged. The human being was considered the ultimate end, eager for rational knowledge and for the affirmation of dominion over nature and history. Literary culture, the sciences, and the arts came to the forefront, and Florence gave Europe an entirely new cultural period. Between 1420 and 1446, artists such as Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446), Masaccio (ca. 1401–1428), and Donatello (ca. 1386–1466) created a number of masterpieces, making Florence the Renaissance city idealized by the Humanists. After the death of Lorenzo il Magnifico (1449– 1492), the republican regime was re-established. The citizens were inflamed by the sermons of the Dominican monk Girolamo Savonarola (1452– 1498) announcing the end of the world, the coming of a judging Christ, and the eternal damnation of the Florentines because of their sinful life. Savonarola ruled Florence for four years, but was then condemned as a heretic and—on the order of Pope 736

Alexander VI—burned at the stake in the Piazza della Signoria on May 23, 1498. The Medici returned, and Michelangelo (1475–1564) sculpted his ‘‘David,’’ to be placed in front of the Palazzo della Signoria as the guardian of Florentine freedom. The elevation to the papal throne first of Giovanni de’ Medici in 1512 (Leo X), and then of Giulio (Clemente VII), reinforced the Medici Signoria. When news of the sack of Rome in 1527 arrived, the people rebelled and proclaimed their freedom: This was the last desperate attempt to reinstate the republican government. On August 12, 1530, after an 11-month siege, the armies of the emperor and the pope entered Florence. Alessandro de’ Medici was declared head of the state and duke of the Florentine Republic. During the sixteenth century, the Neoplatonic ideology and the Renaissance aesthetic were replaced by Machiavelli’s instrumental and empirical conception of power and of the modern state. A writer, scholar, and diplomat, Niccolo` Machiavelli (1469– 1527) dedicated his influential masterwork Il Principe (The Prince, 1513) to Lorenzo de’ Medici. It was—in the author’s own words—a sort of handbook to teach how to maintain power in a complex society like that of Florence, mainly based on the careful study of Greek and Latin political and military history. Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574), painter, architect, writer, and art historian, designed the Palazzo degli Uffizi in 1560. After the discovery of the New World, however, trade and manufacturing declined, eventually followed by banking. Florence remained an important city, but its territory was small, and it could certainly not compete with the great and powerful centralized states. From the late sixteenth century and throughout the seventeenth century, the new Florentine form of the opera lirica, combining music, drama, and poetry, was developed through the discussions of the members of the Camerata de’ Bardi or Camerata Fiorentina, a group of intellectuals and musicians that included Vincenzo Galilei (ca. 1525–1591), author of the book La musica antica e la moderna (Ancient and Modern Music, 1581), and through the compositions of Jacopo Peri (1561–1633), Giulio Caccini (ca. 1550–1618), and Giovanni Battista Lulli (1632–1687). Numerous academies of literature and science came into being, soon transforming literary and cultural work into a bureaucratic and conventional routine. The Accademia della Crusca was founded in 1582. Its principal labor was the compilation of the Vocabolario degli Academici della Crusca (Dictionary of the Members of

FLORENCE the Accademia della Crusca), the first edition of which appeared in 1612. The Teatro della Pergola, designed by Ferdinando Tacca, opened in 1651 as a place to present the productions inspired by the Accademia degli Immobili. Of great importance for the sciences was the Accademia del Cimento, founded by Leopoldo de’ Medici in 1657, with the Galileian motto ‘‘provando e riprovando’’ (trying and trying again). After the death of Grand Duke Gian Gastone, Florence was assigned to Francis I Duke of Lorraine, of the French-Austrian dynasty. With its remarkable history, its genius loci, its unique environment, and its spirit and culture, Florence—especially during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—was of great importance and inspiration for an endless number of international artists and writers, among them painters such as J. M. W. Turner, and authors such as G. W. F. Goethe, who wrote about the ‘‘immortal city,’’ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who came to Florence to study Dante and translate into English his Divina Commedia, and wrote in Florence his famous six sonnets on the Divine Comedy, John Ruskin, who dedicated his Mornings in Florence to the city, and E. M. Forster, whose novel A Room with a View is set in Florence. The critic and collector Bernard Berenson lived in his famous villa, I Tatti, which became an international cultural institution. Contemporary writers such as David Leavitt have also dedicated a number of stories and novels to the city. After the Wars of Independence, Tuscany joined the newly unified Kingdom of Italy under Savoy rule, and Florence was the capital of the new nation for five years (1865–1870). The historical city center underwent intensive urban renovation, which completely destroyed the Old Market and the Jewish quarter. During the nineteenth century, Florence rediscovered its cultural origins and its spirit—the spirit of Dante and Giotto—and enjoyed a cultural revival. The school of painters known as Macchiaioli, with its interest in everyday life and the inner life of people, was founded in 1855. In 1819, Giovan Pietro Vieusseux founded the famous Gabinetto di lettura (library) and, in 1821, the review Antologia, and, with Gino Capponi (1792–1876), the Archivio storico italiano, the first issue of which appeared in 1842. Other cultural institutions date to the same period: the Conservatory L. Boccherini, the Caffe´ giubbe rosse, which soon became one of the meeting places of the intellectuals, and the Dante Society. The poetical works of Giosue Carducci (1835–1907) aimed to present an original

synthesis of European romantic sensibility and the Latin tradition in light of the peculiar spiritual life of Tuscany, based on the heritage of its criticism and of the three great masters, the so-called tre corone (three crowns): Dante, Petrarca, and Boccaccio. However, when the capital was transferred to Rome on February 3, 1871, Florence went through a process of economic and cultural degradation. At the beginning of the twentieth century, a number of original and important literary reviews emerged: Leonardo, Il Regno, Hermes, La Voce, Lacerba, and Vita Nuova. Through the lively debate carried out in these journals, Florence became one of the main sites of the new avant-garde and modernist culture that called into question the principles of nineteenth-century positivist thought. Until World War I, however, the city’s problems accumulated without intervention from the public authorities. In 1928, the Orchestra Stabile of Florence was founded, thus giving birth to the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, the most famous Italian festival of classical music, opera, and ballet. After World War II, important literary reviews such as Il Ponte, Societa`, Letteratura, and Paragone were again crucial to the intellectual life of the city, which was the center of a profound and original cultural quest based on the search for the popular and democratic roots of the city. Its major figures were authors such as Mario Luzi (1914–2004) and Vasco Pratolini (1913–1991), the author of Metello (1955), in which the powerful description of the general strike of 1902 becomes a symbol of the critical spirit of Florence that lives in the popular classes, and of the contemporary life of the city. STEFANO ADAMI Further Reading Adamson, Walter L., Avant-Garde Florence. From Modernism to Fascism, Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1993. Ballini, Pier Luigi, Fiorentini del Novecento, Florence: Polistampa, 2001. Becker, Marvin, Florence in Transition, I: The Decline of the Commune, II: Studies in the Rise of the Territorial State, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965. Boutier, Jean, Sandro Landi, and Olivier Rouchon (editors), Florence et la Toscane, XIVe-XIXe sie`cles. Les dynamiques d’un E´tat italien, Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2004. Brucker, Gene A., Florentine Politics and Society, 1343–1378, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962. Brucker, Gene A., The Civic World of Early Renaissance Florence, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977.

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FLORENCE Bruni, Leonardo, History of the Florentine People, edited by James Hankins, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Burke, James, Changing Patrons: Social Identity and the Visual Arts in Renaissance Florence, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004. Capretti, Enrico, I Medici mecenati a Firenze: da mercanti a signori, Florence: Polistampa, 2004. Cochraine, Eric, Florence in the Forgotten Centuries (1527– 1800), Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973. Cohn, Samuel Kline, Creating the Florentine State: Peasants and Rebellion, 1348–1434, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Connell, William J., and Andrea Zorzi (editors), Florentine Tuscany. Structures and Practices of Power, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Desideri, Laura, Il Vieusseux. Storia di un Gabinetto di lettura. 1819–2000. Cronologia Saggi Testimonianze, Florence: Polistampa, 2001.

Doren, Alfred, Le arti fiorentine, Florence: Le Monnier, 1939. Kent, Dale, The Rise of the Medici: Faction in Florence, 1426–1434. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978. Kent, Dale V., Cosimo de’ Medici and the Florentine Renaissance: The Patron’s Oeuvre, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. Lanuzza, Stefano, Firenze degli scrittori del Novecento, Naples: A. Guida, 2001. Moretti, Italo, La Toscana di Arnolfo. Storia, arte, architettura, urbanistica, paesaggi, Florence: Olschki, 2004. Rossi, Paolo, Storia e filosofia: saggi sulla storiografia filosofica, Einaudi: Torino, 1974. Rubinstein, Nicolai, The Government of Florence under the Medici (1434–1494), Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. Silvano, Giovanni, ‘‘Vivere’’ Civile e ‘‘Governo Misto’’ a Firenze nel Primo Cinquecento, Bologna: Pa`tron, 1985. Stephens, John, The Fall of the Florentine Republic, 1512– 1530, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983.

DARIO FO (1926–) Dario Fo’s theater unfolds in some area midway between a contemporary political-social Wasteland and a timeless fantasy Wonderland. If the themes of many of his plays are taken from the headlines and disputes of the day, as actor-author, Fo is deeply rooted in the traditions of Italian theater. His first debt is to the figure of the fabulatore (storyteller) of Lake Maggiore, where he grew up. The storytellers’ improvised tales, interwoven with irony, whimsy, wit, and satire, start with incidents and places familiar to the hearers but take flight into realms beyond reality and realism. At least in retrospect, he assessed these tales as teaching him the very essence of popular culture: They were independent of any hegemonic culture, and expressed the people’s viewpoint toward society and its values. The cultivation of popular culture, the search for the anger underneath mockery, and the developments of storytelling theater are among the principal and enduring aspects of his work in all phases of his development. In Fo, in keeping with an Italian theater dominated by the actor-author, writing and performance go hand in hand. He began his career by scripting and performing monologues, Poer nano (Poor Wretch, 1950), in which great historical figures such as Christopher Columbus or Goliath are 738

ridiculed and debunked. These pieces were broadcast on radio then recited on stage. Social and political satire was a dominant element of the cabaret-style revues Il dito nell’occhio (A Poke in the Eye, 1954) and I sani dal legare (Madhouse for the Sane, 1955), which he cowrote and staged in subsequent years with actors Franco Parenti and Giustino Durano. After an interval working in cinema, he returned to theater with two programs of one-act farces, Ladri, manichini e donne nude (Thieves, Mannequins, and Nude Women, 1958). By then, he had met and married the actress Franca Rame, who had theater in her blood in a way he had not and who was to appear with him in virtually all his subsequent work. Farce has always been his preferred genre, and initially, but mistakenly, his work was taken as the Italian equivalent of the absurd farce then being produced by Euge`ne Ionesco or Samuel Beckett. Fo harked back to older, more popular forms of French and Italian farce, but rejected any hierarchy in theater that left farce as unworthy of consideration. He has always eschewed all elitist theater-work, and throughout his life has molded and adapted traditional farce to his own ends. While Fo himself views his career as one seamless whole, the phases of his output are as distinct

DARIO FO as they were for Pablo Picasso. The term ‘‘bourgeois period’’ conventionally used to describe the 1959–1967 span may not be the happiest, but it designates the years when Fo attained great success with his work in the big, commercial theaters of Italy. He wrote and staged a play a year, usually opening in the Odeon, Milan, before touring. These plays were comedies rather than farces, generally staged with the support of songs and music composed by Fiorenzo Carpi. The musical aspect of Fo’s creativity has been lost in translation, but songs were integral to his theater, not only in this period. In addition, throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, Fo wrote and recorded songs that had the same vitality and lighthearted whimsicality as the work of such French chansonniers as Juliette Greco. The zest and serendipity of his bourgeois period may have gulled the middle-class audiences that flocked to applaud his plays, but it did not deceive the censors, who applied the red pencil liberally to the advance copies of the scripts that all playwrights were then required to submit. These plays were bourgeois only in the venues in which they were staged, for Fo used conventional forms, as did George Bernard Shaw, to insinuate radical messages. The satire in the first of the comedies, Gli arcangeli non giocano a flipper (Archangels Don’t Play Pinball, 1959), is against the stifling senselessness of bureaucracy rather than against any hard political target. The characters are the rootless, urban youth who made their appearance in the years of Italy’s ‘‘economic miracle.’’ Lanky meets Angela and is deceived into believing her to be a wealthy Albanian while she is in fact the local prostitute. Due to official misunderstandings, Lanky is registered by the officialdom as a bloodhound, and has to take on the lifestyle of a dog. Their success in this and subsequent plays led to Fo and Rame being invited in 1962 to present the TV show, Canzonissima, a variety show that combined a song contest with the performance of sketches. Fo’s sketches carried too high a level of political polemic for the board of directors, and when they refused to allow him to broadcast a piece on the building industry during a national strike, he and Rame walked off the set. Something of his bitterness over the episode may be seen in Isabella, tre caravelle e un cacciaballe (Isabella, Three Caravels, and a Con-man, 1963), dealing at one level with the historical relations between Christopher Columbus and Queen Isabella, and at another dramatizing the contemporary predicament of the left-wing intellectual

entrapped by the wiles of the corridors of power. The structure is the familiar play-within-a-play, where an actor is about to be decapitated but granted provisional pardon to perform a play— on Columbus—while waiting for the confirmation of his release. In a double bluff, the pardon does not arrive, and the actor is decapitated. Settimo, ruba un po’ meno (Seventh: Steal a Little Less, 1964) was an angry farce on corruption in public life, with a purely contemporary setting. In a cemetery, a female gravedigger, Enea, believes she is in contact with the occupant of a coffin, who reveals details of various swindles carried on by the management. Enea, disguised as a prostitute and a nun to seize documents to prove the corruption, ends up in a madhouse run by nuns. The convent-asylum was a metaphor previously used by Fo to designate an Italy run by a clerical-political establishment. The work was rewritten and revived in 1992 as a one-woman play by Franca Rame at a time when Italy was in the ferment of renewal induced by the Milanese magistrates’ anticorruption drive and when reality had caught up with Fo’s fantasy. However much the piece seemed on both occasions the response to an immediate crisis in public life, the structure, with the seemingly naive Enea taking the role of ‘‘lord of misrule’’ and the emergence of the deus ex machina figure from the coffin to right wrongs, are strongly reminiscent of the topsy-turvy tradition of carnival. Fo’s position in official theater was becoming untenable, and in the turbulent year 1968, he broke with bourgeois theater to become il giullare del proletariato (the jester of the proletariat). Nothing is more typical of the complexity of Fo than the mixture of tradition and modernity in his break. The giullare was a figure from pre-Renaissance street theater, an entertainer, the equivalent of a jester or a fool. Fo declared his new drama would be at the service of the proletarian revolution, performed in venues where the working-class audiences he sought to attract would feel more at home, but however contemporary his political aims, his theatrical model was taken from Italy’s past. Other Marxist-leaning companies set up in that year were purely agitprop troupes, but for him the medium mattered as much as the message. In politics, he was revolutionary, but his theater remained traditional and popular. He admired the Bolshevik poet Vladimir Mayakowsky, and in 1994, published an anthology of his works with linking material of his own, but his idols were Jean-Baptiste Poquelin Molie`re and Angelo Beolco (Il Ruzzante), the actor-author of sixteenth-century Venice, some 739

DARIO FO of whose work, highly rewritten, he staged as Dario Fo incontra Ruzante (Dario Fo Meets Ruzante, 1993). The new company was a cooperative, Nuova Scena, and the first production was a large-scale pageant, Grande pantomima con bandiere, pupazzi piccoli e medi (Grand Pantomime with Flags, Large and Medium Puppets, 1969), in which actors wore masks that alluded to commedia dell’arte. The stage was dominated by a big-bellied, grotesque puppet from which emerge figures representing such forces as the Bourgeoisie, Capital, and the Military. The new move galvanized Fo into producing at top speed several scripts that were staged by sections of the troupe, but to the astonishment of his colleagues he announced that in 1969 he would be touring on his own, assuming the role of the giullare in Mistero buffo (Comic Mysteries), a collage of sketches of medieval inspiration. For him, there was no contradiction. The revolutionary activist must know his roots as well as his destination. Other problems were, however, emerging. Nuova Scena was close to the Communist Party, but Fo’s sympathy for the new extraparliamentary left groups was increasing, so in 1969 he made a second break to form another co-operative, Collettivo Teatrale la Comune. The new troupe, although as dedicated to touring as its predecessor, found a permanent base in the Capannone, an ex-industrial workshop in a Milan suburb. Here in 1970, Fo premiered Morte accidentale di un anarchico (Accidental Death of an Anarchist), his most celebrated and successful work. The play was conceived as an exercise of ‘‘counterinformation’’ at a time when press and public accepted that anarchists were responsible for a bombing atrocity in 1969 in Milan that was later shown to have been perpetrated by neo-Fascist cells. Immediately after the bombing, an anarchist, Pino Pinelli, was arrested for interrogation but died in custody. Fo’s approach to the dramatization of this police-political plot was bold and innovative. He eschewed angry denunciation in favor of wild farce, where a madman with a talent for disguise, in many ways a Harlequin in modern dress, infiltrates the police station and conducts his own inquiry into the death of the anarchist. No other work of Fo’s merged so deftly laughter with anger, or used traditional forms so successfully to probe modern dilemmas. This company too was driven with internal dissension, and by 1973 broke apart. Fo’s commitment to radical theater and causes was undimmed, but took new forms. With various followers, he 740

took Milan’s Palazzina Liberty as his new base. His writing entered a new phase with an interest in social affairs rather than strictly political questions. The question of drug use was at the heart of La marijuana della mamma e` la piu` bella, (Mum’s Marijuana is the Best, 1976), but it was the role of women in society that became the central concern. He wrote, or cowrote, several pieces on this theme for performance by Franca Rame. His creativity was unflagging, and in 1997, he was awarded the Nobel prize for literature. The official citation stated that he ‘‘emulates the jesters of the Middle Ages in scourging authority and upholding the dignity of the downtrodden.’’

Biography Born 24 March 1926 at Sangiano (Varese), on Lake Maggiore. 1943, called up by Republic of Salo`, Mussolini’s puppet Fascist state. 1944, deserts. 1945, student of art and architecture in Milan. 1951, his first monologues broadcast on radio. 1952, theater debut with monologues. 1953, forms ParentiFo-Durano company to put on satirical revues. 1954, marries Franca Rame. 1955 son, Jacopo, born. 1956, his only film, Lo svitato, released, but with little success. 1958, Fo-Rame company formed. 1960, Aveva due pistole con gli occhi bianchi e neri, opening work of so-called bourgeois period. 1962, presents TV show, Canzonissima: walks off when refused permission for a political sketch. 1968, forms theatrical cooperative, Nuova Scena. 1969, second cooperative, La Comune. 1973, breakup of La Comune. 1974, takeover of Palazzina Liberty as theater and company base. 1977, return to TV with retrospective of seven plays. 1978, directs Igor Stravinsky’s The Story of a Soldier for La Scala in Milan. 1981, L’opera dello sghignazzo, musical work inspired by Jon Gay’s Beggar’s Opera performed in Turin. 1985, Hellequin, Harlekin, Arlecchino performed at Venice’s Biennale. 1990, directs Molie`re’s Le malade imaginaire at the Come´die Francaise. 1992, directs Il barbiere di Siviglia in the Netherlands, first of several Rossini operas he will direct. 1995, suffers a stroke, which affects his memory and sight. 2003, directs Il viaggio a Reims, an opera inspired by Rossini. 2004, Il teatro in Italia, TV history of Italian theater. 2005, series of TV programs on artists, including Giotto and Caravaggio, and theatrical figures, including the Saroti family of mask-makers; directs Rossini’s La Gazzetta for Pesaro festival. Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1997. JOSEPH FARRELL

DARIO FO Selected Works Collections Compagni senza censura, 2 vols., Milan: Mazzotta, 1970– 1973. Teatro comico, Milan: Garzanti, 1971. Le commedie, vols. 13, Turin: Einaudi, 1974–1998. Other Plays, edited by Stuart Hood, 1991. Plays: One, London: Methuen, 1992 (Mistero buffo, translated by Ed Emery; Accidental Death of an Anarchist, translated by Ed Emery; Trumpets and Raspberries, translated by R. C. McAvoy and A-M Giugni; The Virtuous Burglar, translated by Joe Farrell; One Was Nude and One Wore Tails, translated by Ed Emery). Plays: Two, London: Methuen, 1994 (Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay!, translated by Lino Pertile, adapted by Bill Colvill and Robert Walker); (Elizabeth, almost by chance a woman, translated by Gillian Hanna); (The Open Couple, translated by Stuart Hood).

Plays Poer nano, 1950. Il dito nell’occhio (produced 1953), 1954. I sani da legare (produced 1954), 1955. Ladri, manichini e donne nude, 1958. Comica finale, includes La Marcolfa, I tre bravi, Un morto da vendere, Quando sarai povero sarai re (produced 1958), 1962. Gli arcangeli non giocano a flipper (produced 1959), 1959; as Archangels Don’t Play Pinball, translated by R. C. McAvoy and Anna-Maria Giugni, 1986; translated by Ron Jenkins, 1989. Aveva due pistole con gli occhi bianchi e neri (produced 1960), 1966. Chi ruba un piede e` fortunato im amore (produced 1961), 1966. Isabella, tre caravelle e un cacciaballe (produced 1963), 1963. Settimo, ruba un po’ meno (produced 1964). Settimo, ruba un po’ meno (produced 1964), 1966. La colpa e` sempre del diavolo (produced 1965), 1965. La signora e` da buttare (produced 1967), 1967. Grande pantomima con bandiere, pupazzi piccoli e medi (produced 1968), 1969. Mistero buffo (produced 1969), 1969; as Mistero buffo, translated by Ed Emery, 1988. L’operaio conosce 300 parole il padrone 1000 per questo lui e` il padrone (produced 1969), 1969. Legami pure che tanto io spacco tutto lo stesso (produced 1969), 1969. Vorrei morire anche stasera anche se dovessi pensare che non e` servito a niente (produced 1970), 1970. Morte accidentale di un anarchico (produced 1970), 1970; rev. eds., 1973, 1988, 2004; as Accidental Death of an Anarchist, translated by Gavin Richards, 1980; by Suzanne Cowan, 1980; by John Lahr, 1983; by Richard Nelson, 1984; by Alan Cumming and Tim Supple, 1991; by Ed Emery, 1992; by Simon Nye, 2003. Tutti insieme! Tutti uniti! Ma scusa, quello non e` il padrone? (produced 1971), 1972. Fedayn (produced 1972), 1972. Ordine per Dioooooooo (produced 1972), 1972. Pum, pum! Chi e`? La polizia! (produced 1972), 1970. Guerra del popolo in Cile (produced 1973), 1974.

Non si paga, non si paga! 1974; as We Can’t Pay? We Won’t Pay!, translated by Lino Pertile, 1978; translated by Ron Jenkins, 2001. Il Fanfani rapito (produced 1975), 1975. La marijuana della mamma e` la piu` bella (produced 1976), 1976. Storia della tigre (produced 1977), 1980; as Story of a Tiger, translated by Ron Jenkins, 1988. Clacson, trombette e pernacchi (produced 1981), 1980: as Trumpets and Raspberries, translated by R. C. McAvoy and Anna-Marie Giugni, 1984; as About Face, translated by Ron Jenkins, 1989. Il fabulazzo osceno (produced 1982), 1982. Coppia aperta, quasi spalancata (produced 1983), 1983; as Open Couple—Very Open, translated by Stuart Hood, 1990. Quasi per caso una donna: Elisabetta (produced 1984), 1984; as Elizabeth, translated by Gillian Hanna, 1987; as Elizabeth: Almost by Chance A Woman, translated by Gillian Hanna, 1987. Il ratto della Francesca (produced 1986), 1986: as Abducting Diana, translated by Rupert Lowe, 1994. Parti femminili: Una coppia aperta and Una giornata qualunque (produced 1986), 1987; the latter as An Ordinary Day, translated by Joseph Farrell, 1990. Il Papa e la strega (produced 1989), 1989; as The Pope and the Witch, translated by Ed Emery, 1992. Zitti, stiamo precipitando (produced 1990), 1990. Parliamo di donne: L’eroina and Grasso e` bello (produced 1991), 1992. Johan Padan ala descoverta de la Americhe (produced 1991), 1992; as Johan Padan and the Discovery of the Americas, translated by Ron Jenkins, 2001. Dario Fo incontra Ruzante, 1993. Mamma! I sanculotti! (produced 1993). Sesso? Grazie, tanto per gradire, (produced 1994), 1994. La Bibbia dei villani (produced 1996), 1996. Il diavolo con le zinne (produced 1997), 1998: as The Devil in Drag, translated by Ed Emery, 1999. Marino Libero! Marino e` innocente! (produced 1998), 1998. Lu Santo Jullare Francesco (produced 1999), 1999. L’anomalo bicefalo (produced 2004), 2004.

Other Ballate e canzoni, 1976. Il teatro politico di Dario Fo, 1977. Dario Fo parla di Dario Fo, 1977. Il teatro dell’occhio, 1985. Manuale minimo dell’attore, 1987; as Tricks of the Trade, translated by Joseph Farrell, 1987. Dialogo provocatorio sul comico, il tragico, la follia e la ragione, conversation with Luigi Allegri, 1990. Toto`: Manuale dell’attore comico, 1990; 1995. Fabulazzo, 1991. Pupazzi con rabbia e sentimento: La vita e l’arte di Dario Fo e Franca Rame, edited by Enzo Colombo and Orazio Piaccini, 1998. Vladimir Majakovkij: Messaggi ai posteri selezionati e condivisi da Dario Fo, 1999. La vera storia di Ravenna, 1999. Il paese dei mezarat, 2002. Il tempio degli uomini liberi, Il Duomo di Modena, 2004.

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DARIO FO Further Reading Allegri, Luigi, Dario Fo: Dialogo provocatorio sul comico, il tragico, la follia e la ragione, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1990. Behan, Tom, Dario Fo: Revolutionary Theatre, London: Pluto, 2000. Binni, Lanfranco, Attento te...! Il teatro politico di Dario Fo, Verona: Bertani, 1975. Cairns, Christopher, Dario Fo e la pittura scenica’’: Arte, Teatro, Regie 1977–1997, Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 2000. Catalfamo, Antonio, Dario Fo: ‘‘Il nuovo nella tradizione,’’ Bologna: Libreria Antiquaria Palmaverde, 2004. De Pasquale, Elena, Il segreto del giullare: La dimensione testuale nel teatro di Dario Fo, Naples: Liguori, 1999. Farrell, Joseph, Dario Fo and Franca Rame: Harlequins of the Revolution, London: Methuen, 2001. Farrell, Joseph, and Antonio Scuderi (editors), Stage, Text, and Tradition, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000. Hirst, David L., Dario Fo and Franca Rame, London: Macmillan, 1989. Jenkins, Ron, Dario Fo & Franca Rame: Artful Laughter, New York: Aperture, 2001. Meldolesi, Claudio, Su un comico in rivolta: Dario Fo, il bufalo, il bambino, Rome: Bulzoni, 1978. Mitchell, Tony, Dario Fo: The People’s Court Jester, London: Methuen, 1999. Nepoti, Roberto, and Marina Cappa, Dario Fo, Rome: Gremese, 1997. Pizza, Marisa, Il gesto, la parolo, l’azione: Poetica, drammaturgia e storia dei monologhi di Dario Fo, Rome: Bulzoni, 1996. Puppa, Paolo, Il teatro di Dario Fo: Dalla scena alla piazza, Venice: Marsilio, 1978. Scuderi, Antonio, Dario Fo and Popular Performance, New York: Legas, 1998. Soriani, Simone, ‘‘Testo ed imagine nel Johan Padan di Dario Fo,’’ in Letteratura ed arte, 2 (2004): 243–260. Valentini, Chiara, La storia di Dario Fo, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1977; new edition, 1997.

MISTERO BUFFO, 1969 Play by Dario Fo

Mistero buffo (Comic Mysteries), which was premiered in rudimentary form in October 1969 but was later much expanded and developed, consists of a series of one-man sketches and monologues of 742

broadly medieval inspiration, written, or rewritten, and performed by Dario Fo. There are also a number of scenes, originally played by Franca Rame, featuring the Virgin Mary at the Passion of Christ. Some material is drawn from the Apocryphal Gospels, other is of Italian origin, while other scenes were found in Slovakia, Poland, or Croatia. There has been much debate over the exact nature of Fo’s intervention in, or indeed invention of, pieces that are presented as updated but authentic medieval work. Fo’s own comments on the question have frequently been mischievous, and it seems that many of the sketches are totally his own work. The first performance was given during the most militantly political phase of Fo’s career. In 1968, he established a theatrical cooperative, the Nuova Scena, to perform political drama to popular audiences in an ‘‘alternative circuit’’ of venues. ‘‘Eravamo stufi di essere i giullari della borghesia . . . cosı` abbiamo deciso di diventare i giullari del proletariato.’’ (We were tired of being the giullari of the bourgeoisie . . . so we decided to become the giullari of the proletariat, cited in Chiara Valentini, La storia di Dario Fo, 1977). Attention at the time focused on the politically motivated wish to perform ‘‘for the proletariat,’’ and not on the artistic urge to take the medieval giullare as his model. The term has no standard English equivalent, but ‘‘jester’’ is a reasonable approximation, provided it refers to popular street entertainers, not to ‘‘court jesters.’’ In the cooperative’s second season, Fo startled his comrades by announcing that he would not be offering a play on a contemporary theme, as he had done in the 1968 season, but would take on the giullare role by performing alone with medieval pieces. His stated aim was to demonstrate the vitality and continuity of popular culture, and the centrality of history for a revolutionary movement. He believed that ordinary people in the Middle Ages, as distinct from the hegemonic ecclesiastical institutions, had used religious themes, or mystery and morality plays, to express a perhaps inchoate revolt against injustice. The individual pieces that make up Mistero buffo are preceded by a prologue in which Fo addresses the audience to explain the nature and purpose of the sketches, but also to point to parallels between the situation then and now. Frequently, they contain biting satires on contemporary politicians and churchmen. The mixture of laughter and anger—Fo’s ideal combination—is strong in the satire on the medieval pope, Bonifacio VIII (Boniface VIII), which focuses on his inhumanity and love of pomp. Christ on his way to Calvary meets the pope bedecked in grand vestments, but kicks

ANTONIO FOGAZZARO him on the backside for having betrayed the Gospel message of poverty. In his prologue, Fo speaks not only of the historical figure, the object of Dante’s bile, but uses the opportunity to mock the power and wealth of the contemporary church, and to satirize the current occupant of the throne of St. Peter, John Paul II. Another constituent piece, Nascita del giullare (The Birth of the Jester), can be viewed as a manifesto for Fo’s theater. The protagonist is a farmer who, after seeing his land stolen and his wife raped by a local aristocrat, is prevented from killing himself by a stranger, who turns out to be Christ himself. Christ bestows on him the jester’s gift of storytelling and charges him to give voice to the rage of the downtrodden against injustice. Other sketches feature episodes from the Bible: Le nozze di Cana (The Marriage Feast at Cana) and Resurrezione di Lazzaro (The Raising of Lazarus), or popular legends associated with Christ such as Moralita` del cieco e dello storpio (The Blind Man and the Cripple). Christ may be stripped of his divinity, but Fo attacks only excess or deviation from Gospel teaching, not doctrine. In the Lazarus play, people gather not for an uplifting, spiritual religious event but for an entertaining show, something akin to a hypnotist’s display. The cemetery attendant and various costermongers exploit the gathering of the crowd for easy profit. In an internal prologue to the miracle at Cana, a puritanical archangel and a jolly drunk vie over the value of wine. Christ himself is a relaxed hedonist, an exponent of liberation through enjoyment. Fo makes of the legend of the blind man and the cripple an explicitly political parable. The cripple refuses healing since that would compel him to find work and thus be liable to exploitation, while the blind man whose sight is restored revels in the beauty of creation.

When it was shown on Italian television in 1977, Mistero buffo was denounced by the Vatican as the most sacrilegious work in the history of the broadcast media. Fo retorted that his aim was to revive popular culture and that his only targets were power and privilege. Whatever the politics of the play, it provided Fo with the ideal vehicle to display his superb histrionic gifts. JOSEPH FARRELL Editions First Edition: Mistero buffo, in Compagni sena censura, vol. 2, Milan: Mazzotta, 1970. Other editions: Mistero buffo: Giullarata popolare, Verona: Bertani, 1974; in Le commedie di Dario Fo, vol. 7, Turin: Einaudi, 1977. Translation: as Mistero buffo: Comic Mysteries, translated by Ed Emery, edited by Stuart Hood, London: Methuen, 1988.

Further Reading Jenkins, Ron, ‘‘Clowns, Politics and Miracles: The Epic Satire of Dario Fo,’’ in Drama Review, 30 (Spring 1986): 172–179. Maeder, Costantino, ‘‘Mistero buffo: Negating Textual Certainty, the Individual and Time,’’ in Dario Fo: Stage, Text, and Tradition, edited by Joseph Farrell and Antonio Scuderi, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000. Mitchell, Tony, ‘‘Dario Fo’s Mistero buffo: Popular Theatre, the Giullari and the Grotesque,’’ in Theatre Quarterly, 7, (Autumn, 1979): 1–10. Piccolo, Pina, ‘‘Dario Fo’s giullarate: Dialogic Parables in the Service of the Oppressed,’’ Italica, 65 (1988): 131–143. Scuderi, Antonio, Dario Fo and Popular Performance, New York: Legas, 1998. Soriani, Simone, ‘‘Mistero Buffo di Dario Fo e la cultura popolare tra Medioevo e Rinascimento,’’ in Quaderni medievali, 56 (December 2003): 102–138. Straniero, Michele, Giullari & Fo, Rome: Lato Side, 1978.

ANTONIO FOGAZZARO (1842–1911) Antonio Fogazzaro, whose novels were at once popular and controversial during his lifetime, wrote during a period of historical and cultural transition. His work was anchored in the themes and forms of late European Romanticism and he

was receptive to Decadentism, in which erotic languor and gothic unconventionality coexist. His lacerating, ethical vision of the suffering of contemporary man contributed to his conception of the artist as a prophet and spiritual guide for the 743

ANTONIO FOGAZZARO people. His poetic debut revealed a passionate poet who preferred stories of love and sacrifice featuring a romantic hero. Miranda (Miranda, 1874), a poem in four parts, tells the story of the tormented passion of the poet Enrico for the woman of the title, whose overwhelming love will lead to her death. The poem presents a theme that will recur throughout Fogazzaro’s works: Eros as a disruptive force that needs to be controlled by reason. Fogazzaro was thus suspicious of the excesses exalted by the Romantics and by the members of the Scapigliatura. His love stories are often sad and often do not end happily. In Miranda, the protagonist, a somewhat autobiographical figure, is a narcissistic poet completely absorbed in a vain dream of literary glory. He is the first in a long line of failed artists in Fogazzaro’s poetry and fiction. After Miranda, Fogazzaro turned his attention to the theme of existence unredeemed by religious faith. His religious upbringing, nurtured by the teachings of his beloved uncle Don Giuseppe Fogazzaro, led him down the path trod before him by Alessandro Manzoni and Ippolito Nievo. His characters are torn between carnal sensuality and spiritual anxiety. His positive characters are able to sublimate their feelings and attain some understanding or rapport with the divine. If, however, they succumb to their sensuality, they lose themselves. Love either overcomes his protagonists, for which they are condemned, or it ennobles them through religiously motivated sacrifices. As early as his first poems, this struggle between earthly and divine love takes place against a romantic landscape that itself becomes a protagonist. Nature, in particular the fertile world of the Alpine lakes, is not only a theatrical backdrop against which his characters move like actors; it shares and is animated by the profound passions of humanities, its torments, anxieties, and joys. A telling example is the title poem of Valsolda (1876), his second collection of verses in varying metres, named after the valley where Fogazzaro himself once lived and where he set some of his fictional works. Fogazzaro came to the novel quite late in his career, with Malombra (The Woman), published in 1881. He had collected the preparatory material for the novel as early as 1872, the year in which he also wrote his essay Dell’avvenire del romanzo in Italia (On the Future of the Novel in Italy). In this essay, Fogazzaro argues that the novel is the artistic expression of modernity since it represents the life of the times in all its shades and colours. This does not mean, however, that Fogazzaro’s 744

beliefs were similar to those of veristi writers like Giovanni Verga or Luigi Capuana. On the contrary, he did not view art as a simple mimesis of reality, but as a mix of probable and fantastic elements. Contrary to what the naturalists believe, nature is saturated with spiritual and mystical forces; it does not condition, but reflects humanity. In Malombra, Fogazzaro creates a composite style that alternates dialect and Italian and describes settings in a lyrical prose. The novel has strong musical suggestions (Fogazzaro was a lover of Richard Wagner and music was his favourite art) and an oneiric and funereal atmosphere derived, along with the motifs of spiritualism and ghosts, from late Romanticism. Giovanni Verga, in an admiring letter to Fogazzaro dated 27 September 1881, defined Malombra as ‘‘una delle piu` alte e piu` artistiche concezioni romantiche’’ (one of the highest and most artistic romantic conceptions) (Lettere sparse, 1979). However, the novel is much more than a romantic tale. Its protagonist, Marina Malombra, is obsessed by the idea that she is the reincarnation of one of her ancestors, Cecilia, who died in a dreary mansion on the banks of Lake Lugano. Fogazzaro presents the disturbing mystery of a soul devastated by folly, but also explores the humble world of the less important characters, such as the sensual writer Corrado Silla, author of mystic tales, who is overcome by the sinister attraction of Marina; or don Innocenzo and Edith Steinegge, whose religious sentiments make them positive figures. Malombra is far from the popular and tragic world of Verga’s I Malavoglia (The House by the Medlar Tree), also published in 1881, but Fogazzaro was by no means out of step with his times. Malombra is an important achievement in the genre of the psychological novel. This is confirmed by Daniele Cortis (1885), in which the protagonist is divided between political passion and his love for Elena Santa Giulia, and by Il mistero del poeta (The Mystery of the Poet, 1888), the story of a loving relationship between a poet and a married woman, Violet Yves. In this period, Fogazzaro also became fascinated by the theories of Charles Darwin. His Catholicism became increasingly open to modern thought, so much so that when in 1907 Pope Pius X condemned religious modernism in the encyclical De modernistarum doctrinis, Fogazzaro’s novel, Il Santo (The Saint, 1905), was also censured. Il Santo concludes the cycle begun with his greatest success, Piccolo mondo antico (The Little World of the Past, 1895), in which he attempted to depict postRisorgimento Italian society seen through the

ANTONIO FOGAZZARO experiences of the Maironi family. Around the two emblematic figures of the nobleman Franco Maironi and his wife, the bourgeois Luisa Rigey, there revolves a large cast of characters who at times assume the role of a sort of chorus, counterpointing the main narrative, and at others, as in the case of Lucia’s Uncle Piero, becoming true coprotagonists. In the second volume of the trilogy, Piccolo mondo moderno (The Man of the World, 1901), the protagonist, Piero Maironi, finally renounces earthly love and dedicates himself to a religious life. This second novel expands on Fogazzaro’s typical motifs: The protagonist is torn between his aspiration toward the divine and the attractions of the world of the flesh, especially erotic love. A few months after finishing Piccolo mondo moderno, Fogazzaro, solicited by Giuseppe Giacosa, tried to write for the theater. In 1902, his Garofolo rosso was staged at the Manzoni Theatre in Milan, but it was a failure. It was published in 1903 along with other plays in the volume Scene (Scenes). Unable to write acceptable dramatic works, he quickly returned to the final section of his trilogy. In Il Santo, Piero Maironi intends to evangelize the contemporary world, but, as always happens with Fogazzaro’s characters, he fails. The reigning social order is never seriously challenged and the renewal that he, like his author, calls for never takes place. In the end, Fogazzaro’s characters are fanciful figures, unable to integrate into everyday life. Social order always triumphs, while justice is postponed to a future known only to divine providence, and possibly only to be found in the next world. This pessimistic vision is confirmed in his last novel, Leila (1910). Its protagonist Massimo Alberti, a disciple and follower of Piero Maironi, yearns to return to orthodox Catholicism. However, he is involved in a bitter campaign against the hypocrisy of those of shallow faith and even launches violent attacks against clerical bigotry, represented by don Tita. His love for Leila is finally realized, but society remains largely unregenerate. The virtues are still to be found only in that ‘‘piccolo mondo’’ (little world) of simple people, while the unscrupulous bourgeoisie continue to be obsessed with business and wealth. Fogazzaro’s last novel is in part spoiled by its many ideological appeals, which occasionally transform it into a sort of novel-essay in which Fogazzaro, without idealizing the past and tradition, severely criticizes certain degenerative features of modern life.

Biography Born in Vicenza on 25 March 1842. His father was a member of Parliament. Guided by Father Giacomo Zanella, enrolled at the high school in Vicenza, 1856; received high school diploma in classics, 1858; enrolled at the University of Padua to study law, but due to his precarious health returned to Valsolda and dedicated himself to literary activity. Moved to Turin, 1860; completed his studies and received his degree in law, 1864. Met the noblewoman, Margherita Lampertico di Valmanara, in Milan, 1865; married Margherita, 1866. In Milan, befriended Arrigo Boito and frequented the circles of the Scapigliatura. Returned to Vicenza, 1869. Between 1870 and 1881, his three children were born and his activity as a writer intensified. Death of his father, 1891. The deaths of his beloved uncle Don Giuseppe in 1901 and of his sister Ina pained him deeply. Following the publication of Il Santo clashed with the Catholic Church, 1905. In 1907, the novel was condemned and the writer acquiesced to the wishes of the church. He died in Vicenza on 7 March 1911. ALFREDO SGROI See also: Decadentismo Selected Works Collections Tutte le opere, edited by Piero Nardi, Milan: Mondadori, 1931–1945. Racconti, edited by Floriano Romboli, Milan: Mursia, 1992.

Poetry ‘‘Miranda,’’ 1874. ‘‘Valsolda,’’ 1876.

Novels Malombra, 1881; as The Woman, translated by F. Thorold Dickson, 1907. Daniele Cortis, 1885; translated by J. R. Tilton, 1887. Il mistero del poeta, 1888. Piccolo mondo antico, 1895; as The Little World of the Past, translated by W. J. Strachan, 1962. Piccolo mondo moderno, 1901; as The Man of the World, translated by Mary Prichard Agnetti, 1907. Il Santo, 1905; as The Saint, translated by Mary Prichard Agnetti, 1906, rpt. as The Sinner, 1907. Leila, 1910; as Leila, translated by Mary Prichard Agnetti, 1911.

Short Stories ‘‘Fedele e altri racconti,’’ 1887.

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ANTONIO FOGAZZARO Plays Scene, 1903.

Essays Dell’avvenire del romanzo in Italia, 1872. Discorsi, 1898. Scienza e dolore, 1898. Ascensioni umane, 1899. Il dolore nell’arte, 1901.

Letters Lettere scelte, edited by Tommaso Gallarati Scotti, 1940. Corrispondenza Fogazzaro-Bonomelli, edited by Carlo Marcora, 1968. Lettere a un fuoriuscito, edited by Tommaso Franco, 1988. Carteggio, 1904–1910 (with Brizio Casciola), edited by Paolo Marangon, 1996. Carteggio (1869–1909) (with Paolo Lioy), edited by Ornella Jovane, 2000. Carteggio: un dialogo sulla santita` e il peccato (1903–1910) (with Henri Bremond), edited by Federica Ranzato Santin, 2000. Carteggio, 1885–1910 (with Ellen Starbuck), edited by Luciano Morbiato, 2000.

Further Reading Abrugiati, Luigia, Il volo del gabbiano. Fenomenologia dell’inettitudine tra Ottocento e Novecento, Lanciano: Carabba, 1982. Balducci, Ernesto, Antonio Fogazzaro, Brescia: Morcelliana, 1952. Briosi, Sandro, Il rifiuto inutile, Milan: Celuc, 1971. Caronti, Luigi, Fogazzaro, Subiaco e Il santo, Cinisello Balsamo: Edizioni Paoline, 1989. Cavallini, Giorgio, La dinamica della narrativa di Fogazzaro, Rome: Bulzoni, 1978. Cavalluzzi, Raffaele, Fogazzaro: i romanzi. Contraddizioni e forme di una passione azzurra, Bari: Graphis, 2000. Crupi, Vincenzo, Fra il cielo e l’inferno: ascensioni nell’ultimo Fogazzaro, Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2004. De Rienzo, Giorgio, Fogazzaro e l’esperienza della realta`, Milan: Silva, 1967. Dolfi, Anna, Del romanzesco e del romanzo. Modelli di narrativa italiana tra Otto e Novecento, Rome: Bulzoni, 1992. Gallarati-Scotti, Tommaso, The Life of Antonio Fogazzaro, 1922, rpt. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1972. Ghidetti, Enrico, Le idee e le virtu` di Antonio Fogazzaro, Padua: Liviana, 1974. Ghidetti, Enrico, Malattia, coscienza e destino: per una litografia del decadentismo, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1993. Hall, Robert A., Antonio Fogazzaro e la crisi dell’Italia moderna, New York: Linguistica, 1967. Hall, Robert A., Antonio Fogazzaro, Boston: Twayne, 1978. Marangon, Paolo, Il modernismo di Antonio Fogazzaro, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1998. Nardi, Piero, Antonio Fogazzaro, Milan: Mondadori, 1938. Piccioni, Donatella, and Leone Piccioni, Antonio Fogazzaro, Turin: Utet, 1970.

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Piromalli, Antonio, Miti e arte in Fogazzaro, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1973. Piromalli, Antonio, Introduzione a Fogazzaro, Bari: Laterza, 1990. Romboli, Floriano, Fogazzaro, Palermo: Palumbo, 2000. Tombatore, Gaetano, Fogazzaro, Messina: Principato, 1938. Verga, Giovanni, Lettere sparse, edited by Giovanna Finocchiaro Chimirri, Rome: Bulzoni, 1980. Wittman, Laura, ‘‘Omnes velut aqua dilabimur: Antonio Fogazzaro, The Saint, and Catholic Modernism,’’ in Italian Modernism, edited by Luca Somigli and Mario Moroni, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004.

PICCOLO MONDO ANTICO, 1895 Novel by Antonio Fogazzaro

Piccolo mondo antico (The Little World of the Past) is Fogazzaro’s masterpiece, a most successful novel with public and critics alike. The first draft was completed around 1884, but the author spent many years revising it, a circumstance that confirms the centrality of the work in Fogazzaro’s own opinion. Divided into three parts, it tells the bittersweet story of Franco Maironi, a fervent Catholic and a rebellious nobleman searching for justice, and Luisa Rigey, a member of the bourgeoisie and a patriot. These husband and wife protagonists are inspired by Fogazzaro’s own parents. Their love story takes place against the enchanting Alpine backdrop of Valsolda, and the historical context is that of the Risorgimento during the 1850s. The public and historical dimension thus continually intertwines with the private lives of the protagonists. In spite of the opposition of Maironi’s family, the two lovers marry, thus observing all social demands but also bringing about a classic me´saillance of their classes, and reinforce their bond after they lose their little daughter at about the time when the conflict between Austria and Piedmont breaks out (1859–1860). Though revolving around a love affair, scrutinised in all its daily details and with frequent recourse to minute portraits of scenes of married life,

ANTONIO FOGAZZARO the novel has powerful symbolic implications. Franco and Luisa Maironi become the symbols of the two social classes that, according to Fogazzaro, represent the best that Italy can express and the engine of national unification. Franco is an aristocrat, but has nothing in common with the hypocritical nobility colluding with foreigners and represented in the novel by his resentful grandmother, the Marchioness Orsola. Indeed, his difference is conveyed by his condition as amateur poet and musician and as candid lover of art and nature, considered as the work of the supreme divine artist. In the name of these differences, he does not hesitate to break class prejudices toward his marriage to Luisa and in this sense he is a positive character. Luisa is an energetic bourgeois and thus represents the new rising social class, ready to fight in order to affirm itself, but which also needs to forge an alliance with the aristocracy in order to form the new managerial class. Luisa has more practical sense than her husband and is firmly anchored to the bourgeois values of the family. However, from the Catholic point of view of the author, she has a weak point: She does not believe in God. Thus, when the couple must address the crucial existential questions brought about by the death of their daughter, their value system is overturned: It is Franco, the believer, who shows himself to be more energetic and decisive and joins the fight for national freedom, enrolling in the army of Piedmont, while Luisa looks for consolation in the practise of spiritualism. In the alternating registers of the novel, from the tragic to the comic, from the moralistic to the elegiac, the reader perceives the sentiments of a generation that has passed through the tumultuous historical events of the Risorgimento, to which they now look with a mixture of nostalgia and regret. Piccolo mondo antico was adapted to the screen in 1941 by Mario Soldati, with Alida Valli as Luisa and Massimo Serato in

the romantic lead. The film became a legend and was viewed by some as a forerunner of neorealism. ALFREDO SGROI Editions First edition: Piccolo mondo antico, Milan: Galli, 1895. Other editions: in Tutte le opere, vol. 5, edited by Piero Nardi, Milan: Mondadori, 1931; edited by Angela Gorini Santoli, Milano: Mursia, 1983; with introduction by Luigi Baldacci, Milano: Garzanti, 1984. Translation: as The Little World of the Past, translated by W. J. Strachan, London: Oxford University Press, 1962.

Further Reading Arlandi, Gian Franco, ‘‘Arte e cultura tra ‘antico’ e ‘moderno’ in Fogazzaro: Un’analisi di semiotica estetica,’’ in Antonio Fogazzaro, edited by Attilio Agnoletto, Enzo Noe` Giraldi and Carlo Marcora, Milan: Angeli, 1984. Cavallini, Giorgio, La dinamica della narrativa di Fogazzaro, Rome: Bulzoni, 1978. Cavalluzzi, Raffaele, Fogazzaro: i romanzi. Contraddizioni e forme di una passione azzurra, Bari: Graphis, 2000. De Rienzo, Giorgio, Invito alla lettura di Fogazzaro, Milan: Mursia, 1983 Futre Pinheiro, Marı´lia, Piccolo mondo antico: appunti sulle donne, gli amori, i costumi, il mondo reale nel romanzo antico, edited by Patrizia Liviabella Furiani and Antonio M. Scarcella, Naples: Edizioni scientifiche italiane, 1989. Giudici, Paolo, I romanzi di Antonio Fogazzaro e altri saggi, Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 1969. Montanari, Fausto, ‘‘La morte in Piccolo mondo antico,’’ in Studium, 24 (1968): 808–812. Morbiato, Luciano, ‘‘Dalle ambiguita` drammatiche di Fogazzaro ai dagherrotipi parlanti di Soldati,’’ in Annali d’Italianistica, 6 (1988): 80–97. Roso, Corrado, ‘‘Fogazzaro e il dubbio di Luisa in Piccolo mondo antico,’’ Confronto letterario, 10, no. 19 (1993): 3–15. Travi, Ernesto, ‘‘La Valsolda nella opere di Antonio Fogazzaro,’’ in Antonio Fogazzaro, edited by Attilio Agnoletto, Enzo Noe` Giraldi and Carlo Marcora, Milan: Angeli, 1984.

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TEOFILO FOLENGO (MERLIN COCAI)

TEOFILO FOLENGO (MERLIN COCAI) (1491–1544) Girolamo Folengo, better known by his monastic name Teofilo and by his pseudonym Merlin Cocai, is one of the most eccentric and enigmatic figures of the early Italian Renaissance. He was a Benedectine friar, but expressed evangelical ideas in his writings. Though an intellectual trained in the classics, he dedicated all his talents to perfecting an imaginary language and writing parodies of epic and love poetry. Despite these contradictions, Folengo represents the spiritual liveliness and creative vein of fifteenth-century Italy. His literary activity gave European culture a new linguistic and thematic model: macaronic Latin poetry. Folengo’s literary production can be divided into three linguistic categories: macaronic, vernacular, and Latin. Macaronic Latin is a peculiar fusion of Latin and Italian words. It retains the structure and grammar of the Latin language as well as its metrical rules, but for the vocabulary it uses words borrowed from the vernacular language or freely coined (more or less Latin) neologisms (Joseph Ijsewijn and Dirk Sacre`, Companion to Neolatin Studies, 1998). Folengo invented neither macaronic language nor macaronic poetry, but rather came to know of them during his years in Padua (1513– 1514). Macaronic Latin was originally devised by university students for jokes, mockeries, and even used in literary works such as Tifi Odasi’s Macheronea (1490). Folengo, however, gave this jargon a literary dignity and an international celebrity thanks to his macaronic works, which include Baldus (1552), Zanitonella (1552), Moscheis (The Battle of the Flies, 1552), and Epigrammata (Epigrams, 1552). Folengo published the first versions of these works between 1517 and 1521, and continued to revise them until his death, producing four editions of his macaronic poetry. First published in 1517, Baldus is a mock-heroic epic poem divided, in its fourth and final version, into 25 books. It begins with the love between Baldus’ noble parents and the hero’s birth and childhood in the peasant village of Cipada, where he is raised by locals. Baldus’ youth concludes with 748

his imprisonment and liberation, thanks to his friends’ jokes. The epic begins in book XI, when a battle takes place in Mantua and Baldus embarks on a series of picaresque adventures during which he meets his father, who lives like a hermit on an island (which turns out to be a whale) and gives his son the mission of fighting witches. After a sequence of battles, Baldus and his friends are given the weapons of the ancient heroes and begin their trip to Hell with the intention of defeating evil. Despite their success, after entering the cave of fantasy, they are led into a pumpkin by a jester, where their journey, and the poem, ends. The use of hexameters and some intertextual elements recall the model of Virgil’s Aeneid, yet the number of books and the combination of models (hagiographic tale, chanson de geste, Arthurian romances, and so on) make Baldus a parody of the epic conventions. Folengo rebels against the idealized pastoral worlds that were the convention in the Italian literary tradition. The epic model was also present in his Moscheis, a parody in three books (its first edition of 1521, entitled Moschaea, also had a prologue) written in elegiac couplets. The poem tells the story of a war between flies and ants. Treating the low subject with high language and style, it thus anticipates seventeenth-century Italian and European mock-heroic poetry. However, Folengo’s macaronic work does not always belong to the genre of epic. He also wrote the Zanitonella, a collection of love poems that includes 18 compositions in its last and most famous version. The subject is Tonello’s passion for his beloved Zanina, from their first meeting (which took place, naturally, on a spring day) to their breakup when, rejected and desperate, Tonello forgets his pain with wine and goes back to work. Both characters, as revealed by their names, are peasants and their mentality (along with the development of the plot) is in contrast with the chosen model, which is a combination of Petrarchan and classical topoi (particularly Virgilian eclogues). The use of vernacular and Latin metrical forms (e.g., the ‘‘sonolegı`a,’’ which fused sonnet and elegy), the

TEOFILO FOLENGO (MERLIN COCAI) presence of eclogues, and even the title, structured on the model of Laevius’ Protesilaodamia, reflect Folengo’s intent: the fusion of the classical tradition with vernacular and even popular literature. Love and other motifs like the seasons, contemporary history, places of interest, and friendship were also subjects of the Epigrammata, whose thematic variety reflects their metrical diversity. While composing his macaronic works, Folengo also wrote four vernacular poems: Orlandino (1526), Caos del Triperuno (Chaos of the Triperuno, 1527), Umanita` del Figliuolo di Dio (The Humanity of the Son of God, 1533), and Palermitana, written around 1540 and unpublished in his lifetime. These works document the author’s spiritual experience and temporary intolerance of monastic life, as they combined literary forms with strong religious sentiment, which often bordered on heterodoxy. The Orlandino, a burlesque account of the birth and early years of Roland, was particularly interesting for its religious implications. Written in Italian octaves and divided into eight sections (capitoli), it was at first sight a parody of heroic vernacular poetry. In fact, it is a religious work, which criticizes the secular power of the Church of Rome and the corruption of the clergy. Thus, it documents the religious crisis that led Folengo to write his Caos del Triperuno, an unusual work that mixes verse and prose, and fuses Latin, Italian, and macaronic language. Retracting the heretical ideas he had expressed elsewhere, the author here finally confesses his faith. In order to confirm his renewed orthodoxy and to return to monastic life, Folengo also composed Umanita` del Figliolo di Dio and the Palermitana. The first work is a poem about the history of salvation divided into 10 books and written in Italian octaves. Dedicated to the Benedictine Order, it articulates Folengo’s revolutionary position on religious topics such as the personal reading of the Gospel. The subject of Palermitana, a long poem divided into two books composed respectively of 30 and 18 cantos all written in terza rima, is Christ’s essence and role in the salvation of mankind. The same religious fervor inspired two of Folengo’s Latin works: the poem Hagiomachia (Hagiomachia, ca. 1540), a collection of lives of 18 martyrs written in hexameters, and Atto della Pinta (Pinta’s Act, ca. 1540), his only play and the first Italian example of a Spanish dramatic genre called auto sacramental. Written in liturgical Latin, it is a short allegorical play dealing with the history of redemption from Adam to Christ. Folengo’s subject

matter, however, always combined the sacred and the profane. During the composition of these doctrinal poems, he continuously revised his macaronic works and developed others in Latin. The Varium poema (1533), for instance, is a collection of 68 Latin poems treating various subjects in varying metrical forms. In this collection, Folengo combined religious poems and profane compositions such as eulogies and epigrams inspired by contemporary history. The Latin work that better portrays Folengo’s eclectic literary activity, however, is Janus (1533), a short allegorical poem whose theme is the good use of time. In this work, Folengo looked back at his literary activity and condemned his macaronic works. Above all, he rejected his Baldus, the reading of which he considered a waste of time, and generally condemned theological studies and their pointless discussions. The irony was evident, as Janus was printed at a time of intense theological speculation and literary creativity. Just a few years later, between 1539 and 1540, Folengo printed the third edition of the Baldus and other macaronic works. Humanistic and liturgical Latin, dialects, and vernaculars were all used in Folengo’s multilingual work as a complex parody of the Italian debate over language. Thanks to his artistic irony and philological precision, however, Folengo reached a European public and became a direct source for poets like Franc¸ois Rabelais and a model for worldwide Neo-Latin literature.

Biography Born in Mantua, 8 November 1491. Entered the Benedictine Order in the Monastery of Santa Eufemia, Brescia, 1508; took his vows in 1509. Moved to San Benedetto Po, near Mantua, center of the Cassinese Congregation, 1512. Lived in the Monastery of Santa Giustina, Padua, 1513–1514. Moved to Cesena and traveled to Venice, 1517. Moved to Pomposa, near Ferrara, and to Parma, 1521–1522. Expelled from the congregation for obscure reasons, 1525. Lived in Venice, in communication with the cultural group of Aretino, 1527–1530. Went on pilgrimage with his brother Giambattista. Stayed in San Pietro Capolla, near Naples, as a hermit. Was in touch with Neapolitan Humanists, 1530. In an attempt to return to the congregation, went to Venice and published religious works, 1533. Readmitted to the congregation, lived in Brescia, 1534. Moved to Sicily, where he wrote both poetry and plays, 1539–1542. Prior of Santa Croce in 749

TEOFILO FOLENGO (MERLIN COCAI) Campese (Vicenza), 1542. Died in Santa Croce, 1544. MATTEO SORANZO See also: Heroic-Comic Poetry Selected Works Collections Le opere maccheroniche, edited by Attilio Portioli, 3 vols., Mantua: Mondovi, 1889. Opere italiane, edited by Umberto Renda, Bari: Laterza, 1911–1914. Opere, edited by Carlo Cordie´, Milan and Naples: Ricciardi, 1977. Macaronee Minori. Zanitonella, Moschede, Epigrammi, edited by Massimo Zaggia, Turin: Einaudi, 1987.

Poetry ‘‘Orlandino,’’ 1526. ‘‘Caos del Triperuno,’’ 1527. ‘‘La umanita` del Figliuolo di Dio,’’ 1533; critical edition by Simona Gatti Ravedati, 2000. ‘‘Pomiliones,’’ in Ioan. Bapti. Chrysogoni Folengii Dialogi, quos Pomiliones vocat. Theophili Folengi varium poema, et Ianus, 1533. ‘‘Janus,’’ in Ioan. Bapti. Chrysogoni Folengii Dialogi, quos Pomiliones vocat. Theophili Folengi varium poema, et Ianus, 1533. ‘‘Varium poema,’’ in Ioan. Bapti. Chrysogoni Folengii Dialogi, quos Pomiliones vocat. Theophili Folengi varium poema, et Ianus, 1533; critical edition by Cesare Federico Goffis, 1958. ‘‘Palermitana’’ (ca. 1540). ‘‘Hagiomachia’’ (ca. 1540). ‘‘Zanitonella,’’ in Merlini Cocaii poetae mantuani Macaronicorum poemata, 1552. ‘‘Baldus,’’ in Merlini Cocaii poetae mantuani Macaronicorum poemata, 1552. ‘‘Moscheis,’’ in Merlini Cocaii poetae mantuani Macaronicorum poemata, 1552.

‘‘Epigrammata,’’ in Merlini Cocaii poetae mantuani Macaronicorum poemata, 1552.

Morality Play Atto della Pinta (ca. 1540); critical edition by Maria di Venuta, 1994.

Further Reading Bernardi Perini, Giorgio, Scritti folenghiani, Padua: Imprimatur, 2000. Bernardi Perini, Giorgio, and Claudio Marangoni (editors), Teofilo Folengo nel quinto centenario della nascita, 1491–1991, Florence: Olschki, 1993. Bonora, Ettore, Le Maccheronee di Teofilo Folengo, Venice: Neri Pozza Editore, 1956. Bonora, Ettore, and M. Chiesa (editors), Cultura letteraria e tradizione popolare in Teofilo Folengo, 1979. Capata, Alessandro, Semper truffare paratus: genere e ideologia nel Baldus di Folengo, Rome: Bulzoni, 2000. Chiesa, Mario, Il Parnaso e la zucca: testi e studi folenghiani, Alessandria: Edizioni dell’orso, 1995. Goffis, Cesare Federico, Roma, Lutero e la poliglossia folenghiana, Bologna: Patron, 1995. Gulizia, Stefano, ‘‘La discesa agli inferi: Sette episodi dal ‘Ribaldo’ (libri XXI e XXIV del Baldus),’’ in Quaderni Folenghiani, 3 (2000–2001): 29–55. Ijsewijn, Josef, and Dirk Sacre`, Companion to Neolatin Studies. Part II, Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1998. Lazzerini, Lucia, ‘‘Baldus di Teofilo Folengo (Merlin Cocai),’’ in Letteratura italiana. Le opere, edited by Alberto Asor Rosa, vol. 2, Turin: Einaudi, 1992. Pozzi, Mario, ‘‘Teofilo Folengo e le resistenze alla toscanizzazione letteraria,’’ in Giornale Storico della Letteratura Italiana, 155 (1985): 178–203. Scalabrini, Massimo, L’incarnazione del macaronico: percorsi nel comico folenghiano, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2003. Segre, Cesare, ‘‘Baldus, la fantasia e l’espressionismo,’’ in Strumenti critici, 7, no. 3 (1992): 315–326. Soons, Alan, ‘‘The celebration of the Rustic Virtues in the Works of Teofilo Folengo,’’ in Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1 (1971): 119–129.

´ RE DA SAN GIMIGNANO FOLGO (1265–1275–BEFORE 1332) Giacomo di Michele, nicknamed ‘‘Folgo´re’’ (splendor) perhaps by himself in the commiato to the Sonetti de’ mesi (Sonnets of the Months), is renowned for his vivid depictions of the lifestyles of 750

privileged Tuscans. Hovering between a kind of realist representation of the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century communal state, and a romanticized imagery of knighthood and the feudal court,

´ RE DA SAN GIMIGNANO FOLGO Folgo´re reports on the exquisite sights, smells, tastes, sounds, and activities that filled the days and evenings of a certain sector of the aristocracy and the popolo grasso, the wealthy merchant class. What remains of Folgo´re da San Gimignano’s opus consists of 32 sonnets that were likely composed between 1295 and 1317. Five sonnets describing the armoring of a young knight, Sonetti per l’armamento di un cavaliere (Sonnets for the Armoring of a Knight), are apparently the first of his literary production, followed by four sonnets that critique the Ghibellines and their rule (Folgo´re was a staunch White Guelph); one sonnet lamenting the end of courtesy; and two corone or ‘‘wreaths’’ of poems, which comprise eight sonnets organized around the days of the week, Sonetti de la semana (Sonnets of the Week), and 14 around the months of the year (Sonetti de’ mesi). Folgo´re’s best known poems, the Sonetti de’ mesi, could be considered poetry of plazer and/or souhait—the celebration of worldly pleasures and ideals. Folgo´re seems to have so delighted in describing the life of luxury that his Mesi are prone to flights of fancy, hyperbole, and excess. Words such as tutto and tutti (all) and expressions such as il piu` (the most) or di piu` (more than) are frequent in these sonnets, and the members of the brigata (company) of knights are described as more gallant than Lancelot or more healthy than any fish in any river, lake, or sea. The two quatrains of each sonnet in the Mesi generally paint a picturesque or decadent scene, and begin with the expression of a wish offered by Folgo´re to the brigata. The two tercets, on the other hand, provide a more general reflection on the places and activities previously portrayed. Besides hunting, jousting, feasting, dancing, singing, gambling, and engaging in amorous pursuits, these well-to-do men indulge in great frivolity all year round: jingling their purses of gold to annoy all those who begrudge them (in the sonnet on February), eating and drinking as much as they want (July and October, respectively), and throwing snowballs at young women in the square (January). Nature, too, seems to contribute to making the knights happy, giving them, for example, all the tastiest fruits of summer (June). This depiction of such a hedonistic and dazzling utopia or Eden prompted the jester-poet Cenne dalla Chitarra (died 1322–1336) to write an extended, parodic enueg (a poem that lists annoying things) of the Mesi, using precisely the same form, rhyme scheme, meter, and themes of Folgo´re’s sonnets, but bemoaning the dreadfulness of each month, such as hunting in February’s frozen valleys when big bears are all

around and one’s shoes fall apart. In the past, the brigata of Folgo´re’s Mesi was thought to have been the club of spendthrifts that Dante mentions in canto XXIX of the Inferno, but scholars have since shown that the central figure of Folgo´re’s company of knights, Niccolo` di Nigi of Siena, is not the same Niccolo` that headed up Dante’s brigata. Of Folgo´re’s other poems, the Sonetti de la semana, written to guide knights and noblemen in the proper activities for each day of the week, are the next best known. Tuesday, for example, is for studying the art of battle; Thursday is for jousting; and Sunday is for one’s beloved. The Semana is dedicated to Carlo di Messer Guerra Cavicciuoli, the condottiere of San Gimignano who led the battle against Volterra in which Folgo´re participated in 1308. Unlike the highly materialistic and sensual focus of the two corone, the five Sonetti per l’armamento di un cavaliere allegorically delineate the necessary attributes of a young knight-to-be: Bravery, Humility, Discretion, and Joy. The sonnets are a nostalgic evocation of the character and deeds of courtly life a century before, permeated with elements of what it is to be a privileged citizen in current urban society. Folgo´re anticipates the decline of such feudal ideals that would begin with Boccaccio’s brigata only a few decades later. Wistful for ‘‘Cortesia cortesia cortesia...’’ (Courtesy, courtesy, courtesy), but ferociously critical and disparaging, Folgo´re’s political sonnets mourn the loss of Guelph power to the Ghibellines. In the furious ‘‘Eo no ti lodo, Dio, e non ti adoro’’ (I Praise Thee Not, Oh God, nor Do I Adore Thee), Folgo´re laments the current state of Tuscan affairs with an exasperation equal only to his tirade against priests in the sonnet on the month of March, and against the avaricious throughout his poetry. All 32 of Folgo´re’s sonnets use the same metric: ABBA ABBA CDC DCD. The lexicon of the poems is wide and rich, drawing from such fields as flora, fauna, precious stones, couture, places, landscapes, meteorological phenomena, cuisine, and military and hunting equipment and practices. Folgo´re’s poetry is, arguably, more one of ‘‘ornamentalism’’ than of symbolism, as Michelangelo Picone has noted in Il giuoco della vita bella (1988). As such, the language has somewhat more in common with the poesia giocosa than it does with the abstractions of the dolce stil novo, even though Folgo´re’s attempts to portray an exalted world of beauty and harmony does recall the stilnovisti’s efforts to sing the sublimity of the beloved. Folgo´re’s verses are, on the one hand, an oneiric, stylized vision of 751

´ RE DA SAN GIMIGNANO FOLGO life as a game. On the other, they may perhaps be championing the importance of playfulness, joy, and generosity in any life.

I sonetti dei mesi ed i componenti. La brigata in una cronaca perugina del Trecento, edited by Ubaldo Morandi, Siena: Edizioni Cantagalli, 1991.

Further Reading

Biography There is little information about Folgo´re’s life. Born to a ‘‘Michele’’ ca. 1265–1275 in San Gimignano near Siena, Folgo´re was a public servant and knight who fought under Count Orsello in the battle against Pistoia in 1305, and under Carlo Cavicciuoli in the battle against Volterra in 1308. In 1317 (the year of King Robert of Naples’ peace with the Ghibellines of Pisa), he wrote two political sonnets in memory of the Guelphs’ loss at Montecatini in 1316. He had two children. Died before 1332. ARIELLE SAIBER Selected Works Collections I sonneti, edited by Ferdinando Neri, Turin: UTET, 1925; as A Wreath for Saint Gemignano, edited and translated by Richard Aldington, New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1945. Sonetti, edited by Giovanni Caravaggi, Turin: Einaudi, 1965.

Bertelli, Italo, Esperienze poetiche del Duecento e del primo Trecento: Studi sul ‘‘dolce stil nuovo’’ e sulla letteratura dell’eta` comunale, Milan: Bignami, 1980. Brugnolo, Furio, Il Canzoniere di Nicolo` de’ Rossi, Padua: Antenore, 1974. Caravaggi, Giovanni, Folgore da S. Gimignano, Milan: Ceschina, 1960. Ciccuto, Marcello, ‘‘Lo spazio di Folgore,’’ in Il restauro dell’ ‘‘Intelligenza’’e altri studi dugenteschi, Pisa: Giardino, 1985. Contini, Gianfranco, Poeti del Duecento, Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1960. Marti, Mario, Poeti giocosi del tempo di Dante, Milan: Rizzoli, 1956. Masse`ra, Aldo Francesco, Sonetti burleschi e realistici dei primi due secoli, Bari: Laterza, 1920. Picone, Michelangelo (editor), Il giuoco della vita bella: Folgore da San Gimignano, studi e testi, San Gimignano: Comune di San Gimignano, 1988. Quaglio, Antonio Enzo, La poesia realistica e la prosa del Duecento, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1971. Suitner, Franco, La poesia satirica e giocosa nell’eta` dei comuni, Padua: Antenore, 1983. Vitale, Maurizio, Rimatori comico-realistici del Due e Trecento, Turin: UTET, 1956.

LUCIANO FOLGORE (1888–1966) Luciano Folgore (the pseudonym under which Omero Vecchi published most of his works) is considered, after Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, one of the most important representatives of Italian Futurism. He was an active promoter of the movement until the beginning of World War I through his involvement in the organization of Futurist events in Rome and throughout Italy, as well as through his cultivation of close ties with other artists of international importance (Giacomo Balla, Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso). Folgore always maintained a certain autonomy of thought, not so much to express polemical intentions, but rather to play the role of moderator between the diverging opinions that divided Italian artists, even those within 752

the Futurist movement itself. In spite of the fact that he was among the first members of the movement, his writings only partially follow its poetics, which are much less organic and compact than is generally believed. With the collection of poems Il canto dei motori (The Song of the Engines, 1912), the first of his three Futurist works, Folgore adhered to the more moderate line of Marinetti’s aesthetics, aiming at recovering a certain lyrical dimension and developing the analogical procedures inherited from the symbolist movement, not to mention from Marinetti’s own French beginnings. Interspersed on this post-Impressionist background were verses of social criticism and elements taken from the Italian

LUCIANO FOLGORE literary tradition, such as images from Gabriele D’Annunzio, a declamatory vigor that recalls Giosue` Carducci, Giovanni Pascoli’s human civil sense, and even some distant echoes of Alessandro Manzoni. Critics thus underlined the substantial continuity of thought with respect to his previous phase: Although in some sections technological progress is enthusiastically celebrated, in the general design of the collection one finds the alternation of heterogeneous, and at times irreconcilable, themes that express the artist’s interior struggle between exuberant vitality and melancholic introspection. Already in his next work, Ponti sull’oceano (Bridges over the Ocean, 1914), the poet further distances himself from the avant-garde, freeing himself from Futurist influence with the following collection, Citta` veloce (Fast City, 1919). Here the definition of a strongly personalized style is solidified. Folgore himself defines this style as ‘‘lirismo sintetico’’ (synthetic lyricism), derived from the maturation of the Futurist experience in light of an intentionally modest intimacy directed at objects from everyday life (the affinity with metaphysical painting is evident). Language is reduced to the essential: Going beyond the abolition of grammar, syntax, adverbs, and adjectives— which is customary for the Futurists—Folgore even eliminates verbs, which Marinetti was still using, even if only in the infinitive form. The dynamic role of prepositions became fundamental, as they served as a bridge between different dimensions. These verses intend to represent reality and human emotions through expressions unmediated by the subject, since the exclusive use of the noun would open the way to analogical parallelisms that are the basis of the collective imagination. It is only by way of this network of associations shared by all human beings that it is possible to arrive at the understanding of reality. Therefore, the poet himself becomes a simple vehicle for the interpretation of emotions, while at the same time his writings assume an impersonal character. Here every psychological impulse is overcome, while communication is freed from cultural legacies and from emotional conditioning, thus allowing the poet to experiment with an automated form of writing. This technique eliminates the influence of reason over expression in order to reproduce on paper the involuntary flow of thoughts, and to implement the instinctive fusion between physical experience and literary transfiguration. The direct interaction with the outside world, then, is of primary importance for artistic creation, and the reader contributes, as

well, by way of the imagination, which is stimulated by the almost cinematic editing of images and which bestows new meanings upon the text. In reaction to the horrors of World War I, even Folgore acknowledged the need for the ‘‘return to order’’ that was felt throughout European culture. After the moderate experimentalism of synthetic lyricism—which reflected the existential drama of contemporary society—his style and themes evolved, with abrupt breaks as they moved toward more contemplative attitudes and a ‘‘nonprofessional’’ conception of poetic writing. For these reasons, Folgore became a fundamental model for the avant-garde, in which the young Giuseppe Ungaretti also participated. Therefore, a progressive detachment from reality, analyzed exclusively through the lens of irony, took place, while the technical virtuosity became increasingly refined over the years. The most significant expression of this new poetics is represented by the parodies of poets and short-story writers—most importantly in Poeti allo specchio (Poets in the Mirror, 1926) and in Novellieri allo specchio (Novelists in the Mirror, 1935)—where the poet commits himself to a careful assimilation of the style of others in order to then reproduce it from a grotesque perspective. This creates a sympathetic relationship with the imitated author, and as a consequence the parody is able to expose the hidden truth behind the words. Although this production was appreciated by readers and critics alike, his fiction, moralizing works, and texts for children were received negatively, as they seemed to represent the closing off of the author into an attitude of disengagement from reality. Here, in fact, the aesthetics of the marvelous, elaborated after the example of the fantastic literature of the Renaissance, is used in an exclusively recreational context in which the works cannot—and do not intend to—exercise any other function except that of simple entertainment.

Biography Born Omero Vecchi in Rome on June 18, 1888, the son of Aristide Vecchi, a white-collar worker, and Maria Crema; obtained a professional diploma as commercial surveyor and accountant, 1907; began volunteer work in accounting with the Revenue Office of Rome, 1908; became a member to the Futurist movement, 1909; married Carla Giannarelli, 1910; endorsed numerous Futurist manifestoes, 1910–1911; began to collaborate with the literary 753

LUCIANO FOLGORE journals Lacerba, La Tribuna illustrata, and La voce and to work in the editorial office of Il travaso delle idee, 1913; organized meetings between Futurist authors and sympathizers of the movement, 1914; enlisted as lieutenant of artillery, 1916; declared ineligible for active duty and assigned to antiaircraft defense in Venice, 1917; disassociated himself from the Futurist movement, collaborating with Avanscoperta and with numerous other journals, 1920; his wife Carla died, 1922; began to host a humoristic show on Italian radio entitled Il grammofono della verita`, October 1924; began to collaborate with La Stampa, 1926, and with Gazzetta del Popolo, 1928; began a relationship with Valentina Scalzi, 1946, whom he then married in 1962. Died in Rome on May 24, 1966. GIADA VIVIANI See also: Futurism

‘‘Graffa, l’impermeabile,’’ 1923. ‘‘Nuda ma dipinta,’’ 1924. ‘‘Mia cugina la luna,’’ 1926.

Children’s Books Mamma voglio l’arcobaleno: poesie per bambini grandi e piccini, 1947. Gli animali parlanti, 1953. La favola della volpe, 1953. L’albero di Natale, 1955. E` arrivato un bastimento...: fiabe per bambini grandi e piccini, 1960. Stelle di carta d’argento: fiabe per bambini grandi e piccini, 1960.

Play Esculapio al neon: favola teatrale e musicale, 1964.

Other Poeti controluce, 1922. Poeti allo specchio, 1926. Novellieri allo specchio, 1935. Le strade del Signore: raccolta di massime, pensieri, immagini, similitudini, 1945.

Letters Carteggio futurista (with Filippo Tommaso Marinetti), edited by Francesco Muzzioli, 1987.

Selected Works Poetry ‘‘Hora prima,’’ 1908. ‘‘Fiammeggiando l’aurora,’’ 1910. ‘‘Canto dei motori,’’ 1912. ‘‘Ponti sull’oceano,’’ 1914. ‘‘Citta` veloce,’’ 1919. ‘‘Musa vagabonda... gioconda e qualche volta profonda,’’ 1927. ‘‘Liriche,’’ 1930. ‘‘Il libro degli epigrammi,’’ 1932. ‘‘Favolette e strambotti,’’ 1934. ‘‘Poesie scelte,’’ 1940.

Novels La trappola colorata, 1934. La citta` dei girasoli, 1935.

Short Stories

Further Reading Biondi, Raffaello, ‘‘Ricordo di Luciano Folgore,’’ in Carovana, 18 (1968): 197–200. Manacorda, Giuliano, ‘‘Luciano Folgore,’’ in Studi romani, 29, nos. 3–4 (1981): 354–371. Nerucci, Anna Maria, ‘‘Luciano Folgore, poeta futurista: Il canto dei motori,’’ in Cristallo, 34, no. 1 (1992): 63–78. Papini, Pietro, Luciano Folgore, figura e poesia, Rome: Il Premio, 1967. Saccone, Antonio, Marinetti e il futurismo, Naples: Liguori, 1984. Salaris, Claudia, Luciano Folgore e le avanguardie. Con lettere e inediti futuristi, Scandicci: La Nuova Italia, 1997. Verdone, Mario, Il futurismo, Rome: Newton, 1994.

‘‘Crepapelle: risate,’’ 1919.

FOLK LITERATURE See Popular Culture and Literature

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MODERATA FONTE (MODESTA POZZO DE’ ZORZI)

MODERATA FONTE (MODESTA POZZO DE’ ZORZI) (1555–1592) Moderata Fonte (pseudo. Modesta Pozzo) is a Venetian writer recently recovered to the literary tradition. She penned the best treatise on women’s worth in early modern Italy, Il merito delle donne (The Worth of Women, 1600), and one of the most intriguing chivalric romances of the Renaissance, I tredici canti del Floridoro (The Thirteen Cantos of Floridoro, 1581). Il merito delle donne is an argumentative, at times hilarious text on the position of women in the Italian society of the late sixteenth century. Published as a response to a misogynist treatise by the Paduan Giuseppe Passi, I difetti donneschi (The Defects of Women, 1598), although written independently, Fonte’s book takes an approach different from Lucrezia Marinella’s equally polemical feminist text, La nobilta` et l’eccellenza delle donne (On the Nobility and Excellence of Women, 1600). Rather than arguing, like Marinella, for the inner nobility of women, an angle often used by men when writing benevolently of this sex, Fonte concentrates instead on women’s natural inner worth. Women, she writes, are part of the natural system, just like men, and they too, likewise, have a place in the social structure. Using a dialogue among seven women representing various aspects of the Venetian social order (some of the women are married and some are unmarried or widows; some are young and some are old), Fonte sets up lively arguments and counterarguments centering on the various rationales as to why women have been historically oppressed or dismissed. Since there is no man present at the conversation, which takes place in a woman’s house, the exchange is without inhibitions. Fonte touches expansively on women’s issues, such as marriage, and on women’s sometimes friendly and sometimes adversarial relationship with the men in their family, such as their brothers, husbands, and fathers. The emphasis is on the limitations that culture places on the female sex and on the weaknesses of the very men called upon by society to determine the well-being of the women in their households. Why women are unjustly treated when they too—just like men—are made in the image of God, these female discussants ask why women

have to find themselves bereft of the kind of lives that their families’ wealth and status can afford them, just because their fathers did not provide a dowry and their brothers carelessly used the dotal money for their personal business transactions? No matter how pacifying the attitude of somen of the women in this gathering, the general understanding is that men are hardly worth their highly regarded place in society. Men squander the family patrimony on prostitutes, some of the women argue, are prone to violent deeds, and shamelessly betray even their own mothers. The reader is repeatedly offered the chance to sympathize with women and understand that only male jealousy limits and castigates this sex. The point had already been made by the Paduan writer Giulia Bigolina, who in Urania (ca. 1554), written 40 years earlier and containing what may be today the first treatise written in Italian on women’s worth, had argued forcefully along the same lines. But here the sheer amount of pages dedicated to the subject makes the logic of the argument inescapable. In highlighting, through religious and mythological examples, the dignity that women carry naturally, Fonte ends explaining not only the necessary social role women should have in early modern Italian society but rewrites the myth of creation itself. As for I tredici canti del Floridoro, even though it was published incomplete, this chivalric romance represents the first sustained effort on the part of a woman writer to pen—starting from scratch—a Renaissance epic along the lines of the bestseller of the genre, Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (1532). The task was not easy, since women were supposed to have no clear sense of what jousts, military skirmishes, or even myths of dynastic foundations entailed. The main character in Floridoro is the woman warrior, Risamante, who goes out in the world to fight for her right to her own kingdom in far away Armenia, which she would have inherited, together with her twin sister, had not her father forgotten her very existence after she had been kidnapped as a child. Although many typical elements of chivalric romances are present in this text, such as love at 755

MODERATA FONTE (MODESTA POZZO DE’ ZORZI) first sight, enchanted castles, and wildly beautiful women, Fonte’s main interest is in delineating the heroic spinsterhood of Risamante. Traits such as chastity, honesty, and autonomy in women were also highlighted in Il merito delle donne, but here they are fully embodied in a realistically drawn female character. Unlike most chivalric romances of the period, there are no seduction scenes in Floridoro, no wicked witches, no sexualized enchantresses, and no pictorial Petrarchan representations of women in various states of disrobing. Men, it turns out, are themselves erotic objects of desire, like the youthful Floridoro of the title. They are also inconstant in their choices and moody in their attitudes, traits that usually characterize the women penned by male authors. But they are also faithful in marriage, constant in love, and honest in their behavior— exactly the way women like them in real life and idealistically portray them sometimes in literature.

Biography Born in Venice, 15 June 1555. Orphaned of both parents as a toddler, was raised by her maternal grandmother, Cecilia de’ Mazzi. Studied in a convent until nine and then at home with her older brother Leonardo. Later on she went to live with her aunt and uncle Nicolo` Doglioni, who furthered her studies and sponsored her career as a Venetian enfant prodige. Married Filippo Zorzi, a lawyer, 15 February 1583; had four children. Died giving birth to her fourth child in Venice, 2 November 1592; buried in the cemetery of the Church of the Frari. VALERIA FINUCCI Selected Works Tredici canti del Floridoro, 1581; modern critical edition by Valeria Finucci, 1995; as Floridoro, a Romance, translated by V. Finucci and Julia Kisacky, 2006. La passione di Christo, 1582. La resurretione di Giesu` Christo Nostro Signore, 1592.

Il merito delle donne, 1600; modern critical edition by Adriana Chemello, 1988; as The Worth of Women, translated by Virginia Cox, 1997.

Further Reading Chemello, Adriana, ‘‘La donna, il modello, l’immaginario: Moderata Fonte e Lucrezia Marinella,’’ in Nel cerchio della luna: Figure di donna in alcuni testi del XVI secolo, edited by Marina Zancan, Venice: Marsilio, 1983. Chemello, Adriana, ‘‘Gioco e dissimulazione in Moderata Fonte,’’ in Moderata Fonte, Il merito delle donne, edited by A. Chemello, Venice: Eidos, 1988. Collina, Beatrice, ‘‘Moderata Fonte e Il merito delle donne,’’ in Annali d’Italianistica, 7 (1989): 142–164. Conti Odorisio, Ginevra, Donna e societa` nel Seicento, Rome: Bulzoni, 1979. Cox, Virginia, ‘‘The Single Self: Feminist Thought and the Marriage Market in Early Modern Venice,’’ in Renaissance Quarterly, 48, no. 3 (1995): 513–581. Cox, Virginia, ‘‘Moderata Fonte and The Worth of Women,’’ in Moderata Fonte, The Worth of Women, edited and translated by Virginia Cox, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Cox, Virginia, ‘‘Women as Readers and Writers of Chivalric Poetry in Early Modern Italy,’’ in Sguardi sull’Italia, edited by Gino Bedani et al., Exeter: Society for Italian Studies, 1997. Finucci, Valeria, ‘‘Moderata Fonte e il romanzo cavalleresco al femminile,’’ in Tredici canti del Floridoro, edited by Valeria Finucci, Modena: Mucchi, 1995. Finucci, Valeria, ‘‘When the Mirror Lies: Sisterhood Reconsidered in Moderata Fonte’s Thirteen Cantos of Floridoro,’’ in Sisters and Brothers in the Early Modern World: Thicker Than Water, edited by Naomi Miller and Naomi Yavneh, Aldershot: Ashgate, (2006): 116–128. Kolski, Stephen, ‘‘Wells of Knowledge: Moderata Fonte’s Il merito delle donne,’’ in Italianist, 13 (1993): 57–96. Kolski, Stephen, ‘‘Moderata Fonte’s Tredici Canti del Floridoro: Women in a Man’s Genre,’’ in Rivista di Studi Italiani, 17 (1999): 165–184. Labalme, Patricia, ‘‘Venetian Women on Women: Three Early Modern Feminists,’’ in Archivio Veneto, 117 (1981): 81–109. Malpezzi Price, Paola, ‘‘A Woman’s Discourse in the Italian Renaissance: Moderata Fonte’s Il merito delle donne,’’ in Annali d’Italianistica, 7 (1989): 165–181. Zanette, Emilio, ‘‘Bianca Capello e la sua poetessa,’’ in Nuova antologia, 88 (1953): 455–468.

CULTURE OF FOOD At its origins, gastronomic literature was closely connected to other disciplines, such as medicine, agriculture, and even alchemy; the earliest writings on 756

these subjects often include theoretical discourses, practical suggestions, and even recipes. Italy was fundamental in generating a literature of food that

CULTURE OF FOOD flourished in its own right, until France established its ascendancy in the field in the seventeenth century. As the literature of gastronomy developed, the initial, practical questions about the composition of a wholesome diet gave way ever more to an aesthetic founded on the concept of good taste and driven by a quest for pleasure. The earliest works devoted entirely to gastronomy date back well into the fourteenth century, with the anonymous Liber de coquina (Cookbook), Libro della cocina (Cookbook), and the Libro per cuoco (Book for the Cook). The first is attributed to an author thought to have been a member of the Anjevin court of Naples; the second and third to a Tuscan and a Venetian author, respectively. These works begin to formulate a culture specific to food, a culture expressed in Italian (rather than Latin), which thus has a wider appeal. They result from collaborations between compilers and cooks, as the former enunciate in written form the practical knowledge of the latter, who were often nearly illiterate. The first classic Italian cookbook, however, returns to the Latin language. Entitled Liber de arte coquinaria (The Art of Cooking), it is written by Mastro Martino da Como, cook to the patriarch of Aquileia. The work comprises a collection of recipes laid out according to a strictly rational method, and its detailed directions implicitly evince a specialized and abstract knowledge of cookery. It is believed to be the outcome of a secret collaboration with the Humanist Bartolomeo Sacchi (1421–1481), better known as Platina. In his De onesta voluptate et valetudine (On Right Pleasure and Good Health, 1474), Platina acknowledges his debt to the famous cook; he undertakes studies of nutrition and introduces maxims regarding the ethics of the pleasures of the table, drawing on a classical ideal of moderation, a concept also informed by a bourgeois ideology. The approach to food is balanced, measured and rational, in contraposition to the excesses of the Middle Ages and the banquet. Literature, too, becomes a vehicle for the culture of food. Exemplary are works such as De quinquaginta curialitatibus ad mensam (Concerning Fifty Courtesies at Table) by Bonvesin de la Riva (thirteenth-fourteenth century), Saporetto (A Little Taste) by Simone Prudenzani d’Orvieto (fourteenth century), and especially Baldus by Teofilo Folengo, whose Toscolana edition dated 1521 contains not only a great many scattered disquisitions, but also the Doctrinae cosinandi vigenti (Concerning Current Cooking Instructions), 20 recipes conceived for an imaginary banquet of the gods. Especially noteworthy in the Renaissance, however, is

the revival of the classic culture of antiquity concurrently with Bacchic poetry. The Canzone di Bacco (Song of Bacchus, 1490) by Lorenzo il Magnifico, for example, was probably intended to be sung during the masked carnival pageants that paraded through the streets of Florence. The poem exalts life and love and is tempered by subtle shades of melancholy. Another example is the dithyramb Bacco in Toscana (Bacchus in Tuscany, 1666) by Francesco Redi, initially conceived as a simple toast for the Accademia della Crusca. The proposer of the toast considers the wines then in existence and proclaims that of Montepulciano superior. The toast in verses becomes a literary topos proper, often created in masterful style. Food is a recurring subject in the works of Giulio Cesare Croce (1550– 1609) as well, as is evident in Le sottilissime astuzie di Bertoldo (The Very Subtle Wiles of Bertoldo, 1606), where gastronomy becomes a sardonic lens through which to read the historical drama of hunger and social inequality. Cookery books flourish during the sixteenth century. They become technical, often written by food carvers, and are intended to be used in the service of the courts or by court officials acting in various administrative capacities. They bridge the gap between the literary culture of nobility and the fundamentally practical know-how acquired in the kitchens. Thus abstract considerations and discussions concerning organization are interspersed with sections devoted to recipes proper and to the jocular divertissements of the banquet, including games, dances, and other forms of entertainment. In 1549, Cristoforo Messisburgo (ca. 1490–1548), steward to Cardinal Ippolito d’Este of Ferrara and considered the founder of the Italian tradition of haute cuisine, writes Banchetti, composizioni di vivande et apparecchio generale (Banquets, Food Composition, and Overall Presentation), a tripartite treatise on the court’s kitchen. He begins with general information about the organization of the banquet, and then enters into a description of court events, including a section on entertainment and a large body of recipes. La singolar dottrina (The Special Doctrine, 1560), by the cook and food carver Domenico Romoli (better known as Panunto), also discusses the planning of court banquets, spectacular mise-en-sce`nes ritualized in minute detail and enacted by a staff organized according to rigorously codified roles. Romoli illustrates the recipes with attention to the nutritional and curative properties of foods. But the summa is Opera dell’arte di cucinare (On the Art of Cooking, 1570) by Bartolomeo Scappi, who served as chef to Popes 757

CULTURE OF FOOD Paul III and Pius V. Scappi demonstrates a refined taste for the technical and vividly illustrates his tasks in the kitchen. He creates a deep sense of his ethical and aesthetic commitment in the kitchen, suggesting that the person and the role of chef should converge in one ideal figure. At about the same time, there appear monographs that focus on more specific aspects of culinary practice. Examples are Dell’Insalata (Concerning Salad, 1572) by Costanzo Felici, a medical and anecdotal discussion about different herbs; Il trinciante (The Carver, 1581) by Vincenzo Cervio, a work written in caption style, intended to illustrate the utensils and motions used in artistic food carving and display at the banquet; and Li tre trattati (Three Treatises, 1639) by Mattia Giegher, who devotes an entire book to the figurative folding of napkins and tablecloths into artistic forms. Ritualized codification affects table manners, too, as is evidenced by the proliferation of caption-style works intended to guide the comportment of guests at the table. Exemplary in this regard is Il galateo (A Renaissance CourtesyBook, 1558) by Monsignor Giovanni Della Casa. Table manners are only part of the ground covered in Il galateo, but they are treated at such great length in different chapters that the book became synonymous with etiquette at the table. The figure of the cook returns to the limelight with L’arte di ben cucinare (The Art of Fine Cooking, 1662) by Bartolomeo Stefani, a Bolognese cook at the Gonzaga court. Stefani’s work is transitional between the grand tradition of aristocratic gastronomic literature and the burgeoning bourgeois tradition. It takes into account everyday recipes, with particular attention to the home and its economics, but also includes a section devoted to princely banquets, such as a description of a banquet offered by the Gonzagas for Christina, Queen of Sweden. The anonymous Il cuoco piemontese perfezionato a Parigi (The Piedmontese Cook Perfected in Paris, 1776) is the first cookbook to acknowledge the rise of French cuisine, which tends to privilege recipes subdivided into sections on basic preparation and finishing touches. French influence is particularly evident in the language of cooking, and the heavy influx of Gallicisms and borrowed terms means that gastronomic vocabulary is accessible only to a circle of cognoscenti. A new cuisine is promoted, informed by an Enlightenment conception that seeks to refine the excesses of the Baroque; there is, too, a return to nature, to plain flavors and simplicity, in a bourgeois spirit of thrift, ease of preparation, and utility. The same cosmopolitanism permeates L’Apicio moderno (Modern Apicius, 1790) by Francesco Leonardi, the 758

first encyclopedic treatment of gastronomy, which treats history and nutrition and provides a corpus of recipes that span geographically from Russia to Turkey, as well as regional specialties. Many translations of French books appeared during the eighteenth century, but there also appeared numerous recipe books devoted to regional traditions. These books are often written by women (frequently under fictitious names) and are intended for a nonprofessional bourgeois readership with a predilection for ‘‘natural’’ flavors, a readership that is money-conscious and concerned with simplifying the ceremonial arts of service and preparation. In the late eighteenth century, a new breed of cookbook literature popular among bourgeois housewives develops in the form of the pamphlet, the almanac, and the magazine, with detailed recipes intended for the amateur. Ippolito Cavalcanti’s Cucina casereccia in dialetto napoletano (Home Cooking in the Neapolitan Dialect) addresses a bourgeois audience and is placed in appendix to his aristocratic Cucina teorico-pratica (Cooking: Theory and Practice, 1839). The book is bipartite not only in structure but also linguistically, and the aristocratic section foreshadows the learned style and digressive amateurish approach of Artusi, without his power of synthesis. In parallel to this bourgeois democratization of gastronomic literature, the literature of good manners develops prescriptions for the humbler classes—as in L’arte di convitare spiegata al popolo (The Art of Entertaining at Table, 1850) by Giovanni Rajberti. This work diverges from the traditional style of prescriptive etiquette, whereby class distinctions are the means for organizing conviviality at the table. The two hegemonic traditions of cookbook literature in Italy—rooted in the Po Valley region and the RomeTuscany region—find synthesis in Pellegrino Artusi, born in Forlimpopoli (Forlı`) but raised in Tuscany. La scienza in cucina e l’arte di mangiar bene (The Science and Art of Fine Eating, 1891) creates a new framework for Italian gastronomy even at the level of language, rejecting dialect and Gallicisms in order to forge, instead, a terminology specific to Italy. The rise of Fascism renews the drive to exalt the cuisine of Italy proper, and publications inspired by the country’s regional cuisines and intended in large part for a female readership blossom. The regime uses these publications as a means of autarchic propaganda; accordingly, the lexicon is further purified of Gallicisms. A creative effort in the same vein appears in the glossary to La cucina futurista (The Futurist Cookbook, 1932) by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Futurist gastronomy becomes an active means for achieving aesthetic renewal, and

FRANCO FORTINI (FRANCO LATTES) semantic and sensorial experiments work against tradition and foreign contamination. In the postwar period, the culture of food returns to the ancient split between practice and theory, professionalism and amateurism, but it does so in renewed forms: On the one hand, there emerge magazines and recipe books written by women, as well as countless reprints of Il talismano della felicita` (The Talisman of Happiness, 1929) by Ada Boni, and Le ricette regionali italiane (Regional Italian Recipes, 1967) by Anna Gosetti della Salda; on the other hand, a more abstract knowledge finds voice in magazines such as Il gastronomo (The Gastronomer) founded by Luigi Veronelli in 1956, and La gola (Gluttony), which from 1982 to 1993, collects contributions of esteemed Italian intellectuals. Veronelli, in particular, revolutionizes the discipline by freeing it of the scientific technicality of enology, creating a profession with a language of its own. Gastronomy, in this conception, has the potential to contribute to the edification of a better world, and craftsmanship receives its due recognition. Another prominent figure, an author bound to Luigi Veronelli by a 10-year professional fellowship, is Luigi Carnacina: The course of his career, which took him from tavern scullery boy to palace director, yields manuals of historic standing, such as La cucina rustica regionale (Regional Rustic Cooking, 1966) and Mangiare e bere all’italiana (Eating and Drinking Italian Style, 1965). The recipes represent a general knowledge of human relations and of the naturalness of foods, and the vivid depiction of the food carver offers a vantage point from which to reconsider the cook’s modus operandi. These developments result in the emergence of gastronomic critique in such areas as journalism and book publishing at large, and also in the institution of universities devoted to the science of cooking.

ALESSANDRA MELDOLESI See also: Pellegrino Artusi, Giovanni Della Casa Further Reading Benporat, Claudio, Storia della gastronomia Italiana, Milan: Mursia, 1990. Camporesi, Piero, Introduction to Pellegrino Artusi, La scienza in cucina e l’arte di mangiar bene, Turin: Einaudi, 1970. Capatti, Alberto, and Massimo Montanari, La cucina italiana: Storia di una cultura, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1999. Carnacina, Luigi, A la carte, Bra: Slow Food Editore, 2001. Di Benedetto, Arnaldo (editor), Prose di Giovanni della Casa e altri trattatisti cinquecenteschi del comportamento, Turin: UTET, 1970. Faccioli, Emilio, L’arte della cucina in Italia, Turin: Einaudi, 1987. Flandrin, Jean-Louis, and Massimo Montanari (editors), Storia dell’alimentazione, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1997. Lo Russo, Giuseppe, L’antigastronomo, Florence: Coppini, 1998. Martino, Maestro, The Art of Cooking: The First Modern Cookery Book, edited by Luigi Ballerini, translated by Jeremy Parzen, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Montanari, Massimo, Il Convivio: Storia e cultura dei piaceri della tavola dall’Antichita` al Medioevo, RomeBari: Laterza, 1989. Montanari, Massimo, Nuovo Convivio: Storia e cultura dei piaceri della tavola, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1991. Montanari, Massimo, Il Convivio oggi: Storia e cultura dei piaceri della tavola nell’eta` contemporanea, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1992. Platina, On Right Pleasure and Good Health, edited by Mary Ella Milhan, Tempe, AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1998. Redon, Odile, The Medieval Kitchen: Recipes from France and Italy, translated by Edward Schneider, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Salaris, Claudia, Cibo futurista, Rome: Stampa AlternativaNuovi Equilibri, 2000.

FRANCO FORTINI (FRANCO LATTES) (1917–1994) Poet, literary critic, journalist, novelist, and translator Franco Lattes, better known as Franco Fortini, was among Italy’s most eminent intellectuals

during the postwar years. Though at the time of his death many Italian newspapers remembered him for his political engagement and critical writings, 759

FRANCO FORTINI (FRANCO LATTES) he was also a significant figure in Italian literature due to his poetic activity, which reflected an unusual cultural and ideological background. Born to a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, Fortini joined the Waldensian church in 1939 and developed an acute sense of history and personal responsibility. Actively involved in the Italian Resistance, he joined the clandestine Socialism Party (PSI) and later became a prominent voice of the new left. In his debut as a poet, Fortini entered a cultural scene dominated by irrational philosophical thinkers and Hermetic poets. Refusing to adhere to the cultural trend of his time, he collaborated with Giacomo Noventa, a poet and critic whose magazine, La riforma letteraria, attacked the linguistic and thematic obscurity of Hermetic poetry. This attitude was documented by his first major book of poetry, Foglio di via e altri versi (Deportation Papers and Other Verses, 1946), which includes poems written between 1938 and 1945. The dominant theme of the collection is the relationship between personal biography and history during the years of Fascism and the Italian Resistance. This relationship is about the experience of otherness, as in the poem ‘‘La citta` nemica’’ (The Enemy City), a tragic portrayal of the poet’s condition: ‘‘Quando nei volti vili della citta` nemica / leggo la morte seconda, / e tutto, anche ricordare, e` vano’’ (When on the sordid faces of the enemy city / I read the signs of second death, / and all, even remembrance, is in vain). Elsewhere, this relationship could be an experience of selfrealization, as in the poem ‘‘Italia 1942’’ (Italy 1942), which begins with the poet’s declaration that he is in love with his country: ‘‘Ora m’accorgo d’amarti / Italia, di salutarti / necessaria prigione’’ (Now I realize I love you, / Italy, and salute you, / inevitable prison). The poet’s mission is to remember and to speak on behalf of those who cannot speak, namely his dead comrades and his father, to whom Fortini addresses the poem ‘‘Lettera’’ (Letter): ‘‘Ma quello che tu non dici devo io dirlo per te’’ (But that which you do not say I must say for you). The poems of Poesia e errore (Poetry and Error, 1959) and the cultural-political essays assembled in Dieci inverni (Ten Winters, 1957) demonstrate Fortini’s intense study of Marx, Gramsci, and Lu`kacs, and his first attempts at translating poets such as Paul E´luard and Bertold Brecht. Indeed, translating remained a constant in Fortini’s life, and in 1982, he collected his best works in Il ladro di ciliege e altre versioni di poesia (The Cherry Thief and Other Poetic Translations, 1982). On the other 760

hand, the title Poesia e errore refers to the poet’s own intellectual itinerary between 1937 and 1957 as well as to the ambiguity of his hopes. The depressing reality of Cold War Europe in the years of the reconstruction was the subject of poems like ‘‘Agro inverno’’ (Sharp Winter). In a metaphoric winter, the poet and his generation are victims of their regrets and doomed to extinction: ‘‘Non abbiamo saputo cosa fare per noi / della verde vita e dei fiori amorosi. / Per questo la scure e` alla radice dei cuori / e come stecchi saremo arsi’’ (We did not know what to do / with the green life and the loving flowers. / That is why the axe is at the root of our hearts / and like dry twigs we shall be burned). The disillusionment of Fortini’s generation is the theme of the section ‘‘I destini generali,’’ which includes, among others, ‘‘American Renaissance,’’ a remembrance of literary historian Francis Otto Matthiessen’s suicide and a meditation on his generation’s surrender to the troubled history of postwar Europe. In the early 1960s, most Italian Marxists turned to the Socialist left and then to the politics of the centro sinistra. Experimentalism and Neoavantgarde dominated the artistic scene. Fortini’s beliefs were thus culturally and artistically isolated. He decided to work in partnership with the journal Officina and continued his critical examination of the Marxist cultural tradition. His solitary speculation culminated in the writings collected in Verifica dei poteri (Testing the Powers, 1965), which documented his attempt to combine a Marxist idea of history with a theological notion of redemption, modeled on Walter Benjamin’s writings. Fortini did not accept the radical positions assumed by the Neoavant-garde regarding the language of the middle class and Italian literary tradition. Una volta per sempre (Once and for All, 1963) exemplifies Fortini’s artistic creed. This collection includes the enigmatic ‘‘La poesia delle rose’’ (The Poem of the Roses), an allegory of how the poetic form hopelessly tries to represent the transcendence of history. ‘‘La poesia delle rose,’’ as Thomas E. Peterson explains in The Ethical Muse of Franco Fortini (1997), is ‘‘written in a fusion of acid irony and high lyric style’’ and ‘‘recommends itself to two levels of interpretation: the ideological and the heuristic. As an ideological poem, the text retained the signs of a humanistic and classical orientation—that of civic poetry— even if it distorted the semantic clarity and didacticism of that mode. [...] Conversely, in its redemptive or heuristic character, the work presented a veiled narrative enacted by various mythic figures.’’

FRANCO FORTINI (FRANCO LATTES) ‘‘La poesia delle rose’’ inaugurated the poetics of allegory and parable that characterized Fortini’s subsequent works. In Questo muro: 1962–1972 (This Wall, 1973), the title makes reference to the allegorical wall that divided Dante and Beatrice in the last cantos of Dante’s Purgatorio. This metaphor is also present in Fortini’s other writings and is constantly connected with the barrier between the individual and reality. In Questo muro, Fortini meditated on the history of student protests of 1968 and the war in Vietnam, thus expressing the contrast between the urgency of the present and his personal utopian perspective. This existential condition is suggested through the use of allegory in ‘‘Il seme’’ (The Seed): ‘‘Tutti i fiori non sono che scene ironiche. / Ormai la piaga non si chiudera`. / Con tale vergogna scendero`/ i seminterrati delle cliniche/ e con rancore./ Non ancora e` luglio/ non ancora scaldato asciutto assoluto/ il seme’’ (The flowers are all just scenes of irony. / The wound now will never heal. / With this shame I shall go down / into the basements of the clinics, / and with resentment. / It is not yet July / not yet warmed the seed is dry / absolute). In the 1970s, Fortini’s literary production paid constant attention to the historical context of Italy, to the emergence of terrorism, and to the world. Questioni di frontiera (Border Issues, 1977) is a gathering of Fortini’s essays on the crisis of the USSR, the situation of China, and the politics of the superpowers. The title of the collection, Paesaggio con serpente: versi 1973–1983 (Landscape with Serpent: Verses 1973–1983, 1984), refers to Nicolas Poussin’s painting Landscape with a Snake Killed by a Snake and introduces the menacing atmosphere and the tragic sense of history that pervades the entire work. Here Fortini expresses the interdependence of world history and personal biography, a theme most evident in ‘‘Come si e` stretto il mondo...’’ (How the World Has Shrunk...): ‘‘Oltre il nero dell’orto l’Asia / e i suoi deserti. Piu` in la` colorata di luci / al vento si piega South Kensington’’ (Beyond the black patch of the garden, Asia/ and its deserts. Further beyond with coloured lights/ South Kensington leans with the wind). ‘‘Il Nido’’ (The Nest) is an effective representation of the illusion fostered by the mass media: ‘‘La illusione ha deserto le scene. / Minimi popoli sono bruciati nei diodi’’ (The illusion has deserted the stage. / Puny peoples are burned in the diodes). In Poesia e Errore one can find the poem ‘‘Weltgeschichtlich,’’ which, for Fortini, means ‘‘from the point of view of a world history.’’ This point of

view was constantly present in Fortini’s production and tragically emerged in his last book of poems, Composita Solvantur (Loose Works, 1994), especially in the section titled ‘‘Sette canzonette del Golfo’’ (Seven Songs for the Gulf), thus named to honour the casualties of the Gulf War in 1991. The theme is developed through seven examples of pastiche that imitate eminent representatives from the Italian literary tradition. ‘‘Lontano lontano’’ (Far Far Away), for instance, thematically and formally imitates the chorus of Alessandro Manzoni’s tragedy Adelchi (1882). In Manzoni’s chorus, the Italian population was portrayed as the impotent spectator of the war between the Franks and the Longobards. In Fortini’s version, the impotent spectator is the poet himself, who hopelessly tries to imagine the faraway massacre and bitterly acknowledges the end of his civic and moral mission: ‘‘Potrei sotto il capo dei corpi riversi / posare un mio fitto volume di versi? / Non credo. Cessiamo la mesta ironia./ Mettiamo una maglia, che il sole va via’’ (Could I put a book of poems under the corpses’ heads? / I don’t think so. Let’s stop the sad irony. / Let’s put on a sweater, the sun’s about to set).

Biography Born in Florence on September 10, 1917. Graduated in law and then art history (with a thesis on Rosso Fiorentino) at the University of Florence. Collaborated with Giacomo Noventa and his literary journal La riforma letteraria, 1938–1939. Baptized in the Waldensian Church, 1939. Joined the Italian Army as an officer, 1941. After the armistice (September 8, 1943), moved to Switzerland where he joined the Socialist Party. Joined the Italian Resistance in the Valdossola region, 1944. Moved to Milan. Worked for Olivetti, 1948–1953. Worked for the Socialist newspaper Avanti! (1946–1947), and the journal Il Politecnico (1945–1947) with Elio Vittorini. Alternated literary and political activity, also wrote for Officina, Menabo`, Il corriere della sera, Il manifesto, Il messaggero, and Sole 24 ore. In 1957, one year after the Russian invasion of Hungary, left the Socialist Party. Taught in secondary schools, 1964–1972. Appointed professor of literary criticism at the University of Siena, 1971–1989. Awarded the prestigious Montale-Guggenheim for poetry, 1985. Died on November 28, 1994. MATTEO SORANZO 761

FRANCO FORTINI (FRANCO LATTES) Selected Works

Translations Il ladro di ciliege e altre versioni di poesia, 1982. Breve secondo Novecento: trentasei moderni, 1996.

Collections Una volta per sempre: poesie 1938–1973, Turin: Einaudi, 1978. Paesaggio con serpente: poesie 1973–1983, Turin: Einaudi, 1984. Summer Is Not All: Selected Poems, translated by Paul Lawton, Manchester: Carcanet, 1992. Saggi ed epigrammi, edited by Luca Lenzini, Milan: Mondadori, 2003.

Poetry ‘‘Foglio di via e altri versi,’’ 1946. ‘‘Poesia e errore,’’ 1959. ‘‘Una volta per sempre,’’ 1963. ‘‘L’ospite ingrato. Testi e note per versi ironici,’’ 1966. ‘‘Questo muro: 1962–1972,’’ 1973. ‘‘Paesaggio con serpente: versi 1973–1983,’’ 1984. ‘‘Versi primi e distanti, 1937–1957,’’ 1987. ‘‘Composita Solvantur,’’ 1994. ‘‘Poesie inedite,’’ edited by Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo, 1997.

Fiction Agonia di Natale, 1948; rpt. as Giovanni e le mani, 1972.

Essays Dieci inverni, 1957. Sere in Valdossola, 1963. Verifica dei poteri, 1965. I cani del Sinai, 1967. Questioni di frontiera, 1977. Insistenze: cinquanta scritti 1976–1984, 1985. Extrema ratio: note per un buon uso delle rovine, 1990.

Further Reading Berardinelli, Alfonso, Fortini, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1973. Luperini, Romano, La lotta mentale: per un profilo di Franco Fortini, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1986. Luperini, Romano, Tradizione, traduzione, societa`: saggi per Franco Fortini, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1989. Luperini, Romano, ‘‘Su Fortini critico e teorico della letteratura,’’ in Allegoria, 8, nos. 21–22 (1996): 134–141. Magrini, Giacomo, ‘‘Fortini traduttore,’’ in Allegoria, 8, nos. 21–22 (1996): 163–173. Mazzoni, Guido, Forme e solitudine: un’idea della poesia contemporanea, Milan: Marcos y Marcos, 2002. Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo, La tradizione del Novecento. Da D’Annunzio a Montale, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1975. Niccolucci, Rossella, ‘‘‘Letterati di questa restaurazione.’ Fortini nella pubblicista corrente,’’ in Allegoria, 8, nos. 21–22 (1996): 278–289. Passananti, Erminia, Poem of the Roses: Linguistic Expressionism in the Poetry of Franco Fortini, Leicester: Troubador, 2004. Peterson, Thomas E., The Ethical Muse of Franco Fortini, Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997. Polacco, Marina, ‘‘Fortini e i destini generali. Lirica e ‘Grande Politica’ fino a Composita Solvantur,’’ in Allegoria, 8, nos. 21–22 (1996): 42–61. Zancan, Marina, and Maurizio Gusso, ‘‘Fortini, Franco,’’ in Dizionario critico della letteratura Italiana, Torino: UTET, 1986.

UGO FOSCOLO (1778–1827) Ugo Foscolo’s literary parabola outlines a trajectory that is crucial to Italian culture as it moves from the neoclassical tenets of the late eighteenth century to the Romantic questions of the early nineteenth century. Foscolo’s writings are a response to the education the Italian writer had received in the years he had spent between Venice and Padua, yet they are also forerunners of a different attitude toward aesthetic as well as political issues. In fact, Foscolo’s literary endeavors cannot be separated from the times of their expression, times that can be identified with the Napoleonic period: Significantly, the end of that era marks the end of the most productive period of Foscolo’s 762

literary career, as in his London exile in vain he attempted at the completion of the projects planned before the Congress of Vienna (1815). Furthermore, Napoleon is a prominent figure in the early writings of the Italian poet-soldier, remaining a cumbersome presence even when he is relegated to the background after the Treaty of Campoformio in 1797, which handed Venice and most of its territory to Austria after a short-lived municipality. The enthusiasm with which Foscolo welcomed Napoleon’s military campaign in Italy in 1796 soon left room to the disillusion, which was at once political and existential: The dialectic between the need of illusions and the threat of delusion is

UGO FOSCOLO a constant motif in Foscolo’s main works, especially in the epistolary novel Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis, 1798; 1802; 1817), in the long poem Dei sepolcri (On Sepulchres, 1807), in the few but intense sonnets, and in the fragments of Le Grazie (The Graces). However, Foscolo’s motives may be traced in the first works as well, like the tragedy Tieste (Thyestes, 1797), inspired by classical tradition and the tragic characters in the works by Vittorio Alfieri and often modeled on the lyrical examples offered by Vincenzo Monti. The political motif of the tyrant and the need to murder him is one motif that soon Foscolo abandoned, turning the homicide of the tyrant as antagonist into the suicide of the hero. In Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis, Foscolo throws the magmatic questions of his own existence, caught in the ambiguity of the practical need for political engagement (hence his enrollment in the French army) and the disappointment before the recognition of the impossibility of the independence and unification of Italy through the support of Napoleon’s military intervention. Behind Ortis’ dilemma, uncertain between a life of exile or the choice of suicide, there is Foscolo’s own desperation, strengthened by the hero’s unhappiness because of the impossible love for Teresa, the woman destined to marry the mediocre Odoardo. The political and the sentimental delusions alternate and intersect, inevitably leading the hero to the final decision of suicide. Considering the relevance of contemporary politics in the novel, it is important to remark that often Ortis discusses his own political theories through the readings of the works by thinkers such as Niccolo` Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau as well as through readings of classical authors such as Plutarch. On the one hand, Ortis believes that history is the best teacher for humankind, thus inviting his own contemporaries to learn from the experience of the past and to model their own lives according to those great examples. On the other, Ortis does not believe, as Rousseau does, in the natural goodness of humankind, aligning rather with Hobbes’ concept of the bellum omnium contra omnes (struggle of everyone against everyone else). This is the first step toward the elaboration of a conception of the history of ideas that stresses the very historicity of the approach: Ideas are not valid as such, but according to the historical period in which they were conceived. It follows that they are not applicable to any period, but rather that they must be taken into consideration while elaborating new conceptions, more suitable for one’s own times. In other

words, by attributing this theoretical political thinking to Ortis, Foscolo is offering his own character the conclusions he has reached at least after 1811. However, Ortis is not as explicit as his author in embracing monarchy over republic, as Foscolo does at least since 1815: The preoccupation in the novel is about the tyranny that Bonaparte would like to impose upon Italy and indeed all over Europe. In this respect, Foscolo re-evaluates Dante’s political views, looking at Machiavelli’s construction of Il principe as an impossible ideal: Ortis does dream of a balance among the political forces of a nation, granted by the rule of a leader who is above them, hierarchy that in turn would enable both parties and central authority to maintain the good government of the country. While writing his novel, by 1806, Foscolo also composed his most important poems: the 12 sonnets and the two odes, besides the carme entitled Dei sepolcri. The two odes ‘‘A Luigia Pallavicini caduta da cavallo’’ (To Luigia Pallavicini Fallen from a Horse) and ‘‘All’amica risanata’’ (To the Restored Friend) are the most relevant contributions in the neoclassical tradition, as the very choice of the poetic form confirms. The genesis of the two odes is in the best eighteenth-century tradition: The first was published in 1799 as homage to the convalescent noblewoman of the title after the accident occurred while horse-riding, whereas the second salutes Antonietta Fagnani Arese’s health recovery. Thus, they may be read one next to the other, as they respectively treat the sadness for the loss of health and the threat of the disappearance of beauty, and the joy for the recovered health and the return of beauty in the gracious appearance of the lady. It is implicit progression that leads Foscolo to highlight in the second ode the mythical model implicit in the actual event depicted. Furthermore, in these occasional poems it is possible to trace the debt to the poetry of Giuseppe Parini (the most important Italian author of odi), augmented in the second ode, while Foscolo leaves behind the literary apprenticeship on Vincenzo Monti’s poetry. This choice of Parini’s model is not only a stylistic one, as Foscolo admires also the moral tension in the works of that Milanese poet. In the sonnets, the poet revisits the Petrarchan tradition, taking advantage of its recent developments in Alfieri’s poems, but also looking at the Renaissance examples offered by Giovanni Della Casa or Michelangelo Buonarroti. In writing sonnets, Foscolo confirms his desire to adhere to tradition, to keep in line with the culture that neoclassicism intended to revive. The innovative elements affect 763

UGO FOSCOLO both the stylistic expression of the form of the sonnet and the content. There is the necessity to open quatrains and tercets to a syntactical fluidity, so that the coincidence of sentence and strophe is no longer felt as a natural condition of the sonnet. This communication among the several strophes, in turn, carries semantic weight at least in some circumstances, as in first verse of the sonnet ‘‘A Zacinto’’ (To Zacynthos), ‘‘Ne´ piu` mai tocchero` le sacre sponde’’ (Never more I will touch the sacred banks), in which the syntax links the two quatrains and the first tercet in a long sentence, the fluidity of which is remarked by the rhymes evoking sea water and waves. By the same token, in ‘‘Forse perche´ della fatal quı¨ete’’ (Perhaps because of the fatal quiet) of the sonnet ‘‘Alla sera’’ (To the Evening), the two quatrains present a parallel syntactic structure highlighting their connection. From a thematic viewpoint, the sonnet confirms many motives that Foscolo is elaborating in Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis in those first years of the nineteenth century. Both ‘‘A Zacinto’’ and ‘‘Alla sera’’ insist on motives dear to Foscolo. The former elaborates on exile from one’s homeland, with tones that from existential considerations reach the mythical dimension in the final comparison of the poet’s destiny to that of Ulysses. The latter, by focusing on a specific moment of the day, expands the reflection to a metaphysical level without ever betraying an approach that privileges immanence and even a materialistic perspective. In the sonnet ‘‘In morte del fratello Giovanni’’ (On the Death of His Brother Giovanni), dedicated to his brother who died after committing suicide, ‘‘Un dı`, s’io non andro` sempre fuggendo’’ (One day, if I will not be always fleeing) is an occasion to reflect on the value of the tomb in the realm of family affections. The poem ends with another bitter consideration on the poet’s own condition of exile. If these are the three most famous sonnets, in the others that Foscolo writes there is as well a strong presence of the self, often those sonnets being occasions for a self-portrait, according to a tradition that finds once again in Alfieri the most recent model. Foscolo soon abandoned the structure of the sonnet and embraced a longer form, one that may be reminiscent of the Pindaric ode, that is, of the ode in which the Greek poet aimed at linking myth and tradition to moral and political questions. Furthermore, as Foscolo explains in the letter to the Abbe´ Guillon, the connections among the several parts of the argument must be kept implicit, confiding in the readers’ ability to reconstruct the logic supporting poetry, but leaving the transitions out 764

of the poetic context. The occasion for such experiment was offered by the extension of the French Edict of St. Cloud (1804) to the territory of the Cisalpine Republic in 1806. It is in reaction to this law that Foscolo wrote Dei sepolcri, a poem that, however, takes a wider significance in the treatment of the subject and in the context of Foscolo’s poetics. Of course, the theme of the tombs was also a popular motif in eighteenth-century Europe, and Foscolo is well aware of his predecessors: not only his friend Ippolito Pindemonte, to whom the poem is dedicated, but more importantly Edward Young and Thomas Gray. The poem’s pivotal idea is that funeral rituals are a means whereby the history of the living transmits the memory of the dead ones, who do not survive in any other way. While writing Dei sepolcri, Foscolo also engaged the difficult task of Homeric translation: The Esperimento di traduzione della Iliade di Omero (The Experiment of Translation from the Iliad of Homer, 1807) tackles the translation of the first book of Homer’s epic poem. Later, in 1813, Foscolo completed the translation of Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, which intended to temper the passion of Ortis: In the Notizia intorno a Didimo Chierico (Notice about Didimo Chierico), published as appendix to the translation, the author points out the mature character of Didimo, implicitly alluding to the youthful attitude of Jacopo. Furthermore, in 1809, Foscolo wrote one of his most important critical essays: Dell’origine e dell’ufficio della letteratura (On the Origin and Function of Literature), the inaugural speech of the course held at the University of Pavia. The apostrophe concluding the discourse, ‘‘O Italiani, io vi esorto alle storie’’ (Italians, I exhort you to history), was interpreted as an invitation to the Risorgimento, to the action in that political upheaval that led to the unification of Italy and that, according to the Italian patriots followers of Foscolo, started already in the literary and linguistic concerns of the intellectuals of the time. However, this essay clarifies the writer’s teoria delle illusioni (theory of illusions), as it is elaborated in both the novel and Dei sepolcri. Here again Foscolo betrays his eighteenth-century education, as he formulates a theory of the language, within the context of illusions, that looks back at the tenets of sensistic philosophy, especially in the formulations proposed by E´tienne Bennot de Condillac in his La logique (1780). In particular, Foscolo notices the affinity between the linguistic theories of the French philosopher and Giambattista Vico. Moving from these philosophical premises, Foscolo elaborates his own conception of poetry as a process toward the

UGO FOSCOLO perfection of the ability to think and the means to embellish thought and make it eternal. Given the awareness of the material dimension of the world, poetry assumes the role of comforting humankind; also, together with historians, poets help in the development of civilization. These essential qualities of poetry were present in classical Greece, which justifies why that poetry is at the foundation of Western civilization. In the period preceding his exile, Foscolo wrote two more tragedies, Ajace (Ajax, 1811) and Ricciarda (Ricciarda, 1813), in which the patriotic motif prevails over the Greek context of the former and the medieval atmospheres of the latter. It is not by chance that the Austrian censorship forbade the performance of Ajace staged in Venice in 1797. More importantly, Foscolo attended at the composition of Le Grazie, the unfinished poem that occupied the remaining creative activity of the years to come. The remaining fragments of Le Grazie were mostly written in the years 1812–1813, when Foscolo resided in Florence, although he must have thought of this poem since his commentary on Callimacus’ (and Catullus’) La chioma di Berenice (The Locks of Berenice, 1803), published in Milan with fragments of the translation of a supposedly ancient Greek text dedicated to the three Graces. The work continued less intensely until 1815 and then only sporadically in the years of the London exile. The most important testimony of this period of activity is the Dissertation on an Ancient Hymn to the Graces, included in a volume of Outline Engravings and Descriptions of the Woburn Abbey Marbles, published in London in 1822 and reproducing Canova’s ‘‘Le tre Grazie,’’ which had been purchased by the duke of Bedford. It is difficult to reconstruct the plan of the poem, as sometimes the fragments even exclude one another; yet, they are all pervaded by a stylistic unity. One may reconstruct a broad project of elaboration of an ancient ritual dedicated to the Graces, which in turn becomes an allegory of the process of civilization of humankind through the arts. Certainly Foscolo’s intentions shifted from the initial one long poem to the articulation of the project into three different poems, one for each Grace. The poem on the Graces is also a reflection on the notion of grace and on its necessary ingredients, harmony, and passions. In the decade Foscolo spent in England, besides working on the completion of Le Grazie and the translation of the Iliad, the poet left the pen to the critic. He is a militant critic in many of his essays, in which he discusses the current literary panorama in

Italy: An essay like ‘‘Della nuova scuola drammatica italiana’’ (On the New Italian Dramatic School, 1826–1827) offers a survey of the most prominent figures of the past half-century, at the end of which and according to a line of evolution Foscolo places his own work. Here he attacks Alessandro Manzoni’s Il conte di Carmagnola (The Count of Carmagnola, 1819) for its untruthful representation of the Venetian Doge and Republican Senate. But the most important critical works revolve around the figure of Dante, seen through the philosophy of Vico as a primitive, and therefore universal, poet: Perhaps the most relevant of these essays is Discorso sul testo della Divina Commedia (Discourse on the Text of the Divine Comedy, 1825), in which he elaborates a quite modern reading of that poem as incomplete, hence work in progress as much as his own Le Grazie and the translation of the Iliad. Foscolo enriches his critical perspective with a clear identification with the medieval poet and exile. Although Foscolo also wrote Essays on Petrarch (1821) and Discorso storico sul testo del Decameron (Discourse on the Text of the Decameron, 1825), he is willing to assign them a more limited role vis-a`-vis Dante.

Biography Born at Zacynthos, Greek island in the Jonian Sea, 6 February 1778. His father died, 1788; moved to Venice, 1793; published first poems, 1796; enrolled in Bologna, in the Cisalpine Republic, and published the ode ‘‘A Bonaparte liberatore,’’ 1797; published the first edition of Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis in Bologna, 1798; lived in Milan where he had a love affair with Antonietta Fagnani Arese, 1801– 1804; brother Giovanni commits suicide, December 1801; published the second edition of Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis, 1802; published the definitive edition of his Poesie, 1803; had a love affair with Fanny Hamilton, with whom he had a daughter Floriana, while he enrolled in the French army in northern France, 1804–1806; published Dei sepolcri, 1807; nominated professor at the University of Pavia, 1808; his tragedy Ajace was performed at La Scala in Milan and censored, 1811; moved to Florence, where he had love relationships with Cornelia Martinetti and Quirina Mocenni Magiotti and met Luisa Stolberg, countess of Albany, and worked on Le Grazie, 1812; rented the villa of Bellosguardo in Florence, published his translation of Lawrence Sterne’s Viaggio Sentimentale, and wrote the tragedy Ricciarda, 1813; 765

UGO FOSCOLO went in exile near Zurich, in Switzerland, 1815– 1816; moved to London, 1816; published the definitive edition of Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis, 1817; his mother died in Venice, 1817; pursued by his creditors, moved to Turnham Green, near Chiswick, where he underwent two surgeries because of dropsy, 1827. Died in Turnham Green, 10 September 1827; his tomb was translated into the church of Santa Croce, 1871. ERNESTO LIVORNI Selected Works Collections Edizione Nazionale delle Opere, Florence: Felice Le Monnier, 1933–, 23 vols. Opere, edited by Luigi Baldacci, Bari: Laterza, 1962. Opere, edited by Franco Gavazzeni, Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1974–1981, 2 vols.; Turin: Einaudi-Gallimard, 1994–

Fasano, Pino, Stratigrafie foscoliane, Rome: Bulzoni, 1974. Festa, Nicoletta, Foscolo critico, Florence: Felice Le Monnier, 1953. Fubini, Mario, Ugo Foscolo: Saggi studi, note, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1928; rpt. 1978. Fubini, Mario, Foscolo minore, Rome: Tumminelli, 1949. Gentili, Sandro, I codici autobiografici di Ugo Foscolo, Rome: Bulzoni, 1997. Goffis, Cesare Federico, Nuovi studi foscoliani, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1958. Manacorda, Giuseppe, Studi foscoliani, Bari: Laterza, 1921. Matteo, Sante, Textual Exile: The Reader in Sterne and Foscolo, New York: Peter Lang, 1985. Orelli, Giorgio, Foscolo e la danzatrice: Un episodio delle Grazie, Parma: Pratiche, 1992. Ramat, Raffaello, Itinerario ritmico foscoliano, Citta` di Castello: Macri, 1946. Scotti, Mario, Foscolo fra erudizione e poesia, Rome: Bonacci, 1973. Scotti, Mario, Foscoliana, Modena: Mucchi, 1997. Vallone, Aldo, ‘‘Le Grazie’’ nella storia della poesia foscoliana: Testi, interpretazione, antologia della critica, Naples: Liguori, 1977. Varese, Claudio, Foscolo, sternismo, tempo e persona, Ravenna: Longo, 1982.

Poetry ‘‘Dei sepolcri,’’ 1807. ‘‘Liriche scelte: I sepolcri e Le Grazie,’’ edited by Severino Ferrari, 1908; rpt. 1957. ‘‘Le Grazie,’’ critical edition by Sandro Orlando, 1974.

Fiction Storia vera di due amanti infelici, 1798; as Vera storia di due amanti infelici, ossia, Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis, attributed to Angelo Sassoli, edited by Pino Fasano, 1999. Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis, 1802; rev. ed. 1917; critical edition by Giovanni Gambarin, in Edizione nazionale delle opere di Ugo Foscolo, vol. 4, 1955; as Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis, translated by Douglas RadcliffUmstead, 1970; as Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis: On Tombs, translated by J. G. Nichols, 2002.

Further Reading Binni, Walter, Ugo Foscolo: Storia e poesia, Turin: Einaudi, 1982. Bosisio, Paolo, ‘‘La rappresentazione dell’Aiace e la tecnica teatrale foscoliana,’’ in La parola e la scena: Studi sul teatro italiano tra settecento e novecento, Rome: Bulzoni, 1987. Cambon, Glauco, Ugo Foscolo, Poet of Exile, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980. Catalano, Ettore, La spada e le opinioni: Il teatro di Ugo Foscolo, Foggia: Bastogi, 1983. Catalano, Ettore, Le trame occulte: L’Ajace e la Ricciarda nel percorso teatrale di Ugo Foscolo, Bari: Laterza, 2002. De Sanctis, Francesco, Saggi critici, edited by Luigi Russo, vol. 3m Bari: Laterza, 1952. Di Benedetto, Vincenzo, Lo scrittoio di Ugo Foscolo, Turin: Einaudi, 1990. Donadoni, Eugenio, Ugo Foscolo pensatore, critico, poeta, 1st ed. 1927, Palermo: Sandron, 1964.

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‘‘DEI SEPOLCRI,’’ 1807 Poem by Ugo Foscolo

‘‘Dei sepolcri’’ (On Sepulchres) is a long poem in which Foscolo elaborates his own poetics of illusions and, within it, of the tomb, according to the broad philosophy exposed in Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis. The immediate historical invitation to such a poetic reflection was offered by the Edict of St. Cloud, which was promulgated by Napoleon in France in 1804 and was extended to the Cisalpine Republic in 1806. The decree forbade burial within the city, thus the interment of the bodies of famous people inside churches, and also enforced uniformity in graves. Foscolo called his poem carme, a Latinism evoking ceremonial and prophetic connotations. ‘‘Dei sepolcri’’ is dedicated to the poet and friend Ippolito Pindemonte (1753–1828), who discussed the social and philosophical implications of such legislation while writing a sepulchral poem entitled

UGO FOSCOLO ‘‘Dei cimiteri,’’ which he abandoned upon learning of Foscolo’s carme. From a literary viewpoint, the ‘‘graveyard’’ motif is a well-known one in eighteenth-century European poetry, and Foscolo takes full advantage of the abundance of texts on cemeteries and tombs and of their translations into Italian, but he also enlivens the motif with a new ethical and ideological vigor, making ‘‘Dei sepolcri’’ one of the most important poems of the nineteenth century and a manifesto of Italian Risorgimento. Among the most important influences, we enlist Edward Young’s Nights Thoughts and Thomas Gray’s Elegia sopra un cimitero di campagna, translated into Italian by Melchiorre Cesarotti. Foscolo embraced the longer form of the Pindaric ode in order to combine the lyrical mode, apt to convey the private dimension of the topic of the tombs, with an epic one, aiming at expanding the motif to the recognition of the sepulchral ritual as necessary for civilization. The ode, then, becomes the vehicle through which the modern poet, just like the Greek poet, aspires at embodying myth in the historical process, offering tradition itself as the model for the correct formulation of ethical and political concerns. Foscolo developed the reasons behind such a stylistic choice in the letter to the Abbe´ Guillon, in which he explains that the poem is composed of a series of medallions, that is, sections that are logically independent from one another. ‘‘Dei sepolcri’’ may be divided into four main parts: The first two set the argument in theoretical terms, focusing especially on the importance of the tombs in the realm of private affections and on the historical reconstruction of such necessity through crucial moments of the development of civilization, whereas the last two parts decidedly move to the sphere of collectivity and present three main contemporary examples revealing the cultural importance of the tomb: the tombs of the great Italians in the Church of Santa Croce in Florence, the vision of the Greek soldiers at the Battle of Marathon, and the tombs of the Trojans in Troy (with the closing prophecy of Cassandra). The four parts are marked by essential statements, which point out almost in aphoristic form the focus of each new part: Namely, the remembrance of the dead may inspire the living to noble deeds (egregie cose). ERNESTO LIVORNI Editions Critical edition: ‘‘Dei sepolcri’’, in Poesie e carmi, edited by Francesco Pagliai, Gianfranco Folena, and Mario Scotti, Edizione Nazionale delle Opere, vol. 1, Florence: Felice Le Monnier, 1985.

Translations: as On Sepulchres: An Ode to Ippolito Pindemonte, translated by Thomas G. Bergin, illustrated by Deane Keller, Bethany, CT: Bethany Press, 1971.

Further Reading Amoretti, Giovanni Giuseppe, ‘‘La madre, la morte e il tiranno nella poesia foscoliana: Contributo psicanalitico all’interpretazione dell’Ortis e Dei sepolcri,’’ in ‘Poesia e psicanalisi’: ‘Foscolo e Leopardi’, Milan: Garzanti, 1979. Fubini, Mario, Lettura della poesia foscoliana, Milano: Marzorati, 1954. Gamberini, Spartaco, Analisi dei ‘‘Sepolcri’’ foscoliani, Messina: D’Anna, 1982. Getto, Giovanni, La composizione dei ‘‘Sepolcri’’ di Ugo Foscolo, Florence: Olschki, 1977. Macrı`, Oreste, Semantica e metrica dei ‘‘Sepolcri’’ del Foscolo, Rome: Bulzoni, 1978. O’Neill, Tom, Of Virgin Muses and of Love: A Study of Foscolo’s ‘‘Dei sepolcri,’’ Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1981. Ramat, Raffaello, Itinerario ritmico foscoliano, Citta` di Castello: Macri, 1946.

ULTIME LETTERE DI JACOPO ORTIS, 1798; 1802; 1817 Epistolary Novel by Ugo Foscolo

Foscolo’s Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis) went through three different editions. The novel was first published in 1798 by the editor Marsigli, who commissioned a modest writer, Angelo Sassoli, to complete the novel without the author’s permission, who had in the meantime enrolled in the French army, and under a different title (Storia di due amanti infelici). Foscolo did not recognize this edition and in 1802 published a new one, which bore the final title and presented substantial changes in the plot and in the letters included. After the Zurich edition in 1816 (with the wrong indication of place and date: London, 1814), the definitive edition is published in London in 1817, shortly after Foscolo’s arrival in the British capital, where he spent the 10 years of his exile. 767

UGO FOSCOLO In Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis, Foscolo elaborates on a number of topics that are essential to the understanding of his own personality as well as the culture of his period. First of all, for he who had enthusiastically welcomed Napoleon’s military campaign in Italy, the Treaty of Campoformio was an unbearable disappointment. Jacopo Ortis exists because of this delusion, and his own vicissitudes are but an attempt at overcoming that sense of desperation before the loss of independence of the Venetian Republic and the recognition of the impossibility of the unification of Italy. Ortis’ political faith is briefly consoled by the appearance of love for Teresa, in turn destined to marry Odoardo in order to save the financial situation of her family. Ortis’ letters are addressed to his friend Lorenzo Alderani, who posthumously decides to publish them: Thus Lorenzo, as editor, becomes the link between the hero’s voice and the readers. Furthermore, many of Jacopo’s letters are elaborations of letters Foscolo himself wrote to his several women in Venice, Milan, and Florence: Antonietta Fagnani Arese, Eleonora Nencini, and Isabella Roncioni. Divided into two parts, with the second one following the protagonist in his journey throughout Northern Italy—which Ortis undertakes in a vain attempt at finding solace to the unhappiness caused by politics and love story, before his return to the Euganean Hills to commit suicide—the novel presents a number of motives that are either dictated by the culture of the period or characteristic of Foscolo’s poetics. The very choice of writing an epistolary novel is a tribute to the most fashionable genre of the eighteenth century, as Foscolo’s own Nota bibliografica published in appendix to the 1816 Zurich edition confirms. In that essay, the author discusses Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, although claiming that he had not read the German novel while writing his own, and Rousseau’s La Nouvelle He´loı¨se, while referring to several epistolary novels of the British tradition (especially Samuel Richardson), in order to remark the novelty of his own work. Other aspects that confirm Foscolo’s attention and concern for the issues affecting his own period are even more exquisitely aesthetic: in particular, the distinction between picturesque and sublime (the letter from Ventimiglia is quite telling in this respect), but also the consideration of other arts, especially the figurative arts and music, often raised by the insertion of the interest the characters themselves reveal in painting (Teresa is depicted painting her portrait) and music (Teresa again is shown playing the harp). 768

Jacopo’s suicide can be considered an homage to Vittorio Alfieri’s tragic heroes and heroines. The very spirit of the statement behind Ortis’ decisive action is ascribable to Alfieri’s characters: They all choose suicide as the ultimate rebellion to the world and the society in which they live in order to affirm their own identity and independence. It is not by chance that Ortis in Florence would like to meet Alfieri, who in that period is residing in the Tuscan city; by the same token, in Milan, he visits Giuseppe Parini, the eighteenth-century Italian poet who in his works paid particular attention to social issues (for the same reason, he is remembered in Dei sepolcri). A great role as literary influence is also played by Dante Alighieri and Francesco Petrarca: The several quotations from their works and the pilgrimages to Petrarch’s house at Arqua` at the beginning of the novel and to Dante’s tomb toward the end remark the equal importance of the two models. The topics debated in the novel are several and vary from political theories to aesthetic considerations. But perhaps the crucial concept that pervades Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis is that of the necessity of the tomb as a reminder of the examples of the dead ones for those who still live. ERNESTO LIVORNI Editions Critical editions: Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis, edited by Giovanni Gambarin, in Edizione Nazionale delle Opere, vol. 4, Florence: Felice Le Monnier, 1955; rpt. 1970; as Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis: Poesie e carmi, edited by Mario Puppo, Milan: Rusconi, 1987; edited by Edoardo Sanguineti, Milan: Bompiani, 1990; edited by Giuseppe Nicoletti, Florence: Giunti, 1997. Translations: as Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis, translated by Douglas Radcliff-Umstead, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970; as Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis: On Tombs, translated by J. G. Nichols, London: Hesperus, 2002.

Further Reading Amoretti, Giovanni Giuseppe, ‘‘La madre, la morte e il tiranno nella poesia foscoliana. Contributo psicanalitico all’interpretazione dell’Ortis e dei Sepolcri,’’ in Poesia e psicanalisi: Foscolo e Leopardi, Milan: Garzanti, 1979. Fubini, Mario, Lettura dell’ ‘‘Ortis,’’ Milan: Marzorati, 1947. Fubini, Mario, Ortis e Didimo: Ricerche e interpretazioni foscoliane, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1963. Goffis, Cesare Federico, ‘‘Edizioni dell’Ortis,’’ in Nuovi studi foscoliani, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1958. Grabher, Carlo, ‘‘La figura di Odoardo e un motivo fondamentale dell’Ortis,’’ in Interpretazioni foscoliane, Florence: Sansoni, 1948.

FOTOROMANZO Manacorda, Giorgio, Materialismo e masochismo: Il ‘‘Werther,’’ Foscolo e Leopardi, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1973. Nicoletti, Giuseppe, Il ‘‘metodo’’ dell’ ‘‘Ortis’’ e altri studi foscoliani, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1978.

Terzoli, Maria Antonietta, Le prime lettere di Jacopo Ortis: Un giallo editoriale tra politica e censura, Rome: Salerno, 2004.

FOTOROMANZO Created in the post-World War II period, the fotoromanzo was for decades one of the most popular made-in-Italy products in the world. Within a few years, this innovative means of creation of sentimental stories through photographic sequences and written dialogues and captions, spread from Italy to France, Mediterranean Africa, Turkey, and even Latin America, where it became one of the sources of the still flourishing soap operas known as telenovelas. The date of birth of the fotoromanzo is disputed. On June 29, 1946, the small publisher Universo, owned by the brothers Del Duca, published the first issue of Grand Hotel, an inexpensive weekly magazine that included love stories in cartoon strips, elegantly drawn by Walter Molino, who created an array of glamorous heroines and fabulous heroes, facing tribulations that owed much to the nineteenth-century feuilleton. Almost a year later, in May 1947, the Milanese Mondadori launched Bolero Film, produced by Luciano Pedrocchi, Franco Cancellieri, and Damiano Damiani. Its very first issue featured Catene, by Pedrocchi and Damiani, a complex love story between a governess and her rich and noble employer. Its novelty was in the substitution of the drawn strips with photographs of real actors, with balloons of dialogues inserted in the frames. Shortly thereafter, another Milanese publisher Rizzoli launched Sogno, also a magazine of stories illustrated with photographs, and finally Grand Hotel, in its turn, followed the lead of its competitors and also replaced drawings with pictures. For decades these three major publications, and many minor others, sold millions of copies, achieving a unique success in the publishing industry. The 1950s were the golden age of the fotoromanzo. The number of publications multiplied and diversified, with a growing attention to the emerging industry of celebrities of Cinecitta`. Future film stars such as Sophia Loren, Gina Lollobrigida, Virna

Lisi, and the TV presenter Mike Bongiorno all started working in fotoromanzi. In the 1960s, the publisher Lancio promoted a new kind of fotoromanzo, in monthly issues with complete and original stories. Characterized by good graphics and good quality images as well as by new and original topics in the stories, these new fotoromanzi, which became thus distinct from the fumetto, were directed to younger and less provincial readers. The gradual decline of the genre began in the 1970s, not only because of the increased costs of production that resulted in expensive and less competitive magazines, but above all because of the sudden explosion of private television channels, which targeted the same audience. At the beginning, the fotoromanzo was not exclusively devoted to a female readership, but rather was a form of entertainment for a varied audience including peasants, blue-collar workers, and day laborers who either were illiterate or semiliterate or did not have access to leisure activities such as cinema. As Alberto Abruzzese has pointed out, the fotoromanzo succeeded in so far as it filled a void left by both the high culture of literature and the mass culture of cinema, which required a combination of social behavior, standards of living, and technology that were not homogeneously spread across the country. As a ‘‘visual, miniaturizable and movable storytelling,’’ the fotoromanzo was able to reach those social groups and geographical areas that other media could not reach, achieving its success by combining the strengths of the image and that of narration (‘‘Fotoromanzo,’’ 1989). If what attracted this new readership to the fotoromanzo could be explained as the desire for entertainment not available elsewhere, it is striking that the genre could maintain its success for so long in spite of its repetitiveness and stereotypical formulas. Yet, this renewed success was precisely the result of 769

FOTOROMANZO the readers’ previous knowledge of what would happen in each issue, as they purposely sought and expected the recurrence of an unchanging recipe. Rather than diversion and estrangement, the fotoromanzo relied on identification with the reader, a process facilitated by the standardization of story lines culminating with the final triumph of love, the conventional happy ending that guaranteed ultimate gratification without frustration. Also, the centrality of female characters facilitated the process of identification for the female readership that eventually came to constitute the majority of the public of the fotoromanzo. Furthermore, within the limits of these conventions, the readership also found enjoyment in being creatively involved in the narration. The iconic and verbal apparatuses jointly worked to provide just enough information for the reader to maintain an active, creative role: The text supplied only the information that the images lacked, while the images nourished the imagination of the reader by barely revealing the essential details. The success of the fotoromanzo was such that, though condemned for its content (either too culturally superficial or morally reprehensible) it was adopted by both the Communist Party and the Catholic magazine La famiglia cristiana to reach a wider and more diverse audience. As Anna Bravo has shown in her monograph Il fotoromanzo (2003), then, this form of popular entertainment represented a fundamental stage in the process of modernization of postwar Italy. By mirroring the social changes and contradictions and the desire for

freedom and social mobility of postwar Italian society, it offers an original instrument to understand the cultural reality of twentieth-century Italy. BARBARA GARBIN Further Reading Abruzzese, Alberto, ‘‘Fotoromanzo,’’ in Letteratura italiana. Storia e Geografia, edited by Alberto Asor Rosa, vol. 3, Turin: Einaudi, 1989. Anelli, Maria Teresa, et al., Fotoromanzo: fascino e pregiudizio, Rome: Savelli Editori, 1979. Balbi, Rosellina, ‘‘La magia dei fotoromanzi,’’ in Nord e Sud, 38 (1963): 52–61. Balbi, Rosellina, ‘‘L’esilio della realta`,’’ in Nord e Sud, 39 (1963): 72–81. Bravo, Anna, Il fotoromanzo, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2003. Detti, Ermanno, Le carte rosa: storia del fotoromanzo e della narrativa popolare, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1990. Finucci Gallo, Patrizia, Il pudore dei sentimenti, Bologna: Pendragon, 1993. Gargiulo, Giuseppe, Cultura popolare e cultura di massa nel fotoromanzo ‘‘rosa,’’ Messina and Florence: D’Anna, 1977. Saibene, Roberto, ‘‘Le strutture del fotoromanzo,’’ in Pubblico 1979: Produzione letteraria e mercato culturale, edited by Vincenzo Spinazzola, Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1980. Schimming, Ulrike, Fotoromane. Analyse eines Massenmediums, Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2002. Sullerot, Evelyne, ‘‘I fotoromanzi,’’ in La paraletteratura. Il melodramma, il romanzo popolare, il fotoromanzo, il romanzo poliziesco, il fumetto, edited by Noel Arnaud, Francis Lacassin, and Jean Tortel, Naples: Liguori, 1977.

BIANCAMARIA FRABOTTA (1946–) Poet and professor of Italian literature at La Sapienza University in Rome, Biancamaria Frabotta’s work is often self-referential and primarily devoted to the study of women writers. Her early left-wing political activism was expressed in poetry that gave a voice to the revolutionary generation that came of age in the late 1960s. Over time her body of work became less declamatory, more introspective and prone to ironic self-criticism; it transcended specific issues in favor of a broader 770

analysis of the human experience, including themes such as personal memory, conjugal love, spiritual commitment, the relationships between the individual and the environment, and travel. Frabotta has dedicated her academic career to promoting the importance of women in modern Italian literature, and to the historical investigation of the feminist movement. Particularly Donne in poesia (Women in Poetry, 1976), Letteratura al femminile (Feminine Literature, 1980), and Femminismo

BIANCAMARIA FRABOTTA e lotta di classe 1970–1973 (Feminism and Class Struggle 1970–1973, 1975) laid the groundwork for women’s studies in Italy. Also, her early poems denounced a male-dominated literary world and a society that accepted the emancipation of women only reluctantly. Frabotta’s involvement in the students’ movement of 1968 and her active participation in feminist collectives is reflected in the poems of Affeminata (Effeminate, 1976). Frabotta’s initial ideological works contributed to a gender-based writing not opposed to mainstream male literature but, rather, evolving parallel to it. Her innovative style added a new dimension to women’s literature by introducing the wholly independent female character whose identity is defined according to contemporary terms of individual and psychological liberation. For example, in her introduction to Donne in poesia, a collection of poems by Italian women writers from the postwar era through the 1970s, she writes that the purpose of the anthology is not to separate female literature from mainstream literature, but to show that it exists as part of it. With the essays she edited in Letteratura al femminile, Frabotta extended her argument on behalf of female literature by considering women’s contribution to the novel form. Her second collection of poetry, the critically acclaimed Il rumore bianco (The White Noise, 1982), attests to Frabotta’s urgency to write in 1968, the year of protest par excellence. As the avant-garde poet Antonio Porta shows in his introduction to the volume, the act of writing allowed Frabotta to distance herself from the social and ideological turmoil of the time to find, in the intermediary space of poetry, an observation point to reflect on what was happening. The poems in Il rumore bianco convey a collective feeling of disorientation and confusion, while presenting diverse examples of youth in a dialectical play of images. In her most personal poetry, Frabotta describes the difficult task of establishing her artistic configuration among the social chaos of those years, and sees herself as a poet with a fragmented identity. Her metaphorical, measured language is especially effective when she employs irony. The state of confusion of Frabotta’s generation is also highlighted in the novel, Velocita` di fuga (Escape Velocity), which was written at the end of 1970 but published only in 1989. The novel examines the dynamics of gradual self-awareness in a 25-year-old woman. Her name is never revealed, emphasizing her search for a definite identity. The protagonist is a bright student of letters who at

night fantasizes about liberating herself from the trappings of love and role-playing by writing imaginary letters to great women writers. Her uneasiness with pre-established feminine roles is revealed by the conflicted relationship with her mother Elvira, whom she criticizes, but does not challenge. Furthermore, her boyfriend Eugenio keeps her entangled in a sterile world by imposing his chauvinistic intellectual superiority. As in Il rumore bianco, the author also plays with opposites in Velocita` di fuga. A recurrent trope is that of stasis versus movement, metaphorically represented by an ambivalent character who cannot decide between a passive acceptance of her status and an active desire to react. Her journey leads not to a destination but, in itself, represents an action toward change. Frabotta’s stylistic shifts between first-person narrative and diaristic entries emphasize the undefined personality of the female protagonist. In La viandanza (Wayfaring, 1995), the poems continue to focus on the journey of a woman. But it is not a voyage toward a void as in Velocita` di fuga. The protagonist (the author herself ) departs from her past only to return to it with the experiences accumulated during her voyage through life, her wanderings depicted in melancholic tones. She describes the wayfaring as ‘‘un continuo ritorno a una nuova partenza’’ (continuous return to a new departure). Such a tone is, however, interrupted by self-ironic statements that describe her poetic persona as a traveler who would rather encounter the familiar than adventure into new territories. During her journey, the poet meets those she loved the most: her parents. In the poem ‘‘Vento in Bures’’ (Wind in Bures), a visit to an unknown tomb in the cemetery of Bures near Paris evokes the burial of her own father, months earlier, in a cemetery near Rome. Her imaginary dialogue with him asserts a reassuring contact between the living and the dead. The poem ‘‘La viandanza’’ is instead dedicated to Frabotta’s mother, who was born in Civitavecchia. Juxtaposing the past splendor of the Roman town with that of a contemporary polluted city, the poet acknowledges the impossibility of returning to the idealized place of childhood. Here her words are flexible and free from the strict formal decorum of early works. The rhythmic patterns, the use of foreign words, the multiple semantic and syntactic ambivalences, all emphasize the expansion and strength of Frabotta’s language. As the poet suggests in ‘‘La viandanza,’’ an ideal equilibrium can be found through the connection with others in the precarious voyage of the human existence. 771

BIANCAMARIA FRABOTTA Trittico dell’obbedienza (Triptych of Obedience, 1996), a collection of three one-act plays and Frabotta’s only theatrical work, is distinguished by linguistic clarity and poetic language. Its three independent acts are entitled ‘‘La passione dell’obbedienza’’ (The Passion of Obedience), ‘‘Il mulo sardo lo inganni una volta sola’’ (You Can Fool a Sardinian Mule Just Once), ‘‘Bruna, o tutte le ore in agguato’’ (Bruna, or All the Hours Lying in Wait). These plays are linked thematically by the act of spiritual, professional, and intellectual obedience. Women and their emotions are protagonists. They move between blurred lines of reality and imagination, truth and representation. In the first act, the intellectual love between Abelard and Eloı¨se takes place in the Middle Ages. Through the letters that Abelard writes to his beloved, their liaison is unveiled, as well as the spiritual call that made them reject their son. Different linguistic styles, such as the low language used by the drunken beggar fool and the austere tone employed by the Abbess, echo the author’s awareness of verisimilitude in the theater. The protagonist of the second act is a psychoanalyst, who re-enacts her patient’s psychological life—a reversal of roles. In the third act, Bruna, an actress who lives a fractured life caught between reality and imagination, happens to rescue Salvo, a suicidal, self-involved individual. The winning power of the imaginary world versus the real one is at the center of Frabotta’s theatrical piece. In her most recent work, La pianta del pane (The Bread Plant, 2003), Frabotta’s language remains formally decorous. The plant of the title refers to the foundation of the past on which the present is built, and the work develops the awareness that to return to one’s origins is impossible. These poems express hard-won maturity after a journey in search of truth, identity, and change.

Biography Born in Rome on 11 June 1946. Attended the lyceum ‘‘Pino Albertelli.’’ In 1969, graduated in letters and philosophy at the Roman University La Sapienza with a dissertation on Carlo Cattaneo that wins the Carlo Cattaneo award in Lugano. In the same year, begins academic career on the faculty of letters and philosophy at the University La Sapienza in Rome. In 1970, marries the writer Renzo Paris. In the 1970s, takes part in the Roman feminist movement. From 1974 to 1990, works for the newspaper Il manifesto. In the late 1970s, works 772

for Terzo Programma (national radio). In 1981, cofounds, with Rossana Rossanda and Manuela Fraire, the political and cultural journal L’Orsaminore. From 1985–1990, writes for the weekly magazine L’espresso. In 1991, directs her one-act play, Bruna o tutte le ore in agguato, and the monologue, Controcanto al chiuso, at the Teatro Beat 72 in Rome. From 1989–1991, edits the journal, Poesia. In 1992, directs her one-act play, Il mulo sardo lo inganni una volta sola, at the Colosseo Theatre in Rome. In 1993, wins the Calliope prize for the poem Senz’eco and marries the Italian physicist Brunello Tirozzi. Since 1994, works with the painter Giulia Napoleone on etchings and copper engravings on paper and art books. In 1993 and 1994, is a member of the jury for the Citta` di Recanati prize for New Trends in Songwriting. In 1994, participates in the Festival of Poetry ItalyUSA. In 1995, awarded the Montale prize for La Viandanza. From 1998 to 1999, authors radio dramas for Terzo Programma. In 2003, La pianta del pane wins the Lericipeia prize, the Giuseppe Dessı` prize, and Comune di Trabia prize. Since 2004, has been a jury member of the International Poetry Prize named after Pier Paolo Pasolini. GIOVANNA De LUCA See also: Feminist Theory and Criticism Selected Works Poetry ‘‘Affeminata,’’ 1976. ‘‘Il rumore bianco,’’ 1982. ‘‘La gelosia e` quello che e`,’’ 1984. ‘‘L’altra poesia,’’ 1985. ‘‘Appunti di volo e altre poesie,’’ 1985. ‘‘La viandanza,’’ 1995; as High Tide, translated by Gillian Allnutt et al., 1998. ‘‘Terra contigua,’’ 1999. ‘‘La pianta del pane,’’ 2003. ‘‘Gli eterni lavori,’’ 2005.

Visual Poetry Esorcismo al chiaro di luna, dialogue with three voices dedicated to Sylvia Plath, 1989. Ne resta uno, 16 haikus with six etchings by Giulia Napoleone, 1996. Il messo, in Sopravvivenza del bianco, with six copper/iron engravings in black by Giulia Napoleone, 1997.

Fiction Velocita` di fuga, 1989.

Theater Controcanto al chiuso, 1991. Trittico dell’obbedienza, 1996.

FRANCIS OF ASSISI Critical Essays Carlo Cattaneo, 1971. Donne in poesia, antologia della poesia femminile in Italia dal dopoguerra a oggi, 1976; as Italian Women Poets, translated by Corrado Federici, 2002. Letteratura al femminile, itinerari di lettura a proposito di donne, storia, poesia, romanzo, 1980. Femminismo e lotta di classe in Italia, 1970–1973: analisi, documenti e prospettive, 1975. Giorgio Caproni, il poeta del disincanto, 1993. Poeti della malinconia, 2001. Arcipelago Malinconia; Parole e scenari dell’interiorita`, 2001.

Translations Ana Blandiana, Un tempo gli alberi avevano gli occhi, 2004 (with Bruno Mazzoni).

Further Reading Bevilacqua, Alberto, ‘‘Come in Schonberg,’’ in Poesie d’amore, edited by Francesca Pansa, Roma: Newton Compton, 1986. Franco, Cordelli, ‘‘Biancamaria Frabotta,’’ in Il pubblico della poesia, Cosenza: Lerici, 1975.

Giovanardi, Stefano, ‘‘Biancamaria Frabotta,’’ in Poeti italiani del secondo Novecento 1945–1995, edited by Maurizio Cucchi and Stefano Giovanardi, Milan: Mondadori, 1996. Jewell, Keala Jane, ‘‘Frabotta’s Elegies: Theory and Practice,’’ in Modern Language Notes, 116, no. 1 (January 2001): 177–192 (Italian issue). Lazzaro-Weis, Carol, From Margins to Mainstream: Feminism and Fictional Modes in Italian Women’s Writing, 1968–1990, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993. Niva, Lorenzini, La poesia italiana del Novecento, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1999. O’Brian, Catherine, Italian Women Poets of the Twentieth Century, Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1996. Porta, Antonio, ‘‘Biancamaria Frabotta,’’ in Poesia degli Anni Settanta, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1979. Re, Lucia, ‘‘Language, Gender and Sexuality in the Italian Neo-Avant-Garde,’’ Modern Language Notes, 119, no. 1 (January 2004): 135–173 (Italian issue). Sartini-Blum, Cinzia, ‘‘Beyond ‘the End of the Journey’: Frabotta’s Writing from Fuga to Viandanza,’’ in Italian Culture, 20, nos. 1–2 (2001): 25–43. Zecchi, Barbara, ‘‘Il corpo femminile trampolino tra scrittura e volo. Enif, Robert e Biancamaria Frabotta: settant’anni verso il tempo delle donne,’’ in Italica, 69, no. 4 (1992): 505–518.

FRANCIS OF ASSISI (CA. 1181/1182–1226) Francis was a mystic, founder of the Franciscan Order, and the first Italian poet. His conversion from a leisurely young age to poverty and prayer shaped his life and works, as well as his writing fame. In comparison to the voluminous literary apparatus about him, the so-called Franciscan Legenda, Francis’ own writings have often been overlooked. It was not until the 1970s that scholars rediscovered the importance of understanding Francis and Franciscanism in light of what he had written. Very few originals of Francis’ writings remain: One is a small piece of parchment written on both sides; it contains the ‘‘Benedictio fratri Leoni data’’ (Blessing of Brother Leo) on one side and the ‘‘Laudes Dei altissimi’’ (Praises of God) on the other. A brief ‘‘Epistola ad fratrem Leonem’’ (Letter to Brother Leo), the so-called Chartula, which explains Francis’ interpretation of Christian life, testifies to Francis’ lack of formal education: It contains spelling and grammatical

mistakes. This is the only text by Francis to have come down to us in his own handwriting; the others were possibly dictated by him or rewritten by his followers and, despite Francis’ injunction that his words be copied without modifications, they were often embellished and modified. Luke Wadding’s edition of Francis’ writings, the Opuscola Beati Francisci Assisiensis (1623), is a milestone in Franciscan philology; it remained the only edition until the twentieth century, when four more appeared. In 1976, Kajetan Esser published the critical edition of Francis’ works, which is the result of an analysis of 181 manuscripts and reflects modern philological and scholarly criteria. The chronology of Francis’ writings is extremely difficult to establish. The three-volume edition by Regis J. Armstrong, J. A. Wayne Hellman, and William J. Short, Francis of Assisi: Early Documents (1999–2001), which includes writings by and about Francis, makes a cautious attempt at 773

FRANCIS OF ASSISI dating Francis’ own writings. This is the chronology followed here. Francis’ Latin writings include prayers, commentaries, letters, and two versions of the Order’s Rule: the earlier version of the letter ‘‘Epistola ad fideles [recensio brevis]’’ (Earlier Exhortation to the Brothers and Sisters of Penance, 1209–1215), the later version of the letter ‘‘Epistola ad fideles [recensio ampla]’’ (Later Admonition to the Brothers and Sisters of Penance, ca. 1220), ‘‘Epistola ad clericos’’ (Exhortations to the Clergy, 1219– 1220 ), ‘‘Epistola ad custodes I’’ (First Letter to the Custodian, 1220), ‘‘Epistola ad populorum rectores’’ (A Letter to the Rulers of the Peoples, 1220), ‘‘De religiosa habitatione in eremis’’ (Rule for Hermitages, 1217–1221), ‘‘Regula non bullata’’ (Earlier Rule Without Papal Seal, 1209/10–1221), ‘‘Epistola ad quendam ministrum’’ (Letter to a Minister, 1221–1223), ‘‘Regula bullata’’ (Later Rule With Papal Seal, 1223), ‘‘Epistola ad Antonium’’ (A Letter to Brother Anthony of Padua, ca. 1223), ‘‘Laudes Dei altissimi’’ (The Praises of God, 1224), ‘‘Benedictio fratri Leoni data’’ (A Blessing for Brother Leo, 1224), ‘‘Epistola toti Ordini missa’’ (Letter to the Entire Order, 1225–1226), ‘‘Epistola ad fratrem Leonem’’ (A Letter to Brother Leo, 1224–1226), and ‘‘Testamentum’’ (The Testament, 1226). There are also numerous undated texts: ‘‘Verba sanctae admonitionis’’ (The Admonitions), ‘‘Exhortatio ad laudem Dei’’ (Exhortations to the Praise of God), ‘‘Officium passionis Domini’’ (Office of the Passion), ‘‘Oratio super Pater Noster’’ (A Prayer Inspired by the Our Father), ‘‘Laudes ad omnes horas’’ (Praises to Be Said at All Hours), ‘‘Salutatio beate Marie Virginis’’ (A Salutation of the Blessed Virgin Mary), ‘‘Salutatio virtutum’’ (A Salutation of the Virtues). Francis wrote few texts in the vernacular. Besides the ‘‘Preghiera davanti al Crocifisso’’ (The Prayer before the Crucifix, 1205–1206) and the ‘‘Parole di esortazione alle ‘poverelle’ di San Damiano’’ (Canticle of Exhortation for the Ladies of San Damiano, 1225), Francis is renowned as the author of a single poetic text and is acknowledged as the first literary author in Italian vernacular. His ‘‘Cantico di frate Sole’’ (Canticle of Brother Sun, 1224) begins the Italian poetic canon and is anthologized as the first text of the Italian literary tradition, a prototype for subsequent religious poetry. Gianfranco Contini dates the beginning of Italian literature from Francis’ poem. Alessandro D’Ancona goes a step further than Contini and names the ‘‘Cantico’’ ‘‘the most ancient spiritual 774

poem’’ (Studi sulla letteratura italiana dei primi secoli, 1891) in any vernacular language, thereby placing it in an international perspective. Likewise, Adolfo Oxilia widens the scope of the poem’s initial importance and defines it as ‘‘the first great page of Western civilization: a code of spiritual values, but also of aesthetic values’’ (Il Cantico di frate sole, 1984). Given its archaicity, the text poses numerous philological questions. The first concerns its title. Although the more traditional editorial titles are ‘‘Canticum creaturarum,’’ ‘‘Canticum de creaturis’’ (The Canticle of Creatures), ‘‘Laudes creaturarum,’’ ‘‘Laudes de creaturis’’ (The Praises of Creatures), the majority of contemporary critics agree that ‘‘Canticum fratris solis’’ (The Canticle of Brother Sun) is the authentic title Francis gave his poem and the one his companions used to refer to it. The most authoritative critical edition is by Vittore Branca, who restored the text to its original vernacular form by freeing it of all Umbrian connotations (Il cantico di frate sole. Studio delle fonti e testo critico, 1950). The structure of the poem is highly symbolic. It consists of 14 laisses (a laisse is a stanzaic or verse paragraph), comprising a total of 33 lines. Oxilia identifies the number symbolism and establishes the correspondence with the 14 Stations of the Cross and with the traditional age of Christ at death (Il Cantico di frate sole, 1984). Number symbolism holds also from a thematic point of view because the poem is divided into three sections: The first five laisses concern the heavens, the middle four laisses the earth, and the last five laisses human beings. Such thematic division creates a perfectly symmetrical structure, which matches the typically medieval sense of order as representing closeness to divinity. Such sequential and numerological order, however, bears no correspondence to the three episodes which, according to hagiographic sources, originated the composition of the text. Despite the numerous critical perspectives from which the ‘‘Cantico’’ can be viewed (as prayer, as first poem of the Italian literary canon, as song of thankfulness), its thematic stress remains on nature and on nature’s status as God’s creation. Creatures punctuate Canticum fratris solis, which insists that all created things owe their origin and existence to God, regardless of their material, ethereal, or simply conceptual presence in the cosmos. Sun, moon, wind, earth, fire, water, death, and the people-who-forgive are those evoked in the poem. Their subordination to God represents the creature-Creator relationship that shapes the poem’s theological background. The

FRANCIS OF ASSISI all-encompassing scope of the ‘‘Cantico’’ attempts to include every substantial element that exists in the universe. This feature closely imitates the subject matter of the two biblical texts of the Old Testament, which are considered the philologically accredited sources of the ‘‘Cantico,’’ namely Psalm 148 and the Psalm of the Three Young Men in the Furnace, also known as the Psalm of Daniel (Dan. 3:52–90 in the Vulgate; this passage is not contained in the King James Version). Both inspirational texts are lyrical, prayerful, praising compositions, and both have a litanic scansion obtained through frequent repetition of a refrain—and in this they resemble the Franciscan poem. The ‘‘Cantico’’ distances itself from its sources by means of a few distinctive features, which make it peculiarly Franciscan: its paucity of creatures mentioned, the passive grammatical diathesis of the refrain, the addition of the attribute brother or sister before the name of each creature, the commenting adjectives surrounding the names of creatures, and the complete absence of animals among them. This is the most striking characteristic of the poem, considering the absolute passion Francis displays for animals in the texts of the Legenda. The anaphorical repetition Laudato si’, mi’ Signore (May you be praised my Lord) is an invitation to praise God, similar to the refrain in the biblical sources. But, in Francis’ poem, a certain ambiguity about the identity of the praising entity stems from the repeated use of the preposition per, as in Laudato si’, mi’ Signore, per sora luna (May you be praised my Lord, by / through / through Sister Moon). This preposition is a philological impasse, and its meaning has been the subject of much speculation. In Francis’ time, per may acquire a multiplicity of signifiers. Since it follows the passive form, it may stand for the modern Italian da (by) thereby making the creatures evoked into the bearers of God’s praise. But it is plausible that per could also mean for, as it would in modern Italian; in this case the performers of the act of praise would be human beings, who thank and praise God for all creation. Another possible meaning of this polysemic preposition implies a movement through the creatures, and in this case per would be translated as through or by means of; the creatures would be the agents of the human beings’ praise of God. The dispute over the meaning of the preposition undoubtedly underscores the hermeneutical significance of its referent. Whatever the precise semantic meaning that may be assigned to it, per maintains a mediating function; it stands as a dynamic link between

the two entities located syntactically on each side of it and is invested with the crucial role of evincing the existing ties between God and creatures. As such it stresses the Franciscan theology of nature’s total dependence on divinity. The anaphorical repetition of the refrain Laudato si’, mi’ Signore issues an imperative command to give praise to God. Francis makes the recipient of the praising action clear, while leaving freedom of interpretation concerning the identity of the praisers, whether they may be human beings singing, reciting, or reading the ‘‘Cantico,’’ or human beings praising God by other means, or the various creatures listed in the poem. The refrain changes this prayerful poem into a prayer within the prayer. The metaprayerful message it carries within itself changes the ‘‘Cantico’’ into a specific type of prayer, the praise. The insistent repetition of the refrain establishes a litanic cadence and strongly contributes to the musicality of this Franciscan psalm, which was conceived by the author as a text to be sung. Although the melody has been lost, the ‘‘Cantico’’ was clearly intended for public singing. According to the Legenda, Francis created this song and gave it to his friars to accompany their preaching activity. He wanted the friars to gather a group of people around them, preach to them, and then sing the Canticum fratris solis. Besides melodious sound, the concept of music in the ‘‘Cantico’’ includes the recovery of natural harmony. Nature as the mediating element between human being and God acquires the privileged status of sacrament, being the tangible sign of divine presence in the cosmos. Pleasant sound and harmonious perception of nature find unification in the ‘‘Cantico’’ through music, which to the medieval mind was both melodic singing and natural order as reflection of divine perfection. In this poem, Francis revisits nature, describing its beauty, its sacramentality, and its harmony. In the purified vision of the Saint, creation speaks of God as it spoke to human beings at the initial stages of salvation history in Genesis. The ‘‘Cantico’’ can be interpreted, not only thematically, but also rhetorically as a revisiting of the natural world in light of Christian redemption; the poem is a reacquisition of the biblical myth of creation in light of Christ’s incarnation. The Franciscan theological insistence on nature as the Second Book of God’s revelation after the Bible can be clearly perceived in this first Franciscan poem of the thirteenth century. As a character of numerous hagiographic portrayals, Francis has been depicted as the most 775

FRANCIS OF ASSISI distinguished supporter of poverty, purity, and reconciliation. Since shortly after his death in the thirteenth century, biographers writing about his actions and miracles described his love for nature, his unrelenting dedication to poverty, and his devotion to the Passion of Christ, which culminated in the gift of the stigmata, the five signs of Christ’s Passion that appeared on Francis’ own body. Dante Alighieri offers a brief narrative of Francis’ mystical accomplishments in the Divina Commedia (Paradiso XI), and depicts an unforgettable image of Francis in just 75 lines. After a description of his place of birth, the account focuses on his conversion, his mystical marriage to Lady Poverty, the foundation of the Franciscan Order, the visit to the Holy Land, the stigmata, and his death. Dante’s poetic language shapes a picture of the saint of Assisi as both heroic and humble, which are two (only apparently contradictory) qualities of his personality and sainthood. Francis’ exemplary human experience has also inspired such different films as Mario Corsi’s Frate Sole (1918), Giulio Antamoro’s Frate Francesco (1926–1927), Roberto Rossellini’s Francesco, giullare di Dio (1950), Michael Curtiz’s Francesco d’Assisi (1960), Franco Zeffirelli’s Fratello Sole, Sorella Luna (1972), Liliana Cavani’s Francesco di Assisi (1966) and Francesco (1989). Cavani’s cinematic treatments divest the figure of the saint from all legendary inscriptions and focus on the apostolic agere (to act) of the new man, a symbol of the interpenetration of the historical and the spiritual.

Biography Francis was born in Assisi, ca. 1181/1182, the son of a wealthy cloth merchant and a Provenc¸al woman. After a carefree youth, Francis converted to a life of prayer and repentance, the result of a physical disease and incarceration as a prisoner of war. He rejected his father’s riches, renounced his inheritance, and joined the poor outside Assisi’s city walls. His radical life change brought him to the foundation of three new religious orders, the Franciscan Order, the Poor Clares, and the Third Order of Francis, all three connected by the same theology of poverty and simplicity that governed his converted life. The allegory of his mystical marriage with Lady Poverty was depicted in art and literature by innumerable artists as a typical Franciscan trait. At the end of his life, Francis was granted the gift of the stigmata, the signs of Christ’s crucifixion on his body, the first of several 776

mystics to receive the same gift. He was publicly acclaimed as a saint during his lifetime and, shortly after his death at the Portiuncula, near Assisi, on October 3, 1226, he was officially canonized by Pope Gregory IX (1228). ALESSANDRO VETTORI Selected Works Opuscola Beati Francisci Assisiensis, edited by Luke Wadding, 1623. Analecta Franciscana sive chronica variaque aliadocumenta ad historiam fratrum minorum spectantia..., 12 vols. Ad Claras Aquas prope Florentiam, Ex Typ. Collegii s. Bonaventurae, 1926–1941; in particular Vol. 10, Legendae s. Francisci Assisiensis saeculis xiii et xiv conscriptae. ‘‘The Canticle of the Sun,’’ trans. Joseph Tusiani, in The Age of Dante: An Anthology of Early Italian Poetry, edited by Joseph Tusiani, New York: Baroque Press, 1974. Scritti francescani. Scritti e biografie di San Francesco. Cronache e altre testimonianze del primo secolo francescano. Scritti e biografie di Santa Chiara d’Assisi, edited by Feliciano Olgiati et al., Padua: Edizioni Messaggero, 1990; as Francis of Assisi: Early Documents, edited by Regis J. Armstrong, J. A. Wayne Hellman, and William J. Short, Vol. 1, The Saint, New York: New City Press, 1999; Vol. 2, The Founder, New York: New City Press, 2000; Vol. 3, The Prophet, New York: New City Press, 2001. Francesco d’Assisi. Scritti. Testo latino e traduzione italiana, edited by Aristide Cabassi, Padua: Editrici Francescane, 2002.

Further Reading Branca, Vittore, Il cantico di frate sole. Studio delle fonti e testo critico, Florence: Olschki, 1950. Contini, Gianfranco, Letteratura italiana delle origini, Florence: Sansoni, 1976. Cunningham, Lawrence, Saint Francis of Assisi, Boston: Twaine, 1976. D’Ancona, Alessandro, Studi sulla letteratura italiana dei primi secoli, Milan: Fratelli Tre`ves, 1891. Doyle, Eric, St. Francis and the Song of Brotherhood, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1980. Erikson, Joan Mowat, Saint Francis & His Four Ladies, New York: Norton & Co., 1970. Frugoni, Chiara, Francesco e l’invenzione delle stimmate. Una storia per parole e immagini fino a Bonaventura e Giotto, Turin: Einaudi, 1993. Getto, Giovanni, ‘‘Francesco d’Assisi e il Cantico di frate sole,’’ in Letteratura religiosa dal Due al Novecento, Florence: Sansoni, 1967. House, Adrian, Francis of Assisi, New York: Paulist Press, 2000. Jeffrey, David L., ‘‘Franciscan Spirituality and the Growth of Vernacular Culture,’’ in By Things Seen: Reference and Recognition in Medieval Thought, edited by David L. Jeffrey, Ottawa, Canada: University of Ottawa Press, 1979.

VERONICA FRANCO Leclerc, Eloi, Le cantique des cre´atures ou les symboles de l’union. Une analyse de Saint Franc¸ois d’Assise, Paris: Fayard, 1970. Le Goff, Jacques, Saint Francis of Assisi, translated by Christine Rhone, New York: Routledge, 2003. Oxilia, Adolfo, Il Cantico di frate sole, Florence: Nardini, 1984. Pagliaro, Antonino, ‘‘Il cantico di frate sole,’’ in Saggi di critica semantica, Messina: D’Anna, 1953. Petrocchi, Giorgio (editor), Francesco d’Assisi. Gli scritti e la leggenda, Milan: Rusconi, 1983.

Sabatier, Paul, Life of St. Francis of Assisi, trans. Louise Seymour Houghton, New York: Scribner’s, 1894. Sorrell, Roger D., Saint Francis of Assisi and Nature, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1988. Spitzer, Leo, ‘‘Nuove considerazioni sul ‘Cantico di frate sole,’’’ in Studi italiani, edited by Claudio Scarpati, Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1976. Vettori, Alessandro, Poets of Divine Love. Franciscan Mystical Poetry of the Thirteenth Century, New York: Fordham University Press, 2004.

VERONICA FRANCO (1546–1591) Veronica Franco is the epitome of the successful and gifted cortigiana onesta (honest courtesan) of the Italian Renaissance. In a society that limits women’s lives on the basis of class, station, economics, education, and gender, the figure of the elevated, cultured prostitute stands out as a unique phenomenon. Operating at the margins of high society, such ‘‘honored courtesans’’ are expected to charm, entertain, converse, and seduce by appropriating the language, dress, and behavior of the upper classes. They appear to be ladies, but they also grant full erotic satisfaction to their patrons. Having achieved upward mobility because of their looks, cultivation, sophistication, and intelligence, these women find prestige, wealth, and a measure of societal respect. No longer relegated to the bedroom, the courtesan affirms herself in the salon. For a time, Veronica Franco is the most celebrated courtesan of Venice. Famed for both beauty and wit, she is a recognized figure among the Venetian literati, openly declaring her love of learning and the study of the liberal arts. In her youth, Franco is mistress of patricians, correspondent of kings and cardinals, and friend of poets, painters, and intellectuals. More than a professional accomplishment, her gift for writing is deeply personal and satisfying. Unlike most women writers of her day, Franco is confident of her literary abilities. She openly publishes her poetry, the Terze rime (ca. 1575), and an epistolary volume, the Lettere familiari (Familiar Letters, 1580). Nor is she loathe to seek recognition for her talent, as attested in a wellknown anecdote in Michel Montaigne’s Journal

de voyage en Italie en 1580 et 1581. The Frenchman notes unexpectedly receiving the gift of her epistolary from ‘‘a Venetian gentlewoman,’’ Signora Veronica Franca. The courtesan’s books serve a practical as well as artistic role, bearing witness to Franco’s exceptionality and ingratiating her to celebrated or powerful men. Indeed, the Terze rime are dedicated to the duke of Mantua and the Lettere familiari to Cardinal Luigi D’Este while letters are addressed to two notable recipients: the king of France, Henry III, with whom she briefly shared her favors, and the famous artist Jacopo Tintoretto, who painted her portrait. An autobiographical element is present in both Franco’s poetry and epistolary. As the book’s protagonist, Franco the subject is idealistically rendered. Much of this constructed identity is indebted to the literary and philosophical discourse of her time, but it also displays a unique interpretation of the models utilized. In many ways, Franco employs literature to paint herself verbally in becoming colors. These self-portraits are intended to seduce the reader into accepting an image that is part reality, part invention. For her strategy to succeed, Franco needs to appeal to the taste of her contemporaries who still admired an imitative discourse and demanded adherence to recognized cultural models. Franco owes much to ancient classics and to the Italian canon; she reworks Horace, Ovid’s Heroides, the pastoral, Francesco Petrarca and sixteenth-century Petrarchism, as well as popularizations of Neoplatonic discourse. Similarly, her letters borrow their title, structure, and tone from Cicero’s Epistulae ad familiares and Senecan prose. 777

VERONICA FRANCO Franco was clearly a cultured individual at a time when only 12% of Venetian women were even literate, according to historian Paul Grendler (Schooling in Renaissance Italy, 1989). Franco’s book of lyrics consists of 25 long poems known as capitoli, written in terza rima, the rhyme scheme originally devised by Dante Alighieri for the Divina Commedia. The sixteenth century used capitoli primarily for epistolary or burlesque verse. Franco’s choice of meter sets her apart from the majority of women poets in her day, who tended to produce sonnets in the style of Petrarca or Pietro Bembo. Besides adopting the capitolo for satire and communication, Franco also uses terza rima for amatory, patriotic, militant, and pastoral themes. As Marilyn Migiel has pointed out, Franco’s main theme is the relations between the sexes (Veronica Franco, 1994). In keeping with this theme, the Terze rime are organized as a lyric exchange, taking advantage of the capitolo’s communicative function. The volume is initially structured as a succession of dialogues in verse, in which male and female voices alternate. According to the book’s designations, seven of the 25 capitoli are penned by an anonymous male hand. These poems by the ‘‘uncertain author’’ have been historically attributed to patrician Marco Venier but could have been composed by Franco herself. The collection’s first capitolo is addressed to ‘‘Veronica’’ by the unknown male admirer. The most elaborate compliments, metaphors, and similes in praise of the courtesan are contained in the seven male-authored poems, a technique that allows Franco as subject to be concurrently modest and unparalleled. The dual representation of ‘‘Veronica’’ within the verse results in a doubling of the lyric persona, as perceived through two differing lenses. The subject fashioned in the male-authored poems is hyperbolically conventional, modeled on canonical tropes. Shifting between courtly lady, cruel beloved, and desired beauty, this Veronica can be as miraculously spiritual as Dante’s Beatrice, as unattainable as Petrarca’s Laura, or as wise as Leone Ebreo’s Sophia. The persona emerging from the male-authored capitoli is heir to a long line of exemplary feminine archetypes derived from the Italian canon. In the seven capitoli attributed to the uncertain male author, the rendering of ‘‘Veronica’’ is complicated by her acknowledged sexuality. Eschewing the frustrated gaze typical of the Petrarchan lover, for one, the unknown author pictures his lady as a ‘‘Venus abed,’’ promising the sensual delights of profane, not sacred, love. Unlike the archetypal cruel beloved, ‘‘Veronica’s’’ unapproachability is 778

not due to chastity but to her dedication to poetry. This portrayal of the courtesan as a devoted artist is at the heart of Franco’s self-construction: For example, in Letter 17, she rejects an admirer’s suit, requesting him to turn to her beloved intellectual pursuits in order to win her. In capitolo 13, an unnamed detractor (probably Maffio Venier) is challenged to a literary duel in which she would exchange pen for sword and compose in either Venetian dialect (Venier’s forte) or literary Italian. This image of Veronica as duelist reinforces the author’s inherent challenge to constricting gender definitions when she engages in the prevalently masculine domain of art and writing. In her poetry, Franco emerges as a transgressive figure whose beauty is explicitly sexual, as befits the representation of a courtesan, and whose talent is concurrently conventional and nonconformist. Shunning traditional sexual codes that require feminine passivity, modesty, chastity, and distance, Franco subverts them by proposing self-assurance, passion, and availability instead. Through the centuries, Franco’s literary works have been seen as utilitarian instruments of public propaganda through which she can fashion a desirable self-image to attract clients and mask the sordid realities of a courtesan’s existence. As evidence in support of this interpretation of Franco’s motivation, the Terze rime’s ‘‘male-authored’’ capitoli are clearly adulatory, canonizing the subject Veronica as an exemplary creature. Franco’s declaredly self-authored poems capitalize on the uncertain author’s image-making while adding to the subject Veronica’s qualities, suggesting a new definition of feminine literary selfhood. For example, in response to the Petrarchan construction in the first capitolo of Veronica as the donna crudel (cruel beloved), she represents herself as a perceptive individual open to virtue, valor, and wisdom; her heart cannot be had for the asking. Yet, she adds coyly, Apollo serves Venus—that is, art serves sexual love—and she is a devotee of both gods. Franco, unlike other women writers of her century, openly acknowledges her sexuality. Indeed capitolo 16 operates as a defense of her profession. In the Terze rime, Franco accepts and embellishes the Neoplatonic belief that beauty is an absolute good, although she disassociates it from chastity and stresses her belief that courtesans are the very embodiment of such beauty. The author’s values negate her society’s long-held belief in the superiority of the male sex, based on men’s greater nobility, intellect, and morality; its insistence on female decorum and chastity; and its rejection of sexual

VERONICA FRANCO pleasure, proposed as a natural predisposition. In the Terze rime, the female subject is ennobled and cleansed of negative connotations associated with prostitution, in a fictional universe where Christian morality is redefined and courtesans are reinvented as pagan goddesses. Moreover, the entire female sex is defended against male abuse of power. Capitolo 16 is Franco’s salvo in the battle of the sexes, in which she takes the feminine side in the ongoing querelle des femmes, the international debate on the status and worthiness of women. Clearly derived from classical epistolography, Franco’s published letters also function as instruments for self-fashioning and persuasion. In 1538, Pietro Aretino issues the first volume of his popular epistolary, beginning a new cultural trend: the production of letters as literary artifacts. As is the case for poetry, letter writing was an area of literature that invites female participation since it does not require scholarly learning and is composed in the vernacular. The Lettere familiari were Franco’s intellectual calling card, distributed to discerning recipients, like Montaigne. Consisting of 50 letters, most lacking a designated addressee, the brief volume highlights its rhetorical genesis, suggesting that it be interpreted as literary invention, written to demonstrate Franco’s craftsmanship. Her epistolary eloquence leans toward gravity, sententiousness, and dignity, in keeping with its Ciceronian and Senecan models, whereas the verse exhibits lightness, wit, and a colloquial style typical of the capitolo. As a work of art, the Lettere familiari’s very title challenges the Ciceronian model, inviting direct comparison with Epistulae ad familiares, which was the primary instructional text of the Latin curriculum of the day. Franco’s identification of a mere handful of addressees (a cardinal, a king, a great artist, and a notable patrician family) is suggestive in itself, for the author receives validation through the merits of her addressees, who, in turn, gild her reputation through their association. Franco defies stereotyping, stretches the female boundaries, and revises preconceptions about her sex and profession. But a somewhat different subject emerges in the epistolary: The author takes on the role of moralist, imparting the lessons of a devout sage, in sharp contrast to the banter, witty repartee, and suggestive connotations found in the Terze rime. It is from the contents of a handful of letters that critics and biographers developed the image of Franco as a redeemed sinner who underwent an edifying conversion later in life, although hard evidence for such a transformation is flimsy.

In Letter 22, possibly her most famous epistle, Franco seeks to dissuade a mother from the ‘‘evil’’ intent of introducing a daughter into the demimonde of elite prostitution, emphasizing the degradation and dehumanization of a courtesan’s life. However, concerns with worldly degradation and eternal salvation are secondary in the epistolary. As in Terze rime, Veronica Franco’s concern is the literary construction of a positive, culturally endorsable identity.

Biography Born in Venice in 1546 to a merchant family. Married young to Paolo Panizza, a doctor. Left husband and began career as an ‘‘honest courtesan.’’ In 1564, had the first of six children, among them sons Enea and Achilletto. Listed in the anonymous Catalogo di tutte le principali et piu` honorate cortegiane working in Venice. Active in Venetian cultural life, including Domenico Venier’s celebrated literary salon. In 1574, received King Henry III of France and Poland during his official state visit. In 1575, edited a collection of poems in honor of deceased Count Estor Martinengo but also entered into a scandalous public polemic with an anonymous satirist, later identified as patrician Maffio Venier. In 1575 or 1576, published Terze rime. An epistolary collection, the Lettere familiari, appeared in 1580. In October of that year Franco was tried by the Inquisition based on accusations of using diabolical invocations and practicing black magic; proceedings were quickly suspended. Died in Venice, in July 1591, of fever. FIORA A. BASSANESE See also: Petrarchism Selected Works Collections Lettere, edited by Stefano Bianchi, Rome: Salerno, 1998. Poems and Selected Letters, edited and translated by Ann Rosalind Jones and Margaret F. Rosenthal, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Poetry ‘‘Rime di diversi eccellentissimi autori nella morte dell’Illustre Sign.’’ Estor Martinengo, Conte di Malpaga, edited by Signora Veronica Franco, 1575. ‘‘Terze rime al Serenissimo Signor Duca di Mantova et di Monferrato,’’ ca. 1575. ‘‘Rime: Gaspara Stampa e Veronica Franco,’’ edited by Abdelkader Salza, 1913.

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VERONICA FRANCO Letters Lettere familiari a diversi della S. Veronica Franca all’illustr. e reverendissimo Monsignor Luigi d’Este Cardinale, 1580.

Further Reading Adler, Sara Maria, ‘‘Veronica Franco’s Petrarchan Terze Rime: Subverting the Master’s Plan,’’ in Italica, 65, no. 3 (1988): 213–233. Bassanese, Fiora A., ‘‘Selling the Self; or, The Epistolary Production of Renaissance Courtesans,’’ in Italian Women Writers from the Renaissance to the Present, edited by Maria Ornella Marotti, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996. Bassanese, Fiora A., ‘‘Veronica Franco’s Poetics of Redemption,’’ in From Rome to Eternity. Catholicism and the Arts in Italy, ca. 1550–1650, edited by Pamela M. Jones and Thomas Worcester, Leiden-BostonCologne: Brill, 2002. Diberti-Leigh, Marcella, Vittoria Franco: Donna, poetessa, cortigiana del Rinascimento, Ivrea: Priuli & Verlucca, 1988. Doglio, Maria Luisa, Lettera e donna: scrittura epistolare al femminile tra Quattro e Cinquecento, Rome: Bulzoni, 1993. Graf, Arturo, ‘‘Una cortigiana fra mille,’’ in Attraverso il Cinquecento, Turin: Loescher, 1888. Grendler, Paul F., Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and Learning 1500–1600, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. Jones, Ann Rosalind, The Currency of Eros: Women’s Love Lyric in Europe, 1540–1620, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. Jones, Ann Rosalind, ‘‘Bad Press, Modern Editors versus Early Modern Women Poets (Tullia d’Aragona,

Gaspara Stampa, Veronica Franco),’’ in Strong Voices, Weak History. Early Women Writers and Canons in England, France, and Italy, edited by Pamela Joseph Benson and Victoria Kirkham, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. Lawner, Lynne, Lives of the Courtesans: Portraits of the Renaissance, New York: Rizzoli, 1987. Masson, Georgiana, Courtesans of the Italian Renaissance, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1976. Migiel, Marilyn, ‘‘Veronica Franco,’’ in Italian Women Writers. A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook, edited by Rinaldina Russell, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994. Montaigne, Michel, The Complete Works of Montaigne, translated by Donald M. Frame, Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1948–1957. Phillippy, Patricia, ‘‘‘Altera Dido’: The Model of Ovid’s Heroides in the Poems of Gaspara Stampa and Veronica Franco,’’ Italica, 69, no. 1 (1992): 1–18. Robin, Diane, ‘‘Courtesans, Celebrity, and Print Culture in Renaissance Venice: Tullia d’Aragona, Gaspara Stampa, and Veronica Franco,’’ in Italian Women and the City: Essays, edited by Janet Levarie Smarr and Daria Valentini, Madison, NJ, and London: Farleigh Dickinson University Press/Associated University Press, 2003. Rosenthal, Margaret F., ‘‘Epistolary Self-portraiture in Veronica Franco’s Terze Rime,’’ in Writing the Female Voice. Essays on Epistolary Literature, edited by Elizabeth C. Goldsmith, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1989. Rosenthal, Margaret F., The Honest Courtesan: Veronica Franco, Citizen and Writer in Sixteenth-Century Venice, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Zorzi, Alvise, Cortigiana Veneziana: Veronica Franco e i suoi poeti, Milan: Camunia, 1986.

FREDERICK II OF HOHENSTAUFEN (1194–1250) Stupor quoque mundi et immutator mirabilis (wonder of the world and ingenious innovator), as he was labeled upon his death by the chronicler Matthew of Paris, Frederick II is a towering figure in the first half of the European twelfth century. The son of the Emperor Henry the Sixth and of Constance of Hauteville, last heir of the Norman dynasty, Frederick of Hohenstaufen reunited the crown of the Kingdom of Sicily with German imperial power, thus effecting the return of the seat of 780

the (Holy) Roman Empire to Italy after several centuries. A multifaceted personality, Frederick was a lawmaker, the author of a treatise on falconry, and a poet in his own right. Tolerant in matters of religion, and patron of the arts, Frederick II made Sicily an active crossroads of cultural exchange among Hebrew, Latin, and Arab civilizations. Intellectuals working at his court include the astrologer Michael Scot (more a promoter of the translation of Averroes’ and Avicenna’s works

FREDERICK II OF HOHENSTAUFEN rather than the necromancer he was later depicted as being), Theodore of Antioch (the translator of an Arabic treatise on falconry that serves as the source for Frederick’s treatise), and the mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci (to whom Europe owes the introduction of the Arabic numerical system). It is around this emperor that a group of vernacular poets and notaries also gathered to form the so-called Sicilian School. As functionaries of Frederick’s itinerant and polyglot court (the Magna Curia), these writers represent the first example of the poet-notary, the politically involved, lay intellectual who will dominate Italian vernacular culture until the age of Petrarch. Dante, still the most authoritative voice on early Italian literary history, acknowledges the essential role that Frederick played in shaping both the politics and the poetics of his time. In On vernacular eloquence I.12.2–4, he praises Frederick and his ‘‘well-born’’ son Manfred for having brought together at their court a group of intellectuals who were the first to write secular love poetry in the vernacular—a tradition of which Dante considered himself a part. The complete endorsement of this Latin treatise is later qualified in the Comedia where Frederick’s soul is included among the heretics (Inferno X.119, but see also XIII.58–78, XXIII.64–66, XXVI.119, Purgatorio III.107–132, XVI.117, and Paradiso III.109–120). Dante’s shift from enthusiastic praise of Frederick (as cultural promoter) to eventual condemnation (on religious grounds) reflects the controversial character of the emperor’s presence in the history of Italian culture. Dante’s treatment, however, appears balanced when read against the background of the split judgment provided by Frederick’s contemporaries, who either hailed the emperor as the new Messiah, or railed against him as the Antichrist, according to their Ghibelline or Guelph allegiance, respectively. Frederick himself appears to have lent support to these rumors by having himself portrayed as a Christ/Antichrist figure seated in Judgment on the gate of Capua (Fengler and Stephany). As a lawmaker and state reformer, Frederick’s activity expressed itself primarily in the administration of the Kingdom of Sicily. In Melfi, in 1231, he promulgated the Constitutiones Regni Siciliae (The Constitutions of the Kingdom of Sicily). Drafted with the help of jurisconsults from the universities of Bologna and Paris, this code of law was designed to recuperate foundational elements of Justinian’s law by secularizing and centralizing the administration of the state. Frederick’s interest in modernizing the juridical system of the empire was also

mirrored in his promotion of legal studies in the universities of Salerno and of Naples (founded in 1224). His activity of reorganization was not limited to the realm of the law; Frederick took particular care in implementing a massive fortification program (especially in Apulia, where the magnificent Castel del Monte still stands), carefully organized farming and the construction of domus solaciorum (homes for recreation) that made his kingdom a rich and greatly admired model for contemporary rulers. De arte venandi cum avibus (The Art of Hunting with Birds, 1248) is a massive Latin treatise on the sport of falconry that is comprised of 1,384 dense chapters. Frederick worked on this project until his death, and the text we now possess is the result of several additions by his son Manfred. Aristotelian in inspiration, the treatise ‘‘is a synthesis of theory and practice’’ (Anna Laura Trombetti Budriesi, editor, De arte venandi cum avibus, 2002) that relies on previous literature as well as on the direct experience the author had developed in his lifelong practice of the art. The goal of the work is twofold: On the one hand, it is a practical manual, containing advice on how to capture, train, and use birds of prey in hunting; on the other, it strives to raise the ‘‘mechanical art’’ of venery to the level of ‘‘natural science,’’ an instrument of knowledge and understanding of the nature of birds. An ethical and political dimension is also present in the treatise: addressed to the nobility, the class for which hunting with birds of prey was a status symbol. It sketched a portrait of the perfect artifex (the falconer) as a man of disinterested diligence and rigid bodily and mental discipline. The De arte may be read as a manual for the education of the perfect court functionary, even of a ruler (Franco Cardini, ‘‘Federico II e il De arte venandi cum avibus,’’ 1986). Of Frederick’s literary activity, only three poetic compositions that are generally accepted as authentic remain: the two canzoni, ‘‘De la mia dis¨ıanza’’ (Of My Desire), and ‘‘Poi ch’a voi piace, amore’’ (Since This Is Your Will, Love)—both characterized by the marked use of the Provencal structural artifice of coblas capfinidas (the repetition of a word from the last line of a stanza in the first line of the next one)—and the sonnet ‘‘Misura, providenza e meritanza’’ (Measure, Foresight, and Merit), which deals with the topic of nobility and wealth. Beyond their poetic merits, which have been variously judged, these compositions bear witness to Frederick’s involvement as practitioner as well as initiator of the Sicilian School. Thematically and stylistically they are close to the 781

FREDERICK II OF HOHENSTAUFEN experiments of the acknowledged caposcuola, Jacopo da Lentini. Of particular interest is the sonnet, because it addresses the same topic for which Dante invokes (and eventually dismisses) Frederick’s authority in Convivio IV. While it is not the source for Dante’s oft-quoted sententia (actually of Aristotelian origin), the poem is witness to the intertwining of sociopolitical and literary issues in the pronouncements of this emperor-poet.

Biography Born in Jesi on December 26, 1194. King of Sicily and Naples in 1198; Holy Roman Emperor, 1220; King of Jerusalem in 1227. In 1209, marries Constance of Aragon (daughter of Alphonso II); in 1225, Isabel Yolanda of Brienne (daughter of John, count of Brienne, and King of Jerusalem); in 1235, Isabel of England (sister of Henry III). Of his children, the most important are his two sons: Henry, German king, and Conrad, who will occupy the throne of Sicily after him; as well as his two illegitimate sons: Enzio, King of Sardinia, and Manfred, regent of Sicily first for Conrad and then for Conrad’s son, Conradin. Excommunicated three times for his opposition to papal policies, leads a diplomatic rather than military crusade in 1228. Having crossed over to the Holy Land with a small army, negotiates with the sultan, Malik-al-Kamil, an advantageous treaty, through which the Christians recover Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Nazareth, and Saint John of Acre (1229). Issues the Constitutions of Melfi (1231). In the 20 crucial years of his reign in Italy, wages repeated wars against the Lombard communes of various fortune: in 1237, defeats the Lombard League at Cortenuova; in 1248, his armies suffer a decisive blow at the siege of Parma. Retreats to the South, having isolated himself from his closest aides (in particular, Pier de le Vigne); dies in Castelfiorentino di Lucera on December 13, 1250. Buried in the cathedral church in Palermo. SIMONE MARCHESI Selected Works Letters and Political Documents Huillard-Bre´holles, Jean Louis Alphonse, Historia diplomatica Frederici II, Paris: Plon, 1852–1891 (a 12-volume collection of charters and other materials). The Liber Augustalis; or, Constitutions of Melfi, promulgated by the Emperor Frederick II for the Kingdom of Sicily in 1231, edited and translated by James M. Powell, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1971.

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Treatise The art of Falconry being the ‘‘De arte venandi cum avibus’’ of Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, edited and translated by Casey A. Wood and F. Marjorie Fyfe, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1943. De arte venandi cum avibus, edited by Anna Laura Trombetti Budriesi, Bari: Laterza, 2002.

Poems ‘‘Le rime della scuola siciliana. Introduzione, testo critico e note,’’ edited by Bruno Panvini, Florence: Olschki, 1962, vol. I. ‘‘Poeti italiani della corte di Federico II,’’ edited by Bruno Panvini, Naples: Liguori, 1994. ‘‘Rime,’’ edited by Letterio Cassata, Rome: Quiritta, 2001.

Further Reading Abulafia, David, Frederick II: a Medieval Emperor, London: Penguin Press, 1988. Antonelli, Roberto, ‘‘Politica e volgare: Guglielmo IX, Enrico II, Federico II,’’ in Seminario romanzo, Rome: Bulzoni, 1979. Atti del convegno su Dante e la Magna Curia, A cura del Centro di studi filologici e linguistici siciliani. Palermo, Catania, Messina, 7–11 novembre 1965. Palermo: Centro di studi filologici e linguistici siciliani, 1967. Bocassini, Daniela, Il volo della mente. Falconeria, e Sofia nel mondo mediterraneo: Islam, Federico II, Dante, Ravenna: Longo, 2003. Cardini, Franco, Castel del Monte, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2000. ———, ‘‘Federico II e il De arte venandi cum avibus,’’ in Sergio Gensini (editor), Politica e cultura nell’Italia di Federico Secondo, Pisa: Pacini Editore, 1986. Federico II e le nuove culture, Atti del XXXI Convegno storico internazionale (Todi 1994), Spoleto: Centro Italiano di Studi sul basso medioevo, 1995. Federico II e le scienze, edited by Pierre Toubert and Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, Palermo: Sellerio, 1994. Fengler, Christie K., and William A. Stephany, ‘‘The Capuan Gate and Pier della Vigna,’’ in Dante Studies, 99 (1981): 145–157. Intellectual life at the court of Frederick II Hohenstaufen, edited by William Tronzo, Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1994. Kantorowicz, Ernest H., Frederick the Second, New York: R. R. Smith, 1931. ———, The King’s Two Bodies, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957. Monteverdi, Angelo, ‘‘Federico II poeta,’’ in Atti del convegno internazionale di studi federiciani, Palermo: Renna, 1952. ———, ‘‘L’opera poetica di Federico II imperatore,’’ in Studi e saggi sulla letteratura italiana dei primi secoli, Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1954. Nel segno di Federico II. Unita` politica e pluralita` culturale del Mezzogiorno, Atti del convegno internazionale di studi della Fondazione Napoli Novantanove, edited by M. Del Treppo, Naples: Bibliopolis, 1989. Willemsen, Carl Arnold, Bibliografia federiciana. Fonti e letteratura storica su Federico II e gli ultimi Svevi. Bari: Societa` di Storia Patria, 1982.

FRENCH INFLUENCES

FRENCH INFLUENCES Italian literary language was born between the thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries, about two centuries after its Neo-Latin counterparts in France and Spain. Latin culture in Italy in fact resisted the influence of the Germanic element for longer, and ecclesiastical Latin was prominent for a long time. This phenomenon explains the learned origins of Italian literary culture, which in the Middle Ages produced masterpieces of European importance including works by Dante, Petrarca, and Boccaccio. However, as a result Italy was indebted to the new Romance cultures, first and foremost to France and its two great cultural regions: the North, cradle of epic poetry, in Langue d’oil, and Provence, birthplace of courtly lyric poetry, in Langue d’oc. Among the French cycles of the chansons de geste, the Cycle de Charlemagne is particularly significant, as is the Chanson de Roland by the anonymous Turoldus (eleventh century) and the Matie`re de Bretagne, the cycle of King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table, most importantly elaborated by the poet Chre´tien de Troyes (active 1160–1190). In Italy, the poems and romances related to these cycles are re-elaborated in the Franco-Veneto language in works by Minocchio da Padova (late thirteenth century) and Niccolo` da Verona (fourteenth century). A manuscript of Turoldus’ work (Manuscrit de Venise) is held at the Marciana Library of Venice (the fundamental version is the Manuscrit d’Oxford). The Matie`re de Bretagne, whose written tradition is recorded by Geoffrey of Monmouth (ca. 1100–ca. 1155) in Historia Regum Britanniae (ca. 1136), was re-elaborated by the Anglo-French writer Robert Wace (late twelfth century) into a romance, a large repertory of legends and fables interwoven with elements from Celtic mythology. Such romances, vulgarized in Italy in a Frenchified vernacular, were, as Erich Auerbach notes in Mimesis (1946), the delights of the aristocracy. Indeed, in Dante’s Comedia (Divine Comedy, ca. 1305–1321), in Inferno V, Francesca da Rimini was reading a Breton romance when her familiar tragedy precipitated. The influence of the French epic endured in Italy, culminating, during the Renaissance, in Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato (Orlando in Love, 1482–1483/ 1495), which fuses the Carolingian and the Breton

cycle, and in Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (The Frenzy of Orlando, 1532). French courtly poetry shapes learned Italian poetry from the time of its origins in the Sicilian School of Poetry, at the court of Frederick II of Hohenstaufen (1194–1250), and in the Tuscan lyric of the Dolce Stil Novo, led by Guido Guinizzelli and Dante. The cultured, aristocratic and Hermetic (trobar clus) Provenc¸al poetic language theorized by Andre´ le Chapelain (late twelfth century) is spread by French troubadours who lived in Italy, such as Bernard de Ventadour (ca. 1145–ca. 1195), Bertrand de Born (ca. 1140–ca. 1215), and Jaufre´ Rudel (mid-twelfth century). This tradition continues on the threshold of Humanism in the work of Francesco Petrarca, and re-emerges in the Petrarchism of the Renaissance and the writing of Torquato Tasso. The scientific encyclopedia Li Livres dou Tre´sor (The Books of the Treasure, ca. 1265) by Brunetto Latini, teacher of Dante, is written in langue d’oil. Latini was influenced by the great French allegorical and didactic poem Le Roman de la Rose (1235– 1305) by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meung. Marco Polo’s Divisament dou Monde, or its alternative title Il Milione, dictated to Rustichello da Pisa in 1298, is also composed in langue d’oil. Other genres show evidence of French influence. The fabliaux (from fable in the vernacular of Picardy) are one of the sources of Boccaccio’s Decameron (ca. 1373) characterized as they are by a strong realism and by a range of descriptions of customs. The dramatic scenes that in Italy developed into the medieval sacra rappresentazione (mystery play) derive from the French tropes of the ninth century, chanted commentaries on liturgical texts. The most ancient French example of this genre is Le Jeu d’Adam (twelfth century), by an anonymous writer. Miracles and Myste`res flourished in France in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, and influenced Italian culture up to Gabriele D’Annunzio, whose numerous borrowings from French literature are well-known. The Age classique of Louis XIV had long-lasting repercussions for Italian literature, which in the seventeenth century was extraneous to the European cultural scene. Rene´ Descartes’ Le Discours de la 783

FRENCH INFLUENCES me´thode (1637), Franc¸ois La Rochefoucauld’s Les Maximes (1665), Jean La Bruye`re’s Les Caracte`res de The´ophraste (1688), Janse´nius’ Augustinus (1640), the theologians of Port-Royal, the famous seventeenth-century preachers Jacques-Benigne Bossuet and Louis Bourdaloue, Jean de La Fontaine’s Les Fables (1668–1694), the French theater of that century, and Nicolas Boileau’s L’Art poe´tique (1674) are fundamental French contributions to Italian culture. The e´sprit classique and the will to systematize affected the works of great writers (Alessandro Manzoni in particular) and the debate on literary theory up to the twentieth century. The age of Arcadia, opposed to the Baroque style, was mostly in tune with French Cartesianism, which inspired the Italian poetics of the early eighteenth century. Ludovico Antonio Muratori inherited the principle of ‘‘Reason’’ from French Classicism, as did Gian Vincenzo Gravina and Antonio Conti. The Giornale de’ letterati d’Italia (1710–1740) published in Venice by Apostolo Zeno, author of a reform of melodrama that (following the example of Corneille and Racine) paved the way for the works of Pietro Metastasio, was one of the many learned Italian periodicals that took as their model the Parisian Le Journal des Savans, founded in 1665. French comic models, especially Molie`re’s, are evident in works by Jacopo Nelli (1673–1767), Girolamo Gigli (1660– 1722), and Scipione Maffei (1675–1755). Carlo Goldoni’s reform must be understood in this context of simplified, renewed taste. French influence is particularly evident in the works written by Goldoni during his exile in Paris: Le Bourru bienfaisant (The Well Meaning Crouch, 1771) and L’Avare fastueux (The Ostentatious Miser, 1772). His Me´moires (1787) are also in French. During the eighteenth century, the gallant tale in verses in imitation of the French model became popular and had many followers such as Giambattista Casti (1724–1803). It was above all the culture of the Enlightenment that brought Italy into the wake of French culture. The French influence upon the poetics of sensism, through Etienne Condillac, is remarkable. It had followers among the Italian exponents of the Enlightenment, particularly in Neapolitan and Lombard circles, in the journal Il Caffe` (1764– 1766) with Cesare Beccaria and Pietro Verri, the author of the Discorso sull’indole del piacere e del dolore (Discourse on the Nature of Pleasure and Pain, 1773), and eventually influenced Giacomo Leopardi in the nineteenth century. The rationalist and Cartesian France of Voltaire, Montesquieu, 784

Diderot, Helve´tius, the pre-Romantic Rousseau, the authors of the famous Encyclope´die, and the French language itself became spokesmen in Italy for a new culture. Indeed, in his Misogallo (The Anti-Frenchman, 1814), Vittorio Alfieri polemically attacks the spread of ‘‘gallicisms.’’ However, it is important to recall that in Italy both the French tongue and the more progressive wing of French culture have been the vehicle of free communication in other periods as well, such as during Fascism. This influence is documented by the most important reviews of the early twentieth century such as La voce and Solaria. Massimo Bontempelli published the first issues of the review 900 in French in 1926, while Elio Vittorini founded Il Politecnico (1945–1947) in tune with Jean-Paul Sartre’s notion of engagement. Jacobin theater, inspired by the French Revolution, was particularly important between 1796 and 1800. In terms of the quality of his plays, Camillo Federici (1749–1802) was its principal proponent, although he was more versed in the genre of the come´die larmoyante that had been initiated by Pierre-Claude Nivelle de La Chausse´e in France in the eighteenth century. Jacobin theater gave birth to patriotic theater, to Risorgimento literature, and more recently offered ideological suggestions for new interpretations of Marxist, Gobettian, and Gramscian inspiration. Born out of the Querelle des The´aˆtres of the eighteenth century, it inspired a modern moralizing project, developing new ways to involve the audience through feˆtes (inspired by Rousseau’s utopia in his 1758 Lettre a` D’Alembert sur les spectacles). More recent examples of this tendency in France include Romain Rolland and his The´aˆtre du Peuple (1903), Jacques Copeau, creator of the anticonventional The´aˆtre du Vieux Colombier (1913), whose pedagogic program would inspire Silvio D’Amico’s Accademia d’arte drammatica in 1935, and Firmin Ge´mier, founder of the The´aˆtre National Populaire (1920) that became well-known due to Jean Vilar (1912–1971). The exchanges between France and Italy during the Romantic period are significant. Madame de Stae¨l acted as intermediary in her essay Sull’utilita` delle traduzioni (On the Usefulness of Translations, 1816), published by the journal Biblioteca italiana, which gave rise to the polemic between classicists and Romantics. Both countries were involved in theorizing Romanticism and reciprocal influences abound: between Ermes Visconti (1784– 1841) and Stendhal, between Manzoni, with the Lettre a` M. Ch*** sur l’unite´ de temps et de lieu

FRENCH INFLUENCES dans la trage´die (Letter to M. Ch*** on the Unity of Time and Space in Tragedy, 1823) and Victor Hugo, with his Pre´face de Cromwell (1827), between the periodicals Le Globe (1824–1832) and Il Conciliatore (1818–1819). Hyppolite-Adolphe Taine’s literary theory, inspired by positivism and absorbed into French naturalism by Auguste Comte, exerted its influence on verismo through the Goncourt brothers, E´mile Zola, and Gustave Flaubert. Indeed, the influence of French realism was felt not only by writers such as Giovanni Verga and Luigi Capuana, but also in a wide sector of Italian narrative literature. The same phenomenon occurred in poetry, but in an antinaturalistic direction. Jules Laforgue, author of Moralite´s le´gendaires (1887), influenced Sergio Corazzini, Guido Gozzano, and all of the crepuscolari poets in his ironic poetry that corrodes Romantic elements. Milanese Scapigliatura did not examine the forms of French Decadentism in depth. In Italy, the apre`s Baudelaire that characterized European culture as a whole was carefully investigated between 1914 and 1916, when all of modern French poetry and literature, including Ste´phane Mallarme´, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Claudel, Charles Pe´guy, and Guillaume Apollinaire, came together in the journal La voce, edited by Giuseppe De Robertis. The poetry of Dino Campana, Camillo Sbarbaro, Arturo Onofri, Vincenzo Cardarelli, and Giuseppe Ungaretti must be understood within the context of this journal. La Ronda (1919–1923), founded by Cardarelli, Emilio Cecchi, and Bruno Barilli, drew from Paul Vale´ry the idea of technical and formal perfection that shaped most of Italian modernism. In it, the French sources are innumerable: It will suffice to mention the influence of surrealism on Massimo Bontempelli, Tommaso Landolfi, and Arturo Loria, on the metaphysical tales of Dino Buzzati, on the symbolism of Nicola Lisi, on the metaphysical and French-speaking Alberto Savinio. The postmodern period in France altered the ‘‘historical’’ reasons of Sartrean engagement, dissolving the forms of the novel a` la Balzac. A degre´ ze´ro de l’e´criture reveals, with Roland Barthes (who thus titles a famous essay of 1953), the linguistic elements of an antihistoricist communication. ´ mile Benveniste, and Algirdas Roman Jakobson, E Greimas were its theorists. In 1960, Philippe Sollers founded the group ‘‘Tel Quel,’’ which numbered poets such as Marcelin Pleynet, Jean-Pierre Faye, Denis Roche, and Jean Thibaudet (it dissolved in 1983). A similar group, ‘‘I Novissimi,’’ was founded

in Italy in 1961, with Alfredo Giuliani, Edoardo Sanguineti, and Antonio Porta (whose poetics are close to that of Faye). In the same period, le nouveau roman, whose initiator was Alain Robbe-Grillet, experimented with new ways of writing in which the visual element (e´cole du regard ) is dominant. Indeed, the collaboration of Robbe-Grillet with Alain Resnais and the affinity between the nouveau roman and the cinematographic nouvelle vague is well-known. The Italian neoavant-garde, which followed Artaud in theater, elaborated a disintegrated narrative language; Renato Barilli, Alberto Arbasino, Elio Pagliarani, and Giorgio Manganelli engaged different experimental forms with clear affinities to their French models. The fiction factory of Georges Pe´rec and the OuLiPo (founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau) influenced Umberto Eco and, afterwards, Stefano Benni and Stefano Bartezzaghi. The experimental Italian novel reached into the early 1990s. A recomposition of forms into a subjective heterogeneity characterizes current literary tendencies in both France and Italy. PAOLA MARTINUZZI Further Reading Auerbach, Erich, Mimesis, Berne: Francke, 1946. Bedarida, Henri and Paul Hazard, L’influence franc¸aise en Italie au dix-huitie`me sie`cle, Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1934. Bessie`re, Jean and Manfred Schmelling (eds.), Litte´rature, modernite´, reflexivite´, Paris: Champion, 2002. Dugast-Portes, Francine, Le Nouveau Roman. Une ce´sure dans l’histoire du re´cit, Paris: Nathan, 2001. Galateria, Daria, Entre nous: incontri di scrittori italiani e francesi del Novecento, Palermo: Sellerio, 2002. Guille´n, Claudio, Entre lo uno y lo diverso. Introduccio´n a lo`a literatura comparada, Barcelona: Crı´tica, 1985. Hazard, Paul, La Re´volution franc¸aise et les lettres italiennes, 1789–1815, Paris: Hachette, 1910. Lelie`vre, Rene´e, Le the´aˆtre dramatique italien en France. 1855–1940, Paris: Colin, 1959. Mangoni, Luisa, Una crisi fine secolo: la cultura italiana e la Francia fra Otto e Novecento, Turin: Einaudi, 1985. Milza, Pierre, Franc¸ais et italien a` la fine du XIXe sie`cle, ´ cole franc¸aise de Rome, 1981. Rome: E ´ mile Zola’s Pagano, Tullio, Experimental Fictions: From E Naturalism to Giovanni Verga’s Verism, Madison (NJ): Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Press, 1999. Puppa, Paolo, ‘‘La coreografia dell’ordine,’’ in Lo spettacolo nella Rivoluzione francese, edited by Paolo Bosisio, Rome: Bulzoni, 1989. Starobinski, Jean, 1789, Les emble`mes de la raison, Paris: Flammarion, 1973.

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RENATO FUCINI

RENATO FUCINI (1843–1921) Renato Fucini’s career began with the publication of a collection of delicate poetical sketches of everyday life in the Pisan dialect, Cento poesie in vernacolo pisano (One Hundred Poems in the Pisan Vernacular, 1872), under the nom de plume Neri Tanfucio, an anagram of his own name. It was appreciated by the critics and intellectuals of the time, including Giuseppe Mazzini, and in literary circles as an original product of wit and a clear sign of interest for popular culture, even though the book did not seem to be related to any particular literary school. His style was close to the medieval and Renaissance Tuscan tradition of the novella, which—from the amusing stories of Boccaccio’s Decameron (1348–1353) to the anonymous Renaissance Tuscan story La novella del grasso legnaiuolo (The Story of the Fat Wood-Seller, 1480) to Enea Silvio Piccolomini’s Historia de duobus amantibus (History of Two Lovers, 1476)—celebrated the passion for every aspect of human life and the love for clever sentences and the wit of the popular burla (joke). Recognizing Fucini’s ability in writing vivid sketches that reveal the truth about a character, a case, or a situation with the minimalistic style of the school of painting known as macchiaioli, the periodical La Rassegna Settimanale hired the writer as a contributor and he published a number of stories then collected in Le veglie di Neri: paesi e figure della campagna toscana (Neri’s Wakes. Towns and Figures of the Tuscan Countryside, 1882). The stories, set in the marshes of the Maremma where Fucini had spent his childhood, describe the microcosm of a country village with its characters and typical activities such as hunting, and the life and destinies of the poor, subjected to the local landowners and the new middle class. The tone is passionate and moving, and uses the register of melancholy, of private memories, and of pity and compassion in recollecting past events and figures. Fucini’s position is opposed to the main literary currents of his age, in particular verismo. As Toni Iermano has pointed out, in Fucini’s works there is ‘‘no clear social criticism,’’ no interest for naturalistic impersonality, no theoretical attention for the ‘‘objective descriptions of human life and of its laws, forms, and forces’’ (Esploratori 786

delle nuove Italie, 2002). Indeed, what predominates in both his more melodramatic and sorrowful stories such as the celebrated ‘‘Il Matto delle giuncaie’’ (The Madman of the Rushes) or ‘‘Vanno in Maremma’’ (They Are Going to Maremma) to the more humorous sketches such as ‘‘La fatta’’ (The Dropping) is the writer’s passion and sadness for human destiny, but also a philosophical acceptance of it, with a delicate, profound interest for the expressive and spiritual worlds of the individuals. A romantic regret for bygone traditions and an ethical impulse are also at the heart of Fucini’s literary project, as in his travel book dedicated to Naples and its community, Napoli ad occhio nudo (Naples to the Naked Eye, 1878). In later years, he continued to cultivate the narrative representation of the vanishing way of life of the Tuscan countryside, publishing two further collections, All’aria aperta: scene e macchiette della campagna toscana (In the Open Air: Scene and Sketches from the Tuscan Countryside, 1897) and Nella campagna toscana (In the Tuscan Countryside, 1908), while a final volume of short stories and recollections, Acqua Passata: storielle e aneddoti della mia vita (Water under the Bridge: Stories and Anecdotes of My Life), appeared posthumously in 1921. As a school inspector, he was also very interested in education and wrote several children’s books and textbooks.

Biography Born in the rural village of Monterotondo Marittimo (Grosseto), in Maremma, where his father served as a municipal doctor, 8 April 1843. Enrolled at the University of Pisa, School of Agriculture, 1859; graduated in 1863. First worked as a civil engineer in Florence and then for the Ministry of Education, acting as a school inspector. In 1901, he began working at the Biblioteca Riccardiana in Florence and was elected member of the Accademia della Crusca. Died in Empoli (Florence), on 25 February 1921. STEFANO ADAMI

FUMETTI Selected Works

Further Reading

Collections Tutti gli scritti, Milan: Trevisini, 1956.

Poetry ‘‘Cento poesie in vernacolo pisano,’’ 1872.

Fiction Le veglie di Neri: paesi e figure della campagna toscana, 1884. All’aria aperta: scene e macchiette della campagna toscana, 1897. Nella campagna toscana, 1908. Acqua passata: storielle e aneddoti della mia vita, 1921. Foglie al vento: novelle, ricordi e altri scritti, 1922. Il ciuco di Melesecche: storielline in prosa e in versi, 1922.

Other Napoli a occhio nudo, 1878. Taccuino di viaggio, 2003.

Adami, Giacomo (editor), Omaggio a Renato Fucini: atti del Convegno di studi Renato Fucini nel centocinquantenario della nascita, Pisa: Goliardica, 1995. Borri, Teresa, Renato Fucini: la vita e le opere, Pescara: Attraverso l’Abruzzo, 1976. Fabiani, Vittorio, A spasso col Fucini, Empoli: Caparrini, 1956. Giusti, Mariangela (editor), Un convegno a Monterotondo in onore di Renato Fucini, Monterotondo Marittimo (Grosseto): Adver Agency, 1993. Iermano, Toni, Esploratori delle nuove Italie. Identita` regionali e spazio narrativo nella letteratura del secondo Ottocento, Naples: Liguori, 2002. Matucci, Elisabetta, and Paola Barbadori Lande (editors), I macchiaioli di Renato Fucini, Florence: Pananti, 1985. Sbrocchi, Leonard, Renato Fucini: l’uomo e l’opera, Florence: D’Anna, 1977. Vettori, Vittorio, ‘‘Renato Fucini,’’ in Letteratura italiana: i minori, vol. 4, Milan: Marzorati, 1962.

FUMETTI In order to outline a history of comics—or fumetti as the medium is known in Italy after the characteristic word balloons that resemble puffs of smoke ( fumo)—it is necessary to remark first on the difficulties of defining both the parameters of the genre and its origins. The term ‘‘comics’’ describes a narrative constituted by the interaction of images in sequential order, usually integrated by a text incorporated directly into the image: a minimal definition that, however, should be open to any number of innovations and variations. The fundamental characteristics of the medium, such as the use of word balloons, the conventions establishing the spatial and temporal relations among the separate panels, the creation of recurring characters, etc., become codified by the beginning of the twentieth century, and a long-standing tradition has associated the birth of comics with the apparition of the character ‘‘Yellow Kid’’ in R. F. Outcault’s series of newspaper cartoons Hogan’s Alley in 1895. However, since the 1970s, numerous historians, from David Kunzle in the United States to Alfredo Castelli in Italy, have challenged this perspective, by suggesting that the Yellow Kid is an important stage in a long process of evolution that

had begun at least two centuries before and possibly even earlier. In Italy, it is possible to identify a number of cultural products in between classical comics and older forms of popular illustrated narrative that have affected in important ways the development of the medium. Thanks to the innovations in printing and in the technology for the reproduction of images, throughout the nineteenth century publishers experimented with publications for children and adolescents, both books and periodicals, in which illustrations had a crucial role. Among them, Il novellino (1899) was the first to present to its Italian audience examples of American comic strips, including, in 1904, a Yellow Kid cartoon. The first giornalino (little newspaper), as such publications came to be known, to include foreign and Italian comic strips on a regular basis, however, was the famous Corriere dei piccoli (The Children’s Courier), founded in 1908 as the counterpart for children of the prestigious newspaper Il corriere della sera. The characteristic feature of the comics of the Corriere dei piccoli, imitated by its competitors, was the rejection of the balloons in favor of often precious and affected rhymed couplets of octosyllabic verses at the foot of the 787

FUMETTI individual panels, thus both attenuating the sometimes caustic humor of the original, in the case of translations, and perpetuating the separation and relative independence of text and images. Furthermore, while in the United States comic strips appeared in newspapers and from their inception they addressed the general public, in Italy instead they were associated with children—an association that still plagues the medium—and often characterized by a pedagogical intent. The work of the Italian illustrators who devoted themselves to these early comics often displays the influence of contemporary artistic modernism, from art nouveau in the case of Antonio Rubino (1880–1964) to Futurism in that of Sto, pseudonym of the versatile Sergio Tofano (1886–1973), best known for his work for the theater, who in 1917 created Il signor Bonaventura, one of the most enduring and beloved characters of the Corriere dei piccoli. By the late 1910s, the educational and propagandistic potential of the fumetti became evident, with magazines like the nationalist periodical for the army La tradotta (The Troop-train) or the socialist Cuore (Heart), founded in 1920 and closed by the Fascist authorities in 1923. As with cinema and the radio, the regime quickly took advantage of the expressive possibilities of comics with Il giornale dei Balilla, named after the Fascist youth organization (retitled Il Balilla after 1925, when it became a supplement of the Fascist daily Il popolo d’Italia). In addition to the established Corriere dei piccoli, the major competitor of Il Balilla for the minds and hearts of young Italians was the Catholic Il giornalino (1924), a remarkably long-lived publication sold not only at newsstands but also directly through the parishes, and strengthened by the unofficial imprimatur of the church. These three periodicals, like their more or less successful competitors, were often characterized by a fundamentally traditionalist ideology that foregrounded family values, obedience to one’s elders or superiors, and, especially in the case of Il Balilla, patriotism and loyalty to the ‘‘Fascist revolution.’’ 1932 constituted a turning point with the publication of two magazines featuring fully developed comics that consistently use balloons and internal captions rather than the external texts typical of their predecessors. The first, Jumbo, presented mostly English material, often Italianicized (a practice that remained widespread well into the 1940s), so that, for instance, Walter Booth’s Rob the Rover received a Fascist makeover, becoming Lucio l’avanguardista. Its good sales demonstrated the appeal of adventure comics for an audience that had 788

yet to be recognized by publishers, namely young adults. On 31 December 1932 the Florentine publisher Nerbini launched Topolino (Mickey Mouse), under the direction of Collodi Nipote (Paolo Lorenzini, 1875–1958), subsequently acquired by Mondadori in 1935 (since 1988, all Disney publications are managed directly by Walt Disney Company Italia). In addition to stories of various Disney characters, Topolino introduced several American adventure strips as well as some of the best work by Italian authors before the war, such as the western Kit Carson (1937) by Rino Albertarelli (1908– 1974), and one of the first examples of science fiction featuring Italian characters and settings, the series Saturno contro la terra (Saturn Versus the Earth, 1937), coauthored by Cesare Zavattini (1902–1989) with Federico Pedrocchi (1907–1945) and the artist Giovanni Scolari (1882–1956). The continued success of Topolino, which since 1949 features only Disney characters, is indeed remarkable, especially if compared to the relative disinterest in Disney comics in the United States after the heyday of Carl Barks’ Donald Duck between the 1940s and the 1960s. Since the 1950s, the American stories have been supplemented with an increasingly sophisticated Italian production that has resulted in the formation of a sort of Italian Disney ‘‘school’’ whose comics have been distributed in numerous countries, including the United States itself. The comic book that most captured the imagination of readers in the 1930s, however, was Nerbini’s L’avventuroso (The Adventurous, 1934), which published most of the major series of the ‘‘classical age’’ of American comics, from Lee Falk and Phil Davis’ Mandrake to Milton Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates, and Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon, to name only a few. These and other early masters of American adventure strips—Hal Foster, Burne Hogarth—had a lasting influence on Italian artists and writers of the period, although with significant differences due to the distinctive context in which their stories appeared: Working in installments of a certain number of pages, Italian comics creators were in fact free of some of the restrictions imposed by the newspaper comic strip on their American colleagues, and they were thus able to develop specific compositional and narrative strategies. But the cultural influence of American comics was more profound: As Giulio Cuccolini has suggested, by presenting heroes that often escaped the stiflingly nationalist and provincial cultural atmosphere of the Fascist regime, they influenced the youth in a way that is comparable to American literature at the level of high culture. Il vittorioso

FUMETTI (The Victorious, 1937), the Catholic answer to L’avventuroso, never quite matched the sales of its rival, but was equally important because it featured almost exclusively Italian material and formed the testing ground for a whole generation of artists and writers, such as Caesar (Kurt Caesar, 1906– 1974), who, with Romano il legionario (Romano the Legionnaire, 1938), produced one of the most blatant and popular examples of comics as Fascist propaganda; Benito Jacovitti (1923–1997), the creator of a plethora of humorous and surrealistic characters such as the chamomile-drinking cowboy Cocco Bill (1957); and Walter Molino (1915–1997), who abandoned comics after 1941 and became one of the best-known illustrators in Italy with his covers for the weekly La domenica del corriere. As it did with other forms of popular culture, the Fascist regime sought to control the production of comics, first by encouraging the publication of stories that glorified the nation, its history, and its policies (such as the colonial conquest of Ethiopia), then by forbidding the publication of foreign material in 1939 (with the exception of Disney stories, until the entry of the United States into World War II in 1942). The transition to the postwar period is marked by a series of resumptions and discontinuities. American comics reappeared, often in the revived version of prewar periodicals (Il vittorioso, L’intrepido), and some Italian characters survived the political transformations of the country. During this period numerous and cheaply produced publications appeared, often short-lived, in the most diverse genres: comedy, masked heroes, science fiction, war, exotic adventure, mystery, and, most popular of all, western. In the late 1940s and 1950s, two trends are notable: the beginning of the crisis of the traditional giornalino featuring multiple stories and characters (by the early 1970s many closed or were transformed into youth publications also featuring articles on music, sports, etc.) and the emergence of single-character or single-genre comic books, in a variety of sizes and formats; a reduced interest for American characters matched by the increased popularity of Italian comics, usually set in exotic and foreign locales. The great success story of this period is Tex, the longestrunning, single-character comic book in Italian history and a veritable cultural institution, which was created in 1948 by the writer Gianluigi Bonelli (1908–2001) and the artist Aurelio Galleppini (1917–1994), who often signed his work as Galep. Tex rose above its competitors in the overcrowded field of western comics by offering creative and complex stories, illustrated with great realism and

dynamism by Galleppini. Significantly, Tex anticipated Hollywood in rethinking the American myth of ‘‘the conquest of the West.’’ Bonelli was also the creator of numerous other characters, including Il vendicatore dell’ovest, Hondo, El Kid (illustrated by Dino Battaglia), and Davy Crockett. In the 1960s, the cultural status and the relationship of the medium with its audience undergoes a series of major transformations. During the 1950s, educators and pedagogues increasingly saw comics as a threat to the social and scholastic maturation of young readers, and a number of bills were unsuccessfully introduced in Parliament in order to censor fumetti. Publishers responded by adopting a self-imposed code of conduct (not unlike that of the ‘‘Comic Code Authority’’ in the United States), which was indicated by the insignia ‘‘GM’’ (Garanzia morale, ‘‘Pledge of Morality’’). The debate reignited in 1962 with the appearance of Diabolik, written by Angela and Luciana Giussani. Diabolik, which featured a master criminal a` la Fantomas or Rocamble as the eponymous ‘‘hero,’’ initiated a fundamentally Italian genre, the fumetto nero (dark comics). With the publication in 1964 of Kriminal and Satanik, two series written by Max Bunker (Luciano Secchi, 1939–) and drawn by Magnus (Roberto Raviola, 1939–1996), the original theme of crime was supplemented by violence (bordering on sadism), explicit sexual situations, and a penchant for the macabre. The erotic element was cultivated by the second major current of popular comics that emerged during the 1960s: pornographic or ‘‘sexy’’ fumetti for adults. At the same time, the medium is recognized as a mainstream cultural expression. Fans and collectors research the history of comics, and promote fan clubs and publications, which are often remarkable for their philological rigor. Sociologists, psychologists, semioticians, and art and literary historians initiate a serious critical debate, with numerous public initiatives: exhibitions, seminars, conferences, and works such as Umberto Eco’s essays on Superman and Peanuts in Apocalittici e integrati (1964). In 1962, Giovanni Gandini founded Linus, the first comics magazine intended for a mature reader. Besides American strips (notably, Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts), it featured material by Italian authors and critical essays by contributors such as Oreste Del Buono, Elio Vittorini, and Eco. Linus and its less fortunate imitations (Sgt. Kirk, Eureka, Il Mago) signal the emancipation of comics from the ghetto of purely escapist and entertaining literature for children. The 1960s are also a decade marked by experimentation and the 789

FUMETTI birth of the fumetto d’autore (auteur comics). In 1965, Valentina, the most famous character created by Guido Crepax (1933–2003), made her debut in Linus, and soon became the protagonist of a series of oneiric, surrealistic, and erotic stories. Crepax breaks with many of the conventions of the medium and develops a fluid and psychedelic style (at times self-complacently Baroque), which is influenced by contemporary art. In 1969, he published L’astronave pirata (The Pirate Starship) and La casa matta (The Mad House), which marks the appearance of a new character, Bianca. For publisher Franco Maria Ricci, he also adapted Histoire d’O and SacherMasoch’s La venere in pelliccia (Venus in Furs). In 1967, Hugo Pratt (1927–1995) creates Una ballata del mare salato (A Ballad of the Salt Sea), first published in Sgt. Kirk, where he introduces his most popular character: Corto Maltese, wanderer and adventurer, protagonist of magical and nostalgic stories set around World War I. Free of any false moralism or hypocrisy, Valentina and Corto Maltese reflect the nonconformist and critical temper of the countercultural movements of the 1960s. The more radical phenomenon of American ‘‘underground comix’’ finds its counterpart in Italy in a series of satirical and visionary magazines of the 1970s, which mix comics, cartoons, and other types of texts and illustrations: Cannibale (Cannibal, 1977), Il male (Evil, 1978), and Frigidaire (1980) established Tanino Liberatore (1953–), Filippo Sco`zzari (1946–), Stefano Tamburini (1955–1986), and Andrea Pazienza (1956–1988) as symbols of the young generation of 1977. Especially Pazienza’s characters (Pentothal, Zanardi) represented their anxieties and dysfunctions. Popular comics also find new expressions. Max Bunker and Magnus’ Alan Ford (1969), about a ragtag group of secret agents whose comical adventures display a cutting satirical edge, is one of the enduring successes of the 1960s. In the 1970s, new characters are imported from the United States (Marvel superheroes, most notably); new periodicals are founded, including more mature versions of the giornalini (e.g., Lanciostory, 1975); more complex types of popular comics are launched, such as the poetic and realistic western series Ken Parker, created by writer Giancarlo Berardi (1949–) and artist Ivo Milazzo (1947–) in 1977. A new generation of Italian auteurs emerge. Among them, Milo Manara (1945–), best known for his ironic and erotic tales, and for his collaborations with Hugo Pratt and with Federico Fellini; Vittorio Giardino (1946–), the creator of Max Friedman, protagonist of stories of espionage set against the 790

political background of the 1940s; Lorenzo Mattotti (1954–), known for his original pictorial style poised between Expressionism and abstraction. In the 1980s, however, the market undergoes a decline, resulting in a drastic cut in publications, particularly the ones for younger readers. The launching of new and more sophisticated magazines for adults (Orient Express, 1982; Comic Art, 1984) does not compensate for the losses. In 1986, the publishing house Bonelli produced the phenomenal Dylan Dog by Tiziano Sclavi (1953–), a black-and-white horror series with profoundly humane characters, inventive plots, and rich intertextual and metaliterary references. Dylan Dog is an investigator of the paranormal, accompanied in his adventures by a sidekick who looks remarkably like Groucho Marx. The extraordinary critical and popular success of the series is in great part responsible for the renewed interest in the medium during the 1990s, when publications in the most varied formats and for the most diverse audiences appear. At the same time, public initiatives (such as comics fairs and prizes) as well as the consolidation of a critical tradition with specialized journals, such as the veteran Fumo di china (Ink Smoke, 1978), have established the cultural legitimacy of the fumetti. At the beginning of the new century, the most significant phenomenon is perhaps the more extensive involvement with comics by well-known writers. If the publication of Dino Buzzati’s Poema a fumetti (Comic Book Poem) was viewed in 1969 as a kind of literary stunt, Eco’s La misteriosa fiamma della regina Loana (Queen Loana’s Mysterious Flame, 2004) was not. Today, the collaboration of successful novelists such as Carlo Lucarelli, Valerio Evangelisti, and Nicolo` Ammaniti with artists Onofrio Catacchio (1964–), Francesco Mattioli (1973–), and Davide Fabbri attests to the versatility and the newfound status of the fumetti. LUCA SOMIGLI

Further Reading Barbieri, Daniele, I linguaggi del fumetto, Milan: Bompiani, 1992. Becciu`, Leonardo, Il fumetto in Italia, Florence: Sansoni, 1971. Bertieri, Claudio, Fumetti all’italiana: Le fiabe a quadretti 1908–1945, Rome: Comic Art, 1989. Bertusi, Daniele, Tiziano Sclavi, Fiesole (Florence): Cadmo, 2000. Beseghi, Emy, and Antonio Faeti (editors), La scala a chiocciola. Paura, horror, finzioni: dal romanzo gotico a Dylan Dog, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1993.

FUTURISM Bono, Gianni, Guida al fumetto italiano, 1994, 2nd ed., Milan: Epierre, 2003. Boschi, Luca, Frigo, valvole e balloons: Viaggio in vent’anni di fumetto italiano d’autore, Rome: Theoria, 1997. Brancato, Sergio, Fumetti: Guida ai comics nel sistema dei media, Roma: Datanews, 1994. Carabba, Claudio, Il fascismo a fumetti, Rimini: Guaraldi, 1973. Castelli, Alfredo, Aspettando Yellow Kid: Il fumetto prima dell’industria del fumetto, Lucca: Museo Italiano del Fumetto, 2004. Cuccolini, Giulio C., ‘‘Profilo storico-critico del fumetto in Italia,’’ in Enciclopedia mondiale del fumetto, edited by Maurice Horn and Luciano Secchi, Milan: Editoriale Corno, 1978. Eco, Umberto, Apocalittici e integrati, Milan: Bompiani, 1964. Faeti, Antonio, La freccia di Ulceda: Di fumetti e altro, Rome: Comic Art, 1990.

Faeti, Antonio, Manifesti di Mattotti, Milan: Nuages, 2002. Favari, Pietro, Le nuvole parlanti: Un secolo di fumetti tra arte e mass media, Bari: Dedalo, 1996. Fossati, Franco, Fumetti, Milan: Mondadori, 1992. Kunzle, David, History of the Comic Strip, 2 vols., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973 and 1990. Laterza, Rossella and Marisa Vinella, Le donne di carta: Personaggi femminili nella storia del fumetto, Bari: Dedalo, 1980. Sco`zzari, Filippo, Prima pagare poi ricordare. Da «Cannibale» a «Frigidaire»: Storia di un manipolo di ragazzi geniali, Rome: Castelvecchi, 1997. Sessa, Maurizio, La bottega delle nuvole: La storia del fumetto da Nerbini ai disegnatori toscani, Florence: Edizioni Medicea, 1995. Spinazzola, Vittorio, L’immaginazione divertente: Il giallo il rosa il porno il fumetto, Milan: Rizzoli, 1995.

FUTURISM Futurism was founded by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944) in 1909 as a literary movement, only to expand soon after to include other arts such as painting, sculpture, architecture, music, theater, photography, cinema, and, to a certain degree, politics. The inaugural mapping of Futurism as a literary movement appeared in Marinetti’s manifesto, Fondazione e manifesto del Futurismo (The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism), published, in French, on 20 February 1909 in Le Figaro. Futurist aesthetics has its roots in the anticonformism and irrationalism that permeated literature, the arts (symbolism, Impressionism, cubism), and philosophy (Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, Benedetto Croce) at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as in the new developments in science and technology. In a literary sense, the sources of these thematics can be found in the nineteenth century, in the works of the poe`tes maudits (damned poets) and various decadents, especially the likes of Jules Laforgue and Emile Verhaeren. Soon after the publication of Marinetti’s founding manifesto, other more specific manifestos appeared before his technical manifesto: Manifesto dei pittori futuristi (Manifesto of Futurist Painters, 1910), Manifesto dei musicisti futuristi (Manifesto of Futurist Musicians, 1910), Manifesto dei drammaturghi

futuristi (Manifesto of Futurist Playwrights, 1911), and Manifesto tecnico della scultura futurista (Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture, 1912). With its desire to reject tradition and all its representatives in favor of a more modern and technological modus vivendi and ars operandi, Futurism figures as the first twentieth-century avantgarde of the Western world, and it subsequently influenced most other European movements, from Russian Futurism to dadaism, and surrealism, to name a few. In addition, the iconoclastic declaration of aggressiveness and defiance of Marinetti’s original manifesto had a curious side-effect: It seemed to launch a trend of manifesto writing that expanded beyond the Italian movement to these other European avant-gardes, many of whom eventually perpetuated their own genres of manifesto writing in the decades to follow. The main themes of Futurism, as outlined in Marinetti’s founding manifesto, included anarchical vitalism, love for danger, rebellion against passe´isme or passatismo (love for the past), the destruction of academies and museums, the achievements of the technological civilization, the machine as a symbol of the new aesthetics, speed, contempt of women, and violence as an expression of vital impulse. According to Marinetti, the various developments 791

FUTURISM of technology produced profound changes in both the physical world and the human psyche. The world acquired a new dimension in speed that, in its various manifestations—trains, automobiles, airplanes, telegraph, telephone—revolutionized the traditional way of life, as well as the aesthetic perception of it. Marinetti encapsulated his new aesthetic principle, the ‘‘bellezza della velocita`’’ (beauty of speed) when he declared that ‘‘un automobile ruggente [...] e` piu` bello della Vittoria di Samotracia’’ (a roaring car [...] is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace) (Apollonio, Futurist Manifestos, 1973). Marinetti, consequently, raised technology to a symbol of unmitigated vitalism. The Futurist aesthetics of speed reflected the poetic perception of a chaotic universe, which allowed the writer to express simultaneously the complexity of the whole by means of verbal syntheses. Chaos was elevated to the status of a poetic principle and paradoxically incorporated into a carefully thought-out system based on the concept of simultaneity. Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916) and the other Futurist painters, for instance, defined during this period their goal as ‘‘la simultaneita` degli stati d’animo nell’opera d’arte. [...] Il che significa simultaneita` d’ambiente, e quindi dislocazione e smembramento degli oggetti, sparpagliamento e fusione dei dettagli, liberati dalla logica comune e indipendenti gli uni dagli altri’’ (the simultaneousness of states of mind in the work of art. [...] This implies the simultaneousness of the ambient, and therefore, the dislocation and dismemberment of objects, the scattering and fusion of details, freed from accepted logic, and independent from one another) (Apollonio, Futurist Manifestos, 1973). Simultaneity therefore is creation. Robert Delauney espoused a similar concept, which later was quoted by Guillaume Apollinaire: ‘‘The simultaneity of colors through simultaneous contrasts and through all the (uneven) quantities that emanate from the colors, in accordance with the way they are expressed within the movement represented—that is the only reality one can construct’’ (Apollinaire on Art: Essays and Reviews, 1902– 1918, 1971). Delauney underscores the importance of colors, the artist’s primary medium of expression. In applying this concept of simultaneity to poetic invention, one shifts the emphasis to words and how they relate to each other. The result is thus a series of lines (or verse), often short and abrupt, that do not necessarily follow any discursive or logical unity. These lines may consist of disconnected sentences, mere phrases, or single words, if not mere parts thereof. 792

The Manifesto tecnico della letteratura futurista (Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature, 1912) was the first specific articulation of the literary aesthetics of Futurism. It was followed by several other ‘‘technical’’ declarations, among them Risposta alle obiezioni (Answer to the Objections, 1912), Distruzione della sintassi – Immaginazione senza fili—Parole in liberta` (Destruction of Syntax—Wireless Imagination—Words in Freedom, 1913), and Lo splendore geometrico e meccanico e la sensibilita` numerica (Geometric and Mechanical Splendor and the Numerical Sensibility, 1914). The Futurists advocated the destruction of traditional poetic language regulated by the laws of causality in favor of a new language based on intuition. Most significant are the rejection of the pronoun I and the use of verbs only in the infinitive form. The elements superimposed on language by a logical structure (conjunctions, adverbs, adjectives, verbal conjugations, and punctuation) were then eliminated, and the reduction of language to its essential parts (substantives and verbs in the infinitive) thereby provided the poet with a code system capable of bridging the gap between perception and expression. This new poetic language consisted of parole in liberta` or words in freedom related to each other by analogy, according to the principle of ‘‘Immaginazione senza fili’’ (wireless imagination), that is, without the aid of syntactical connecting ‘‘wires.’’ The juxtaposition of parole in liberta` generated a ‘‘catena di analogie’’ (chain of analogies) that usurped the function that was proper to syntax, as it connected by simultaneous intuition what was once connected by means of a logical process. Freed hence from the prison of traditional syntax, the words in freedom were supposed to communicate immediately the physical qualities of the object (its color, weight, odor, dynamism). The ‘‘distruzione della sintassi’’ (destruction of syntax) was followed by the ‘‘rivoluzione tipografica’’ (typographical revolution) (Apollonio, Futurist Manifestos, 1973), as words in freedom were visually emphasized by the use of different fonts and inks. The creation of tables of words in freedom followed, where words were no longer arranged in a linear succession but composed figuratively in order to form a picture, thereby constituting the first examples of concrete poetry. Along with literature, painting and sculpture proved equally significant in the early years of Futurism. Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carra`, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, and Gino Severini authored two important proclamations on painting, La pittura futurista. Manifesto tecnico (Futurist

FUTURISM Painting. Technical Manifesto, 1910) and Les exposants au public (The Exhibitors to the Public, 1912), while Boccioni composed his Manifesto tecnico della scultura futurista. Paintings such as The City Rises (Boccioni, 1910), Memories of the Night (Russolo, 1911), Funeral of the Anarchist Galli (Carra`, 1912), and Self Portrait (Severini, 1912) all tried to convey in some manner the tenets espoused in the manifestos, though one clearly notices the influence of cubism as well as a sprinkling of neoimpressionism. With regard to sculpture, the two pieces that best exemplify the Futurist aesthetic are surely Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913) and Balla’s Boccioni’s Fist—Lines of Force (1915). Futurism, a particularly urban-based movement, glorified the industrial cities of the north— Turin, Genoa, Milan—and scorned museum cities, especially Venice, Florence, and Rome. In this sense, then, architecture proved to be an exciting Futurist enterprise, though short-lived, as Antonio Sant’Elia, its main exponent, died in battle in 1916. He was much more a theorist than a practitioner and his drawings were exhibited in 1914 with the group Nuove Tendenze, of which he was a founder. This exhibition proved important for a number of reasons: first, it demonstrated how Sant’Elia’s architectural concepts were consonant with the Futurist aesthetic; second, it completed the list of disciplines (e.g., literature, painting, sculpture) to which architecture had yet to be added (it had remained, so to speak, a vacant field); third, the exhibition came with its own ‘‘manifesto,’’ Sant’Elia having composed his theoretical Messaggio, which Marinetti eventually re-edited into the manifesto L’architettura futurista (Futurist Architecture, 1914). The headquarters of Futurism were in Milan, where several years before the birth of the movement Marinetti had already established a journal, Poesia (1905–1909), and, soon afterwards, a publishing house under the imprint Edizioni Futuriste di Poesia, financed by Marinetti himself. The aim of Poesia was to acquaint the Italian public with contemporary poetry outside of Italy, especially symbolism. ‘‘Edizioni Futuriste di Poesie,’’ in turn, was dedicated to the publication of Futurist works and manifestos. Some of the poets who subscribed to Futurism in the initial years (1909–1915) include: Luciano Folgore (1888–1966), Corrado Govoni (1884–1965), Paolo Buzzi (1874–1956), Francesco Cangiullo (1888–1986), Enrico Cavacchioli (1885–1954), and Auro D’Alba (1888– 1965). Most of them were represented in the first

anthology of Futurist poetry, I poeti futuristi (The Futurist Poets, 1912). Three other writers, Giovanni Papini (1881–1956), Ardengo Soffici (1879–1965), and Aldo Palazzeschi (1885–1974), also major theorists and practitioners of what was to be considered Florentine Futurism associated with the Florentine magazine Lacerba (1913– 1915), and gave their support to Futurism in the early years of the movement (1909–1915), only to disavow it publicly: Palazzeschi in 1914 in a Dichiarazione (Declaration) in La Voce, and the three together with a critical piece in Lacerba, Futurismo e Marinettismo (Futurism and Marinettism, 1915). If it is easy to establish the birth date of Futurism, 1909, with Marinetti’s first manifesto, it is much more difficult to determine the date of its death. It is certain that the decline of the first, truly revolutionary, phase of Futurism coincided with the Futurists’ involvement with the interventionist movement and their participation in World War I. After the war, the original group disintegrated, and a new generation of poets assembled around Marinetti. The poetry that appeared in the anthology I nuovi poeti futuristi (New Futurist Poets, 1925) is, for the most part, a simulationrepetition of the earlier Futurist aesthetics. The movement lost its force as a countercultural phenomenon in this later stage, and, although Futurist works continued to appear until the early 1940s (its most notable results were theatrical texts, the so-called Futurist ‘‘syntheses’’), Futurism a´ la Marinetti was co-opted by the Fascist regime. The early proponents of the movement saw in Futurism the possibility of again bestowing upon Italy its former primary role in the Western world, making it once again both a political and cultural power, with its new aesthetic as both a way of life as well as a new mode of cultural productions. The authors of the Manifesto dei pittori futuristi (Boccioni, Carra`, Russolo, Balla, Severini) perhaps best summarized the movement’s philosophy early on. According to them, through the exaltation and creation of a modern and contemporary, technological society, early twentieth-century Italy was to become the capital of Western culture. In order to do so, it also had to detach itself emotionally from its past, abandon the ‘‘vile pigrizia’’ (foul laziness) of those who depend on tradition and replace it with what Futurists considered living art, accomplished through the ‘‘tangibili miracoli della vita contemporanea’’ (tangible miracles of contemporary life) (Apollonio, Futurist Manifestos, 1973). The impact of Futurism in its first stage was especially felt not only in all of Europe but also in 793

FUTURISM other parts of the world, such as North America, Latin America, Japan, and China. Subsequent avant-garde movements, including, in part, the Italian Gruppo ‘63 and the more recent experiments in concrete and visual poetry, are indebted to Futurism. ANTHONY JULIAN TAMBURRI See also: F.T. Marinetti Further Reading Apollinaire, Guillaume, Apollinaire on Art: Essays and Reviews, 1902–1918, edited by Leroy C. Breunig, New York: The Viking Press, 1971. Apollonio, Umbro (editor), Futurist Manifestos, New York: Viking, 1973. Berghaus, Gu¨nter, The Genesis of Futurism: Marinetti’s Early Career and Writings: 1899–1909, Leeds: Society for Italian Studies, 1995. Berghaus, Gu¨nter, Italian Futurist Theatre 1909–1944, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Bohn, Willard, The Other Futurism. Futurist Activity in Venice, Padua, and Verona, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004.

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Crispolti, Enrico, Storia e critica del Futurismo, Bari: Laterza, 1986. De Maria, Luciano and Laura Biondi (editors), Marinetti e il futurismo, Milan: Garzanti, 1994. Drudi Gambillo, Maria and Teresa Fiore (editors), Archivi del futurismo, 2 vols., Rome: De Luca, 1958–1962. Godoli, Ezio (editor), Il dizionario del futurismo, 2 vols., Florence: Vallecchi, 2001. Martin, Marianne, Futurist Art and Theory 1909–1915, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. I nuovi poeti futuristi, Rome: Poesia, 1925. Perloff, Marjorie, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. I poeti futuristi, Milan: Poesia, 1912. Salaris, Claudia, Storia del futurismo, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1985. Somigli, Luca, Legitimizing the Artist. Manifesto Writing and European Modernism, 1885–1915, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. Tisdall, Caroline, and Angelo Bozzolla, Futurism, London: Thames and Hudson, 1977. Verdone, Mario (editor), Teatro italiano d’avanguardia: drammi e sintesi futuristi, Rome: Officina Edizioni, 1970. Verdone, Mario, II movimento futurista, Rome: Lucarini, 1986. White, John J., Literary Futurism: Aspects of the First Avant Garde, New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

G CARLO EMILIO GADDA (1893–1973) he occasionally accomplished within a single sentence. This trait, present in most of the author’s texts, is easily discerned in the short stories of Disegni milanesi (Milanese Drawings), the subtitle for the 1944 collection L’Adalgisa. Milan emerges as the subject of L’Adalgisa’s sketches, which are not stories, precisely, for Gadda’s preference for the fragment can be seen not only in this work but in the later masterworks as well from Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana (That Awful Mess on Via Merulana; 1957) to La cognizione del dolore (Acquainted with Grief, 1963), where inconclusiveness and incompletion have been well documented. The sketches celebrate ‘‘la Milano che dispare’’ (the Milan that is disappearing); the city’s history; its urban plan, architecture, customs, inhabitants; their foibles and their Lombard dialect. Throughout the ten sketches, Gadda obviously rejoiced in the Lombard idiom, amply demonstrated by the lengthy notes that accompany each story. As Gian Paolo Biasin has detailed in his 1997 essay ‘‘Of Bards, Lombards, and Longobards,’’ the linguistic and etymological work Gadda does in L’Adalgisa is taken up again in his nonfiction meditations on language, especially in the essays Come lavoro (How I Work), Le belle lettere e i contributi espressivi delle tecniche (Belles Lettres and Their Technical Contribution), and Lingua letteraria e lingua dell’uso (Literary Language and Language of Use), all collected in I viaggi la morte (Travels, Death, 1958). As in the later works, where accumulation and chaotic enumeration

Carlo Emilio Gadda’s contribution to Italian literature can be classified as ‘‘modernist,’’ thus aligning the author with other European writers like James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Robert Musil. This denomination owes in no small part to Gadda’s linguistic adventurousness; to the stylistic characteristics of pluralism, fragmentation, and accumulation; and to the convergence of philosophy, science, and the history of ideas and consciousness, which bear testimony to twentieth-century developments in European culture, to the waxing of machine culture, and the waning of an understanding of society and culture based on a humanist’s perception. Before authoring some of the most widely received and acclaimed narrative texts in Italian literature, Gadda trained and worked as an engineer. The apprenticeships for these twin careers make constant appearance throughout his corpus, wherein the author’s technical expertise of the physical world comes together with his profound philological interest. Much has been said of the author’s ‘‘plurilinguism,’’ as critic Gianfranco Contini described his work and that of other linguistically experimental authors (La letteratura italiana, 1974). ‘‘Plurilinguistic’’ also describes the many different Italian regional dialects found in Gadda’s oeuvre, but it should also be understood in a wider context that features a range of formal genres that spans, for example, the grotesque, low comic, and the most exalted; his prose is characterized by virtuosic leaps between these two poles, something 795

CARLO EMILIO GADDA would figure prominently, so too in L’Adalgisa, so that their Lombard names will not be forgotten, Gaddus the narrator reads from the social registry (or telephone directory) of Milan. The collection showcases an engineer’s attention to structural detail, something evident in careful linguistic analysis of the dialect, both in direct and indirect discourse, but also in the sketches’ very composition, particularly the author’s footnotes (at least one of which, concerning the crowning of Napoleon as King of Italy in 1805 in Milan’s cathedral, is five pages in length). The notes, which could be looked on as fragmentary analyses in their own right, play an essential intertextual role: Not only do they emphasize the omnipresence of Gadda/Gaddus, but they also provide information about characters in the sketches that is otherwise unknowable. Stylistically, then, the Gaddian corpus depends on the fragment and its relation to other fragments, which, multiplied and integrated, became his epistemological foundation. In discussing multiplicity, Italo Calvino observed that the multiplication of possibility (known also as accumulation or chaotic enumeration) was the author’s attempt to represent a world that is ‘‘a knot, a tangled skein of yarn’’ (Lezioni americane, 1988). In addition to serving as the author’s stylistic trope, fragmentary multiplicity also figured thematically. Gadda’s explorations of such philosophers as Leibniz and Spinoza may have imposed upon him the need (or predilection for) deep processes of rational thought, but the author’s characters do not always enjoy the same systematic, surety of Dasein, or being-in-the-world. On the contrary, thematically, Gadda’s characters seem caught in the jaws of the dilemma of modernity: The world’s previous (philosophical, geopolitical, aesthetic, socio-cultural) unity is shattered and cannot be pieced together again. Some of the author’s characters laugh it off, but the oeuvre’s most memorable protagonists—Ingravallo in Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana, Gonzalo of La cognizione del dolore—instead give way to violent, desperate rage. Themes that would manifest themselves in more elaborate fashion in the mature works can be seen in Gadda’s earliest writings from the 1920s and 1930s, specifically, in his first published collection of short stories, La Madonna dei filosofi (Philosophers’ Madonna, 1931). An interest in Freud and in psychoanalysis infuses the short story that lends its name to the title of the collection with the sort of self-awareness and irony that also characterized Italo Svevo’s work. The neurotic engineer, 796

Baronfo, finds comfort in much the same way that Boethius does, in the allegorical (and feminized) figure of Philosophy in his Consolatio philosophiae. And if, in La Madonna dei filosofi, there is need for comfort, it is owed to the presence of sorrow, woven here, as elsewhere in Gadda’s work, from parts both autobiographical and fictional. The young Maria Ripamonti’s fiance´ dies in battle, not unlike Gadda’s beloved brother, Enrico, a pilot who was killed in World War I; her life, much like that of the author, is haunted by this absence, which will always be grieved and never resolved. And while the linguistic embroidering for which Gadda would become so well known is here only muted, La Madonna dei filosofi presents ‘‘studi imperfetti’’ (imperfect studies), as Contini noted, which privilege the fragmented and incomplete, a formal choice, not to mention an ethical and philosophical position that Gadda would later embrace fully (La letteratura italiana, 1974). In La cognizione del dolore, mourning and melancholy form two cardinal axes in Gadda’s work. Indeed, the bereavement present in La Madonna dei filosofi (and that the author would make use of once more in his subsequent, more elaborate narratives) matches the elegiac tone set by parts of Il castello di Udine (The Castle at Udine, 1934). This collection of writings divided into four roughly equal parts (‘‘Il castello di Udine,’’ ‘‘Crociera mediterranea,’’ ‘‘Polemiche e pace,’’ and ‘‘Polemiche e pace nel direttissimo’’) predicates on the terse ‘‘Io non fui e non sono un umile fante, ma un soldato d’Italia’’ (I was and am not a simple foot soldier, but a soldier of Italy). And the lost and longed-for object of desire is not only Gadda’s fallen brother but also the evanescing, tragicomic world of the proper Lombard bourgeoisie. As Federica Pedriali has detailed, the mourning of Enrico is attested to by its long evolution in Gadda’s poetry (there are 23 poems in all), vastly underrepresented in Gadda scholarship due to the fact that they were not available for study until the early 1990s (‘‘The Mark of Cain,’’ 1997). The word most closely associated with Enrico is ‘‘sorriso’’ (smile), which hovers in the poems as it does in ‘‘La sala di basalte’’ (The Basalt Room): Un’ombra passa sul ponte.... / Come le ombre di quelli / Che sono passati sopra la terra / Avevano nel viso una luce / E un sorriso’’ (A shadow passes on the bridge.... / like the shadows of those who have passed over the earth / They had a light in their faces / And a smile). Gadda’s literary expression featured more polyvalence than linguistic registers alone. The appearance

CARLO EMILIO GADDA of wide and varied languages (literary and otherwise) corresponded to the ways in which Gadda’s works defy monovalent interpretation. Indeed, in both Quer pasticciaccio de via Merulana and La cognizione del dolore, the works for which he is best known and appreciated, polyvalence is crucial to both the form of the novels as well as their content. Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana is set in 1927 and tells the story of Don Ciccio Ingravallo’s investigation of two crimes that happen within days of each other at the same address in Rome: Via Merulana 219. The first crime is the theft of some costume jewelry from the Venetian Countess Menecacci. The second is the vicious garotting murder of Liliana Balducci, a proper Roman signora who happens to be a friend of the detective’s. As L’Adalgisa did of Milan, Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana makes a subject out of the city of Rome, which seethes with life and explodes with excess, linguistic and otherwise. The fragment, which elsewhere in Gadda’s work has a more felicitous, humorous status, does not enjoy a similar fate in the novel. The detective knows he should approach the crimes rationally, but, in a failure of positivism that thrives elsewhere in Gadda’s works, Ingravallo finds he cannot. As he says to himself at the second crime scene, ‘‘La ragione gli diceva che i due delitti non avevano niente in commune...La ragione gli diceva di studiare separatemente i due casi di ‘palparli’ a fondo ma ognuno per se`’’ (Reason told him that the crimes had nothing to do with each other. Reason told him to study each one separately, massage them in depth but each one independent of the other). But reason cedes to chance or, as Ingravallo notes ‘‘L’ambo non esce cosı` di rado alla ruota di Napoli’’ (The double zero doesn’t come up so rarely in the Naples lottery), and the detective’s feeling is that he should pursue the crimes as related occurrences. In the first version, which Gadda published in installments in Letteratura in late 1946 and 1947, produces an unmistakable murderer and, therefore, a conclusion. However, in the decade that it took for Gadda to transform the shorter work into a novel, the suture that makes the gap between reason and chance disintegrated and, in the Garzanti version of 1957, Ingravallo is able to solve only the lesser of the two crimes and Liliana Balducci’s murderer is, at novel’s end, still unrevealed. In a 1973 interview with Dacia Maraini in E tu chi eri?, Gadda stated that, for him, the novel was complete. When Maraini asked if he meant literarily complete,

Gadda agreed, saying, ‘‘Il poliziotto capisce chi e` l’assassino e questo basta’’ (The police officer understands who the killer is and this is sufficient). The scream of rage, frustration, and sorrow that concludes Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana resurfaces in Gadda’s La cognizione del dolore. Set in the South American country Maradagal, the novel tells the story of Don Gonzalo de Pirobutirro, the rageful scion of a financially failing, fading aristocratic family. La cognizione del dolore also has a curious publication history in which a conclusion was added well after initial publication, making possible multiple interpretations. And the shocking murder of a mother, here the generous and innocuous Senora Elisabetta, is staged once more. The rage, pathos, and grotesque humor evident elsewhere in Gadda’s corpus visit the author’s 1967 essay-pamphlet (it is a hybrid genre), Eros e Priapo: Da furore a cenere (Eros and Priapus: From Fury to Ash, 1967). Thirty years after Fascism, Gadda made of Benito Mussolini a grotesque, larger-thanlife buffoon he lampooned with all the considerable late-career talent he could muster. As Peter Hainsworth shows, in Eros e Priapo Gadda ‘‘oscillates between analysis of Fascism as an objective phenomenon and a mode of writing which is contaminated with at least some of the features he lays at Mussolini’s door’’ (‘‘Fascism and Anti-Fascism in Gadda,’’ 1997). Carlo Emilio Gadda’s oeuvre offers examples of quintessentially twentieth-century themes and problems. The author’s texts all show an ironic dismay at the disintegration of the tenets (social, ethical, philosophical, and scientific) upon which the world, and particularly the embourgeoised, Milanese world of Gadda’s upbringing, was founded.

Biography Carlo Emilio Gadda was born on 18 November 1893 in Milan to Adele Lehr and Francesco Ippolito Gadda. He studied at Milan’s prestigious Parini high school and Istituto Tecnico Superiore. In 1915, Gadda enlisted in the army and fought in Adamello, Isonzo, and Tonale. He was taken as a prisoner of war by the Germans, which would serve as the basis for his Giornale di Guerra e prigionia. His brother Enrico’s death in combat was a loss he mourned for the rest of his life. After finishing his degree, Gadda worked as an electrical engineer in Italy and, from 1922–1924, in Argentina. 797

CARLO EMILIO GADDA Returning to Italy, he went to Rome, where he worked as an engineer for a private company from 1925 until 1931; in this period his literary career began with the Apologia manzoniana (1924), followed by contributions to the journal Solaria. In 1932 Gadda worked in the Vatican, where he remained until 1934. During this period, he published several collections of short stories and, after his mother’s death in 1936, he began writing novels, beginning the first draft of La cognizione del dolore. Gadda moved to Florence in 1940, where he made contact with influential scholars and writers and began writing the first sections of Quer pasticciaccio brutto de Via Merulana, which appeared in serialized form in Letteratura in late 1946 and early 1947. He was awarded the Viareggio prize for Novelle dal ducato in fiamme in 1953. In the second half of the decade, he revised the serialized version of Quer pasticciaccio brutto and presented it to Garzanti Editors in Milan, who published it in 1957. Gadda moved to Rome in 1950, where he lived until his death on May 21, 1973. ELLEN NERENBERG Selected Works Collections Opere, 5 volumes, edited by Dante Isella, Milan: Garzanti, 1988–1993. Romanzi e racconti I, edited by Giorgio Pinotti, Dante Isella and Raffaella Rodondi, Milan: Garzanti, 1988. Romanzi e racconti II, edited by Giorgio Pinotti, Dante Isella and Raffaella Rodondi. Milan: Garzanti, 1989. Saggi Giornali Favole I, edited by Liliana Orlando, Clelia Martignoni, and Dante Isella. Milan: Garzanti, 1991. Saggi Giornali Favole II, edited by Claudio Vela, Gianmarco Gaspari, Giorgio Pinotti, Franco Gavazzeni, Dante Isella, and Maria Antonietta Terzoli, Milan: Garzanti, 1992. Scritti Vari e postumi, edited by Andrea Silvestri, Claudio Vela, Dante Isella, Paola Italia, and Giorgio Pinotti, Milan: Garzanti, 1993.

Fiction La Madonna dei filosofi, 1931. Il castello di Udine, 1934; revised edition, 1955. Le meraviglie d’Italia, 1939; revised edition, 1964. L’Adalgisa: Disegni milanesi, 1944. Il primo libro delle favole, 1952. Novelle dal ducato in fiamme, 1953. I sogni e la folgore, 1955. Quer pasticciaccio brutto de Via Merulana, 1957; as That Awful Mess on Via Merulana, translated by William Weaver, 1966. I viaggi la morte, 1958. Accoppiamenti giudiziosi, 1963.

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La cognizione del dolore, 1963; revised edition 1970; as Acquainted with Grief, translated by William Weaver, 1969. Eros e priapo (da furore a cenere), 1967.

Poetry ‘‘Poesie,’’ 1993.

Theater Gonnella buffone, 1955.

Other L’ingegner Fantasia: Lettera a Ugo Betti 1919–1930, edited by Giulio Ungarelli, 1984.

Further Reading Amigoni, Ferdinando, La piu` semplice macchina. Lettura freudiana del ‘Pasticciaccio,’ Bologna: Il Mulino, 1995. Andreini, Alba, Studi e testi gaddiani, Palermo: Sellerio, 1988. Baker, Margaret, ‘‘The Women Characters of Carlo Emilio Gadda,’’ in Visions and Revisions: Women in Italian Culture, edited by Mirna Cicioni and Nicole Prunster, Providence: Berg, 1993. Bertone, Manuela, Il romanzo come sistema. Molteplicita` e differenza in Carlo Emilio Gadda, Rome: Riuniti, 1993. Bertone, Manuela, and Robert Dombroski (editors), Carlo Emilio Gadda, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. Biasin, Gian Paolo, ‘‘Of Bards, Lombards and Longobards,’’ in Carlo Emilio Gadda: Contemporary Perspectives, edited by Manuela Bertone and Robert Dombroski, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. Bouchard, Norma, Celine, Gadda, Beckett: Experimental Writings of the 1930s, Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000. Calvino, Italo, Lezioni americane: Sei proposte per il prossimo millennio, Milan: Garzanti, 1988; as Six Memos for the Next Millennium, translated by Patrick Creagh, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. Carlino, Marcello, Aldo Mastropasqua, and Francesco Muzzioli (editors), Gadda, progettualita` e scrittura, Rome: Riuniti, 1987. Ceccaroni, Arnaldo, ‘‘Per una lettura del ‘Pasticciaccio’ di Carlo Emilio Gadda,’’ Lingua e stile, 5:1 (April 1970): 57–85. Contini, Gianfranco, La letteratura italiana, FlorenceMilan: Sansoni-Accademia, 1974. Dombroski, Robert S., Creative Entanglements: Gadda and the Baroque, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. Ferretti, Gian Carlo, Ritratto di Gadda, Bari: Laterza, 1987. Gioanola, Elio, Carlo Emilio Gadda: topazi e altre gioie familiari, Milan: Jaca Books, 2004. Hainsworth, Peter, ‘‘Fascism and Anti Fascism in Gadda,’’ in Carlo Emilio Gadda: Contemporary Perspectives, edited by Manuela Bertone and Robert Dombroski, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. Lucchini, Guido, L’istinto della combinazione. Le origini del romanzo in Carlo Emilio Gadda, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1988. Maraini, Dacia, E tu chi eri? Milan: Bompiani, 1973.

CARLO EMILIO GADDA Pedriali, Federica, ‘‘The Mark of Cain: Mourning and Dissimulation in Gadda,’’ in Carlo Emilio Gadda: Contemporary Perspectives, edited by Manuela Bertone and Robert Dombroski, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. Roscioni, Gian Carlo, La disarmonia prestabilita, Turin: Einaudi, 1975. Sbragia, Albert, Carlo Emilio Gadda and the Modern Macaronic, Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996. Terzoli, Maria Antonietta, ‘‘Problemi di metodo in margine alle poesie di Gadda,’’ Strumenti critici, 9 May 1994: 287–308. Ungarelli, Giulio (editor), Gadda al microfono, Turin: Eri, 1974. Zublena, Paolo, ‘‘Il linguaggio tecnico-scientifico nel Gadda narratore,’’ Lingua e Stile, 34:2 (June 1999): 253–283.

LA COGNIZIONE DEL DOLORE, 1963 Novel by Carlo Emilio Gadda

Gadda initially published La cognizione del dolore (Acquainted with Grief) as a novel composed of two parts. A third and final part existed at the time of publication, but Gadda, to use the words of his translator, William Weaver, in the latter’s introduction, was either ‘‘unwilling’’ or ‘‘unable’’ to include it for publication. Gadda revised the third section and published the novel entire in 1970 (one year after, one notes, the section had already appeared as the novel’s conclusion in English translation). In view of its publication history, La cognizione del dolore emerges as a work of two separate moments and with correspondingly separate conclusions. Gadda began work on La cognizione del dolore after the death of his mother in 1936 and, in fact, the novel centers on the troubled and turbulent relationship between mother and son. La cognizione del dolore, first published in installments in Letteratura between 1938 and 1940, tells the story of Don Gonzalo de Pirobutirro, an anguished, youngish man who lives with his mother, Senora Elisabetta, in their ancestral villa in a fictitious,

hazily South American country, Maradagal, vaguely inspired by Gadda’s sojourn in Argentina in 1922–1923. Though his illness is never named, Don Gonzalo suffers clearly from a psychological disturbance that may be only a sort of homespun nervous breakdown or neurasthenia but may also be a disease whose etiology resembles some form of clinical depression. Gonzalo’s condition may also bring him close to the figure of the female hysteric, complicating the novel’s family romance and, ultimately, the matricide with which it is resolved. His mother is the only other inhabitant of the villa, and she appears as afraid of her son’s frequent tirades as she is of the nocturnal marauders whose raids on nearby villas underscore the need for the presence of the Nistitu`os provinciales de vigilancia para la noche (The Provincial Institute for Night Watchmen), which is always referred to, in both the Italian and English publications, in Gadda’s bowdlerized Spanish. Don Gonzalo is the proverbial angry young man and has been used as a window into Gadda’s ‘‘rage.’’ Indeed, the wordless howl Don Ciccio lets loose at the end of the unfinished and irresolvable crime of Liliana’s murder in Quer pasticciaccio brutto de Via Merulana matures into Gonzalo’s irrepressible spleen, which he vents over the series of several chapters that give expression to his conversation with the good doctor of Pastrufazio, the fictitious town in Maradagal where the novel’s action is set. Gonzalo rages at everyone and no one and at everything: his mother, her peasant maid, modern capitalism that has depleted and devastated the family fortune and has made Gonzalo’s erudition both obsolete and foolish, the lack of education of the colonials, the Nistituos, the son of the tenant—no one or thing is spared his wrath, which, in the first two sections of the novel (those published in 1963), takes the shape of verbal abuse. The murder of Senora Elisabetta in the last section, added after 1969, could be seen as Gonzalo’s rage transformed into physical expression, but she could indeed have been the victim of the incredible thieves who have provided the need for the Nistituos’s night watchmen. Like Quer pasticciaccio brutto de Via Merulana, La cognizione del dolore was written and rewritten over a period of 30 significant years in the cultural history of Italy, as it embraced, rejected, and ultimately repressed Fascism. There is no unequivocal (nor timely) critique of Fascism in Gadda’s oeuvre, though some critics such as Peter Hainsworth see the engagement between the thieves and the 799

CARLO EMILIO GADDA watchmen, pervasive in the novel and invisible to the reader, as reference to the ways in which Fascism worked in Italy: It is real and explicit enough to be feared but also interstitial enough to elude detection. ELLEN NERENBERG Editions First Edition Appeared serially in Letteratura, 1938–1940; La cognizione del dolore del dolore, Turin: Einaudi, 1963; revised edition 1970.

QUER PASTICCIACCIO BRUTTO DE VIA MERULANA, 1957 Novel by Carlo Emilio Gadda

Other Editions Opere. Romanzi e racconti, vol. 1, edited by Giorgio Pinotti, Dante Isella, and Raffaella Rodondi. Milan: Garzanti, 1988.

Translations As Acquainted with Grief, translated by William Weaver, New York: George Braziller, 1969 (includes third section, unpublished in Italian until 1970).

Further Reading Bertone, Manuela, ‘‘Murderous Desires: Gaddian Matricides from Novella seconda to La cognizione del dolore,’’ in Carlo Emilio Gadda: Contemporary Perspectives, edited by Manuela Bertone and Robert Dombroski, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. De Ortega, Galli Gloria, ‘‘Pasticciaccio argentino o Carlo Emilio Gadda in Argentina,’’ Esperienze Letterarie, 23 (Winter 1998): 41–52. Di Spigno, Stelvio, ‘‘Conoscenza e realta` nella cognizione del dolore del dolore di Carlo Emilio Gadda,’’ Annali Istituto Universitario Orientale, Napoli, Sezione Romanza, 42 (January 2000): 269–280. Dombroski, Robert S., ‘‘Overcoming Oedipus: Self and Society in La cognizione del dolore,’’ Modern Language Notes, 99 (Winter 1984): 125–143. Hainsworth, Peter, ‘‘Fascism and Anti-Fascism in Gadda,’’ in Carlo Emilio Gadda: Contemporary Perspectives, edited by Manuela Bertone and Robert Dombroski, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. Luperini, Romano, ‘‘Nevrosi e crisi dell’identita` sociale nella Cognizione del dolore,’’ Problemi, 60 (Winter 1981): 66–73. Pedriali, Federica G., ‘‘La bibbia illustrata dell’ingegnere. Osservazioni per un bestiario gaddiano,’’ Modern Language Notes, 117 (January 2002): 194–206. Pierangeli, Fabio, ‘‘Gadda, il medico, La cognizione del dolore,’’ Campi Immaginabili, 13–15:1–3 (1995): 155–174. Rebaudengo, Maurizio, ‘‘Il crinale della tenebra: Lettura de La cognizione del dolore,’’ L’anello che non tiene, 5 (Spring 1993): 59–81. Sbragia, Albert, ‘‘Fear of Periphery: Colonialism, Class, and the South American Outbacks in Carlo Emilio Gadda,’’ Modern Language Notes, 111 (January 1996): 38–57.

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Carlo Emilio Gadda first published Quer pasticciaccio brutto de Via Merulana (That Awful Mess on Via Merulana) in installments in the literary journal Letteratura in late 1946 and early the following year and, after a decade and significant revision, as a novel in 1957. Like Gadda’s La cognizione del dolore (Acquainted with Grief), which he started in 1936, published in installments in 1938–1940, published in novel form in 1963, and then substantially revised for its reprinting in 1970, the two versions of Quer pasticciaccio are markedly distinct, and its transformation into novel form helps to reveal a Gadda firmly entrenched in a postmodernist aesthetic of inconclusivity. Quer pasticciaccio follows inspector Don Ciccio Ingravallo as he makes his way through a labyrinthine (or, as critic Robert Dombroski might say, ‘‘baroque’’ or ‘‘grotesque’’) Rome in pursuit of the perpetrators of two crimes that happen within days of each other in 1927 in Via Merulana No. 219. For Don Ciccio, the two crimes—the brutal murder of a Roman matriarch Ingravallo knew and the theft of some unimportant jewels—however distinct in appearance, must be related because of their proximity in time and space. The failure of this logic to cohere and deliver a conclusive ending places Gadda’s project in the realm of other European modernists, such as Marcel Proust or Virginia Woolf, who insisted on the ultimate inexplicability of social reality. This inexplicability does not translate into unrepresentability but, rather, an insistence on a partial and perspectival representation of reality. In the 1946–1947 version of the novel, Signora Balducci’s killer is revealed, and a conclusion is patent. In the version of a decade later, however, the novel closes with the recovery of stolen (fake) jewels but with Liliana Balducci’s killer still unapprehended. At the novel’s end, in the hinterland of

GALILEO GALILEI Rome he is sure houses the killer thief, Don Ciccio emits his remarkable howl, reminiscent of the wordless pain depicted in Edvard Munch’s painting ‘‘The Scream.’’ Quer pasticciaccio brutto de Via Merulana is acclaimed for its linguistic virtuosity, which, combined with its lack of resolution, has made it a modernist masterpiece. Gadda mined the capital for the dialect treasures brought from the countryside of surrounding Latium, from Rome’s San Giovanni quarter in which the crimes take place, from Don Ciccio’s native Molise, and other regions of the peninsula. Like Joyce, Gadda gamboled from one lexical register to another, often within one paragraph, sometimes within one sentence. The admixture of linguistic and literary styles, sometimes comic, sometimes grotesque, sometimes solemn, evokes Dante. The multiplicity of interpretations of the two crimes in Via Merulana corresponds to the proliferation of styles, linguistic registers, and dialects. Linguistic polyvalence undergirds the novel’s polysemy, which seeks to express the often inchoate multiplicity of modern subjectivity and society. ELLEN NERENBERG Editions First Edition Appeared serially (except for one part) in Letteratura, 1946–1947; Quer pasticciaccio brutto de Via Merulana. Milan: Garzanti, 1957.

Other Editions Opere. Romanzi e racconti, vol. 1, edited by Giorgio Pinotti, Dante Isella, and Raffaella Rodondi. Milan: Garzanti, 1988.

Translation As That Awful Mess on Via Merulana, translated by William Weaver, New York: George Braziller, 1966.

Further Reading Alessandri, Luca, ‘‘L’autore nel Pasticciaccio,’’ Lingua e Stile, 31:1(March 1996): 79–99. Bignamini, Mauro, ‘‘Un requiem per il romanzo giallo: Sul finale del ‘Pasticciaccio,’’’ Strumenti Critici, 20:2 (May 2005): 247–264. Ceccaroni, Arnaldo, ‘‘Per una lettura del ‘Pasticciaccio’ di Carlo Emilio Gadda,’’ Lingua e stile, 5:1 (April 1970): 57–85. De Lucca, Robert, ‘‘A Translator’s View of Gadda’s Language: The Pasticciaccio,’’ Quaderni d’Italianistica, 23:1 (2002): 133–161. Dombroski, Robert, ‘‘Gadda and the Baroque,’’ in Carlo Emilio Gadda: Contemporary Perspectives, edited by Manuela Bertone and Robert Dombroski. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. Marchesini, Manuela, ‘‘Literature as the Experience of Boundary Crossing: Gadda’s Descent to Hell and the Solution to That Awful Mess of Via Merulana,’’ Modern Language Notes, 119 (Jan 2004): 109–134. Pedriali, Federica G., ‘‘Gli occhi del Lazio: Symmetries of Closure in Gadda’s Quer pasticciaccio,’’ Italica. 78:2 (Summer 2001): 176–192. Pedriali, Federica G., ‘‘Of Saints and Toes: Baroque Connectives in Gadda’s Pasticciaccio (with a Manzonian Intertext),’’ Forum Italicum, 35:2 (Fall 2001): 351–367. Rushing, Robert A., ‘‘‘La sua tragica incompiutezza’: Anxiety, Mis-Recognition and Ending in Gadda’s Pasticciaccio,’’ Modern Language Notes, 116 (Jan. 2001): 130–149. Van der Linde, Gerhard, ‘‘The Body in the Labyrinth: Detection, Rationality and the Feminine in Gadda’s Pasticciaccio,’’ American Journal of Italian Studies, 21 (1998): 26–40.

GALILEO GALILEI (1564–1642) Galileo’s appointment in 1592 to the prestigious post in mathematics at the University of Padua, once a stronghold of Aristotelian thought, signaled the beginning of what this scientist, as well as many of his biographers, would regard as the most productive phase of his long career. It was in the Veneto, in the orbit of the learned and well-connected Gian Vincenzo Pinelli, the powerful Servite friar

Paolo Sarpi, and the amiable patrician statesman Giovan Francesco Sagredo, that Galileo undertook significant work in optics and catoptrics, magnetism, tidal theory, mechanics, and instrumentation. Though his financial situation was somewhat precarious in Padua—like many of his colleagues, he was obliged to undertake private tutoring in addition to his university lectures and 801

GALILEO GALILEI to host students in his home—Galileo enjoyed more intellectual liberty here than in his eventual role as mathematician and philosopher to the Grand Dukes of Tuscany. Certain of his conjectures regarding tidal theory and the law of the fall, as well as a letter he wrote to Johannes Kepler in 1597, suggest that he began to support Copernicanism in Padua in the mid-1590s, though perhaps not in any systematic fashion. The dramatic appearance of a new star in 1604 seemed to offer strong evidence against Aristotelian conventions regarding an immutable world beyond the moon. Though he was not the author of a dialogue written in Paduan dialect and concerning the nova—one where two plainspoken peasants ridiculed the traditional philosophical position, explained parallax in a series of risible earthly demonstrations, and made favorable references to the Copernican viewpoint—Galileo was certainly associated with this text, and like many lettered men in the region, he remained attached to and conversant with this dialect literature throughout his life. The tenor of Galileo’s few extant writings about the nova is neo-Stoic, being modeled on Seneca’s Natural Questions and Cicero’s On the Nature of Gods, and these texts promote a cosmos characterized by a single medium and animated by endless cycles of rarefaction and condensation. While consonant with a Copernican world system and sometimes associated with it, these features were most noteworthy for their sharp departure from the Aristotelian model of a remote and unchanging superlunary region entirely without analogy with that beneath the moon. It is significant that Galileo’s early and erroneous explanation of the aurora borealis also emerged in the context of neo-Stoic physics; in 1600 Bernardo Davanzati offered a detailed summary of this hypothesis in the course of his commentary on Tacitus’s Annals. Between 1605 and 1607, Galileo observed and showed to others the ashen light reflected onto the moon by the rough surface of the earth at the very beginning and end of each lunar cycle, inferring from this phenomenon—depicted in several paintings by his close friend Lodovico Cigoli—that the surface of our globe differed little from those of other bodies in space, and that the earth was in all likelihood mobile. In this period Galileo was also engaged in more studies of motion and hydrostatics and involved with additional work in magnetism. The sudden emergence of the Dutch telescope in September 1608 is something of a puzzle: As early 802

as the 1570s, inferior perspective devices based on reflection, rather than refraction, had been developed and subsequently abandoned in Italy and in England. Paolo Sarpi’s and Galileo’s participation in these largely unsuccessful experiments may explain either their apparent indifference to the rumor of the Dutch telescope or their misunderstanding of the components of the new invention. By spring or summer 1609, Galileo was making celestial observations with the aid of a refracting telescope at least three times more powerful than the Dutch prototype, and by November he had developed an instrument that magnified 20 times. In his Sidereus Nuncius (The Starry Messenger, 1610), he described the moon’s newly revealed peaks and valleys in terms of their terrestrial analogues—comparing the crater Albategnius, for example, to Bohemia—used the shadows cast by a particular lunar mountain to calculate the average height of such formations, and disclosed countless new stars in several constellations and in the Milky Way. Most startling, both for his audience and for Galileo himself, was his chance discovery of four satellites orbiting about Jupiter: Their orbital movements were presented in a series of schematic diagrams at the end of the Sidereus Nuncius, and the existence of moons about another celestial body strongly suggested to him, if not to all readers, that the earth was neither unique nor central nor motionless. The years that followed this publication were characterized by intense scientific activity and a certain public prominence, some of which was given over to deflecting the popular criticism of those who inferred, for example, on the basis of his reference to Bohemia in the Sidereus Nuncius, that he supported the very problematic notion of extraterrestrial life. By the end of 1610, Galileo had interpreted the moonlike phases of Venus as a confirmation of Copernican claims, and he had some notion of the sunspots by spring 1611, though his systematic study of the phenomena appears to date only to early 1612, when he was staying at the villa of the prominent Florentine nobleman Filippo Salviati. This period of intense observation of the sun and of Jupiter’s satellites, occasionally punctuated by Galileo’s amusing excurses on the work of the great poet of Paduan dialect, Angelo Beolco—better known as Il Ruzzante—resulted in the publication of the Istoria e dimostrazioni intorno alle macchie solari e loro accidenti (Letters on the Sunspots, 1613). This work offered excellent engravings and geometrical discussions of the path

GALILEO GALILEI and speed of the spots newly visible on the sun’s body, attacked the Jesuit astronomer Christoph Scheiner’s insistence on ‘‘solar stars,’’ and ridiculed the Aristotelian notion of the immutable heavens. Galileo’s membership in the Accademia della Crusca, then publishing its first lexicon, and in the first scientific society, the Accademia dei Lincei, bears witness to his considerable stature among and contact with a variety of scholars. Galileo’s next work, his Lettera a madama Cristina di Lorena (Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina), circulated widely in manuscript but remained unpublished for several decades, for in several brilliant pages he showed how a Scriptural passage— the warrior Joshua’s plea for a longer day, ‘‘Sun, stand thou still at Gideon’’—was compatible with a heliocentric universe and incompatible with a geocentric one. In late 1614, a Dominican preacher in Florence criticized Galileo and his followers, and in early 1615 another member of that order sent another one of his manuscript letters to the Inquisition in Rome. His meeting in February 1616 with Cardinal Bellarmino was soon followed by an edict formally prohibiting works that attempted to reconcile Scripture and the hypothesis of a mobile earth and placing Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus on the Index until problematic passages could be deleted. Though Galileo had devoted himself as a young man to a traditional problem for readers of Dante—the site and size of Hell—and was especially delighted by the poetry of Virgil, Ovid, and Horace among the ancients, and by that of Francesco Petrarch and Francesco Berni among the moderns, in this period he turned with new attention to a comparison of Lodovico Ariosto and Torquato Tasso and made notes elaborating, for the most part, the triumph of the former author over the latter. This effort did not result in a publication, for a new controversy had developed, after the emergence of three comets in the fall of 1618. In his Il saggiatore (The Assayer, 1623) Galileo did not enroll the comets as evidence of Copernicanism and offered no detailed explanation of their nature but attacked instead the various flaws in the arguments of the Jesuit astronomer Orazio Grassi, especially the latter’s support for the Tychonic world system. Il saggiatore is valuable above all for its presentation of questions regarding parallax and telescopic magnification, for its pithy methodological statements, and for its display of caustic wit. The synthesis of Galileo’s decades of astronomical observations, speculation, and revision, the Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo,

tolemaico e copernicano (Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Ptolemaic and Copernican), promised in 1610 in the Sidereus Nuncius, was at last published in Florence in 1632. Set in a Venetian villa and animated by three speakers—the scholarly and rather solemn Salviati, the affable dilettante Sagredo, and the persistent Aristotelian Simplicio—the Dialogo takes place over the course of four leisurely days. Beginning with traditional cosmological arguments about the motions, substance, and final purpose of celestial and terrestrial bodies, the speakers move to experimental and logical evidence for the earth’s diurnal and annual movements, and as Simplicio grows increasingly embattled, Salviati and Sagredo discuss the particulars of the orbits and telescopic appearance of the other planets; draw on the emergent science of magnetism as well as upon observations of the new stars of 1572 and 1604, the fixed stars, the moon spots, and the sunspots; and conclude with an ample discussion of Galileo’s theory of tides. The Dialogo moves steadily toward its unstated goal of establishing the superiority of the Copernican world system over its Ptolemaic predecessor, incorporating calculations, diagrams, rhetorical flourishes, observational data, and amusing anecdotes in the exchanges of the three men. The work cannot be said, however, to present Copernicanism as a mere hypothesis, or both systems as equally plausible, or the three speakers as independent and wellmatched representatives of different philosophies, for Sagredo soon adopts Salviati’s view, while Simplicio’s arguments are constantly paired with the bumbling assertions of other Aristotelians, and he is reduced to silence by the final pages of the Dialogo. Soon summoned to Rome for an encounter much more menacing than that of 1616, Galileo was forced to recant on June 22, 1633. A period of depression and ill-health followed, and while Galileo was under house arrest in Arcetri, his best-loved child, Suor Maria Celeste, died in a nearby convent. He had some slight satisfaction in seeing both a Latin translation of his Dialogo published in Strasbourg in 1635 and the Italian original and Latin translation of his Lettera a madama Cristina in Strasbourg the following year. He had also returned to his research, and his Discorsi e dimostrazioni matematiche intorno a due nuove scienze attinenti alla meccanica ed i movimenti locali (Two New Sciences Pertaining to Mechanics and Local Motions) was published in Leyden in 1638. Like the Dialogo, this work is set in Venice—in the 803

GALILEO GALILEI Republic’s busy Arsenal, rather than in a peaceful villa—and it also involves the exchanges of Salviati, Sagredo, and Simplicio. Though significantly less light-hearted in tone than the Dialogo, it moves briskly through timely military problems involving projectiles and examines notions of impact and resistance, the principal of the balance, and uniformly accelerated or natural motion. While its discussion of scale, an outgrowth of early modern meditations on colossal bones and the outsized remains of fossilized trees, bears crucially on recent efforts to fashion structures and machines of immense size, some investigations within the Discorsi, as for example those of the speed of light and of musical intervals, appear to have been pursued in a setting mercifully remote from the backdrop of the Thirty Years’ War, and for no practical ends. The examination of the philosophical notions of condensation, rarefaction, and the void, while raised in connection with the very real problem of explosives and fuel, also allows Galileo the opportunity of a covert attack on his old enemy Orazio Grassi for the latter’s facile equation of atomism with a godless determinism. The true fight, as Galileo’s dedication and several asides suggest, was for the reestablishment of his scientific and ethical reputation, and despite the burden of illness and old age, the stricture of house arrest, and his renunciation of cosmological issues, the victory was his. In 1638, though bedridden and almost completely blind, Galileo was visited by John Milton, who would recall in his Areopagitica ‘‘the famous Galileo, grown old, a prisoner to the Inquisition, for thinking in astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licensers thought,’’ and who would commemorate ‘‘the Tuscan artist,’’ his celestial discoveries, and his telescope in both Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, suggesting the extraordinary reach and range of the astronomer’s achievement and the permanent legacy he left to scientists and humanists alike. Galileo’s last years were marked both by ill health and by industry; with the help of Vincenzio Viviani, his last student and one of his first biographers, he was able to continue his correspondence, assess and improve upon new astronomical and mechanical hypotheses, and even develop a mechanism for a pendulum clock. In the last months of his life he dictated the beginnings of another dialogic encounter of Salviati, Sagredo, and Simplicio, this one having to do with two Euclidean notions of ratios. Galileo’s literary interests comprised annotations on Petrarch, Ariosto, and Tasso, a capitolo 804

in terza rima, six sonnets, two canzoni, and a draft for a comedy. That his views of the moderns underwent some evolution as he aged is suggested by the fact that his Dialogo contains no explicit references to his beloved Ariosto but rather a citation of Gerusalemme Liberata XII: 36 during a discussion of the observable effects of impetus on masses of water and an allusion to Tasso as ‘‘the sacred poet.’’ Galileo wrote in Italian in order to promote the new sciences with a lay reading audience; his prose style, while influenced by Baroque rhetoric and discursiveness, is dynamic in its argumentation and relentless in its ridicule of his enemies, particularly the Aristotelians. As the most scandalous case of the Counter-Reformation, Galileo’s life and scientific achievements have inspired several theatrical and cinematic adaptations, most notably by Bertold Brecht (1943), Liliana Cavani (1968; denied distribution due to Vatican intervention), and Joseph Losey (1974).

Biography Galileo Galilei was born in Pisa, 15 February 1564, the eldest of six or seven children of the merchant, musician, and music theorist Vincenzo Galilei and Giulia Ammannati. After a childhood in Pisa, Florence, and the Camaldolese Monastery at Vallombrosa, he began courses in medicine at the University of Pisa, 1581; having much more interest in studying perspective and mathematics in private lessons, he left the university without a degree, 1585. He taught mathematics for the next three years in Florence, Siena, and Vallombrosa, 1586– 1589; he held the chair of mathematics at the University of Pisa, 1589–1592, a position he soon exchanged for a more prestigious post in the same discipline at the University of Padua, 1592–1610. Galileo conducted research on the matter of light and the telescopic lenses, 1609–1611; he was appointed as mathematician and philosopher at the court of the Grand Duke Cosimo II of Tuscany, 1610. He was officially admonished by the Inquisition, 1616. He was summoned to Rome by a special commission under the direct control of the pope, 1632; his trial and abjuration took place in 1633. Galileo had three illegitimate children: Virginia (born in 1600), Livia (born in 1601), and Andrea (born in 1606). Galileo Galilei died in Arcetri (Florence), 8 January 1642. EILEEN ADAIR REEVES

` MBARA VERONICA GA Selected Works Collections Opere di Galileo Galilei nobile fiorentino, 13 vols., Milan: Societa` Tipografica de’ Classici Italiani, 1808–1811. Opere, edited by Antonio Favaro et alia, 20 vols., 1890–1909; reprint edited by Giorgio Abetti, et al., Florence: Barbera, 1964–1966. Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo: Including The Starry Messenger, Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, and Excerpts from Letters on the Sunspots and the Assayer, edited and translated by Stillman Drake, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1957.

Writings Sidereus Nuncius, edited by Maria Timpanaro Cardini, 1948; edited by Andrea Battistini, 1993; as The Starry Messenger, translated by Stillman Drake, 1957; as Sidereus Nuncius or the Sidereal Messenger, translated by Albert van Helden, 1989. Il saggiatore, edited by Libero Sosio, 1992; Galilei, Galileo and Orazio Grassi, The Controversy on the Comets of 1618, translated by Stillman Drake and C. D. O’Malley, 1960. Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo, edited by Libero Sosio, 1970; edited by Ferdinando Flora, 1997; as Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, translated by Stillman Drake, 1953; as Galileo on the World Systems, translated and abridged by Maurice A. Finocchiaro, 1997. Discorsi e dimostrazioni matematiche intorno a due nuove scienze, edited by Adriano Carugo and Ludovico Geymonat, 1958; as Two New Sciences, translated by Stillman Drake, 1974.

Further Reading Biagioli, Mario, Galileo, Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993. Blackwell, Richard J., Galileo, Bellarmine, and the Bible, Notre Dame, IN: The University of Notre Dame Press, 1991. Dear, Peter, Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995. Drake, Stillman, Galileo at Work: His Scientific Biography, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978. Finocchiaro, Maurice A. (editor), The Galileo Affair: A Documentary History, Berkeley, CA: The University of California Press, 1989. Machamer, Peter (editor), The Cambridge Companion to Galileo, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Paschini, Pio, Vita e opere di Galileo Galilei, 2 vols., Vatican City: Pontificia Academia Scientiarum, 1964. Redondi, Pietro, Galileo eretico, Turin: Einaudi, 1983; as Galileo Heretic, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987. Reeves, Eileen Adair, Painting the Heavens: Art and Science in the Age of Galileo, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. Renn, Ju¨rgen (editor), Galileo in Context, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Santillana, Giorgio de, The Crime of Galileo, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1955. Shea, William, Galileo’s Intellectual Revolution: Middle Period, 1610–1632, New York: Science History Publications, 1977.

` MBARA (1485–1550) VERONICA GA Left to govern her husband’s feudal territories after his death, Veronica Ga`mbara led an exceptional life in dangerous times of religious and political turmoil. She judiciously leveraged her artistic gifts and connections to defend a family and state precariously sandwiched between French, Venetian, and imperial forces in the advent of the Catholic Reformation; and, though she wrote with little regard for lasting fame (memoria posteritatis), she was nonetheless destined for celebrity. Born into an illustrious line of learned women—her paternal grandmother was the Humanist Ginevra Nogarolla, sister of Isotta Nogarolla, and her maternal aunt was none other than the remarkable Emilia

Pio of Baldassare Castiglione’s Il libro del Cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier, 1528)—Veronica achieved a virtually unequalled poetic and epistolary fame of her own. Although one of her first biographers would claim that she obtained a university degree in philosophy, she most probably received a classical education from private tutors similar to that of her brothers. Outside of one late Horatian-styled Latin ode in celebration of Emperor Charles V, Veronica’s poetic and epistolary corpus makes exclusive use of the vernacular. Like many educated women of her station, in her youth poetry served as a form of aristocratic diversion. Her earliest 805

` MBARA VERONICA GA surviving works abound with the amorous Petrarchan conceits that occupy so much of the Italian Renaissance imagination. She sang of a heart made captive by the tyranny of love; of the torment, conflict, and exquisite agony caused by Amor’s cruel game; and of the hopeless desperation afflicting her embattled soul. More than the secret expression of a real ill-fated love affair, Veronica’s thematic repertoire essentially conforms to the aesthetic norms established for poetry by Pietro Bembo. Her verses circulated openly from hand to hand, and her talents soon gained the attention of society’s most illustrious minds. By 1502 she had initiated epistolary contact with Bembo himself (as evinced in a letter he addressed to her two years later), and by 1504 she was already intimately corresponding with the noted humanist Gian Giorgio Trissino. That same year, one of her earliest poems, ‘‘Or passata e` la speranza’’ (Now Hope Has Died, 1504), appeared in print along with other frottole set to music by composer Bartolomeo Tromboncino, a favorite of the Gonzaga court. The piece represents an anomaly in Ga`mbara’s literary production primarily because it can be located chronologically. Deviating from the contemporary vogue for autorepresentation through print, Ga`mbara never wrote with an eye toward publishing her epistles or deigned to order her scattered rhymes into a unitary Petrarchan-styled canzoniere. Few autographs survive, and most of her works lack the place and date of composition. An assortment of her poems was printed posthumously in Venice in the Rime di diversi eccellenti autori bresciani (Poems by Several Excellent Authors from Brescia, 1554), as well as in the earliest volume dedicated exclusively to female poetry, the Rime diverse d’alcune nobilissime, et virtuosissime donne (Several Poems by Some Very Noble and Virtuous Women, 1559), though many more remained hidden within unpublished collections. Felice Rizzardi, the first editor to attempt to unite her poetry for print, amassed a total of 42 examples and resolved the chronological challenge by ordering her poems thematically in Rime e lettere di Veronica Ga`mbara (The Poems and Letters of Veronica Ga`mbara, 1759). Matters were further confounded by the problem of misattribution— seven of her works originally appeared in print under the name of her contemporary and correspondent, Vittoria Colonna, who, in turn, received the credit for two of Ga`mbara’s. Ironically, she was also identified as the author of a poem composed by an unlikely source, Veronica Franco. 806

The modern critical edition by Alan Bullock currently attributes 67 sonnets, madrigals, ballads, and stanze to Ga`mbara’s own hand. Although they address a vast array of political, religious, and encomiastic subjects, she is best known for the sequence dedicated to her consort Giberto’s eyes. Adapting Bembo’s neo-Platonic sublimation of love as the means between humankind and God, Ga`mbara invested her husband’s angelicized eyes with the same divine power traditionally attributed to the donna-angelo of male Petrarchan poets. In the madrigal ‘‘Occhi lucenti e belli’’ (Beautiful lucent eyes), they are described as proud, humble, blessed, serene, and dear, the source of both her life and death, of hope and fear; again, in ‘‘Dal veder voi, occhi lucenti e chiari’’ (To see you, to gaze into your serene and clear eyes), they figure as the source of all her happiness. She ran to them for repose in ‘‘Vero albergo d’amor’’ (True home of love), and agonized over their absence in ‘‘Se piu` stanno a parir quei duo bei lumi’’ (If those two bright lights delay in appearing). Undoubtedly laden with Petrarchan artifice, Ga`mbara’s poems nonetheless convey an earnest love and admiration for her Lord of Correggio, a man destined to be taken away from her after ten years of happy marriage. His death brought on a period of intense mourning—from that day forth she donned only the black of widowhood, insisting that her whole court, including the horses, dress accordingly as well. The doors to her palace were inscribed with Dido’s plaint over the death of Sichaeus as a permanent reminder of her irreparable loss: ‘‘ille meos, primus qui me sibi iunxit, amores / abstulit; ille habeat secum servetque sepulchro’’ (He, who first linked me to himself, has taken away my heart: / may he keep it with him, and guard it in the grave). Vowing never to remarry again, Ga`mbara lamented her cruel fortune and the annihilation of her former happiness in a sonnet entitled ‘‘Quel nodo in cui la mia beata sorte’’ (That knot in which my blessed fate). Left to manage the affairs of her deceased beloved, she then dedicated her talents to the subject of governance. In her youth Ga`mbara began to correspond with important figures from the highest echelons of European society (her earliest known epistle, dated February 1, 1503, is addressed to Isabella d’Este, wife of Francesco Gonzaga of Mantova), only to abruptly cut off all communication during her marriage. As a widow, the mature author resumed her epistolary activity, nurturing ties to powerful magnates capable of granting privileges, advancing her

` MBARA VERONICA GA family, and safeguarding her feudal lands. Her chancery letters display an ability to ceremoniously combine ambassadorial formalities with practical requests. They exhibit a strong tendency toward moral reflection and an overriding concern for peace and religious unity, elements also present in the political and encomiastic poems addressed to Charles V and Pope Paul III, such as ‘‘Vincere i cor piu` saggi’’ (To win over the wisest hearts) and ‘‘Quella felice stella’’ (That happy star), dedicated to the young emperor. ‘‘Tu che di Pietro il glorioso manto’’ (You who with the glorious mantle of Peter) is a call to triumph against the Protestant enemy directed toward the pontiff. Ga`mbara also engaged in both polished and spontaneous forms of ‘‘civil conversation’’ with literary friends and close acquaintances. They vary in register from the intimate, ironic, and often colloquial letters sent to her friend Ludovico Rossi to the respectfully affectionate exchanges with her poetic mentor Pietro Bembo. She maintained ties to Venice through Ludovico Dolce and with the ‘‘scourge of princes’’ Pietro Aretino (a contact she kept perhaps out of fear of incurring his wrathful pen). Her epistolary is lamentably full of lacunae—out of approximately 150 extant correspondences, only one letter survives to Bernardo Tasso, two to Trissino, ten to Bembo, and eleven to Aretino, while the letters that presumably passed between her and Vittoria Colonna are entirely missing. Despite the losses, however, their esteem for her is manifest in their own works. Bernardo Tasso praised her gentle and sonorous poetry in his Amadigi di Gaula (1560). Ludovico Ariosto, who visited her home in Correggio in 1531, paid tribute to the hostess in his Orlando Furioso (The Frenzy of Orlando, 1532) the following year by depicting her as especially pleasing to Apollo and the Muses. Aretino sang of her ‘‘gloriose fatiche’’ (glorious labors) in the prologue to the second edition of his La Cortigiana (The Courtesan, 1534) and honors the poetess in 1537 by printing the verses written by her in celebration of his lover Angela Tornibeni da Padova. After their first meeting in Brescia in 1504, Bembo affectionately referred to her as Berenice—the same name assigned to the most virtuous female interlocutor of his fictional dialogue, Gli Asolani (1505). First hailing her as a ‘‘Ver unica—Vergine veramente unica e sola,’’ a truly unique and singular maiden, later as a woman whose genius he would never tire of praising (‘‘ingegno a cui lodar son roco’’), Bembo encouraged Veronica as she evolved from a young

Pertrarchan sonneteer into her maturity as a militant poet of the Catholic faith. It was an honor she repaid with a lifetime of devotion and with two moving eulogies upon his death: ‘‘Or che sei tornata, anima felice’’ (Now that you have returned, o happy soul) and ‘‘Riser gli spiriti angelici e celesti’’ (The angelic and celestial spirits rejoiced).

Biography Veronica Ga`mbara was born in Pratalboino (Brescia) to Count Gianfrancesco and Alda Pio di Carpi, November 30, 1485. She was educated in Latin and gained attention at an early age for her poetry. In 1502, she initiated epistolary contact with Pietro Bembo. She married (condottiere) Giberto X, lord of Correggio, 1508; they had two sons, Ippolito (baptized January 27, 1510) and Girolamo (baptized February 17, 1511). Returning to Brescia for her father’s funeral, she became trapped, with her mother and children, within the city while a Venetian-led rebellion laid siege; they were freed a few weeks later when French troops subdued the insurgents, February 1512. She accompanied her husband to Bologna for the historic meeting between Pope Leo X and France’s new regent, King Francis I, and formed a friendship with the latter, 1515. Giberto died August 26, 1518, Veronica also cared for his two daughters from a previous marriage and governed the Correggio territories. She secured advantageous military and ecclesiastical charges for her sons, arranged profitable marriages for Giberto’s daughters, and consolidated the interests of her late husband’s feudal territories. Dismayed by the factionalism that plagued Italy, she aligned with the imperial cause and sought the favor of the Hapsburg emperor, Charles V, receiving the official investiture of the Correggio lands for her sons in 1520. In 1526, she called her citiens to arms to defend against an incursion led by Fabrizio Maramaldo. In light of her brother Uberto’s recent appointment to the governorship of Bologna by Pope Clement VII, Veronica sent her 17-year-old son Girolamo to his uncle to advance his ecclesiastical career while obtaining a position for her firstborn, Ippolito, in the imperial army, 1528. Later that year in Bologna, she met Charles V and Clement VII, celebrated her brother Brunoro’s marriage to Virginia Pallavicini, and solidified her friendships with the literati. She returned to Correggio to host a two-day imperial visit by Charles V and Manfred III, March 23, 1530. Alfonso d’Avalos, Marquis of Vasto, marched 807

` MBARA VERONICA GA 8,000 Spanish troops through Correggio, devastating her lands and resources, June 29 through November 25, 1531. During Avalos’s march, she hosted Ludovico Ariosto and exchanged letters with Vittoria Colonna; she overcame an invasion led by Galeotto Pico and rallied her people during the pestilence, 1538. Veronica Ga`mbara died and was buried alongside her husband in the Correggio mausoleum of the church of San Domenico, June 13, 1550. SARA E. DI´AZ

Selected Works Collections Rime e lettere di Veronica Ga`mbara, edited by Felice Rizzardi, Brescia: Rizzardi, 1759. Le Rime, edited by Alan Bullock, Florence: Olschki and Perth: The University of Western Australia, 1995.

Letters Cataloghi delle lettere di Veronica Ga`mbara, preceduti da un saggio critico. Con lettere inedite, edited by Fernando Manzotti, 1950.

Further Reading Bozzetti, Cesare, Pietro Gibellini, and Ennio Sandal (eds.), Veronica Ga`mbara e la poesia del suo tempo nell’Italia settentrionale, Florence: Olschki, 1989. Chimenti, Antonia, Veronica Ga`mbara, gentildonna del Rinascimento: un intreccio di poesia e storia, Reggio Emilia: Magis Books, 1995. De Courten, Clementina, Veronica Ga`mbara. Una gentildonna del Cinquecento, Milan: EST, 1934. Finzi, Riccardo, Umanita` di Veronica Ga`mbara, Reggio Emilia: Arti Grafiche Emiliane, 1950. Jaffe, Irma, and Gernando Colombardo, Shining Eyes, Cruel Fortune: The Lives and Loves of Italian Renaissance Women Poets, New York: Fordham University Press, 2002. Pizzagalli, Daniela, La signora della poesia: vita e passioni di Veronica Ga`mbara, artista del Rinascimento, Milan: Rizzoli, 2004. Poss, Richard, ‘‘Veronica Ga`mbara: A Renaissance Gentildonna,’’ in Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation, edited by Katharina M. Wilson, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987. Russell, Rinaldina, Italian Women Writers: a Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994. Stortoni, Laura Anna (editor), Women Poets of the Italian Renaissance: Courtly Ladies and Courtesans, translated by Laura Anna Stortoni and Mary Prentice Lillie, New York: Italica Press, 1997.

CESARE GARBOLI (1928–2004) Garboli claimed for himself the right not to be labeled as a literary critic. In him, a restive intolerance of presumed aesthetic and cultural values imbued with objectivity and detachment was combined with the awareness that the ideological and pedagogical function of the critic, particularly in the second half of the twentieth century, had lost both its institutional legitimacy and the reality of dialectical vision. He made a cutting diagnosis of the bourgeois abstraction of culture in La stanza separata (The Separate Room, 1969), a collection of essays, short polemics, and articles that is his first book, published when he was already a successful journalist of art and literature. Ever since his professional debut at the beginning of the 1950s, Garboli had distinguished himself for the breadth of his interests and for a fine narrative sensibility that made use ‘‘di un’immaginazione 808

ribollente come un fiume in piena, simile a quella dei profeti e degli indovini’’ (of an imagination bubbling like a swollen river, like that of the prophets and the diviners), as he wrote in Pianura proibita (Forbidden Plane, 2002). In this work, he confessed to not possessing the novelist’s unquestioned faith in his own imagination as a value. At the same time, the historian’s inquisitorial intentions, which place an emphasis more on the judicial inquiry into facts than on the rhetorical organization of the historical discourse, generated his mistrust. The rhetorical nature of literature was, instead, what drove his interest in books: their always being at the service of something else. He further wrote in Pianura proibita: ‘‘scrivere senza una finalita`, utilitaria, e` oggi da imbecilli’’ (to write today without a political, utilitarian end, is imbecilic), because if it is true that culture belongs to action, and that it is a

CESARE GARBOLI factory and not a garden, it is equally true that ‘‘diventa utile soltanto in tempi di barbarie’’ (it becomes useful only in times of barbarism). Garboli turned his own hermeneutic reading toward texts that were familiar to him in search not of the intoxication of what is expressed but of what remains outside of the work, of that energy that in the entropic process of literary creation had been dispersed, bereft of an opportunity to be realized. The twentieth century taught that ‘‘si scrive quando la gioia o il desiderio di vivere non basta [...] quando e perche´ si e` malati’’ (one writes when the pleasure or the desire of living is not enough [...] when and because one is sick), as in the case of Natalia Ginzburg, the eternal Ragazza (Girl), as he called her in his preface to her Opere (Works, 1986), who lived the impact with the Other in the contrasting terms ‘‘di sfida e di scommessa verso il mondo, e di paura e di regressione verso la tana’’ (of challenge and gambling toward the world, and of fear and regression toward a refuge) (Pianura proibita). But the movement of this mysterious infection that only artistic creativity can heal leaves traces of histories, messages, fragments of experience, details of events, that flutter in a no-man’s land at whose extremities arise two incommensurable realities that must be kept separate: the author’s work and the contours of the author’s life. Literature and life are like two cities between which there spreads a chaotic desert of water, where no point is privileged or necessary, a place that exists only at the moment in which someone traverses it. Through archival papers, notebooks, secret and confidential notes, rejected variants, and forgotten drafts, the anti-Crocean Garboli reconstructed, in Antonio Delfini’s Diari 1927–1961 (Diaries: 1927– 1961, 1982), in Penna Papers (1984), in Trenta poesie famigliari di Giovanni Pascoli (Thirty Family Poems by Giovanni Pascoli, 1990), and in Matilde Manzoni’s unpublished Journal (1992), a level of competing reality, an autonomous and indiscreet map that is beyond genres. Not only a metaphor of this potential realm, the theater is the subject of numerous articles written by Garboli between 1972 and 1978 in national dailies, and of wellknown translations, especially of Molie`re and Shakespeare. ‘‘Non si entra in Molie`re senza consequenze’’ (You do not delve into Molie`re without consequences), he wrote in ‘‘L’Attore’’ (The Actor), a piece published in Falbalas: Immagini del Novecento (Falbalas: Images of the Twentieth Century, 1990). Tartuffe, in particular, rediscovered in 1962–1963 by the director Roger Planchon, who subjected the texts to a rigorous Brechtian

historicization, seemed to Garboli not a character but an archetype, ‘‘il modello dei metodi di comportamento del potere, quando il potere non nasce dal privilegio ma dalla frustrazione (dal nulla, dallo zero sociale). Questo potere ha bisogno per esistere di consensi occulti e di opinioni intoccabili. Tre secoli fa aveva bisogno delle religione; oggi, non puo` fare a meno della cultura’’ (the model of the behavioral methods of power, when power is born not from privilege but from frustration [from the nothing, from the social zero]. In order to exist, this power needs hidden consensuses and untouchable opinions. Three centuries ago it needed religion; today, it cannot do without culture), as he described it in Un po’ prima del piombo (Just Before the Bullet, 1998). For Garboli, Tartuffe is a servile character who challenges the servant–master dichotomy until he succumbs before the impossible task of finding a solution halfway between the barren intelligence of servants and the blind privilege of masters’ passions. The scathing adjective ‘‘servile’’ returns in the title of a small volume collecting essays, presentations, and introductions, Scritti servili (Servile Writings, 1989). He explained the implications of the title to Corrado Stajano in an interview that appeared in Il corriere della sera (6 March 1989): ‘‘Accetto le committenze proprio per non avere a che fare con quella che viene chiamata creativita`. Se penso di scrivere veramente quello che sento, ho paura [...] Non ho voglia di tirare fuori me stesso. Quando mi occupo degli altri sono protetto dagli schermi’’ (I accept commissions precisely in order not to have anything do with what is called creativity. If I think of truly writing what I feel, I’m frightened [...] I have no desire to draw myself out. When I concern myself with others, I’m protected by screens): This is the paradox of the critic whose creativity lay in reading the work of art already written in experience.

Biography Cesare Garboli was born in Viareggio, Lucca, on 17 December 1928. A pupil of Roberto Longhi, he interrupted his university studies while writing his graduation thesis with Natalino Sapegno. At the beginning of the 1950s, he became editor of the Enciclopedia dello spettacolo and entered the intellectual circuit of the journals Officina and Paragone. At first Garboli concerned himself with Dante, Penna, Montale, and Leopardi, later centering his interests on Ginzburg, Morante, Delfini, Soldati, and Pascoli. He was awarded the Viareggio 809

CESARE GARBOLI Prize for La stanza separate, 1969. He worked as militant theater critic for Il Mondo, Il corriere della sera, and L’Unita`, 1972–1978. He taught at the University of Rome, the University of Macerata, and the Polytechnical Institute of Zurich. Garboli died on 11 April 2004 in Rome. NOEMI BILLI Selected Works Essays La stanza separata, 1969. Penna papers, 1984; expanded, 1996. Scritti servili, 1989. Cento libri per due secoli di letteratura, with Giorgio Manganelli, 1989. Falbalas. Immagini del Novecento, 1990. Trenta poesie famigliari di Giovanni Pascoli, 1990. Il gioco segreto: nove immagini di Elsa Morante, 1995. Penna, Montale e il desiderio, 1996. Un po’ prima del piombo, 1998. Ricordi tristi e civili, 2001. Pianura proibita, 2002. Storie di seduzione, 2005.

Edited Works Dante Alighieri, La Divina Commedia, le Rime, i versi della Vita Nuova e le canzoni del Convivio, 1954. Giacomo Leopardi, Canti, with Niccolo` Gallo, 1959. Giacomo Debenedetti, Opere, 1968. Ennio Flaiano, Autobiografia del Blu di Prussia, 1974. Niccolo` Gallo, Scritti letterari, with Ottavio Cecchi, and Gian Carlo Roscioni, 1975. Antonio Delfini, Diari: 1927–1961, with Natalia Ginzburg, 1982. Giovanni Pascoli, Poesie famigliari, 1985. Natalia Ginzburg, Opere, 1986. Elsa Morante, Opere, with Carlo Cecchi, 2 vols., 1988–1990. Mario Soldati, Racconti autobiografici, 1991. Mario Soldati, Romanzi brevi, 1992.

Matilde Manzoni, Journal, 1992. Bernard Berenson and Roberto Longhi, Lettere e scartafacci, 1912–1957, with Cristina Montagnani, 1993. Franc¸ois Auguste Rene´ de Chateubriand, Memorie d’oltretomba, 1995. Roberto Benigni, E l’alluce fu: monologhi e gag, 1996. Antonio Delfini, Manifesto per un partito conservatore e comunista e altri scritti, 1997. Goffredo Parise, L’odore del sangue, with Giacomo Magrini, 1997. Natalia Ginzburg, E’ difficile parlare di se´: conversazioni a piu` voci condotta da Marino Sinibaldi, with Lisa Ginzburg, 1999.

Translations Teatro francese del grande secolo, 1960. Molie`re, Tartufo, 1974. Harold Pinter, Terra di nessuno, 1976. Molie`re, La Principessa d’Elide, Tartufo o l’Impostore, Don Giovanni o Il festino di Pietro, Il borghese gentiluomo, Il malato immaginario, 1976. Pierre de Marivaux, Le false confidenze, 1986. Molie`re, La scuola delle mogli, 1988. William Shakespeare, Misura per misura, 1992. Anonymous, La famosa attrice, 1997. Franc¸ois Auguste Rene´ de Chateubriand, Di Buonaparte e dei Borboni, with Graziella Giordano, 2000.

Further Reading Berardinelli, Alfonso, ‘‘Garboli, critico controvoglia,’’ Il Foglio quotidiano, 149 (2005), 4. Dego, Giuliano, ‘‘Tags and Trappings,’’ TLS, 4561 (1990), 914. Ferrara, Luigi, ‘‘Cesare Garboli, l’indovino della critica,’’ Silarus, 45:239–240 (2005), 45–46. Gambaro, Fabio, ‘‘Cesare Garboli: ’Un Monde sans perspectives,’’’ Magazine Litte´raire, 407 (2002,), 40–42. Itine´raire de Roger Planchon 1953–1964, Paris: L’Arche, 1970. Taviani, Ferdinando, ‘‘Cesare Garboli interpreta La fameuse come´dienne,’’ Nuovi Argomenti, 1–2 (1998), 316–344.

THE GARDEN OF THE FINZI-CONTINIS See Il Giardino dei Finzi-Contini (Work by Giorgio Bassani)

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ALFONSO GATTO

ALFONSO GATTO (1909–1976) Within the context of Italian Hermetic poetry, Alfonso Gatto is significant for his ability to reinterpret the Hermetic ‘‘canon’’ with an inventive, surrealist freedom. This unique style distinguishes him from the more typically metaphysical branch of Hermeticism. Beginning in his earliest works, Gatto’s surrealism is extremely controlled, attenuating his propensity for courageous linguistic invention by making recourse to the music and the harmony of traditional Italian Melic poetry. His verses are marked by an effortless cantabile; although written in a basic language, his poetry is founded on a few theme words and a restricted choice of analogous meanings, which are both unrealistic and often inclined to an immediate intimism. In his early poetry, in particular, personal sentiment rooted in memories of youth and his childhood home, Salerno, allows for the flourishing of images connected to family life, in particular his relationship with his mother. These elements often prevent his first collections from achieving balance. Instead there are contradictions between the free, abstract games of his surrealist imagination and the concrete descriptions and psychology of a sentimental world that is more immediately singable. Gatto’s entire poetic oeuvre is based on his gift for song, in fact. In his work, the poem-song assumes a form that is sign of order and harmony, which can then confront chaos, violence, and the arbitrary nature of history and power. The poet, however, failed to fully reach the only truly modern conclusion: that of a poetry that can cross the nonsense of existence and of the world, using expressive and linguistic instruments that reinvent reality. These subjects and formal characteristics are already present in Gatto’s first collection, Isola. Prose e versi (Isle. Prose and Poems, 1932), which includes lyric and prose poems. The collection helped to establish the canon of Italian Hermetic poetry in the 1930s through its use of a rarefied language, entrusted to indefinite, allusive temporal categories, and with sudden semantic strokes that express elements of his personal life and of nature. It is poetry staged in the interior dimension of absence, of uprooting, typical of many contemporary southern poets who tend to a mythical revocation of their

distant childhood via impressionistic memory and a strongly analogous, metaphoric word. If on the one hand, the hidden presence of Giovanni Pascoli and Gabriele D’Annunzio is evident in Gatto’s impressionism and his musicality (along with the regional, dialectical influence of Salvatore Di Giacomo), on the other, the presence of Salvatore Quasimodo, the young Mario Luzi, Libero De Libero (representatives of a specific type of Hermeticism) is evident in his use of analogy and the tendency to create what some critics (including Giansiro Ferrata) have called an ‘‘idyllic surrealism.’’ In Isola. Prose e versi, Gatto’s most original and definitive formal solutions are identifiable in his use of rhyme and of enjambements. Rhyme contributes to the invention of analogies that are connected more by phonetics than semantics, in the creation of a surrealist, illogical fugal composition. The enjambements accelerate the meaning of the composition and multiply the images, distorting metrical and the musical rhythms (generally entrusted to the sonnet and to the hendecasyllable), with respect to the construction and the syntactic stressing of the sentences: ‘‘Tremo d’esile vena per lontane / arie di suono, mi lusingo in volto. Come alleviate toccano le vane / solitudini il cielo vuoto, ascolto’’ (I tremble of a weak vein for distant / airs of sound, I delude myself. As a relief they touch the vain / solitudes the empty sky, I listen; from ‘‘Notte,’’ in Isola). Such formal choices, courageously selected to create a ‘‘liberating’’ poetic with respect to the formal elements of Hermeticism, brought Gatto toward a kind of incompleteness, an imaginative indeterminacy, as if his verse sought an indefinable, uninterpretable meaning. The second collection, Morto ai paesi. Poesie (Dead to the Birthplaces: Poems, 1937), is without a doubt one of the central works of Hermetic poetry: In it, there converge poems from the years 1933–1937, which offer greater balance than is found in the imaginative energy—liberating, unbridled, elusive—that characterizes Isola. Prose e versi. One discovers in the components of this collection a more concrete existential experience, a greater objectification of the poetic ‘‘I,’’ no longer or not only consisting in a pure, autonomous poetic voice but shaded in mystery, in the living multiplicity of the 811

ALFONSO GATTO universe itself, beyond its pure, natural facts: ‘‘Immagine d’aria / la luna morta odora / sfinita in pendio. / Eternamente ferma / torna al pallido volto / che l’alba consuma e profila / in un gelido picco di sole’’ (Image of air / the dead moon smells / lost in its rise. / Eternally still / it returns to the pale face / that the sunrise consumes and outlines / in a cold peak of sun; from ‘‘Luna d’alba,’’ in Morto ai paesi). Such a character reelaborates in a symbolic key the world of domestic fondness, not forgetting the lesson of Giovanni Pascoli, but nevertheless changing the living presence of creatures, the sea, the earth, the night, death, into symbols weighty with arcane meaning. The same idyllic framing of images, present in Isola. Prose e versi, is dramatized in the conflict between the self and history, for which the themes of death and of evil become an evermore constant reference. In particular, that which was for many Hermetic poets the existential crux, historical and political, of ‘‘absence,’’ the strong point of their poetics, is developed in Morto ai paesi. Poesie with affirmative certainty. The collection conceives of death both as a zeroing, no longer nostalgic or mythical experience of the past, and as an openness to new ‘‘waits,’’ driven, in the young, anxious poetic generation of poets, by the historical times and by political and social asphyxiation. In the 1940s, Gatto began to distance himself from other poets in the Hermetic vein. In 1943, Vallecchi published Poesie (Poems), a text that recapitulates, with many variations, a 15-year period of poetic writing, subdivided into two sections: La memoria felice (The Happy Memory) and Arie e ricordi (Melodies and Memories). The collection also contains compositions from the years 1937– 1941. In particular, in Arie e ricordi Gatto dedicated himself to the ‘‘canzonetta,’’ constructed in singing hendecasyllables, which express a world of private feeling. But with the onset of the war and his engagement fighting in the Resistance, the poet was led evermore toward mythopoetical experiences. In particular, there is the collection Il capo sulla neve (The Head on the Snow, 1949), in which the verse is more proselike and narrative, in confronting themes of horror, of hate, of violence: There remains at base his lyric vein, so that his work can neither be wholly identified as an engaged literature nor one of condemnation. Other collections to recall include Osteria flegrea (Flegrea Tavern, 1962) and La storia delle vittime. Poesie della Resistenza (Story of Victims: Poems of the Resistance, 1966). In the latter, the poet returned to the period of the Resistance, demonstrating a notable capacity to combine autobiography, 812

lyric, civic engagement, and historical passion. In Osteria flegrea, the theme of death is rendered reassuring by the recollection of the mother, feeding Gatto’s poetic vein in the archaic vision of the homeland and its familiar, eternal sun. Over the years, Alfonso Gatto, entrusting himself to carefully controlled expressive instruments against formal, youthful libertarianism, was able to offer other valuable proofs of his tale-weaving and melodic talents. Consistent with his being a painter, as well as a talented art critic, he sketched many compositions as though they were landscapes and still lifes in the form of words. As a writer of prose, he should be remembered in particular for La sposa bambina (The Bride Child, 1943), an impressionistic representation of the provincial, infantile world; in Carlomagno nella grotta (Charlemagne in the Cave, 1962), he confronted burning southern questions, at times in an essayistic form, sometimes returning to a newly Hermetic expository style.

Biography Born in Salerno, 27 July 1909, Alfonso Gatto was the descendant of a family of modest shipowners in Calabria. He completed high school in Salerno and enrolled in the department of Lettere in Naples, interrupting his studies before finishing, however. He tried various professions and suffered various economic difficulties. In 1934, he moved to Milan, where he met a group of innovative artists led by the architect Edoardo Persico, director of Casabella. In Milan, Gatto met artists, men of letters, and poets, who stimulated his creativity and collaborated on various projects that flourished around the Cafe´ Craja, where many young artists and writers met. Arrested in 1936 for political reasons, as an adversary of Fascism, he spent six months in the prison of San Vittore. He contributed to various literary journals (including Circoli, Letteratura, and La Ronda). With Vasco Pratolini, he directed Campo di Marte from 1938 to 1939, an important Florentine journal that was central in the debate on Italian Hermetic poetry. This experience pushed Gatto’s poetry to maturity, deepening the dialectic between innovation and tradition. He participated as fighter in the Resistance, and enrolled, after the Liberation, in the Communist Party. He contributed to Rinascita, directed the daily Milano sera, and served on the editorial staff for Unita`. He left the party in 1951 and chose Rome shortly afterward as his residence. He continued in the journalistic profession, living his engagement as a writer,

GIOVAN BATTISTA GELLI expressing his artistic passion, and winning, among other prizes, the Bautta Prize in 1956 and the Viareggio Prize in 1966. He married Jole Turco, with whom he had two daughters. Gatto died in auto accident in Ortobello (Grosseto), on 8 March 1976. GIORGIO TAFFON Selected Works Collections Tutte le poesie, Milan: Mondadori, 2005.

Poetry ‘‘Isola. Prose e versi,’’ 1932. ‘‘Morto ai paesi. Poesie,’’ 1937. ‘‘Poesie,’’ 1943. ‘‘Il capo sulla neve,’’ 1949. ‘‘Osteria flegrea,’’ 1962. ‘‘La storia delle vittime. Poesie della resistenza,’’ 1966. ‘‘Poesie (1929–1969),’’ 1972. ‘‘Poesie di Alfonso Gatto,’’ 1998.

Fiction La sposa bambina, 1943. Carlomagno nella grotta, 1962.

Theater Il duello, 1944.

Further Reading Alfonso Gatto, special issue of La fiera letteraria (25 December 1955). Borraro, Pino, and Francesco D’Episcopo (editors), Stratigrafia di un poeta: Alfonso Gatto. Atti del convegno nazionale di studi su Alfonso Gatto (Salerno-MaioriAmalfi, 8–9–10 April 1978), Galatina: Congedo, 1980. Ferrata, Giansiro, ‘‘Alfonso Gatto: ‘Morto ai paesi,’’’ Letteratura, 3(1937), 162. Gioanola, Elio, ‘‘Alfonso Gatto,’’ in Letteratura italiana contemporanea, vol. 2, Rome: Lucarini, 1980. Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo (editor), ‘‘Alfonso Gatto,’’ in Poeti italiani del Novecento, Milan: Mondadori, 1978. Montale, Eugenio, ‘‘Isola, di Alfonso Gatto,’’ Pegaso, 5 (1933), 634. Muscetta, Carlo, ‘‘Alfonso Gatto poeta,’’ Primato, 1 (1942), 15–17. Pento, Bortolo, Alfonso Gatto, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1972. Perilli, Plinio, ‘‘Alfonso Gatto: un trobadore del Novecento,’’ Poesia, 12 (1999), 41–43. Pozzi, Giovanni, ‘‘Alfonso Gatto,’’ in La poesia italiana del Novecento, Turin: Einaudi, 1965. Ramat, Silvio, ‘‘Gatto, Alfonso,’’ in Dizionario critico della letteratura italiana, vol. 2, Turin: Utet, 1986. Ramat, Silvio, ‘‘Introduction to Alfondo Gatto,’’ Tutte le poesie, Milan: Mondadori, 2005. Tedesco, Natale, ‘‘Alfonso Gatto un veggente nelle grotte del Sud,’’ in Interventi sulla letteratura italiana. L’occhio e la memoria, Palermo: Lombardi, 1993.

GAY WRITING See Lesbian and Gay Writing

GIOVAN BATTISTA GELLI (1498–1563) Giovan Battista Gelli stands out among the Italian literati for his unusual social position: He remained a shoemaker all his life and designated another craftsman as a reader for his solemn funeral eulogy. It is still debatable whether this decision indicated resignation to unbridgeable social divides or an

expression of working-class pride. Notwithstanding this aspect of his personality, Gelli was not a champion of revolutionary e´lan or ideals; patience and submission to rulers are the social qualities he praised in his works. Learning represented for him a self-fulfilling activity, devoid of social ambition 813

GIOVAN BATTISTA GELLI and political and religious engagement. He considered the intellectual vocation as an education of the mind apt to lead to spiritual refinement. Therefore, Gelli did not promote a literary model of plebeian roughness, whereas authors such as Luigi Pulci, Pietro Aretino, and Teofilo Folengo—who, unlike Gelli, did not belong to the laboring class—represented the most sordid aspects of their inferiors, not without a certain patronizing attitude. Gelli, however, should not be depicted as a naı¨ve selfmade man, content with the literary notions he had acquired, and incapable, or rather unwilling, to question any hierarchical power. His Catholicism, for instance, did not hinder him from expressing opinions on religious matters in his works. He reproached the corruption of the clergy and never rejected the neo-Platonic appreciation of beauty. In politics, though loyal to the Medicis, Gelli maintained overt contacts with personages of the anti-Medicean circle of the Orti Oricellari, such as Benedetto Varchi, often aspiring to broker their reconciliation with the Grand Duke. Early on, Gelli developed a cult for Dante and devoted all his spare time to studying the poet’s works under the guidance of excellent teachers such as Francesco Verino. In 1553, Cosimo I appointed him as Public Commentator of the Comedia (ca. 1305–1321). For the Florentine shoemaker, this nomination represented a platform from which to express both his veneration for Dante and his deeply felt convictions of the value of Florentine culture and language. Apart from the epistolary, several public speeches (including some to the Accademia fiorentina), some translations from Latin, and a mediocre poetical production, Gelli’s literary reputation is based on his philosophical dialogues, his commentaries on Dante and Petrarch, his intervention in the debate on the questione della lingua, and, most importantly, his comedies. La sporta (The Bag, 1543) takes the topic of the avaricious character who finds a pot of gold from Plautus’s Aulalaria but incorporates elements of contemporary satire. I capricci del bottaio (A Barrel Maker’s Caprices, 1546) is formed of ten dialogues between a cooper and his soul, in which, behind the colloquial and humorous tone, the author discussed serious topics. The word capricci should be read not as mere ‘‘whims’’ but more as ‘‘caprichos,’’ in the sense of nocturnal or seminocturnal images. This play indeed represents an essay of moral philosophy explained in simple form. In 1554, the Inquisition placed I capricci del bottaio on the Index for its satirical content, although the author was not prosecuted. In La Circe (Circe, 1549), the sorceress 814

grants Ulysses the boon to turn back into human those of his companions whom she had transformed into animals, provided that they want to be changed back. Inspired by Plutarch’s Gryllus (The Cricket), Gelli’s work is a reflection on the human condition and the opposition between appetites and intellect. The portrayal of the conditions of humanity reaches the tone of existentialistic lamentation, which turns into dissimulated protest against social injustice when the play describes the more humble layers of society. As a result, La Circe was prohibited in Spain in 1559 and in Italy in 1560. Finally, Lo errore (The Error, 1556), modeled after Niccolo` Machiavelli’s La Clizia (1525), unfolds the psychological dynamics within a family in which the elderly father falls in love with a neighbor. The comedy highlights the necessity of respecting family decorum by praising the savvy role of the main character’s wife, who ruins her husband’s plans but also preserves his dignity by hiding this misadventure. Finally, the play Polifila (1566) is no longer attributed to Gelli. Gelli’s public lectures on Dante attest to his skillful approach to difficult subjects with erudition and common sense in the best Florentine tradition of Franco Sacchetti and Matteo Palmieri. Although he often showed more enthusiasm for the text than for critical enquiry, many of his intuitions are still valid now. As for the debate on the questione della lingua, Gelli defended the superiority of the contemporary learned Florentine dialect against Pietro Bembo’s defense of the language of Boccaccio and Petrarch. His linguistic position is specifically recounted in Trattatello sopra l’origine di Firenze (Essay on the Origin of Florence), written around 1540, and in Uno dialogo di Giovan Battista Gelli sopra la difficolta` di ordinare detta lingua (A Dialogue by Giovan Battista Gelli on the Difficulties of Regulating Our Language), published in Pier Francesco Giambullari’s De la lingua che si parla e scrive in Firenze (On the Language Spoken and Written in Florence, 1551).

Biography Giovan Battista Gelli was born in Florence to the wine-seller Carlo, 12 August 1498, and lived all his life in Florence, working as a shoemaker. His wife’s name was Maria, and not Pentasilea as commonly stated, the latter being his sister. Neither the date of his marriage nor the birth dates of their two daughters, Alessandra and Marietta, are known. Under Cosimo de’ Medici’s protection, Gelli assumed the public office of Magistrato delle Arti Minori, 1534.

GENOA He was a member of the Collegio dei Dodici Buonomini, 1539, and was admitted to the Accademia degli Umidi (later called Accademia fiorentina), 1540. He was appointed Console of the Accademia, 1548, and Public Commentator of Dante’s Comedia, 1553–1563. Gelli died in Florence, 24 July 1563, and was buried in the church of Santa Maria Novella. BERNARDO PICICHE` See also: Questione della lingua Selected Works Opere, edited by Delmo Maestri, Turin: UTET, 1976.

Plays La sporta, 1543. I capricci del bottaio, 1546. La Circe, 1549. Lo errore, 1556.

Essays Trattatello sopra ll’origine di Firenze (ca. 1540), edited by Alessandro D’Alessandro in Atti e memorie della Accademia toscana di scienze e lettere La Colombaria, 44 (1979), 59–122.

Tutte le lezioni di Giovanbattista Gelli fatte da lui nell’Accademia fiorentina, 1551. Uno dialogo di Giovan Battista Gelli sopra la difficolta` di ordinare detta lingua, 1551. Letture sulla Commedia, 7 vols., 1551–1561. Letture edite ed inedite sopra la Commedia di Dante, edited by Carlo Negroni, 1887.

Further Reading De Gaetano, Armand, Giambattista Gelli and the Florentine Academy: The Rebellion against Latin, Florence: Olschki, 1976. Ghigo Bezzola, Rosa, ‘‘Un autore ‘capriccioso’ italiano e la sua fortuna nella Francia del Cinquecento: G. Gelli,’’ Studi di Letteratura Francese, 19 (1992), 251–264. Maestri, Delmo, ‘‘Le commedie di G. Gelli e la Polifila,’’ Lettere italiane, 30 (1978), 185–192. Mazzacurati Giancarlo, ‘‘Un itinerario della mente in Dante,’’ Filologia e Letteratura, 15 (1969), 49–94. Montu, Angelo, Gelliana: appunti per una fortuna francese di Giovan Battista Gelli, Turin: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1973. Pozzi, Mario, I trattatisti del Cinquecento, Milan: Ricciardi, 1978. Rhodes, Dennis E., ‘‘An Edition of the Circe of G. Gelli,’’ Gutenberg-Jahrbuch, 67 (1992), 236–237. Singleton, Charles S. (editor), Canti carnascialeschi del rinascimento, Bari: Laterza, 1936.

GENOA First a commune and then an aristocratic republic, the port city of Genoa became a financial powerhouse during the epoch of Carlo V and Filippo II and then an industrial center from the end of the nineteenth century to the 1970s. Documented by landscape painters and photographers, the layers of Genoa’s urban and architectural history (from the Roman, to the Baroque, to Art Nouveau, to the restructurings of the past decades) have conditioned the city’s literary image. Early travelers described the city as a stone amphitheater that rises suddenly from the water, framed by mountains assaulted by construction on their slopes (humanity’s challenge to nature). They illuminated the contrast between the sumptuous aristocratic palaces and the labyrinth of tall, narrow alleys and dwelled on the plays of light and shadow these created. In varying combinations, these are

the recurrent images of the city found in Petrarch’s Itinerario in Terrasanta (Itinerary in the Holy Land, 1358), where he coins the adjective ‘‘superba,’’ to describe the city, and in Rubens’s Palazzi antichi di Genova, raccolti e disegnati (Ancient Palaces of Genoa, Collected and Drawn, 1622), which offers the emblem of a new Baroque city. Often fascinated by nature, foreign writers who visited Genoa and her rivieras in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Byron, Shelley, Stendhal, Dumas, Dickens, Flaubert, Twain, Ibanez, Nietzsche, Lawrence, Pound) placed particular emphasis on the contradiction between ancient splendor and recent decadence. In 1853, Jules Michelet described the city in his diary as dominated by the money of a few capitalists, while the population supported socialism. In a letter of 14 May 1909 to Louise Kautzki, Rosa Luxembourg also underlined 815

GENOA the city’s contradictions, by then blue-collar and industrial. For Guido Piovene, in Viaggio in Italia (Voyage in Italy, 1957), Genoa remained ‘‘misteriosa’’ (mysterious), and provoked the ‘‘fantasia di ‘retroscena clandestini’’’ (image of ‘clandestine backstage areas’) and of a ‘‘speciale teatralita`’’ (a special theatricality) that had ‘‘qualche cosa di occulto’’ (something of the occult). Literature that invokes Genoa is strictly tied to images of an autochthonous city (in language and dialect), of the ruling classes (those of the mercantile commune, of the aristocratic republic, of the bourgeois-Risorgimental ones), of the concrete problems of life in the city, of the city’s strong municipal character, of its self-referentiality (somewhere between apologetic and denigrating). The verses of the Anonymous Genovese of the thirteenth century propose a patriotic municipal myth of a mercantile, maritime city, portrayed by Dante in his invective against the Genovese (Inferno, XXXIII, vv. 151–157), ‘‘diversi / d’ogni costume e pien d’ogni magagna’’ (different in every custom and full of every imperfection) and destined to be ‘‘dispersi’’ (scattered) over the earth. Two stories in Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (ca. 1373) have Genoese merchants as protagonists, upsetting the stereotype of greed (I, 8) and proposing exemplars of virtue, courage, and feminine intelligence (II, 9). Described by Simonetta, the landscape of ‘‘aspra Liguria’’ (severe Liguria) lives again, mythologized, in the Stanze (1494) by Angelo Poliziano (I, 51): ‘‘si sente il fer Nettuno e irato fremere’’ (one hears Neptune tremble irately). In Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (The Frenzy of Orlando, 1532), Genoa is celebrated in the figure of Andrea Doria (XV, 30– 36). In the figure of Federico Fregoso, one of the interlocutors of the Il libro del Cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier, 1528), Baldassare Castiglione proposed an ideal portrait of nobility. In his Novelle (1554/73), Matteo Bandello (1553– 1554) exulted the spirit of adventure of Magnolo Lercaro (II, 14) and the generosity of Luchino Vivaldi (II, 26). Genoa’s subjection to Spain provoked the writings of Oberto Foglietta (Dialogo della Repubblica; Dialogue of the Republic, 1559), Giovanni Botero (Della ragion di stato; On the Reason of the State, 1589), Ansaldo Ceba` (Il cittadino di Repubblica; The Citizen of Republic, 1615), and Tommaso Campanella (Aforismi politici; Political Aphorisms, 1614). Giavanbattista Marino and Gabriello Chiabrera found protection and an audience in the seventeenth-century aristocracy. The primary writers of the period, Gianvincenzo Imperiale 816

(1582–1648) and Antongiulio Brignole-Sale (1605– 1665), in fact belonged to powerful families. Aristocratic life is masked in chivalrous terms in Baroque proto-novels from Liguria. Popular games and alleys suited for ambushes form the background of the picaresque episodes of the Travagliuse ammure de Ciullo e Perna (Labored Loves of Ciullo and Perna, 1614) by the Neapolitan Giulio Cesare Cortese. The setting for the adventures of Antonio Piazza’s L’Attrice (The Actress, 1777– 1778) is instead bourgeois and popular, as are the settings for comedies written in dialect (imitations and reductions of Molie`re and Goldoni) by Steva de Franchi (1714–1785). In A Luigia Pallavicini caduta da cavallo (To Luigia Pallavicini Fallen from a Horse, 1800), Ugo Foscolo transformed the ‘‘petrosa riva’’ (rocky shore) of Sestri into a mythological form: ‘‘il re dell’onde / dolente ancor d’Ippolito / surse per le profonde / vie dal tirreno talamo’’ (the king of the waves / still suffering over Ippolito / rose through the depths / from his Tyrrhenian nuptial bed). Jacopo Ortis wrote some of his Ultime Lettere (Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis, 1801–1802) from Liguria, which is captured above all in the descriptions of landscapes: ‘‘Strade alpestri, montagne orride dirupate’’ (Alpine roads, horrible steep mountains). The encounter with his Venetian compatriot also happens in Pietra Ligure. Genoa of the period of the carbonari and of Giuseppe Mazzini is at the center of Lorenzo Benoni (1853) by Giovanni Ruffini and of Misteri di Genova (Mysteries of Genoa, 1850–1870), a feuilleton by Antongiulio Barrili (1836–1908), who mixed love and politics in his scripts. The juxtaposition between the old popular neighborhoods and bourgeois urbanization becomes a narrative structure in La bocca del lupo (The Mouth of the Wolf, 1892) by Remigio Zena (1850–1917). A stop on the maritime itineraries of the nineteenth century, the port, with its freighters and commercial agencies, appears in the story ‘‘Dagli appennini alle Ande’’ (From the Apennines to the Alps) in Cuore (Heart, 1886) and in Sull’Oceano (On the Ocean, 1889) by Edmondo De Amicis (1846–1908), while the trilogy Capricci per pianoforte (Capriccios for Piano, 1887–1891) by the Piedmontese Giovanni Faldella (1846–1928) captures the growing industry that generates illegal emigration and prostitution. Nationalist Genoa is the subject of the interventionist discourses of Gabriele D’Annunzio (1914–1915); Angela (1923) by Umberto Fracchia (1889–1930) recounts the dawning Fascism; the petty bourgeois is mirrored in the dialect theater of Gilberto Govi (1855–1966).

GENOA As a stage for commemorations of the partisan fight, Genova symbolizes the disasters of the bellicose tragedy in La luna e i falo` (The Moon and the Bonfires, 1950) by Cesare Pavese and offers a realistic backdrop for the existential discomfort in Sei stato felice, Giovanni (You Have Been Happy, Giovanni, 1952) and Il buio e il miele (The Dark and the Honey, 1969) by Giovanni Arpino; to fantastical and adventurous plots by Mario Sodati (Regione Regina; Queen Region, 1987); and the means for brief evasions of the factory in Memoriale (Memorial, 1962) by Paolo Volponi. Antonio Tabucchi sets Il filo dell’orizzonte (The Edge of the Horizon, 1996), a story of the ‘‘years of lead,’’ in Genova, and this period is also evoked in Armi e bagagli (Arms and Baggage, 1987) by Enrico Fenzi and Una rabbia gridata (A Shouted Rage, 1955) by Luigi Fenga. Industrial Genoa, a city that attracts southern emigrants, and one divided between its bourgeois center and working-class suburbs, between whiteand blue-collar workers, lives on in the novels of Vincenzo Guerrazzi. In L’aiutante di S. Presidente operaio (The Helper of S., President, Worker, 2004), Guerrazzi formulated a bitter, grotesque metaphor of Premier Silvio Berlusconi’s Italy. In La regina disadorna (The Queen Disadorns, 1998) and Vite senza fine (Lives without End, 1999), Maurizio Maggiani and Ernesto Franco respectively create mythical and fablelike images of the city at the beginning of the twentieth century. In principio erano le mutande (In the Beginning There Was Underwear, 1992) by Rosanna Campo recounts the precarious bohemianism of students in the ‘‘sbando’’ (chaos) between extracomunitari (noncitizens), drug addicts, prostitutes, and retirees. In Il verbale (2000), Marco Berisso traces the labyrinthical itinerary of the search for a mysterious girl. Genoa is a city of poetic suggestions: In the works of Heine, Claudel, and Vale´ry, it is difficult to distinguish between diaristic form and lyrical expression. The futurist Marinetti, instead, became the cantor of industrial Genoa in Distruzione (Destruction, 1911): ‘‘le Gru colossali si trasformano / in Kanguri fantastici di bronzo’’ (the colossal Cranes transform / into fantastical bronze Kangaroos). Fablelike, fantastical in Dino Campana’s Canti Orfici (Orphean Cantos, 1914), for Camillo Sbarbaro Genoa is the ideal place for flaˆnerie: It is both a place of sensuality, of sensual pleasure and is intimately linked to religious sentiment. Furthermore, in Eugenio Montale, who remembered his own youth in Quaderno Genovese (Genovese Notebook, 1883), the Ligurian landscape of Ossi di

seppia (Cuttlefish Bones, 1925) and the civic foreshortening of Occasioni (Occasions, 1939) produced impromptu revelations; in the stores of La farfalla di Dinard (Dinard’s Butterfly, 1956–1973) and in his Diari (Diaries, 1973), the poet’s memories of places and people come into play. For Giorgio Caproni, the city is a place of memory, as synthesized in ‘‘Litania’’ (Litany) from Il seme del piangere (The Seed of Tears, 1959): ‘‘citta` dell’anima,’’ (city of soul) but also ‘‘degli amori in salita’’ (of uphill loves), an occasion for reflecting on contemporary anguish. Caproni also traduced Le silence de Geˆnes (The Silence of Geˆnes, 1962) by Fre´nuad. Discovered through the works of poets, the Ligurian city became an emotional pole for Eugenio De Signoribus (1947–) in the ‘‘Tavole genovesi’’ from Principio del giorno (Beginning of the Day, 2000). Themes and motives taken up in the popular realm by singer-songwriters (Gino Paoli, Luigi Tenco, Umberto Bindi) include the city of alleys and of prostitutes (Via del Campo, Bocca di rosa) of Fabrizio De Andre´ (1940–1999); nostalgia for the other in the work of the Piedmontese Paolo Conte (Genova per noi); through to the evocation of the death of Carlo Giuliani during the G8 in 2002 in Piazza Alimonda (last myth of the city’s topography) by the Modenese Francesco Guccini in the album Ritratti (Portraits, 2004). FRANCO VAZZOLER Further Reading Baiardo, Enrico, L’identita` nascosta. Genova nella cultura del secondo Novecento, Genoa: Erga, 1999. Baratono, Pierangelo, Genova a lume di naso, Genova: Libreria Editrice Moderna, 1925. Beniscelli, Alberto, Vittorio Coletti, and Lorenzo Co`veri, ‘‘La Liguria,’’ in L’italiano nelle regioni, edited by Francesco Bruni, Turin: Utet, 1992. Bertone, Giorgio, ‘‘Paesaggio e letteratura: il paradigma ligure,’’ in Storia d’Italia. Le regioni dall‘‘Unita` a oggi. LaLiguria, edited by Antonio Gibelli and Paride Rugafiori, Turin: Einaudi, 1974. Bo, Carlo, Echi di Genova, Turin: ERI Edizioni Rai, 1966. Cattanei, Giovanni, La liguria e la poesia italiana del Novecento, Milan: Silva, 1966. Clerici, Luca, Il viaggioatore meravigliato. Italiani in Italia 1714–1996, Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1999. Croce, Franco et al. (editors), La letteratura ligure, 5 vols., Genoa: Costa & Nolan, 1988–1992. Fantoni Minella, Giorgio, Genova dei viaggiatori e dei poeti, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 2004. De Guglielmi, Ada, Liguria, Brescia: La Scuola, 1987. De Nicola, Francesco, and Roberto Trovato, Parole e scene di un secolo in Liguria, Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2002.

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GENOA Dossena, Giampaolo, I luoghi letterari (paesaggi,opere e personaggi). Italia settentrionale, Milan: Sugar, 1972. Marcenaro, Giuseppe (editor), Viaggio in Liguria, Genova: Consiglio regionale della Liguria, 1974. Merlanti, Federica, Genova fra le righe. La citta` nelle pagine di narratori italiani fra ’800 e ’900, Genoa: Marietti 1820; reprinted, 2000. Montale, Eugenio, and Cesare Fera, Genua urbs maritima, Genoa: Italsider, 1968. Petti Balbi, Giovanna, Genova medievale vista dai contemporanei, Genoa: Sagep, 1978. Poleggi, Ennio, and Paolo Vevini, Le citta` nella storia d’Italia. Genova, Bari-Rome: Laterza, 1981.

Quaini, Massimo, ‘‘La liguria invisibile,’’ in Storia d’Italia. Le regioni dall‘‘Unita` a oggi. LaLiguria, edited by Antonio Gibelli and Paride Rugafiori, Turin: Einaudi, 1974. Sapegno, Natalino, ‘‘Liguria,’’ in Storia letteraria delle regioni d’Italia, edited by Walter Binni and Natalino Sapegno, Florence: Sansoni, 1968. Toso, Fiorenzo (editor), La letteratura genovese e ligure. Profilo storico e antologia, 6 vols., Genoa: Marietti, 1989–1991. Varaldo, Alessandro, Genova sentimentale, Genoa: Libreria Editrice moderna, 1913. Verdino, Stefano (editor), Genova in versi e l’entroterra ligure. Poesia del Novecento, 2 vols., Ventimiglia: Filolobiblon Edizioni, 2003.

GENRES Literary genres were the subject of great debate in the twentieth century. Whether affirmed or negated, the identity of these genres followed the waves of the avant-gardes and the successive returns to order, waves that characterized the century in more than simply literary terms. The result in the twentyfirst century is that of a more or less peaceful coexistence of two opposite tendencies: that of affirming and redefining genres in theoretical terms and that of post- and neo-avant-garde writing that negates and mixes them freely, often with positive results. Italian literature plays a determining role in the first great, systematic negation of genre through the work of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Futurism. One must also take into account, however, the corrosive action exercised by the historical avant-gardes at the end of the nineteenth century, especially in France. Marinetti is the product of French symbolism, of Gustave Kahn and Alfred Jarry, and of those artists who bring literary writing to abandon mimesis and fight against metric form and traditional codes. However, Italian literature remained for centuries the most accredited depositary of the written canon, at least until the birth of the modern novel around the middle of the seventeenth century. The heredity of Plato and, above all, of Aristotle, which passed through Latin culture and was revisited in the medieval period, was handed down until then without significant transgressions with respect to genre. In order to better understand the historic 818

progression of the theory of genres, a brief overview is necessary. Traditionally, literary genres have been classified as rhetorical categories, in which works are codified according to their formal characteristics and their contents. Plato himself used these criteria in several of his dialogues (Ion, Menexenus, Gorgias, The Republic, Phaedrus), proposing the first classification known to us. Serious content distinguishes the epic and the tragic; witty content, comedy, and iambic poetry. Mimetic and dramatic form is characteristic of tragedy and comedy, while narrative form characterizes lyric and epic. All artistic genres are marked by mimesis and by the passionate involvement of the public, while the subject determines a hierarchy of values. In the first position come hymns to gods and heroes; in the second, epic poems; finally, drama, judged by Plato to be the corruptor of souls because it encourages emotional involvement. Aristotle’s Poetics asserts itself as the overturning of Platonic theory by introducing the concept of catharsis, which is capable of sublimating passions and creates a neat bipartition between the dramatic and the narrative. The former is considered a perfect form of poetry. Aristotle’s followers, the peripatetic philosophers, thus fixed genres and their norms, prohibiting the mixing of different poetic forms and codifying metric, contents, and styles. This classifying effort passed from the Hellenist world into Roman culture and became the subject of study in the schools. Here were born Horace’s

GENRES Ars poetica and Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria. In the medieval period, attempts were made to maintain the distinctions formulated by the Greeks, but such attempts had to take into account genres born in the new Western culture. Furthermore, Aristotle’s Poetics was lost for a few centuries, and the rise of the chansons de gestes, the mystery plays, and the visiones required the search for new codifications. The Rhetorica ad Herennium (first century BC), falsely attributed to Cicero, dictates the new canon of genres: Tragedy is characterized by sublime language and its fatal ending; comedy has a humble language and a happy ending; elegy expresses feelings, most prevalently painful ones. In De vulgari eloquentia (Eloquence in the Vulgar Tongue, ca. 1304–1305), Dante Alighieri once again took up ancient distinctions based on content, respecting the tripartite division in high, medium, and low genres. He further proceeded with the proposal of a common language for Italians, identified in the vernacular as ‘‘illustre’’ (illustrious), ‘‘cardinale’’ (cardinal), ‘‘aulico’’ (elevated), and ‘‘curiale’’ (courtly), already used by the great poets. The reappearance of Aristotle’s Poetics, translated into Latin in 1498 by Giorgio Valla (1447–1500), then in 1536 translated into Italian by Alessandro de’ Pazzi (1483–1530), provided an enormous incentive to Renaissance treatise writing, which was already oriented toward the codification of every aspect of knowledge within the laws of each discipline. In tragedy, Giulio Cesare Scaligero (1484– 1558) introduced the unity of time in Poetices libri septem (Seven Books of Poetics, 1561), and Ludovico Castelvetro (ca.1505–1571), author of a vernacular version of Aristotle’s Poetics (1507), added the unity of place. Thus were born the ‘‘three Aristotelian unities,’’ only one of which, the unity of action, can really be called Aristotelian. The bipartite division (dramatic and narrative) is substituted with a tripartite division: epic, dramatic, and lyric. In an incessant attempt to codify and define, pastoral drama, tragicomedy, the chivalric poem, and melodrama were added to the traditional genres, and a sort of Italian genre tyranny reigned in Europe until the eighteenth century. However, there was no lack of alternative voices: in De gl’heroici furori (The Heroic Frenzies, 1585) Giordano Bruno argued that there are as many genres as there are poets; Gian Vincenzo Gravina, in Ragion poetica (Poetic Reason, 1708), exalted invention and poetic imagination and reexamined the forgotten Dante. Lodovico Antonio Muratori, in Della perfetta poesia (On Perfect Poetry, 1706), opposed the Baroque proliferation of styles in the name of the ideals

of simplicity, clarity and ethics. Finally, Giovan Battista Vico treated genres as instruments of historical interpretation in La scienza nuova (The New Science, 1725). The Enlightenment and Romanticism reopened the discussion on genre statutes. Voltaire proposed a new theory of epic poetry in Essay sur la poe´sie e´pique (1726). Denis Diderot reflected variously on theater and on dramatic art in the Encyclope´die, in the Discours sur la poe´sie dramatique (1758), and in the Paradoxe sur le come´dien, written in 1773 but published posthumously in 1830, then reprinted throughout the world and considered one of the primary sources of Bertold Brecht’s concept of the theater of estrangement. Diderot’s reform, which preceded and introduced Carlo Goldoni’s, used tableaux vivants to propose a dramatization of situations. Under this reform, all was conducted professionally and studied in its typically social and cultural elements. He eliminated from acting the sensibility and the emotional participation of both actor and spectator. Diderot even invented a third form of performance, between comedy and tragedy, a bourgeois drama that renders comedy serious and tragedy domestic, bringing characters’ conditions—more than their personalities—onstage. In the formulation of his theories, he used centuries of reflections on theater, including the most recent ones, such as those expressed by Luigi Riccoboni in Dell’arte rappresentativa (On the Art of Performance, 1728), a work obsessed with the theme of the ethical reform of comedy. The Romantics once again took up the distinction between epic and dramatic poetry, deepening, with Friedrich von Schlegel, the philosophical reflections on ancient sources. Goethe named lyric, epic, and drama as the only literary genres directly suggested by nature. In his Aesthetik (1823), Hegel explained the origins of the three traditional classical genres and analyzed their dissolution. Romanticism tended to pull down the tripartition of the unities, considered (mistakenly) to be Aristotelian. Alessandro Manzoni intervened on the subject in his Lettre a` Monsieur Chauvet sur l’unite´ de temps, de lieu et d’action dans la trage´die (Letter to M. Cauvet on the Unity of Time, Space and Action in Tragedy, 1823), taking a position against the unities, above all those of time and place. He aligned himself instead with Schlegel in his choice of the founding values of the tragic genre: the respect for historic veracity as the guarantor of moral validity and the unity of action understood as the capacity of the writer to collect the interpretative nexuses of the various actions. Francesco De 819

GENRES Sanctis, recalling Vico, traced the history of literary genres as evolution and cyclical change. Positivism ratified their existence as biological organisms of literature, as Ferdinand Brunetie`re, who inspired Italian supporters of the historic method such as Alessandro D’Ancona and Pio Rajna, argued in L’e´volution des genres dans l’histoire de la litte´rature (1890). At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, Benedetto Croce instead refuted the existence of literary genres. All Italian critics of the idealist mold followed him, supported also by the American philosopher John Dewey, author of Art as Experience (1934), in spite of the fact that an important publisher, Vallardi, printed a monumental Storia dei generi letterari italiani (History of Italian Literary Genres), of which the first volume, by Adolfo Albertazzi on the novel, dated to 1902, while the last two, dedicated to the lyric, appeared as late as 1950. However, the explosion of the avant-garde accompanied this dissolution of borders. Not only in literature were the boundaries between genres struck down, but all artistic manifestations tended to mix and annul. From free verse to parole in liberta` (words in freedom), from Futurist simultaneity to aeropoesia (aeropoetry), through contemporary reinterpretations of the most ancient forms of visual poetry, the beginning of the twentieth century did away with tradition. Poetry returned to its nature, that of an event that must be set in motion and made to happen in its original theatricality and its simultaneity. The novel broke down, renouncing narrativity, and proposed rather the stream of consciousness, the nonnovel, and the antinovel. At the same time, theater rejected the model of bourgeois drama to create events that embrace all artistic forms: improvisation, performance, happening, and finally synthetic theater, that completely refused the immersion of the spectators and roused their intelligence, calling them to creative and not simply interpretative cooperation. The Futurist synthesis was no longer a theatrical genre but rather an artistic form like any other. Successive artistic and literary avant-gardes followed the disintegrating action of genres, proposing ever new forms of abstraction. The birth of new critical methodologies (sociology, structuralism, semiotics, psychoanalysis, hermeneutics) brought works and interpretative languages to meet ever more often, in a reciprocal exchange of genres, of functions, and of interpretations. At the end of the 1970s, the formal rediscussion of genres informed philosophical research, as in 820

¨ esthetische Theorie, and Theodor W. Adorno’s A taxonomical work, as in Paul Hernadi’s What Is Literature? (1978), oscillating among characterizations based on thematic elements (for example, pastoral poetry, bildungsroman, and so on), on formal characteristics (for example, sonnet or canzone), or on the type of communication (for example, interior monologue or dialogue). In reality, the structural analysis of narrative continued to have great paradigmatic value. The French group of the Nouvelle critique, which included Roland Barthes, Claude Bremond, Tzvetan Todorov, and Ge´rard Genette, proposed such analyses at the end of the 1970s, on the heels of Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale (1928), which enjoyed a rediscovery and diffusion in Western Europe in the 1960s, and of the narratology of Mikhail Bakhtin. The analysis of narrative proposed narratological theories, without concern for distinguishing the story as a narrative genre of ‘‘story-telling.’’ Such work created theories and analyses of all of the techniques present in novels, short stories, and ‘‘simple forms’’ such as myths and legends already defined by Andre´ Jolles in Einfache Formen (1930), then taken up by Northrop Frye in his Anatomy of Criticism (1957). The concept of genre intermingled with that of ‘‘mode,’’ already present in Frye, as a way of organizing the imaginary, a place in which experiences of the world are represented and connected, culturally speaking, with the rhythms of the seasons. Rather than destroying genres, the late-twentieth-century debate consolidated them and brought their identities into view, including those longest ignored. Academic publications in Italy teemed with research on theories and histories of literary genres, and school manuals were often organized according to them. New genres or modes not frequently identified by analyses and literary theories were brought to light in the course of these studies. News reporting, dialogue, parody, and utopian literature were considered alongside the short story and the novel, drama and the lyric, poetry and satire, in new perspectives that valued the methodologies of twentieth-century criticism. The role of the avant-garde was never adequately underlined, including, in particular, the importance of Futurism, not only for its destruction of but also its identification of new genres and literary modes. With the birth of deconstruction, emphasis was placed on the work of the public as a postmodern practice. Speed, assumed as a model by Futurism, realized the process of disruption of literary and artistic genres begun in France in the second half of

GENRES the nineteenth century. Hence, the abandonment of the principle of mimesis on the one hand and the need, on the other, to put into effect the interferences and simultaneities of a visual-tactile-acousticolfactory nature led to the creation of texts that are in reality events, dynamic objects that require the active collaboration of the public, anticipating to a certain extent the theories articulated by Umberto Eco in Lector in fabula (The Role of the Reader, 1979). To be fully realized, such texts must be made to happen, rather than read, seen, or heard. From Futurism to Surrealism, from Dadaism to all the other abstract movements of the twentieth century, the theatrical genre was redesigned, becoming distinct from a generic ‘‘theatrical literature’’ in numerous ways. No longer simply defined according to the material treated or to the tragic or happy nature of the ending, it was also classified according to the new forms assumed. The ‘‘serata futurista’’ (Futurist evening) was a theatrical canvas with its own rules, less improvised that the Futurists themselves declared; the ‘‘sintesi teatrale’’ (theatrical synthesis) is a representation of objects that can be based on an ancient model of seventeenthand eighteenth-century tableaux vivants for the primacy conferred on the image in movement; the ‘‘poesia non umana dei tecnicismi’’ (nonhuman poem of technicalities) or the ‘‘aeropoema’’ are poetry for the theater with their own rules, completely different from both traditional theater and from poetry. Verbal-visual poetry is now particularly widespread, although there are not yet sufficient theoretical studies that define the fluid space of writing in which words exist together with images. Futurist visual poetry is not born out of nothing: A marginal tradition, infrequently visited and infrequently reproduced in part due to technical difficulties, drives Futurists to the technopaegnia (Greek pattern poems), the carmina figurata (illustrated poems), the calligrams and the poems shaped to form an image. From Simmias of Rhodes (fourth– third century BC), Dosiadas of Crete, Theocritus and other Alexandrine poets, who invented compositions in the form of altars and of bagpipes, this tradition led to Christian poets, such as Porfirius Ottantianus (fourth century), Venantius Fortunatus (sixth century), Rabanus Maurus (ninth century), who accentuated the graphic, geometric aspect of writing. The poetic word in this case seeks, in its very form, full adherence to the religious significance of the work. As a result, in these poets there is a proliferation of serpentines, acrostics, and carmina figurata. In fact, over the course of the

centuries, many authors have tried their hand at these expressive forms; in 1532 Franc¸ois Rabelais composed various calligrams, including one in the shape of a bottle written in praise of wine. It can therefore be said that from Theocritus to Marinetti, to Apollinaire, passing by way of the experiments of Les Mots dans la peinture (Words in Painting) or of La parola dipinta (The Painted Word), to quote the titles of the studies by Michel Butor (1969) and Giovanni Pozzi (1981), the avant-garde has been driven by the paradox that it has found its materials in a long-standing, if minor, literary tradition. If today visual poetry is considered in effect a genre— albeit one still predominantly studied by its producers, artists, and poets—this is in part because of Futurism, which brought to evidence and into practice its specific characteristics. In the absence of new, convincing methodological proposals on the part of scholars, the ‘‘militant’’ theoretical statements of the artists remain among the most important documents, not simply from a historiographic point of view, but also from a Hermeneutic one. In the end, such statements constitute their own genre: One might think of the theories of Vincenzo Accame (Il segno poetico, 1977) or Lamberto Pignotti (Figure scritture, 1987), to give a few contemporary examples. This type of document dates back as another avant-garde genre, the poetic manifesto, whose specific codification began with symbolism and Ste´phane Mallarme´ but was perfected in the paroxysm of manifesto writing with Futurism. From Marinetti’s first manifesto of 1909, to the last, including that written with Fillia on Futurist cooking, the oratory structure based on the ancient model is evident, in particular from the Institutio oratoria by Quintilian, with many rhetorically distinguishable parts, such as the inventio, the dispositio, the elocutio, the actio, and the memoria. Following this, Dadaism, Surrealism, and the other avant-gardes of the twentieth century have taken up and confirmed its importance. New modes of communication influence, in interesting ways, the formal statutes of genres, even inventing new ones, such as instant text messaging. Online short stories and novels, for example, transform addressees, space, time, and structural form. The short story recalls its origins in the oral tradition when, on the Internet, it appears next to urban stories born in the daily news; the novel becomes once again a serial novel, now on a Web page instead of in a newspaper; poetry is read in festivals and theaters, proposing itself anew as a primordial event in which all the senses and the other arts come into play, as in ancient times and in Futurism. 821

GENRES These new communicative genres call for a new reading of genre itself in terms of performance, dramatization, poetry slam. The Internet, in this variegated panorama of interpretations, was first a perturbing element, then a force for change. If studies of these transformations are still lacking, this certainly is due to the fact that, as always, reality is faster and more complex than its theoretical formulations. GIUSEPPINA BALDISSONE Further Reading Accame, Vincenzo, Il segno poetico: materiali e riferimenti per una storia della ricerca poetico-visuale e interdisciplinare, Samedan: Munt Press, 1977. ¨ esthetische Theorie, Frankfurt am Adorno, Theodor W., A Main: Suhrkamp, 1970. Agosti, Stefano, Il testo poetico. Teoria e pratica d’analisi, Milan: Rizzoli, 1972. Anceschi, Luciano, Gli specchi della poesia, Turin: Einaudi, 1989. Asor Rosa, Alberto (editor), Le forme del testo, 2 vols., Letteratura italiana, Turin: Einaudi, 1984. Bagni, Paolo, Genere, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1997. Baldissone, Giusi, Gli occhi della letteratura. Miti, figure, generi, Novara: Interlinea, 1999. Barthes, Roland (editor), L’analyse structurale du re´cit, special issue of Communications, 8 (1966). Bigazzi, Roberto, Le risorse del romanzo. Componenti di genere nella narrativa moderna, Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1996. Bologna, Corrado, Flatus vocis. Metafisica e antropologia della voce, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1992.

Brioschi, Franco, and Corrado Di Girolamo (editors), Manuale di letteratura italiana. Storia per generi e problemi, 4 vols., Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1993–1996. Butor, Michel, Les Mots dans la peinture, Gene`ve: E¨ditions d’Art Albert Skira, 1969. Cardona, Giorgio Raimondo, Antropologia della scrittura, Turin: Loescher, 1981. Carlson, Marvin, Theories of the Theatre. An Historical and Critical Survey from the Greeks to the Present, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984. Cavarero, Adriana, A piu` voci: Filosofia dell’espressione vocale, Milan: Feltrinelli, 2003. Ceserani Remo, Raccontare la letteratura, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1990. Frye, Northrop, Anatomy of Criticism. Four Essays, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957. Fubini, Mario, Critica e poesia. Saggi e discorsi di teoria letteraria, Bari: Laterza, 1956. Hernadi, Paul, What is Literature? Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1978. Ong, Walter J., Orality and Literacy. The Technologizing of the Word, London and New York: Methuen, 1982. Pignotti, Lamberto, Figure scritture. Su certi segni delle arti e dei mass-media, Udine: Campanotto, 1987. Pozzi, Giovanni, La parola dipinta, Milan: Adelphi, 1981. Propp, Vladimir, Morphology of the Folktale, Bloomington: Indiana University Research Center in Anthropology, Folklore, and Linguistics, 1958. Raimondi, Ezio, and Luciano Bottoni (editors), Teoria della letteratura, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1975. Segre, Cesare, Avviamento all’analisi del testo letterario, Turin: Einaudi, 1985. Segre, Cesare, Le strutture e il tempo. Narrazione, poesia, modelli, Turin: Einaudi, 1974. Todorov, Tzvetan (editor), The´orie de la litte´rature, Paris: Seuil, 1966.

GIOVANNI GENTILE (1875–1944) Giovanni Gentile was a major figure in Italian idealist philosophy, as well as an educator, critic, and politician who became a prominent figure during in the Fascist Party, especially in the 1920s, as a Minister of Education of Benito Mussolini’s government. He is sometimes called the ‘‘philosopher of Fascism,’’ in recognition of his attempts to justify the dictatorship philosophically. Born in Sicily, Gentile wanted to complete his education in a city that could offer him future possibilities and moved to Pisa, where he studied at the Scuola Normale Superiore, at that time one of the best universities 822

in Italy. At the Scuola Normale Superiore, which had been reformed immediately after Italian unification by Ministers of Education Francesco De Sanctis (1817–1883) and Carlo Matteucci (1811–1868), Gentile assimilated the foundations of Italian postunification culture, a mixture of positivism, erudition, and civil engagement. He was particularly influenced by Alessandro D’Ancona (1835–1914) and Donato Jaja (1839–1914), two of his professors, as well as by the works of Bertrando Spaventa (1817–1883), the central figure of nineteenth-century Italian Hegelianism. This environment did not prevent him

GIOVANNI GENTILE from developing an original and independent thought. He often engaged in controversy with many of the intellectuals of the period in his opposition to positivism and historical materialism. He soon developed a polemical and biting style in his reviews and articles, which often did not allow him room for any compromise. Gentile’s position matured during the years he spent in Florence to complete his education after 1897. There he also met the philosopher Felice Tocco (1845–1911) and the historian Pasquale Villari (1826–1917). From a philosophical point of view, Gentile’s attualismo (actual idealism) shows the strong influence of Hegel, reinterpreted according to a peculiar and radically idealistic perspective. Gentile, writing against current philosophical ideas, articulated his philosophical idealism while criticizing historical materialism in his La filosofia di Marx (Marx’s Philosophy, 1899) and dissecting positivism in discussions with Villari and in his critique of Antonio Rosmini in Rosmini e Gioberti (1898). The restoration of the Hegelian dialectic, which he theorized in his La riforma della dialettica hegeliana (The Reform of the Hegelian Dialectic, 1913), was probably in his mind a sort of ‘‘third way’’ that allowed him to keep his distance from these two philosophical poles of the Italian cultural establishment. He considered idealism as the only true philosophy, born with Plato and yet to complete its development. For Gentile, it was still possible to find traces of realism in Kant, while Hegel himself considered thought in an abstract way, as an ‘‘idea’’ or as ‘‘spirit.’’ Hegel’s logic shows a series of categories that are not ‘‘thinking’’ but ‘‘thought;’’ thus the real subject is not included in the dialectical act of thinking. Therefore, according to Gentile, it is necessary to reform Hegel’s dialectic by shifting from the pure being or the ‘‘idea’’ to the concrete act of thinking; in other words, to make the living subjectivity of the ego, not a generic spirit, the foundation of idealist thought. Gentile’s philosophy, which posits the ego as a pure act that establishes itself, distinguishes between a subjective moment (which is the thinking act itself) from an objective one (which is what ‘‘thought’’ is). What is ‘‘thought’’ has to be identified with nature, history, or even god, all of which, being ‘‘objects,’’ do not exist by themselves but only in the thoughts that conceive and establish them. Therefore, everything is ‘‘act,’’ and everything exists only in the actuality of the thinking act: For this reason Gentile’s philosophy is called attualismo (actualism). This thinking act characterizes all empirical egos that, by virtue of being empirical, are also different and opposed to

one another. However, as mere thinking egos, they can be considered as constituting a universal Ego. This universal Ego is immanent in all the empiric ones and does not exist as a separate being. In this way, Gentile opposed his idealism both to materialism and to religious spiritualism, as it is ‘‘absolute’’ because of its radical ‘‘immanence’’ (while Hegel’s idealism still had traces of transcendence). Gentile articulated his philosophical theory in his Teoria generale del conoscere dello spirito come atto puro (The Theory of Mind as Pure Act, 1916) and Sistema di logica come teoria del conoscere (The System of Logic as Theory of Cognition, 1917–1921), in two volumes. Both works were the result of a long gestation and had already been outlined in 1899, while the author was writing La filosofia di Marx. In the same period Gentile met Benedetto Croce, who was nine years older and was already a wellknown intellectual. Their friendship lasted until 1924, when it ended as a result of Gentile’s adherence to Fascism. Since the early 1900s Gentile and Croce had collaborated on La critica, which they founded in 1902, making it one of the most important literary reviews of the period, and frequently discussed their philosophical thoughts, deeply influencing one another. The end of their friendship was underlined by the publication of two manifestos in 1925. To rally Italian intellectuals to a Fascist commitment to the country, Gentile drafted the Manifesto degli intellettuali fascisti (Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals), issued after the first congress of Fascist culture in Bologna and signed by, among others, Ugo Spirito, Luigi Pirandello, Ardengo Soffici, and Margherita Sarfatti. A few days later Croce responded with the Manifesto degli intellettuali antifascisti, in which he expressed his opposition to Fascism much more clearly than he had ever done before. Gentile explained his embrace of Fascism on philosophical grounds, above all through his adaptation of Hegel’s concept of the ‘‘ethical state.’’ The state, in his mind, had to be considered a synthesis of will (authority) and freedom. Gentile advocated an authoritarian and ‘‘ethical state’’ that should represent the universal being of the empirical egos without compromising public and private interests, as, argued, happens in a democracy. From this perspective, it is not difficult to see the connections of this political position to the philosophy of attualismo— the state itself must be considered as a universal Ego incarnate—but its proximity to the principles of totalitarianism. As Gentile declared, everything is in the state, and nothing is out of the state, which also means that only by submitting to the ethical 823

GIOVANNI GENTILE state can people attain a true freedom, equal for all. Those who refuse to submit are simply acting on egoistic interests. Gentile’s identification of ethical state and universal ego led him to justify violence, as well as a sort of political mysticism. However, his support of Fascism not only reflected his philosophical thought but was also the result of personal experience. Gentile’s family belonged to the Sicilian middle class, which historically had played a mediating role between the aristocracy and rural classes, and which, fearing social disorder, was always on the side of the established authorities. Gentile had a very strong sense of the state and its institutions, to which he always remained loyal. Therefore, after the downfall of the Fascist regime and the Italian armistice on September 8, 1943, he decided to embrace the Fascist Social Republic of Salo` to save his honor and integrity. As a politician, Gentile’s fame is linked to his role in the first Fascist government as Minister of Education and to the school reform that he planned and implemented, thus bringing to fruition several years of speculation on pedagogy. Gentile had always been interested in this matter. As early as 1900 he had published L’insegnamento della filosofia nei licei (The Teaching of Philosophy in the High Schools), written just after he had begun to teach and later developed into Sommario di pedagogia come scienza filosofica (Summary of Pedagogy as a Philosophical Science, 1913–1914). Gentile’s educational system was based on principles partly related to his ‘‘actualism’’ and partly to direct experience. If reality, history, and nature are nothing but an act of thinking, then the cornerstone of education must be the act itself: The educational experience is both teaching and learning at the same time, as the teacher sums up in himself the empirical subjectivities of the students and elevates them to the universal Ego. In practical terms, Gentile refused any general didactic method and criticized the separation of form and content, arguing that a subject cannot be considered as abstract knowledge to be apprehended in isolation from other subjects. Gentile’s pedagogy, characterized by a moral foundation like much of his thought, aimed at forming students rather than at imparting knowledge. For this reason, his system also favored classical over scientific studies. From this perspective, his ideas were in perfect accord with the needs of Fascism, which aimed at shaping society according to its principles. In spite of this, Gentile created a rigid structure in which philosophical education, the foundation of the whole system, was the privilege of an elite. The teaching of the Catholic 824

religion, considered as a connection between art and philosophy, also played an important role. One of Gentile’s most important achievements was the publication of the first edition of the Enciclopedia italiana (1936), which Institute he directed from 1925, when the Institute itself was created, until 1943. Despite the objections and the difficulties raised by both Fascists and anti-Fascists, he tried to involve the largest number of intellectuals in this project, aiming as much as possible at keeping the Institute and the encyclopedia above political factions.

Biography Giovanni Gentile was born in Castelvetrano (Trapani) on May 29, 1875. He earned a degree in philosophy from the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa, 1897. He was cofounder of the journal La critica with Benedetto Croce, 1902. He became a professor at the University of Palermo, 1906; a professor at the University of Pisa, 1914; and then a professor at the University of Rome, 1917. He founded the Giornale critico della filosofia italiana, 1920. Gentile was elected Senator, 1922, and appointed Minister of Education in the first Fascist government, 1922–1924. He carried out extensive reform of Italian schools and directed the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. He became director of the Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana (Treccani), 1925. He served as President of the Supreme Council of Public Education, 1926–1928, and was a member of the Fascist Grand Council, 1925–1929; thereafter his political influence steadily declined. In 1943 he supported the Social Republic of Salo`. Gentile was killed in mysterious circumstances (most likely a political execution) on April 15, 1944 in Florence. NICOLA FUOCHI Selected Works Collections Opere complete, Florence: Sansoni, 1955–. Il pensiero politico-pedagogico di Giovanni Gentile, edited by Dario Faucci, Florence: Le Monnier, 1972. Opere filosofiche, edited by Eugenio Garin, Milan: Garzanti, 1991.

Philosophical and Pedagogical Writing Rosmini e Gioberti, 1898. La filosofia di Marx, 1899. L’insegnamento della filosofia nei licei, 1900. La scuola primaria di Stato, 1907. La riforma della dialettica hegeliana, 1913.

GERMAN INFLUENCES Sommario di pedagogia come scienza filosofica, 2 vols., 1913–1914. I fondamenti della filosofia del diritto, 1916. Teoria generale dello spirito come atto puro, 1916; as The Theory of Mind as Pure Act, translated by H. Wildon Carr, 1922. Sistema di logica come teoria del conoscere, 2 vols., 1917– 1921. Le origini della filosofia contemporanea in Italia, 4 vols., 1917–1923. La riforma dell’educazione, 1920; as The Reform of Education, translated by Dino Bigongiari, 1922. Che cosa e` il fascismo; discorsi e polemiche, 1925. Origini e dottrina del fascismo, 1929; as Origins and Doctrine of Fascism, translated by A. James Gregor, 2002. La filosofia dell’arte, 1931; as The Philosophy of Art, translated by Giovanni Gullace, 1972. Economia ed etica, 1934. La mia religione, 1943. Genesi e struttura della societa`, 1946; as Genesis and Structure of Society, translated by Henry S. Harris, 1960. Discorsi parlamentari, 2004.

Critical Essays Studi vichiani, 1915. Studi sul Rinascimento, 1923. Dante e Manzoni, 1923. Poesia e filosofia in Giacomo Leopardi, 1939.

Letters Carteggio Gentile-Jaja, edited by Maria Sandirocco, 2 vols., 1969. Carteggio Gentile-D’Ancona, edited by Carlo Bonomo, 1973. Lettere a Benedetto Croce, edited by Simona Giannantoni, 5 vols., 1972–1990.

Giovanni Gentile e il Senato. Carteggio (1895–1944), edited by Fortunato Pintor, 2004.

Further Reading Agosti, Vittorio, Filosofia e religione nell’attualismo gentiliano, Brescia: Paideia, 1977. Coli, Daniela, Giovanni Gentile, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2004. Colombo, Katia, La pedagogia filosofica di Giovanni Gentile, Milan: Franco Angeli, 2004. Di Giovanni, Piero (editor), Giovanni Gentile. La filosofia italiana tra idealismo e anti-idealismo, Milan: Franco Angeli, 2003. Di Lello, et al. (editors), Giovanni Gentile: Il pensiero dell’Italia, Rome: Pantheon, 2004. Gaeta, Maria Ida (editor), Giovanni Gentile: la filosofia, la politica, l’organizzazione della cultura, Venice: Marsilio, 1995. Gregor, A. James, Giovanni Gentile: Philosopher of Fascism, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2001. Harris, Henry S., The Social Philosophy of Giovanni Gentile, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1960. Moss, E. M., Mussolini’s Fascist Philosopher: Giovanni Gentile Reconsidered, New York: Peter Lang, 2004. Natoli, Salvatore, Giovanni Gentile filosofo europeo, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1989. Pellegrino, Paolo, L’estetica del neoidealismo italiano, Galatina (Lecce): Congedo, 1996. Petrillo, Francesco, Diritto e volonta` dello Stato nel pensiero di Giovanni Gentile, Turin: Giappichelli, 1997. Raschini, Maria Adelaide, Gentile e il neoidealismo, Venice: Marsilio, 2001. Romano, Sergio, Giovanni Gentile. Un filosofo al potere negli anni del regime, Milan: Rizzoli, 2004. Turi, Gabriele, Giovanni Gentile, Florence: Giunti, 1995.

GERMAN INFLUENCES There has never been any lack of exchange or contact between Italian culture and the culture of Germanic countries, but for a long period what can be considered their common ground was dominated by Latin as the language of culture. Up to the fifteenth century, not much of what was being produced in German gained any attention in Italy. Likewise, while Petrarch and Boccaccio were known to some extent, it cannot be said that Italian literary production, which was already showing the first signs of the Renaissance sophistication and splendor to come, received ‘‘due’’ attention in Germany (although contacts between artists occurred:

Albrecht Du¨rer was in Venice twice). The interests and the general atmosphere in the two countries were, in fact, too different; and, from a cultural and literary point of view, sixteenth-century Germany still remained medieval in many respects. Only the passage through the Reformation led to fresh prospects, which are generally linked to the poet Martin Opitz (1597–1639), and to borrowing forms and contents from the Italian and French Renaissance. The fashion of Petrarchism, the names of Ludovico Ariosto and Torquato Tasso, and the elegance of the Baroque all reached Germany and other states of Germanic culture together (earlier on in Holland 825

GERMAN INFLUENCES and a little later in Sweden). On the other hand, at the end of the seventeenth century it was a German, Leibniz, whose name as a philosopher was on everyone’s lips, even though he was considered more the representative of a universal literary republic rather than of a specifically German culture, as Benedetto Croce put it (‘‘Cultura germanica in Italia nell’eta` del Risorgimento,’’ 1927). If during the seventeenth century Italy’s prestige in Europe tended to decline, the excellence achieved in culture and the arts rendered it immune to foreign influences, and, indeed, Italian forms of poetry were adopted elsewhere. Not until later, and in the case of Germany mainly from the Romantic age onward, would the flow be reversed. Moreover, the German language was little known and valued: Pietro Metastasio, for instance, did not bother to learn it despite his long stay in Vienna. During the seventeenth century, however, a few scholars and men of letters—starting with Aurelio de’ Giorgi Bertola (1753–1798), author of Idea della poesia alemanna (An Idea of German Literature, 1779) and Idea della bella letteratura alemanna (An Idea of Fine German Literature, 1784), which contains translations of Salomon Gessner’s Idyllen (1756– 1772)—took a different course and translated directly from the German, making their readers acquainted with Christoph Martin Wieland, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774), which achieved immediate success throughout Europe, was translated into Italian, and its influence is evident in the structure of Ugo Foscolo’s Ultime letteere di Jacopo Ortis (Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis, 1798), Vincenzo Monti’s works, and in some of Giacomo Leopardi’s poems. During the nineteenth century, Goethe’s Faust (Part I, 1808; Part II, 1832) met with the same success. Arrigo Boito drew freely on it for his Mefistofele (Mephistopheles, 1868) and Giovanni Prati for his Armando (1868), as did Enrico Thovez and Arturo Graf. However, rather than being seen as a product of the German tradition, Goethe soon came to represent the eternal ideal of poetry, alongside Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare. At a different level of critical recognition, Friedrich Schiller’s plays also become popular (Don Carlos, in the translation by Andrea Maffei, was admired by Carlo Cattaneo), and his themes were taken up in opera by Gioacchino Rossini, Gaetano Donizetti, and Giuseppe Verdi, while his idealistic drive was appreciated by Giuseppe Mazzini. Giovanni Berchet, with his translations of Gottfried August 826

Bu¨rger, brought Italy the Romantic ballad, whose exponents were Luigi Carrer, Francesco Dall’Ongaro, and Aleardo Aleardi. Of great significance were figures such as Novalis, the poet-philosopher, in some respects close to Leopardi, who nevertheless seems not to have known him; Heinrich von Kleist, whose theatrical works would be better appreciated later on; the Grimm brothers, with their studies of language and folklore (their Fables were translated throughout Europe); August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, writers and critics who, together with Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, spread Romanticism and were well loved in Italy, particularly by the Liberals (Francesco De Sanctis and the brothers Silvio and Bertrando Spaventa were among the first translators of Hegel). It was once again the Romantic vein of his works that made Heinrich Heine famous in Italy: He inspired Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi, Giacomo Zanella, Antonio Fogazzaro, and, most importantly, Giosue` Carducci, who reinterpreted his ironic and rebellious spirit. In the Odi barbare (Barbaric Odes, 1893), Carducci also drew upon August von Platen, developing his historical and classical interests, and translated him, as well as Klopstock, Uhland, Herder, and Ho¨lderlin. The end of the nineteenth century witnessed the emergence of new themes and names that influenced European literature in different ways, notably Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche. In Italy, Gabriele D’Annunzio took it upon himself to interpret, or rather misinterpret, them, in particular in the novels Il trionfo della morte (The Triumph of Death, 1894) and Il fuoco (The Flame, 1900), transforming whatever was grandiose and tragic in them into a totally sensual decadentism. The irrational element of Nietzsche’s message can be noticed in early twentieth-century journals such as Il Leonardo and Lacerba. On a different level, Nietzsche’s psychology was used as a resource by Umberto Saba, who also proved to be highly sensitive to the teachings of Sigmund Freud in the poems of Il piccolo Berto (Little Berto, 1929–1931) and above all in his prose works. Indeed, Freud would influence in different ways the whole of twentieth-century literature, from the sceptic Italo Svevo of La coscienza di Zeno (Zeno’s Conscience, 1923) to Alberto Moravia, and his interpretations of the unconscious became a vital part of all reflections on humankind. The complex tangle of the human soul returns time and again in the narrative and drama of Luigi Pirandello, who attended Lipps’s courses in atomistic psychology in Germany and subsequently completed his studies by graduating

GERMAN INFLUENCES in philology in Bonn in 1891. The spiritualist and humorous framework of his works (the Germanisms of which have often been critiqued, as in the case of Svevo) is reminiscent of Hoffmann and Heine. The young generation of Triestine intellectuals frequently had the University of Vienna as their reference point (for instance Carlo Michelstaedter, a scholar of Hebbel and Ibsen), when they did not demonstrate their debt to German culture in other ways, as in the case of Scipio Sla`taper, who graduated in Florence with a thesis on Ibsen. German symbolism, connected in various ways to its French counterpart and represented mainly by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Stefan George, and Rainer Maria Rilke, influenced the Florentine Hermetics, who also introduced expressionist authors such as Georg Trakl and Gottfried Benn. An important mediating role was played by the translation of Leone Traverso. In the period between the two world wars, and despite the limits imposed by Nazi and Fascist directives, the works of Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Arnold and Stefan Zweig, Arthur Schnitzler, Erich Maria Remarque, and the authors of the Neue Sachlichkeit (including, among others, Alfred Do¨blin) enjoyed considerable attention. Their skilled detailed analysis contributed to bringing traditional Italian prose more up to date. On the contrary, the mesmerizing works of Franz Kafka and Robert Musil would become better known after World War II. In the context of broader and freer cultural exchange following the war, it becomes more difficult to establish which authors really exerted an active influence. In the field of criticism, particular recognition is due to Leo Spitzer’s and Eric Auerbach’s stylistics and to the philosophical thought of Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer, while in the field of creative writing there was a boom in translations. Moreover, because literature was being consumed far more rapidly than before, in the end one has to rely on more transitory evidence: the awarding of significant literary prizes, social and political events (the ‘‘two Germanies’’ and their literary representations), the incidence on or coincidence of literary research with the suggestions from mass media, entertainment, and in particular cinema. Hermann Hesse won the Nobel Prize in 1946, but his narrative became most widely read in the 1960s and 1970s, when his mystical and irrational writings attracted the student generation of 1968. The theater of Berthold Brecht was influential in the immediate postwar period, and his lyric poetry was translated by Franco Fortini. In the 1970s it would enjoy a comeback thanks to the

vicissitudes of criticism, with the rediscovery of Walter Benjamin’s writings and the theories of the Frankfurt School. Other authors who were widely discussed between the 1950s and 1960s include Heinrich Bo¨ll (Nobel prize winner in 1972), Gu¨nther Grass, and Hans Magnus Enzensberger. In 1963 Rolf Hochhuth’s play Der Stellvertreter (The Vicar) created a scandal for its representation of the Vatican position on the Holocaust. In later years it would be the turn of Peter Handke, Thomas Bernhard, Christa Wolf in fiction, and in poetry, necessarily a more elitist domain, of Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan. EDOARDO ESPOSITO Further Reading Azzolini, Margherita, Giosue Carducci und die deutsche Literatur, Tubingen: J. C. Mohr, 1910. Bach, Giovanni, ‘‘La letteratura tedesca in Francesco De Sanctis,’’ in Studi e ricordi desanctisiani, Avellino: Tipografia Pergola, 1935. Beller, Manfred, Le metamorfosi di Mignon: l’emigrazione poetica dei tedeschi in Italia da Goethe a oggi, Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1987. Binni, Walter, ‘‘Le traduzioni preromantiche,’’ in Preromanticismo italiano, Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1949. Borgese, Giuseppe Antonio, ‘‘Leopardi wertheriano e l’Omero di Ugo Foscolo,’’ in Me´langes d’histoire litte´raire, ge´ne´rale et compare´e, offerts a` Fernand Baldensperger, Paris: Campion, 1930. Cantarutti, Giulia, Stefano Ferrari, and Paola Maria Filippi (eds.), Il Settecento tedesco in Italia: gli italiani e l’immagine della cultura tedesca nel XVIII secolo, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2001. Cecchini, Laudomia, La ballata romantica in Italia, Turin: Paravia, 1901. Croce, Benedetto, ‘‘Cultura germanica in Italia nell’eta` del Risorgimento,’’ in Uomini e cose della vecchia Italia, Bari: Laterza, 1927. Croce, Benedetto, ‘‘Goethe e la critica italiana,’’ in Goethe, 3rd. revised edition, Bari: Laterza, 1939. Croce, Benedetto, ‘‘Per la storia del pensiero tedesco in Italia,’’ in Aneddoti di varia letteratura, vol. 3, Bari: Laterza, 1942. Esposito, Edoardo (editor), Le letterature straniere nell’Italia dell’entre-deux-guerres, Lecce: Pensa MultiMedia, 2004. Galletti, Alfredo, ‘‘Richard Wagner e Gabriele D’Annunzio,’’ in Teorie di critici ed opere di poeti, L’Aquila: Vecchioni, 1930. Giovannetti, Paolo, Nordiche superstizioni. La ballata romantica italiana, Venice: Marsilio, 1999. Hazard, Paul, ‘‘L’invasion des litte´ratures du Nord en Italie,’’ in Revue de litte´rature compare´e, 1(1921), 30–67. La¨mmert, Eberhard, and Giorgio Cusatelli (editors), Avantgarde, Modernita¨t, Katastrophe: letteratura, arte e scienza fra Germania e Italia nel primo ’900, Florence: Olschki, 1995.

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GERMAN INFLUENCES Natali, Giulio, ‘‘Appunti su la cultura tedesca in Italia e italiana nei paesi tedeschi nel sec. XVIII,’’ Rivista d’Italia, 31(1928), 416–428. Rubino, L. Mario, I mille demoni della modernita`. L’immagine della Germania e la ricezione della narrativa tedesca contemporanea in Italia fra le due guerre, Palermo: Flaccovio, 2002.

Santoli, Vittorio, ‘‘La letteratura italiana, la tedesca e le nordiche,’’ in Letterature comparate, edited by Antonio Viscardi et al., Milan: Marzorati, 1960. Tortarolo, Edoardo, La ragione interpretata: la mediazione culturale tra Italia e Germania nell’eta` dell’Illuminismo, Rome: Carocci, 2003.

PIETRO GERMI (1914–1974) Pietro Germi was one of Italian cinema’s most popular directors at a time when Italy had the third-largest movie-going public in the world and, most likely, the highest ratio of movie theaters to population. An aesthetically accomplished master of commedia all’italiana (comedy Italian-style), he was, above all, an eclectic craftsman possessed of great technical skills. Often dismissed as a genre director using commercial, Hollywood-style scenarios, Germi experimented with various genres and achieved remarkable results in each: from the politically engaged Western, In nome della legge (In the Name of the Law, 1948), to the traditional melodrama in Il ferroviere (The Railroad Man, 1955); from the detective story of Un maledetto imbroglio (The Facts of Murder, 1959) to his comic-satiric masterpiece Divorzio all’italiana (Divorce ItalianStyle, 1961). Throughout his career, Germi explored the ambiguities and complexities of a nation that, soon after World War II, was undergoing an irreversible transformation from a rural to an industrial society—a transformation that changed the face of the country while altering its identity. Germi successfully wed refined narration and mass communication, popular entertainment and social critique, romantic tragedy and corrosive humor, sarcasm and idealism. He aimed to incorporate postwar neo-Realistic trends into mainstream cinema, thus attracting wide audiences to socially committed films. The populist lyricism of Germi’s early films and the grotesque melancholy of his mature comedies sprang from his unwillingness to accept the world as it is. While in Italy shooting Avanti! (1972), Billy Wilder asked to meet Pietro Germi because he considered him the European filmmaker with whom he had the most in common. Like Germi’s, Wilder’s critical reputation has fluctuated. 828

Germi’s cinematic career began under the auspices of Alessandro Blasetti, the most influential director of his day. In 1941, he made a cameo appearance in Blasetti’s La corona di ferro (The Iron Crown). Germi’s directorial debut, however, came only at the end of the war with Il testimone (The Witness, 1945), a courtroom drama. His next two films marked him as a neo-Realist: Gioventu` perduta (Lost Youth, 1947), which explores criminality among the young, relies on the conventions of popular American genres (gangster movies and film noir). The main character, Marcello, recalls Alan Ladd’s role as a hired killer in Frank Tuttle’s This Gun for Hire (1942). In nome della legge, the first courageous Italian film to be made about the Sicilian Mafia, revisits the frontier setting of John Ford’s My Darling Clementine (1946). These legendary American films were released in Italy just before Germi began production on his own films. Il cammino della speranza (Path of Hope, 1950) tells the story of a group of Sicilian sulfur miners who cross the Italian peninsula in the hope of emigrating illegally to France. This film can be considered the director’s most original contribution to postwar Italian cinema. It is a kind of stylized adaptation of the classical plots of Ford’s films of the 1940s, particularly The Grapes of Wrath. Germi was a superb visual storyteller who combined the elements of the Russian school (considerable compositional and editing skills) with the social themes of Italian neo-Realism (nonprofessional actors, authentic locations, true stories). At the same time, he was adept at attracting a mass audience with moving plots, epic breadth, and popular themes. During the 1950s Germi directed some of his least critically acclaimed films: La citta` si difende (Four Ways Out, 1951); Il brigante di Tacca del

PIETRO GERMI Lupo (The Brigand of Tacca del Lupo, 1952); La presidentessa (The Chief Judge’s Wife, 1952); and Gelosia, (Jealousy, 1953). As a social democrat, he also came to be known as an artist at odds with the ideological Left. Germi was openly antiCommunist. By the end of the decade, he had released three stunning films in which he also played the leading role. Il ferroviere (1956), L’uomo di paglia (The Straw Man, 1958), and Un maledetto imbroglio are notable for Germi’s exploration of the psychological drama of the family. Germi also worked as an actor in films by Damiano Damiani, Mauro Bolognini, and Martin Ritt. Itwas in this period that his maturation as an actor and director breathed life into his solid, robust films, which with remarkable assurance reworked the melodrama and film noir, but which, more importantly, again spotlighted his power to analyze, through the cinema, the deep structures of Italian society, like the family, the petit bourgeoisie, and the suburbs. His recitative dramatic style was made up of simple but impeccable gestures; his power of telling stories to any spectator with fluid camera work, unbroken rhythm, and emotionally rich narration was augmented in these years—when an unexpected transformation radically altered his style—by his dramatic classicism. To the great surprise of his critics, who would have never expected from a dramatic director such brilliant comedies as Divorzio all’italiana, Sedotta e abbandonata (Seduced and Abandoned, 1962) and Signore e signori (The Birds, the Bees and the Italians, 1965), Germi visually translated the stories of Italians, who were once accustomed to problems like hunger or the invention of elaborate schemes to secure temporary jobs but who must now find new solutions to difficult problems in a modern and wealthy nation. In Divorzio all’italiana, the use of a barbaric law concerning an honor killing is the occasion for an irreverent satire of the backwardness of Southern Italy but also for a disillusioned reflection on its sentiments and mores. The film, which predated the legal institution of civil divorce in Italy, shows the clumsy attempts of a Siclian nobleman, Fernando Cefalu` (Fefe` to his friends) to divorce his wife Rosalia in order to marry his beloved cousin Angela. He schemes for Rosalia to commit an act of infidelity so that he can murder her, an obligatory honor killing. Sedotta e abbandonata takes the use of grotesque faces (as in the drawings of Goya, which Germi adored) and the tendency to stress narrative rhythm and paradox to an extreme. The plot centers on a courageous Sicilian girl, Agnese, who dares to break the

traditional code of silence or omerta` after she is seduced by her suitor, who then refuses to marry her because she is no longer a virgin. In the end, individual rebellion is defeated, and the honorable Sicilian moral code forces Agnese to marry against her will. Germi’s next comedy, Signore e signori, directs the same corrosive humor of the Sicilian comedies toward the society of the North. It also perfects the use of the traveling shot and the zoom in original combinations, thanks to which his visual style acquired a dynamism, akin to that of a swift bird of prey, which surveyed the entire community of a small town in order to reveal its secrets and miseries. These films were box office hits both because they were funny and because they represented individuals destroyed by opposing social values. Germi adopted a sophisticated comedic style: contrast-lighting enhanced by the use of deep blacks and blinding whites, fast cutting, and a mobile camera. Despite his undeniable success and some recognition on the international scene after Divorzio all’italiana won the Academy Award for the best screenplay, the last years of the director’s life were unsatisfying. L’immorale, (The Climax, 1966), Serafino (1968), Le castagne sono buone (Chestnuts Are Good, 1970), and Alfredo, Alfredo (1972) no longer show his extraordinary satiric panache. Only his last film, Amici miei (My Friends, 1974), directed by Mario Monicelli, was successful enough to prompt a sequel. Germi was too ill to direct it himself and died on the first day of shooting. For years Pietro Germi’s name seemed to have vanished. It was only at the end of the 1990s that his films were restored by Cineteca Nazionale and Cinema Forever-Mediaset and that retrospectives of his work (particularly the 1999 New York Film Festival) contributed to his revival and recognition as one of the most original and influential directors of Italian cinema. Otar Ioseliani and Billy Wilder, two extremely different artists, both loved Germi’s films. Today, Daniele Luchetti, Gabriele Muccino, and Paolo Virzı` can most closely be identified with his extraordinary comic legacy.

Biography Pietro Germi was born in Genoa to Giovanni and Armellina Castiglione, 14 September 1914. His father, who died when Pietro was 10, was a hotel porter; his mother was illiterate. Germi attended the Liceo Nautico, where he studied to become a naval officer, 1931–1934; he applied to the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia (the Italian film 829

PIETRO GERMI school) in Rome and was turned down, 1937; he reapplied and was admitted under the sponsorship of Alessandro Blasetti. Germi married Anna Maria Bancio, 1940; their daughter Linda was born, 1945. He was divorced from his first wife in 1954, and married Olga D’Ajello, 1966. Germi produced for RAI television the series I giorni della signorina Giulia (Ms. Giulia’s Days), adapted from short stories by Piero Chiara, 1969. He was awarded numerous prizes, including Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival for Il cammino della speranza, 1950; an Academy Award for Divorzio all’italiana, 1961; the Palm d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival for Signore e signori, 1965; and a film retrospective at the New York Film Festival, 1999. Germi died of cirrhosis in Rome, 5 December 1974. MARIO SESTI Selected Works Films Il testimone, 1945. Gioventu` perduta (Lost Youth), 1947. In nome della legge (In the Name of the Law), 1949. Il cammino della speranza (Path of Hope), 1950. La citta` si difende (Four Ways Out), 1951. La presidentessa, 1952. Il brigante di Tacca del Lupo, 1952. Gelosia, 1953. Amori di mezzo secolo (second episode), 1953. Il ferroviere (The Railroad Man), 1955. L’uomo di paglia, 1957.

Divorzio all’italiana (Divorce, Italian Style), 1961. Sedotta e abandonata (Seduced and Abandoned), 1963. Signore e signori (The Birds, the Bees and the Italians), 1965. L’immorale (The Climax), 1966. Serafino (Serafino), 1968. Le castagne sono buone, 1970. Alfredo Alfredo (Alfredo Alfredo), 1972.

Screenplays L’uomo di paglia, edited by Fausto Montesanti, Bologna: Cappelli, 1958. Divorzio all’italiana, edited by Giorgio Moscon, Roma: F. M. Edizioni, 1961. Sedotta e abbandonata, edited by Giacomo Gambetti, Bologna: Cappelli, 1964. Pietro Germi, et al., Finche` divorzio non vi separi (original treatment of Alfredo Alfredo), Rome: Tipografia C. Corvo, 1971.

Further Reading Apra`, Adriano, Massimo Armenzoni, and Patrizia Pistagnesi (editors), Pietro Germi: Ritratto di un regista all’antica, Parma: Pratiche Editrice, 1989. Buache, Freddy (editor), Hommage a` Pietro Germi, Locarno: Cine´mateque Suisse, 1976. Caldiron, Orio, Pietro Germi: Le cine`ma frontalier, Rome: Gremese International, 1995. Positif (special issue on Germi), 406(1994). Sesti, Mario, Tutto il cinema di Pietro Germi, Milan: Baldini & Castoldi, 1997. Sesti, Mario (editor), Pietro Germi: The Latin Loner, Milan: Edizioni Olivares, 1999. Sesti, Mario (editor), Signore e signori: Pietro Germi, Siena: Gli Ori, 2004. Vigano, Aldo (editor), I film di Pietro Germi, Genoa: AgisSNCCI, 1994.

GIACOMINO DA VERONA (MID- TO LATE-THIRTEENTH CENTURY) The De Ierusalem celesti (The Heavenly Jerusalem) and De Babilonia civitate infernali (Babylon Infernal City) are the only extant works definitively attributed to the Franciscan cleric Giacomino da Verona. Written in monorhythmic alexandrine quatrains, the De Ierusalem celesti deals with the joys reserved for the blessed in Paradise, while the De Babilonia civitate infernali describes the torments awaiting the unrepentant in the infernal 830

city. In both metric style and content, Giacomino’s eschatological poems closely approximate Bonvesin de la Riva’s more refined Libro delle tre Scritture (Book of the Three Scriptures, ca. 1274), and together they represent two of the finest examples of late medieval didactic poetry written in a northern Italian vernacular. Though attempts to trace any direct link to Dante have been tenuous at best, both authors of these allegorical visions

GIACOMINO DA VERONA have long been grouped among his so-called precursors. The material for the diptych is culled by and large from Revelations, often cited by Giacomino himself, as well as from sermons and the Franciscan literature of the period. Certain verses also bear a stylistic resemblance to a vernacular piece entitled Della caducita` della vita umana (The Frailty of Human Life), which, coincidentally, rests alongside the works of Giacomino and Bonvesin in their oldest manuscript edition (Marciano it. 4744). Giacomino therefore belongs to an established tradition of didactic religious poetry then popular in northern Italy. What distinguishes his work from that of his contemporaries, however, is his quasi-mimetic eye for realism—a charming, almost naı¨ve tendency to transpose concrete elements from quotidian life into his fantastical vision of the afterlife. The damned suffer from extreme cold and heat; they are attacked by animals, subjected to the beatings of their cruel master Beelzebub, and, in short, suffer a fate that would differ from a peasant’s daily toil only in the severity of degree. Thus, the De Babilonia civitate infernali preys on the common fears shared by its humble audience, twisting their mundane trials and tribulations into hyperbolic eternal punishments. In contrast to this monstrous caricature stands the fablelike heavenly court of the De Ierusalem celesti. Here, a familiar urban landscape becomes regally bejeweled with the most coveted objects of the popular imaginary. The majestic city is surrounded by impenetrable walls adorned with precious stones, metals, and jewels and guarded by an angel brandishing a fiery sword. The streets and the piazzas are lined with silver and crystal; the homes sumptuously decked in marble and rich colors; and their security is guaranteed by the divine prince, Christ the Lord. Situated within the walls lies a resplendent park that closely resembles the gardens of Earthly Paradise found in other examples of courtly, popular, and Christian medieval literature. Trees, flowers, and fruit bloom perennially; birdsong and rich odors fill the air; and a chivalrous entourage of martyrs, prophets, and virgins strolls, sings, and pays homage to the enthroned Christ and his exalted Lady, the Virgin Mary. In true courtly fashion, she receives magnificent steeds and palfreys as gifts and is crowned with a noble garland. Scored to the polyphonic music of an ineffably perfect angelic choir, the poem concludes with an invitation to pray to the Virgin so that she may intercede on the listener’s behalf and grant him a seat among the blessed.

Many of the most salient features of the De Ierusalem celesti and De Babilonia civitate infernali serve as functions of Giacomino’s edifying mission. The use of the Veronese vernacular and the frequent admonitions to listen attentively suggest that the pieces were originally intended to be read before an unlettered audience. The language, orality, and easily identifiable images would have invited recognition and facilitated the reception of the moral lessons contained therein. Though the De Ierusalem celesti is presented as a somewhat static reenactment of apocalyptic and liturgical scenes, the De Babilonia civitate infernali manages to both instruct and entertain with its grotesque yet spirited spectacles and tragic-comic dialogues. Inventive allegory and symbolic figures aim toward transmitting the same truths contained within the Scriptures and add authority to Giacomino’s humble creation. Most tellingly, Giacomino prefaced the first poem with a defensive note against any supercilious theologians who might object to his brand of popular representation, admonishing them to look beyond the poverty of his work and instead heed the truth-value of his exempla. Though clearly aware of the disdain he could incur, Giacomino nonetheless opted to lead his simple flock down the easiest path to salvation. Finally, a notable fact is that Giacomino, like Bonvesin, omitted any mention of Purgatory. Since Purgatory had gained official recognition at the Council of Lyons in 1274, one can only wonder if Giacomino predated or rather willfully ignored the papal amendment.

Biography All that is known of Giacomino’s life comes from the one autobiographical reference contained within the Babilonia infernali: ‘‘Iacomino da Verona de l’Orden de Minori’’ (Giacomino of Verona of the Order of the Friars Minor); no trace of his name has been found in Wadding’s annals of the Franciscan Order, leading to the conclusion that Giacomino never carried out any public or ecclesiastical charges. The closest approximate date that can be given comes from the philological study of the earliest Venetian codex containing his work (Marciano it. 4744), dating back to the late 1200s. It is therefore assumed that Giacomino was active during the last half of the thirteenth century. No information survives pertaining to his birth or death. SARA ELENA DI´AZ 831

GIACOMINO DA VERONA Selected Works La Gerusalemme celeste e la Babilonia infernale, secondo la lezione dei quattro codici conosciuti, edited by Emilio Barana, Verona: La Tipografica Veronese, 1921; as The ‘‘De Jerusalem celesti’’ and the ‘‘De Babilonia infernali’’ of Fra Giacomino da Verona, edited by Esther Isopel May, London: Milford, 1930.

Further Reading Avogaro, Carlo, L’opera di Giacomino da Verona nella storia letteraria del secolo XIII, Verona: Franchini, 1901. Barbiero, Daniel, ‘‘Giacomino da Verona’s De Ierusalem: An Interpretation,’’ The Georgetown Journal of Languages and Linguistics, 1:4 (1990), 391–400.

Cerroni, Monica, ‘‘Tipologia dell’allegoria e dinamiche del vero in Giacomino da Verona e Bonvesin de la Riva,’’ Strumenti critici, 15:1(2000), 53–74. D’Agige, Franco, Frate Giacomino da Verona, c. 1260: francescano precursore di Dante Alighieri, Milan: Lanzani, 1919. Rossi, Aldo, ‘‘Poesia didattica e poesia popolare del Nord,’’ in Storia della letteratura italiana, edited by Emilio Cecchi and Natalino Sapegno, vol. 1, Milan: Garzanti, 1987. Russo, Luigi, Ritratti e disegni storici, vol. 1, Bari: Laterza, 1953. Schrage, Marco, Giacomino da Verona: Himmel und Ho¨lle in der fru¨hen italienischen Literatur, Frankfurt am Main and New York: Lang, 2003. Stefanini, Ruggero, ‘‘Una congettura a Giacomino da Verona (51),’’ Romance Philology, 23 (1969), 300–03.

GIACOMINO PUGLIESE (FL. 1220–1240) Giacomino Pugliese was a rhymer of the so-called Sicilian School of Poetry, which flourished under Emperor Frederick II of Swabia. His full name is attested in the important Italian canzoniere (songbook) of Vatican City (Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Lat. 3793), which attributes eight poems to him; and in that of Florence (Biblioteca MediceoLaurenziana, Redi 9), which contains a single poem ascribed to ‘‘Giacomo Pulliese.’’ Three of his poems contain his first diminutive name, Giacomino, as an internal signature. The interpretation of Pugliese as a simple toponym for Apuliense, or ‘‘from Southern continental Italy,’’ gave rise to the identification of Giacomino with Giacomo di Morra from Campania, who covered important charges on behalf of Frederick II in Treviso, Spoleto, and Ancona from 1239 to 1245 and who was probably the dedicatee, together with Corraduccio da Sterleto, of a Provenc¸al grammar (Donat proensal) written by Uc Faidit. According to Gianfranco Contini, however, the epithet ‘‘Pugliese’’ should be interpreted as a family name, which was ‘‘very widespread in all Southern Italy, Sicily included’’ (Poeti del Duecento, 1960). For instance, one ‘‘Iacobus Apuliense de Cathania’’ is known to have died as a prisoner to the Angevins between 1299 and 1303, but he can hardly be identified with our poet, whose work had circulated already in the 1230s. The earliest testimony of a Sicilian poem is a copy of the initial four 832

stanzas of Giacomino’s song ‘‘Resplendiente stella de albur’’ (Shining Star of Dawn), discovered in 1991 at the bottom of a legal document (Landfriede) issued by German King Henry VII and dated 1234–1235 (Giuseppina Brunetti, Il frammento inedito, 2000). This circumstance has been connected with a political encounter occurred two years before (spring 1232) in Aquileia, Friuli, between Henry VII’s court and that of his father Frederick II, both poets in their own right. Giacomino actually mentions Germany and the town of Aquileia in the envoy of his ‘‘Lontano amore’’ (Distant Love): ‘‘de Lamagna infino in Aghulea’’ (l. 31). His extant corpus consists of seven love songs or canzoni (one of which, ‘‘La dolce ciera,’’ is attributed to Pier delle Vigne in two manuscripts) and one discordo, an heterostrophic poem. Giacomino’s metrical structures are less articulated than those of other Sicilian poets and possibly reflect an original link with music (Francesco Carapezza, ‘‘Un ‘genere’ cantato,’’ 1999). Three of his songs display a plain octosyllabic pattern with a typically troubadour rhyme scheme: 8 a b, a b; c d c d (c) (or c d d c). Each stanza of ‘‘Donna di voi mi lamento’’ (Lady, It Is of You I Complain) is furthermore concluded with a short refrain line (amore), characteristic of musical genres. Another two metrical patterns, those of ‘‘Lontano amore’’ and ‘‘Resplendiente,’’

GIACOMINO PUGLIESE consist of two monometric blocks with that same type of rhyme scheme (respectively 10 a b, a b; 11 c c b, and 5 a b, a b; 10 c d, d c). The presence of decasyllables, an unusual and perhaps archaic type of line in Italian poetry, is also noteworthy. Such structural indications are corroborated by a rare and explicit reference to musical performance found in Giacomino’s only discordo, ‘‘Donna per vostro amore’’ (Lady, for Your Love): ‘‘isto caribo / ben distribo’’ (I accurately compose this caribo [name of a dance]) and ‘‘lo stormento / vo sonando / e cantando’’ (I play the instrument and sing). According to Aurelio Roncaglia, ‘‘it is possible, then, that the old minstrel unity of poet-musician-performer survives and reoccurs in him’’ (‘‘Sul ‘divorzio tra musica e poesia,’’’ 1978). Finally, the precocious and isolated circulation of one of his songs in a Germanic area could have been favored by melodic transmission. Giacomino Pugliese shows a distinct preference for a simple style, which has been associated with Old Provenc¸al trobar leu (literally, ‘‘easy composition’’). Accordingly, his themes are quite removed from the analytical reflections and lyrical purity of a Giacomo da Lentini or a Guido delle Colonne, and he usually resorts to expressive direct speech effects. The key words of his songbook are rimembranza (recollection) and fallanza (infidelity), two topical situations of medieval courtly romance in its most realistic acceptation. Otherwise, Giacomino’s most aulic and rhetorically ambitious piece is a lament for the death of the beloved, ‘‘Morte, perche´ m’hai fatta sı` gran guerra’’ (Death, Why Have You Warred Against Me So), the oldest Italian example of its kind, together with Pier delle Vigne’s ‘‘Amando con fin core e con speranza.’’ His literary relationship with other early poets of the Sicilian school, such as Giacomo da Lentini, Rinaldo d’Aquino, and Emperor Frederick II himself, is certified by a close net of intertextuality. An interesting episode of his reception are the two extant poems by Tuscan rhymer Compagnetto da Prato, which probably constitute a melodic imitation of Giacomino’s ‘‘Quando vegio rinverdire’’ (When I See Green Growth).

Biography Giacomo Pugliese was born in southern Italy, at the end of the twelfth or beginning of the thirteenth century. He belonged to the courtly entourage of Emperor Frederick II of Swabia (1220–1250) and possibly followed him to Aquileia on the occasion

of a political encounter with German King Henry VII, 1232. The place and date of his death are unknown. FRANCESCO CARAPEZZA See also: Sicilian School of Poetry Selected Works Collections ‘‘Giacomino Pugliese e le sue rime,’’ in Gennaro Maria Monti, Studi letterari, Citta` di Castello: Il Solco, 1924. Le poesie di Giacomino Pugliese, edited by Margherita Santangelo, Palermo: Boccone del Povero, 1937. Bruno Panvini, Le rime della scuola siciliana: Introduzione, testo critico, note, vol. 1, Florence: Olschki, 1962. The Age of Dante: An Anthology of Early Italian Poetry, translated by Joseph Tusiani, New York: Baroque Press, 1974. The Poetry of the Sicilian School, edited and translated by Frede Jensen, New York: Garland, 1986. Concordanze della lingua poetica italiana delle origini (CLPIO), edited by Silvio d’Arco Avalle, vol. 1, Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1992. Bruno Panvini, Poeti italiani della corte di Federico II, Naples: Liguori, 1994.

Further Reading Bertoni, Giulio, ‘‘Il pianto di Giacomino Pugliese per la donna amata,’’ in Studi su vecchie e nuove poesie e prose d’amore e di romanzi, Modena: Orlandini, 1921. Brugnolo, Furio, ‘‘La Scuola poetica siciliana,’’ in Storia della Letteratura Italiana, edited by Enrico Malato, vol 1, Rome: Salerno, 1995. Brunetti, Giuseppina, Il frammento inedito ‘‘Resplendiente stella de albur’’ di Giacomino Pugliese e la poesia italiana delle origini, Tu¨bingen: Niemeyer, 2000. Brunetti, Giuseppina, ‘‘Il libro di Giacomino e i canzonieri individuali: Diffusione delle forme e tradizione della Scuola poetica siciliana,’’ in Dai Siciliani ai Siculotoscani. Lingua, metro e stile per la definizione del canone, Atti del Convegno di Lecce (21–23 April 1998), edited by Rosario Coluccia and Riccardo LGualdo, Galatina (Lecce): Congedo, 1999. Brunetti, Giuseppina, ‘‘Giacomino Pugliese,’’ in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, vol. 54, Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 2000. Carapezza, Francesco, ‘‘Un ‘genere’ cantato della Scuola poetica siciliana?’’ Nuova rivista di letteratura italiana, 2(1999): 321–354. Contini, Gianfranco, Poeti del Duecento, vol. 1/1, Testi arcaici. Scuola siciliana. Poesia cortese, Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1960; reprinted, 1995. Folena, Gianfranco, ‘‘Cultura e poesia dei Siciliani,’’ in Storia della Letteratura Italiana, edited by Emilio Cecchi and Natalino Sapegno, vol. 1, Le origini e il Duecento, Milan: Garzanti, 1965. Roncaglia, Aurelio, ‘‘Sul ‘divorzio tra musica e poesia’ nel Duecento italiano,’’ in L’Ars nova italiana nel Trecento,

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GIACOMINO PUGLIESE vol. 4, edited by Agostino Ziino, Certaldo: Centro di Studi sul Medioevo, 1978. Schulze, Joachim, ‘‘Giacomino Pugliese und Gaucelm Faidit.’’ Cultura neolatina, 63(2003):57–72.

Spitzer, Leo, ‘‘Un passo di una canzone di Giacomino Pugliese,’’ Cultura neolatina, 10(1955): 143–146. Tuulio (Tallgren), O. J., ‘‘Una canzone di Giacomino Pugliese,’’ Aevum, 9(1935): 261–280.

GIACOMO DA LENTINI (FL. 1220–1242) Acknowledged founder of the Italian lyric tradition, Giacomo (or Iacopo) da Lentini was an imperial notary and scribe under Frederick II Hohenstaufen of Swabia (1194–1250), King of Sicily from 1198 and Emperor from 1220, who played a major role in the constitution of the so-called Sicilian School of Poetry. Giacomo’s notarial activity is certified by a set of five liens and deeds dating from December 1232 to September 1233 and drawn up in Southern Italian cities of San Severo (Puglia), Policoro (Basilicata), Catania, Messina, and perhaps Palermo (Sicily), during a journey of the imperial court, and by another deed of May 1240 from Messina, which bears his autograph signature: ‘‘Jacobus de Lentino domini Imperatoris notarius testor.’’ It is simply by his professional epithet of ‘‘il Notaro’’ (the notary), which is found in one of his poems (‘‘Meravigliosamente,’’ l. 62) and which preceeds his proper name in the rubrics of the extant manuscripts, that Giacomo is called by later poets such as Chiaro Davanzati and Dante Alighieri. Aurelio Roncaglia (‘‘Angelica figura,’’ 1995) put forward the hypothesis that the poet took part in a journey to Sardinia on the occasion of the wedding of Frederick’s son, Enzo, with Adelasia of Torres and Gallura, in 1238. Nothing else is known of his biography, although it has been inferred that he belonged to a family of Norman origins from the opulent feud of Lentini, in Eastern Sicily and that he was acquainted with Berardo di Castanea, renowned archbishop of Messina (1213–1252). One might also assume that Giacomo was trained as a notary at the University of Bologna or at the Studium of Naples, founded by Frederick II in 1224. The beginning of his poetical activity, traditionally set in the early 1230s, has been convincingly antedated by at least a decade after the finding of a lyric fragment by Giacomino Pugliese, another rhymer of the Sicilian school, transcribed at the bottom of a legal document of 1234–1235. 834

Giacomo da Lentini is responsible for the systematic transposition of Old Provenc¸al lyric models into an Italian vernacular. In spite of the evidence of an anonymous poem dating back to the end of the twelfth century (Alfredo Stussi, ‘‘Versi d’amore,’’ 1999), which certifies the existence of Italian poetry prior to the Sicilian School, Giacomo must be considered the real initiator of a poetical tradition. His literary and chronological primacy is corroborated by the quantity of his extant poems (some 39 pieces) and by the fact that they inaugurate the most substantial collection of Old Italian poetry: Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Lat. 3793 (= MS V), copied in Florence before the end of the thirteenth century, which preserves around 1,000 poems arranged in a rough chronological order. The other two principal testimonies of his work, both older than MS V, are Florence, Biblioteca Mediceo-Laurenziana, Redi 9 (= MS L), copied at least by two scribes, one from Pisa and one from Florence; and Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Banco Rari 217 (= MS P), copied and illuminated in Western Tuscany (Lucca or Pistoia). Other interesting, although lesser, testimonies of Giacomo’s poetry are the so-called Memoriali Bolognesi (Bolognese Records) of 1288, 1300, and 1310, in which some notaries transcribed from memory two initial fragments of his canzoni and two complete sonnets. The idiom of the Sicilian poets, a cultivated Kunstsprache (literary language) based on the Sicilian vernacular of that time and rich in Latin and Provenc¸al forms, underwent a typical alteration, or ‘‘Tuscanization,’’ in the common lost source of MSS V, L, and P. Nevertheless, some original linguistic features were preserved by Tuscan scribes or can be inferred from the versification. Giacomo’s corpus consists of 16 canzoni, one discordo, and 22 sonnets (plus two of dubious authenticity). In comparison with the courtly

GIACOMO DA LENTINI Provenc¸al canso (song) from which they derive, the greater part of his canzoni display a structural refinement that has been related to the alleged separation of poetry and music in the Sicilian school. A telling example is the poetical translation of a plain decasyllabic song attributable to troubadour Folquet de Marselha (fl. 1178–1195), ‘‘A vos, midonz, voill retrair’en chantan.’’ For his Italian rendering, ‘‘Madonna, dir vo voglio’’ (My Lady, I Wish to Tell You), Giacomo employed a long and elaborated stanza of seven-syllable and hendecasyllabic lines subdivided into two metrical units: The first one, later called fronte, is further divided into two symmetrical piedi (here with rhyme scheme a b a C, d b d C), and the second one, later called sirma, is further divided into two symmetrical volte (here with rhyme scheme e e f [f]G, h h i [i] G). This structural typology of four-part stanza establishes itself as a model for Italian canzone. However, a number of Giacomo’s stanza poems, called canzonette due to their less elevated style, repeat simpler isometric schemes borrowed from Old French and Provenc¸al repertories, perhaps because they were originally intended for a musical performance (as it is probably the case for his only discordo, composed of a sequence of different metrical patterns). Giacomo’s metrical creativity resulted in the invention of the sonnet, the most successful and long-lasting form of European versification. This unchangeable pattern of 14 hendecasyllabic lines (metrically and syntactically divided into an octet and a sextet, usually connected by the repetition of a thematic word) has been formally interpreted as an isolated stanza of canzone, but the intellectual process that led to the appearance of the first ‘‘closed form’’ of Romance versification still remains unexplained, though some critics put forward intriguing interpretations based on medieval numerology. An interesting purpose served by the newborn metrical genre was that of poetical correspondence: Three of Giacomo’s sonnets were written as responses to Abate di Tivoli (identified with the abbot of a famous monastery in Latium, or with one Gualtiero from Rome, acquainted with Pope Innocent IV) and to Jacopo Mostacci and Pier delle Vigne, both high-ranking poets of the imperial court. Apart from his inventive elaboration of formal structures and metrical genres, the comparison with preexistent lyric models reveals a significant uniqueness of themes in Giacomo’s work. Unlike the troubadours, who incorporated contemporary events and characters (especially in a genre called sirventes and even within their courtly love songs),

this Sicilian poet concentrated on the effects of love on the thoughts and behavior of the lyric ‘‘I.’’ This process of interiorization implies a shift in focus from the beloved madonna to the loving subject, who performs in an abstract world of sublimated characters and feelings. Furio Brugnolo (‘‘La Scuola poetica siciliana,’’ 1995) has singled out two dominant themes in Giacomo’s poems: the image of the lady imprinted within the lover’s heart, and the paradoxical description of love’s incommunicability. Both are effectively combined, for instance, in the second stanza of ‘‘Meravigliosamente’’ (Wonderfully), which can be considered the manifesto of Giacomo’s innovative intentions: ‘‘In cor par ch’eo vi porti, / pinta come parete, / e non pare difore. / O Deo, co’ mi par forte, / non so se lo sapete, / con’ v’amo di bon core; / ch’eo son sı` vergognoso / ca pur vi guardo ascoso / e non vi mostro amore’’ (It seems that I carry you inside of my heart, like a painted wall which can’t be seen from outside. Oh God, how hard it is—I wonder if you know it—to love you with a good heart; I am so bashful that I hiddenly look upon you and I don’t show you my love). Giacomo’s figural representation of abstract concepts is enhanced by the frequent use of naturalistic metaphores (drawn from bestiary and lapidary traditions) in order to explain the lover’s states of mind. His visuality is deeply connected with the physical genesis of love, asserted by the medieval tradition: As the poet himself claimed in one of his most famous sonnets (‘‘Amor e` desio che ven da core’’), it is the eyes that first generate love, which is then nurtured by the heart (‘‘e li occhi in prima generan l’amore / e lo core li da` nutricamento’’). Another sonnet, ‘‘Lo viso e son diviso da lo viso’’ (I See It and Yet Am Separated from What I See), is based on the obsessive repetition of the word viso and plays with its double function of noun (face, sight, vision) and verb (I see). The interest for natural science, a hallmark of Frederick II’s anticlerical court, is displayed in many of Giacomo’s sonnets, where the analysis of love is carried out by means of impressive scientific similitudes. Giacomo’s rhetorical skill and literary consciousness stand out in the harmonious relations between syntax and meter; in a manneristic recourse to internal rhymes, perfect rhymes, alliteration; and in the suggestive references to Old French romanesque tradition. As Furio Brugnolo remarks, ‘‘an equally strong and definite personality is not found at the beginning of any other lyric tradition in vernacular of the Middle Ages’’ (‘‘La Scuola poetica siciliana,’’ 1995). The importance of 835

GIACOMO DA LENTINI Giacomo da Lentini is attested by the imitation of his stylistic manners in the work of contemporary rhymers (especially Frederick II and his son Enzo, Guido and Odo delle Colonne, and Percivalle Doria). Giacomo’s work later influenced Bonagiunta Orbicciani da Lucca, a true Tuscan epigon of the Sicilian poet, and was eventually subsumed by Guido Guinizzelli da Bologna, the precursor of the stil novo school of poetry.

Biography Giacomo da Lentini was probably born in Lentini (Sicily) at the end of the twelfth or beginning of the thirteenth century. He studied as a notary (presumably in Bologna or Naples) in the late 1220s; followed the imperial court of Frederick II of Swabia during a journey from Puglia to Sicily, 1232– 1233; and perhaps accompanied Frederick’s son Enzo to Sardinia on the occasion of his wedding with Adelasia of Torres and Gallura, 1238. Giacomo da Lentini exchanged sonnets with Abate di Tivoli, Jacopo Mostacci, and Pier delle Vigne, probably 1241–1242. The place and date of his death are unknown. FRANCESCO CARAPEZZA See also: Sicilian School of Poetry; Frederick II of Hohenstaufen Selected Works Collections Ernest F. Langley, The Poetry of Giacomo da Lentino, Sicilian Poet of the Thirteenth Century, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1915. Poeti del Duecento, edited by Gianfranco Contini, vol. 1/1, Testi arcaici. Scuola siciliana. Poesia cortese, MilanNaples: Ricciardi, 1960 (reprint 1995). Bruno Panvini, Le rime della scuola siciliana, vol. 1, Introduzione, testo critico, note, Florence: Olschki, 1962. Poesie, critical edition by Roberto Antonelli, vol. 1, Introduzione, testo, apparato, Rome: Bulzoni, 1979. The Poetry of the Sicilian School, edited and translated by Frede Jensen, New York: Garland, 1986. Concordanze della lingua poetica italiana delle origini (CLPIO), edited by Silvio d’Arco Avalle, vol. 1, Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1992. Bruno Panvini, Poeti italiani della corte di Federico II, Naples: Liguori, 1994.

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Further Reading Antonelli, Roberto, ‘‘Dal Notaro a Guinizzelli,’’ in Da Guido Guinizzelli a Dante: Nuove prospettive sulla lirica del Duecento, Atti del Convegno di studi (PadovaMonselice, 10–12 May 2002), edited by Furio Brugnolo and Gianfelice Peron, Padua: Il Poligrafo, 2004. Antonelli, Roberto, ‘‘Rima equivoca e tradizione rimica nella poesia di Giacomo da Lentini,’’ Bollettino del Centro di studi filologici e linguistici siciliani, 13 (1977): 20–126. Arque´s, Rossend (editor), La poesia di Giacomo da Lentini: Scienza e filosofia nel XIII secolo in Sicilia e nel Mediterraneo occidentale, Atti del Convegno tenutosi all’Universita` Autonoma di Barcellona (16–18, 23–24 October 1997), Palermo: Centro di studi filologici e linguistici siciliani, 2000. Brugnolo, Furio, ‘‘La Scuola poetica siciliana,’’ in Storia della Letteratura Italiana, directed by Enrico Malato, vol. 1, Rome: Salerno, 1995. Brugnolo, Furio, ‘‘I siciliani e l’arte dell’imitazione: Giacomo da Lentini, Rinaldo d’Aquino e Iacopo Mostacci ‘traduttori’ dal provenzale,’’ La parola del testo, 3 (1999): 45–74. Coluccia, Rosario, and Riccardo Gualdo (editors), Dai Siciliani ai Siculo-toscani: Lingua, metro e stile per la definizione del canone, Atti del Convegno di Lecce (21–23 April 1998), Galatina (Lecce): Congedo, 1999. Crespo, Roberto, ‘‘Lettura di Chi non avesse mai veduto foco di Giacomo da Lentini,’’ Medioevo romanzo, 12 (1987): 353–362. Damiani, Rolando, ‘‘La replicazione del viso amato in due sonetti di Giacomo da Lentini,’’ in Miscellanea di studi in onore di Vittore Branca, vol. 1, Dal Medioevo al Petrarca, Florence: Olschki 1983. Folena, Gianfranco, ‘‘Cultura e poesia dei Siciliani,’’ in Storia della Letteratura Italiana, directed by Emilio Cecchi and Natalino Sapegno, vol. 1, Le origini e il Duecento, Milan: Garzanti, 1965. Katainen, Viena Louise, Simile and Other Figures of Comparison in the Poetry of Giacomo da Lentini (fl. 1230–50), Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1987. Kleinhenz, Christopher, The Early Italian Sonnet: The First Century (1220–1321), Lecce: Milella, 1986. Mancini, Mario, La figura nel cuore fra cortesia e mistica: Dai Siciliani allo Stilnuovo, Naples: ESI, 1988. Monteverdi, Angelo, Cento e Duecent:. Nuovi saggi su lingua e letteratura italiana dei primi secoli, Rome: Ateneo, 1971. Roncaglia, Aurelio, ‘‘Angelica figura,’’ Cultura neolatina, 55 (1995): 41–65. Stussi, Alfredo, ‘‘Versi d’amore in volgare tra la fine del secolo XII e l’inizio del XIII,’’ Cultura neolatina, 59 (1999): 1–69. Vanasco, Rocco R., La poesia di Giacomo da Lentini: Analisi strutturali, Bologna: Pa`tron, 1979.

GIUSEPPE GIACOSA

GIUSEPPE GIACOSA (1847–1906) The playwright Giuseppe Giacosa can be considered, along with Giovanni Verga, the leading representative of Italian ‘‘Verist’’ theater, although his production cannot be entirely identified with the Naturalist movement. Living at a time when the theater was undergoing a rapid transformation, he composed works that ranged from drama in verse of medieval inspiration to historical drama, from the romantic-bourgeois to the realistic play. The first phase of his activity is composed of a series of works of medieval taste. The one-act play in Martellian verse Una partita a scacchi (A Game of Chess, 1873), Giacosa’s first work, is taken from an episode from a French popular ballad and offered the audience legendary atmospheres between the fairy tale and the idyll. The play, which centers on a chess match between the young page Fernando and the beautiful Jolanda, in spite of its simplicity, obtained immediate and lasting success. Less fortunate was his second attempt, Il trionfo dell’amore (Love’s Triumph, 1875), a work inspired by Carlo Gozzi’s Turandot (1762) but set, rather than in a fantastical China, in Piedmont during the Middle Ages. Giacosa completed what was defined as the ‘‘medieval trilogy’’ with Il fratello d’armi (Brother in Arms), first performed in 1877. A second and related genre practiced by Giacosa was the historical play, examples of which are, among others, Il marito amante della moglie (The Husband, Lover of His Wife, 1877), which is set in the eighteenth century and also written in Martellian verse; Il conte rosso (The Red Count, 1880), a drama centered around the figure of Amadeus VII of Savoy, written in hendecasyllables; and La signora di Challant (The Lady of Challant, 1891), a story of love and violence. I diritti dell’anima (The Rights of the Heart, 1894), characterized by Nordic symbolism, was evidently influenced by Henrik Ibsen’s works. As in A Doll’s House (1879), the central theme is the disenchantment of a young wife toward a husband praised for too long. The new sense of awareness of the woman, in a society that evolves rapidly, leads her to earn her own independence, which she no longer is able to renounce even after her

husband’s repentance. The most interesting works in Giacosa’s production, however, are those tied to Naturalism. The movement toward this poetics, which began to mature by 1880, provoked a series of profound changes at the dramaturgical and stylistic level: Verse was abandoned in favor of a modest and everyday prose language, and complex events gave way to linear storylines without coups de the´aˆtre. At the center of Giacosa’s interest was now the study of contemporary society, of which he highlighted the decadence of the bourgeois class and the evils it hid. A significant work, in this sense, is L’onorevole Ercole Mallardi (The Honorable Ercole Mallardi, 1885), which is a disillusioned denunciation of the corruption in the political world of the late nineteenth century. The protagonist, a dishonest man, unscrupulously uses politics for personal gain, often deceiving his wife Vittoria who, in her naivety, represents the other side of a corrupt and decadent society. But the most accomplished result of Giacosa’a naturalist production is certainly Tristi amori (Sad Loves, 1888), which, along with Come le foglie (Like Falling Leaves, 1900), constitutes his masterpiece. Presented for the first time at the Teatro Valle in Rome, Tristi amori was rejected by the public, which could not accept the detailed realism that permeated the work. It was successful a few months later in Turin, thanks to Eleonora Duse’s performance. The plot, following the most typical of late-nineteenth-century canons, narrates a conjugal betrayal: The solution, however, presented a series of innovations. The husband, once the affair has been discovered, allows his wife to choose between staying with him or fleeing with her lover. The woman, held back by her maternal duties, decides to stay at the side of a man who at this point can no longer love her, if only to provide a future for her daughter. With this work, the transition from lateRomantic dramaturgy to bourgeois naturalist theater is completed. The previous representation of the marital couple, as for instance in Achille Torelli’s I mariti (Husbands, 1867), was replaced by the tempestuous triangle ‘‘her-him-lover,’’ which introduced new themes and elements such as a greater

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GIUSEPPE GIACOSA awareness of female roles and the concepts of money and of honor, around which the mechanism of the storyline revolved. Come le foglie, first presented at the Teatro Manzoni in Milan, is a play that is still frequently produced today. Here the author represented the decline of a rich industrialist’s family stricken with economic hardships. But while the father, Giovanni Rosani, and the daughter, Nennele, resist in the face of financial difficulty, the stepmother, Giulia, and the son, Tommy, in the hopes of maintaining their lifestyle, give in to compromise. The title, thoughtfully chosen and meaningful, contains the moral of the story: As the leaves that, in the face of the autumn wind, fall irreparably, Giulia and Tommy, in the face of the family’s economic disaster, let themselves be dragged down, abandoning themselves at first to corruption and then deciding to leave for good. But, like the robust branches of a tree that hold fast against the fury of the winter to generate a new flowering, Giovanni and Nennele roll up their sleeves and perform humble jobs, thereby reestablishing the economic fortunes of the family. Come le foglie is a work that is constructed by skilful dramaturgical writing, where unexpressed passions dominate, silence is full of meaning, and situations at times bordering on the melodramatic create an atmosphere that brings Chekhov to mind. Particularly successful are the scenes in which two characters express the delicate relationships, full of sweetness that binds together the two siblings, the father and the daughter, or Nennele and her future husband Massimo. Giacosa’s last theatrical piece, Il piu` forte (The Strongest Man, 1904), signals once again the return to social themes and to a critique of bourgeois society. In this case, a son, educated according to a strict morality, condemns his unscrupulous businessman father and, in separating himself from him, reproaches him for having raised his son in comfort and luxury, therefore denying him of the highest good: a conscience. Much appreciated by his contemporaries, Giacosa was later remembered uniquely for the softened tones that grouped him with much of the lesser literature of the time. Recent critics have reassessed his historical significance, highlighting the particular ways in which he represented the crisis of the late nineteenth century as well as his capacity to exalt, by detailed realism, the action on the stage, thereby carrying out an authentic break with the Italian theatrical tradition. Furthermore, Giacosa is now perhaps best known as the librettist, with Luigi Illica (1857–1919), of several operas 838

by Giacomo Puccini, including La bohe`me (1896), Tosca (1900), and Madama Butterfly (1904). Taken, as was then customary, from preexisting works, the three librettos constitute some of the best examples of a genre that did not always produce results of great quality. In dividing the work with Illica, Giacosa versified the text, elaborated the lyrical situations, handled the logical succession of the scenes, and placed emphasis on literary refinements. Illica’s role was to outline the scenario and develop the storyline in all its details. Critics have always recognized the great talent of the two authors, above all in their capacity to adapt brilliantly to the constant requests of Puccini, who demanded continuous modifications in function of his musical sensibility. While difficult to judge independently from the music, these librettos present an excellent dramaturgical system, rapidity of action, a calibrated succession of scenes, and a description of characters that is all but conventional.

Biography Giuseppe Giacosa was born in Colleretto Parella (today Colleretto Giacosa) in the province of Turin on October 21, 1847, of a bourgeois family. After obtaining a degree in law in Turin in 1868, he practiced for some time in his father’s studio, but his first successes in 1871 as a playwright induced him to follow a career in the theater. He married his cousin Maria Bertola, 1877, and moved to Turin, where he taught at the Accademia di Belle Arti. He traveled to Sicily and southern Italy, 1876, then to France and Germany, 1878. He moved to Milan, 1888, where he was named director and instructor at the Accademia dei Filodrammatici as well as teacher of dramatic literature and acting at the Conservatory. He resigned from the Academy, 1889, and from the Conservatory, 1892. He became director of the Societa` Italiana degli Autori, 1895. He collaborated with the Gazzetta piemontese, Gazzetta letteraria, and Il corriere della sera and was director, since its foundation in 1900, of Lettura. He maintained friendships with numerous writers of his time, from Fogazzaro to Verga, from Boito to Zola, and was a friend of Eleonora Duse (who called him ‘‘Pin’’ in her correspondence) and Sarah Bernhardt, with whom in 1891 he took a trip to the United States on the occasion of the production of his play La signora di Challant. Giacosa died of cardiac arrest in Colleretto Parella on September 1, 1906. PAOLO QUAZZOLO

PIER FRANCESCO GIAMBULLARI Selected Works Collections Teatro, 2 vols., Milan: Mondadori, 1949. Three Plays (The Stronger, Like Falling Leaves, Sacred Ground), translated by Edith and Allan Updegraff, Boston: Litte, Brown, 1916.

Plays Una partita a scacchi, 1873. I figli del marchese Arturo, 1873. Intrighi eleganti, 1874. Il trionfo d’amore, 1875. Sorprese notturne, 1875. Teresa, 1875. Acquazzoni di montagna, 1876. Il marito amante della moglie, 1877. Il fratello d’armi, 1877. Il Conte Rosso, 1880. La zampa del gatto, 1883. La sirena, 1883. L’onorevole Ercole Mallardi, 1885. Resa a discrezione, 1886. Tristi amori, 1888. La signora di Challant, 1891. Diritti dell’anima, 1894. Come le foglie, 1900. Il piu` forte, 1904.

Librettos La bohe`me, with Luigi Illica, 1896. Tosca, with Luigi Illica, 1900. Madama Butterfly, with Luigi Illica, 1904. Puccini Librettos, translated by William Weaver, 1966.

Short Stories ‘‘Novelle e paesi valdostani,’’ 1896.

Essays Conferenze e discorsi, 1909.

Other Castelli valdostani e canavesi, 1898. Genti e cose della montagna. Impressioni d’America, 1899.

Further Reading Alonge, Roberto (editor), Materiali per Giocosa, Genoa: Costa & Nolan, 1998. Barsotti, Anna, Giuseppe Giacosa, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1973. Donelli, Delfina, Giuseppe Giocosa, Milan: Vita e pensiero, 1948. Doroni, Stefano, Dall’androne medievale al tinello borghese: teatro di Giuseppe Giocosa, Rome: Bulzoni, 1998. Ferrone, Siro (editor), Teatro dell’Italia unita, Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1980. Gedda, Lido, Giuseppe Giocosa: commediografo e narratore, Turin: Trauber, 2000. Gotta, Salvator, Tre maestri: Fogazzaro, Giacosa, Gozzano, Milan: Mondatori, 1975. Nardi, Piero, Vita e tempo di Giuseppe Giacosa, Milan: Mondatori, 1949. Pellini, Pierluigi, ‘‘L’ultimo Giacosa: Intertestualita` e ricezione,’’ Otto/Novecento, 19:3–4(1995), 41–73. Puppa, Paolo, ‘‘Una partita a scacchi di Giacosa,’’ in Il neogotico in Italia nel XIX e nel XX secolo, edited by Rossana Bossaglia, vol. 2, Milan: Mazzotta, 1989.

PIER FRANCESCO GIAMBULLARI (1495–1555) Grammarian, literato, and historian, born and educated in Florence, Pierfrancesco was the son of the poet Bernardo Giambullari (Florence, 1450–1529), whose canti carnascialeschi and religious poems were marked by a whimsical facility with language. Bernardo ensured that his young boy received a thorough humanist education that included not only Latin and Greek but also Hebrew and, some say, Chaldean. The talented boy inherited his father’s interest in the Tuscan language but soon shied away from literature and poetry, preferring to dedicate himself, instead, to the study of language and to history.

Pierfrancesco first appeared in print in 1539 with a long and detailed description of the festivities for the wedding of Duke Cosimo I of Florence and Eleonora di Toledo—the Apparato et feste nelle noze dello illustrissimo Signor duca di Firenze & della duchessa, sua consorte (Scenery and Festivities for the Wedding of the Most Illustrious Lord Duke of Florence and the Duchess, His Consort). Commissioned by the duke for clearly political and propagandist purposes, the work stands at the vanguard of a new genre—the narrative description of royal entries and celebrations—that would flourish throughout Europe in the sixteenth and 839

PIER FRANCESCO GIAMBULLARI seventeenth centuries. In describing and interpreting the ephemeral structures, decorations, inscriptions, songs, music, and even movements that went into the celebration, Giambullari set a standard that would be followed in later descriptions of princely weddings in Florence and abroad. Giambullari’s fame, however, did not rest on his chronicle of ducal festivities but on his writings on the Tuscan language, its origins, and its grammar. A founding member of the Accademia degli Umidi (1540), he remained one of its major players even after the academy was absorbed into Cosimo’s cultural program and transformed into the Accademia Fiorentina (1541). Within the Academy, Giambullari prospered as a scholar and made important connections with fellow literati. He thus became one of the major players in Florentine cultural circles and one of the most productive, as well. As a Florentine academician, Giambullari readily and willingly took up the challenge of defending and advancing Florentine language and culture. Arguing against Pietro Bembo and his disciples, Giambullari sought to validate not only contemporary Florentine language but also Dante’s Divina Commedia. Already in 1538 he had begun working on a commentary of the Commedia that, however, did not go beyond the first canto of the Inferno. His efforts eventually produced a curious volume, De ’l sito, fo´rma, & misu´re de´llo Infe´rno di Da´nte (On the Location, Form and Size of Dante’s Inferno, 1544), of interest both for its commentary on Dante and for Giambullari’s innovative orthography and use of accents. It also produced a number of lectures (lezioni) on the Commedia delivered within the context of the Accademia (1541–1548), some of which were soon published first by Anton Francesco Doni in a variorum edition (Lettioni d’academici fiorentini sopra Dante, libro primo, 1547, which also included lezioni by Francesco Verini, Giovan Battista Gelli, Giovanni Strozzi, Cosimo Bartoli, Giovan Battista da Cerreto and Mario Tanci), and then in a solo edition by Lorenzo Torrentino, the duke’s and the Accademia’s official printer (Lezzioni ... lette nella Accademia fiorentina, 1551). Giambullari’s reputation as a Dante commentator was such that his colleague and friend Giovan Battista Gelli often referred to him in his own lezioni and commentary as the ‘‘moderno espositore’’ (the modern commentator). Giambullari’s interest in the Florentine language also produced other important works. The first was a short treatise, ‘‘Osservazioni per la pronunzia fiorentina (A gli amatori della lingua fiorentina)’’ (Observations on Florentine Pronunciation—To 840

the Lovers of the Florentine Language) that he published under the pseudonym No´ri Dortela´ta as a preface to his coedition (together with Cosimo Bartoli) of Marsilio Ficino’s Sopra lo amore o ver’ Convito di Platone (On Love, That Is the Convivium of Plato, 1544). With his work on Ficino, Giambullari continued the Florentine Christian neo-Platonic tradition and made himself one of its most ardent supporters in the mid-cinquecento. Two years later his dialogue Il Gello sull’origine della lingua fiorentina (Gello, or on the Origin of the Florentine Language, 1546) argued that the Florentine language derived not from Latin but from Aramaic by way of Etruscan—a theory that clearly went hand-in-hand with the regime’s efforts to validate the Etruscan history of the region and thereby distance itself, somewhat, from Rome and its Latin heritage. The theory and its supporters, the ‘‘Aramei,’’ quickly attracted the derision of many a more serious linguist. Five years later Giambullari published his De la lingua che si parla e scrive in Firenze (On the Language That Is Spoken and Written in Florence, 1522), the first descriptive grammar of Tuscan ever written by a Florentine. His efforts garnered much wider success and support than his Gello and its unusual theories. Composed in 1546–1548, the De la lingua was prefaced by a Ragionamento by Giovan Battista Gelli between himself and Cosimo Bartoli, both colleagues and supporters of Giambullari, on the difficulties inherent in trying to draw up a Tuscan grammar. One of the major characteristics of this language book is that it was clearly addressed not to fellow intellectuals or scholars but to a public of foreigners or young readers, very much like its young dedicatee, the 11-year-old heir to the duchy, Francesco de’ Medici (half-Spanish through his mother, Eleonora di Toledo). Fundamental to all three of Giambullari’s works on language was his belief in the central position of contemporary, living Florentine in any discussion on a national Italian idiom. While he was prepared to accept the authority of the great writers of the fourteenth century, he was also keen to balance their example with current Florentine practice. For Giambullari, as for most members of the Accademia Fiorentina, a balance had to be struck between respect for the models and recognition of current use. Although Giambullari did compose some poems in his youth, he never published them. A few of his canti carnascialeschi were published posthumously in Benedetto Varchi’s Tutti i trionfi, carri, mascheaate [sic] o canti carnascialeschi andati per

PIER FRANCESCO GIAMBULLARI Firenze dal tempo del magnifico Lorenzo vecchio de Medici ... infino a questo anno presente 1559 (1559), while some of his other poetry was published only in 1820 as a nuptial gift booklet. In his last years Giambullari turned his attention to history and began writing a Storia d’Europa (History of Europe) that, however, remained unfinished at his death. Though incomplete and covering only the years 800–913 CE, the work was published posthumously (1566) and enjoyed many editions until the early twentieth century. It is the first history by a Florentine to look beyond Italy and take a wider, European perspective. Although Giambullari was an important and influential intellectual of his time, there is no complete edition of his works, and only his description of the 1539 wedding celebrations is currently available in English.

Biography Pier Francesco Giambullari was born in 1495 in Florence, the son of the poet Bernardo Giambullari and Lucrezia degli Stefani. He received a thorough humanist education and in 1511 became secretary to Alfonsina Orsini, widow of Piero di Lorenzo de’ Medici; thanks to her patronage he was appointed rector of the parish church in Careggi (1515) and chaplain of S. Maria della Compagnia di Libbiano in Volterra (1515?), both good renumerative posts. Leo X provided him with a lucrative benefice in Spain. He was promoted from canon supernumerary (pre-1515) to canon regular (1527) of the Basilica of San Lorenzo in Florence. In 1540 he became a member of the Accademia degli Umidi (quickly restructured as the Accademia Fiorentina) and held various important positions in it. In 1541–1548 Giambullari gave a number of public lectures on Dante’s Divina Commedia. Together with Benedetto Varchi, he was a member of the committee appointed by Duke Cosimo I to draw up a grammar of the Florentine language. In 1549–1550 he helped with the final linguistic revisions to Vasari’s Vite in preparation for its publication. From at least 1550 he was the ‘‘Custode’’ of the Biblioteca Laurenziana in Florence (he was, in fact, its first ‘‘custode’’). He died in Florence on 24 August 1555 and was buried in Santa Maria Novella with all the honors of the Accademia Fiorentina and a eulogy pronounced by Cosimo Bartoli. KONRAD EISENBICHLER See also: Questione della lingua

Selected Works Grammatical Writings Il Gello, Florence: Anton Francesco Doni, 1546. Origine della lingua fiorentina, altrimenti il Gello, Florence: Lorenzo Torrentino, 1549, in 8 . Lezzioni ... lette nella Accademia fiorentina, Florence: [Lorenzo Torrentino], 1551, in 8 . De la lingua che si parla & scrive in Firenze. Et uno dialogo di Giovan Batista Gelli sopra la difficulta` dello ordinare detta lingua, Florence: Lorenzo Torrentino, 1551, in 8 . In difesa della lingva fiorentina, et di Dante. Con le regole da far bella et nvmerosa la prosa ... Florence: [L. Torrentino], 1556, in 8 . Regole della lingua fiorentina, Ilaria Bonomi, editor, Florence: Accademia della Crusca, 1986.

History Historia dell’Europa. ... nella quale ordinatamente si trattano le cose successe in questa parte del mondo dall’anno DCCC fino al 913, Venice: Francesco [De Franceschi] senese, 1566, in 4 ; Della istoria d’Europa; Aurelio Gotti, editor, Florence: Le Monnier, 1888.

Other De ’l sito, fo´rma, & misu´re de´llo Infe´rno di Da´nte, Florence: No´ri Dortela´ta, 1544. Saggio di poesie inedite di Pier Francesco Giambullari. Pubblicate per le fauste nozze del sig. cav. Francesco Arrighi gia` Griffoli colla nobile donzella sig. Teresa Ricasoli, Domenico Moreni, editor, Florence: Stamperia Magheri, 1820. ‘‘Commento inedito al canto I dell’Inferno,’’ in Michele Barbi, Della fortuna di Dante nel sec. XVI, Pisa: Nistri, 1890. Personificazione delle citta` paesi e fiumi di Toscana festeggianti le nozze di Cosimo I ed Eleonora di Toledo, Ubaldo Angeli, editor, Prato: G. Salvi, 1898.

Edited Works Ficino, Marsilio, Sopra lo amore o ver’ Convito di Platone, Fire´nze: N. Dortela´ta, 1544.

Further Reading Bonomi, Ilaria, ‘‘Giambullari e Varchi grammatici nell’ambiente linguistico fiorentino,’’ in La Crusca nella tradizione letteraria e linguistica italiana, Florence: Presso l’Accademia [della Crusca], 1985. Croce, Benedetto, ‘‘Pier Francesco Giambullari,’’ in Poeti e scrittori del pieno e del tardo Rinascimento, vol. 2, 2nd ed. Bari: Laterza, 1958. D’Alessandro, Alessandro, ‘‘Il Gello di Pierfrancesco Giambullari. Mito e ideologia nel principato di Cosimo I,’’ in La nascita della Toscana, Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1980. D’Alessandro, Alessandro, ‘‘Il mito dell’origine ‘aramea’ di Firenze in un trattatello di Giambattista Gelli,’’ Archivio storico italiano, 138:3 (1980): 339–389. Fiorelli, Piero, ‘‘Pier Francesco Giambullari e la riforma dell’alfabeto,’’ Studi di filologia italiana, 14 (1956): 177–210.

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PIER FRANCESCO GIAMBULLARI Padley, G. A., Grammatical Theory in Western Europe, 1500–1700, vol. 2, Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985–1988. Pignatti, Franco, ‘‘Giambullari, Pierfrancesco,’’ Dizionario biografico degli italiani, vol. 54, Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 2000.

Valacca, Clemente, La vita e le opere di Messer Pierfrancesco Giambullari, Bitonto: N. Garofalo, 1898. Vasoli, Cesare, ‘‘A proposito della Storia d’Europa del Giambullari,’’ Nuova rivista storica, 77 (1993): 624–639. Vitale, Maurizio, La questione della lingua, Palermo: Palumbo, 1978.

NATALIA GINZBURG (1916–1991) In her unsentimental regard for unremarkable people with their ordinary stories and baffled feelings, Natalia Ginzburg has often been compared to Chekhov, ‘‘my numen,’’ as she once called him. Calvino placed her in the tradition of Jane Austen, Maupassant, and Katherine Mansfield but also remarked her strong affinity to the Italian women of ‘‘il nostro verismo, Deledda, Percoto’’ (our verismo, Deledda, Percoto) in her depictions of provincial life (‘‘E` stato cosı` di Natalia Ginzburg,’’ Saggi, 1995). Although she lived through the most politically convulsive and morally challenging period in modern Italian history, she interpreted her time, as they did theirs, through the unheroic drama of commonplace, if often anguished, personal relations. Born in Sicily, Ginzburg was raised in Turin by a family of Socialist convictions that were never compromised nor abandoned when the Fascists came to power. Her first husband, Leone Ginzburg, a Jewish Marxist political activist who helped found Einaudi Press, was imprisoned, then forced into exile for his anti-Fascist activities; he returned to Rome in 1944, where he was again imprisoned and died after being tortured. Ginzburg joined him in exile in the Abruzzi, where life was governed by the traditional rhythms of rural Italian culture. The knowledge gained in this period of exile helps explain the special character of Ginzburg’s literary modernism. Her own familial and cultural traditions were urban and intellectual. Carlo Levi and Cesare Pavese were both models and mentors for her early writings, and Alberto Moravia’s novel Gli indifferenti (Time of Indifference, 1929) was an important early influence. She was an editor at Einaudi, for whom she also worked as a translator, producing an admired translation of Marcel Proust, whose epic on human remembrance was to affect her own understanding of the treacherous, 842

yet potentially redemptive powers of memory and its inseparable partner, forgetting. Despite her wide acquaintance with the community and culture of a politically sophisticated intellectual elite, her imaginative writings are imbued with a fatalism that typically prevails in more traditional societies. She concluded ‘‘Inverno in Abruzzo’’ (Winter in the Abruzzi, 1944), her account of her life in exile, by asserting that human life is governed by ‘‘by ancient, unchangeable laws, according to an invariable and ancient rhythm.’’ Her fictional characters struggle in vain to escape or deny their subjugation to these implacable laws. They complain of a boredom they are helpless to dispel, lacking the spiritual and intellectual resources to enliven their confined and barren existence. Nor can love redeem the monotony and emptiness of their lives. When they love, their love is as hopeless as it is obsessive. They often fall in love with people who are thought to be ugly, a feeling they actually share, so that their love seems a mask for self-loathing. This is the erotic perversity that afflicts the narrator of E` stato cosı` (The Dry Heart, 1947) who marries a man who physically repels her. The matter-of-factness of the title is powerless to contain the explosive violence barely suppressed in the demand that set offs her narrative: ‘‘Dimmi la verita`.’’ Because her abrupt demand for the truth about her husband’s feelings for another woman (also ugly) is ignored, the narrator shoots him between the eyes. For all the surface quiet of their lives, Ginsburg’s characters are intimate with emotional and often physical violence, although more often as its victims rather than its agents. They find themselves on the periphery of life despite their efforts to conform to the dictates of convention, which seems to guarantee them a secure place in the social and moral world.

NATALIA GINZBURG In ‘‘Ritratto d’un Amico’’ (Portrait of a Friend, 1957), her admiring yet clear-eyed tribute to Pavese, Ginzburg claimed that Pavese was mistaken in his refusal to love ‘‘the daily current of existence, which flows evenly and apparently without secrets.’’ She seemed determined to avoid and at the same time explore the consequences of Pavese’s mistake. Her narratives rarely deviate from the daily current of existence and its surface calm. Her grip on the quotidian, however, is slackened by the relentless, impersonal forces that propel her story and her syntax along its fated, often disastrous course. This narrative technique puts inordinate pressure on her endings to arrest the fluidity of life so that its meaning as well as its depth might be, if only momentarily, arrested. Ginzburg’s art flowered in her endings as much as in the continuous, desperate tread of her narration. Sometimes this moment is purely negative, an acknowledgment of the final oblivion that awaits all living things, as in the mournful ending of La strada che va in citta` (The Road to the City, 1942) or the letter of the disconsolate homosexual that concludes Caro Michele (Dear Michael, 1973). The power of these endings derives from the tragic understatement of Ginsburg’s style. Her language is direct, even austere, in its idiomatic simplicity. Although not immune to comedy, her fiction is generally without humor, since most of her narrators lack the necessary distance and self-confidence to make fun either of life or of themselves. A vibrant exception is Lessico Famigliare (Family Sayings, 1963), her novelized memoir of her family, which achieves much of its humorous impiety by fondly reproducing the regional dialect and characteristic expressions that defined her father and mother. Although generally forswearing the highly rhetorical and ornate style associated in her mind with Fascist oratory and propaganda, Ginzburg did allow her characters, who would ordinarily be incapable of tragic poetic expression, their singular moments of lyrical outcry. Famiglia (Family, 1977) concludes with a poetic tour de force that recreates the final moments of a dying man; his darkening consciousness is fitfully illuminated by a single memory of being cradled in his mother’s arms in a crowded train station: ‘‘Why on earth his memory should have squandered and destroyed so many days and so many events, and yet preserved that moment so accurately, bringing it safely through the years, tempest, ruins he did not know... he had retained a whole pile of random detailed impressions, that were hazy, but light as a feather. He had kept the memory of voices, mud, umbrellas, people, the night.’’

These poetic fragments can be read as surviving remnants of Ginzburg’s first literary efforts as an aspiring poet. She soon discovered that her gift was for storytelling, not lyric utterance. Her first major work, La strada che va in citta´, which appeared under the pseudonym Alessandra Tornimparti to protect her against the racial laws then in force, articulated her major preoccupations in a form and language distinctly her own. It was a language and form that initially was conditioned by the limits and possibilities of first person narrative and by her growing appreciation, as she relates in ‘‘Il mio mestiere’’ (My Vocation, 1949), that women’s knowledge of the world was distinct from men’s, an early confirmation of the feminist strains in her work. In these initial works, Ginzburg struggled to solve ‘‘the autobiographical problem’’ of writing from herself without writing about herself. Her characters, as she freely and often admitted, were drawn partly from her own feelings toward the world and partly from people she knew well or had attentively observed. She demonstrated her virtuosity in exploiting the expressive possibilities of first-person narration in works whose narrators are not, like the confused or distraught females who narrate La stada che va in citta` and E` stato cosı`, at the center of the stories they tell. Valentino (1957), the story of a scapegrace brother told from the indulgent perspective of his adoring sister, is the triumph of this use of a first-person narrator who remains peripheral to the human drama she recounts, contenting herself with the role of supporting player and moral chorus. In the 1960s Ginsburg began to explore and exploit the properties of first-person narratives with more subtlety and daring. A stay in London, where her second husband, Gabriele Baldini, held a post as director of the Italian Cultural Institute, introduced her to the idiosyncratic novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett, which consist almost entirely of dialogue. The fruit of this encounter is the polyphonic Le voci della sera (Voices in the Evening, 1961), whose narrator Elsa is at once an historian chronicling the fate of her town during the Fascist and postwar era and an elegist of her own doomed love affair. This technically meticulous experiment in camouflaging, then exposing, her narrator’s damaged life was followed by the utterly original Lessico famigliare, an exercise in personal memory for which she devised a new autobiographical form that mimicked the novel in its arrangement of incidents and in the surface objectivity of its narration. The result is a triumph of impersonal personal 843

NATALIA GINZBURG narration in which Ginzburg felt she had written ‘‘in stato di assoluta liberta`’’ (in a state of total freedom) and produced a work of ‘‘pura memoria’’ (pure memory) (‘‘Nota,’’ in Opere, vol. 1, 1986). It was also during this period that she started writing plays, beginning with Ti ho sposato per allegria (I Married You for the Fun of It, 1966), filmed in 1967 by Luciano Salce and starring Monica Vitti, and L’inserzione (The Advertisement, 1968). L’inserzione, the only one of her plays to be translated into English, was first produced in England at the National Theater in London with Joan Plowright in the lead and Laurence Olivier as director. She confessed in a playbill note to that production that she approached theater with a certain repugnance, fearful that she would forfeit the intimacy of the author/reader relationship. Despite her self-described malaise, she continued to write plays, including Fragola e panna (Strawberry and Cream, 1966) and La segretaria (The Secretary, 1966), first performed under the direction of Luciano Salce with Adriana Asti in the title role at the Stabile di Torino in 1965; and La parrucca (The Wig, 1973), a monologue in which a ruined wig becomes a comic, but unnerving, symbol of the emotional violence rampant in the monologuist’s disintegrating life. Ginzburg had become expert in using the monologue to dramatize the emotional isolation of her characters, who in their clamoring for attention cannot seem to hear any other voice but their own. Soon she began experimenting more directly with the intersubjective play of voices intrinsic to drama. L’intervista (The Interview, 1988), whose premier at the Piccolo Teatro di Milano with Giulia Lazzarini was dedicated to the director Luca Coppola, who was murdered that year, is Ginzburg’s most ironic interrogation of the drama’s dialogic form. It is also the play in which her debt to Carlo Goldoni’s theatricality is inventively acknowledged. A series of scheduled interviews, each accorded a separate act, fail to take place because the interviewee forgot or could not keep his appointment. The unofficial and unguarded conversations with the family members and servant of the absent celebrity form the unglamorous but richly emotional heart of the drama. The milieu and the social types are familiar from Ginzburg’s fiction— the provincial, comfortably bourgeois family; the servant class that ministers to their needs and vanities; the weak-willed and indecisive intellectual—which only highlights the productive difference, even tension, between Ginzburg’s ventriloquizing in her first-person and epistolary narratives and 844

the vocal and more public dramas of the theater. Her last play, commissioned by Giorgio Pressburger in 1991, was the short, devastating, Il cormorano (The Cormorant), whose title is a late and unforgettable echo of her beloved Chekhov’s The Sea-Gull. In the oil-drenched wings of the cormorant, Ginzburg offers an abject but potent symbol for the emotional and moral incapacities of her adulterous protagonists, but also for the historical debacles and spiritual futility that plague modern life on the brink of the new millennium. Ginzburg, who often protested that her limited formal education disqualified her as an authoritative woman of letters, nevertheless wrote widely on literary and moral questions. Le piccole virtu` (The Little Virtues, 1962) is an ironic title for a collection of personal topical and moral essays that demonstrate Ginzburg’s motivating love of the great virtues—especially magnanimity of feeling and generosity of imagination—that morally inspired her apparently modest portraits of everyday life. Her final writings, which attest to the continuing strength of her own literary virtues, show a willingness to explore new forms and embrace more public subjects. She was to demonstrate the still relevant virtues of the epistolary form to coordinate diverse, often incompatible points of view in Caro Michele and La citta` e la casa (The City and the House, 1984), her final novel. Her skills as a creator of novelistic character animate her collective biography of the Manzoni family. Her last work, Serena Cruz, o la vera giustizia (Serena Cruz, or True Justice, 1990), which addresses the legal and moral questions raised by a controversial adoption case, is yet another departure, a work that is part reportage, part political tract, part humanist manifesto. The case spoke passionately to Ginzburg’s obsession with families, how they are formed, sustained, and dissolved. Despite the growing pessimism of her literary work, the provocative subtitle of ‘‘o la vera guistizia’’ proclaims the moral idealism never despaired of by the author, who had survived the death and depredations of Fascism and the spiritual malaise of Italy’s postwar prosperity.

Biography Natalia Ginzburg was born as Levi in Palermo, July 14, 1916. In 1935, she enrolled in the Faculty of Letters at the University of Turin but dropped out. In 1938, she married Leone Ginzburg, editor and anti-Fascist political activist; in 1939 their son Carlo was born. From 1940 to 1943, Ginzburg

NATALIA GINZBURG accompanied her husband to Pizzoli, a remote village in the southern region of Abruzzi, where he was imprisoned. Their daughter Alessandra was born there. In November 1943–1945, she was living in hiding in Rome with her children. On February 5, 1944, her husband died from torture wounds inflicted by the Gestapo in Regina Coeli prison. In 1950, Ginzburg married Gabriele Baldini, professor of Anglo-American literature, musicologist, and critic. In 1952, Tutti i nostri ieri was awarded the Veillon Prize. In 1957, Ginzburg was awarded the Viareggio Prize for Valentino; in 1964, she won the Strega Prize for Lessico famigliare. In 1968, Ginzburg won the Marzotto Prize for European Drama for L’inserzione, and in 1969, she won the Milan Club Degli Editori Award. Her second husband died in Rome from hepatitis in June 1969. In 1983, Ginzburg was elected to Parliament as member of the Independent Left Party, representing Turin. In 1984, she won the Bagutta Award for La famiglia Manzoni and in 1985, she was awarded the Ernest Hemingway Prize. On October 7, 1991, Ginzburg died of cancer in Rome. MARIA DIBATTISTA Selected Works

La famiglia Manzoni, 1983; as The Manzoni Family, translated by Marie Evans, 1987. La citta` e la casa, 1984; as The City and the House, translated by Dick Davis, 1986; reprinted, 1987.

Theater Ti ho sposato per allegria, 1966. Fragola e panna, 1966. La segretaria, 1966. Paese di mare e altre commedie, 1973. L’inserzione, 1968; as The Advertisement, translated by Henry Reed, 1969. La poltrona, 1987. L’intervista, 1988.

Essays Le piccole virtu´, 1962; as The Little Virtues, translated by Dick Davis, 1986. Mai devi domandarmi, 1970; as Never Must You Ask Me, translated by Isabel Quigly, 1970. Vita immaginaria, 1974 Serena Cruz, o la vera giustizia, 1990. Non possiamo saperlo: Saggi 1973–1990, edited by Domenico Scarpa, 2001.

Translations Marcel Proust, La strada di Swan, 2 vols., 1946. Gustave Flaubert, La signora Bovary, 1983; reprinted, 2001.

Edited Works Mario Soldati, La carta del cielo: Racconti, 1980. Antonio Delfini, Diari, 1927–1961 (with Giovanna Delfini), 1982.

Interviews Collections Opere raccolte e ordinate dall’autore, Prefazione by Cesare Garboli, 2 vols., Milan: Mondadori, 1986–1987. Teatro, Turin: Einaudi, 1990.

Fiction La strada che va in citta`, 1942 (as Alessandra Tornimparti); reprinted in 1945; as The Road to the City, translated by Francis Frenaye, 1949; reprinted in 1952 and 1990. E` stato cosi, 1947; as The Dry Heart, translated by Francis Frenaye, 1949. Tutti i nostri ieri, 1952; as All Our Yesterdays, translated by Angus Davidson, 1985. Valentino, 1957; as Valentino, translated by Avril Baroni, 1987. La madre, 1957. Sagittario, 1957; as Sagittarius, translated by Avril Baroni, 1987 Le voci della sera, 1961; as Voices in the Evening, translated by D. M. Low, 1963. Lessico famigliare, 1963; as Family Sayings, translated by D. M. Low, 1967; revised, 1984; as The Things We Used to Say, translated by Judith Woolf, 1997. Paese di mare, 1973. Caro Michele, 1973; as No Way, translated by Sheila Cudahy, 1974; as Dear Michael, translated by Sheila Cudahy, 1975. Famiglia, 1977; as Family, translated by Beryl Stockman, 1988. Borghesia, 1977; as Borghesia, translated by Beryl Stockman, 1988.

` difficile parlare di se´, edited by Cesare Garboli and Lisa E Ginzburg, 1999; as It’s Hard to Talk About Yourself, translated by Louise Quirke, 2003.

Further Reading Borrelli, Clara, Notizie di Natalia Ginzburg, Naples: L’Orientale, 2002. Bullock, Alan, Natalia Ginzburg: Human Relationships in a Changing World, New York: Berg-St. Martin’s Press, 1991. ` stato cosı` di Natalia Ginzburg, in Saggi Calvino, Italo, E 1945–1985, Milan: Mondadori, 1995. Contemporary Literary Criticism, special issues dedicated to Ginzburg, 5 (1976); 11 (1979); 54 (1989). Del Greco Lobner, Corinna. ‘‘A Lexicon for Both Sexes: Natalia Ginzburg and the Family Saga,’’ in Contemporary Women Writers in Italy: A Modern Renaissance, edited by Santo L. Arico`, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990. Garboli, Cesare, ‘‘Prefazione’’ in N. Ginzburg, Opere, 2 vols., Milan: Mondadori, 1986–1987. Grignani, Maria Antonietta, et al. (editor), Natalia Ginzburg: La narratrice e i suoi testi, Rome: La Nuova Italia Scientifica, 1986. Grignani, Maria Antonietta, ‘‘Dialoghi di Natalia,’’ Studi linguistici italiani, 23(1997): 255–267. Jeannet, Angela M., and Giuliana Sanguineti Katz (editors), Natalia Ginzburg: A Voice of the Twentieth Century, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000.

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NATALIA GINZBURG Marchionne Picchione, Luciana, Natalia Ginzburg, Florence: Il Castoro, 1978. O’Healy, Anne-Marie, ‘‘Natalia Ginzburg and the Family,’’ Canadian Journal of Italian Studies, 9 (1986): 21–36. Montale, Eugenio, ‘‘Due Narratori,’’ in Il Secondo Mestiere Prose 1920–1979, Milan: Mondadori, 1996. Picarazzi, Teresa, Maternal Desire: Natalia Ginzburg’s Mothers, Daughters, and Sisters, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press and London-Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2002. Puppa, Paolo, ‘‘Natalia Ginzburg: una lingua per la scena,’’ in La passione teatrale. Tradizioni, prospettive e spreco nel teatro italiano: Otto e Novecento. Studi per Alessandro D’Amico, edited by Alessandro Tinterri, Rome: Bulzoni, 1997. Salmagundi, special issue on Ginzburg, 96(Fall 1992): 54–167. Taviani, Fernando, ‘‘Tutti i cinghiali hanno detto di sı`,’’ Teatro e storia, 1(1992): 137–153. Weinstein, Jen, ‘‘Il maschio assente nell’opera narrativa e teatrale di Natalia Ginzburg,’’ in Donna: Women in Italian Culture, edited by Ada Testaferri, Toronto: Dove House, 1989.

LE VOCI DELLA SERA, 1961 Novel by Natalia Ginzburg

Le voci della sera (Voices in the Evening), Natalia Ginzburg’s second novel, was the first to be published under her own name. It bears all the signature traits of her mature fiction—modest in its narrative scope; spare but vividly colloquial in its language; concerned with ordinary, even drab characters; yet structurally and emotionally complex in interweaving fragmented memories into the tattered fabric of an emotionally desolate present. As in much of Ginzburg’s fiction, the social and moral toll of Italy’s Fascist past is not represented on a monumental scale but registered in the everyday occurrences of life in a provincial Italian town. This novel marks the first time Ginzburg wrote about the provincial places of her own childhood she once considered ‘‘una paternita` inaccettabile,’’ or ‘‘an unacceptable patrimony,’’ without shame or 846

repugnance (‘‘Nota,’’ in Opere, vol. 1, 1986). The novel is narrated by Elsa, the daughter of a middleclass family who shows little inclination to criticize or escape the traditional society into which she has been born. Elsa writes with easy, if sardonic familiarity about three well-established families, including her own, tracing their fortunes from the rise of Fascism, through the war, into the years of postwar prosperity. We learn who are the Fascist sympathizers, who the resistors, who profit from the war, who survive and why, who marry, happily or unhappily. These facts are recounted with no more moral or even emotional emphasis than reports of a dinner party to which one was not invited. Ginsburg’s manipulation of Elsa as both a detached observer and a self-protective narrator of her own life was partly inspired by her encounter with the fiction of Ivy Compton-Burnett, whose novelistic dialogue,‘‘pervicace e maligno’’ (obstinate and malignant), Ginzburg admired and adapted to her own idiosyncratic experiments with first person narratives (‘‘Nota,’’ in Opere, vol. 1, 1986). The ‘‘voices’’ of the novel are those that reverberate through Elsa’s consciousness, often muting her own. Thus she begins the novel virtually silent, listening uncomplainingly to her mother’s medley of complaints and gossip. She is similarly impassive in recording the village chatter, the ‘‘voices of spite and insult’’ that surround her. Her narrative is shadowed by a brief but telling anecdote about a cousin who had a beautiful voice, went to America to sing, and lost her voice in a fire. The loss of voice, whether it is gradual or traumatic, is a catastrophe Elsa tries ironically to forestall through her own self-effacing narration. Elsa overcomes her reticence halfway through her narrative. She finally reveals her name and suddenly shifts from the past to the present tense to recount her own clandestine love affair and brief engagement. Her story emerges within the communal ‘‘frame’’ she has assembled out of provincial convention and the shards of social memory, but by then she cannot, as her lover remarks, step out of it to experience or enjoy an independent life. Her entrapment is signaled by the novel’s ending, which reabsorbs Elsa’s identity and voice within static structures of recurrence. Elsa concludes the novel by transcribing, in the indefinite present tense, her mother’s insistent chatter, chatter that at once ignores and finalizes her daughter’s emotional extinction. MARIA DIBATTISTA

NATALIA GINZBURG Editions First edition: Le voci della sera, Turin: Einaudi, 1961. Critical edition: Le voci della sera, edited by Alan Bullock, Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1982. Translation: as Voices in the Evening, translated by D. M. Low, New York: Dutton, 1963.

Further Reading Bullock, Alan, ‘‘Natalia Ginzburg and Ivy Compton-Burnett: Creative Composition and Domestic Regression in Le voci della sera,’’ Rivista di Letterature Moderne e Comparate, 30 (1977): 203–226. Carle, Barbara, ‘‘Natalia Ginzburg’s Narrative Voci della sera,’’ Quaderni d’Italianistica, 14: 2 (Autumn 1993): 239–254. Fontanella, Luigi, ‘‘Natalia Ginzburg Between Fiction and Memory: A Reading of Le voci della sera and Lessico Famigliare,’’ in Natalia Ginzburg: A Voice of the Twentieth Century, edited by Angela Jeannet and Guiliana Sanguinetti Katz, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. Garboli, Cesare, Prefazione, in N. Ginzburg, Opere, 2 vols., Milan: Mondadori, 1986–1987. Picarazzi, Teresa, Maternal Desire: Natalia Ginzburg’s Mothers, Daughters, and Sisters, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press and London-Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2002.

LESSICO FAMIGLIARE, 1963 Novel by Natalia Ginzburg

In Lessico famigliare (Family Sayings), a personal and highly idiosyncratic history of her own family during the Fascist era and its postwar aftermath, Natalia Ginzburg reinvented the memoir as a novelized collective autobiography. In her preface, she declared that not a person, place, or incident in the book had been invented but then insisted that the book be read ‘‘senza chiedergli nulla di piu`, ne´ di meno, di quello che un romanzo puo` dare’’ (without asking either more or less of it than a novel can give). What the novel form gave Ginsburg was the freedom to select those sayings and incidents that, however trivial or fragmentary, nevertheless constituted a ‘‘romanzo di pura, nuda, scoperta and dichiarata memoria’’ (a novel of pure, naked,

discovered and professed memory) (‘‘Nota,’’ in Opere, vol. 1, 1986). This freedom was often negatively exercised. Her narrative is full of gaps attributable less to faulty memory than to deliberate authorial omissions. The most discontinuous, inscrutable presence is Ginzburg herself. Details of her courtship and marriage to Leone Ginsburg, their shared exile in the Abruzzi, the birth of their children, and his eventual death by torture are reported rather than dramatized. Only when her narrative approaches those intimates of her adult life outside her immediate family do her personal recollections become more expansive and detailed, culminating in her complex portrait of Cesare Pavese. Dominating the family and this memoir is the opinionated, often despotic voice of Ginzburg’s father, Giuseppe Levi. He is given the first and last words of the book—his first a thundering command for civility, his last a protest against his wife’s oft-told tales of the past (precisely the kind of anecdotes and sayings of which the book itself is made). He confers authority on the family’s ‘‘lexicon,’’ which is their special language for reality, for the past, and for each other. It is vocabulary assembled from words and idioms native to the father’s Triestine and the mother’s Milanese dialects but adapted to the family’s private meanings. Their private language at once announces and disguises the tensions between ‘‘the incommunicable worlds’’ of Ginzburg’s father, an ethnic but not religious Jew who is anti-Modernist in his artistic tastes, and her mother, raised Catholic, who loves Proust and never tires of repeating the droll anecdotes that the father dismisses as scherzettini (little jokes). Their different but married idioms knit the Levi family together in a shared family code that unites them when the ties of affection become frayed by temperamental differences and the tragic accidents of history. The violence and pain of modern Italian history are not so much kept in the background as absorbed into the durable rhythm of the family’s daily life. Catastrophes are recalled through a single gesture: Thus Ginzburg revealed that the fall of France would always be linked in her mind to cherries that Pavese, on his visits, ‘‘would make us taste on his arrival, pulling them one by one from his pocket with a parsimonious and grudging hand.’’ This novelistic way of remembering seems to defeat the impersonal verdicts of history. Lessico Famigliare ends with a return to a past that is at once within and outside of history. Its concluding pages anthologize the characteristic expressions of 847

NATALIA GINZBURG the father and mother in dialogue with each other. Their comic duet is a tour de force of tribal memory and indomitable character that affirms as it resurrects a life now vanished. MARIA DIBATTISTA Editions First Edition Lessico famigliare, Turin: Einaudi, 1963.

Other Editions Lessico famigliare, edited by Cesare Garboli, Milan: Mondadori, 1972.

Translations As Family Sayings, translated by D. M. Low, London: Hogarth, 1967; revised edition, Manchester: Carcanet, 1984. As The Things We Used to Say, translated by Judith Woolf, Manchester: Carcanet, 1997.

Further Reading Barani,Valeria, ‘‘Il ‘latino’ polifonico della famiglia Levi nel ‘Lessico famigliare’ di Natalia Ginzburg,’’ Otto/Novecento, 6 (1990): 147–157. Bullock, Alan, Natalia Ginzburg: Human Relationships in a Changing World, New York: Berg-St. Martin’s Press, 1991. Del Greco Lobner, Corinna, ‘‘A Lexicon for Both Sexes: Natalia Ginzburg and the Family Saga,’’ in Contemporary Women Writers in Italy: A Modern Renaissance, edited by Santo L. Arico`, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990. Garboli, Cesare, ‘‘Introduzione,’’ in N. Ginzburg, Lessico famigliare, Milan: Mondadori, 1972. Montale, Eugenio, ‘‘Lessico famigliare, crudele con dolcezza,’’ in Secondo Mestiere Prose 1920–1979, vol. 2, Milan: Mondadori, 1996. O’Healy, Anne-Marie, ‘‘Natalia Ginzburg and the Family,’’ Canadian Journal of Italian Studies, 9 (1986): 21–36. Sodi, Risa, ‘‘A Family Grammar: Natalia Ginzburg’s Lessico Famigliare,’’ Entralogos, 1 (1987): 106–114. Woolf, Judith, ‘‘Silent Witness: Memory and Omission in Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Sayings,’’ Cambridge Quarterly, 25:3 (1996): 243–262.

GIOACCHINO DA FIORE (CA. 1135–1202) Also known as Joachim di Fiore or Joachim da Flora, the Cistercian monk, then abbot at Corazzo, and famous biblical exegete, Joachim lived in his native Calabria all his life. His innovative biblical scholarship and his wisdom brought him the respect and admiration of popes and kings, who consulted him on spiritual and political matters. The gift of prophecy attributed to his theological investigations would grant him a legendary aura after his death. Some of Joachim’s doctrines may have developed as a consequence of his frequent contacts with Greek monks, who lived in great numbers in the eastern portion of twelfth-century Calabria, and also with Islam, which was highly represented in southern Italy at the time. Believing that the Cistercian Order could not fulfill his desire for an austere hermitical life, Joachim founded a new order at St. John of Fiore, in the Calabrian mountains of Sila. The Florensian Order was approved by Pope Celestine III in 1196 and spread over the next three centuries, until most monks rejoined the Cistercian Order in 1505. After 848

Joachim’s death, a considerable controversy arose about the orthodoxy of his spiritual and theological pronouncements. He was considered by some a prophet and by some a teacher of false doctrine. In the late thirteenth century, his ideas were embraced by the Spiritual Franciscans and were disseminated rapidly by them through northern Italy. In 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council condemned Joachim for his doctrine on the Trinity. Joachim’s controversial deployment of biblical texts to understand and predict human history is expressed in three major works, Liber de Concordia Novi ac Veteri Testamenti (Book of the Concordance between the Old and the New Testaments, 1182–1200), Expositio in Apocalypsim (Exposition of the Apocalypse, 1182–1200), and Psalterium decem cordarum (Psaltery of Ten Strings, 1182– 1200). These three commentaries aim at the same exegetical purpose and develop similar arguments. Themes and concepts are cross-referenced among the three different works, which, in the intentions of the author, constitute a trilogy. In the Concordia

GIOACCHINO DA FIORE the treatment is historical, in Expositio exegetical, and in Psalterium theological. Joachim’s study theorizes a spiritual perception of history. He creatively combined a close exegetical study of biblical texts with figural and numerical symbolism, while placing his analysis on a historical background and prophesying future occurrences. His investigation of the Bible was intended to establish a series of parallel readings of the Old Testament, the New Testament, and human history. People, events, and periods in the Old Testament have correspondences in people, events, and periods in the New Testament and in the final age of human history, which Joachim prophetically announced as an age of peace and reconciliation. The Concordia was conceived and written first and contains a philosophy of history. It begins by establishing an elaborate and fanciful parallel between the Old and New Testaments and states that all corresponding elements in the two parts of the biblical narrative prefigure the third and final age of the Spirit, which is yet to come. History is divided into three overlapping epochs, corresponding to the three persons of the Trinity. The age of the Father has faith, the age of the Son knowledge, and the age of the Spirit contemplation as their chief qualities, respectively. The age of the Father spanned from Adam to Christ, and human beings live a carnal life; the age of the Son stretched from King Uzziah (first millennium before Christ) to 1260, between the flesh and the spirit; the third age is from the time of St Benedict (sixth century AD) to the end of the world, and human beings live a spiritual life. The Expositio summarizes some of the same ideas and then analyzes in greater detail the Book of Revelation, the last book of the Bible, which Joachim considered the key to interpreting all Scripture. It explains the prophetic symbolism of the Apocalypse and forecasts things yet to come. The Psalterium clarifies Joachim’s theory on the Trinity. The musical instrument known as lyre or psalter serves as allegorical representation of the Trinity. The body of the instrument represents the Father, the psalm sung on it represents the Son, the melody produced by both instrument and psalm represents the Spirit. The treatise is accordingly divided into three books, one for each Person of the Trinity. A correspondence with the three historical stages created in the previous two works is maintained. It has been suggested that, through the Saracen culture of southern Italy at the time, Joachim felt the influence of Averroistic tendencies, which put

forth vague dreams of a universal religion, a future age of the spirit in which all separating forms and partial dogmas would disappear. Many books attributed to Joachim are expositions of his prophecies, and it is mostly on these that Joachim’s fame rested for some generations. The ensemble of spurious Joachite literature, known as pseudo-Joachite, contributed to Joachim’s popularity and helped spread the notions truly deriving from his canonical works. Joachim’s general spiritual and theological framework came to be known later as the Eternal Gospel.

Biography Gioacchino da Fiore, or Joachim, was born around the year 1135 in Celico, near Cosenza, in the southern Italian region of Calabria, which was then a very composite and complex region under Norman rule. His father was a notary at the court of Roger II of Sicily. After training to become a notary himself, he went on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and spent time wandering in the Palestine desert, possibly around the year 1158. Upon his return to Calabria, he was ordained and became a monk in the Cistercian monastery at Corazzo, where he professed in 1168. In 1178 he became abbot but neglected the leadership of the monastery to dedicate himself to biblical exegesis. He left Corazzo for Casamari, where he wrote his commentaries. He died in San Giovanni in Fiore, Calabria, on March 30, 1202. ALESSANDRO VETTORI Selected Works Liber de Concordia Novi ac Veteris Testamenti (written between 1182 and 1200), 1519. Liber de Concordia Novi ac Veteris Testamenti, edited by E. Randolph Daniel, 1983. Expositio magni prophete Abbatis Ioachim in Apocalipsim (written between 1182 and 1200), 1527. Expositio in Apocalypsim (written between 1182 and 1200), 1964. Psalterium decem cordarum (written between 1182 and 1200), 1527. Il salterio a dieci corde, 2004.

Further Reading Buonaiuti, Ernest, Gioacchino da Fiore, Rome, Collezione Meridionale Editrice, 1931. McGinn, Bernard, The Calabrian Abbot. Joachim of Fiore in the History of Western Thought, New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1985.

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GIOACCHINO DA FIORE Napolillo, Vincenzo, Gioacchino da Fiore: le fonti biografiche e le lettere, Cosenza: Progetto 2000. Reeves, Marjorie, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages: A Study in Joachimism, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1969. Reeves, Marjorie, Joachim of Fiore and the Prophetic Future, New York, Harper & Row, 1977. Reeves, Marjorie, ‘‘The Originality and Influence of Joachim of Fiore,’’ Traditio 36 (1980): 269–316.

Storia e messaggio in Gioacchino da Fiore: Atti del I Congresso internazionale di studi gioachimiti, S. Giovanni in Fiore, Abbazia Florense (19–23 September 1979), S. Giovanni in Fiore: Centro di studi gioachimiti, 1980. Troncalli, Fabio, Gioacchino da Fiore: la vita, il pensiero, le opere, Rome: Citta` Nuova, 2002. West, Delno (editor), Joachim of Fiore in Christian Thought, 2 vols., New York: Burt Franklin, 1975.

VINCENZO GIOBERTI (1801–1852) Vincenzo Gioberti was a Turinese philosopher, theologian, and statesman whose impressive quantity of works elucidates a philosophy of pantheistic ontologism mixed with traditionalism and a nationalistic political agenda that made him the theoretician of the neo-Guelph movement. Gioberti wrote articles under the pen name of ‘‘Demofilo’’ for Giovine Italia (Young Italy), the political sect of his contemporary revolutionary thinker Giuseppe Mazzini. Although both Gioberti and Mazzini recognized at a young age the seriousness of their country’s decline, Gioberti, unlike Mazzini, saw amelioration in systematic and moderate steps. Arrested and exiled on suspicion of political intrigues in 1833, Gioberti would spend the next fifteen years abroad articulating his plan for Italy’s recovery through the publication of numerous philosophical and political works. His most influential work, Del primato morale e civile degli italiani (1843; On the Moral and Civil Primacy of the Italians) appeared to many to be the answer to Italy’s problems. Dedicated to Silvio Pellico, the book is divided into two parts, ‘‘Del primato italiano rispetto all’azione’’ (On Italian Primacy with Respect to Action) and ‘‘Del primato italiano rispetto al pensiero’’ (On Italian Primacy with Respect to Thought), which elaborate reasons for Italy’s early primacy in Europe and its subsequent demise, and propose a plan for its revival. An ordained priest, Gioberti not only preached moral salvation through Christianity,

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but suggested that Italy’s political redemption lay in the Church’s ability to govern. As the providentially chosen home of Catholicism and the Papacy, Gioberti claimed Italy has a mission to be a model for all nations in the materialization of the divine in history. To remove Italy from its condition of political insignificance, Gioberti offered a solution to Italian unification in the formation of a federation of Italian states under the guidance of the Pope, in whose Church Gioberti saw the source of moral and social values, and backed by the military force of Piedmont. Del primato morale e civile degli italiani experienced great popularity, making Gioberti the leading theoretician of the ‘‘neo-Guelph’’ movement. Some heavy criticism, however, prompted Gioberti to publish a new edition in 1845 preceded by an introduction of 559 pages called the ‘‘Prolegomeni del Primato’’ (Prolegomena of the Primacy). Gioberti’s conception of the Church brought him into conflict with the Jesuits, against whom he wrote the invective Gesuita moderno (The Modern Jesuit, 1846) and the subsequent Apologia del libro intitolato il Gesuita moderno (Apology of the Book Entitled The Modern Jesuit, 1848). Gioberti saw an important role for the cleric in the unfolding of Italy’s political destiny. Clerics, he believed, should modernize themselves and know how to evaluate the social forces at work in the world with political realism; they must always be able to control and guide the fickle public opinion toward progress.

VINCENZO GIOBERTI Gioberti’s return to his native Turin in May 1848 was triumphant, garnering much attention from both Piedmont and Rome. After traveling to Milan to oppose Mazzini, whose republican sympathies he no longer shared, he founded a society advocating a federated Italy, this time with the King of Piedmont and not the Pope as its leader. His plans unrealized, Gioberti retreated to Paris in 1849, where he saw all of his volumes placed on the Index of Prohibited Books before his death in 1852. In his last works, such as the Del rinnovamento civile d’Italia (On the Civil Renewal of Italy, 1851) and the philosophical treatise Della protologia (1857), Gioberti drastically modified a number of the ideas advanced in Del primato morale e civile degli italiani and demonstrated pantheistic inclinations. Gioberti’s orientation toward pantheism, particularly evident in the posthumously published Della protologia, recalls ideas of both Giordano Bruno and Giambattista Vico and relies on the Platonic tradition emphasizing ontology, or the science of being. Gioberti asserted that the primum cognitum of man is the idea of ‘‘Being,’’ which is nothing other than God Himself. Ens creat existentias, or ‘‘being creates existing things,’’ is the basis of the theory of creation which he calls Esse universale (Universal Being). The ‘‘Entity’’ is the divine beginning in which reality originates but from which it is separated and distant. Despite this distance, the relationship between Entity and existing things is dynamic and reveals itself in the unfolding of history. History, therefore, is the stage for the interplay between the Entity and existing creation. In Del bello (On Beauty, 1841), Gioberti further asserted the important role of literature and art in this philosophy of history. Although most of Gioberti’s theories were dreams too impractical to realize at the height of the nineteenth century, the power of his writing and the passion of his convictions secure his place as one of Italy’s nation-builders. The complete works of Gioberti were published in thirty-five volumes in Naples in 1877. ERIN M. MCCARTHY

Biography Born in Turin on April 5, 1801; studied theology at University of Torino, obtained doctorate; ordained

priest in 1825; court chaplain and professor in the theological college, 1826–1833; wrote under the pen-name ‘‘Demofilo’’ in Mazzini’s Giovine Italia, printed in Marseilles; arrested for political ideas, 1833; exiled and moved to Paris, 1833–1834; lived in Brussels, 1834–1845; returned to Italy to actively participate in the political upheaval, May 1848; became minister, president of the Parliament, and Prime Minister from December 13, 1848 to February 19, 1849; after the failure of his neoGuelph political movement in Piedmont, went to France, May 1849; died in Paris of a heart attack on October 26, 1852. Selected Works Collections Epistolario, edited by Giovanni Gentile and Gustavo Balsamo-Crivelli, 11 vols., Florence: Vallecchi, 1927. Opere edite e inedite, Milan: Bocca-Padua:Cedam, 1938– 1971. Scritti letterari, edited by Ernesto Travi, Milan: Marzorati, 1971.

Philosophical Writings

Teorica del soprannaturale, 1838; 2nd edition, with replies to critics, 1850. Introduzione allo studio della filosofia, 1840. Lettere sugli errori politico-religiosi di Lamennais, 1840. Del bello, 1841. Del buono, 1841. Errori filosofici di Antonio Rosmini, 1842. Del primato morale e civile degli italiani, 1843; new edition, 1845. Gesuita moderno, 1846. Apologia del libro intitolato il Gesuita moderno, 1848. Del rinnovamento civile d’Italia, 1851. Della riforma Cattolica della Chiesa, 1856. Filosofia della Rivelazione, 1856. Della protologia, 1857.

Further Reading Freschi, Renato, L’azione politica di Gioberti, Milan: A. Corticelli, 1935 Gentile, Giovanni, Rosmini e Gioberti: saggio storico sulla filosofia italiana del Risorgimento, Florence: Sansoni, 1955. Giusso, Lorenzo, ‘‘Il Cahier de Philosophie di Vincenzo Gioberti: Rinascita,’’ Italica, 26, No. 2 (June 1949): 151–160 Holland, Rupert Sargent, Builders of a United Italy, New York: H. Holt & Company, 1908. Muste`, Marcello, La scienza ideale: filosofia e politica in Vincenzo Gioberti, Soveria Mannelli (Catanzaro): Rubbettino, 2000.

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VINCENZO GIOBERTI Portale, Vincenzo, Vincenzo Gioberti e l’ontologismo, Cosenza: Pellegrini, 1968. Rossi, Joseph, ‘‘The Piedmontese Moderates and America,’’ Italica, 43, No. 1, (March 1966): 1–31. Rumi, Giorgio, Gioberti, Bologna: Il mulino, 1999.

Salomone, A. William, ‘‘Statescraft and Ideology in the Risorgimento. Reflections on the Italian National Revolution,’’ Italica, 38, No. 3 (September 1961): 163–194.

PIETRO GIORDANI (1774–1848) Critic and essayist Pietro Giordani played a notable role in the unfolding of the intellectual life of Italian Romanticism. Because of his radical commitment to the life of the mind, he has come to incarnate the figure of the ‘‘engaged man of letters,’’ and, from this viewpoint, in his work and posture one can perceive the distant echo of the French ide´ologues (Diderot, Rousseau). Like his transalpine colleagues, Giordani wrote about literature, politics, art, and theology, and he did so with the aim of reaching a wider public, opening up and debating the moral questions of the time, and educating the young to a modern and somewhat liberal sense of contemporary reality. The signs of his view of literature as part of a larger civic-intellectual conversation were visible from the start of his career. An early political-poetic work was his Panegirico alla sacra maesta` di Napoleone il grande (Panegyric to His Sacred Majesty Napoleon the Great, 1808) written at the heyday of the growing myth of the French general-emperor. More in the moderate style of Vincenzo Monti rather than of Ugo Foscolo (who by this time, had experienced disillusionment with Napoleon’s handling of Venetian independence), Giordani’s panegyric was applauded by the academicians. He wrote it in Cesena, read it to the city’s academy, and was rewarded for it by the vice-king Eugenio with a teaching position in the same institution. His tenure lasted from 1810 to 1815. Giordani’s intellectual curiosity led him to other domains of the cultural debates of the time. He composed a Panegirico ad Antonio Casanova (Panegyric of Antonio Canova, 1808), which triggered a friendship with the sculptor (who at this

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time was himself rumored to be involved with a member of the Bonaparte family, Paolina). Giordani’s poem centers essentially on the neoclassical style and beauty of Canova’s art, which he, much like Giacomo Leopardi, fully endorsed and admired. The poem, however, also shows that Giordani’s inspiration stemmed from the close ties of friendship he had forged with the sculptor. The way he understood friendship provides a sort of key to his character: It was his means of expressing his sentimental exuberance, and he would write about friends the way others have written about love passions. Soon after this phase, Giordani’s fortunes shifted. In 1815, while the government of the Papal States was seated in Bologna, he lost his position as pro-secretary of the academy that the viceroy Eugenio had conferred upon him. He moved to Milan, where, thanks to his popularity as an elegant prose writer, he became codirector of the influential Biblioteca italiana (1816–1840). The ‘‘Proemio’’ (Introduction) to the inaugural issue is entirely his own, and it contains the fundamental articles of liberal-moderate intellectual vision he was to develop later in life. In 1817, Giordani, thanks to a small inheritance he obtained at his father’s death, left his position at the Biblioteca italiana and returned to Piacenza, where he promoted the foundation of the ‘‘Societa` di lettura’’ as well as the institution of a kindergarten. It was in this context that his modern moral-educational principles began to be articulated with clarity: He fought an intense campaign against schoolteachers who inflicted physical punishment on children in public schools (1819); he advised and guided young

PIETRO GIORDANI men and women in their studies and encouraged their intellectual growth. Among these young men there was Leopardi, and their relationship turned for a time into a significant collaboration. In 1818 Giordani traveled to Recanati to meet the young and still obscure poet. He was drawn to him by their shared interest in philology, which for Leopardi, however, was more than an exercise in erudition and which he managed to absorb into the new and yet classical lyrics he had been shaping. The meeting with the poet signaled Giordani’s decision to act as a promoter of Italian letters. Accordingly, he wrote the preface to a book of poetry composed in honor of the bishop Antonio Loschi. It happened, however, that some phrases in the preface were viewed as disrespectful toward the Duchess Maria Luisa, and Giordani was thus forced to move to Florence. The seven years he spent there were the happiest of his life: He became a member of the Gabinetto Vieusseux and a contributor to the Antologia, and two distinguished intellectuals, Gino Capponi and Pietro Colletta, welcomed him in their circle. Above all, in Florence he renewed his contacts with Leopardi and met Alessandro Manzoni. Giordani found Manzoni’s moderate-liberal esthetics to his liking, and he admired I promessi sposi (The Betrothed, 1840–1842) without reservation. Giordani’s liberal leanings forced him to leave Florence in November 1830. He moved to Parma, where he lived till his death. He wrote many letters that established him as the supreme arbiter of Italian literature at this time. In short, Giordani’s life displayed the variety and scope of his intellectual power. He lived it as an aristocrat of the mind; as an apostle of history, music, literature, painting, science, sculpture, and Italian culture across the ages; and as a moral conscience at a time when men of letters felt hemmed in by various sorts of political tyranny. As an essay writer on many subjects, he was peerless in mixing together eloquence, passion, and a colorful style adorning his practical objectives. Among his many works still worth remembering are the oration Per le tre legazioni riacquistate dal sommo pontefice Pio Settimo (About the Three Legations Regained by the Pope Pius VII, 1815); the essay ‘‘Sul discorso di madama di Stae¨l. Lettera di un italiano ai compilatori della ‘Biblioteca italiana’’’ (On Mme. De Stae¨l’s Discourse: The Letter of an Italian to the Editors of the Biblioteca italiana, 1816), one of the first salvos in the debate on Romanticism that followed Mme. De Stae¨l’s famous letter in the first

issue of the journal; and L’istruzione a un giovane italiano per l’arte di scrivere (Instruction Given to a Young Italian about the Art of Writing, 1821), possibly written for Leopardi and important in determining the ideal that he was looking to find in himself and to promote in others.

Biography Pietro Giordani was born in Piacenza in a well-todo family, on January 1, 1774. After his graduation, due to an unhappy love experience, he entered a Benedectine monastery in Saint Sisto, Piacenza, 1797, where he remained for three years. Afterward, turned off by the demands of monastic life, he left before receiving the sacred orders, 1800; this experience remained fundamental and accounts in large measure for his anticlerical verbal violence and posture. He was employed in the Napoleonic public administration, 1800–1804. He was a substitute for the chair of eloquence at the University of Bologna, 1804, and taught at the academy of Cesena, 1810–1815. His father died, 1817. He moved to Piacenza, 1818. and was exiled to Florence, 1824. His books were placed on the Index by the Church, 1825. He moved to Parma, 1830. Giordani died in Parma, on September 2, 1848. MARIA C. PASTORE PASSARO Selected Works Collections Opere, edited by Antonio Gusalli, 14 vols., Milan: Sanvito, 1854–1863. Prose e Poesie, Florence: Societa` Editrice Toscana, 1924.

Poetry ‘‘Panegirico alla sacra maesta` di Napoleone il grande,’’ 1808. ‘‘Panegirico ad Antonio Casanova,’’ 1808. ‘‘Per le tre legazioni riacquistate dal sommo pontefice Pio Settimo,’’ 1815.

Critical Writing L’istruzione a un giovane italiano per l’arte di scrivere, 1821. Alcune prose di Pietro Giordani, 1824. Nuove prose, 1830. Di quattro affresco del Parmigianino e di tutti quelli del Correggio in Parma, 1846. Frammento inedito: Il peccato impossibile, edited by William Spaggiari, 1985.

Letters Lettere, edited by Giovanni Ferretti, 2 vols., 1937. Carteggio Giordani-Vieusseux: 1825–1847, edited by Laura Melosi, 1997.

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PIETRO GIORDANI Carteggio. Pietro Giordani, Antonio Canova, Giovanni Battista Sartori, edited by Matteo Ceppi and Claudio Giambonini, 2004.

Other Arte della perfezion cristiana del cardinale Sforza-Pallavicino, con discorso sulla vita e sulle opere dell’autore, di Pietro Giordani, 1820. Studi filosofici di Giacomo Leopardi, edited by Pietro Pellegrini and Pietro Giordani, 1845.

Further Reading Capasso, Gaetano, La giovinezza di Pietro Giordani da Carteggi e documenti inediti, Turin: Roux Frassati, 1896. Cecioni, Gabriele, Lingua e cultura nel pensiero di Pietro Giordani, Rome: Bulzoni, 1977.

Facchini, Cesare, La scuola letteraria Bolognese e L’Antologia: a proposito di alcune Lettere inedite del Giordani, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1887. Ferni, Stefano, Bibliografia delle lettere a stampa di Pietro Giordani, Florence: Olschki, 1923. Ferretti, Giovanni, Pietro Giordani sino ai quaranta anni, Rome: Edizioni di Storia e letteratura, 1952. Forlini, Giovanni, Bibliografia di Pietro Giordani: le opere e la critica, Florence: Sansoni, 1974. Melosi, Laura, In toga e in camicia: scritti e carteggi di Pietro Giordani, Lucca: Fazzi, 2002. Panizza, Giorgio (editor), Giordani letterato, Piacenza: Tipografia Le. Co., 1996. Pietro Giordani nel II centenario della nascita: atti del Convegno di studi, Piacenza, 16–18 marzo 1974, Piacenza: Cassa di Risparmio, 1974. Schippisi, Ranieri, Capitoli giordaniani, Piacenza: Tipografia Le. Co., 1992. Tissoni, Roberto, Giordani Leopardi 1998, Piacenza: Tipografia Le. Co., 2000.

DOMENICO DI GIOVANNI See Il Burchiello

PAOLO GIOVIO (1483–1552) Among the cinquecento polymaths, Paolo Giovio is traditionally best known for the experimental quality of his style and the wide array of his works, which range from accurate exercises of ekphrasis to historiography, from a gallery of biographical portraits to epistolography. Yet, despite some stylistic evidence that seems to anticipate Mannerism or the Baroque, it would be impossible to discuss Giovio’s linguistic results without considering his firm loyalty to the experience of the Renaissance courts. In the Dialogo dell’imprese militari e amorose (Dialogue on Military and Amorous Undertakings), published posthumously in 1555 and the most successful among Giovio’s vernacular works, he made it clear that he was not bound to use the Tuscan idiom, and he wanted ‘‘in tutti i modi esser libero di parlare alla cortigiana’’ 854

(to be completely free to speak the courtly language). On the other hand, the career of this disciple of philosopher Pietro Pomponazzi (1462–1525) was framed by the rise and the maturation of a new literary genre, the collection of familiar letters. In this field, an influential model was offered by Pietro Aretino’s Libro primo de le lettere (First Book of Letters), first published in Venice by Francesco Marcolini in 1538, and the Piacevoli discorsi (Pleasant Discourses, 1547) of Andrea Calmo (ca. 1510–1571), characterized by a considerable use of linguistic elements drawn from dialects. A new paradigm of literature arose from the intersection between the two genres of the letter and of the ragguaglio (the narrative of an imaginary journey) and from the use and ostensible adoption of dialect.

PAOLO GIOVIO In the hands of Giovio, this amounted to the integration into the realm of literature of the rhetoric of the naturale, beyond what had already been practiced by the Paduan actor-playwright Angelo Beolco (Il Ruzzante). Giovio’s strategy was to imitate the freedom and mutability of an improvised oral conversation. Even when the writer became ‘‘Tuscan’’ in the mimetic effort to conform to the language of some of his addressees, such as Giorgio Vasari, Benedetto Varchi, Piero Vettori, or the Duke Cosimo I, behind every line there lurked an expert narrator, an ‘‘uomo archicima d’arte di non arte’’ (overskillful man of the art which does not betray artifice; Lettere in volgare, 1560, nos. 253, 258), searching for pointed language and a wellchosen word. Giovio’s departure from Rome in 1549 as a result of his strained relationship with Pope Paul III was a bitter one. Indeed, he had to reposition himself on a new intellectual landscape, determined by the events of the Council of Trent (1545–1563). In the collection Elogia virorum bellica virtute illustrium (Writings in Praise of Men Famous for Their Martial Virtue, 1551), Giovio allotted a sizeable amount of space to the political leaders of his time: Charles V, above all, but also Cosimo I, his new protector, as well as Andrea Doria, Ferrante Gonzaga, Barbarossa, and even Suleiman the Magnificent. The same broad horizon characterizes the Historiarum sui temporis libri XLV (Forty-Five Books on the History of His Times, 1550–1552), published by Lorenzo Torrentino, the same official printer of Guicciardini’s Storia d’Italia (The History of Italy, 1561). This is a work for which, as he stated in his introduction, the author expected to be praised ‘‘da altre e piu` remote nazioni’’ (by other and more remote nations). In both cases, Giovio painted his historical canvas starting from the ‘‘infinite nove di varii colori, fatte a cangiante’’ (infinite news of various colours, always becoming), as in the memorable description of the battle of Frosinone, where ‘‘le piche de’ pazi rompeno spesso el disegno de li savii cameranti’’ (the swords of the mad men break the designs of wise counselors). After Vittorio Cian’s pioneering studies, published in 1890–1891, Giovio’s value as a historian became a disputed issue, until the recent Paolo Giovio: The Historian and the Crisis of SixteenthCentury Italy (1997) by T. C. Price Zimmermann and Tra Mantova e la Sicilia nel Cinquecento (2003) by Massimo Zaggia. The long-standing negative opinion of Giovio’s historical works was effectively dispelled by Benedetto Croce with his essay ‘‘La grandiosa aneddotica storica di Paolo Giovio’’

(1958). Indeed, the writer’s eclectic curiosity is now viewed as positive, although ‘‘cold and detached,’’ to use the words of Carlo Dionisotti, who underlines the more progressive stance of Guicciardini and the historiography in vernacular and consequently blames Giovio for a lack of ‘‘tragic participation’’ (Discorso sull’Umanesimo italiano, 1967). Giovio’s works have seen a revival of interest, first with the new edition of his works edited by Giuseppe Guido Ferrero (Opera, 1956– 1958) and more recently with the publication of new critical and biographical works, including essays in Guido Arbizzoni’s Un nodo di parole e di cose (2002) and Tommaso Casini’s Ritratti parlanti (2004). The real cornerstone in Giovio’s bibliography, however, remains Gianfranco Folena’s extensive study ‘‘L’espressionismo epistolare di Paolo Giovio’’ (1991). Folena wrote in the wake of an important reassessment of the genre of the ‘‘familiar letter’’ in the Renaissance and used Gianfranco Contini’s notion of ‘‘expressionism’’ as a key to approach Giovio’s multifaceted writing.

Biography Paolo Giovio was born in Como, in 1483; he trained as a physician in Padua and Pavia, where he graduateed in 1507, then practised medicine, first in his native city and then in Milan before moving to Rome ca. 1512, under the protection of Leo X, who appointed him university professor, and of Clemente VII, to whom Giovio was personal doctor. In 1528, he became bishop of Nocera; in 1531, he published the Commentarii delle cose dei Turchi and worked for the collection of Elogia, conceived for the Museo in Como. After 1547, Giovio wrote against the politics of Pope Paul III to Cardinal Alessandro Farnese; in 1548, he moved to Florence and to the court of Cosimo I, to whom Giovio dedicated his Descriptio Britanniae, Scotiae, Hiberniae et Orchaddum and the Historiarum sui temporis libri XLV. Paolo Giovio died in Florence on 3 August 1552. STEFANO GULIZIA Selected Works Collections Pauli Iovii Opera, 2 vols., edited by Giuseppe Guido Ferrero, Rome: Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato– Libreria, 1956–1958. Ritratti degli uomini illustri, edited by Carlo Caruso, Palermo: Sellerio, 1999.

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PAOLO GIOVIO Scritti d’arte: lessico ed ecfrasi, edited by Sonia Maffei, Pisa: Scuola Normale Superiore, 1999.

Latin Works Elogia veris clarorum virorum imaginibus apposita, 1546. Descriptio Britanniae, Scotiae, Hyberniae, et Orchaddum, 1548. Illustrium virorum vitae, 1549. Elogia virorum bellica virtute illustrium, 1551. Historiarum sui temporis libri XLV, 1550–1552.

Works in the Vernacular Commentario de le cose de Turchi, 1538. Dialogo dell’imprese militari e amorose, 1555. Lettere volgari, 1560.

Further Reading Chabod, Federico, ‘‘Paolo Giovio,’’ in Scritti sul Rinascimento, Turin: Einaudi, 1967. Cian, Vittorio, ‘‘Gioviana,’’ Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 17 (1891): 277–357.

Croce, Benedetto, ‘‘La grandiosa aneddotica storica di Paolo Giovio,’’ in Poeti e scrittori del pieno e del tardo Rinascimento, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1958. Del Ben, Andrea, ‘‘‘Io credo vorria qualche presente’: revisioni nell’opera di Paolo Giovio,’’ Aevum, 75:3 (2001): 695–704. Dionisotti, Carlo, ‘‘Discorso sull’Umanesimo italiano,’’ in Geografia e storia della letteratura italiana, Turin: Einaudi, 1967. Ferrero, Giuseppe Guido, ‘‘Per una nuova edizione delle lettere di Paolo Giovio,’’ Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 113 (1939): 225–255. Folena, Gianfranco, ‘‘L’espressionismo epistolare di Paolo Giovio,’’ in Il linguaggio del caos. Studi sul plurilinguismo rinascimentale, Turin: Bollati-Boringhieri, 1991. Michelucci, Lara, Giovio in Parnaso: tra collezione di forme e storia universale, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2004. Travi, Ernesto, ‘‘Giovio, gli Orti Oricellari e Machiavelli,’’ Testo, 4:5 (1983): 53–61. Zimmermann, T. C. Price, Paolo Giovio: The Historian and the Crisis of Sixteenth-century Italy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.

GIAMBATTISTA GIRALDI, (‘‘IL CINZIO’’) (1504–1573) Dramatist and novelliere Giambattista Giraldi, known as ‘‘Il Cinzio,’’ the Italianized version of Cynthius, a name he had assumed in his youth in honor of a woman, was a very prolific man of letters culturally and socially rooted in the court of Ferrara, where he created most of his works. Giraldi wrote in almost all the genres typical of his time but earned a special renown for his work in the cultivated and erudite tradition. He wrote both verse and prose, in Italian and Latin, using the latter language especially for those works relating to the classical tradition, in particular his early collection of poems, Poematia (Poems, 1536). He wrote his two best-known theoretical works in Italian: Lettera ovvero discorso sopra il comporre le satire adatte alle scene (Letter or Discourse on the Composition of Satires Suitable for Stages, 1545), published as an appendix to the satirical drama Egle; and the Discorsi intorno al comporre dei romanzi, delle commedie e delle tragedie (Discourses about the Composition of Novels, Comedies and Tragedies, 1554). 856

Arguably Della Valle’s most famous work is the tragedy Orbecche (1543), performed for the first time in 1541 in Ferrara in the author’s house and in the presence of the duke. The tragedy tells the story of Orbecche, King Sulmon’s daughter, whose father, not knowing that she is already married and the mother of two sons, intends to give her in marriage to another king. Upon discovering the truth, Sulmon decides to kill Orbecche’s husband and sons and to offer their remains to her at her new wedding. In desperation, Orbecche kills her father and commits suicide. Orbecche, generally considered the first modern tragedy, became an important model for later tragedians. It represents a perfect synthesis of Giraldi’s theoretical speculations on the genre, which had been stimulated by the debate provoked by the publication of several editions of Aristotle’s Poetics in the 1640s. Giraldi proposed a moderate restoration of the three unities, limiting them, however, to time and space in order to make Aristotle’s ideas more congruent with the masterpieces of Italian literature. Seneca,

GIAMBATTISTA GIRALDI (‘‘IL CINZIO’’) whose vivid sense of cruelty and horridness made him more compatible with the taste of the times, remained Giraldi’s most important influence and model. Giraldi can be considered a forerunner of the Baroque tragedy, and indeed his reform had a profound influence not only on future Italian tragedians but also on the playwrights of Elizabethan England. The emphasis he placed on tragedy in his theoretical writings on drama was important because it legitimized and helped codify the moral function of the theater in society in educating and improving the spectators. This notion corresponds more or less with an adaptation of the Aristotelian idea of catharsis: According to Giraldi, the more the events of the tragedy are horrible, cruel, and painful, the more effectively the cathartic effect can be achieved. In his analysis of the theater, Giraldi considered not only the texts of comedy and tragedy but also the technical problems specifically related to staging them, recognizing that it was better to have a wellperformed bad drama than a good text performed by bad actors. These beliefs show that Giraldi worked also as a ‘‘corago’’ (stage director and producer), assuming a very modern position, which in the same period can only be compared to that of Leone de’ Sommi (1527–1592). As noted previously, Orbecche is the first and best-known of Giraldi’s tragedies, but other plays, such as Didone (Dido, 1583), written in 1541, or Epitia (1583), written after 1563 and the source for Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, are important for the new elements they added to the playwright’s repertoire: a plot based on fabulous characters and events rather than on historical figures and situations; a drama with a happy ending. In fact, Giraldi theorized the possibility of a form of tragedy with a positive outcome that he called tragedia mista. Bringing together the cathartic effect of tragedy with the pleasure of seeing virtue rewarded, the tragedia mista anticipates the tragicomedy. Giraldi is also well known for Egle, a ‘‘satyr play’’ that became the model for the ‘‘pastorale ferrarese.’’ Even though it can be considered as a revival of Hellenic satire and was mostly based on the style of Euripides, it represented a first step in the development of a new genre, a pastoral in which the plot is no longer the result of the capricious game of moody gods but represents the benevolent plan of a merciful God. In the field of fiction, Giraldi’s anthology of short stories Degli Hecatommithi (The Hundred Stories, 1565) is especially remarkable for one of its tales, ‘‘Il Moro di Venezia’’ (The Moor of Venice), which later served

as the source of Shakespeare’s Othello. These stories, however, belong squarely to the tradition of the novella and were not nearly as innovative as Giraldi’s theatrical works. As in his tragedies, Giraldi applied the principles he had defined in his Discorsi intorno al comporre dei romanzi, delle commedie e delle tragedie and sought to strike a compromise between the Aristotelian unities and the Italian literary tradition.

Biography Giambattista Giraldi, ‘‘Il Cinzio,’’ was born in Ferrara in 1504 to an aristocratic family. In Ferrara, he studied under Celio Calcagnini and Niccolo` Leoniceno and earned a degree in arts and medicine from the University of Ferrara, 1530. He taught philosophy at the University of Ferrara, 1534–1541, then rhetoric, 1541–1558. He served as secretary to Duke Ercole II D’Este, 1542–1558, and to Duke Alfonso II D’Este, 1558–1560. He left Ferrara for the University of Mondovı`, 1562, then for the University of Turin, 1566. Giraldi Cinzio died in Ferrara on December 30, 1573. NICOLA FUOCHI Selected Works Collections Tragedie, Venice: Giulio Cesare Cagnacini, 1583. Scritti critici, edited by Camillo Guerrieri Crocetti, Milan: Marzorati, 1973.

Poetry ‘‘Poematia,’’ 1536.

Plays Didone (1541); in Tragedie, 1583. Cleopatra (1542); in Tragedie, 1583. Orbecche, 1543. Altile (1543); in Tragedie, 1583. Egle, 1545. Antivalomeni (1548); in Tragedie, 1583. Selene, (1551); in Tragedie, 1583. Eufimia (1554); in Tragedie, 1583. Arrenopia (1562–1563); in Tragedie, 1583. Epitia (after 1563); in Tragedie, 1583.

Novel Degli Hecatommithi, 1565.

Treatises Lettera ovvero discorso sopra il comporre le satire adatte alle scene, 1545. Orationes, 1554. Discorsi intorno al comporre dei romanzi, delle commedie e delle tragedie, 1554. Discorsi intorno a quello che si conviene a giovin nobile e ben creato nel servire un gran Principe, 1569.

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GIAMBATTISTA GIRALDI (‘‘IL CINZIO’’) Commentario sulle cose di Ferrara e de’ principi d’Este, 1597. Dialoghi della vita civile, 1608.

Letters Carteggio, edited by Susanna Villari, 1996.

Further Reading Ariani, Marco, Tra classicismo e manierismo. Il teatro tragico del Cinquecento, Florence: Olschki, 1974. Attolini, Giovanni, Teatro e spettacolo nel Rinascimento, Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1988. Bonora, Ettore, ‘‘La teoria del teatro negli scrittori del Cinquecento,’’ in Retorica e invenzione, Milan: Rizzoli, 1990. Carandini, Silvia (ed.), Teatri barocchi: tragedie, commedie, pastorali nella drammaturgia europea fra ’500 e ’600, Rome: Bulzoni, 2000.

Cremante, Renzo (ed.), Teatro del Cinquecento, vol. 1, La tragedia, Milan: Ricciardi-Mondadori, 1997. Horne, P. R., The Tragedies of Giambattista Cinthio Giraldi, London: Oxford University Press, 1962. Lucas, Corinne, De l’horreur au ‘‘lieto fine’’: Le controˆle du discours tragique dans le the´aˆtre de Giraldi Cinzio, Rome: Bonacci, 1984. Mastrocola, Paola, L’idea del tragico. Teorie della tragedia nel Cinquecento, Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 1998. Morrison, Mary, The Tragedies of G.-B. Giraldi Cinthio: The Transformation of Narrative Source into Stage Play, Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1997. Osborn, Peggy, G. Giraldi’s ‘‘Altile’’: The Birth of a New Dramatic Genre in Renaissance Ferrara, Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992. Weinberg, Bernard (ed.), Trattati di poetica e retorica del Cinquecento, 4 vols., Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1970–1974.

GIOVANNI GIUDICI (1924–) Giovanni Giudici is one of the greatest living Italian poets. His cultural background is rooted in both Catholicism and Marxism, and he has had extensive experience as a journalist and translator. Fundamentally extraneous to the hermeticist lineage of twentieth-century poetry, Giudici is closer to the tradition of crepuscolarismo, from which he inherited the impulse to speak of his own existence and to use poetry as an instrument in the construction of his own autobiography. His earliest works draw their inspiration from the places of his youth and the discomfort of a repressive Catholic education. Starting with these reflections on that education, his poetry increasingly became an act of critical knowledge of industrial society, aimed at defining the role of the intellectual who questions himself regarding the lack of certainties for contemporary human beings. With the collection La vita in versi (Life in Verses, 1965), he represented his personal life ironically, as a flow of memories, public tragedies, and private dramas constructed with a direct rhythm, which became speech and nonlyrical song. Full of attention for small everyday things, it is ‘‘una sorta di romanzo in versi in cui il quotidiano si sciorina davanti al lettore in un’ampia gamma di microeventi’’ (a sort of novel in verse in which the commonplace is displayed before the reader in a wide 858

range of micro-events). In the book there resonate ‘‘i grandi temi del mistero della morte, l’amore, il dolore, le emozioni profonde, il male di vivere’’ (the great themes of the mystery of death, love, pain and profound emotions, the mal-de-vivre), as Giuseppe Leonelli has written (‘‘La poesia del primo e secondo novecento,’’ 2000). The condition of the contemporary human being takes shape in a pained, nearly theatrical self-analysing monologue. Giudici created an ‘‘I’’-character, a sort of double, within whom simmers, in an atmosphere of bitterness and impotence, Catholic, anarchist, and socialist elements. Giudici’s strength lies in his will to recount his biography at a historical moment when the economic boom seems to reduce the individual—including even the poet, a member of a frightened and frustrated middle class—to the mere social figure of the ‘‘salaried worker.’’ Thus, this autobiography coincides with the biography of the ‘‘umile e umiliato membro del nuovo ceto italiano anni settanta con le sue frustrazioni, lamentele, velleita` e arti della sopravvivenza’’ (humble and humiliated member of the new Italian middle class of the 1970s, with its frustrations, grievances, aspirations and survival skills), as Alfonso Berardinelli has remarked (‘‘La musa umile,’’ 1983). Meanwhile, the narrating ‘‘I’’ is turned precisely into a theatrical mask or character. Giudici attempted an analysis of this multiplicity in

GIOVANNI GIUDICI Autobiologia (Autobiology, 1969). Here he surveyed the places and emblematic gestures of a dismembered life, observed with cruelty. Words are dried up, verses are terse, language is emptied of any emotions since the poet, in his search for the miserable remains of his own self, offered neither solutions nor consolation. Rather, by freeing himself from his dramatic backdrop, he always managed to temper his subjectivity, injured by the unsustainable petit-bourgeois daily life, with the comic mode. After Autobiologia, Giudici’s poetry returned to a ‘‘high’’ lyrical dimension. In the collection Salutz (1986), he experimented with new expressive possibilities, going back to the structures of the medieval tradition. Salutz constitutes his most unexpected and unpredictable book. Compared to his previous works, it is a thoroughly alternative kind of poetry, a courtly world reinvented purely for the purpose of playing with words and verse, as if Giudici wanted to display all his linguistic skills in order to free himself from the autobiographical and quotidian dimension. In the collections from Quanto spera di campare Giovanni (How Long Giovanni Hopes to Live, 1993), to Eresia della sera (Evening Heresy, 1999), Giudici reached an extremely sophisticated synthesis between the two poles of his poetical production, recuperating and fusing together twentieth-century experiences with the stil novo and Provencal traditions. The result of this encounter between the poetry of the everyday, of the helpless nakedness of the real that erases lyricism, and the noble tradition of Italian verse is a surprising comical poetry, sometimes characterized by sharp irony. The fundamental element of Giudici’s poetry remains the tension in each recollection of his life, grasped in its exemplary meaning. Through a direct and inexorable discourse, figures, facts, and typical moments of a life offered as meditation on the state of things become a rigorous will to understand the world, to act within it and to resist it with dignity. Historical events, such as the invasion of Prague (summer of 1968) or the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) and the end of Communism, are mere examples, not significant in themselves, but as instruments through which it is possible to illuminate the story of any individual human being. The poet’s task is to read such an exemplary meaning and to reveal the truth, however bitter and unpleasant it may be for the reader, especially as far as it regards the vanquished. In any case, Giudici is well aware of the fact that poetry is unarmed, incapable

of affecting the present or of escaping into utopia. Paradoxically, its last task is merely analysing its own impotence.

Biography Giovanni Giudici was born on 26 June 1924 in Le Grazie (La Spezia). His family moved to Rome, 1933, and he enrolled in the Faculty of Medicine, University of Rome, in 1941, switching to the Faculty of Literature in 1942. He graduated in French language and literature, with a dissertation on Anatole France, 1945. Giudici married Marina Bernardi in 1952. He moved to Ivrea to work for Olivetti as a copywriter, 1956, and then moved to Milan, 1958. He has enjoyed friendship with Franco Fortini, Vittorio Sereni, Elio Vittorini, Giacomo Noventa. He has been active as translator from French, Spanish, English, Russian, and Czech and collaborates to numerous periodicals (Menabo`, Rinascita, Comunita`, Aut-Aut, Paragone). Giudici won the Librex Guggenheim-Eugenio Montale for Salutz; the Pushkin Prize from the Soviet Literary Fund for his translation of Evgenii Onegin, 1987; and the Premio Bagutta, 1992. Giudici lives between La Serra di Lerici and Milan. ANDREA BOSELLO Selected Works Collections Poesie 1953–1990, Milan: Garzanti, 1991. I versi della vita, edited by Rodolfo Zucco, Milan: Mondadori, 2000.

Poetry ‘‘Fiorı` d’improvviso,’’ 1953. ‘‘La stazione di Pisa e altre poesie,’’ 1955. ‘‘L’intelligenza col nemico,’’ 1957. ‘‘L’educazione cattolica,’’ 1963. ‘‘La vita in versi,’’ 1965. ‘‘Omaggio a Praga,’’ 1968. ‘‘Autobiologia,’’ 1969. ‘‘O Beatrice,’’ 1972. ‘‘Il male dei creditori,’’ 1977. ‘‘Il ristorante dei morti,’’ 1981. ‘‘Lume dei tuoi misteri,’’ 1984. ‘‘Salutz,’’ 1986. ‘‘Prove del teatro,’’ 1989. ‘‘Scarabattole,’’ 1989. ‘‘Quanto spera di campare Giovanni,’’ 1993. ‘‘Empie stelle,’’ 1996. ‘‘Eresia della sera,’’ 1999.

Fiction Frau Doktor, 1989.

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GIOVANNI GIUDICI Play Il paradiso: perche` mi vinse il lume d’esta stella. Satura drammatica, 1991.

Essays La letteratura verso Hiroshima e altri scritti, 1976. La dama non cercata. Poetica e letteratura, 1985. Andare in Cina a piedi. Racconto sulla poesia, 1992. Per forza e per amore, 1996.

Translations Ezra Pound, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, 1959. Robert Frost, Conoscenza della notte e altre poesie, 1965. J. Crowe Ramsom, Le donne e i cavalieri, 1971. Aleksandr Sergeevic Puskin, Eugenio Onieghin, 1975. Sylvia Plath, Lady Lazarus e altre poesie, 1976. Addio, proibito piagere e altri versi tradotti (1955–1980), 1982. Ignacio De Loyola, Esercizi spirituali, 1984. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, La rima del vecchio marinaio, 1987. A una casa non sua. Nuovi versi tradotti (1955–1995), 1997.

Edited Works Umberto Saba, Poesie scelte, 1976.

Further Reading Ba`rberi-Squarotti, Giorgio, Poesia e narrativa del secondo novecento, Milan: Mursia, 1978. Berardinelli, Alfonso, ‘‘La musa umile,’’ in Il critico senza mestiere, Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1983. Bertoni, Alberto, Una distratta venerazione: La poesia metrica di Giovanni Giudici, Bologna: Book, 2001. Forti, Marco, ‘‘Giudici ‘nuovo’ e ‘vecchio,’ in Tempi della poesia: Il secondo Novecento da Montale a Porta, Milan: Mondadori, 1999. Leonelli, Giuseppe, ‘‘La poesia del pieno e secondo novecento,’’ in Storia della letteratura italiana, edited by Enrico Malato, vol. 9, Rome: Salerno, 2000. Morando, Simona, Vita con le parole: La poesia di Giovanni Giudici, Pasian di Prato (Udine): Campanotto, 2001. Neri, Laura, Vittorio Sereni, Andrea Zanzotto, Giovanni Giudici: Un’indagine retorica, Bergamo: Sestante, 2000. Raboni, Giovanni, Poesia degli anni sessanta, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1976. Ramat, Silvio, Storia della poesia italiana del novecento, Milan: Mursia, 1976. Sereni, Vittorio, Scritture private con Fortini e Giudici, Bocca di Magra: Edizioni Capannina, 1995.

GIUSEPPE GIUSTI (1809–1850) Best known as a political satirist, Giuseppe Giusti began his literary career in 1833 when he was charged by the police for the anti-Austrian views expressed in his first poem, ‘‘La guigliottina a vapore’’ (The Steam Guillotine). The poem, a witty description of how the invention leads to an increased number of beheadings in China, was a kind of manifesto against the corrupt Tuscan rule of these years. In Florence, where he was living and working, Giusti made the acquaintance of the Marquis Gino Capponi, a liberal activist during the Risorgimento who played a leading role in the city’s cultural life. Through Capponi, Giusti became a member of the Gabinetto Vieusseux, a circle noted for its interest in new cultural developments and intense literary exchanges. In 1845 he went to Milan to meet Alessandro Manzoni, who showed a hearty appreciation of Giusti’s poetry and was instrumental in shifting his initial republican propensities to moderate politics. The visit to the famous Lombard author inspired one of Giusti’s best poems, ‘‘Sant’Ambrogio’’ (In Sant’Ambrogio’s, 1846), which gives an indignant description of 860

how he and Manzoni entered the Milanese Church of Sant’Ambrogio and found it full of Austrian soldiers. Giusti’s first feeling is one of surprise and repugnance at the sight of soldiers, symbol of the foreign domination. At the conclusion of the poem, however, he hears the Austrian soldiers sing a melancholy religious anthem and identifies with them as part of a human, Christian fraternity. In 1844, the first unauthorised collection of his poetry was published by Cesare Correnti in Lugano under the title of Poesie tratte da una stampa a penna (Poems). The same year, Giusti himself published a collection, Versi (Poems), which was posthumously published in 1852 as Versi editi ed inediti (Published and Unpublished Poems). Versi is a book of poetical sketches in which Giusti ironically and indignantly reviewed the historical events of his age as well as his own personal memories. He used narrative stanza forms like the terzina and the ottava rima that were popular in the oral tradition in composing short poetic lines with a strong cadence, like the quinario sdrucciolo. Giusti was trying to create a new poetical language that

GIUSEPPE GIUSTI combined the language and tone of oral poetry with the poetic language of popular, cantabile songs of the traditional Italian opera buffa. Many of the verses he called scherzi are capricious and comical caricatures that capture, in pungent colloquial Tuscan, the foolish and pompous action, the contradiction between public solemn and ideal sayings and everyday immoral conduct of satirical characters. ‘‘Il brindisi di Girella’’ (Girella’s Toast, ca. 1835–1840), dedicated to Talleyrand, targets profiteers and cunning politicians who are ready to change their minds to maintain their power; ‘‘Delenda Carthago’’ (Delenda Carthago, 1841) expresses the Italian patriot’s intolerance for the Germans; ‘‘Il genio umanitario’’ (The Humanitarian Genius, 1843) is a caricature of the philanthropic and humanitarian ideology popular among the upper classes; ‘‘Il re Travicello’’ (King Log, 1841), one of his most celebrated sketches, is a satire on the talkative, cowardly and servile Italian populace, ruled by inept kings and leaders. Based on the famous fable by Aesop about frogs who, upon requesting a king of Jupiter, are sent a log instead, the poem makes fun of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Leopold II. ‘‘La chiocciola’’ (The Snail, 1840–1841), a poetic satire without any specific political reference, is an ode to a humble creature that lives in peace and serenity. The snail is viewed as an exemplary social model whose modest existence represents the virtues of modesty, love for the home, and pride. In a different vein, ‘‘Gingillino’’ (The Trifler, 1844–1845) is a vigorous poem in which Giusti represented the vileness of treasury officials. Giusti’s poems offer a complex and disillusioned representation of the behavior of the middle classes, split between the ethical ideals of the Risorgimento and the conservativism and compromises of their everyday life. Every human figure is shown to be, in reality, a puppet, less a character than a grotesque version of a psychosocial and metahistorical type. In certain respects, these secondary characters seem to live the quiet life, obsessed with propriety, that was denounced three centuries earlier by the Renaissance political thinker and historian Francesco Guicciardini. In his final satiric works, Giusti concentrated on openly political polemics like those of the Tuscan historical novelist Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi writing againt democratic extremists. Besides his poetry, Giusti also left a journal of the political events in Tuscany between the years 1845–1849, which he titled Cronaca dei fatti di Toscana (A Chronicle of the Facts of Tuscany) but which was published posthumously under the

title Memorie inedite (Unedited Memories, 1890). Pursuing his interest in popular culture and oral tradition, Giusti supervised a collection of popular Tuscan sayings, Raccolta dei proverbi toscani con illustrazioni (A Collection of Tuscan Proverbs, with Illustrations, 1848), in which he analysed more than 3,000 proverbs. Giusti was also an acute literary critic, devoting most of his scholarship to the work of two influential writers, Giuseppe Parini and Dante Alighieri. In 1846, Giusti published an essay on the life and works of Parini as well as a philological edition of his poetry. In Postille alla Divina Commedia (Notes to the Divine Comedy, 1846), Giusti emphasised Dante’s fight for the institution of a moral state in Italy and his interest in the spiritual life of the lower classes.

Biography Giuseppe Giusti was born in Monsummano Val di Nievole (Pistoia), 12 May 1809. He attended a number of schools, including the Seminary in Pistoia and the Collegio dei Nobili in Lucca, then studied law at the University of Pisa, 1826–1834. Alleged by the police to be the leader of a student riot in a theater in Pisa, 1832, he moved to Florence, where, during the 1830s and 1840s, he wrote many of his works. In 1844 he traveled to Rome and Naples; in 1845 he visited Milan and met Manzoni. Between the years 1847 and 1849 he was involved in politics and served as a Civic Guard, then as a deputy in the Tuscan Legislative Assembly. He supported the return of Leopold II but was disappointed when the Grand Duke returned to Florence supported by the Austrian Army. He withdrew from public life in 1849 and retired to his friend Gino Capponi’s house. Giuseppe Giusti died of consumption in Capponi’s house, in Florence, 31 March 1850. STEFANO ADAMI Selected Works Collections Poesie, 2 vols., edited by Nunzio Sabbatucci, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1962. Tutte le opere, Florence: Barabba, 1968. Opere, edited by Nunzio Sabbatucci, Turin: UTET, 1976.

Poetry ‘‘Versi,’’ 1844. ‘‘Versi editi ed inediti,’’ 1852.

Other Cronaca dei fatti di Toscana, 1845–1849.

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GIUSEPPE GIUSTI Postille alla Divina Commedia, 1846. Versi e prose di Parini, 1846. Raccolta dei proverbi toscani con illustrazioni, 1848. Memorie inedite di Giuseppe Giusti (1845–1849), 1890, edited by Ferdinando Martini. Epistolario, 5 vols., 1932, edited by Ferdinando Martini.

Further Reading Baldacci, Luigi, ‘‘Giuseppe Giusti e la societa` fiorentina,’’ Paragone, 126 (1960): 3–26. Bossi, Maurizio, and M. Branca (editors), Giuseppe Giusti. Il tempo e i luoghi, Florence: Olschki, 1999.

Binni, Walter, ‘‘Giuseppe Giusti scrittore,’’ in Critici e poeti dal Cinquecento al Novecento, Florence: La Nuova Italia 1969. Calducci, Marino, La morte di re Carnevale. Studio sulla fisionomia poetica dell’opera di Giuseppe Giusti, Florence: Le Lettere, 1989. Finzi, Gilberto, ‘‘Giuseppe Giusti rivoltato,’’ Belfagor, 36 (1991), 399–410. Luti, Giorgio, Cronache dei fatti di Toscana. Storia e letteratura tra Ottocento e Novecento, Florence: Le Lettere, 1996. Vigliero, Lami, and Vincenzo Monti, Maturita`: poesie in prosa da Monti a Carducci, Florence: Sansoni, 1992.

PIERO GOBETTI (1901–1926) In common with many militant Italian intellectuals of the first decades of the twentieth century, Piero Gobetti sought ways to bring post-Risorgimento Italy out of the state of crisis into which it had fallen. Along with Giuseppe Papini, Giuseppe Prezzolini, Benedetto Croce, and Giovanni Gentile, to name but the most prominent, Gobetti was convinced that Italy was in urgent need of cultural reform, which was to precede or at least accompany political reform. It was politics that took its lead from culture, not culture from politics. What he did not have in common with his fellow intellectuals of the time was age. Gobetti, in fact, was in his late teens and early twenties when he founded and edited two of Italy’s most influential cultural reviews: Energie nove (1918–1920) and La rivoluzione liberale (1922–1925). He also collaborated with L’Ordine nuovo, another Turin-based review, edited by Antonio Gramsci, writing a series of theater reviews. Memorable among these is a fourpart study on the return to the stage of the actress Eleanora Duse in 1921. A voracious reader, of an almost uncontainable intellectual curiosity and energy, Gobetti drew inspiration from those intellectuals who had acted as cultural organizers in the early twentieth century. As well as Papini and Prezzolini and the La voce group based in Florence, Gobetti found inspiration in the work of Croce and Gentile, especially from their review La critica, and from Gaetano Salvemini’s L’unita`. As Gobetti saw it, the crisis in postRisorgimento Italy was that of absence of political dynamism. The Liberal governments that had run 862

the nation in various, but hardly differing, formats since unification now gave the impression of holding power for power’s sake. Gone was any vision of what a future society should look like, gone was a sense of mission, gone was any sense of progress and growth. In its place was a parliamentary regime that sought to govern through short-term compromises and backdoor deals. The figure that represented this utterly corrupt form of government was Giovanni Giolitti, an evergreen of Italian politics in the first decades of the twentieth century. Indeed, the corrupt state into which Italian liberalism had fallen laid the foundations for the coming of Fascism, a phenomenon that Gobetti famously labeled in his 1922 article ‘‘Elogio della ghigliottina’’ (In Praise of the Guillotine) the ‘‘autobiography of the nation.’’ Gobetti was such a staunch opponent of the regime that he was singled out for special attention by Benito Mussolini himself. As well as closing down his reviews, the regime was also responsible for a beating inflicted on Gobetti, the repercussions of which led him to an early death in 1926. A great part of Gobetti’s intellectual activity was taken by his search for dynamism within the area of liberalism. To some extent he found it in the past, in what he termed the ‘‘forgotten figures’’ of the Piedmont Risorgimento, such as Vittorio Alfieri. But in the present Gobetti was at something of a loss, given the poor state of liberalism in Italy. His solution to the quandary—locating instances of political dynamism in the Workers’ Councils movement in the Turin car factories and in the Russian Revolution—was by far the most

PIERO GOBETTI controversial part of his intellectual life. For some, on the Liberal side, Gobetti’s championing of two left-wing phenomena was tantamount to betrayal; for others, on the left, this was the sign that the enlightened Liberal intellectual must inevitably recognize that the future was in socialism and that the days of liberalism were numbered. Although Gobetti certainly recognized the novelty represented by the new protagonists on the social scene—Bolsheviks in Russia and the workers’ movement in Turin—he was always very careful to underline that they were both elites who were far more advanced than the masses. In fact, the whole question of the role of intellectual elites and their impact on civil society had been the subject of a wide-ranging debate in the early decades of the twentieth century. In this, Gobetti followed the lead that had been supplied by the likes of Vilfredo Pareto and Gaetano Mosca. It was in the wake of Pareto and Mosca that he felt the need to differentiate between the leadership of the Factory Council movement, which he admired greatly as a new ruling class in nuce, and the mass of followers, for which he had little time. It was this that enabled him to make his most controversial claim: that both the Factory Council movement and the Russian Revolution were not socialist, but liberal in nature insofar as they both worked to enlarge the reach of liberty. Although the protagonists themselves may well not have realized it, they were doing what liberal elites had been doing for centuries. For Gobetti, it was impossible to admit that any movement that contributed to the spread of personal and political liberty was anything other than liberal in nature. Rather than being examples of socialist ideology in action, Gobetti saw the Russian Revolution and the Factory Councils movement as spurs to political action that would lead, not to the result the protagonists themselves imagined, but to the formation of new, dynamic and forward-looking ruling classes. In Turin, what the Consigli di Fabbrica were showing was not how to create propitious conditions for a socialist revolution in Italy but how to run a factory in a more efficient manner. In other words, they were learning to be the new generation of managers, a new dynamic bourgeoisie that Italy had never had before but had sorely lacked. Revolutions, Gobetti thought, never go the way they are planned to go. But what the initial impetus for social action does is to give its protagonists something to work for, something to aim at, something at which to direct their energy. The end result was not determined by what the

protagonists imagined it would be but by what history deemed feasible at any given time. Like Salvemini, Gobetti was a practical thinker and had little time for anything that resembled a utopic scenario. His greatest critique of Italian intellectuals such as Gabriele D’Annunzio was that they lived in an ivory tower world with little idea of what real historical conditions were like. Indeed, the adjective ‘‘bookish’’ is employed by Gobetti on more than one occasion to mark the distance between intellectuals and the real concerns of civil society. This is the reason why literature is largely absent from the reviews he edited. Gobetti, however, was responsible for the discovery of the poet Eugenio Montale and for a number of translations of works from French and Russian (a language he had learned in order to study the Russian Revolution). But for the most part, his concern for literary questions was confined to the latter part of his young life when he founded the review Il baretti, which became a kind of literary forum. But in the wake of the strict censorship that had made continued publication of his political reviews impossible, Gobetti began to use the literary texts as a pretext to send coded messages to his anti-Fascist readership. In general, literature remained something of a danger area, as it tended to lead attention away from what he considered the real and practical tasks of the committed intellectual. Gobetti was an immensely productive writer of articles, essays, and letters. Since his early death, his attempt to supplement liberal ideology with the best of socialist thought has been of crucial importance for future generations. Carlo Rosselli’s Giustizia e liberta` group in the 1930s, as well as the Partito d’azione in the 1940s, owe a great debt of gratitude to Gobetti. As a champion of a workingclass revolution based on liberal-democratic principles, Gobetti has become a reference point for the Italian left, ever more anxious to underscore its liberal credentials without losing sight of its socialist origins.

Biography Piero Gobetti was born in Turin, 9 June 1901, the only son of a Giovanni Battista and Angela Canuto, who had come to the city from the surrounding countryside ten years earlier to open a grocery store. He attended Liceo Gioberti in Turin, where he received his diploma, 1918; he intended to enroll in army to fight in World War I, but the armistice signed on 4 November brought war to an end, 1918. He enrolled in the Faculty of Law, Turin 863

PIERO GOBETTI University, graduating with a thesis on Vittorio Alfieri, 1922. Gobetti founded Energie nove, 1918, and joined the Turin group of ‘‘unitari,’’ followers of Gaetano Salvemini, 1919; he represented the Turin group at the first congress. Gobetti collaborated with a number of newspapers and magazines of the period; he was a theater critic for the Communist review L’Ordine nuovo, edited by Antonio Gramsci, 1921. He abandoned Energie nove, 1920. Gobetti founded La rivoluzione liberale, 1922. He married Ada Prospero, whom he had met at the Liceo Gioberti, 1923. Gobetti was beaten up by Fascist thugs, September 1924. Two consecutive numbers of La rivoluzione liberale were seized by Fascist authorities in 1925. His son Paolo was born in 1925. Gobetti founded Il baretti, 1926, then went into exile in France, leaving his wife Ada and son in Turin, 1926. He died in Paris, 15 February 1926, and is buried in the Pe`re Lachaise cemetery. Ada joined the Resistance movement; her Diario partigiano (1972) was published four years after her death. After fighting as a partisan in the Resistance, Paolo Gobetti dedicated himself to preserving the memory of the anti-Fascist struggle, founding the Archivio Nazionale Cinematografico della Resistenza in Turin, 1966. DAVID WARD Selected Works Collections Opere complete, 3 vols., 1960–1974, vol. I, Scritti politici, edited by Paolo Spriano, 1969; vol. II, Scritti storici, letterari e filosofici, edited by P. Spriano, 1969; vol. III, Scritti di critica teatrale, edited by Carla Gobetti and G. Guazzotti, 1974.

Political Writings Risorgimento senza eroi: Studi sul pensiero piemontese nel Risorgimento, 1926; reprinted as Risorgimento senza eroi e altri scritti storici, 1969.

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La rivoluzione liberale: Saggio sulla lotta politica in Italia, 1949; new edition, 1995. Nella tua breve esistenza: Lettere 1918–1926, edited by Ersilia Alessandrone Perona, 1991. Con animo liberale: Piero Gobetti e i liberali. Carteggi 1918– 1926, edited by Bartolo Gariglio, 1997. Carteggio di Piero Gobetti, 1918–1922, edited by Ersilia Alessandrone Perona, 2003.

Other La frusta teatrale, 1923. La filosofia politica di Vittorio Alfieri, 1923. Paradosso dello spirito russo e altri scritti sulla letteratura russa, 1976.

Further Reading Bagnoli, Paolo Rosselli, Gobetti e la rivoluzione democratica: Uomini e idee tra liberalismo e socialismo, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1996. Basso, Lelio, and Luigi Anderlini (editors), Le riviste di Piero Gobetti, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1961. Bobbio, Norberto, Italia fedele: Il mondo di Gobetti, Florence: Passigli, 1986. Cabella, Alberto, Elogio della liberta`: Biografia di Piero Gobetti, Turin: Il Punto, 1998. Cabella, Alberto, and Oscar Mazzoleni (editors), Gobetti tra riforma e rivoluzione, Milan: Franco Angeli, 1999. Gariglio, Bartolo, Progettare il postfascismo: Gobetti e i cattolici (1919–1926), Milan: Franco Angeli, 2003. Gervasoni, Marco, L’intellettuale come eroe: Piero Gobetti e le culture del Novecento, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 2000. Morra Di Lavriano, Umberto, Vita di Piero Gobetti, Turin: Utet, 1984. Panze`, Valentina (editor), Cent’anni: Piero Gobetti nella storia d’Italia. Atti del Convegno di Studi, Torino 8–9 Novembre 2001, Milan: Franco Angeli, 2004. Prezzolini, Giuseppe (editor), Gobetti e la voce, Florence: Sansoni, 1971. Roberts, David, ‘‘Frustrated Liberals: De Ruggiero, Gobetti and the Challenge of Socialism,’’ The Canadian Journal of History, 17:1 (April, 1982): 59–86. Spadolini, Giovanni, Gobetti, un’eredita`, Florence: Passigli, 1981. Spriano, Paolo, Gramsci e Gobetti: Introduzione alla vita e alle opere, Turin: Einaudi, 1977. Urbinati, Nadia (editor), On Liberal Revolution, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000.

CARLO GOLDONI

CARLO GOLDONI (1707–1793) ‘‘My life offers nothing interesting; but it may be that, after some time has passed, a collection of my works may be discovered in some corner of an old library. And that will give rise to curiosity about who this singular man was—a man who proposed the reform of his country’s theater, who brought to the stage and through the presses one hundred and fifty comedies, in verse, in prose, comedies of character and of plot, and who saw, in his lifetime, eighteen editions of his plays.’’ These reflections from the Prefazione (Preface) to his autobiography seem to suggest on Carlo Goldoni’s part the need to illustrate a life of the dramatist that is much more interesting than the life of the man. His Me´moires (Memoirs, 1784) present us with the image of a serene character, devoted to the creation of theatrical works crowned by success with the public and in print, who does not correspond to the dramatist’s complex personality, or to his tormented history in the realm of eighteenth-century theatrical life. One thing, however, is certain: He proposed a reform that effectively revolutionized the texts, scenes, and the lives of actors in an important way for Italian dramaturgy, which also witnessed the end of a golden age of fame and European success for the commedia dell’arte. Indeed, when Goldoni began to write comedies, the situation of the acting companies and their repertory was in decline: By then the stories had been repeated ad infinitum, the performers relied on their craft, and the comic scenes became more and more scurrilous in their attempt to attract the attention of a public that was more and more easily bored. Venice, in particular, offered itself as a privileged place of observation because it boasted a large number of theaters in competition with one another (the Teatro di San Cassiano, owned by the Tron family, specializing in musical plays; the Teatro di San Luca or San Salvador, owned by Vendramin, and today known as the Teatro Goldoni, specializing in musical plays and comedy; the Teatro di San Moise´, owned by Giustinian, specializing in musical theater, ballet, and comedy; the Teatro di San Samuele, owned by Grimani, specializing in opera buffa, comedy, and tragedy; the Teatro di Sant’Angelo, owned by Marcello and Cappello, specializing

in music and comedy beginning in the 1740s; and the Teatro di San Giovanni Grisostomo, owned by Grimani, specializing in musical plays) and whose impresarios were particularly anxious for any new play to attract spectators. Goldoni, who was born into this setting, seemed attracted to it ever since his youthful flight on a boat of comic actors, a flight that was later pardoned by his father, a doctor, who wanted to launch Goldoni in the same profession. After the failure of this plan, the young Goldoni pursued his studies of jurisprudence and later became a lawyer. He began to practice, but by this point he had been composing comedies for some time, although they were still tied to the technique of the canovaccio (rough scenarios), that is, partly written and partly entrusted to the inventiveness of the actors, as in Momolo cortesan (Momolo the Courtesan, 1738). One important text is La donna di garbo (A Lady of Charm, 1742), which preceded his move to Pisa, where he intensified his activity as a dramatist; among other things, he wrote a comedy destined to become famous, Il servitore di due padroni (The Servant of Two Masters, 1745) and then decided to abandon the legal profession in order to pursue the activity more suited to him. Thus in 1748 he was once again in Venice after signing a contract with Girolamo Medebac, the impresario of the Teatro Sant’Angelo. Goldoni’s first idea was to moralize the theater by reestablishing an exemplary function for human behavior. The central reflection for his poetics occurred, however, in 1750, a fundamental year for the Reform, inaugurated with the composition of 16 new comedies. Among these figures, Il teatro comico (The Comic Theater, 1750), which, aside from being an important and successful example of the ‘‘play within the play’’ (representing the rehearsals of a company of actors before opening night), served above all as the manifesto of the ‘‘new’’ theater. Goldoni here confronted problems of various kinds—from plot to thematics, from character to performance, from verse to music. The central point is the conflict between commedia dell’arte and commedia riformata. The deeper significance is in fact the contrast between an old and a new mode of conceiving of the theater. The text had to 865

CARLO GOLDONI be entirely written, and the actors needed to learn the script offered to them by the author; the masks had to be progressively reduced until they disappeared, in order to leave room for characters who reflect the ‘‘world,’’ in which the spectators could see themselves reflected; the dialogue should preferably be in prose and not in verse, and music should not belong to the comic genre. This ‘‘revolution’’ in reality did not turn out to be as drastic as it might seem. Goldoni himself asserted that the process of revision should take place in successive stages and without traumatic changes; he himself continued to insert some masks into his texts and to write libretti for music, not to mention comedies in verse. The core of innovative progress consisted essentially in the revisitation of traditional characters who were realized and called upon to embody contemporary typologies, real social classes, and conflicts that were forcefully present in contemporary Venetian society. One of the clearest examples is illustrated by Mario Baratto, who showed the process of adhering to reality by a well-known stock character, Pantalone, which Goldoni revitalized in the figure of the eighteenth-century Venetian merchant, the true backbone of the Republic’s economy, at least until the last third of the century (‘‘‘Mondo’ e ‘teatro’ nella poetica di Goldoni,’’ 1964). In the ensuing years the mercantile class in fact suffered a regression that would strongly influence Venice’s progressive decline. This process was captured lucidly in comedies such as La buona moglie (The Good Wife, 1749), La famiglia dell’antiquario (The Antiquarian’s Family, 1750), I Rusteghi (The Boors, 1760), La trilogia della villeggiatura (The Holiday Trilogy, 1762), and Sior Todero brontolon (Mr. Todero the Grouch, 1762), in a span of time that ended with Goldoni’s departure for France. However, the Goldonian view of reality takes in not only the bourgeoisie but also the nobility, a mirror of indolence and the inability to worry about anything except one’s own interests, almost always reduced to mere caprice. This is what appears in comedies such as La putta onorata (The Honorable Girl, 1749), La serva amorosa (The Loving Maid, 1752), or La locanderia (Mirandolina, 1753), in which alongside the positive figure of the merchant there appear or alternate figures of enterprising and honorable women. This is equally the case with the portrayal of the lower classes: the gondolier protagonists of the Bettina cycle, the poor families who inhabit the small squares of Venice, the families of fishermen in 866

Chioggia. Thus arise masterpieces like Il campiello (The Public Square, 1756) and Le baruffe chiozzote (Squabbles in Chioggia, 1762). Another essential component of Goldoni’s plays is the excavation of sentiments and human emotions, as one comedy magisterially demonstrates, Gl’innamorati (The Lovers, 1759), rightly considered one of his masterpieces for its power to capture all the nuances of its two protagonists’ souls. Important examples in this area came from the comedies with female protagonists, in which the relation of the ‘‘world,’’ the ‘‘theater,’’ and the actors’ abilities mix harmoniously, producing figures like those of La serva amorosa or La cameriera brillante (The Brilliant Waitress, 1753), which, among other things, produced the ascendancy of the leading character of the servetta or young servant. The productions tied to ‘‘high models’’ also deserve a brief mention because Goldoni used historical and famous figures, such as Il Molie`re (Molie`re, 1751), Terenzio (Terence, 1754), and Torquato Tasso (Torquato Tasso, 1755), in pursuit of an integration into the dramaturgical, and in a larger sense, literary, tradition that he always clung to tenaciously. The titles cited therefore reveal the richness of the Goldonian repertory, which ranges from character comedies, such as La vedova scaltra (The Artful Widow, 1748), Il filosofo inglese (The English Philosopher, 1753), La buona madre (The Good Mother, 1760) to ensemble comedies, such as La bottega del caffe` (The Coffee-House, 1750), I Rusteghi, and La casa nova (The Superior Residence, 1760). The fashions of the day also attracted the author, especially if the public responded positively: One thinks of the taste for orientalism in La sposa persiana (The Persian Wife, 1753) and in L’impresario delle Smirne (The Impresario from Smyrna, 1760), which inspired the composition of comedies that are little seen today but that enjoyed an enormous success among his contemporaries, or the allure exercised by plots of famous novels, which give rise to the cycle of Pamela (1760). One of the themes that recent criticism emphasizes is the autobiographical within Goldoni’s theatrical oeuvre. We know in fact that Goldoni, during the century in which autobiography was officially codified as a genre, left us his Me´moires, supporting a mode that involved the majority of eighteenth-century writers in Europe. All writing about the self assumes particular characteristics; Goldoni’s, which he drafted in French during his

CARLO GOLDONI Parisian period, is subdivided into three distinct parts: his youthful adventures up to his choice to become exclusively a dramatist; a description of the plots and successes of his comedies; and finally his life in France at the court of Versailles as the tutor of Italian. The peculiarity of this work is the author’s almost total silence about any kind of disappointments he had suffered, his avoidance of any consideration of a France preparing to behead her sovereign, and his focus on his own theatrical production instead. Thus it is the comedies that provide us with autobiographical clues ‘‘officially’’ avoided by the dramatist. Among these we should mention, for example, L’avvocato veneziano (The Venetian Lawyer, 1748), which refers directly to the profession Goldoni practiced at different times, or Il giocatore (The Gambler, 1751), which illuminates another peculiar aspect of his life. Sometimes it is chance meetings that furnish the comedies with their characters: In I due gemelli veneziani (The Venetian Twins, 1748), for example, there appears the figure of a hypocrite, Pancrazio, who is very close to a Dominican friar whom the author knew at the time of his flight as a young man; in Le baruffe chiozzotte, the character of the adjutant at the Cancelleria reflects a position that Goldoni himself held at one time in that city. Other hypotheses have been formulated by critics or directors, as in the case of L’avventuriere onorato (The Honorable Adventurer, 1751), which might allude to an interlude as a spy on the author’s part. Certainly the comedy with the greatest autobiographical resonance is Una delle ultime sere di Carnovale (One of the Last Nights of Carnival, 1792), which is, as the author himself says, ‘‘an allegory.’’ Indeed, behind the figure of the cloth designer Anzoletto, who leaves Venice for Russia, is clearly Goldoni, who left Venice for Paris, hoping for a return that never takes place, while his designs offer themselves as metaphors for scenes, and the figure of the fiance´e, Domenica, likely alludes to the commedia riformata, in contrast to the old and ridiculous Madame Gatteau, who is associated with the commedia dell’arte. His departure from Venice was a sad moment for the great dramatist, who in the preceding years suffered many disappointments in Venice. In fact, from the beginning of his career he was never lacking in opponents and even detractors of his theater; we know, for example, of numerous disputes between Goldoni and another Venetian dramatist (and novelist), the abbot Giuseppe Chiari (1711–1785), who often mocked his adversary by writing

parodies of his comedies. His other hardened enemy was Carlo Gozzi (1720–1806), whose brother Gasparo, a well-known contributor to one of the first ‘‘gazettes’’ to be distributed in the eighteenth century, Venice’s Giornale de’ letterati, showed himself to be a sincere admirer of ‘‘reformed’’ comedy. Carlo Gozzi disparaged anyone who, like Goldoni, resorted to theatrical writing as a trade to survive; Gozzi was still tied to the conception of the superiority of the intellectual, who could support himself free of all conditions. Indeed he boasted of never receiving a penny from the impresarios or acting companies for whom he composed several comedies. Gozzi aimed at restoring the ‘‘high’’ tradition of the commedia dell’arte and the dimension of the fantastic of the early seventeenth century: his fiabe teatrali, or theatrical fables, met with enormous success. This took place around the years 1758–1759, in a period of crisis for Goldoni (a crisis not unrelated to this event). Goldoni even distanced himself from Venice for some time in order to work in Rome. But the controversy did not die down when he returned, because the public seemed truly seduced by the stagings of Gozzi’s plays. In the meantime Goldoni received an invitation to work with the Come´die Italienne in Paris. At first he did not seem inclined to accept the position, despite the unmistakable appeal of a cultural circle from which he received many accolades (even Voltaire wrote some verses in his honor); on the other hand, Goldoni also wanted to receive economic recognition in his own country. To this end he beseeched the government of Venice, justifying his request for a pension with his by-now firmly established fame that had contributed to the prestige of his city. Waiting for this recognition proved vain. Goldoni felt himself to be a Venetian before all else, and his pain at leaving was truly felt, while any hope for a quick return was dashed. His departure marked the dissolution of the company that had worked for him and for the impresario Antonio Vendramin, to whom Goldoni had been tied since 1753, after the break with Medebac. Leaving Venice in April of 1762, he arrived in Paris the following August. Working with the Come´die Italienne proved to be more demanding than he imagined—the French actors were accustomed to canovacci and not to texts that are entirely written. Out of these difficulties emerged different works, such as the series of French scripts that seem to be a return to the past: the Trilogia di Zelinda e Lindoro (The Trilogy of Zelinda and Lindoro, 1773), born years before as 867

CARLO GOLDONI the Trilogy of Arlequin and Camille, and Gli amanti timidi o sia L’imbroglio dei due ritratti (The Timid Lovers, or The Affair of the Two Portraits, 1765) are amusing portraits quite far from the last Venetian season. However, in 1764, Goldoni created Il ventaglio (The Fan), in which the idea of the fan that passes from hand to hand creates a brilliant comedy, lively and rich in suggestions that anticipate a much more modern ambience. His last work, when he was practicing his profession as a master of Italian at Versailles and enjoying a court pension, belongs to the vein of the comedy of manners: Le Bourru bienfaisant (The Well-Meaning Crouch, 1771) and L’avare fasteux (The Ostentatious Miser, 1772) mark the final investigation into the character of the Venetian merchant, who reaches the end of his long career on stage. This character’s true crisis is marked by Trilogia della villeggiatura: In these three comedies the enterprising exponent of the bourgeois class stopped investing his profits in commerce (the engine of Venice’s great prosperity) and began to imitate the nobles in their habit of staying outside the city and investing in real estate but causing a regression in the city’s economic process. We are confronted with an arc of decline that is also lucidly observed in another of Goldoni’s masterpieces, I Rusteghi, in which four grumpy old men refuse any compromise with the progression and the evolution of customs and lock themselves in a blind social and linguistic conservatism that will shortly prove its sterility. Goldoni’s last years were occupied with the composition of his autobiography, which he dedicated to Louis XVI. He died at the height of the French Revolution, deprived of his royal pension. Goldoni’s critical reception, understood as an amalgam of interpretations and stage productions, has enjoyed and still enjoys great success. Naturally the reception of his vast ouevre has changed over the course of the years and the centuries: Thus we may recognize some texts of undisputed value that form a kind of ‘‘reduced’’ repertory, in which the so-called masterpieces have a place and are constantly revived on stage: Il servitore di due padroni, La locandieria, Il campiello, Le baruffe chiozzote, Gli’innamorati. One thinks of certain female figures wisely portrayed in La putta onorata or La serva amorosa, of the rediscovery of Il teatro comico that appears to be only theoretical but that in reality can be successfully staged, and of the reconsideration of Una delle ultime sere di Carnovale for more than its autobiographical elements. There are also sporadic revivals of minor texts, such as Il filosofo inglese or L’apatista (The Apathetic, 1758), on 868

which Franco Fido dwelled in his Le inquietudini di Goldoni. Nor should we forget the great importance of the Venetian author in the realm of his triple linguistic practice—in Italian, French, and above all in dialect. Linguistic expression was employed in all of its potential because it could reflect character and setting: Sometimes it appeared as more conservative, sometimes more modern, in order to mark, for example, generational or class conflicts.

Biography Carlo Goldoni was born in Venice, 25 February 1707. He studied medicine until 1720. After a flight to Chioggia (from Rimini, where he studied philosophy at a Dominican college) in 1721, he moved to Pavia at the Collegio Ghislieri; he was expelled in 1725 for writing a satire of the women of the city. Goldoni became the adjutant of the podesta` in Chioggia in 1728. After the death of his father in 1731, he practiced law in Venice; and, after a flight to Milan, he returned to Venice, along with theatermanager Giuseppe Imer. Goldoni moved with the theatrical company of the Teatro San Samuele and in Genoa met and married Nicoletta Conio in 1736. In 1742, he fled Venice because of debts. During the years 1745–1748, Goldoni practiced law in Pisa and was admitted to the local Arcadian colony. He composed important comedies, among which, for the actor Antonio Sacchi, is Il servitore di due padroni, and later accepted the offer of the theatrical manager Girolamo Medebac and returned to Venice as the in-house author of the Sant’Angelo theater in 1750. Goldoni wrote 16 comedies and launched the ‘‘reform’’ of the theater. In 1753, because of disputes with Medebac, who published some of his comedies without authorization, Goldoni moved to the Teatro San Luca of Antonio Vendramin, where he remained until 1762, with an interruption during the years 1758–1759, when he was in Rome. In 1762, disappointed by the indifference of the Venetian republic to his work, he went to Paris to direct the Come´die Italienne. In 1765 he was named master of Italian at Versailles for the sons of Louis XVI. In 1765 he obtained a court pension, which was taken away in 1792 by the Legislative Assembly. Carlo Goldoni died in poverty on 6 February 1793. ANGELA GUIDOTTI See also: Commedia dell’arte

CARLO GOLDONI Selected Works Collections The Comedies of Carlo Goldoni, translated by Helen Zimmern, London: D. Hott, 1892. Tutte le opere, edited by Giuseppe Ortolani, 14 vols., Milan: Mondadori, 1935–1956. Opere, edited by Filippo Zampieri, Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1954. Opere, edited by Gianfranco Folena, Milan: Mursia, 1969. Three Comedies (Mine Hostess, The Boors, The Fan), translated by Clifford Bax et al., London-New York: Oxford University Press, 1961; reprinted, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979. Four Comedies (The Venetian Twins, Artful Widow, Mirandolina, The Superior Residence), translated by Frederick Davies, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968. Edizione Nazionale Goldoniana, edited by Sergio Romagnoli, Venice: Marsilio, 1993.

Plays Momolo cortesan, 1738. La donna di garbo, 1742. Il servitore di due padroni, 1745; as The Servant of Two Masters, translated by Edward J. Dent, 1928; translated by Frederick H. Davies, 1965; as A Servant to Two Masters, translated by Gwenda Pandolfi, 1999; as The Servant of Two Masters, translated by Dorothy Louise, 2003. L’avvocato veneziano, 1748. I due gemelli veneziani, 1748; as The Venetian Twins (with Mirandolina), translated by Ranjit Bolt, 1993. La vedova scaltra, 1748. La buona moglie, 1749. La putta onorata, 1749. La bottega del caffe`, 1750; as The Coffee House, translated by Jeremy Parzen, 1998. La famiglia dell’antiquario, 1750. Il teatro comico, 1750; as The Comic Theatre, translated by John W. Miller, 1969. L’avventuriere onorato, 1751. Il giocatore, 1751. Il Molie`re, 1751. La serva amorosa, 1752. La cameriera brillante, 1753. Il filosofo inglese, 1753. La locandieria, 1753; as Mirandolina, translated by Lady Isabella Augusta Gregory, 1924; as Mirandolina (with The Housekeeper), translated by Robert David MacDonald, 1994. La sposa persiana, 1753. Terenzio, 1754. Torquato Tasso, 1755. Il campiello, 1756; as Il campiello, a Venetian comedy, translated by Susanna Graham-Jones and Biel Bryden, 1976. L’apatista, 1758. Gl’innamorati, 1759. La buona madre, 1760. La casa nova, 1760. L’impresario delle Smirne, 1760. La Pamela, 1760. I Rusteghi, 1760. Sior Todero brontolon, 1762.

Le baruffe chiozzote, 1762. La trilogia della villeggiatura, 1762. Una delle ultime sere di Carnovale, 1762. Il ventaglio, 1764; as The Fan, translated by Frederick Davies, 1968. Gli amanti timidi o sia L’imbroglio dei due ritratti, 1765. Le bourru bienfaisant (Il burbero benefico), 1771. L’avare fasteux, 1772. Trilogia di Zelinda e Lindoro, 1773.

Other I Me´moires, 1784; as Memoirs of Carlo Goldoni Written by Himself, translated by John Black, edited by W. A. Drake, 1926; reprinted, 1976.

Further Reading Alberti, Carmelo, La scena veneziana nell’eta` di Goldoni, Rome: Bulzoni, 1990. Alberti, Carmelo, and Ginette Herry (editors), Carlo Goldoni: Tra Libro e scena, Venice: Il Cardo Editore, 1996. Angelini, Franca, Vita di Goldoni, Rome: Laterza, 1993. Anglani, Bartolo, Goldoni, il mercato, la scena, l’utopia, Naples: Liguori, 1983. Baratto, Mario, ‘‘‘Mondo’ e ‘teatro’ nella poetica di Goldoni,’’ in Tre studi sul teatro, Venice: Neri Pozza, 1964. Borsellino, Nino (editor), L’interpretazione goldoniana: Critica e messinscena, Rome: Officina, 1982. Bosisio, Paolo, Il teatro di Goldoni sulle scene italiane del Novecento, Milan: Electa, 1992. Crotti, Ilaria, Libro, mondo, teatro: Saggi Goldoniani, Venice: Marsilio, 2000. Emery, Ted, Goldoni as Librettist: Theatrical Reform and the ‘‘drammi giocosi per musica,’’ New York: Peter Lang, 1991. Farrell, Joseph (editor), Carlo Goldoni and Eighteenth-Century Theatre, Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 1997. Fido, Franco, Le inquietudini di Goldoni, Genoa: Costa and Nolan, 1995. Fido, Franco, Nuova guida a Goldoni: Teatro e societa` nel Settecento, Turin: Einaudi, 2000. Folena, Gianfranco, L’Italiano in Europa: Esperienze linguistiche del Settecento, Turin: Einaudi, 1983. Folena, Gianfranco, Vocabolario del Veneziano di Carlo Goldoni, Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 1993. Guidotti, Angela, Goldoni par lui-meme, Alessandria: Dell’Orso, 1992. Gu¨nsberg, Maggie, Playing with Gender: The Comedies of Goldoni, Leeds, U.K.: Northern Universities Press, 2001. Holme, Timothy, A Servant of Many Masters: The Life and Times of Carlo Goldoni, London: Jupiter, 1976. Joly, Jacques, L’altro Goldoni, Pisa: ETS, 1989. Jonard, Norbert, Goldoni, Bari: Laterza, 1990. Mangini, Nicola, Bibliografia goldoniana (1908–1957), Rome-Venice: Istituto per la Collaborazione Culturale, 1961. Padoan, Giorgio, ‘‘L’esordio di Goldoni: la conquista della moralita`,’’ Lettere Italiane, (1983): 29–60. Petroni, Giuseppe, Il punto su Goldoni, Bari: Laterza, 1986. Pietropaolo, Domenico (editor), Goldoni and the Musical Theatre, New York: Legas, 1995.

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CARLO GOLDONI Riedt, Heinz, Carlo Goldoni, New York: Ungar, 1974. Ringger, Kurt, ‘‘Introduzione,’’ in C. Goldoni, Commedie, Turin: Einaudi, 1972. Stewart Pamela, Goldoni fra letteratura e teatro, Florence: Olschki, 1989.

IL CAMPIELLO, 1756 Il campiello (The Public Square) inaugurated a new trend in Goldoni’s production because it combines a text in dialect and in verse together with a lowerclass setting. In particular, the verse does not belong to the tradition of the theatrical genre (the martelliano or double heptasyllablic line) but is rather a free sequence of hendecasyllables and heptasyllabic lines, with the possible presence of rhyme (internal as well)—in short, a musical use of the word that evokes the arias of the melodrama (Goldoni also boasted a considerable production of librettos as well). The lower-class setting is immediately referred to by the title, which indicates a typical piazza in Venice onto which look the dwellings of ordinary people (for example, a woman who sells hotcakes or a girl who is a seamstress) captured at a particular time of the year: the last days of carnival, in which joy is mixed with melancholy, because the end of the festival is near. It is in this context that the comedy opens, with a first act enlivened by the squabbles between old women and those who are younger: Jealousy winds its way through, but so does the desire for fun and play, in the open, as a comforting moment of life in common. Estranged from this is Gasparina, who, after her mother’s death, has been raised by a rich uncle: Her condition makes her feel superior to the girls of the lower classes, by whose carefree nature she is surely attracted. For this reason she elicits their envy, a cause of her insecurity, which translates into a severe speech defect (putting the letter ‘‘z’’ in place of ‘‘s’’). Into the midst of these small stories of skirmishes, marriage plans, loves, and hopes comes the figure of the Cavaliere, a penniless Neapolitan nobleman, who is curious about the reality 870

of the campiello and decides to amuse himself in Venice during the carnival. He occupies the comedy’s estranged perspective, the one who observes ‘‘from outside,’’ like the thinker Isidore in Le baruffe chiozzote (Squabbles in Chioggia, 1762). He is the kingpin of the plot: He is attracted by Gasparina and begins to court her; later, to win over everyone’s sympathies he agrees to serve as a witness at the marriage of one of the girls, and when a scuffle breaks out, he threatens to resort to the sword. The comedy ends with the recognition of the noble ancestors of Gasparina herself, whose uncle and tutor, also Neapolitan, reveals the story of his origins and his niece to the suitor who by marrying her will come into possession, among other things, of a considerable dowry. The girl’s final departure from Venice and the campiello is an aching farewell that seems to predict Goldoni’s own and testifies to the author’s deep attachment to his city. Il campiello retains, within an original setting like that of the piazza and of lower-class characters, a series of elements still tied to the commedia dell’arte: for example, the story that leads to the final recognition and to the marriage of Gasparina with the penniless noble swordsman. It is a work of the highest quality, thanks to the continual alternation of joy and melancholy, of youthful freedom from worry and the real problems of people whose existence concedes little to them. This comedy is the first of Goldoni’s great plays in dialect. ANGELA GUIDOTTI Editions First edition: Il campiello, in Commedie di Carlo Goldoni, vol. 5, Venice: Pitte`ri, 1758. Critical edition: in Tutte le opere, edited by Giuseppe Ortolani, vol. 6, Milan: Mondadori, 1935–1956. Translation: as Il campiello, a Venetian Comedy, translated by Susanna Graham-Jones and Biel Bryden, London: Heinemann Educational for the National Theatre, 1976.

Further Reading Angelini, Franca, ‘‘Le strutture del Carnevale in Goldoni,’’ in L’interpretazione goldoniana: Critica e messinscena, edited by Nino Borsellino, Rome: Officina Edizioni, 1982. Bosisio, Paolo, Il teatro di Goldoni sulle scene italiane del Novecento, Milan: Electa, 1992. Lunari, Luigi, ‘‘Introduzione,’’ in C. Goldoni, Il campiello, Milan: Rizzoli, 1997. Davico Bonino, Guido, ‘‘Introduzione,’’ in C. Goldoni, Il campiello, Turin: Einaudi 1988. Ringger, Kurt, ‘‘Introduzione,’’ to C. Goldoni, Commedie, Turin: Einaudi, 1979.

CARLO GOLDONI

LA LOCANDIERA, 1753 Comedy by Carlo Goldoni

La locandiera (Mirandolina) is one of the most famous and most represented of Goldoni’s comedies, thanks to the success of the character of the female protagonist. The action unfolds at an inn owned by Mirandolina, an expert at making men fall in love with her. From the rich Count of Albafiorita to the penniless Marquis of Forlimpopoli, no one seems able to resist her, except for the Cavaliere di Ripafratta, a great despiser of women. For this reason, the seductress enacts a subtle design that consists at first of agreement and complicity with her misogynist guest, then of turmoil and desperation when he declares his desire to leave the inn, and finally of impassibility and coldness once she realizes she has conquered him. Thus, in the span of a single day, the cunning young girl reduces the Cavaliere to his knees: once he unmasks his passion in public, she decides not to follow him, however, and instead to marry Fabrizio, the waiter at the inn. La locandiera is a complex work, which has lent itself over the course of time to many interpretations, both literary and theatrical. The image that the author intended to give of the protagonist is anything but flattering. Faithful to his idea of the theater as a mirror of reality and hence also as an observation of his own experiences, Goldoni declared in his prefatory ‘‘L’autore a chi legge’’ (A Note from the Author to the Reader) that men must beware of certain women who are particularly cunning, so as not to fall into ruin. Indeed, he claimed ‘‘not to have depicted elsewhere a more tempting and more dangerous woman than this one.’’ One might think that the Cavaliere falls a little too quickly; but his misogyny is precisely the reason he falls so quickly: As a ‘‘despiser of women,’’ he succumbs more easily, since ‘‘disparaging without knowing them, and not knowing their arts and where they ground the hope for their triumphs, he believed that his aversion would suffice to protect him, and he offered his bare chest to the blows of his enemy.’’ It is therefore necessary to defend oneself from these ‘‘enchanting Sirens,’’ of whose arts the

author himself confessed to have been at times a victim. This self-analysis has been progressively refuted by criticism, which shows instead how Mirandolina embodies a certain bourgeois wisdom: First she puts her inventiveness to the test before the obtuse character of the misogynist; later, however, once she unmasks his superficiality and hence his illusions, she grasps that it is impossible for her to move from the bourgeois class to the nobility and decides with economic prudence to marry someone of her own station. Beyond, however, this ‘‘reversal’’ of perspective, what makes the comedy rich and pleasurable is the author’s notable power to create a character full of nuances and shadings; he brings out her turmoil as well, her contradictions, and praises her intelligence, thanks especially to the introduction of two actresses, Ortensia and Deianira, who represent an inferior mode of performing, tied to the ill-fated commonplaces and fictions of the old comedies, compared to the vivacity of the world brought onto the stage. The various actresses who from 1800 onward have included this female character into their repertoires (from Adelaide Ristori to Tatiana Pavlova, from Irma Grammatica to Eleonora Duse) have contributed substantially to the comedy’s success. In this period, Goldoni was inspired by Maddalena Marliani, who joined Medebac’s company in the role of the servetta (servant), in the footsteps of her husband Giuseppe Marliani, known as Brighella. He noticed how Marliani’s Colombina was colored with various nuances, which convinced him to make her a protagonist, thus compromising his relationship with the leading actress Teodora Medebac–who was responsible for the interruption of the reruns after the comedy’s opening night and for its substitution with Pamela, a character more suited to exploit the interpretive gifts of the impresario’s wife. La locandiera became important not only to the actresses but also to directors (Luchino Visconti’s 1953 production with set design by Piero Tosi remains famous). Indeed, the calibration of scenic time is perfect: Everything takes place in an interior, the inn, which represents an unstable microcosm in which various characters come together with their stories in such a way as to condense the events by bringing out the essential traits that make possible their progressive evolution. Thanks to the dialogue and use of gesture as well, the characters all turn out to be important. Gesture is supported by the original use of objects: the handkerchief, the little glass bottles, the iron that Mirandolina 871

CARLO GOLDONI handles nervously when she must make her final decisions. Goldoni showed a sensitivity to the minute elements of the stage, which anticipated certain innovations of much more recent drama. ANGELA GUIDOTTI Editions First Edition La locandiera, in Commedie, vol. 2, Florence: Paperini, 1755.

Critical Edition In Teatro, edited by Giuseppe Ortolani, vol. 4, Milan: Mondadori, 1935–1956.

Translations As Mirandolina, translated by Lady Isabella Augusta Gregory, London: Putnam’s Sons, 1924. As Mine Hostess in Three Comedies, translated by C. Bax, London-New York: Oxford University Press, 1961; reprinted, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979. As Mirandolina in Four Comedies, translated by Frederick Davies, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968. As Mirandolina, translated by Robert David MacDonald, London: Oberon, 1994.

Further Reading Alonge, Roberto, ‘‘Approcci goldoniani: Il sistema di Mirandolina,’’ in Goldoni dalla commedia dell’Arte al dramma borghese, Milan: Garzanti, 2004. Anglani, Bartolo, Goldoni: Il mercato, la scena, l’utopia, Naples: Liguori, 1983. Davico Bonino, Guido, ‘‘Introduzione,’’ in C. Goldoni, La locandiera, Turin: Einaudi, 1971. Lunari, Luigi, ‘‘Introduzione,’’ in C. Goldoni, La locandiera, Milan: Rizzoli, 2001. Marelli, Cesare, ‘‘La seduzione tra ‘intingoletti’ e aporie: Rilettura de ‘La locandiera,’’’ Annali d’Italianistica, 2 (1993): 205–212. Momo, Arnaldo, La carriera delle maschere nel teatro di Goldoni, Chiari, Gozzi, Venice: Marsilio, 1992. Strehler, Giorgio, ‘‘Introduzione,’’ in C. Goldoni, La locandiera, Milan: Mondatori, 2002.

I RUSTEGHI, 1760 Comedy by Carlo Goldoni

I Rusteghi (The Boors) opens the phase of Goldoni’s critique of Venice’s mercantile society in the second half of the eighteenth century; in particular, 872

he revealed the uneasiness of one who, though belonging to the bourgeois class, perceived with clarity the state of its impending crisis. However, as always happens in Goldoni’s works, the dramatic context is softened by the irony of the argument, the play of the dialogue, and the revisitation of stock masks that are revitalized thanks to the use of the Venetian dialect. The author himself outlined the typology of his protagonists in the prefatory notes of the comedy entitled ‘‘L’autore a chi legge’’: ‘‘Rusteghi in the Venetian language is not the same as rustici in the Tuscan tongue. In Venice we mean by a rustego a bitter, boorish man, an enemy of civilization, culture, and conversation.’’ This specification serves to distinguish this character from the mask of the old miser and grouch of the commedia dell’arte and also from the old crab of the French theater between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. To the four main characters of this play, in fact, the author applied his idea of the relation between world and theater and also modified traditional characterization with the observation of Venetian reality from different points of view—the sociological, the political, and the linguistic. At the same time, the four mature reactionaries oppose themselves to the new generations, universalizing the motif of the conflict between the old and the young; in this mode, from the microcosm of the bourgeoisie of the old Venetian republic, the picture broadens to represent much wider misunderstandings and atmospheres. Canciano, Simone, and Maurizio recognize their leader in Lunardo, who decides to marry off his daughter Lucietta without even letting her meet her future husband (Filippetto). A coalition of wives headed by Signora Felice is able to play a joke on the four old men by successfully allowing a meeting between the engaged young man and woman. At the end, the rustics resign themselves to and accept the situation. This is a comedy of ‘‘involuntary’’ formation because the four rustics do not love the theater, are enemies of the author, and prevent the women in the house from going outside because they are against the wastefulness of the carnival, though they are voluptuaries behind closed doors. Thus Signora Felice brings the theater into the house, with plenty of disguise. It is therefore a thin plot for an ensemble comedy that relies on atmospherics and verbal disputes. On these occasions, the old men always express themselves through conservative ideas and expressions, while the young people and the wives try to counter them. Later on, Lunardo is distinguished for his tenacious expressive attachment

CORRADO GOVONI to formulas and phrases that denote his being ‘‘closed’’ to the external world and any form of innovation. The comedy is constructed with great mastery and experience of dramatic time: The action takes place in half a day, and the protagonist is quadrupled without becoming boring, creating instead a sort of counterpoint to the lines of one thanks to the comments of another. Often the characters are defined by their linguistic expressions: from ‘‘vegnimo a dir el merito’’ (we speak the reason why) to ‘‘figurarse’’ (just imagine), and still others like the persistent use of the adjective serrao (closed) to indicate how doors and windows must always be found, so that no ‘‘incursions’’ from the external world are possible. But we should remember that the comedy’s happy ending is only fictitious: The rusteghi resign themselves to the deception but do not change their general attitude. The positive upshot is momentary and tied to that particular event. On the other hand, the situation of the Venetian republic ends up mirroring this domestic panorama: In 1762, in fact, all possible reforms of an innovative nature were rejected, and decline became irreversible.

Editions First edition: I Rusteghi, in C. Goldoni, Le commedie, vol. 3, Venice: Pasquali, 1762. Critical edition: In Opere, edited by Giuseppe Ortolani, vol. 7, Milan: Mondadori, 1935–1956. Translation: As The Boors in Three Comedies, translated by C. Bax, London-New York: Oxford University Press, 1961; reprinted, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979.

Further Reading Alberti, Carmelo, ‘‘I rusteghi e dintorni,’’ in I quattro rusteghi, Programma di sala, Venice: Teatro La Fenice, 1987–1988 Season. Baratto, Mario, Tre saggi sul teatro, Venice: Neri Pozza, 1957. Davico Bonino, Guido, ‘‘Introduzione,’’ to C. Goldoni, I rusteghi, Turin: Einaudi, 1970. Puppa, Paolo, Cesco Baseggio: Ritratto dell’attore da vecchio, Verona: Cierre, 2003. Savvioli, Aggeo, ‘‘Vent’anni di messinscena goldoniana,’’ in L’interpretazione goldoniana: Critica e messinscena, edited by Nino Borsellino, Rome: Officina Edizioni, 1982.

ANGELA GUIDOTTI

CORRADO GOVONI (1884–1965) The poetics of Govoni’s early verse show the influence of both Giovanni Pascoli and Gabriele D’Annunzio. The rich verbal material of the sonnets that form his initial collection, Le fiale (The Phials, 1903), is strongly determined by the D’Annunzio of La Chimera (Chimera, 1890) and of the Poema paradisiaco (Heavenly Poem, 1893). However, these texts also attempt to overcome decadent poetic elements, both on the linguistic level through ‘‘low’’ lexical insertions and in the preference of the ‘‘I’’ for simple and normal reality. This antidecadent attitude derived from Pascoli but was also influenced by the prosaicness of Crepuscolarismo. The crepuscular theme, with its air of melancholic and spiritual weariness, breaks out in Armonia in grigio et in silenzio (Harmony in Grey

and Silence, 1903). The everyday quality and the unassuming character of the landscapes and objects described, reminiscent of Impressionist paintings, were from this point on recurrent features of Govoni’s poetry. In contrast to other crepuscular poets, such as Guido Gozzano and Sergio Corazzini, Govoni did not fall back on sentimentality or on the description of the intimate world of the subject. In Armonia in grigio et in silenzio, as well as in subsequent collections such as Fuochi d’artifizio (Fireworks, 1905) and in Gli aborti (Miscarriages, 1907), the influence of symbolism and French Decadence (Paul Verlaine in particular) is evident, although it is filtered through a reading of Franco-Belgian poets such as Georges Raymond, Costantin Rodenbach, and Maurice Maeterlinck. 873

CORRADO GOVONI The first product of Govoni’s engagement with the Futurist movement was the volume Poesie elettriche (Electric Poems, 1911). His next book, Rarefazioni e parole in liberta` (Rarefactions and Words in Freedom, 1915), was divided into two parts: The first presented a series of experiments in visual poetry, while the second featured applications of the poetical techniques suggested by F. M. Marinetti in the Manifesto della letteratura futurista (Manifesto of Futurist Literature, 1912). In both instances, however, the Futurist method provided Govoni a pretext for his eclectic analogical imagery. These works were often illustrated by the poet’s own sketches or drawings, which constituted an integral part of his verse. The most important work of these years was undoubtedly L’inaugurazione della primavera (The Inauguration of Spring, 1915), poems in which the poet endowed natural phenomena and daily objects with an original ‘‘sensitive’’ (one could almost say ‘‘animistic’’) content. An example is ‘‘La primavera del mare’’ (The Springtime of the Sea), greeted with enthusiasm by Eugenio Montale: ‘‘trovo meraviglie di poesia nuova e autentica. Costui e` grande!’’ (I find marvellous poetry, which is new and authentic. Govoni is great!) (Il secondo mestiere, 1996). The structure of the poetic discourse in Govoni is mainly paratactic, and often the author accumulated images in long sequences, as in ‘‘Le cose che fanno la domenica’’ (The Things They Do on Sunday). The path from Le fiale to L’inaugurazione della primavera also represents a personal and progressive ‘‘metrical liberation’’ in Govoni’s poetics. In Le fiale the regular hendecasyllable alternates with hypometric and hypermetric verses, often with noncanonical stresses. Later this metric irregularity would displease Govoni, who began to alter numerous poems with the ultimately unsuccessful intention of regularizing their meter. In Armonia in grigio et in silenzio, rhyme is maintained, but the structure of the stanzas is irregular. Finally, in the Futurist collections, the poems are mostly undivided, polymetric, and only partially rhymed. The affirmation of parole in liberta` (free verse) in early twentieth-century Italy is also unquestionably due to the formal results of Govoni’s poetry. In the period between the two World Wars, Govoni continued to pursue these stylistic experiments. While his works from this period time were characterized by a remarkable search for a freer poetic language, they did not reflect the lyrical experiments carried out in those years by younger Italian poets. The changes introduced by Govoni in his poetry were not, then, necessarily a sign of a greater 874

originality. The moment of the most intense retreat into his inner world was represented by the poems of Aladino (Aladdin, 1946), dedicated to his son, who was among those executed by the Germans at the Fosse Ardeatine in 1944. The collection includes the moving lament ‘‘Dialogo dell’angelo e del giovine morto’’ (Dialogue of the Angel and the Dead Boy). Besides his poetic activity, Govoni was also a prose writer and a playwright. His most important novels, Anche l’ ombra e` sole (Even the Shadow Is Sun, 1920) and La strada sull’acqua (The Road on the Water, 1923), were written between 1918 and 1926, a period in which he almost entirely abandoned poetry. He also published a few collections of short stories, including Piccolo veleno color di rosa (Little Rose-Coloured Poison, 1921) and Bomboniera (Bonbonnie`re, 1929), while in La santa verde (The Green Saint, 1919) he produced a volume of remarkable lyrical prose or poemetti in prosa. The theatrical texts published during his lifetime belong to the Futurist period and include La neve (Snow, 1914), considered closer to D’Annunzio’s La fiaccola sotto il moggio (The Light under the Bushel, 1905) than to genuine avant-garde drama, and the short play Caccia all’usignuolo (Hunting the Nightingale), published in 1915 in the collection Teatro futurista (Futurist Theatre), edited by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Carlo Corra, and Emilio Settimelli. The passage from his brief engagement with Futurism to the recovery of the traditional structures of the wellmade comedy is also evident in the philosophical inclinations of his quasi-allegorical dialogue and his recourse to elementary symbolist typology. In particular, there is the sign of his contact with Eleanora Duse in a 1921 production, now missing, of Selvaggio padrone (Savage Master), which later became Il pane degli angeli (The Bread of the Angels, 1940), a work whose expressionist echoes are attributable to Rosso di San Secondo and whose erotic tension fuels a debate between spirit and matter. Govoni’s interest in the theatre persisted during the period between the wars, with a predilection for religious themes, as in La vernice del presepe di Natale (The Varnish of the Nativity Scene, 1939). Some of Govoni’s lyric works influenced contemporary poets, in particular Giuseppe Ungaretti and Montale. The young Montale was fascinated by the analogical equivalences in Govoni, and so it is quite correct to speak of a form of ‘‘govonismo montaliano’’ in Quaderno genovese and in some other poems that mimic Govoni’s musical

CORRADO GOVONI procedures, of which only ‘‘Corno inglese’’ (French Horn), published in Ossi di seppia (Cuttlefish Bones, 1925), survives. Govoni’s presence can also be perceived in Le occasioni (Occasions, 1939), in which the ‘‘simple objects’’ of crepuscolarismo (the bucket that knocks against the well, the mirrors in the room, the weathervane) are transformed by Montale into presences with a strong symbolic and metaphysical character.

Biography Corrado Govoni was born at Ta`mara (Ferrara), on 20 October 1884, to a family of well-to-do farmers, Govoni had no normal scholastic education. In 1895 he went to a private boarding school run by the Salesian Order in Ferrara, where he remained for a short period, after which he devoted himself to agriculture. In 1903 he moved to Florence, where he came in contact with the main literary circles of the time and befriended Sergio Corazzini, Aldo Palazzeschi, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, and several other intellectuals and men of letters. He collaborated in many periodicals such as Poesia, La Riviera ligure, Lacerba, La Voce. In 1914 he moved to Milan, but he was unable to find a job and was obliged to return to Ferrara, where he found employment at the Municipal Archives. In 1919 he left Ferrara for good and moved to Rome, where he practiced various professions: vice-director of the book section of the Societa` Italiana Autori ed Editori (SIAE) and head of ministerial protocol after World War II. In 1944 his son Aladino was killed at the Fosse Ardeatine near Rome. Govoni died at Lido dei Pini (Rome) on 20 October 1965. DIRK VANDEN BERGHE See also: Futurism Selected Works Collections Poesie (1903–1959), edited by Giovanni Ravegnani, Milan: Mondadori, 1961. Teatro, edited by Anna Folli, Rome: Bulzoni, 1984.

Poetry ‘‘Armonia in grigio et in silenzio,’’ 1903. ‘‘Le fiale,’’ 1903. ‘‘Fuochi d’artifizio,’’ 1905. ‘‘Gli aborti,’’ 1907. ‘‘Poesie elettriche,’’ 1911. ‘‘Rarefazioni e parole in liberta`,’’ 1915. ‘‘Inaugurazione della primavera,’’ 1915; revised, 1920.

‘‘La santa verde,’’ 1919. ‘‘Brindisi alla notte,’’ 1924. ‘‘Il quaderno dei sogni e delle stelle,’’ 1924. ‘‘Il flauto magico,’’ 1932. ‘‘Canzoni a bocca chiusa,’’ 1938 ‘‘Pellegrino d’amore,’’ 1941. ‘‘Govonigiotto,’’ 1943. ‘‘Aladino,’’ 1946 ‘‘Patria d’alto volo,’’ 1953. ‘‘Preghiera al trifoglio,’’ 1953. ‘‘Manoscritto nella bottiglia,’’ 1954. ‘‘Stradario della primavera,’’ 1958. ‘‘La ronda di notte,’’ 1966.

Fiction Anche l’ombra e` sole, 1920. Piccolo veleno color di rosa, 1921. La terra contro il cielo, 1921. La strada sull’acqua, 1923. La cicala e la formica, 1925. Il volo d’amore, 1926. Bomboniera, 1929. La maschera che piange, 1930.

Plays La neve, 1914. La caccia all’usignuolo, 1915. La madonnina dei pastori, 1939. La vernice del presepe di Natale, 1939. Il pane degli angeli, 1940.

Letters Lettere a F. T. Marinetti, 1990.

Further Reading Berardi, Quirino, Govoni, un poeta crepuscolare, Modena: Teic, 1979. Blasucci, Luigi, ‘‘Montale, Govoni e l’oggetto povero’’ (1990), in Gli oggetti di Montale, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002. Corrado Govoni e l’ambiente letterario ferrarese del primo Novecento, Ferrara: Accademia delle Scienze di Ferrara, 1985. Curi, Fausto, Corrado Govoni, Milan: Mursia, 1964. Folli, Anna (editor), Corrado Govoni: Atti delle giornate di studio, Ferrara, 5–7 maggio 1983, Bologna: Cappelli, 1984. Gargiulo, Alfredo, ‘‘Gozzano, Govoni,’’ in Letteratura italiana del Novecento, Florence: Le Monnier, 1940. Livi, Franc¸ois, Dai simbolisti ai crepuscolari, Milan: Istituto Propaganda Libreria, 1974. Livi, Franc¸ois, Tra crepuscolarismo e futurismo: Govoni e Palazzeschi, Milan: Istituto Propaganda Libreria, 1980. Mariani, Gaetano, ‘‘Crepuscolari e futuristi,’’ in La vita sospesa, Naples: Liguori, 1978. Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo, ‘‘Corrado Govoni,’’ in Poeti italiani del Novecento, Milan: Mondadori, 1978. Montale, Eugenio, ‘‘La morte di Corrado Govoni poeta fanciullo della natura,’’ in Il secondo mestiere. Prose 1920–1974, edited by Giorgio Zampa, Milan: Mondadori, 1996. Pietropaoli, Antonio, Poesie in liberta`: Govoni, Palazzeschi, Soffici, Naples: Guida, 2003.

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GUIDO GOZZANO

GUIDO GOZZANO (1883–1916) ‘‘Gozzano entro` nel pubblico come poi non avvenne piu` ad alcun poeta: familiarmente, con le mani in tasca’’ (Gozzano appeared in public as no other poet would do: in a familiar way, with his hands in his pockets): With these words, Eugenio Montale appraised the unique position of Guido Gozzano (Sulla poesia, 1976). Turning Gabriele D’Annunzio’s aristocratic myth of the sublime artist and superman on its head, the self-effacing Gozzano proclaimed in his ironic and sing-song verses his shame at being a poet and proceeded to turn all the postromantic cultural refuse cluttering the minds of the fin de sie`cle bourgeoisie into poetry. Writing for the public of newspapers and fashion magazines, Gozzano consciously set himself at the center of the sphere of mass cultural consumption, creating an artistic product for a modern time devoid of aura. Although somewhat reluctant to admit it, he collaborated with the burgeoning film industry that in the second decade of the twentieth century had one of its main centers in Turin. Notwithstanding these extraliterary interests, Gozzano’s importance is tied to his two collections of poems, La via del rifugio (The Road to the Refuge, 1907) and I colloqui (The Man I Pretend to Be: The Colloquies and Selected Poems, 1911). Already from 1903 Gozzano had started publishing in various literary magazines, but his first collection constitutes the true start of his career. By the time of La via del rifugio, Gozzano had appropriated and subverted the various conventional poetic languages of his day: the lyricism of D’Annunzio; the domestic sentimentalism of Giovanni Pascoli; the critique of positivist materialism pursued by the poet Arturo Graf, whose philosophical vein finds its reflection in Gozzano’s poems, but with irony and understatement. The collection comprises 30 poems, all composed after 1905. The metrical form most used is the sonnet, but Gozzano introduced new meters, such as couplets of nine- and seven-syllable lines with an internal rhyme, stylistic innovations that give a lightness, an easiness, a ‘‘coraggiosa allegria’’ (courageous happiness) to his poetry, as Alvaro Valentini showed (I piaceri di Gozzano, 1978). In these early compositions, the personal story of the new poetic ‘‘I’’ is firmly introduced. In a radical 876

and surprising move, the subjectivity of the poet is put at a distance, objectified and playfully transformed into a character. Comforted by the melody of a popular nursery rhyme—‘‘Trenta quaranta / tutto il Mondo canta’’ (Thirty forty / the whole World is singing)—that makes a light entertaining game of the World and Fate, the poet announced, eyes closed, lying on the grass: ‘‘e vedo un quadrifoglio / che non raccogliero`’’ (and I see a four-leaf clover / that I will not pick). Thus, from the opening lines, ‘‘La via del rifugio’’ (the eponymous poem opening the collection) articulates a paradigmatic existential stance: renunciation and retreat. And yet, as always in Gozzano’s poetry, irony colors every statement. While expressing pessimism and detachment, the poet’s voice, modulated on the rhythm of children’s rhymes, infuses a contagious playfulness into his grim meditation, as in ‘‘L’avvocato’’ (The Lawyer): ‘‘Ma dunque esisto? O strano! / vive tra il Tutto e il Niente / questa cosa vivente/ detta guidogozzano’’ (But then do I exist? How weird! / between All and Nothing lives / this living thing / called guidogozzano). The use of the folk narrative tradition, of its iterative models for memorization—the very same lines or slight variations often return within the same poem and between different ones—as well as the use of dialogue, are the most original features of Gozzano’s poetry, further indicating its closeness to oral literature and popular cultural consumption. The contamination of genres, already undertaken by D’Annunzio, is crucial to Gozzano’s work. As Pier Paolo Pasolini acutely observed in Descrizioni di descrizioni (1999): ‘‘La poesia di Gozzano e` tutta narrativa . . . se non e` una vera storia che egli racconta, e` comunque una ‘scena’ di vita reale. . . . Gozzano e` il piu` dantesco dei poeti italiani. E cio` appunto perche´ egli non e` un lirico ma un narratore’’ (Gozzano’s poetry is completely narrative . . . if not a story, it is a real life ‘scene’ that he unfolds . . . Gozzano is the most Dantesque of all Italian poets. And this precisely because he is not a lyric poet but a narrator). The sitting room of ‘‘L’amica di nonna Speranza’’ (The Friend of Grandmother Hope) with ‘‘Loreto impagliato e il busto d’Alfieri, di Napoleone, / i fiori in cornice (le buone cose di pessimo gusto!)’’ (The stuffed parrot and the bust

GUIDO GOZZANO of Alfieri and Napoleon, / the framed flowers [the good things in awful taste!]), the visit to the dusty attic with the homely Signorina Felicita, or the dialogue between the child and the ‘‘Cocotte’’ in the eponymous poem of I colloqui, open up theatrical scenarios that unfold with novelistic verve and remain indelibly in the reader’s mind. Alongside the mundane situation and the social cliche´, Gozzano put on the stage his poetic self, and, as in a Baroque Trauerspiel (mourning play), dramatized his own temporality: ‘‘Socchiudo gli occhi, estranio / ai casi della vita. / Sento fra le mie dita / la forma del mio cranio’’ (With eyes closed, estranged / from life’s events / I feel through my finger / the shape of my skull). Conscious of the implacable movement of time, detached from life and from his self, the subjectivity of the poet becomes the site of the story of otherness and dissolution in ways that will not be again pursued within the Italian lyrical tradition. Indeed, in La via del rifugio there is no ‘‘road’’ to the refuge. Gozzano has been staying, as he would stay throughout his poetic production, in a place of estrangement and negation on the side of the road, as in ‘‘Nemesis’’: ‘‘Ne´ voglio piu`, ne´ posso. / Piu` scaltro degli scaltri / dal margine d’un fosso / guardo passare gli altri’’ (I don’t want anymore, nor can I. / More cunning than the cunning / at the edge of a ditch / I watch the others go by). Thus the evils of time, sickness, and death, and the falsity of social conventions dominate the reflection of the poet, and yet he warned: ‘‘Da tempo ho ucciso il tarlo della malinconia. / Inganno la tristezza / con qualche bella favola’’ (Ages ago I killed the worm of melancholy / I trick sadness / with some beautiful fable). Poetry itself is the path, the act of distancing time, the illusion that returns to the first illusion, that childhood dream—‘‘le antiche stampe . . . il minareto e tre colonne infrante’’ (the old engravings . . . the minaret and three broken columns)—the poet used to feed upon. The period spanning 1907 to 1911 was the most productive and difficult in Gozzano’s life: His tuberculosis worsened, his mother was paralyzed, and yet he also started his collaboration with cinema and wrote fables, which he would publish as a collection entitled I tre talisman (The Three Talismans, 1914). He also wrote the poems that would converge into I colloqui. Here the meter is further perfected with the acquisition, in ‘‘Cocotte’’ and ‘‘La signorina Felicita ovvero la Felicita`,’’ of the narrative sestine. Unlike its predecessor, this collection is divided in three sections that, through the titles, hint to a narrative unfolding. As Gozzano

himself suggested, it can be read as an ascent from an unhealthy sensual sadness to a serene idealism or as a more secular novelistic Bildung. The collection is opened and closed by two poems both titled ‘‘I colloqui’’: The first one reiterates the detachment of La via del rifugio, and in the last one the poet, made ‘‘healthy’’ again, decided that ‘‘meglio e` tacere, dileguare in pace’’ (it is better to be silent, disappear in peace). Notwithstanding the expressed desire to be silent, in another poem, ‘‘Pioggia d’Agosto’’ (August Rain), the poet declared he would write again with a voice celebrating nature. Here Gozzano seemed to anticipate the didactic poem ‘‘Epistole Entomologiche’’ (Entomological Letters). The aim of the project—heavily indebted to the Belgian writer, Maurice Maeterlinck—was to sing, through the observation of the lives of various butterflies, of the oneness of the human spirit with Nature’s endless transformations. Possibly because his health worsened or because his irony rejected this assertive terrain, Gozzano never finished the poem. And yet, some of the poems, like the ‘‘Acherontia Atropos,’’ which knocks at dusk on the window of the family room, truly embody Gozzano’s art, an art akin to the butterfly, light, entertaining, gracious, mundane, and yet, without seeming so, a severe harbinger of the imminent passing of the season. A debt yet to be explored is the one with the poet Amalia Guglielminetti, likely muse of the ‘‘Epistole Entomologiche.’’ Beyond the biographical reality of their short romantic involvement, the dialogue Gozzano entertained with this other—a woman, Sister, Lover, Friend—is central to understanding his subject torn between renunciation and the desire to be other. Collected posthumously and still awaiting a critical edition are the short stories Gozzano published throughout his life in various journals and newspapers. These pieces, like the stories inspired by the trip he took to India in 1912 and published after his death under the title Verso la cuna del mondo (Journey toward the Cradle of Mankind, 1917), are of uneven quality, a fact that may be explained by the journalistic occasion of their composition. After the avant-garde’s critique of the cynical poet alienated from the world of action and the misunderstanding of idealist criticism that cast his poetry under the deforming label of ‘‘crepuscolare’’ (twilight), Gozzano has been the object of a reappraisal that started with Montale and continued with critics like Edoardo Sanguineti, Marziano Guglielminetti, and Luca Lenzini. An understanding 877

GUIDO GOZZANO of Gozzano is crucial for a rereading of Italian twentieth-century literature within the frame of the Modernist movement, for which the ironic poet Gozzano may turn out to be a crucial interpreter and a unique protagonist.

Biography Guido Gozzano was born in Turin, 19 December 1883. He enrolled in 1904 in the law faculty in Turin but never concluded his studies. He published poems, prose, and reviews in magazines and journals. In 1907, the year of publication of La via del rifugio, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. He had a short-lived relationship with the poet Amalia Guglielminetti. In 1909 his mother was paralyzed. In 1911, Gozzano published I colloqui and started a collaboration with the Catholic journal Il Momento. In the same years, he wrote various scripts for the cinema. In 1912, he traveled to India. He was excused from military service at the start of the war in 1915. Gozzano died in Turin on 9 August 1916. GIULIANA MINGHELLI Selected Works Collections Poesie e prose, edited by Alberto De Marchi, Milan: Garzanti, 1961. Tutte le poesie, edited by Andrea Rocca, Milan: Mondadori, 1980. I sandali della diva: Tutte le novelle, edited by Giuliana Nuvoli, Milan: Serra e Riva, 1983.

Poetry ‘‘La via del rifugio,’’ 1907. ‘‘I colloqui,’’ 1911; as The Man I Pretend to Be: The Colloquies and Selected Poems, translated by Michael Palma, 1981; as The Colloquies and Selected Letters, translated by J. G. Nichols, 1987.

Further Reading Carnero, Roberto, Guido Gozzano esotico, Anzio: De Rubeis, 1996. Ciccarelli, Andrea, ‘‘Tra le file dei vili: Il viaggio mancato di Gozzano,’’ Modern Language Notes, 114:1(1999), 106–125. Contorbia, Franco, Il sofista subalpino, Cuneo: L’Arciere, 1980. Cudini, Piero, ‘‘Prefazione,’’ to Un Natale a Ceylon e altri racconti indiani, Milan: Garzanti, 1984. Della Coletta, Cristina, ‘‘Transtextual Patterns: Guido Gozzano between Epic and Elegy in ‘Goa: La Dourada,’’’ in Italian Modernism: Italian Culture between Decadentism and Avant-Garde, edited by Luca Somigli and Mario Moroni, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. Di Biagi, Flaminio, Sotto l’arco di Tito: Le ‘‘Farfalle’’di Gozzano, Trento: La Finestra, 1999. Gambacorti, Irene, Storie di cinema e letteratura. Verga, Gozzano, D’Annunzio, Florence: Societa` Editrice Fiorentina, 2003. Getto, Giovanni, ‘‘Guido Gozzano,’’ in Poeti del Novecento e altre cose, Milan: Mursia, 1977. Guglielminetti, Marziano, ‘‘Introduction’’ to Tutte le poesie, edited by Andrea Rocca, Milan: Mondadori, 1980. Guglielminetti, Marziano, Introduzione a Gozzano, Bari: Laterza, 1993. Lenzini, Luca, Gozzano, Palermo: Palumbo, 1992. Montale, Eugenio, ‘‘Gozzano dopo trent’anni,’’ in Sulla poesia, Milan: Mondadori, 1976. Pasolini, Pier Paolo, ‘‘Guido Gozzano, Poesie,’’ in Descrizioni di descrizioni: Saggi sulla letteratura e l’arte, vol.2, Milan: Mondadori, 1999. Sanguineti, Edoardo, Guido Gozzano: Indagini e letture, Turin: Einaudi, 1966. Serra, Renato, ‘‘Le lettere,’’ in Scritti letterari morali e politici, Turin: Einaudi, 1974. Savoca, Giuseppe, Tra testo e fantasma: Analisi di poesia da Gozzano a Montale, Rome: Bonacci, 1985. Tamburri, Anthony Julian, Una semiotica della ri-lettura: Guido Gozzano, Aldo Palazzeschi, Italo Calvino, Florence: Franco Cesati Editore, 2003. Valentini, Alvaro, I piaceri di Gozzano, Rome: Argileto, 1978.

Fiction I tre talismani, 1914. La principessa si sposa, 1917. L’altare del passato, 1918. L’ultima traccia, 1919.

Travel Literature and Other Verso la cuna del mondo: Lettere dall’India (1912–1913), 1917; as Journey toward the Cradle of Mankind, translated by David Marinelli, 1996. Nell’Oriente favoloso: Lettere dall’India, 2004. San Francesco d’Assisi, 1997.

Letters Lettere d’amore di Guido Gozzano e Amalia Guglielminetti, 1951. Lettere a Carlo Vallini, 1971.

878

I COLLOQUI, 1911 Poems by Guido Gozzano

Between 1907 and 1910, Guido Gozzano composed his second collection of poems in a state of therapeutic isolation because of his tuberculosis.

GUIDO GOZZANO I colloqui (The Colloquies) is a slim volume containing 24 poems. The working title for the collection had been I canti dell’attesa (The Songs of Waiting), and the projected ordering was comprised of four parts. The third section, ‘‘Il riscatto’’ (The Redemption), however, was never realized, leaving the final volume in three parts: ‘‘Il giovenile errore’’ (The Youthful Error), ‘‘Alle soglie’’ (On the Thresholds), and ‘‘Il reduce’’ (The Survivor). A study of the notebooks used for I colloqui reveals Gozzano’s writing process. The poet worked simultaneously, often on the same page, on more than one poem at a time, setting in motion a system of internal quotations and a symphonic effect of assonances and refrains that came to characterize the collection. This strategy of self-quotation allowed Gozzano to distance and contemplate, as if through a screen, his poetic and existential experience. The thematic counterpart to this rhetorical device is the ongoing de´doublements of the lyrical subject into others: the ‘‘brother,’’ ‘‘spettro ideale di me’’ (my ideal spectre) in the eponymous poem, the sick self and the healthy one, and the ‘‘gelido, consapevole di se´’’ (cold, self-conscious) alter-ego of the poem ‘‘Toto` Meru`meni.’’ Quotation, montage, and contamination also constitute the way Gozzano approached literary tradition. The many echoes of Dante, Petrarch, and Leopardi, already recuperated though the filter of Pascoli or D’Annunzio, are further distilled through rhythmic or phonic commonplaces voided of any emotional investment, an aesthetic inspired, as in ‘‘La signorina Felicita’’ by the ‘‘Bellezza riposata dei solai / dove il rifiuto secolare dorme!’’ (Quiet beauty of attics / where centuries-old rubbish sleeps!). In a similarly corrosive appropriation, Gozzano chose a variety of traditional meters— sestina, novenario, terza rima—and undermined their lyrical quality by the everyday ‘‘colloquiality’’ of the language. Indeed, it is this conversational tone evoked in the title and the orality pervading the poems that lend formal and structural coherence to the collection. Despite the poet’s intention that I colloqui be read as a story of sin and reconquered spiritual health, the various compositions are only loosely connected with the three section headings. Even if the single poems—like the one about the homely Signorina Felicita in the dusty attic or the child’s encounter with the ‘‘Cocotte’’ living next door— are narrative in structure, the comprehensive unfolding of the collection is strongly antinarrative. The temporality of I colloqui is frozen in a recurrent

staging of a moment of displacement, of belatedness, the moment in which life, literature, and his present and past selves are bypassed. The fixity of time in Gozzano’s text evokes the conventionality of the photographic cliche´. In fact, photos appear frequently in the collection as scorned and yet deeply loved samples of archived life, proof of a past existence and a defense against life’s assaults. In this sense, all the poems express a disengagement from life: ‘‘Giova guarire? Giova che si viva?’’ (What good is healing? What good is living?; ‘‘La signorina Felicita’’). The dominant attitude is one of disenchanted contemplation of past, present, and future, all equally distanced, lost, consumed, as in ‘‘Paolo e Virginia’’: ‘‘La patria perduta / che non conobbi mai, che riconosco’’ (The lost homeland / that I never knew, that I recognize). The new century of technological innovations and political and cultural upheavals disappears in Gozzano under a heap of ‘‘ciarpame/ reietto, cosı` caro alla mia Musa!’’ (forgotten rubbish so dear to my Muse; ‘‘La signorina Felicita’’). For this reason, criticism has spoken of Gozzano as a poet on the cusp of modernism. And yet his first critic, Renato Serra, recognized Gozzano’s momentous contribution in his gesture of ‘‘renewal through impoverishment’’ (Review of I colloqui, 1965). Impoverished by the poet’s irony, literary models, meters, and ideals appear as poor as the poet in authentic experiences, emotions, and interpretation. The modernist crisis staged by Gozzano is not the impossibility of representing reality but rather the impossibility of living in and through representations. The outlook is consistently ironic and cynical and yet, in the last lines of the collection, a remnant of a lyrical world resists the corrosion of irony. There, the image of the child, in a concluding figure of de´doublement, leaves literature behind: ‘‘il fanciullo . . . (che) lasciava la pagina ribelle / per seppellir le rondini insepolte, / per dare un’erba alle zampine delle / disperate cetonie capovolte . . . .’’ (The child . . . [who] abandoned the rebellious page / to bury the unburied swallows / to give a blade of grass / to desperate upturned beetles; ‘‘I colloqui’’), offering a glimpse of authenticity that symbolically embodies the gesture performed by I colloqui as a whole. The childish act of piety, both an inauguration and a burial, foreshadows in images from the animal world another burial: the death of the figure of the poet as it had previously been understood. GIULIANA MINGHELLI 879

GUIDO GOZZANO Editions First edition: I colloqui. Liriche di Guido Gozzano, Milan: Fratelli Treves, 1911. Other editions: I colloqui e altre poesie, in Opere di Guido Gozzano, vol. 2, Milan: Treves, 1935; in Opere, edited by Carlo Calcaterra and Alberto de Marchi, Milan: Garzanti, 1948; in Poesie e prose, edited by Alberto de Marchi, Milan: Garzanti, 1968; in Poesie, edited by Edoardo Sanguineti, Turin: Einaudi, 1973; in Tutte le poesie, critical edition by Andrea Rocca, Milan: Mondadori, 1980. Translations: as The Man I Pretend to Be: The Colloquies and Selected Poems, translated by Michael Palma, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981; as The Colloquies and Selected Letters, translated by J. G. Nichols, Manchester, UK: Carcanet Press, 1987.

Further Reading Lenzini, Luca, ‘‘Il libro di passato. Sull’istanza narrativa dei Colloqui,’’ Studi Novecenteschi, 12:30 (1985), 275–307. Longhi, Silvia, ‘‘Il tutto e le parti nel sistema di un canzoniere,’’ Strumenti critici, 39–40 (1979), 265–300. Lorenzini, Niva, ‘‘I colloqui di Guido Gozzano,’’ in Letteratura italiana. Le opere, vol. 4, Turin: Einaudi, 1995. Marra, Monica, ‘‘Guido Gozzano tra ‘polifonia’ ed emotivita`,’’ Lingua e stile, 24:2 (1989), 307–327. Rocca, Andrea, ‘‘Fra le carte di Guido Gozzano: materiali autografi per I colloqui,’’ Studi di filologia italiana, 35 (1977), 395–471. Sanguineti, Edoardo, ‘‘Poesia e tecnica di Gozzano,’’ in Guido Gozzano. Indagini e letture, Turin: Einaudi, 1966. Serra, Renato, Review of I colloqui, in Ezio Raimondi, Il lettore di provincia: Renato Serra, Florence: Le Monnier, 1964.

CARLO GOZZI (1720–1806) A playwright who took an active part in the cultural life of eighteenth-century Venice, Carlo Gozzi owed his fortune to a cycle of theatrical Fiabe (Fables) that combine the spectacles of the old commedia dell’arte companies with a renewed taste for the ‘‘marvelous.’’ Gozzi was the last genial defender of the traditional Italian theater against the theatrical reform of Goldoni. Coming from a noble, but not rich, family, Gozzi was self-taught and so studied the ‘‘irregulars’’ Luigi Pulci, Il Burchiello, and Francesco Berni. His youthful compositions have remained unpublished: Berlinghieri, Don Chisciotte, Gonella, and La filosofia morale (Moral Philosophy). His Saggio di novelle (Presentation of Short Stories, 1747) may date to this period. A supporter of a stylistic variety, invective, and satire, he was among the founders, together with his brother Gasparo, of the Accademia dei Granelleschi (1747). His aptitude for satirizing customs, characters, and cultural ‘‘novelties’’ is evident in La tartana degli influssi per l’anno bisestile (The Tartan of Influences for Leap Year, 1756). The satire, written in various meters, attacks the culture and politics of the Enlightenment, as well as the literature that supports it. Its two main characters, recognizably drawn after Pietro Chiari and Carlo Goldoni, are depicted as awkward duelists and verbose men of letters 880

engaged in a controversy over the so-called reform of the theater. Goldoni’s reply, All’illustrissimo signor avvocato Giuseppe Alcaini (To the Most Illustrious Lawyer Giuseppe Alcaini, 1757) ignited the famous controversy that ensued. Gozzi responded with La scrittura contestativa al taglio della tartana (The Writing Protesting against Cutting the Tartan, 1758), which Goldoni then answered with La tavola rotonda (The Round Table, 1758). Gozzi answered back with I sudori d’Imeneo (The Labors of Hymen, 1759). At this stage the controversy centered on a prose work, which was censored and only published later, called Il teatro comico all’osteria del Pellegrino (The Comic Theater at the Pilgrim’s Tavern, 1805). Goldoni was portrayed as a ‘‘mostro, o chimera’’ (‘‘monster, or chimera’’) with four faces that impersonated the stock comic characters of the maschera: lovers, historical figures, and realistic characters. Gozzi criticized Goldoni’s La putta onorata (The Honored Whore, 1749) and the Buona moglie (The Good Wife, 1749) for portraying the nobles as grotesques, having servants speak like noblemen, and depriving the maschera stock comic characters of their magic. In the same year Gozzi began writing La Marfisa bizzarra (The Bizarre Marfisa, 1772), in which the heroine of Matteo Maria Boiardo’s chivalric romance transforms herself into a capricious lady. The paladin

CARLO GOZZI Dodone, a figure for the author, delivers judgment on characters and events, while Goldoni and Chiari, represented as knights, are again portrayed as confused. La Marfisa bizzarra renewed the form of the mock epic poem in the tradition of Berni and Giuseppe Parini, whom Gozzi explicitly mentions in his preface. When Antonio Sacchi, the famous Truffaldino of Goldoni’s Il servitore di due padroni (Servant of Two Masters, 1746), returned to Venice, Gozzi received him by writing Canto ditirambico de’ partigiani del Sacchi Truffaldino (A Dithyramb Poem of the Partisans of Sacchi Truffaldino, 1761). He began to make notations of scenes and ideas that eventually led to L’amore delle tre melarance (The Love of the Three Oranges), the first of ten scenic Fiabe dedicated to Sacchi, which premie`red in 1761 at the San Samuele Theater. Written with little dialogue, the fables recount how the sad prince Tartaglia is bound by a spell. His life depends on finding the three oranges that are also being sought by Morgana and her helper, the awkward magician Celio (both caricatures of Chiari and Goldoni). Thanks to the loyal Truffaldino, the prince will find salvation and happiness in his marriage to Ninetta. The plot, which allowed Gozzi to stage spectacular visual tricks, was inspired by a novella by Giambattista Basile, which blends folklore, allegory, and parody. Aware of having helped create a new genre, Gozzi turned from overt satire and began writing extended dialogues. Again drawing from Basile and from an eighteenth-century French short story based on Eastern tales, he wrote Il corvo (The Crow, 1761), the story of Millo, a spellbound, melancholic King of Frattombrosa, and Annilla, the daughter of a necromancer and the only person able to save his life. Then came Il re cervo (The Stag King, 1762), which recounts the love between Deramo, King of Serendippo, and Angela, the daughter of Pantaloon. Their love is opposed by Tartaglia, the first minister, and tested when a spell put on the king turns him into the stag of the title. Both works develop the roles and define the figurative and poetic value of the maschera stock comic characters. With the success of Turandot (1762), which minimizes the coups de the´aˆtre in telling the exotic love story between the beautiful and badtempered princess of China and the bold and unknown prince of the Tartars, determined to marry her at the risk of his own life, Sacchi moved to the more spacious Sant’Angelo theater. There, in October of the same year, he staged La donna serpente (The Snake Lady), in which a fairy princess falls in love with a mortal, defying the laws of her magic

world. She must make her spouse curse her and force him to undertake difficult tests to win her back. The fairy tale motif of the search for happiness was the key to the success of his subsequent works: Zobeide (1763), I pitocchi fortunati (The Lucky Beggars, 1764), Il mostro turchino (The Blue Monster, 1764), and L’augellino belverde (The Green Bird, 1765). The Fiabe conclude with Zeim re de’ geni (Zeim King of the Spirits, 1765), in which the ‘‘marvelous’’ again becomes the means to penetrate and change reality. With the cycle of tales at an end and Goldoni and Chiari having left Venice in 1762, Gozzi devoted himself to the fascinating and spectacular stories of the Spanish writers Pedro Calderon de la Barca, Tirso de Molina, and Juan de Matos Fragoso. The tragicomedies followed, among them La donna vendicativa (The Vindictive Woman, 1767), La caduta di donna Elvira (The Fall of Donna Elvira, 1768), Le due notti affannose (Two Troubled Nights, 1771), La malia nella voce (The Enchanting Voice, 1774), and Il moro di corpo bianco (The Moor with the White Body, 1775). These works are set in exotic environments and portray exceptional happenings. In 1771 significant changes took place in Sacchi’s troupe, which moved to the San Luca theater. Darbes, the maschera Pantaloon, left. Teodora Ricci, the troupe’s first woman, arrived and started a muchtalked-about relationship with Gozzi that lasted six years. Gozzi now wrote for Ricci, beginning with La donna innamorata di vero (The Woman in Love with Truth, 1771), a comedy with intreccio bizzarro (bizarre intrigue) that did not achieve its expected success. He then wrote La principessa filosofa (The Princess Philosopher, 1772), without maschera characters, and, most important of all, Le droghe d’amore (The Potions of Love, 1777), which caused a scandal because it caricatured, in the figure of Don Adonis, a lover of Teodora Ricci, who was forced to leave Venice. Ricci also left, but Gozzi would later compose one last comedy for her, L’amore assottiglia il cervello (Love Makes the Brain Thin, 1782). In the meantime, Gozzi decided to publish his own works. He first published the Fiabe, followed by Opere (1772–1774), a collection of his tragicomedies that included the famous Ragionamento ingenuo (Naı¨ve Reasoning) that argued against the prevailing drame larmoyant. Then came a second complete edition, Opere edite e inedite (1801–1804 and 1805). Finally he wrote his Memorie inutili (Useless Memoirs, 1797–1798), in response to libelous remarks by Teodora Ricci’s lover. Without minimizing the controversial events of his own life, he spoke up for the idea, so dear to the romantics, 881

CARLO GOZZI of dramatic art as a disinterested and ‘‘useless’’ activity. The ‘‘fortune’’ of Gozzi’s reputation, which has rested on the reception of his Fiabe, is emblematic and paradoxical. In Italy he was attacked by Giuseppe Baretti, Pietro Napoli Signorelli, and Francesco Albergati Capacelli, even though the latter imitated him. In the early nineteenth century, Ugo Foscolo and Niccolo` Tommaseo continued to criticize him, while outside Italy his Fiabe enjoyed extraordinary success. Translated into German (1777–1779), they fascinated the Sturm und Drang romantics, who saw in his works the triumph of spectacle and the mixing of exotic elements with a ‘‘popular’’ vocation. Lessing, the Schlegels (Friedrich compared him to Shakespeare), Tieck, Goethe (who staged Turandot in a translation by Schiller in 1802), and Hoffmann continued to value him. He enjoyed a similar success in France, where Madame de Stae¨l, Philare`te Chasles, and Alfred de Musset preferred him to Goldoni. Despite the late Italian recovery by Francesco De Sanctis and, subsequently, by Benedetto Croce, his most enthusiastic supporters remained Wagner and Schopenhauer. In the twentieth century, the Russian directors of formalist tastes preferred him to Stanislavskij’s realism. Vsevolod Mejerchol’d named the magazine Ljubov’k trem apel’sinam (1914–1916) after L’amore delle tre melarance. Evgenij Vachtangov staged a historic Turandot in Moscow (1922), and Aleksa`ndr Blok named another magazine after L’augellino, Zele¨naja pticˇka (1922), shortly before ideologues overthrew their judgments of Gozzi, whom they regarded as a reactionary aristocrat.

Biography Carlo Gozzi was born in Venice on December 13, 1720, the son of Count Iacopo Antonio and Angela Tiepolo, into a family of ten children. His studies were irregular, with the family in financial straits. Between 1740 and 1744 he was a volunteer in the Venetian army in Dalmatia. He wrote theater pieces for the company of Antonio Sacchi, first working at the San Samuele theater (1761) and then at the Sant’ Angelo (1762) and finally at the San Luca theater (1771). Between 1771 and 1776 he had a relationship with the actress Teodora Ricci, to whom he dedicated numerous comedies. Between 1772 and 1774 he published the eight volumes of the Colombani edition of his Opere; two more were published with the publishers Foglierini (1787) and Curti Vitto (1792). He prepared a 882

second extended edition of 14 volumes for Zanardi (1801–1804) to which a fifteenth was added in 1805, with nontheatrical works. Carlo Gozzi died in Venice on April 4, 1806. ROBERTO CUPPONE See also: Commedia dell’arte Selected Works Collections Opere, 8 vols., Venice: Colombani, 1772–1774. Opere edite e inedite, 15 vols., Venice: Zanardi, 1801–1805. Opere: Teatro e polemiche teatrali, edited by Giuseppe Petronio, Milan: Rizzoli, 1962. Five Tales for the Theatre (The Raven, The King Stag, Turandot, The Serpent Woman, The Green Bird), edited and translated by Albert Bermel and Ted Emery, Chicago-London: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Fiabe teatrali, edited by Alberto Beniscelli, Milan: Garzanti, 1994. Novelle, edited by Ricciarda Ricorda, Venice: Marsilio, 2001.

Plays L’amore delle tre melarance (produced 1761), 1772–1774; as The Love of the Three Oranges, translated by John Louis Di Gaetani, 1988. Il corvo (produced 1761), 1772–1774. La donna serpente (produced 1762), 1772–1774; as The Snake Lady, translated by John Louis Di Gaetani, 1988. Il re cervo (produced 1762), 1772–1774; as The King Stag, translated by Carl Wildman, 1958. Turandot (produced 1762), 1772–1774; as Calaf: A Rejected Drama, translated by Chrysalia, 1826; as Turandot, Princess of China, translated from the German of Schiller by Archer T. Gurney, 1836; as Turandot, translated by John Louis Di Gaetani, 1988. Zobeide (produced 1763), 1772–1774. Il mostro turchino (produced 1764), 1772–1774; as The Blue Monster, translated by Edward Joseph Dent, 1951. I pitocchi fortunati (produced 1764), 1772–1774. L’augellino belverde (produced 1765), 1772–1774; as The Green Bird, translated and adapted by John D. Mitchell, 1985. Zeim re de’ geni (produced 1765), 1772–1774. La donna vendicativa (produced 1767), 1772–1774. La caduta di donna Elvira (produced 1768), 1772–1774. Il pubblico segreto (produced 1769), 1772–1774. La donna innamorata di vero (produced 1771), 1772–1774. Le due notti affannose (produced 1771), 1772–1774. La principessa filosofa (produced 1772), 1801–1803. I due fratelli nemici (produced 1773), 1801–1803. La malia nella voce (produced 1774), 1801–1803. Il moro di corpo bianco (produced 1775), 1801–1803. Le droghe d’amore (produced 1777), 1801–1803. Il metafisico (produced 1778), 1801–1803. Bianca contessa di Melfi (produced 1779), 1801–1803. L’amore assottiglia il cervello (produced 1782), 1801–1803. Cimene Pardo (produced 1786), 1801–1803. La figlia dell’aria (produced 1786), 1801–1803.

GASPARO GOZZI Essays Saggio di novelle, 1747. La tartana degli influssi per l’anno bisestile, 1756. La scrittura contestativa al taglio della tartana, 1758. I sudori d’Imeneo, 1759. La Marfisa bizzarra, 1772. Ragionamento ingenuo, 1772–1774. Memorie inutili, 1797; as The Memoirs of Count Carlo Gozzi, translated by John Addington Symonds, 2 vols., 1890; as Useless Memoirs, translated by John Addington Symonds, 1962. Il teatro comico all’osteria del Pellegrino, 1805.

Further Reading Alberti, Carmelo (editor), Carlo Gozzi scrittore di teatro, Rome: Bulzoni, 1996. Beniscelli, Alberto, La finzione del fiabesco. Studi sul teatro di Carlo Gozzi, Casale Monferrato: Marietti, 1986. Bosisio, Paolo, Carlo Gozzi e Goldoni. Una polemica letteraria con versi inediti e rari, Florence: Olschki, 1979. Croce, Benedetto, ‘‘Il carattere delle fiabe di Carlo Gozzi,’’ in La letteratura italiana del Settecento, Bari: Laterza, 1949.

De Sanctis, Francesco, Storia della letteratura italiana, Naples: Morano, 1870–1871. Di Gaetani, John Louis, Carlo Gozzi: A Life in the 18th Century Venetian Theatre, an Afterlife in Opera, London: Jefferson, 2000. Guthmu¨ller, Bodo, and Wolfgang Osthoff (editors), Carlo Gozzi, Letteratura e musica. Atti del convegno internazionale, Venezia 11–12 ottobre 1995, Rome: Bulzoni, 1997. Luciani, Ge´rard, Carlo Gozzi ou l’enchanteur de´senchante´, Grenoble: Presses Universitaires, 2001. Ricco`, Laura, ‘‘Parrebbe un romanzo.’’ Polemiche editoriali e linguaggi teatrali ai tempi di Goldoni, Chiari, Gozzi, Rome: Bulzoni, 2000. Rusack, Hedwig Hoffmann, Gozzi in Germany: A Survey of the Rise and Decline of the Gozzi Vogue in Germany and Austria, with Especial Reference to the German Romanticists, New York: Columbia University Germanic Studies, 1930. Starobinski, Jean, ‘‘Ironie et me´lancolie: Gozzi, Hoffmann, Kierkegaard,’’ in Sensibilita` e razionalita` nel Settecento, edited by Vittore Branca, vol. 1, Florence: Olschki, 1967. Taviani, Ferdinando, and Mirella Schino (editors), Carlo Gozzi, Rome: Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, 2000.

GASPARO GOZZI (1713–1786) Gasparo Gozzi, journalist and writer, played a leading role in the cultural debates of eighteenthcentury Venice. Although known as a poet, essayist, translator, and theatrical impresario, he is most remembered as the founder and manager of three periodicals, La gazzetta veneta, L’osservatore Veneto, and Il sognatore italiano. The older brother of the famous dramatist Carlo Gozzi, Gasparo served his apprenticeship in a literary salon. Between 1731 and 1735, Antonio Sforza and the brothers Niccolo` and Anton Federico Seghezzi urged him toward Arcadian poetry, while his wife Luisa Bergalli, a poet and playwright, directed him toward Petrarch. He served as editor of Antonio Sforza’s Rime (Rhymes, 1736), for which he wrote a biographical essay. He went on to write letters, sonnets, and farcical verses, but the main work of this period involved a collaboration with the Venetian publisher Francesco Storti. His editorial work also included the ten-volume Poesie

drammatiche (Dramatic Poems, 1744) of Venetian librettist and critic Apostolo Zeno. In 1747, Gozzi, with his brother Carlo and other noblemen, founded the Accademia dei Granelleschi. He took the leading role in moderating the literary controversies, especially those revolving around Carlo Goldoni, then raging in Venetian cultural circles. One important work in this line is his Giudizio degli antichi poeti sopra la moderna censura di Dante attribuita ingiustamente a Virgilio (Judgment of the Ancient Poets on the Modern Censure of Dante Unjustly Attributed to Virgil, 1758), which became known as Difesa di Dante (Defense of Dante), in which Gozzi offered the first proto-romantic reading of Dante’s poetry in its historical context. Gozzi made his debut as a playwright at the San Samuele theater with adaptations of two tragedies by Hilaire-Bernard de Requeleyne Longepierre: Elettra (1743) and Medea (1746). His 883

GASPARO GOZZI passion for the theater and hope of profits led to his acquiring, with Bergalli’s help, the Sant’Angelo theater. But the verbose, moralistic French dramas, adapted from Voltaire and Destouches, that he staged failed to attract the Venetian public. Girolamo Medebach took over the company in 1748 and made Goldoni the company’s playwright. Gozzi’s Edipo (Oedipus, 1749) won Goldoni’s approval, however. Gozzi then tried his hand at melodrama with L’isola d’amore (The Island of Love), which premiered in 1752 at the San Moise` theater, and I tre matrimoni (The Three Marriages), staged at the San Samuele theater in 1756. He also created new adaptations of Voltaire’s Zaira (1749) and Marianna (1751). When the theatrical controversy between Goldoni and Pietro Chiari was at its height, Gozzi took aim at Chiari and so earned the sympathy of Goldoni, who dedicated the comedy L’impostore (The Impostor) to him. Finally, Gozzi wrote three ‘‘scenic representations’’ for the San Giovanni Crisostomo theater: Marco Polo (premie`re 1755) and Costantinopoli (Constantinople, premie`re 1755), better known as Enrico Dandolo, both of which take famous Venetians as their subject; and Antiochia (premie`re Antioch, 1758). This ‘‘historical’’ trilogy marked the end of his active work in the theater. He afterward became a trustee of the published work of Molie`re and translated the dramatic poem La morte di Adamo (The Death of Adam) by Friedrick Klopstock, which appeared in didactic journal/novel Il mondo morale. Gozzi went on to publish two volumes of Lettere diverse (Miscellaneous Letters, 1750–1752), with the significant title page that indicated that they were serious, facetious, capricious, letters, dealing with various moral points, and Sermoni (Sermons, 1763), a series of satires in verse. These works announced Gozzi’s new phase as a journalist. With financial help he began his first newspaper, the La gazzetta veneta (1760–1762), modeled on Addison and Steele’s The Spectator and The Tatler, in which Gozzi commented on Venetian customs, social types, and morality. His didactic moralism led him to create a second periodical, Il mondo morale (1760–1761), in which he combined elements of the newspaper and the novel to create a kind of moral novel in installments. The lack of success of these ventures did not prevent him from starting a third, more explicitly journalistic paper, L’osservatore veneto (1761–1762), in which he wrote more as a reporter or ‘‘observer’’ of reality. The 18 anonymous numbers of Il sognatore italiano (1768), a strongly anti-Enlightenment and conservative 884

paper, are also attributed to him. Gozzi’s attitudes toward Venice and Italian literature were quite mixed: He defended Venetian history but was disillusioned by its institutions; he loved the highest examples of Italian literary genius but was always drawn to the literary novelties coming from France.

Biography Gasparo Gozzi was born in Venice on December 4, 1713, the first of 11 children. He went to college in Murano and attended courses on mathematics and law in Venice. In 1738 he married Luisa Bergalli, with whom he had five children. He moved to Visinale, near Pordenone (1739) for financial reasons. Back in Venice, he was appointed to transcribe the catalog of the Library of San Marco (1754). Following a relationship with Marianna Mastraca, he lived alone for a short period. In 1762 he was made superintendent for prints and literary subjects at the Studio of Padua; in 1764 he was the superintendent for prints in Venice. He made the acquaintance of Caterina Dolfin, a noblewoman who stood by him in his final years. Between 1770 and 1775 he was involved in the reform of the Venetian school system: He elaborated a reform for the University of Padua and a project for lay public schools to replace those run by the Jesuits. The death of his wife (1779) and his own hypochondria led to a failed suicide attempt. In 1780 he married Sara Cenet, whom he had met in the house of Marianna Mastraca and who had served as his housekeeper since 1757. He moved to Padua, where he died on December 27, 1786. ROBERTO CUPPONE Selected Works Collections Opere in versi e in prosa, 6 vols., Venice: Occhi, 1758. Opere in versi e in prosa, 12 vols., edited by A. Salmistro, 1794. Opere, edited by A. Dalmistro, Padua: Tipografia della Minerva, 1818. Scritti di G. Gozzi con giunta d’inediti e rari, 3 vols., edited by Niccolo` Tommaseo, Florence: Le Monnier, 1849. Prose scelte e sermoni, edited by P. Pompati, Milan: Vallardi, 1914. Scritti scelti, edited by Nicola Mangini, Turin: UTET, 1960.

Plays Edipo, 1749. Constantinopoli (Enrico Dandolo), (produced 1755), 1758. Antiochia (premie`re 1758).

ARTURO GRAF Poetry ‘‘Favole esopiane,’’ 1748. ‘‘Rime piacevoli d’un moderno autore,’’ 1751. ‘‘Sermoni,’’ 1763.

Edited Works Antonio Sforza, Rime, 1736. Iacopo Nardi, Il segretario principiante, 1740. Apostolo Zeno, Poesie drammatiche, 10 vols., 1744. Dante Alighieri, La divina commedia, 1757. Giuseppe Baretti, Poesie piacevoli, 1764.

Translations Voltaire, Marianna, 1751. Teatro comico francese, 1754. Jean-Franc¸ois Marmontel, Novelle morali, 1762.

Other Della letteratura veneziana, 1752 (with Marco Foscarini). Lettere diverse, 1750–1752; edited by Fabio Soldini, 1999. Giudizio degli antihi poeti sopra la moderna censura di Dante attribuita ingiustamente a Virgilio, 1758.

Further Reading Amato, Marco, ‘‘‘Un libro cominciato e non finito’: l’attivita` giornalistica di Gasparo Gozzi,’’ Studi settecenteschi, 15 (1995): 163–234. Capaci, Bruno, ‘‘Lo stomaco di carta. Bagni termali e patologie mondane nelle lettere di Caterina Dolfin e Gasparo Gozzi,’’ Intersezioni, 16:2 (1996): 291–307. Crotti, Ilaria, and Ricciarda Ricorda (editors), Gasparo Gozzi: il lavoro di un intellettuale nel Settecento veneziano. Atti del convegno (Venezia-Pordenone 4–6 dicembre 1886), Padua: Antenore, 1989. Fido, Franco, ‘‘Gasparo Gozzi e la ricerca della felicita`,’’ Yearbook of Italian Studies, 8 (1989): 20–31. Ricco`, Laura,‘‘Parrebbe un romanzo.’’ Polemiche editoriali e linguaggi teatrali ai tempi di Goldoni, Chiari, Gozzi, Rome: Bulzoni, 2000. Ricorda, Ricciarda, ‘‘Gasparo e Carlo Gozzi,’’ in Il ‘‘Mondo vivo.’’ Aspetti del romanzo, del teatro e del giornalismo nel Settecento italiano, edited by Ilaria Crotti, Piermario Vescovo, and Ricciarda Ricorda, Padua: Antenore, 2001.

ARTURO GRAF (1848–1913) Influential literary critic and poet, Arturo Graf is an interesting example of a turn-of-the-century intellectual. His heterogeneous cultural background provided the context for his poetic and critical perspective, a diversity evident in a childhood spent in Athens, Trieste, and Bralia in Romania. Graf’s most notable works were collections of verse that illustrate the predominant poetic taste of that period. The French Symbolists and German Romantics play an important role in his poetic achievements, although his poetry is often enriched by Positivist reasoning and ironic posture. His lyrics reflect a strong subjective perspective; even his declaration of poetics, entitled Prometeo nella poesia (Prometheus in Poetry, 1880), which was released after his first major book of verses, Poesie e novelle di gioventu` (Poems and Tales of Youth, 1876), is a clear defense of such subjectivism. In other critical writings, especially Dello spirito poetico dei nostri tempi (On the Poetic Spirit of Our Times, 1877), Graf believed that poetry was not threatened by scientific developments but that it could incorporate them as well. Thus the dynamics between science and the arts was symbiotic in nature, not antagonistic. His best-known collection of

lyrics, Medusa (1880), relies primarily on images taken from s symbolist repertory. It was then followed by Dopo il tramonto (After the Sunset, 1890), Le Danaidi (Danaides, 1897), Morgana (1901), Poemetti drammatici (Dramatic Poems, 1905), and Le rime della selva (Rhymes of the Wood, 1906), which became theater dialogues. Graf’s poetry shows a pessimistic perspective that owes much to Giacomo Leopardi. Indeed Leopardi’s central role in defining Graf’s poetics is also confirmed in his seminal article ‘‘Una sorgente di pessimismo del Leopardi’’ (A Source of Leopardi’s Pessimism), published in the journal Nuova antologia in 1890. Furthermore, Graf’s verse is often melancholy in tone, existentially unsettled. This is especially true in Le rime della selva, addressed ‘‘alle Ombre, ai Silenzi, all’Anima occulta della Selva Nera’’ (to Shadows, to Silence, to the Hidden Soul of the Black Wood). Critics such as Benedetto Croce have not failed to remark that Graf’s poetic production has little relevance to his theoretical thinking. Graf’s partially autobiographic novel, Il riscatto (Redemption, 1901), reflects the author’s personal tragedies (his brother Ottone’s suicide), which 885

ARTURO GRAF brought him closer to religion, as the subsequent Ecco Homo (1908), a collection of aphorisms and parables, also attests. In pleasant prose style, Il riscatto recounts the life of protagonist Aurelio Agolanti from early childhood into his thirties. The character struggles with an uncertain future and the burden of his family legacy, when his discovery of his real parents unveils a dynasty whereby young men between the ages of 30 and 35 are struck by an irresistible suicidal tendency. According to his father’s will (his father committed suicide), Aurelio was adopted by relatives in order to conceal these family roots. A series of events alerts him to the truth, however, and compels him to face his terrible destiny. He unsuccessfully tries to avoid this destiny by means of science: He reads Ribot’s and Galten’s works on psychological and physical inheritance and undergoes several hypnosis sessions. Helpless and alone, he finally accepts fate when suddenly a woman named Viviana saves him: The power of love seems to defeat both science and fate. Graf ended his novel emphatically paraphrasing Virgil’s famous verse Omnia vincit amor (Love wins all). Graf’s other essential production was critical, connected contemporary intellectual issues; and he founded, with Rodolfo Renier and Francesco Novati, the prestigious Giornale storico della letteratura italiana in 1883. Works such as his inaugural lecture at the University of Turin Di una trattazione scientifica della storia letteraria (On a Scientific Treatment of Literary History, 1877) and La bancarotta della scienza (The Bankruptcy of Science, 1895) display the prominent role of Positivism in his cultural framework. His most enduring contributions were, however, erudite historical works, in particular those that reflect his interest in medieval culture: Roma nella memoria e nelle immaginazioni del Medio Evo (Rome in the Memory and Imagination of the Middle Ages, 1882), Miti leggende e superstizioni nel Medio Evo (Myths, Legends, and Superstitions in the Middle Ages, 1892–1893), as well as L’anglomania e l’influsso inglese in Italia nel secolo XVIII (Anglomania and the English Influence in Italy in the 18th Century, 1911). In these works, Graf paid close attention to historical detail, but such a focus on the particular also limited these essays, along with analysis that was too narrowly scientific. In spite of his Positivistic ideas, a wider perspective was present in his most literary works, Foscolo, Manzoni, Leopardi (1898), and Preraffaelliti, simbolisti ed esteti (Pre-Raphaelites, Symbolists and Aesthetes, 1897). 886

Biography Arturo Graf was born in Athens (Greece), on January 19, 1848, the son of a German father and an Italian mother. He moved to Italy, 1851, but was forced to leave Trieste because of family setbacks after the death of his father, 1855. After spending his childhood in Bralia (Romania), he moved to Naples, where Antonio Labriola influenced his philosophical and ideological (Marxist) thinking, 1863. He met Michail Bakunin in Naples, 1868. He obtained a law degree from the University of Naples, 1870. Graf was hospitalized in Vienna because of an ophthalmic desease, 1873. He obtained qualification as a teacher in Rome, 1875, and began to teach at the University of Turin, 1876. He wrote articles for Critica sociale and Nuova antologia, 1880. He was appointed professor of Italian literature at the University of Turin, 1882–1907. Along with Novati and Renier, he cofounded the Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 1883. He married Sofia Loescher Rauchenegger, 1893. Graf’s brother Ottone committed suicide, 1894. Graf died in Turin on May 30, 1913. DIEGO BERTELLI Selected Works Collections Poesie, edited by Ferdinando Neri, forward by Vittorio Cian, Turin: Chiantore, 1922. Opere critiche, 4 vols., Turin: Chiantoe, 1925–1927.

Poetry ‘‘Poesie e novelle di gioventu`,’’ 1876. ‘‘Medusa,’’ 1880. ‘‘Dopo il tramonto,’’ 1890. ‘‘Le Danaidi,’’ 1897. ‘‘Morgana,’’ 1901. ‘‘Poemetti drammatici,’’ 1905. ‘‘Le rime della selva,’’ 1906. ‘‘Poesie (1893–1906),’’ 1915.

Fiction Il riscatto, 1901. Ecce Homo, 1908.

Critical Writing Dell’epica neolatina primitiva, 1876. Dello spirito poetico dei nostri tempi, 1877. Di una trattazione scientifica della storia letteraria, 1877. Provenza e Italia, 1877. Storia letteraria e comparazione, 1877. Studi drammatici, 1878. La leggenda del paradiso terrestre, 1878. Prometeo nella poesia, 1880. La leggenda dell’amore, 1881.

ANTONIO GRAMSCI Roma nella memoria e nelle immaginazioni del Medio Evo, 1882. Cavalieri ed animali, 1884. L’insegnamento classico nelle scuole secondarie, 1887. Attraverso il Cinquecento, 1888. La crisi letteraria, 1888. Il diavolo, 1889; as Story of the Devil, translated by Edward Noble Stone, 1931. Questioni di critica, 1889. I precursori del barone di Mu¨nchausen, 1890. Una sorgente di pessimismo del Leopardi, 1890. Miti, leggende e superstizioni nel Medio Evo, 1892–1893. Il tramonto delle leggende, 1892. La bancarotta della scienza, 1895. Preraffaelliti, simbolisti ed esteti, 1897. Foscolo, Manzoni, Leopardi, 1898. Il canto XXVIII del Purgatorio, 1902. Victor Hugo cent’anni dalla nascita, 1902. Per una fede (con un saggio sul Santo di Antonio Fogazzaro), 1906. Per la nostra cultura. Un discorso e tre saggi, 1907. L’anglomania e l’influsso inglese in Italia nel secolo XVIII, 1911.

Other Lettere a un amico triestino, edited by Baccio Ziliotto, 1951. Lettere a Vittorio Cian, 1996. Confessioni di un maestro: scritti su cultura e insegnamento con lettere inedite, edited by Stefania Signorini, 2002.

Further Reading Allasia, Clara (editor), Arturo Graf militante, Turin: Scriptorium, 1998.

Baldacci, Luigi, ‘‘Arturo Graf,’’ in Poeti minori dell’Ottocento, vol. 1, Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1958. Borghese, Giuseppe Antonio, ‘‘Arturo Graf,’’ in Studi di letterature moderne, Milan: Treves, 1915. Calcaterra, Carlo, ‘‘Il sentimento del mistero nella poesia di Arturo Graf,’’ in Studi critici, Asti: Taglieri and Raspi, 1911. Cesareo, Giovanni Alfredo, Critica militante, Messina: Trimarchi, 1907. Cian, Vittorio, Arturo Graf, Turin: Bocca, 1918. Cian, Vittorio, ‘‘Graf nel primo centenario della nascita’’ (1948), in Scritti di erudizione e di storia letteraria, Siena: Maia, 1951. Croce, Benedetto, La letteratura della nuova Italia, vol. 2, Bari: Laterza, 1914. De Liguori, Girolamo, I baratri della ragione. Arturo Graf e la cultura del secondo Ottocento, Manduria: P. Lacaita, 1986. Defendi, Adrienne S., ‘‘Arturo Graf ’s Medusa: Toward a Demystification of Myth,’’ Italica, 77:1 (2000), 26–44. Farinelli, Arturo, Critici del mio tempo, Galatina: Tipografia Vergine, 1946. Lonardi, Gilberto, Arturo Graf, il lavoro perduto, la rima, Padua: Marsilio, 1971. Momigliano, Attilio, ‘‘Graf critico,’’ in Ultimi studi, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1954. Morandi, Maria, Arturo Graf, Rome: Mondadori, 1921. Petrocchi, Giorgio, Scrittori piemontesi del secondo Ottocento, Turin: Silva, 1948. Pirandello, Luigi, Saggi, poesie e scritti vari, Milan: Mondadori, 1977. Raimondi, Ezio, Anatomie secentesche, Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1966. Renier, Rodolfo, Arturo Graf, Turin: Paravia, 1913.

ANTONIO GRAMSCI (1891–1937) Widely acknowledged as one of the most innovative and influential Italian Marxist thinkers of the twentieth century, Antonio Gramsci was introduced to socialism between 1908 and 1911 by his brother Gennaro, a trade union official and a member of the PSI or Partito Socialista Italiano (Italian Socialist Party). At that time, he also became familiar with the contributors of the journal La Voce, which included the neo-idealist philosopher Benedetto Croce and the radical politician and historian Gaetano Salvemini. Yet, the young Gramsci’s interest lay more in Sardinian nationalism, and it was only in 1913, after he had relocated to Turin to

further his studies, that he joined the PSI and began contributing essays on cultural topics and commentaries on national and international events to the socialist journals Avanti! and Il grido del popolo. In 1915, despite the prospect of a promising career as a scholar of glottology and linguistics, Gramsci left the university and engaged in militant activism. Convinced that the agency of the proletariat could change historical course, he became involved in educational activities for working classes, delivering lectures on the writings of Karl Marx, the Paris Commune, and other topics relevant to the socialist struggle. 887

ANTONIO GRAMSCI It was this same belief in the agency of the proletariat that led Gramsci to support Italy’s intervention in World War I. Contrary to the majority of the members of the PSI, who remained resolutely neutral, Gramsci saw in the conflict an occasion to widen the socialist cause by way of the mass mobilization of the proletariat. The victory of the Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917 and the establishment of ‘‘soviets,’’ that is, associations of workers, peasants, and soldiers, increased Gramsci’s confidence that the demise of capitalism could occur via the people’s will. Therefore, he endorsed the methods and objectives of the Russian leaderships, writing approvingly of the Russian revolution in ‘‘La rivoluzione contro il Capitale’’ (The Revolution Against Capital ), published in Avanti! (24 November 1917), and editing a volume of essays, La citta` futura (Future City, 1917–1918), which stressed the importance of the social and political activity of the proletariat. The periodical L’ordine nuovo, which Gramsci cofounded in 1919 with Angelo Tasca, Umberto Terracini, and Palmiro Togliatti, took the socialist struggle one step further and was conceived as the forum for a successful revolution in Italy. With the post–World War I crisis that befell Italy in 1918, a wave of riots in the northern and central regions of the country rapidly developed into high levels of militancy during the ‘‘Biennio Rosso’’ (Two Red Years) 1919–1920. The experience of the Russian ‘‘soviets’’ prompted Gramsci to endorse the ‘‘Consigli di Fabbrica‘‘ (Factory Councils) that had been formed as the foundation of a new worker-run state, but since the PSI and the socialist trade union organizations did not back the activities of the workers, Gramsci voiced a harsh critique of the official positions of the party. By January 15, 1921, the ideological fracture between the reformist and the revolutionary wings of the Italian left widened, and Gramsci and other members of the party succeeded in creating the PCd’I (Partito Comunista d’Italia), a section of the Communist International under the leadership of the General Secretary Amadeo Bordiga. Meanwhile, the social tensions of the Biennio Rosso had provided much impetus to the growth of the Fascist movement, which claimed the ability to restore national order from the chaos caused by the recent workers’ agitation. Unlike many of the members of the PSI and PCd’I, Gramsci realized the danger of Fascism almost immediately and thought that the only way to counter its strength was to seize power by way of an alliance between working-class 888

parties and the bourgeois opposition to Fascism. In 1924, L’unita` was founded, following Gramsci’s directions, and, in the same year, he became the general secretary of the PCd’I and was elected to the House of Deputies. Rome was rocked by the assassination of the reformist Socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti that had occurred on June 10, 1924. The implication of Fascist extremists in the crime was clear, and a strong reaction ensued. Once again, Gramsci sought to ally the PCd’I with the opposition in order to defeat Benito Mussolini, but his proposed compromise failed. Despite parliamentary immunity, following the passing of special Fascist laws, on November 8, 1926, Gramsci was arrested in Lyons (France) and in 1928 sentenced to 20 years in the prison of Turi, near Bari. He would die on April 27, 1937, at the age of 46, his prison term having expired just five days earlier. Despite his increasingly failing health, Gramsci’s prison years were marked by a most extraordinary intellectual activity that is recorded in his copious prison writings. Gramsci’s preprison writings for Avanti!, La citta` futura, L’ordine nuovo, and Il grido del popolo document his early thoughts on national and international events, the function of intellectuals, the role of culture, and the responsibility of leftist parties in the creation of a revolutionary consciousness. The drama reviews that he wrote between 1916 and 1920 for Avanti!, generally known as Le cronache teatrali (Theater Chronicles), are especially noteworthy. Gramsci examined drama from the perspective of its writers, actors, public, and performances, and considered it as a privileged site for the perpetuation but also the subversion of dominant hegemonic forces. Among the playwrights he criticized was Dario Niccodemi, in whose work he saw a facile resolution of social contradiction and a means to reproduce and maintain the bourgeois status quo. Gramsci was also very critical of the use of drama as propaganda, which he located in works where myths of duty, virtue, and honor were at the service of nationalist war rhetoric. By contrast, he praised the work of Ibsen. In ‘‘La morale e il costume’’ (Morals and Customs), published on March 22, 1917, he hailed A Doll’s House as the embodiment of the positive social function of theater as well as a play that provided an alternative to the subjection of women that was part of the cultural fabric of the bourgeoisie. Gramsci’s early drama reviews reveal the influence of Neapolitan critic Francesco De Sanctis, whose Saggi critici (Critical Essays, 1869)

ANTONIO GRAMSCI and Storia della letteratura italiana (History of Italian Literature, 1870–1871) were well known to him. De Sanctis’s criticism was permeated by sociopolitical commitment and moral concerns; thus Gramsci could translate it into Marxian terms, while challenging Croce’s assessment of De Sanctis as a precursor of his own idealist aesthetics. Gramsci’s fame rests, however, on Quaderni del carcere (Prison Notebooks, 1975) and Lettere dal carcere (Prison Letters, 1947). Announced in a letter of March 19, 1927, to his sister-in-law Tatiana Schucht, Quaderni del carcere is a collection of over 30 ‘‘prison notebooks‘‘ written between 1929 and 1935, mostly in the prison of Turi. These writings were made public in a thematic edition, published by Einaudi between 1949 to 1951. While this edition had the merit of arranging Gramsci’s reflections by subjects, it did not account for the developments in his argumentation and therefore was superseded by the critical edition prepared by Valentino Gerratana in 1975. In Quaderni del carcere, Gramsci further elaborated his own interpretation of Marxist theory, while developing the concepts of egemonia (hegemony), blocco storico (historic bloc), intellettuale organico (organic intellectual), intellettuale tradizionale (traditional intellectual), letteratura nazional-popolare (nationalpopular literature), and societa` civile (civil society). Influenced by the revival of idealist thought carried out by Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile, Gramsci placed, at the center of Marxist inquiry, the power of human creativity and agency to effect social change. As a result, he questioned deterministic forms of Marxism, whereby the overthrow of the bourgeois order would occur as a result of capitalism’s internal contradictions, and revised the relationship between superstructural formations and the productive forces of the base from one of reflection into one of reciprocity. Among the many corollaries of this revision was Gramsci’s relentless emphasis on the importance of culture in organizing and forming the intellectual and moral collective will and his belief in the necessity of bridging the gap between theory and praxis, abstract epistemic systems and empirical sociopolitical reality. In addition to rethinking some of the fundamental tenets of traditional Marxism, Gramsci also created a synthesis of the international context of Marxist inquiry and the specificity of the European and especially Italian situation, where local class structures and political and economic systems

required different ideological models. While the thought of Lenin remained of fundamental importance for his work, Gramsci was convinced that the Marxist revolutionary strategy for the West had to be distinct from the one adopted in the Soviet Union. The structures of capitalist societies, he argued, required the undermining of egemonia, or the organization of consent to the prevailing bourgeois order by way of institutions of societa` civile, before the overthrow of the political state could occur. Hence, Gramsci studied the work of bourgeois intellectuals and developed counterhegemonic tactics that could be applicable to the revolutionary struggle of the subalterns. His writings subverted the figure of the traditional intellectual, that is the humanist, idealistically and illusorily autonomous social forces who had emerged in the separation between intellectuals and popular masses during the Renaissance and who were, for Gramsci, chiefly responsible for the lack of a ‘‘national-popular‘‘ literature in modern Italy. To the concept of the intellettuale tradizionale, Gramsci preferred that of the intellettuale organico. Rooted in the material, historical process of his time and defined according to his organic function as advocate of the popular masses, this new intellectual would articulate the spontaneous and fragmentary needs of the subaltern in a mature class-consciousness while countering existing hegemonies by creating and shaping alternative ones. The definition of intellectual activity in terms of its organic function also allowed Gramsci to widen the definition of the intellectual to encompass not only traditional figures of writers, philosophers, and artists but also of all those who were the voice of subaltern groups. With regards to the specificity of the Italian situation, Gramsci devoted much energy to examining the questione meridionale or Southern Question. Acquainted from his childhood in Sardinia with the plight of the Southern Italians as well as familiar, ever since his youth, with the work on the topic by Gaetano Salvemini, the author of La questione meridionale (The Southern Question, 1898– 1899) and other essays later collected in Scritti sulla questione meridionale (Writings on the Southern Question, 1896–1955), Gramsci was convinced that the moderate agrarian reforms introduced by the bourgeois-democratic state had not eliminated the destitute conditions of the Southern peasantry. In the social unrest that he witnessed in the industrialized city of Turin, Gramsci saw the occasion to overthrow the industrial-agrarian bloc, or blocco 889

ANTONIO GRAMSCI storico, created by Northern industrialists and the Southern landowners to the detriment of the subalterns, by way of an alliance between urban workers and Southern peasants. After the revolutionary moment, this alliance could introduce significant changes not only in the urban centers but also in the South where cooperatives could be created, land socialized, and the agricultural process made more productive through mechanization and rationalization. His reflections on the specificity of the Italian situation also led him to interpret the Risorgimento, the political and cultural struggle that led to the unification of the Italian peninsula in 1861, as a social revolution that was thwarted by a coalition between moderate liberals and the existing feudal order. The endemic disorder that ensued after Italy’s failed revolution also explained, for Gramsci, the bourgeoisie’s attempt at countering class unrest by supporting the rise of Fascism. Gramsci’s revision of nineteenth-century history proved to be extremely influential in post– World War II historiography and provided an alternative interpretation to Croce’s account of Risorgimento as the great achievements of Italian liberalism. In addition to Quaderni del carcere, while in prison Gramsci authored about 500 letters addressed to friends and members of the Schucht and Gramsci family. More than half of these letters were written to Tania Schucht, who provided him with moral and physical support during his imprisonment. Chiefly responsible for the popularity of Gramsci with the general Italian reader, the letters were made public in 1947, albeit in an edition censored by PCI leader Palmiro Togliatti and Felice Platone. Ranked as the most important example of epistolary writing in twentieth-century Italian culture, they provide insights into the physical and psychological pain endured by Gramsci as a confined human being and contain important reflections on political and cultural theory. Even though Gramsci’s writings were scarcely available to non-Italian readers before the 1960s, their scope and reach have acquired a worldwide resonance. While the teleological assumptions that inspired much of Gramscian writings have been subject to questioning with the new epistemic changes brought about by discourses of postmodernism and poststructuralism that followed the historical crisis of Marxism, Antonio Gramsci’s works continue to be a fundamental point of reference for political and cultural theorists, philosophers, historians, and literary critics. 890

Biography Antonio Gramsci was born in Ales, January 2, 1891. He studied at Liceo Dettori of Cagliari, 1908–1911. He was a correspondent for L’unione sarda. He studied further at the Facolta` di Lettere e Filosofia, University of Turin, in 1911–1915; joined the Italian Socialist Party, 1913; collaborated on Il grido del popolo and Avanti! 1915–1917; became editor-inchief of Il grido del popolo and founder of the Club di vita morale, 1917. Gramsci edited La citta` futura, 1917–1918 and cofounded L’ordine nuovo, 1919. He was a founding member of Partito Comunista d’Italia and founded Istituto di cultura proletaria, 1921. As a representative of PCd’I for Comintern of the Third International, he traveled to Moscow, where he discussed socialist revolutionary strategies with Lenin and met his future wife, Julka Schucht, 1922. He relocated to Vienna, 1923, and proposed the creation of a new workers’ paper, L’unita`, 1923. Gramsci was elected to House of Deputies, April 1924, and returned to Italy, May 1924. He became General Secretary of the PCI, 1924. His son Delio was born, September 1924. He traveled to Moscow for Comintern meeting, March 1925, and addressed Parliament and confronted Mussolini’s legislation, May 1925. Gramsci attended Lyons Congress, 1926. His son Giuliano was born, August 1926. He was arrested, November 1926, and sentenced to five years detention in Ustica (Sicily), 1927. He was tried in Rome and sentenced to 20 years, four months, and five days in the prison of Turi (Bari), 1928. He began Quaderni del carcere, 1929. Gramsci was transferred to a clinic at Formia, 1933, then transferred to Quisisana clinic in Rome, 1935; he died of cerebral hemorrhage, April 27, 1936. NORMA BOUCHARD See also: Communism Selected Works Political Writing Lettere dal carcere, edited by Palmiro Togliatti and Felice Platone, 1947; edited by Sergio Caprioglio and Elsa Fubini, 1965; as Letters from Prison, selected and translated by Lynne Lawner, 1973; as Gramsci’s Prison Letters, edited and translated by Hamish Henderson, 1988; as Letters from Prison, edited by Frank Rosengarten and translated by Raymond Rosenthal, 2 vols., 1994. Quaderni del carcere, 6 vols., 1949–1951; edited by Valentino Gerratana, 4 vols., 1975; as Prison Notebooks, vol. 1, translated by Joseph A. Buttigieg and Antonio Callari, 1992; as Further Selections from the Prison

ANTONIO GRAMSCI Notebooks, edited and translated by Derek Boothman, 1995; as Prison Notebooks, vol. 2, translated by Joseph A. Buttigieg, 1996. L’Ordine Nuovo, 1919–1920, 1954. Scritti giovanili, 1914–1918, 1958. Sotto la Mole, 1916–1920, 1960. Duemila pagine di Gramsci, vol 1. Nel tempo della lotta (1914–1916), vol. 2, Lettere edite e inedite (1912– 1937), edited by Niccolo` Gallo and Giansiro Ferrata,1964. Socialismo e fascismo: L’Ordine Nuovo, 1921–1922, 1966. Scritti 1915–1921, edited by Sergio Caprioglio, 1968. La costruzione del partito comunista, 1923–1926, 1971. Per la verita`: Scritti 1913–1926, edited by Renzo Martinelli, 1974. Cronache torinesi: 1913–1917, edited Sergio Caprioglio, 1980. La citta` futura: 1917–18, edited Sergio Caprioglio, 1982. Il nostro Marx: 1918–20, edited Sergio Caprioglio, 1984. La nostra citta` futura: Scritti torinesi (1911–1922), edited by Angelo D’Orsi, 2004.

Selected English Translations The Modern Prince and Other Writings, edited and translated by Louis Marks, 1957. Selections from Political Writings: 1910–1920, edited by Quintin Hoare and translated by John Matthews, 1977. Selections from Political Writings: 1921–1926, edited and translated by Quintin Hoare, 1978. Antonio Gramsci Pre-Prison Writings, edited by Charles Bellamy and translated by Virginia Cox, 1994.

Further Reading Bellamy, Richard, and Darrow Schecter (editors), Gramsci and the Italian State, Manchester, U.K., and New York: Manchester University Press, 1993. Cavalcanti, Pedro, and Paul Piccone (editors), History, Philosophy and Culture in the Young Gramsci, Saint Louis, MO: Telos Press, 1975. Clark, Martin, Antonio Gramsci and the Revolution That Failed, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977. Davico Bonino, Guido, Gramsci e il teatro, Turin: Einaudi, 1972. Fiori, Giuseppe, Vita di Antonio Gramsci, Bari: Laterza, 1966. Holub, Renate, Antonio Gramsci: Beyond Marxism and Postmodernism, London: Routledge, 1992. Joll, James, Gramsci, Harmondsworth, U.K., and New York: Penguin Books, 1978. Nemeth, Thomas, Gramsci’s Philosophy: A Critical Study, Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1980. Orru`, Eugenio (editor), Omaggio a Gramsci, Cagliari: Tema, 1994. Salvadori, Massimo L., Gramsci e il problema storico della democrazia, Turin: Einaudi, 1970, 1973. Spriano, Paolo, Introduzione a L’Ordine Nuovo (1919– 1920), in La cultura italiana del ‘900 attraverso le riviste, vol. 6, Turin: Einaudi, 1962. Spriano, Paolo, Torino operaia e socialista: Da De Amicis a Gramsci, Turin: Einaudi, 1972. S¸tipc¸evic´, Niksa, Gramsci e i problemi letterari, Milan: Mursia, 1968, 1974.

QUADERNI DEL CARCERE, 1975 Prison Notebooks by Antonio Gramsci

After his arrest in 1926, Antonio Gramsci was sentenced to a period of five years of detention in the island of Ustica. In a letter of March 19, 1927, to his sister-in-law Tatiana Schucht, Gramsci declared his desire to do something fu¨r ewig (for eternity) and outlined a plan for his writings while in prison. Between February 1929 and August 1935, he filled 33 notebooks containing about 3,000 pages. After his death, these notebooks were saved for posterity by one of Gramsci’s cellmates, Gustavo Trombetta, and by Tatiana Schucht, who numbered and sent them to Moscow to some of the members of the Communist Party of Italy. In the first page of Notebook 1, Gramsci provided a list of the 16 major topics that he intended to examine. These topics encompassed a wide array of historical and sociological subjects, ranging from the development of the Italian bourgeoisie and the Catholic Action Party to observations on Italian emigration, Americanism, and Fordism. However, since Gramsci’s plan was to examine the role of culture in processes of class domination and subordination, his list also included discussions of linguistics, folklore, popular literature, and canonical artworks. Gramsci addressed many of the topics that he listed but often could not develop his notes into finite arguments, and his writing must be considered as a series of comments and reflections at various stages of their completion. The open structure of the work is rendered more complex by Gramsci’s frequent use of code words so as to circumvent Fascist censorship. Between 1948 and 1951, at the height of the cold war, six volumes of Gramsci’s notebooks were published as Quaderni del carcere (Prison Notebooks) by Einaudi. Edited under the supervision of Palmiro Togliatti, the historical leader of the PCI (Partito Comunista Italiano), and Felice Platone, these volumes followed a thematic ordering. Such ordering sought to reinforce the links between

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ANTONIO GRAMSCI Gamsci’s thoughts and the indigenous Italian intellectual and cultural tradition while providing a theoretical framework for interpretation. While this edition made Gramsci’s thoughts more accessible, the substantial editing sacrificed the integrity of the original text. These six volumes were superseded by the critical edition of the notebooks published in 1975, once again by Einaudi. This edition is philologically more accurate, even though Valentino Gerratana, the editor, could not escape the cultural influence of the PCI, particularly strong in the early 1970s. Gramsci’s Quaderni del carcere address a variety of political and cultural themes that have proven to be extremely influential to historians, political scientists, literary critics, and scholars of popular culture and cultural studies. Among political themes, Gramsci discusses the national and international contexts of the socialist struggle and the organization of capitalism in the United States with the rationalization of labor and private life introduced by Taylor’s and Ford’s models of production. Much attention is also given to bourgeois and socialist forms of journalism. Topics related to Italian history, especially of the Risorgimento and the questione meridionale, are also analyzed at great lengths. Themes of cultural history encompass discussions of folklore, which Gramsci considered to be the subversive and revolutionary cultural production of the subaltern class, music, architecture, and melodrama. Numerous pages are also devoted to popular literature, including detective fiction, the serial novel, and the opera. Gramsci also devoted much attention to questions of language and literature and discussed works by Dante, Guido Cavalcanti, Niccolo` Machiavelli, Ugo Foscolo, Luigi Pirandello, Luigi Capuana, Alfredo Oriani, and the futurists. Gramsci’s understanding of literature runs counter to the neoidealist aesthetic of Croce, whereby artistic creation is the translation of an individual’s intuition or vision while matters of form remain subordinated to the practical need of the individual and, like creation, essentially divorced from history. By contrast, for Gramsci, a strict relationship existed between form and content, material and cultural practices. Hence, since both the artistic vision and its means of formal expressions are historicized, Gramsci praised Dante’s canto X of Inferno (the heretics in the Sixth Circle) for its dialectical effects in transforming the world of social and historical experience in both structure and language, and Pirandello’s theater for breaking with the tradition of bourgeois culture and promoting working-class 892

consciousness. By contrast, he criticized those writers whose works reproduced the values of the hegemonic groups, such as the futurists and the many offspring of the nineteenth-century reactionary novelist Father Bresciani (Giovanni Papini, Ugo Ojetti, Curzio Malaparte, Giuseppe Prezzolini, and Ardengo Soffici). Gramsci’s departure from Croce’s neo-idealist aesthetics explains his revisitation of Neapolitan critic Francesco De Sanctis, in whose work he located the militancy and social commitment necessary for a counterhegemonic cultural struggle capable of leading to an alternative social order. NORMA BOUCHARD Editions First Editions Il materialismo storico e la filosofia di Benedetto Croce, Turin: Einaudi, 1949. Gli intellettuali e l’organizzazione della cultura, Turin: Einaudi, 1949. Il Risorgimento, Turin: Einaudi, 1949. Note sul Machiavelli, sulla politica e sullo stato moderno, Turin: Einaudi, 1949. Letteratura e vita nazionale, Turin: Einaudi, 1950. Passato e presente, Turin: Einaudi, 1951.

Critical Edition Quaderni del carcere, edited by Valentino Gerratana, 4 vols., Turin: Einaudi, 1975.

Translations As Selection from the Prison Notebooks, translated and edited by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, New York: International Publishers, 1971. As Selections from Cultural Writings, translated by William Boelhower and edited by David Forgacs and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985. As Prison Notebooks, Vol, 1, translated by Joseph A. Buttigieg and Antonio Callari, New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. As Further Selections from the Prison Notebooks, translated and edited by Derek Boothman, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1995. As Prison Notebooks, Vol. 2, translated by Joseph A. Buttigieg, New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.

Further Reading Adamson, Walter L., Hegemony and Revolution: A Study of Antonio Gramsci’s Political and Cultural Theory, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. Bocock, Robert, Hegemony, London: Tavistock, 1986. Boelhower, William, ‘‘Antonio Gramsci’s Sociology of Literature,‘‘ Contemporary Literature, 22:4 (1981): 574–599. Buttigieg, Joseph, ‘‘Gramsci on Civil Society,‘‘ Boundary 2, 22:3 (1995): 1–32.

GIAN VINCENZO GRAVINA Buttigieg, Joseph, ‘‘Gramsci’s Method,’’ Boundary 2, 17:2 (1990): 60–81. Cochran, Terry, ‘‘Culture in Its Sociohistorical Dimension,’’ Boundary 2, 21:2 (1994): 139–178. Crehan, Kate A. F., Gramsci, Culture and Anthropology, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Davis, John A. (editor), Gramsci and Italy’s Passive Revolution, London: Croom Helm; New York: Barnes and Noble, 1979. Dombroski, Robert S., Antonio Gramsci, Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1989.

Femia, Joseph, Gramsci’s Political Thought: Hegemony, Consciousness, and the Revolutionary Process, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981. Ghosh, Peter, ‘‘Gramscian Hegemony: An Absolutely Historicist Approach,’’ History of European Ideas, 27:1 (2001): 1–43. Lucente, Gregory, ‘‘Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: Notes on Gramsci’s Theory of Literature and Culture,’’ Forum Italicum, 23:1–2 (1989): 168–177. Mouffe, Chantal (editor), Gramsci and Marxist Theory, London-Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979.

GIAN VINCENZO GRAVINA (1664–1718) Gian Vincenzo Gravina was one of the most complex and lively intellectual figures of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, and his activity as a literary theorist and jurist can be considered as one of the best results of the Neapolitan cultural milieu in which he was formed. From the example of masters such as Gregorio Caloprese, Serafino Biscardi, and Gregorio Messere, he acquired the antidogmatic and progressive spirit that characterized his entire intellectual path. These aspects of his personality found expression early in his life with Hydra Mystica (Mystic Hydra), published under the pseudonym Priscus Censorinus Photisticus in 1691. In this brief text, Gravina violently attacked Jesuit morals as well as the Aristotelianism still rampant in the Baroque age. All of his following works were devoted to the project of cultivating a cultural model capable of renewing Italian cultural institutions. His research followed two main directions, the first of which was juristic thought. His most important work in this field is Origines juris civilis (The Origins of Civil Law), published in Leipzig in 1708 and widely circulated in eighteenth-century Europe. The merit of this work consists in tracing the history of law in the context of the cyclical evolutions and involutions of social institutions. Gravina posited the agreement among citizens and the respect for civil liberties as the basis for the state. A consequence of this formulation was the complete condemnation of tyranny, always judged as unconstitutional. One of the salient aspects of Gravina’s work, his interweaving of erudition and theoretical clarity,

characterizes also his second field of interest, the nature and function of literature. The work that best synthesized the author’s thought and that had great impact on the culture of the period was Della ragione poetica (On Poetic Reason, 1708), divided into two books. The first considers the theoretical foundations of his thought and provides a critical analysis of classical literature, with particular attention to Homer. The second focuses on poetry written in the vernacular, of which Dante’s work is considered to be the greatest example. Gravina’s theoretical assumption was that God has given everyone the seeds of rational truth. Not everyone, however, has the capability to accessing these truths in their abstract form. Therefore, the work of the poet consists in translating them into a form that is concrete and thus accessible to all. In this perspective, great poets such as Dante and Homer are a bridge between God and human beings, and their function of mediation is the more effective the greater the content of truth of their works and their ability of affecting readers with the images they create. This theoretical perspective also explains Gravina’s polemic with the Baroque, which reduced poetry to a purely intellectual game incapable of depicting reality and emptied of any rational content. In the last phase of his thought, Gravina became progressively more interested in the theater as the form that most easily adapted to his ideal of art as a civilizing instrument for the masses. In 1715 he wrote Della tragedia (On Tragedy), which deals with the theoretical aspects of tragedy while criticizing the theatrical productions of authors such as 893

GIAN VINCENZO GRAVINA Torquato Tasso and Battista Guarino. In support of his own theses, Gravina had already published the volume Di Vincenzo Gravina tragedie cinque (Five Tragedies by Vincenzo Gravina, 1712), a collection of tragedies on classic subjects, Palamede, Andromeda, Appio Claudio, Papiniano, and Servio Tullio. In spite of the disappointing quality of these works, they provide a useful example of the evolution of the author’s thought. The strongest theme running through the plays is the clash between the tyrant and the intellectual, a high and noble figure who acts as a channel of communication between God and humanity and who ends up fatally defeated. While the tragedies clearly depict the themes that were dear to Gravina, they also testify to the increasing pessimism, in his later years, of an author who had always oriented his long career under the banner of intellectual reform. Gravina’s aesthetic theories enjoyed the support of many eighteenth-century intellectuals, including Voltaire (who, however, expressed serious reservations about his tragedies). The first author to dedicate a systematic study to his thought was Antonio Conti in ‘‘Dissertazione sopra la Ragione Poetica del Gravina’’ (Dissertation on the Poetic Reason of Gravina, 1751), and it was through his meditation that the teachings of Gravina came to influence the classicism of authors such as Ugo Foscolo. Following Conti’s study, Francesco De Sanctis harshly criticized Gravina for reducing poetry to simple ornamentation of rational truths (Storia della letteratura italiana, 1870), while Benedetto Croce considered his proposals antiquated in their connection to a utilitarian vision of poetry (Problemi di estetica e contributi alla storia dell’estetica italiana, 1910). Authors such as Hugh Quigley (Italy and the Rise of a New School of Criticism in the 18th Century, 1921) and John George Robertson (Studies in the Genesis of Romantic Theory in the Eighteenth Century, 1923) mitigated the position of Croce by showing how the author provided a link between sixteenthcentury poetics and modern aesthetics, and his importance in this respect has been re-reinforced by more recent studies such as those of Amedeo Quondam in Cultura e ideologia di Gianvincenzo Gravina (1968) and Filosofia della luce e luminosi nelle egloghe del Gravina (1970).

Biography Gian Vincenzo Gravina was born in Roggiano, near Cosenza, on February 18, 1664, to a well-todo family. He conducted his early studies under the tutelage of his cousin, Gregorio Caloprese. He 894

moved to Naples, 1680, where he studied with Serafino Biscardi, a distinguished jurist who directed him toward juristic historiography, and with Gregorio Messere, chair of Greek at the University of Naples. Gravina moved to Rome as an agent to Francesco Pignatelli, then bishop of Taranto, 1689. He became a professor of civil law, 1699, then of canon law, 1703, at the Collegio Romano della Sapienza. He was among the founders of the Arcadia with the title of Opico Erimanteo Bione Crateo, 1690. The relationship between Gravina and other members of the accademia, led by Giovan Mario Crescimbeni, soon became tense. Gravina and his followers left the Arcadia, 1711, and formed the Accademia dei Quirini, 1714, which dissolved soon after the death of its founder. Gravina died in Rome on January 6, 1718. MATTIA BEGALI See also: Arcadia (Accademia); Neoclassicism Selected Works Collections Opera omnia, edited by J. Moscov, 3 vols., Naples: Raimondi, 1756–1757. Scritti critici e teorici, edited by Amedeo Quondam, Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1973.

Essays Hydra Mystica, 1691; edited by Fabrizio Lomonaco, 2002. Delle antiche favole, 1696. Opuscola, 1696. Origines juris civilis, 1708. Della tragedia, 1715. Della ragione poetica, 1708; edited by Giuseppe Izzi, 1991.

Tragedies Di Vincenzo Gravina tragedie cinque, 1712.

Further Reading Carena, Tiziana, Critica della ragion poetica di Gian Vincenzo Gravina: l’immaginazione, la fantasia, il delirio e la verosomiglianza, Milan: Mimesis, 2001. Croce, Benedetto, Problemi di estetica e contributi alla storia dell’estetica italiana, Bari: Laterza, 1910. De Sanctis, Francesco, Storia della letteratura italiana, 2 vols., Naples: Morano, 1870. Ghisalberti, Carlo, Gian Vincenzo Gravina giurista e storico, Milan: Giuffre`, 1962. Lo Bianco, Rosalba, Gian Vincenzo Gravina e l’estetica del delirio, Palermo: Centro internazionale studi di estetica, 2001. Nikitinski, Oleg, Gian Vincenzo Gravina nel contesto dell’umanesimo europeo: per una rivalutazione dell’immagine di Gravina, Naples: Vivarium, 2004. Piccolomini, Manfredi, Il pensiero estetico di Gianvincenzo Gravina, Ravenna: Longo Editore, 1984.

ANTON FRANCESCO GRAZZINI (‘‘IL LASCA’’) Quigley, Hugh, Italy and the Rise of a New School of Criticism in the 18th Century, Perth: Munro & Scott, 1921. Quondam, Amedeo, Cultura e ideologia di Gianvincenzo Gravina, Milan: Mursia, 1968. Quondam, Amedeo, Filosofia della luce e luminosi nelle egloghe del Gravina. Documenti per un capitolo della cultura filosofica di fine Seicento, Naples: Guida, 1970.

Robertson, John George, Studies in the Genesis of Romantic Theory in the Eighteenth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923. Ulivi, Ferruccio, ‘‘La cultura del primo settecento e G. V. Gravina,’’ in Settecento Neoclassico, Pisa: NistriLischi, 1957.

ANTON FRANCESCO GRAZZINI (‘‘IL LASCA’’) (1503–1584) Grazzini is an important representative of the sixteenth-century popular literature that opposed itself to the classicizing taste of the age and to the refined artistic ideals of Pietro Bembo. An independent and rebellious figure, he participated passionately in the debates over the questione della lingua, asserting a pronounced Florentine literary identity. He promoted the knowledge of and publication of works by popular Tuscan authors, as well as the use of the spoken language. To defend these ideals, he founded, along with several others, the Accademia degli Umidi (1540). The pseudonyms of the academy members were to be connected with water; Grazzini settled on ‘‘Lasca’’ (a fresh water fish), by which he was already known and which he kept for the rest of his life. His opposition to the classicizing tendencies subsequently adopted by the Academy, which transformed itself in 1541 into the Accademia Fiorentina, led to his expulsion for 20 years (1547–1566). His poor relations with contemporary men of letters and academicians made it difficult to circulate his works, many of which were published posthumously in the eighteenth century. Of his vast and varied literary productions, many texts have been lost, and others seem incomplete and of uncertain date. Known for his plays and above all for his stories, he wrote sonnets, songs, ballads, carnival songs, eclogues, madrigals, capitoli, epitaphs, and letters. In 1584, he tried his hand as well at an unfinished playful poem, La guerra dei mostri (The War of the Monsters), in octaves, whose target, the monsters, are the literary enemies of the Umidi. His Rime appeared, during his life, in occasional publications, such as those for the death of Michelangelo and of Benedetto Varchi. The complete

collection of Rime (Poems, 1741–1742) was published only in the eighteenth-century edition by the Accademia della Crusca, which Il Lasca, in 1582, helped to found. This edition suffers from the inspection of the ecclesiastical authorities, who censured and manipulated some of the texts. These compositions bear the explicit influence of the anti-Petrarchist and colorful burlesque poetry of Francesco Berni, of whom Grazzini declared himself a great admirer. He made his debut as a playwright in 1541 with the staging of the three-act farce Il Frate (The Friar). Attributed to Machiavelli and published in 1769, Il Frate was recognized to be the work of Grazzini only at the end of the nineteenth century. Between 1540 and 1566 he composed the comedies: La Gelosia (Jealousy, 1551), performed in Florence during the carnival of 1550 and built around a prank thought up by a servant at the expense of his old master; and La Spiritata (The Possessed Woman, 1561), a comedy that had great success and was performed in Bologna in 1560. The protagonist is a young woman who pretends to be possessed in order to extort from an old miser the money necessary to marry his son. The old man is forced to consent to the marriage in order to recover the 3,000 scudi of which he has been robbed. La Strega (The Witch), La Sibilla (The Sibyl), La Pinzochera (The Go-Between), and I Parentadi (The Kinships), which were published together in a Venetian edition of the comedies in 1582, and L’Arzigogolo (The Quibble), published in 1750, were not staged during his lifetime. They are comedies built around the theme of intrigue-deception, in which the author is able to create original comicburlesque situations, supported by the liveliness of 895

ANTON FRANCESCO GRAZZINI (‘‘IL LASCA’’) the dialogue and the expressive realism of spoken language. As a comedian, Grazzini, although he never broke with the Plautine and Terentian tradition, had decisive intentions of renewal with respect to the classical model and showed a great interest in and openness toward the world of masks. His most important work is the Le Cene (The Suppers, 1756), written between 1549 and his death. The initial project of an organic collection of some 30 novelle remains incomplete—the first posthumous edition contains only 22 of them. The model is explicitly the Decameron, from which he derived the same ‘‘frame’’: Five young men and five women decide to tell stories to one another, on three successive days, while waiting for dinner (hence the title), with ten stories each night. To make ‘‘allegramente passar il tempo’’ (the time pass happily) forms the principal objective declared by the author, who thus reveals his characteristics, but also his own limits. The ideological and civil engagement that animates much of the work of contemporary ‘‘court’’ writers is absent in Le Cene of Grazzini, who is a stranger to political passion and any ethical preoccupation. His predilection for comic themes answers the need for pure entertainment. The stories are built around the dominant theme of the prank or hoax, united with elements of violence, cruelty, and horror, which are described with pitiless realism. The initially playful mechanism of the prank approaches tragic consequences; the comic element is interwoven with the dramatic, rich with bloody overtones. Doctors, astrologists, pedagogues, betrayed husbands and wives, unfaithful spouses, country priests, artisans, merchants— the characters of Le Cene inhabit the panorama of city life in which the streets, palaces, churches, piazzas, and neighborhoods of Florence are recognizable. Within this closed petit-bourgeois world move the mocked and the hoaxers, who are portrayed sympathetically for the ingenuity of their cunning and with no pity for the victims. Despite superficial analogies, the influence of the Decameron is restricted to the formal expedient of the frame and the thematic flavor of the prank. Grazzini’s language is the lively and popular version of spoken Florentine, intentionally distant from the golden style of Boccaccio, who was taken up as a model by many storytellers of the sixteenth century.

Biography Anton Francesco Grazzini was born in Florence on March 22, 1503. His father was a notary. He did 896

not pursue a course of regular studies. He himself declared that he did not care for the classics and did not know Latin. He had a specialty goods shop. His long life unfolded entirely within the city of Florence, which he left only for brief holidays. He was one of the founders of the Accademia degli Umidi in 1540. He was elected chancellor in 1541. He was expelled from the Accademia in 1547 and was readmitted only in 1566. He helped to found the Accademia della Crusca in 1582. Grazzini died in Florence on February 18, 1584, and is buried in the church of San Pietro Maggiore. DANIELE VIANELLO Selected Works Collections Teatro, edited by Giovanni Grazzini, Bari: Laterza, 1953. Opere, edited by Guido Davico Bonino, Turin: U.T.E.T., 1974.

Poetry ‘‘Rime,’’ 2 vols., 1741–1742; as Le rime burlesche edite e inedite, edited by Carlo Verzone, 1882.

Plays Il Frate (1541); in Commedie, terzine ed altre opere edite ed inedite di N. Macchiavelli, 1769. La Gelosia, 1551. La Spiritata, 1561. La Strega, 1582. La Sibilla, 1582. La Pinzochera, 1582. I Parentadi, 1582. L’Arzigogolo, 1750.

Short Stories ‘‘Le Cene,’’ 1756; edited by E. Mazzali, 1989; as The Story of Doctor Manente: Being the Tenth and Last Story from the Suppers of Anton Francesco Grazzini, called il Lasca, translated by D. H. Lawrence, 1929.

Further Reading Ba`rberi Squarotti, Giorgio, ‘‘Struttura e tecnica delle novelle del Grazzini,’’ Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 138 (1961): 497–521. Cottino-Jones, Marga, ‘‘‘L’invenzione e il mondo’ de ‘Le cene’ del Lasca,’’ in Il dir novellando: modello e deviazioni, Rome: Salerno, 1994. Plaisance, Michel, ‘‘La structure de la ‘beffa’ dans les Cene d’Antonfrancesco Grazzini,’’ in Formes et significations de la ‘‘beffa’’ dans la litte´rature italienne de la Renaissance, edited by Andre´ Rochon, Paris: Universite´ de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1972. Plaisance, Michel, ‘‘Re´e´critures et e´criture dans les deux commentaires burlesques d’Antonfrancesco Grazzini,’’ Re´e´critures et e´criture dans les deux commentaires, parodies, variations dans la litte´rature de la Renaissnace, 1 (1983): 185–223.

TOMMASO GROSSI Plaisance, Michel, ‘‘Une repre´sentation burlesque du Parnasse dans le ‘Piangirida’ d’Antonfrancesco Grazzini,’’ Chroniques italiennes, 63–64 (2000): 209–215. Rodini, Robert J., Anton Francesco Grazzini Poet, Dramatist and Novelliere (1503–1584), Madison-London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970. Spalanca, Carmelo, Anton Francesco Grazzini e la cultura del suo tempo, Palermo: Manfredi, 1981.

Spalanca, Carmelo, ‘‘Le ‘Rime’ di Anton Francesco Grazzini e la cultura del suo tempo,’’ in Il Rinascimento. Aspetti e problemi attuali, edited by Vittorio Branca et al., Florence: Olschki, 1982. Trovato, Roberto, Anton Francesco Grazzini: un commediografo fra tradizione e modernita`, Genova: La Quercia, 1996.

TOMMASO GROSSI (1790–1853) Like a wolf in search of food that comes down from snow-covered mountains, so Griso, setting off toward Monza, ‘‘leva il muso, fiutando il vento infido’’ (raises his snout, sniffing a treacherous wind). In the eleventh chapter of I promessi Sposi (The Betrothed, 1840–1842), improving the zoomorphic simile with a poetic verse, Alessandro Manzoni declared that he had drawn it from I Lombardi alla prima crociata (The Lombards in the First Crusade, 1826) while going through the papers of its author, Tommaso Grossi, in virtue of their fraternal friendship. The success prophesied at the time by Manzoni for Grossi’s heroic poem was also due, in an indirect fashion, to the libretto of the same title that Temistocle Solera drew from it in 1843 for the opera set to music by Giuseppe Verdi. Concerning this deep friendship, Grossi’s later confirmation sounds more contrite and deferential: In 1834, he ‘‘candidamente’’ (ingenuously) offered to Manzoni,‘‘colla riverenza d’un discepolo, [...] coll’amore d’un fratello’’ (with a disciple’s reverence, [...] with a brother’s love), his novel Marco Visconti. In 1816, in the shadow of Carlo Porta, Grossi developed his first experiences of dialectal poetry in various registers. La pioggia d’oro (The Golden Rain, 1816), which is against the excessive use of mythology, has a satirical flavor, as does Prineide (The Priniad, 1816), in which the reference to the lynching of the minister Prina is a pretext for an anti-Austrain polemic. La fuggitiva (The Fugitive, 1816), a woman’s sad tale of love and death, set against the backdrop of the Russian campaign, is sentimental in tone. Transposing a similar plot into Italian but situating it now at the time of Barbarossa, Grossi inaugurated the romantic fortune of the verse tale with Ildegonda (1820), on the model of Gottfried Bu¨rger’s Lenore. His last effort in

dialect was ‘‘In morte di Carlo Porta’’ (On the Death of Carlo Porta), sestets composed in 1821, when Grossi edited the first complete edition of Porta’s Poesie edite in dialetto milanese (Published Poems in Milanese Dialect), prefaced by a moving commemoration. However, his most successful and ambitious projects gravitated toward the orbit of Manzoni: the poem I Lombardi alla prima crociata, in 15 cantos in octaves, and the novel Marco Visconti, whose subtitle is Storia del Trecento cavata dalle cronache di quel tempo (A Story of the Fourteenth Century Drawn from the Chronicles of the Day). In Marco Visconti, even the lakeside landscape of Bellagio, Lecco, and Bellano (which was Grossi’s native landscape) is interpreted through Manzoni. Here, ‘‘a mezza costa’’ (halfway up the hillside), rises the small village of Limonta, ‘‘una terricciola presso che ascosa fra i castagni’’ (a hamlet practically hidden by the chestnut trees), just as ‘‘E` Pesacrenico una terricciola, sulla riva sinistra dell’Adda’’ (Pesacrenico is a hamlet on the left bank of the Adda). As for characters, the count Oldrado del Balzo, learned like Don Ferrante and timid like Don Abbondio, is also thoroughly Manzonian. Marco Visconti aspires to the tragic charisma of the Innominato, although to a less austere degree since he is still tormented by love and jealousy. While the topos of a blocked marriage is at the core of the plot, Grossi’s two betrothed, Bice del Balzo and Ottorino Visconi, are very far from Renzo and Lucia and are meant for a quite different fate. Ottorino is a graceful knight; Bice is a fairhaired damsel who has inherited her pathos-filled weakness from La fuggitiva and Ildegonda. One faint Manzonian echo, to be found in her death scene, is perhaps Ermengarda from Adelchi (1822). 897

TOMMASO GROSSI The minor figures are satellites of the protagonists: Lauretta, Bice’s maid and confidante, and Lupo, Ottorino’s squire. Making his knight the champion of daring deeds, Grossi got to the heart of the chronicle of 1329, which shapes the plot. The fall of Ludwig the Bavarian and the papal schism are the context in which Marco hatches his plan to make himself lord of Milan by discrediting his nephew Azzone with the emperor. It is a subtle maneuver that contrasts with his image as a valorous leader, and its guilt falls on the evil adviser Lodrisio and on the perfidious henchman Pelagrua. In this way, the moral scheme appears simplified: good on the one side, evil on the other. Marco rises above both spheres, trembling with rage and capable of sublime emotions; always titanic, even in the delirium of his amorous passion, when in the beauty of the 16-year-old Bice he contemplates the image of Ermelinda, her mother, and his unforgotten first love. His belated conversion, through the grace of Ermelinda, does not manage to reestablish justice and order: Bice dies of languishing exhaustion, Ottorino goes crusading, and the wicked go unpunished, allowing the author cautious reflections on the long-term workings of Providence. Edifying and liberating, the end is in harmony with the lyrical and pathos-filled vein that emerges in the novel when the grief of the old boatman at the death of his son is represented or when the jongleur Tremacoldo sings the verses of ‘‘Rondinella pellegrina’’ (The Little Pilgrim Swallow). Upon Bice’s death there returns the theme of female love, passionate, fragile, and doomed, and celebrated by Grossi in his verse tales. This is a crucial motif of his sensibility that goes back to his sentimental inclination, diverted in the satirical results of his early work in dialect. After driving his most challenging effort, his sensibility also abounds in his last tale of desperate love, Ulrico e Lidia (Ulrich and Lydia, 1837). The fourteenth-century story of Marco Visconti that disappointed Manzoni because it did not glow with ‘‘lo spirito d’azione’’ (the spirit of action) remains an indispensable document, precisely as a ‘‘meloromanzo’’ (melonovel) of a culture and a taste, as Folco Portinari called it (Le parabole del reale, 1976). It holds, in its pages, the spirit of the age.

Biography Tommaso Grossi was born in Bellano, a Lombard village near Lecco, on January 23, 1790. His uncle, a canon in Treviglio, provided for his education 898

and would have had him become an ecclesiastic. Having given proof of his exuberant temperament with an adventurous flight from Lecco’s seminary, Grossi began other studies, and in 1810 he obtained a degree in jurisprudence at the University of Pavia. Moving to Milan in order to practice, he came into contact with the city’s literary circles and entered into friendship with Carlo Porta. When the anonymous Prineide came out in 1916, and the Austrian police suspected Porta of being the author, Grossi claimed responsibility, suffering a fine and two days of confinement in January 1817. In 1822, he moved into the home of Alessandro Manzoni, and there he conceived his works of greatest range; then, as though to declare his richest creative period finished, he concentrated more on his profession as a notary, though he maintained his literary relationships. He married Giovannina Alfieri, with whom he had two daughters, in 1838. He wrote a document proclaiming the popular desire to annex Lombardy to Piedmont and composed a brief poem to celebrate the Cinque Giornate, June 1848. On the return of the Austrians, he was therefore forced to flee to Switzerland and lived in Lugano for a short time. Grossi died in Milan on December 10, 1853. EMMA GRIMALDI See also: Historical Novel Selected Works Collections Opere complete, Naples: Rossi, 1851. L’arcadia all’incanto. Scritti inediti, edited by Adriano, Bozzoli Milan and Varese: Istituto editoriale Cisalpino, 1971. Opere poetiche, edited by Raffaele Sirri, Naples: Rossi, 1972. Poesie milanesi, edited by Aurelio Sargenti, Milan: Scheiwiller, 1988.

Novels Marco Visconti, 1834. Ulrico e Lidia, 1837.

Poetry ‘‘La pioggia d’oro,’’ in Poesie di Tommaso Grossi, Carl’Alfonso Pellizzone, Francesco Bellati, Giuseppe Zanoja, 1816. ‘‘La fuggitiva,’’ in Poesie di Tommaso Grossi, Carl’Alfonso Pellizzone, Francesco Bellati, Giuseppe Zanoja, 1816. ‘‘Prineide’’ (1816); edited by Umberto Gualdoni, 1996. ‘‘Ildegonda,’’ 1820. ‘‘I Lombardi alla prima crociata,’’ 1826.

Edited Work Carlo Porta, Poesie edite in dialetto milanese, 1821.

GIOVANNI GUARESCHI Further Reading Borrelli, Clara, ‘‘L’antitassismo di Tommaso Grossi ne I Lombardi alla prima crociata,’’ Annali Istituto Universitario Orientale, Napoli, 38:2 (1996), 271–285. Cenni, Alessandro, C’era una volta I lombardi: Tommaso Grossi e il suo tempo, Milan: Viennepierre, 1999. Chandler, S. Bernard, ‘‘La religione in alcuni romanzi del Settecento e nei romanzi storici di Tommaso Grossi e Massimo D’Azeglio,’’ Esperienze Letterarie, 17:1 (1992), 16–37. De Sanctis, Francesco, ‘‘Tommaso Grossi e la maniera romantica,’’ in La scuola cattolico-liberale e il romanticismo a Napoli, edited by Carlo Muscetta and Giorgio Candeloro, Turin: Einaudi, 1953.

Macchia, Giovanni, ‘‘Origini europee del Romanticismo,’’ in Storia della Letteratura Italiana, edited by Emilio Cecchi and Natalino Spegno, vol. 7, Milan: Garzanti, 1969. Manzoni/Grossi, 2 vols., Milan: Casa del Manzoni, Centro nazionale studi manzoniani, 1991. Orioli, Giovanni, ‘‘Teorici e critici romantici,’’ in Storia della Letteratura Italiana, edited by Emilio Cecchi and Natalino Spegno, vol. 7, Milan: Garzanti, 1969. Portinari, Folco, Le parabole del reale. Romanzi italiani dell’800, Turin: Einaudi, 1976. Romagnoli, Sergio, Manzoni e i suoi colleghi, Florence: Sansoni, 1984.

GROTTESCO See Teatro grottesco

TOMMASO GUARDATI See Masuccio Salernitano

GIOVANNI GUARESCHI (1908–1968) In 1989, the weekly book review supplement of the newspaper La Stampa of Turin received about 10,000 responses to its survey for the best book of the twentieth century. Somewhat surprisingly, the winner was Don Camillo (The Little World of Don Camillo, 1948), the first volume of Giovanni Guareschi’s cycle Mondo piccolo (The Little World). However, while the author enjoys the status of a modern classic among readers, critics remain

for the most part indifferent to his works. His continued success is also due to the tireless efforts of his son and daughter Alberto and Carlotta Guareschi, who have been able to bring the paradigmatic author of the popular Italy of the 1940s and 1950s to new generations of readers. An indefatigable and inventive author, Guareschi wrote regularly for over 30 years for numerous publications, including the humorous biweekly Il Bertoldo 899

GIOVANNI GUARESCHI (1936–1943), of which he was also the editor-inchief, and Candido, which he cofounded with Giovanni Mosca in 1945. He obtained his best results in the genre of the short story, of which he wrote 346 (his corpus is one of the largest of the twentieth century), while his novels such as Il destino si chiama Clotilde (Duncan & Clotilda, 1942) and Il marito in collegio (School for Husbands, 1944), published during the war and addressed to a lower-middle-class readership eager for amusement, are overall disappointing. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Il destino si chiama Clotilde is the ‘‘digression’’ in which the author described a fantastic Latin America that is in fact a sharp parody of peaceless totalitarian Europe. Guareschi’s antagonistic temperament and his penchant for allegory and thinly disguised autobiography are evident in La scoperta di Milano (The Discovery of Milan, 1941), in which the city is considered from the point of view of Giovannino and Margherita, a young couple from the provinces, and assumes a surreal and fantastic atmosphere that recalls the works of Guareschi’s friend Cesare Zavattini, who was responsible for introducing him into mainstream journalism after their common apprenticeship in the vital but narrow circle of journalism in Parma. In La scoperta di Milano, the guardian angel Camillo also makes an appearance, foreshadowing the parish priest of the same name in Guareschi’s more successful fiction. However, it was the experience of the war and prison, recalled in Diario clandestino: 1943–1945 (My Secret Diary, 1943–1945, 1949), that marked a sharp break in the work of Guareschi, who at last began to give shape to the fantasies destined to become the Mondo piccolo. The village in Guareschi’s heart, placed in generic terms between the river Po and the Apennines, is characterized by a series of typical and recurrent traits: the church tower, the square, the working-class Communist club, the inns, the workshops of the craftsmen, the foggy climate of the Bassa (the region between the provinces of Parma and Reggio Emilia). Caught, like much of Italy in the postwar period, in the transition between agriculture and industry, it is a virtual village that could easily be placed anywhere on the map. The main characters of the cycle are Don Camillo, the priest; his archrival but, in the end, also closest friend Peppone, the rabid anticlerical mayor; and the crucifix in the church, through which Christ speaks to Don Camillo and the author can express his religious faith. By deploying these simple elements and characters in innumerable configurations, Guareschi created a 900

narrative formula that could be used over and over, with overwhelming success. The popularity of the cycle was enhanced by the fortunate series of films starring Fernandel as the priest and Gino Cervi as the mayor, begun in 1952 with Julien Duvivier’s Don Camillo. Sociological criticism has criticized the Don Camillo cycle for its supposed politically opportunistic attitude, but perhaps all that Guareschi had in mind was to articulate a parable on the superior importance of the general interest and the common good, for which it was necessary to reconcile the devil and the holy water, the dominant cultures of Communism and Catholicism: In the end, both Don Camillo and Peppone are good Christians who express a tradition of solidarity inherent to the peasant world that they inhabit. In any case, it is difficult to divorce the characters of Guareschi’s Mondo piccolo from the salient political questions of the postwar period and from the disorientation experienced by the Catholic world faced with growing Communism.

Biography Giovannino Guareschi was born into a family of traders in Roccabianca, in the province of Parma, on 1 May 1908. He began very early to publish articles and drawings in the local newspapers. Upon completion of his military service, he went to Milan to work with the editorial staff of the satirical weekly Il Bertoldo, 1938. His journalisticliterary collaborations increased, while his collaboration with the radio was suspended in October 1943, for offences to Mussolini. Guareschi married Ennia and was drafted, 1943; after 8 September 1943, he was captured by the Germans in Alessandria and sent to concentration camps in Poland and then in Germany; he was freed, early 1945. He founded and edited, with Giovanni Mosca, the periodical Candido, a satirical journal published by Rizzoli, 1945. He took part in the promonarchy election campaign during the referendum, 1946. Although he campaigned against left-wing parties in 1948, he did not support the Christian Democrats, either. He was sentenced to 405 days in prison for publishing in Candido letters attributed to De Gasperi, 1954. He moved to Le Roncole in the province of Parma, where he set up a village cafe´ next to Giuseppe Verdi’s birthplace. Guareschi died of a heart attack in Cervia (Ravenna) on 22 July 1968. ALESSANDRO SCARSELLA

BATTISTA GUARINI Selected Works Collections The Don Camillo Omnibus, London: Gollancz, 1974. Tutto Don Camillo: mondo piccolo, edited by Carlotta and Alberto Guareschi, 3 vols., Milan: Rizzoli, 1998.

Mondo Candido 1946–1948, 1991. Mondo Candido 1948–1951, 1992. Chi sogna nuovi gerani?: autobiografia, edited by Carlotta and Alberto Guareschi, 1993. Mondo Candido 1951–1953, 1997. Mondo Candido 1953–1958, 2003.

Novels La scoperta di Milano, 1941. Il destino si chiama Clotilde, 1942; as Duncan & Clotilda, translated by L. K. Conrad, 1968. Il marito in collegio, 1944; as School for Husbands, 1968. La favola di Natale, 1945. Il compagno Don Camillo, 1963; as Comrade Don Camillo, translated by Frances Frenaye, 1964.

Short Stories ‘‘Don Camillo’’, 1948; as The Little World of Don Camillo translated by Una Vincenzo Troubridge, 1951. ‘‘Lo Zibaldino,’’ 1948. ‘‘Don Camillo e il suo gregge,’’ 1952; as Don Camillo and His Flock, translated by Frances Frenaye, 1952. ‘‘Corrierino delle famiglie,’’ 1954; as My Home, Sweet Home, translated by Joseph Green, 1966. ‘‘La calda estate di Gigino Pestifero,’’ 1967. ‘‘Vita in famiglia,’’ 1968; as The Family Guareschi. Chronicles of the Past and Present, translated by L. K. Conrad, 1970. ‘‘Don Camillo e i giovani d’oggi,’’ 1969; as Don Camillo Meets the Flower Children, translated by L. K. Conrad, 1969. ‘‘L’anno di Don Camillo,’’ 1986. ‘‘Ciao, Don Camillo,’’ 1996.

Nonfiction Italia provvisoria, 1947. Diario clandestino: 1943–1945, 1949; as My Secret Diary, 1943–1945, translated by Frances Frenaye, 1958.

Further Reading Baricco, Alessandro, ‘‘Il che e` bello e istruttivo,’’ in Giovanni Guareschi, Lo zibaldino. Storie assortite vecchie e nuove, Milan: Rizzoli, 1997. Gnocchi, Alessandro, Don Camillo & Peppone: l’invenzione del vero, Milan: Rizzoli, 1994. Gnocchi, Alessandro, Giovannino Guareschi, una storia italiana, Milan: Rizzoli, 1998. Gualazzini, Beppe, Guareschi, Milan: Editoriale Nuova, 1981. Guareschi, Carlotta, and Alberto Guareschi (editors), Fantasie della bionda. Scene da un romanzo all’antica, Milan: Rizzoli, 1993. Guareschi, Carlotta, and Alberto Guareschi, Milano’36’43: Guareschi e il ‘‘ Bertoldo, ’’ Milan: Rizzoli, 1994. Lugaresi, Giovanni, Le lampade e la luce: Guareschi: fede e umanita`, Milan: Rizzoli, 1996. Perry, Alan R., ‘‘Giovannino’s Secret Weapon: The German Lager and Guareschi’s Use of Reason as Humor,’’ Italian Quarterly, 39:153–154 (2002), 39–53. Vene`, Gian Franco, Don Camillo, Peppone e il compromesso storico, Milao: Sugar Co, 1977. Vene`, Gian Franco, L’ ideologia piccolo borghese: riformismo e tentazioni conservatrici di una non classe nell’Italia repubblicana: 1945–1980, Venice: Marsilio, 1980.

BATTISTA GUARINI (1538–1612) A courtier, diplomat, playwright, essayist, and professor of rhetoric, Battista Guarini, who is often associated with the origins of opera, is the exemplary figure of the literate courtier, even more than Baldassare Castiglione, but he also has a sinister reputation as a father figure. All three perspectives on this complex figure require reconsideration. Guarini is best known as a pastoral dramatist because of his masterpiece Il Pastor fido (The Faithful Shepherd, 1590), which brought him immediate recognition throughout Europe; inspired great composers such as Luzzasco Luzzaschi (ca. 1545– 1607), Carlo Luigi Pietragrua (ca. 1665–ca.1740), Antonio Salieri (1750–1825), and Joseph Haydn

(1732–1809); and offered a pattern for future libretto writers. Guarini’s own scholarly observations on his masterpiece represent the best critical definition of the new genre of tragicomedy, which paved the way for the development of opera. This transition was made possible by Guarini’s attention to possible musical accompaniments and chorographical renderings for his text despite the difficulties of staging it (length being not the least obstacle). Tragicomedy is the fusion of comedy, because of the happy ending, and tragedy, because of the high social rank of the characters (even the shepherd Mirtillo is finally recognized as the son of the high priest Montano). Because such a plot clashes 901

BATTISTA GUARINI with the traditional Aristotelian distinction of the categories of comedy, tragedy, and epic poem, Guarini needed to defend the new genre against the direct and indirect attacks of purists such as Jason de Nores (ca. 1530–1590). In Il Verrato (1588), Il verato secondo (Part Two of Verato, 1593), and the Compendio della poesia tragicomica (Compendium of Tragicomic Poetry, 1603), he contended that tragicomedy does not contradict, but interprets, Aristotle, who never explicitly denied the possibility of mixed genres. Although authors before him had adopted the form of tragicomedy (for instance, Fernando de Rojas, in whose works the tragic element prevail, and Giambattista Giraldi, ‘‘Il Cinzio’’), his observations offer the new genre a theoretical framework and literary legitimacy. Il Pastor fido was written between 1580 and 1583 and first published in 1590, with the definitive edition appearing in 1602. It was first represented in Crema in 1596 and in Mantua in 1598. The tragicomedy consists of a prologue and five acts in hendecasyllables intertwined with lines of seven syllables. Like Aminta (1580), Torquato Tasso’s earlier pastoral drama, Il Pastor fido evokes an idealized Arcadia, but Guarini, in tune with but also shaping baroque taste, added a sense of inquietude to Tasso’s drama and further elaborated the plot. The single love story in Aminta turns into a complex tangle involving two major couples, Amarilli and Mirtillo and Silvio and Dorinda, continuous coups de the´aˆtre, and a joyful ending after coming close to tragedy. The ostentation of Counter-Reformation morality clumsily hides the sensuality that pervades the drama. After enjoying great success for at least two centuries, Il Pastor fido was forgotten, if not downright reviled as futile courtly entertainment. Detractors nonetheless recognized that Guarini’s versification and mastery of poetic techniques reach sublime peaks in this work. The second common view of Guarini regards his supposed courtesan servility and results from a long critical tradition, especially popular in the nineteenth century. However, the author was a courtier by default, not vocation. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he did not embrace religious vows to take advantage of ecclesiastical benefits, nor could he rely on a conspicuous personal income to maintain his large family with the decorum his aristocratic stock required. He thus gravitated for most of his life around the court (mainly Ferrara) because he needed it to survive, but his letters and literary works, including the most courtly or entertaining, always include complaints about the humiliating 902

status of the courtier. Indeed, Guarini repeatedly showed his longing for the freedom needed to pursue philosophical studies and more than once tried to abandon his courtly roles. A servile nature will display itself at any moment and with any authority. Guarini, by contrast, tossed his barbs not only at the court but also at the authority of the Aristotelians who had rejected the genre of tragicomedy. Finally, Guarini’s bad reputation as a parent is related to the legal controversy with his son Alessandro for control of the dowry of Alessandro’s wife. Battista’s claim was not unusual for his time. Alessandro’s wish for emancipation was outside the norm, and Guarini’s disappointment was genuine. Letters show him acting as careful father, burdened by the responsibility of raising numerous children alone after his wife’s premature death. Guarini is not a one-book author. He wrote lyrics in the best Petrarchian form, and the quality of his Rime (Poems, 1598) is far greater than its reputation. In particular, his madrigals are remarkable for their daring metrical structure. Conjectures are also frequently made about his alleged inferiority complex toward Tasso, and indeed the mutual declarations of admiration may have been dictated by courtesy or opportunism. Although Guarini claimed to consider poetry less appealing than philosophy and mocked those who write only verse, he too sought poetical recognition, and as a result he may have felt anxious when faced with Tasso’s talent. Nevertheless, reasons for jealousy could have emerged from both sides, and Tasso may have envied Guarino’s greater success at court, not only as a courtier, but also as an artist. Guarini’s scholarly contributions are impressive. In addition to literary theory, his competence extended to political and diplomatic matters, as demonstrated by the Discorso sopra le cose di Polonia (Speech on the Events of Poland), an incisive account of his unsuccessful mission to Poland in 1574–1576, which remained unpublished until 1928. Il Segretario (The Office of Secretary, 1593), dedicated to Cardinal Ascanio Colonna, is presented as an essay on the art of writing letters but is in fact a careful analysis of the secretarial role and an attempt to cast dignity on the profession. Guarini also authored a comedy, presented in 1608 and published posthumously in 1613. The plot of the Idropica (The Hydropic) is modeled after classical comedies, with the usual presence of couples whose love is impeded by an imposed marriage. After a machination full of humorous consequences, the lovers win their battle. Guarino’s rich correspondence, which remains partially

BATTISTA GUARINI unpublished in archives in Modena, is fundamental to understanding his personality and his intellectual dimension (particularly interesting in this respect are the letters exchanged with Annibal Caro). Although Guarini’s fame has experienced different fortunes through the centuries, his crucial role in the development of European taste is undeniable.

Biography

Selected Works Collections Opere, edited by Marzio Guglielminetti, Turin: UTET, 1971. Opuscula, edited by Luigi Piacente, Bari: Adriatica, 1995.

Plays Il Pastor fido, 1590; definitive edition, 1602; as The Faithfull Sheperd, translated by Richard Fanshawe, 1647. Idropica, 1613.

Poems

Born in Ferrara on 10 December 1538, Battista Guarini was the son of Francesco, a descendent of the humanist Guarino Veronese, and Orsina Macchiavelli. He studied with his granduncle Alessandro, secretary of the Duke of Este, and completed his education at the University of Padua, where he studied law and philosophy. Returning to Ferrara, he was appointed professor of rhetoric and poetics, 1577. He married Taddea Bendidio, who died prematurely, leaving him with several children. He was enrolled in the register as ducal courtier in 1567, a role that he tried more than once to quit. He undertook many diplomatic missions in the name of the Duke of Ferrara, traveling to Turin, Venice, Florence, Rome, and Poland. After the death of Il Pigna (1575) and with Tasso reduced to live in S. Anna (1579), Guarini became the official court poet. He was a member of several academies, including the Eterei of Padua, the Innominati of Parma, the Gelati of Bologna, and the Umoristi of Rome. He left the court of Ferrara in 1588, alternating sojourns in his country estate ‘‘La Guarina’’ and periods at other courts (Florence, Urbino, and Rome). His domestic life was troubled by the long quarrel with his son Alessandro and by the tragedy of his daughter Anna, a renowned virtuoso singer, murdered in 1598 by her husband with the complicity of her brother Girolamo. Guarini died in Venice, on 7 October 1612. BERNARDO PICICHE`

‘‘Rime,’’ 1598.

Treatises Discorso sopra le cose di Polonia, ca. 1576; edited by C. Zaghi in Il corriere padano, 11 March 1928. Il Verrato, 1588. Il verato secondo, 1593. Il Segretario, 1593. Compendio della poesia tragicomica, 1603.

Further Reading Dalla Valle, Daniela, Pastorale barocca. Forme e contenuti dal Pastor Fido al dramma pastorale francese, Ravenna: Longo, 1973. Gareffi, Andrea (editor), La questione del Pastor fido, Manziana (Rome): Vecchiarelli, 1997. Kahn, Victoria, ‘‘The Passions and the Interests in Early Modern Europe: The Case of Guarini’s Il Pastor fido,’’ in Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion, edited by Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Perella, Nicolas James, The Critical Fortune of Battista Guarini’s ‘‘Il pastor fido,’’ Florence: Olschki, 1973, Pompilio, Angelo, Guarini, la musica, i musicisti, Lucca: Libreria Musicale Italiana, 1997. Rossi, Massimiliano, and Fiorella Gioffredi Superbi (eds.), L’arme e gli amori: Ariosto, Tasso and Guarini in late Renaissance Florence, Florence: Olschki, 2004. Sampson, Lisa, ‘‘The Mantuan Performance of Guarini’s Pastor fido and Representations of Courtly Identity,’’ Modern Language Review, 98:1 (2003), 65–83. Scarpati, Claudio, ‘‘Poetica e retorica in Battista Guarini,’’ in Studi sul Cinquecento italiano, Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1982.

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STEFANO GUAZZO

STEFANO GUAZZO (1530–1593) Born in Casale Monferrato, Stefano Guazzo lived the greater part of his life in the service of the Gonzaga family. Even though he spent long periods in Mantua and in France as ambassador, he never completely lost contact with Casale, actively contributing to the cultural life of his birthplace. This strong bond to his place of origin reveals itself not only in his minor works such as the collection, Lettere volgari di diversi gentilhuomini del Monferrato (Vernacular Letters of Several Gentlemen of Monferrato, 1566) or the Dialoghi piacevoli (Pleasant Dialogues, 1586), but also in the text commonly considered his masterpiece, La civil conversatione (The Civil Conversation, 1574), a manual of conduct that is distinctly placed in the tradition of Renaissance-style treatise writing. Baldassare Castiglione’s Il libro del Cortigiano (The Book of the Courtier, 1528) is clearly its model, not only in the division of the work into four books but also in the choice of the form of the dialogue. Despite these similarities, however, there are many ways in which the author distinguished himself from the model set forth by Il Cortigiano. The setting chosen by Guazzo for his work is not the court at Urbino but rather the private residences of two gentlemen, the doctor Annibale Magnocavallo and Guglielmo Guazzo, brother of the author. Guglielmo, saddened by the artificiality of court life, tends to seclude himself in his room and to spend a lot of time alone. At the beginning of the dialogue, Annibale convinces him to break free from his dangerous isolation. It is clear that the conversation extolled by the doctor is not like that of Castiglione’s book, a theatrical performance. Rather, it becomes an exercise for both a physical and psychological return to balance. Many pages of the first book are dedicated to confirming this hypothesis, demonstrating how man is by nature gregarious and needs to share himself with others. Conversation, or social interaction, is also emphasized by Christianity as a driving force that encourages an open and trusting attitude toward others. Another important aspect of the work is the realization that both scientific and literary activities are based entirely on the comparison of

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different opinions. Through conversation, passive, book-based knowledge is transformed into practical and active knowledge. From these assumptions came Guazzo’s praise of religious councils, and local academies and political bodies, in which truth is the result of a collective effort of debate. The horizon of the treatise widens in the following books as Guazzo established a distinct phenomenology of conversation. The author, through the character of Annibale, described with attention to detail the relationships that tie people both in their public life (for example: young/old, noble/plebian, citizen/foreigner) and in private life (husband/wife, father/son, master/servant). Civil conversation, a model of behavior inspired by the value of moderation, is indicated here as an important means of guaranteeing the cohesion of society. La civil conversatione considers a reality that is much more variegated than that of Castiglione. This change in perspective is important to understand Guazzo’s ideal audience: no longer the world of the court, now in decline, but the emerging bourgeoisie and the small nobility of the provinces. It is to these classes that Guazzo wanted to convey the ethic-aesthetic values of the Renaissance, communicating with them on a prudent, commonsense level. Guazzo wrote in a didactic but easily understandable style, enriched with well-known proverbs and quotes taken from the classics (above all Plutarch) or from collections of aphorisms and anecdotes such as Erasmus of Rotterdam’s Apophthegmata (1531). By virtue of its clarity and simplicity, Guazzo’s work had a great impact on European culture, becoming a classic of treatise writing of the ancien re´gime. After the expanded edition of 1579, 43 Italian editions were published by the middle of the seventeenth century, as well as translations into Latin, French, and German, and it reached English Tudor culture through George Pettie’s translation. Numerous allusions to Guazzo, both implicit and explicit, are present in the works of Gabriel Harvey, Edmund Spenser, and Robert Greene. The French translation inspired Montaigne to revise his Essais in 1582. In Germany the work was translated into Latin in 1585 and published by

TONINO GUERRA Cologne-based Coggeman with a strongly antiProtestant slant. Gauzzo’s influence in Germany would be long lasting, at least until the publication of Umgang mit Manschen by the illuminist Adolph von Knigge in 1788. After centuries of oblivion, La civil conversatione has once again become an object of study in the contexts of classicism and the birth of modern morals. Scholars have today at their disposal the monumental edition of Amedeo Quondam, which includes a solid body of commentary and indices.

Biography Stefano Guazzo was born in Casale Monferrato (Alessandria) in 1530; his father Giovanni was an officer of the Gonzagas. He studied law in Pavia and soon entered the service of the Gonzagas, following Ludovico Gonzaga to France, 1554. He returned to Casale and founded the Accademia degli Illustri, ca. 1562. He was again in France on a mission for Carlo IX, 1563. He married Francesca Da Ponte, 1566; they had two children, Olimpia and Giovanni Antonio. He moved to Olivola, a villa near Casale, in the early 1570s. Francesca died, 1575, and Guazzo married a Bartolomea, 1580, who died six years later. In old age, he was tormented by crises of depression and hypochondria. He moved with his son Giovanni Antonio to Pavia, where he was decorated with many honors and accepted into the Accademia degli Affidati, 1585. Guazzo died in Pavia on 6 December 1593 and was buried in the church of S. Tommaso de’ Predicatori. MATTIA BEGALI See also: Courts and Patronage

Selected Works Treatises La civil conversazione, 1574; expanded, 1579; critical edition by Amedeo Quondam, 2 vols., 1993; as The Civile Conversation of Mr. Steven Guazzo, translated by George Pettie, 2 vols., 1581; reprinted, 1967. Dialoghi piacevoli, 1586.

Letters Lettere, 1591,

Edited Works Lettere volgari di diversi gentilhuomini del Monferrato, 1566. La Ghirlanda della contessa Angela Maria Beccaria, 1595.

Further Reading Auernheimer, Richard, Gemeinschaft und Gespra¨ch; Stefano Guazzos Begriff der conservatione civile, Munich: Fink, 1973. Bonfatti, Emilio, La ‘‘Civil conversazione‘‘ in Germania: letteratura del comportamento da Stefano Guazzo a Adolph Knigge, 1574–1788, Udine: Del Bianco, 1979. Doglio, Maria Luisa, ‘‘Il segretario tra corte e accademia: i ‘Dialoghi piacevoli’ di Stefano Guazzo,’’ in Il segretario ed il principe: studi sulla letteratura italiana del Rinascimento, Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 1993. Ferrari, Daniela (editor), Stefano Guazzo e Casale Monferrato tra Cinque e Seicento, Rome: Bulzoni, 1997. Girardi, Raffaele, ‘‘La nuova sprezzatura dei moderni: Civil conversazione e Pellegrini Ingegni,’’ in La societa` del dialogo: retorica e ideologia nella letteratura conviviale del Cinquecento, Bari: Adriatica, 1989. Javitch, Daniel, ‘‘Rival Arts of Conduct in Elizabethan England: Guazzo’s Civile Conversazione and Castiglione’s Courtier,’’ Yearbook of Italian Studies, 1 (1971), 178–198. Lievsay, John, Stefano Guazzo and the English Renassaince, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961. Ossola, Carlo, Dal ‘‘Cortegiano‘‘ all‘‘‘Uomo di mondo‘‘: storia di un libro e di un modello sociale, Turin: Einaudi, 1987. Patrizi, Giorgio (editor), Stefano Guazzo e la Civil conversazione, Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1990.

TONINO GUERRA (1920–) Tonino Guerra does not fit easily into any single category; he is an extremely versatile creative artist, at once a poet, a prose fiction writer, a screenwriter, a painter, and a visionary activist and ecologist. Known primarily for his collaboration with many of Italy’s most renowned film directors, he has also

been recognized as a dialect poet of great stature. Guerra has always drawn on his Romagnol origins in creating his art, yet he also has a universal perspective that brings him out of the local and into the global arena of shared human concerns, emotions, and quandaries. 905

TONINO GUERRA During World War II, Guerra was deported to a concentration camp in Germany, where he began to compose, orally, dialect poems for the enjoyment and encouragement of his fellow prisoners, many of whom were, like him, from peasant families of the Emilia-Romagna region. Upon release from the camp and the end of the war, Guerra published at his own expense his first book of verse, I scarabo´cc (Scribblings, 1946), which was graced with an introduction by the eminent critic Carlo Bo. This first volume was followed by the collection La s-ciupte`da (The Gunshot, 1950) and by the volume Lunario (Almanac, 1954). When these poems, along with others, were published in 1972 under the title I bu (The Oxen) and with an introduction by Gianfranco Contini and standard Italian translations by Roberto Roversi, they were greeted with positive and widespread critical response. Guerra painted a peasant world that was fast disappearing in these early poems. While evoking the realities of the poor, the old, and the disenfranchised, they also reveal Guerra’s visually acute imaginative powers as well as his penchant for the carnal and the magical elements of human experience. Always there is a sense of the transience of life and the hovering inevitability of death, but this is tempered by the poet’s warm embrace of sexuality, companionship, and natural beauty. Guerra also wrote some early prose works: the short novel La storia di Fortunato (Fortunato’s Story, 1952) and Dopo i leoni (After the Lions, 1956). His major activity after the early 1950s was, however, screenwriting. After teaching secondary school in his native region for many years, Guerra moved to Rome, the center of Italian filmmaking, and he collaborated for years with some of the most eminent directors: Fellini, Antonioni, Rosi, the Taviani brothers, Angelopoulos, and Tarkovskij among them. His poetic sensibility and acute visual imagination come through strongly in his film work, especially in films such as Fellini’s Amarcord and Tarkovskij’s Nostalghia. Guerra’s collaboration with Fellini and Antonioni was especially intense; he and Fellini shared roots in Romagna, while Antonioni’s painterly style and existentially conditioned view of human experience were very close to Guerra’s own sensibilities. He accompanied Antonioni to the United States when the director was filming Zabriskie Point in 1969, but Guerra’s stay was cut short due to a familial crisis that resulted in a nervous breakdown. Guerra had returned to prose writing with the novel L’equilibrio (Equilibrium, 1967), and in 1969 he wrote a very ‘‘Antonioni-esque’’ portrait of modern 906

alienation and angst entitled L’uomo parallelo (The Parallel Man). In the late 1960s and into the mid1970s he cowrote, with fellow screenwriter and prose fiction author Luigi Malerba, the very successful Millemosche (Thousandfly) stories, about a so-named tramp of the year 1000, published collectively as Storie dell’anno Mille (Stories from the Year One Thousand, 1973). From the early 1950s to today, Guerra is best known, however, as having played an essential role in shaping the Italian cinema, and he is now recognized as Italy’s greatest living screenwriter. By the early 1980s, Guerra was spending more and more time back in Santarcangelo di Romagna, his home town. He made a definitive move back to Romagna in the mid-1980s and soon settled into the little town of Pennabilli, high in the Apennines. He writes his prose fiction and most film scripts in standard Italian, but he needed to be in his beloved region in order to be inspired as a dialect poet. Throughout the 1980s he wrote a great deal of dialect poetry, resulting in, among other volumes, the trilogy E’mel (Il miele in standard Italian, meaning Honey, 1981), La capanna (The Hut, 1985), Il viaggio (The Journey, 1986), and the volume Il libro delle chiese abbandonate (The Book of Abandoned Churches, 1988). His more recent poetry, like his early verse, received accolades from the critical establishment; the trilogy is perhaps the culmination of his poetic powers, evoking a peasant world that comes vividly alive for the reader while at the same time it is gradually fading away due to modernization. This world lives in the language of its people, and in the customs and ways of daily living that Guerra so beautifully captures in his poems. There is no easy sentimentality in these poems, nor is there simple nostalgia. Complex inner emotions as well as externally conditioned styles of life are put on the page in Guerra’s always lyrical yet straightforward, sometimes even harsh, voice. Since the 1980s Guerra has continued to publish dialect poetry and prose fiction, and he has collaborated with established and younger film directors. His generous activism and magical fantasy came together in a series of civic projects dedicated to saving the natural beauties of his region and encouraging the artistic creativity of others. An artist who always uses many media for the expression of his visions, Guerra began to paint and draw more and more, and he did a number of posters on which he mixed messages of an ecological kind with opinions on how to preserve local traditions with advice about how to organize artistic events for the citizens of the area. In and around Santarcangelo

TONINO GUERRA he stimulated and oversaw projects such as the creation of a ‘‘garden of lost flowers,’’ the preservation of tiny churches scattered through the Romagnol hills, the placement in his hometown of tile plaques produced in Santarcangelo that record the sayings and poems of local folk, and the distribution of benches around the steep streets so that citizens could rest and contemplate the beauties of their town. Tonino Guerra is a ‘‘force of nature,’’ a genuine national treasure, and one of contemporary Italy’s most multifaceted and unforgettable poets, a word that applies to him in its fullest sense.

Biography Tonino Guerra was born in Santarcangelo di Romagna (Forlı`) of peasant parents, 16 March 1920. In 1943, he was sent to a German war camp in Troisdorf, where he began to compose dialect poetry. He earned a degree at the University of Urbino with a thesis on dialect poetry, 1946, then taught in secondary schools in Savignano sul Rubicone until moving to Rome in 1953, where he began his career as a screenwriter. Guerra traveled to the United States with Antonioni, 1969; he traveled often to Russia in the 1970s and 1980s. He moved back to Romagna in the mid-1980s, eventually settling in Pennabilli. He has been awarded many prizes, among which are the ‘‘Gozzano’’ and the ‘‘Pasolini’’ prizes for poetry. Guerra has been honored internationally on many occasions for his essential contributions to Italian cinema. REBECCA WEST Selected Works Poetry ‘‘I scarabo´cc,’’ 1946. ‘‘La s-ciupte`da,’’ 1950. ‘‘Lunario,’’ 1954. ‘‘I bu: Poesie romagnole,’’ translated into standard Italian by Roberto Roversi, 1972. ‘‘Il miele: Poema,’’ 1981. ‘‘La capanna,’’ 1985. ‘‘Il viaggio,’’ 1986. ‘‘L’albero dell’acqua: Dedicato soprattutto a Ezra Pound,’’ edited by Luca Cesari, 1992. ‘‘E’ caval d’Ulisse,’’ 1996.

Fiction La storia di Fortunato, 1952. Dopo i leoni, 1956. L’equilibrio, 1967; as Equilibrium, translated by Eric Mosbacher, 1969. L’uomo parallelo, 1969.

Il cannocchiale e altri testi, with Lucile Laks, 1972. Storie dell’anno Mille, with Luigi Malerba, 1973. I cento uccelli, 1974. Il polverone: Storie per una notte quieta, 1978. I guardatori della luna, 1981. L’aquilone: Una favola del nostro tempo, with Michelangelo Antonioni, 1982. Il leone dalla barba bianca, with Michail Romadin, 1983. La pioggia tiepida, 1984. Il libro delle chiese abbandonate, 1988. L’orto d’Eliseo, 1989. Il vecchio con un piede in Oriente, 1990. Il profilo del conte, 1990. Cenere, 1990. Piove sul diluvio, edited by Ennio Grassi, 1997.

Screenplays L’assassino, with Elio Petri, Milan, 1962. Michelangelo Antonioni, Screenplays, 1963. Il deserto rosso, with Michelangelo Antonioni, edited by Carlo Di Carlo, 1964. Uomini contro, with Francesco Rosi and Raffaele La Capria, 1970. Zabriskie Point, with M. Antonioni et al., 1970. Amarcord, with Federico Fellini, 1973; as Amarcord: Portrait of a Town, translated by Nina Roots, 1974. Federico Fellini, Casanova, lyrics by T. Guerra and Andrea Zanzotto, 1976. E la nave va, with F. Fellini, 1983. Identificazione di una donna, with M. Antonioni and Gerard Brach, edited by Aldo Tassone, 1983. Ginger e Fred, 1986. Good Morning, Babylon, with Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, 1987. Cadaveri eccellenti, with Francesco Rosi and Lino Jannuzzi, 1992. Tre fratelli: Sceneggiatura dell’omonimo film di Francesco Rosi, with Francesco Rosi, 1999.

Other Dizionario fantastico, 2000.

Translations Haller, Hermann W. (editor), The Hidden Italy: A Bilingual Edition of Italian Dialect Poetry, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1986. Abandoned Places (Il miele, La capanna, Il viaggio, Il libro delle chiese abbandonate), translated by Adria Bernardi, Toronto: Guernica Press, 1999.

Further Reading Bertacchini, Renato, ‘‘Antonio Guerra,’’ in I contemporanei, vol. 5, Milan: Marzorati, 1969. Contini, Gianfranco, ‘‘Excursus continuo su Tonino Guerra,’’ in T. Guerra, I bu: Poesie romagnole, Milan: Rizzoli, 1972. Corti, Maria, ‘‘L’asola cucita,’’ Panorama, 16 April 1989, 21–22. Isella, Dante, ‘‘Postfazione a Tonino Guerra,’’ in T. Guerra, Il viaggio, Rimini: Maggioli Editore, 1986. Lingua, dialetto, poesia: Atti del Seminario popolare su Tonino Guerra e la poesia dialettale romagnola, Ravenna: Girasole, 1976. Migliorati, Silvia, ‘‘Tonino Guerra fra cinema e poesia,’’ Autografo, 12 (1987): 29–51.

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TONINO GUERRA Saccani, Rossana, ‘‘Materiali poetici di Tonino Guerra,’’ Autografo, 4:10 (1987): 107–119. Tassone, Aldo, ‘‘Entretien avec Tonino Guerra,’’ La Revue du cine´ma: Image et son, 279 (December 1973): 67–82. Tonino Guerra, Rimini: Maggioli Editore, 1985.

West, Rebecca, ‘‘Introduction,’’ to T. Guerra, Abandoned Places, translated by Adria Bernardi, Toronto: Guernica Press, 1999. West, Rebecca, ‘‘Tonino Guerra and the Space of the Screenwriter,’’ Annali d’Italianistica, 6 (1988): 162–178.

FRANCESCO DOMENICO GUERRAZZI (1804–1873) Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi was a writer—storyteller, essayist, dramatist, and polemicist—as well as a patriot. As a young man, his acquaintance with George Gordon, Lord Byron, whom he met while a student in Pisa, was formative, as was his acquaintance with Anne Radcliffe. He distanced himself, however, from Walter Scott, emphasizing the difference of his own work; Guerrazzi’s work was to be centered on society, concentrating on ordinary people and the notion of the city and religious and political ideas, rather than on character, which he saw as the driving force of Scott’s work. After a debut as a dramatist and an essayist, Guerrazzi dedicated himself to the historical novel, developing patriotic themes and combining historical events, political polemic, and a defense of nationalistic sentiment. This appears clearly in his novel La battaglia di Benevento (The Battle of Benevento, 1827), in which allegory serves to veil, through the reevocation of the conflict between Manfred of Swabia, the son of Frederick II, and Charles of Anjou, an intense polemic against the papacy’s marriage of temporal and spiritual power. La battaglia di Benevento presents itself as a grand and rhetorical epic novel, which is also interlaced with stories of love and betrayal and told from a Ghibelline and nationalistic perspective: a novel rich in Byronic ideas, dark histories, and sarcastic impulses. Other historical novels by Guerrazzi have a similar format. The most famous, L’assedio di Firenze (The Siege of Florence, 1836), published under the pseudonym of Anselmo Gualandi, praises the valor of the Florentine people, who are betrayed by Clement VII, and emphasizes the commitment and vigor of the resistance of the city’s best citizens. Other novels include La duchessa di San Giuliano, 908

which later became Veronica Cybo, duchessa di San Giuliano (Veronica Cybo, Duchess of San Giuliano, 1837), an intense, sensational story of vengeance motivated by love; Isabella Orsini, duchessa di Bracciano (Isabella Orsini, Duchess of Bracciano, 1844), Beatrice Cenci (1854), which develops motifs drawn from a well-known judicial incident of the sixteenth century, also rich in passion and violence; and Lo assedio di Roma (The Siege of Rome, 1863), a narrative that feeds on antipapal political polemic. Using documents collected within the context and environment of the story’s protagonist, Guerrazzi wrote Pasquale Paolo ossia La rotta di Pontenuovo. Racconto coˆrso del secolo XVIII (Pasquale Paolo, or the Rout of Pontenuovo: A Corsican Tale of the Eighteenth Century, 1864), which is dedicated to Giuseppe Garibaldi: a critical, passionate, and polemical portrait of the Corsican hero and a tale, in the genre of fictionalized history, of the anti-French struggle of the island patriots. Guerrazzi also authored satirical writings, such as the political and moral fable in the form of a short story, La Serpicina (The Little Serpent), written in 1830 but published only in 1847; the political and moral satirical novel L’asino (The Donkey, 1857), which is both apocalyptic and humorous, and which tells of a dream in prison relating to universal judgment, in which the moral superiority of animals to humans is apparent; biographical writings, including Pasquale Sottocorno (1858), dedicated to a hero and an episode of the cinque giornate (five days) in Milan; and novels that reveal a psychological sociological interest, such as Il buco nel muro (The Hole in the Wall, 1862). Guerrazzi also wrote numerous autobiographical works, from Note autobiografiche (Autobiographical Notes, published posthumously in 1899) to Memorie

FRANCESCO DOMENICO GUERRAZZI (Memoirs, 1848), Apologia (1851), and Orazione a difesa (A Speech in My Defense, 1853). Guerrazzi was one of the most important exponents of the democratic current of the Risorgimento. Readers and critics have been impressed by the humorous elements of his work but have responded negatively to the rhetorical tone, the polemical impetus, a certain taste for gloomy and macabre tones, and the lack of organic structure in his works. His style is often viewed as excessively literary, and critics have commented on a lack of balance between the various elements of ideology and style. His letters, on the other hand, being more natural and incisive, have met with greater favor. Guerrazzi’s works are not currently widely appreciated, though they had considerable resonance in the first decades of his career. It was a resonance perhaps, as Gaetano Trombatore noted, disproportionate to what his works might actually offer of interest and originality (Memorialisti dell’Ottocento, 1953). Nor have critics been kind to Guerrazi, beginning with Francesco De Sanctis’s harsh criticism of the novel Beatrice Cenci (Saggi critici, 1952). Other interpretations try to understand the reason for Guerrazzi’s positive reception, being a writer who ‘‘lampeggia, tuona, tempesta, urla’’ (flashes, thunders, storms, and shouts) and ‘‘mescola la Bibbia, Byron, Swift’’ (mixes together the Bible, Byron, and Swift) (Felice Momiliano, editor, Pagine vive, 1921). There are those too who have praised that part of Guerrazzi’s work in the tradition of Laurence Sterne, which seems so distant from Byronism and which lacks the grandiloquence and lyricism that nevertheless served him well in his polemical writings.

Biography Francesco Domenico Guerazzi was born in Livorno on 12 August 1804. He attended the Barnabite college. Having run away from home, he reconciled with his father—a wood engraver— and studied law in Pisa, graduating in 1824. His funeral elegy in 1830 for a general of the Napoleonic army, Cosimo del Fante, earned him a relatively long confinement in Montelpulciano. For his close relations with Giuseppe Mazzini (he was affiliated with La Giovine Italia), he was again confined to the prison of Portoferraio in the wake of the discovery of correspondence among conspirators. After the promulgation of the Constitution, in 1848, Guerazzi was chosen as a representative. He became minister of the Interior in the Giuseppe Montanelli government. After the flight of the

Grand Duke, in February 1849, he was a member— along with Mazzini and Montanelli—of the triumvirate that remained in power until March 1849; at the end of March 1849 he became the head of the executive power and remained dictator until 11 April. Upon the return of the Grand Duke, who was favored by the moderates, Guerrazzi was imprisoned, accused of rebellion, and after the trial his jail sentence was commuted to exile in Corsica. Having fled from Corsica in 1846, he came to Pisa and Turin, and then to Genoa, where he lived from 1857 to 1862; he was reelected as a representative in 1860 and remained in Parliament until 1870; an antimoderate, he moved from the radicals to the republicans. His companion during his later years was Maria Papadopulo; after 1870, he lived at his farm in Cecina until his death on 23 September 1873. ELVIO GUANINI See also: Historical Novel Selected Works Collections Scritti, Florence: Le Monnier, 1847. Scritti politici, Turin: Casa Editrice di M. Guigoni, 1862. Scritti letterari, Turin: Casa Editrice di M.Guigoni, 1862. Scritti scelti, edited by Arrigo Cajumi, Turin: UTET, 1955; reprinted in 1966.

Fiction I Bianchi e i Neri, 1827. La battaglia di Benevento, 1827; as Manfred, or the Battle of Benevento, translated by Luigi Monti, 1875. L’assedio di Firenze, 1836. Veronica Cybo, duchessa di San Giuliano, 1837. Isabella Orsini, duchessa di Bracciano, 1844; as Isabella Orsini, translated by Luigi Monti, 1859. La Serpicina, 1847. Beatrice Cenci, 1854; as Beatrice Cenci, translated by Mrs. Watts Sherman, 1858; translated by Charles Alexander Scott, 1858. L’asino, 1857. La torre di Nonza, 1857. Pasquale Sottocorno, 1858. Storia di un moscone, 1858. Il buco nel muro, 1862. Lo assedio di Roma, 1863. Pasquale Paolo ossia La rotta di Pontenuovo. Racconto coˆrso del secolo XVIII, 1864. Il secolo che muore, 1885.

Letters Lettere, 1880–1882. Lettere, edited by Ferdinando Martini, 1891. Lettere famigliari, 1924.

Other Memorie, 1848. Apologia, 1851.

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FRANCESCO DOMENICO GUERRAZZI Orazione a difesa, 1853. Note autobiografiche e poema, 1899.

Further Reading Borlenghi, Aldo, Narratori dell’Ottocento, Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1961. Colummi Camerino, Marinella, ‘‘Il narratore dimezzato. Legittimazione del racconto storico italiano,’’ in Storie su storie. Indagine sui romanzi storici (1814–1840), Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1985. Croce, Benedetto, Letteratura della Nuova Italia, vol. 1, Bari: Laterza, 1929. De Sanctis, Francesco, Saggi critici, vol. 1, Bari: Laterza, 1952. Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi: Studi e documenti, Florence: Societa` Anomina ‘‘La Voce,’’ 1924. Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi nella storia politica e culturale del Rinascimento. Convegno di Studi promosso da Regione Toscana, Leghorn-Florence, 16–18 November 1973, Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1975. Fucini, Renato, Acqua passata, Florence: La Voce, 1921.

Guastalla, Rosolino, La vita e le opere di Francesco Domencio Guerrazzi (1804–1835), Rocca San Casciano: Cappelli, 1903. Gramsci, Antonio, Letteratura e vita nazionale, Turin: Einaudi, 1950. Lopez Celly, Furio, Francesco Domencio Guerrazzi nell’arte e nella vita, Milan-Rome: Societa` Editrice Dante Alighieri, 1918. Martini, Ferdinando, Due dell’estrema: il Guerrazzi e il Brofferio-Carteggi inediti (1859–1866), Florence: Le Monnier, 1920. Momigliano, Felice (editor), Pagine vive, Milan: Caddeo, 1921. Rabizzani, Giovanni, Sterne in Italia, Rome: Formiggini, 1920. Ragonese, Gaetano, Francesco Domencio Guerrazzi, in Letteratura italiana, I minori, vol. 3, Milan: Marzorati, 1964. Tommaseo, Niccolo`, Dizionario d’estetica, Milan: Fortunato Perelli, 1860. Toschi, Luca, L’epistolario di Francesco Domencio Guerrazzi: con il catalogo delle lettere edite e inedite, Florence: Olschki, 1979. Trombatore Gaetano, Memorialisti dell’Ottocento, vol. 1, Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1953.

AMALIA GUGLIELMINETTI (1881–1941) In 1907 two collections of poems hit the Turinese literary scene simultaneously: Amalia Guglielminetti’s Le vergini folli (The Crazed Virgins) and Guido Gozzano’s La via del rifugio (The Road to the Refuge). Guglielminetti, who had already published Voci di giovinezza (Voices of Youth, 1903), received critical attention and public notoriety far overshadowing Gozzano’s. Saluted as the ‘‘Saffo dalla chioma di viola’’ (purple-haired Saffo) by the influential critic Giuseppe Antonio Borgese (‘‘Una poetessa,’’ 1910); compared to the Renaissance poet Gaspara Stampa; genuinely admired by Gozzano himself, who learned her sonnets by heart; Guglielminetti, through her poetry, gives voice to a new woman subject in Italian literature. Like Sibilla Aleramo’s novel Una donna (A Woman, 1906), Le vergini folli unveils a world still in search of expression. The poem follows the wanderings of a young woman poet in the silent cloisters of girlhood, through what Gozzano called ‘‘I gironi di quell’inferno luminoso che si chiama verginita`’’ (The circles of that bright hell called virginity) (Lettere d’amore, 1951). The poet unravels a possible path of salvation—of identity, 910

health, and dignity—for the silent maidens. But the garden is a prison no woman can leave. The desired entrance to the house of life is barred by a stern and pitiless ‘‘Lord.’’ Guglielminetti poignantly represents the knot that binds woman to a deified male figure before whom ‘‘l’indoma si ammansi, e la superba / si faccia schiava . . . nuocendo a se`, come nemica acerba’’ (the rebellious is domesticated, and the proud / makes herself slave . . . harming herself as a bitter enemy). Waiting is the only existential dimension the poet gains for herself and the young maidens, an unsettling Purgatory without guarantee of salvation, where darkness and perdition loom. As if following a foretold and ironic destiny, Amalia Guglielminetti is mostly remembered in the history of Italian literature for her love story with Guido Gozzano, chronicled in the following collection of poems, Seduzioni (Seductions, 1909). This is an unfair destiny, because her poetry, although not formally innovative and often yielding to a conventional literary pathos, lucidly expresses the lacerating tension between a vital openness to life and a desire that enslaves. In Seduzioni, the

AMALIA GUGLIELMINETTI dialogue with an elusive and cruel lover turns into a pained solitude that the poetic celebration of the sensory seduction of ‘‘rare gems,’’ ‘‘silks,’’ and ‘‘fiery chalices,’’ borrowed from the D’Annunzian boudoir, can do little to dispel. Despite her search to articulate woman’s specificity, Guglielminetti remained indifferent to the rising feminist movement. So even if Seduzioni concludes by stating the collective plight of women—‘‘Io non volli cantar, volli parlare / e dir cose di me, di tante donne / cui tanti desideri urgon l’insonne / cuore e lascian con le labbra amare’’ (I didn’t want to sing but speak / and tell things about myself and many women / whose desires push the sleepless / heart and leave bitter mouths)—the dominating image is the one of the poet beckoning to her frozen image in a mirror as ‘‘colei che va sola’’ (the one who goes alone). Daniela Curti described well the ambiguity of Guglielminetti’s artistic career. On the one hand, she transgressed with her poetic voice ‘‘la saggezza d’antiche norme’’ (the wisdom of ancient norms), which seeks to define and limit woman’s experience; and on the other, she gradually adapted to society’s ‘‘leggiadri schermi’’ (graceful screens) for the exceptional woman: from the femme poe`te to the femme fatale to the Fascist ‘‘modern woman’’ (‘‘Quella che va sola,’’ 1988). Revealing of this ambiguity is Guglielminetti’s choice of poetic meters. At a time when verse was being progressively freed from formal restraint, she elected the tercet and the sonnet for women’s doomed aspirations and frail dreams. Guglielminetti abandoned poetry with her 1913 collection of short stories I volti dell’amore (The Faces of Love) and thereafter wrote rather conventional stories and novels centered on love intrigues in high-society settings. Through the 1920s and 1930s, she participated in Italian cultural life as journalist; founder of a literary magazine, also called Seduzioni; and as a writer of children’s stories and successfully performed plays. A mysteriously fated mixture of ‘‘good’’ and ‘‘bad’’ make the figure of Amalia Guglieminetti emblematic of the cultural climate at the beginning of the last century in Italy. Her poetry at the same time negates the contemporary misogynist discourse of Cesare Lombroso and Otto Weininger, ambiguously flirts with D’Annunzian style, and inspires the new poetry of Gozzano. For these reasons, her work occupies an important crossroads from which to attempt an understanding not only of the challenging position of the woman writer but her centrality to that complex phenomenon that is literary and cultural modernity.

Biography Amalia Guglielminetti was born into an industrialist family in Turin, 4 April 1881. In 1907, she started an epistolary exchange with Guido Gozzano that turned into a tormented love affair and then friendship. She attended the First Women’s Congress in Rome in 1908. From 1908, she contributed verses, stories, and articles to newspapers and magazines like La stampa and L’illustrazione italiana. She had a liaison with the writer Pitigrilli (Dino Segre). Guglielminetti was founder and director of the literary magazine Le seduzioni (1926– 1928). In 1934, she traveled to Egypt. Guglielminetti died 4 December 1941 after a fall while on the way to a bomb shelter. GIULIANA MINGHELLI Selected Works Poetry ‘‘Le voci di giovinezza,’’ 1903.v ‘‘Vergini folli,’’ 1907. ‘‘Seduzioni,’’ 1909. ‘‘L’insonne,’’ 1913. ‘‘I serpenti di Medusa,’’ 1934.

Fiction I volti dell’amore, 1913. Gli occhi cerchiati d’azzurro, 1918. Le ore inutili, 1919. La reginetta Chiomadoro, 1923. La rivincita del maschio, 1923. Quando avevo un amante, 1924.

Plays L’amante ignoto, 1911. Nei e cicisbei, 1926. Il baro dell’amore, 1926.

Epistolary Lettere d’amore di Guido Gozzano e Amalia Guglielminetti, 1951.

Further Reading Borgese, Giuseppe Antonio, ‘‘Una poetessa,’’ in La vita e il libro, Turin: Bocca, 1910. Calcaterra, Carlo, ‘‘Gozzano-Guglielminetti,’’ Il ponte, 7 (August 1951): 875–894. Curti, Daniela, ‘‘Le paure di Guido: Il carteggio Guglielminetti-Gozzano,’’ in Memoria, 8, 1983: 114–120. Curti, Daniela, ‘‘Quella che va sola: Amalia Guglielminetti,’’ in Svelamento, edited by Marina Zancan and Annamaria Buttafuoco, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1988. Guglielminetti, Marziano, Amalia: La rivincita della femmina, Genoa: Costa & Nolan, 1987. Guglielminetti, Marziano, Dalla donna fatale alla donna emancipata, Nuoro: Ilisso, 1993.

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AMALIA GUGLIELMINETTI Morandini, Giuliana, ‘‘I volti dell’amore,’’ in La voce che e` in lei, Milan: Bompiani, 1980. Piromalli, Antonio, ‘‘Amalia Guglielminetti,’’ in Novecento, Milan: Marzorati, 1982.

Turoff, Barbara, ‘‘Amalia Guglielminetti,’’ in Italian Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook, Westport: Greenwood Press, 1994. Zaccaro, Vanna, ‘‘Introduction,’’ to Le seduzioni, Bari: Palomar Edizioni, 2001.

FRANCESCO GUICCIARDINI (1483–1540) Francesco Guicciardini was a Florentine statesman who became a key figure in the administration of the Medici popes Leo X (Giovanni de’ Medici) and Clement VII (Giuliano de’ Medici), including an appointment as Lieutenant General of the Papal Armies opposing the forces of Charles V that sacked Rome in 1527. He lived in a period of political decline for Italian principalities such as the Papal States, which were increasingly little more than pawns in the battle for political hegemony between the consolidated monarchies of France and Spain during the conflict that would later be known as the Italian Wars of 1494–1534. Guicciardini recounted the events that he witnessed first hand as a high papal minister in the Storia d’Italia (History of Italy, 1561). His political and philosophical outlook was conditioned by the precarious and tumultuous political and social climate of his day. In his writings (none of which were published during his lifetime), he often presented a sense of the manner in which the events in Italy were beyond the control of any individual. His histories and his Ricordi (Maxims and Reflections, 1576), a miscellaneous work in the tradition of Tuscan mercantile maxims written in three different redactions, are part of a larger current of Renaissance treatise writing in which authors attempted to interpret and represent the nature of the reality they experienced. Guicciardini’s individual analysis was undertaken with an eye on preserving his personal interests by using his intellectual abilities. Unlike his compatriot Niccolo` Machiavelli, Guicciardini’s works and worldview evidence skepticism toward grand designs and universal solutions in the face of an unpredictable and constantly dynamic reality. Guicciardini was born into an aristocratic merchant family proud of its tradition of public service in the Florentine republic. His godfather was the philosopher Marsilio Ficino. His ancestors had held 912

important posts throughout the history of the Florentine republic, and Guicciardini’s worldview was very much influenced by the presumption of service from his elite class. The family also had a multinational textile business with outlets in northern Europe that would remain active until the end of the sixteenth century. However, as the thirdborn son in a large family, Francesco did not have a secure claim on his family patrimony. Yet he demonstrated an ambitious character at an early age. In the Accusatoria (Accusation, 1527), he confessed that his schoolmates nicknamed him Alcibiades, after the infamous Athenian. In 1498 Guicciardini began legal studies in Florence, transferring to Ferrara and Padua before receiving a law degree in Pisa in 1505. One possibility for Francesco was to become a prelate. However, when he considered pursuing an ecclesiastical career, with an eye to perhaps becoming a cardinal, his father, Piero di Jacopo Guicciardini, a quiet follower of the disgraced reformist friar Girolamo Savonarola, opposed the decision, an early indication of the contrasting opinions about the Church that would resurface in Guicciardini’s later writings. In 1507 he married Maria di Alamanno di Averardo Salviati in a private ceremony despite the reservations of his father, who had hoped for a marriage into a family less openly aligned with the pro-Medici line in Florentine republican politics. In 1508 Guicciardini began the Storie fiorentine (The History of Florence, 1508–1509), written in the style of civic histories and covering the period from the Ciompi revolt of 1378 to the Battle of Agnadello in 1509. Despite his relative youth, he was quickly honored with important appointments representing the Florentine republic in neighboring cities. In 1511 he was offered a Florentine ambassadorship to the court of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, which he accepted after

FRANCESCO GUICCIARDINI initial reservations about leaving his legal practice. He recounted his impressions of Spain and the Spaniards in the Diario del viaggio in Spagna (Diary of the Trip to Spain, 1512). In Spain Guicciardini gained exposure to Ferdinand of Aragon, one of the most astute leaders in Europe in a period when the Castillian court was receiving fresh dispatches from the Americas and had interests in several European countries, including Italy. The experience provided Guicciardini with a political schooling comparable to Niccolo` Machiavelli’s period with Cesare Borgia. Yet, given the distances involved, his relations with the Florentine chancery were sporadic, and he received ambiguous instructions, increasing his misgivings about popular governments and preparing his rapprochement with the pro-Medici forces in Florence. Guicciardini wrote a number of treatises during his stay in Spain, including the Relazione di Spagna (Report on Spain, 1514), and also began his first composition of the Ricordi, a collection of aphorisms in which he would delineate his opinions on themes from personal conduct to political and religious affiliation. In Spain Guicciardini began to delve into political treatises with a work on governmental theory, the Discorso di Logron˜o (1512), in which he voiced fears about the instability of the Florentine republic and Italian peninsular autonomy and expressed ideas about how government should be controlled by persons of standing, such as those of his own aristocratic class. The Florentine republic fell in 1512, after Spanish forces savagely sacked Prato, and the Medici reentered Florence. When the Medici cardinal Giovanni became Pope Leo X, succeeding Julius II in 1513, Florentine prestige increased, because the Medici now controlled both Florence and the Papal States. Upon returning to Florence, Guicciardini was able to ingratiate himself with the ruling family and wrote the Discorso nel modo di assicurare lo stato alla casa dei Medici (Discourse on How to Ensure the State to the House of the Medici, 1515). In 1516 the head of the Medici clan, Pope Leo X, appointed Guicciardini papal governor of Modena, and his governorship would be extended to Parma, Reggio, and eventually the entire Romagna region. The author apparently handled his responsibilities with great competence in a time of general ineptitude and corruption among rulers and governors, earning the esteem and continued patronage of his Medici employers. In 1521 Guicciardini became commissioner general in Leo X’s Papal Army in an alliance with Charles V of Spain against Francis I of France.

Around this time he also began the Dialogo del reggimento di Firenze (Dialogue on the Government of Florence, 1522), another work of political theory. This was also the period of the Guicciardin–Machiavelli correspondence, known by the reference to the practical jokes they played at the expense of the friars who hosted Machiavelli in the repubblica degli zoccoli (republic of clogs) letters of May 1521. Machiavelli and Guicciardini would develop a lasting friendship while both composed important works in history and political science. Guicciardini’s Considerazioni sopra i Discorsi del Macchiavelli (Considerations on the Discourses of Machiavelli, 1530) were written as a response to Machiavelli’s Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio (Discourses on Livy, 1513–1517). Just as papal fortunes improved in the war against the French, Leo X died suddenly, leaving Guicciardini as the commander of an army that could receive no more orders until the election of a new pope. Despite this tenuous political situation, he saved Parma from a French siege related in the Relazione della difesa di Parma (Report on the Defense of Parma, 1521). Clement VII, another Medici pope and Guicciardini benefactor, succeeded Leo’s short-lived successor, Hadrian VI, in 1523, and Guicciardini remained in his position as president of the Romagna region, an indication of his abilities as a papal governor. Convinced that Charles V’s defeat of French forces at Pavia in 1525 forecast an end to peninsular self-determination, he urged the pope to form a league with Spain’s potential rivals Venice, France, and England and, as the papal league army’s Lieutenant General, advocated a quick attack on Milan in order to drive Charles V’s imperial forces from Italy and free Francesco Sforza, then besieged in his Milanese fortress. However, the commander of the Venetian army allied with the pope, Francesco Maria della Rovere, the Duke of Urbino, did not follow Guicciardini’s counsel and thus received much of the blame for the papal league’s defeats in Storia d’Italia. In late 1526 German mercenaries, the infamous landsknechts, arrived in support of Charles V’s imperial army in Italy. The papal forces suffered the loss of their most feared and capable military leader, Giovanni de’ Medici, known as Giovanni dalle Bande Nere, killed in a skirmish. In the opening months of 1527, imperial commanders Frundsburg and Borbone joined forces, moving to sack Rome on May 6. Many historians have referred to the absolute military, political, cultural, and psychological low in the Italian peninsula after the Sack of Rome, wherein many notable figures of the time were 913

FRANCESCO GUICCIARDINI directly involved. Baldassare Castiglione was the pope’s ambassador to Charles V’s court in Madrid. Benvenuto Cellini was among those besieged with Clement VII in Castel Sant’Angelo. Guicciardini was the pope’s political advisor. With the pope trapped and negotiating his own ransom, the Medici fell into disgrace in Florence, and Florentine republicans installed a third and final republic. As the political situation in Florence turned against him, Guicciardini retired to the Tuscan countryside, where he compiled extracts of Savonarola’s sermons, the Estratti savonaroliani (Savonarolian Extracts, 1528), to determine whether the 1527 Sack of Rome was the verification of the Dominican friar’s prophesies about divine retribution against Italy and her rulers, including the pope. Guicciardini also composed three orations, the Consolatoria, Accusatoria, Defensoria (Consolation, Accusation, Defense, 1527), works that express the essence of his cultural background as a Florentine aristocrat at a time of peninsular and personal crisis. The very idea of composing opposing speeches is an exercise from classical and legal culture and a foundation of humanist education. In the first oration, the Consolatoria, Guicciardini assumed the voice of a friend who tries philosophical arguments to convince the disgraced former Lieutenant General to accept and understand the damage to his status and reputation after the Sack of Rome. In the Accusatoria, he voiced the position of a vengeful prosecutor as Guicciardini imagined himself called before the Quarantia, a judicial body that during the last Florentine republic purged the city of Medici supporters. In the final oration, the Defensoria, Guicciardini offered an insight into his capacity as an advisor and legal counselor by completing the rhetorical exercise of taking opposite sides of a case, standard in classical authors like Thucydides and Livy, by defending himself from the strident charges laid in the Accusatoria. In 1528–1529 Guicciardini also began his second Florentine history, the unfinished Cose fiorentine (Florentine Affairs, 1528–1531), a work in the style of Renaissance civic histories. He also updated his earlier collection of Ricordi into a redaction, now known as the B version, that expanded the earlier maxims to include further insight into human nature and history. When the more radical arrabbiati (angry) faction took power in Florence on 17 April 1529, Guicciardini was faced with possible arrest. In June of 1529 Pope Clement VII and Emperor Charles V came to terms with the Treaty 914

of Barcelona. Part of the deal brokered by Clement was a return of the Medici to Florence, terms that were unacceptable to the republican government. On 12 October 1529, imperial forces began a siege of Florence. Guicciardini was summoned before a republican court on December of 1529; he was sentenced to exile in absentia on 17 March 1530, and his goods were confiscated. The last Florentine republic fell to Spanish imperial forces after Ferruccio Ferrucci’s heroic resistance when the city gates were treacherously opened on 12 August 1530. Guicciardini was sent back to Florence by Clement VII to organize the transfer of power to the Medici, an important step in the establishment of a Medici duchy in the city. In this period he composed the last, or C, redaction of the Ricordi, in which he revised some of the aphorisms from the earlier version to reflect his experiences as the defeated Lieutenant General of the papal league that had allowed the Sack of Rome. Written in crypto-Savonarolian tones, the ricordo C28 reveals a sense of guilt about his decision to serve the Medici popes despite his own misgivings about temporal power for the papacy because of the advantage of his personal self-interest, his particulare. Literary historian and educational reformer Francesco De Sanctis, in ‘‘L’uomo del Guicciardini’’ (1869), made this ricordo the center of Guicciardini’s critical reputation for later generations. For De Sanctis, writing in the romantic moment of Italy’s national unification in the Risorgimento, Guicciardini’s particulare explained why Italy came to suffer and even deserved foreign domination in the sixteenth century and why Guicciardini’s legacy posed a threat to the ethical fiber of a newly united Italy. After the fall of Florence in 1530 Guicciardini had hoped to oversee the installation of the sort of proaristocratic republic that he had theorized in the Dialogo del reggimento di Firenze, but the city had seen its last republic. Clement sent Guicciardini back to Bologna as governor and appointed Baccio Valori to the presidency of the entire Romagna region, a decision that Guicciardini took as an indication of his loss of favor in the papal court. When Clement died and Paul III was elected new pope in 1534, Guicciardini’s career as a papal governor seems to have ended. In 1535 Guicciardini abandoned the Cose fiorentine and began the Commentari della luogotenenza (Commentary on the Lieutenantship), about his experiences as Lieutenant General in the papal armies. This work would eventually form Chapters XVI and XVII of his

FRANCESCO GUICCIARDINI masterpiece, the Storia d’Italia. Guicciardini’s final history expands the focus of his earlier Storie fiorentine and Cose fiorentine to produce a work that fused the influence of his personal experience as papal administrator with the models from classical historians like Thucydides and his earlier attempts at Florentine civic histories. In the Storia d’Italia, Guicciardini made extensive use of his access to primary materials and portrayed the crisis of Italy from the years of the invasion of King Charles VIII of France in 1494 to the death of Pope Paul III in 1534 in a wider European context, making it an important example of early modern historiography. In 1535 Guicciardini defended Duke Alexander de’ Medici against Florentine expatriates in an imperial court but was excluded from Florentine government after Alexander’s assassination in 1537. He rejected further papal appointment in the Romagna, having retired to work on the Storia d’Italia. He suffered a stroke in July of 1539, recovered temporarily, but succumbed on 22 May 1540, leaving the last books (XVI–XX) of his masterpiece unedited.

Biography Francesco Guicciardini was born 6 March 1483 in Florence. He attended university, studying law, at Florence 1498–1505 before transferring to Ferrara 1501–1502, and then Padua 1502–1505, obtaining a degree from the University of Pisa in 1505. Public announcement was made of his marriage to Maria di Alamanno di Averardo Salviati in 1508. He was a member of a diplomatic delegation to Spain for the Republic of Florence 1512; he returned to Florence and was appointed to positions in the Medici-controlled Florentine government, 1514. Guicciardini became Papal Governor of Modena, 1516; Papal Governor of Reggio; Lieutenant General of papal forces, papal President of Romagna, 1524; and Lieutenant General of papal armies, 1526. After the Sack of Rome by the forces of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, 1527, the Florentine republic sentenced Guicciardini to exile, 1528. He defended Duke Alexander III from accusations from Florentine exiles, 1535. Guicciardini suffered a stroke in 1539 and died in Florence, 22 May 1540. CARLO CELLI See also: Historiography

Selected Works Collections Opere inedite, edited by Giuseppe Canestrini, 10 vols., Florence: Barbera, 1857–1867. Carteggi, edited by Roberto Palmarocchi and Pier Giorgio Ricci, 17 vols., Rome: Istituto Storico Italiano, 1938– 1972. Opere, edited by Costantino Panigada and Roberto Palmarocchi, 9 vols., Bari: Laterza, 1929–1936. Opere, edited by Emanuella Lugnani Scarano, 3 vols., Turin: UTET, 1970–1981.

Political and Philosophical Treatises Relazione di Spagna, 1514. Discorso nel modo di assicurare lo stato alla casa dei Medici, 1515.Relazione della difesa di Parma, 1521. Dialogo del reggimento di Firenze, 1522; as Dialogue on the Government of Florence, translated by Alison Brown, 1994.

Historical Writing Storie fiorentine, 1508–1509; as The History of Florence, translated by Mario Domandi, 1970. Cose fiorentine, 1528–1531. Storia d’Italia, 1561; as The History of Italy, edited and translated by Sidney Alexander, 1968. Commentari della luogotenenza, 1535.

Other Discorso di Logron˜o, 1512; as Francesco Guicciardini’s Discorso di Logrogno, translated by Athanasios Moulakis, 1998. Diario del viaggio in Spagna, 1512. Consolatoria, 1527. Accusatoria, 1527. Defensoria, 1527. Estratti savonaroliani, 1528. Considerazioni sopra i Discorsi del Macchiavelli, 1530. Ricordi, 1576; as Maxims and Reflections, translated Mario Domandi, 1972.

Further Reading Bondanella, Peter, Francesco Guicciardini, Boston: Twayne, 1976. Bruni, Francesco, La citta` divisa: le parti e il bene comune da Dante a Guicciardini, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2003. Cadoni, Giorgio, Un governo immaginato: l’universo politico di Francesco Guicciardini, Rome: Jouvance, 1999. Chabod, Frederico, ‘‘Francesco Guicciardini,’’ in Enciclopedia italiana di scienze, lettere ed arti, Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1933. Cochrane, Eric, Historians and Historiography in the Italian Renaissance, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. De Caprariis, Vittorio, Francesco Guicciardini: dalla politica alla storia, Bari: Laterza, 1950. De Sanctis, Francesco, ‘‘L’uomo del Guicciardini,’’ in Saggi critici, Naples: Morano, 1869. Gilbert, Felix, Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and History in 16th Century Florence, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965.

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FRANCESCO GUICCIARDINI Jacobelli, Jader, Machiavelli e/o Guicciardini: alle radici del realismo politico, Milan: Mursia, 1998. Luciani, Vincent, Francesco Guicciardini and His European Reputation, New York: K.Otto, 1936. Lugnani Scarano, Emanuella, La ragione e le cose: tre studi su Guicciardini, Pisa: ETS, 1980. Moulakis, Athanasios, Republican realism in Renaissance Florence: Francesco Guicciardini’s Discorso di Logrogno, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998. Pocock, John Greville Agard, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975. Quatela, Antonio, Invito alla lettura di Francesco Guicciardini, Milan: Mursia, 1991. Ridolfi, Roberto, Vita di Francesco Guicciardini, Rome: Belardetti, 1960; as The Life of Francesco Guicciardini, translated by Cecil Grayson, London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1967. Sasso, Gennaro, Per Francesco Guicciardini quattro studi, Roma: Istituto italiano storico per il medioevo, 1984.

RICORDI, 1576 Aphorisms and sayings by Francesco Guicciardini

First published in 1576 with the title Consigli et Avvertimenti (Counsels and Warnings), the Ricordi (Maxims and Reflections) are collections of aphorisms and maxims composed by Renaissance historian and statesman Francesco Guicciardini over the course of his adult life. The keeping of personal notebooks was an established genre in Tuscan literature, and Guicciardini’s Ricordi offers the essence of Guicciardini’s historical and political thinking. Its intended readership was a private and familial audience of aristocrats in the tradition of Tuscan mercantile culture. If Machiavelli’s Il principe (The Prince, 1532) was a guidebook for rulers interested in attaining and expanding their power, then Guicciardini’s Ricordi offered advice for the members of his elite aristocratic class. Many of the topics were the same, but the aim was not necessarily the conquest and preservation of power but the maintenance of social status and wealth. In fact, throughout the Ricordi Guicciardini seemed to have been aware that he was living during the twilight of Florentine republicanism and that his mission was to transmit the fruit of his experience 916

to a readership of his progeny in posterity. Guicciardini’s advice was for survival through discretion with a focus on individual utility rather than grand design. The fatalistic tone of his advice may have been driven by his reduced expectations, but he still offered a rich assortment of opinions on a wide array of subjects from the validity of classical examples to insights on ambition, friendship, religion, reputation, and simulation. Guicciardini’s aim was for his wise man, the savio, to be ever vigilant and use his discretion in order to prevent and predict the vicissitudes of fortune. Despite the perceptive advice he offers, the Ricordi are permeated with examples of how reason may be undermined by irrational or unpredictable forces as part of Guicciardini’s realistic worldview. The Ricordi presented an editorial challenge because the author produced successive versions of his observations about human nature and history throughout his life. Critics and literary historians eventually agreed on three redactions. The A version contains entries written as early as 1512, during Guicciardini’s period as Florentine ambassador to Spain, and continuing into the 1520s, during Guicciardini’s appointments as papal governor in Romagna for Leo X. The B version of 1528 was written in the aftermath of Guicciardini’s tenure as Lieutenant General of Clement VII’s Papal League against the forces of Charles V, which sacked Rome in 1527. The final C version of 1530 was written after the denouement of Guicciardini’s career as a papal governor and advisor and in the period of the 1530 siege of Florence by the troops of Charles V. The three redactions of the Ricordi evidence a progression in Guicciardini’s thinking and opinions as he reacted to the events of his life. His final historical work, the Storia d’Italia (1561), is less provincial than his earlier histories, Storie fiorentine (The History of Florence, 1508– 1509) and Cose fiorentine (Florentine Affairs, 1528–1531), which have a decidedly civic focus. In a similar manner, in the later versions of the Ricordi, Guicciardini became less partisan and more practical and reserved. When he offered opinions and advice in the final C version of the Ricordi, his views on the same subjects from the earlier A or B versions had been transformed due to the intervening events in his life and in Italian history, such as the 1527 Sack of Rome and the 1530 siege of Florence. In fact, Guicciardini’s Storia d’Italia took much of its worldview and sense of observational detachment from the moral truths exposed and expounded in the final C redaction of the Ricordi.

FRANCESCO GUICCIARDINI As a result of the interpretation of the C28 Ricordo by Risorgimento-era critic Francesco De Sanctis (‘‘L’uomo del Guicciardini,’’ 1869), Guicciardini became equated with his self-interest, his particulare, for stating that he decided to serve the Medici popes, Leo X and Clement VII, against his conscience and only to further his personal status and wealth. With the dissemination of editions of the Ricordi during the idealistic moment of Italian unification in the nineteenth century, Guicciardini became emblematic of the moral decay of the Italian Renaissance and an explanation for the successive foreign domination of the peninsula. This interpretation of Guicciardini’s writings has diminished among contemporary critics more willing to understand that the author’s often cynical attitudes are evidence that he lived in a time of great chaos and uncertainty. In fact, his discerning eye for the brutal realities of life is a telling testament to the experiences of his generation. The themes he explored would influence subsequent authors interested in the fine mix between personal and political themes. CARLO CELLI Editions First edition: Consigli et Avvertimenti, edited by J. Corbinelli, Paris: Morel, 1576. Critical edition: Ricordi, edited by Raffaele Spongano, Florence: Sansoni, 1951. Translations: as Maxims and Reflections, translated Mario Domandi, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972; in Guicciardini on Diplomacy: Selections from the Ricordi, edited G. R. Berridge, Leicester: Centre for the Study of Diplomacy, University of Leicester, 1998.

Further Reading De Sanctis, Francesco, ‘‘L’uomo del Guicciardini,’’ in Saggi critici, Naples: Morano, 1869. Forni, Pier Massimo, ‘‘Teoresi e forma del precetto nei Ricordi del Guicciardini,’’ Annali d’italianistica, 2 (1984): 123–130. Fubini, Mario, ‘‘Le quattro redazioni dei ‘Ricordi’ del Guicciardini,’’ in Studi sulla letteratura del Rinascimento, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1971. Holmes, Olivia, ‘‘Reading Order in Discord: Guicciardini’s Ricordi,’’ Italica, 76:3 (1999): 314–344. Lugnani Scarano, Emanuella, La ragione e le cose: tre studi su Guicciardini, Pisa: ETS, 1980. Palumbo, Matteo, Gli orizzonti della verita`: saggio su Guicciardini, Naples: Liguori, 1984. Sasso, Gennaro, Per Francesco Guicciardini quattro studi, Rome: Istituto italiano storico per il medioevo, 1984. Tanturli, Giuliano, ‘‘Quante sono le redazioni dei ‘Ricordi’ di Francesco Guicciardini?’’ Studi di Filologia Italiana, 56 (1998): 229–270.

STORIA D’ITALIA, 1561 Guicciardini’s Storia d’Italia (History of Italy) covers the period in Italian history from the death of Lorenzo de’ Medici in 1492 to the election of Pope Paul III in 1534. The work begins with a description of the years preceding the reign of Lorenzo de’ Medici in Florence as a period of idyllic prosperity followed by the invasion of King Charles VIII of France in 1494, which led to the period known as the Italian Wars conducted between France and Spain in Italy and including tragic events such as the 1527 Sack of Rome. The Storia d’Italia ends with a description of the years after the siege of Florence in 1530, another event indicative of the definitive end of the previous era. Guicciardini presented his history according to classical models with a division of the events in 20 books featuring opposing speeches by political figures and an emphasis on politics and foreign affairs. He also offered interesting digressions on divine will, ambition, psychological portraits, the role of fortune, historical studies on the legitimacy of the papacy, and even the arrival of venereal disease and the discovery of the Americas. Guicciardini’s descriptions of the Borgia papacy and of religious reformer Girolamo Savonarola would earn sections of the text a place on the papal index of prohibited books, as early Italian editions were subject to censorship. Along with his exhaustive details of events, much of the commentary and ideological gist in the Storia d’Italia has been identified in an earlier form in Guicciardini’s Ricordi (Maxims and Reflections, 1576), collections of sayings and aphorisms that Guicciardini compiled throughout his adult life. Guicciardini had written histories before with the Storie fiorentine (The History of Florence, 1508–1509) and the Cose fiorentine (Florentine Affairs, 1528–1531), as well as the Commentari della luogotenenza (Commentary on the Lieutenantship, 1535), a narrative of his administration of the papal armies. But when his career in the service of the Medici popes Leo X and Clement VII came to a close in the mid-1530s, Guicciardini began to consider recent history within a peninsular and even European context rather than through the 917

FRANCESCO GUICCIARDINI civic focus of his earlier works. For his composition of the Storia d’Italia between 1537 and 1540, Guicciardini relied on histories written by previous Florentine civic functionaries. He then made a direct and exhaustive study of archival documents and primary sources of information to arrive at his version of events and studied the work of contemporary historians, being particularly influenced by classical models such as Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. Thus the Storia d’Italia came out of the tradition of civic and humanist writings in which the function of history was to provide readers with didactic lessons. But Guicciardini’s work has a wider scope and includes psychological examinations, which are the result of his more detailed, critical methodology incorporating the Italian historical experience into a larger European framework. Critics have noted that the Storia d’Italia focuses on the efforts of individuals who attempted to mold events to their own will but were inevitably confronted by a reality that was larger than their own perceptions. CARLO CELLI Editions First Editions Historia d’Italia, Florence: Lorenzo Torrentino, 1561 (censored, first 16 books only). Dell’Historia d’Italia, Venice: Gabriele Giolito, 1564 (censored, first publication of full 20 book text). La historia d’Italia, Geneva: Stoer, 1621.

Critical Editions La storia d’Italia sugli originali manoscritti, edited by Alessandro Gherardi, 4 vols., Florence: Sansoni, 1919– 1920.

Storia d’Italia, edited by Silvana Seidel Menchi, Turin: Einaudi, 1971.

Translations As History of Italy and History of Florence, edited by John R. Hale, translated by Cecil Grayson, New York: Washington Square Press, 1964. As The History of Italy, edited and translated by Sidney Alexander, New York: McMillan, 1968.

Further Reading Albertini, Rudolf von, Firenze dalla repubblica al principato: storia e coscienza politica, translated by C. Cristofolini. Turin: Einaudi, 1970. Barbuto, Gennaro Maria, La politica dopo la tempesta: ordine e crisi nel pensiero di Francesco Guicciardini, Naples: Liguori, 2002. Barucci, Guglielmo, I segni e la storia: modelli tacitiani nella Storia d’Italia del Guicciardini, Milan: LED, 2004. Cochrane, Eric, Historians and Historiography in the Italian Renaissance, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. De Frede, Carlo, L’impresa di Napoli di Carlo VIII: commento ai primi due libri della Storia d’Italia del Guicciardini, Naples: De Simone, 1982. Di Maria, Salvatore, ‘‘Divine Order, Fate, Fortune and Human Action in Guicciardini’s Storia d’Italia,’’ Forum Italicum, 28:1 (1994): 22–40. Gilbert, Felix, Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and History in 16th Century Florence, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965. Lugnani Scarano, Emanuella, La ragione e le cose: tre studi su Guicciardini, Pisa: ETS, 1980. Palumbo, Matteo, ‘‘I discorsi contrapposti nella Storia d’Italia di Francesco Guicciardini,’’ MLN, 106:1 (1991): 15–37. Phillips, Mark, Francesco Guicciardini: The Historian’s Craft, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977. Sasso, Gennaro, Per Francesco Guicciardini quattro studi, Roma: Istituto italiano storico per il medioevo, 1984.

MARGHERITA GUIDACCI (1921–1992) Margherita Guidacci’s restless work as a poet, translator, teacher, and essayist spans from the end of World War II to the time of her death in 1992. Despite the positive early response of important critics such as Giacomo Debenedetti and Giuseppe De Robertis, her figure has remained at the margins of mainstream Italian criticism. She was 918

one of the first writers who dared to abandon the example of the great Italian Hermetic masters and foster her own lyrical voice, one of existentialist and religious inspiration. However, her aloof voice cannot be labeled as countercurrent, as contemporary events and personal vicissitudes do intertwine in her writing. Her first collection of

MARGHERITA GUIDACCI poems, La sabbia e l’Angelo (The Sand and the Angel), was written during the dramatic years of World War II and published in 1946. Comprising three sections whose dominant theme is death and whose key note is of a religious nature, the book attests to the dialectical mode of Guidacci’s verses in relation to themes such as life and death, hope and dejection, transience and eternity. While the lyrics are dense with fresh memories of the despair and horror caused by the war, they are also tempered by a sentiment of optimism and comfort. Her style and language provide support to this dialectical attitude with the use of the oxymoron, already seen in the title, along with the image of the water cycle. As the poet later stated about her first book in an interview with Giacinto Spagnoletti in his La poesia che parla di se` (1996), for her, language is not a magic combination of sounds but rather a dramatic combination of meanings. She explained further that the three most important components of her writing are the quest for knowledge; the desire to communicate with the reader, which translates into a refusal of a fragmented style; and a necessity of simplicity and concreteness of language. In most of Guidacci’s lyrics, and especially in this first volume, the communicative aspect has been an act of interpretation by the poet of the message left by the war dead. The epitaph is in fact a favored form in this collection. Creative writing and translation remained equally important to Guidacci throughout her career. Her deep and vast knowledge of biblical texts as well as classical and modern works shaped her oeuvre. During the 1940s and 1950s she translated John Donne’s Sermons (1946) and a volume of English mystery plays, Sacre rappresentazioni inglesi (1950), along with numerous Anglo-American authors such as Conrad, Eliot, Gissing, Joyce, Pound, and Twain, among others. In most of Guidacci’s recurring images and themes, such as grass and rain, stones and sea, wind and sand, land and sky, light and darkness, one can find echoes of the authors she skillfully translated. As for her poetry, the decade of the 1950s was prolific, as evidenced by the publication of several collections such as La morte del ricco (The Death of the Rich Man, 1954), Giorno dei Santi (All Saints’ Day, 1957), and Paglia e polvere (Straw and Dust, 1961). La morte del ricco is once again a book of religious inspiration in which the evangelic parable of Lazarus and Dives as well as Guidacci’s recent translations provide the stimulation for an oratory, a sacred representation retelling the well-known evangelic parable in which characters—a priest, Dives’s mistress and servants,

Lazarus’s children, and others—perform their own monologues. Although set within an ancient context, the lyrics focus on the theme of death, as in the author’s first collection, and Dives represents both history, refusing redemption, and ideology, refusing the miracle. During the 1960s Guidacci suffered from physical and mental problems that resulted in both her permanent residence in a mental hospital and her poetic silence. This experience provided the setting and the themes for one of her most accomplished and acclaimed collections, Neurosuite (1970), published soon after another minor work, Un cammino incerto (An Uncertain Path, 1970). It is in Neurosuite, in such themes as a shipwreck or waiting to leave a prison, that one senses most strongly the influence of Emily Dickinson, an author whom Guidacci translated and greatly admired. She described the condition of the mentally ill patients whom she met at the hospital and the striking empathy she felt for them. This is certainly the book in which the dark, anguished side of human existence was most notably explored. From within an environment of alienation, where body and reason are set apart, Guidacci reached for hope and faith once more in the book’s final passages. Of her writings published in the 1970s, the most significant are Terra senza orologi (Land Without Clocks, 1973), Taccuino slavo (Slavic Notebook, 1976), and Il vuoto e le forme (The Void and the Shapes, 1977), which, while using stylistic and rhetorical devices already present in the previous collection (for instance, the oxymoron, foregrounded in the title Il vuoto e le forme), she also presents new personal experiences and addresses contemporary historical events such as her journey to Croatia and the revolt against General Pinochet in Chile. Outstanding among her numerous publications of the 1980s is L’altare di Isenheim (The Isenheim Altar, 1980), based on the homonymous polyptych by the sixteenth-century German artist Mathis Gru¨newald. Framed by a prologue and Guidacci’s farewell to her recently deceased husband, the book comprises three sections interpreting the main subjects of each of the painting’s panels, the Annunciation, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection. In his introduction to L’altare di Isenheim, Raffaele Crovi stated that this book, along with others of its decade, can be read as a reconsecration of life through a meditation on death. Il buio e lo splendore (The Darkness and the Splendor, 1989), her last volume aside from the posthumous Anelli del Tempo (Rings of Time, 1993), deserves special 919

MARGHERITA GUIDACCI attention as well, as it confirms her predilection for a dramatic and choral poetic voice. Homogeneous, rich, and compact, Guidacci’s work documents a continuing reflection upon the duplicity of human existence, life and death, and the poet’s special role as an interpreter and translator of the human experience.

‘‘L’orologio di Bologna,’’ 1981. ‘‘Inno alla gioia,’’ 1983. ‘‘La via crucis dell’umanita`,’’ 1984. ‘‘Liber Fulguralis,’’ 1986. ‘‘Poesie per poeti,’’ 1987. ‘‘Una breve misura,’’ 1988. ‘‘Il buio e lo splendore,’’ 1989. ‘‘Anelli del tempo,’’ 1993.

Essays

Biography Margherita Guidacci was born in Florence, April 25, 1921. Her father died, 1931. She graduated from the University of Florence in 1943 with a dissertation on Giuseppe Ungaretti’s poetry under the supervision of Domenico De Robertis. She traveled to England and Ireland, 1947. She married the sociologist Luca Pinna, 1949. They moved to Rome, 1957. Guidacci taught English language and literature at Liceo Scientifico Cavour, 1965–1975. She traveled in Jugoslavia, 1972. She obtained the libera docenza in English language and literature, 1972, and taught Anglo-American literature at the University of Macerata, 1975–1981. Pinna died, 1977. Guidacci was awarded the Biella Poesia prize for Il vuoto e le forme, 1978. She taught AngloAmerican literature and language at the Istituto Universitario di Magistero ‘‘SS. Maria Assunta,’’ 1981. She traveled to the United States, 1986. She was awarded the Premio Caserta for her complete works, 1987. Guidacci died of a stroke in Rome, on June 19, 1992. LODOVICA GUIDARELLI Selected Works Collections Landscape with Ruins: Selected Poetry, translated by Ruth Feldman, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992. In the Eastern Sky: Selected Poems, translated by Catherine O’Brien, Dublin: Dedalus Press, 1993. Le poesie, edited by Maura del Serra, Florence: Le Lettere, 1999.

Poetry ‘‘La sabbia e l’Angelo,’’ 1946. ‘‘Morte del ricco: un oratorio,’’ 1954. ‘‘Giorno dei Santi,’’ 1957. ‘‘Paglia e polvere,’’ 1961. ‘‘Un cammino incerto,’’ 1970. ‘‘Neurosuite,’’ 1970. ‘‘Terra senza orologi,’’ 1973. ‘‘Quindici poesie e sette disegni,’’ with Giuseppe Banchieri, 1973. ‘‘Taccuino slavo,’’ 1976. ‘‘Il vuoto e le forme,’’ 1977. ‘‘L’altare di Isenheim,’’ 1980. ‘‘Brevi e lunghe,’’ 1980.

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Studi su Eliot, Milano, 1975. Studi su poeti e narratori americani, 1978. ‘‘Northangerland’’ e altri studi brontiani, 1988.

Other Prose e interviste, edited by Ilaria Rabatti, 1999. La voce dell’acqua: quaderno di traduzioni, edited by Giancarlo Battaglia and Ilaria Rabatti, 2002.

Translations John Donne, Sermoni, 1946. Emily Dickinson, Poesie, 1947. Sacre rappresentazioni inglesi, 1950. Gorge Gissing, Sulla riva dello Jonio, 1957. Ezra Pound, Patria mia, 1958. Ezra Pound, A lume spento (1908–1952), with Salvatore Quasimodo and Giuseppe Ungaretti, 1958. Ezra Pound, Le ‘‘Trachinie’’ di Sofocle, 1958. Archibald MacLeish, New York, 1958. Joseph Conrad, Destino, 1961. Emily Dickinson, Poesie e lettere, 1961. Mark Twain, Vita sul Mississipi, 1962. John Paul II, Il sapore del pane, 1979. Elizabeth Bishop, L’arte di perdere, 1982. Oscar Wilde, Il Principe Felice e altre bellissime Fiabe, 1989.

Further Reading Baldacci, Luigi, ‘‘Nuove poesie di Margherita Guidacci,’’ L’Approdo Letterario, 71–72 (1975), 43–52. Crovi, Raffaele, ‘‘Introduction,’’ to Margherita Guidacci, L’altare di Isenheim, Milan: Rusconi, 1980. Feldman, Ruth, ‘‘La poesia di Margherita Guidacci,’’ Studium, 90:6 (1994), 903–912. Le foglie di Sibilla. Scritti su Margherita Guidacci, Rome: Studium, 2005. Frattini, Alberto, ‘‘Margherita Guidacci: Realta`, trascendenza, mistero nel cuore della poesia,’’ Il Veltro, 43:5– 6 (1999), 603–612. Frattini, Alberto, and Marcella Uffreduzzi, eds., Poeti a Roma (1945–1980), Rome: Bonacci, 1983. Ghilardi, Margherita, ed., Per Margherita Guidacci, Florence: Le Lettere, 2001. Harwell, Margherita, ‘‘La poesia di Margherita Guidacci: Origini e sviluppo,’’ Annali d’Italianistica, 7 (1989), 354–381. Harwell Pieracci, Margherita, ‘‘L’opera di Margherita Guidacci,’’ in Un cristiano senza chiesa e altri saggi, Rome: Studium, 1991. Manescalchi, Franco, ‘‘Condizione esistenziale ed ‘etica cristiana’ nell’opera di Margherita Guidacci (Lettura di Neurosuite),’’ in Etica cristiana e scrittori del Novecento, edited by Florinda M. Iannace, Stony Brook, NY: Forum Italicum, 1993. Spagnoletti, Giacinto, La poesia che parla di se´, SalernoRome: Rispostes, 1996.

ARMANDA GUIDUCCI

ARMANDA GUIDUCCI (1923–1992) An extraordinarily multifaceted individual, Armanda Guiducci was a central figure in postwar Italian culture. Formed as a philosopher in the school of Antonio Banfi and in the intellectual tradition of the Italian Left, she became a social and cultural activist. As a Marxist critic, she argued in favor of ‘‘deprovincialization’’ and the internationalization of Italian letters, a belief she put into practice as cofounder and editor of the journal Ragionamenti. Guiducci’s literary studies reflected her ideological stance: Her acclaimed academic studies of Cesare Pavese’s opus are grounded in their common belief in the social value of literature. Similarly, she shared the intellectual curiosity of Marxist theoretician Antonio Gramsci. For Guiducci, the exploration of individual writers evolved into an elaborate analysis of the collective cultural experience of an historical period. To her expertise in philosophy and literature, she later added anthropology, ethnology, sociology, and psychoanalysis: All of these played an important role in her own writing. Her work sought to diffuse information, foster social awareness, and question the hegemony of institutions and traditions. Guiducci is best known for her feminist writings, in which the personal is rendered paradigmatic and, thereby, political. Starting in the 1970s, she committed her knowledge and skills to the cause of women’s liberation from social, political, and individual exploitation. Fully engaging in the debates over women’s issues that shook Italy, Guiducci wrote a series of polemical and thought-provoking books, published by Rizzoli. The first, La mela e il serpente (The Apple and the Serpent, 1974) is an innovative ‘‘novel,’’ told in the first person. The narrator explores her life through the biological aspects of gender, including menstruation and pregnancy. Searching for identity, the protagonist uncovers the barriers facing women because of their biological make-up and comes to an understanding of her experience as the descendent of Eve. By describing the physical journey into femaleness, the author criticized the developmental model for women espoused by society. Drawing on psychoanalysis and cultural anthropology, Guiducci included forays into the character’s unconscious and into dream states to show the symbolic

power and depth of social conditioning. The significance of this novel and its paradigmatic message was clearly understood at the time of publication, garnering extensive press coverage. Other feminist texts followed quickly, most notably Due donne da buttare (Two Disposable Women, 1976), La donna non e` gente (Women Are Not People, 1977), and Donna e serva (Woman and Servant, 1983). All examine gender definition through social history and present the protagonists as everywoman, bearers of a universal message about the female condition. Guiducci’s most critically analyzed work, Due donne da buttare, was written in a confessional style, structured on patriarchy’s antithetical division of women into Madonnas or whores. The two protagonists, who recount their lives in the first person, are a middle-aged housewife and a young prostitute. Rather than moral opposites, the two emerge as equal victims of misogyny. They both suffer economic, emotional, and sexual exploitation and respond with dependency and mental instability. The housewife’s home is a prison affording few satisfactions and requiring considerable selfabnegation motivated by guilt; she represents centuries of denigrated homemakers (which Guiducci also depicted in her Donna e serva, a study of female isolation in the private sphere). Stellina, the call girl, views herself as meat to be bought and consumed. Both women are controlled by the men in their lives, who possess the money and manipulate love. As a Marxist, Guiducci viewed sexual relations in economic, as well as biological and cultural, terms. In capitalist societies, men control women by controlling money and work. Whereas the confessions of Due donne da buttare describe modern urban life, La donna non e` gente explores peasant culture, little changed through time. Basing her writing on actual interviews, Guiducci acted as an intermediary, allowing uneducated women to break the code of silence and speak of their powerlessness. Stylistically, Armanda Guiducci’s feminist works are intricate and difficult to categorize, eluding genre classification. Called a novel, for example, La mela e il serpente is actually a hybrid that blends statistics, historical information, sociological data, 921

ARMANDA GUIDUCCI confession, and psychological narrative, thus challenging the demarcations separating author and narrator. Donna e serva goes beyond sociology and anthropology into current events, religion, Marxist theory, and psychiatry. What is well defined is the representation of women as the second sex, subject to subordination and oppression. On the other hand, Guiducci’s poetry is intimate and simple. The collection Poesie per un uomo (Poems for a Man, 1965) focuses on the theme of erotic love, while A colpi di silenzio (With Silent Blows, 1982) adds an element of human fragility motivated by the poet’s own experience with death. In a subjective way, the verse takes on some of the themes present in her prose: the universal biological experience of femaleness, gender differences leading to miscommunication, maternity, sexual passion, and the difficulties of aging.

Biography Armanda Guiducci was born in Naples, 1923. She moved to northern Italy to study, receiving a degree in philosophy from University of Milan. A committed and influential leftist, she became a cultural and political activist in the postwar period. In the 1950s, she engaged in prolific careers as a journalist, literary critic, and creative writer, contributing articles on cultural and intellectual issues. In 1955, with Franco Fortini, Luciano Amodio, Sergio Caprioglio, and Roberto Guiducci, Guiducci cofounded Ragionamenti, dedicated to political and literary topics. She became a regular contributor to L’Avanti!, the newspaper of the Italian Socialist Party, and was the editor and writer for avant-garde periodicals including Tempi Moderni and Opinione. Guiducci was director of programming for Swiss television and director of the socialist Circolo Turati of Milan. In 1967, her most famous critical work, Dallo zdanovismo allo strutturalismo, appeared. She won the Cittadella Prize for Poesie per un uomo, 1965, and the Pisa Prize for A colpi di silenzio, 1982. Guiducci died of cancer in 1992 in Milan. FIORA A. BASSANESE

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Selected Works Fictional Prose La mela e il serpente, 1974. Due donne da buttare, 1976. A testa in giu`, 1984. Virginia e l’angelo, 1991.

Poetry ‘‘Poesie per un uomo,’’ 1965. ‘‘A colpi di silenzio,’’ 1979.

Literary Criticism Dallo zdanovismo allo strutturalismo, 1967. Il mito Pavese, 1967. Invito alla lettura di Pavese, 1972.

Socio-Historical Essays La donna non e` gente, 1977. All’ombra di Kali, 1979. Donna e serva, 1983. Perdute nella storia: Storia delle donne dal I al VI secolo D. C., 1989. Medioevo inquieto: Storia delle donne dall’VIII al XV secolo D.C., 1990.

Further Reading Bassanese, Fiora A., ‘‘Armanda Guiducci.’’ in Italian Women Writers, edited by Rinaldina Russell, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994. Bassanese, Fiora A., ‘‘Armanda Guiducci’s Disposable Women,’’ in Contemporary Women Writers in Italy, edited by Santo L. Arico`, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990. Ghezzo, Flora, ‘‘Armanda Guiducci,’’ in The Feminist Encyclopedia of Italian Literature, edited by Rinaldina Russell, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997. Lazzaro-Weis, Carol, ‘‘Gender and Genre in Italian Feminist Literature in the Seventies,’’ Italica, 65:4(1988): 293–307. Nozzoli, Anna, ‘‘Verso l’identita`: ipotesi sul romanzo femminista degli anni settanta,’’ in Tabu` e coscienza: La condizione femminile nella letteratura italiana del Novecento, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1978. Wood, Sharon, Italian Women’s Writing, 1860–1994, London: Athlone, 1995.

GUIDO GUINIZZELLI

GUIDO GUINIZZELLI (CA. 1230–1276) Much of Guido’s fame as a poet depends on the praise and historical contextualization given him and his works by Dante Alighieri, who mentioned him in the Vita Nuova, the Convivio, the De vulgari eloquentia, and the Divina Commedia. Through these references Guido emerged as the most important poet between the Sicilian-Tuscan school and Dante. In his treatise on vernacular eloquence, Dante cited Guido as an outstanding practitioner of illustrious poetry, mentioning three of his canzoni: ‘‘Madonna, il fino amor ched eo vo porto’’ (My lady, the noble love that I have for you), ‘‘Tegno di folle ‘mpres’, a lo ver dire’’ (I consider him foolish, to tell the truth), and especially the doctrinal ‘‘Al cor gentil rempaira sempre amore’’ (Love always has its home in the noble heart), to which Dante also referred in the Convivio in the discussion of the concept of nobility. In canto 11 of the Purgatorio Dante refers to Guido as the first major figure in the line of poetic succession, the one who would be followed—and whose fame would be eclipsed—by Guido Cavalcanti (who in turn, it is noted, would be succeeded by another poet, probably Dante himself ). Finally, it is in Purgatorio 26, on the terrace of the lustful, that Dante the Pilgrim meets Guido Guinizzelli, whom he acknowledges as his poetic ‘‘father’’: ‘‘il padre / mio e de li altri miei miglior che mai / rime d’amor usar dolci e leggiadre’’ (vv. 97–99: the father of me and of the others—those, my betters— who ever used sweet, gracious rhymes of love). This great praise of the older poet from Bologna complements Dante’s earlier recognition of Guido as the ‘‘wise man’’ (‘‘saggio’’) in the sonnet in Chapter 20 of the Vita Nuova, ‘‘L’amor e ’l cor gentil sono una cosa’’ (Love and the noble heart are one and the same), which obviously takes its lead from his mentor’s canzone, ‘‘Al cor gentil rempaira sempre amore.’’ At this particular point in the Vita Nuova Dante was consciously moving away from a selfcentered preoccupation with the sorrow and pain of love to a more elevated conception of love that would then be the subject of his love lyrics. It was here that he recognized the dramatic change in the poetic tradition of the thirteenth century that Guido Guinizzelli announced in his verse and that critics would eventually term the ‘‘poetics of

praise,’’ that is, poetry no longer concerned with personal suffering but dedicated to extolling the beautiful, indeed the divine and miraculous qualities of the beloved. Guido’s poetry—five canzoni and fifteen sonnets, plus a couple of fragments—is contained, for the most part, in the major early manuscript collections of verse: two codices in the Vatican (Lat. 3793 and Chigi L.VIII.305) and two in Florence (Rediano 9 in the Laurentian Library and Banco Rari 217 in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale). The authenticity of a few other poems is in question. A good two-thirds of Guido’s poetic production followed the various models of the Sicilian-Tuscan school; indeed, Guido was an early adherent of Guittone d’Arezzo, to whom he addressed the sonnet, ‘‘O caro padre mio’’ (O my dear father), and whose sententious style can be observed in Guido’s canzone ‘‘Tegno di folle ‘mpres,’ a lo ver dire.’’ Similarly, some sonnets are didactic in tone, as ‘‘Pur a pensar mi par gran meraviglia’’ (For me it’s a great wonder simply to think). Other poems reflect the themes and language of the earlier Sicilian and Provenc¸al love poetry, such as ‘‘Donna, l’amor mi sforza’’ (My lady, love urges me) and ‘‘Madonna, il fino amor ched eo vo porto.’’ Guido also composed a couple of sonnets in the comic style, one of which, ‘‘Volvol te levi, vecchia rabbiosa’’ (May a whirlwind carry you off, you meddlesome old hag), conforms to the generic characteristics of the vituperium. At some point in his career Guido changed his poetic style and composed lyrics that varied greatly from those of his predecessors in style, theme, and conception. For this changeover he was reprimanded by Bonagiunta Orbicciani da Lucca who, in a well-known tenzone (sonnet exchange), accused him of having ‘‘mutata la mainera / de li piacenti ditti dell’amore / de la forma dell’esser la` dov’era’’ (changed the manner of the pleasing songs of love from their earlier forms). In his response, ‘‘Om ch’e` saggio non corre leggero’’ (A wise man does not run rapidly), Guido gently criticized the older, more traditionally minded poet. It is for his key role in the transformation and renewal of the Italian lyric tradition, that Guido 923

GUIDO GUINIZZELLI Guinizzelli has been recognized as the father of the dolce stil novo, the poetic school that flourished in the last quarter of the thirteenth century and drew some of its imagery from natural philosophy and its inspiration from religious mysticism. The primary characteristics of stilnovismo may be found in Guido’s praise of the divine beauty and miraculous qualities of his lady, as the first eight verses of the following sonnet demonstrate: Io voglio del ver la mia donna laudare ed asembrarli la rosa e lo giglio: piu` che stella diana splende e pare, e cio` ch’e` lassu` bello a lei somiglio. Verde river’ a lei rasembro e l’are, tutti color di fior’, giano e vermiglio, oro ed azzurro e ricche gioi per dare: medesmo Amor per lei rafina meglio. (I truly wish to praise my lady and to compare her to the rose and lily: More than the morning star she shines and comes into view, and all that is beautiful in the heavens I compare to her. I compare her to the verdant river bank and the gentle breeze, all colors of flowers, yellow and red, gold, and blue and precious stones worthy of being given: Through her even Love achieves greater perfection)

In his doctrinal canzone, ‘‘Al cor gentil rempaira sempre amore’’ (Love always has its home in the noble heart), Guinizzelli attempted to resolve the difficult questions concerning the nature of human nobility (gentilezza), the role of the woman in the amorous relationship and the purpose and meaning of earthly love. Contrary to traditional wisdom, gentilezza is not determined by a person’s wealth, or family, or any other external circumstance; rather, nobility is the consequence of one’s innate qualities. Therefore, the capacity or disposition to love purely and nobly is reserved for those to whom Nature has endowed with the ‘‘cor gentil’’ (noble heart). No longer a passive object of desire, Guinizzelli’s lady is an active force, who assumes in the elaborate system of analogies of the canzone ‘‘Al cor gentil’’ a power and status equal to that of God. In this manner the woman is responsible for activating in her admirer that inborn potentiality to love; indeed, Guinizzelli’s woman becomes a true ‘‘donna angelicata’’ (angelicized woman), similar to the angelic intelligences who move the eternal spheres. Given the philosophical pretensions and the numerous metaphysical parallels and analogies of the canzone, Guinizzelli was probably intending to ennoble human love by transforming it into a sort of secular caritas, a project that, however, proved to be too ambitious, for he concluded the poem on a humorous note. In the last strophe of 924

the canzone, Guido imagined that, after death, he was being judged by God, who rebuked him for having dared to use Him as a term of comparison for a vain, earthly love (‘‘vano amor’’): Donna, Deo mi dira`: ‘‘Che presumisti?’’ sı¨ando l’alma mia a lui davanti; ‘‘Lo ciel passasti, e ’nfin a me venisti, e desti in vano amor Me per semblanti: ch’a Me conve`n la laude, e a la Reina del regname degno, per cui cessa onne fraude.’’ Dir Li poro`: ‘‘Tenne d’angel sembianza che fosse del Tuo regno: non me fu fallo, s’in lei posi amanza.’’ (My lady, God will ask me, when my soul stands before Him, ‘‘What presumption is yours?’’ You passed through the heavens and came to My presence and used Me as a comparison for a vain love. All praise belongs to Me and to the Queen of this worthy realm, through whom all fraud ceases.’’ I will be able to answer Him: ‘‘She looked like an angel from Your kingdom: it was not my fault that I loved her.’’)

Despite his failure to reconcile human affection for woman and divine love for God, Guido Guinizzelli clearly indicated a new direction in love poetry, one that would be pursued by poets such as Guido Cavalcanti, Cino da Pistoia, and especially Dante. Indeed, it would be to this model that Dante would eventually turn in the Vita Nuova and the Divina Commedia, where Beatrice became his personal bearer of spiritual salvation (‘‘salute’’), thus fulfilling the lofty, but unrealized aspirations of Guido Guinizzelli and representing the supreme achievement of the dolce stil novo.

Biography Guido Guinizzelli was born in Bologna of the Magnani family, ca. 1230. His grandfather was Magnano, who served as prosecutor for the Commune of Bologna. Similarly, his father, Guinizzello di Magnano, was employed by the Commune as a judge; he also served as a member of the Council of the People and later as podesta` of Narni. The first of six children, Guido was, like his father, a judge in Bologna. He married Beatrice della Fratta in 1272, and their son, Guiduccio, was born the following year. Guido’s political allegiance was with the Ghibelline faction, headed by the Lambertazzi family. In 1274, as a result of increasing hostilities between the Ghibellines and their Guelf opponents, headed by the Geremei family, and the victory of the latter, Guido and his brothers (Giacomo and Uberto) were exiled. Guido and his

GUITTONE D’AREZZO family took refuge in Monselice (near Padua), where he died two years later, sometime before November 14, 1276. CHRISTOPHER KLEINHENZ See also: Dolce stil novo Selected Works Collections Rimatori del Dolce Stil Novo, edited by Luigi di Benedetto, Bari: Laterza, 1939. La poesia lirica del Duecento, edited by Carlo Salinari, Turin: UTET, 1951. Poeti del Duecento, 2 vols., edited by Gianfranco Contini, Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1960. Poeti del dolce stil nuovo, edited by Mario Marti, Florence: Le Monnier, 1969. The Poetry of Guido Guinizelli, edited and translated by Robert R. Edwards, New York: Garland, 1987.

Selected Translations German and Italian Lyrics of the Middle Ages: An Anthology and a History, edited and translated by Frederick Goldin, Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1973. The Age of Dante: An Anthology of Early Italian Poetry, translated by Joseph Tusiani, New York: Baroque Press, 1974. Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, The Early Italian Poets (1861), edited by Sally Purcell, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981.

Wilhelm, James J., Lyrics of the Middle Ages, New York: Garland, 1990.

Further Reading Barolini, Teodolinda, Dante’s Poets: Textuality and Truth in the Comedy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. Bertelli, Italo, La poesia di Guido Guinizzelli e la poetica del ‘‘Dolce stil nuovo,’’ Florence: Le Monnier, 1983. Bertelli, Italo, Poeti del Dolce stil nuovo: Guido Guinizzelli e Lapo Gianni, Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1963. Folena, Gianfranco, ‘‘Il canto di Guido Guinizzelli,’’ Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 154 (1977): 481–508. Folena, Gianfranco (editor), Per Guido Guinizzelli: Il Comune di Monselice (1276–1976), Padua: Antenore, 1980. Ker, W. P., ‘‘Dante, Guido Guinizelli and Arnaut Daniel,’’ Modern Language Review, 4 (1909): 145–152; reprinted in Form and Style in Poetry, London: Macmillan, 1929. Kleinhenz, Christopher, The Early Italian Sonnet: The First Century (1220–1321), Lecce: Milella, 1986. Marti, Mario, Storia dello stil nuovo, 2 vols., Lecce: Milella, 1973. Moleta, Vincent, Guinizelli in Dante, Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1980. Russell, Rinaldina, Tre versanti della poesia stilnovistica, Bari: Adriatica, 1973. Wilkins, Ernest Hatch, ‘‘A Note on Guinizelli’s ‘Al cor gentil,’’’ Modern Philology, 12 (1914): 325–330. Wilkins, Ernest Hatch, ‘‘Guinizelli Praised and Corrected,’’ in The Invention of the Sonnet and Other Studies in Italian Literature, Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1959.

GUITTONE D’AREZZO (CA. 1230/35–1294) Very little is known about Guittone—possibly a nickname for the common first name Guido— from sources other than his own, or other people’s, literary works. The central event of his life, the one around which all of his writings are organized, appears to have been the religious conversion that coincided with the complete rejection of the considerable body of love poetry that had till then been the basis of his fame. Around 1265, in fact, Guittone joined the Milites Beatae Virginis Mariae (Soldiers of the Blessed Virgin Mary), a newly formed religious order popularly known, as a sly commentary on their moderate and tolerant rule, as the Frati Gaudenti (the Jovial Friars). At this time, Guittone composed an 86-line canzone or ode,

‘‘Ora parra` s’eo savero` cantare’’ (Now We Shall See Whether I Am Still Able to Sing), in which he vehemently retracts and stigmatizes as reprobate and corrupting all poetry inspired by Amore, the god of love, especially the poetry he himself had written up to that point. This palinode, composed in the same highly wrought style and complicated rhyme schemes that had characterized Guittone’s earlier production, also functioned as a manifesto of his new poetry, which would now be devoted to the praise of God and the teaching of Christian values. As a consequence, the three oldest manuscripts that transmit his work (along with the work of the other poets of the Duecento)—Vaticano Latino 3793, Laurenziano Rediano 9, and Palatino 418 (now 925

GUITTONE D’AREZZO Banco rari 217)—all divide his poetic production into two groups, attributing his texts either to ‘‘Guittone’’ or to ‘‘Frate Guittone,’’ almost as if they had been written by two different people. The structure of the Laurenziano Rediano manuscript is particularly emblematic in this respect. Copied in all probability in the last decade of the thirteenth century in an environment close to Guittone, the codex opens with a group of 41 epistolary texts, 35 by the friar, followed by 434 poems, 232 by the poet from Arezzo, metrically subdivided into canzoni and sonnets. The section containing the canzoni begins with the above-mentioned manifesto followed by 23 other texts, all listed under the friar’s name. There follow, symmetrically, 24 love songs attributed to Guittone and finally 76 poems by other authors. In the sonnet section, the order is reversed: The texts attributed to Guittone precede the ones attributed to Frate Guittone. This arrangement creates a somewhat circular structure in which the religious experience encloses, but also orients, the interpretation of the older preconversion lyrical production. The image that emerges, then, from this manuscript is that of an emblematic Christian life, with a conversion that has its illustrious models in Paul and Augustine. The passionate moral teachings of the converted friar, conveyed by both the letters and the poetry, as well as their repeated condemnations of a sinful past, encourage a reading in autobiographical terms of all of his work, including the poems written before he joined the Milites. The love poetry attributed to Guittone is thus retrospectively stripped of its original literary autonomy, becoming a mere testimony to an earlier erotically errant version of the self and reinforcing by contrast the sincerity of both his conversion and the moral preaching of the friar. The implicit goodness of the fully embraced Christian doctrine, coupled with Frate Guittone’s undisputed poetical mastery, guarantees the moral and literary authority of his teaching. Furthermore, the religious texts establish a continuous dialogue with the older poems, not only through the repeated palinodes, but also by means of a high quotient of intertextuality. Although the Laurenziano manuscript was neither compiled nor ordered by the poet’s own hand, it may well have been copied from a previous authorial redaction. Two independent sources, a polemical sonnet by Guido Cavalcanti addressed to the friar and an incidental remark made by Dante commentator Benvenuto da Imola, explicitly mention a volume assembled by Guittone. Whether or not, in the last years of his life, the poet personally 926

prepared a ‘‘book’’ in which he collected and ordered his production in a form similar to that transmitted by Laurenziano Rediano 9 is still an object of debate among scholars. Undisputed, however, is the fact that, toward the end of Guittone’s life, his poetry must have presented itself as roughly divisible into two parts: one dealing, like most contemporary lyric poetry, with erotic themes; the other engaged with moral and religious issues, often set in direct opposition to and with the declared intent of making amends for the love poetry. How Guittone’s immediate posterity reacted to his legacy is epitomized by Dante’s repeated and systematic condemnations of his poetry, a critique that would exert a powerful negative influence on its subsequent reception. This devaluation lasted well into the twentieth century, and Guittone was for a long time considered either as a passive imitator of Provenc¸al modes or at best a clumsy precursor of Dante’s own moral and political vein. While an accurate assessment of all that Dante learned from Guittone is still to come, the advances in Guittonian scholarship have been enormous, as the essays presented at the conference organized in 1994 to commemorate the 700th anniversary of the poet’s death show (Michelangelo Picone, ‘‘Guittone, Guinizzelli e Dante,’’ 1995). Guittone’s lyric poetry seems to have been finally rescued from Dante’s wholesale condemnation and placed in the context of its direct predecessors and models, namely the Provenc¸al troubadours and the poets of the so-called Sicilian School. Several commentators tend to read Guittone’s early production, at least partially, as an ironic treatment, from a realistic, bourgeois point of view, of the fashionable love poetry of his day. While northern Italy and the court of Treviso were becoming the main center for the diffusion and revitalization of Occitan lyric poetry, especially at the hands of Uc de Saint Circ, compiler of most of the Provenc¸al vidas and the razos, and while the poets of Emperor Frederick II’s Magna Curia had recently proposed the translation and adaptation of selected Provenc¸al modules into the Sicilian vernacular, Guittone’s early production seems to take off in a different direction. Far from being an abstract idealization of the behavioral dynamics of the court, with the poet praising an unattainable lady, the source of his inspiration, who grants her favors only in terms of protection and patronage, as was still the case with the Sicilians, Guittone’s Madonna is instead a credible real, live, woman equally skilled in the language of deceit that constitutes the courtly love lyric. Instead of attempting

GUITTONE D’AREZZO to revitalize the conventions of a genre, possibly adapting it to a new social environment, Guittone operated within the same linguistic and stylistic parameters but willfully exaggerated those conventions or offered parodies of their cliche´s in order to demonstrate the ultimate falsity of that language. In a spirit akin to that of the Roman de la Rose, the rituals of courtly love, in the more down-to-earth context of Italian communal society, are exposed as an elegant pantomime that disguises its real aim, the actual seduction of the lady. This parodic attitude is especially evident in the first 86 love sonnets transcribed under Guittone’s name in the Laurenziano manuscript. Thanks to the presence of formal and semantic interconnective devices, the texts may be read as a single sequence in which a character, a poet called Guittone, enters into open debate with the lady whom he is courting. The textual exchange becomes similar to a theatrical representation with overtly comic tones, especially since the suitor’s real intentions are eventually revealed, though in the end he is unsuccessful in obtaining the lady’s favors. Guittone also seemed to adopt a similar stance in several of his canzoni, revealing an author whose ultimate goal was a radical critique of the conventions of the genre from a literary and intellectual viewpoint. Scholars such as Vincent Moleta have tried to show how Guittone’s early poetry progressively succeeds in freeing itself from stereotyped courtly modes and already contains in nuce the moral preoccupations that will eventually lead to his religious conversion (The Early Poetry of Guittone d’Arezzo, 1976). In this view, the political texts in particular evince the young Guittone’s sincere and original ethical disposition. The famous canzone, ‘‘Ahi lasso! or e` stagion de doler tanto’’ (Alas, Now Is the Season for Great Lamentation), deploring the Florentine defeat at Montaperti (1260), is indeed a powerful example of sirventes, the troubadour term for a polemical political text, while another ode, ‘‘Gente noiosa e villana’’ (A Noisome and Abject People), lamenting the poet’s self-imposed exile from Arezzo where his lady still dwells, fuses themes typical of a ‘‘distance song’’ with harsh criticism of the city’s moral and civic decadence. A thorough and balanced treatment of Guittone’s poetry and his literary accomplishment has yet to appear. It can hardly be expected until the long-awaited critical edition of his poetry that takes into account all of the developments in Guittonian scholarship becomes available. Until such time, the most philologically reliable texts remain

those established by Silvio D’Arco Avalle for the Concordanze della lingua poetica italiana delle origini (1992).

Biography Guitttone d’Arezzo was born, possibly in Arezzo, between 1230 and 1235. He was probably in exile outside Tuscany, 1257–1259. He joined Milites Beatae Virginis Mariae around 1265. He was in Bologna as a representative of the Milites, 1285. A donation for the construction of a Florentine monastery was registered under his name in Arezzo, 7 September 1293. Guittone died, according to a Bolognese obituary, 21 August 1294. ANTONELLO BORRA Selected Works Poetry ‘‘Sonetti e canzoni di diuersi antichi autori toscani in dieci libri raccolte. Di Dante Alaghieri libri quattro. Di M. Cino da Pistoia libro uno. Di Guido Caualcanti libro uno. Di Dante da Maiano libro uno. Di fra Guittone d’Arezzo libro uno. Di diuerse canzoni e sonetti senza nome d’autore. Libro uno,’’ 1527. ‘‘Le rime di Guittone d’Arezzo, edited by Francesco Egidi, 1940; selections in German and Italian Lyrics of the Middle Ages,’ translated by Frederick Goldin, 1973; and ‘The Age of Dante: An Anthology of Early Italian Poetry, translated by Joseph Tusiani,’’ 1974. ‘‘Concordanze della lingua poetica italiana delle origini,’’ edited by Silvio D’Arco Avalle, 1992.

Letters Le lettere di Guittone d’Arezzo, edited by Claude Margueron, 1990.

Further Reading Borra, Antonello, Guittone d’Arezzo e le maschere del poeta: La lirica cortese tra ironia e palinodia, Ravenna: Longo, 2000. Borsa, Paolo, ‘‘La tenzone tra Guido Guinizzelli e frate Guittone d’Arezzo,’’ Studi e problemi di critica testuale, 65:(2002), 47–88. Holmes, Olivia, ‘‘S’ eo varro` quanto valer gia` soglio’’: The Construction of Authenticity in the Canzoniere of Frate Guittone and Guittone d’Arezzo (Ms Laurenziano-Rediano 9),’’ Modern Philology, 95 (1997), 170–199. Leonardi, Lino, ‘‘Il canzoniere Laurenziano: Struttura, contenuto e fonti di una raccolta d’autore,’’ in I canzonieri della lirica italiana delle Origini: Studi critici, vol. 4, edited by Lino Leonardi, Florence: SISMEL, 2001. Leporatti, Roberto, ‘‘Il ’libro’ di Guittone e la ‘Vita Nova,’’’ Nuova Rivista di Letteratura Italiana, 4(2001): 41–150.

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GUITTONE D’AREZZO Margueron, Claude, Recherches sur Guittone d’Arezzo, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1966. Moleta, Vincent, The Early Poetry of Guittone d’Arezzo, London: The Modern Humanities Research Association, 1976. Picone, Michelangelo (editor), Guittone d’Arezzo nel settimo centenario della morte: Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Arezzo, Florence: Cesati Editore, 1995. Picone, Michelangelo, ‘‘Guittone, Guinizzelli e Dante,’’ Alighieri: Rassegna Bibliografica Dantesca, 18 (2001): 5–19.

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Poli, Andrea, ‘‘Una scheda provenzale per Guittone: Le canzoni XX, ‘Ahi lasso, che li boni e li malvagi’ e XLIX, ‘Altra fiata aggio gia` donne parlato,’’’ Filologia e critica, 25 (2000): 95–108. Storey, H. Wayne, ‘‘Sulle orme di Guittone: I programmi grafico-visivi del codice Banco Rari 217,’’ in Studi vari di lingua e letteratura italiana in onore di Giuseppe Velli, edited by Claudia Berra, Milan: Cisalpino, 2000. Tartaro, Achille, Il manifesto di Guittone e altri studi tra Due e Quattrocento, Rome: Bulzoni, 1974.

H HALCYON See Alcyone (Work by Gabriele D’Annunzio)

HARD LABOR See Lavorare stanca (Work by Cesare Pavese)

HERMETICISM essential language representing the universal, tragic condition of human beings. The term Hermeticism was first applied to this poetic movement, in a derogatory way, by Francesco Flora in his La poesia ermetica (1936). In this book, Flora, a critic of Crocean legacy, condemns Giuseppe Ungaretti, among others, for the obscurity of his writing: a style that he defines as hermetic.

In twentieth-century Italian literature, the term ermetismo (Hermeticism) indicates a poetic movement that flourished mainly in Florence, with branches in Milan and Rome, roughly between 1930 and 1950. This movement developed thanks to the activity of poets, critics, and translators who promoted a type of poetry that excluded explicit political references, and was characterized by an

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HERMETICISM The label was soon pre-empted by those very poets and critics who were damned as Hermetics, and it assumed a positive connotation. Ermetismo, as a term of identity, in fact, enabled the Hermetic poets to synthesize and to explain the theoretical and spiritual foundation of their work. This is apparent, for example, in Carlo Bo’s Letteratura come vita (1938), a work, however, that is not meant to be read as a programmatic manifesto like those of other avant-garde literary movements, but rather as a document assessing a common itinerary and taste. According to Bo, what unites the Hermetic poets is a shared appreciation of the spiritual value of literature, intended as a supreme truth reflected in the essential nature of life itself. Poetry, in short, is the highest expression of the human soul. Because of its apparent detachment from contingent social and historical facts, Hermeticism has not had an easy reception in Italy. From the beginning of the Fascist regime, Hermetics became the target of opposing factions. Some interpreted their political disengagement as a neutral position of aesthetes that the regime could safely ignore; others saw it as an indirect way—and the only possible way, at the time—of declaring an anti-Fascist stance. This can be seen, for example, in the polemics of Luigi Russo, Mario Morandi, and Giuseppe Villaroel in Donato Valli’s Storia degli ermetici (1978) and in Marco Fioravanti’s La critica e gli ermetici (1978). After World War II, with the emergence of a neorealist trend in Italy, in which activism in literature was considered essential, the Hermetics were criticized for their lack of engagement. And even later—for example in the 1960s, with the formation of the neoavant-garde—their contributions were often belittled or ignored. It is significant that, in his introduction to the anthology Poesia del novecento (1969), Edoardo Sanguineti, speaking of the poet Mario Luzi, declares, with him ‘‘si ha il senso pieno di essere giunti a una stazione terminale, e si volta pagina con assoluta tranquillita`’’ (one has the sense of having arrived at a terminal point, so that it is possible to turn over to a new leaf with absolute calm). Although Hermetics espoused common literary aims, they did not perceive themselves as an organized school. This is probably why various critics, including Silvio Ramat, Ruggero Jacobbi, Mario Petrucciani, Sergio Pautasso, and Luciano Anceschi, define Hermeticism and identify its representatives by different criteria. Anceschi, for example, in his introduction to Lirici nuovi (1942) recognizes three distinct generations of Hermetics. According to him, the first generation is composed 930

of such poets as Ungaretti, Montale, and Sergio Solmi; the second by exponents such as Salvatore Quasimodo, Leonardo Sinisgalli, Sandro Penna, and Alfonso Gatto; and, finally, the third by representatives of the Florentine circle (Mario Luzi), and of the Milanese circle (Vittorio Sereni). Despite Anceschi’s assertion, it is clear that within this subdivision, further nuances exist. For example, even if Montale, in such works as Le occasioni (The Occasions, 1939) displays the Hermetic trait of a concentrated and difficult language, his poetry is significantly different from that of Ungaretti, one of the poets with whom he is grouped. Unlike Ungaretti, Montale never carries the symbolist influence to the extremes. The drive that leads Montale toward an irrational side of existence is always controlled by a rational restraint. In addition to the poets mentioned above, many others contributed to the formation and diffusion of the Hermetic spirit. Some critics, including Bo and Oreste Macrı`, were directly involved with the movement. Others, such as Anceschi, Contini, and Alfredo Gargiulo, followed and supported the activities of the group. Moreover, prestigious literary journals, including Solaria and Letteratura, published Hermetic pieces. And other well-known journals, because of their prevailing philosophical line, ended up as virtual organs of the movement itself: in Florence, Frontespizio and Campo di Marte (this latter became the most militant Hermetic journal), and in Milan, Corrente. Among representative Hermetic poets, Salvatore Quasimodo, Mario Luzi, and Vittorio Sereni have emerged as distinctive voices: Quasimodo, for his rich style and the recovery of classical elements; Luzi for his linguistic sophistication, along with his idiosyncratic Catholicism; and, finally, Sereni for his sober tone and his moral intent. The Sicilian Salvatore Quasimodo (1901–1968) made his de´but as a poet in Florence in 1930 by publishing three poems in Solaria: ‘‘Albero’’ (Tree), ‘‘Prima volta’’ (First Time), and ‘‘Angeli’’ (Angels). He went on to write numerous renowned works in the Hermetic style: Acque e terre (Waters and Lands, 1930); Oboe sommerso (Oboe Under Water, 1932); Odore di eucalyptus e altri versi (Essence of Eucalyptus and Other Poems, 1933); Erato e Apollion (Aerato and Apollyon, 1936), and Poesie (Poems, 1938). Recurrent themes are his sense of estrangement as an anonymous sojourner in modern society, and his nostalgic longing to recover a mythical lost childhood: a childhood that harks back to an ideal, classical Sicily. Quasimodo’s employment of frequent analogies, elliptical

HERMETICISM forms, sophisticated words, and mystical motifs— all hallmarks of Hermetic verse—clearly identifies him as a member of the movement. The works that Quasimodo wrote after World War II mark a different phase in his poetic career. They manifest a belief in progressive ideologies and an interest in social issues that were absent in the poet’s earlier production. Mario Luzi (1914–2005), like Quasimodo, lived and worked in Florence. His poetry collections achieve some of the most coherent and refined results of the movement. Being particularly inspired by French Catholic thought and by Orphic poetry, he often creates rarefied atmospheres in his work. His blurring of real referents evokes suggestive spiritual and metaphysical dimensions. Luzi initially made himself known in 1935, through his poetic collection La barca (The Boat). Then he consolidated his reputation with Avvento notturno (Night Advent, 1942), Un brindisi (A Toast, 1946), Quaderno gotico (Gothic Notebook, 1947), Primizie del deserto (First Fruits of the Desert, 1952), Dal fondo delle campagne (From the Depths of the Countryside, 1965), Su fondamenti invisibili (On Invisible Foundations, 1971), and other works. His most characteristic production is that published between the 1940s and the 1960s. In these poems, poetic personae placed in imaginary worlds yearn to overcome different obstacles, in an attempt to give real substance to an otherwise vain existence. Vittorio Sereni (1913–1983), born in Luino, had contacts with the Hermetics in Florence, but he developed as a poet chiefly in the Milanese milieu, where he had the opportunity to work with the philosopher Antonio Banfi, and meet artists and writers associated with the journal Corrente. His first volume of poems, Frontiera (Boundary), appeared in 1941; his second, Diario d’Algeria (Diary of Algeria), in 1947. This second book reveals the profound impact of war and captivity on Sereni. In Diario d’Algeria, the faded and elegiac landscapes of the soul that are presented in Frontiera are noticeably absent. In their place, one encounters references to history, and a sense of bewilderment and loss: The poetic personae feel powerless, swept along in the tide of relentless events that they cannot change. In 1965, after a few years of silence, the poet published Gli strumenti umani (Human Instruments). This book, which expresses the inability of individuals to control the mechanisms of a neocapitalist society, marks Sereni’s definite closure with the Hermetic experience.

Despite a decidedly mixed critical reception, Hermeticism—as represented in the works of Quasimodo, Luzi, Sereni and others—marks a milestone in the history of Italian literature. The Hermetic movement revives and solidifies certain nineteenth-century symbolist traits, notably an ascetic vocabulary and an emphasis on the noumenal aspect of human existence. It also responds to the most recent philosophical debates of phenomenology and existentialism. In the sociopolitical context, Hermeticism implicitly rejects Fascist ideology, and—in keeping with its antimodern and antimaterialistic spirit—rejects the taste of an evolving mass culture. PAOLA SICA Further Reading Anceschi, Luciano (editor), Lirici nuovi: antologia, Milan: Hoepli, 1942; enlarged edition: Milan: Mursia, 1964. Bo, Carlo, Letteratura come vita (1938), edited by Sergio Pautasso, Milan: Rizzoli, 1994. Contini, Gianfranco, Esercizi di lettura sopra autori contemporanei con un’appendice su testi non contemporanei, Florence: Parenti, 1939; enlarged edition, Turin: Einaudi, 1974. Dolfi, Anna, Terza generazione: ermetismo e oltre, Rome: Bulzoni, 1997. Fioravanti, Marco, La critica e gli ermetici, Bologna: Cappelli, 1978. Flora, Francesco, La poesia ermetica, Bari: Laterza, 1936. Jacobbi, Ruggero, Campo di Marte trent’anni dopo: 1938– 1968, Florence: Vallecchi, 1969. Jones, Frederic J., Modern Italian Lyric, Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1986. Macrı`, Oreste, Teoria letteraria delle generazioni, edited by Anna Dolfi, Florence: Franco Cesati, 1995. Mattesini, Francesco (editor), Dai solariani agli ermetici: studi sulla letteratura italiana degli anni ’20 e ’30, Milan: Vita e pensiero, 1989. Pautasso, Sergio, Ermetismo, Milan: Editrice bibliografica, 1996. Petrucciani, Mario, Poetica dell’ermetismo italiano, Turin: Loescher, 1955. Pieri, Marzio, Interdizioni postermetiche: invenzione e deriva di una poesia italiana novecentesca, Trento: La finestra, 2003. Ramat, Silvio, L’ermetismo, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1969. Sanguineti, Edoardo (editor), Poesia del novecento, Turin: Einaudi, 1969. Stasi, Beatrice, Ermetismo, Milan: La Nuova Italia, 2000. Strazzeri, Marcello, Profilo ideologico dell’ermetismo italiano, Lecce: Milella, 1977. Valli, Donato, Storia degli ermetici, Brescia: La scuola, 1978.

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HEROIC-COMIC POETRY

HEROIC-COMIC POETRY The intricacy of the connections between imitation, ludic translations, and plot-making in the epic tradition suggests taking a fresh look at heroic-comic poetry in the first two decades of the seventeenth century. Writers such as Alessandro Tassoni (1565–1635), Francesco Bracciolini (1566–1645), and Lorenzo Lippi (1606–1665) should be credited as the ‘‘creators’’ of a new type of poetry that parodies the high style of epic by applying it to everyday and trivial themes. Like their Greek predecessor, the pseudo-Homeric Batracomiomachia (Battle of the Mice and Frogs), they contrive to make us wonder at their ability of manipulating the plot, and insist on the parallel between the dramatic intrigue and the unleashing of violence in peasant villages. Although introduced by Francesco Bracciolini, the term ‘‘heroic-comic’’ has its rhetorical genesis in the preface to La secchia rapita (The Rape of the Bucket, 1622), where Alessandro Tassoni presents his work as a new type of poem in mixed forms. Tassoni’s aim is to surprise his audience, because ‘‘inventar fuori della strada comune una sorte di poema, che piaccia ugualmente ai dotti e agli idioti e porga loro diletto, non e` cosa ordinaria’’ (it is not ordinary to invent, off the beaten path, a sort of poem which might appeal to the learned and to the ignorant and bring them delight). Yet, an alternative genealogy for the rise of the heroic-comic poem is to be found in an almost neglected treatise on rhetoric, Ragionamento dello Academico Aldeano sopra la poesia giocosa de’ Greci, de’ Latini, e de’ Toscani (Argument of the Academician Aldeano on the Playful Poetry of the Greeks, the Latins, and the Tuscans, 1634), by Niccolo` Villani (1590–1636), which alludes to Giovanni Della Casa’s parody of Ariosto. According to Villani, Della Casa comically applied himself to the Orlando Furioso and systematically transformed the first lines of each canto. This cannot be a coincidence. Della Casa understood the value of the narrator’s introduction and the importance of Ariosto’s octave stanza in the transition from the heroic poem to the mock heroic. Giancarlo Mazzacurati, in ‘‘Varieta` e digressione. Il laboratorio ariostesco nella trasmissione dei ‘generi’’’ (1996), has convincingly described the role of 932

Ariosto as a ‘‘laboratory’’ for the transmission of literary genres, and this is true also for the heroiccomic. Moreover, Villani’s story on Della Casa—if it is not entirely invented by its author—has a further, less obvious implication. It suggests that the new poetical form, traditionally linked to the Seicento, in fact has its origin in the very heart of the Renaissance. As is clear from recent studies such as Maria Cristina Cabani’s La pianella di Scarpinello: Tassoni e la nascita dell’eroicomico (1999), the heroiccomic tradition is centered on the Renaissance idea that new epics are composed out of scraps from earlier literature. According to Villani’s work, Virgil’s Aeneid is reputed to have been translated into the language of Norcia, Ovid’s Metamorphoses into that of Bergamo, and Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem Delivered, 1580) into the Bolognese dialect. The canon of ancient and modern classics strictly follows that established by Henri Estienne’s Parodiae morales (Moral Parodies, 1575), from which comes also some of the literary terminology, such as ‘‘mutare’’ (how to change words), and ‘‘rivoltare’’ or ‘‘travolgere’’ (how to turn a text). At the end of his treatise, Villani describes the new typology of poetry as hilaroepica or eroicocomica, thus repeating, with a little variation, the adjective eroicomico that appears in the preface of Tassoni’s La secchia rapita. This early heroic-comic criticism provides the broad context in which can be located L’Eneide travestita (The Aeneid Disguised, 1634), by Giovan Battista Lalli (1572–1637). In the prefatory Autore al lettore (The Author to the Reader), Lalli is clearly aware that his Virgilian experiment is not just a parody, but rather ‘‘un discrivere con modo parafrastico la sostanza dell’original sentimento dell’autore’’ (a paraphrastic way to describe the substance of the author’s original intent). For this reason, and even if we account for Villani’s specific interest in the background of Lalli’s ‘‘travestimento,’’ the heroic-comic tradition must also be understood in the context of the study of Virgil during the Renaissance. These traditions share important elements such as the epic technique of ekphrasis (the use of written language for highly visual scenes), and the imitative strategy of the

HEROIC-COMIC POETRY ‘‘centone’’ or pastiche, which will find its acme in the Baroque with the prodigious Metametrica (Metametrics, 1663) of Juan Caramuel, bishop of Vigevano (1606–1682). Finally, the heroic-comic is located at the intersection between the picaresque protonovel, which includes texts like Leon Battista Alberti’s Momus (1540) and the ancient Life of Aesop, and the macaronic tradition. Teofilo Folengo’s Baldus, published in its first version in 1517, is clearly a model for Tassoni and the other heroic-comic writers for both its experimental epic and its language. However, Folengo is a crucial figure also because of Orlandino (1526), an Italian attempt at heroiccomic that exploits both the possibilities of the Carolingian epic and of the octave stanza, fashioned in the manner of Ariosto. In fact, even though some elements of low style are already present in Boiardo, it is especially Ariosto that feeds heroic-comic experimentalism. Indeed, the heroic-comic tradition expands its eclectic imitation from style to the characters and the plot itself. The only thing that sets Tassoni aside from Tasso is the fact that his subject is no longer heroic but laughable. In light of this eclecticism, it thus is not quite important or easy to trace a distinction between heroic and burlesque poems. Bracciolini can easily pass from the serious Della croce racquistata (The Reconquered Cross, 1605) to the parodic Lo scherno degli dei (The Mockery of the Gods, 1618). Likewise, Il conquisto di Granata (The Conquest of Granada, 1650), an epic poem written by Girolamo Graziani (1604–1675), is not very different, even in the title, from Lippi’s comic Il Malmantile racquistato (Malmantile Reconquered, 1676). The difference between Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata and the heroic-comic L’Asino (The Donkey, 1652), written by Carlo de’ Dottori (1618– 1686), is a matter of an inner transformation within the Italian epic. Another source of influence for heroic-comic poetry is Marinismo. Despite his criticism of Marino’s ‘‘modern’’ style, too obscure and richly ornamented, Tassoni describes the form of L’Adone (Adonis, 1623) in his own La secchia rapita as a new epic in progress. In fact, Marino’s keen understanding of the rules of marketing stands out as one of the more powerful experiences of the post-Tasso generations. Moreover, his artful flexibility became a model for heroic-comic writers for its constant varietas, that is, its contamination of different genres, seen as necessary to avoid the passive imitation of the predecessors. The heroic-comic writers thus develop an already expanding tradition. They

accept the playful component of the epic, already exploited as a source by Marino’s antiheroic Adone. However, Tassoni, who was accused of provincialism, offered more corrections and norms to his generic models than any of his Italian ancestors. With him, we have a crucial change of direction for the epic. The seemingly narrow focus on ‘‘provincial’’ life in his La secchia rapita serves as an antidote to the utopian pretentiousness of the Renaissance epic poem. Given what is known of the reception of Tassoni, at least three conclusions can be drawn. First, heroic-comic poems display a similarity with some works within the realm of ‘‘serious epic.’’ A good example would be Lo stato rustico (The Rustic State, 1611), written by Gianvincenzo Imperia`l (1570–1645), which dislocates the epic geography by idealizing a premodern Arcadian landscape. Second, Tassoni’s heroiccomic intuition allows the reuse of low and highly mimetic genres, which had previously been exiled from the epic tradition. Finally, Tassoni’s linguistic experimentalism preserves oddities of vocabulary otherwise poorly transmitted in the Italian epic, as one can see in book 12, where Tassoni imitates Ruzante’s Paduan jargon. This comedic strategy had already been observed by an Aristotelian critic, Emanuele Tesauro. As he notes in the Trattato de’ ridicoli (Treatise on Ridiculous People) in his Cannocchiale aristotelico (The Aristotelian Spyglass, 1654), there are the ‘‘ridicoli’’ who ‘‘con parole oneste e nobili coprono concetti servili’’ (conceal servile notions behind honest and noble words) and those who on the contrary ‘‘con parole servili o poco oneste significano onesti concetti’’ (signify honest concepts with servile or not so honest words). Likewise, Tassoni uses the low Paduan dialect of Ruzante to counter the degradation of epic language and the shift in rhetorical strategies initiated by his poem. STEFANO GULIZIA Further Reading Bertoni, Clotilde, Percorsi europei dell’eroicomico. Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1997. Cabani, Maria Cristina, La pianella di Scarpinello: Tassoni e la nascita dell’eroicomico. Lucca: Pacini Fazzi, 1999. Capata, Alessandro, Semper truffare paratus: Genere e ideologia nel Baldus di Folengo, Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 2000. Daniele, Antonio, ‘‘Di alcuni caratteri della poesia eroicomica. Dal Tassoni al Dottori, e oltre,’’ in Carlo De’ Dottori. Lingua, cultura e aneddoti, Padua: Antenore, 1987.

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HEROIC-COMIC POETRY Dawson, C.M., ‘‘Spοudaiοgέlοiοn: Random Thoughts on Occasional Poems,’’ in Yale Classical Studies, 19 (1966): 39–76. Feo, Michele, ‘‘Dal pius agricola al villano empio e bestiale (A proposito di una infedelta` virgiliana del Caro),’’ in Maia, 20 (1968): 89–136, 206–223. Gorni, Guglielmo, and Silvia Longhi, ‘‘La parodia,’’ in Letteratura Italiana Einaudi, vol. 5, Turin: Einaudi, 1986. Il poema eroicomico, Turin: Tirrenia Stampatori, 2001. Mazzacurati, Giancarlo, ‘‘Varieta` e digressione. Il laboratorio ariostesco nella trasmissione dei ‘generi,’’’ in Rinascimenti in transito, Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1996. Quint, David, ‘‘Francesco Bracciolini as a Reader of Ariosto and Tasso,’’ in L’arme e gli amori. Ariosto, Tasso and Guarini in Late Renaissance Florence, edited by Massimiliano Rossi and Fiorella Gioffredi Superbi, Florence: Olschki, 2004.

Rossi, Massimiliano, and Fiorella Gioffredi Superbi (editors), L’arme e gli amori. Ariosto, Tasso and Guarini in Late Renaissance Florence, Florence: Olschki, 2004. Sangirardi, Giuseppe, Boiardismo ariostesco. Presenza e trattamento dell’ ‘Orlando Innamorato’ nel ’Furioso’. Lucca: Pacini Fazzi, 1993. Scalabrini, Massimo, L’incarnazione del macaronico. Percorsi nel comico folenghiano, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2003. Tassoni, Alessandro, La secchia rapita e scritti poetici, edited by Pietro Puliatti, Modena: Panini, 1989. Tesauro, Emanuele, Canocchiale aristotelico, Turin: Sinibaldo, 1564. Valesio, Paolo, ‘‘Origini narrative: dal macaronico al cosmico,’’ in La novella, la voce, il libro. Dal ‘‘cantare’’ trecentesco alla penna narratrice barocca, Naples: Liguori, 1996. Villani, Niccolo`, Ragionamento dello Academico Aldeano sopra la poesia giocosa de’ Greci, de’ Latini, e de’ Toscani, Venice: Pinelli, 1634.

HISPANO LATIN-AMERICAN INFLUENCES Cultural relations between Italy and Spain date back to the Middle Ages. Scholarly debate continues on the role that Arab civilization (mediated by the Spanish presence in Italy) played in the development of the theme of the idealized woman in Italian literature. Literary scholars suggest that this influence led to the formation of such mythical literary figures as Dante’s Beatrice and Petrarch’s Laura. It has been ascertained that a noted legend from Islamic literature (which entered the European cultural patrimony in the thirteenth century via the court of Alfonso X the Wise in Toledo) influenced the writing of the Comedia (ca. 1305–1321), in particular the scenes of the ascension of Dante and Beatrice. During the fifteenth century, there was a literary prolongation of the Iberian peninsula on Italian soil, an extension effected by the presence of the court of Alfonso the Magnanimous in Naples. The intense literary exchange between the two countries that began during that period remained largely uninterrupted to the present day. Alfonso’s court contributed to the circulation of the poetry of the cancioneros in Venice, Milan, Modena, and Rome, while the romances were present in collections and compilations of poetry from Spain. 934

A large number of Spanish literary works were diffused in Italy after the expulsion of the Jews by the Catholic kings Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon in 1492, given that many authors were conversos of Jewish origin. This literary dissemination gradually increased during the sixteenth century; it included chivalric works, sentimental novels, historical texts (primarily printed in Venice), and the works of Antonio de Guevara, whose influences on utopian writers in the Renaissance (Anton Francesco Doni, Francesco Patrizi, and Tommaso Garzoni) has been noted. The fortune of such chivalric works led to the composition of poems in octaves including Bernardo Tasso’s Amadigi di Gaula (1560), inspired by the Amadı´s de Gaula (1508) by Garci Rodrı´guez de Montalvo, and Ludovico Dolce’s Il Palmerino (1561) and Primaleone (1562), inspired by the Spanish originals, Palmerı´n de Oliva (1511) and Primaleo´n (1512), by anonymous authors. During these years, an Italian culture often convinced of its own superiority accepted Juan de Valde´s as a master. His Dia´logo de la lengua (censored in 1549 by the CounterReformation and finally published in 1737) offered a perspective on Spanish cultural values that diverged from the dominant view, exalting instead

HISPANO LATIN-AMERICAN INFLUENCES popular literature and proverbs. In the same period, the diffusion of works on theological morality by Martı´n de Azpilcueta, Diego de Estrella, and Luis de Granada, and later of Santa Teresa de ´ vila and San Juan de la Cruz, was also important. A While this phenomenon has been little studied, it undoubtedly had a strong influence on spirituality in the era of the Counter-Reformation. In the meantime, the existence of the Americas began to register in cultured circles, specifically thanks to texts by Spanish chroniclers. New geographic discoveries and the conquest of the American territories slightly marred the myth of antiquity as a model. In the seventeenth century, concettismo and acuteness developed in parallel in Italy and in Spain. An interesting case in this regard is the reappropriation by Giovanbattista Marino of sonnets by Lope de Vega, who was originally inspired by Torquato Tasso. With regard to theater, on the other hand, it was no longer the Italian companies that traveled to Spain, but the other way around. Influences of Spanish theater are evident in Giacinto Andrea Cicognini’s Il convitato di pietra (The Guest of Stone, 1671). A rewriting of El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra (1630) commonly attributed to Tirso de Molina (by others to the actor, company manager, and writer Andre´s de Claramonte), this is probably the first Italian version of the myth of Don Juan. Spanish culture was especially present in Italy during the first half of the seventeenth century, even though several works were translated initially into Italian from French, as, for example, Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quijote (Part I, 1605; Part II, 1615). This was decisive in the genesis of the genre of the heroic-comic poem, such as La secchia rapita (The Rape of the Bucket, 1622) by Alessandro Tassoni (1656–1635) and l’Asino (The Ass, 1652) by Carlo Dottori (1618–1686). Generally, however, the idea of the primogeniture of the classics impeded Italians from fully appreciating the innovative elements offered by Spanish literature. The War of Spanish Succession (1700–1714), which ended the long presence of the Spanish in Italy, marked a new era in the relationship between the two countries, although contacts did not end, due in part to the efforts of intellectuals such as Pietro Napoli Signorelli (1731–1815). Spanish literature was present above all in the theater. Apostolo Zeno, Pietro Metastasio, and Carlo Gozzi were particularly influenced by Lope de Vega, Pedro Caldero´n de la Barca, and Agustı´n Moreto. In Don Giovanni Tenorio (1736), Carlo Goldoni eliminated the

stone dinner guest, substituting it with a miraculous bolt of lightning and thus rewriting the myth in a version consistent with his conception of realism. Don Quijote continued to be the best-known Spanish work in Italy, although it was valued primarily for its comic and burlesque qualities. Socrate immaginario (Imaginary Socrates, 1775) by Ferdinando Galiani (1728–1787) and Giambattista Lorenzi (1721–1807) is considered the librettist masterpiece of Neapolitan comic opera, and was set to music by Giovanni Paisiello. Don Chisciotti e Sanchu Panza (Don Quijote and Sancho Panza, 1787), a work in octaves composed in Sicilian by Giovanni Meli (1740–1815), was more faithful to the spirit of Cervantes. In 1767, Charles III expelled the Jesuits from Spain and from all the territories under Spanish domination. Many of these, for the most part men of letters, came to Italy, where they contributed to the cultural relationship between the two countries. If for a time Spain was seen in terms of its domination of part of the peninsula in the seventeenth century, the Risorgimento instead propounded the exemplary image of the Spanish resistance to Napoleon. Furthermore, some Romantics such as Giovanni Berchet and Pietro Monti became interested in popular genres like the romances, considered proof of the irrepressible Spanish patriotism. These romances, together with the theatrical works, thus entered the Italians’ understanding of Spanish literature alongside Cervantes’ novel, now so widely recognized that it influenced even the narrative structure of Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi (The Betrothed, 1827–1840/1842). In the nineteenth century, Spanish Romantic theater also inspired the librettos for three lyric operas by Giuseppe Verdi: Il Trovatore (1853), Simon Boccanegra (1857), and La forza del ´ lvaro destino (1862), which are reworkings of Don A o la fuerza del sino (1835) by Duque de Rivas, of El trovador (1836), and of Simo´n Bocanegra (1843) by Antonio Garcı´a Gutie´rrez. At the end of the century, the theatrical work Juan Jose´ (1895) by Joaquı´n Dicenta enjoyed singular success; it was translated into Italian (1906) and into many dialects (an unusual occurrence). In the first decades of the twentieth century, a new season of critical studies of Spanish literature began. Benedetto Croce, one of the leaders of this trend, conducted extremely important studies on the presence of Spain in Italy, but his criticism of Spanish literature was guided by antiquated, intolerant criteria that gave way to commonplaces successively repeated for decades in literary manuals. 935

HISPANO LATIN-AMERICAN INFLUENCES A result of this renewed interest, however, was a new wave of studies of Cervantes, echoes of which are present in the works of Luigi Pirandello, who abundantly cites the Don Quijote in L’umorismo (On Humor, 1908), and who draws upon the Spanish writer for his contraposition between the eternity of the character and the transience of the author. The theme of the character who rebels and criticizes his author, present in Pirandello and in Miguel de Unamuno, is also typically Cervantian. In poetry, the great writers of the Spanish Baroque, Caldero´n and Luis de Go´ngora, were the objects of a new cult. Giuseppe Ungaretti translated Go´ngora in Da Go´ngora a Mallarme´ (From Go´ngora to Mallarme´, 1948), and explained, in Go´ngora al lume d’oggi (Go´ngora Today, 1951), how the re-evaluation of the Baroque was connected to the rise of Hermeticism. With this reconsideration of the Baroque, the poetry of Federico Garcı´a Lorca enjoyed immense and unparalleled success, thanks to Elio Vittorini, Carlo Bo, and Oreste Macrı`. The poets Raffaele Carrieri, Ferruccio Masini, Vittorio Bodini, and Bartolo Cattafi were initially inspired by Garcı´a Lorca. Later, Antonio Machado, Juan Ramo´n Jime´nez, and Jorge Guille´n also entered the Italian literary scene. Latin American literature, long considered an offshoot of Spanish literature, also garnered interest by the early twentieth century. In the second half of the century in particular, Latin American novelists such as Gabriel Garcı´a Ma´rquez, Mario Benedetti, Mario Vargas Llosa, Jorge Luis Borges, ´ ngel Asturias, Alejo Carpentier, Julio Miguel A ´ lvaro Mutis, and Corta´zar, Carlos Fuentes, A others, impressed readers with their original stylistic combinations, and with their unhinging of the traditional enunciative function and of the criteria of verisimilitude. Some of their fiction inspired our master filmmakers, from Federico Fellini (a great admirer of Borges) to Michelangelo Antonioni, who based his most popular film Blow Up (1966) on Corta´zar’s short story ‘‘Las babas del diablo,’’ to Francesco Rosi, whose 1987 Cronaca di una morte annunciata stylishly revisits Ma´rquez’s homonymous novel. The writings of the founders of the new Latin American poetry also had global resonance, including work by Ce´sar Vallejo, Vicente Huidobro, Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda, and Octavio Paz. Salvatore Quasimodo translated Neruda, whose poetry began to be known and strongly appreciated by the 1950s thanks to Dario Puccini and Giuseppe Bellini. Borges’ influence on Italian narrative in the past decades is perhaps the most wide-ranging and prolific. Italo Calvino even 936

enumerated the various elements of his profound interest for the Argentine author (besides that for chivalric literature and for Cervantes): short writing, the fantastic, the combinatory potential of the text, the presence of space-time infinity. Critics have also studied the influence of Borges on Umberto Eco, Leonardo Sciascia, Antonio Tabucchi, Claudio Magris, and in the younger generation, Paola Capriolo and Laura Pariani, whose La straduzione (Stranslation) appeared in 2004. Declared instances of intertextuality include Alberto Arbasino’s Il principe costante (The Constant Prince, 1972), Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Caldero´n (1973), and Dacia Maraini’s Suor Juana (1980), works inspired, respectively, by Caldero´n’s El prı´ncipe constante (1629) and La vida es suen˜o (1635), and by Respuesta a Sor Filotea (1691) by the Mexican Sor Juana Ine´s de la Cruz. Andrea Camilleri has, on more than one occasion, recognized the influence of Manuel Va´zquez Montalba´n on the structure of some of his novels. Indeed Montalbano, the name of the famous protagonist of his detective fiction, is a name widely diffused in Sicily but also an act of homage to the Spanish writer. Fabrizia Ramondino’s novel Guerra d’infanzia e di Spagna (War of Childhood and of Spain, 2001) shares with some novels by Ana Marı´a Matute (in particular Primera memoria, 1960) both its setting, the island of Majorca during the Civil War, and its dominant theme, the child’s sensory experience. Along with Latin-American literature, the Spanish novel also began to regain popularity in Italy in the 1990s, and important authors such as Carmen Martı´n Gaite, Juan Jose´ Milla´s, Javier Marı´as, Arturo Pe´rez Reverte, Antonio Mun˜oz Molina have been well-received in Italy. In the last decades, Spanish and Latin American studies have flourished in the universities, although much still remains to be done to fill in the gaps in what is available in Italian libraries and bookstores. Furthermore, Spanish and Latin American culture, including that of the pre-Colombian peoples, have recently been widely diffused at the level of popular culture. To name only a few examples, the films of Luis Bun˜uel and Pedro Almodo´var, the play ¡Ay, Carmela! (1987) by Jose´ Sanchı´s Sinisterra, the theatrical adaptation of Javier Tomeo’s Amado monstruo (1985), and theatrical and cinematic adaptations of the Chilean story by Luis Sepu´lveda, Historia de una gaviota y del gato que le ensen˜o´ a volar (1996) have all enjoyed great success. Cinema, theater, dance, painting, and music have thus become fashionable, and have presented commercial opportunities (which do not always avoid

HISTORICAL NOVEL stereotypes), while in Italian universities Spanish has been for some time the second most studied language after English. LUIGI CONTADINI Further Reading Bardi, Ubaldo, ‘‘La visione culturale dell’Iberoamericana nella letteratura italiana del primo novecento,’’ in Silarus, 45, no. 241 (2005): 70–77. Bellini, Giuseppe, Storia delle relazioni letterarie tra l’Italia e l’America di lingua spagnola, Milan: Cisalpino/ Goliardica, 1977. Bertini, Giovanni Maria, Cesare Acutis, and Pablo Luis ´ vila, La romanza spagnola in Italia, Turin: GiappiA chelli, 1970. Buxo, Jose´ Pascual, Ungaretti y Go´ngora, Me´xico: Universidad Nacional Auto´noma de Me´xico, 1978. Convegno internazionale sul tema Italia e Spagna nella cultura del ’700: Roma, 3–5 dicembre 1990, Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1992.

Corti, Maria, ‘‘La Commedia di Dante e l’oltretomba islamico,’’ in Belfagor, 50 (1995): 301–314. Cro, Stelio, ‘‘Pirandello lettore di Don Quijote,’’ in Teatro Contemporaneo, 13 (1986): 1–20. ´ . Lozano and Juan A. Rı´os Gime´nez, Enrique, Miguel A ˜ (editors), Espanoles en Italia e italianos en Espan˜a, Alicante: Universidad de Alicante, 1996. Menarini, Piero, ‘‘Il dramma romantico spagnolo in musica,’’ in La questione romantica, 11 (2001): 43–71. Meregalli, Franco, Presenza della letteratura spagnola in Italia, Florence: Sansoni, 1974. Meyran, Daniel (editor), Italie, Amerique Latine. Influences Reciproques, Rome: Bulzoni, 2001. Paoli, Roberto, Borges e gli scrittori italiani, Naples: Liguori, 1997. Profeti, Maria Grazia, ‘‘Importare letteratura: Italia e Spagna,’’ in Belfagor, 41, no. 4 (1986): 365–379. Puccini, Dario, Segno del presente: studi di letteratura spagnola, Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 1992. Puccini, Dario, and Sau´l Yurkievich (directors), Storia della civilita` letteraria ispanoamericana, 2 vols., Turin: Utet, 2000. Savoca, Monica, Go´ngora nel Novecento in Italia (e in Ungaretti) tra critica e traduzioni, Florence: Olschki, 2004.

HISTORICAL NOVEL Georg Luka´cs’ fundamental idea about the spread of the historical novel during the age that saw the rooting in the collective European consciousness of the profound conviction that each man is the protagonist of history (The Historical Novel, 1963) found its confirmation, on the Italian cultural scene, between the 1820s and the achievement of national unity. Beginning at least in 1802, with Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis), Ugo Foscolo already proved to be aware that it is the sociohistorical context that determines all human destiny. From his encounter with the Hegelian thesis that politics is the ‘‘Fate of the Moderns,’’ Foscolo’s young alter ego draws, as the sole lesson historically permitted to him, only the extreme warning, before an unknown death, to write and testify to the tragedy of his own time: a tragedy of the decay of illusions, of a disenchantment that kills. On the other hand, in the wake of the success of Walter Scott, as well as the idealist thrust of Romantic theorists such as Pietro Borsieri (1788–1852), Giovanni Berchet (1783–1851), and Ludovico Di Breme (1754–1828), the writers of the

early Risorgimento began to harbor convictions of great openness to the new working possibilities now offered to literature. Proposing to write a ‘‘libro per tutti’’ (book for all), as Vittorio Spinazzola put it in his 1983 essay of the same title, Alessandro Manzoni, with I promessi sposi (The Betrothed, 1840– 1842), gambled on the considerable growth of the audience, the consumers of the literary product, which, with the fading of the age-old niches of the court and the academy, could now be identified with the social entity, romantically called the ‘‘popolo’’ (people). This ‘‘popolo’’ in fact coincided with the bourgeoisie, an intermediary band between the opposing extremes of the ‘‘Parigini’’ (Parisians) and the ‘‘Ottentotti’’ (Hottentots), to quote Berchet’s Lettera semiseria di Giovanni Crisostomo al suo figliolo (A Semi-Serious Letter by Giovanni Crisostomo to His Son, 1816). If the new subject/ protagonist of history is identified with the bourgeoisie, it follows that progressive intellectuals look to the bourgeoisie as the most suitable audience for a new campaign of propaganda intended to solicit a sense of national dignity and pride. 937

HISTORICAL NOVEL An art form endowed with a power of persuasion unknown to other literary genres (and inferior only to that of opera), and self-defined as a mixed composition of history and invention, the new bourgeois epic strategically chose to become a ‘‘national/popular’’ genre. Not, to be sure, in the sense sketched out by Antonio Gramsci, but rather in its search for exemplary glimpses and figures, in relation to the emergence of a collective identity and consciousness. Anything that can turn a ‘‘volgo disperso’’ (scattered populace) into a people and a nation and serve as a warning and omen for a future redemption, was sought out in the ancient chronicles that witness to the permanent state of crisis of Italian history and society. We can thus understand why in Ettore Fieramosca (1833) by Massimo D’Azeglio (1798–1866) a culminating moment of great resonance in the collective memory should be a minor episode of the war between France and Spain for the kingdom of Naples evoked by Guicciardini in Book V of his Storia d’Italia (History of Italy, 1561): the tournament held in Barletta, in February 1503, between 13 French knights and 13 Italian knights. To these 13 brave men, who came from different regions (Ettore Fieramosca from Capua, Fanfulla from Lodi, Riccio from Parma, and so on) but are ‘‘tutti figli d’Italia ugualmente’’ (all equally sons of Italy), belonged the task of redeeming the national pride, while praising the value of unity against foreign oppression. And while microhistory easily supports the patriotic epic, invention can indulge in pathos and sentiment, with the impossible love between Ettore and Ginevra of Monreale, who is betrayed and killed by Cesare Borgia. The same name, Ginevra, a veritable senhal full of suggestions from Arthurian epic, seals the fate of the natural daughter of Bernabo` Visconti, who is loved by Palamede de’ Bianchi, against the backdrop of family feuding in Lombardy at the end of the fourteenth century in Il castello di Trezzo (The Castle of Trezzo, 1827) by Giambattista Bazzoni (1803–1850), which shares its year of publication with the first version of I promessi sposi, as well as with Sibilla Odaleta by Carlo Varese (1792–1866). The two works by Bazzoni and Varese enjoyed considerable success, although hardly as much as Ettore Fieramosca, which D’Azeglio, Manzoni’s son-in-law, had written in the lively circle of the Morone district of Milan, one of whose regular visitors is Tommaso Grossi, who converted to the historical novel—his Marco Visconti is from 1834—after practicing the genres of the verse tale and epic poetry in octaves, and having developed, 938

even earlier, in the orbit of Carlo Porta, a solid experience with poetry in dialect. However, the success of Ettore Fieramosca remained surprising enough to convince D’Azeglio, until then predominantly devoted to painting, to embrace fully the role of novelist. It is a commitment that the Turinese nobleman tried to uphold; he published his second novel Niccolo` de’ Lapi, ovvero I Palleschi e i Piagnoni (Niccolo` dei Lapi, or the Last Days of the Florentine Republic, 1841) after eight years, which he spent documenting the events of Florentine history between 1529 and 1530. Within the perspective of an enlightened conservatism, D’Azeglio thus came to treat the same historical material that in an entirely different perspective—of fiery democratic rebellion, and in the mode of the ‘‘Ghibelline Gothic’’ novel—inspired Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi (1804–1873) to write L’assedio di Firenze (The Siege of Florence), published pseudonymously in Paris in 1836, but begun in the jail of Portoferraio, where the novelist, an active member in the secret societies of the Carboneria and the ‘‘Giovine Italia,’’ was imprisoned in 1832. With demagogic fervor, he intended his novel as a ‘‘poema epico popolare’’ (popular epic poem), in which the protagonist is the Florentine people rallying around Francesco Ferrucci, while a series of historical figures, from Machiavelli to Michelangelo, intervene to praise republican and anticlerical ideas. Warmly praised by Giuseppe Mazzini, L’assedio di Firenze somewhat softens the Gothic tones with which Guerrazzi imbues his first and most famous novel, La battaglia di Benevento (The Battle of Benevento, 1827), structuring the end of the Swabian dynasty as a series of crimes and betrayals. But compared to the monotonous patriotism of Ettore Fieramosca, the web of ideological references was already becoming complicated. Indeed, to speak of a ‘‘Ghibelline Gothic’’ for the work of the republican Guerrazzi entails the opposite reference to a ‘‘Guelph Gothic’’ of Cesare Cantu` (1804–1895), who is entirely devoted to the praise of Catholicism and neo-Guelphism, to the point of defending the Inquisition. Cantu`’s predilection for an oleographic and simplified Middle Ages perfectly suits the Gothic’s wide use of stereotypes, in a novel like Margherita Pusterla (1838), which starts with a warning that attests to the suitability of the book only for a reader able to ‘‘spasimare’’ (languish). This is a clear sign of the prevalence of fantastical escape, compared to an ideal commitment that various ideological subtleties are in danger of shattering, and was more than sufficient to ignite the

HISTORICAL NOVEL dissociation in Manzoni between historical truth and novelistic invention, to the point of inducing him, in 1845, to declare the end Del romanzo storico e, in genere, de’ componimenti misti di storia e d’invenzione (Of the Historical Novel, and, in General, of Mixed Compositions of History and Invention), in the face of the exhaustion of the pedagogical charge that had been for him the primary ethical reason for the novel form. An unusual man of letters like Giuseppe Rovani (1818–1874) also became convinced of a progressive ‘‘erosion’’ or loss of meaning. In the years surrounding Manzoni’s palinode, Rovani passed through the experience of the historical novel with a strong Romantic imprint, and later, after a decade of silence, offered a new typology with his I cento anni (A Hundred Years), first serialized in 1857–1858. This typology is one in which a century of history unravels until the present day, in a crowded series of frames animated by invented figures and historical personalities, reexperienced through the memory of an aged narrator and tied together in a quick-moving plot that, beginning from a topical contrivance, such as the theft of a will, does not hesitate to avail itself of discoveries and twists worthy of the best feuilleton. Contemporary history substitutes for that of distant centuries; it is no longer an omniscient narrator, extraneous to the horizon of the plot, who translates it into a story, but a voice from within that articulates itself in unison with the voices of the other characters. And if the arc of historical time is that of time experienced and recounted, a double self can fill the two roles of narrator and protagonist, as occurs with Ippolito Nievo (1831– 1861) in Confessioni d’ un italiano (The Castle of Fratta), published posthumously in 1867. In the work’s constitutive double-ness of meanings, historico-political memory and autobiographical vocation, the new ideological and cultural climate makes the second dominant, as demonstrated by the editorial change of the title to Confessioni di un ottuagenario (Confessions of an Octogenarian). More closely, it is interesting to note how in the continuous play of mirrors between Carlo Altoviti the narrator and Carlino the protagonist, it is precisely through the autobiographical form, a formal solution antithetical to the demiurgic omniscience of the Romantic school, that Nievo reclaims the truest substance of the historical novel: the indissoluble connection between history and destiny. His protagonist/ narrator, born a ‘‘Venetian’’ and not far from dying an ‘‘Italian,’’ can actually say that ‘‘nulla sarebbe di strano o degno di essere narrato’’ (there would be nothing strange or worthy of

being narrated) if his life did not reflect the universal change ‘‘a cavalcione di questi due secoli’’ (straddling these two centuries). The decline of the historical novel in postunification Italy was related in great part to the fading of the ideal motivations that had determined its success, while in the new canon of verismo, it is critical attention to the ways in which unification was realized that determined, in subsequent decades, another mode of joining history and invention. While in Southern Italy the historical novel of the Romantic school was ideally addressed to those called to make history, the reconstruction of past incidents, meant to deny any substantial progress in history, now gives voice, especially in the regions of the South, to the profound discontent of those who had to suffer from history, while sacrificing to it their hopes and ideals. Opening the way to the ‘‘romanzo antistorico’’ (antihistorical novel), as Spinazzola has called it (1990), is Giovanni Verga, who in Mastro-Don Gesualdo (1889) mercilessly destroys the apologetic myth of the self-made man, who is organic to the age of nascent industrialism. Verga’s sober pessimism widens into tones of bitter polemical sarcasm in the work of his friend and disciple Federico De Roberto (1861–1927), who in the vast fresco of I Vicere` (The Viceroys, 1894) resorts to the mode of the family saga, through the arc of three generations, in order to show how, in any epochal revolution, only the exterior forms of political bargaining change, but not the substance of power, or the identity of its perpetual holders. Much of De Roberto’s teaching seems to pass into that late fruit of the ‘‘antihistorical novel,’’ Il Gattopardo (The Leopard, 1958) by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1896–1957), the moral of which has long seemed to be enclosed in the cynical admonition to ‘‘cambiare tutto per non cambiare nulla’’ (change everything to keep everything the same); in fact, this moral is much more than clever opportunism, as it feeds on the aristocratic disenchantment for the advent of hyenas and vultures where there were once tigers and leopards. The perfect meeting point of De Roberto and Lampedusa, in the continuity of a Sicilian line, is certainly Luigi Pirandello, with his I vecchi e i giovani (The Old and the Young), which he himself calls an ‘‘amarissimo e popoloso romanzo’’ (bitter and populous novel). Set against the backdrop of the bloodily repressed civil revolts and political and financial scandals between 1892 and 1894, it deals with an atmosphere of sordid disintegration, divided equally between Rome, ‘‘cloaca fangosa del patriottismo’’ (muddy cesspool of patriotism) 939

HISTORICAL NOVEL and Sicily, which is treated ‘‘come terra di conquista’’ (as a conquered land) by the national rulers, from whom it has suffered nothing ‘‘altro che la miseria e l’abbandono’’ (other than misery and abandonment). Written with an eye turned to recent social history, the novel was first published in 1909 installments in Rassegna contemporanea, and it is interesting to note that, while it echoes certain forms of the finest journalism, the ideological thrust of a final conviction of the modes of history, is connected, in Pirandello, with stylistic-formal solutions intentionally patterned after a Manzonian form of discourse. Humor becomes a legitimate result of the irony of the ‘‘gran Lombardo’’ (great Lombard), whose pessimistic core is too often misunderstood by many of his followers, who are unable to lift the veil of his apparent bonhomie. Less problematic, though consistent with a clear literary program, is the Manzonianism of Riccardo Bacchelli (1891–1985), who evokes in Il diavolo al Pontelungo (The Devil at Pontelungo, 1927) the presence of Bakunin in Emilia, amid the attempts at insurrection between 1873 and 1876, while in the broad trilogy Il mulino del Po (The Mill on the Po)—Dio ti salvi (God Save You, 1938), La misera viene in barca (Misery Comes to a Boat, 1939), and Mondo vecchio sempre nuovo (Nothing New Under the Sun, 1940)—boldly weaves together public and private affairs between the retreat from Russia and the battle of Vittorio Veneto. In fact, the soldier Lazzaro Scacerni escapes from the Napoleonic disaster, while in the victorious epilogue of the Great War, his namesake descendent dies. A constant center of symbolic reference, the river mill against the flat backdrop of the Po Valley clearly alludes to the passing of time that grinds down events and destinies. We must return to 1898, however, and to Piedmont, where the reckoning with history seems less urgent than in Sicily, to capture the experience of Edoardo Calandra (1852–1911), who in La bufera (The Storm, 1898) takes up a tale of loves and disappearances set against the backdrop of the Revolution, in a nostalgic pretext to elegize a tiny world shaken by grand events. Calandra’s discreet lineage continues, thanks to common Piedmontese memory, through Rosetta Loy’s Le strade di polvere (The Dust Roads of Monferrato, 1987), a lyrical saga of a peasant family between the battle of Marengo and the battle of Lissa. That fabled phoenix, the ‘‘mixed composition’’ can re-emerge, therefore, surprisingly, from its ashes, perhaps revamping itself as a ‘‘metanovel’’ in the learned eclecticism of Umberto Eco, with Il nome della rosa (The Name of the Rose, 1980) and Baudolino 940

(2002), to the point of legitimizing the idea that only as a historical novel does the novel truly exist. EMMA GRIMALDI Further Reading Allegri, Marco, ‘‘Le Confessioni d’un Italiano di Ippolito Nievo,’’ in Letteratura Italiana, edited by Alberto Asor Rosa, Le Opere, vol. 3, Dall’Ottocento al Novecento, Turin: Einaudi, 1995. Arslan, Antonia, and Patrizia Zambon, Romanzo storico, d’appendice, di consumo: guida bibliografica 1960, Milan: UNICOPLI, 1983. Asor Rosa, Alberto, Scrittori e popolo. Saggio sulla letteratura populista in Italia, Rome: Samona` e Savelli, 1965. Baldi, Guido, Giuseppe Rovani e il problema del romanzo nell’Ottocento, Florence: Olschki, 1967. Bertacchini, Renato, Il romanzo italiano dell’Ottocento, Rome: Studium, 1961. Bruscagli, Riccardo, and Roberta Turchi (editors), Teorie del romanzo nel primo Ottocento, Rome: Bulzoni, 1991. Burke, Peter, ‘‘L’histoire dans un genre neuf: ’I Promessi Sposi’ come storia sociale,’’ in Il romanzo, edited by Franco Moretti, vol. 4, Temi, luoghi, eroi, Turin: Einaudi, 2003. Croce, Benedetto, La letteratura della nuova Italia, 6 vols., Bari: Laterza, 1914–1940. De Castris, Arcangelo Leone, La polemica sul romanzo storico, Bari: Cressati, 1959. Della Colletta, Cristina, Plotting the Past: Metamorphoses of Historical Narrative in Modern Italian Fiction, West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1996. Ganeri, Margherita, Il romanzo storico in Italia: il dibattito critico dalle origini al postmoderno, Lecce: P. Manni, 1999. Gramsci, Antonio, Letteratura e vita nazionale, Turin: Einaudi, 1950. Grimaldi, Emma, ‘‘La ragione e i mostri. I Vicere` cent’anni dopo,’’ in Gli inganni del romanzo. I Vicere` tra storia e finzione letteraria, Catania: Fondazione Verga, 1998. Luka˘cs, Georg, The Historical Novel, translated by Hannah and Stanley Mitchell, Boston: Beacon Press, 1963. Marini, Quinto, ‘‘La letteratura del pieno Romanticismo e del Risorgimento,’’ in Storia della Letteratura Italiana, edited by Enrico Malato, Rome: Salerno Editrice, Petrocchi, Giorgio, Il romanzo storico nell’800 italiano, Turin: E.R.I., 1967. Portinari, Folco, Le parabole del reale. Romanzi italiani dell’800, Turin: Einaudi, 1976. Romagnoli, Sergio, Ottocento tra letteratura e storia, Padua: Liviana, 1961. Romagnoli, Sergio, Manzoni e i suoi colleghi, Florence: Sansoni, 1984. Salinari, Carlo, ‘‘I vecchi e i giovani,’’ in Il romanzo di Pirandello, edited by Enzo Lauretta, Palermo: Palumbo, 1976. Spinazzola, Vittorio, Il libro per tutti. Saggio sui ‘‘Promessi Sposi,’’ Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1983. Spinazzola, Vittorio, Il romanzo antistorico, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1990. Villari, Enrica et al., Storie su Storie. Indagine sui romanzi storici (1814–1840), Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1985.

HISTORIOGRAPHY

HISTORIOGRAPHY Historiography is the study of how history is written, and it is essentially concerned with the variety of conceptions about the past that a given culture manifests. Historiography is interested in when, where, and why a certain idea of history began to circulate, whether and how this impacted on other distinct practices of society, and finally how it was articulated, how it was written. Because by the time it acquired the status of an independent discipline, writers of history had related it to just about all aspects of our social and psychic experience, it soon became clear that history could be understood, at one end of the spectrum, as a general philosophy of life, and on the other as a specific and rigorous mode of inquiry about a specific object or activity. Literary historiography would therefore be concerned with the time, the reason, and the manner a certain idea about literature emerged and how it was understood by the critics and historians of a particular epoch, who spontaneously would also evaluate their predecessors. As Herbert Butterfield observes, ‘‘the history of historiography is more than a mere branch of the history of thought, more than the mere study of individual thinkers. It comprises the story of establishments and institutions, the policies of governments and teaching bodies, and the results of co-operative endeavour’’ (Man on His Past, 1960). The origins of historiography can be traced back to Herodotus (495–425 BC), whose aim in writing about the Persian War was to make sure that the great exploits of the Greeks, as well as the barbarians, would not be forgotten. This is the beginning of the dialectic between the single event and its possible universal sense. The more ‘‘archaeological’’ Thucydides (ca. 471–400 BC) believed that history and politics were intrinsically connected, and raised the problem of a history of the present in which the historian is eyewitness to or participant in the event described. He also sought a distinction between immediate causes and underlying causes. Straddling the Greek and Roman world, Polybius (198–117 BC) seeks on a more pragmatic level a universal view, and abides by the advice of historians who believe that the actual training for a life in politics is the study of history. Writing history soon became a genre, and the Romans, Livy (59

BC–17 AD), Plutarch (ca. 45–125 AD), and Lucian (125–200 AD), who developed new styles of recording and recounting past events, elaborated the notion that history could indeed represent a body of knowledge from which one can derive practical norms and social understanding. It is the ideology of historia magistra vitae (history as teacher of life), which further separated the field from both philosophy and poetry. In this context, the Roman Annales Maximi, which included a register of official events, became the model for the High Middle Ages (for instance, during the Carolingian period). In the ensuing centuries, historical thinking and writing were greatly influenced by Christianity, which introduced novel approaches to the overarching relevance of temporality, causality and finality. While Origen (195–254) developed an allegorical hermeneutics, Saint Augustine’s providential Neoplatonic view of history set the stage for a tripartite subdivision of time into ortus (ante legem) or prior to the law, procursus (sub lege) or time when laws are in effect, and finis (sub gloria) or end of time in God’s glory. Events in short were seen as typical, as exempla, and there was no principle of verification of the sources. Against universal and hegemonic providential history, there slowly emerges, in the later Middle Ages, a competing conception aspiring to validate the middle period of human life here on Earth. This more empirical narration took the shape of Chronicles, which mostly told of the deeds and valor of the royal houses and nobility. Along with this there occurs a growth of biographies of illustrious figures, which emphasized the civic more than their religious relevance. Giovanni Boccaccio’s Genealogia deorum gentilium (The Genealogies of the Gentile Gods, 1363–1375) and De casibus virorum illustrium (The Fates of Illustrious Men, 1355– 1374), Vespasiano Da Bisticci’s De Viris Illustribus (The Lives of Illustrious Men, 1489) and other collections by Filippo Villani (1325–ca. 1407– 1409), or Francesco Matarazzo (1443–1518) are significant not only because they offer a veritable encyclopedia of people worthy of being remembered, but also because they draw attention to the lives not only of artists but of public servants, polymaths, political leaders, and aristocrats, in 941

HISTORIOGRAPHY short, the key players of the emerging process of secularization of European society. During the quattrocento, with the revaluation and publication of the writings by the ancient authors, a new set of questions arose that spurred a major philosophical turn with respect to the Middle Ages. Significant in this context is Sicco Polenton’s Scriptorum illustrium latinae linguae Libri XVIII (Illustrious Latin Writers, ca. 1437), a bulky compendium of Latin literature that attempted the first historical periodization by introducing the distinction between classic, medieval, and humanistic periods, the latter also known as Aevo Modernus (The Modern Age). Polenton also reintroduced that critical practice of comparing present-day writers with their ancient models. At this time, a tendency developed aimed at hierarchizing the work of writers, and at evidencing continuities in style and a certain unity of intention. The humanistic period was interested in original sources, in witness accounts of any one given event, in translations, and in treatises and laws that marked changes in the evolving and constituting of civil society. Key contributions to general historiography are made by Leonardo Bruni (1369– 1444), Flavio Biondo (1388–1463), and Lorenzo Valla (1407–1457). Bruni’s Historiae florentini populi (History of the Florentine People, 1405) exhibits a critical capacity to compare and contrast facts and relations in a diachronic sense, and attempts to explain history without any reference to supernatural forces (other than ‘‘nature’s gift’’ to the Florentines). Biondo is credited with having begun the tradition of erudite history, stressing the necessity to be more descriptive and direct while focusing on the sources themselves. Lorenzo Valla is generally considered the founding father of Western historiography. His De falso credita et ementita Constantini donatione declamatio (The Falsely Believed and Forged Donation of Constantine, 1440) employs an analytical method later identified with comparative historical linguistics. Valla raises the question of authority and legitimacy in history, and makes of historiography a tool in challenging the hegemony of the church. It will soon appear evident, for instance to Niccolo´ Machiavelli (1469– 1527), that history writing can serve political ends. It is in fact no accident that Machiavelli makes recourse to Livy as a model. But in his case, politics precedes history and philology. Roman history becomes his paradigm in order to illustrate how to defy the uncontrollable forces of necessity or fortuna, seeking a deeper law of causation. Perhaps it is true, as modern thinkers from Friedrich 942

Nietzsche to Michel Foucault have observed, that the engine of social change, and thus of history, is power. Nevertheless, for Machiavelli, the actions of individuals are considered less for their individuality or specificity, or how they show their virtu´, and more in terms of collective interactions. Machiavelli’s contemporary Francesco Guicciardini (1483–1540) does not look into the past actions of political figures but at the elements of causation in the fact itself. In his Storia d’Italia (History of Italy, 1561–1564), more emphasis is placed on the individual’s ‘‘particular’’ way of being; history turns pragmatic, aiming at the discovery of an all-embracing principle. Rather than political history, Guicciardini engages in historical politics, stressing that humankind’s essential trait is to seek one’s own personal interest. He attests to the Humanist tendency to remove all external forces from an understanding of the historical process (such as spiritual interventions or philosophical a priori conditions), and to explain the reasons ‘‘why’’ events occur by identifying interconnections among the competing interests of various figures. But unlike Machiavelli, he does not think that fortuna can be subsumed or built into the equation: No real logic of history exists; it is naı¨ve to believe that history can be magistra vitae. With print culture solidly established, and following upon the impact of the New World and the Reformation, the shifting political, religious, and geohistorical panorama of the second half of the cinquecento and of the first decades of the seventeenth century is witness to a renewed attention to the texts themselves. Paolo Sarpi (1562–1623), author of Istoria del Concilio di Trento (History of the Council of Trent, 1619), consolidates a by now highly specialized field: religious-political history, while Ferdinando Ughelli’s Italia sacra (Sacred Italy, 1643–1662) offers the first thorough account of the church in Italy. In the field of poetics, growing reflection on the nature and function of the arts led some to eschew history and make of literature a world apart from the realities of the day. Although some late Renaissance treatise writers, such as Jacopo Mazzoni (1548–1598), Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639), Alessandro Tassoni (1565–1632), and Scipione Errico (1592–1670), favored a heteronomous approach to art, there was also emerging a generation of writers of ars poeticae who tended toward an early form of the autonomy of art, and at worst tended toward normative manuals. Here we enlist, among others, Emanuele Tesauro (1592–1675), Girolamo Aleandri (1574–1629), Francesco

HISTORIOGRAPHY Frugoni (1620–1687), and Giovan Mario Crescimbeni (1663–1728), a founding member of the Accademia dell’Arcadia and author of Istoria della volgar poesia (A History of Poetry in the Vernacular, 1699). Crescimbeni privileges the lyric art form, therefore, in his history of Italian literature (the first of its kind), he singles out that specific tradition, at the expense, for instance, of Dante’s Expressionist poetic, unexemplary for such pre-Enlightenment rationality. Not so with Gian Vincenzo Gravina (1664–1718), another founder of Arcadia, whose Della ragion poetica (The Logic of Poetry, 1708) signals a turning point for literary history. Gravina defines poetry as an imaginative referent of knowledge with the capacity to trigger civic renewal, thus recognizing the intrinsic sociohistoricity of art. The eighteenth century saw in fact a large segment of the cultured population champion the idea of literature as unrelated to anything but fantasy, whereas others were beginning to question the ‘‘truth’’ in art, against a growing scientific and travel literature, and the widening gap between theologians and natural philosophers. We also witness the emergence of a different kind of historiographic consciousness, one that can be summarized as a split between an erudite camp (stressing what counts as a source and what the ramifications of a ‘‘history’’ might be) and a philosophical one (focused on the role of reason and its effects). With the latter goes the universal belief in emancipation and progress in society, specifically reflected in the British and French production of the times. In his anticlerical Istoria civile del Regno di Napoli (A Secular History of the Kingdom of Naples, 1723), Pietro Giannone (1676–1748), rejects previous arguments about the legitimization of ecclesiastical jurisdictions, and focuses instead on secular institutions, the relationship between juridical forces, and their relevance in historical process. A practicing lawyer, Giannone studies how and why constitutions are drawn, and sets up a theoretical defense for a separation of powers between state and church. His Istoria gained him European fame, but he was excommunicated and his work was placed on the Index in 1724. The greatest historical undertaking of the century was the vast collection of Rerum italicarum scriptores ab anno Christi 500–1500 (Historians of Italy, 1723–1738) by Lodovico Antonio Muratori (1672–1750), whose relevance in the debate about aesthetics and poetics is also attested by his Della perfetta poesia (On Perfection in Poetry, 1706), in which he argues against the idea that poetry has supernatural origins. In particular, Muratori

championed the notion of the verisimile introducing the distinction between what is real or probable in poetry versus what is real or probable in nature. An adversary of Cartesianism and of John Locke, a severe critic of church corruption and temporal ambitions, an enemy of the backward-looking academies, Muratori’s lasting fame rests with three monumental works: the Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, which became a model for erudite sources and philological rigor; the Antiquitates italicae medii aevi (Medieval Italian Archaeology, 1738–1743), covering various aspects of Italian life in the Middle Ages; and the Annali d’Italia (The Annals of Italy, 1740–1750), a year-to-year chronicle of Italian history from the fifth century to the present day. Muratori’s treatment of the Middle Ages prepares the ground for the reappraisal of that period during European Romanticism. His work compiles a network of data, documents, manuscripts, letters, registers, diplomatic exchanges, and juridical information, offering to a contemporary researcher intriguing and heterogeneous materials: It could be read as a ‘‘collective history’’ a` la Fernand Braudel. Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), the other intellectual giant in early eighteenth-century Italian historical thought, did not have the erudition of Muratori but had a stronger sense of historical patterns of development. His major achievement was in conceiving a theory of history within which facts find their own justification and interrelatedness, while subject to some distinct extrahistorical mechanism. In Principi di scienza nuova (Principles of a New Science, 1732), he argued that the past unfolds through cyclic corsi and ricorsi, manifests a triadic breakdown in ages of gods, heroes, and men, and comprises a notion of decline and return to the origins after the third period. This occurs not in a universal progressive movement (which is what many illuminists wanted to believe). For Vico, the peoples who make up ‘‘nations’’ go through these cycles at different rates of change while retaining a recognizable identity. Historians and philosophers should bear in mind the dialectic between what humans can know and create (social institutions) and what is ontologically out of their capacity to know or interfere with (nature and providence). Thus, individual and society, myth and science, existence and history are all dynamically interconnected from a primitive age of sense, through a period of imagination, to one of reason. But what makes Vico relevant to the twentieth century is his claim that poetry can be, and has been, a source of knowledge for historians as well as for sociologists and anthropologists. 943

HISTORIOGRAPHY In the North, the Milanese philosopher and reformer Cesare Beccaria (1738–1794) achieved international recognition with his influential opuscule on the penal code, Dei delitti e delle pene (Of Crime and Punishment, 1764), which criticized the system of justice and called for radical changes in the law and ethics according to the times. The Turinese Giuseppe Baretti (1719–1789) expressed the new possibilities of a critique of literature untrammeled by servitude to patrons, as he distanced himself from collectors, antiquarians, philanthropists and court writers. In his polemical essay Dissertation upon Italian Poetry (1753), he sets out to prove, against Voltaire, the continuity and integrity of Italian literature. Baretti preferred writers who espoused sensismo, and treasured self-awareness against the oppressive demands of existence and rationality. The Jesuit Girolamo Tiraboschi (1731– 1794), director of the Estense library in Modena, is the author of a milestone, Storia della letteratura italiana (History of Italian Literature, 1772–1782; enlarged ed. 1794), which signals the transition from mere compilation to a work based on factual research. Assimilating the lesson of Muratori and Gravina, Tiraboschi insisted that truth and precision are the first qualities required of a historian. His understanding of literature is broad and embraces all aspects of culture available in written form, paying more attention to literariness rather than to the author’s personality. Important for later historians is the work of Vincenzo Cuoco (1770–1823), who took part in the Neapolitan revolution of 1799. In his Saggio storico sulla rivoluzione napoletana (Historical Essay on the Neapolitan Revolution, 1801), which relies on Machiavelli’s historiography by making history ancilla to politics, he criticizes the Jacobins for having promoted a revolution that did not mirror local conditions. Cuoco lays the foundation for an understanding of ‘‘passive’’ versus ‘‘active’’ revolution, a concept that would be widely useful during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. With the fall of Napoleon, the sociopolitical dynamics in Europe changed. Rising against the restoration, the strongest political force is nationalism. Historical writing reflects the several ways in which Italian culture started rethinking itself, as documented, for instance, in the Milanese journal Il Conciliatore (1818–1819), which addressed the question of truth and history, the relationship between culture and national identity (necessary if a discourse on national unity were to gain ground), and hosted the debate between Romantics and classicists. For the ensuing four decades, critics and historians alike 944

introduced and took positions on a new vocabulary, which sought to redefine the concepts of origin, destiny, freedom, independence, tradition, and the link between the state and nation-building. The age of the Risorgimento fostered federalist currents in Italian historiography. The Turinese philosopher and politician Vincenzo Gioberti (1801–1852) represented the Catholic liberal strand of history writing. His Del primato morale e civile degli italiani (On the Moral and Civil Superiority of the Italians, 1843) entertained a vision of modern bourgeois societies reconciled under the leadership of the Roman pontiff, and supported by the military power of Piedmont. Just as politically committed but with more secular convictions was Carlo Cattaneo (1801–1869), author of a history of civilization of Lombardy in which he collects documentary evidence from agriculture, labor relations, use of language, and general customs over time. On the witness-participant side of history writing (he was one of the leaders of the Cinque giornate), Cattaneo’s L’insurrection de Milan en 1848 (The Insurrection of Milan, Italian ed. 1849) recounts the tragic five-day battle to free the city, and a novel conception of history that anticipates modern theories: the city as the ideal principle of Italian histories. For some other intellectuals the issue of national independence was pervasive. Literature and history were only a component of this scenario, but a crucial part owing to their power of symbolization and construction of belief systems. There were historians and historiographers, however, who centered on literature and then essayed to understand the larger worldview or the reality that is given outside of the text. Among the authors who wrote histories of Italian literature, we enlist Cesare Cantu` (1804–1895), the liberal moralist author of a 34-volume Storia universale (Universal History, 1838–1847), in which he attributes the development of the arts and sciences to the supremacy of the Catholic Church. In his Storia della letteratura italiana (History of Italian Literature, 1865), Cantu` argued that national literature should be interpreted against the backdrop of the relentless struggle between Guelphs and Ghibellines, an engine of history that in different guises has pitted bourgeoisie and church against aristocrats and nobles for centuries. Literary critics need to focus on the ‘‘content’’ of the texts, while historians can read the society in question right through the literature. For Cantu`, history remains magistra vita; thus, in order to achieve national unity the above antagonism must be overcome. A position shared

HISTORIOGRAPHY by Giuseppe Ferrari (1811–1876) in his Histoire de re´volutions d’Italie (History of Italian Revolutions, 1856–1858). Writing from a Ghibelline viewpoint was Luigi Settembrini (1813–1876), whose Lezioni di letteratura italiana (Lectures on Italian Literature, 1869–1872) argued for criteria of analysis based on how pagan, noble, and antichurch writers were; he thus finds in literature the trustworthy expression of Italian society. Francesco De Sanctis (1817–1883), perhaps the most important Italian cultural critic of the postunification period, stood against the erudition of the previous century and the assumptions of the democratic school (Mazzini). Hegelian by formation, he believed that the idea is embedded in reality, and that one finds the origin and purpose of literature in history. Literature is a living organism that changes through history because it both makes history and is conditioned by it. In his seminal Storia della letteratura italiana (History of Italian Literature, 1870–1872), De Sanctis illustrates the dialectic between representative writers and their epoch, identifying an expressionistic and socially committed trunk, and an impressionistic and selfabsorbed lyrical canon. After the annexation of Rome in 1870, historians must contend with the growing influence of positivism, the Hegelians, the materialists, and the spiritualists. Noteworthy is the establishment of a scuola storica (historical school), which viewed literature strictly in positivistic context and continued to assemble archival materials for a more global and heterogeneous history of Italy. On the other hand, with the expanding influence of the sciences there also grew the danger of adopting a scientific model a` la Hyppolite Taine, and applying it to literary and cultural memory. During the first half of the twentieth century, four major currents in historical studies emerged around distinct groups or schools: the one believing in the primacy of the juridical-economic sphere, the idealist-historicist currents, the Catholic school, and the Marxist-Socialist camp. But what dominated was idealism. Benedetto Croce (1866–1952) had an immense influence in Italian culture, especially in history, literature, aesthetics, and politics. Before his 1902 Estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale (Aesthetics as the Science of Expression and General Linguistics), the Neapolitan liberal philosopher had subsumed history under the general category of art, but after his rejection of all positive modes of thought and the completion of his fourfold system of the spirit (aesthetics, logic,

economics, and ethics), he gave history a greater relevance. Originally referred to as ‘‘absolute historicism,’’ Croce espoused a view according to which truth evolved through the historical process, inasmuch as history is the only immanent reality. In his Teoria e storia della storiografia (Theory and History of Historiography, 1917), he argues that history, knowledge, and time are all coterminous, that the distinction between chronicle or pseudohistory and history resides in the latter possessing a unity that, raised to the understanding (conoscenza) of the eternal present, reveals itself ‘‘to be at one with philosophy, which in its turn, is nothing else but the thought of the eternal present.’’ Thus, history coincides with the act of thinking itself, therefore philosophy, ‘‘is nothing other than the methodological instance of historiography, the explanation of the constitutive categories of historical judgments, that is, of the working concepts of historical interpretation.’’ The rise and consolidation of Fascism produced a further revision of Croce’s ideas: In 1928, he publishes Storia d’Italia dal 1871 al 1915 (History of Italy from 1871 to 1915), in 1932 Storia d’Europa nel secolo decimonono (History of Europe in the XIX Century) and with his summa, reiterating his liberal views, La Storia (History as the Story of Liberty, 1938), he reaches the paradoxical conclusion that history consists in what we say or think as historical, that the overall preoccupation of the historian seeking to understand the past entails investigating how the spirit, through human interaction, has constantly attempted to become free, how that has driven all other changes in values. On the broader front of juridical and economic history, two authoritative figures combated Croce: Gaetano Salvemini (1873–1957), a leading antiFascist, and Gioacchino Volpe (1876–1971), whose influential Il medioevo (The Middle Ages, 1927) singled out in economics the driving force of social mobility and privileged comparative philological research. In the period immediately following World War II, Italian culture opened up to foreign discourses, and idealism underwent much revisions at the hands of general historians such as Delio Cantimori, Walter Maturi, Adolfo Omodeo, Federico Chabod, and Giuseppe Galasso, with much attention going to the reinterpretation of the Risorgimento, the thorny issue on what the ‘‘origins of Italy’’ might mean, and the inclusion of popular culture in the historian’s syntheses. Very evident is the surge in Marxist criticism, with the added stimulus provided by the publication of the writings of Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) in 945

HISTORIOGRAPHY the early 1950s, which develops more integrative models of analysis and begs the question of revisionism in history writing. A Marxist historiography requires now that scholars take into account the more material and social dimension of artworks, the dialectics of class, the author’s worldview, questions of influence and circulation, the previously unthematized role of the intellectual as an interclass strategic group, and the presence of the lower or popular classes in the shaping of a nation and of a politics. But there is also the influence of the French Annales school. New studies appear by Emilio Sereni (1907–1977), with his La questione agraria nella rinascita nazionale italiana (History of the Italian Agricultural Landscape, 1946); Giorgio Candeloro (1909–1988), historian of religious movements and of a monumental 10volume Storia dell’Italia Moderna (History of Modern Italy, 1956–1986); Rosario Romeo (1924–1987), author of Risorgimento e capitalismo (Capitalism and the Risorgimento, 1959) and books on industrialization; and Ruggiero Romano (1923–2002), a specialist in Latin America who sought to contextualize Italy and Europe in a world perspective, coedited the 17-volume Annali d’Italia (Annals of Italy), and lamented the dearth of studies on Italian colonialism. Among the historians of Fascism (of which there are three currents, the Marxist, the Radical, and the Liberal), we must not forget the pioneering work of Renzo De Felice (1929–1996), whose eight-volume ‘‘revisionist’’ biography of Mussolini has become a canonical reference point. In philosophy, we recall the work of Eugenio Garin (1909–2004), whose Storia della filosofia italiana (History of Italian Philosophy, 1966) put the history of ideas back into the reality of a documentable Italian world, while rendering obsolete Giovanni Gentile’s nationalistic and immanent history of Italian thinking. Finally, in literary studies, there is the 10-volume critical history and anthology assembled by Remo Ceserani and Lidia De Federicis, Il materiale e l’immaginario (Imagination and Material Culture, 1980–1985), in which the arts and culture of Italy are placed in a network of relations with other fields and in a European and Mediterranean context; and Giuseppe Petronio’s L’attivita` letteraria in Italia (Literature and Society in Italy, 1979), with its emphasis on writers as ‘‘real’’ agents endowed with ideas that do have an effect on the society in which they live and interact. PETER CARRAVETTA See also: Literary History 946

Further Reading Baroni, Giorgio (editor), Storia della critica letteraria, Milan: UTET, 1997. Braudel, Fernand, On History, translated by Sarah Matthews, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Breisach, Ernst, Historiography, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Butterfield, Herbert, Man on his Past: The Study of the History of Historical Scholarship, Boston: Beacon Press, 1960. Canfora, Luciano, Teorie e tecnica della storiografia classica, Bari: Laterza, 1974. Cecchi, Ottavio, and Enrico Ghidetti (editors), Fare storia della letteratura, Rome: Editori Riunti, 1986. Chabod, Federico, Lezioni di metodo storico, Bari: Laterza, 1973. Cochrane, Eric, Historians and Historiography in the Italian Renaissance, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Croce, Benedetto, Teoria e storia della storiografia, Bari: Laterza, 1917; rpt. 1973. Croce, Benedetto, History as the Story of Liberty, translated by Sylvia Sprigge, Chicago: Gateway Edition, 1941; rpt. 1970. Dionisotti, Carlo, Geografia e storia della letteratura italiana, Turino: Einaudi, 1967. Galasso, Giuseppe, L’Italia come problema storiografico, Turin: Utet, 1979. Getto, Giovanni, Storia delle storie letterarie, Florence: Sansoni, 1942; rpt. 1969. Hay, Denys, Annalists & Historians: Western Historiography from the VIII to the XVIII Century, London: Metheun, 1977. Kelley, Donald (editor), Versions of History from Antiquity to the Enlightenment, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991. Leduc, Jean, Les Historiens et le temps, Paris: Seuil, 1999. Lefebvre, Georges, La Naissance de l’historiographie moderne, Paris: Flammarion, 1971. Le Goff, Jacques (editor), La Nouvelle histoire, Paris: RetzCepl, 1979. Lucchini, Guido, Le origini della scuola storica, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990. Momigliano, Arnaldo, Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography, Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1977. Petronio, Giuseppe, L’attivita` letteraria in Italia, Palermo: Palumbo, 1979. Petronio, Giuseppe (editor), Teoria e realta` della storiografia letteraria, Bari: Laterza, 1981. Romano, Ruggiero, La storiografia italiana oggi, Milan: L’Espresso Strumenti, 1978. Sinopoli, Franca, Storiografia e comparazione: Le origini della storia comparata della letteratura in Europa tra Settecento e Ottocento, Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1996. Vivarelli, Roberto, Storia e Storiografia: Approssimazioni per lo studio dell’eta` contemporanea, Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2004.

HOLOCAUST LITERATURE

HISTORY OF ITALY See Storia d’Italia (Work by Francesco Guicciardini)

HISTORY: A NOVEL See La Storia (Work by Elsa Morante)

HOLOCAUST LITERATURE Holocaust literature is a genre that developed out of testimonies by survivors and fictive works by authors who sought to explore the defining event of the twentieth century through imaginative writings. As a genre, Holocaust literature is relatively new, defined as such within the emerging field of Holocaust studies in the 1960s. The term ‘‘Holocaust’’ itself to refer to the massacre of European Jewry is problematic, as its Greek origin refers to burnt sacrifice, thus producing an inappropriate image of Christian redemption or martyrdom for victims. The term has been widely adopted beginning in the 1960s and is still the most commonly used term. ‘‘Shoah’’ is often preferred instead, which in Hebrew means ‘‘catastrophe.’’ Besides the documentation of events experienced by individuals, the mission of Holocaust literature is also that of the memory and commemoration of the victims of the Holocaust. Literary criticism on these texts often focuses on the function of commemoration, trauma and its aftermath, the role of fiction in Holocaust writings, and the inadequacy of language to express unimaginable events. As the noted literary critic Lawrence Langer remarks in

Art from the Ashes (1995), ‘‘The challenge of this literature is to discover and accept the twisted features of the unfamiliar without searching for words, like ‘‘suffering,’’ to shape what we see into more congenial facades.’’ In 1994, Anna Brava and Daniela Jalla published a book entitled Una misura onesta (An Honest Measure) that collected data about Italian Holocaust survivors, what they had written about their experiences, and biographical information about them up until 1993. Since then many more accounts have been either presented or published. Early testimonies by Primo Levi, Giuliana Tedeschi, and Bruno Piazza were not widely read; it was only after the republication of Se questo e` un uomo (Survival in Auschwitz) by Einaudi in 1958 (after their initial refusal of the manuscript in 1946) that any significant attention was paid to Italian testimonies. The Bravo and Jalla study of 1994 was the first major study to come out on Italian survivors. Italy has been notably well-represented in this genre due to the work of Primo Levi (1919–1987), who is among the most well-known Holocaust writers in the world. His works appear in virtually 947

HOLOCAUST LITERATURE every anthology or study devoted to the subject and have been translated into many languages. Elie Wiesel’s (1928–) evocative testimony Night, published in 1960, and Levi’s 1947 Se questo e´ un uomo are the two most widely read Holocaust testimonies in the world. In Se questo e` un uomo, Levi explores the morally ravaged world of Auschwitz and the effects of dehumanization on the human spirit in his philosophically and ethically profound text. Levi went on to write La tregua (The Reawakening, 1963), in which he recounts his long, arduous, and adventuresome journey home. In this text, Levi engages important themes of the restoration of self, and his physical journey becomes a metaphor for the psychological process of reintegration into society and what that means for a Holocaust survivor. In his other works, such as his collections of science fiction stories, and his semiautobiographical work Il sistema periodico (The Periodic Table, 1975), Levi often engages the topic of the Holocaust. Levi spent much of his life involved in Holocaust education, visiting schools and speaking to children about his experiences. He wrote about the Holocaust in essays, poetry that is both beautiful and devastating, short stories, and theater, and in a novel about Jewish partisans, Se non ora, quando? (If Not Now, When?, 1982). In 1986, he published a collection of essays, I sommersi e I salvati (The Drowned and the Saved), in which he confronts complex issues such as collaboration, bystander complicity, and survivor guilt. Another Italian survivor, Bruno Piazza of Trieste (1889–1946), wrote his testimony right after the war and died a few months afterward. His moving work, Perche´ gli altri dimenticano (Why Others Forget) was published posthumously in 1956. Piazza offers one of the few accounts of a concentration camp on Italian soil, the Risiera di San Sabba, located outside Trieste. He begins his narrative with his imprisonment there, followed by a short stay in a local prison, and finally his deportation to Auschwitz. In the description of the deportation itself, Piazza painstakingly describes each railway station still in Italy that the train passes, hoping that the prisoners will somehow be stopped and rescued by partisans. This rescue never comes. Piazza’s text offers a freshness of perspective largely due to his terse prose style that communicates a strong emotional immediacy, and the fact that he wrote his narrative right after the war. Along with a detailed chronology, Piazza’s testimony renders an account of the damage and outrage to the human spirit by the univers concentrationnaire. 948

An area of Holocaust literature that has received more attention in the past few years is that of women’s testimonies. In his introduction to Liana Millu’s Il fumo di Birkenau (Smoke Over Birkenau), Primo Levi calls it ‘‘one of the most powerful European testimonies to come from the women’s lager at Auschwitz–Birkenau and by far the most affecting among Italian accounts,’’ and calls the camp experience much more difficult for women than for men. Millu (1914–2005), originally from Genoa, published her testimony in 1986. Differences in camp experiences due to sex are also highlighted in the work of Giuliana Tedeschi. Originally from Turin, she was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944 along with her husband and mother-in-law, who were both killed there. Her first testimony, Questo povero corpo (This Poor Body) was published in 1946, and her second, C’e´ un punto sulla terra: una donna nel Lager di Birkenau (There is a Place on Earth: A Woman at Birkenau) was published in 1988. Tedeschi writes vividly about not only her own experiences in the camp but about those around her. Her gripping yet lyrical style recounts the effects of the loss of children and family on the other women and on herself. In 1995, Tedeschi elaborated these themes in an essay entitled Memoria di donne e bambini nei lager nazisti (Memory of Women and Children in the Nazi Camps), in which she discusses the fatal consequences of pregnancy and childbearing in the camps, the removal of femininity from the prisoners, and other hardships endured by women prisoners. The concept of fiction representing the Holocaust has been controversial because of the potential of using the Holocaust in a melodramatic and exploitative way that distorts its history and its significance. Roberto Benigni’s film La vita e` bella (Life is Beautiful, 1997), for example, has been at the center of many debates regarding this issue. Nonetheless, fictive writing can be evocative and tell a haunting story. Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl (1980) is an excellent example of fiction written by a nonsurvivor that forcefully depicts the damaged world of the survivor; as Levi said about one of his own fictive works about the Holocaust in his essay Itinerario di uno scrittore ebreo (Itinerary of a Jewish Writer), it is ‘‘immaginario ma plausibile’’ (imaginary but plausible). One excellent example of powerful Italian fictional writing about the Holocaust is found in the work of Giorgio Bassani (1916–2000). An early short story of Bassani’s, ‘‘Una lapide in Via Mazzini’’ (A Plaque on Via Mazzini), published as part

HOLOCAUST LITERATURE of his collection Cinque storie ferraresi (Five Stories of Ferrara, 1956) speaks in forceful terms of the precariousness of Jewish existence in Italy and the culpability of Fascism in the Holocaust. Written in 1952, the story recounts the return of Geo Josz, a concentration camp survivor, who arrives in his hometown only to discover his name listed on the plaque of local Jews killed during the Holocaust. During the course of Geo’s ambivalent and at times hostile reception by his town, we are made to realize that for the town it was easier to commemorate its deported Jews on a plaque than to deal with its Fascist past in the form of a survivor who did not want the townspeople to forget their Fascism and its relation to his fate. In this story, Bassani directly confronts the issues of Fascism, collaboration and guilt apparently well ahead of his time. Bassani’s 1962 novel, Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini (The Garden of the Finzi-Contini), examines the losses and hardships that the Jewish community of Ferrara experienced due to the racial laws and the antiSemitism of the community. He also explores another aspect of the crisis of Jewish communities at the time: the relationship of Italian national identity to Jewish cultural identity. The Jewish community in Italy is the oldest in Europe, established under the Romans around 200 BCE. Since then the community has survived despite strict anti-Semitic measures in intervening centuries, usually proposed by the Catholic Church. Unlike most other Jews in Europe combating similar prejudices and exclusions, Jews in Italy usually spoke the dialect of the region or town in which they were living. This ensured a much faster integration into mainstream Italian society upon the abolition of the ghettos in the nineteenth century. The unification in Italy (1870) was closely linked to Jewish emancipation from the ghettos. As a result, many Italian Jews were fierce patriots, and Jewish cultural identity in Italy became strongly intertwined with the newly forming Italian national identity. Growing anti-Semitism in Italy in the 1930s under Fascism, however, severely challenged this linked identity. In his novel, Bassani demonstrates two schools of thought regarding Jewish cultural identity: one represented by the Finzi Contini family who is (as it turns out, rightfully so) skeptical of the safety of Jews in Italy under Fascism. Instead, Giorgio’s family wants desperately to believe in a continued smooth integration, even despite strong evidence to the contrary: the oppressive, marginalizing effects of Fascism and the racial laws. This debate between the two groups is tragically resolved at the end of the novel by the roundup of the Jewish

community by Italian officials and the subsequent deportation to their deaths. The Holocaust literature that has grown out of the Italian experience needs to be seen against a complicated political and historical backdrop. One example of an autobiographical work that looks carefully at the relationship between the Catholic Church, Fascism and the fate of Italy’s Jews is Rosetta Loy’s La parola ebreo (First Words, 1997). Loy writes of her childhood growing up caught between the Catholic Church and Fascism, of growing state- and church-generated anti-Semitism, the bystander complicity of her own family and other Italians who passively stood by, and the ultimate fate of her Jewish neighbors. The Holocaust in Italy is a topic that has recently been the focus of intense scrutiny because of its close relation to and interdependence with the Fascist era. Italy was to some degree a perpetrator and collaborator in the Holocaust and at the same time a victim of Nazi aggression after 1943. Prevailing beliefs regarding the role of Fascism in the Holocaust and Italy’s status as a victim have been challenged in recent debates. To what degree was Italy and Fascism responsible for the Holocaust and therefore for the Italian survivors and victims in whose name Holocaust literature has been written? Some of the persistent myths regarding Italian Fascism have been that Mussolini was not interested in promoting official anti-Semitism until asked to do so by Hitler, very few Italian Fascists carried out the deportation of Italian Jews after the German occupation of 1943, and that Italians in general turned a blind eye to anti-Semitic measures. New research has shown these myths to be untrue: Almost half the deportations were carried out by Italians and not by Germans. Because of the racial laws of 1938–1939, the Fascist regime kept records of Jews that made deportations much easier for the Nazi and Fascist officials who carried out these actions. The racial laws were among the most strict and oppressive anti-Semitic legislation in Europe, and most Italian Jews were forced to comply. Even the myth of a Mussolini who only came up with anti-Semitic legislation due to pressure from Hitler has been thoroughly debunked by historians such as Giorgio Fabre. Robert Gordon has analyzed the tensions regarding Italy’s Fascist past and the identity of the perpetrators in the Holocaust that became obvious in debates regarding the new legislation for Il giorno della memoria (The Day of Memory), enacted in 2001, and in the very language of the referendum itself. 949

HOLOCAUST LITERATURE This increased interest in wartime Italy has occurred at the same time as a resurgence of interest in survivor stories. As a result, more and more survivor testimonies and accounts are being heard in Italy. This corresponds to a worldwide increase in survivor testimonies in recent years, as many survivors are coming to the end of their lives and wish to leave a record behind of their individual experiences. NANCY HARROWITZ Further Reading Bravo, Anna, and Daniela Jalla, Una misura onesta, Milan: Franco Angeli, 1994. Deaglio, Enrico, La banalita` del bene. Storia di Giorgio Perlasca, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1991. Debenedetti, Giacomo, Otto ebrei, Rome: Editrice Atlantica, 1944. De Felice, Renzo, Storia degli ebrei italiani sotto il fascismo, Turin: Einaudi, 1961. Fabre, Giorgio, Mussolini razzista. Milan: Garzanti, 2005. Fabre, Giorgio, Hitler’s Contract: How Mussolini Became the Fuhrer’s Publisher: the History of the Italian Edition of Mein Kampf, US Enigma Books Network, 2006. Farrell, Joseph (editor), The Austere Humanist, OxfordNew York: Peter Lang, 2004. Fleischmann, Luigi, Un ragazzo ebreo nelle retrovie, Florence: La Giuntina, 1999.

Gordon, Robert S.C., Primo Levi’s Ordinary Virtues. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Gordon, Robert S.C. ‘‘The Holocaust in Italian Collective Memory: Il giorno della memoria, 27 January 2001,’’ in Modern Italy, 11, no. 2 (June 2006): 167–189. Kremer, Roberta (editor), Memory and Mastery: Primo Levi as Writer and Witness, Albany: SUNY Press, 2001. Langer, Lawrence, Art From the Ashes; A Holocaust Anthology, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Levi, Primo, ‘‘Itinerario di uno scrittore ebreo,’’ in Opere, vol. 2, edited by M. Belpoliti, Milan: Einaudi, 1997. Loy, Rosetta, La parola ebreo, Milan: Einaudi, 1997. Millu, Liana, Il fumo di Birkenau, Florence: La Giuntina, 1986; as Smoke over Birkenau, translated by Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988. Millu, Liana, I ponti di Schwerin, Genoa: Le Mani, 1998. Modigliani, Piero, I nazisti a Roma. Dal diario di un ebreo, Rome: Citta` Nuova, 1984. Morpurgo-Fano, Letizia, Diario. Ricordi di Prigionia (10.9.43–27.4.45), Trieste: Tip. Leghissa, 1966. Navarro, Amalia, Siamo ancora vive!, Padua: Messaggero, 2002. Sarfatti, Michele, Gli ebrei nell’Italia fascista. Vicende, identita`, persecuzione, Turin: Einaudi, 2000. Stille, Alexander, Benevolence and Betrayal. New York: Summit Books, 1991. Zimmerman, Joshua D. (editor), Jews in Italy under Fascist and Nazi Rule, 1922–1945, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Zuccotti, Susan, The Italians and the Holocaust, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996.

HUMAN INSTRUMENTS See Gli strumenti umani (Work by Vittorio Sereni)

HUMANISM The term ‘‘Humanism’’ indicates the fifteenthcentury movement of thought that places man and human experience at the core of its investigation. In reaction to medieval speculative thought, the 950

philosophical and scientific goals of Humanism were essentially practical, aiming at moral and civic education as a premise to construct a Christian ideal society. Covering a core period from the

HUMANISM mid-fourteenth century to the early decades of the sixteenth century, Humanism greatly influenced the formation of modern thought. An essential trait of this movement was the recovery of pagan and Christian antiquity, on which the Humanists based their program of educational reform. Although Humanism brought innovation in many fields, from education to statecraft, art, and theology, and had a broader scope than education, in the late fourteenth century the term ‘‘Humanist’’ denoted just the professional rhetoricians and grammarians who taught classical texts with a philological approach. This limited meaning resurfaced in the nineteenth century, when the German pedagogist Immanuel Niethammer coined the term ‘‘Humanism’’ to designate a pedagogical theory that privileged classical studies in scholastic curricula. The historical and political conditions of the fourteenth and fifteenth century favored a philosophical reorientation toward practical issues. The political context of the Italian city-states encouraged the formation of a professional category of civil servants and teachers able to fulfill the rhetorical exigencies of a ruling class that used cultural prestige to reinforce its political power. The crisis that the Italian communal civilization underwent during the fourteenth century conditioned the passage from a Heaven-oriented to a man-centered culture. Famines, wars, and epidemics, culminating with the devastating Black Death of 1348, plagued Europe through the fourteenth century, and led to questioning medieval faith in the capacity of scientific knowledge to explain and control natural phenomena. As a result, a tendency to abandon abstract speculation in favor of practical wisdom prevailed and paved the way to Humanism. Ever since the publication of Jacob Burckhardt’s Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien (The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, 1860), scholars have debated the character and scope of Humanism. It is possible to distinguish two main approaches: one stressing the continuity of Humanism with medieval culture; the other focusing on its innovative traits. Among those who stressed the continuity with the Middle Ages are Augustin Renaudet (Humanisme et renaissance, 1958) and Giuseppe Toffanin (La fine dell’umanesimo, 1920), who attributed an essential religious meaning to Humanism and saw in it an attempt to reconcile classical culture and patristic theology. Reacting against a too abstract and broad definition of this movement, historians like Paul Oskar Kristeller claimed that Humanists represented an evolution of medieval grammarians and rhetoricians, whose highest accomplishment

was the educational curriculum of studia humanitatis based on classical literature. In Kristeller’s view, although their program included the study of moral philosophy, the Humanists did not produce original philosophical thought (Renaissance Thought and its Sources, 1979). Hans Baron’s notion of ‘‘Civic Humanism’’ was an important contribution to the understanding of the impact of political and historical factors on the development of Humanism (The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance, 1955). The term referred to the politically committed movement that flourished in Florence in the early fourteenth century, and had in chancellors Coluccio Salutati (1331–1406) and Leonardo Bruni (ca. 1370–1444) its most representative figures. In Baron’s view, the need to defend the Florentine republic from the expansionistic politics of the papacy and the visconti of Milan gave origin to a culture that celebrated the ideals of republicanism and freedom. Scholars such as Eugenio Garin (L’Umanesimo italiano, 1952) and Ernesto Grassi (La filosofia dell’umanesimo, 1988) focused on the centrality of the philosophy of man in Humanist thought. They argued that the Humanists acquired a sense of history unknown to the Middle Ages and, in their opposition to medieval dogmatism, elaborated a form of critical thinking that anticipated modernity. In the Humanists’ critique of Scholasticism, these scholars saw the end of the medieval trust in the human capacity of explaining transcendent reality. In their view, the originality of Humanism is in the shift from metaphysics to ethics and politics, from logic to poetry, and in the asserted superiority of metaphorical language over logical discourse in conveying practical truths and in inspiring love for virtue. This changed vision of man and the world determined in their view the nature and the goals of Humanism. A relatively more recent approach, like that of Charles Trinkaus, suggests the necessity to combine different historiographical methodologies to gain a comprehensive view of Humanism (In Our Image and Likeness, 1970). The origin of the Humanist movement can be traced back to the revival of classical culture that originally took place in France in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and continued with the Paduan Humanists Lovato dei Lovati (1241–1309) and his disciple Albertino Mussato (1261–1329). Around these figures, jurists, notaries, and literati formed a circle dedicated to the study of classical Latin authors and to the collection of ancient manuscripts. A culture centered on the investigation of natural and moral sciences reached its full 951

HUMANISM maturity by elaborating original goals and methods. Although these goals were common to the majority of Humanists, it would be misleading to consider Humanism a homogeneous movement. Rather, it developed through different phases, with a variety of different opinions openly debated and represented in all genres of literature. The Humanist orientation toward moral philosophy was already visible in the works of the two major Italian intellectuals of the fourteenth century: Francesco Petrarca (1304–1374) and Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375), who already saw in classical ethics the underpinning of Christian society. At the turn of the fifteenth century, Florentine civic Humanism bloomed, giving a crucial contribution to the recovery of both classical and Christian antiquity. In this period, following ancient models, the Humanists retrieved the genres of historical narrative, biography, dialogue, and oration, and undertook a major effort to make ancient Greek texts available in Latin. Translation became a main activity for Humanists such as Leonardo Bruni, Ambrogio Traversari (1386–1439), Giannozzo Manetti (1396–1459), and Matteo Palmieri (1406– 1475), who drew the profile of the perfect citizen in his Della vita civile (On Civil Life, 1431–1438). Theoretical treatises and discussions on translation animated the correspondences of authors such as Bruni and Manetti. In parallel, a passionate hunt for manuscripts in the monasteries of Europe and Italy developed, and antiquarians and Humanists such as Niccolo` Niccoli (1363–1437) and Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459) began to collect them in libraries. The exaltation of virtue, the recovery of antiquity, and the construction of an ideal city built on pagan and Christian civic ideals were central themes debated in this period, already present in Petrarch’s and Boccaccio’s works. Parallel to literary Humanism, an artistic movement seeking scientific and cultural foundations flourished in Florence. Following in the footsteps of Giotto (1267–1337), Masaccio (1401–1428), and Donatello (1386–1466), artists such as Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446), Leon Battista Alberti (1406– 1472), and Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) invented and developed the technique of perspective, promoting a new artistic sensibility centered on the rational representation of reality. In Northern Italy, Guarino Veronese (1370– 1460), Vittorino Ramboldini, better known as Vittorino da Feltre (1378–1446), and Francesco Filelfo (1398–1481), realized a program of Humanist educational reform along the lines indicated in the groundwork of Petrarch and Boccaccio. The 952

Humanist curriculum was a transformation of the medieval system of liberal arts based on the traditional division of trivium (grammar, rhetoric, dialectic) and quatrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy). It included literary studies, rhetoric, history, and moral philosophy, and concentrated on the study of classical texts in their original languages. Following an ideal of universal development of mind and body, it also integrated physical and intellectual education. Ancient historians, philosophers, poets, and medieval auctores previously known only in epitomes or through inaccurately copied manuscripts, constituted the main rhetorical models of Humanist education. Although the Humanists criticized scholastic Aristotelianism, they continued to teach Aristotle in the universities, particularly politics and ethics, along with Plato and the Neoplatonists. Their curriculum became the model of education in Europe during the Renaissance and the following centuries. If Florence was the heart of artistic and civic Humanism, and Padua and Ferrara the centers of education, Rome was the cradle of antiquarian and archeological Humanism as evidenced by the works of Flavio Biondo (1392–1463). Biondo authored two major works, the Italia Illustrata (Italy Illustrated, 1531), a geographical and historical description of the Italian provinces written between 1448 and 1453, and Historiarum ab inclinatione Romani imperii decades (Decades of History from the Decline of the Roman Empire, 1531), presenting a chronology from the fall of the Roman Empire until Flavio’s own time. Noteworthy are also his Roma instaurata (Rome Restored, 1531), a catalogue of Rome’s architectural treasures written in 1446, and his Roma triumphans (Rome Triumphant, 1531), written in 1456–1459, which studies the institutions and customs of ancient Rome. Erudite and versatile, Biondo tended to proceed by the encyclopedic accumulation of documents and materials rather than attempt to reproduce the ancient ideal of formal perfection. In a famous controversy with Leonardo Bruni, synthesized in his De verbis Romanae locutionis (On the Words of Roman Speech, 1435) Biondo affirmed the unity of the Latin spoken in Rome, and argued that the vernacular originated from the linguistic corruption caused by the barbaric invasions. Crucial for the recovery of ancient texts was the arrival in Italy of Byzantine scholars such as Manuel Chrysoloras (ca. 1355–1415), called by Salutati to teach Greek at the Studio Fiorentino in 1397. During the Council of Florence (1439– 1445), convoked to reunify the Greek and the

HUMANISM Roman Church, more Byzantine scholars came to Italy, including Bessarion (1403–1472) and Giorgio Gemisto Pletone (1355–1452). Together with Italian Humanists like Giovanni Aurispa (1369–1459), these scholars brought many untranslated Greek codices from Constantinople, enriching the Italian libraries. Other pre-eminent Greek scholars such as John Argyropoulus (ca. 1393–1487) also moved to Italy after Constantinople fell in the hands of the Turks in 1453. Humanism reached its peak with the critical works of Lorenzo Valla (1407–1457), the artistic rationalization of Leon Battista Alberti, and the philology of Angelo Ambrogini, called Poliziano (1454–1494). In the second half of the quattrocento, the progressive affirmation of the Signorie in Central and Northern Italy caused a turn in the evolution of Humanism, connecting it to the courts and bending it toward speculative thought. Typical of this phase was the revival of Platonism and Neoplatonism, particularly in the two major philosophical centers of Naples, with Giovanni Pontano (1429–1503), and Florence, with Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494). The tendency to a synchretistic reconciliation of heterogeneous philosophical and religious sources, including mysticism and esoterism, characterized the works of this period, like Ficino’s translation of the Corpus Hermeticus (Hermetic Writings, 1471) and the cabalistic studies of Pico della Mirandola. The celebration of the dignity of man, exalting the divine potentiality of the human in his task of ‘‘completing’’ the divine work of creation was a central theme of this period. Manetti’s De dignitate et excellentia hominis (On the Dignity and Excellence of Man, 1452), and Pico’s Oratio de hominis dignitate (Oration on the Dignity of Man, 1486) are the two main treatises on this theme. The second half of the quattrocento saw the progressive affirmation of vernacular Humanism with the poetry of Lorenzo de’ Medici (1449– 1492) and Poliziano, and with the prose of Alberti and Jacopo Sannazzaro (1457–1530). By the end of the fifteenth century, Humanism spread through Europe. Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464), Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466–1536), Thomas More (1478– 1535), Franc¸ois Rabelais (ca. 1490–1533), and Juan Luis Vives (1492–1540), assimilated and cultivated the legacy of Italian Humanism. Through these authors, and particularly through Erasmus, Humanism influenced both Protestant and Catholic Reformations. Humanists set their goals within a framework of Christian values. Following the Aristotelian view

that ethics was the underpinning of politics and economics, they considered the pursuit of virtue and the construction of a just and free society two necessary steps toward fulfilling their ideal of Christianity. The cultivation of virtue and the building of the ideal Christian city were at the basis of the Humanists’ focus on moral philosophy and their pedagogical interest in finding models of virtue in classical sources. The exigency of moral rebirth ran parallel to the desire for religious reform, determining the simultaneous recovery of ancient Christian and pagan authors. Since the Humanists took the theology and ecclesiology of the early fathers as their models, an additional and autonomous study of ancient thought was necessary to understand the patristic texts, imbued of classical culture. Furthermore, ancient poets and philosophers were valuable to Christian thought because, even before revelation, they had intuited natural and moral truths, achieving excellence in these fields. Humanist and medieval approaches to classical texts differed radically. Humanists preserved a glorious past from oblivion by restoring it to its authenticity and using it to mold their present. They acquired a ‘‘sense of history’’ and, with it, the consciousness that any text and any language is a historical product subject to critical interpretation, valid according to its time and place. The authors ceased to be auctoritates conveying eternal truths and became historical figures belonging to given cultural and linguistic contexts. The Humanist critique of Scholasticism began with Petrarch’s invectives and culminated with Lorenzo Valla’s Encomium Sancti Thomae Aquinatis (Encomium of Saint Thomas Aquinas, 1457), works that challenged the Scholastic claim that knowledge of transcendent reality was possible. In Scholasticism, by starting from indemonstrable premises, logic guaranteed scientific reliability to the deductive process and gave validity to its conclusions. The Humanists argued on the contrary that when premises are indemonstrable, as in the case of faith, logical inference is fallacious and leads to aporias. Only metaphorical language is able to comprehend and express moral and natural truths, which for the Humanists were the only attainable ones. Indeed, not reason but folly can arguably speak of God, as in Erasmus of Rotterdam’s Moriae encomium (Praise of Folly, 1511). Rhetoric, understood as the art of communicating wisdom, became ancillary to moral philosophy and determined the pre-eminence of poetry over demonstrative rationality. Rhetorical studies reached a climax with the works of Valla, who adopted Quintilian’s definition 953

HUMANISM of rhetoric as the art of speech founded on grammar in opposition to Poggio Bracciolini, who supported Ciceronian persuasive rhetoric. Valla’s method of textual analysis applied the principles of Quintilian rhetoric to the critical revision of both secular and sacred literature. It relied on a normative doctrine of speaking and writing (grammatica methodica), and on the study of the spoken and literary usage of language (grammatica historica). He illustrated his philological methodology in his Elegantiae linguae latinae (Elegances of the Latin Language, 1471), the first Humanist Latin grammar textbook, and in his In Novum Testamentum ex diversorum utriusque linguae codicum collatione adnotationes (Annotations on the New Testament Collected from Various Codices in Each Language, 1449), published by Erasmus in 1505. Both these texts had a great influence on European Humanism and critically contributed to the formation of Humanist theology, which with Valla became the science of biblical exegesis that uses philology as a means of investigation. The Humanists extended their critique of the medieval world to theology and ecclesiastical institutions. They felt that the medieval secularized church no longer reflected the evangelical principles of the proto-Christian Church. Although Christians, the Humanists shared a general tendency toward anticlericalism and a criticism of medieval ecclesiology. Valla’s Encomium Sancti Thomae Aquinatis can be considered as the manifesto of Humanist theology. In this speech, delivered to commemorate Aquinas in Santa Maria Sopra Minerva in Rome, the author attacked the two major ecclesiastical institutions of the Middle Ages: Scholasticism and the secular church. The church based its claim to temporal power on the Donation of Constantine, a document with which the Roman Emperor Constantine had supposedly transferred the dominion of part of his imperial territory to Pope Sylvester I in 313. By applying his critical methodology, Valla demonstrated that the donation was a forgery and attacked the very foundation of the secular power of the church. Humanist criticism of ecclesiastic institutions also involved monasticism, born as an early reaction to a church corrupted by temporal power. In withdrawing from society to escape the corruption of the world, however, not even monasticism fulfilled the Christian evangelical mission, which, for the Humanists, demanded an active presence in the civic community. SUSANNA BARSELLA

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Further Reading Baron, Hans, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955. Billanovich, Giuseppe, La tradizione del testo di Livio e le origini dell’Umanesimo, Padua: Antenore, 1981. Black, Robert, Humanism and Education in Medieval and Renaissance Italy. Tradition and Innovation in Latin Schools from the Twelfth to the Fifteenth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Burckhardt, Jacob, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, translated by Samuel G. Chetwynd Middlemore, 2 vols., London: Kegan Paul, 1878. Camporeale, Salvatore I., Lorenzo Valla. Umanesimo, Riforma e Controriforma, Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2002. Cassirer, Ernst, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, translated by Mario Domandi, New York: Dover, 1963. Celenza, Christian, The Lost Italian Renaissance: Humanists, Historians, and Latin’s Legacy, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. Fubini, Riccardo, Umanesimo e secolarizzazione da Petrarca a Valla, Rome: Bulzoni, 1990. Garin, Eugenio, L’Umanesimo italiano, Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1952. Garin, Eugenio, Il ritorno dei filosofi antichi, Naples: Bibliopolis, 1983. Grafton, Anthony, and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe, London: Duckworth, 1986. Grassi, Ernesto, La filosofia dell’umanesimo: un problema epocale, edited by Lino Rossi, Naples: Tempi moderni, 1988. Kristeller, Paul Oskar, Renaissance Thought and its Sources, New York: Columbia University Press, 1979. Panofsky, Erwin, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art, Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1960. Rabil, Albert (editor), Renaissance Humanism: Foundations, Forms, and Legacy, 3 vols., Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988. Renaudet, Augustin, Humanisme et renaissance, Geneva: Droz, 1958. Rico, Francisco, Il sogno dell’umanesimo: da Petrarca a Erasmo, Turin: Einaudi, 1993. Stinger, Charles L., Humanism and the Church Fathers. Ambrogio Traversari (1386–1439) and Christian Antiquity in the Italian Renaissance, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1977. Toffanin, Giuseppe, La fine dell’umanesimo, Milan: Bocca, 1920. Trinkaus, Charles, In Our Image and Likeness. Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought, 2 vols., London: Constable, 1970. Trinkaus, Charles, The Scope of Renaissance Humanism, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1983. Vasoli, Cesare, La dialettica e la retorica dell’Umanesimo, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1968. Witt, Ronald G., In the Footsteps of the Ancients. The Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni, Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2003.

I IACOPONE DA TODI (CA. 1230/1236–1306) liturgical context, the vernacular replaced Latin as its principal language. Before Iacopone, most collections of laude were coauthored by anonymous writers or written collectively by brotherhoods known as laudesi, while the literary value of the approximately 200 extant laudari, the collections of laude, in Latin or in the vernacular, remains negligible. Iacopone’s Laude is the first singleauthored collection of this poetic form. With Iacopone, the predominantly popular and folkloric genre of lauda achieved a valuable literary status; thanks to his poetic skills, the lauda acquired respectability and prestige, which it had never enjoyed before, when it was simply the expression of popular devotional practices. Iacopone transformed the lauda into a highly complex poetic genre, which deals with numerous religious topics and loses its specificity as simply a song of praise. The lauda became a supple poetic form, which is apt to express numerous subjects. Iacopone’s poems display a wide range of topics and styles; they feature invocations; petitions; thankful songs to God; didactic, edifying poems; virulent and satirical attacks on the poet’s enemies; irreverent and pugnacious diatribes against the corrupt papacy and clergy; poetic renderings of theological and doctrinal issues; as well as prayerful addresses to God. Within the genre of lauda, Iacopone experimented with numerous poetic forms. Some of his poems may be classified as tensos or debate poems, others as dramatic dialogues, some as litanies, others as prayers. Although he operated at the dawn of

Also known as Jacopo de’ Benedetti or Jacopo da Tuderto (the spelling of Iacopone’s name was traditionally Jacopone; in recent years, however, criticism in the English language has opted for the spelling ‘‘Iacopone’’), Iacopone was a Franciscan friar of the third generation of the order, a mystic, and a poet. He wrote 100 poems in the vernacular, which were later assembled by an editor and given the title Laude (Lauds). The Bonaccorsi edition, the editio princeps, appeared in Florence in 1490 and, through the centuries, was used as the canonical edition by generations of Iacopone’s readers. In the last half century two critical editions of the laude have appeared, one by Franca Ageno (1953) and one by Franco Mancini (1974). Besides the 100 laude of the collection, the Stabat Mater dolorosa (The Suffering Mother Stood), a Latin liturgical sequence, has been unconvincingly attributed to him. Similarly doubtful is the attribution of two Latin prose works, the Tractatus (Treatise), which deals with the amorous encounter of God and the human soul, and a collection of religious aphorisms known as Dicta (Sayings). Iacopone was a most prolific author of laude, a religious poetic form. By the thirteenth century, the lauda was a well-established poetic genre and a popular form of prayer. The Latin lauda had its roots in liturgy, since it derived from the Gospel acclamation, the Hallelujah, during Mass. As early as the ninth century, the lauda indicated a religious song of praise to Christ, the Virgin Mary, or the saints. As the lauda gradually acquired independence from the 955

IACOPONE DA TODI Italian vernacular poetry, the poet used rare linguistic techniques and complex rhetorical structures. His poetic sophistication transpired through the usage of noteworthy tropes; he employed specific figures of speech such as epanadiplosis, which indicates the repetition of a word or expression at the beginning and at the end of each verse. Iacopone uniquely combined mystical drive and poetic sensitivity. His literary endeavors reflected his postconversion impetus toward the spiritual realm, which permeated his entire intellectual development, as poet as well as human being. He has been reputed by some to have reached the highest poetic accomplishments in medieval Italian after Dante Alighieri. Critical approaches to his production suffered from a controversy between those who believed he was a rough and uncouth author, whose work was primitively unadorned, and those who attributed to him profound poetic taste and sublime inventiveness. Alessandro D’Ancona named Iacopone a ‘‘fool of God,’’ a minstrel or ioculator Domini, on the basis of the poet’s alleged rejection of culture in favor of a thorough acceptance of poverty and simplicity, two typically Franciscan virtues. In the wake of St. Paul’s formulation of an irreconcilable opposition of scientia and charitas, according to this critical perspective, it is claimed that Iacopone sided unwaveringly against knowledge acquired through learning and in defense of unembellished love. Subsequent generations of critics discarded this notion of an ‘‘ignorant’’ Iacopone and emphasized the poet’s deep doctrinal knowledge and poetic virtuosity. Although he adopted an inelegant and rustic attitude, Iacopone drew from an excellent educational background in both poetics and theology; he also studied and practiced law and was certainly well read and knowledgeable in the arts of the curriculum. From the formal point of view, Iacopone broke away from the Provenc¸al tradition of courtly love, which his contemporary Italian poets were following. Most laude of his collection are a lyrical exploration of his inner life. Iacopone used poetry as an instrument of spiritual growth and testimony for his mystical accomplishments. Several laude are structured in the form of dialogue or diatribe between two opposing entities: body and soul, soul and Christ, angels and soul, sinner and God. The dialogue suits the tension between the two parties involved particularly well. Iacopone’s uncompromising attitude provided his poetic texts with a dichotomic split between what is divinely acceptable and what is humanly contemptible. This 956

morally induced division operates at various levels: between poverty and wealth, body and soul, physical realm and spiritual realm, Christ and Satan. Iacopone’s excessive hatred for the worldly and corporeal dimension has raised some doubts about his Christian orthodoxy, particularly in relation to the Incarnation. His refutation of the body inspired him to list requests to God for diseases in Lauda 48 (numbering follows the Bonaccorsi edition). Iacopone’s achieved asceticism also caused his unequivocal opposition to the Roman Curia, which he deemed excessively worldly and impure. In Lauda 54 he rejoiced at the election of the mystical Pietro da Morrone as Pope Celestine V, but he prophetically also announced the impossibility of Celestine’s task to withstand the intricacies of the papal court and his desire to abdicate. Celestine’s successor, Pope Boniface VIII, was Iacopone’s personal and public archenemy. After being caught in the struggle between the pope and the Spiritual Franciscans, Iacopone fought against the papal troops at Palestrina and, after his party’s defeat, was excommunicated and taken prisoner. His imprisonment in the papal jail for five years prompted Lauda 55, which may be considered the first prison poem of modern times. In Laude 56, 57, 58, Iacopone addressed Pope Boniface directly in the form of an epistle and accused him of hypocrisy, corruption, heresy, and of having been elected to the Holy See illegitimately. He also pled for forgiveness and clemency, in order to be readmitted into the Church and to be freed from jail. The majority of Iacopone’s laude express the love of Christ and describe Christian mysteries, particularly the Incarnation and Passion. The famous Lauda 93, ‘‘Donna de Paradiso’’ (Lady of Paradise) has been regarded by critics as the first literary seed of Italian theatrical performance in the vernacular. Lauda 93 narrates Christ’s Passion and crucifixion. Because of the four characters’ interacting in its dialogic text, it has been staged innumerable times and has served as a much-needed instrument of spiritual elevation and instruction for illiterate Christians. Those who are unable to read the biblical text can more easily understand a theatrical representation of its contents. Lauda 93 is a unique example of its kind in Iacopone’s collection and does not seem to fit the rest of his production, even though its focus on Mary’s lament over the death of her son made critics associate this poem with other Marian poems in the collection, such as Laude 1 and 2.

IACOPONE DA TODI At times Iacopone’s poetry becomes doctrinal and instructive, to the detriment of its poetic quality; at other times, Iacopone’s realism expresses itself polemically against the hypocrisy of his fellow Christians. His polemic particularly targeted those Franciscan friars who, according to him, had betrayed Francis’s teaching and particularly the virtue of poverty. Iacopone’s mysticism poetically expressed the conceptual cluster behind apophatic theology. Since nothing can be articulated about God and his goodness, the mystic concentrates on the affirmation of what God is not, according to a Christian tradition going back to Dionysius the Areopagite. Iacopone’s recurrent reference to nichilitate accounted for this theological tradition. The ineffability the poet faced when dealing with a poetic rendition of an encounter with divinity was circumvented by means of various tropes and by a recourse to music, the privileged medium to account for an encounter with God. Several laude evoke the presence of God by repetition of the word Amore (Love), which gives the poetic text the scansion of a litany and transforms it into a singable prayer. In the hands of Iacopone, language became a malleable medium that, in the most sublimely lyrical texts, stresses the signifier over the signified; the poet’s original creation of words created an enchanting, almost spellbinding attraction. The resulting effect works on two levels: From a spiritual point of view, the language is bent to accommodate the ineffable experience of accounting for the presence of divinity; from a poetic point of view, the referent is secondary to sound and melody, which make Iacopone’s poetry closer to musical texts and therefore to the origins of lyrical poetry.

Biography Information on Iacopone’s life is scarce and typically inserted in a legendary and hagiographic context or simply drawn from his own dubiously reliable poetic production. Most critics have fallen prey to the temptation of reconstructing the salient facts of his life through those poetic texts of the Laude that appear to be autobiographical. Most of the unconfirmed information on his life before and after conversion comes from a late-fourteenthcentury legendary biography, known as La Franceschina. Iacopone was born in Todi, in the central Italian region of Umbria, to a wealthy family of the lesser nobility. According to most biographical accounts, he spent his youth among the comforts

and luxury that his privileged social and economic status afforded him. He studied jurisprudence, possibly at Bologna, and became an attorney; his title ‘‘messer’’ (sir) testifies to his professional position. He also led a very carefree moral existence, enjoying all the pleasures his youth dispensed him. In his mid-thirties, he married a woman of a neighboring town, Monna Vanna of the Counts of Coldimezzo, who belonged to a higher social rank. The couple enjoyed a pleasurable life of luxury and comforts. Vanna’s death during a party in 1268 caused Iacopone’s profound psychological and moral crisis. While preparing her body for burial, Iacopone discovered (as recorded by hagiographic accounts) that, although she conformed to the lifestyle her husband enjoyed, she had been wearing a cilicium, an instrument of self-mortification on her flesh. Messer Jacopo de’ Benedetti converted, joined the Franciscan Tertiaries, and became known by the nickname ‘‘Iacopone.’’ For the next ten years, Iacopone led the life of a penitent beggar (bizzocone), until he was admitted into the Franciscan Order of Friars Minor in 1278. After siding with the radical faction of the Franciscan Spirituals, who believed in the uncompromising application of the rule of poverty, in 1297 Iacopone signed the Longhezza Manifesto, which denied validity to the election of Pope Boniface VIII to the papal seat, and fought with the Colonna family against Boniface’s troops at Palestrina; after his party was defeated in 1298, he was excommunicated and imprisoned in the papal jail for five years. During his imprisonment he composed most of his poetic texts and, when he was released in 1303 at the death of Boniface, he withdrew to the Convent of Collazzone, where he died on Christmas Eve of the year 1306. Although he was never canonized, Iacopone is popularly acclaimed as Blessed. ALESSANDRO VETTORI See also: Religion and Literature Selected Works Laude, Florence, Francesco Bonaccorsi, 1490. Laudi, Trattato e Detti, edited by Franca Ageno, Florence: Le Monnier, 1953. Le laude, edited by Luigi Fallacara, Florence: Libreria Editrice Fiorentina, 1955. Laude, edited by Franco Mancini, Bari: Laterza, 1974. Le laude, ristampa integrale della prima edizione (1490), edited by Giovanni Papini, Florence: Libreria Editrice Fiorentina, 1923.

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IACOPONE DA TODI Further Reading Contini, Gianfranco, Letteratura italiana delle origini, Florence: Sansoni, 1970. D’Ancona, Alessandro, ‘‘Jacopone da Todi, il giullare di Dio del secolo XIII,’’ in Studi sulla letteratura italiana dei primi secoli, Milan: Fratelli Tre`ves, 1891. D’Ancona, Alessandro, Jacopone da Todi: Il giullare di Dio del sec. XIII, Todi: Atanor, 1914. Fleming, John V., An Introduction to the Franciscan Literature of the Middle Ages, Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1977. Fortini, Arnaldo, La lauda in Assisi e le origini del teatro italiano, Assisi: Edizioni Assisi, 1961. Getto, Giovanni, ‘‘Francesco d’Assisi e il Cantico di frate sole,’’ in Letteratura religiosa dal Due al Novecento, Florence: Sansoni, 1967. Katainen, Louise V., ‘‘Jacopone da Todi, Poet and Mystic: A Review of the History of the Criticism,’’ Mystics Quarterly, 22:2 (June 1996): 46–57. Moleta, Vincent, ‘‘Dialogues and Dramatic Poems in the Laudario Iacoponico,’’ Italian Studies. An Annual Review, 30 (1975): 7–29.

Papini, Giovanni, Jacopone da Todi, Todi: Res Tudertinae, 1980. Pasquini, Emilio, ‘‘La lauda’’ in Il Duecento: Dalle origini a Dante, vol. 1, edited by Emilio Pasquini and Antonio Enzo Quaglio, Bari: Laterza, 1970. Peck, George T., The Fool of God: Jacopone da Todi, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1980. Richardson, Brian, ‘‘The First Edition of Iacopone’s Laude (Florence, 1490) and the Development of Vernacular Philology,’’ Italian Studies. An Annual Review, 47 (1992): 26–40. Sapegno, Natalino, Frate Jacopone, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1985. Underhill, Evelyn, Jacopone da Todi, Poet and Mystic, 1228–1306: A Spiritual Biography, with a Selection from the Spiritual Songs, London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1919. Valesio, Paolo, ‘‘‘O entenebrata luce ch’en me luce’: La letteratura del silenzio,’’ in Del silenzio: Percorsi, suggestioni, interpretazioni, edited by Giovannella Fusco Girard and Anna Maria Tango, Salerno: Ripostes, 1992.

IF ON A WINTER’S NIGHT A TRAVELER See Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore (Work by Italo Calvino)

IF THIS IS A MAN See Se questo e` un uomo (Work by Primo Levi)

ILLUMINISMO See Enlightenment 958

VITTORIO IMBRIANI

VITTORIO IMBRIANI (1840–1886) Vittorio Imbriani began his literary career in 1860 as an editor of the newspaper La patria and contributor to L’Italia, La nuova patria, and Il giornale napoletano della domenica. Having fought with Garibaldi as a young man, Imbirani eventually became a conservative and a fervent monarchist, skeptical of republican and democratic solutions. He came to believe that the ruling middle class, having won the civil wars of the Risorgimento, had within few years betrayed their national ideals. In his opinion, the middle classes were defined by an empty materialism and a clear incapacity for assuming their responsibilities. In his literary essay ‘‘Dell’organismo poetico e della poesia popolare italiana’’ (On the Poetic Organism and the Popular Italian Poetry, 1866), he supported research into folklore and oral tradition as source of artistic value. He himself produced remarkable studies in this field, publishing Canti popolari delle province meridionali (Songs of the Southern Provinces, 1871–1872), a collection of southern Italian popular songs; a book of Tuscan tales, La novellaja fiorentina (Florentine Short Stories, 1871), and a book on the Lombardian oral tradition, La novellaja milanese (Milanese Short Stories, 1872). He published an important study of the Milanese poet and critic Giovanni Berchet, Giovanni Berchet e il Romanticismo (Giovanni Berchet and Romanticism, 1868), which argues for Berchet as the most influential advocate for a profound moral renewal of Italy. Another important study is Il gran Basile: studio biografico e bibliografico (The Great Basile: A Biographical and Bibliographical Study, 1875), in which he considered Basile, the Neapolitan baroque writer of novella and the author of Lo cunto de li cunti (The Story of Stories, 1634), as one of his masters. Basile’s influence is apparent in the ornate and eccentric diction of Imbriani’s tales, in his Latinisms, archaisms, dialect, mannerisms, and play on words. In these years, Imbriani also published a number of original short stories, characterized by a parodic, decidedly anti-Manzonian prose. Imbriani’s prose style led the critic Gianfranco Contini to link Imbriani’s pastiches with the northern Italian literary movement of the Scapigliatura, especially as exemplified in the work of Carlo Dossi and Giovanni Faldella (Letteratura dell’Italia Unita,

1968). Among Imbriani’s best-known fiction is the satirical story Le tre maruzze: novella trojana da non mostrarsi alle signore (The Three Maruzzas: A Trojan Novella Not to Be Shown to the Ladies, 1875), in which Troy is in fact the city of Naples, and La novella del vicomburio (The Novella of the Vicomburio, 1877). Imbriani’s conception of literature was based on his interpretation of Hegel, whom he had studied as a young man in Berlin. He assimilated the philosophy of Hegel as he had the work of Francesco De Sanctis while a student in Zurich. Imbriani held an elitist view of literature, a fact that is demonstrated in the way he chose to produce his books in numbered editions that circulated only among a few intellectual friends. For example, only 28 copies were printed of Le tre maruzze, seven on fine red paper, seven on green, seven in purple, seven in blue, and all without the author’s name. The first edition of La novella del vicomburio appeared in 90 copies, 70 of them on grey paper. Imbriani adopts a fierce tone in his descriptions of the middle class. The narrator of his short stories typically addresses a ‘‘common’’ listener with whom the narrator enters into a frank dialogue conducted in friendly, cultivated, or quarrelsome tones. Imbriani adopted an ironic attitude toward the moral themes of his stories: married life, the ‘‘normal’’ extramarital affair, the problems of the feminine condition, and the relationships between the sexes in a decaying urban environment, degraded by misrule and unsolved social problems. The narrator is a gossipy polemicist who organizes his story around a number of familiar linguistic acts and rhetorical forms—questions, clauses, confirmations, exhortations, pauses, exclamations—that give it a theatrical texture. Imbriani’s most famous novel, Dio ne scampi dagli Orsenigo (God Save Us from the Orsenigos, 1876), which is sum of these themes and narrative devices, is a further expression of his aggressive satire of the Italian nobility.

Biography Vittorio Imbriani was born in Naples, 27 October 1840, son of Paolo Emilio, a liberal and a patriot, and Carlotta Poerio, sister to the poet Alessandro. He studied at the University of Zurich, where in 959

VITTORIO IMBRIANI 1858 he attended Francesco De Sanctis’s lectures. Imbriani served as a volunteer in the Second Independence War, 1859; he fought with Garibaldi and was caught by the Austrians in Croatia, 1866. He was Professor of Aesthetics at the University of Naples and was elected Consigliere provinciale (Provincial Councillor) in Pomigliano D’Arco. He served as editor-in-chief of La patria, 1866–1867. Imbriani died in Pomigliano d’Arco (Naples), 1 January 1887. STEFANO ADAMI Selected Works Collections I romanzi, edited by Fabio Pusterla, Milan: Guanda, 1992. Racconti e prose 1863–1876, edited by Fabio Pusterla, Milan: Guanda, 1992. Racconti e prose 1877–1866, edited by Fabio Pusterla, Milan: Guanda, 1994.

Fiction La novellaja fiorentina, 1871. La novellaja milanese, 1872. Mastr’Impicca, 1874. Le tre maruzze, novella troiana da non mostrarsi alle signore, 1875. La novella del vicomburio, 1877. Merope IV: Sogni e fantasie di Quattr’Asterischi, 1867. Dio ne scampi dagli Orsenigo, 1876.

Nonfiction La religione dell’ateo, 1870. Canti popolari delle province meridionali, 2 vols., 1871–1872 (with A. Casetti). Paralipomeni alla novellaia milanese, 1873. La pulce, saggio di zoologia letteraria, 1875. Il gran Basile: studio biografico e bibliografico, 1875. Sulle canzoni pietrose di Dante, 1882. Studi danteschi, 1891.

Further Reading Cenati, Giuliano, Torniamo a Bomba, i guizzi narrativi di Vittorio Imbriani, Milan: LED, 2004. Contini, Gianfranco, Letteratura dell’Italia unita. 1861–1968, Florence: Sansoni, 1968. Croce, Benedetto, Studi letterari e bizzarrie satiriche, Bari: Laterza, 1907. Franzese, Rosa, and Emma Giammattei (editors), Studi su Vittorio Imbriani, Naples: Guida, 1990. Giammattei, Emma (editor), Vittorio Imbriani nel centenario della morte, Pomigliano d’Arco (Naples): Biblioteca Comunale, 1996. Giglio, Raffaele, ‘‘Il giornalismo di Vittorio Imbriani,’’ in Studi in onore di Gioacchino Paparelli, edited by Luigi Reina, Salerno: Laveglia, 1988. Palermo, Antonio, Ottocento italiano: l’idea civile della letteratura, Naples: Liguori, 2000. Tordi, Rosita, Irregolari e isolati del secondo ottocento, Bologna: Calderoni, 1978.

INDEX LIBRORUM PROHIBITORUM See Censorship

INDIAN NOCTURNE See Notturno indiano (Work by Antonio Tabucchi)

960

CAROLINA INVERNIZIO

INFLUENCES See Anglo-American Influences, French Influences, German Influences, Hispano-Latin American Influences, Russian Influences

CAROLINA INVERNIZIO (1851–1916) During the era of national unification, Italian society was plagued by mass illiteracy. As a result, the public was unable to evaluate political ideologies critically and readily accepted tendentious historical representations. It was in this social context that the first truly popular Italian novels appeared, presenting points of view that had previously been censured or consciously ignored. One of the most prolific authors of the period was Carolina Invernizio. With over 120 novels to her credit, she was an acclaimed master of the serialized story (romanzo d’appendice). In Florence, a cultural center where popular literature coexisted with the high culture promoted in the salons of an intellectual elite, Invernizio made her debut. Here Salani published Invernizio’s first novel, Rina o l’angelo delle Alpi (Rina, or the Angel of the Alps, 1877). An epic about a foundling who is really the daughter of a baron, Rina was an instant success. The period immediately after the unification of Italy was rich in historically and socially important events, but Invernizio chose not to represent them in her works. She did not take a clear political stance, and yet her social and historical novels reflect the sentiments, passions, and morality of the public more accurately than most other contemporary literary work. Her apolitical novels are dark stories about infamous crimes, dazzling redemptions, and lifeless characters with an aura of sanctity. In fact, her sensationalist narratives have a somewhat didactic purpose. Invernizio’s novels promote the

ideals of the conservative middle class. The reader can cross the border between reality and fantasy without being tempted to rebel or bring about change. Instead, Invernizio encouraged solid loyalty to the ideology and morality of the institutions and the government in power. Invernizio told stories about noblemen as well as middle-class, proletarian, and subproletarian families. In her fiction, little girl orphans, dressmakers, and working women enter the world of ‘‘ladies’’ through wise and honorable conduct. Invernizio created a universe of exhausting vicissitudes, betrayal, and revenge in which the coups de the´aˆtre follow one another closely, the dialogues are often confused, and the ending is not always happy and reassuring. However, she overcame the problem of me´salliance without introducing the theme of divine revenge, a common means to justify a rearrangement of the traditional social order. The main characters in the novels are women, consistently represented either as virtuous heroines or perverse corruptors. The principal role of male protagonist is foil to the heroine. He proves to be essential for the development of the plot but not for its resolution. Conceived according to a fixed typology, the male protagonist is frequently characterized as an unreliable husband, incapable of moral strength. As a brother, he is often an illegitimate son who is far removed, altogether missing, or habitually preoccupied with his personal problems. His aid always comes at the last minute. As a 961

CAROLINA INVERNIZIO friend, he is generally obsessed with old wounds and betrayals for which he plans a horrible revenge. Thus, he is more of a source of trouble than of help and support. For instance, in Invernizio’s most famous novel, Il bacio d’una morta (The Kiss of a Dead Woman, 1889), the angelic Clara is betrayed by her husband, the Earl Rambaldi, who is in thrall to the satanic dancer Nara. Rambaldi decides to poison Clara and flee with his lover to Paris, bringing with him the innocent daughter Lilia. Clara is lying in the cemetery chapel when her illegitimate brother Alfonso arrives. Once banished, he has been freed thanks to the secret intervention of his sister. In a rare case of initiative for a male character, Alfonso demands that the coffin be opened. His doing so reveals that the incompetent earl has mistaken the dose of poison, and Clara is still alive. The story ends with the reunion of mother and daughter and the absolution of the unfaithful husband. The novel’s plot is centered and develops around the female characters. The one significant exception is the contribution of a solicitor, an old family friend. Yet even his broader poetic function is to personify the established authority, not to allow for a stong male presence in the work. These novels, which enjoyed a great success in Latin America, where they were brought by Italian immigrants, reduce everything to a set of norms clearly identified with the predetermined social order, the peace of the hearth, the rejoined family, and the love of children. Cheap dreams, perhaps, a mass drug, as the cruellest critics of every age (from Antonio Gramsci to the actor Paolo Poli, who in 1969 dedicated a polemical show to her) dismiss them. Yet Carolina Invernizio’s works were created with the undeniable conviction that a novel, in Giovanni Papini’s words, ‘‘si scrive per divertire e si legge per divertirsi’’ (is written to amuse and read to delight), that is, with the aim of gratifying those who seek such diversion in them (‘‘Carolina Invernizio,’’ 1918).

Biography Carolina Invernizio was born in Voghera (Pavia) on March 28, 1851. The daughter of a high government official, she lived in Florence for a long time. This was where in 1881 she married the lieutenant of the Bersaglieri, Marcello Quinterno. With him she had her only daughter, Marcella. In 1877 Carolina Invernizio published her first novel, Rina o 962

l’angelo delle Alpi. She also wrote stories published in various collections. She died in Cuneo on November 27, 1916. ANNA BOGO See also: Rromanzo rosa Selected Works Collection Romanzi del peccato, della perdizione e del delitto, Milan: Accademia, 1971.

Fiction Un autore drammatico, 1876. Rina o l’angelo delle Alpi, 1877. Satanella ovvero La mano della morta, 3 vols., 1888. Il bacio d’una morta. Romanzo storico-sociale, 1889. La guantaia di Torino, 2 vols., 1891. Storia d’una sartina, 1892. L’orfanella di Collegno, 2 vols., 1893. La vendetta d’una pazza (serial end of Il bacio d’una morta), 1894. La sepolta viva, 2 vols., 1896. La peccatrice, 1897. Cuor di madre, 2 vols., 1897. Il delitto di una madre, 1898. Vendetta di operaio, 1900. Il figlio dell’anarchico, 2 vols., 1901. Cuore d’operaio, 1902 Torino misteriosa, 3 vols., 1903–1904. Le avvelenatrici, 1904. Il treno della morte, 1905. La rediviva, 1906. La felicita` nel delitto, 1907. La via del peccato, 1908. Nina la poliziotta dilettante, 1909. Lara, l’avventuriera, 1910. La maschera bianca, 1911. La figlia del morto, 1913. L’avventuriero, 1914. L’orfana di Trieste, 1915. Morta d’amore, 1916.

Children’s Books I sette capelli d’oro della fata Gusmara, 1909. Spazzacamino, 1912.

Further Reading Arslan Veronese, Antonia, Dame, droghe e galline: romanzo popolare e romanzo di consumo tra 800 e 900, Padua: Cleup, 1977. Bianchini, Angela, Il romanzo d’appendice, Turin: Eri, 1969. Cantelmo, Andrea, Carolina Invernizio e il romanzo d’appendice, Florence: Atheneum, 1992. Davico Bonino, Guido Ioli, and Giovanna Ioli (editors), Carolina Invernizio. Il romanzo popolare, Turin: Gruppo Editoriale Forma, 1983.

ITALIAN‐AMERICAN LITERATURE Eco, Umberto, et al., Carolina Invernizio, Matilde Serao, Liala, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1979. Eco, Umberto, Il Superuomo dii massa, Milan: Cooperativa Scrittori, 1976. Fedi, Roberto, Introduction to Carolina Invernizio, Il bacio d’una morta, Milan: Mursia, 1990. Gramsci, Antonio, Letteratura e vita nazionale, Turin: Einaudi, 1950.

Papini, Giovanni, ‘‘Carolina Invernizio,’’ in Testimonianze. Saggi non critici. Nuova serie dei ‘‘24 cervelli,’’ Milan: Studio Editoriale Lombardo, 1918. Zaccaria, Giuseppe, Il romanzo d’appendice. Aspetti della narrativa popolare nei secoli XIX e XX, Turin: Paravia, 1977.

ITALIAN-AMERICAN LITERATURE Traditionally, Italian-American prose begins with Peppino (1885), by Luigi Ventura (1845–1912), published first in French, then in English (1886), and with I misteri di Mulberry (The Mysteries of Mulberry, 1893), by Bernardino Ciambelli (1862–1931), written in Italian. English was not at the outset the lingua franca, though much of what has since been classified as Italian-American writing does appear mainly in that language. The themes of this early literature included immigration, family, the working class, and ethnic identity. Political themes also recur in some narratives: For instance, in The Story of Antonio (1911), Antonio Arrighi (1837–1920) uses Italy’s failed 1848–1849 revolution as backdrop to an Italian political exile’s struggles to begin anew in America. As these writers passed from one generation to the next, other issues arose: race, Mafia, gender, and interethnic relations. A significant amount of Italian-American fiction is autobiographical, and it includes Pascal D’Angelo (1894–1932) and Constantine Panunzio (1884–1964). In his Son of Italy (1924), D’Angelo recounted the trials and tribulations of striving for the American dream, becoming the poet no one thought he could be. Panunzio’s The Soul of an Immigrant (1921) tells similar tales, underscoring the challenges for survival. To some degree, both books became yardsticks for their contemporary fiction writers. In subsequent decades, Garibaldi LaPolla (1888–1954), with The Grand Gennaro (1934), told the story of a payback from an incident that occurred many years before; Jo Pagano (1906–1982) and Mari Tomasi (1907–1965) also produced significant works. Pagano’s The Golden Wedding (1943) celebrates a couple’s fiftieth wedding anniversary

and reminisces of a time long past; Tomasi’s Like Lesser Gods (1949), in turn, commemorates the travails of northern Italian granite workers in Vermont. The outstanding works from this era are the classics of Italian-American fiction: In 1938 John Fante (1909–1983) published Wait until Spring, Bandini, a coming-of-age novel that recounts Arturo Bandini’s family’s life in Colorado and that is the first of a long series narrative works; Jerre Mangione (1909–1998) made his mark with his novelized autobiography, Mount Allegro (1942). But the one novel that truly captivated the largest reading audience in the United States was Christ in Concrete (1939), by Pietro di Donato (1911–1992). Based on the author’s father’s tragic death on a construction site, the novel documents the travails of the dead man’s family. A smash hit, this novel trumped John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath as first selection of the Book of the Month Club. Even though the 1950s did not witness any smash hits, they introduced authors who went on to publish well-respected novels. Two names that appear for the first time in this period and continue to stand out are Ben Morreale (1924–) and Mario Puzo (1920–1999). Morreale’s The Seventh Saracen (1958) recounts a Sicilian American’s trip to Sicily in search of his ancestors in order to make some sense of his life. Puzo’s critically acclaimed The Dark Arena (1955) tells of an Italian-American soldier’s return to Germany, where he had spent part of World War II, in search of a new life that he could not find in the United States. Many new writers appeared in the 1960s, while others returned with second and third novels or short-story collections. Among them were Di 963

ITALIAN‐AMERICAN LITERATURE Donato’s Three Circles of Light (1960) and Mangione’s Life Sentences for Everybody (1965) and Night Search (1965). This is also the decade of Marion Benasutti (1908–1992), author of No Steady Job for Papa (1966); Raymond de Capite (1924–), who released The Coming of Fabrizze (1960); Ben Piazza (1934–1991) with The Exact and Very Strange Truth (1964); and George Cuomo (1929–). Another significant author was Octavia Waldo (1929–), whose A Cup of the Sun (1961) recounts the conflicts between old world and new world through the perspective of gender. But the decade belonged to Mario Puzo with his second critically successful novel, The Fortunate Pilgrim (1964), and his classic The Godfather (1969). Contemporary fiction proves equally productive and often boasts an impressive aesthetic quality. Umbertina (1979), by Helen Barolini’s (1928–), solidifies the woman’s voice, while her later collection of stories, More Italian Hours, and Other Stories (2001), underscores the variety of her themes. Tina De Rosa’s modernist narrative Paper Fish (1980) is a coming-of-age novel set in Chicago’s Little Italy. Another midwesterner faithful to his geographical roots, Tony Ardizzone (1949–), proves prolific with both collections and novels, especially Taking It Home (1996) and In the Garden of Papa Santuzzu (1999). Many first books have appeared during this period: Rachel Guido de Vries’s Tender Warriors (1986), Mary Bucci Bush’s A Place of Light (1990), Anthony Valerio’s The Mediterranean Runs through Brooklyn (1982), Chuck Wachtel’s Joe, The Engineer (1986), Fred Misurella (1940–) with Short Time (1996), and Louisa Ermelino (1947–) with Joey Dee Gets Wise (1991). An unusual debut is that of Giose Rimanelli (1925–), who wrote his first work in English, having already achieved success in Italian. His Benedetta in Guysterland (1993) is a masterful, postmodern tour de force that examines Italian-American culture through a Mafia-like parodic perspective, leaving the reader ever wondering about the reality of the storyline. Four novelists, at this time, stand out for a variety of reasons: Rita Ciresi (1960–), Don Delillo (1936–), Carole Maso (1955–), and Lisa Scottoline (1955–), all of whom enjoy great popular success. Ciresi’s prose explores Italian Americana through a comedic, gendered lens, as her last novel, Sometimes I Dream in Italian (2001), testifies. Scottoline, in turn, offers up the Italian-American female sleuth as lawyer, exploring in her latest case, Killer Smile (2004), the internment of Italian-Americans during World War II. Maso, conversely, relies on a more lyrical, sensual rhetoric, beginning with Ghost 964

Dance (1986), a woman’s search for her sexual and ethnic identity. Delillo, with White Noise (1984), has produced one of contemporary America’s fictional masterpieces. While, on most occasions, he relegates his italianita` to the background, such secondary status is vindicated in Underworld (1997). As far as the poetic production is concerned, Pascal D’Angelo (1894–1934), a self-described ‘‘pick and shovel poet,’’ represents one of the firstgeneration figures to overcome the trials and tribulations of immigrant life. Learning English on his own, his poetry (mostly in free verse) combines the lofty with the mundane in a swirl of images contrasting the idealized with the harsh reality of daily life. The poetry of Emanuale Carnevali (1897– 1944), which exhibits the free spirit of a modern experimental poet, articulates his headlong collision with his adopted culture. Unable to overcome the daily travails of immigration, Carnevali returned to Italy after less than a decade. From coal mining to radical politics (for example, the Lawrence textile strike of 1912), Arturo Giovannitti (1884–1959) was considered in his time to be the greatest Italian-American poet. Arrows in the Gale (1914) laments the exploitation of immigrants and the injustices placed upon the working class. His poetry was written in free verse, in long rhythmic prose paragraphs, accompanied by an impelling, austere, realistic style. However, John Ciardi (1916–1986) was the first to achieve national prominence. Not explicitly Italian American, Ciardi’s early poems nevertheless exhibit sentiments readily associated with his italianita`. His first collection, Homeward to America (1940), set up the dichotomy of the Old and New Worlds, where America is now home. His Italian heritage is reflected in his translation of Dante’s Divina Commedia, which excels for its lyrical quality in English. With close to 50 books of poetry, criticism, and translations, Ciardi has made an indelible mark on American literature. Vincent Ferrini (1913–) honed his literary skills at a young age while also working as an instructor of literature for the Works Project Administration from 1935–1940. He has been a prolific writer since 1941, and his poetry is steeped in the social issues related to industrialization. He figures as the logical successor to Giovannitti. Like Ciardi, Henry Rago (1915–1969) was one of the first to break into mainstream literary America. Having published in Poetry when he was 16, he later went on to edit the prestigious journal. Another poetic voice of the pre-World War II era was Elda Tanasso (1917–1977), who published in

ITALIAN‐AMERICAN LITERATURE Voices, Lyric, Columbia Poetry, and New English Weekly. Both award-winning poets, Felix Stefanile (1920–) and Lewis Turco (1934–) are children of immigrants who have sunk their roots in the American literary soil. From River Full of Craft (1956) to The Country of Absence (2000), Stefanile’s poetry has consistently sung the highs and lows of the human condition in venues such as the Saturday Review, Poetry, Sewanee Review, and The Formalist. Stefanile was at the forefront of the New Formalist movement in American poetry, as was his editorially mercurial magazine, Sparrow (1954– 2000), dedicated in its last decade to the sonnet. Like other talented poets of Italian descent such as Jonathan Galassi, Michael Palma, or Stephen Sartarelli, Stefanile also translated numerous Italian poets into English, including Cecco Angiolieri, the Futurists, and Umberto Saba. With a dozen poetry books to his name, Lewis Turco is among the most prolific of first-generation, Americanborn poets. Though not explicitly on Italianate topics, ‘‘The Ice House’’ may be considered a metaphor for the disappearing Italian America that the poet knew as a child. Turco has also written books of literary criticism as well as works of fiction such as Dialogue (1989). Other members of this generation are John Tagliabue (1923–) and Gerard Malanga (1943–). Whereas Tagliabue periodically invests his poetry with imagery of his Italian American-ness, similarly to Stefanile, Malanga is much more reserved with respect to an explicit ethnic repertoire. Like Turco, Malanga engages in poetry of oppositional veneration. The migratory experience of Joseph Tusiani (1923–) is unlike that of his predecessors, as he moved to the United States as an adult with an Italian university education. His polycultural experiences contributed to a poetry that mediates the rhetorical extravagance of Italy and the linguistic economy of the United States. With the vast linguistic inventory of someone who consistently writes in four different languages—English, Italian, Latin, and his native dialect—Tusiani exhibits a vast thematic repertoire from the culturally specific immigrant experience to the more general motifs of solitude and nostalgia. Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919–), Gregory Corso (1930–2001), Philip Lamantia (1927–2005), and Diane di Prima (1934–) are four poets who originated from the Beat Generation. Ferlinghetti is the more readily recognized. His poem ‘‘The Old Italians Dying’’ (1976) is a swan song to the old Italian neighborhood of San Francisco’s North

Beach. Furthermore, his City Lights Publishing has been instrumental in getting out not only his fellow Beat Italian Americans but also numerous Italian poets in English translation. Diane di Prima is one of the most prolific writers of the nonconformist generation. ‘‘Backyard’’ and ‘‘April Fool Birthday Poem for Grandpa,’’ both in the anthology of Italian-American women writers The Dreambook (1987), stand out as examples of reconciliation of an ideological and formalistic avant-gardist attitude with her Italian heritage. Di Prima embraces wholeheartedly an historic Italian anarchy, be that anarchy specifically Italian-American, as in ‘‘April Fool Birthday Poem for Grandpa,’’ or more universal, as in ‘‘Rant’’ (1968), a creative/ideological manifesto. Poets of the later generation, whom we may label ‘‘baby boomers,’’ include David Citino (1947–) and W. S. Di Piero (1947–), the latter also a translator. To this generation belongs also Paul Vangelisti (1945–), celebrated poet, novelist, publisher, and translator, whose editorial successes include Red Hill Press and Sun & Moon Publishers. Like some of her predecessors, Maria Mazziotti Gillan (1940–) is also involved in publishing as editor of Footwork: The Patterson Literary Review. Her self-reflexivity as an Italian-American female is apparent from her earliest collection, Flowers from the Tree of Night (1980), to her latest, Where I Come From: New and Selected Poems (1994). Another Italian-American writer who reflects with sensitivity on the issues of gender and prejudice is Daniela Gioseffi (1941–) in books such as the anthologies Women on War (1988), which won the American Book Award in 1990, and On Prejudice: A Global Perspective (1993). Gioseffi writes spiritual poetry, in the tradition of Whitman, and exhibits an impressive breadth of reading and eloquence. Be it Eggs in the Lake (1979) or her later poetry collection, Going On (2000), her work is accompanied by a compelling amount of unreservedness for the things she holds dearly, social and political commitments that date back to the civil rights movement. Considered by the magazine Esquire one of the ‘‘Best of the New Generation,’’ Dana Gioia (1950–) is a poet of great sophistication and elegance, as well as a critic, translator, editor, and chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. Work and money seem to occupy a good part of his earlier poetry, where the initial desire to succeed financially transforms itself into a burden. A major participant in the New Formalist movement, Gioia once stated that while ‘‘many American poets reject 965

ITALIAN‐AMERICAN LITERATURE European influences as distractions from the search for a native voice, most Italian-American poets view Europe—sometimes in its Modernistic aspects and sometimes in its older traditions—as a potential source of strength’’ (‘‘What Is Italian-American Poetry?’’ 1991). Along with Ciardi and Gioia, Jay Parini (1948–), also a novelist, critic, and radio commentator, is one of the most prominent American poets of Italian origin. His poetry exhibits an immense erudition and familiarity with the master poets. Yet, his themes are very much drawn from everyday life and transcend any specific ethnic or racial context. Be it on the hard work of the mine workers, the praises of family elders, the desire to delve into one’s ancestry, any American reader of Parini’s can readily identify with his poetry and, at the same time, marvel at his craft. Identified with the Bread Loaf School and editor of the Columbia Anthology of Poetry (1993), Parini has been involved in the mainstream of American letters like very few other Italian Americans. He is a true cultural broker, contributing to the greater history of American literature and its contemporary canon. Among others, younger writers of note include Mary Jo Bona (1959–), Peter Covino (1963–), Carolyn Guinzio (1964–), and Gerry LaFemina (1968–). Furthermore, the more technically conscious and, at times, wistful poets such as the wellknown feminist scholar Sandra Gilbert (1943–) and Diane Raptosh (1955–) also deserve notice for their attempt to reconcile the ethnic with the general cultural milieu. Likewise, the religious poetry of Peggy Rizza Ellsberg (1910–1987) must be mentioned for a more encompassing view of ItalianAmerican poetry. In a different vein, Rose Romano (1947–) has earned her own place in the history of the genre both for her own austere creative work and her unselfish editorial activity dedicated to giving voice to the Italian-American lesbian, female, and gay voices that remained otherwise silent. In conclusion, writers of Italian descent in the United States often consider themselves too American to be ethnic. This is, perhaps, the most intriguing aspect of all and proves how the national literary scene is, indeed, a conglomeration of different voices. This entails a pluralistic process of artistic invention and interpretation which, by its very

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nature, cannot exclude the individual (artist and reader/viewer), who has found an ars poetica that does not violate the several components of his or her identity, thus (re)creating, ideologically speaking, a diverse repertoire of signs. ANTHONY JULIAN TAMBURRI Further Reading Barolini, Helen (editor), The Dream Book: An Anthology of Writings by Italian American Women, New York: Schoken, 1985. Bona, Mary Jo, Claiming a Tradition: Italian American Women Writers, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999. D’Acierno, Pellegrino (editor), The Italian American Heritage: A Companion to Literature and Arts, New York: Garland, 1999. Gardaphe`, Fred. L., Italian Signs, American Streets: The Evolution of Italian American Narrative, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. Gioia, Dana, ‘‘What Is Italian-American Poetry?’’ in Poetry Pilot, December 1991, 3–10. Giordano, Paolo A., and Anthony Julian Tamburri (editors), Beyond the Margin: Readings in Italian Americana, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998. Giunta, Edvige, Writing with An Accent: Contemporary Italian American Women Authors, New York: Palgrave, 2002. Green, Rose Basile, The Italian-American Novel: A Document of the Interaction between Two Cultures, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1974. LaGumina, Salvatore J., et al. (editors), The Italian American Experience: An Encyclopedia, New York: Garland Publishing, 2000. Tamburri, Anthony Julian, A Semiotic of Ethnicity. In (Re) cognition of the Italian/American Writer, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1998. Tamburri, Anthony Julian, Paolo A. Giordano, and Fred L. Gardaphe´ (editors), From the Margin: Writings in Italian Americana, West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1991, 2nd revised edition, 2000. Tamburri, Anthony Julian, et al. (editors), Italian/American Literature and Film: A Select Bibliography, West Lafayette, IN: Bordighera, 1997. Verdicchio, Pasquale, Bound by Distance: Rethinking Nationalism through the Italian Diaspora, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997. Vitiello, Justin, Poetics and Literature of the Sicilian Diaspora: Studies in Oral History and Story-Telling, Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1993.

HISTORY OF THE ITALIAN LANGUAGE

HISTORY OF THE ITALIAN LANGUAGE With reference to Italian, the label ‘‘history of the language’’ may designate either the evolution from Latin into Italian or the changes within Italian itself, from the origins to the present day. In the case of the evolution from Latin into Italian, we can say that Italian derives from Latin or even that it is Latin as used in Italy today. Of course we consider Latin and Italian to be different languages, but this depends mainly on our assumptions—on our looking at them as standard languages and considering them synchronically, as structures endowed with their own vocabulary, grammar, phonology, and clearly distinct from each other. But if we analyze individual examples of these languages we may find that, particularly for certain periods and areas, it is almost impossible to decide whether a text is in Latin or in Italian. Frequently collections of Early Italian texts begin with documents for which it is difficult to say if they are in Latin or in Italian, such as the Indovinello veronese (Veronese Riddle), penned at the beginning of the ninth century (or possibly earlier) on a page of a prayer book prepared in the seventh or eighth century and now preserved in the Chapter Library at Verona. The text says: ‘‘se pareba boves alba pratalia araba & albo versorio teneba & negro semen seminaba’’ (He was driving oxen, ploughing white meadows and holding a white plough and sowing black seed. This is one of the many possible interpretations). The riddle is apparently about oxen and ploughing and sowing, and the solution is the quill used for writing, leaving ink traces on the page. Linguistically, certain features are clearly Latin (b instead of v in the imperfect endings of pareba, araba, teneba, seminaba; the consonant endings in boves and semen; the voiceless t instead of d in pratalia). Others are, equally clearly, vernacular (the dropping of the consonantal endings in the -ba instead of –bat suffixes; the endings in –o instead of –um in albo, versorio, negro; the pronoun se instead of sibi). In a way, it is not the words that dictate our choice to interpret them as belonging to one language or another, but instead it is our assumptions about the language being used that determine our interpretation of individual expressions. So, paradoxically, in order to decide whether a text is in

Latin or in Italian, the crucial question seems to be: Which language did speakers think they were using? And the answer, not unreasonably, implies that the choice depends on their competence, that is, on the options available to them, and not on what we mean by Latin and Italian. The earliest dated text that is unequivocally in the vernacular, is included in a legal document in Latin, from Montecassino, of the year 960, which quotes some witnesses stating: ‘‘Sao ko kelle terre, per kelle fini que ki contene, trenta anni le possette parte S(an)c(t)i Benedicti’’ (I know that those lands, through those boundaries which are contained here, the party of St. Benedict owned them for thirty years). We have to remember that this document, although it refers to an oral statement, belongs to a written tradition, and it has been reliably suggested for instance that the letters –nt in kontene and trenta corresponded then, as they do today in Campania, to the sounds [nd]; besides, we do not know how long the opposition between Latin and vernacular had been valid: For instance, in the graffiti at Pompei, in the first century AD, one finds parallel indications of Latin –nt and –nd being pronounced respectively [nd] and [nn] as they are today in the equivalent words, in the same region. In what period did Latin stop being a mother tongue, being replaced by the vernacular, in speech, and later also in writing (with the consequence that literacy offered a choice between two different idioms, i.e., Latin and vernacular)? Scholars traditionally answered: between the sixth and the seventh centuries, for speech, and later, at times that varied according to the different literary traditions, for writing. But in recent decades linguists have become increasingly aware of the difficulty of giving the question a theoretically satisfactory formulation. If we concentrate on the transformation of Latin into the vernacular, we need to consider, in Italy, about 15 idioms, linked to the regions (Liguria, Piedmont, Lombardy, Veneto, Emilia, Tuscany, Marche, Umbria, Abruzzi, Latium, Campania, Molise, Lucania, Puglia, Calabria, Sicily, Sardinia), each fragmented into countless local dialects (Gerhard Rohlfs, Grammatica storica 967

HISTORY OF THE ITALIAN LANGUAGE della lingua italiana e dei suoi dialetti, 1966–1969). These regional idioms, although they derive from Latin, have changed so much as to become reciprocally unintelligible. For instance, the Latin filius (son) may appear as [‘fio], [‘fi( )o], [‘fi( )ju], [‘fijjo], [‘fi( )u], and the like, and [fi( ‘ )lo], [‘fj( )l], [‘fjfl], and so on. The change from Latin into Late Latin and then into the vernacular obviously affects the phonological system. In Latin there were ten vowel phonemes, that is, those indicated by the five letters i, e, a, o, u, each of which could correspond to a long or short phoneme: pilum (hair), pilum (javelin); uenit (he or she comes), uenit (he or she came); malum (bad), malum (apple); colo (I cultivate), colo (I filter); putet (he or she may think), putet (he or she smells). In Late Latin/Proto Romance, vowel length is no longer a phonemic choice but is determined by syllable structure: In a stressed syllable the vowel must be short if the syllable is checked (that is, if it ends in a consonant) and long if the syllable is free (that is, if it ends in a vowel). At the same time, if the vowel is short it becomes more open, and the opposition between open and closed es and os becomes distinctive or phonological. Here are some examples, with reference to Tuscan: pilum>p[e]lo, ventum>v[]nto, venam>v[e]na, octo>[
]tto, solem>s[o]le, rumpo>r[o]mpo. The most notable consonsant changes concern assimilation (as in pt>tt: ruptum>rotto; ct>tt: actum>atto); voicing (as in stratam>strada, ripam>riva, acu>ago); and palatalization (as R in vicinum, with velar [k] >vicino, with palatal [t ], medium>mezzo, maiorem>maggiore). Important changes take place in morphology and syntax: The Latin system of six case endings (nominative, accusative, genitive, and so on) is reduced to one (lupus, lupum, lupi and so on > lupo), and syntactic relations (subject, object) are manifested by word order rather morphological endings: l’uomo (subject) vede il lupo (object) ¼ lupum (accusative) homo (nominative) videt, as against il lupo (subject) vede l’uomo (object) ¼ hominem (accusative) lupus (nominative) videt. Certain structures, such as those represented by Italian faccio bere il vino a Cesare (‘‘I make Caesar drink the wine’’) are Romance innovations not available in Latin. One could imagine a Late Latin equivalent facio Caesarem bibere vinum, but a dative Caesari for the subject of the infinitive bibere would be out of the question. At the same time the semantic system evolves, so that in domus>duomo the meaning changes from 968

‘‘house’’ to ‘‘temple,’’ in casa>casa it changes from ‘‘hut’’ to ‘‘house,’’ in mulier>moglie it changes from ‘‘woman’’ to ‘‘wife.’’ Then, passing to the transformations within Italian itself, we note that from the earliest stages to the present day the language has remained considerably stable, certainly more so than for French, English or German. This follows from Italian having been used mainly as a written language, based on the literary form of Florentine, particularly as represented by the vernacular works of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio in the fourteenth century. Another factor is ‘‘Tuscanization’’: Other vernaculars, such as Venetian, were influenced by Tuscan, from the beginning, in their written versions; and in some cases, such as that of the Sicilian School (which, according to a tradition going back to Dante, marked the beginning of Italian literature), were preserved in manuscripts prepared by Tuscan copyists. As for the evolution within Italian itself, we have to consider the question of periodization. For other European languages periodization is fairly straightforward, with an Old, a Middle, and a Modern phase. For Italian these classifications are less well established. This paradoxically depends on what can be described as the precocious, and at the same time the late development of the language. Precocious, because Italian was the first language in Europe to acquire, in the late thirteenth and during the fourteenth century, a shape that was to survive, basically unchanged, to the present. The use of Italian has also been self-conscious and accompanied from the start by explicit discussions on the idiom most suitable as a literary language. Dante, in the De vulgari eloquentia (ca. 1305), produced a treatise on linguistics and poetics putting forward the notion of ‘‘illustrious vernacular,’’ which foreshadows what could be called, in modern terms, the ‘‘standard language,’’ that is, a supraregional literary variety. In the first half of the fifteenth century the ‘‘language question’’ (questione della lingua) came to the fore, and contrasting ideals were discussed. The line that prevailed was that of Pietro Bembo, who in his Prose (1525) proposed a model based on Florentine literary usage of the fourteenth century as exemplified by Petrarch for poetry and Boccaccio for prose. Different models proposed modern Tuscan (Niccolo` Machiavelli) or a supraregional ‘‘Italian’’ variety (Baldassare Castiglione), also called cortegiana as it was exemplified by the usage of the courts (such as those of Mantua, Ferrara, Urbino, or Rome). It must be remarked that, however heated the disagreements, these

HISTORY OF THE ITALIAN LANGUAGE distinctions were mainly questions of style and detail. Linguistically, all the proposals were based on some variety of literary Tuscan. In fact, from the beginning of the sixteenth century, we have dialect productions that present themselves explicitly as being on a ‘‘lower’’ level, contrasted with the ‘‘higher’’ variety of standard Italian. Similar considerations apply to the discussion between Alessandro Manzoni (who favored a model based on contemporary colloquial educated Florentine) and the eminent philologist Graziadio Isaia Ascoli (who preferred a literary language based on the tradition of written Italian). The choice was in fact between varieties of standard Italian, clearly distinct from the other languages, which were the dialects. We stated above that one could also say that the development of Italian was late, because it was only in 1861 that a unified kingdom of Italy was proclaimed and that Italian was recognized as the language of the new state. It is true that the speech used by most Italians was then, and was to remain for a long time, as it was before, the dialect—effectively languages different from region to region (Martin Maiden and Mair Parry, editors, The Dialects of Italy, 1997; Manlio Cortelazzo et al., editors, I dialetti italiani, 2002). We have contrasted spoken and written Italian, but the distinction is less straightforward than it seems. In a sense this is a choice between two media, one spoken and one written. In another, the dialects are typically spoken, and Italian is typically a written language, but this does not imply that a dialect expression cannot be ‘‘transcribed’’ or that an Italian expression cannot be ‘‘pronounced.’’ Besides, speech and writing also refer to different genres and literary devices. Literary works may include ‘‘narrative’’ sections (nearer to ordinary written texts) and sections of dialogue, nearer to speech; and plays normally consist mainly of ‘‘speech.’’ On the other hand, it has been observed that ‘‘speech’’ may refer to ‘‘speech proper’’ (as one might hear it in everyday life) or to speech as it is stylized in a play or as it is ‘‘read out’’ in more formal circumstance. There is, however, little doubt that after unification Italian became employed on a much larger scale than before in all spheres of public life, parliament, law, bureaucracy, education, army, journalism, and the like, and this applies both to the spoken and the written medium. Besides, the language used in the area of literature, novels, poetry, and so on gradually changed,

acquiring a more colloquial tone, nearer to an everyday register, which would have been more difficult to achieve before the turn of the nineteenth century. In particular, poets like Giovanni Pascoli and Guido Gozzano and prose writers such as Benedetto Croce appear to have marked the way which the Italian literary language was to follow during the twentieth century—it was still highly literary but getting gradually nearer to the level of educated usage and abandoning the recherche´, puristic, and archaizing preferences of the Italian literary tradition. This direction is recognizable among more modern writers, in authors such as Italo Calvino, Alberto Arbasino, Umberto Eco, who have adopted an unaffected, fluent sort of Italian characterized by features that need not be specified regionally or expressionistically—a sort of linguistically ordinary, everyday, average type of Italian that has only recently become available. It may be useful to list some examples of the phenomena we are referring to. Concerning phonology and spelling: In medieval manuscripts and in printed texts until the modern period, spellings such as spatio instead of spazio, acto and apto instead of atto were common; not to speak of the use of u/v and i/j, of the conventions governing the use of the apostrophe (un amico but un’amica; qual e` and not qual’e`), which have become standardized only recently and still not consistently. Concerning morphology, the first person singular of the imperfect (io faceva instead of io facevo) was prevalent in the past, and it remained such, in writing, until the mid-nineteenth century. Pronominal forms such as eglino side by side with essi were to be found in puristic texts until recently. As for syntax: An interesting example of historical evolution was offered by the so-called law of Tobler-Mussafia (identified by Alfred Tobler for Old French and by Adolfo Mussafia for Old Italian; it is linked to facts studied by Jacob Wackernagel for the early stages of the Indo-European languages). Until about the end of the fourteenth century, it was exceptional (if not outright impossible) to begin a sentence in Italian with a weak pronoun: The clitic had to come after and not in front of the verb: not Mi vide but Videmi (he or she saw me), not Si dice but Dicesi (it is said). This rule is not compulsory any longer, but owing to the archaistic preferences of the Italian literary tradition it remained prevalent until the end of the nineteenth century and was frequently respected even after the beginning of the twentieth. It is still 969

HISTORY OF THE ITALIAN LANGUAGE followed in formulaic expressions such as locasi or affittasi (to rent) to be seen on notices outside Italian boardinghouses. For Lexis, in Italian, as in most modern languages of culture, it has been estimated that over half of the vocabulary, if we include scientific terminology, was introduced during the twentieth century. But if we consider the basic vocabulary, consisting of the most common and frequent words, we find that 87 percent were in use at the end of the fourteenth century, about 10 percent were introduced during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and the remaining 3 percent in the following centuries. It is useful to keep this in mind also when we consider the penetration of Anglicisms, which is frequently considered a very dangerous development. This seems, however, to be a worry more of a cultural and ideological than of a linguistic nature. One can observe that, first, the question concerns not just Italian but most cultures affected by modern technological developments; second, what is involved is mainly technical terminology: the number of Anglicisms that entered ordinary usage is fairly limited, and phenomena affecting the basic syntactic structures are extremely hard to find; and third, as for the supposedly damaging consequences of these borrowings, one may note

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that English, which has been voracious in its absorptions from other languages, does not seem to have been weakened by the promiscuity of its contacts. GIULIO LEPSCHY Further Reading Bruni, Francesco, L’italiano: Elementi di storia della lingua e della cultura italiana, Turin: UTET, 1984. Bruni, Francesco (editor), Storia della lingua italiana, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1989–2003. Cortelazzo, Manlio, et al. (editors), I dialetti italiani: Storia struttura uso, Turin: UTET, 2002. De Mauro, Tullio, Storia linguistica dell’Italia unita, Bari: Laterza, 1963. Maiden, Martin, A Linguistic History of Italian, London: Longman, 1995. Maiden, Martin, and Mair Parry (editors), The Dialects of Italy, London: Routledge, 1997. Marazzini, Claudio, La lingua italiana: Profilo storico, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1994; 2nd ed., 1998. Migliorini, Bruno, Storia della lingua italiana, Florence: Sansoni, 1960; as The Italian Language, abridged, recast and revised by T. Gwynfor Griffith, London: Faber, 1966; 2nd ed., 1984. Rohlfs, Gerhard, Grammatica storica della lingua italiana e dei suoi dialetti, 3 vols., Turin: Einaudi, 1966–1969. Serianni, Luca, and Pietro Trifone (editors), Storia della lingua italiana, 3 vols., Turin: Einaudi, 1993–1994.

J FLEUR JAEGGY (1940–) often ingenious play of reflections, memories, and resemblances face each other in a dialogue against the ‘‘regno dei fatti’’ (realm of facts), in which the only, albeit impossible, reward is equivalence, ‘‘la cancellatura dei tracciati, l’origine perfetta’’ (The erasure of outlines, the perfect origin). Isolation is also at the core of her next novel, Le statue d’acqua (Statues of Water, 1980), in which a man lives confined in an Amsterdam basement, outside time, surrounded by statues, an exile to life. As in previous works, the writing cannot escape the constant temptation of a stony lyricism. At the same time, the dissociation of images and the masterful montage of sentences that recalls theatrical writing (and indeed the characters are introduced at the beginning under the heading ‘‘dramatis personae’’) are meant to evoke the sense of a ceremony of solitude, a veritable apologue of renunciation. This first group of writings is traversed by a series of themes and actions translated in the body of the texts into powerful metaphors such as the double, embroidery (present especially in Le statue d’acqua), and contagion, in accordance with a Mitteleuropean literary tradition that amalgamates different literary experiences, from Robert Walser and Georg Bu¨chner to Lewis Carroll and Virginia Woolf, among others. In I beati anni del castigo (Sweet Days of Discipline, 1989), Jaeggy revisits her experiences in a Swiss boarding school. This is perhaps her bestknown novel, the story of the tough initiation to discipline of the protagonist, a 14-year-old girl, and Fre´de´rique, a mysterious adolescent, set in the

In one of his 1996 essays entitled Finestre d’angolo su Fleur Jaeggy, Giovanni Pozzi introduced the writer’s complex biography and literary profile by describing her as ‘‘an author with a German last name and a French first name, and who is nevertheless neither German nor French, but Swiss, although she has nothing in common with the literature in Italian Switzerland (and little in common with Italian literature of Italy).’’ Indeed the complex cultural and linguistic reality of Italianspeaking Switzerland has long comprised an intense literary dialogue with Italy proper, particularly during the twentieth century. The themes that characterize Jaeggy’s works, who has now moved from Lugano to Milan, were already evident in her extraordinary de´but novel Il dito in bocca (The Finger in Mouth, 1969), in which she described, against the background of a motionless lake landscape, the impossibility ‘‘di vivere nel mondo’’ (of living in the world) on the part of the young protagonist Lung. These themes include difficult affective relations; the narrative perspective of ‘‘inazione’’ (inaction), since, as Jaeggy states at the end of the novel, ‘‘fare e` un modo di dire’’ (doing is a way of saying); the precariousness and the dissolution of gender identities; and the aphoristic vocation of her writing. Her second novel, L’angelo custode (The Guardian Angel, 1971), revolves around the theme of the double and of the resemblance between the two protagonists, Jane and Rachel, two sisters in selfimposed exile from the world. In an incessant and 971

FLEUR JAEGGY Bausler Institut, a girls’ boarding school in Appenzeller. The novel describes also the protagonist’s desire to enter into the world, but through a subterranean, sacrificial course in which the word indicates the moment of disorder, of loss. La paura del cielo (Last Vanities, 1994) is a collection of seven short stories set in Northern landscapes, which unfold fiercely between the glorification of the power of vanitas and the narration of the sudden dynamics of catastrophes. As Pozzi has remarked, gravestones and cut flowers—for instance, anemones, the flowers born of Adonis’ blood in the story ‘‘I gemelli’’ (The Twins)—here become symbols of the existential revolt against ‘‘the impenetrable sky that provides a terrifying backdrop to the fable-like plot’’ (Finestre d’angolo su Fleur Jaeggy, 1996). Jaeggy’s most recent novel Proleterka (S. S. Proleterka, 2001) takes its title from the name of a Yugoslavian ship that carried passengers from Venice to Greece, and is stylistically her most accomplished work. The systematic use of parataxis and the mosaic-like progression of the sentences suggest a more symbolic, as well as temporal or existential, brevitas, in which the lyrical temptations of the early novels unfolds now without song. Rather than merely written down, the necessary, authentically Italian words appear sculpted with objective care, recalling Gertrude Stein’s obsessive mastery, even in the quotation camouflaged in the phrase ‘‘Ombre nella sala da pranzo’’ (Shadows in the dining room) that seems to allude to the title of a famous novel by the American writer, Blood on the Dining-Room Floor (1933). Proleterka narrates the progressive estrangement of familial relations in an irrevocable experience of evil, which is destined, like the ship, to move southward, toward Hades, finally reaching ‘‘un silenzio d’ombra’’ (a shadow silence).

Biography Born in Zurich on 31 July 1940, resided first in Rome, then, since 1968, in Milan. Her theatrical work Un tram che si chiama Tallulah was performed at the Spoleto Festival, 1975. Awarded the Bagutta prize for I beati anni del castigo, 1990;

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the Moravia prize for La paura del cielo, 1994, and the Viareggio-Re`paci prize, 2002. Married to the writer Roberto Calasso. Currently lives in Milan. STEFANO TOMASSINI Selected Works Novels Il dito in bocca, 1969. L’angelo custode, 1971. Le statue d’acqua, 1980. I beati anni del castigo, 1989; as Sweet Days of Discipline, translated by Tim Parks, 1991. Proleterka, 2001; as S.S. Proleterka, translated by Alastair McEwen, 2003.

Short Stories ‘‘La paura del cielo,’’ 1994; as Last Vanities, translated by Tim Parks, 1998.

Translations Marcel Schwob, Vite immaginarie, 1972. Thomas de Quincey, Gli ultimi giorni di Immanuel Kant, 1983.

Further Reading Boyers, Robert, ‘‘Discipline and Punish,’’ in The New Republic, 23 November 1998: 38–41. Ciccarelli, Andrea, ‘‘Frontier, Exile, and Migration in the Contemporary Italian Novel,’’ in The Cambridge Companion to the Italian Novel, edited by Andrea Ciccarelli and Peter Bondanella, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Fajen, Robert, ‘‘Die Schrecken des Idylls, u¨ber Fleur Jaeggys La Paura del Cielo,’’ in Erzalhen in der Romania am Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts, Sonderbruck: Peter Lang, 2001. Garboli, Cesare, ‘‘Jaeggy: Lo stile di una scrittrice che guarda il mondo con gelida innocenza,’’ in La Repubblica, 3 March 2002: 40–41. Montesano, Giuseppe, ‘‘La vita perduta: appunti su Fleur Jaeggy,’’ in La Rivista dei Libri, 13, no. 3 (2003): 10–12. Parmeggiani, Francesca, ‘‘Resisting Identity: Fleur Jaeggy’s Life Stories,’’ in Forum Italicum, 38, no. 1 (2004): 166–186. Pozzi, Giovanni, ‘‘Finestre d’angolo su Fleur Jaeggy,’’ in Alternatim, Milan: Adelphi, 1996. Serkowska, Hanna, ‘‘Sette puntate di vuoto: La paura del cielo di Fleur Jaeggy,’’ in Spunti e Ricerche, 18 (2003): 41–52.

PIERO JAHIER

PIERO JAHIER (1884–1966) Piero Jahier was both novelist and poet and also made a substantial contribution to Italian literary journalism of the first half of the twentieth century. His religious background—he was born into a Genoese Waldensian family—was a constant inspiration in all his work. The reforming ideology of La Voce, of which he was editor from 1911–1913, combined with a strongly autobiographical tendency, were the hallmarks of Jahier’s most relevant literary production. From his first forays into publication it was clear that his work would not be limited to a merely literary approach: His early contributions to La Voce combined personal reflection and family experiences linked with a religious subject: ‘‘Quel che rimane di Calvino’’ (What Remains of Calvin, 1909), ‘‘I Valdesi nelle Valli’’ (The Waldensians in the Valleys, 1910), ‘‘I protestanti in Italia’’ (The Protestants in Italy, 1910). Jahier’s autobiographic concerns also characterize his first literary work, Resultanze in merito alla vita e al carattere di Gino Bianchi con un allegato (Outcomes Relating to the Life and Character of Gino Bianchi, along with an Attachment, 1915). The Resultanze presents a main character derived from Jahier’s own experience as a railway clerk. Jahier’s decision to call his character Gino Bianchi also emphasizes the author’s intention to mix fictional elements with personal experience—Gino Bianchi was Jahier’s nom de plume during his contribution to La Voce. Jahier’s investigation of Gino Bianchi’s life examined both his employment and private life. The work is essentially a satirical inquiry into Italian bureaucracy based on the loyal civil servant ‘‘Bianchi Geom. Comm. Gino.’’ Written in a lively style, Jahier integrates prose and poetry with consummate mastery, deliberately creating a fragmentary discontinuity, as was advocated at the time by many of the authors who wrote for Giuseppe Prezzolini’s La Voce. The alternation of different expressive forms defines the nature of the text. A perfectly measured medley of officialese works to gloss the dull chronicle of the character’s life. The hypotaxis is never overdone; on the contrary, the accumulation of subordinate clauses always achieves its logical limit of expression. Thus, the syntax may appear distorted but never loses its sense. The stylistic panache of the Resultanze, along

with its irony, does not, however, exclude consideration of those themes that became constant elements of Jahier’s literary work: the economic straits that led Gino Bianchi’s family into poverty; the effort to continue his studies, economic difficulties; and the determination to gain an education, as is poetically highlighted by the ‘‘Canzone dello spostato’’ (The Song of the Displaced): ‘‘Ho rimosso di non averlo pagato...Ho rimosso di aver anteposto alla risolatura le poesie di Verlaine’’ (I repressed the fact that I did not pay...I repressed that I chose Verlaine’s poetry instead of shoes). Jahier repeats this topos in his novel Ragazzo (Boy, 1919) with the episode of the gymnasium guy who sells papers in order to buy Giacomo Lepardi’s Canti (1831). In this second work, Jahier reflects specifically on his own life, recollecting some crucial events including his father’s suicide, his brother’s return home, family subsistence, and the central role of his mother. Ragazzo, considered Jahier’s most coherent work, is divided into five chapters: ‘‘La morte del padre’’ (The Death of the Father), ‘‘La famiglia povera’’ (The Poor Family), ‘‘Avventura settimanale’’ (The Weekly Adventure), ‘‘Il guadagno’’ (The Earnings), and ‘‘Il paese’’ (The Village). In this work, a sincere lyricism, but untouched by nostalgia, prevails over any irony. Jahier does not merely recall the past but, as it were, relives the unfolding events, seen entirely from the boy’s perspective. The result is an episodic bildungsroman—it is no surprise that Jahier wrote and published the chapters in a literary journal as independent works. The following year Jahier published his war journal: Con me e con gli Alpini (With Me and with the Alpine Troops, 1920). It was an account of his experience as a volunteer during World War I, and an idealization of the sense of brotherhood among soldiers. The authenticity of a ‘‘primitive’’ nature as well as the concrete virtues of the mountain people struck Jahier’s imagination deeply. According to his point of view, this joyful genuineness was the most suitable antidote to the army’s coercive discipline and methods. The trenches also provided Jahier with material for an ideological and educational feature: The paper L’Astico, giornale delle trincee was born in this context. It ran to 39 issues, from February 14, 973

PIERO JAHIER 1918, to November 10, 1919. Gaetano Salvemini’s thought was its most important reference. Critics have noted a close relationship with Lacerba’s radical ideology of war at that time. Jahier knew Lacerba and, between 1914 and 1915, he was an active contributor with ‘‘Allegri Italiani’’ (Joyful Italians), ‘‘Mio popolo’’ (My People), ‘‘Pane’’ (Bread), and ‘‘Wir mu¨ssen’’ (We Must). If the first text is clearly a satire that fitted perfectly with the ideological position of Lacerba, the others (‘‘Mio popolo’’ could even be read as a palinode of the ‘‘Allegri Italiani’’) did not praise the war either according to the perspective of Futurism or that of Giovanni Papini. Certainly the L’Astico gave Jahier the opportunity to analyze beliefs already expressed in the poem-preamble to Con me a con gli Alpini, ‘‘Dichiarazione’’ (Declaration). But it was evident that Jahier’s celebration of war was a defense of his mountain people that did not avoid transparent populism and mystical hints. The experience of Il Nuovo Contadino, giornale del popolo agricoltore (1919) made the question still more complicated. The final result of both these experiences showed how Jahier tried to think about his deep beliefs: The idea of war as a revolution of people facing the Germans became simply an attempt at cooperation among different social classes, including the middle class. Jahier also made an important contribution to the field of literature with his translations; above all, with his translations of Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad. Jahier’s translations anticipated the pivotal work of Elio Vittorini and Cesare Pavese. Jahier translated French and Chinese authors as well: Pierre Joseph Proudhon, Molie`re and, most importantly, Paul Louis Charles Claudel, Lin-Yu.T’Ang (from English into Italian), and Chin P’ing Mei, romanzo cinese del sec. XVI (Chin P’ing Mei, Novel of the 16th Century). As far as Jahier’s poetry is concerned, he has not been served well by the Vallecchi edition of 1964, which is completely lacking in philological apparatus. Poesie (Collected Poems) is a kind of collage of verses that were part of Jahier’s three main works and seem to suffer from decontextualization. However, Jahier himself authorized this volume and it should therefore be considered the author’s final poetic testament.

Unione Cristiana Apostolica Battista, 1877. Moved to Florence, 1895. Jahier’s father committed suicide, 1897. Attended the Scuola di Teologia Valdese in Florence, 1902. Hired as a railway clerk of Societa` Adriatica, 1905. Contributor of La Voce, 1909. Married Pochat Corday, 1910. Obtained a law degree from the University of Urbino and later the professional qualification as a French teacher from the University of Turin, 1911. Built his famous ‘‘casa rossa’’ in Campo di Marte with Giuseppe Prezzolini as his neighbor, but they never got along, 1911. Manager of La Voce bookstore in Florence and later editor-in-chief of the literary journal, 1911–1913. Contributor to Lacerba and La Riviera Ligure, 1914–1916. Joined the army, fighting at Caporetto in World War I, 1915. Rejected Benito Mussolini’s offer to be the editorin-chief of Il popolo d’Italia. Returned to his previous work as a railway clerk and promoted a cultural club with a clear political aim, 1919. Commemoration of patriot Cesare Battisti, who was executed (1916) by the Austrians in Trento, 1922. Commemoration of Socialist martyr Giacomo Matteotti, 1924. Kept under surveillance by the regime police in Bologna because of his anti-Fascist activities and his political experience with Italia libera, 1927. Joined the Resistance fight and returned to Florence after the liberation, 1945. His wife died, 1945. Awarded the Vallombrosa prize for poetry (ex aequo with Luigi Fallacara), 1962. Awarded the Premio della Critica Emilio Cecchi for Poesie, 1965. Died in Florence, on November 19, 1966. As a posthumous award, he received the Libri dell’Anno della Scuola Italiana prize for Ragazzo and Con me e con gli Alpini, 1967. DIEGO BERTELLI Selected Works Collections Ragazzo e prime poesie, Florence: Vallecchi, 1939. Opere, 3 vols., Florence: Vallecchi, 1964–1967. Poesie in versi e in prosa, edited by Paolo Briganti, Turin: Einaudi, 1981.

Fiction Resultanze in merito alla vita e al carattere di Gino Bianchi, 1915. Ragazzo, 1919. Con me e con gli Alpini, 1920.

Biography

Articles

Born in Genova, on April 11, 1884. Joined the Evangelical Church after his theological studies in Geneva, 1871. Rebaptized as a servant of the

‘‘Quel che rimane di Calvino,’’ 1909. ‘‘I Valdesi nelle Valli,’’ 1910. ‘‘I protestanti in Italia,’’ 1910. ‘‘Allegri Italiani,’’ 1914–1915.

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BENIAMINO JOPPOLO ‘‘Mio popolo,’’ 1914–1915. ‘‘Pane,’’ 1914–1915. ‘‘Wir mu¨ssen,’’ 1914–1915.

Other 1918: L’Astico, giornale di trincea; 1919, Il nuovo contadino, edited by Mario Isnenghi, Padua: ‘‘Il rinoceronte,’’ 1964. Paul Claudel en Italie: avec la correspondance Paul Claudel– Piero Jahier, 1975.

Further Reading Alicata, Mario, Scritti letterari, Milan: Mondadori, 1968. Benevento, Aurelio, Primo Novecento: saggi su Giovanni Boine e Piero Jahier, Naples: Loffredo, 1986. Bo, Carlo, ‘‘Jahier e Sbarbaro,’’ in L’Approdo Letterario (April–June 1968): 3–20. Boine, Giovanni, Il peccato e le altre opere, Parma: Guanda, 1971. Briganti, Paolo, Jahier, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1976.

Cadioli, Alberto, Le muse e le sirene. Gli scrittori e l’industria culturale del primo Novecento in Italia, Milan: Iulm, 1990. Gargiulo, Alfredo, Letteratura italiana del Novecento, Florence: Le Monnier, 1940. Giordano, Alberto, Invito alla lettura di Piero Jahier, Milan: Mursia, 1973. Isnenghi, Mario, Il mito della grande guerra, Bari: Laterza, 1970. Isnenghi, Mario, Giornali di trincea, Turin: Einaudi, 1977. Macrı`, Oreste, Caratteri e figure della poesia italiana contemporanea, Florence: Vallecchi, 1956. Pancrazi, Pietro, Ragguagli di Parnaso, Florence: Vallecchi, 1920. Petrocchi D’Aura, Francesca, Studi su Piero Jahier, Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1988. Scheiwiller, Vanni (editor), Con Claudel (1913–1955), Milan: All’Insegna del Pesce d’Oro, 1964. Testa, Antonio, Jahier, Milan: Mursia, 1970. Tilgher, Adriano, Ricognizioni, Rome: Libreria di Scienze e Lettere, 1924.

JERUSALEM DELIVERED See Gerusalemme liberata (Work by Torquato Tasso)

JOHNNY THE PARTISAN See Il Partigiano Johnny (Work by Beppe Fenoglio)

BENIAMINO JOPPOLO (1906–1963) A complex and multifaceted artist—novelist, poet, playwright, and painter—Beniamino Joppolo stands out in the landscape of twentieth-century Italian literature for his original approach to and

adaptation of the poetics of the European avantgardes of his times. His first work, the collection of poems I canti dei sensi e dell’idea (Songs of the Senses and of Thought, 1929), is a late example of 975

BENIAMINO JOPPOLO symbolism, while his first and still best-known work of fiction, the volume of short stories C’e´ sempre un piffero ossesso (There Is Always a Possessed Fife, 1937), is an experimental text in the spirit of surrealism. Among his novels, La giostra di Michele Civa (The Carousel of Michele Civa, 1945) is considered his best effort, a work that reflects in critical fashion the dominant ideas of his cultural environment. The protagonist, Michele Civa, is a young Sicilian who volunteers in the air force to improve the indigent state of his family. The fundamental event of the novel is his homecoming, as Joppolo makes use of one of the recurrent themes in twentieth-century Italian fiction, the experiences of war veterans. What sets apart La giostra di Michele Civa from other examples of the genre is the rapidity and essentiality of the descriptions, as the author creates a narrative that overcomes traditional forms and conventions. Although Joppolo never fully rejected the tradition of verismo, his move to Milan in 1937, his collaboration to the journal Corrente (1938–1940), and his frequent visits to Paris determined his cultural and ideological emancipation from Sicilian realism. Examples of this dual heritage are the stories of ordinary life told through the use of surrealistic forms in the collection La nuvola verde e altri racconti (The Green Cloud and Other Tales, 1983). Many critics consider Joppolo’s theatrical works as the most significant results of his intellectual enterprise. In the one-act play Il cammino (The Journey, 1942), he tells the story of a supposed adultery, once again balancing naturalism and surrealism, and already presenting several of the fundamental aspects of his dramatic production. Attempting to circumvent Fascist censorship, in the plot he reached a sort of narrative ambiguity that gave him the opportunity to speak about political and social conflicts through the symbolic interaction of his characters, who act out plots and mysterious moods recalling Dino Buzzati’s early plays. Paolo Grassi, the founder with Giorgio Strehler of the Piccolo Teatro of Milan, first staged Il cammino in 1942 with Strehler and Franco Parenti in the main roles. The play Domani parleremo di te (Tomorrow We’ll Speak about You, 1943) brings together the ambiguity of paradox and the plausibility of humor. The absurd dialogue of the stock masks of comedy serves as the pretext to analyse fashionable allegories and incomprehensible cultural hostilities. In Sulla collina (On the Hill, 1943), for instance, the irrational ‘‘Signora,’’ who chooses to bury herself because she is certain of the day and hour of her death, attests to Joppolo’s 976

ongoing interest in avant-garde drama, imbued with elements of Pier Maria Rosso di San Secondo’s narrative lyricism. After World War II, Joppolo pursued his artistic interests in new venues, including the figurative arts, and in 1947 was one of the founders, with Lucio Fontana, of the ‘‘Movimento spaziale,’’ a form of abstract and conceptual art. Among his later works for the stage, I carabinieri (The Carabinieri, 1959) and Le acque (The Waters, 1961) are acclaimed as his most mature, in which he manages to merge a strongly liberal and libertarian eccentricity with a crystalline formal structure. I carabinieri is the story of two farmers, Leonardo and Michelangelo Lapenna, who enlist to fight in the war when they are promised the freedom to do what they want. A meditation on violence and power, it enjoyed critical success both in Italy and abroad, and was performed in Paris, Vienna, and other European cities. In 1962, Roberto Rossellini, who admired Joppolo’s ability of creating dramas devoid of any realistic archetypes but firmly set in ordinary circumstances, chose I carabinieri for his only foray into stage directing. In 1963, Jean-Luc Godard directed a screen adaptation, Les Carabiniers. Indebted to Expressionist theater, Le acque combines two separate one-act plays entitled L’acqua si diverte ad uccidere (Water Enjoys Killing) and L’acqua si diverte a farti morire di sete (Water Enjoys Killing You of Thirst). Joppolo’s growing isolation on the Italian literary scene, which had never fully understood or accepted his experimentalism, is the subject of his last work of fiction, La doppia storia (The Double Story), which appeared posthumously in 1968.

Biography Born in Patti (Messina), on 31 July 1906. Graduated in political science at the University of Florence, 1929. Arrested for anti-Fascism and sent to confinement, 1934; moved to Milan, 1935. Married the painter Carla Rossi, 1942; they had two children. Enlisted in the army, 1942; founded, with Lucio Fontana, ‘‘Il movimento spaziale,’’ 1947. Founded, with Jacques Audiberti, the philosophical movement ‘‘Abumanesimo,’’ 1950. Held exhibitions in Milan, Venice, Copenhagen, and Paris. Moved to Paris after being banned from the Milanese Piccolo Teatro by Giorgio Strehler and Paolo Grassi, who had previously supported him, 1954. Died in Paris on 2 October 1963. ANNA SICA

JOURNALISM Selected Works

L’abumanesimo, 1951. L’arte da Poussin a l’abumanesimo, 1954.

Collections Teatro, Marina di Patti: Pungitopo, 1989.

Poetry ‘‘I canti dei sensi e dell’idea,’’ 1929.

Fiction C’e` sempre un piffero ossesso, 1937. Tutto a vuoto, 1945. La giostra di Michele Civa, 1945. Un cane ucciso, 1949. La doppia storia, 1968. Gli angoli della diserzione, 1982. La nuvola verde e altri racconti, edited by Natale Tedesco, 1983. Il ritorno di Leone, 1993.

Plays L’ultima stazione, 1941. Il cammino, 1942. Ritorno di solitudine, 1942. Sulla collina, 1943. Domani parleremo di te (1943), in Teatro, 1989. I carabinieri, in Filmcritica no. 90, 1959. Le acque, in Teatro siciliano, edited by Achille Mango, 1961.

Nonfiction Giacomo Manzu`, 1946. Antonio Calderara, 1948.

Further Reading Abumanesimo: Audiberti, Joppolo, Rome: Bulzoni; Paris: Nizet, 1984. Beniamino Joppolo tra segno e scrittura: (1946–1954), Palermo: Sellerio, 1984. Fontanella, Luigi, ‘‘Joppolo e il surrealismo: i racconti di C’e` sempre un piffero ossesso,’’ in La parola aleatoria, Florence: Le Lettere, 1992. Joppolo, Giovanni, Beniamino Joppolo: la figura e l’opera, Marina di Patti: Pungitopo, 2004. Meldolesi, Claudio, Fondamenti del teatro italiano: la generazione dei registi, Florence: Sansoni, 1984. Perrone, Domenica, L’esistenzialismo narrativo di Joppolo tra ipotesi surrealista e scrittura espressionistica, Palermo: Stampatori Tipolitografi Associati, 1982. Perrone, Domenica (editor), Beniamino Joppolo e lo sperimentalismo siciliano contemporaneo, Marina di Patti: Pungitopo, 1989. Romano, Massimo, ‘‘Beniamino Joppolo,’’ in Gli eredi di Verga, edited by Giorgio Ba`rberi Squarotti, Randazzo: Comune, 1984. Samec-Luciani, Annette, ‘‘La religione di Joppolo secondo Gesu` (1948),’’ in Gradiva, 6, no. 1 (1994–1995): 23–31. Tedesco, Natale, Il cielo di carta: teatro siciliano da Verga a Joppolo, Naples: Guida, 1989.

JOURNALISM Italian journalism originated in Venice, where the newborn press became a profitable industry, facilitated by the existence of a public system of education and a tradition granting wide latitude to freedom of thought. Of the 803 periodicals in the eighteenth century, 240, or 30%, were published in the Venetian republic, 20% in the duchy of Milan, and 13% in the pontifical state. The first Italian newspaper, however, the Giornale de’ letterati, was founded in Rome in 1668. From the very beginning, there was a difference between news journalism and cultural journalism, of greater interest for educated citizens. There was no shortage of intermediary forms combining culture and news, such as Pallade veneta (1687–1688) or Galleria di Minerva (1696–1717), but until the mid-nineteenth century interest in news developed slowly. For all the differences in their relations with power and

with readers, what prevailed in the periodicals of this early period was the cultural and political debate: The tumultuous and passionate years of the French Revolution saw the birth of well over 150 newspapers, which expounded ideas rather than facts, and in which indeed facts were subordinated to propagandistic demands. However, some newspapers such as the Gazzetta di Milano, an organ of the Austrian government, anticipated the modern newspaper by publishing news stories (always deferential to the ‘‘voice of the master’’), short fiction, and correspondence. Even today, Italian newspapers reserve a considerable amount of space for culture. For all of its value in the popularization as well as the elaboration of culture, the so-called terza pagina (articles on culture used to be printed on page 3) was slow to have an impact on journalism as a genre, and rather found itself part of the 977

JOURNALISM genre without influencing its development. Only in the twentieth century have successful writers— Giovanni Verga, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Curzio Malaparte, Matilde Serao, Alberto Moravia, Dino Buzzati, Giovanni Arpino, Oriana Fallaci, Goffredo Parise, and Alessandro Baricco, to name only a few—become special correspondents and described unusual events or distant places with works endowed with literary value. A parallel development, as in France, is that of the serialized novel published in installments and aimed at a popular audience (or presumed as such), a genre that boasts prestigious authors. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the newspaper assumed its modern form and drew particular attention from those in power. Article 28 of the Albertine Statute of 1848 recognized the freedom of the press, but was concerned with disciplining it. On the other hand, Article 21 of the Republican Constitution of 1947, drafted in the climate of recovered freedom, proclaimed: ‘‘La stampa non puo` essere soggetta ad autorizzazioni o censure’’ (the press may not be subjected to authorizations or censorship). But threats to freedom of the press are always impending, and do not require legal censorship in order to be carried out. In 1859, Bettino Ricasoli (1809–1880), who two years later would become prime minister, launched La nazione in Florence. Having founded La patria in 1847, Ricasoli was familiar with the effectiveness of the press and had a precise political aim: speeding up the union of Tuscany and Piedmont. In the meantime, the culture of news was developing. On 25 January 1853, the first news agency was born, founded by Guglielmo Stefani (1819–1861), with the backing of another powerful figure, Camillo Cavour. However, the first newspaper that developed a culture of news and gave ample space to local events was Il secolo, founded in 1866 in Milan by the brothers Raffaele (1829–1875) and Edoardo Sonzogno (1836–1920), owners of a publishing house dating back to 1818. Its director was Teodoro Moneta (1833–1918), a former follower of Garibaldi who would win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1907. Other newspapers emerged in the wake of Il secolo: in Turin, the Gazzetta piemontese, an eighteenth-century newspaper, was revived in 1867 and renamed La stampa in 1895; on 5 March 1876, Eugenio Torelli Viollier (1842–1900) founded Il corriere della sera, which joined the other eight dailies then published in Milan, including Il pungolo, the most popular, edited by the Triestine Leone Fortis (1824–1896). Il corriere della sera offered an independent treatment of the news: Its first 978

leading article was entitled ‘‘Pubblico, vogliamo parlarti chiaro’’ (To the Public—We Will Speak Clearly to You). Nevertheless, the newspaper was slow to grow because it had insufficient resources (30,000 lire), until a group of industrialists, led by Benigno Crespi and including Pirelli and De Angeli, acquired ownership in 1882 with an investment of 100,000 lire, and the situation changed. La stampa would also be taken over by an entrepreneur, Alfredo Frassati. This highlights a characteristic of Italian journalism, the retention of ownership by entrepreneurial groups with dominant interests in various sectors of publishing, to which the politics of the newspapers are subordinated, thus compromising their independence. At most, the newspaper becomes the center of publishing enterprises. Thus, after Luigi Albertini (1871–1941) assumed the editorship of Il corriere della sera in 1900 (he would hold it until 1921), he developed a number of side publications such as La domenica del corriere, launched in 1899 and closed in 1989, and the Corriere dei piccoli, founded in 1908, which lasted until 1995 and had among its editors writers such as Silvio Spaventa Filippi (1871–1931) and Giovanni Mosca (1908–1983). Beginning respectively in 1901 and 1903, La lettura and Il romanzo mensile came to replace the serial novel. In the meantime, newspapers with local circulation emerged: In 1873, there were 55 dailies in Italy that printed as a whole almost 800,000 copies for a population of about 28,150,000. This is a small number, but at that time illiteracy exceeded 70%. Within two years of its creation in 1878, Il messaggero, the Roman newspaper edited by Luigi Cesana, achieved a circulation of 35,000 copies, thanks to its low price (5 cents) and to the participation of readers, who were invited to provide news for a compensation of a half-lira. La tribuna, another newspaper of Rome, was founded in 1883 through the initiative of the Venetian industrialist Alessandro Rossi. Other important dailies included: in Trieste, Il piccolo (1881); in Bologna, Il resto del carlino (1885), to which poets such as Giosue` Carducci and Giovanni Pascoli contributed; in Genoa, Il secolo XIX (1875), owned by the industrialist Ferdinando Maria Perrone, the proprietor of the Ansaldo shipyards; in Venice, the liberal-democratic Gazzettino (1887), founded, owned, and directed by Giampietro Talamini until his death in 1934, and its competitor, the Gazzetta di Venezia, edited after 1922 by Gino Damerini (1881–1967); in Naples, Il mattino (1892), edited by Edoardo Scarfoglio (1860–1917) who invited contributions by writers

JOURNALISM such as Gabriele D’Annunzio and Matilde Serao, the latter author of the important mosconi, a series of pieces on the daily life of Naples. In 1901, supported by the influential politician Sidney Sonnino (1847–1922), the monarchical-liberal Giornale d’Italia began publication under the editorship of Alberto Bergamini (1871–1962), the inventor of the terza pagina, which Il corriere della sera adopted only three years later. Bergamini left the editorship when the Italian press was enslaved by Fascism. The newspaper, the mouthpiece for conservative groups, survived until 1976. The foundation of Il sole, an economics newspaper, in 1865 by Pietro Bagiola Bellini, and the Gazzetta dello sport in 1896 marked the birth of specialized newspapers. 1896 was also the founding year of the first party daily, the socialist Avanti!. In political periodicals, coverage of events was integrated with theoretical reflection, as in Critica sociale, founded by the Socialist leader Filippo Turati (1857–1932) in Milan in 1891, and suppressed by Fascism in 1926, and in the weekly L’unita`, founded in 1911 by Gaetano Salvemini (1873–1957), who edited it almost uninterruptedly until its closing on 30 December 1920. Its contributors included the philosopher Benedetto Croce. The newspaper resumed in 1924 as the official organ of the Communist Party of Italy, and was directed by Antonio Gramsci, also the editor of the weekly of cultural politics L’ordine nuovo (1919– 1925). Women’s press deserves special attention. Its origins can be traced back to the eighteenth century with the Florentine journal La toelette (1770); La donna galante ed erudita (1786–1788), a fashion magazine published in Venice that also offered models of clothes to make oneself; and the Milanese Giornale delle dame e delle mode di Francia (1786). In the second half of the nineteenth century, with the rise of the feminist movements, women’s press took a different turn. In addition to the bitterly anticlerical periodical La donna (1868–1890), directed by Guadalberta Alaide Beccari, one must remark the success in the Catholic camp of Cordelia (1881–1918), Margherita (1878–1921), and La donna e la famiglia (1862–1902), which enjoyed a large circulation at the beginning of the twentieth century, and in the Socialist camp of La difesa delle lavoratrici, founded on 7 January 1912 by Anna Kuliscioff (1857–1925) and suppressed by Fascism in 1925. During the Fascist regime, the women’s press propagandized the image of the prolific woman devoted to her family: the magazines then in vogue were Rakam (1930), Annabella (1933), Grazia (founded in 1927 with the title Sovrana),

and Gioia (1937), all of which continue in some form to this writing. World War I was a test bed for censorship and propaganda, and government press agencies had the exclusive management of news, while correspondents were forbidden access to war zones. After the war, when the conditions develop for the advent of Fascism, the press played a decisive role. Indeed, Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) came out of journalism, having served as editor of Avanti! from 1 December 1912 until 20 October 1914, when he came in sharp conflict with the neutralist positions of the Socialist Party, which he himself had supported until then, and wrote an article entitled ‘‘Dalla neutralita` assoluta alla neutralita` attiva ed operante’’ (From Absolute Neutrality to Active and Efficient Neutrality) in favor of Italy’s intervention. He then founded a new newspaper, Il popolo d’Italia, which began publication on 15 November and which, thanks to the mediation of Filippo Naldi, the director of Il resto del carlino and a trusted friend of the minister of the interior, the Marquis Antonino di San Giuliano, enjoyed the financial support of a group of industrialists, including Agnelli, the Perrone brothers, and Parodi. Given this background, Mussolini was well-versed in using the press to manage public opinion. On 28 October 1922, with the march on Rome, he took power and on 30 October he ceded the editorship of Il popolo d’Italia to his brother Arnaldo, who held it until his death in December 1931. Immediately, in three articles published in November, Mussolini showed his intention of subjecting the newspaper to Fascism, a regime that allowed no alternatives or electoral tests. The operation is facilitated by the fact that the major Italian newspapers are the property of industrialists, bankers, or landowners. On the one hand, Mussolini proceeded with the promulgation of a set of restrictive provisions: A decree of July 1923 ordered prefects to dismiss editors of newspapers for expressing positions contrary to the policy of the government, for instigation of class hatred, and for disparagement of the nation, the royal family, the pope, the institutions, and friendly powers. On the other hand, Fascist paramilitary violence against nonaligned newspapers continued and, most importantly, Fascists achieved the majority in the administrative boards of newspapers. The story of Il secolo is a typical example: In 1923, ownership was acquired by Senator Borletti, a financier and owner of SNIA, ‘‘Rinascente,’’ and countless other companies, and by Cesare Goldmann, the president of the Societa` di Credito 979

JOURNALISM Commerciale. As a result of the new disposition, the nationalist Senator Giuseppe Bevione, more palatable to the government, was appointed editor, and a newspaper that had always taken positions on the moderate left radically changed its course. Likewise, all of the large Italian newspapers changed editors in this period: In 1923, Olindo Malagodi (1870–1934), the editor of the La tribuna, resigned, while at La stampa Frassati withdrew from ownership in November 1925, his shares passing to the Agnellis: The new editor was a Fascist, Andrea Torre. A few days later, Luigi Albertini, the editor of Il corriere della sera, resigned. On 10 October 1928, Mussolini said, pretending not to notice the contradiction: ‘‘Il giornalismo italiano e` libero perche` serve soltanto una causa e un Regime’’ (Italian journalism is free because it serves only one cause and one Regime). The objective had been achieved. The editor-in-chief of every newspaper had to be a member of the Fascist party and, before being printed, newspapers were subjected to government control. The regime founded the ‘‘Ordine dei Giornalisti,’’ whose members also had to be members of the Fascist party, and created the governmental ‘‘Ufficio Stampa’’ (transformed in 1937 into the Ministry of Popular Culture), which controlled all publications and issued ‘‘ordini di stampa’’ (press orders) and ‘‘veline’’ (press releases), which imparted regulations on the content of articles, their page layouts, and even their titles. Fascist magazines such as Roma fascista, Milizia fascista, Critica fascista, La rivista illustrate del Popolo d’Italia, and Lavoro fascista began to gain ground. The most important was Gerarchia, an official magazine founded in 1922 by Mussolini, with a select group of collaborators that included the historians Gioacchino Volpe and Arrigo Solmi, the painter and poet Ardengo Soffici, and the art scholar Margherita Sarfatti, who was also the Duce’s lover. The anti-Semitic and racist La difesa della razza, edited by Telesio Interlandi (1894–1965), and with the young Giorgio Almirante (1914–1988) as assistant editor, was created in 1938 and ceased publication in 1943. A leading figure in Italian journalism in these years was Leo Longanesi (1905–1957), who founded various periodicals: L’italiano in 1926, Omnibus, the first illustrated Italian weekly magazine, in 1937, and Il borghese in 1950. Longanesi was Fascist in his own way, but often swam against the current fostering a kind of internal opposition. Indeed, a need for innovation was felt by many within Fascism, and especially by the younger generation, which on the threshold of World War II gathered around the magazine Primato, founded 980

by the minister Giuseppe Bottai (1895–1959) with the aim of bringing together all of the currents of Italian culture regardless of their ideological differences. To this context belonged also Indro Montanelli (1909–2001), a fine writer as well as a great journalist, who began to distance himself from Fascism in 1937. Another victim of the Fascist purges was Mario Missiroli (1886–1974), who only after the liberation of Rome was able to resume his work at Il messaggero, of which he became editor in 1946, later moving on to direct Il corriere della sera in 1952. The Italian press enjoyed new vitality at the end of the war and of the Fascist dictatorship: In 1945– 1946, the number of dailies rose from 80 to 150, reversing the previous trend. Perhaps the most characteristic element was the development of the weeklies, which better satisfied the need of the popular masses for agreeable, and at times slightly gossipy, information. The most successful weekly continued to be La domenica del corriere, which reached 930,000 copies in 1957, but the most authoritative in its genre was L’europeo, edited by Arrigo Benedetti (1910–1976), who had previously directed with Mario Pannunzio (1910–1968) Oggi from 1939 to its suppression in 1941 (Pannunzio, in his turn, created Il mondo, a liberal and progressive weekly, in 1949). When L’europeo was bought by the Milanese publisher Angelo Rizzoli in 1953, Benedetti resigned and founded L’espresso with capital from an innovative entrepreneur, Adriano Olivetti. L’espresso began publication in 1955. During the 1970s, L’espresso came into competition with Panorama, the political magazine of the Mondadori group, which had been founded as a monthly in 1962 and transformed into a weekly in 1967. But other weeklies had a wide circulation as well: the resurrected Oggi (which in the 1970s also reached 900,000 copies), edited by Edilio Rusconi (1916–1996), who also founded Gente in 1957; Tempo (400,000 copies in the 1970s); Epoca (300,000 copies). A particular case was that of Candido (1945–1957), founded and edited by Giovanni Guareschi, who skillfully played a part in political debate using irony rather than invective. As for the dailies, the most important events of the second half of the twentieth century are in April 1956: the birth of Il giorno, edited by Gaetano Baldacci, through the initiative of Enrico Mattei, president of ENI, the state oil agency, and in 1976 the foundation of La repubblica, edited by Eugenio Scalfari (1924–). Meanwhile, a class of cultured and competent journalists was taking shape, and most of them added extensive literary productions

JOURNALISM to their journalistic activities. It includes Enzo Biagi (1920–), Alberto Ronchey, Piero Ottone (1924–), Igor Man, Mario Pirani, and Sandro Curzi (1930–). Their approach does not much differ from that of the younger generation, for whom they became an example of professionalism. That younger generation includes Lucia Annunziata (1950–), Paolo Mieli (1949–), Giuliano Ferrara (1951–), Marcello Veneziani (1955–), Curzio Maltese (1959–), Gianni Riotta (1954–), Beppe Severgnini (1956–), to name only a few. Riotta and Severgnini deserve particular mention for their books as well as the quality of their articles. Riotta, as of this writing at Il corriere della sera after being coeditor of La stampa, is the author of Cambio di Stagione (Change of Season, 1991), his first work, for which he won the Premio Bergamo and the Grinzane Cavour, Ultima dea (The Last Goddess, 1994), Principe delle nuvole (Prince of the Clouds, 1997), and NY: Undici settembre (New York, September 11, 2001), an acute political analysis of the attack on the World Trade Center and its consequences. Severgnini, who is also at Il corriere della sera after working for Montanelli’s La voce, is the author of about 15 works, including L’inglese. Lezioni Semiserie (English: Semi-Serious Lectures, 1992), an amusing and original analysis that moves from the language to the character not of English speakers, but of Italians who use English, Un italiano in America (An Italian in America, 1995), an introduction to the American way of life, and the witty Manuale dell’uomo domestico (Manual of the Domestic Man, 2002). The years of global protest at the end of the 1960s and in the early 1970s fostered the foundation of the periodicals of the extraparliamentary left, in particular Il manifesto, created by a group of intellectuals from the Communist Party (Lucio Magri, Rossana Rossanda, Aldo Natoli, Massimo Caprara, and Luigi Pintor) and Lotta continua. Both founded as weeklies in 1969, they became dailies, respectively, in 1971 and 1972. This provoked, almost as a backlash, the birth in June 1974 of Il giornale nuovo (later renamed simply Il giornale), a daily of the moderate right, directed by Montanelli, who left the editorship of Il corriere della sera. Coming into conflict with the publisher Silvio Berlusconi when he went into politics, Montanelli left Il giornale and created La voce (1994), the expression of a liberal and anticonformist right, which however lasted only a year. Reflecting the changed political reality of the 1990s, La padania, directed at first by the secretary of the Northern League, Umberto Bossi, was the answer to the new political demands of the separatist movement.

The major problem of the decade between the mid-1990s and the beginning of the new century was that of the ‘‘conflict of interests,’’ that is, the relationship between political and economic power on the one hand and information in general, and, more particularly, television news on the other. The best example is the competition between Carlo De Benedetti and Silvio Berlusconi. The former is at the head of an entrepreneurial complex that numbers more than 10,000 employees, and owns the weekly L’espresso and the daily La repubblica, the flagship publications of a group that includes 15 local newspapers and several local radio stations; the latter is, as of 2005, the prime minister, the leader of the ‘‘Forza Italia’’ party, and of the majority coalition, the richest man in Italy; he controls Mediaset, the most important private Italian group in the communications and television media sector, and one of the largest in the world. But, as we have seen, the problem is not new in the history of the media in Italy. BRUNO ROSADA See also: Literary Journals Further Reading Asor Rosa, Alberto, ‘‘Il giornalista. Appunti sulla fisiologia di un mestiere difficile,’’ in Storia d’italia: annali, vol. 4, Intellettuali e potere, edited by Corrado Vivanti, Turin: Einaudi, 1981. Berengo, Marino (editor), Giornali veneziani del Settecento, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1962. Cassero, Riccardo, Le veline del duce. Come il fascismo controllava la stampa, Milan: Sperling e Kupfer, 2004. Castronovo, Valerio, La stampa italiana dall’unita` al fascismo, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1973. Castronovo, Valerio, and Nicola Tranfaglia (editors), Storia della stampa italiana, 7 vols., Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1976–2002. De Felice, Renzo (editor), I giornali giacobini italiani, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1962. Farinelli, Giuseppe, et al., Storia del Giornalismo italiano. Dalle origini ai giorni nostri, Turin: Utet, 1997. Gozzini, Giovanni, Storia del giornalismo, Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2000. Hallin, Daniel C., and Paolo Mancini, Modelli di giornalismo, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2004. Infelise, Mario, L’editoria veneziana nel ‘700, Milan: F. Angeli, 1989. Infelise, Mario, Prima dei giornali. Alle origini della pubblica informazione, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2002. Isnenghi, Mario, Giornali e giornalisti. Esame critico della stampa quotidiana in Italia, Rome: Savelli, 1975. Isnenghi, Mario, Intellettuali militanti e intellettuali funzionari. Appunti sulla cultura fascista, Turin: Einaudi, 1979. Janni, Paolo (editor), Italy at the Millennium: Economy, Politics, Literature, and Journalism, Washington: Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 2001.

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JOURNALISM Lumley, Robert, ‘‘Peculiarities of the Italian Newspaper,’’ in Italian Cultural Studies: An Introduction, edited by David Forgacs and Robert Lumley, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Lumley, Robert, Italian Journalism: A Critical Anthology, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996. Murialdi, Paolo, La stampa italiana del dopoguerra: 1943– 1972, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1973. Murialdi, Paolo, Storia del giornalismo italiano: dalle prime gazzette ai telegiornali, Turin: Gutenberg, 1986. Murialdi, Paolo, La stampa italiana dalla liberazione alla crisi di fine secolo, Bari: Laterza, 1995.

Mussolini, Benito, Scritti e discorsi, 14 vols., Milan: Hoepli, 1914–1939. Papuzzi, Alberto, Letteratura e giornalismo, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1998. Roncarolo, Franca, ‘‘Crisis in the Mirror: Old and New Elements in Italian Political Communication,’’ in Political Journalism: New Challenges, New Practices, edited by Raymond Kuhn and Erik Neveu, London and New York: Routledge, 2002. Spriano, Paolo, ‘‘L’informazione nell’Italia unita,’’ in Storia d’Italia, vol. 1, I documenti, edited by Ruggiero Romano and Corrado Vivanti, Turin: Einaudi, 1973.

LITERARY JOURNALS The first Italian literary journals began to appear in the seventeenth century. Following the French pattern of erudite journalism directed at a public of intellectuals, such as the Journal des Savants (1665– 1792), they published mainly abstracts of studies relating to philosophy and science. One of the most important periodicals of this type is the Giornale de’ letterati (1668–1681), founded in Rome by the cleric Francesco Nazzari. Periodicals attained a larger audience in the eighteenth century when other disciplines in addition to those of an exclusively theoretical-scientific nature also came forward, such as economy, law, and pedagogy. The contributors now belonged to the category of professional, secular intellectuals rather than to the clergy. The journals of this period are either influenced by the English Spectator, directed by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, or by the French Encyclopedie of Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond D’Alembert. The periodicals of the first type, which include Giuseppe Baretti’s La Frusta letteraria (1763–1765) and Gasparo Gozzi’s L’osservatorio veneto (1761–1762), are characterized by an ironical view of social and cultural events. A second category includes the Giornale enciclopedico (1774–1789) directed by Domenico Caminer, and then continued by his daughter Elisabetta (1751– 1796) under the title Nuovo giornale enciclopedico (1790–1796). The Milanese Il caffe` (1764–1766), founded by Pietro and Alessandro Verri, was named after the characteristic and fashionable space of male interaction of the cafe´. Having elements of both types of journals, it was also the first 982

periodical in which editors and authors treated social problems against the background of the universal values advanced by culture. Such attitude occurs frequently in the later historical development of the Italian cultural press, which in the nineteenth and twentieth century often expressed the view of the intellectuals who, as a pressure group, wanted to have political influence. The intention of influencing public opinion by means of periodicals is evident in the culture of the early nineteenth century, although it should be pointed out that the circulation of these periodicals was limited. Indeed, a few hundred copies were often sufficient to reach the small number of intellectuals who gave shape to the cultural life of the nation. During the Restoration, the Austrian regime attempted to curb patriotic activity in Lombardy by founding a periodical that encouraged mainly erudite studies, the Biblioteca italiana (1816–1859), initially directed by Giuseppe Acerbi, Pietro Giordani, and Vincenzo Monti. Giordani and Monti became quickly aware of the intentions of the Austrian authorities and left the editorship. As other liberal-minded contributors distanced themselves from the journal and went on to found Il conciliatore in 1818, Biblioteca italiana became the symbol of the conservative, neoclassical cultural tendency. As its name implies, Il conciliatore was characterized by a spirit of ‘‘reconciliation’’ or ‘‘unification’’ among different tendencies (for instance, technicalscientific and literary knowledge, Catholicism and laicism, Enlightenment and Romanticism). However, the Austrian authorities could not tolerate its

LITERARY JOURNALS patriotic-liberal spirit, and the periodical was suspended in 1819. Il conciliatore marks an important phase in the resistance to the classical and conservative tendencies of Italian culture, and begins to open the way to interdisciplinary and comparative studies. In Florence, Tuscan liberals gathered around L’antologia (1821–1833), founded by Giovan Pietro Vieusseux and Gino Capponi. Their initial intention was to publish only extracts from important European cultural periodicals in Italian translation, but eventually L’antologia began to feature original studies, especially on economics, statistics and history, as well as contributions on literature. Ultimately, the censorship of the grand duchy of Tuscany found L’antologia too liberal and suppressed it in 1833. With Il politecnico (1839–1844 and 1860–1865), Carlo Cattaneo created in Milan a mainly didactical and popular journal that focused on the social, economic, and technical problems of Lombardy, and only occasionally dealt with literature. Its aim was to stimulate a greater participation of the population in cultural and social life, thus continuing the rational and enlightened attitude in a period that was ideologically characterized by the neospiritualism of Romanticism. The same democratic intention of Il politecnico can be found in Il crepuscolo (1850–1859), directed by Carlo Tenca. Both periodicals show an internal evolution toward a more liberal ideology, such as was personified by the politician Camillo Cavour. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the Rassegna settimanale (1878–1782), by Leopoldo Franchetti and Sidney Sonnino, contributed to the development of verismo through its inquiries into the difficult social situation of Southern Italy. Eclectically literary were on the other hand Cronaca bizantina (1881–1885), founded by Angelo Sommaruga, Il convito (1895–1907), directed by Adolfo De Bosis and closely influenced by Gabriele D’Annunzio, and Il Marzocco (1896–1932), founded by Angiolo and Adolfo Orvieto. The most important Italian periodicals in the first decades of the twentieth century were seldom exclusively literary, and more generally aimed at contributing to political and cultural life. Many were published in Florence, where intellectual activity flourished after Italian unification. Among the Florentine periodicals, Leonardo (1903–1907), Hermes (1904–1906), and Il regno (1903–1906) had a number of common characteristics: Their editors all were hostile to positivism, and they were the cultural expression of a new generation of intellectuals characterized by a subjective, antidemocratic,

and idealistic attitude. This gained them the sympathy of the philosopher Benedetto Croce (himself the founder of the influential La critica in 1903 and its director until its closing in 1944), who saw the editors of Leonardo as allies in his struggle for a new idealism in philosophy and culture. Leonardo, founded by Giovanni Papini and Giuseppe Prezzolini, contributed to get Italy acquainted with the pragmatism of the American philosopher Charles Sanders Pierce. On the other hand, Hermes, directed by Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, was almost exclusively a literary journal closely allied to symbolism. The nationalistic and reactionary Enrico Corradini was the founder of Il regno, an almost exclusively political periodical that he directed until 1905, when he was replaced by Alderico Campodonico. The periodical that, with its diverse cultural platform, unified young Italian intellectuals, however, was La voce (1908–1916), the journal of ‘‘militant idealism,’’ as its subtitle suggested. Its founder, Giuseppe Prezzolini, was influenced by Croce as well as by the French philosopher Henri Bergson. Concrete information on cultural and social problems took a central place in the periodical and, since Prezzolini identified contemporary literature with decadentism a` la D’Annunzio, he rejected contributions on literary subjects. After 1912, pressure to recognize literature again as a privileged intellectual activity increased, and from 1914 onwards, under the directorship of Giuseppe De Robertis, La voce became an exclusively literary periodical. The literature published in De Robertis’ new La voce, sometimes called Voce ‘‘bianca’’ because of the white color of its covers, did not want anything to do with discredited naturalism and symbolism, and thus also rejected the dominant literary genre of the nineteenth century, the novel. For the authors of La voce, only autobiographical and often fragmentary and nonnarrative prose writing was credible. If Prezzolini’s La voce was a cultural instrument with an organizational and pedagogical aim, on the contrary, Lacerba (1913–1915), founded by his discontented collaborators Giovanni Papini and Ardengo Soffici, wanted to emphasize the individual, intuitive, and irrational aspects of art and culture. The name of the periodical recalls the title of a fourteenth-century didactic poem by Cecco d’Ascoli, ‘‘L’Acerba’’ (The Sour One), in which the author expresses his disapproval for the allegorical dimension of Dante’s Commedia. The twentieth-century periodical also represents a certain typical Tuscan mentality of cynicism and derision. As an avant-garde periodical that continued the 983

LITERARY JOURNALS activism of Leonardo, Lacerba was receptive to the project of the Futurist movement, led by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. However, the collaboration between the Futurists and the group of Lacerba was short-lived, because, in spite of their desire to provoke, the Florentine authors Papini, Soffici, and Palazzeschi advocated the centuries-old humanistic idea of the artist. The central role of Florence in the culture of periodicals at the start of the twentieth century was challenged by La ronda (1919–1923), published in Rome by Vincenzo Cardarelli and Emilio Cecchi. With La ronda, Cardarelli wanted to engage a figurative ‘‘patrol’’ (ronda) against the irrationalistic attitude of many contemporary intellectuals. La ronda went back to the cult of creative literature as the most appropriate form of expression for the modern man of letters. Its contributors advocated a more classical style, of which Giacomo Leopardi’s Operette morali was considered as the leading example. In spite of its consciousness of the novelty of its project, however, La ronda continued the autobiographical fragmentism of La voce and Lacerba. A similar withdrawal of the intellectuals from literature can be found in Il Baretti (1924– 1928), published in Turin by Piero Gobetti. Less political than Gobetti’s previous periodicals Energie nuove (1918–1920) and La rivoluzione liberale (1922–1925), Il Baretti was named after the eighteenth-century author Giuseppe Baretti, who was taken as a model of independent and free speech. Consequently, in an ‘‘enlightened’’ way, Il Baretti considered the conscious work of the man of letters as a basis for a freer and more coherent culture and society. Il Baretti, in contrast to La ronda, was also strongly interested in the new developments in the European literatures. Under the Fascist dictatorial regime, the more militant expressions of culture could only survive as long as they did not trespass the ideological boundaries of Fascism. This was the case with the movements of Stracitta` and Strapaese. The former saw city life as central to modern culture, while the latter glorified the countryside. Stracitta` can be identified with the periodical 900 (1926–1929), founded by Massimo Bontempelli and initially published in French as a sign of international spirit (under pressure from the regime, it eventually had to add Italian, which became its sole language in 1928). In general, 900 emphasized the need for art to engage with the various aspects of industrialized society. Furthermore, 900 contributed to a return to the novel in a time when nonnarrative artistic prose was highly 984

acclaimed. The Strapaese counterpart of 900 was Il selvaggio (1927–1943), founded by the Tuscan author and artist Mino Maccari, which in a way continued the anarchic tendency of Lacerba. In this sense, Maccari and his contributors represented the so-called ‘‘left wing’’ of Fascism. In the Florence of the 1920s and 1930s, the memory of the avant-garde before World War I was still alive. In a spirit of openness toward other European cultures, Alberto Carocci founded Solaria in 1926 and directed it until its demise in 1934 (but the final issues appeared in 1936). The name of the periodical refers to a utopian society such as that described in Tommaso Campanella’s La citta` del sole (The City of the Sun, 1692). The utopia of the solariani consisted in the hope for a freer and more humane society that would take as its starting point the values put forward by literature, and its project descended from the emphasis on the ethical responsibility of the writer that had characterized La voce ‘‘bianca’’ and Il Baretti. On the other hand, the care shown by the contributors for the stylistic aspects of their work indicates a connection with the Roman La ronda. Furthermore, Solaria wanted to hold on to the nonconformist spirit of Lacerba, even though its contributors did not consider themselves as a new avant-garde. This eclectic project, inspired by the example of the French Nouvelle revue franc¸aise (1909–1943), had as its main purpose the discovery of a third way between literary tradition and innovation whereby the concern for form would coincide with new themes, such as introspection or the evocation of remote memories. Because of the tension between the writers who believed in ‘‘pure’’ literature (and who constituted the majority of the contributors) and the intellectuals who were more interested in social debate, Solaria finally broke into two separate journals. Under the guidance of Alessandro Bonsanti, Letteratura (1937–1947) continued the creative-literary work of Solaria, while Carocci took a more philosophical direction with La riforma letteraria (1936– 1939). In the name of the universal human values of which literature is a vehicle, the Hermetics, a poetic group active especially in Florence, and a number of socially engaged authors united for a short time in the periodical Campo di Marte (1938–1939), of which the novelist Vasco Pratolini and the poet Alfonso Gatto became the editors-in-chief. The Hermetics rejected any political engagement, convinced as they were that the core of life lies in the inner wanderings of the human being rather in the practical dimension of daily life. For the Hermetics, religious conviction

LITERARY JOURNALS should inform this existential odyssey rather than lead it, and it was precisely in opposition to the more militant Catholicism of the Florentine Frontespizio (1929–1940) that Carlo Bo, a critic of Christian inspiration, published in 1938 the essay Letteratura come vita (Literature as Life), which can be considered a manifesto of Hermeticism. At the outbreak of World War II, Fascism tried to co-opt the authors who had kept their distance from the regime. For this reason, Minister of Education Giuseppe Bottai founded Primato (1940–1943), which suggested from its very title that the ‘‘primacy’’ of culture would serve as a basis for the political success of Italy. Bottai’s appeal was met with an overwhelming response, and almost all Italian writers of the time, as well as historians and philosophers, made their contribution. Significantly, Primato was also open to cultural movements such as the existentialism and Hermeticism that Fascist ideology had been unable to absorb. Another call for unity among intellectuals was launched after the war. With Il Politecnico (1945– 1947), Elio Vittorini wanted to create a democratic forum. Its title refers to the periodical of the same name founded by Cattaneo in 1839, and indeed Vittorini aimed at resuming its tradition by establishing a direct contact with social reality through a sequence of inquiries. At the same time, the periodical opened up to young writers and to new cultural tendencies. Soon the project came into collision with the politics of the Italian Communist Party. The party secretary of the time, Palmiro Togliatti, reproached Vittorini’s attitude as too generally cultural and not contributing to the creation of an Italian national-popular literature. According to Vittorini, however, culture had by its very nature a progressive function, and he strongly rejected any use of it as a tool of propaganda. Officina (1955–1959), founded by Francesco Leonetti, Roberto Roversi, and Pier Paolo Pasolini, was critical of both direct political engagement and of total political abstinence. Officina preferred an experimental literature that introduced stylistic innovations without breaking completely with tradition. Social engagement remained a necessity, but did not require a downright militant attitude within a political party, as the most important task was harmonizing ‘‘passion’’ and ‘‘ideology.’’ Officina was succeeded by Vittorini’s new periodical Il menabo` di letteratura (1959–1967), which originated in the industrial city Milan, and was intended as a means of reflection on the role of literature in a technological society. The title (the menabo` is the

layout of a newspaper page) refers to the particular way in which written language makes its appearance in modern society. Its thematic issues on the relation between literature and industry published in 1961 and 1962 are typical of the cultural approach of the periodical as a whole. In Milan, the philosopher and literary critic Luciano Anceschi founded Il Verri in 1956. From the beginning, the periodical has attentively followed recent cultural developments, and it contributed to the diffusion of phenomenology, structuralism, and semiology in Italy. Taking the French periodical Tel Quel as a model, Anceschi made the choice for a scientifically oriented culture in which technical abilities have precedence and the ideological attitude is neutral. In 1961, Anceschi published I novissimi. Poesie per gli anni ‘60 (Novissimi. Poetry for the Sixties), an anthology of poets who contributed to Il Verri. Thus the neoavantgarde was born. In 1963, several authors and contributors to Il Verri organized themselves as the movement known as Gruppo 63, but only in 1967 were they able to have an official journal with the launch of Quindici. During the upheavals of 1968, however, the editors had a disagreement over the question of whether they should continue their literary activity or let literature be entirely ‘‘politicized,’’ and as a result Quindici came to an end. More generally, with the movement of 1968 literary periodicals came under pressure, and risked being replaced by political publications with cultural sections such as Piergiorgio Bellocchio’s Quaderni Piacentini (1962–1985): The opinion was that intellectuals ought not to behave like exclusively cultural specialists but that they should become political militants in the struggle for a more ‘‘direct’’ democracy. In the 1970s, minor literary periodicals appeared, mostly dedicated to poetry. In 1979, a number of intellectuals under the guidance of Nanni Balestrini founded Alfabeta, a publication that sustained a general literary and political debate until 1988. Besides ex-militants of the neoavantgarde, its contributors included also semioticians such as Maria Corti and Umberto Eco or philosophers such as Pier Aldo Rovatti. After Alfabeta, general literary and political-cultural periodicals seem to have lost their attractiveness as a tool of expression for the general viewpoint of intellectuals. These publications have been replaced on the one hand by more specialized periodicals, and on the other by popularizing newspapers and magazines. DIRK VANDEN BERGHE 985

LITERARY JOURNALS Further Reading Basso, Lelio, and Luigi Anderlini (editors), Le riviste di Piero Gobetti, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1961. Berengo, Marino (editor), Giornali veneziani del Settecento, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1962. Bossaglia, Rossana, et al. (editors), Alfabeta 1979–1988. Antologia della rivista, Milan: Bompiani, 1996. Branca, Vittore (editor), Il Conciliatore. Foglio scientificoletterario, Florence: Le Monnier, 1948–1954. Briosi, Sandro, Il problema della letteratura in «Solaria», Milan: Mursia, 1976. Carpi, Umberto, La Voce. Letteratura e primato degli intellettuali, Bari: De Donato, 1975. Cassieri, Giuseppe (editor), ‘‘La Ronda’’ 1919–23, Turin: ERI, 1969. Castronovo, Valerio, Giuseppe Ricupati, and Carlo Capra (editors), La stampa italiana dal Cinquecento all’Ottocento, Bari-Rome: Laterza, 1976. Falqui, Enrico (editor), Antologia della rivista ‘‘900,’’ Lucugnano: Edizioni dell’ ‘‘Albero,’’ 1958. Ferretti, Gian Carlo (editor), Officina. Cultura, letteratura e politica negli anni cinquanta, Turin: Einaudi, 1975. Fiaccarini Marchi, Daria (editor), Il Menabo` (1959–1967), Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 1973. Forti, Marco, and Sergio Pautasso (editors), Il Politecnico: antologia critica, Milan: Lerici, 1960. Fortini, Franco, ‘‘Che cos’e` stato ‘‘Il Politecnico,’’ in Dieci inverni, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1957. Frigessi Castelnuovo, Delia (editor), La cultura italiana del ‘900 attraverso le riviste. ‘‘Leonardo,’’ ‘‘Hermes,’’ ‘‘Il Regno,’’ 2 vols., Turin: Einaudi, 1960. Infelise, Mario, L’editoria veneziana nel ‘700, Milan: F. Angeli, 1989. Jacobbi, Ruggero (editor), ‘‘Campo di Marte’’ trent’anni dopo (1938–68), Florence: Vallecchi, 1969.

Mangoni, Luisa (editor), Primato, 1940–1943, Bari: De Donato, 1977. Mangoni, Luisa, ‘‘Le riviste del Novecento,’’ in Letteratura italiana, vol. 1, edited by Alberto Asor Rosa, Turin: Einaudi, 1982. Oddone, Enrico (editor), La Biblioteca italiana, Treviso: Canova, 1955. Panicali, Anna, Le riviste del periodo fascista, MessinaFlorence: D’Anna, 1978. Prezzolini, Giuseppe (editor), La Voce 1908–1914. Cronaca, antologia e fortuna di una rivista, Milan: Rusconi, 1974. Ragghianti, Carlo Ludovico (editor), ‘‘Il Selvaggio’’ di Mino Maccari, Venice: Neri Pozza, 1955. Ricuperati, Giuseppe, ‘‘Periodici eruditi, riviste e giornali di varia umanita` dalle origini a meta` Ottocento,’’ in Letteratura italiana, vol. 1, edited by Alberto Asor Rosa, Turin: Einaudi, 1982. Romagnoli, Sergio, and Gianni Francioni (editors), Il Caffe`, 1764–66, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1993. Romano, Angelo (editor), La cultura italiana del ‘900 attraverso le riviste. ‘‘La Voce’’ 1908–1914, Turin: Einaudi, 1960. Ruesch, Diana, and Bruno SOMALVICO (editors), La Voce e l’Europa, Rome: Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri, 1982. Scalia, Gianni (editor), La cultura italiana del ‘900 attraverso le riviste. ‘‘Lacerba,’’ ‘‘La Voce’’ 1914–1916, Turin: Einaudi, 1961. Siciliano, Enzo (editor), Antologia di ‘‘Solaria,’’ Milan: Lerici, 1958. Zancan, Marina, Il progetto Politecnico: cronaca e strutture di una rivista, Venice: Marsilio, 1984. Zazo, Emiliano (editor), Antologia della Antologia (1821–32): rassegna di una rivista, Milan: Bompiani, 1946.

FRANCESCO JOVINE (1902–1950) Neorealist writer Francesco Jovine’s entire production is characterized by a single concern known as the questione del Mezzogiorno (the Southern Question). In Jovine’s fiction, predominantly set in his native Molise and influenced by nineteenth-century verismo, this topic deals with the increasing gap between Northern and Southern Italy and the continued underdevelopment of the South after the unification in 1861. His first published book, Un uomo provvisorio (A Temporary Man, 1934), which received a mixed reception, recounts the story of a young doctor 986

who relocates to a big city in order to become a specialist, only to discover loneliness and indifference. Eventually he recaptures his sense of purpose in life, by returning to his hometown. This novel reflects the author’s wavering attitude between rejection and acceptance of the literary tendencies that were fashionable at the time: namely, the diatribe between calligrafi and contenutisti, that is, writers primarily interested in stylistic devices as against those who privileged a poetics of facts. This is also true of Jovine’s next novel, Ragazza sola (A Lonely Girl), which was issued in installments in

FRANCESCO JOVINE the journal I diritti della scuola between 1936 and 1937. Only with subsequent novels did Jovine’s critical perspective on the failures and social consequences of the Risorgimento become the subject of his literary work. His was an engaged account of the life and contingencies presiding over the working class of Italy’s South. Jovine, who joined the Communist Party (PCI) in 1948 and actively participated in the cultural and political debates that marked the immediate postwar years, depicts a world without any chance of social development, attacking the values upheld by the high-ranking leaders of Risorgimento. For this reason, a later novel, Signora Ava (Seeds in the Wind, 1942), attracted great critical attention and was considered Jovine’s first major literary achievement as well as a salient example of realistic fiction. Its title refers not to the novel’s protagonists but to a figure in a popular Southern song whose words Jovine quotes as an epigraph at the beginning of the book. The gist of the quotation is that the social context of the Italian South should remain identical to that of the past. The story unfolds in the final years of the Bourbon ruling and the beginnings of the unification in Jovine’s own region of Molise. The world of Don Matteo Tridone, a priest ‘‘dannato senza remissione’’ (damned without any hope of grace) and Don Carlo de Risio, ‘‘un dottore fisico’’ (a physician), as well as that of Pietro Veleno and the other peasants who died while working, establishes a gallery of characters who belong to an immutable social hierarchy. Detailed attention to social and linguistic differences links Jovine’s Signora Ava to the influence of the Italian veristi, particularly Giovanni Verga and Giuseppe Antonio Borgese. Signora Ava is commonly viewed as an exemplary neorealistic narrative, along with the works of Corrado Alvaro, Carlo Levi, and Vitalino Brancati. Much of the historical research that Jovine included in the novel was later published in the periodical Belfagor with the title ‘‘Del brigantaggio merdionale’’ (On the Southern Brigandage, 1970). Jovine’s sociohistorical interests connected to his homeland were also strengthened by his journalistic activity for the paper Il Giornale d’Italia. A collection of articles dating back to 1941, which further explored the questione meridionale, appeared after Jovine’s death as Viaggio nel Molise (Travels in Molise, 1967). Jovine’s negative judgment of the aftermath of Risorgimento went hand in hand with his historical and philosophical interests as

well as his incipient Marxism and opposition to Fascism. Indeed a specific discussion of the role of Fascism in Molise became the subject of a collection of short stories, L’impero in provincia (The Empire in the Provinces, 1945). Jovine’s focus on the South of Italy and Molise, which was apparent since his first collections of short stories, Il ladro di galline (Chicken Thief, 1940); and Il pastore sepolto (The Buried Shepherd, 1945), is fully displayed in his last and best-known novel, Le terre del Sacramento (The Estate in Abruzzi), posthumously published in 1950. An emblematic work set in Molise in 1921–1922, at the time of the rise of the Fascist movement, it is deeply influenced by Antonio Gramsci’s thought regarding the social rebirth of the working class and the Italian Southern question. Jovine’s world of underprivileged people, who are unable to escape from their unchangeable future, is depicted with compelling epic coloring. Le terre del Sacramento recounts the peasants’ struggle for land through the main character Luca Marano, the son of peasants, who breaks the social chain and gains an education in order to raise the people of his village above their present subsistence. A rebellion against the local Fascist authority provides the last part of the book. The rebellion ends tragically with the death of Marano; however, this exemplary figure gives the peasants the strength to endure oppressive power. Jovine’s assertion is a declaration of human dignity embodied by the peasants through their passive resistance. It offers hope for the ethical rebirth and social transformation of a world long forgotten after the Fascist debacle.

Biography Born in Guardialfiera (Campobasso), on 9 October 1902. Moved to the Collegio Vescovile of Larino, 1911. Attended the Istituto Magistrale of Velletri where he gained his professional qualification as a schoolteacher, 1918. Started his training as a primary schoolteacher, 1919. Moved to Rome for his national service, 1922. After a period in Campobasso and Guardialfiera, returned to Rome and obtained a degree in philosophy from the University of Rome, 1925. Contributor to Primato, Oggi, L’Italia letteraria, 1927–1950. Married Dina Bertoni, 1928. After joining the ‘‘Alleanza della cultura’’ promoted by Emilio Sereni and influenced by Marxist ideology, Jovine worked in Italian schools in Northern Africa, 1937. After his stay in Tunisia and Cairo, moved back to Rome where he later 987

FRANCESCO JOVINE became a teaching assistant to professor Giuseppe Lombardo Radice, 1940. Joined the Resistance fight, 1943; enlisted in the Italian Communist Party, 1948. Correspondent of Il Giornale d’Italia, 1941–1945. Awarded the Viareggio prize for Le terre del Sacramento, 1950 (ex aequo with Carlo Bernari). Died in Rome, on 30 April 1950 of a heart attack. The ‘‘Francesco Jovine’’ prize for journalism was established in 1966. DIEGO BERTELLI See also: Neorealism Selected Works Collections Racconti, Turin: Einaudi, 1960. Commedie inedite e cronache teatrali, edited by Francesco D’Episcopo, Ravenna: Longo, 1983. Scritti critici, edited by Patrizia Guida, Lecce: Milella, 2004.

Fiction Un uomo provvisorio, 1934. Ragazza sola, 1936–1937. Ladro di galline, 1940. Signora Ava, 1942; as Seeds of Time, translated by Adrienne Foulke, 1946. Il pastore sepolto, 1945. L’impero in provincia: cronache italiane dei tempi moderni, 1945. Tutti i miei peccati, 1948. Le terre del Sacramento, 1950; as The Estate in Abbruzzi, translated by Archibald Colquhoun, 1952.

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Theater Il burattinaio metafisico, 1933. Giorni che rinasceranno, 1948.

Essays Viaggio nel Molise, edited by N. Perazzelli, 1967. ‘‘Del brigantaggio merdionale,’’ 1970.

Further Reading Balbo, Pier Paolo, Molise: un paesaggio letterario, Rome: Gangemi, 2002. Carducci, Nicola, Invito alla lettura di Francesco Jovine, Milan: Mursia, 1977. Cecchi, Emilio, Di giorno in giorno, Milan: Garzanti, 1954. D’Episcopo, Francesco (editor), Francesco Jovine scrittore molisano, Naples: Esi, 1994. D’Episcopo, Francesco, ‘‘L’effetto Pirandello nella narrativa di Francesco Jovine: ‘Ragazza sola,’’’ in Critica letteraria, 24, 90 (1996): 171–185. D’Episcopo, Francesco, Invito a Francesco Jovine uomo e scrittore: la vita e le opere, Ferrazzano: E. Nocera, 2001. Giardini, Gino, Francesco Jovine, Milan: Marzorati, 1967. Guida, Patrizia (editor), Francesco Jovine: scritti critici, Lecce: Micella, 2004. Litwan-Kunz, Monica, Francesco Jovine: mito e realta` nel Meridione, Berne: H. Lang, and Frankfurt: P. Lang, 1973. Mauro, Walter, Francesco Jovine, Carlo Bernari, Vasco Pratolini, Milan: Marzorati, 1963. Muscetta, Carlo, Letteratura militante, Florence: Parenti, 1953. Procaccini, Alfonso, Francesco Jovine: The Quest for Realism, New York: Peter Lang, 1986. Ragni, Eugenio, Jovine, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1972.

L RAFFAELE LA CAPRIA (1922–) natural surroundings. Using the metaphor of porosity, the German philosopher Walter Benjamin had similarly argued that the physical structure of the city, the fact that it is built on tuff, a porous rock formed by the consolidation of volcanic ash, which is visible especially in the hills of Posillipo, helps to explain its cultural specificity (One-way Street and Other Writings, 1979). In L’occhio di Napoli (The Eye of Naples, 1994), La Capria gave an explanation of the fascinating ‘‘interpenetration’’ of different architectural styles, both among themselves and with the surrounding natural landscape, that is most disconcerting to a foreign eye. Unlike other Mediterranean cities, Naples does not display classical artistic forms characterized by a ‘‘regular,’’ normative beauty. The city is instead a site of chaotic artistic forms, where the arabesque of medieval Arabic-Byzantine art meets the ornate forms of the Baroque. In L’armonia perduta: una fantasia sulla storia di Napoli (The Lost Harmony; A Fantasy on the History of Naples, 1986), La Capria attempted to retrace the history of the city and singled out the loss of the Neapolitan identity in the failed revolution of 1799, when the ruling class was executed under the eyes of the mocking populace. According to La Capria, the formation of the napoletanita` (Neapolitaness) resulted afterward, in the absence of a real ruling class, when the middle class took over trying to domesticate the lower classes. In this attempt, the city lost connection with the present,

Neapolitan novelist and critic Raffaele La Capria was among a group of young intellectuals who between 1946 and 1948 left Naples for Rome. Among them were Francesco Rosi, Antonio Ghirelli, Giuseppe Patroni Griffi, and Achille Millo. They had attended the same educational institutions, the Liceo Umberto and the University of Naples, and were close friends. In the 1980s the playwright Eduardo De Filippo called them the generation of the Fuitevenne (Neapolitan dialect for ‘‘Go away!’’), underscoring the fact that they had to leave the city of Naples in order to operate successfully in their fields. Later in his career, La Capria collaborated with one of his old friends, the filmmaker Francesco Rosi, in the seminal film Le mani sulla citta` (Hands over the City, 1963), a work that still remains one of the most powerful and courageous visual manifestos of political corruption: the denunciation of laurismo (Achille Lauro, as mayor of the city) and the housing speculation in the late 1950s. The critic Goffredo Fofi argued that La Capria had been writing constantly the same novel with the same two recurrent characters, himself and Naples (Strade maestre, 1966). In fact, the city of Naples continues to be at the core of La Capria’s narrative inspiration, and he himself has stated many times that distance provided the necessary objectivity for him to write about the city in a way that would otherwise have resulted in a partial and biased account. According to La Capria, the mental image of Naples is inseparable from its 989

RAFFAELE LA CAPRIA isolating itself and creating a representation of its inexistent identity that is still perpetrated in the repetition of its dialect and its worn-out popular stereotypes. La Capria writes from the privileged perspective of the upper-middle class, to which he belongs, looking at it with the gaze of the insider and of the outsider that is at the same time complicit and critical. In the autobiographical Ferito a morte (The Mortal Wound, 1961), he depicted the young bourgeoisie of the Neapolitan Yacht Club, fixed in an eternal state of adolescence, and the myth of the bella giornata (beautiful day), focusing on their responses to critical issues of cultural change, with a sharp eye, as Anna Maria Ortese had done in the last story (‘‘Il silenzio della ragione’’) of Il mare non bagna Napoli (The Bay Is Not Naples, 1953). Ferito a morte has been defined as one of the most beautiful novels of the post–World War II era, a bildungsroman that documents the city’s transition from the devastation of the war to the economic boom of the 1960s. Its complex formal style is indebted to surrealist, existentialist, and hermetic models (Breton, Camus, Moravia, and Montale) and the nouveau roman. The precision and clarity of La Capria’s prose, which carefully avoids any sentimentalism, conveys a well-crafted harmony and linearity while concealing a state of hidden uneasiness. His textual strategies erode the classical structure of the novel with the montage of images through stream of consciousness, the juxtaposition of different points of view, and the simultaneous description of multiple spaces.

Biography Raffaele La Capria was born in Naples, 3 October 1922. He served in the military in 1943 and met William Weaver, who was enrolled with the Allied Forces, 1944. He founded the literary journal Sud with Pasquale Prunas, Luigi Compagnone, Anna Maria Ortese, and Gianni Scognamiglio, 1945. In 1947 he received a law degree at the University of Naples and traveled to Paris and London. La Capria moved to Rome, 1949. He married Fiore Pucci, 1953. He attended the International Seminar of Literature at Harvard University, where he met Henry Kissinger, Lee Strasberg, and Allen Tate, in 1957. La Capria separated from his wife and began a relationship with the actress Ilaria Occhini, 1961. He was awarded the Strega Prize for Ferito a

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morte, 1961. He wrote the screenplay of Le mani sulla citta` with Francesco Rosi, 1963 and wrote the screenplay of Identikit, directed by Giuseppe Patroni Griffi, 1974. His Amore e psyche was a finalist for the Campiello Prize, 1973. La Capria translated Jean Paul Sartre’s Huis clos as Porte chiuse for Patroni Griffi, 1978. He wrote the screenplay of Carlo Levi’s Cristo si e` fermato a Eboli with Francesco Rosi, 1979 and the screenplay of Beppe Fenoglio’s Una questione privata with Paolo Virzı`, 1982. He translated Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral for Patroni Griffi, 1984. He was awarded the Capri Prize for Capri e non piu` Capri, 1991, and the Campiello Prize for his career, 2001. The University of Caen organized an international symposium on La Capria, 2001. Antonio Piccolo read and provided a commentary of Ferito a morte on Radio Tre, 2001. La Capria was awarded the Chiara Prize for his career, 2001. PATRIZIA LA TRECCHIA

Selected Works Collections Tre romanzi in una giornata, Turin: Einaudi, 1982.

Fiction Un giorno d’impazienza, 1952; as A Day of Impatience, translated by William Weaver, 1954. Ferito a morte, 1961; as The Mortal Wound, translated by Marguerite Waldman, 1964. Amore e psyche, 1973; as This Has Nothing to Do with Me, translated by Kathrine Jason, 1991. Colapesce, 1974. False partenze: frammenti per una biografia letteraria, 1974. Fiori giapponesi, 1979. La neve del Vesuvio, 1988.

Critical Essays Variazioni sopra una nota sola, 1977. L’armonia perduta: una fantasia sulla storia di Napoli, 1986. Una visita a una centrale nucleare, 1987. Letteratura e salti mortali, 1990. Capri e non piu` Capri, 1991; as Capri and No Longer Capri, translated by Elisabeth Petroff and Richard Pioli, 2001. L’occhio di Napoli, 1994. L’apprendista scrittore, 1996. La mosca nella bottiglia: elogio del senso comune, 1996. Il sentimento della letteratura, 1997. Neapolitan Graffiti: come eravamo, 1998. Ultimi viaggi nell’Italia perduta, 1999. Lo stile dell’anatra, 2001. Letteratura e liberta`: conversazioni con Emanuele Trevi, 2002. Me visto da lui stesso, 2002.

GINA LAGORIO Cinquant’anni di false partenze ovvero l’apprendista scrittore, 2002. Guappo e gli altri animali, 2003.

Further Reading Benjamin, Walter, ‘‘Naples,’’ in One-way Street and Other Writings, London and New York: Verso, 1979. Berardinelli, Alfonso, ‘‘La mosca nella bottiglia,’’ in La forma del saggio: definizione e attualita` di un genere letterario, Venice: Marsilio, 2002. De Seta, Cesare, ‘‘Confessioni di uno scrittore ‘‘non’’ napoletano,’’ in Cronache napoletane, edited by Piero Antonio Toma, Naples: Eurocomp, 2000. Contarini, Silvia, ‘‘Narrare Napoli, anni Cinquanta: Domenico Rea, Anna Maria Ortese, Raffaele La Capria, Erri De Luca,’’ Narrativa, 24 (January 2003): 159–172. Fofi, Goffredo, ‘‘Raffaele La Capria,’’ in Strade maestre: ritratti di scrittori italiani, Rome: Donzelli, 1996. Fofi, Goffredo, and Alfonso Berardinelli, Il romanzo involontario di Raffaele La Capria, Naples: Liguori, 1996. Grossi, Paolo (editor), Raffaele La Capria: letteratura, senso comune e passione civile. Atti del convegno

internazionale dell’Universita` di Caen: 18–19 maggio 2001, Naples: Liguori, 2002. Jeuland-Meynaud, Maryse, ‘‘Ferito a morte,’’ Nuovi Argomenti, 50 (1976): 131–158. Lamberti, Luigi, and Pina Lamberti Sorrentino, ‘‘Raffaele La Capria. Il romanzo della bella giornata,’’ in Napoli salvata dai suoi scrittori, Naples: Tempolungo, 1999. Manica, Raffaele, ‘‘Gli sguardi di La Capria,’’ in La prosa nascosta: narrazioni del Novecento italiano, Cava de’ Tirreni: Avagliano Editore, 2002. Mele, Angelo, ‘‘La Capria e il realismo,’’ Nostro Tempo, 11 (1962): 47–52. Pampaloni, Geno, et al., 9 modi di leggere Ferito a morte, Naples: Fausto Fiorentino, 1997. Perrella, Silvio (editor), ‘‘Gli anni Cinquanta a Napoli, andirivieni letterari,’’ in Napoli 1950–59: il rinnovamento della pittura in Italia, edited by Angela Tecce, Ferrara: Civiche Gallerie d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, 2000. Storini, Monica Cristina, ‘‘I ‘libri non riusciti’: Polimorfia del romanzo nella scrittura di Raffaele La Capria,’’ Cristallo: Rassegna di Varia Umanita`, 45:1 (April 2003), 60–77. Terrile, Cristina, ‘‘Ferito a morte nel romanzo italiano del Novecento,’’ Narrativa, 24 (January 2003): 173–194.

GINA LAGORIO (1922–2005) Gina Lagorio’s strong ties to her native region of Piedmont played an important role in her artistic and critical production. The hard and stark landscape of the Langhe hills in southern Piedmont, where her family had worked the soil for generations, instilled in her a ‘‘geographical courage’’ that had a direct influence on her decision to become a writer. She inherited a deep sense of history from fellow Piedmontese writer, Beppe Fenoglio, to whom she dedicated a number of critical studies. With Cesare Pavese and Fenoglio, she shared a concrete faithfulness and deep attachment to the Langhe that surfaces as a dominant theme in all her works. Another important point of reference and inspiration in Lagorio’s writings was the severe and rocky coastal landscape of Liguria, where she lived as a young girl and where she raised her family. Her indebtedness to this region was also reflected in her critical works on the Ligurian poets Camillo Sbarbaro and Antonio Barile. From these two

literary and biographical backgrounds, there emerged a central tenet of her works: the theme of feminine indomitability as many of her female characters search for self-identity, maturity, and autonomy. Apart from her teaching duties at a local high school in Savona and her contributions to leading Italian literary journals, Lagorio began her distinguished creative writing career in the 1960s. Her first works included Le novelle di Simonetta (Simonetta’s Tales, 1960), a collection of children’s stories written for her first daughter; Il Polline (Pollen, 1966), a collection of short stories dedicated to the peasant women of the Langhe who had taught her ‘‘to breathe Piedmont’’ in a special way; and Un ciclone chiamata Titti (A Cyclone Called Titti, 1969), an autobiographical piece in which she explored the theme of positive motherhood. This first period came to an end with the death of her husband and the publication of Approssimato 991

GINA LAGORIO per difetto (Connected by Default, 1971), an autobiographical novel that captures artistically the events related to this tragic experience. In 1974 Lagorio settled in Milan, attracted by the vitality of the city’s cultural life. Shortly thereafter, she wrote her bestselling novel La spiaggia del lupo (The Beach of the Wolf, 1977), the story of a young woman from a town along the Ligurian riviera who struggles against the code of bourgeois respectability and discovers a new awareness of female independence and sexual freedom. In 1979 Lagorio returned artistically to Piedmont with the novel Fuori scena (Offstage). It is the story of a successful stage actress who, during a period of professional and personal crisis, leaves Rome in order to seek shelter and salvation in the ‘‘village of clear air’’ (Cherasco), the land of her roots, the place where she finds validity in a more natural setting. In 1983 Lagorio won the Flaiano prize for the play Raccontami quella di Flic (Tell Me the One about Flic), which would later appear in the collection Freddo al cuore (Cold at Heart, 1989). The following year she received the prestigious Viareggio Prize for her novel Tosca dei gatti (Tosca of the Cats, 1983). Set in a small seaside town in Liguria, the novel delineates the everyday gestures and words of a humble, aging, and lonely caretaker of an apartment complex, who succeeds in giving some sense to her bleak existence by communicating her maternal instinct and affections to her cats. Liguria reappears as the backdrop of Lagorio’s next novel, Golfo del Paradiso (The Gulf of Paradise, 1987). It is a fictional portrayal of the isolated and uncompromising painter Oscar Saccorotti, whose ‘‘genuine relationship with objects, people, and art’’ represented ‘‘a model of existence and a possible victory against confusion’’ for the author. Lagorio’s commitment to women’s rights led to her election in 1987 to the Italian parliament, where she served as a member of the nonaligned left for five years. During these years of intense political activity, she published the notebooks of her travels to the then Soviet Union in 1977 and 1988, Russia oltre l’Urss (Russia beyond the Soviet Union, 1989) and completed the novel Tra le mura stellate (Between the Starry Walls, 1991), considered by its author to be the ‘‘summa of her experience and the result of a long search into, and meditation on, the history of Cherasco’’ (Blelloch, ‘‘Gina Lagorio,’’ in Italian Women

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Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook, 1994, p. 193). In her later works, Lagorio continued to turn to memory and the past, not as a form of nostalgic retreat but as a source of strength for the present. Her historical novel Il bastardo ovvero gli amori, i travagli e le lacrime di Don Emanuel di Savoia (The Bastard, or the Loves, Labors, and Tears of Don Emanuel of Savoy, 1996) is the story of the illegitimate son of Charles Emanuel I, ‘‘the Great,’’ the Duke of Savoy. Here Lagorio explored the question of young Emanuel’s ‘‘diversity,’’ his homosexuality, which resulted in painful marginalization. Lagorio’s book Raccontiamoci com’e` andata (Let’s Tell Each Other How It Went, 2003) is, as its subtitle suggests, a personal remembrance of her late husband, Emilio Lagorio, and of the Resistance movement in the city of Savona. It was a testament to her husband’s commitment to public duty and a reminder of how much the present can learn from the ideals and passions of the antiFascist movement. Lagorio’s final novel, Capita (It Happens, 2005), was sent to her publisher three weeks before her death. It is a story about her illness but, above all, it is a book full of curiosity and passion.

Biography Gina Lagorio was born in Bra, in the province of Cuneo, 1922. She studied at the University of Turin, where she earned a degree in English literature, 1943. She married Emilio Lagorio, 1945. Gina Lagorio taught Italian literature and history in Savona, 1954–1974. She moved to Milan and began working as a consultant for Garzanti Publishers, 1974. She was elected a member of the Chamber of Deputies, then of the Senate, as an Independent in the Italian Communist Party, 1987–1992. She contributed to numerous literary and cultural magazines, including Il ponte, Letterature moderne, Uomini e libri, and Paragone; she collaborated with RAI broadcasting on numerous cultural projects. She was awarded the Flaiano Prize, Pescara, 1983; Rapallo Prize, 1987; Viareggio Prize, 1994; Grinzane-Cavour Prize, TurinAlba, 1997; and Flamalgal Prize, Cuneo and Imperia, 2001. Lagorio died in Milan on 17 July 2005, after a long illness. MARK PIETRALUNGA

CRISTOFORO LANDINO Selected Works Fiction Le novelle di Simonetta, 1963. Attila re degli Unni, 1964. Il Polline, 1966. Un ciclone chiamata Titti, 1969. Approssimato per difetto, 1971. Qualcosa nell’aria: Racconti, 1975. La spiaggia del lupo, 1977. Fuori scena, 1979. Tosca dei gatti, 1983. Golfo del Paradiso, 1987. Freddo al cuore, 1989. Tra le mura stellate, 1991. Il silenzio, 1993. Il bastardo ovvero Gli amori, i travagli e le lacrime di Don Emanuel di Savoia, 1996. Inventario, 1998. L’arcadia americana, 1999. Elogio della zucca, 2000. Capita, 2005.

Nonfiction Fenoglio, 1970. Sui racconti di Sbarbaro, 1973.

Sbarbaro: un modo spoglio di esistere, 1981. Penelope senza tela: argomenti e testi, edited by Franco Mollia, 1984. Russia oltre l’URSS, 1989. La stella di Cherasco, 1990. Il decalogo di Kieslowski, 1992. Raccontiamo com’e` andata: Memoria di Emilio Lagorio e della Resistenza a Savona, 2003.

Further Reading Blelloch, Paola, ‘‘Gina Lagorio,’’ in Italian Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook, Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1994. Felici, Lucio, ‘‘Gina Lagorio,’’ Otto/Novecento, 4 (1980), 121–147. Frassica, Pietro, ‘‘Gina Lagorio and Tosca’s Solitude,’’ Italica, 65:4 (1988), 329–343. Maffia, Dante, Forme espressive e radici nella narrative di Gina Lagorio, Acireale: Lunarionuovo, 1985. Mollia, Franco, ‘‘La piaga c’ho nel core,’’ Lettore di Provincia, 29:101 (1998), 27–45. Pietralunga, Mark, ‘‘Gina Lagorio and the Courage of Women,’’ in Santo L. Arico` (ed.), Contemporary Women Writers in Italy: A Modern Renaissance, Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1990.

CRISTOFORO LANDINO (1424–1498) Poet, professor, militant critic, and philosopher, Cristoforo Landino contributed the theory of vernacular humanism to fifteenth-century culture and renewed Italian literary studies with scholarly perspective. Landino’s theoretical and literary writings offered a model of poetry, style, and language to a generation of writers such as Lorenzo Il Magnifico, Michelangelo Buonarroti, and other protagonists of the early Renaissance. The cultural and literary model he outlined represented the answer of Florentine culture to the crisis of the fifteenth century and an alternative to Lorenzo Valla’s scientific philology. Landino started his intellectual journey as a neoLatin poet. Most of his youthful production was gathered in a collection of Latin elegies, entitled Xandra, which he began in 1443 and constantly revised until 1458. The first version of the book, dedicated to Leon Battista Alberti, documents the features of Landino’s earliest poetry: the imitation

of classical motifs, an idyllic and descriptive vein, and a conception of love and female characters that followed the example of Latin elegy. Changes in the second version of Xandra are shown by the poems collected in the second part, which he wrote as an answer to contemporary literary tendencies such as the erotic neo-Latin poetry of Siena. Dedicated entirely to a single female character, Landino combined motifs from Petrarch and Propertius and fused modern sensibility and rhetorical patterns with ancient metrics and language. Further changes in the third version (dedicated to Piero de’ Medici) were concentrated in the poems found in the last part of the book. Adjusting to the new Florentine scene dominated by the oligarchic regime of the Medicis, Landino’s lyrics reflected political and historical themes, blending elegiac patterns with the model of Virgil. Only in 1475–1476 would Landino return to poetry, writing poems about neo-Platonic subjects connected to his philosophical engagement. 993

CRISTOFORO LANDINO In fact, once he became a professor at the Studio Fiorentino, succeeding Carlo Marsuppini, he worked mostly as a literary critic and a philosopher. As a teacher, Landino did not forget his literary and poetic debut. In his approach to the humanities, he rejected the tradition of civic humanism, which considered study as a step toward political and social life. He also rejected Lorenzo Valla’s reformist philological reasoning, which approached the literary text as a historical source that was to be framed and interpreted within its original context. Rather, he supported a contemplative and literary approach to studies based on the neo-Platonist theory of poetry as a source of knowledge and civilization. In his classes, he adopted creative techniques, such as translating from the vernacular to Latin, which encouraged his pupils to pursue artistic activities. His method of literary analysis was stylistic and rhetorical: It evaluated the text as a model of style and doctrine, something that was useful to writers of the period. Furthermore, he paid constant attention to emerging Tuscan writers, thus demonstrating his vocation for critical activity despite his didactic commitments. The most representative document of Landino’s method was the Prolusione petrarchesca (Introduction to Petrarch, 1467), a discourse he delivered as the first official lecturer of Petrarch in Florence. It attests to Landino’s attempt to renew Italian literature in a humanistic light and is also indicative of his patriotic convictions. Other didactic activities included his commentaries of the Latin poets Horace, Virgil, and Persius. Landino developed his conception of poetry while engaged in a dialogue with the influential Platonist thinker Marsilio Ficino and his academy. This encounter produced an intense philosophical activity, which began with the treatise De nobilitate animae (On the Nobility of the Soul, ca. 1471), also known as De Anima (On the Soul), and concluded with De vera nobilitate (On True Nobility, ca. 1487). In his dialogues, Landino discussed problems such as the immortality and dignity of humankind, combined with the Platonic heritage and Latin philosophical works. His approach to the philosophical text discarded Scholasticism and adopted a rhetorical method of analysis. In his expositions, he made use of the rhetorical form of the disputatio. Landino’s theoretical activity culminated in the Disputationes Camaldulenses (Camaldulensian Disputations, ca. 1480), a philosophical dialogue in four books, and a literary turning point

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evidenced by his subsequent writings. In this work, the author imagined four days of Platonizing conversations between Lorenzo de’ Medici, Leon Battista Alberti, Marsilio Ficino, and Donato Acciaiuoli, outlining an ideal figure of the intellectual suitable for the court of Florence in the age of the Medici. The intellectual’s task, in this new historical context, was the education and counselling of the prince whose activity could be inspired by philosophical principles. Poetry was no longer merely an instrument of knowledge and civilization but was also the source for models of humanity representing philosophical and moral principles. Hence, Landino was forced to develop a philosophical approach to the literary text and a new method of analysis that combined stylistic and doctrinal knowledge with literary techniques such as the allegory. This method was applied to his commentary on Virgil’s Aeneid (1488) and developed in the third and fourth books of the Disputationes Camaldulenses. Landino continued to practice the method defined and tested in the Disputationes Camaldulenses in his Comento sopra la Comedia (Commentary on the Divine Comedy, 1481), which is considered the masterpiece of his critical activity and the most important document of vernacular Italian humanism. The commentary is based on a wide knowledge of theology and astrology along with an extraordinary proficiency in the Tuscan vernacular. Dante’s text is explained and linguistically altered so it can be completely understood by his contemporaries. Landino, however, refused the heritage of scientific philology and ignored the textual tradition of manuscripts documenting Dante’s work. Alternatively, he approached Dante’s poetry on a neo-Platonic theoretical basis and in humanistic terms. With this synthesis of Christian religion and pagan culture, doctrine, and poetry, he interpreted the Comedia as the allegory of humanity’s ascent from earth to heaven, from materiality to spirituality. The great success of his commentary not only demonstrates Landino’s influence on the reception of Dante throughout the sixteenth century but also attests to the presence of an alternative idea of poetry, study, and humanities in early Renaissance Italy. His philosophical and humanistic solution to the crisis of the fifteenth century did not survive Pietro Bembo’s reformation of Italian poetry and language. However, the model of humanity Landino identified in Dante’s Comedia endured.

TOMMASO LANDOLFI

Biography

Commentaries

Cristoforo Landino was born in Florence, 1424. He did early studies in classics, law, and poetics with Carlo Marsuppini and Leon Battista Alberti. He took part in the literary competition Certame Coronario, 1441. He moved to Rome, 1446. Landino was appointed to the chair of poetics and oratory at the Studio Fiorentino, 1458. He defined his cultural program in the inaugural lecture on Petrarch’s Canzoniere, 1467. He devoted himself to teaching, philosophical speculation, and literary criticism, 1468–1498. Landino died in Borgo alla collina (Arezzo), 1498. MATTEO SORANZO Selected Works Collections Cristophori Landini Carmina Omnia, ex codicibus manuscriptis, edited by Alessandro Perosa, Florence: Olschki, 1939. Scritti critici e teorici, edited by Roberto Cardini, 2 vols., Rome: Bulzoni, 1974.

Poetry ‘‘Xandra,’’ 1458.

Philosophical Treatises De nobilitate animae, ca. 1471; books 1 and 2, edited by Alessandro Paoli in Annali delle Universita` toscane, 34 (1915) and new series 1 (1916); book 3, edited by Giovanni Gentile in Annali delle Universita` toscane, new series 2(1917). Disputationes Camaldulenses, ca. 1480; critical edition by Peter Lohe, 1980. De vera nobilitate, ca. 1487; critical edition by Maria Teresa Liaci, 1970.

Comento sopra la Comedia, 1481; critical edition by Paolo Procaccioli, 2001.

Further Reading Cardini, Roberto, La critica del Landino, Florence: Sansoni, 1973. Cardini, Roberto, ‘‘Landino e Dante,’’ Rinascimento, 30 (1990), 175–190. Cardini, Roberto, ‘‘Landino e Lorenzo,’’ Lettere Italiane, 45:3 (1993), 361–375. Di Cesare, Mario A., ‘‘Cristoforo Landino on the Name and Nature of Poetry: The Critic as Hero,’’ The Chaucer Review, 21:2 (1986), 155–181. Di Cesare, Mario A., ‘‘Cristoforo Landino’s Disputationes Camaldulenses,’’ in The Early Renaissance: Virgil and the Classical Tradition, edited by Anthony L. Pellegrini, Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1985. Ecker, Ute (editor), Cristoforo Landino. Index, Hildesheim: Olms, 1998. Giannantonio, Pompeo, Cristoforo Landino e l’Umanesimo volgare, Naples: Liguori, 1971. Gilson, Simon A., Dante and Renaissance Florence, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Kallendorf, Craig, ‘‘Cristoforo Landino’s Aeneid and the Humanist Critical Tradition,’’ Renaissance Quarterly, 36:4 (1983), 519–546. Ludwig, Walther, ‘‘The Beginnings of Catullan Neo-Latin Poetry,’’ in Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Torontonensis, edited by Alexander Dalzell, Charles Fantazzi, and Richard J. Schoeck, Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1991. Murgatroyd, Paul, ‘‘Landino’s Xandra 3.3 and Its Ancient Latin Models,’’ Renaissance Studies, 11:2 (1997), 57–60. McNair, Bruce G., ‘‘Cristoforo Landino’s De Anima and His Platonic Sources,’’ Rinascimento, 32 (1992), 227–245. Procaccioli, Paolo, Filologia ed esegesi dantesca nel Quattrocento: l’Inferno nel Comento sopra la Comedia di Cristoforo Landino, Florence: Olschki, 1989.

TOMMASO LANDOLFI (1908–1979) Tommaso Landolfi was Italy’s master of literary horror in the first half of the twentieth century and beyond. Critics have variously characterized Landolfi’s works (novels, short stories, plays, and poetry) as fantastic, surreal, magical, or grotesque. His flowing, elegant prose style is marked by a difficult lexicon that combines somewhat jarringly

with subjects like degeneration and death. The cultural milieu within which the writer began his career in the 1930s was, loosely, Hermeticism and the Florentine literary journal associated with it, Campo di Marte. The Hermetic trend favored difficult, enigmatic language and sometimes arcane symbolism, which harked back to earlier lyric 995

TOMMASO LANDOLFI traditions, especially medieval ones. This poetic strategy allowed authors to distance themselves from official political efforts (including censorship) to establish a ‘‘Fascist art.’’ Landolfi was himself a notorious recluse (with a penchant, though, for gaming). The 1930s were also years of heated debate over Italian national identity, over whether ‘‘Italianness’’ derived from traditional agricultural, small-town values or from Italy’s great urban civilization, linked to ancient Rome. Landolfi was able to sidestep this cultural debate by writing of ‘‘other worlds’’ of the imagination—a move that linked his name to magical realism. For example, in the short story ‘‘Il mar delle blatte’’ (The Sea of Cockroaches), first published in Letteratura in 1938 and then collected in the volume of the same title, the sea is afloat with cockroaches. Undoubtedly, Landolfi favored shocking distancing mechanisms in his writing, along with the theme of death as the final detachment from the world. Yet it would be a mistake to limit one’s reading of his corpus to existential matters. Landolfi’s horror stories, with their extreme representations and their nineteenth-century aura, create an anticonventional vision of modern social realities as themselves monstrous. This view had an important effect on subsequent generations of Italian writers, especially Italo Calvino and Alberto Moravia. By the same token, Landolfi’s writing was less in vogue in the two decades following World War II when neo-Realist aesthetic norms were predominant. Avant-garde critics were instrumental in a rebirth of critical interest in Landolfi in the late 1960s, shortly before his death. His many translations from Russian literature (Gogol, Lermontov, and Pushkin) were another important literary legacy. Landolfi’s narrative works use one of a variety of psychological devices. The fictions often enter into the mind of a phobic maniac (insects abound) on the verge of murder or some other ferocious act. Since a madman or, in some cases, a madwoman would not be thinking about how to explain the madness while going about his or her deeds, Landolfi, by depicting their inner world, left his reader in the dark about the actual causes and the effects of derangement. Landolfi thus produced puzzles and conundrums, and he did so with superb timing and buildup—as well as few tight endings. The theme of obsession and its forms of expression in words and deeds were his strong suit, and his creations set out to be shocking and freakish. As befits this subject matter, his narratives are predominantly nonlinear when not 996

truly fragmentary. The representation of reality is filtered through the fundamental instability of the speaking, writing subject. Supernatural elements such as specters and ghosts are frequent in his stories, as are elements drawn from science fiction. In the novella Cancroregina (Cancerqueen, 1950), a man leaves earth in a spaceship and begins to experience paranoid thoughts that lead him to murder his companion, wrap him up, and eject him from the ship. The body gets caught in the ship’s slipstream and follows it endlessly as the narrator begins to hallucinate, seeing bugs around him and in his orifices. The device of increasing madness also governs the narration in the long story Le labrene (The Geckos, 1974), in which the narrator, who pathologically dreads geckos, becomes paralyzed with fear when one drops on him from the ceiling. He remains sentient though others believe he is dead and entomb him. The narrator recounts his tale of horror all too convincingly. In other narratives, repulsive men prey on the innocent, usually women or children, including their own offspring, then recount their fantasies in disturbing detail. In yet other stories, Landolfi crafted surreal situations, for instance in a group of stories with animal narrators or protagonists such as a diabolical monkey in Le due zittelle (The Two Old Maids, 1946). Comic elements are rare, but irony abounds, as in ‘‘La moglie di Gogol’’ (Gogol’s Wife), a story published in the 1954 volume Ombre (Shadows) in which the Russian novelist keeps a blow-up doll (his so-called wife) as an erotic toy until one day it bursts. The early novel La pietra lunare (The Moonstone, 1939) features a kinder narrator, a young poet, Giovancarlo Scarabozzo, who falls in love with an otherwordly being. He meets a young seamstress and family friend, Guru´, and notices to his dismay that she has cloven goat feet. No one else confirms the veracity of his perception, however. Guru´, who becomes his lover, hails from a local aristocratic family that has degenerated into poverty and takes its revenge on the townsfolk in acts of sadism. Her home is a corner of a ruined castle separate from the town. Set in the provinces and satirizing petit-bourgeois life, the novel takes off in an even more bizarre direction when the goat-woman draws the hero out of the village on a moonlit night to nearby rocky mountains where she couples with a ram and gains goat legs. She is one of a race of were-goats and other were-animals who inhabit a moonlike realm and who come out with the full moon

TOMMASO LANDOLFI to interact with ferocious bandits who seem to hark back to Gothic romance. The bandits are in fact specters from the past. The novel ends with the narrator’s uncertainty: Were the night’s events a dream or indeed did he travel to another world? Among subsequent works, the novel Racconto d’autunno (An Autumn Story, 1947) stands out as an exemplary text. It too is set in a rural mountainous area, which has utterly resisted the growing ‘‘norm’’ of urbanization in modernity. In a remote castle, a young soldier during World War II encounters two beings that shatter all norms of the world he had heretofore inhabited. Even the physical constraints of reality are loosed in an ancient, enchanted place when a frightening specter seems to come to life. The novel takes the themes of La pietra lunare to an extreme when incest and sadomasochism are normalized by a degenerate aristocratic family relegated to the remote castlelodge. The discoveries of the hero (including a sexual dungeon) defy his understanding. The plot thickens when a seemingly unhinged young woman reveals herself to him after the protagonist has followed for several days the signs of her fleeting, hidden presence among the secret passageways and rooms of the dusty, dank manor. She is Lucia, the spitting image of her mother, seen by the soldier in a portrait. The decrepit old father who lives with his daughter and two enormous dogs has been treating his daughter as a wife after the woman’s death, leading young Lucia to near-madness and a belief that she possesses magical powers that once belonged to her unearthly, beautiful, and cruel mother. Landolfi gives Lucia a dual character not only as the double of her mother but as a hybrid Medusa with snaky black locks who communes with animals but also tortures them. This communing, or knowledge, seems to derive from Lucia’s isolation in this remote area, separated from all humans except for her incestuous father. Her powers of perception have grown to monstrous proportions. Part of Lucia’s madness is a factor of disease, her inherited epilepsy, but Landolfi also suggested that taking her mother’s place has left a hole in her own identity. This lack leads to the blockage of self-awareness. Landolfi used a narrative of violence in order to portray misdirection in identity formation, which has unexpected results: abnormal female powers and horror. A similar narrative strategy appears in Landolfi’s fascinating, multiple quasi-autobiographic works,

La biere du pecheur (The Sinner’s Coffin, or The Fisherman’s Beer, 1953; the title, written without accents, is intentionally ambiguous), Rien va (Nothing Goes, 1963), and Des mois (About Myselves, 1967), in which we learn of a marriage to a virtual child-woman and of an addiction to gambling, as well as, and perhaps more importantly, of his theories of language and writing. Central to these is in fact the notion that the ‘‘hole’’ or lack that is the ‘‘I’’ is susceptible to moments of loss of control and is bereft of a calming sense of selfawareness. While Landolfi’s fundamental literary strategy was to write darkly about inscrutable things such as violent transgressions that go beyond the realm of comprehension, other questions are crucial. The root meaning of ‘‘enigma’’ is the Greek ainigma, meaning literally to speak darkly. Ainigma is also the root for the word ‘‘allegory.’’ This semantic connection is crucial in reading Landolfi. Are his narratives to be read as ‘‘about’’ something else? The issue of allegory and historical allusion is not clear-cut in his works, and this is part of their fascination. Horror is never reined in or put under control, and no myth of stabilization or circumscription of the fearful is put forward. Specters are not exorcised. It follows that human beings in their collectivities—be they families, villages, or nations—are abandoned, each on their own in a narrative of fear without resolution. Perhaps loneliness was the greatest horror in a world in the grasp of extremes, in the world of mid-twentieth-century Europe.

Biography Tommaso Landolfi was born in Pico Farnese (Frosinone), 9 August 1908, the descendant of an ancient, aristocratic Lombard family. His mother died in childbirth when Tommaso was one and a half years old. He was educated in Prato at the Collegio Cicognini. In 1929 he published his first short story, ‘‘Maria Giuseppa,’’ in the magazine Vigilie letterarie, which he coedited with Renato Poggioli. In June 1942 he was imprisoned for a month in Florence, where he had joined the anti-Fascist Giubbe rosse group. The family home in Pico Farnese was taken over first by the Germans and then by the Allies from the fall of 1943 until May of 1944. In 1956 Landolfi married at the age of 48 and fathered two children. In 1971, he suffered a heart attack, and 997

TOMMASO LANDOLFI in 1973 he developed cancer. He was awarded the Premio Strega in 1975 in recognition of his literary career and won the Viareggio Prize for Il tradimento, 1977. Landolfi died in Rome, 8 July 1979. KEALA JEWELL Selected Works Collections Racconti, Florence: Vallecchi, 1961. Opere I (1937–1959), edited by Idolina Landolfi, Milan: Rizzoli, 1991. Opere II (1960–1971), edited by Idolina Landolfi, Milan: Rizzoli, 1992.

Landolfi, Idolina, and Ernestina Pellegrini (editors), Gli altrove di Landolfi: atti del Convegno di studi, Firenze 4–5 dicembre, 2001, Rome: Bulzoni, 2004. McLoughlin, Michael, ‘‘Landolfi’s Phobias: Fear and the Fantastic in the Stories of Tommaso Landolfi,’’ Studi d’Italianistica nell’Africa Australe/Italian Studies in Southern Africa, 10:2 (1997), 44–71. Macrı´, Oreste, Tommaso Landolfi: Narratore poeta critico artefice della lingua, Florence: Le Lettere, 1990. Pandini, Giancarlo, Landolfi, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1975. Sanguineti, Edoardo, ‘‘Tommaso Landolfi,’’ in Letteratura Italiana. I Contemporanei, vol.2, Milan: Marzorati, 1963. Tarquini, Tarcisio (editor), Landolfi, libro per libro, Alatri: Hetea, 1988.

Fiction Dialogo dei massimi sistemi, 1937. Il mar delle blatte e altre storie, 1939. La pietra lunare, 1939. Le due zittelle, 1946. Racconto d’autunno, 1947; as An Autumn Story, translated by Joachim Neugroschel, 1989. Cancroregina, 1950; as Cancerqueen, translated by Raymond Rosenthal, 1971. La biere du pecheur, 1953. Ottavio di Saint-Vincent, 1958. Rien va, 1963. Ombre, 1964. Un amore del nostro tempo, 1965. Des mois, 1967. Le labrene, 1974. A caso, 1975.

Poetry ‘‘Viola di morte,’’ 1972. ‘‘Il tradimento,’’ 1977.

Theater Landolfo VI di Benevento, 1959. Scene dalla vita di Cagliostro, 1963.

Other Un paniere di chiocciole, 1968.

Further Reading Capek-Habekovic, Romana, Tommaso Landolfi’s Grotesque Images, New York: Peter Lang, 1986. Carlino, Marcello, Landolfi e il fantastico, Rome: Lithos Editrice, 1998. Fontanella, Luigi (editor), Omaggio a Tommaso Landolfi, special issue of Gradiva, 3 (1989). Landolfi, Idolina (editor), La liquida vertigine: atti delle Giornate di studio su Tommaso Landolfi, Prato, Convitto Nazionale Cicognini, 5–6 febbraio, 1999, Florence: Olschki, 2002. Landolfi, Idolina (editor), Le lunazioni del cuore: Saggi su Tommaso Landolfi, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1996.

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RACCONTO D’AUTUNNO, 1947 Novel by Tommaso Landolfi

Tommaso Landolfi’s Racconto d’autunno (An Autumn Story, 1947) presents a puzzling set of contradictions. The narrative unfolds over a few weeks of what seems to be the late autumn of 1943 (though no precise temporal or geographical markers are supplied), the season that followed a great upheaval: Mussolini’s removal from power in July and the subsequent armistice between Italy and the Allies on 8 September. With Hitler’s support, Mussolini was quickly restored to power, but only in Northern Italy, as the Republic of Salo`. In Central and Southern Italy, the populace and Italian military came under Allied domination when, precisely in the autumn of 1943, the invasion of Italy began in earnest. In Nazi/Fascist-controlled areas of the country, soldiers had to make a dramatic choice either to join Fascist groupings or to join the Resistance. What resulted has been called a civil war. In the plot of Landolfi’s novel, the protagonist has already made his decision to resist Fascism but one day finds himself cut off from his comrades at arms. At that point, his adventures begin. The location of the action is signaled only by the letter ‘‘P.,’’ a probable reference to Pico Farnese, Landolfi’s birthplace and home (commandeered first by

TOMMASO LANDOLFI the Germans and then by the Allies), near the Gustav line. Landolfi’s hero retreats into a remote valley. Famished, exhausted, and alone, he comes across a decrepit, secluded manor guarded by ferocious dogs and attempts entry in order to gain protection and sustenance. Landolfi rather quickly sets aside the war story and transforms the narrative into an eerie, obsessive tale of the soldier’s encounter with seemingly demented, certainly tormented denizens of the uncanny abode. An ancient, impoverished aristocrat at first appears to live alone in the crumbling seventeenth-century hunting lodge, replete with secret passages, hidden rooms, and a dungeon. Curious noises in the night cause the protagonist to undertake a prolonged search for an unidentified presence within the labyrinthine space. He falls in love with a woman painted in a portrait and subsequently is led to believe he has unearthed her comely ghost. It turns out that the aristocratic beauty was the wife of the old man and that his daughter, her double, has been secreted on the premises. She does her father’s bidding now as a surrogate wife, enacting with him rites of resurrection and reenacting what had been a cruel, sadistic relationship. The questions Landolfi pressed upon his readers are legion. The young woman, Lucia, evinces witchlike traits, as she seems to hear the ‘‘voices’’ of animals and inanimate things. She possesses knowledge of the supernatural that is no match for the soldier’s rational explorations of the castle world. When the soldier becomes entrapped and paralyzed by obsessions, Lucia cautiously seeks him out and reveals herself to him–her only hope to extract herself from the chains of a decadent, ferocious, incestuous aristocracy lost to modernity. The story Lucia tells remains incoherent for protagonist and reader alike, since she suffers from lapses of epilepsy and her knowledge of the world is tragically incomplete. At the end of the novel, Lucia is shot not by the Germans but by Allied

Moroccan troops fighting alongside the ‘‘Free French’’ during the campaign to gain Rome. Readers and critics have wondered how the war narrative, the ‘‘Gothic’’ tale, and the love story can possibly be read and understood together. Indeed, critical opinion is distinctly divided between readers who view the Resistance setting as a pretext for an experiment in the grotesque genre and those who would read the theme of an excruciating pursuit of knowledge in this novel as indivisible from the context of cultural and political disorientation and tragedy of the autumn of 1943. It is this enigma that lends Racconto d’autunno its power. KAELA JEWELL Editions First edition: Racconto d’autunno, Florence: Vallecchi, 1947. Critical edition: Edited by Idolina Landolfi, Milan: Adelphi, 1995. Translation: As An Autumn Story, translated by Joachim Neugroschel, Hygiene, CO: Eridanos Press, 1989.

Further Reading Amigoni, Ferdinando, ‘‘Putting Ghosts to Good Use: Savinio, Bontempelli, Landolfi,’’ Italica, 77:1 (2000): 69–80. Carbone, Rocco, ‘‘La dimora violata: Tommaso Landolfi e Racconto d’autunno,’’ Chroniques italiennes, 47–48 (1996): 67–77. Carlino, Marcello, ‘‘Tommaso Landolfi,’’ in Storia generale della letteratura Italiana, edited by Nino Borsellino and Walter Pedulla`, vol. 11, Milan: Motta, 1999. Cecchini, Leonardo, Parlare per le notti: il fantastico nell’opera di Tommaso Landolfi, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press and University of Copenhagen, 2001. De Robertis, Giuseppe, ‘‘Landolfi liberato,’’ Tempo, 15–22 November 1947, p. 11. Landolfi, Idolina, ‘‘Nota al testo,’’ in Tommaso Landolfi, Racconto d’autunno, Milan: Adelphi, 1995. Spagnoletti, Giacinto, ‘‘Racconto d’autunno,’’ in Scrittori di un secolo, Milan: Marzorati, 1974. Tarquini, Tarciso (editor), Landolfi libro per libro, Alatri: Hetea, 1988.

IL LASCA See Anton Francesco Grazzini (Il Lasca)

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LITERATURE IN LATIN

THE LAST LETTERS OF JACOPO ORTIS See Le Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (Work by Ugo Foscolo)

THE LATE MATTIA PASCAL See Il Fu Mattia Pascal (Work by Luigi Pirandello)

LITERATURE IN LATIN The populations of the Roman Empire stopped speaking Latin around the time of the fall of Rome—a phenomenon that, naturally, happened also in Italy, where the language split into different regional dialects. Nevertheless, Latin in both spoken and written forms survived for many centuries and remained the vehicle of culture for the upper classes up to the sixteenth century throughout Europe. If, on the one hand, the diffusion of the vernaculars in daily communication was relatively fast, on the other, the status of such languages for literary production remained marginal for a long time. During the Middle Ages, Latin was still known as gramatica, as Dante himself used to call it, making a distinction between it and the variety of local dialects. For this reason, it should not be surprising that the wide majority of extant written texts until the 1300s are in Latin, a language that retained a large range of uses: theology, philosophy (St. Thomas Aquinas and the whole patristic tradition are outstanding examples), chronicles, codes of laws, acts of chancellery, and even treatises of medicine and astrology, as well both holy (liturgical hymns, sequenzas) and secular 1000

poetry (the goliardic poems of the clerici vagantes). There are enormous differences among these uses: Pier delle Vigne’s language, for instance, is extremely refined, while Aquinas’s Latin is simpler in its structure and rich with colloquialisms. The figure of Dante in this context assumes a crucial role, as he was the first to theorize the potential of emerging dialects in literary uses in his treatise De vulgari eloquentia (Eloquence in the Vulgar Tongue, ca. 1304–1305), written in Latin to awaken the interest of a highly educated public, and then to put his theory into practice with the Comedia (Divine Comedy, ca. 1305–1321). During the fourteenth century, all the official acts were written in Latin, and a central subject for students was grammar, which meant Latin. As much as they may be recognized as crucial from a historical perspective, works in the vernacular like Boccaccio’s Decameron (ca. 1373) and Petrarch’s Canzoniere (ca. 1342–1374) did not change much in the linguistic scene of the time, nor did their authors mean to change it. Boccaccio wrote his doctrinal works such as the Genealogie deorum gentilium (Genealogies of the Gentile Gods, ca. 1350–1360) in Latin, and

LITERATURE IN LATIN Petrarch believed that he would be remembered for his Africa (ca. 1338–1374), an enormous historical poem written in hexameters. Indeed, he spoke Latin fluently, wrote letters in Latin, and probably even thought in that language: Even the annotations at the margins of the manuscripts of his Canzoniere (not by coincidence named Rerum vulgarium fragmenta), were in Latin. In his conception, the vernacular could be used in poetry for specific stylistic purposes, without challenging the intrinsic superiority of Latin. Petrarch’s use of the language was extremely refined and elegant, and Cicero was his model. During the so-called preHumanism, a similar approach was followed by Lovato Lovati (ca. 1240–1309) and Albertino Mussato (1261–1329) in Padua and by Giovanni del Virgilio (ca. 1300–ca. 1327) in Bologna and continued later in Florence by Coluccio Salutati (1331–1406), Leonardo Bruni (d. 1444), and Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459). After the midfifteenth century, writers in their works harked back to the language of the time of Augustus, purifying it from formal constructs and vocabulary imported from medieval Latin, and as a result the renewed language of highly educated people became again completely distinct from that spoken in the chancelleries and schools. In that century, Latin was thus used in the scientific, philosophical, and literary fields. However, there was a new approach to ancient works, as texts were compared to each other and studied to establish a version that closely matched the original Latin: Thus philology was born. After Petrarch, many humanists searched through libraries all over Europe for unknown texts and authors who had been forgotten. Their commitment led to the rediscovery of such works as Lucretius’s De rerum natura. Meawhile, Greek language and its literature also began to arouse renewed interest among intellectuals. During Humanism, the dominant genre was the treatise, normally on philosophical and literary topics, with the Platonic dialogue as its model. The genre reflected the spirit of the time, the active process of the transmission of culture. Among the large number of writers and works, Giannozzo Manetti’s De dignitate et excellentia hominis (On the Dignity and Excellence of Man, 1452), and Lorenzo Valla’s De voluptate (On Pleasure, 1430) and his best-known work De falso credita et ementita Constantini donatione declamatio (The Treatise of Lorenzo Valla on the Donation of Constantine, 1440) are considered as perfect examples. Furthermore, Valla’s treatise is also an excellent philological study, which led the author to prove the

falsity of the famous document on which the Church founded its temporal power. Examples of the genre proliferated throughout the quattrocento, including Leon Battista Alberti’s Profugiorum ab aerumna (Flight from Hardship, 1441–1442), a treatise on the peace of the soul in which the author argued that men must have such calm even during adversities, and De re aedificatoria (Ten Books of Architecture, 1485), an architectural treatise; Giovanni Pontano’s De fortuna (On Fortune, 1460) and De principe (On the Prince, 1468), a manual of politics that recalled the classical ideal of the wise men of government; Pico della Mirandola’s Oratio de hominis dignitate (Oration on the Dignity of Man, 1486), a treatise on human beings and their intermediate position between material and spiritual beings; and Cristoforo Landino’s Disputationes Camaldulenses (Camaldulensian Disputations, 1480), on the advantages of contemplative life versus active life. However, other genres were also practiced, nor was Latin limited to the works of philosophers. The artist Piero della Francesca wrote De prospectiva pingendi (On Perspective in Painting, 1482), in which he theorized the discovery of perspective and its rules. Angelo Polizano, mostly remembered for his verses in the vulgar tongue, wrote a Miscellanea (Miscellany, 1489) of philological researches, as well as lyrics in Latin modeled on classical Latin and Greek. The epistolary production remained in Latin as well, even for private purposes: Examples include the correspondence of figures such as Paolo Cortesi or Laura Cereta. In this context, the memoir, a genre between the treatise and the historiographic work, arose and enjoyed great popularity. Enea Silvio Piccolomini dominated this field with his Commentarii rerum memorabilium (Commentaries, 1462), which presented his personal reflections, autobiographical memories, and a political analysis of the time. In the sixteenth century the vernacular began to impose itself on the cultural scene. The revival of classical Latin had produced at that point a language that was extremely different from the one spoken in everyday life by normal people and was limited to few aristocrats. Indeed, classical Latin became a dead language, and the vernacular took its place, being used in an increasing number of city statutes, in court acts, and of course in literature, a field in which vernacular production soon surpassed that in Latin. Nevertheless, the question of the recognition of the formal dignity of the new language provoked a major debate, the questione della lingua, which found a conclusion satisfactory to most in Pietro Bembo’s Prose della volgar lingua 1001

LITERATURE IN LATIN (Writings in the Vernacular Language, 1525), in which he proposed Petrarch as the ideal linguistic and stylistic model for poetry and Boccaccio for prose. However, the process of recognition of the vernacular was neither rapid nor homogeneous. The great majority of works printed in the cinquecento were still in Latin, the language in which students in schools were taught and lectures in universities were given. Moreover, Latin was the language of the Church well into the twentieth century, when with the second Vatican Council (1962–1965) other languages were allowed for the liturgy. In the second half of the sixteenth and in the seventeenth century, Latin remained also the language of science, for instance in the case of Galileo Galilei’s Sidereus Nuncius (The Starry Messenger, 1610), even as its usage declined in literature, in which Petrarch’s style became the tradition to be imitated. The only literary area in which Latin still had a crucial role was in the works written in a mixture of both Latin and vulgar, the so-called Macaronic, which reached a remarkable quality with works such as Teofilo Folengo’s Baldus (1552). Structured as a chivalrous poem, it created a new language that applied Latin morphology to vernacular expressions. In this context, the mixture of low standards and elevated style achieved a completely original artistic effect, and it did not in any way suggest merely a poor knowledge of classical texts. By the eighteenth century, Latin had been almost completely abandoned, even in a scientific context. However, the language of the period can no longer be called vernacular, as it was Italian in most respects. The last among the major Italian writers that composed verses in Latin—and in a completely Italian linguistic context—was Giovanni Pascoli, whose Latin production includes 32 short poems collected with the title of Carmina (Poems, 1914) and several fragments. The language that he used was obscure, tense, and complex, and it is impossible to find any sort of similarity with Petrarch or other classical models. VALERIO VICARI

1002

Further Reading Barrigan, Joseph R., ‘‘Early Neo-Latin Tragedy in Italy,’’ in Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Lovaniensis: Proceedings of the First International Congress of Neo-Latin Studies, Louvain, 23–28 August 1971, edited by Jozef IJsewijn et al., Munich: Fink; Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1971. Bruni, Francesco (editor), Storia della lingua italiana, 10 vols., Bologna: Il Mulino, 1989–2004. Canfora, Davide, ‘‘La produzione latina del cinquecento,’’ in Storia della letteratura italiana, vol. 10, La tradizione dei testi, edited by Enrico Malato, Rome: Salerno, 2001. Coppini, Donatella, and Paolo Viti, ‘‘La produzione latina dell’eta` umanistica,’’ in Storia della letteratura italiana, vol. 10, La tradizione dei testi, edited by Enrico Malato, Rome: Salerno, 2001. Dionisotti, Carlo, Geografia e storia della letteratura italiana, Turin: Einaudi, 1967. Feo, Michele, ‘‘Tradizione latina,’’ in Letteratura italiana, vol. 5, Le questioni, edited by Alberto Asor Rosa, Turin: Einaudi, 1986. Ferroni, Giulio, Storia della letteratura italiana, vol. 1, Dalle origini al Quattrocento, Milan: Elemond, 1991. Fogazza, Donatella, ‘‘Les Carmina de Giovanni Pascoli,’’ ´ tudes Classiques, 60:3 (1992), 263–267. Les E Formentin, Vittorio, ‘‘La ‘crisi‘ linguistica del Quattrocento,’’ in Storia della letteratura italiana, vol. 3, Il Quattrocento, edited by Enrico Malato, Rome: Salerno, 1996. Garin, Eugenio, ‘‘Coluccio Salutati e la cultura umanistica agli inizi del Quattrocento,’’ in Storia della letteratura italiana, edited by Emilio Cecchi and Natalino Sapegno, vol. 3, Milan: Garzanti, 1966. Garin, Eugenio (editor), Prosatori latini del Quattrocento, Naples: Ricciardi, 1952. Garin, Eugenio, L’Umanesimo italiano, Bari: Laterza, 1947. IJsewijn, Jozef, Companion to Neo-Latin Studies, Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1977. Il Petrarca latino e le origini dell’Umanesimo, Florence: Le Lettere, 1996. Migliorini, Bruno, Storia della lingua italiana, Florence: Sansoni, 1937. Paoli, Ugo Enrico, Prose e poesie latine di scrittori italiani, Florence: Le Monnier, 1926. Rizzo, Silvia, ‘‘Il latino dell’Umanesimo,’’ in Letteratura italiana, vol. 5, Le questioni, edited by Alberto Asor Rosa, Turin: Einaudi, 1986. Tateo, Francesco (editor), La prosa dell’umanesimo, Roma: Istituto poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, 2004.

BRUNETTO LATINI

BRUNETTO LATINI (CA. 1220–1294) The importance of Brunetto Latini’s writings resides largely in the ways in which they advance a renewed perspective on ethical, rhetorical, and political issues in the context of the Italian commune. A politically active Florentine Guelf, he was the author of translations of three orations by Cicero, a poem de amicitia (on friendship) addressed to Rustico Filippi entitled Il Favolello (The Little Fable) written in the mid-1260s, and some lyric poems including ‘‘S’eo son distretto inamoratamente’’ (If I Am Hard Constrained by Love). He drafted many legal texts and is credited with introducing the rules of the ars dictandi and the Roman cursus, originally developed in an imperial context, into the style of the Chancery of the Florentine Commune. The three works for which he is most rightly remembered today—Li Livres dou Tre´sor (The Books of the Treasure), usually simply called Tre´sor; the Tesoretto (Little Treasure); and the Rettorica (Rhetoric)—concern themselves largely with the formation and instruction of the citizen of the contemporary Italian city-state as the emerging governing class. All three are products of his time of exile between 1260 and 1266 (although some have argued that the Tesoretto could have been written or expanded upon his return to Florence) and represent his political thought as it matures consequent to his loss of a direct political role in Florence as well as his injection of contemporary French learning into an Italian political context. All three are deeply influenced by intellectual trends he encountered in France. Both the Tre´sor and the Tesoretto present themselves as encyclopedic compendia of all manner of knowledge, and all three are couched in the context of service to republican concerns. The Rettorica transforms Cicero’s civic perspective into a lively reflection on the place of rhetoric in the Italian cityrepublics. Indeed, Giovanni Villani in his Cronica (VIII, 10), first published in 1537–1554, famously remembered Brunetto in this context as a civic ‘‘philosopher’’ and a perfect master of rhetoric: ‘‘It was he who commented upon Cicero’s Rhetoric, and wrote a good and useful book called the Tesoro, and the Tesoretto, and the Chiave del Tesoro, and many other books of philosophy, and

of virtues and vices; [...] it was he who was the initiator and the teacher in refining the Florentines, making them aware of the way to speak well and in knowing how to guide and rule our republic according to politics.’’ The Rettorica, the first of his major works written in exile, perhaps in 1260, is an Italian translation and commentary of the first 17 chapters of Cicero’s De Inventione. It places special emphasis on the role the eloquent and wise orator has in civilizing and forming communities. The commentary itself draws on a broad range of classical and medieval authorities and argues that eloquence, far from being mere ornamentation of speech, requires the orator to be a man of a vast culture as the one who civilizes society, an argument that foreshadows the civic importance of the Tre´sor and Tesoretto. The Rettorica’s most significant addition to the original of Cicero, however, is the enlargement of the area susceptible to the rules governing rhetoric to include not only courts and essentially legal disputes but also the contemporary civic realms of embassies and communal political deliberations. Latini even suggested that letters and love poetry are to be governed by rhetoric, which means that they also are to be seen as aspects of civic life and of the citizen qua citizen. The Tre´sor, written in French because of the beauty of the language and its greater diffusion, is an encyclopedic attempt at providing a handbook of all that is knowable and useful for the citizen in the civic context envisioned in the Rettorica. It is primarily a compendium drawn from biblical, medieval, and classical materials, organized into three books of culminating importance leading toward the proper mode of civic governance. The first book contains a summary of theology, biblical, classical, and contemporary history, as well as natural history broadly understood as including anatomy, zoology, geography, and cosmology; the second includes a translation of a Latin abbreviation of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and appends a treatise on the virtues and vices; the third is a treatise on rhetoric, which repeats much of the material in the Rettorica, together with a logically subsequent treatise on politics, understood as the art of governing cities and, as such, the highest of the 1003

BRUNETTO LATINI sciences. The Tre´sor’s significance in no small part lies in its progression from history, to virtues and vices, and finally to rhetoric and politics, thus placing this wealth of knowledge in the context of consciously civic practice. Written in an easy clear style, the book is not so much an erudite work for the scholar as one for the practical use of the citizen. The Tesoretto, a scribal name for a work that calls itself the Tesoro (75, 113), is an unfinished allegorical first-person poem of 2,944 verses, which is cast in the tradition of Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis, Boethius’s Consolatio Philosophiae, and their medieval descendants such as Le Roman de la Rose and Alain de Lille’s works. It was probably written concurrently with the Tre´sor. It is the narrative of the formation of the ‘‘citizen’’ rendered ingeniously as the admittedly fictional history of Brunetto himself, whose education during his political exile in the encyclopedic culture delineated by the Tre´sor is presented in terms that make him an everyman-citizen. Following a prologue and dedication, the poem begins with Brunetto learning of his exile in 1260 while he was traveling through southern France on his return from an embassy to Spain. Despondent, he turns off the main road leading back to Italy and wanders into a forest, where he encounters Nature personified, who instructs him on the working of natural phenomena and then sends him off through a desert on a further allegorical journey, where he encounters personifications of Virtues and of Love; he falls prey to the power of love and is aided by Ovid as the master of love-lore. He subsequently goes to Montpellier, where he makes his confession and expatiates on the vices, before finding himself again in the forest. He eventually climbs Mount Olympus and meets Ptolemy, who is about to tell him about the four elements when the poem breaks off. Its first-person historical narrative style had a large influence on Dante; indeed, Dante’s heavy use of the poem in the Commedia suggests that Brunetto himself held a major if relatively unexamined position as an inspiration of Dante’s own masterpiece. Because of Dante’s early critiques of Brunetto and his work, the mass of criticism addresses not so much Brunetto’s contributions to Italian literature or even to the Commedia as Dante’s apparent rejection of him as a model, in spite of Francesco Mazzoni’s pioneering work on his importance in the entry on the author for the Enciclopedia dantesca (1971). In the De Vulgari Eloquentia, Dante dismissed the style of his lyric poems as ‘‘municipal’’—that is, not the illustrious vernacular. 1004

He also suggested that Brunetto was guilty of sodomy when he condemned him in Inferno XV, a judgment that has been at the center of much of Brunetto’s subsequent reception. There is no clear external confirmation of Dante’s suggestion that Brunetto was a sodomite, and the fact that he was married and had a daughter and two sons has suggested to some critics that he could not have therefore been a sodomite of the type we would label as homosexual. There have consequently been a number of speculations that sodomy as understood today was not the sin in question; however, these arguments fail ultimately to convince most readers.

Biography Brunetto Latini was born in Florence ca. 1220. He served with the embassy to Alfonso X of Castile and was exiled in France after the Battle of Montaperti in 1260. He returned from exile after the Battle of Benevento in 1266. He was dettatore of Florence, 1267; chancellor, 1272–1274; console dell’arte dei notai, 1275; guarantor for the Guelfs of the peace of Cardinal Latino, 1280; president of the league of Florence, Genoa, and Lucca against Pisa, 1284; and Prior, 1287. Latini died in Florence in 1294. FRANK ORDIWAY Works Treatises Rettorica, ca. 1260; edited by Francesco Maggini, 1915. Li Livres dou Tre´sor, mid-1260s; edited by Francis J. Carmody, 1948; as The Book of the Treasure—Li Livres dou Tresor, translated by Paul Barrette and Spurgeon Baldwin, 1993. Il Tesoretto, mid-1260s; edited by Giovanni Pozzi in Poeti del Duecento, edited by Gianfranco Contini, vol. 2, 1960; as The Little Treasure, translated by Julia Bolton Holloway, 1981.

Poetry ‘‘Il Favolello,’’ mid-1260s; edited by Giovanni Pozzi in Poeti del Duecento, edited by Gianfranco Contini, vol. 2, 1960.

Translation L’Ethica d’Aristotile ridotta in compendio da ser Brunetto Latini. Et altre traduttioni, & scritti di quei tempi, 1568.

Further Reading Alessio, Gian Carlo, ‘‘Brunetto Latini e Cicerone (e i dettatori),’’ Italia medievale e umanistica, 22(1979), 123–169.

GAVINO LEDDA Armour, Peter, ‘‘Dante’s Brunetto: The Paternal Paterine?’’ Italian Studies, 38 (1983), 1–38. Armour, Peter, ‘‘The Love of Two Florentines: Brunetto Latini and Bondie Dietaiuti,’’ Lectura Dantis, 9 (1991), 11–33. Ceva, Bianca, Brunetto Latini, l’uomo e l’opera, Milan: Ricciardi, 1965. Ciccuto, Marcello, ‘‘Introduction,’’ to Il Tesoretto, Milan: Rizzoli, 1985. Davis, Charles Till, ‘‘Brunetto Latini and Dante,’’ Studi Medievali, 8 (1967), 421–450. Holloway, Julia Bolton, Brunetto Latini: An Analytic Bibliography, London: Grant & Cutler, 1986. Holloway, Julia Bolton, Twice-Told Tales: Brunetto Latini and Dante Alighieri, New York: Peter Lang, 1993.

Kay, Richard, Dante’s Swift and Strong: Essays on Inferno XV, Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1978. Maggini, Franceso, La Rettorica italiana di Brunetto Latini, Florence: Istituto di studi superiori pratici e di perfezionamento—Sezione di filosofia e filologia, 1912. Mazzoni, Francesco, ‘‘Brunetto Latini,’’ in Enciclopedia dantesca, vol. 3, Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1971. Najemi, John M., ‘‘Brunetto Latini’s ‘Politica,’’’ Dante Studies, 112 (1994), 33–51. Segre, Cesare, Lingua, stile e societa`; studi sulla storia della prosa Italiana, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1963. Sundby, Thor S., Della vita e delle opere di Brunetto Latini, translated by Rodolfo Renier, Florence: Le Monnier, 1884.

FRANCO LATTES See Franco Fortini

GAVINO LEDDA (1938–) Sardinian writer Gavino Ledda is a representative figure of Italian literature of the 1970s. Following the narrative path initiated by Giuseppe Dessı`, and Salvatore Satta, also from Sardinia, Ledda became an overnight success in 1975 when he published his autobiographical novel Padre Padrone (The Education of a Shepherd, 1975). Mixing chronicle with a spontaneous autobiographical narrative, Ledda recounted the first 18 years of his life and how he evolved from an illiterate shepherd to a professor of Romance philology. When he was 6 years old, his father forced him to leave the school in their village Siligo, near Sassari, after only two months, because he was needed to look after the flock in Baddhevru`stana. Subsequently, Ledda spent his youth in a peculiar world inhabited by few people, all shepherds: his friend Nicolau, Thiu (which means ‘‘uncle’’ in the Sardinian dialect) Pulinari, Thiu Ziromine,

and Thiu Costantinu. Other characters are Thiu Giommaria Ledda, Thiu Jombattista, and Don Peppe. Important to Ledda’s childhood and adolescence were his faithful dog Rusigabedra and Thiu Juanne, who has an almost magical role as ‘‘a storyteller’’ who relates tales about family ancestors. Finally there is Gavino’s own family, his mother and siblings, Filippo and Vittoria (called ‘‘the teacher,’’ since she was the only one to have been to school) who from 1949 onward kept him company as he tended the sheepfold. But the central figure in Ledda’s young life was his father, a daunting figure embodying the force of tradition and his own character. He imposed his will on the family, especially his elder son, purely to show his authority, not his affection. He claimed the right to treat his son in such a manner in order to fulfil his duty as a father. And it is here that the two clashed. Despite his docility as a young 1005

GAVINO LEDDA child, Gavino became rebellious once he reached adolescence, mainly because he wanted to study. His father never managed to subdue this passion, and Gavino decided to join the army in order to get an education. Motivated by newly found values of freedom, awareness, and human dignity, Ledda eventually freed himself from his father’s oppression. He never denigrated, however, the role of his father. In an interview released years after the publication of the book, Ledda made it clear that he would not have been able to complete his cultural and emotional maturation if he had not been able to forgive his father. Padre Padrone brought attention to the Sardinian dialect, which is fully independent of Italian. It is the most conservative among the neoLatin languages. This conservatism is reflected in the society as a whole, as Ledda showed in the difficult relationship between father and son, but also in his description of the archaic and patriarchal society in which he grew up and which still persists. In this deeply conservative society, life is closely related to work, and work primarily means the farm chores undertaken by an entire family for their entire life, from early childhood to death. The relationships within the family are marked by an age-old hierarchy: The man commands the woman; the father his children; the old are often given an almost mystical role, as if they were priests appointed to preserve tradition from the subversions of modernity. As Vincenzo Commerci noted, Padre Padrone expresses indeed ‘‘the refusal of a chronically irremovable culture’’ (Gavino Ledda, l’irruzione della prassi nell’arte, 1986). The struggle against poverty and ignorance and the commitment to preserve Sardinian culture remain the focus of Ledda’s subsequent fiction and essays. In Sos Attentura`dos (Their Elopement, 1977), for example, Ledda recounted the love story of Gı`oiosi, who is rich, and Elena, who is poor. Their love is strongly opposed by his parents, who would never consent to their son’s marriage to a poor girl. The two then decide to organize an attentura (an elopement), which would present their families with an accomplished fact. Then followed, among others, Le canne amiche del mare (Reeds, Friends of the Sea, 1978) and a collection of short stories entitled I cimenti dell’agnello (The Lamb’s Trials, 1995). In 1991, Ledda published Aurum tellus, which responded to Karl Popper’s views on language (‘‘Language Is a Jail’’). Here he interpreted language not as a cage but as a freedom (including dead and living languages, 1006

dialects, signs, and images) to reach what he called ‘‘truth.’’ As a philologist at the University of Sassari, Ledda spent many years working on the creation of a language for narration ad andatura di natura (with the rhythm of nature). In the same way, in Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s cinematic adaptation of Padre Padrone (1977), utopia assumes a concrete dimension as the Sardinian shepherd reaches the almost unattainable goal of surviving the tyrannical tribal strictures imposed upon him since birth and succeeds in returning to his island, where he lives ad andatura di natura. The film interweaves fact and fiction in its presence of the real Gavino Ledda in the closing scene.

Biography Gavino Ledda was born in Siligo (Sassari) on 30 December 1938. In 1958, he enrolled as a volunteer in the Italian army, becoming a sergeant and a radio technician in Rome. In April 1962 he left the army. Having passed the examinations for a high school diploma in Ozieri (Sardinia), he enrolled in Rome University in 1964 and was awarded a degree in Italian literature in December 1969. He published Padre Padrone, which was awarded the Viareggio Prize, 1975. He directed the film Ybris (for TV) and won the New Cinema Prize at the Venice Film Festival, 1984. Ledda is a professor of romance philology at the University of Sassari. He is married and lives in Siligo. MARIANO D’AMORA Selected Works Fiction Padre padrone: L’educazione di un pastore, 1975, translated by George Salmanazar, 1998. Lingua di falce, 1977. Sos Attentura`dos, 1977. Le canne amiche del mare, 1978. I cimenti dell’agnello, 1995; enlarged edition, 2000. Padre Padrone, e, Recanto, 1998.

Other Aurum Tellus, 1991.

Further Reading Argentieri, Mino, ‘‘Una tragedia ottimista,’’ in Paolo e Vittorio Taviani, Padre Padrone, Bologna: Cappelli, 1977. Brigaglia, Manlio, Gavino Ledda dopo ‘‘Padre Padrone’’: il libro, il film, la Sardegna, Cagliari: Edizioni della Torre, 1978.

LEONARDO DA VINCI Commerci, Vincenzo, Gavino Ledda, l’irruzione della prassi nell’arte, Catanzaro: Rubettino Editore, 1986. Guglielminetti, Marziano, Il romanzo del novecento italiano, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1986. Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo, Profili critici del novecento, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1998.

Reina, Luigi, Scenario novecento, Naples: Editrice Ferraro, 1993. Tani, Stefano, Il romanzo di ritorno: Dal romanzo medio degli anni Sessanta alla giovane narrativa degli anni Ottanta. Milan: Mursia, 1990.

LEONARDO DA VINCI (1452–1519) Celebrated as the epitome of the Renaissance man, Leonardo da Vinci was a painter, scholar, anatomist, sculptor, architect, engineer, inventor, musician, and writer—a man whose genius covered the span of human knowledge in his time. His innovations in painting deeply influenced the development of Italian art, and masterpieces like the mural Ultima cena (The Last Supper, 1495–1497) in the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, the two versions of the Vergine delle rocce (The Virgin of the Rocks, 1483–1485/1506–1508), and the amazing portrait of Mona Lisa (La Gioconda, 1500–1510/after 1513) are now celebrated around the world. Moreover, Leonardo’s scientific intuition led him to anticipate many of the achievements of modern science, and his writings reveal extensive scientific research in addition to his exploration of the arts. Although he defined himself as a homo sanza littere (a man without literary education), Leonardo could write, count, and read the vernacular as well as the Latin of Mass from an early age. In his thirties he decided to improve his scientific knowledge while he also studied Latin and grammar. In Milan he became close friends with the Franciscan mathematician Luca Pacioli (ca. 1445–1517), who was particularly interested in Euclid and introduced Leonardo to higher-level mathematics and geometry. Already acquainted with Aristotelian and Platonic philosophy, Leonardo da Vinci was mainly interested in ‘‘natural philosophy’’ (filosofia naturale). Most of his research was focused on natural phenomena, and he tested his countless discoveries through mathematical and geometrical calculations. Hence, he rightfully declared that, ‘‘non mi legga chi non e` matematico’’ (whoever is not a mathematician must not read me).

In the context of his far-reaching and innovative research, it may appear paradoxical that Leonardo did not occupy a prominent role in the field of science and philosophy up until the early twentieth century. Still, this can be explained by the fact that his writings were not systematic to begin with, and many of his manuscripts, bequeathed to Francesco Melzi in Leonardo’s will (1519), were dismembered, dispersed, and partly lost. Leonardo experimented with and developed certain ideas over lengthy periods of time and used to take notes about the same subject in different notebooks and albums, some of which were unknown until recent years. It is extremely difficult to organize his notes chronologically. A passage on a particular topic can be repeated many times with slight changes and even contradictions in different manuscripts or in side notes, often added at different times. Citations from other authors and a record of contemporary events, professional notes, private accounts, and memoranda appear side by side in Leonardo’s notebooks. His writings were never thoroughly organized, but very often his notes on a particular subject appeared as if the author kept an underlying coherent structure in mind while recording his observations. Leonardo tended to synthesize his notes as much as possible, and his writing is often incomplete. Even though at certain points the text appears to be addressing a possible outside reader, Leonardo was obviously writing mainly for himself. In his notebooks and on individual sheets of paper the treatment of a topic was generally developed in just a few lines and rarely exceeded a page in length. The style was sharp and apodictic. The author offered only synthetic definitions because the proof and explanation to his claims was meant to be based on mathematical and scientific 1007

LEONARDO DA VINCI grounds. It appears that Leonardo was more successful in illustrating his ideas through images, as drawing was a dominant means of communication for him. The loss and damage of texts, interpolations of different texts, and Leonardo’s characteristic mirror-image writing (from right to left) have caused enormous trouble for scholars trying to read his works. For this reason it is impossible to offer a comprehensive survey of his writings. Still, one can refer to studies on Leonardo written in the period from the late nineteenth century to the present day, some of which transcribe selected original texts. Moreover, the recent major editions of his manuscripts can be particularly helpful in this endeavor. Leonardo’s ‘‘literary’’ works (that is, fragments not related to painting, anatomy, and mechanics) have been classified by Augusto Marinoni (1952; 1974) according to their content. The Pensieri (Thoughts) are mostly about general science and moral life. The Favole (Tales), on the other hand, are short texts in which the protagonists are animals. In addition, the Indovinelli (Riddles) are what Leonardo himself called Profezie (Prophecies). Then follow his Facezie (Jokes), personal letters, narrative passages, and Proemi (Poems) to works he never wrote. The latter reveal various projects of a literary nature. Although none of his literary attempts are complete, and some remain at the stage of an outline, it is evident that Leonardo da Vinci was versed in all of the literary forms of contemporary scientific writing, including the treatise, the discorso, the dialogue, and the epistle. His works were first cited by Luca Pacioli in 1498. In the dedication of his treatise De divina proportione (Of Divine Proportion, 1509), Pacioli claimed that Leonardo already finished the Libro de pictura et movimenti umani (Book about Painting and Human Movement) and was completing another inextimabile (inestimable) one del moto locale (on local motion). Then, around 1504, Leonardo himself created a list of the books he owned (in Madrid II), many of which he noted down by author and title. Fifty of them, however, were classified only by size and are most probably his own works. Among them, two books remain an exception as they have a specific designation as Libro di mia vocaboli (Book of My Words) and a book on horses schizzati pel cartone [della Battaglia di Anghiari] (sketched for the cartoon [of the Battle of Anghiari]). 1008

In 1517, in Leonardo’s studio in Cloux, Cardinal Louis of Aragon saw the artist’s studies in anatomy, hydraulics, and engineering, written in the volgare (old Italian vernacular), and affirmed that, if they had been popularized, they would have been useful and extremely pleasant reading. The best-known written work by Leonardo is the Trattato della pittura (Treatise on Painting), first published in Paris in 1651. Yet, notwithstanding Pacioli’s claims, it seems that this work was never written by Leonardo himself in the form in which we know it today. In fact, the coherent text is a posthumous compilation by Melzi or another member of the Vincian circle, such as the anonymous painter referred to in Giorgio Vasari’s Vite (Lives, 1568), who allegedly intended to publish a series of Leonardo’s writings about painting. Although the author of the compilation cannot be identified, a careful reading of Leonardo’s heterogeneous notes on the subject allows one to identify a number of passages copied by an amanuensis in a codex acquired by the Urbino court and presently located in the Vatican library (Codex Urbinas Latinus 1270). Thus, the Trattato della pittura as we know it today is a literal but incomplete compilation of 18 Leonardesque fragments, seven of which were listed in the codex. It is plausible that Leonardo intended the treatise to consist of three different sections, a theoretical, a practical, and a didactic one. The first section would include a definition of painting as an art and a science as well as the paragone (comparison) with the other arts, meant to demonstrate its preeminence over sculpture, poetry, and music. A discussion about linear, aerial, and chromatic perspective; an analysis of light and shadow; and a theory of colors were also likely components of the first part of the Trattato. The second section would have discussed drawing and color in the larger context of painting in addition to the study of the human figure from an anatomical point of view, including a subsection on man’s physical and psychological motions. An examination of the other natural elements would also be presented in this second part. Thus, the structure of the Earth and its components, namely the atmosphere, air, wind, water, rivers, lakes, sea, fog, and clouds, as well as the universe as a whole and the forces that act in it would have been introduced after the examination of the human figure. This subsection would, then, have been followed by comments about the composition of

LEONARDO DA VINCI one or more figures in relationship with the natural elements. Finally, the last section could have offered a number of precetti (suggestions) for the reader. Yet, it is not clear whether they were to be placed in the beginning, scattered throughout the text, or used as a conclusion. The chronology of the various parts of the Trattato della pittura is uncertain as well. The book Pacioli cited as completed in 1498 must have included notes from about 1490. More fragments were added to it in the following years until 1515, when Leonardo most probably decided to discuss anatomy separately. Similarly, while the paragone is accepted as having been written in the beginning of Leonardo’s Milanese stay, a number of other elements were developed or modified later. On the whole, Leonardo’s project seem to have been conceived as a sort of encyclopedic work related to the art of painting and the rivalry between writers and painters. In his notes he argued against the classification of the fine arts as a part of the lower artes mechanicae (mechanical arts) and sought to provide a truly scientific grounding for them. According to Leonardo, a painter has to apply his knowledge of mathematics, optics, and anatomy, among other fields, in the delineation of various figures and their environment. Hence, painting is filosofia (philosophy), that is, a science and a ‘‘liberal’ art like poetry and music. Yet, painting is superior to these arts as it also offers the best representation of the different aspects of nature, which Leonardo also considered to be the main purpose of figurative art. Finally, the author opposed new science and traditional conceptions of scientific knowledge. Thus, enough is known about Leonardo’s Trattato for it to be considered an important key for a better understanding of the master. Clearly, the study of Leonardo da Vinci’s works would remain incomplete if due attention were not paid to his writings as well as his art. Leonardo was particularly influential in the Italian literary and esthetic culture of the early twentieth century. His works had an impact on the Symbolist movement, beginning with Angelo Conti’s studies, and thus played a role in the formation of Gabriele D’Annunzio’s concept of beauty. Moreover, from 1903 to 1907 Giovanni Papini and Giuseppe Prezzolini published an important literary magazine called Leonardo whose focus was the prominence of intellectual energy.

Biography Leonardo was born on April 15, 1452, in Vinci (Florence). The illegitimate son of a lawyer, Piero, and a peasant woman, he was brought up by his father in Florence. In 1469, he was admitted to the workshop of Verrocchio, and from 1475 on he developed an independent activity as painter and sculptor. Some of his early works are the Annunciazione (1475–1478), the portrait of Ginevra Benci (1475–1478), and the unfinished Adorazione dei Magi. Between 1478 and 1482, he wrote a number of literary works and produced his first technological designs. From then on, he recorded his studies in science and engineering in notebooks, comprising some 13,000 pages of notes and drawings, which he never published nor otherwise distributed. In about 1482, Leonardo worked as a painter, sculptor, engineer, and architect for Ludovico Sforza, duke of Milan. In Milan he painted the Virgine delle rocce and also created the model for an equestrian monument to Francesco Sforza (1483–1493). On a brief trip back to Florence in 1495, he worked on the new Grand Council Room of the Palazzo Vecchio. Then, from 1495 to 1497, his main project was the mural Ultima cena in the Sala delle Asse in the Castello Sforzesco (1498). In Milan he set up an ideal Vincian Academy (1490–1498), for whose students he probably created his original notes and sketches about painting, later collected in the famous Trattato della pittura and serving as illustrations to the De divina proportione by Luca Pacioli (1498). In 1500, he returned to Florence and stopped in Mantua and Venice on the way. Then, Leonardo became Cesare Borgia’s military architect in Romagna (1502–1503). In Florence, he worked in the service of the Republic, developing projects for the canalization of the Arno River and the decoration of the Grand Council Room in the Palazzo Vecchio. He was also sent on a mission to Piombino as a military architect. Between 1506 and 1508, he moved continuously between Florence and Milan, while working for the French governor of Milan as an architect and painter. In the period of 1500–1510 he painted La Battaglia di Anghiari (1503–1504), a second Virgine delle rocce, and perhaps the Mona Lisa. While in Milan, he drafted a plan for the canalization of the Adda River (1510–1515). He was a guest of the Melzi family in Vaprio d’Adda shortly before going to Florence on his way to Rome, where he moved on September 25, 1513. Up until 1516, Leonardo worked in the service consecutively of

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LEONARDO DA VINCI Giuliano de’ Medici, the pope’s brother, and Lorenzo de’ Medici, the pope’s nephew. He made trips to Parma (1514), Florence (1515), and Milan (1515). When Francis I of France regained control of Milan, Leonardo was commissioned to create a mechanical lion that was shipped from Florence to Lyon in 1515. In 1517, still the service of Francis I, he moved to France, to the manor house Cloux (Clos Luce´) next to the Royal Castle at Amboise, where he died on May 2, 1519. MARIA AGNESE CHIARI MORETTO WIEL Selected Works Libro de pictura et movimenti umani, ca. 1509. Libro di mia vocaboli, ca. 1509. Trattato della pittura, 1651; edited by Ettore Camesasca, 2000. Codex Atlanticus, Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana; as Leonardo da Vinci, Il codice atlantico della Biblioteca Ambrosiana a Milano, edited by Augusto Marinoni, 24 vols., 1974–1980. Codex Leicester, Seattle, Bill Gates Collection; as The Codex Hammer (i.e., the Codex Leicester), edited by Carlo Pedretti, 1987. Codices Madrid I and II, Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional; as The Manuscripts of Leonardo da Vinci at the Biblioteca Nacional of Madrid, edited by Ladislao Reti, 5 vols., 1974. Codex Arundel, London, British Museum; as I manoscritti e i disegni di Leonardo da Vinci. Il codice Arundel 263, 4 vols., 1923–1930. Codex Forster, London, Victoria and Albert Museum; as Leonardo da Vinci, il Codice Forster del Victoria and Albert Museum di Londra, edited by Augusto Marinoni, 3 vols., 1992. Mss. A–I, Paris, Institut de France; as Leonardo da Vinci, I manoscritti dell’Institut de France, edited by Augusto Marinoni, 12 vols., 1986–1990. Windsor, Royal Library; Leonardo da Vinci. Corpus of the Anatomical Studies in the Collection of her Majesty the Queen at Windsor Castle, edited by Kenneth D. Keele and Carlo Pedretti, 3 vols., 1978–1980. Windsor, Royal Library; Carlo Pedretti, The Drawings and Miscellaneous Papers of Leonardo da Vinci at Windsor

Castle, vol. 1, Landscape, Plants and Water Studies; vol. 2, Horses and Other Animals, 1982–1987. Trattato della pittura, 1651; Libro di pittura, edited by Carlo Pedretti and Carlo Vecce, 2 vols., 1995; as Treatise on Painting (Codex Urbinas Latinus 1270), translated and annotated by Philip A. McMahon, 2 vols., 1956; as Treatise on Painting, translated by John Francis Rigaud, 2002. Prophecies and Other Literary Writings, translated by J. G. Nichols, London: Hesperus, 2002.

Further Reading Clark, Kenneth, Leonardo da Vinci, Baltimore: Penguin, 1973. Ferrero, Leo, Leonardo o dell’arte, prefazione di Paul Vale´ry, Turin: Buratti, 1929. Kemp, Martin, Leonardo, New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Kemp, Martin, Leonardo on Painting: An Anthology of Writings by Leonardo da Vinci with a Selection of Documents Relating to His Career as an Artist, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989. Koestler-Grack, Rachel A., Leonardo da Vinci: Artist, Inventor and Renaissance Man, Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2005. Marinoni, Augusto, Leonardo da Vinci. Scritti letterari, Milan: Rizzoli 1974; reprinted, 1987. Nicholl, Charles, Leonardo da Vinci. Flights of the Mind: A Biography, New York: Viking Penguin, 2004. Pacioli, Luca, De divina proportione, Venice: Paganino da Paganini, 1509. Parr, Adrian, Exploring the Work of Leonardo da Vinci within the Context of Contemporary Philosophical Thought and Art: From Bergson to Deleuze, New York: Mellen Press, 2004. Pedretti, Carlo, The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci. A Commentary to Jean Paul Richter’s Edition, London: Phaidon, 1977. Richter, Jean Paul, The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci, 2nd edition, London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1939 (first published 1883). Ricorda, Ricciarda (editor), Leonardo pittore-Angelo Conti, Padua: Editoriale Programma, 1990. Scarpati, Claudio, Leonardo scrittore, Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 2001. Zo¨llner, Frank, Leonardo da Vinci, 1452–1519. The Complete Paintings and Drawings, Cologne and London: Taschen, 2003.

LEONE EBREO (CA. 1460/65–after 1521) The physician, philosopher, and poet Jehudah Abrabanel, known as Leone Ebreo, is the author of Dialoghi d’amore (Dialogues on Love, 1535), 1010

the most important treatise on love after Marsilio Ficino’s seminal De amore (On Love, 1484) and one of the most influential philosophical works

LEONE EBREO of the Italian Renaissance. Ficino’s original interpretation of Plato’s Symposium initiated a literary and philosophical genre commonly called trattati d’amore (treatises on love), which became extremely popular in sixteenth-century Italy, primarily in the northern and central regions of the peninsula. Leone Ebreo’s book is a compelling and unique example of this genre. Dialoghi d’amore soon acquired an indisputable authority and was frequently cited in many other trattati d’amore, even though the complexity of its philosophical message, based on a fascinating amalgam of Neoplatonic philosophy, Jewish mysticism, and Christian theology, was poorly understood during the Renaissance. Rather than discussing its multifaceted view of love, many authors of trattati d’amore used the Dialoghi d’amore as a trove of poetic, and general, references to the love experience. In the prologue of Don Quixote, Cervantes wrote that the Dialoghi d’amore is one of the two fundamental treatises on love, the other being Cristo´bal de Fonseca’s Tratato del amor de Dios, a religious analysis of love that echoes Ficino and Leone Hebreo’s thought. Dialoghi d’amore still awaits a comprehensive analysis. Leone Ebreo’s oeuvre is composed of two works, the Dialoghi d’amore and five poems in Hebrew. Particularly famous are an elegiac poem on Fate and Telunah ‘al ha-zeman (A Complaint Against Time), probably composed around 1503–1504. In the former, Leone Ebreo sketched an autobiography as a progressive disclosure of divine will. It details the vicissitudes of the philosopher and his family from Portugal to Italy and dwells on his love for his son Isaac, whom fate took away from his father. This elegy could be read as a penitential psalm, but in its second part it turns into a poetic dialogue with his son, whom the philosopher invited to pursue a life of religious piety in accordance with the Jewish law. Destiny is portrayed as an overwhelming force springing from God’s unfathomable love. Leone Ebreo is primarily remembered for his Dialoghi d’amore, whose composition occupied him for a long period of time, probably from his first stay in Naples in 1492, where he became acquainted with Ficino’s work and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, who thought very highly of him. A thorny critical debate concerns the original language of the Dialoghi d’amore, although it is a fact that this essential text of the Renaissance was first known through its Italian edition published in Rome by Antonio Blado d’Assola, 1535, on which all subsequent European translations were based (first French translation in 1551; first Spanish printed translation in 1584, although

Garcilaso Inga de la Vega’s prestigious and enduring version came out in 1590). The Dialoghi d’amore is a conversation between Filone (Lover), who expresses the author’s opinions, and Sofia (Wisdom), a lady who questions her male interlocutor on the nature and meaning of love. The treatise is divided into three books, which thematically and structurally are not equally balanced. The first two books have a similar three-part construction. The first book tackles the distinction between love and desire; the nature of divine love, which corresponds to the highest buono (good); and finally human love, with special focus on the relationship between passions and reason. Unlike most trattati d’amore, Leone Ebreo’s treatise does not despise physical love but rather offers a moving defense of marriage as a reflection of divine love. At the end of book one, Filone contends that ‘‘negli uomini si truovano due sorti di ragioni: l’una chiamata ordenaria e l’altra estraordinaria. L’intento de la prima e` reggere e conservare l’uomo in vita onesta . . .Ma de la ragione estraordinaria l’intento suo e` conseguire la cosa amata’’ (every human being has two sorts of reasons: one is called ordinary and the other [is called] extraordinary. The goal of the first one is to keep and preserve a human being’s honest life . . . But the goal of the extraordinary reason is to attain the object of his love; Dialoghi d’amore, edited by Santino Caramella, 57). The beloved, Filone added, is nobler than the lover, because the beloved is the lover’s goal, and ‘‘il fine e` piu` nobile che quello che e` per il fine’’ (the goal is nobler than the lover for whom he [the beloved] is the goal). The second book analyzes the presence of love in the three areas of the cosmos, the ‘‘inferior’’ world; the celestial world, which is examined through a fascinating and complex examination of Greek mythology, also in its connections with astrology; and the angelic world. The third and last book has two sections. The first is dedicated to the theory of ‘‘spirit,’’ which means both soul and intellect, whereas the second section deals with five possible origins of love and takes up almost half of the entire treatise. In this long chapter, Aristotelian and Platonic philosophy converse with Jewish theology and Greek mythology. For instance, in his discussion of the possible origins of love, the author first examined the myth of the androgynous expressed by Aristophanes in the Symposium and then the biblical narration of the birth of Adam and Eve. This was the core of Leone Ebreo’s vision of love. For Leone Ebreo, the universal essence of love was a desire directed at something. 1011

LEONE EBREO The author defined the word bello (beautiful) as buono con bellezza (good with beauty). Beauty is a form of grace that, by pleasing the soul, compels the subject to love. In one of the most inspired pages of his book, Leone Ebreo held that, when he created the universe in the likeness of his perfect beauty, God felt love for his creation. Unlike most authors of trattati d’amore, Leone Ebreo contended that the goal of love is not the lover’s pursuit for a beauty that he, the lover, does not have. The universal goal of love is in fact the perfection of the beloved.

Biography Leone Ebreo was born in Lisbon between 1460 and 1465, son of Isaac Abrabanel, a descendant of one of the noblest Jewish families who played an influential role in Portuguese society. He studied the Kabala, Talmudic literature, and ancient and medieval philosophy and at the age of 20 became a well-respected physician. In 1483 first Isaac and then his family took refuge in Seville, where Leone Ebreo worked as physician for eight years. Still in Seville, in 1491 he married and had a child. In 1492, the Jews were expelled from Spain. Leone Ebreo sent his baby to an aunt in Portugal, and the rest of the family immigrated to Naples. In Naples, Leone Ebreo may have become acquainted with Christian neo-Platonic thought, above all Ficino and Pico della Mirandola. In 1495, he was forced to move to Genoa, where he probably began working on the Dialoghi d’amore. In 1501, he returned to Naples with a second child, who died at the age of five in 1504. Because of the changed political situation, he was compelled to move again, this time to Venice. In 1521, he returned to Naples where he regained great respect as physician. The

last biographical information regards an infamous decision of the Neapolitan authorities, which ordered that the Jews wear a yellow beret as they were forced to do in Venice. Leone Ebreo was part of the Jewish delegation that successfully voiced their protest to the Viceroy of Naples. He probably died a few years before the publication of Dialoghi d’amore in 1535. ARMANDO MAGGI Selected Works Dialogi d’amore di maestro Leone medico hebreo, edited by Mariano Lenzi, Rome: Blado d’Assola, 1535. Dialoghi di amore composti per Leone Medico Hebreo, Venice: Manuzio, 1541 (this edition contains several arbitrary interventions and was the basis of three additional editions in 1545, 1549, and 1552). Dialoghi d’amore, critical edition by Santino Caramella, 1929; as Leo Hebraeus, The Philosophy of Love, translated by F. Friedeberg-Seeley and Jean H. Barnes, 1937.

Further Reading Ariani, Marco, Imago fabulosa: mito e allegoria nei ‘‘Dialoghi d’amore’’ di Leone Ebreo, Rome: Bulzoni, 1984. Damiens, Suzanne, Amour et intellect chez Le´on l’He´breu, Toulouse: Privat, 1971. Garin, Eugenio, Storia della filosofia italiana, vol. 2, Turin: Einaudi, 1966. Perry, T. Anthony, ‘‘Dialogue and Doctrine in Leone Ebreo’s Dialoghi d’amore,’’ PMLA, 88(1973), 1173– 1179. Pflaum, Heinz, Die Idee der Liebe. Leone Ebreo, Tu¨bingen: Mohr, 1926. Saitta, Giuseppe, Filosofia italiana e umanesimo, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1928. Soria Olmedo, Andre´s, Los Dialoghi d’amore de Leo´n Hebreo, Granada: Universidad de Granada, 1984.

SERGIO LEONE (1929–1989) In the 1960s Europe witnessed a flourishing of cinematic modernism, a brand of filmmaking that revolutionized film narrative and challenged Hollywood’s hegemony. Italian directors tried to counterfeit American production by investigating 1012

further the notion of realism as well as by developing strong and idiosyncratic authorial voices, as seen in the work of filmmakers such as Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. Theirs were the most convincing voices

SERGIO LEONE of a cinema that cannot be described according to genre conventions and is in constant pursuit of the transgression of specific generic codes; it developed suddenly, became intensely exploited, and was swiftly exhausted. Most often it targeted a limited audience and was consequently fairly precarious. At the time, Sergio Leone became the leading director of a fairly popular interpretation of Italian cinema that produced comedies, horror films, peplum epics (costume dramas), and Westerns. Both comedy ‘‘Italian style’’ and Sergio Leone’s Westerns were successful with broad audiences and had a long-lasting and beneficial effect on Italian and world cinema. Sergio Leone came to life in the world of cinema, as the son of Roberto Roberti (Vincenzo Leone), one of the most acclaimed Italian metteurs en sce`ne of the silent era, and Bice Valerian (Edvige Valcarenghi), a well-known actress. Curiously enough, in 1913 Leone’s father directed the first Italian Western, La vampire indienne (The Indian Vampire), and his mother was cast as the female lead. Moreover, Leone came to life at a time when world cinema was being revolutionized by the advent of sound, and the Italian intelligentsia was riveted by vibrating discussions on the nature of the new medium. This was a telling detail in the life and work of a filmmaker who would revolutionize one of the most established film genres, the Western; who would contribute to cinematic Modernism; and who would also anticipate the boom of cinematic Postmodernism. Sergio Leone experienced a long apprenticeship, one which consisted of over 50 collaborations in directing, such as Vittorio De Sica’s neo-Realist masterpiece Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thief, 1948)—in which he also starred as an extra as one of the German seminarians who walked by Porta Portese during a rainstorm. Other films by Alessandro Blasetti, Carmine Gallone, Mario Camerini, and Mario Soldati, as well as by American directors William Wyler, Raoul Walsh, and Fred Zinnemann during the so-called Hollywoodon-the-Tiber years at Cinecitta` studios, are included as well. Many directors influenced his work— among others, Akira Kurosawa, Charlie Chaplin, Fritz Lang, and John Ford—as Leone constructed an extremely coherent and essential opus of merely eight films—including the uncredited Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei (The Last Days of Pompei, 1959)—and of numerous commercials produced between 1976 and 1983. In a small and yet extremely interesting body of works, Leone identified his route in filmmaking by visiting a single narrative

form, the epic, and constructing a sort of shared artistic realm where images and feelings of our past, present, and future merged and created narratives that forever defeated death and conquered the time and space of eternity, as noted by Marcello Garofalo in his Tutto il cinema di Sergio Leone (1999). Unquestionably, from his first film to his last and unrealized project, to be titled Leningrado, Sergio Leone revisited the epic genre at times disguised as a peplum, as a Western, or as a thriller. What possibility intrigued Leone was the fact that epic was the genre that most effectively dealt with time, and time was after all the very essence of the medium. Leone’s work was thus an endless reflection on cinema itself and its own language, and this is why the past time and the far-off place that are eventually ‘‘revisited’’ assume the substance and the form of the myth, since our own postmodern time is only made of an eternal present. Such a personal conception of time, grounded on the notion of dilation, when he cuts back and forth in action, came to characterize Leone’s idiosyncratic style, and this served as the guiding principle in the construction of his unforgettable and breathtaking images accompanied by Ennio Morricone’s memorable musical scores (often composed before the shooting), and integral parts of the films’ inner texture. Leone’s first directorial experience was a ‘‘peplum,’’ Il colosso di Rodi (The Colossus of Rhodes, 1960). The film was largely indebted to Hollywood historical epics and particularly to Mervyn Le Roy’s Quo vadis? (1951) and Cecile B. De Mille’s The Ten Commandments (1956), notwithstanding a far more ingenuous approach to the subject matter. Yet, the mythological narrative proved an unsuitable genre for him to perfect his own personal style. Soon after, while Italian directors were primarily concerned with a renegotiation of cinematic realism, Sergio Leone chose instead to make Westerns (or ‘‘spaghetti Westerns,’’ as they are often nicknamed), all set in America and often shot in English. Leone displayed a preference for the past and a total lack of interest in the historical present; with his aggressive style of montage, highly influenced by the Russian school and Sergei Eisenstein, he developed a most evidently modernist cinema based on duration. Leone’s revolutionary notion of time became the trademark of all his major films, even though his cinema exploited other traditions generally founded on a swift tempo: Per un pugno di dollari (A Fistful of Dollars, 1964), Per qualche dollaro in piu` (A Few Dollars 1013

SERGIO LEONE More, 1965), Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo (The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, 1966), C’era una volta il West (Once Upon a Time in the West, 1968), and C’era una volta in America (Once Upon a Time in America, 1984). Indeed, when swift and fast action occurred in Leone’s films, it was only a provocation, excessive, unreal, and contrary to conventional narrative logic. Thus, the appearance of the Man with No Name at the incipit of Per un pugno di dollari—a film he signed as ‘‘Bob Robertson’’ meaning ‘‘the son of Roberto Roberti’’—not only signalled a revolutionary step in the transformation of the Western but also marked the beginning of an important stage in the development of world cinema, one that we normally refer to as ‘‘postmodern.’’ Per un pugno di dollari was the first of the ‘‘spaghetti Western’’ cycle. Inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961), it featured the Man with No Name (played by Clint Eastwood) as a gun for hire who played off two rival gangs, the Baxters and the Rojos, in a corrupt Mexican border town, where the only booming economy was the undertaking business. With great irony and numerous jokes, highly dramatic close-ups, a wealth of Christian imagery (including Eastwood’s death and resurrection), and a caustic sense of death and landscape, Per un pugno di dollari provided the stencil for Leone’s subsequent works and for copycat Westerns, which established the Clint Eastwood persona and revitalized the genre. Within two years, the film had grossed over two billion lire in Italy alone and had sold surprisingly well in the United States. The success of Per un pugno di dollari was spell-binding. Leone, who had faked that the film was a Hollywood production and had dared to cast the relatively unknown Eastwood in the main role, went on to surpass in profits John Sturges’s famous western The Magnificent Seven, enlisting the most celebrated studio stars. Leone’s (anti)hero has nothing of the noble generosity of the classical cowboy. A cynical killer, he remains a mysteriously ambiguous figure who performs for money and whose double moral standards more closely remind us of George Stevens’s Shane (1953). Following Per un pugno di dollari came Per qualche dollaro in piu`, a more parodic and better scored, edited, and acted film in which the unforgettable Gian Maria Volonte´ played the villain. The story unfolds around a psychotic killer/bandit named Indio (Klaus Kinski appeared as a hunchback) and a bounty hunter (Eastwood) who teams up with an ex-rebel officer and avenging angel 1014

(played by Lee van Cleef) in order to frame Indio. Images of violence become commonplace in Leone’s next film, Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo, now available in a newly restored version that extends the classic English edition by nearly 20 minutes. Propelled by Ennio Morricone’s unforgettable whistle musical score, the film opened with three prologues, and thus soon constructed its three mythical parts: the Good (Clint Eastwood), who is a con man with no name; the Bad (Lee van Cleef ), who is a coldblooded bounty hunter ironically named Angel Eyes; and the Ugly (Eli Wallach), who is Tuco, a Mexican bandit with a killer grin and a lust for life and death. Against the backdrop of the American Civil War, the three fight each other for loot of gold buried in a graveyard. Here one can find a thematic structure and a stylistic construction that made the film quite similar to the previous two works. In like manner, Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo is characterized by a cult of individualism and friendship and by the rivalry among men as a cement of their own existence as well as by a vague form of romanticism. In Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo, Leone became famous for editing extreme wide-angle shots together with extreme close-ups and for his creative use of deep focus and mobile camera work. Sergio Leone’s next revisitation of the mythical American West came with C’era una volta il West, a film of epical proportions, one of the director’s best. The script, coauthored by Dario Argento and Bernardo Bertolucci, combined the tale of the obsessed Harmonica (Charles Bronson), with a biting and bitter critique of capitalism, embodied by a fight over water rights. Leone cast Henry Fonda against type as the contemptible, cold-eyed killer Frank and voluptuous Claudia Cardinale as Jill McBain, who embodies the moral center and Mediterranean earth mother in an otherwise violently male and amoral Western universe. C’era una volta il West, shot in Techniscope, relies once again on the instrumental music score by Ennio Morricone (partly inspired by John Cage) and a monumental sense of the American landscape, flawlessly recreated in Spain. Leone’s next film, Giu` la testa (Duck, You Sucker, 1971), set in Mexico in 1913–1914, is a transitional work but certainly one filled with unprecedented political implications (the disenchantment of the 1960s): Violence bestows more violence, and rebellion triggers assassinations and endless deaths. Leone’s brief and yet enticing filmography closes with yet another masterpiece, C’era una volta in America. Released in 1984, the

LEONE EBREO film is a hallucinatory epic that encompasses half a century of American history. The director’s cut was originally 219 minutes but was edited down to 135 minutes and noticeably simplified in its narrative structure by the American producers. A restored version is now available and displays Leone’s sophisticated time structure and complex narrative development. The film is a saga centered on a group of Jewish gangsters in New York. It opens in the 1920s and finds its pivotal moments in three time frames as it traces the relationship between the brutal and maliciously ambitious Max (Michael Woods) and his best friend Noodles (Robert De Niro) as they go from childhood pranks to the world of crime. In its operatic ambitions, the film became a stunning and intimately nostalgic swan song, for Leone’s life in the cinema as well. If the American Western had tried to create an epic image of the past in order to glorify the American way of life in the present, as Lino Micciche` reminded us, Sergio Leone’s films demystify the Western frontier, aesthetically and thematically, giving a revolutionary contribution to the development of world cinema and to the shaping of the popular forms of cultural discourse.

Biography Sergio Leone was born in Rome on 3 January 1929. The son of a film director and an actress, Leone was around the movies from an early age. His first appearance on a film set was in 1948, as an extra in Vittorio De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette. Between 1945 and 1959 he collaborated as an assistant director and occasionally as an actor in the making of nearly 50 films before making his directorial debut in 1960 with Il colosso di Rodi. In the 1970s he codirected (with Nanny Loy, Elio Petri, Luchino Visconti, and others) a documentary on the 1969 terrorist bombing in Piazza Fontana in Milan, entitled 12 dicembre o Document on Tullio Pinelli. Between 1976 and 1983, Leone directed a number of commercials, including two for Renault. He also produced numerous films directed by others.

Leone died of a heart attack in Rome on 30 April 1989. MANUELA GIERI Selected Works Films Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei (based on Bulwer Lytton’s novel), 1959; (uncredited), directed by Mario Bonnard. Il colosso di Rodi, 1960. Per un pugno di dollari (A Fistful of Dollars), 1964. Per qualche dollaro in piu` (A Few Dollars More), 1965. Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo (The Good, The Bad and the Ugly), 1966. C’era una volta il West (Once Upon a Time in the West), 1968. Giu` la testa (Duck, You Sucker), 1971. C’era una volta in America (Once Upona Time in America), 1984.

Screenplays Giu` la testa, in Franco Ferrini, ‘‘L’antiwestern e il casoLeone,’’ Bianco e Nero, nos. 9–10 (September– October, 1971). Per un pugno di dollari, edited by Luca Verdone, Bologna: Cappelli, 1979.

Further Reading Cumbow, Robert C., Once Upon a Time: The Films of Sergio Leone, Lanham, MD, and London: Scarecrow Press, 1985. De Fornari, Oreste, Sergio Leone, Florence: Moizzi, 1977. Donati, Roberto, Sergio Leone: America e nostalgia, Alessandria: Falsopiano, 2004. Frayling, Christopher, Sergio Leone: Something to Do with Death, London and New York: Faber and Faber, 2000. Frayling, Christopher, Spaghetti Westerns, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980. Garofalo, Marcello, Tutto il cinema di Sergio Leone, Milan: Baldini & Castoldi, 1999. Mininni, Francesco, Sergio Leone, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1989. Ortoli, Philippe, Sergio Leone. Une Amerique de le´gendes, ´ ditions L’Harmattan, 1994. Paris, E Pugliese, Roberto (editor), Sergio Leone, Venice: Edizioni Circuito Cinema, 1989. Staig, Laurence, and Tony Williams, Italian Western (The Opera of Violence), London: Futura Publications, 1975.

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FRANCESCO LEONETTI

FRANCESCO LEONETTI (1924–) One of the most original and versatile intellectuals of the second half of the twentieth century, Francesco Leonetti has been, from time to time, a poet, critic, narrator, founder of literary and political journals, political theoretician, director, actor, and teacher. His cultural journey represents one of the most crucial experiences of our time, and his pivotal contribution to the redefinition of the role of culture in modern Italy has been repeatedly acknowledged. After graduating in philosophy with a dissertation on Tommaso Campanella, Leonetti began to work in two different libraries, the Biblioteca Malatestiana in Cesena and the Archiginnasio in Bologna. This experience proved to be decisive for his intellectual growth, as it provided him with a vast, although at times perhaps inorganic, cultural background, which deeply affected his art and his approach to literature. His poetry, for instance, clearly shows signs of his considerable erudition (Dante, Carducci, Leopardi), along with his attempt to reconcile the Italian literary tradition with the need for a new and more updated literary language. His first major poetical work, La cantica (The Canto, 1959) is a telling example of Leonetti’s literary research, a daring effort to combine ideology and form and to redefine the role of the artist/ intellectual in modern society. To fully understand Leonetti’s impact on Italian culture, one needs to discuss his contribution to journals such as Officina and Il Menabo`. Published from 1955 to 1959, Officina represents the first factual attempt to renew the Italian literary landscape and question both the Hermetic and neo-Realist canons. Leonetti, together with Pier Paolo Pasolini, Roberto Roversi, and Franco Fortini, was deeply committed to the exploration of new languages and styles (the so-called neosperimentalismo) and, following Pasolini’s theoretical suggestions, devoted himself to the exploitation of a more colloquial and ‘‘low’’ language, where poetry and prose meet. In addition to a number of poems such as ‘‘La disperata fatica’’ (The Desperate Effort, 1956) and ‘‘La messa di mezzogiorno’’ (The Midday Mass, 1956), Leonetti contributed to the journal crucial critical essays such as ‘‘Il decadentismo come problema contemporaneo’’ (Decadentism as a Contemporary Problem, 1956) 1016

and ‘‘Proposizioni per una teoria della letteratura’’ (Propositions for a Theory of Literature, 1957), in which he addressed, respectively, the relationship with tradition and the urgency for a new theory of literature. In 1960, he began his collaboration with Elio Vittorini’s Il Menabo`. Vittorini, whom he had first met in 1956, became for him a decisive point of reference. Indeed, it was during the Menabo` years, and under Vittorini’s knowledgeable supervision, that he familiarized himself with thinkers such as Claude Le´vi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Maurice Blanchot, and Ferdinand de Saussure and with the new theoretical approaches of structuralism, semiotics, and Lacanian psychoanalysis. In this context, one should also mention the fruitless effort to create an international edition of the journal (Gulliver), the purpose of which was to establish a network with the leading European intellectuals of the period. The product of all these theoretical influences is an original and audacious blend of Marxism and structuralism through which Leonetti attempted to reconcile his ideological commitments with an alternative way of tackling the linguistic/literary experience. The writer’s restless effort produced both theoretical and practical results. Among the former, particularly significant are some of the essays published in Il Menabo`, such as ‘‘La negazione in letteratura’’ (Negotiation in Literature, 1964) and, more importantly, ‘‘L’eversione costruita’’ (The Constructed Subversion, 1965). The practical results include a series of experimental novels, Conoscenza per errore (Knowing through Mistakes, 1961), L’incompleto (The Incomplete, 1964), and Il tappeto volante (The Flying Carpet, 1967), which are among the most interesting works of his literary production. Conoscenza per errore, Leonetti’s first major narrative endeavor, tells the story of Giacomo, a young man who, after finishing high school, begins a journey through post-Fascist Italy and gains a better sense of his self and his place in the world through a series of intellectual and erotic encounters. Due to its experimental character, this work can be considered as a sort of anticipation of the poetics of the Italian neo-avant-garde and, more precisely, of Gruppo 63. In this regard, it should be

FRANCESCO LEONETTI noted that, although Leonetti has never considered himself a member of the group, it is nevertheless possible to establish a literary kinship between him and writers such as Edoardo Sanguineti and Nanni Balestrini on the basis of their common artistic and ideological goals. L’incompleto is probably the author’s best fictional effort, and critic Walter Pedulla` has identified in it the influence of two great figures of French culture, Blanchot and Barthes (La letteratura del benessere, 1973). The novel, centered on the figure of Ernesto, a Marxist intellectual, is an example of experimental fiction in which the author employed an original narrative technique constantly shifting from the third to the first person. Furthermore, it perfectly embodies Leonetti’s main concern with literature and with the possibility of combining art and ideology. Indeed, through Ernesto, Leonetti analyzed the relationship between the intellectual and the world of consumption and its myths, which he was ultimately unable to accept. In 1967 a new phase of Leonetti’s intellectual career began. He founded, with Roberto Di Marco, Gianni Scalia, and Arnaldo Pomodoro, Che fare. The journal, the official voice of the militant New Left, marked the author’s transition to a more direct political and revolutionary involvement, during which he left behind the abstract and theoretical principles of literature and devoted himself entirely to politics. Although the second part of Leonetti’s life is still rich with literary and political endeavors, including the collaboration with two other important journals, Alfabeta and Campo, however, his most fruitful contributions to Italian literature and culture in general took place in the 1960s. Despite the consistent number of publications of the subsequent years, among which one can still find interesting pieces such as the novel Campo di battaglia (Battlefield, 1981), the poems of Palla di filo (Thread Ball, 1986), and the humorous and provocative autobiography La voce del corvo: Una vita 1940–2001 (The Voice of the Crow: A Life, 2001), none of them match the power and theoretical audacity of the works composed in the early years of his literary practice, during which Leonetti gave a critical contribution to the renewal of the Italian cultural scene and the redefinition of the role of the artist.

the Universita` di Bologna, 1945. He married Gabriella Amaniera, 1945. He worked at the Biblioteca Malatestiana of Cesena and at the Archiginnasio of Bologna, 1946–1961. He became a cofounder, with Pier Paolo Pasolini, of Officina, 1955–1959; and, with Premio Marzocco, of La cantica, 1959. Leonetti collaborated with Il Menabo`, 1960–1967. He moved to Milan, 1963, and worked as an actor in Pasolini’s Il Vangelo secondo Matteo, Uccellacci e Uccellini, Edipo Re, Capriccio all’italiana, 1964– 1968. He was cofounder of Che fare, 1967–1975. He directed the film Processo politico, 1970, and taught aesthetics at the Accademia delle Belle Arti di Brera in Milan, 1971–1995. He was director of Alfabeta, 1979–1988, and of Campo, 1990–1996. Leonetti lives in Milan. PAOLO CHIRUMBOLO Selected Works Fiction Fumo, fuoco e dispetto, 1956. Conoscenza per errore, 1961. L’incompleto, 1964. Il tappeto volante, 1967. Irati e sereni, 1974. Campo di battaglia, 1981. Piedi in cerca di cibo, 1995. I piccolissimi e la circe, 1998. Le storie furiose, 2003.

Poetry ‘‘Sopra una perduta estate,’’ 1942. ‘‘Poemi,’’ 1952. ‘‘Arlecchinata,’’ 1955. ‘‘La cantica,’’ 1959. ‘‘Percorso logico del 1960–75,’’ 1976. ‘‘Palla di filo,’’ 1986. ‘‘In uno scacco: (nel settantotto),’’ 1979. ‘‘Le scritte sconfinate,’’ 1994. ‘‘La freccia,’’ 2001.

Autobiography La vita e gli amici (in pezzi), 1992. La voce del corvo: Una vita 1940–2001, 2001.

Essays Un lavoro mentale, 1976. Il leone e la volpe: dialogo nell’inverno ‘94, with Paolo Volponi, 1994.

Further Reading

Biography Francesco Leonetti was born in Cosenza on 27 January 1924. He graduated in philosophy from

Ferretti, Gian Carlo (editor), ‘‘ Officina’’: Cultura, letteratura e politica negli anni cinquanta, Turin: Einaudi, 1975. Golino, Enzo, Letteratura e classi sociali, Bari: Laterza, 1976.

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FRANCESCO LEONETTI Muzzioli, Francesco, ‘‘Una proposta di strutturalismo italiano: Leonetti tra Barthes e Blanchot (1963–1966),’’ Quaderni di critica, 2 (1974), 93–111. Pedulla`, Walter, La letteratura del benessere, Rome: Bulzoni, 1973.

Piemontese, Felice, ‘‘Francesco Leonetti,’’ in Letteratura italiana. I contemporanei, vol. 6, Milan: Marzorati, 1974. Piscopo, Ugo, ‘‘Francesco Leonetti,’’ in Novecento. I Contemporanei, vol. 9, edited by Gianni Grana, Milan: Marzorati, 1979.

GIACOMO LEOPARDI (1798–1837) It was not until the 1950s that Giacomo Leopardi finally gained the recognition that he deserved. Walter Binni’s La nuova poetica leopardiana (1947), Cesare Luporini’s Leopardi progressivo (1947), and Natalino Sapegno’s Leopardi (1948) all came to challenge Benedetto Croce’s established narrow interpretation of the greatest Italian poet after Dante in his Poesia e non poesia (1923). Leopardi, in fact, was much more than a poet, but even the value of his poetry had been, for almost a century, limited to a fraction of it. The literary taste of the first half of the twentieth century was ruled by Croce with his philosophy of distinti, the separation, that is, of human faculties, whereby intellect operates independently from imagination and cannot cooperate with it. Only Leopardi’s short lyric poems, the idylls, Croce ruled, were worthy of the name of poetry; the rest of his poetical production was labeled as philosophical poetry and was thus nonpoetry. Croce’s attitude not only discarded a large part of Leopardi’s work, it actually misunderstood even the part he wanted to save. None of Leopardi’s poetry, in fact, is devoid of philosophical thought, not even the idylls that Croce extolled as pure poetry. Ironically, during his lifetime Leopardi’s fame lay more in his linguistics and philological accomplishments than in his poetry: his erudite editions and translations of the Greek, Latin, and Italian classics. Already in 1816 his translation of the first book of the Odyssey and the second of the Aeneid attracted the attention of the editor Antonio Stella, for whom he was to do many editions. In the debates of the time on classicism and romanticism, Leopardi’s early allegiance was with the former. As Leopardi stated in his 1818 ‘‘Discorso di un italiano intorno alla poesia romantica’’ (‘‘Essay of an Italian on Romantic Poetry’’), Italian literature (the direct heir of the classical languages) should 1018

remain faithful to its origin and hold the classics as its unsurpassable models, rather than imitating the European literatures, as the romantics preached. This philosophical poet developed his pessimistic thought out of a life that came from his upbringing in the backward and reactionary town of Recanati. Giacomo, the firstborn of Count Monaldo Leopardi and Marchesa Adelaide Antici, constantly complained about the ‘‘prison’’ of Recanati. The family, one of the oldest in town, lived in its most important palace and had to endure the ‘‘offense,’’ as Monaldo called it, of the invasion of the French republican army in 1796 and a few years later the arrival of Napoleon himself, who rode through the town on a horse. Count Monaldo, as the story goes, proudly refused to see him. If Monaldo was a political reactionary, Adelaide was a religious bigot, who raised her children with the iron rod of religious fanaticism and harsh discipline. Her coldness was proverbial and the consequences, especially on the very sensitive Giacomo, devastating. At 22 Giacomo described her in these words: Io ho conosciuto intimamente una madre di famiglia che non era punto superstiziosa, ma saldissima ed esattissima nella credenza cristiana e negli esercizi della religione. Questa non solamente non compiangeva quei genitori che perdevano i loro figli bambini, ma gl’invidiava intimamente e sinceramente, perche´ questi erano volati al paradiso senza pericoli, e avevano liberato i genitori dall’incomodo di mantenerli I have known intimately a mother who, though not superstitious, was steadfast in her Christian faith and in her religious practices. Not only did she not feel sorry for those parents who lost their children early, but she envied them intimately and sincerely, because their little ones had flown to heaven without dangers, and had freed their parents from the burden of supporting them (Zibaldone, 1898).

GIACOMO LEOPARDI Giacomo found his outlet and relief in the family library, which was to become his sanctuary. His dissatisfaction with the ignorance and narrowmindedness of the people of Recanati and his knowledge, which soon surpassed that of his preceptors, made him a recluse, and in the family library, he spent his seven years of ‘‘studio matto e disperatissimo’’ (desperate and maddening study), as he wrote to his friend, the humanist and patriot Pietro Giordani, in a letter dated 2 March 1918: ‘‘mi sono rovinato infelicemente e senza rimedio per tutta la vita’’ (I ruined myself unhappily and without remedy for life). And not only was his health damaged but also his appearance, ‘‘che e` la sola a cui guardano i piu`’’ (which is the only thing that counts for the majority). Within a few years Giacomo acquired an incredible knowledge of Latin and Greek and read voraciously all he could find. His first exercise in erudition was a Storia dell’astronomia (History of Astronomy, 1813), which he compiled by consulting hundreds of volumes and dedicated to his father; it was followed, two years later, by his Saggio sopra gli errori popolari degli antichi (Essay on the Popular Errors of the Ancients, 1815), where both his attraction to the intellectual accomplishments of the Enlightenment in fighting superstition and his fascination with the happy errors and illusions of the primitives were evident. He was to return to the theme and give it poetic form in ‘‘Alla primavera o Delle favole antiche’’ (On Spring, or On the Fables of the Ancients, 1822) and ‘‘L’Inno ai Patriarchi’’ (Hymn to the Patriarchs, 1822), where the poet’s longing for a lost era is revealed. In a famous page of the Zibaldone, Leopardi explained his spiritual and intellectual development: ‘‘Nella carriera poetica il mio spirito ha percorso lo stesso stadio che lo spirito umano in generale. Da principio il mio forte era la fantasia, e i miei versi erano pieni d’immagini’’ (In the poetical career my spirit followed the same path as the human spirit in general. At the beginning my strength was fantasy, and my verses were filled with images), just as it is with children and as it was with the ancients. The radical change, he continued, took place in 1819 when a temporary blindness deprived him from reading: ‘‘Cominciai ...a riflettere profondamente sopra le cose...a divenire filosofo di professione’’ (I began...to reflect in depth over everything...to became a philosopher by profession). His imagination weakened, and he turned from naı¨ve poetry to sentimental, a` la Schiller. In his era, Leopardi argues,

naı¨ve poetry is no longer possible since humanity has realized the split between the self and the outside reality. Thus the great poetry of the classics, especially his beloved Greeks, could no longer be reproduced. Poetry could only be sentimental, because ‘‘il sentimentale e` fondato e sgorga dalla filosofia, dell’esperienza, dalla cognizione dell’uomo e delle cose, in comma, dal vero, laddove era della primitiva essenza della poesia essere ispirata al falso’’ (the sentimental springs forth from philosophy, experience, from man’s knowledge of man and things, in short, from the true, whereas the essence of primitive poetry was to be inspired by falshood). Through his constraining upbringing, his solitude, his voracious reading, Giacomo began living a life of imagination, in which he could create for himself pleasures and joys he could never experience in reality. The love for women, especially, became for him the search of the ‘‘woman who cannot be found.’’ The reading of Rousseau helped him in elaborating his theory: Pleasure consists in desiring the beloved object, not in its fruition, which will necessarily bring about disillusionment. Reality cannot stand up to imagination. His first love poem, ‘‘Il primo amore’’ (The First Love, 1817) closes with praise of the image over reality ‘‘Spira nel pensier mio la bella imago. . . e sol di lei m’appago’’ (the beautiful image breathes in my thought . . . and I find enjoyment only in it), and six years later the more mature poem ‘‘Alla sua donna’’ (To His Woman, 1823) reiterated and developed his belief that the desired woman is a Platonic idea which the poet alone enjoys. Never, in fact, did Leopardi experience a reciprocated love, and women remained to him either the ‘‘bestie femmine’’ (feminine beasts) of Rome, ‘‘frivole, dissipate e piene di ipocrisia’’ (frivolous, dissipated and full of hypocrisy) or angels, ideal beings, created by his imagination. Still in his operetta morale ‘‘Dialogo di Tasso e del suo genio familiare’’ (Dialogue of Tasso and His Familiar Genie), when asked by his familiar genie whether it is sweeter for him to see or to think of his beloved, Tasso (the alter ego of the poet) admits that in presence she appears to him as a woman and in his thought as a goddess. All the women who inspired his poetry were inaccessible, thus coveted. For a century his pessimistic philosophy was seen as the consequence of his physical and psychological sufferings; and Croce greatly contributed to this interpretation. Already in 1953, however, Romano Amerio realized that, whereas his personal condition might have initially 1019

GIACOMO LEOPARDI prompted Leopardi’s pessimistic disposition, his philosophical conclusions were the results of a profound and broad theoretical speculation nourished by French materialism and sensationalism (‘‘L’ultrafilosofia di Giacomo Leopardi’’). Philosophers such as Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Pierre Jean George Cabanis, Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, Paul Henri (Baron) D’Holbach, Denis Diderot, and the Marquis De Sade contributed to Leopardi’s elaboration of his own philosophy; and also John Locke, and Thomas Hobbes, and among the classics, his beloved Lucretius. He defended the theoretical soundness of his ideas with a moving letter written in French to the Swiss philologist M. De Sinner, where he appealed to his readers to challenge and destroy his observations and reasoning rather than accusing his maladies for them. His friendship with Pietro Giordani brought him to the liberal and antipapal ideas of the Risorgimento, so much feared by his father. It inspired him to write in 1818 his political canzoni, ‘‘All’Italia’’ (To Italy) and ‘‘Sopra il monumento di Dante’’ (On the Monument to Dante), which, though still imbued with scholastic rhetoric, made him known outside Recanati and inspired Italian patriots to political action. The atmosphere of the prison of Recanati had become unbearable. At 20, Giacomo had never left the house by himself or had a penny in his pocket. He had to ask his father for any book he wanted to buy and could not convince his parents to let him leave Recanati and find work in a real city. His attempt to escape failed—the passport he requested in secret to leave the Papal States was sent to his father, rather than to him, and Giacomo fell into a deep depression. An affliction in his eyes that made reading impossible worsened his mental state. He called this spiritual crisis his ‘‘philosophical conversion,’’ and he recorded it in his diary, the Zibaldone, where he continued to write and analyze his reflections on an incredible variety of topics: philology, religion, poetry, ethics, and politics. In the letters to Giordani he poured out his frustrations and sufferings of this period, and in the blackest state of mind he began to write his finest poetry: the first idylls. It would always happen this way: From desperation and suffering his most beautiful poems will be born. His hatred for the prison of Recanati, his longing for a big city and great spaces, were nurtured by his vivid imagination and were therefore doomed to disappointment. It is, in fact, the limit, the impediment that brings pleasure, since it stimulates the creativity of the imagination, as his most 1020

famous poem ‘‘L’infinito’’ demonstrates. When Giacomo finally left Recanati in the company of his uncle, Marquis Carlo Antici, and arrived in the big city of Rome, his disenchantment was immediate. He was disappointed by the ignorance of the so-called learned men, especially of the clergy; by the superficiality and vanity of women; and by the selfishness of everybody. Although the learned Romans claimed to know literature and archaeology, he wrote to his father on 9 December 1822, the so-called men of letters did not even know Greek and Latin, ‘‘senza la perfetta cognizione delle quali lingue, Ella ben vede che cosa possa essere lo studio dell’antichita`’’ (without which, as you well see, the knowledge of antiquities is practically impossible). And on 6 December he wrote to his brother Carlo that the vastness of the city, too, upset him, because in it he felt ignored, lost: ‘‘L’attirare gli occhi degli altri in una gran citta` e` impresa disperata’’ (To attract the others’ eyes in a big city is a desperate task). He soon began looking back to the familiar environment of Recanati, where at least he felt loved and respected. His ambition and intense need of recognition could not be satisfied because in a large city there is such abundance of beauty, doctrine, or nobility ‘‘che non se ne fa caso veruno’’ (that nobody pays any attention to them). ‘‘L’indifferenza, quell’orribile passione, anzi spassione, dell’uomo, ha . . . la sua principal sede nelle grandi citta`’’ (Indifference, that horrible passion, or better, non-passion of man reigns in large societies). In another letter to Carlo (25 November 1822), he revealed his loneliness and strong need of love: ‘‘Amami, per Dio. Ho bisogno d’amore, amore, amore, fuoco, entusiasmo, vita: il mondo non mi par fatto per me; ho trovato il diavolo piu` brutto assai di quello che si dipinge’’ (Love me, for God’s sake. I need love, love, love, fire, enthusiasm, life: the world does not seem made for me: I found the devil much worse than it was depicted). In the same years Shelley and Chateaubriand had totally different impressions of the great city and found inspiration from the ruins, landscapes, and the atmosphere. This was not the case with Leopardi, who could love places only if enriched by his own remembrances, thus with the meaning he himself would create for them. After five months in Rome, he returned to Recanati, even more deluded and unhappy, and devoted the next two years to the writing of his Operette morali (Moral Essays and Dialogues, 1827), the most philosophical of his poetical works, or ‘‘poetry in prose,’’ as he described it in a letter to his father. On its foundation there is the

GIACOMO LEOPARDI constant struggle between reality and illusions and the ever-frustrated human search for infinite pleasure. What happened in Rome would recur later on in Milan and then in Florence. Giacomo would never fit with the environment around him. Only the first few months in Bologna with the short-lived friendship with the Countess Teresa Carniani Malvezzi and a brief period in Pisa brought him some illusion of happiness. His complete mistrust in men and disbelief in the social role of literature isolated him even from the Florentine liberal group of La Nuova Antologia that had invited him to contribute his ferocious social and intellectual criticism to the new journal. What could they gain from one who could never believe in the happiness of the many? To Giordani he wrote on 14 July 1828, ‘‘umilmente domando se la felicita` de’ popoli si puo` dare senza la felicita` degl’individui. I quail sono condannati alla infelicita` dalla natura, e non dagli uomini ne´ dal caso’’ (I humbly ask whether the happiness of the people could be given without that of the individuals; who are condemned to unhappiness by nature and not by men or chance). By age 20, Leopardi’s philosophy was established and was never to change. Founded in the rationalistic thought of the French tradition, it did not share its optimistic faith in reason. Reason, in fact, discovers that the world is only matter, that there is neither a transcendent principle governing nature nor a soul surviving the death of the body. Humanity is part of nature and undergoes the same process of creation, destruction, and, eventually, extinction, as any other species of plants or animals. Only our presumptuousness and vanity make us forget what Nicolaus Copernicus long time ago had revealed, namely that we are not the center of the universe. Nature, in the ‘‘Dialogo della Natura e di un Islandese’’ (Dialogue Between Nature and the Icelander) rhetorically asked the Icelander: Immaginavi tu forse che il mondo fosse fatto per causa vostra? Ora sappi che nelle fatture, negli ordini e nelle operazioni mie...sempre ebbi ed ho l’intenzione a tutt’altro che alla felicita` degli uomini o all’infelicita`. Quando io vi offendo in qualunque modo e con qual si sia mezzo, io non me n’avveggo.... E finalmente, se anche mi avvenisse di estinguere tutta la vostra specie, io non me avvedrei Did you think by any chance that the world was made for you alone? Now let me tell you that my works, laws and operations...my purpose was not, and is not, the happiness or unhappiness of men. When I harm you in any way and by whatever means, I don’t notice it....

Finally, even if I happened to wipe out the entire species, I wouldn’t notice it.

If this was Leopardi’s theoretical philosophy, his ethics were founded in his theory of pleasure, which he described as never present, but either past or future. In the past, pleasure exists as remembrance of an old, faraway experience that becomes pleasurable as remembered, and precisely because of its distance and vagueness, as in the poems ‘‘Alla luna’’ (To the Moon), and ‘‘Le rimembranze’’ (Remembrances). Imagination fills in the gaps and creates a pleasurable experience, thus an illusion, a fiction. In the future, pleasure exists as hope of things to come, thus still in the work of the imagination, as poems like ‘‘Il sabato del villaggio’’ (The Village Saturday) and ‘‘A Silvia’’ (To Silvia) clearly demonstrate. Vagueness, variety, infinity are the qualities beloved by the Romantics, but in Leopardi the emphasis was more on the indefinite that allows one to supplement what is missing than on the overwhelming emotion. If humans are only one of the many species in nature destined to extinction, our revenge over nature is our ability to delude ourselves, to create fables, to write poetry. Illusions are in fact that which makes it possible for humanity to go on living, and fortunately, even the most skeptical of us survive because nature allows us to forget the truth and delude ourselves. However, as Leopardi stated in his last work, Pensieri (Thoughts, 1831), fortunately for humans, ‘‘gli uomini sono miseri per necessita`, e risoluti di credersi miseri per accidente’’ (men are miserable by necessity, yet determined to think themselves miserable by accident). A cynical view of society derived from such harsh philosophy. Hobbes was right in his belief homo homini lupus: ‘‘l’uomo e` quasi sempre tanto malvagio quanto gli bisogna. Se si conduce dirittamente, si puo` giudicare che la malvagita` non gli e` necessaria’’ (man is almost always as wicked as he needs to be. If he acts honestly, it means that he does not need wickedness). Leopardi’s Pensieri, modeled after those of Montaigne and Pascal, were aphoristic commentaries on men and society. If his canti, that is poetry, were created through the dialectics of reality and illusion, the Pensieri are sheer prose where illusion no longer has any part, and they present humanity and society without redeeming features: ‘‘Il genere umano...si divide in due parti: gli uni usano prepotenza ,e gli altri la soffrono. Ne´ legge, ne´ forza alcuna, ne´ progresso di filosofia ne´ di civilta` potendo impedire che uomo nato o da nascere non sia o degli uni o degli altri’’ 1021

GIACOMO LEOPARDI (The human race...is split in two camps: the bullies and the bullied. Neither law nor force of any kind, nor advancement in civilization or philosophy, can prevent men now or in the future from belonging to one of these two camps), a notion that carries clear echoes of Machiavelli’s thought. If Leopardi’s philosophy was not given enough credit until very recently, it was not only because of its bleakness and incoherence, the ‘‘sentimental mess’’ described by Benedetto Croce (Poesia e non poesia, 1923). There was a more serious reason. The great construction of Western philosophy that had started with Aristotle and was completed by Hegel tended to identify philosophical with systematic thought. At the basis of such a frame of mind was the faith in the readability of the world, thus in the existence of stable and fixed principles by which phenomena could be explained. Only recent scholars (Antonio Prete, Emanuele Severino, Elio Gioanola, Sergio Givone) familiar with Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Sigmund Freud could find in Leopardi’s asystematic thought the trait of a modern philosophical approach that was far ahead of its time. But Leopardi’s contribution to modernity (and even postmodernity) goes even farther and is to be found in his discovery of the cognitive power of imagination. Dismantling the barrier between poetry and philosophy, imagination and reason, he saw them both working together not only in the creation of art, but also in the discovery of scientific truth. What writers like Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco and scientists like Ilya Prigogine and Rita Levi Montalcini are saying now, Leopardi had already intuited almost two centuries ago.

Biography The son of Count Monaldo and Marchesa Adelaide Antici, Giacomo Leopardi was born in the small town of Recanati in the Marche region, part of the Papal States, 28 June 1798. His education and that of his siblings were entrusted to private tutors from the clergy, but Giacomo soon continued on his own, learning the classical and the modern languages, Hebrew, and the sciences in the family library. Seven years of ‘‘desperate and mad study’’ ruined his health forever. Only in November 1821 was he able to leave home for Rome with his uncle, Carlo Antici. Five months later, disappointed by the large city, he returned to Recanati, where he wrote his philosophical dialogues. In 1825, feeling constrained in Recanati 1022

again, he was able to go to Milan at the invitation of the editor Antonio Stella, who assigned him a critical translation of Cicero’s works. On his way to Milan, he stopped in Bologna, where he had his first pleasant stay among friends and scholars who respected and admired him and where he found the people hospitable and generous. When in Milan, instead, the impersonality and coldness of the big city caused him to fall once again into the depression he had experienced in Rome. After convincing Stella he could also do his work away from Milan, he quickly returned to Bologna, where he experienced for the first time the intense intellectual company of a woman, Countess Teresa Carniani Malvezzi. In 1827, he moved to Florence, where he met Antonio Ranieri, who was to become his constant companion until his death. After a brief happy stay in Pisa, he returned to Florence, where he had an amorous interlude with Fanny Targioni Tozzetti for whom he wrote the poems ‘‘Il pensiero dominante’’ and ‘‘Aspasia.’’ In 1833, Ranieri and Leopardi moved to Naples and in 1836, to flee from the cholera epidemic, to a villa on the slope of Mount Vesuvius, where he wrote his last two poems and died 14 June 1837. DANIELA BINI Selected Works Collections Opere di Giacomo Leopardi, edited by Antonio Ranieri, Florence: Le Monnier, 1845. Scritti letterari, 2 vols., edited by Giovanni Mestica, Florence: Le Monnier, 1899. Puerili e abbozzi vari, edited by Alessandro Donati, Bari: Laterza, 1921. Tutte le opere di Giacomo Leopardi, 5 vols., edited by Francesco Flora, Verona: Mondadori, 1947, 1968–1973. Tutte le opere, edited by Walter Binni, Milan: Sansoni, 1969. ‘‘Entro dipinta gabbia.’’ Tutti gli scritti inediti, rari e editi 1809–1810 di Giacomo Leopardi, edited by Maria Corti, Milan: Bompiani, 1972. Correspondance Selections, translated by Prue Shaw, Leeds, U.K.: Northern University Press, 1998. Selected Poems with Excerpts from the Poets’ Journals, Letters and Notes, translated by Thomas G. Bergin and Anne Paolucci, London: Griffon House, 2003.

Poetry ‘‘Canzoni sull’Italia e sul Monumento di Dante,’’ 1818. ‘‘Canzone ad Angelo Mai,’’ 1820. ‘‘Canzoni,’’ 1824. ‘‘Il sogno’’/ ‘‘Elegia,’’ 1825. ‘‘Idilli e volgarizzamenti di alcuni versi morali dal greco,’’ 1825; 1826. ‘‘Versi,’’ 1826.

GIACOMO LEOPARDI ‘‘Canti,’’ 1831; new edition, 1835; as Selected Poems, translated by Eamon Grennan, 1997; as Leopardi’s Canti, translated by Joseph Tusiani, 1998. ‘‘Paralipomeni alla Batracomiomachia,’’ 1842; as The War of the Mice and the Crabs, translated by Ernesto Caserta, 1976.

Prose Operette morali, 1827, as Essays and Dialogues, translated by Giovanni Cecchetti, 1982. Pensieri, vol. 2 of Opere Minori approvate di Giacomo Leopardi, 1831; as Pensieri, translated by William Simone Di Piero, 1981. Studi filologici, 1845. Saggio sopra gli errori popolari degli antichi, 1815; 1846. Storia dell’astronomia, 1813; in Opere Inedite di G. Leopardi, 1878–1880. Pensieri di varia filosofia e di bella letteratura di Giacomo Leopardi, 1897; as Zibaldone di pensieri, 1898. ‘‘Discorso di un italiano intorno alla poesia romantica,’’ in Scritti vari inediti di Giacomo Leopardi dalle carte napoletane, 1906. Lettere, edited by Francesco Moroncini, 1934–1941; edited by Francesco Flora, 1947; as Epistolario, 1998. Dialogo del primo amore e prose autobiografiche, 1981. Dissertazioni filosofiche, 1983. Appunti e ricordi, 2000.

Further Reading Alcorn, John, ‘‘Giacomo Leopardi’s Art and Science of Emotion in Memory and Anticipation,’’ MLN, 111:1 (January 1996), 89–122. Amerio, Romano, ‘‘‘L’ultrafilosofia’ di Giacomo Leopardi,’’ Filosofia, July 1953, 451–485. Barricelli, Gian P., Giacomo Leopardi, Boston: Twayne, 1986. Bigongiari, Piero, Leopardi, Florence: Vallecchi, 1962. Bini, Daniela, A Fragrance from the desert: Poetry and Philosophy in Giacomo Leopardi, Gainsville: Univerity Press of Florida, 1983. Binni, Walter, La nuova poetica leopardiana, Florence: Sansoni, 1947. Binni, Walter, La protesta di Leopardi, Florence: Sansoni, 1973. Biral, Bruno, La posizione storica di Giacomo Leopardi, Turin: Einaudi, 1974. Bonadeo, Alfredo, ‘‘Death in Leopardi’s Prose,’’ Italian Quarterly, 18:70 (Fall 1974), 3–19. Brioschi, Franco, La poesia senza nome. Saggio su Leopardi, Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1980. Carrera, Alessandro (editor), Giacomo Leopardi: poeta e filosofo, Fiesole (Florence): Cadmo, 1999. Carsaniga, Giovanni, Giacomo Leopardi: The Unheeded Voice, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1977. Casale, Ottavio, A Leopardi Reader, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981. Cecchetti, Giovanni (editor), Giacomo Leopardi, Forum Italicum. Leopardi Supplement 1990. Croce, Benedetto, Poesia e non poesia, Bari: Laterza, 1923. Damiani, Rolando, L’impero della ragione: studi leopardiani, Ravenna: Longo, 1994.

De Feo, Italo, Leopardi. L’uomo e l’opera, Verona: Mondadori, 1972. Della Terza, Dante, Saggi su Giacomo Leopardi, Rome: Edizioni dell’Atenea, 2005. De Robertis, Giuseppe, Saggio sul Leopardi, Florence: Vallecchi, 1973. Ferruci, Carlo, Leopardi filosofo e le ragioni della poesia, Venice: Marsilio, 1987. Ferrucci, Carlo (editor), Leopardi e il pensiero moderno, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1989. Frattini, Alberto, Giacomo Leopardi, Bologna: Cappelli, 1969. Frattini, Alberto, Giancarlo Galeazzi, and Sergio Sconocchia (editors), Ripensando Leopardi: l’eredita` del poeta e del filosofo alle soglie del terzo millennio, Rome: Studium, 2001. Galimberti, Cesare, Linguaggio del vero in Leopardi, Florence: Olschki, 1959. Gioanola, Elio, Leopardi, la malinconia, Milan: Jaca Book, 1995. Givone, Sergio, ‘‘Uno sguardo dal nulla,’’ Paradosso, 5 (1993), 29–46. Luporini, Cesare, ‘‘Leopardi progressivo,’’ in Filosofi vecchi e nuovi, Florence: Sansoni, 1947. Negri, Antonio, Lenta ginestra. Saggio sull’ontologia di Giacomo Leopardi, Milan: Sugar Co Edizioni, 1987. Origo, Iris, Leopardi: A Study in Solitude, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1953. Perella, Nicholas, Night and the Sublime in Giacomo Leopardi, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970. Prete, Antonio, Il pensiero poetante, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1980. Ranieri, Antonio, Sette anni di sodalizio con Giacomo Leopardi, Milan: Mursia, 1995. Rigoni, Mario Andrea, Saggi sul pensiero leopardiano, Naples: Liquori, 1985. Sapegno, Natalino, ‘‘Leopardi,’’ in Disegno storico della letteratura italiana, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1948. Severino, Emanuele, Il nulla e la poesia. Alla fine dell’eta` della tecnica: Leopardi, Milan: Rizzoli, 1990. Speciale, Emilio (editor), Giacomo Leopardi, estetica e poesia, Ravenna: Longo, 1992. Whitfield, John Humphreys, Giacomo Leopardi, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1954. Williams, Pamela, ‘‘Leopardi in the English Speaking World: A Bibliography,’’ Italian Studies, 18 (1988), 41–59.

CANTI, 1831, 1835 Poems by Giacomo Leopardi

Giacomo Leopardi’s Canti were first published in Florence by Guglielmo Patti in 1831. Four years later, the first complete edition of Leopardi’s 1023

GIACOMO LEOPARDI poems, edited by the author, was published in Naples in 1835 by Saverio Starita. Only ‘‘Il tramonto della luna’’ (The Setting of the Moon) and ‘‘La ginestra, o il fiore del deserto’’ (The Broom, or The Flower of the Wasteland) were not included, because the poet wrote them in Naples just before his death in 1837. They appeared in the Le Monnier edition, published in Florence in 1845, edited by Antonio Ranieri. It was Leopardi who gave his poems the name Canti to call attention to their musical qualities. Leopardi called his first phase of poetical composition idyllic, where imagination reigns and feeds past memories and future hopes. It would be interrupted by the prosaic phase of the Operette morali; then briefly return with his canti pisani (in Pisa), ‘‘Risorgimento’’ (Resurgence) and ‘‘A Silvia’’ (To Sylvia); cease again with the so-called Aspasia cycle (with the delusion of his love for Fanny Targioni Tozzetti); and pick up once more in the final moment in Naples with ‘‘Il tramonto della luna’’ and ‘‘La ginestra.’’ Leopardi repeated over and over in his Zibaldone and letters that in the moment of desperation man is rescued by the return of illusions that keep him alive and hoping. This parabola was clearly evident in his poetical production, where idyllic moments and poems were followed either by the ironical and caustic prose of the Operette morali and I pensieri or by the negative and desperate tone of poems such as ‘‘Aspasia,’’ ‘‘Amore e morte’’ (Love and Death), and ‘‘A se stesso’’ (To Himself ). ‘‘All’Italia’’ (‘‘To Italy’’), written in 1818 and published the following year, is considered Leopardi’s patriotic appeal to the Italians to liberate their country from the foreigners. It expresses, however, even more the poet’s longing for the world of the ancients when the Greek youth defending their land against the Persians, ‘‘parea ch’a danza, e non a morte andasse...o a splendido convito’’ (seemed to go to a dance or to a splendid banquet, not to death). Together with the cult of the ancients Leopardi, just as Foscolo did in his Dei sepolcri, was also celebrating the greatness of the poets, here Simonides, who keep alive the memory of glorious deeds. The first group of canzoni, ‘‘Sopra il monumento di Dante’’ (On the Monument to Dante), ‘‘Ad Angelo Mai’’ (To Angelo Mai), and ‘‘Bruto Minore’’ (Brutus the Younger), in fact have in common the social call to the Italians to rescue their land politically and even more, culturally, since Italy is the direct 1024

heiress of the great civilizations of the Greeks and the Romans, which must be models and stimuli for present actions. In ‘‘Alla Primavera’’ (To Spring) and ‘‘Inno ai Patriarchi’’ (Hymn to the Patriarchs), however, Leopardi recognized that the world of the glorious illusions of the ancients was long gone. Nature, who to the ancients seemed a caring mother and companion, to the reasoning modern person has finally appeared as a mechanistic force senselessly creating and destroying. In these first poetical compositions Leopardi’s language was still imbued with classical images, and his richly rhetorical style mimicked that of his beloved classics. In Recanati, Leopardi composed his most famous poems, those he called idylls, beginning with ‘‘L’infinito’’ (The Infinite), his true masterpiece. He wrote it in 1819, and it was first published in the Milan journal Nuovo Ricoglitore in 1825. It is a meta-poem in that its theme and inspirational force are the fictional power of the poet that can overcome and defeat the limit and finiteness (finitude) of reality. Its brevity yet complex structure makes its message more powerful: Semantics, syntax, and rhythm are working together. The centrifugal force rests on the verb mi fingo placed at the center of the poem and of the line, and whose meaning is even closer etymologically to the Latin word and the English ‘‘fiction.’’ Space and time are the main agents in the poem, in their finite form; the physical limit of the siepe (hedge) that blocks the physical eye and the senses triggers the flight of the imagination that can create infinity of time and space— something that nature cannot do. One of the hardest poems to recite because of its complex syntax and complete absence of rhyme, it nevertheless creates with its meter a rhythm that evokes the very infinity of its theme. The idylls Leopardi wrote in these early years find all their inspiration in a familiar landscape, from a physical sensation that triggered by opposition the poet’s inspiration. The natural calm of moonlight shining over the familiar roofs or the song of an artisan coming home in the evening after ‘‘il dı` di festa’’ (the evening of the holiday) caused the poet to reflect on the passing of time and precariousness of life. Yet the memory of the past, as in ‘‘Le ricordanze’’ (The Remembrances), and the hope for the future sweeten the sorrow of those reflections. In ‘‘A Silvia,’’ written in Pisa in 1828 (published in 1931), the poet lamented the death of the young woman friend, the end of hope

GIACOMO LEOPARDI brought about by mature age. The first half of the poem was constructed on past memories conveyed by the poetical use of the imperfect. It loses much in the English translation. Pleasure exists only in the remembrance of the past or in the hope for the future, thus in humanity’s fictional power, in our ability to create illusions. If Silvia died before seeing her illusions deluded, the poet’s hope dies with the passing of years. Silvia and Hope become one and the same in the moving end of the poem, where Giacomo exclaims: ‘‘Ahi, come, / Come passata sei, / cara compagna dell’eta` mia nova, / Mia lacrimata speme!’’ (Alas, how quickly you passed, dear companion of my youth, my lamented hope). ‘‘Il sabato del villaggio’’ (The Village Saturday) exemplifies this theme by stating that pleasure is in the eve of the holiday, thus in expectation and hope, and not in the holiday itself. The moon is a steady presence in Leopardi’s poems. As with woman, it is the unresponsive, unreachable, cold, and ideal object of desire. Thus she is the perfect object of poetry, distant, vague, indefinite, unknowable. Though unreachable, with her peaceful presence she is a constant companion to the restless soul of the poet and his sleepless nights, as in ‘‘Alla luna’’ (To the Moon) and ‘‘La vita solitaria’’ (The Solitary Life), or the silent interlocutor in the philosophical poem ‘‘Canto notturno di un pastore errante nell’Asia’’ (Night Song of a Shepherd Wandering in Asia). Present but unmoving, she is identified with youth in her final appearance in ‘‘Il tramonto della luna’’ (The Setting of the Moon). In her light, objects around lose their definite contours and acquire vaghi aspetti (vague shapes) and deceiving appearances, just as life when colored by youth. But if the moon will continue to color the world with her nocturnal light, ‘‘la vita mortal, poi che la bella giovinezza sparı`, non si colora d’altra luce giammai, ne´ d’altra aurora’’ (mortal life, once youth has gone, will not be colored by any other light or dawn). Leopardi spent his last two years in a villa on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius. The memory of the destruction of Pompei and Herculaneum inspired him to write ‘‘La ginestra.’’ In it, the frailty and precariousness of humanity are rendered more dramatic by presumptuousness: ‘‘Caggiono i regni intanto, / Passan genti e linguaggi: ella non vede: / E l’uom d’eternita` s’arroga il vanto’’ (Kingdoms change, people and languages pass: nature does not see: and man claims to be eternal). How much

wiser is the broom that grows in this deserted land, that does not pride itself on its strength, but humbly endures the harshness of its life—a stupendous metaphor of Leopardi’s final poetry, a poetry no longer of illusions but of nothingness. DANIELA BINI Editions First Edition Canti del conte Giacomo Leopardi, Florence: Guglielmo Patti, 1831. Enlarged edition, Naples: Saverio Starita, 1835; including ‘‘La ginestra, o il fiore del deserto’’ and ‘‘Il tramonto della luna,’’ edited by Antonio Ranieri, Florence: Le Monnier, 1845.

Critical Editions Canti di Giacomo Leopardi, edited by Francesco Moroncini, Bologna: Cappelli, 1927. In Scrittori d’Italia, vol. 4, edited by Leone Ginzburg, Bari: Laterza, 1938. In vol. 1 of Tutte le opere di Giacomo Leopardi, Poesie e prose, edited by Francesco Flora, Milan: Mondadori, 1940. Canti di Giacomo Leopardi, edited by Achille Tartaro, Bari: Laterza, 1978. Canti di Giacomo Leopardi, edited by Domenico De Robertis, Milan: Mondadori, 1978. Canti di Giacomo Leopardi, edited by Emilio Peruzzi, Milan: Rizzoli, 1998.

Translations As Translations from Leopardi, by Robert Calverley Trevelyan, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1941. As Canti, translated by John Humphreys Whitfield, Naples: G. Scalabrini, 1962. As Selected Prose and Poetry, translated and edited by Iris Origo and John Heath-Stubbs, New York: New American Library, 1966. As The War of the Mice and the Crabs, translated and edited by Ernesto G. Caserta, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1976. As Canti, bilingual edition, translated by Ghanshyan Singh, Recanati: Centro Nazionale Studi Leopardiani, 1990. As The Canti: With a Selection of His Prose, translated by John Gordon Nichols, Manchester: Carcanet, 1994. As Canti; selected and edited by Franco Fortini, translated by Paul Lawton, Dublin: UCD Foundation for Italian Studies, 1996. As Selected Poems, translated by Eamon Grennan, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. As Leopardi’s Canti, translated by Joseph Tusiani, Fasano (Brindisi): Schena, 1998. As Thoughts and The Broom or The Flower of the Desert, translated by John Gordon Nichols, London: Hesperus, 2002.

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GIACOMO LEOPARDI Further Reading Blasucci, Luigi, Leopardi e i segnali dell’infinito, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1985. Brose, Margaret, Leopardi Sublime, translated by Elisabetta Bertoli, Bologna: Re Enzo, 1998. Campailla, Sergio, Fingere l’infinito: l’ascolto dei Canti di Giacomo Leopardi, Rome: Il Veltro, 2003. Dolfi, Anna, Leopardi tra negazione e utopia. Indagini e ricerche sui ‘‘Canti,’’ Padua: Liviana, 1973. Ferrucci, Carlo, Un’estetica radicale: Leopardi, Rome: Lithos, 1999. Folin, Alberto, Leopardi e la notte chiara, Venice: Marsilio, 1993. Fontanella, Luigi (editor), Leopardiana, special issue of Gradiva, 8–9 (1990–1991). Girardi, Antonio, Lingua e pensiero nei Canti di Leopardi, Venice: Marsilio, 2000. Givone, Sergio, ‘‘Uno sguardo dal nulla,’’ Paradosso, 5 (1993), 29–46. Maglione, Armando, Lectura leopardiana: i quarantuno canti e i nuovi credenti, Venice: Marsilio, 2003. Pelosi, Pietro, I fiumi del tempo, i luoghi dell’anima: tempo e spazio nei Canti leopardiani, Napoli: Federico & Ardia, 1996. Singh, Ghanshyam, Leopardi and the Theory of Poetry, Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1964. Verna, Anthony, ‘‘The Memory of Poetry and the Poetry of Memory: Notes on the Meaning of Remembrance in Leopardi’s Canti,’’ Semiotics as a Bridge between the Humanities and the Sciences, edited by Paul Perron, New York: LEGAS, 2000.

OPERETTE MORALI, 1827 Essays by Giacomo Leopardi

To his friend Antonio Stella, who preferred to publish the Operette moral del conte Giacomo Leopardi (The Moral Essays of Count Giacomo Leopardi) separately for fear of the censorship, Leopardi wrote that he would rather keep them in his drawer than see fragmented a work he considered whole. Many of the letters Leopardi wrote between March and June 1826 return to this work in which ‘‘consiste il frutto della mia vita finora passata, e io l’ho piu` caro dei mei 1026

occhi’’ (in which the fruit of all my past life is concentrated, and it is more dear to me than my eyes) (Lettere, 1947). But Stella was right, and the book was poorly received by the critics. There was a second edition in 1834 with additions and corrections, published in Florence by Guglielmo Piatti. Leopardi made another attempt at publication with the Neapolitan publisher Saverio Starita in 1835, but this was short lived because of local censorship, and the complete posthumous edition by Antonio Ranieri published in Florence by Le Monnier in 1845 was placed in 1850 on the Index of forbidden books by the Roman Curia. Praised for its style, the work was condemned for its negative content. It expressed in artistic form Leopardi’s materialism and atheism— the long philosophical reflections that filled so many pages of his Zibaldone. Most of the Operette morali were composed in 1824, and at their core there is always the constant struggle between illusions and reason. Leopardi himself admitted that the great satirical Greek poet Lucian was a model, but the idea of the dialogue, naturally, went back to an even-greater model, Plato, whom he praised for being a poet-philosopher. The Operette morali opens with the prelude ‘‘Storia del genere umano’’ (History of the Human Race), in which Jove sends Love, the greatest illusion, to earth to relieve humanity from the unhappiness caused by reason’s discovery of Truth. They go on to show, through a series of dialogues between mythological characters, the failure of sheer philosophical thought and the necessity of the collaboration between poetry and philosophy as in ‘‘Parini ovvero della Gloria’’ (Parini’s Discourse on Glory). The first group of operette morali, which comprises ‘‘Dialogo di un folletto e di uno gnomo’’ (Dialogue Between a Sprite and a Gnome) and ‘‘Dialogo della Terra e della Luna’’ (Dialogue Between the Earth and the Moon) exposes humanity’s presumption in considering themselves the center of the world, whereas the earth will continue its course without finality even when the human race is extinguished—a theme Leopardi developed humorously in ‘‘Copernico’’ (Copernicus). In this, the sun one morning, tired of endlessly circling the earth, refuses to rise. A solution must immediately be found to avoid the extinction of life. A crazy scientist (Copernicus) is persuaded to rescue the earth from extinction by convincing her that she must now work and

GIACOMO LEOPARDI run around the sun. Having established that suffering and boredom are necessary components of human life and are caused by reason’s discovery of its meaninglessness, the second group of operette tries to suggest ways to reduce humanity’s suffering. Since reason is its cause, in ‘‘Dialogo di Cirstoforo Colombo e di Pietro Gutierrez’’ (Dialogue Between Christopher Columbus and Pietro Gutierrez), a life filled with action and risks is certainly more pleasant than one without, because the latter brings about boredom whereas the former brings about fear but also hope. In a stormy ocean humanity fears for its life, and escaping death is thus experienced as happiness. Movement and change bring variety to life and defeat boredom, thus the praise of birds and their flight in ‘‘Elogio delgi uccelli’’ (In Praise of Birds). If the world and living species are only matter, they will perish, and new ones will be born. Even our universe will die, and another might be formed. Only matter will persist and will assume different shapes and forms. Leopardi’s materialism is presented as a philosophical essay in the ‘‘Frammento apocrifo di Stratone di Lamsaco’’ (Apocryphal Fragment of Strato of Lampsacus) and then rendered in poetic form in the sublime song of the gallo silvestro in ‘‘Cantico del Gallo Silvestre’’ (Song of the Great Wild Rooster). People will die, and so will the universe and ‘‘questo arcano mirabile e spaventoso dell’esistenza universale, innanzi di essere dichiarato ne´ inteso, si dileguera` e perderassi’’ (this stupendous and frightening mystery of universal existence, before it can be declared or understood, will vanish and be lost). Humanity’s superiority over all the other creatures rests in our ability to create sublime poetry out of the silence of the universe. The end of this operetta is a magnificent example of what Leopardi’s final poetry will be—a poetry no longer nurtured on illusions but on nothingness. If suicide might seem a reasonable way out of a life of suffering, Leopardi, with the words of Porphyry in ‘‘Dialogo di Plotino e di Porfirio’’ (Dialogue Between Plotinus and Porphyry), rejected it not through logic but through what he called ‘‘il senso dell’animo’’ (the feeling of the soul) and the affection and consideration for others. If, in fact, the philosopher’s task is that of discovering the truth, and though painful, declaring it to the world through his writings, the books that will help humanity to survive will not be those of the philosopher but those of the poet, as in ‘‘Dialogo di Timandro e di Eleandro’’

(Dialogue Between Timander and Eleander): ‘‘cioe` libri destinati a muovere la immaginazione’’ (books destined to move the imagination). At the end of his philosophical work it is the imagination that once more triumphs, the only human faculty able to create happiness through the invention of future pleasures, as in ‘‘Dialogo di un venditore di almanacchi e di un passaggere’’ (Dialogue Between an Almanac Peddler and a Passer-By). DANIELA BINI Editions First Edition Operette morali del conte Giacomo Leopardi, Milan: Antonio Stella, 1827.

Critical Editions Operette, edited by Francesco Moroncini, Bologna: Cappelli, 1929. Operette morali in Tutte le opere di Giacomo Leopardi, vol. 1, edited by Francesco Flora, Milan: Mondadori, 1940. Operette morali, edited by Cesare Galimberti, Naples: Guida, 1998.

Translations As Essays, Dialogues and Thoughts, translated by James Thomson, London: Routledge, 1905. As Essays and Dialogues, translated by Giovanni Cecchetti, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. As The Moral Essays, translated by Patrick Creagh, New York, Columbia University Press, 1983.

Further Reading Bigi, Emilio, ‘‘Tono e tecnica nelle Operette morali,’’ in Dal Petrarca al Leopardi, Milan: Ricciardi, 1956. Binni, Walter, Lettura delle Operette morali, Genoa: Marietti, 1987. Blasucci, Luigi, ‘‘La posizione ideologica delle Operette morali,’’ in Critica e storia letteraria, studi offerti a Mario Fubini, vol.1, Padua: Liviana Editrice, 1970. Campailla, Sergio, La vocazione di Tristano, Bologna: Patron, 1977. Cecchetti, Giovanni, Sulle ‘‘Operette morali.’’ Rome: Bulzoni, 1978. Fabio, Nicoletta, L’ ‘‘entusiasmo della ragione’’: studio sulle ‘‘Operette morali,’’ Florence: Le Lettere, 1995. Sangiardi, Giuseppe, Il libro dell’esperienza e il libro della sventura: forme della mitografia filosofica nelle Operette morali, Rome: Bulzoni, 2000. Severino, Emanuele, Cosa arcana e stupenda. L’Occidente e Leopardi, Milan: Rizzoli, 1997. Vitale, Maurizio, ‘‘La lingua della prosa di G. Leopardi: le Operette morali,’’ Florence: Nuova Italia Editrice, 1992.

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GIACOMO LEOPARDI

ZIBALDONE DI PENSIERI, 1898 Intellectual diary by Giacomo Leopardi

Leopardi’s Zibaldone di pensieri, the thousands of notes he made on a variety of topics for most of his life, was first published posthumously with the title Pensieri di varia filosofia e di bella letteratura di Giacomo Leopardi, edited by the poet and scholar Giosue´ Carducci, in 1898. In 1920 it gained its current title; and since 1937, with the edition by Francesco Flora, it has also been known as Zibaldone. The first entry was made in July or August 1817; the last, on December 4, 1832, though most pages were written between 1819 and 1823, the years of Leopardi’s philosophical speculation. It is not a coincidence that the Operette morali would follow in 1824, and Pensieri would conclude it. The topics treated are innumerable, and poetry and poetics take a large part. As a young poet, Leopardi was in fact caught in a difficult impasse. If supreme poetry is only that of the ancients, who believed in the reality of illusions, it followed that in modern times, where reason triumphs, poetry can no longer live. It took Leopardi many attempts to arrive at the elaboration of a sentimental, or philosophical, poetry, the only one possible in his time. The Zibaldone was the storage of his thoughts but also his workshop, where ideas were tried out, recorded, revisited, changed, and developed. It is a unique document of thought in progress. Some paragraphs are complex and convoluted, for they mirror the movements of his mind. Often there is no continuity between paragraphs: One thought can occupy a few pages, then be completely abandoned and taken up again three months and 50 pages later. From an early age, Leopardi explored a great variety of subjects: astronomy, religion, history, ethics, and especially linguistics, philology, and poetics. There are hundreds of pages where he analyzed the use of verb forms, adverbs, and cases in Greek and Latin texts, and hundreds where he explored his own beloved Italian language. Poetry being his strongest interest, Leopardi wrote long analyses of 1028

the poetical quality of certain words. Here he elaborated his famous distinction between termini and parole, anticipating Ferdinand de Saussure’s between parole and langue. Whereas terms (termini) ‘‘determinano e definiscono la cosa da tutte le parti’’ (define and circumscribe the things from all sides), words (parole) ‘‘presentano immagini accessorie’’ (present accessory images), memories, feelings that enrich the language. Thus Leopardi insisted on the poetical quality of indefinite and vague words and expressions that stimulate the imagination to add to and enrich their meanings. The words lontano (far away) and antico (ancient) were poetic and pleasurable for Leopardi because they aroused vast, indefinite, imprecise, and indistinct ideas. He devoted many pages to his ‘‘theory of pleasure,’’ the core of his philosophy that he derived from the French sensationalists and materialists. Humanity constantly seeks pleasure but can never be satisfied by a particular one. We want an infinite pleasure. But nothing in nature is infinite or limitless, thus our constant frustration. Nature is therefore responsible for our unhappy state. Yet nature has granted us illusions (love, glory, fame) that give us temporary happiness, until reason destroys them. Nature is, in fact, a complex character in Leopardi’s philosophy. On the one hand it is personified as matrigna (stepmother), responsible for all sufferings, on the other, nature nourishes our illusions, nurtures our enthusiasm, makes us forget reason’s ills. Reason has enlightened humanity’s world, destroyed the errors of the ancients, but with truth reason also brought pain. Finally in the Zibaldone, Leopardi worked out and developed those ideas that make him our contemporary: the cognitive power of imagination, that is, the mutual contribution of the two faculties that Benedetto Croce still considered as opposite and brought Charles Percey Snow to the philosophy of the two cultures. DANIELA BINI Editions First Edition Pensieri di varia filosofia e di bella letteratura di Giacomo Leopardi, edited by Giosue´ Carducci, Florence: Le Monnier, 1898.

Critical Editions Zibaldone di pensieri, edited by Valentino Piccoli, Turin: UTET, 1920.

LESBIAN AND GAY WRITING Zibaldone, 2 vols., in Tutte le opere di Giacomo Leopardi, edited by Francesco Flora, Milan: Mondadori, 1947. Zibaldone, edited by Giuseppe Pacella, Milan: Garzanti, 1991. Zibaldone, edited by Rolando Damiani, Milan: Mondadori, 1997. As Zibaldone di pensieri, selection edited by Sergio and Raffella Solmi, Turin: Einaudi, 1977. Tutto e nulla: antologia dello Zibaldone di pensieri, edited by Mario Andrea Rigoni, Milan: Rizzoli, 1997.

Translation As Zibaldone. A Selection, translated by Martha King and Daniela Bini, New York: Peter Lang, 1992.

Further Reading Amerio, Romano, ‘‘‘L’ultrafilosofia’ di Giacomo Leopardi,’’ Filosofia, July 1953, 451–485. Anceschi, Luciano, Un laboratorio invisibile della poesia: le prime pagine dello ‘‘Zibaldone,’’ Parma: Pratiche, 1992. Bini, Daniela, ‘‘Giacomo Leopardi’s Ultrafilosofia,’’ Italica, 74 (Spring 1997): 52–66.

Bonadeo, Alfredo, ‘‘Il corpo e il vigore nello Zibaldone di Leopardi,’’ Italianistica, 5:1 (January–April 1976), 55–65. Capodaglio, Enrico, ‘‘Due impronte stilistiche nello Zibaldone di Giacomo Leopardi,’’ Strumenti Critici, September 1998, 321–362. Foschi, Franco (editor), Lo Zibaldone cento anni dopo. Atti del X Convegno internazionale di studi leopardiani, Florence: Olschki, 2000. Gerato, Erasmo, ‘‘Reality of Illusion and Illusion of Reality in Leopardi’s Zibaldone,’’ South Atlantic Bulletin, 41: 2 (May 1976): 117–125. Gioanola, Elio, Leopardi, la malinconia, Milan: Jaca Book, 1995. Girolami, Patrizia, L’antiteodicea. Dio, dei, religione nello Zibaldone di Giacomo Leopardi, Florence: Olschki, 1995. Marcon, Loretta, Vita ed esistenza nello Zibaldone di Giacomo Leopardi, Rome: Stango, 2001. Verdenelli, Marcello, ‘‘Cronistoria dell’idea leopardiana di Zibaldone,’’ Il Veltro, September–December 1987, 591–621.

LESBIAN AND GAY WRITING Current academic discourse groups nonnormative sexual identities in the discipline known as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (LGBTQ) studies, which also probes the complex interactions among gender and sexual identities and—perhaps most crucially—problematizes transhistorical notions of same-sex desire as ‘‘the same’’ across centuries. Human same-sex desire has always existed and marks Italian literature from the earliest texts, but to label these instances ‘‘lesbian’’ or ‘‘gay’’ imposes a decidedly modern label on desires that carried differing personal and social meanings. This is not to say that modern LGBTQ readers cannot or should not search for medieval and early modern ancestors among expressions of same-sex desire in period texts but that genealogical endeavors of this sort must take great care to consider local constructs and the great distances between then and now. Only very recently has Italian writing begun to reflect modern ‘‘lesbian’’ and ‘‘gay’’ identities, cultural constructs often considered more Northern European and/or Anglo-American than ‘‘properly’’ Mediterranean or Italian.

And yet it is well known by now that same-sex desire (particularly, but not exclusively, male) boasts a culturally illustrious past from that Greek and Roman antiquity so central to the entire history of Italian literature. According to Plato, via Socrates and Diotima, in the Symposium (360 BCE), the highest form of love is male pederastic, the love of an older wiser man or philosopher for his beautiful adolescent charge, a love that ideally transcends the physical and transports one to pure Being. Such philosophical or pedagogical eros informs the entire sweep of Italian literature, indeed of Western letters, and is modeled on an ancient Athenian social reality that allowed adult male citizens to seek sexual gratification with any number of social underlings—adolescent boys, women, slaves, foreigners—without seriously compromising the boundaries of normal manhood. Sappho’s archaic verse (ca. 630 BCE) suggests an analogous educational setting for same-sex desire among women; other Greek and Roman texts project sexual mentorship of this sort in a military setting. This intergenerational mode that customarily featured the older partner as sexual agent has 1029

LESBIAN AND GAY WRITING sometimes been referred to as ‘‘Mediterranean.’’ Contemporary queer theorists in Michel Foucault’s wake have made much of the fact that these sorts of liaisons are unintelligible under modern discursive regimes that strictly divide homosexual from heterosexual. Still, literature and social history from antiquity on offer evidence for some individuals who always preferred members of their own sex, inveterate sodomites, and sometimes long-term relationships between age-equals. Pastoral fantasy provided a textual space in antiquity for desires that played variations on the intergenerational model. Virgil’s second eclogue (37 BCE) sings of the shepherd Corydon’s yearning for the young Alexis. Virgil’s readers also recognized a familiar, if somewhat idealized, relationship (forged on Homeric types) in the Aeneid (19 BCE) 5 and 9 between the seasoned warrior Nisus and his beardless beloved Euryalus. It is certainly at least noteworthy that Dante—in what is probably the most famous text in all Italian literature, the first canto of Inferno (1305–1308)—exercised a curious sort of sexual democracy in choosing representatives of Italy’s glorious Roman past, harbingers of a future greatness presaged by the mysterious greyhound, ‘‘di quella umile Italia ... salute / per cui morı` la vergine Cammilla, / Eurialo e Turno e Niso di ferute’’ (salvation of that lowlying Italy / for which the virgin Camilla / and Euryalus, Turnus, and Nisus died of their wounds; vv. 106–108; translated by Singleton). The four names Dante posited here include one rather unflattering envoy for traditional heterosexual patriarchy, the petulant Turnus, and three selfless gender warriors, the Amazonian Camilla and the lovers Nisus and Euryalus. Could it be that, to cast Roman glory in its best light, Dante relied on two gay men and a lesbian? Of course, by Dante’s day and the rise of an Italian vernacular literary tradition in the thirteenth century, Christianity had intervened and further complicated constructions of same-sex desire around the contested category of natura and the invention of sodomia, an ill-defined subspecies of luxuria given substance by St. Peter Damian in the eleventh-century Liber gomorrhianus (Book of Gomorrah). Concern over same-sex coupling as corruption of a certain notion of human nature can be found in Plato and Aristotle, but clear moral condemnation falls to the neo-Platonist St. Paul. Paul accused women and men who burn with passion for others of their sex of having converted ‘‘natural use’’ to a use that is contra naturam (against nature). Echoed by St. Augustine 1030

and codified by the Scholastics and particularly St. Thomas Aquinas in the Summa (1265–1273), sodomy as violation of a now-idealized and heterosexualized Natura informs Dante’s placement of the sodomites in Inferno 15–16. Dante’s sodomites wander through eternity in troops in the third and last subdivision of circle seven (violence) upon an arid plain of burning sand, allusive of the sin’s alleged sterility, and under a rain of scorching fire reminiscent of God’s destruction of the biblical cities on the plain, Sodom and Gomorrah. Dante’s sodomites are all men, as the sin was overwhelmingly construed as male through the Middle Ages and beyond. But at least one famous reader from Medici Florence, Cristoforo Landino (1424–1498), echoed Pauline and Scholastic definitions in his 1481 commentary and allowed that there may also be women here in the seventh circle. Most famously, Dante encountered among the sodomites his own beloved master Ser Brunetto Latini (ca. 1220/25–1293), Florentine statesman and man of letters in his own right whose protohumanist tendencies would flower among Italian writers of the following centuries. In Brunetto’s eyes, the young Dante—thoroughly sexualized as a dolce fico (sweet fig)—represents a decadent Florence’s only hope for redemption. Ancient modes of sexual desire between master and pupil loom large in this canto, where Brunetto goes on to inform us that all the members of his troop were ‘‘clerics’’ and ‘‘famous men of letters,’’ including the celebrated Latin grammarian Priscian. Nearly all of Dante’s early readers agreed that Priscian is meant to represent grammar teachers, who are almost all sodomites, mostly because they have the easy opportunity with so many young men under their control in a relatively private setting. In a somewhat baser reflection of the Platonic tradition, the grammar master as pederast becomes a commonplace in ancient, medieval, and early modern grammatical and parodic texts. Likewise, intensely homosocial parochial and monastic settings tended to make sodomites of clerics as well, a fact born out by Peter Damian’s Book of Gomorrah, whose professed aim was to counter a vice apparently well known in Italian monasteries. Umberto Eco’s best seller Il nome della rosa (The Name of the Rose, 1980) depicts just such a medieval environment and deploys homosexual jealousy as a central plot device. In the end, Dante structured his Inferno and condemned the sodomites as violent against nature in strict accordance with Thomist principles; but the poet then framed the sodomy episodes with elaborate

LESBIAN AND GAY WRITING images from the natural world as powerful flows of water and of human attempts to counter nature’s sometimes destructive force—images that recall medieval debates over what exactly constituted ‘‘nature,’’ a mysterious, inexorable power whose precise relation to the divine remained unclear. Christian efforts to undo classical constructs of same-sex desire never entirely succeeded. The opening chapters of any standard history of Italian literature feature the extraordinary courtly lyric produced in Sicily and then in Tuscany by men ardent for a distant, often cruel, lady; but at the same time, poets such as Marino Ceccoli and Cecco Nuccoli in Perugia were pining away after beautiful young men in sonnet form. Vernacular preachers like Giordano da Pisa, Bernardino da Siena, and in the fifteenth century Girolamo Savonarola, translated the Latin fathers’ writings on sodomy into vernacular sermons pitched at a mass audience. The sodomite became something of a stock figure in the comic novella tradition and other parodic texts through the Renaissance. Boccaccio’s Decameron (ca. 1350/52–1373) features sodomitic characters in two stories: In 1.1, the Florentine Ser Ciappelletto is a trickster, bold antihero, and walking catalogue of sin who enjoys women ‘‘come sono i cani de’ bastoni’’ (about as much as a dog enjoys being beaten with a stick) but takes great delight in young men. In 5.2, the middle-class Perugian Pietro di Vinciolo marries according to society’s demands, but his self-assured young wife refuses to keep quiet when he ignores her to indulge his penchant for young men. She insists, in the end, that he at least share. Same-sex desire is a regular feature of Boccaccio’s comic universe that makes its mark in other stories as well, such as 1.2 where the Jew Abraham visits the capital of Christendom, Rome, only to find the cardinals and prelates at the papal court steeped in lust and ‘‘non solo nella naturale ma ancora nella sogdomitica’’ (and not just natural lust but the sodomitic type as well); or 2.3, where Boccaccio flirted with male–male desire in a bedroom farce between Florentine Alessandro and the cross-dressed daughter of the King of England. In the sixteenth century, Matteo Bandello’s Porcellio would take the Scholastic tradition head on by declaring that sex with males is for him as natural as eating or drinking. Quattrocento humanists formally recuperated the Platonic dialogues on love and the possibility of desire between males as culturally prestigious. The ancient tradition of pedagogical eros, attached primarily to the grammar classroom through much of the Middle Ages, rediscovered its textual and

conceptual origins in the Renaissance. Implicit in the patriarchal humanist endeavor was a rejection of biological reproduction as common in favor of a loftier love of generation through letters, a love traditionally passed from male master to male pupil. Many Italian humanists produced homoerotic lyrics; most notable are the Greek and Latin epigrams of Angelo Poliziano (1454–1494), along with his pastoral play Fabula di Orpheo (Orpheus, 1484). The Medici court in Florence— and particularly the court of Lorenzo Il Magnifico in the later fifteenth century—appears to have served as a something of matrix in this regard. Michelangelo spent his formative years there. While the precise details of whatever physical love life he may have had will remain a mystery, his sonnets to the Roman aristocratic Tommaso de’ Cavalieri (along with a couple of other young men) are filled with passionate longing, at once sexual and transcendent in the best Platonic tradition. As the great humanist Pope Leo X, Lorenzo’s son Giovanni reigned over a glorious papal court that unabashedly embraced classicism and whose erotic culture has been described as ‘‘queer’’ for the capital of Catholicism, very much in line with what Boccaccio’s Abraham had discovered there centuries earlier. Rumors of Leo’s own desire for other men have persisted in accounts of his life through the centuries. But sodomy was also a common accusation in the Renaissance mentioned at one point or another in connection with many of the most celebrated figures. In his Forbidden Friendships (1996), historian Michael J. Rocke has studied the extensive archival record left by the Ufficiali di Notte or Night Officers, a special magistracy that operated in Florence between 1432 and 1502 charged with surveillance and control of evidently widespread sexual activity between men in that city. Rocke’s analyses suggest again that most Florentine males of the period had sex with other men at some point in their lives. Comic constructions of sodomy can be found in many texts of the period: Stefano Finiguerri’s (known as il Za ) fifteenth-century vernacular parody poem ‘‘La buca di Montemorello’’ (Montemorello’s Hole); Antonio Beccadelli’s (‘‘Il Panormita’’) Latin Hermaphroditus of 1425; and, in the early sixteenth century, Antonio Vignali’s La cazzarı`a (The Book of the Prick, 1525). Pietro Aretino and his circle were particularly virulent and inventive when it came to hurling sodomitic invective in rhyme and meter. The title character of Aretino’s popular play Il marescalco (The Marescalco, 1533) prefers men and resists marriage until he can no longer hold out against social demands; 1031

LESBIAN AND GAY WRITING the play’s ‘‘Some-Like-It-Hot’’ resolution allows him to wed his handsome page cross-dressed as blushing bride. Cross-dressing on stage afforded playwrights opportunity to test social norms of gender and sexuality, particularly with the rise of the commedia dell’arte in the following centuries. The manifold intrigue of Flaminio Scala’s Il finto marito (The False Husband, 1618), for instance, turns on layers of drag and what might be called a lesbian wedding. Cross-dressing also served Ludovico Ariosto in his sly, prurient probing of the complex relations among body parts, gender, and desire in cantos 22 and 25 of the Orlando furioso (The Frenzy of Orlando, 1532). The deft virgin-at-arms Bradamante—magnificent in full armor atop her mighty steed, direct descendant of Virgil’s and Dante’s Camilla—is taken for a man by the lovely princess Fiordispina, who immediately falls in lust. Ariosto inherited the ‘‘lesbian’’ impasse from Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato (1482/83; 1495), which left the two impassioned women without the apparently obligatory phallic means to resolve their desire: ‘‘Che´ gratugia a gratugia poco acquista’’ (one grate against another doesn’t get you much; 3.9.11.8). But Ariosto’s Fiordispina is not the least put off when she discovers the cruel trick ‘‘nature’’ has played. Ariosto eventually furnished the requisite body parts and a heterosexualized outcome, but not before a truly remarkable bedroom scene with many an ironic turn on the missing phallus. Later in the cinquecento, amid the more stringent atmosphere imposed by Counter-Reformation morality, Torquato Tasso orientalized same-sex desire as infidel other between Lord Solimano and his suggestively named page Lesbino in the epic Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem Delivered, 1581). Pedagogical, humanist, clerical, pastoral, chivalric, and comic constructions of sodomitic desire all flourished side-by-side through the Renaissance and well beyond. The figure of the humanist pedant as sodomite shows up again in Ariosto’s Satires, particularly the sixth (1524–1525), which is dedicated to the great Venetian man of letters Pietro Bembo—‘‘Senza quel vizio son pochi umanisti’’ (Few humanists are without that vice; 6.25)—and in his incomplete comedy I studenti (The Students, 1519; completed and renamed by his brother Gabriele under the title La scolastica); and again in the anonymous Sienese farce Gli ingannati (The Deceived, 1538). Nearly 100 years later, around 1631, the libertine priest Antonio Rocco (1596–1653) composed the Alcibiade fanciullo a 1032

scola (Alcibiades the Schoolboy), an unrepentant defense of pedagogical eros that draws on libertine philosophies of nature as an all-embracing and benevolent mother. Around this same time in the mountains northwest of Florence, Sister Benedetta Carlini, once abbess of the Theatine monastery at Pescia, was serving a sentence for having been caught in a lesbian affair with another nun, a rare documented instance of same-sex desire among women studied by historian Judith C. Brown (Immodest Acts, 1986). Lesbian lovemaking, again between two nuns, would be briefly inscribed with amusement in the following century by Giacomo Casanova (1725–1798) in book one of his Histoire de ma vie (The Story of My Life, 1798). Eighteenthcentury penal and confessional codes—including the otherwise enlightened Cesare Beccaria— continued to take sodomy as a serious infringement of natural law and prescribed sometimes harsh punishments. In the nineteenth century, the modern Italian nation state took form, at least nominally, while the larger (northern) European imagination cast Italy as either locus classicus of high cultural achievement in arts and letters and thus land of exquisite aesthetic experience, or a precultural paradise where ‘‘primitive’’ urges could be explored without fussy social restraint. This latter fantasy attached mostly to the south and the islands, and in particular the isle of Capri, host to distinguished artist scholars who might today be considered ‘‘sex tourists,’’ as well as a group of cosmopolitan lesbians of the sort described by Compton Mackenzie’s 1928 Extraordinary Women. By this time, the writings of German and English sexologists that distinguished ‘‘homosexuals’’ from ‘‘heterosexuals’’ and labeled the former ‘‘sexual inverts’’ (souls trapped in the body of the opposite sex) had made their way into Italian clinical writing as well. Radclyffe Hall’s classic lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness (1928) was translated into Italian as Il pozzo della solitudine in 1930. But for many years before and through the Fascist era, less fretful lesbian characters appeared in a variety of serial pulp novels, as well as texts like Guido da Verona’s parodic revision of Alessandro Manzoni’s canonical I promessi sposi (The Betrothed, 1827–1840/42), where the Monaca di Monza—again, a nun—takes more than a spiritual interest in the lovely young Lucia. Earlier in the century, Sibilla Aleramo (1876– 1960), a leading figure of Italian and European feminism, had lightly inscribed lesbian experience in Il passaggio (The Passage, 1919), a reflection of her real-life relationship with Lina Poletti. Aleramo’s

LESBIAN AND GAY WRITING description of desire in this book is more lyric idyll than real-life experience, cast in a fantasy space outside of history and society. This might fairly describe the nature of gay male characters as well in several twentieth-century Italian texts often called ‘‘novels,’’ but in fact more poetic or pastoral when it comes to the portrayal of same-sex desire. Works like Filippo de Pisis’s Ver-Vert (1919–1926), Giovanni Comisso’s Gioco d’infanzia (Childhood Game, 1931–1932), Umberto Saba’s Ernesto (1975), and Pier Pasolini’s Amado mio (My Beloved, 1982) mostly fail to represent gay desire as an integral component of social or individual character of the sort normally associated with the bourgeois novel, a genre that Italy came to rather late and only incompletely in any case. To underscore the point, some of these writers (like Saba) were better known as poets. Pasolini’s hymns to beautiful youths in his prose works are in many ways indistinguishable from similar moments in his verse. For Pasolini, fascination with young men formed part of his mythologization of the working class as an antidote to the oppressions of consumer culture, as well as an increasingly scandalous element of his life as a public intellectual, right up to his brutal murder by a Roman hustler in 1975. As we have seen, the insistence of pastoral fantasy as relatively hospitable to gay desire has ancient roots that never quite let go. Risorgimento patriot Luigi Settembrini (1813–1876) passed part of his long years in Bourbon prisons writing a homoerotic tale of love between Greek youths entitled I neoplatonici (The Neo-Platonics, 1851–1859). Settembrini’s work was discovered only after his death and published in 1977, just as Saba’s Ernesto, written in 1953, had to await the author’s death and 1975 to come to print. A reflection of the author’s own somewhat tortured experience, Ernesto tells the story of a middle class adolescent in turn-of-the-century Trieste whose sexual initiation with/by an older working-class man both recalls and reconfigures ancient intergenerational models within a modern urban social context. Sandro Penna (1906–1977), one of Italy’s most accomplished and celebrated twentieth-century poets, also described erotic enchantment with young men, often sailors, as a mode of quasi–other worldly transcendence. Conversely, many of the lesbian and gay characters found in twentieth-century Italian fiction, by gay and straight writers alike, represent homosexuality as a pathological or corrupt condition often emblematic of bourgeois decadence or Fascist perversion, as in Cesare Pavese’s Tra donne sole (Among Women Only, 1949), Vasco Pratolini’s

Cronache dei poveri amanti (A Tale of Poor Lovers, 1947), and Alberto Moravia’s Il conformista (The Conformist, 1951). One notable exception to this trend is Giorgio Bassani’s Gli occhiali d’oro (The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles, 1958), where the protagonist’s homosexuality constitutes an element of authentic personhood decimated by middle-class conformity and the onslaught of Fascist bigotry. Homosexual initiation as loss of purity and innocence is also a common thread among works as varied as Moravia’s Agostino (1944), Elsa Morante’s L’isola di arturo (Arturo’s Island, 1957), and even Giuseppe Patroni Griffi’s Ragazzo di Trastevere (The Boy from Trastevere, 1955). Carlo Coccioli’s postwar novels struggle to come to terms with homosexual desire and Catholic faith, a theme also taken up by novelist Giovanni Testori. On a somewhat different note, the novels of Alberto Arbasino from the 1960s and 1970s are filled with gay characters, mostly well-traveled and well-heeled intellectual snobs. The late 1960s and 1970s witnessed the rise of a lesbian and gay rights movement in Italy, whose history has now begun to be written (in particular by Gianni Rossi Barilli). Theoretical writing of the period on lesbian feminism centered around the Libreria delle Donne in Milan. Most typical of the somewhat utopian leftist thinking that informed the early movement is Mario Mieli’s Elementi di critica omosessuale (Homosexuality and Liberation: Elements of a Gay Critique, 1982), which has recently been republished and become the object of scholarly interest. Two well-regarded gay male novelists emerged in the 1980s and 1990s: Pier Vittorio Tondelli and Aldo Busi. Many of Busi’s ironic, rhetorically dense narratives have been translated into English. Homosexuality is in general merely one more element in his characters’ arsenal of iconoclastic tricks aimed at a repressive society that would impose behavioral norms. Tondelli produced four major books before his death from AIDS in 1991, all four of which contain gay characters. His most mature and final novel, Camere separate (Separate Rooms, 1989), offers an exceptionally nuanced and elaborate meditation on gay male selfhood, sex, love, death, and the writer’s vocation. The current generation of openly lesbian and gay writers includes Matteo B. Bianchi with Generations of Love (1999) and Margherita Giacobino with Casalinghe all’inferno (Housewives in Hell, 1996). Gay bookstores exist in several Italian cities (particularly noteworthy is the Libreria Babele in Milan); gay characters in TV and film are now rather commonplace. Giovanni Dall’Orto, 1033

LESBIAN AND GAY WRITING an independent journalist, activist, and historian in Milan, has been researching and writing on lesbian and gay Italian history and literature for nearly 20 years. And LGBTQ studies has begun to find its niche in the Italian academy as well, with scholars such as sociologist Daniela Danna in Milan, literary historian Francesco Gnerre in Rome, and queer theorist Marco Pustianaz in Vercelli. GARY P. CESTARO

Further Reading Ahern, John, ‘‘Troping the Fig: Inferno XV, 66,’’ Lectura dantis, 6 (Spring 1990), 80–91. Aldrich, Robert, The Seduction of the Mediterranean: Writing, Art and Homosexual Fantasy, London and New York: Routledge, 1993. Barilli, Gianni Rossi, Il movimento gay in Italia, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1999. Barkan, Leonard, Transuming Passion: Ganymede and the Erotics of Humanism, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991. Borghi, Liana, ‘‘Insegnare il queer: Marginalita`, resistenza, trasgressione,’’ in Pro/posizioni: Interventi alla prima universita` gay e lesbica, edited by Gigi Malaroda and Massimo Piccione, Florence: Edifir, 2000. Boswell, John, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Botterill, Steven, ‘‘Autobiography and Artifice in the Medieval Lyric: The Case of Cecco Nuccoli.’’ Italian Studies, 46 (1991), 37–57. Brown, Judith C., Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance, New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Camille, Michael, ‘‘The Pose of the Queer: Dante’s Gaze, Brunetto Latini’s Body,’’ in Queering the Middle Ages, edited by Glenn Burger and Steven F. Kruger, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Cestaro, Gary P., Queer Italia: Same-Sex Desire in Italian Literature and Film, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Cestaro, Gary, ‘‘Queering Nature, Queering Gender,’’ in Dante for the New Millenium, edited by Teodolinda Barolini and H. Wayne Storey, New York: Fordham University Press, 2003. Dall’Orto, Giovanni, La gaya scienza, at www. giovannidallorto.com

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Danna, Daniela, Amiche, compagne, amanti. Storia dell’amore tra donne, Milan: Mondadori, 1994. Duncan, Derek, ‘‘Italian Literature,’’ in The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage: A Reader’s Companion to the Writers and Their Works from Antiquity to the Present, edited by Claude J. Summers. New York: H. Holt, 1995. Duncan, Derek, Reading & Writing Italian Homosexuality: A Case of Possible Difference, Hampshire, England: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2006. Giacobino, Margherita, Orgoglio & Privilegio: viaggio eroico nella letteratura lesbica, Milan: Il Dito e La Luna, 2003. Gnerre, Francesco, L’eroe negato: il personaggio omosessuale nella narrativa italiana contemporanea, Milan: Gammalibri, 1981. Gnerre, Francesco, L’eroe negato: omosessualita` e letteratura nel Novecento italiano, Milan: Baldini&Castoldi, 2000. Holsinger, Bruce, ‘‘Sodomy and Resurrection: The Homoerotic Subject of the Divine Comedy,’’ in Premodern Sexualities, edited by Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero, New York: Routledge, 1996. Jordan, Mark D., The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Makowski, John F., ‘‘Nisus and Euryalus: A Platonic Relationship,’’ The Classical Journal, 85:1(October/November 1989), 1–15. Mieli, Mario, Elementi di critica omosessuale, edited by Gianni Rossi Barilli and Paola Mieli, Turin: Einaudi, 1977; reprinted, Milan: Feltrinelli, 2002; as Homosexuality and Liberation: Elements of a Gay Critique, translated by David Fernbach, London: Gay Men’s Press, 1980. Pequigney, Joseph, ‘‘Sodomy in Dante’s Inferno and Purgatorio.’’ Representations, 36(Fall 1991), 22–42. Pustianaz, Marco, ‘‘Transitive Gender and Queer Performance in the Novels of Mario Mieli and Vittorio Pescatori,’’ in Queer Italia: Same-Sex Desire in Italian Literature and Film, edited by Gary P. Cestaro, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Rocke, Michael J., Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence, New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Saslow, James M., The Poetry of Michelangelo: An Annotated Translation, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991. Stewart, Alan, Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. Vignali, Antonio, The Book of the Prick, edited and translated by Ian Frederick Moulton, New York: Routledge, 2003.

CARLO LEVI

CARLO LEVI (1902–1975) Carlo Levi first made his name as a writer with the publication of the novel Cristo si e` fermato a Eboli (Christ Stopped at Eboli, 1945), his muchtranslated account of the period of time he spent in southern Italy, where he had been confined by the Italian Fascist regime. Although now best known as a novelist, during his life Levi was also extremely active as a painter, a political activist, and a writer of travelogues. Levi’s themes were those of an Italian liberal socialist intellectual: namely, autonomy, creativity, and growth. Of these, perhaps the key question for Levi was that of autonomy, at both a personal and political level. Levi was of Jewish origins, although one would hardly know it through his writings. Indeed, of all the Jewish Italian writers of the twentieth century, Levi was the one who made fewest references to Italian-Jewish culture. Rather, Levi is best seen as an example of the extent to which an Italian-Jewish intellectual had been perfectly integrated into the social and cultural fabric of the post-Risorgimento nation. Levi had a rather complicated relationship with the Italian literary tradition. His writings bear little resemblance to the established forms of the literary canon. The genre into which his two novels and travel writing fall most easily is that of autobiography, the two novels recounting respectively Levi’s personal experience in the Italian South in the mid1930s and in Rome in the immediate postwar years. Yet, as autobiographies these texts are anachronistic insofar as they are highly subjective, impressionistic writings devoid of any clear chronology. Levi, in fact, has few antecedents in the Italian literary tradition. It is no surprise that one of his favorite writers was the English author Laurence Sterne, whose own antinovel Tristram Shandy is itself an illustration of a nonconventional approach to time. Levi first came to the public eye and to the attention of the Fascist Secret Services as a painter and political activist. In the early 1920s Levi became increasingly involved in the Italian antiFascist movement and came under the sway of Liberal leader Piero Gobetti. By far the most crucial figure in Levi’s intellectual and political formation, Gobetti was a precocious Italian cultural organizer and editor of two important magazines, Energie nuove and Rivoluzione liberale, who died at

the age of 24 as a result of injuries he had suffered after being beaten up by Fascist thugs. Levi met Gobetti when they were both in their late teens and made his debut as a writer with a number of articles for the magazines his friend edited. Gobetti’s influence over Levi was enormous and was to accompany him all his life. Levi’s first articles, in fact, one on the Liberal politician Antonio Salandra and another on the city of Turin, are little more than reiterations in both style and content of Gobetti’s analysis of the state of Italian society in the immediate post–World War I years. Levi at once identified himself with the intransigence and with the intellectual and personal rigor that Gobetti exemplified. Indeed, the issues with which Gobetti grappled in his life as a cultural organizer were those that underlay Levi’s later writings, both as a journalist and as a novelist. What drew Levi to Gobetti was the latter’s attempt to develop a new and enlightened form of Italian liberalism free of dogma and preconceived ideas, as well as being receptive to the political dynamism of the worker’s movement, especially in Turin, Italy’s industrial heartland. Gobetti’s aim to give birth to a new liberalism was a polemical response to what he (and Levi with him) saw as the crisis of traditional Italian liberalism, which had in the opening decades of the twentieth century lost its way. Like Gobetti, Levi developed a staunchly anti-Fascist stance, becoming one of the leaders in Turin of the Giustizia e liberta` (Justice and Liberty) group in the years following Gobetti’s death. It was in this period that Levi further developed his political thought, writing important articles for the group’s journals that dealt with the themes that would be at the very center of his future political and intellectual life: namely, federalism and the reform of the state. For Levi, autonomy was the starting point for all effective political action, whether at a personal level or at the public level of a reform of the state that opened the way to local and autonomous self-government. Levi was arrested twice for his anti-Fascist activities. After his second arrest in 1935, he was sentenced to a period of exile in Aliano. Although he initially dreaded the prospect, the eight months he spent in the forgotten area of Lucania were perhaps the crucial experience of his entire life. In his 1035

CARLO LEVI encounters with the peasant culture of the area, which he recounted in his first novel Cristo si e` fermato a Eboli, Levi found an alternative to what he considered the corrupt course of mainstream history, which had led the Western world to the disasters of Fascism, Nazism, war, and the Holocaust. The novel takes the form of a series of vignettes that recount Levi’s encounters with the inhabitants of the village to which he had been confined. What emerges is a wonderfully positive picture of the peasants, whom Levi considered potentially new and creative agents on the political and social scene (in much the same way that Gobetti and he had welcomed the emergence of the working class in Turin during the Factory Council movement), and an awfully negative picture of the southern bourgeoisie—doctors, lawyers, local administrators—guilty of opportunism, ineptitude, and thorough corruption. In the thirst for power and prestige of this debased local bourgeoisie, Levi found the basis of what he was to call eternal Italian Fascism. By this, he meant the propensity of a badly educated and amorphous middle class to follow whomever was in power in order to preserve their own privileges and further their status. This was Levi’s version of Gobetti’s wellknown definition of Fascism as the autobiography of the nation. Levi was unique among Italian intellectuals insofar as he attempted to understand peasant culture on its own terms and not as an inferior version of a dominant model. Although Cristo si e` fermato a Eboli was Levi’s first published novel, it was not his first piece of writing. In fact, as World War II was breaking out, Levi wrote the manuscript for a short philosophical book that would be published only in 1946 under the title Paura della liberta` (Of Fear and Freedom). This book is crucial for an understanding of Levi’s deep-seated critique of Western history but also as a prism through which to read Cristo si e` fermato a Eboli. Paura della liberta` is, like almost all Levi’s early writing, a disjointed text that meanders across many fields. At its heart is Levi’s perception of the need for humankind to go back to its origins in order to initiate a new historical course. For Levi, history was not a never-ending story of progress. There are times, he thought, when history could go wrong and when a rupture with the past was in order. The Europe of the late 1930s and 1940s was just one such moment. It was in the return to a primordial condition, which Levi termed the original indeterminate state, that humankind could recharge its batteries and begin a new, alternative, more dynamic and creative course of history. What 1036

Levi saw in the peasant civilization of Lucania was just such an alternative, either long forgotten by Italian intellectuals or regarded as backward. Levi’s second novel, L’orologio (The Watch, 1950), also has a strong autobiographical slant, this time dealing with Levi’s activity as editor of the anti-Fascist newspaper L’Italia libera. In common with Levi’s previous novel, L’orologio takes the form of a meandering narrative that does little to preserve the unity of time and packs into the five days and nights over which it is set an impossibly rich number of events. Time, for Levi, was lived at its most authentic not as clock or linear time but in the manner of Giambattista Vico’s corsi and ricorsi as a cyclical process that opens up the way to regeneration. Telling of the hopes held by Levi and his fellow activists in the Partito d’azione that a new, regenerated Italy could be born after the disasters of Fascism and World War II, L’orologio is set in the final days of the short-lived government headed by the anti-Fascist Ferruccio Parri. It was in the government of this latter that Levi lay his hopes for any regeneration of the nation, and it was in the wake of its demise that those hopes also collapsed. If the novel can be read as an account of the failure of the political project of the Partito d’azione, its final scenes, which see the central character Carlo (Levi himself) emerge regenerated from a trip to the chaotic but energizing back streets of Naples, can also be read as Levi’s affirmation that even if a political project aimed at regeneration has failed, a personal project of regeneration is nonetheless still possible. During the 25 years between the publication of L’orologio and his death, Levi dedicated himself to journalistic activity, political militancy, and travel. Between 1955 and 1964, Levi published four travelogues: Le parole sono pietre (Words Are Stones, 1955), about Sicily; Il futuro ha un cuore antico: Viaggio nell’Unione Sovietica (The Future Has an Ancient Heart: Journey to the Soviet Union, 1956), about the Soviet Union; La doppia notte dei tigli (The Linden Trees, 1959), about both sides of the then divided Germany; and Tutto il miele e` finito (All the Honey Is Finished, 1964), about Sardinia. In all of these writings the theme of regeneration comes to the fore. Disappointed in the failure of a national rebirth, in the form of the democratic revolution that had seemed to be imminent in the immediate postwar years, Levi devoted his intellectual and political life to seeking out and publicizing possible new instances of regeneration. Some of these he found on his travels both around Italy and abroad. In Sicily, he

CARLO LEVI found comfort in the example of the trade unionist Salvatore Carnevale and his mother and in what he saw in the then German Democratic Republic. But it was in the Soviet Union that Levi himself seemed to undergo another personal rebirth. Transported back into the time of his infancy in Turin, Levi’s impression of time was warped, as the sights and tastes he had of Moscow and Kiev took on the form of replays of his own infancy in Piemonte. In the same way, Levi’s enthusiasm for the peasant movement of southern Italy, the student protests of 1968, and the struggles for national liberation abroad that marked the 1960s and 1970s had its origin in his desire to find the sparks of potential new beginnings. Indeed, in his travels and in his writings it was to this search that Levi dedicated the last years of his life.

Biography Carlo Levi was born in Turin, 29 November 1902, the son of Ercole and Annetta Treves. He received his degree in medicine from the University of Turin, 1924; until 1928 he worked as an assistant in the university’s medical clinic. He met Piero Gobetti and wrote first articles for Rivoluzione liberale, 1918. He abandoned the medical profession to dedicate himself to painting, 1928. He became increasingly involved in the Italian anti-Fascist movement and became a founding member of the Turin group of Giustizia e liberta`. His first arrest for anti-Fascist activity was in 1934. He had a second arrest and was sentenced to three years’ exile in southern Italy, 1935. He was released from exile following an amnesty, 1936. His daughter Anna, whose mother was Paola Olivetti, wife of Adriano Olivetti, was born in 1937. He lived in various locations in France and wrote Paura della liberta`. He returned to Italy and joined the antiFascist Resistance movement in Florence, 1941. He wrote Cristo si e` fermato a Eboli while in hiding in Nazi-occupied Florence, 1944. He met Linuccia Saba, daughter of the poet Umberto Saba, who became his lifelong companion. He was editor of Nazione del popolo, the clandestine newspaper of the local Comitato di liberazione nazionale (Committee of National Liberation), 1944–1945; and, in Rome, of L’Italia libera, the newspaper of the Partito d’azione, 1945–1946. He was awarded the Viareggio Prize for Le parole sono pietre, 1956. Levi was elected to the Italian Senate as member of the Independent Left group, 1963–1972. He was founder of Federazione Italiana Lavoratori Emigrati e Famiglie (Italian Federation of Workers,

Emigrants and Families), 1967. He underwent two eye operations, 1973, and while convalescing wrote Quaderno a cancelli (Gated Notebook), published posthumously in 1979. Carlo Levi died in Rome, 4 January 1975; he was buried in Aliano, the town where he had spent his period of political exile. DAVID WARD Selected Works Collections Il coraggio dei miti (Scritti contemporanei, 1922–74), edited by Gigliola De Donato, 1975. Le mille patrie: Uomini, fatti, paesi d’Italia, edited by G. De Donato, 2000. Opere scelte 1926–1974, edited by Salvatore Abita and Pia Vivarelli, 2001. Lo specchio: Scritti di critica d’arte, edited by Pia Vivarelli, 2001. Prima e dopo le parole: Scritti e discorsi sulla letteratura, edited by Rosalba Galvagno, 2001. Roma fuggitiva: Una citta` e i suoi dintorni, edited by G. De Donato, 2002. Le tracce della memoria, edited by Maria Pagliara, 2002. Il pianeta senza confine: Prose di viaggio, edited by Vanna Vaccaro, 2003. Carlo Levi: Discorsi parlamentari, 2003. Un dolente amore per la vita: Conversazioni radiofoniche e interviste, edited by Luigi M. Lombardi and Letizia Bindi, 2003. Le ragioni dei topi: Storie di animali, edited by G. De Donato, 2004.

Fiction Cristo si e` fermato a Eboli, 1945; as Christ Stopped at Eboli: The Story of a Year, translated by Frances Frenaye, 1947; 1963. L’orologio, 1950; as The Watch, 1951; 1999.

Poetry ‘‘Poesie inedite 1934–1946,’’ 1990. ‘‘Noi esistiamo: Poesie inedite,’’ 1991.

Other Paura della liberta`, 1946, as Of Fear and Freedom, translated by Adolphe Gourevitch, 1950. Le parole sono pietre, 1955; as Words Are Stones: Impressions of Sicily, translated by Angus Davidson, 1958. Il futuro ha un cuore antico: Viaggio nell’Unione Sovietica, 1956. La doppia notte dei tigli, 1959; as The Linden Trees, translated by Joseph M. Bernstein, 1962. Tutto il miele e` finito, 1964. Scritti politici, edited by David Bidussa, 2001.

Further Reading Bidussa, David, ‘‘Prima di Eboli: La riflessione civile e politica di Carlo Levi negli anni del fascismo e dei totalitarismi,’’ in Carlo Levi, Scritti politici, Turin: Einaudi, 2001.

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CARLO LEVI De Donato, Gigliola, Saggio su Carlo Levi, Bari: De Donato, 1974. De Donato, Gigliola, and Sergio D’Amaro, Un torinese del sud: Carlo Levi. Una biografia, Milan: Baldini & Castoldi, 2001. Ward, David, Antifascisms: Cultural Politics in Italy, 1943– 1946. Benedetto Croce and the Liberals, Carlo Levi and the ‘‘Actionists,’’ Madison, NJ, and London: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996. Ward, David, Carlo Levi: Gli Italiani e la paura della liberta`, Milan: Nuova Italia/Rizzoli, 2002.

` CRISTO SI E FERMATO A EBOLI, 1945 Novel by Carlo Levi

Cristo si e` fermato a Eboli (Christ stopped at Eboli) is Carlo Levi’s first, best, and most successful novel. Published in 1945, it tells of the eight months Levi spent in a small, isolated village in southern Italy. As an active member of the Giustizia e liberta` (Justice and Liberty) anti-Fascist group, he had been arrested in a sweep, along with many other of his fellow anti-Fascists in Turin, and confined by the Fascist authorities to a period of exile in the Italian South. Although the events of the novel cover a period of eight months between 1935 and 1936, the novel itself was written in 1944, while Levi, again very prominent in the anti-Fascist struggle, was living a clandestine life in Nazi-occupied Florence. In 1939, Levi had written Paura della liberta` (Of Fear and Freedom), in which he sought to analyze the crisis of European civilization that had brought the continent to the twin disasters of Fascism and World War II. His concept of the end of civilization relies on cyclical epistemological processes, from Vico to Hegel to Spengler. Indeed, Paura della liberta` is very much an indictment of the West and of civilization in general, which Levi saw not as a monument of all that is best in human endeavors but as a stage in history that had run its course, that was now in its death 1038

throes, and for that very reason was all the more dangerous. In many ways, Cristo si e` fermato a Eboli is akin to a book of Levi’s memories of the period he spent in southern Italy filtered through two lenses: first, that of the ten years that separated the experience itself from his account of it and, second, that of his reflections on the state of humanity and the need for a new beginning to which he had given voice in Paura della liberta`. Most notable about Cristo si e` fermato a Eboli is its depiction of the lives and customs of southern Italian peasants. In the immediate wake of unification in 1860, the South had been perceived by intellectuals and politicians alike as an albatross around the nation’s neck. Southerners were often described as devils, the South itself likened to Africa, a part of the new nation that shared none of the civilization of the modern North. Levi was one of the few Italian intellectuals to have attempted to understand peasant culture on its own terms and not simply as an inferior version of the so-called civilized culture Levi had come to distrust. In other words, peasant culture with all its reliance on magic, superstition, and the irrational represented a viable alternative model to what Levi considered the disaster of Western civilization. It is for this reason that the book concludes with Levi’s proposal that the South administer itself autonomously in a way consonant with its inhabitants’ actual needs and not follow administrative models imported from the North. This was a controversial view of the Italian South that went against the grain of the way Italian intellectuals, including the majority of Southern intellectuals themselves, had described the region. In fact, the initial critical reception of the book was almost unanimously hostile. Critics accused Levi of being a romantic and having invented a poetic world of the southern peasant that had little or nothing to do with social reality. In more recent years, however, Levi’s novel has been reassessed as being one of the few genuine attempts to understand the South on its own terms. Cristo si e` fermato a Eboli has been translated into many languages, has gone through numerous editions, and was made into a film in 1979 by director Francesco Rosi, starring Gian Maria Volonte` as Carlo Levi. DAVID WARD Editions First edition: Cristo si e` fermato a Eboli, Turin: Einaudi, 1945.

PRIMO LEVI Other: Cristo si e` fermato a Eboli, edited by Peter M. Brown, London: Harrap, 1965; 1969. Translations: Christ Stopped at Eboli: The Story of a Year, translated by Frances Frenaye, New York: Farrar, Straus & Co., 1947; reprinted, 1963.

Further Reading Barani, Valeria, and Maria Chiara Grignani (editors), Carlo Levi, L’invenzione della verita`: Testi e intertesti per ‘‘Cristo si e` fermato a Eboli,’’ Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 1998.

De Donato, Gigliola, Carlo Levi: Il tempo e la durata in ‘‘Cristo si e` fermato a Eboli,’’ Rome: Fahrenheit 451, 1999. De Donato, Gigliola, Le parole del reale: Ricerche sulla prosa di Carlo Levi, Bari: Dedalo, 1998. De Donato, Gigliola, Saggio su Carlo Levi, Bari: De Donato, 1974. Ward, David, Antifascisms: Cultural Politics in Italy, 1943– 1946. Benedetto Croce and the Liberals, Carlo Levi and the ‘‘Actionists,’’ Madison, NJ, and London: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996. Ward, David, Carlo Levi: Gli Italiani e la paura della liberta`, Milan: Nuova Italia/Rizzoli, 2002.

PRIMO LEVI (1919–1987) With the growing awareness in the second half of the twentieth century of the importance of the Holocaust for that century’s history, the written testimonies of those who survived it gained increasing recognition. Throughout this process, visible not only in the world of professional historians but relevant to a wider, one could say global, audience of readers, Primo Levi became a major, universally recognized, icon in so-called Holocaust literature. The word ‘‘literature’’ itself ought to be understood here as synonymous for written testimony, without suggesting an esthetic value. However, within the circle of witnesses providing a written account of their experience, a few are also unanimously recognized as ‘‘writers,’’ literary figures in their own right, enhancing the strictly testimonial part of their writing with what is generally considered as lasting ‘‘literary’’ quality. Esthetics, and literary esthetics, more specifically, were tools, in Levi’s case, for highly effective and cogent communication. Levi was one of those authors whose career as a writer and whose constant efforts to communicate content considered incommunicable by others, are a proof of the fact that literature has lost none of its original power. Prisoner at the labor camp—a chemical plant for research on synthetic rubber— of Buna Monowitz, near Auschwitz, Primo started writing his memoir Se questo e` un uomo (If This Is A Man, 1947) immediately upon return to his hometown Turin in 1945. After a first painful refusal on the part of Turin’s leading publisher Einaudi, Se questo e` un uomo became, in Italy and

abroad, one of the most powerful and influential literary testimonies of the Nazi concentration camps, a deeply analytic account of the underlying mindset of those who reinvented genocide in the age of technology. At the same time, though, Se questo e` un uomo, with its alternating narrative and reflective chapters, its diary-like composition, its keen selection and ordering of highly emblematic episodes, its deliberate language and rhetoric of constraint, its highly effective use of irony and understatement, is as much a classic of twentiethcentury Italian literature as it is a deeply unsettling documentary record. Levi’s subsequent literary work, while exploring various other topics and genres, intermittently returned, in novels, short stories, and essays, to the Buna Monowitz experience and its consequences. Sometimes remembering new episodes, or reconstructing adventurous homecomings, or creating fictional utopias or dystopias, or reflecting on new waves of negationism or historical revisionism, or in his poetry deploying profound pessimism, the Holocaust is more or less always present in each of Levi’s subsequent books. There is no straightforward development of Levi’s literary activity after Se questo e` un uomo. Short stories, such as ‘‘Mnemagoghi’’ on some refined techniques of recalling past experiences through rare perfumes, are reminiscent of a prewar atmosphere and a certain literary taste, characteristic of the mainly Turin-based movement of Decadentismo. That Levi was already interested in writing before deportation was signaled by the 1039

PRIMO LEVI author himself. Friends also commented on his talent for storytelling. As far as life after deportation is concerned, he usually emphasized his professional career as a chemical engineer specializing in enamel coatings. But here too, as in ‘‘La misura della bellezza’’ (The Measure of Beauty), his first moves and occasional mishaps on the chemical work floor found their way into short stories, not to be published, however, until 1966 under the pseudonym Damiano Malabaila and with the Plinian title Storie naturali (The Mirror Maker). In the wake of Auschwitz, Einaudi published La tregua (The Truce, 1963), an account of the author’s nine-month-long journey home via Belarus, Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, and Austria. The events told were, in Levi’s own words, ‘‘veri, ma filtrati’’ (‘‘true, but filtered’’). As he later confided to Philip Roth, at a time when he could see for himself a future as a writer, this novel became his first attempt to loosen the ties with the Auschwitz issue (A Man Saved by His Skills, in Marco Belpoliti, editor, Primo Levi, 1997). Full of memories of the camp and flashbacks to momentous episodes of the recent past, La tregua also explicitly confronts the future: A bunch of repressed human beings faces normality again as a group, in spite of their contrasting characters and aspirations. The book’s message is contradictory: Truce, not peace, will be the principal state of affairs for times to come. Some may read in the line ‘‘guerra e` sempre’’ (war, always), pronounced by one of the main characters, the Greek Mordo Nahum, as a reference to the Cold War, others as a more general, philosophical statement on life after Auschwitz. In the process of considering himself more and more as a ‘‘writer,’’ the Holocaust witness and the engineer discovered the epic drive of what can be considered as Levi’s first novel, or at least his first long narrative. This narrative vein, however, remained largely unexplored during the next 20 years. His time divided between the factory hours of the chemist, now in charge of a whole company, and the nighttime writing of the author, Levi’s fractured life was mirrored in the literary form he employed: Until 1982 he almost exclusively published short stories. Alongside these, Levi continued to prepare and adapt Se questo e` un uomo for new audiences: a radiophonic play first broadcast in Canada (1962); then presented for RAI, the Italian National Television, in 1964; later adapted for stage by Pieralberto Marchesini in 1966 (Teatro Stabile di Torino, directed by Gianfranco De Bosio). A special edition for schools (1973) and numerous translations carefully overseen by Levi followed. 1040

Levi’s collections of short stories are impressive: After Storie naturali, he published Vizio di forma (Flaw, 1971) and Lilı´t e altri racconti (Lilith and Other Tales, 1981). Inspiration for these stories was still widely sought in his labor camp experience, but some subsets took up a proper identity and thematic unity, especially those displaying various forms of fantastic inspiration or influence from science fiction. Here too an ambivalence emerged. On the one hand, Levi appeared optimistic with respect to scientific and technological progress (the same optimism the reader encounters in his reviews of new scientific discoveries); on the other, he made it clear that scientists and technicians may develop strange ideas and need guidance or restraint. This sense of irreversible and potentially apocalyptic developments of scientific research is found in those stories where such research, gone astray, meets the irrational aspirations of a superior race such as the Third Reich. The spectral shadows of the concentration camps victims are still silently drifting between the lines of such stories. The most immediate explanation for the predominance of short stories and for the fragmented way in which Levi’s literary creativity expressed itself in these years is the pressure stemming from his work as a professional chemist. Until 1977, Levi never fully retired from his post as executive director, and later consultant, of Societa` Industriale Vernici Affini (SIVA), located in Settimo Torinese. But the long aftermath of Se questo e` un uomo and La tregua, with marked autobiographical contents, did not make it easy for Levi to find his literary voice. In one case, however, a prodigious match between inspirational unity and a certain degree of fragmentation was reached in Il sistema periodico (The Periodic Table, 1975). Twenty-one chapters, each entrusted to an element of Dmitri Mendeleyev’s periodic table, unveil various episodes of Primo Levi’s own life. Different in style and tone, these distinct stories grow into the prismatic unity of a multifaceted allegory: Levi affectionately caricatured his Piedmontese ancestors’ social isolation; passionately recalled the chemistry institute of Turin University; solemnly paid tribute to his friend Sandro, assassinated by the Fascists of the Salo` regime; gravely disclosed his original fascination of scientific interest; respectfully re-created the trail of Rodmund, the mineral seeker; mockingly remembered professional anecdotes, small-mindedness as well as courage; eerily revealed the unexpected death of Dr. Mu¨ller, a former camp official, now a business contact. Playing freely with

PRIMO LEVI chemical elements, juggling as it were, without even aiming at a one-to-one allegorical relationship between the single element and its narrative, the author established science as the protean common denominator for all stages of his life. The periodic system, in this sense, is a symbol for science, but a multiple symbol: for science as alphabet, Bible, comforter, lifesaver, livelihood, dream, alike. Science and technology as a paradigm for life crystallize in Levi’s next work, La chiave a stella (The Monkey’s Wrench, 1978), which tells the story of an industrial rigger, Libertino Faussone; or rather lets Faussone recount his story by means of his own uncultured, harsh language (a mixture of Piedmontese dialect and jargon). As an independent foreman, Faussone travels the world to where his technical skills and leadership guide his steps. The innovating stylistic factor in La chiave a stella lies in the use of the spoken language; in the dialogue between men dealing with challenging technical problems, while struggling with dams and bridges. Similar to the wandering survivor of La tregua, but not in search of the shortest way home, the nomadic Faussone enhances the level of a traditional adventure story by means of his archetypal examples of human activity and craft. In this book, which lacks any reference to Judaism, the nonreligious Levi rediscovered the sanctity of human labor, the reenactment as it were of God’s creation of the world (Cesare Segre, ‘‘Primo Levi et la conception he´braı¨que du travail manuel,’’ 2002). At this point in Levi’s literary career, a certain pattern emerged of the wandering male protagonist, changing places as circumstances or duties evolve, adapting his ethics according to Mordo Nahum’s cynicism but with more room for solidarity, crafty and daring but not fearless. Such a protagonist survives the labor camp—his ‘‘university,’’ as Levi calls it—never stops learning, mingles with people of all walks of life during his odyssey in Central and Eastern Europe on his long way homeward, and can make himself useful and survive, with or without war. In his last fictional text, Se non ora, quando? (If Not Now, When?, 1982), a band of mostly Jewish people, young and old, good and bad, civilians and deserters, roam in the European war zone from the summer of 1943 to the winter of 1945. What many critics view as Levi’s only fully fledged novel, Se non ora, quando? recreates the atmosphere of self-regulatory chaos of La tregua. It ends with most of them arriving in Italy and preparing for travel to Palestine with the help of American Zionists. This novel may be

considered Levi’s political testament in fiction, summarized in Mendel’s—the group’s leader and Levi’s declared alter ego—catchphrase about Abram’s house with the four doors, one for each wall, open to the world. Nationalism, initially earmarking the other as other, then excluding and eliminating him, was the antagonistic notion par excellence in Levi’s political beliefs. What, paradoxically, keeps the rambling group of oppressed and partisans together are, precisely, their different political views, their common refusal to homologize. In one of his last interviews in 1986, with Milvia Spadi, in answer to a question on declining values in the contemporary world, Levi emphasized the importance of political values, that is the importance for every person to safeguard his or her own senso politico (‘‘Capire e far capire,’’ in Marco Belpoliti, editor, Primo Levi, 1997). Levi’s last and most striking book I sommersi e i salvati (The Drowned and the Saved, 1986), which was published one year before his suicide, became his moral, philosophical, and political testament, the ultimate reflection on what the concentration camp meant for him: The Lager is a miniature totalitarian state, made possible by what he terms the ‘‘deificazione dello stato’’ (deification of the state). Not a poetry enthusiast himself, Levi composed many poems after 1943, some of which are collected in the books L’osteria di Brema (The Bremen Tavern, 1975) and Ad ora incerta (Collected Poems, 1984). In the first collection, with numerous references to Auschwitz and its aftermath, one poem is dedicated to Adolf Eichmann. Levi’s poems are a telling expression of his nihilistic philosophy: ‘‘il mondo era uno sbaglio di Dio/ Io uno sbaglio del mondo’’ (the world might be one of God’s mistakes / Myself a mistake of the world) (February 11, 1946). Levi also edited an anthology of favorite authors and thinkers entitled La ricerca delle radici (The Search for Roots, 1981); and L’altrui mestiere (Other People’s Trades, 1985), which contains a selection of articles published in Italian newspapers.

Biography Primo Levi was born in Turin, 31 July 1919. His father, Cesare, was an engineer. The family were only superficially observant Jews. In 1934, Levi attended the Liceo D’Azeglio in Turin. His favorite hobby was mountaineering. In 1937, he enrolled as a chemistry student at Turin University, one year before racial laws prohibited first enrollment for Jewish students. In 1941, he graduated and began 1041

PRIMO LEVI his initial professional activity. In 1943 Levi became a prisoner at Carpi-Fo`ssoli concentration camp; he was sent to Auschwitz when Nazis took over the camp from Fascists in February 1944. In January 1945 Levi was in the camp hospital for scarlet fever when the camp was liberated by the Red Army. From January to October 1945, he journeyed through Eastern Europe. In 1947 Levi married Lucia Morpurgo and started an engineering career for SIVA. His daughter Lisa was born in 1948, and his son Renzo was born in 1957. Levi was awarded the Campiello Prize for La tregua in 1963. In 1965 he visited Auschwitz. In 1967 he was awarded the Bagutta Prize for Storie naturali. Levi took early retirement as a chemist in 1975. In 1978 he won the Strega Prize for La chiave a stella. In 1982 Levi made a second visit to Auschwitz and a first visit to the Birkenau monument; he made a public anti-Israel stand after the invasion of Lebanon and the slaughter of civilians in the Sabra and Chatila Palestinian refugee camp. In 1982 he won the Viareggio Prize for Se non ora, quando? In 1983 he started translating for Einaudi Publisher (Kafka, Le´vi-Strauss). Levi made a conference tour of the United States in 1985. In 1986 he took a public stand on the responsibility of the scientist. In 1987 he took a public stand against revisionistic views, resurfacing in Germany, concerning the historical truth of the Shoah. In 1987 he underwent prostate surgery. Levi committed suicide in his home in Turin, 11 April 1987. WALTER GEERTS See also: Holocaust Literature Selected Works Collections Opere, edited by Marco Belpoliti with an introduction by Daniele Del Giudice, 2 vol., Turin: Einaudi, 1988; 1997. Collected Poems, translated by Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann, London: Faber and Faber, 1988; 1992.

Novels/Memoirs Se questo e` un uomo, 1947; enlarged edition 1958; as Survival in Auschwitz, translated by Stuart Woolf, 1961; as If This Is a Man, translated by Stuart Woolf, 1996. La tregua, 1963; 1972; as The Reawakening, translated by Stuart Woolf, 1965; as The Truce, translated by Stuart Woolf, 1996. La chiave a stella, 1978; as The Monkey’s Wrench, translated by William Weaver, 1986. Se non ora, quando? 1982; as If Not Now, When? translated by William Weaver, 1986; 2000.

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I sommersi e i salvati, 1986; as The Drowned and the Saved, translated by Raymond Rosenthal, 1988; 1989.

Short Stories ‘‘Storie naturali,’’ 1966; as The Mirror Maker, translated by Raymond Rosenthal, 1989. ‘‘Vizio di forma,’’ 1971. ‘‘Il sistema periodico,’’ 1975; as The Periodic Table, translated by Raymond Rosenthal, 1984; 1996. ‘‘Lilı´t e altri racconti,’’ 1981; as Moments of Reprieve, translated by Ruth Feldman, 1985; 2002.

Poetry ‘‘L’osteria di Brema,’’ 1975. ‘‘Ad ora incerta,’’ 1984.

Other La ricerca delle radici, 1981; as The Search for Roots, translated by Raymond Rosenthal, 2001. L’altrui mestiere, 1985; as Other People’s Trades, translated by Raymond Rosenthal, 1989.

Further Reading Angier, Carole, The Double Bond: Primo Levi. A Biography, London: Penguin and Viking, 2002. Belpoliti, Marco (editor), Primo Levi: Conversazioni e interviste 1963–1987, Turin: Einaudi, 1997. Belpoliti, Marco, Primo Levi, Milan: Mondadori, 1998. Cavaglion, Alberto (editor), Primo Levi: Il presente del passato. Giornate internazionali di studio, Milan: Franco Angeli, 1991. Cicioni, Mirna, Primo Levi: Bridges of Knowledge, Oxford and Washington, DC: Berg, 1995. Emmett, Lucy, Rewriting the Holocaust: Intertextuality in the Works of Primo Levi, Exeter: University of Exeter, 2001. Farrell, Joseph (editor), Primo Levi: The Austere Humanist, Oxford: Peter Lang, 2004. Geerts, Walter, and Jean Samuel (editors), Primo Levi: Le Double Lien. Science et Litte´rature, Paris: Ramsay, 2002. Gordon, Robert, Primo Levi’s Ordinary Virtues: From Testimony to Ethics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Homer, Frederic D., Primo Levi and the Politics of Survival, Columbia-London: University of Missouri Press, 2001. Kelly, Judith, Primo Levi: Recording and Reconstruction in the Testimonial Literature, Market Harborough, Leicestershire: Troubador, 2001. Neiger, Ada (editor), Primo Levi: Il mestiere di raccontare, il dovere di ricordare. Atti del convegno di Trento, Fossombrone (PS): Metauro, 1998. Pugliese, Stanislao G. (editor), The Legacy of Primo Levi, New York: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2005. Ross, Charlotte, Representations of Science, Literature, Technology and Society in the Works of Primo Levi, Coventry: University of Warwick, 2004. Santagostino, Giuseppina (editor), Shoah, memoire et e´criture: Primo Levi et le dialogue des savoirs, Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997. Segre, Cesare, ‘‘Primo Levi et la conception he´braı¨que du travail manuel,’’ in Primo Levi: Le Double Lien. Science et Litte´rature, edited by Walter Geerts and Jean Samuel, Paris: Ramsay, 2002. Thomson, Ian, Primo Levi, London: Hutchinson, 2002.

PRIMO LEVI

LA TREGUA, 1963 Novel/Memoir by Primo Levi

While revising Se questo e` un uomo (If This Is a Man) for republication by Einaudi in 1958, Primo Levi was prompted to look again at the events surrounding his deportation and to reconsider them from a writer’s rather than from a witness’s viewpoint. La tregua (The Truce), which was written between December 1961 and November 1962, is a picaresque account of his tortuous, nine-monthslong journey back to Turin after the liberation of Auschwitz by the Red Army. The first two chapters, entitled ‘‘Il disgelo’’ (The Thaw) and ‘‘Il Campo Grande’’ (The Main Camp), revisit the occurrences of January 1945 already addressed in ‘‘Storia di dieci giorni’’ (The Tale of Ten Days), the concluding chapter of his earlier memoir. But a change in tone has taken place. Levi’s chronicle, which depicts the daily life of a turbulent pack of human beings assembled at the refugee camp of Katowice in June 1945, is bursting with vitality. There are petty criminals and academics alike, coming from heterogeneous backgrounds and obey to diverse moral and social standards. The journey back home proves to be an extraordinary experience of spiritual rebirth, hope, and underlying courage. Select portraits of survivors introduce the reader to a reality in its most threatening guise: The world seems to have reverted to primeval chaos. Yet Levi’s discourse is fashioned by a strong belief in humanity. For example, the young Henek is described as a ‘‘giovane carnivoro pronto, sagace, feroce e prudente’’ (a young carnivore, agile and smart, ferocious and shrewd), while the mature Mordo Nahum, called Il greco (The Greek), embodies a kind of post-Auschwitz cynicism rather than ancient Greek philosophy. The infernal machine that Levi experienced at Auschwitz can now only be occasionally overcome during short and fragile periods of ‘‘truce.’’ Upon publication, the author discarded his original working title of Vento alto (High Wind), because it evoked high expectations for the world to come and did not reflect the experiential human condition, which he compared to the Lager. The concluding lines of La tregua underlie a recurrent

sogno entro un altro sogno (dream within a dream) that haunted Levi upon his return to Turin: The initial ‘‘internal’’ dream of peace is exceeded by the ‘‘external’’ dream, in which the brutal dawn command of Auschwitz, Wstawa`c´ (get up), still resounds, ‘‘e nulla era vero all’infuori del Lager’’ (and nothing was true outside the Lager). Thus, Levi’s humanistic logic is cast in a shadow of profound pessimism; at the same time, he strove for a political allegory of the future. In fact, the first description of organized life in the post-Auschwitz era illustrates the Katowice refugee camp as a political fairyland. Levi recounted his farewell to The Greek with an explicit reference to international politics: Greece was one of the founding countries of the United Nations, so Mordo Nahum was able to return home; Levi had to stay behind since Italy joined in 1955. The allusion to the United Nations underlines the author’s shift from personal suffering toward an international concern for the future. The United Nations appears to be the official model of the joyously unstructured Katowice camp, where family-like harmony is restored by keeping away all hierarchical structures. Even a cook, in the land of plenty as it were, can assume the reins of government. Nationalism is criticized and opposed to cultural exchange: In Slutsk, another halt of the refugees, the Hungarian band ‘‘attacca con l’inno nazionale sovietico, quello ungherese e la Hatikva` (in onore del forte nucleo di ungheresi ebrei)’’ (begins with the Soviet national anthem, then the Hungarian and the Hatikva`, in honor of the large group of Hungarian Jews). Primo Levi’s compulsion to enact the past, a gesture that compensates for a sentiment of loss and guilt, is above all defined by a profound moral insight. The Lager continues to haunt the survivor from the space of the unconscious; however, Levi felt impelled by an obscure imperative to metamorphose his experience into storytelling itself and bear witness to the atrocities involved in a systematic dehumanization of millions of victims. In 1997, director Francesco Rosi released an epical adaptation of this chaotic aftermath of World War II, starring John Turturro as Levi. Working under tremendous restraints, Rosi was able to create a moving film that captures that very moment when civilization existed only through its scattered fragments of friendship, hope, and laughter. WALTER GEERTS Editions First edition: La tregua, Turin: Einaudi, 1963.

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PRIMO LEVI Other editions: in Opere, edited by Marco Belpoliti, vol. 1, Turin: Einaudi, 1997. Translations: as The Reawakening, translated by Stuart Woolf, Boston: Little and Brown, 1965; reprinted, New YorkToronto: Simon & Schuster, 1995; as The Truce, translated by Stuart Woolf, London: Vintage, 1996.

Further Reading Anissimov, Myriam, Primo Levi ou la trage´die d’un optimisme, Paris: E`ditions Jean-Claude Lattes, 1996. Belpoliti, Marco, and Robert Gordon (editors), The Voice of Memory: Interviews 1961–1987, New York: New Press, 2001. Bobbio, Norberto, ‘‘La voce dell’indecifrabile: Primo Levi nell’inferno dei degradati,’’ La stampa, 10 April 1997, 1, 25. Brombert, Victor, ‘‘Primo Levi and the Canto of Ulysses,’’ in In Praise of Antiheroes: Figures and Themes in Modern European Literature, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999. Calcagno, Giorgio, and Gabriella Poli (editors), Echi di una voce perduta: Incontri, interviste, conversazioni con Primo Levi, Milan: Mursia, 1992. Camon, Ferdinando, Conversazione con Primo Levi, Milan: Garzanti, 1991. Ferrero, Ernesto (editor), Primo Levi: Un’ antologia della critica, Turin: Einaudi, 1997. Rudolph, Anthony, At an Uncertain Hour: Primo Levi’s War Against Oblivion, London: Menard Press, 1990.

` UN SE QUESTO E UOMO, 1947 Novel/Memoir by Primo Levi

In spite of Primo Levi’s eagerness to see the memoir of his year of camp labor at the BunaMonowitz chemical plant published as soon as possible, Se questo e` un uomo (If This Is A Man) did not reach its first readers until 1947. Feverishly written immediately upon homecoming, several months after the liberation of the Nazi camp by Soviet troops, Levi’s book was initially turned down by the Turin publishing house Einaudi. Subsequently, Levi’s one-time Resistance comrade and publisher Franco Antonicelli agreed to publish but discarded the title proposed by the author: I sommersi e i salvati (The Drowned and The Saved). Significantly 1044

enough, Levi would use the rejected title in 1986 for another influential book, containing his concluding thoughts on the Shoah. Einaudi eventually published a revised edition of the work in 1958 following a revival of interest in the subject after an exhibition on the Resistance and the deportation, organized in Turin in 1955 to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the liberation of the camps. Meanwhile, Se questo e` un uomo had been translated into 15 languages and had developed into one of the major written testimonies of the Holocaust in world literature. For the author, this first book, and the experience it discloses, would remain as a constant reference during his 40 years of literary activity. The deep moral urge moving the storyteller (Levi used to quote Coleridge’s character of the Ancient Mariner) is established by the introductory poem, biblical in style: It is inspired by Deuteronomy 6:4–9 and solemnly exhorts the reader to meditate on the story and pass it on to posterity. With the exception of the grave warning for the ever-present danger of xenophobia, which is expressed in the Preface, the voice heard in Se questo e` un uomo is dispassionate, restrained, detached. It may be compared with the clinical scientists’ voice explaining the variety of reactions, often destructive and unforeseeable, that can be observed in humans and in their history. Acknowledging that his fortuna (luck) had been not to reach Auschwitz until 1944, Levi’s subtle irony emerges in the chapters where, for example, he depicted Auschwitz as a huge financial marketplace granting only short-term credit. Other chapters, such as ‘‘Al di qua del bene e del male’’ (This Side of Good and Evil), disclose that, beyond his status of historical witness, Levi was a master of the modern grotesque. The overall structure of the book is chronological. The opening chapter describes the journey by train from the Italian Fascist prison camp in Fossoli to Auschwitz. The book ends on January 27, 1945, when Primo Levi and his French friend Charles disposed of the dead body of a fellow prisoner while Red Army troops entered the camp. In between, 15 chapters give detailed insight into the methods the Nazis used to deprive prisoners of their humanity, to make them reach the fondo (rock bottom). Levi termed this complete loss of human dignity as the ‘‘demotition of man.’’ Often effective, at times this systematic degradation encounters physical resistance, which is immediately suppressed as in ‘‘L’ultimo’’ (The Last One). More often, it is moral or symbolic resistence, a more effective remedy to preserve some degree of humanity, essential for survival. Even mud can be used for daily washing, as Steinlauf informs his

LIALA (AMALIANA CAMBIASI NEGRETTI) younger camp mate Primo Levi. Knowledge also can be helpful in maintaining moral, and/or physical, integrity as shown in the emblematic and anecdotal chapters ‘‘L’esame di chimica’’ (The Chemistry Examination) and ‘‘Il Canto di Ulisse’’ (The Canto of Ulysses). In the latter, Dante’s high moral lesson in Inferno XXVI (intellectual courage as exemplified in Ulysses) is scaled down to teaching basic Italian to Jean Samuel (Pikolo), a young French fellow prisoner. Other chapters are less narrative in tone and more imbued with reflective memory: mostly so in ‘‘I sommersi e i salvati,’’ with its controversial theory of the gray zone, where guilt affects even the survivors since the drowned can no longer speak for themselves. Namely, as Levi argues, ‘‘la mala novella di quanto, ad Auschwitz, e` bastato animo all’uomo di fare all’uomo’’ (the evil tidings of what man’s presumption made of man in Auschwitz). WALTER GEERTS Editions First edition: Se questo e` un uomo, Turin: Francesco De Silva, 1947; enlarged edition, Turin: Einaudi, 1958.

Critical edition: in Opere, vol. 1, edited by Marco Belpoliti, Turin: Einaudi, 1988; 1997. Translations: as Survival in Auschwitz, translated by Stuart Woolf, New York: MacMillan, 1961; reprinted, New York: Summit Books, 1986; as If This Is a Man, translated by Stuart Woolf, London: Vintage, 1996.

Further Reading Calvino, Italo, ‘‘Un libro sui campi della morte,’’ in Riga 13: Primo Levi, edited by Marco Belpoliti, Milan: Marcos y Marcos, 1997. Cavaglion, Alberto, Primo Levi e ‘‘Se questo e` un uomo,’’ Turin: Loescher, 1993. Cavaglion, Alberto, ‘‘Il termitaio,’’ in Primo Levi: Un’ antologia della critica, edited by Ernesto Ferrero, Turin: Einaudi, 1997. Feinstein, Wiley, The Civilization of the Holocaust in Italy : Poets, Artists, Saints, Anti-semites, Madison, NJ and London: Associated University Presses, 2003. Segre, Cesare, ‘‘Primo Levi in the Tower of Babel,’’ in Primo Levi as Witness, edited by Pietro Frassica, Fiesole: Casalini Libri, 1990. Segre, Cesare, ‘‘Lettura di Se questo e` un uomo,’’ in Primo Levi: Un’ antologia della critica, edited by Ernesto Ferrero, Turin: Einaudi, 1997. Woolf, Judith, The Memory of the Offence: Primo Levi’s ‘‘If This Is a Man,’’ Market Harborough, U.K., and Woodstock, VT,: University Texts, 1995.

LIALA (AMALIA CAMBIASI NEGRETTI) (1897–1995) A village on the banks of Lake Como often appears in the landscapes of Liala’s autobiographical novels, most notably in Voci dal mio passato (Voices from My Past, 1949), Ombre di fiori sul mio cammino (Shadows of Flowers on My Way, 1950), and Diario vagabondo (Wandering Diary, 1977). In fact, this was the birthplace of Amalia Liana Negretti, better known by her pen name, Liala. One of the most prolific and successful Italian writers of popular romantic fiction (romanzo rosa), Liala had a conventional childhood and adolescence very much in keeping with the customs of her time. Moreover, she made a good marriage according to the social standards of her class but then encountered the love of her life. These events marked her deeply both as a woman and

as an author. After the death of her lover, Liala discovered the therapeutic effect of writing. She recorded her memories and shared her sorrow with millions of sympathetic female readers. In 1931 her first novel, Signorsı` (Yes Sir, 1931), was published by Mondadori. The book was such a success that Gabriele D’Annunzio coined the pen name Liala for the author, a pseudonym that became synonymous with romance. Over 80 of her novels, short stories, and tales have been serialized and published by various magazines. Sometimes collected in volumes by different publishing houses, today these works are hard to date. Even though Sonzogno acquired Liala’s copyrights in 1934—rather early in her career—it is difficult to pinpoint the first edition of many of Liala’s works. Furthermore, the difficulty 1045

LIALA (AMALIANA CAMBIASI NEGRETTI) was compounded by the destruction of the author’s archives during the bombings of World War II. Critics have long considered Liala’s writings as minor literature. Yet her works reflect a number of the literary tendencies of her time as well as political and historic events of great importance. Because of her great male characters and emotional writing style, she became the female symbol of Fascist culture in Italy. As the political situation in Italy changed and became uncertain, Liala set her novels in no particular historical period or time. This allowed her to keep the values, ideals, and type of society she had been presenting to the public all along without appearing to be making a political statement. Indeed, there was a drop in the popularity of Liala’s novels in the postwar period because the public was focused mainly on the reconstruction of the country. This dip lasted a short while. A few years later, women—who had become active agents in the reconstruction of Italy—sought an escape from reality in the trite but reassuring image of an angel of the hearth. No one responded to this need better than Liala, whose female characters already were exemplary models of traditional conduct. What is most astonishing in Liala’s success is the disconnection between the aspirations of her female readers, reflected by her characters, and the opportunities offered in actual life. As if enclosed in an ivory tower, Liala denied the everyday reality in which she could not find a place for herself. In her novels she asserted rather questionable moral truths, dispensed deserved prizes and right punishments—always according to her own criteria—and set rather superficial virtues and sentiments as a model. Thus, her narratives touch upon the absurd and can appear ostentatious and even irritating. Liala wrote about a society in which social class and economic well-being determine the characters’ moral values and behavior. Thus, if one is born in a well-to-do family, one is also virtuous by nature and has the moral right to enjoy and benefit from the best in this world. Those who have only limited means, on the other hand, have no redeeming features and no means of reforming. Their destiny is decided ahead of time and the punishment they receive is often extreme. For example, Coralla Kroon, the main character in Una notte a Castelguelfo (A Night in Castelguelfo, 1953), is a 16-year-old girl condemned by society because her family works in a theater. Even though Coralla is determined to guard her innocence until her marriage with the noble lieutenant Lauro Luis, the hypocrisy of the dramatic profession dishonors her irreversibly. Certain that her 1046

hopes and dreams of love will fail to come true, she eventually chooses to be with a man whom she does not love. The sinful aura of the theater has not left her unmarked, and her aspirations for a life of moral rectitude and social acceptance appear to be futile, even arrogant. At last, Coralla decides to resolve the situation in which she finds herself. She drowns herself in a lake whose waters close over her much like the curtain at the end of the final act of a play. Yet even the death of the reprobate cannot atone for her guilt. In the universe created by Liala, women’s nature is to act as dispensers of peace and serenity. Hence, when they commit a sin, their crime is double—against society and against nature. In this context, Coralla’s suicide confirms her fault and even makes it stand out, regardless of whether the sin was the result of a conscious choice. However, this moral resolution appears rather perplexing, given the fact that Liala herself had a forbidden love affair. In the context of Liala’s works, the story of Coralla Kroon is hardly unique. The author’s first novel, Signorsı`, has a similar plot. The protagonist is the sweet girl Beba, who is condemned despite her brave inner struggle. Beba has the corrupt blood of her mother flowing though her veins and cannot avoid sinning. Her only way out of this deadlock is suicide. On the other hand, in Il peccato di Guenda (Guenda’s Sin, 1964) the crowd rushes to defend the handsome Faliero Dubensshouting, ‘‘No, non va in gabbia un galantuomo!’’ (No, a gentleman can’t be put in jail!). At this point in the novel, Faliero is in love with his sister-in-law Danila and has already killed his wife Guenda, guilty of infidelity. Still the earl is released. Liala’s fictional world was embellished further by the setting she chose for her novels. The novel often takes place in a military setting, providing Liala the opportunity to parade snow white or deep blue navy and air force uniforms and her characters the opportunity to talk of integrity and heroism. Other novels take place in a pastoral world of limpid lakes and sunshine. The women of these novels have perfect complexions, thick and shiny hair, and fine hands, while the men are muscular and pure and resolute in character. This ideal reality was represented in Liala’s works during the very period when poverty, emigration, civil war, or even terrorism troubled the rest of the population. Therefore, the popularity of Liala’s novels can plausibly be explained as a form of escapism. Nowadays Liala’s books continue to seduce. In them everyone always settles down happily, and everything goes right.

LIBRARIES

Biography Liala was born in Carate di Lario (Como), on March 31, 1897. Still very young, she married Marquis Pompeo Cambiasi, with whom she had two daughters, Primavera and Serenella. Later she fell in love with Marquis Vittorio Centurione Scotto, a marine pilot, and decided to leave her husband and face an inevitable scandal. In September 1926 her lover died tragically in an accident. He sunk in Lake Varese with his aircraft during a training session before the Schneider Cup. This led Liala to start writing in order to overcome her great sorrow. Eventually she reconciled with her husband and chose to lead a quiet life in her country house La Cucciola, near Varese. Liala died in Varese on April 15, 1995. ANNA BOGO See also: Romanzo rosa

Ombre di fiori sul mio cammino, 1950. Bisbigli nel piccolo mondo, 1951. La meravigliosa infedele, 1952. Una notte a Castelguelfo, 1953. Per ritrovare quel bacio, 1954. Le creature dell’alba, 1955. Un altare per il mio sogno, 1956. Una carezza e le strade del mondo, 1957. L’azzurro della vetrata, 1958. Sottovoce, o mia Niny, 1959. Passione lontana, 1960. La finestra aperta sulla notte, 1961. Belle nubi solitarie, 1962. Il vento inclina la fiammella, 1963. Il peccato di Guenda, 1964. Un gesto, una parola, un silenzio, 1966. Sognai di essere tuo, 1967. Una pagina d’amore, 1970. Good-bye sirena, 1975. Non crescono fiori per Abigail, 1976. Diario vagabondo, 1977. Frantumi di arcobaleno, 1985.

Further Reading

Selected Works Fiction Signorsı`, 1931. Peregrino del ciel . . ., 1934. Sotto le stelle, before 1943. La casa delle lodole, before 1943. Settecorna (sequence to Signorsı`), after 1943. Il tempo dell’aurora (sequence to Sotto le stelle), post-1943. Dormire e non sognare, 1944. Lalla che torna (sequence to Dormire e non sognare), 1945. Il velo sulla fronte (sequence to Lalla che torna), 1946. Fiaccanuvole, 1947. Donna delizia, 1948. Voci dal mio passato, 1949.

Busi, Aldo, L’amore e` una budella gentile: Flirt con Liala, Milan: Leonardo Editore, 1991. Carrano, Patrizia, ‘‘La leggenda di Liala,’’ in Firmato donna: Una donna, un secolo, edited by Sandra Petrignani, Rome: Il Ventaglio, 1986. Eco, Umberto, et al., Carolina Invernizio, Matilde Serao, Liala, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1979. Gastaldi, Mario, Dizionario delle scrittrici italiane contemporanee, Milan: Gastaldi, 1957. Gregoricchio, Francesca, Liala, Milan: Gammalibri, 1981. Rosa, Giovanna, ‘‘Lo specchio di Liala,’’ in Il successo letterario, edited by Vittorio Spinazzola, Milan: UNICOPLI, 1985. Surghi, Laura, Evasione e conformismo nella narrativa rosa, Messina-Florence: D’Anna, 1977.

LIBRARIES The network of historic and archival libraries in Italy is an impressive one and is the equivalent of the country’s artistic heritage for bibliographic materials. However, in spite of this theoretical acknowledgment, two perspectives and two objects must be considered, the book and the act of reading per se. In Italy, public libraries have overlooked the book as an entity in and of itself, designating the

library as a resource center for information and cultural services. Instead, archival libraries have focused their attention on the preservation, restoration, photographic reproduction, and digital imaging of manuscripts and old texts. To the archivist, these materials are relics, excluded not only from reading, which is seen as an ‘‘inferior’’ function, but also from other forms of social function, 1047

LIBRARIES including those of reference and study. The historical roots of this duality can be found, on the one hand, in the virtually unlimited richness of Italy’s book heritage, and, on the other, in the difficult nature of defining the more complex tasks for a sector that has been assimilated to public administration. The mapping of Italian historic libraries reflects the decentralization that characterized preunification Italy, a landscape replete with an extraordinary number of cultural centers. As a result, the large national and government-run libraries inherited the collections of the great royal libraries: from the Biblioteca Reale of Turin (1837), to the Estense of Modena (1764), to the Palatina of Parma (1769), to the Laurenziana of Florence (1571), and, moving backward in time, to the Marciana of Venice (1536), the first Italian civic library. Unlike the other libraries, the Marciana did not belong to a prince but was a public institution as well, conceived as a heritage library belonging, theoretically, to all citizens. Indeed it was the product of the Europeistic insight of a Greek humanist, Cardinal Basil Bessarion (ca. 1403–1472), its first benefactor, who in 1468 donated his library made of some 600 Greek and Latin manuscripts to the republic of Venice. The Vatican’s library (1450), established by Pope Nicholas V, belongs to the category of a ruler’s library, even if it was designed to meet wider interests. The examples of rich and complex libraries, however, also include some smaller cultural centers with brilliant and uninterrupted traditions. This perspective, which seems to exclude any possibility of centralization, is captured similarly in the anomalous Italian situation that allowed for the coexistence of two Biblioteche Nazionali, one housed in Rome (1876) and the other in Florence (1885; previously named Maglabechiana, and established in 1747), both entrusted with the function of documentation and coordination, as well as with the more general task of acquiring and saving entire libraries. Indeed, contributions to the establishment of a national library heritage came not only from the collections existing in ancient capitals but also from the monasteries of suppressed religious orders, from confraternities, schools, hospitals, military institutions, academies, and universities—in other words, the local libraries that merged chaotically into state institutions and municipal departments that as early as the Napoleonic era had the function of collecting this cultural heritage. Thus, local institutions often became the only cultural reality on the territory, especially when, after World War II, it became even more urgent 1048

to train or retrain the masses to read. From the very beginning, then, the dualism of state libraries and civic libraries did not reflect any sort of difference in their collections. Whoever explores Italy’s libraries should take into account both types and search through civic as well as national or state libraries, or vice versa: Treasures are to be found hiding in both. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Italy found a place among the modern nations as the country endowed, paradoxically, with the most solid book heritage and at the same time the highest number of illiterate citizens. This kind of relationship between quantity and quality explains why Italian libraries aimed at reaching unrealistic standards and were overcome by conflicting tasks: preservation and reading, development and paternalistic didacticism. In an ideal situation, the distinction between archival and public access libraries is helpful, as it indicates institutional objectives that are parallel but never converging. The archival library is defined as a so-called introverted institution, given that its objective is to establish the procedures required in the protection and development of its own heritage. However, even in this situation, a library should not fall short of the essential requirement for carrying out the research appropriate to its own tradition and the composition of its collection. For this reason, an archival library where research is not carried out is considered an anomaly, as it does not carry out its function of valorization. Ninety percent of Italian libraries are anomalous. In archival libraries, the interface of research is primarily teaching, as the Biblioteca Ambrosiana of Milan has shown since the early 1990s in exhibitions of its miniatures, prepared with great attention to the presentation of the material to the public. However, the Ambrosiana was from its inception a library of modern design, founded by Cardinal Federico Borromeo in 1609, and is a private institution, as indeed are the great ecclesiastic libraries from the national monuments of Cassini, Farfa, and Casamari, to name a few, to the Capitolare of Verona, the fifth-century gem that was passed on from Roman antiquity to the medieval era. In monumental public libraries, however, teaching remains a sore spot because a credible didactic project assumes not only an internal differentiation of functions but also, and above all, the preexistence of permanent structures to be aligned with successful exhibitions and with the never-ending work of cataloging. The work of cataloging in the field of incunabuli and old texts, for

LIBRETTO example, has produced enviable databases, such as the Indice generale degli incunaboli (IGI) and the Indice del Servizio Bibliotecario Nazionale (SBN). Another outcome of the cooperation among the large historic Italian libraries is the census of sixteenth-century editions, the Censimento delle Edizioni italiane del XVI secolo (EDIT 16). Moreover, librarian training, which has traditionally been based on humanistic subjects and philology and only recently on computer science, seems also to be facing a double challenge. Neither the act of studying nor cataloging can automatically result in development. It comes as no surprise that some libraries that have a museum or a picture gallery should hire an art historian who would take on specific tasks of preservation, study, and development of either the ‘‘container’’ (the library) or of the ‘‘content’’ (the books). Examples include Michelangelo’s Laurenziana, the Marciana library of Michelangelo’s pupil Sansovino, the Malatestiana of Cesena (1454) by Matteo Nuti, or the Palatina of Parma, which houses the Museo Bodoni. ALESSANDRO SCARSELLA Further Reading

Annuario delle biblioteche italiane, 5 vols., Rome: Palombi, 1949–1981. Apollonj, Ettore (editor), Cento biblioteche italiane, Rome: Palombi, 1964. Barone, Giulia, and Armando Petrucci, Primo: non leggere. Biblioteche e pubblica lettura in Italia dal 1861 ai nostri giorni, Milan: Mazzotta, 1976. Biblioteche d’Italia: le biblioteche pubbliche statali, Rome: Ministero per i beni culturali e ambientali, 1996. Bottasso, Enzo, Storia della biblioteca in Italia, Milan: Bibliografica, 1984. Crinelli, Lorenzo (editor), Treasures from the Italian Libraries, London: Thames & Hudson, 1997. Eco, Umberto, De bibliotheca, Milan: Comune di Milano, 1981. Guida all’Italia del libro, Rome: Istituto poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, 1998. Le biblioteche d’Italia, Rome: La meridiana, 1990. Le edizioni italiane del XVI secolo: censimento nazionale, Rome: ICCU, 1986–. Indice generale degli incunaboli delle biblioteche d’Italia, 6 vols., Rome: Istituto poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, 1943–1965. Petrucciani, Alberto, and Paolo Traniello (editors), La storia delle biblioteche: temi, esperienze di ricerca, problemi storiografici, Rome: Associazione italiana biblioteche, 2003. Traniello, Paolo, Legislazione delle biblioteche in Italia, Rome: Carocci, 1999. Traniello, Paolo, Storia delle biblioteche in Italia: dall’Unita` a oggi, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002.

Annuario delle biblioteche ecclesiastiche italiane, Milan: Bibliografica, 1990–1995.

LIBRETTO The libretto is the written text that, with a musical accompaniment, constitutes opera. For this reason, its effectiveness always depends on its relationship to the music. As a literary genre the libretto emerged in the Italian courts of the sixteenth century, when theatrical performances, including works in prose and musical intermezzi, were organized. This changed along with changes in literary fashion. In the 1570s, the Camerata dei Bardi, a cultural association aimed at bringing Greek tragedy back to life by means of the creation of a musical theater, was founded in Florence. The musical theater that they envisioned had to be based on mythological themes, expressed in literary

compositions in verse and to be set to music. Euridice (1600) by Ottavio Rinuccini (1564–1621), a member of the Camerata, is considered to be the first libretto in the history of opera. It presents the typical characteristics of this genre: the alternation of arias and recitatives, a mythological theme, and verse composition. The metrical system, seven-syllable lines, and free rhyme (the rhyming couplet is used more frequently) are derived from the pastoral fables and remained unaltered throughout the seventeenth century. Arias, however, can be composed of various types of verses, due mainly to the work of Gabriello Chiabrera (1552–1638). At the start of the seventeenth century, 1049

LIBRETTO libretto production spread to many Italian cities, first among them Venice, the capital of theaters and of the great impresarios, where Andromeda by Benedetto Ferrari (ca. 1597/1604–1681) was staged in 1637. At that point, the form of the libretto was clearly defined: It was divided into three acts and several scenes, usually of the mythological genre. However, the characters, often taken from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, were greatly changed to appear more realistic. They usually respected the unity of time and action, while the plot was a mixture of comic and tragic themes. The individual scenes, at first unlinked, started to be connected, and more and more frequently the scene changes were marked by the aria. The themes of chivalry and heroism were also given ample space, especially in Venice. In the final decades of the seventeenth century, the librettists of several cities, such as Naples, also drew inspiration from the Spanish commedies of Calderon and the French tragedies of Corneille and Racine. In the eighteenth century, choruses became fewer and the arias multiplied, becoming the most important element. The dominance of the aria over the recitative followed the requirements of the performance, as the audiences appreciated the sung parts above all. For this reason, the libretto was considered by the writers themselves as a minor genre of scarce literary dignity. Famous librettos have been set to music by different musicians in different epochs, in a continual process of ‘‘remake.’’ In the meantime, the Accademia dell’Arcadia spread throughout Italy, influencing many librettists, starting with Scipione Maffei (1675– 1755), who collaborated with Antonio Vivaldi (1678–1741). A significant reform was begun by Apostolo Zeno (1668–1750), who in his 36 operas reduced the number of arias, confining them to the beginning or the end of the scenes. He also theorized the seriousness of drama for music, while the comic component became exclusive to the so-called comic opera. In libretto writing, certain essential rules were now applied: The number of characters was reduced, as were the arias; literary dignity was claimed for the text; and parallels with reality were sought. Thus, the composition of the librettos required greater attention to versification and the construction of characters that obey rational principles. Fantastic subjects were abandoned, and Zeno made an effort to eliminate the supernatural elements that abounded in the libretto composition of his time. The result was librettos like Gli inganni felici (The Happy Deception, 1695). Librettists have a fundamental role also in comic opera, 1050

which became increasingly popular by the middle of the century. In their works, satire was used to attack popular social figures, the aristocracy and above all, the ridiculous poseurs who mistook pretence for reality. In this context, the most famous libretto was Socrate immaginario (The Imaginary Socrates, 1775) by Giambattista Lorenzi (1719–1807), the ridiculous story of Tammaro, who becomes mad after reading too many books by ancient philosophers. Initially the librettos were handwritten, then printed on the occasion of the staging of a particular opera. In the introduction, the librettist explained his personal poetics, and the impresario listed the names of the performers. These publications were usually given as gifts to the most important guests, while the general public could buy them at the theater. The librettists did not limit themselves to written composition but participated in staging the performance. One of the main centers in which they worked was the court of Vienna between 1650 and 1740. Francesco Sbarra (1611– 1668), Nicolo` Minato (1620–post-1698), Silvio Stampiglia (1664–1725), Pietro Pariati (1665– 1733), Zeno, and Metastasio all lived and worked there at various times. On a stylistic level, the poetics of Arcadia suggested formal regularity of the verses and clarity of language. Da capo arias thus assumed great importance, since in them characters express their feelings in rational terms. Furthermore, the use of the septenary was reaffirmed with Metastasio, although a diversified metre remained prevalent, as the libretto production of Carlo Goldoni confirmed. Libretto writing in the eighteenth century was in fact characterized by a sort of scheme, especially following Metastasio’s reform, and the authors composed their works while rigidly respecting the codified rules. The same themes were repeated with monotony: At the center there is nearly always a virtuous man who triumphs after overcoming obstacles and conflicts. In the contrast between passion and reason, the latter is always victorious and attains the final prize. Language itself is crystallized, and the job of the librettist is only to produce a variation on a theme that has already been prepared. A further reform was made by Ranieri de’ Calzabigi (1714–1795), whose ideas would influence the language of the librettos in the nineteenth century. In a letter of 6 September 1783 to Vittorio Alfieri, he stated that it is necessary to create works that will strike the spirit of the audience, unveiling the passions felt by the protagonists of the work. Furthermore, he rejected imaginary characters and

LIBRETTO the ‘‘deus ex machina’’ and believed that respect for the unity of action is indispensable. His reform was put into practice with works such as Orfeo ed Euridice (Orpheus and Euridice, 1762) and Alcesti (Alcestes, 1767), set to music by Christoph von Gluck. Calzabigi also questioned the ideas of Metastasio and suppressed the use of ‘‘dry recitative’’ and of da capo arias. In the 1769 introduction to Alcesti he reaffirmed the importance of the libretto, arguing that the task of the music ought to be that of serving poetry and that the fundamental ideal should be a ‘‘beautiful simplicity.’’ According to Calzabigi, the genre of the libretto has high poetical dignity that reaches back to Greek tragedy, in which choruses are similar to arias. Metastasio’s successor at the Viennese Court was another celebrated librettist, Giovan Battista Casti (1724–1803), a longtime rival of Lorenzo Da Ponte (1749–1838). Da Ponte’s fame is tied to the fact that the numerous librettos written during his stay in the Austrian capital between 1784 and 1790 were set to music by some of the greatest musicians of his time, in particular Mozart, for whom he wrote his three masterpieces: Le nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro, 1786), Il dissoluto punito ossia Don Giovanni (The Punished Libertine, or Don Giovanni, 1787), and Cosı` fan tutte (Women Are Like That, 1790). Later in life, he moved to the United States, where he eventually became professor of Italian at Columbia University, thus playing a crucial role in the diffusion of both Italian culture and opera in the New World. Casti arrived in Vienna in 1783 and wrote Teodoro in Venezia (King Theodore in Venice, 1784), based on chapter 26 of Voltaire’s Candide. The work, staged at the Burgtheater of Vienna on 23 August 1784, was a resounding success. Da Ponte, a relentless detractor of Casti, attempted to ignore the merits of the libretto. In effect, Casti abandoned the traditional canons of style in favor of new lexical choices and started a radical reform of the comic opera. He satirized the theatrical world in Prima la musica e poi le parole (First the Music and Then the Words, 1786), which continues a tradition that includes Metastasio’s L’impresario delle Canarie (The Impresario of the Canary Islands, 1724) and Calzabigi’s Opera seria (Serious Opera, 1769). Through the character of Tonina, Casti expressed his contemptuous criticisms of the banality of the repertoire of serious opera, celebrating the triumph of comic opera and claiming the dignity of the work of the writer, who must not give in to the arrogance of the musicians.

In spite of these attempts, the next generation of librettists criticized eighteenth-century production for its excessive schematicism and its poverty of language. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the role of the librettist had been further diminished, and often he was little more than a mere reviser of dramas composed by others. This is for example the case of Gaetano Rossi (1774–1855), who defined himself not as a poet but as a word-monger. One of the most productive librettists of the period was Francesco Maria Piave (1810–1876), author of 60 texts, almost all set to music by Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901). The writing process followed a simple pattern: Once the story of the opera was agreed upon, the librettists composed the script, organizing it in isometric verses, favoring lines with an even number of syllables (six to ten) and simpler linguistic expression. Musicians like Gioacchino Rossini (1792–1868) and Vincenzo Bellini (1801–1835) used librettos of scarce value by now. A further change was made after national unification, when libretto writing entered a period of profound crisis. From this period, there are few works worth remembering, the most important of which is Mefistofele (Mephistopheles, 1868) by Arrigo Boito (1842–1918), who also worked intensively as a librettist for other musicians. Based on Goethe’s Faust, Mefistofele is an attempt to change the genre of libretto composition. The prologue in prose takes place on a stage where a critic, a spectator, and the author meet. This is then followed by a brief prologue in Heaven, in which Mephistopheles and God bet on the salvation of Faustus. The novelty of this work is the considerable number of protagonists, made greater by the presence of ‘‘choruses.’’ The language is very varied, according to the dramatic situations. In effect, it passes from the elevated to the common in the ostentatious display of a desirable language, expressed in lines of differing rhythm and metre. The work that the poet set himself had the fundamental aim of giving literary dignity back to the genre of libretto composition. He opposed the domination of music and believed it to be indispensable to rebalance the relationship between music and the literary text in order to create a new operatic theater in which music and language become one in a harmonious way on the basis of an analogous dignity. In order to attain this new musical dramaturgy, Boito believed the fusion of the tradition of Greek tragedy with the typical themes of medieval theatre to be indispensable. 1051

LIBRETTO A new phase seemed to begin with realism, thanks to Cavalleria Rusticana (1889), the libretto by Giovanni Targioni-Tozzetti and Guido Menasci set to music by Pietro Mascagni (1863–1945), which tells the story of a crime of passion and honor in Sicily (the subject is taken from a short story by Giovanni Verga). However, such hopes for renewal were short lived, and Gabriele D’Annunzio declared opera an ‘‘exhausted genre’’ in an article in the periodical Galleria of 1 March 1887, although he eventually wrote the libretto for Mascagni’s Parisina in 1913. Among the librettists active at the end of the nineteenth century, perhaps the most prolific and critically recognized was Antonio Ghislanzoni (1824–1893), author of 85 texts, including that for Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida (1870). ALFREDO SGROI See also: Lorenzo Da Ponte; Opera Further Reading Aloisi, Giovanna, Stefania Cuffaro, and Maria Teresa Iovinelli (editors), Libretti per musica della Biblioteca del Burcardo, Rome: SIAE, 1993. Baldacci, Luigi, Libretti d’opera e altri saggi, Florence: Vallecchi, 1974. Baldacci, Luigi, La musica in italiano: libretti d’opera dell’Ottocento, Milan: Rizzoli, 1997. Berrong, Richard M., Grammar and Translation for the Italian Libretto, New York: Excalibur, 1996. Black, John, The Italian Romantic Libretto. A Study of Salvadore Cammarano, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1984.

Calzabigi, Ranieri, Scritti teatrali e letterari, 2 vols., edited by Anna Laura Bellina, Rome: Salerno, 1994. Dace, Wallace, Opera as Dramatic Poetry, New York: Vantage Press, 1993. Fabbri, Paolo, Il secolo cantante. Per una storia del libretto d’opera nel Seicento, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990. Ferro, Donatella, L’America nei libretti italiani del Settecento, Rome: Bulzoni, 1992. Freeman, Robert S., ‘‘Apostolo Zeno’s Reform of the libretto,’’ Journal of the American Musicological Society, 21 (1968), 321–341. Gallarati, Paolo, Musica e maschera. Il Libretto italiano del Settecento, Turin: EDT, 1984. Goldin, Daniela, La vera fenice. Librettisti e libretti tra Sette e Ottocento, Turin: Einaudi, 1985. Kimbell, D. R. B., Verdi in the Age of Italian Romanticism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Malipiero, Gian Francesco, L’armonioso labirinto: teatro da musica: 1913–1970, edited by Marzio Pieri, Venice: Marsilio, 1992. Mioli, Piero, Invito all’ascolto di Gioacchino Rossini, Milan: Mursia, 1986. Nicastro, Guido, Letteratura e musica. Libretti d’opera e altro teatro, Cosenza: Marra, 1992. Nicastro, Guido, Sogni e favole io fingo: gli inganni e i disinganni del teatro tra Settecento e Novecento, Cosenza: Rubbettino, 2004. Portinari, Folco, Pari siamo! Io la lingua, egli il pugnale. Storia del melodramma ottocentesco attraverso i suoi libretti, Turin: EDT, 1981. Sartori, Claudio, I libretti italiani a stampa dalle origini al 1800: catalogo analitico con 16 indici, 7 vols., Cuneo: Bertola e Locatelli, 1990. Sgroi, Alfredo, ‘‘Aspetti e itinerari della drammaturgia di G. B. Casti: tra eros e impegno civile,’’ Ariel, 40 (1999), 47–71. Smith, Patrik John, The Tenth Muse: A Historical Study of the Opera Libretto, New York: Knopf, 1970.

A LIFE See Una Vita (Work by Italo Svevo)

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LINGUISTICS AND PHILOLOGY

LINGUISTICS AND PHILOLOGY The relation between the two terms that appear in the title of this entry, ‘‘linguistics’’ and ‘‘philology,’’ needs to be clarified. Depending on the contexts, they may either be used as synonyms or sharply contrasted to each other. The aspects that allow them to be used almost interchangeably are those that, in both cases, refer to the linguistic expression of texts. This is reinforced by denominations traditional in our cultural tradition; comparative philology (and in Italian glottologia) is an old-fashioned, but in some cases still current, designation of a discipline that is nowadays prevalently called linguistics, or historical linguistics. On the other hand, the two terms may also designate different perspectives, and even separate disciplines, ‘‘linguistics’’ being concerned with the study of ‘‘language’’ (traditionally from a diachronic viewpoint, that is, concentrating on language change; but during the twentieth century mainly from a synchronic viewpoint); ‘‘philology’’ being concerned with the study of ‘‘texts.’’ If we accept this dichotomy, we can say that linguistics aims at generalizations, at identifying those laws or rules of a general nature that lie behind our language ability, our capacity to produce and understand sentences or utterances; philology concentrates on the analysis and understanding of individual linguistic expressions. Linguistics tries to show what languages share with each other, what certain data have in common with different data; individual facts are interesting just because they are examples of ‘‘general’’ rules, concrete illustrations of abstract laws. Philology instead tries to illustrate what characterizes a fact in its ‘‘specificity,’’ making it peculiarly ‘‘different’’ from similar ones and stressing its uniqueness. It is useful to keep in mind that in Englishspeaking universities sometimes ‘‘linguistics’’ and ‘‘philology’’ are used approximately as synonyms, but that prevalently ‘‘linguistics’’ tends to refer to a more ‘‘modern’’ perspective, both in the sense of concentrating on contemporary language and of making use of more recent theories and methods, while ‘‘philology’’ tends to refer to a more traditional perspective, both in the sense of concentrating on earlier stages of the language and of having

recourse to long-established methods and techniques. In particular philology, concentrating on texts, aims at establishing their transmission and constitution, stressing different aspects, such as the ‘‘ecdotic,’’ concerned with the criteria for editing texts; the ‘‘Hermeneutic,’’ concerning their ideological and cultural interpretation; and finally the ‘‘exegetic,’’ aiming, at a more literal level, with their word-for-word clarification. There is an area in which it is normally accepted that linguistics and philology must go hand in hand and inevitably overlap—even if their perspectives remain different—and this is the study of early texts. In the university curriculum of Italian studies there used to be a section devoted to the study of the Early Italian texts or Testi Italiani Antichi. During the last two or three decades of the last century the interest moved away from linguistic and philological studies in general, and from pretwentieth century topics in particular. This is in itself an interesting phenomenon, which has affected all modern languages, and its nature and consequences deserve to be understood and analyzed better. As far as Italian is concerned, the implications are particularly relevant, for reasons that are specific to the Italian linguistic and cultural development. It is normally said that Italian, like the other Romance languages, derives from Latin. This is true, as a first approximation, but it is also misleading. In Italy, spoken Latin developed during the early Middle Ages into a large number of local varieties, which can be grouped into a score of regional vernaculars, with a rich written documentation from about the eleventh century. These regional varieties, usually called dialects (Piedmontese, Ligurian, Lombard, Venetian, Tuscan, Umbrian, Neapolitan, Sicilian—to mention a few) are the origin of the idioms still spoken today in their respective Italian regions. They are in effect different Romance languages and not dialects of Italian. They are different grammatically, syntactically, and lexically and are generally thought to be reciprocally unintelligible. Reciprocal intelligibility is of course not a clear-cut yes-or-no feature, but there is little doubt that, say, Neapolitan and Milanese are as different (or as reciprocally 1053

LINGUISTICS AND PHILOLOGY unintelligible) as, say, Spanish and French. Phonological development may render words that have the same etymology (that is, derive from the same Latin word) unrecognizable: The word for ‘‘Sunday,’’ from the Latin Dominica (itself derived from Dominus ‘‘Lord’’: Dominica dies ‘‘the day of the Lord’’), Italian domenica, is rummeneca in Neapolitan, dmandga in Bolognese, domenega in Venetian. Not to speak of the cases in which the etymology differs according to the dialect: The word for ‘‘chair,’’ Italian sedia, in Venetian is carega (Latin cathedra, from the Greek kathedra, which is also at the root of the English ‘‘chair,’’ through Old French and Anglo-Norman); the word for ‘‘to break,’’ Italian rompere, in Venetian is sbregar (from a Germanic root that is also the source of ‘‘break’’). To which variety do the Italian forms that I have quoted (contrasting them with the dialect ones) belong? They are recognizably Tuscan. But why do we call them ‘‘Italian’’ and consider them as belonging to a national language rather than to a regional dialect? These may appear simple, straightforward questions—but it is enough to try to give a clear-cut answer to realize that the questions are in fact ill defined and elusive. The distinction between language and dialect is not a linguistic but a sociopolitical one. As the Yiddish specialist Max Weinreich once stated, a language is a dialect that has an army and a navy. Typically, imperial and national powers have languages, while communities that are subordinate to higher, more powerful ones are thought to have dialects. If one looks at the way in which these terms are used, one finds that a language may not imply the existence of subordinate dialects, but a dialect always implies the presence of a superordinate language. For English it is common to talk about dialects of English (often referring to different accents, rather than regional varieties, lexically and grammatically distinct from standard English). For Italian it is less common to talk about dialects of Italian; and by Italian dialects one generally means, as we said, regional idioms that are different from the Italian language. This distinction is, however, fairly modern. The term ‘‘dialect’’ is based on the Greek dialektos, which means both ‘‘speech’’ and also the different idioms (Attic, Aeolic, Doric, and so on) accepted as belonging to Greek; the literary language of the Hellenistic period was called koine, a feminine (dialektos being feminine) of the adjective koinos, meaning ‘‘common.’’ The Latin form dialectus was far less common, since the Romans did not put a premium 1054

on the notion of language variation. It was in fact through the Italian humanists, in the second half of the fifteenth century, that the word and the notion of dialect were introduced into European national cultures. In Italy in particular the prestige of the Greek dialects was seen as a relevant parallel in the discussions, in the sixteenth-century questione della lingua, concerning the different varieties of Italian and their literary validity. In this context we need to consider also the notion of ‘‘standard.’’ The English word indicates a recognized level (a model, size, quality, or norm), and from the nineteenth century it has also been used with reference to language (as in ‘‘standard English’’). In Italian it is a remarkably modern borrowing to which purists prefer the term norma. But the notion is ancient, in fact inseparable from that of ‘‘literary language,’’ and in some ways from certain aspects of the modern linguistic concepts of langue in Saussure, of ‘‘grammaticality’’ in Chomsky, and indeed of Latin as grammatica in the Middle Ages. Dante, in the De vulgari eloquentia, elaborated the notion of illustre vulgare (a Latin neuter form, ‘‘illustrious vernacular’’), which does not correspond to any of the individual local dialects but has those features of regularity, uniformity, and abstraction that we attribute to a koine or to a ‘‘standard.’’ Similar ideals are central in the Renaissance discussions designated as questione della lingua, which concern the variety of Italian most suitable to be adopted as a literary language, such as the lingua cortegiana, the idiom used by the intellectuals and administrators in the main Italian courts; or, in the form that actually prevailed, literary Tuscan as used by the great writers of the trecento, represented, in particular, for prose by Boccaccio’s Decameron and for poetry by Petrarch’s Canzoniere. This ideal of a model based on the Tuscan trecento literary language was codified by Pietro Bembo in his 1525 Prose, a work that had a crucial importance in determining the history of Italian. Similarly the Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca, published in 1612, the first important dictionary of a national language, was based on a canon of authors deemed to be linguistically ‘‘pure,’’ in particular those of the Tuscan trecento. During the nineteenth century Alessandro Manzoni took a more radical, progressive position, suggesting that the model for standard Italian, the national language of the recently constituted Italian state, had to be based not on an archaic, literary canon but on the living language, used in

LINGUISTICS AND PHILOLOGY everyday life by a real community of people. The only possible model, he suggested, was educated Florentine. But the problem was intractable. The Italian state, proclaimed after unification in 1861, was constituted of a large number of regions, which had a different history, inhabited by largely illiterate communities of speakers of diverging dialects. As was pointed out by Graziadio Ascoli, the greatest Italian comparative philologist of the time, a realistic solution could not be found in adopting an idiom (spoken contemporary Florentine) that was effectively a foreign language for the vast majority of Italians but rather in adopting educational policies that reduced illiteracy and in creating conditions that allowed people to learn, alongside their native dialects, the written and spoken forms of the national language. This is what gradually happened during the twentieth century, on the one hand with the reduction of illiteracy and on the other with the spread of spoken Italian throughout the country, thanks to the mass media, radio, and particularly television. For the first time in the history of Italy, Italians became native speakers of their national language, Italian (rather than their local dialect) became their mother tongue. This had important consequences not only for the cultural complexion of the country but also from the viewpoint of the standard. The gap between written and spoken Italian diminished, owing to a converging movement on both sides: Written Italian became less formal, and the rules of the accepted written norm grew more inclusive, accepting many previously spurned colloquialisms; and the spoken standard found a better balance, distancing itself both from the rigidity of the traditional models adhered to in the past and from the demotic awkwardness of ‘‘popular Italian,’’ described as the usage of speakers who were not fully in command of the national standard. These developments are obviously reflected also in the current bibliography, in both the areas mentioned above of linguistics and philology. For linguistics, apart from the standard comprehensive treatments of historical grammar (Rohlfs, 1966– 1969; Castellani, 2000), we have synthetic descriptive and historical presentations (Lepschy & Lepschy, 1977; Maiden, 1995) and good reference grammars: in English, Maiden and Robustelli (2000); in Italian, Renzi et al. (3 vols., 1988–1995) from a generativist perspective; and the traditional, balanced, reliable, and serviceable Serianni and Castelvecchi (1988). For the history of the language there are excellent discussions in Migliorini

(1960), Bruni (1987), Serianni and Trifone (1993– 1994), and Marazzini (1994). For philology the best introduction, synthetic and yet comprehensive, is Stussi (1994). In the context of both perspectives, it is worth remembering the discussions, which concern the very nature of both disciplines, about the preferable way of presenting texts and particularly the literary classics. It has been observed that it is a common experience that editions of Dante’s Comedy (in Italian Comedia, with one m; Dante did use the word in the poem—although of course this was not a ‘‘title’’: Titles in the modern sense are a later creation) and of Petrarch’s Canzoniere (also a later title—Petrarch used a Latin designation: Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, fragments of his vernacular writings) look at first sight very different. Dante seems more modern than Petrarch. This is, of course, misleading and is due only to the fact that Dante’s Comedy is traditionally known in a ‘‘modernized’’ version, critically as reliable as it can be, but following modern spelling conventions, as long as they do not affect textual and linguistic (as against transcription) matters. For Petrarch, current editions often follow Gianfranco Contini’s critical text, which keeps nearer to some fourteenthcentury spelling habits (apart from the fact that for Petrarch’s poems, but not for Dante, we have autographs). The reader might believe that Petrarch wrote, for example, gratia, ringratia, philosophia, extremo, and et, where Dante used grazia, ringrazia, filosofia, estremo, and e, when the choice depends in fact on the criteria adopted by modern editors. These problems are inevitably somewhat different when we are dealing, from the second half of the quattrocento, with editions of printed texts. Textual bibliography (see Conor Fahy, Saggi di bibliografia testuale, 1988) is a discipline that points out that in the Renaissance (and later too) each individual copy of a book consists of sheets that may represent earlier or later stages in the process of correcting or modifying the text and that therefore each copy of a book must be treated, as happens with manuscripts, as a unique individual witness. But of course modern readers expect to be offered texts adapted to modern conventions of spelling and punctuation. Here are a couple of examples. At the beginning of Bembo’s Prose della vulgar lingua, the book that is recognized as having established the standard for literary Italian, in the Venetian first edition of 1525 (the princeps, as philologists traditionally call it), we read: ‘‘Se la natura, Monsignor M. Giulio, delle 1055

LINGUISTICS AND PHILOLOGY mundane cose producitrice, et de suoi doni sopra esse dispensatrice, si come ha la voce a gli huomini et la dispositione a parlar data; cosi anchora data loro hauesse necessita di parlare d’una maniera medesima in tutti; ella senza dubbio di molta fatica scemati n’haurebbe et alleuiati, che ci soprasta.’’ In a standard modern edition, by the most authoritative twentieth-century expert on Bembo, Carlo Dionisotti, this passage appears as: ‘‘Se la natura, Monsignor messer Giulio, delle mundane cose producitrice e de’ suoi doni sopra esse dispensatrice, sı` come ha la voce agli uomini e la disposizione a parlar data, cosı` ancora data loro avesse necessita` di parlare d’una maniera medesima in tutti, ella senza dubbio di molta fatica scemati ci avrebbe e alleviati, che ci soprasta`’’ (Bembo, Prose e rime, 1966). Dionisotti’s edition is based on the 1549 text published posthumously by Torrentino in Florence, which incorporates Bembo’s corrections. The only textually relevant change is ci haurebbe for n’haurebbe, which in any case conforms with the observation by Bembo himself that ‘‘si vede la Ci, in vece della Ne, comunemente usarsi da’ prosatori [...] Da’ poeti ella non cosı` comunemente si vede usata’’ (Bembo, Prose e rime, 1966). What immediately strikes the modern reader is a host of spelling differences, such as ‘‘&’’ for ‘‘e,’’ ‘‘u’’ for ‘‘v’’ (hauesse for avesse), ‘‘t’’ for ‘‘z’’ (dispositione for disposizione), the presence or absence of ‘‘h’’ (anchora for ancora, haurebbe for avrebbe), the use of accent marks and apostrophes (sı` for si, necessita for necessita` ). In some cases, the 1549 edition modifies the 1525: As well as ci replacing n[e], we find soprasta` replacing ‘‘soprasta.’’ One assumes that the modern edition would have introduced the accent on soprasta` anyway, as part of the spelling modernization, as it does for necessita`, which has no accent both in the 1515 and in the 1549 edition. We note also that the modern edition tacitly expands the abbreviation M. and prints messer. This may appear innocuous enough, until one realizes that the habit of tacitly expanding abbreviations is fraught with dangers. For instance, in a well-known early Italian text, the Formula di confessione umbra (1075–1080), the traditional reading of Me accuso (Dionisotti and Grayson, Early Italian Texts, 1972), is changed in Castellani (I piu` antichi testi italiani, 1980) to M(iserere) Acc(usome), which overcomes the transgression of Tobler and Mussafia’s law. Obviously for a reader to evaluate this hypothesis it is important for the reading of the manuscript 1056

M. Acc. to be preserved and not tacitly expanded into Me accuso. Another example: Il libro del Cortegiano, del Conte Baldesar Castiglione, to quote the title of the first edition published in Venice in 1528, opens with these words: ‘‘Fra me stesso lungamente ho dubitato Messer Alphonso carisimo, qual di due cose piu difficil mi fosse o il negarui quel, che con tanta instantia piu uolte m’hauete richiesto, o il farlo.’’ The Cortegiano must be one of the most accurately studied texts of the Italian Renaissance. It is editorially extremely difficult, full of inconsistencies, due to different reasons. There are many important modern editions but not a single one enjoying undisputed authority that a modern reader can use with full confidence. Amedeo Quondam, an eminent Renaissance expert and a major Castiglione specialist, published a fully annotated two-volume Mondadori edition in 2002, in which the opening reads as follows: ‘‘Fra me stesso lungamente ho dubitato, messer Alfonso carissimo, quale di due cose piu` difficile mi fosse: o il negarvi quello che con tanta istanza piu` volte mi avete richiesto, o il farlo.’’ It is instructive to compare the two versions: Quondam’s edition opts for a consistent modernization, which makes the text more legible for present-day readers. The criteria are of course fully explained and justified in the introduction. They are more radical than those used for Bembo’s passage. The changes could be ordered according to their relative weight: Some are purely graphic spelling conventions, such as ‘‘u’’ for ‘‘v’’ (negarui for negarvi, uolte for volte, hauete for avete), or the absence of accent marks (piu for piu` ), which do not appear to have further implications. Others, also belonging to spelling and without phonological relevance, may have implications of a stylistic or cultural nature, such as ‘‘ph’’ for ‘‘f,’’ or the presence versus absence of ‘‘h’’ (Alphonso for Alfonso, hauete for avete). In some cases the reader may wonder whether phonological implications are present or not: Instantia for istanza is likely to be purely a spelling Latinism, but what the intended pronunciation was supposed to be is not obvious (istanza, instanza, instanzia, instantia, or other alternatives). Even more uncertain would be the case of certain elisions or truncations (qual for quale, difficil for difficile), which obviously do not pose textual problems but could certainly be relevant from a linguistic viewpoint, even if they alternate in the text in what appears to be free variation. In both passages, the punctuation is modern: It is treated as if it did not belong to

LINGUISTICS AND PHILOLOGY the original text but to the modern editor’s interpretation of it. This appears almost inevitable when the original punctuation criteria are so different as to be unintelligible to the modern reader. On the other hand, the nearer in time the text is to us, the more one expects the original punctuation to be preserved. The results may be inconsistent, as when we find a secondary clause preceded and followed by semicolons, as in Bembo’s passage quoted above (‘‘; cosi anchora [...] in tutti;’’), which in the modern edition become two commas (‘‘, cosı` ancora [...] in tutti,’’). But when the two semicolons are used with the same function in Leopardi’s Operette morali (1827), we expect them to be preserved in a modern edition (1940), for instance in the ‘‘Elogio degli uccell’’: ‘‘Amelio filosofo solitario stando [...]; scosso dal cantare degli uccelli [...] e lasciato il leggere; [...] scrisse le cose che seguono.’’ These choices are inevitably linked, as Quondam himself states in his introduction to Castiglione, to prevailing attitudes and to the current discussion on modernizing the classics. There is of course a distinction between an ‘‘edition’’ that is only modernized in ‘‘spelling’’ and ‘‘punctuation’’ and a ‘‘version’’ or a ‘‘translation’’ into modern Italian. But this distinction is not a clear-cut separation, rather a question of degrees along a scale that at one end presents the original as belonging to an altogether different language and culture and at the other manipulates it at the risk of obliterating its peculiarity and treating it as if it belonged to our own intellectual world. The manner of ‘‘editing’’ a text shares the same nature as that of ‘‘translating’’ and faces similar conflicting choices, between pulling readers toward the text, making them aware of its distance and foreignness, and pulling the text toward the readers, making it as transparent and understandable as possible. It is a choice, as we have seen, that involves both a ‘‘linguistic’’ and a ‘‘philological’’ aspect. GIULIO LEPSCHY Further Reading Ascoli, Graziadio, ‘‘Proemio,’’ Archivio Glottologico Italiano, 1 (1873), v–lxi. Battaglia, Salvatore (editor), Grande dizionario della lingua italiana, 21 vols., Turin: UTET, 1967–2002. Battisti, Carlo, and Giovanni Alessio, Dizionario etimologico italiano, 5 vols., Florence: Barbera, 1950–1957. Bembo, Pietro, Prose della vulgar lingua. L’editio princeps del 1525 riscontrata con l’autografo Vaticano latino

3210, critical edition by Claudio Vela, Bologna: CLUEB, 2001. Bembo, Pietro, Prose e rime, edited by Carlo Dionisotti, 2nd revised edition, Turin: UTET, 1966. Bruni, Francesco, L’italiano: Elementi di storia della lingua e della cultura italiana, Turin: UTET, 1984. Bruni, Francesco (editor), L’italiano nelle regioni: Lingua nazionale e identita` regionali, Turin: UTET, 1992. Bruni, Francesco (editor), Storia della lingua italiana, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1989–2003. Bruni, Francesco (editor), L’italiano nelle regioni: Testi e documenti, Turin: UTET, 1994. Castellani, Arrigo, Grammatica storica della lingua italiana, vol. 1, Introduzione, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2000. Castellani, Arrigo, I piu` antichi testi italiani: Edizione e commento, 2nd revised edition, Bologna: Pa`tron, 1980. Castiglione, Baldassarre, Il Cortigiano, edited by Amedeo Quondam, 2 vols., Milan: Oscar Mondadori, 2000. Cortelazzo, Manlio, and Paolo Zolli, Il nuovo etimologico. DELI–Dizionario etimologico della lingua italiana, 2nd ed., by Manlio Cortelazzo and Michele A. Cortelazzo, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1999. De Mauro, Tullio, Grande dizionario italiano dell’uso, 6 vols., Turin: UTET, 1999. De Mauro, Tullio, Grande dizionario italiano dell’uso, vol. 7, Nuove parole italiane dell’uso, 2003. De Mauro, Tullio, Storia linguistica dell’Italia unita, Bari: Laterza, 1963. Dionisotti, Carlo, and Cecil Grayson (editors), Early Italian Texts, 2nd ed., Oxford: Blackwell, 1972. Fahy, Conor, Saggi di bibliografia testuale, Padua: Antenore, 1988. Leopardi, Giacomo, Operette morali, Milan: Stella, 1827. Leopardi, Giacomo, Tutte le opere, edited by Francesco Flora, vol. I, Milan: Mondadori, 1940. Lepschy, Anna Laura, and Giulio Lepschy, The Italian Language Today, London: Hutchinson, 1977; new edition, London: Routledge, 1991. Lepschy, Giulio, Mother Tongues and Other Reflections on the Italian Language, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Maiden, Martin, A Linguistic History of Italian, London: Longman, 1995. Maiden, Martin, and Mair Parry (editors), The Dialects of Italy, London: Routledge, 1997. Maiden, Martin, and Cecilia Robustelli, A Reference Grammar of Modern Italian, London: Arnold, 2000. Marazzini, Claudio, La lingua italian: Profilo storico, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1994; 2nd edition, 1998. Migliorini, Bruno, Storia della lingua italiana, Florence: Sansoni, 1960; as The Italian Language, abridged, recast, and revised by T. Gwynfor Griffith, London: Faber, 1966; 2nd edition, 1984. Morgana, Silvia, Mario Piotti, and Massimo Prada (editors), Prose della volgar lingua di Pietro Bembo, Gargnano del Garda (4–7 ottobre 2000), Quaderni di Acme, 46, Milan: Cisalpino, 2001. Pfister, Max, LEI: Lessico etimologico italiano, Wiesbaden: L. Reichert, 1979. Renzi, Lorenzo (editor), Grande grammatica italiana di consultazione, vol. 1, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1988; vol. 2, Lorenzo Renzi and Giampaolo Salvi (editors), 1991; vol. 3, Lorenzo Renzi, Giampaolo Salvi, and Anna Cardinaletti, (editors), 1995.

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LINGUISTICS AND PHILOLOGY Rohlfs, Gerhard, Grammatica storica della lingua italiana e dei suoi dialetti, 3 vols., Turin: Einaudi, 1966–1969. Serianni, Luca, with Alberto Castelvecchi, Grammatica italiana: Italiano comune e lingua letteraria. Suoni forme costrutti, Turin: UTET, 1988.

Serianni, Luca, and Pietro Trifone (editors), Storia della ligua italiana, 3 vols., Turin: Einaudi, 1993–1994. Stussi, Alfredo (editor), Fondamenti di critica testuale, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1998. Stussi, Alfredo, Introduzione agli studi di filologia italiana, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1994.

HISTORY OF LITERARY CRITICISM In the first decades of the sixteenth century, there began to take shape in Italian culture an idea of literature as a discipline standing on its own, as a language endowed with its own functions and rules, along with a desire to establish a canon of literary language that might compensate, with its rigid laws and exemplary uniqueness, for the absence of a national identity, which the great European monarchies had already achieved. Once established, the prescribed norms also functioned as a parameter for the judgment of texts, whose value turned out to be proportional to their greater or lesser adherence to the recommended precepts; hence, under the common banner of modernity, there emerged in equal measure a new conception of literature as a selfsufficient rhetorical practice and the notion of literary criticism as an autonomous exercise of reading. The treatise in the form of a dialogue is the form most suited for a reflection on the literature that came out of the fertile encounter of the various positions of intellectuals engaged in identifying laws and models of reference: Pietro Bembo’s Prose della vulgar lingua (Prose in the Vernacular Tongue, 1525) is exemplary in this sense. The imaginary conversation among Giuliano de’Medici, Ercole Strozzi, Federico Fregoso, and Carlo Bembo (a transparent spokesman for his brother Pietro) codified the humanistic principle of imitatio as well as the ideals of ‘‘harmony’’ and ‘‘equilibrium’’ that make up Renaissance classicism in art and aimed at consecrating the literary dignity of the vernacular. Petrarch and Boccaccio were chosen as archetypes of stylistic perfection in poetry and prose, with the significant omission of Dante, considered illsuited owing to the multilingual choices he adopted in the Comedia. In the second half of the sixteenth century, the numerous translations of and commentaries on 1058

Aristotle’s Poetics inspired reflection on the question of genres (a question already raised in the 1540s by Sperone Speroni). The Aristotelian idea of art as imitation and the realm of the ‘‘plausible’’ and the norm of the three unities (of time, place, and action) were at the core of the sixteenth-century debate on the heroic poem and later of the debate that juxtaposed Ariosto and Tasso’s poetics. Critics such as the Ferrarese Giambattista Giraldi Cinzio (1504–1573) and Il Pigna (Giovan Battista Nicolucci, 1530–1575), upholders of the value of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and its fictional variety, clashed with Tasso himself and Camillo Pellegrino (1527– 1603), who championed the ‘‘modern’’ heroic poem and its locuzione artificiosa (artificial idiom). Although partly thwarted by the repressive thrusts of the Counter-Reformation and by the persistence of an idea of poetry still bound to classical models, Baroque culture—anti-Aristotelian, transgressive, ingenious, and experimental—permeated all the genres and artistic forms of the seventeenth century, not to mention the literary theory and criticism called upon to elaborate new rules and parameters of judgment. Giovanbattista Marino (1569–1625), the poet of the ‘‘marvelous,’’ a modern figure of the intellectual, attentive to public taste and convinced that his own success depended on the fluctuations of the book market, became his own sponsor, encouraging the proliferation of ‘‘Marinist’’ criticism, provoking scandals and polemics on the proper way of creating poetry, and, finally, becoming the enthusiastic exegete of the innovative substance of his own productions. Battista Guarini (1538–1612) was also at the center of a lively debate arising around his Il pastor fido (The Faithful Shepherd, 1590). The label ‘‘tragicomedy,’’ elaborated by Guarini himself, emphasizes a desire to mix the two genres of the

HISTORY OF LITERARY CRITICISM classical theater and hence to transgress the rigid taxonomy of literary forms. To the attacks of one professor of the Paduan Studium, Giasone De Nores (1530–1590), a strict Aristotelian who polemically drafted a Discorso (1586) and an Apologia (1590), Guarini responded with Verato (1588), Verato secondo (1592), and Compendio della poesia tragicomica (Compendium of Tragicomic Poetry, 1602), which, taken together, constitute an important work of Baroque poetics. Both as an author and as a critic, Alessandro Tassoni (1565–1635), on the other hand, opted for a provocative desecration of tradition: Although La secchia rapita (The Rape of the Bucket, 1622) is a parodic translation of the chivalric poem, he included in his Considerazioni sopra le Rime del Petrarca (Thoughts on Petrarch’s Rhymes, 1609) a sharp critique of Petrarchism and through it the Aretine poet’s untouchable monumentality. But it was Emanuele Tesauro (1592– 1675) who most completely theorized the new art. In his treatise Il cannochiale aristotelico (The Aristotelian Telescope, 1654)—a title that provocatively brings together the present and the past, Galilean experimentation and Aristotle’s rigid rationalism—the metaphor, the concept, the marvel (a key word of the aesthetics of Marinism), become so many elements of a philosophy of knowledge that entrusts to observation and experience the possibility of grasping hitherto-unseen relations between things. By the end of the century, however, through the work of the Accademia dell’Arcadia, a strongly negative judgment was laid upon the Baroque and its leading figures. Only in the second half of the twentieth century did the richness and originality of Baroque literature come to be fully recognized, particularly in Luciano Anceschi’s Barocco e Novecento (1960) and in Giovanni Getto’s Barocco in prosa e poesia (1969). As the cultural climate shifted toward the Enlightenment, literary criticism of the 1700s began to undertake entirely different paths, owing in part to its new rationalistic approach. Between 1698 and 1711, Giovan Mario Crescimbeni (1663–1728), one of the founders of the Roman Academy, published the Istoria della vulgar poesia (History of Vernacular Poetry) and five volumes of Commentari intorno alla storia della vulgar poesia (Commentaries on the History of Vernacular Poetry), in which he returned to Petrarch and developed the classical line of poetics that had been ‘‘interrupted’’ by the ‘‘acutezze’’ (witticisms, subtleties) of the ingenious seventeenth-century poets. The great historian Ludovico

Antonio Muratori (1672–1750) as well, beginning with Della perfetta poesia italiana (On Perfect Italian Poetry, 1706) up to Della forza della fantasia umana (On the Power of Human Imagination, 1745) and Dei pregi dell’eloquenza popolare (On the Values of Popular Eloquence, 1750), worked toward a redefinition of taste, which is now measured on the basis of values of ‘‘prudence’’ and ‘‘right reason.’’ Literary art, according to Muratori, must banish all excess in diction, rely on the trustworthiness of ‘‘documents’’ for judgment, and develop a critical sensibility capable of grasping the creative essence of literature. Gian Vincenzo Gravina’s treatise Della ragion pratica (Of Practical Reason, 1708) harks back to the idea of poetry as essentially a product of the imagination, a ‘‘fable’’ that can communicate, through the pleasure of fiction, the values of civil life. For Gravina, the greatest artificers of fictitious worlds, pregnant with history in which ‘‘passion’’ coexists with ‘‘reason,’’ were Homer and (with some reservations) Dante, both of whose rhetorical structures Gravina, a member of the Arcadia, studied with particular attention. For Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), poetry, along with myth, belonged to the primitive age of humanity, a primal form of knowledge that is structured through images and feeds on intuitions but that offers materials from which the primal phases of the history of humanity can be reconstructed. Philosophy and philology were the privileged instruments with which Vico, in La scienza nuova (The New Science, 1744), critically retraced the ages of poetry, from Homer to Dante up through his own day, which he considered a world without poetry but which, because of the cyclical nature of historical recurrences, is susceptible of once again recovering the ‘‘heroic’’ imagination of the ancients. The priority that the eighteenth century assigned to the meticulous search for documents and dates and to the evolutionary processes of culture, led to the birth of a new genre of criticism, the history of literature. The most important is certainly La storia della letteratura italiana (The History of Italian Literature, 1772–1782) by Girolamo Tiraboschi (1731–1794), in which erudition and an attention to historical context allowed him to reconstruct a broad and articulate picture of Italian letters. In the second half of the century, Naples and Milan became the centers of the Italian Enlightenment. Particularly in the Lombard capital, there arose a critica militante, or militant criticism, which championed the unavoidable connection of culture with 1059

HISTORY OF LITERARY CRITICISM civil commitment and of the communicative aspects of literary language. To reach a broader audience, critics turned to the periodical or the gazette as the privileged instrument for an increased dissemination of ideas and to establish a closer relationship between literary production and the discourse it generates. Inspired by the Parisian encyclopaedists, who used to gather at a cafe´ called Procope, Pietro and Alessando Verri, along with Cesare Beccaria, members of the combative Accademia dei Pugni, established the newspaper Il Caffe`, a significant title that alludes to the socializing dimensions of cultural activity, no longer relegated to stuffy enclosed spaces of academies, but rather accessible to bustling city life. In its pages they battled linguistic purism because they were convinced of the primacy of ‘‘things’’ over ‘‘words.’’ Around the same time, Giuseppe Baretti founded the Frusta letteraria, in which, under the name of Aristarco Scannabue, he polemicized against the Italian poetic tradition (from Dante to the Arcadia), and with the editors of Il Caffe`, to whose faith in Enlightenment he contrasted a critical sensibility already steeped in preromantic ideas. Emblematic in this regard is his Discours sur Shakespeare et monsieur de Voltaire (Discourse on Shakespeare and Monsieur Voltaire, 1777), in which he held that the author’s excess of rationalism in Candide showed his incomprehension of Shakespeare’s poetry, considered the absolute model of creative freedom. The primacy accorded to the theater as a literary form particularly suited for a wider exchange of culture was at the root of the flowering of eighteenthcentury dramaturgy and, consequently, of the criticism and history of the theater. In the first half of the century, Scipione Maffei (1675–1755), a versatile intellectual and author of a Discorso storico sul teatro italiano (Historical Perspective on the Italian Theater, 1723), written as a preface to a collection of Italian tragedies, was particularly keen at pointing out that the Italian drama had developed its own specific set of values and was in no way inferior to that of the French. In the second half of the century, the polemical librettist Ranieri de’ Calzabigi (1714– 1795) drew attention to the quality of scenes, to style, and to the impact of the incidents represented on the audience. A member of the Arcadia, Calzabigi satirized melodrama in his L’opera seria (1769), fiercely criticized Metastasio, but was appreciative of Vittorio Alfieri’s tragedies. The figure of the professional critic was born in the nineteenth century and found in Ugo Foscolo 1060

(1778–1827) its most complete prototype. During his London exile, Foscolo published Essays on Petrarch (1821–1823), A Parallel between Dante and Petrarch (1823), Discorso critico sul testo del Decameron (A Critical Discourse on the Text of the Decameron, 1825), and Discorso sul testo della Commedia di Dante (A Discourse on the Text of Dante’s Commedia, 1825), in which philological competence and poetic experience, in the light of an idea of poetry as a language of the self but also as a product of the times, introduced a historical perspective and allowed him to offer intelligent interpretations of the classics of the Italian tradition. Sociohistorical factors and an e´lite literary tradition confer on Italian romanticism characteristics that in a sense are distant from the disquieting core of transalpine literature. Initially a marginal participant to the political and industrial revolution that convulsed the European states, Italy experienced the pre-Risorgimento birth pangs that engaged intellectuals of diverse origins in the formation of a national consciousness able to support the stirrings for independence. There took shape, then, a ‘‘positive’’ Romanticism, which was civil and patriotic, and that rediscovered, after the Enlightenment’s disparagement of it, the meaning of history, nation, and people—values that found fecund expression in all of the literary genres of the early nineteenth century. Criticism was therefore also reformed in the name of an idea of art freed from norms and models and as the product of the free expression of ‘‘genius.’’ Literary language sought to recount both the passions of the self and the suggestive scenes of the past and aimed at the representation of the ‘‘true’’ just as much as on the ‘‘beautiful.’’ Reflection on literature was freed from the traps of erudition and pedantry and was prepared to seek in literary texts the intensity of the ‘‘feeling’’ or the pedagogical function of their message. The need for a wider circulation of ideas was reflected in the proliferation of journals, which became the preferred vehicle for the critical enterprise, and in the role played by the nascent newspaper industry. It was in the pages of the Biblioteca italiana of January 1816 that the Romanticism versus Classicism debate erupted. An article by Madame de Stae¨l, Sulla maniera e l’utilita` delle traduzioni (On the Manner and Usefulness of Translations), exhorted the Italian literati to break free from the shackles of their tradition and open themselves to European Romanticism. Pietro Giordani and Giacomo Leopardi—to name only the most prominent intellectuals—took up the defense of the arguments for Classicism, whereas

HISTORY OF LITERARY CRITICISM the Romantics rallied around the journal Il Conciliatore, which was founded by Luigi Porro and Federico Confalonieri, and for which Alessandro Manzoni was a kind of e´minence grise. At the same time, Pietro Borsieri, Ludovico Di Breme, Giovanni Berchet, Ermes Visconti, and Silvio Pellico all agreed on the connection between literature and civilization and between a people’s language and history. They also felt, almost as a consequence, that literature should be ‘‘useful,’’ and that it should reach a much broader, middle-class readership. Above all, as Pietro Borsieri (1788–1852) stated in his Programma of Il Conciliatore (1818), they shared an idea of a literary criticism that ‘‘dall’intima conoscenza dell’umano cuore, e delle nostre varie facolta` intellettuali, desume le leggi e il metodo con che procedere sia nel comporre le varie opere sia nel giudicarle’’ (from an intimate knowledge of the human heart, and of our various intellectual faculties, deduces the laws and method with which to proceed in composing different works and in judging them). Popularizers of a broad conception of ‘‘modernity,’’ the Romantics supported the novel (a genre that is practically absent in the Italian eighteenth century) and favored the transformation of classical tragedy into historical drama. After a year in existence, Il Conciliatore was suppressed by the Austrian censors, but literary criticism continued in various ways to accompany the events of the Italian struggle toward unification. Exiled intellectuals like Giuseppe Mazzini, neo-Guelfs like Antonio Rosmini and Vincenzo Gioberti, federalists like Carlo Cattaneo (founder of Il Politecnico), and Mazzinians like Carlo Tenca (editor of Rivista Europea) studied foreign literature, began to reread the Italian classics (especially Dante), spread knowledge of contemporary writers like Foscolo and Manzoni, and promoted popular poetry and the rustic novel; they were always moved by the programmatic intention to spread a conception of literature anchored in history and working toward political action. In the second half of the century, with the advent of Italian unity, the political and historical climate changed, and as a result culture in general and criticism in particular entered a new stage. The debate on the novel, which went from being historical to being the story of contemporary life, grew larger, and literary histories proliferated: In 1865 Cesare Cantu` (1804–1895) published his Storia della letteratura italiana (History of Italian Literature) followed by Luigi Settembrini’s Lezioni di Letteratura italiana (Lectures on Italian Literature,

1866–1872), and Francesco De Sanctis’s Storia della letteratura italiana (A History of Italian Literature, 1870–1871). Influenced by the climate of Neapolitan Hegelianism, De Sanctis elaborated a notion of art as ‘‘life,’’ developing a concept of ‘‘form’’ in which content must have its organic development and for which texts are therefore ‘‘living organisms’’ immersed in their contexts, documents of the spirit of an age. By the same token, fictional characters, far from being abstract incarnations of ‘‘types,’’ are read as so many ‘‘individuals,’’ mature products of ‘‘artistic creation.’’ Thus De Sanctis’s historical examination of literary eras proceeded through value judgments—the ‘‘poet’’ is only one who realizes a perfect fusion of form and content—employing a lively prose able to recount the vicissitudes through which authors and their characters, in the course of time, constructed the ‘‘soul’’ of the nation. Attentive as well to contemporary culture, De Sanctis followed with interest the diffusion throughout Italy of positivist theories, to which he devoted La scienza e la vita (Science and Life, 1872), Il principio delrealismo (The Principle of Realism, 1876), Studio sopra E´mile Zola (A Study of E´mile Zola, 1878), and Il darwinismo nell’arte (Darwinism in Art, 1883). The critical approach of Giosue´ Carducci (1835– 1907) is of an entirely different kind. His Dello svolgimento della letteratura nazionale (On the Development of National Literature, 1873–1874) is more an analysis of individual texts than an organic and complete picture of literary history. Convinced that the critic must possess a solid classicist culture and a knowledge of European literature and must be at once philosopher, historian, and artist, Carducci approached works (he preferred poetry and the minor works of the greatest authors) armed with philological tools and metrical expertise: He studied Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Poliziano, and especially Parini. The so-called historical school was tied to Carducci. Promoted by the spread of positivism and by the faith in science that positivism defends, uninterested in critical judgment and engaged in the scrupulous search for documents to be sifted through with philological rigor, this school counted among its best practitioners Arturo Graf (1848– 1913), Alessandro D’Ancona (1835–1914), and Pio Rajna (1847–1930), the latter famous to this day for his fundamental study on Le fonti dell’ ‘‘Orlando furioso’’ (The Sources of ‘‘Orlando Furioso,’’ 1876). 1061

HISTORY OF LITERARY CRITICISM Luigi Capuana’s connection with Positivism was of a different kind. A theoretician of the method of ‘‘impersonality,’’ a careful reader of French literature, a supporter of the ‘‘revolution’’ effected by his friend Giovanni Verga within the novel form, his writings of literary criticism, from Studii sulla letteratura contemporanea (Studies of Contemporary Literature, 1880) to Gli ‘‘ismi’’ contemporanei (Contemporary ‘‘Isms,’’ 1898) allowed him to retrace the trajectory of Italian verismo. Furthermore, as the theater critic of La nazione, Capuana consistently devoted himself to the renewal of the Italian theater, pointing first to Dumas fils, then to Henri Becque as role models. Between the end of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century, the aesthetics of Benedetto Croce (1866–1952), deeply rooted in both philology and philosophy, challenged the primacy of positivism in the critical realm. Through the journal La Critica, founded in 1903, and works such as Estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale (Aesthetics as Science of Expression and General Linguistic, 1902), Breviario di estetica (Essence of Aesthetics, 1912), Aesthetica in nuce (Aesthetics in a Nutshell, 1929), and La Poesia (Poetry, 1936), the philosopher promoted his idealist conception of poetry as ‘‘pure intuition,’’ which is realized without mediation in ‘‘expression,’’ thus ushering an autonomous and absolute ‘‘form’’ freed from history. That poetry is ‘‘beautiful’’ which does not present ‘‘extraneous’’ elements within it—such as references to philosophy or politics. The latter, according to Croce, would immediately turn poetry into non poesia (nonpoetry) by polluting the compact harmony of the aesthetic form. On this basis he rejected literary histories in favor of monograph studies, which have no use for the notion of genre (they would be contrary to the individual value of the work of art), as well as that of poetics (as it would be an exercise of reflection, incompatible with the intuitive substance of the poetic word). Croce applied his aesthetic theory in a series of essays on postunification literature, later collected in the six-volume Letteratura della Nuova Italia (The Literature of the New Italy, 1914–1940), as well as in different studies of Dante and Ariosto, of baroque culture, of Manzoni, and of popular poetry. In the history of Italian culture, Croce rapidly achieved monumental stature and became an interlocutor whom, whether in agreement or disagreement, it was difficult to ignore. While Renato Serra, Giovanni Boine, and Giuseppe De Robertis clarified their 1062

own methods of reading by debating, in the pages of the Florentine journal La Voce, with Croce and certain of his ideas on literature, critics of the stature of Alfredo Gargiulo, Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, Attilio Momigliano, Natalino Sapegno, Luigi Russo, Walter Binni, Giacomo Devoto, Mario Fubini, and Francesco Flora departed from Croce’s teachings in order to restore the connections between literature and history or the significance of poetics or the value of style. Journals played an essential role in critical debate in the years after World War I (La Ronda, Il selvaggio, Solaria, 900, to name a few), but it was the publication of Antonio Gramsci’s Quaderni del carcere (Prison Notebooks, 1948–1951) that offered an unprecedented interpretive perspective on Italian literature. Beginning from the definition of the mediating function that the ‘‘organic’’ intellectual must perform within a social class, Gramsci retraced the story of Italian intellectuals, who in his view were historically separated from society and disconnected from the masses. His call for a national-popular literature was the call for a wider circulation of culture, for the people’s participation in culture—through intellectuals—that can lead the proletariat to political hegemony. Hence his interest in the theater and its educative function and in serial literature, which responds to the reading needs of those who are less learned; hence, finally, the need to connect the critique of ideology with aesthetic evaluation. Gramsci’s legacy includes the birth of the sociology of literature and Marxist criticism. The first school was promoted in Italy at the end of the 1960s by Robert Escarpit and focused in particular on the circuits of production and transmission of the literary text (publishers, audience, marketing), whereas Marxist criticism combined the teaching of Gramsci with Luka´cs’s theory of ‘‘reflection.’’ Academic critics like Giuseppe Petronio (1909–2003), Carlo Salinari (1919–1977), and Carlo Muscetta (1912–2004) studied, among others, Leopardi, Verga, the Decadent School, and contemporary literature, focusing their arguments on the relations between structure and superstructure, between literature and society. One strand that rejected the traditional line of Gramscian Marxism is represented by the ‘‘New Left.’’ Key figures in this camp are Alberto Asor Rosa (1933–), who, in his 1965 Scrittori e popolo, critiqued the ‘‘populism’’ of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Italian literature; and Franco Fortini (1917–1994), who distanced himself from the cultural policy of Communist orthodoxy while seeking

HISTORY OF LITERARY CRITICISM to align criticism with the ‘‘negative dialectics’’ of the Frankfurt school. In the second half of the twentieth century, in an effort to confer scientific status to literary analysis, the dominant concern in critique revolved around the problem of ‘‘method.’’ Disciplines as diverse as linguistics, psychoanalysis, and Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology contributed to the proliferation of various approaches to reading and of the theoretical discourses required for their foundation. The critical activity of several scholars can be traced directly to linguistic-philological studies: Salvatore Battaglia (1904–1971); Vittore Branca (1913–2004), to whom we owe a critical edition of the Decameron; Giorgio Petrocchi (1921–1989), the editor of Dante’s Commedia secondo l’antica vulgata (1966–1967); Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo (1936–), a master of structuralist criticism; and, finally, Gianfranco Contini (1912–1990), who, by combining philology and stylistic criticism, introduced the criticism of variants in his 1970 Varianti e altra linguistica but is also known as militant critic and historian of literature particularly alert to the ‘‘expressionistic’’ strand of the Italian tradition. On another front, we owe the first applications of psychoanalysis to literary texts to Giacomo Debenedetti (1901–1967). With his absorbing style, in numerous essays as well as in Il romanzo del Novecento (The Twentieth-Century Novel, 1971), Poesia italiana del Novecento (Twentieth-Century Italian Poetry, 1974), Verga e il naturalismo (Verga and Naturalism, 1976), among others, Debenedetti told a ‘‘critical story’’ dense in illuminating digressions and wide-ranging cultural references and proceeded toward a systematic excavation of texts in search of signs, clues, and traces that may clarify their deepest meanings. It is to his example that we can attribute the principal merit of the most recent Italian psychoanalytic criticism, which privileges works and their hidden meanings. This is the perspective of Francesco Orlando (1934–) in his 1998 L’intimita` e la storia, a reading of Giuseppe Tomansi di Lampedusa’s novel Il gattopardo. But at the same time, for other critics the borders between psychoanalytic criticism and symbolic criticism turn hazy, as demonstrated, for example, by the rich critical activity of Giorgio Ba`rberi Squarotti (1929–). One scholar capable of approaching literary texts according to the most varied perspectives, from the anthropological to the symbolic and the Hermeneutic, has been Ezio Raimondi (1924–), whose Metafora e storia (Metaphor and History,

1970) and Il romanzo senza idillio (The Anti-Lyric Novel, 1974) are exemplary. On the other hand, the research of Carlo Dionisotti (1908–1988) is alien to any methodological infatuation and is positivistically inspired by a scrupulous analysis of facts. With his Geografia e storia della letteratura italiana (A Geography and History of Italian Literature, 1967), he successfully offered new historiographic criteria, though he remained practically peerless. The aesthetics of Luciano Anceschi (1911–1995), founder of the journal Il Verri and a member of the avant-garde Gruppo 63, are tied to Husserl’s phenomenology. From Autonomia ed eteronomia dell’arte (The Autonomy and Heteronomy of Art, 1936) to Il caos, il metodo (Chaos and Method, 1981), a key part of his interpretations is ‘‘hearing,’’ making oneself available, free of value judgments, to the particularities of literary phenomena and poetics. Anceschi combated the idealism and historicism of Croce and his followers, and theorized the notion of literary ‘‘institutions.’’ During the 1960s, there was an intensive undertaking to translate foreign critical texts and methodologies, and the theories of Russian formalism, French structuralism, and American semiotics appeared almost contemporaneously on the Italian book market, offering to experts a rich range of theoretic proposals and investigative tools capable of interacting and permitting articulate and innovative readings of literary messages. Maria Corti, Cesare Segre, D’Arco Silvio Avalle, and Umberto Eco established an Italian semiotics with their studies of the poetic and narrative text in broader cultural horizons, which then included popular literature. Although in his 1974 Le strutture e il tempo, Cesare Segre (1928–), influenced by Jurij Lotman’s study of cultural systems, read semiological models in the light of their historical contexts, Umberto Eco (1932–), with Lector in fabula (The Role of the Reader, 1979), offered acute and original analyses of the function of the reader in the text. In I limiti dell’interpretazione (The Limits of Interpretation, 1990), Eco also worked in the field of reception studies begun by the school of Konstanz, pointing out, to the proponents of ‘‘deconstructionism’’ and those who go too far in a ‘‘creative’’ relation with texts (both results of the ‘‘postmodern’’ that, in the critical realm, places ‘‘method’’ and its scientific status in doubt), the implicit dangers of an unreliable reading. Among the crowded ranks of writer-critics who offer important contributions to the history of Italian literary criticism, we should mention Eugenio 1063

HISTORY OF LITERARY CRITICISM Montale and his sensibility as a reader of contemporaneity (without him, Italian culture would have ignored Italo Svevo); Pier Paolo Pasolini, a ‘‘militant’’ critic of the review Officina, who is supported, in his provocative intuitions, by the fertile dichotomy that provides the title for his work Passione e ideologia (Passion and Ideology, 1960); and Italo Calvino, who, with Una pietra sopra (The Uses of Literature, 1980) and Lezioni americane (Six Memos for the Next Millennium, 1988), was committed to tackling the complexity of contemporary culture and its languages and to investigating the ways in which literature may still be connected to society. GIUSEPPINA BALDISSONE See also: Literary History Further Reading Asor Rosa, Alberto (editor), Letteratura italiana, vol. 4, L’interpretazione, Turin: Einaudi, 1985.

Baldacci, Luigi, I critici italiani del Novecento, Milan: Garzanti, 1969. Baroni, Giorgio (editor), Storia della critica letteraria in Italia, Turin: Utet, 1997. Borsellino, Nino, Critica e storia. Rendiconti di fine secolo, Rome: Kepos, 1993. Carravetta, Peter, ‘‘Italian Theory and Criticism,’’ in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, 2nd ed., Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. Casadei, Alberto, La critica letteraria del Novecento, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2001. Corti, Maria, and Segre, Cesare (editors), I metodi attuali della critica in Italia, Turin: ERI, 1970. Getto, Giovanni, Storia delle storie letterarie (1942), Florence: Sansoni, 1981. Leone De Castris, Arcangelo, La critica letteraria in Italia dal dopoguerra ad oggi, Bari: Laterza, 1991. Leonelli, Giuseppe, La critica letteraria in Italia 1945–1994, Milan: Garzanti, 1994. Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo, Profili di critici del Novecento, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1998. Muzzioli, Francesco, Le teorie della critica letteraria, Rome: La Nuova Italia Scientifica, 1994. Russo, Luigi, La critica letteraria contemporanea, Bari: Laterza, 1942–1943.

LITERARY HISTORY Even though no one can cast doubt on the historical nature of literature, literary history is a genre in crisis since the nineteenth century. For a long time, the Storia della letteratura italiana (History of Italian Literature, 1870) by Francesco De Sanctis (1817–1883) was considered the model of such a history, ‘‘a novel of formation’’ that proved a lasting stimulus to future historians because of the tasks it posed for the critic. There seemed to be two ways to get beyond De Sanctis: The first was to make literary research genetic and no longer teleological, entrusting it to a staff of specialists rather than to a single person; the second was to return to the spirit of the ten-volume Storia della letteratura italiana (History of Italian Literature, 1787–1794) by Girolamo Tiraboschi (1731–1794), which presented a model of literary history that was erudite, precise, and interdisciplinary. What was literary history before De Sanctis? From Giusto Fontanini (1666–1736), whose Della eloquenza italiana (On Italian Eloquence, 1706) is the 1064

first critical bibliography of Italian literature, to Tiraboschi, it was a matter of imposing biobibliographies that are still used in bibliographic and philological research. To these national bibliographies, we should add local and regional documentation, which would become topics of great interest again in the 1900s. On the other hand, Romantic historiography (from Luigi Settembrini, to Emiliani Giudici, to Cesare Cantu`) holds that literary quality is a distinct cultural function and places literature at the center of a rhetoricalpolitical design that covers both secularism and Catholicism. De Sanctis’s work envisions historiography as a political and, at the same time, didactic project. In contrast to other voices of the romantic school, however, De Sanctis recognized the need for the critic’s or theorist’s own self-examination in analyzing the formal nature of the literary work and its interaction with the powers of history. Without this preliminary clarification, he would not have left his

LITERARY HISTORY mark. However, Benedetto Croce (1866–1952), who placed De Sanctis at the origin of his aesthetics, was the first to reject the model of a chronological history and suggested a type of literary historiography understood as a successive collection of essays written by an author and interpreter of the texts. This interpreter would not aspire to an organic explanation of the literary phenomena he surveys. This was the line that would be taken by Attilio Momigliano (1883–1952) and Francesco Flora (1891–1962), who both died at the end of the World War II but whose work endured until the 1970s because of their essaylike freshness. The fact of the matter is that, apart from Croce, De Sanctis’s lesson passed into the Marxism of Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), and that Marxism leaves its mark on a large part of subsequent Italian literary criticism, its principles unintentionally reflected in the most apolitical criticism. Only in Italy would literary history become a trend, an ‘‘ism’’ among the other ‘‘isms’’: that is, the ‘‘historicism’’ that is still a generic basis of the historical-literary studies at Italian universities, even where it has been reformulated in the form of aesthetics of reception and sociology of the literary imagination. This historicism has also been accompanied by the rediscovery of comparatism and of the positivist methodology of source finding (from Francesco D’Ovidio to Pio Rajna). Unlike De Sanctis or Croce, Gramsci had aimed (in the cultural tradition of liberal Italy) at a literary criticism relevant to political-social debates. All of this would not have been possible if De Sanctis’s work had not contained romantic vision of the literature-nation connection. Similarly, the suggestions that come from the perspectives outlined by Gramsci would be filtered through the rereading of De Sanctis. The return to De Sanctis attributed to Gramsci became the program of a generation of critics including Luigi Russo, Walter Binni, Carlo Muscetta, and Natalino Sapegno. Only afterward would Gramsci’s work become known in its detail, but we can say that Gramsci’s philosophy owes its fortune to it quasi-aphoristic form, which makes it even today stimulating and accessible. The asystemic nature of Gramsci’s works established a new materialistic, though antidogmatic, method. Gramsci exemplified the problem literature’s nonconformity presented to any systematic history, on which, however, Italian historicism embarked with great energy. One important link in this historical project was the legacy of an undoubtedly conservative culture, which, nevertheless, was the guardian of a

patrimony of taste, of a strong formal feeling, and of an unfailing ability to judge. One can also find these traits in the new literary history projected by Sapegno and Emilio Cecchi. One should also note Gianfranco Contini’s effort to bring together linguistic analysis and judgment about historicalstylistic values. However, in his La letteratura italiana: storia e testi (Italian Literature: History and Texts, 1970–1980), Carlo Muscetta, a fervent follower of De Sanctis, showed a growing sensitivity toward the text and, at the same time, an increasing intolerance for comments on literature unsupported by specific examples. He inserted in his historical account an anthology of the most representative texts. Alberto Asor Rosa (1933–) challenges the formula of De Sanctis with a polemical (and mythological) return to Tiraboschi’s interdisciplinary idea. Asor Rosa also expands on the notions parsimoniously provided by Carlo Dionisotti (1908– 1998), in his Geografia e storia della letteratura itlaiana (Geography and History of Italian Literature. 1967), that literary history should be reinstituted on a geographical basis. Actually, Dionisotti did not mean to introduce into literary research ‘‘localism’’ or ‘‘regionalism,’’ which, in fact, were pursued by Walter Binni and by the Sapegno, with their Storia letteraria delle regioni d’Italia (Literary History of the Regions of Italy, 1968). Instead, Dionisotti advocated a mode of literary criticism determined not so much by abstract aesthetic principles as by the cultural context in which works appear, including information on their editing and publication. The extent to which this perspective could be assimilated to a general literary history can be evaluated by looking at the thick volumes on Italian literature, which copiously offer material on the institutional frameworks of literary production. In the background of this project is the shadow of Gramsci. The editor’s personality and his most ideologically committed collaborators stand in this shadow in their attempt to preserve the political mission of literary research. On the other hand, in the Storia della civilta` letteraria italiana (History of Italian Literary Civilization, 1990), edited by Giorgio Ba`rberi Squarotti (1929–), history unfolds through a continuous narration of events reconstructing the evolution of a national literature: ‘‘the term history does not, in our case, mean anything other than the tale of the events of Italian Literature laid out in chronological order. It does not allude in any way to political or social history.’’ The history of the language, which charts developments in ‘‘style,’’ and 1065

LITERARY HISTORY the secondary literature, that is the history of literary criticism, are allowed to stand. Another solution was offered by Enrico Malato’s Storia della letteratura italiana (History of Italian Literature, 1994), which opts for the concept of national ‘‘literary space’’ rather than for terms like ‘‘culture’’ or ‘‘civilization.’’ Malato’s history was based on the assumption that literature ‘‘is the privileged space where the culture, if not the very civilisation, of a nation is expressed.’’ The literary space is silhouetted against the historical backdrop in which production, reception, and transmission of the text take place. Accepting the assumption that the relationship between historicity and literary word is in a state of crisis, Nino Borsellino and Walter Pedulla` stressed the need to consider the differences that characterize the literary phenomenon in its own context: ‘‘Literature is the brightest star in a dense constellation consisting of what takes place before, alongside, and after it’’ (Storia generale della letteratura italiana, 2004). The term ‘‘general’’ preceding ‘‘history’’ evokes the spirit of the 1700s, when the idea of the specificity of the literary text originated in annalistic work and erudite documentation. The recovery of interdisciplinarity and interest in minor writers characterizes the methodical doubt of today’s literary historiography. We should bear in mind that literary histories are different not so much in the ‘‘canonical’’ writers they consider but in their treatment of ‘‘minor’’ writers, their quotation of extraliterary texts, or their references to examples drawn from other arts. These volumes covering various authors sometimes contain contributions on a highly specialized level that do not do justice to the tradition of the ‘‘literary history’’ genre, which is, by its very nature, a work of synthesis and not of analysis, aimed at teaching and not at research, and consequently entrusted to the commitment and talent of a single expert. Inspired by complex principles and directed to the experience of reading, Giulio Ferroni’s literary history is essentially based on theory and sociology of literature: ‘‘from the institutional data to the material elements of the production of literature, from the forms of organisation of the intellectuals to the characteristics of the cultural centres, from the methods of transference of the texts to the definitions of genres and codes’’ (Storia della letteratura italiana, 1991). Even in this last effort to be objective, literary history cannot give up the utopia connected to a unitary point of view. If one does not wish to subscribe to skeptical relativism, one must humbly recognize the value of 1066

reciprocal transcendence among the separate dimensions of history-life/literature-fiction. In conclusion, the most important histories of Italian literature on the market appeal to different users and audiences: for university students, Ferroni; for teachers, Ba`rberi Squarotti; for militant teachers, Muscetta; for militant critics, Asor Rosa; for publishers, the updated version of CecchiSapegno; for librarians and philologists, Malato; and, for readers with fewer elementary instructional tools, Borsellino-Pedulla`. Only taken together do all these works, which do not always adhere each to its respective programmatic aims, supply an idea and a method for a global study of Italian literature. The widespread feeling that literary histories have lost their credibility persists, perhaps because of the proliferation of histories and anthologies of Italian literature that again prompts the question posed by Ruggero Bonghi (1826–1895) in his essay Perche´ la letteratura itlaiana non sia popolare in Italia (Why Italian Literature Is Not Popular in Italy, 1873) initially published in the Florentine journal Spettatore in 1855. Bonghi attacked elitist academic literary histories, favoring a Manzonian ‘‘popular language.’’ One provoking solution to the crisis affecting literary criticism and history has been put forward by Vittore Branca (1913–2004), who advocated combining criticism, philology, and literary history: to tell the history of Italian literature backwards, not, that is, from its origins to the 1900s, but from contemporary literature (which, in theory, is better known to the public) back to the first books in the vulgar language, unknown to the masses and not comprehensible without historical-critical mediation. Whether this represents a radical application of a genetic research or a deconstruction of De Sanctis’s scheme or, yet again, a desperate didactic plan that developed as a result of the dispersion of knowledge that seems to have taken place in the Italian schools and universities, Branca’s idea is yet to be put into practice. However, the question is this: Who in Italy would be willing to study even European and American literatures backward? ALESSANDRO SCARSELLA Further Reading Asor Rosa, Alberto (editor), Letteratura italiana, Turin: Einaudi, 1982. Ba`rberi Squarotti, Giorgio (editor), Storia della civilta` letteraria italiana, Turin: Utet, 1990.

LITERARY PRIZES Bettini, Filippo, and Mirko Bevilacqua, Marxismo e critica letteraria in Italia, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1978. Binni, Walter, Poetica, critica e storia letteraria, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1976. Binni, Walter, and Natalino Sapegno (editors), Storia letteraria delle regioni d’Italia, Florence: Sansoni, 1968. Borsellino, Nino, and Walter Pedulla` (editors), Storia generale della letteratura italiana, Milan: Motta, 2004. Cecchi, Emilio, and Natalino Sapegno (eds.), Storia della letteratura italiana, Milan: Garzanti, 1965. Cecchi, Ottavio, and Enrico Ghidetti (eds.), Fare storia della letteratura, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1986. Ceserani, Remo, Raccontare la letteratura, Turin: BollatiBoringhieri, 1990. De Sanctis, Francesco, Storia della letteratura italiana, Naples: Morano, 1870. Dionisotti, Carlo, Geografia e storia della letteratura italiana, Turin: Einaudi, 1967.

Esposito, Enzo (editor), Il minore nella storiografia letteraria, Ravenna: Longo, 1984. Ferroni, Giulio, Storia della letteratura italiana. Dalle origini al Quattrocento, Turin: Einaudi, 1991. Getto, Giovanni, Storia delle storie letterarie (1942), Florence: Sansoni, 1981. Malato, Enrico (editor), Storia della letteratura italiana, Rome, Salerno, 1995. Muscetta, Carlo (editor), La letteratura italiana: storia e testi, Rome-Bari, Laterza, 1970. Pazzaglia, Mario (editor), Letteratura e storia della letteratura, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1978. Petronio, Giuseppe (editor), Storiografia letteraria in Italia e in Germania. Tradizioni e problemi attuali, Florence: L. S. Olschki, 1990. Petronio, Giuseppe (editor), Teorie e realta` della storiografia letteraria. Guida storica e critica, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1981.

LITERARY PRIZES There are almost 2,000 literary prizes given in Italy. Their very number indicates the extent to which the literary prize represents a promotional vehicle for literature in which public and private bodies, municipalities, and council offices for culture believe they can invest without hesitation. It is necessary to return to the roots of this institution to understand the conception of the literary honor such prizes represent, the relationship between writer and public that they reflect, and the critical judgment and social expectations they express. Precedents in the history of Italian literature include the famous Certame coronario (Crowning Contest), organized in October 1441 in Florence, which had friendship as its theme, the promotion of vernacular literature as its purpose, and a silver crown of laurel as its prize. However, the jury, presided over by humanists like Leon Battista Alberti, decided not to award rhymers who spoke the vulgate and to uphold the priority of the Latin language. This did not prevent rejected poems from having great success as manuscripts (for printing had still not been invented). In the early nineteenth century a prize was also established by the Accademia della Crusca. In its modern shape, the Italian literary prizes were established later than in other European countries. Academic awards had lost public interest,

and prizes were sponsored by critics, writers, and readers outside official institutions. Financing came from private venues, banks, industrialists, and government agencies: Their guiding goal was commercial. The most important Italian prizes today are, chronologically, the Bagutta (Milan, 1927) and the Viareggio, created by Leonida Re`paci and some other writers and critics in 1929 in order to frequent, as the Calabrian writer himself jokingly asserted, the salons and to meet the most beautiful girls in Versilia. Rome’s Strega Prize, sponsored since 1947 by the eponymous liqueur, is the award linked to the dolce vita of the postwar period. The Bancarella, promoted by the booksellers of Pontremoli, is the most popular prize. However, since 1952, winners have been best sellers, like the UFO-archaeology by Peter Kolosimo which, in the 1960s, made the purists and the Catholics turn up their noses. The most recent is the Campiello, established by the Catholic industrialists in the Venetian area in 1962 with the aim of countering the hegemony of the Marxist literary culture. Among prizes awarded to authors rather than to single works of literature, one should mention the Antonio Feltrinelli, awarded by the Accademia dei Lincei (Rome, 1952), and the most recent award, Nonino (Udine, 1977). For the novice writers, the 1067

LITERARY PRIZES most prestigious is the Grinzane Cavour (Cuneo, 1982). Finally, the prize awarded to works of translation, extremely important in Italy, where readers prefer foreign novels and poems to Italian ones, is the Monselice award (Padua, 1951). In general, the most prestigious literary prizes, which are important from the commercial point of view, are controlled by publishing lobbies, that is, by a system consisting of publishers, members of the editorial staff, literary critics, television journalists, and so on. These juries can operate to the detriment of new writers, and their judgment is questionable in any case. However, this does not mean that good writers cannot win a prize. Still, prize winners will themselves become members of the jury for that, or other, literary prizes and will be subjected to all the pressures of their position to play the game of reciprocal favors. Reading through the correspondence and investigating the archives of the 1900s, the concern with prizes exceeded the amount of the award in money terms. Prizes represent literary glory and can be seen as a symptom of an identity crisis of the Italian writers, which is disquieting, enduring, and difficult to interpret. According to several first-hand accounts, sometimes the awards are so egregiously corporate that members of the panel who voted in good faith resign or refuse other prizes awarded to

them. This happened with Elio Vittorini (tacitly) in 1942 in the case of a prize awarded by the Accademia d’Italia and with Alessandro Baricco in the case of the Viareggio Award in 1993. Thus there has been a shift in media recognition from the books themselves to the disputes among jury members. However, these same authors, who are now contesting the merit and fairness of awards, owe a lot of their own literary success to the blurb advertising a particular prize at the right moment in their career. This is because the blurb has an irresistible appeal for the public seeking assurance of ‘‘quality.’’ Distributors single out prize winners from their unsold stock, and booksellers who have no other way of promoting their wares display the book with the blurb in the shop window. ALESSANDRO SCARSELLA Further Reading Bellonci, Maria, Come un racconto gli anni del premio Strega, Milan: Mondadori, 1971. Bruschi, Max, ‘‘I premi letterari,’’ in Il Novecento. Scenari di fine secolo 2, edited by Nino Borsellino and Lucio Felici, Milan: Garzanti, 2001. Martignoni, Maria Pia (editor), Catalogo dei premi letterari italiani, Milan: Bibliografica, 1999. Tani, Cinzia, Premiopoli, Milan: Mondadori, 1987.

LITTLE WORLD OF THE PAST See Piccolo mondo antico (Work by Antonio Fogazzaro)

LITURGICAL DRAMA Liturgical drama is a complex and elusive entity that has received many and controversial interpretations, especially with regard to its origins. Even 1068

its definition, although commonly entered in ordinary works and handbooks on the history of the theater, is under dispute, because not all scholars

LITURGICAL DRAMA agree on the assumption that the dramatic events with which it is concerned actually belong to the liturgical repertoire. For this reason, Italian historiography prefers to define it as dramatic liturgy, or Latin church drama, or Latin religious drama. The generic definition ‘‘liturgical drama’’ refers to the adjuncts of the Catholic Church liturgy in the form of alternating song and visible action, which appeared in the Western Church around the middle of the tenth century and was performed by clerics until the sixteenth century, when it was suppressed following the reform of the Roman breviary after the Council of Trent. The plays, based on biblical texts or other religious elements, were chanted in a plainsong style, in unison, based on neumatic notation; they were in Latin, but there are also some later examples that present a number of vernacular inclusions. So far, no conclusive theory about the origin of liturgical drama has been formulated. A theory generally supported by such scholars as Young, Donovan, Smoldon, and others assumes that it developed from the phenomenon of trope singing, in consideration of the fact that the earliest testimonies, all of them coming from cathedral and monastic churches, were found in manuscript collections of tropes (known as tropers). According to this hypothesis, liturgical drama descended from the expansion and dramatization of a trope sung before the Introitus of the Easter morning Mass in order to celebrate the mystery of the Resurrection. Conversely, some other scholars, such as Hardison, Drumbl, and McGee, convincingly maintain that the play originated as an additional ceremony formed out of the processional before the Mass and that only later on it was included in the trope repertoire. The simplest version of a liturgical drama is to be found in a troper belonging to St. Gall Monastery (ms. 484), which is attributed to the monk Tutilone. It represents in the form of a dialogue the encounter of the three Marys with the angel near Christ’s tomb and the annunciation of Christ’s resurrection. The text starts with the angel’s question: ‘‘Quem quaeritis in sepulcro, Christicolae?’’ followed by the women’s answer: ‘‘Iesum Nazarenum crucifixum, o Caelicolae.’’ Angel: ‘‘Non est hic, surrexit sicut predixerat. Ite, nuntiate quia surrexit de sepulchre.’’ ‘‘Alleluia’’ (Angel: ‘‘Whom are you seeking in the sepulchre, O followers of Christ?’’; Women: ‘‘Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified, O celestial one.’’ Angel: ‘‘He is not here; he has risen, just as he foretold. Go, announce that he has risen from the sepulchre.’’ ‘‘Alleluia!’’). This ceremony,

named Visitatio Sepulchri (Visit to the Sepulchre), underwent several levels of literary elaboration and soon spread all over Europe: At least 400 manuscripts have reached us. One of the oldest known testimonials, the Regularis concordia of St. Ethelwold from Winchester, circa 965–975, prepared for the Benedictine monasteries of England, reports that the three Marys and the angel were played by deacons and subdeacons, the former wearing copes and carrying censers replete with incense, the latter wearing albs and holding palms. Usually the acting was performed in the choir near the high altar, which was symbolically meant to represent Christ’s sepulchre, or in front of a masonry aedicule purposely built in the likeness of the sepulchre, as can still be found at Aquileia Cathedral, or also on a transitory framework, which was dismantled after the ceremony. During the tenth century the Visitatio Sepulchri was moved from the Introitus of the Easter morning Mass to the end of Easter matins, before the Te Deum, where there was room enough for it to be modified and enlarged with the addition of other characters and episodes—such as, for example, the Unguentarius (the merchant who sold to the three Marys the ointments for Christ’s body) or the Peregrinus (the Journey to Emmaus)—according to the liturgical requirements of individual churches. On the model of the Easter ‘‘Quem quaeritis?’’ in about the eleventh or twelfth century, a new text was created, the ‘‘Quem quaeritis in presepe pastores, dicite?’’, called the Officium pastorum, which introduced Christmas Mass, soon followed by other dramatizations of different episodes of the Christmas season, like the Officium Stellae or Ordo ad representandum Herodem or Ordo Rachelis (The Magi Play and The Slaughter of the Innocents) or like the Ordo Prophetarum (Procession of the Prophets). Moreover, between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries new texts appeared on subjects different from the Easter and Christmas cycles, taken from the Old Testament, such as the Ludus Danielis (twelfth century: The Play of the Prophet Daniel) from Beauvais Cathedral, or taken from hagiographic sources, such as the four dramas on the miracles of St. Nicholas from Fleury-sur-Loire (twelfth or thirteenth century), and others (almost the complete corpus of liturgical dramas can be read in the two volumes edited by Karl Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church, 1933). In Italy, liturgical drama is widely represented from North to South, usually in forms that were well known all over Europe, and it is attested in monastic as well as episcopal churches: 1069

LITURGICAL DRAMA In Nonantola Convent, some eleventh-century tropers conserve the Visitatio sepulchri and an Ascension service, the only one known in Italy; two versions of Visitatio sepulchri with a different textual elaboration belong to the cathedral of Cividale; and a twelfth-century Sicilian manuscript contains a detailed Officium sepulchri, an Officium de Peregrino, and a play about the Magi and Herod, just to give a few examples. Conversely, as regards the European background, of special interest are the Passione (The Passion Play) of the Benedictine monastery at Monte Cassino and the corpus of the ceremonies celebrated by the Church of Padua. The Monte Cassino Passion Play belongs to the twelfth century and is the earliest known dramatization of this subject, which was rarely acted in the Latin theater. Although parts of its first and last scenes are missing, the text extends from Judas’s betrayal to the Crucifixion and ends with the first verses of a Planctus Mariae (Mary’s Grief ) in the vernacular, a genre that was widely developed during the following centuries, the most renowned example being Jacopone da Todi’s Donna de Paradiso, from the mid-thirteenth century. On the other hand, the Paduan Corpus, preserved in three fourteenth-century manuscripts, is a rare testimony of the ritual celebrations that were performed throughout the whole liturgical year in the city of Padua. All performances, from the Annunciation to the Nativity and the Slaughter of the Innocents, from the Purification to the Resurrection and to Pentecost, together with their musical annotations, are described with full details concerning their stage setting and the vocal scores. Thus, the Corpus presents an exceptionally complete documentation of medieval Latin drama. PAOLA VENTRONE

Further Reading Brandt, Alvin G., Drama Handbook for Churches, New York: Seabury Press, 1964; reprint Spiritual Theater International, 2002. Chambers, Edmund, The Mediaeval Stage, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1903. De Bartholomaeis, Vincenzo, Le origini della poesia drammatica italiana, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1924. Donovan, Richard B., Liturgical Drama in Medieval Spain, Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1958. Drumbl, Johann, Quem quaeritis. Teatro sacro dell’alto medioevo, Rome: Bulzoni 1981. Hardison, O. B., Jr., Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages: Essays in the Origin and Early History of Modern Drama, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1965. Harris, John Wesley, Medieval Theatre in Context: An Introduction, London and New York: Routledge, 1992. Inguanez, D. M., Un dramma della Passione del secolo XII, Montecassino: Badia di Montecassino, 1939. Kurvers, Robert G. A., Ad faciendum ‘‘Peregrinum’’: A Study of the Liturgical Elements in the Latin ‘‘Peregrinus’’ Plays in the Middle Ages, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1996. McGee, Timothy J., ‘‘The Liturgical Placements of the Quem quaeritis Dialogue,’’ Journal of the American Musicological Society, 29(Spring 1976), 1–29. Ogden, Dunbar H., The Staging of Drama in the Medieval Church, Newark: University of Delaware Press; London and Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2002. Smoldon, William L., The Music of the Medieval Church Dramas, edited by Cynthia Bourgeault, London, New York, and Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1980. Sticca, Sandro, The Latin Passion Play: Its Origins and Development, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1970. Sticca, Sandro, The Planctus Mariae in the Dramatic Tradition of the Middle Ages, Athens, GA, and London: University of Georgia Press, 1988. Tydeman, William (editor), The Medieval European Stage, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Vecchi, Giuseppe, Uffici drammatici padovani, Florence: Olschki, 1954. Young, Karl, The Drama of the Medieval Church, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933; reprinted, 1951.

See also: Sacra rappresentazione

FRANCO LOI (1930–) One of the strongest dialect poets of the late twentieth century, Franco Loi has described his commitment as a writer in a statement of poetics 1070

entitled Attorno alla poesia (On Poetry) with these words: ‘‘Per me la poesia non e` solo un fatto letterario, ma un modo di essere dell’uomo e un modo

FRANCO LOI di affrontare la realta` [...] forse l’unica istanza di resistenza al processo in atto di disgregazione dell’uomo e della societa` civile’’ (For me, poetry is not only a literary phenomenon, but a way of being for man, a way of confronting reality [...] perhaps the sole instance of resistance to the ongoing process of the disintegration of man and civil society; in Maria Ida Gaeta and Gabriella Sica’s La parola ritrovata, 1995). The statement helps us to understand Loi’s hunger for essentials, his need to restore dignity to an injured and marginalized humanity, to oppose the violence of power and the tyranny of institutions, and not to rely on lazy, conventional, and worn-out words. Hence his choice of dialect as a way of being and a way of seeing things, as a language of energy, emotions, passions, intense orality, sound, movement, thought, and rhythm. Loi found within himself the Milanese dialect, albeit in a considerably personalized and mixed form. It is the language in which he thinks and which, in addition to offering great expressive potential and vividness, has a dramatic nature; it comes from the theater (and indeed, Loi has worked in the theater, especially in collaboration Dario Fo and Franco Parenti). Already in his early collections I cart (Papers, 1973) and, particularly, Stro`legh (Astrologer, 1975), what emerges most forcefully, along with orality and the epic-narrative and popular dimension, are the dramatic gesture and the staging of monologues. As for themes, the prevailing ones are tied to political passion, to social and war experiences, and to the memories of the years spent as a child on the outskirts of Milan, as well as to the hopes and subsequent political disillusionments of the postwar period. Above all, Loi wants to give a voice, within a hallucinatory and tragic setting, to the common folks, to the Milanese working and artisanal class, and to the excluded. Furthermore, the personal and social intersect; the past and the present alternate; and the antibourgeois thrust, the anarchist, libertarian, and anticlerical perspectives are conspicuous. Thus, the poet distances himself from the socialist myth of an inevitably bright future, in the name of a kind of permanent revolution. In Teater (Theater, 1978) as well, Loi showed solidarity with the poor and abandoned himself to the memory of personal experiences. Here, then, are the strongly expressionistic images of the ‘‘sbrindellati, in camisa nera della grama Milan’’ (men in tatters, in the black shirts of poor Milan) or the scabrous and grotesque images of Piazza Loreto, where the faces of the hanged Fascists swing and sway like ‘‘inguri a

coll’’ (watermelons hanging by their stalk). At the same time, the poet looked to the living present, which is marked by an enslaved humanity, by false hedonism, and by unbridled consumerism. He contrasted to this spreading hypocrisy the power of love and the joy of harmony and communion. Later, his vision became lighter and more full of wonder in L’aria (The Air, 1981). This title, in fact, alludes to the void, to the fragility of knowledge, to the agonizing tenuousness of life, and, at the same time, to the space of rebirth. Together with the poems that reconstruct the end of a time full of idealisms and hopes, we find poems ‘‘d’amore, di riflessione e di solitudine’’ (of love, of reflection, of solitude) and lyrics inspired by the death of his friend and teacher, Giulio Trasanna, and of his father. The collections Lu¨nn (Moons, 1982), whose lunar title and wrenching nocturnal backdrops confirm a progressive weakening of expressionism in the direction of a lyrical tone, elegiac, and increasingly private, and Bach (1986) offer up once again the theme of death, of whom the poet called himself the son. Moreover, mort (death) is a key word in Umber (Shadow, 1992), in which words obsessively recur that refer to the semantic field of consumption, devitalization, and dust. In the memorialnarrative poem ‘‘L’angel’’ (The Angel, 1981) as well, the sole certainty is the awareness that ‘‘se`m fjo¨ del nient’’ (we are children of nothingness), of the void. In order to have any hope, there is nothing left but to make a choice of humility, to become angels, accepting both the good and bad to be found within and outside of ourselves, and giving ‘‘un post al Diu’’ (a place to God) and to love. The latter is the only hope for a world that has reached its winter and for a stifling civilization, as the poems of Verna (Winter, 1997) demonstrate beautifully. The word, however, also means ‘‘slave’’ in Latin and recalls, by echoing the monastery of La Verna, the stigmata of Saint Francis and of Amur del temp (The Love of Time, 1999), in which there also returns the theme of air as freedom, lightness, and excess. Isman (2002) ends with a celebration of life’s beauty, and its poems, like those of the collection Aquabella (2004), sound like further evidence of the ethical tension, of the religious spirit infusing Loi’s poetry—with religion taken as an inner sense of oneness with the universe and of oneness with others. Franco Loi is the last representative of the grand literary tradition in the Milanese dialect, perhaps the last ever, since dialects are dying out. Often true poets are poets precisely in a dead language: 1071

FRANCO LOI A language of the heart rather than of reality becomes their dialect. Loi exploits this status of language in order to contaminate it with expressive contributions of different origins invented by other languages: It is thus that he secures an inventive freedom that would not be possible with the pure imitation of objective speech.

Biography

Poetry

Franco Loi was born on January 21, 1930, in Genoa; his father was from Sardinia, his mother from Parma. He moved to Milan, 1937, and lived through the experience of the war and the Resistance in the working-class district of Casoretto. After the war, his political militancy on the left was passionate. He completed his studies of economics and business at Milan’s Bocconi University. He worked until 1950 at the Scalo Merci, then from 1955 at the advertising office and in public relations for the department store La Rinascente, and finally, after 1962, in the press office of the publisher Mondadori. Since the early 1980s, he has intensified his collaboration with newspapers and periodicals, especially with the cultural supplement of Sole-24 Ore, and, recently, of L’avvenire. He was awarded the Nonino Prize for Liber, 1990. Loi lives in Milan. ANTONIO D’ISIDORO Selected Works Collections Alice, 1999. Amur del temp, 1999. Aquabella, 2004. Arbur, 1994. Aria de la memoria, 2005. Bach, 1986. El Vent, 2000. I cart, 1973. Isman, 2002. L’aria, 1981.

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Liber, 1988. Lu¨nn, 1982. Memoria, 1991. Poesie: antologia personale, Rome: Fondazione Piazzola, 1992. Poesie d’amore, 1974. Stro`legh, 1975. Teater, 1978. Umber, 1992. Verna, 1997. ‘‘L’angel,’’ 1981; expanded, 1994.

Short Stories ‘‘L’ampiezza del cielo,’’ 2001.

Essays Diario breve. Scritti sulla poesia e sulla letteratura, 1995. Milano: lo sguardo di Delio Tessa, 2003.

Further Reading Brevini, Franco, Le parole perdute: dialetti e poesia nel nostro secolo, Turin: Einaudi, 1990. Brevini, Franco (editor), La poesia in dialetto: storia e testi dalle origini al Novecento, 3 vols., Milan: Mondadori, 1999. Fortini, Franco, Nuovi saggi italiani, Milan: Garzanti, 1987. Gaeta, Maria Ida, and Gabriella Sica (editors), La parola ritrovata: ultime tendenze della poesia italiana, Venice: Marsilio, 1995. Lollini, Massimo, ‘‘Il dialetto come lingua della poesia: Aspetti della poesia neo-dialettale in Pasolini, Zanzotto e Loi,’’ Nemla Italian Studies, 16 (1992), 67–84. Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo (editor), Poeti italiani del Novecento, Milan: Mondadori, 1978. Piccini, Daniele, Con rigore e passione: viaggio fra le letture del nostro tempo, Sant’Elpidio a Mare: L’albatro, 2001. Raboni, Giovanni, Poesia degli anni sessanta, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1976. Sicari, Giovanna, Milano nei passi di Franco Loi, Milan: Unicopli, 2002. Tolve, Antonello, ‘‘Una conversazione con Franco Loi,’’ Sı`larus, 45:238 (March 2005), 22–28. Zagarrio, Giuseppe, Febbre, furore e fiele: repertorio della poesia italiana contemporanea, 1970–1980, Milan: Mursia, 1983.

ROBERTO LONGHI

ROBERTO LONGHI (1890–1970) An influential art historian and critic in the formalist tradition, Roberto Longhi is a unique figure in twentieth-century Italian culture. Early on, his subtle prose style attracted the attention of such prominent critics as Emilio Cecchi, who had been involved with him in numerous cultural initiatives. Cecchi was the first to suggest that Longhi be understood in relation to the literary milieu of La ronda (1919–1923), the Roman journal founded as a reactionary response to Futurism, and to the work of music critic and composer Bruno Barilli (1880– 1952): ‘‘Mi fosse consentita una immagine,’’ he writes, ‘‘ricorderei le incrostazioni della salsedine e degli acidi marini che irritano e macchiano il cristallo della conchiglia piu` gentile di tinte’’ (If I were allowed to conjure up a picture, I would recall the encrustation of sea salts and acids that irritate and stain the crystal of the most delicately tinted seashell; ‘‘Roberto Longhi scrittore,’’ 1928). In thus combining literary with art criticism, Longhi’s writing belongs to the tradition of prosa d’arte, a style of firmly founded on classicist principles that influenced many other writers of his generation, from Pier Paolo Pasolini to Giovanni Testori. However, Cecchi also remarked on the anomalies and eccentricities of Longhi’s style, such as the effect of his lexical erudition. Indeed, Longhi has also been compared to Gabriele D’Annunzio in his verbal gifts. Longhi wrote seminal essays on many artists, most notably on Caravaggio and Piero della Francesca, and also worked with film critic Umberto Barbaro on documentaries. Longhi felt that Benedetto Croce had subjected the visual arts to the principles of literary criticism, thus ignoring their technical dimensions. Through the works Bernard Berenson (1865–1959) in particular but also of Conrad Fiedler (1841–1895), Adolf Hildebrand (1847–1921), Heinrich Wo¨lfflin (1864–1945), and Alois Riegl (1858– 1905), Longhi came to know and be influenced by the Vienna School. However, what distinguished his vision was his awareness of the tradition of Italian art, which he interpreted through its moments of crisis. Caravaggio in particular, the subject of Longhi’s constant rediscoveries in important monographs, exemplified his Hermeneutical method.

Mindful of the practices of the avant-garde, Longhi’s method conceived of the work as a crossroads of diverging tensions within European, national, regional, and local traditions. This method finds an exemplary application in Officina ferrarese (The Workshop of Ferrara, 1934), which was dedicated to the ‘‘metaphysicians’’ of the Este duchy in the Renaissance. At the same time, Longhi took care that the critical text reflected and transcribed in verbal terms the genesis and coherence of the visual work. He found correlations between the works of Giovanni da Milano and Orcagna, Masaccio and Masolino, Moron and Titian, Caravaggio and the Cavalier d’Arpino, Derain and Morandi, or, finally, Ce´zanne, Seurat, and Carra`. In essence, his art criticism was intertextual in comparing works and analyzing their techniques in a historical-critical context. The critic’s task was to reconstruct, through language, the processes by which the work of art came into being. As a result of this method, art and literature were treated as intersecting subjects. Longhi’s method is still of great interest both for its theoretical aspects and for the social responsibility with which he imbued the practice of art history and criticism. In the essay ‘‘Critica d’arte’’ (Art Criticism), published in the first issue of the journal Paragone, which he founded in 1950, Longhi explained: l’opera d’arte non sta mai da sola: e` sempre un rapporto [...] che da` necessita` alla risposta critica. Risposta che non involge soltanto il nesso tra opera e opere, ma tra opera e mondo, socialita`, economia, religione, politica e quant’altro [...] si puo` cercare in essa, purche´ sia l’opera ad avvertirci che bisogna ancora trovarlo, perche´ ancora qualcosa manca al suo pieno intendimento. ...the work of art never stands alone: it is always a relationship [...], which necessitates a critical response. This response involves not only the links between work and works, but between work and world, social relations, economy, religion and anything else [...] may be found in it, as long as the work tells that its meaning must be sought, because something is still missing for its full understanding.

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ROBERTO LONGHI

Biography Roberto Longhi was born in Alba (Cuneo) on 28 December 1890. He completed his university studies at the University of Turin, with a dissertation on Caravaggio, 1911, then moved to Rome with a scholarship to the postgraduate program directed by Adolfo Venturi, 1912. His first contact with Bernard Berenson dates back to 1912; in that same year, he began writing for the journal La voce, contributing a study entitled ‘‘Rinascimento fantastico’’ and becoming involved in a heated debate in favor of Futurism in this journal and in L’Arte. He taught history of art in secondary schools in Rome, 1913–1914. With his friend Alessandro Contini-Bonaccossi, Longhi visited the major European collections, building up his own collection, 1920–1922. He married Lucia Lopresti, who wrote under the pseudonym of Anna Banti, 1924. He was coeditor of Vita artistica, with Emilio Cecchi, 1927. He became a professor of art history at the University of Bologna, 1934; he moved to the University of Florence, 1949. With Anna Banti, he foundedthe journal Paragone, 1950. Longhi died in Florence on 3 June 1970. ALESSANDRO SCARSELLA Selected Works Collections Edizione delle opere complete di Roberto Longhi, 14 vols., Florence: Sansoni, 1956–1991. Three Studies, Riverdale on Hudson, NY: Stanley MossSheep Meadow Books, 1995.

Art Criticism Scultura futurista: Boccioni, 1914. Piero dei Franceschi e lo sviluppo della pittura veneziana, 1914. Gentileschi, padre e figlia, 1916. Piero della Francesca, 1927; as Piero della Francesca, translated by David Tabbat, 2002. Officina ferrarese, 1934.

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Carlo Carra`, 1937. Ampliamenti nell’Officina ferrarese, 1940. Fatti di Masolino e di Masaccio, 1941. Viatico per cinque secoli di pittura veneziana, 1946. Il Caravaggio, 1952. Giovanni Serodine, 1954. Il Correggio e la Camera di San Paolo a Parma, 1956. Caravaggio, 1962. Da Cimabue a Morandi. Saggi di storia della pittura italiana, edited by Gianfranco Contini, 1974. Nove secoli d’arte a Bologna, 1987. Il palazzo non finito: saggi inediti 1910–1926, edited by Francesco Frangi and Cristina Montagnani, 1995.

Letters Lettere e scartafacci, 1912–1957, with Bernard Berenson, edited by Cesare Garboli and Cristina Montagnani, 1993. Il carteggio Longhi-Pallucchini. Le prime Biennali del dopoguerra, 1948–1956, edited by Maria Cristina Bandera, 1999.

Further Reading Boschetto, Antonio, Bibliografia di Roberto Longhi, Florence: Sansoni, 1973. Boschetto, Antonio (editor), La collezione Roberto Longhi, Florence: Sansoni, 1971. Casu, Mario, Schede di italianistica attinenti al figurativo, Sassari: Libreria Dessi Editrice, 1981. Causa, Stefano, Il sale nella ferita: antico e moderno nell’officina di Longhi, Naples: Arte Tipografica, 2001. Cecchi, Emilio, ‘‘Roberto Longhi scrittore’’ (1928), in Roberto Longhi, Da Cimabue a Morandi. Saggi di storia della pittura italiana, edited by Gianfranco Contini, Milan: Mondadori, 1974. Marchesini, Alberto, ‘‘Longhi e Pasolini tra fulgurazione figurativa e fuga dalla citazione,’’ Autografo, 26(1992), 3–31. Montagnani, Cristina, Glossario longhiano. Saggio sulla lingua e lo stile di Roberto Longhi, Pisa: Pacini, 1989. Previtali, Giovanni (ed.), L’arte di scrivere sull’arte. Roberto Longhi nella cultura del nostro tempo, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1982. Raimondi, Ezio, Barocco moderno: Roberto Longhi e Carlo Emilio Gadda, edited by Jonathan Sisco, Milan: Mondadori, 2003. Spadoni, Claudio (editor), Da Renoir a De Stae¨l: Roberto Longhi e il moderno, Milan: Mazzotta, 2003.

CARLA LONZI

CARLA LONZI (1931–1982) Carla Lonzi, art critic and writer, was one of the proponents of Italian feminism in the 1970s, but her thought surpasses this delimited context and gives life to a concrete utopia of enduring vitality. She composed political texts of unusual efficacy and a diary of 1,300 pages, the product of six years of poetic self-analysis. The titles of her works suggest their essence: Sputiamo su Hegel (Let’s Spit on Hegel, 1974) or Taci, anzi parla: Diario di una femminista (Be Quiet, No, Speak: Diary of a Feminist, 1979) underline the fact that theoretical thinking does not precede action: It becomes action. Her career was characterized by radical shifts made necessary by her loyalty to her own reasoning, which was marked by an intimate correspondence between life and thought, public and private. Lonzi came to feminist engagement through her work in the figurative arts, first as a historian (see, for example, her thesis, Rapporti tra la scena e le arti figurative dalla fine dell’800; The Relationship Between Scenes and Figurative Arts from the End of the Nineteenth Century) and then as an art critic. She placed her bets on artists ‘‘senza curriculum, senza opere, quasi’’ (without resume´s, without artwork, almost), who later became central in understanding the 1960s, as she herself declared in presenting the show Identite´ italienne at the Beaubourg in Paris in 1981 (Marta Lonzi and Anna Jaquinta, Vita di Carla Lonzi, 1990). The nature of this engagement can be understood through Autoritratto (Self-Portrait, 1969), a montage of recorded conversations with 14 artists in a text marked by her distinctive writing style. Carla Lonzi put the artists in the foreground (not their art) and their relationships with critics and followers; she criticized both the role of the critic, who in critiquing enters into a position of power, and the artist’s dependence on a spectator, a passive subject, and a ‘‘female’’ one. In July 1970, the Manifesto di Rivolta Femminile, also signed by Carla Accardi and Elvira Banotti, marked the birth of the group of the same name. Commencing with a citation of the French revolutionary Olympe de Gouges, the document poses fundamental questions in a series of 60 enunciations, from the affirmation of the

difference between the sexes to the criticism of the patriarchal institutions and masculine culture, which consider man the absolute subject and woman his complement. The feminist revolution took on selfawareness (autocoscienza) as its political practice, privileging life experience and separate relationships between women in order to advance a new vision of the world. To create the space for a different kind of thought, Lonzi wrote Sputiamo su Hegel. The criticism of the masculine culture was in fact indispensable to the project of ‘‘exiting oneself,’’ and it was Hegel who conferred philosophical and ethical dignity on the difference between the sexes, sanctioning their disparity by linking the masculine to transcendence and the feminine to immanence, the ‘‘human’’ principle to man and the ‘‘divine’’ to woman. As a result, this latter must create her transcendence and her way of existing in history, without subordinating herself either to the struggle between other subjects or to the search for emancipation through work. From this derived one of Lonzi’s challenges: She expressed simultaneously the aspiration to make her mark on the world and her need ‘‘not to betray herself.’’ Her approach to the theme of maternity was also original. In Sputiamo su Hegel, she characterized maternity as the ‘‘momento in cui, ripercorrendo le tappe iniziali della vita in simbiosi emotive col figlio, la donna si disaccultura. La maternita` e` il suo ‘viaggio’’’ (moment in which, re-traversing the initial stages of life in emotional symbiosis with her child, woman de-cultures. Maternity is a woman’s true ‘journey’). At the base of the conflict between the sexes and of the social contract, Lonzi placed sexuality: In La donna clitoridea e la donna vaginale (The Clitoral Woman and the Vaginal Woman, 1974) she denounced man’s universalizing of the connection between pleasure and fecundity as his first act of violence. She countered the vaginal women, complementary in coitus, with the clitoral one, who recognizes in the clitoris her own pleasure and begins to acknowledge herself as an autonomous subject. This concept also explains Lonzi’s position during the battles for abortion rights, because these social struggles implicitly assume the 1075

CARLA LONZI dominant sexual model and operate according to traditional political modalities. Self-awareness and the search for autenticita` (authenticity) remained of central importance for her, whether the relationships between women are realized at the personal level or in small structured groups. These ideals also guided her in relating to herself and were made manifest in her writing, Lonzi’s principal activity. From these stemmed the exceptional nature of her Diario di una femminista, which exists in an intimate dialectic with her political texts; in it, the complex nexus between thought and lived experience can be unpacked over the course of time, revealing her choice to exist only in self-awareness. Her feminism revealed a substantial vitality: It was not limited to the foundational phase of the movement, nor to its ideological premises. It existed rather in the complexity (biographical and theoretical) brought to light by Marta Lonzi and Anna Jaquinta. There remains to consider her return to the theater in a search for antecedents, a return that caused her to declare of Molie`re’s Femmes savantes: ‘‘Armande sono io!’’ (I am Armande!).

Biography Carla Lonzi was born in Florence, 6 March 1931. From the ages of 9 to 13, she studied in a boarding school run by nuns; she graduated from the University in Florence under the direction of Roberto Longhi, 1956. Lonzi married Mario Lena, chemist and Communist trade unionist, 1958; their son Battista was born, 1959. As an art critic, she curated important shows, among which were Artisti americani—Nevelson, Tobey, Hultberg, Borduas, Rothko, Kline at Galleria Notizie, Turin, 1963. She became involved with the sculptor Pietro Consagra, 1963. Sputiamo su Hegel was the first in a series of libretti verdi (little green books) published by Scritti di Rivolta Femminile; Vai pure: Dialogo con Pietro Consagra inaugurated the series

‘‘Prototipi.’’ Her work has been translated in Argentina, Germany, and Spain. Carla Lonzi died of cancer in Milan, 2 August 1982. ANNA LAURA MARIANI See also: Feminist Theory and Criticism Selected Works Rousseau: I maestri del colore, 1965. Seurat: I maestri del colore, 1966. Autoritratto, 1969. Sputiamo su Hegel–La donna clitoridea e la donna vaginale e altri scritti, 1974; as Let’s Spit on Hegel, translated by Veronica Newman in Italian Feminist Thought: A Reader, edited by Paola Bono and Sandra Kemp, 1991 (excerpt). ` gia` politica, 1977. Itinerari di riflessioni, in E Mito della proposta culturale, in La presenza dell’uomo nel femminismo: Secondo Manifesto di Rivolta Femminile «io dico io», 1978. Taci, anzi parla: Diario di una femminista, 1979. Vai pure: Dialogo con Pietro Consagra, 1980. Scacco ragionato: Poesie dal ’58 al ’63, 1985. Armande sono io!, 1992. Rapporti tra la scena e le arti figurative dalla fine dell’800, 1995.

Further Reading Boccia, Maria Luisa, L’io in rivolta: Vissuto e pensiero di Carla Lonzi, Milan: La Tartaruga, 1990. Calabro`, Anna Rita, and Laura Grasso (editors), Dal movimento femminista al femminismo diffuso: Ricerca e documentazione nell’area lombarda, Milan: Franco Angeli, 1983. Causse, Miche`le, and Maryvonne Lapouge, Ecrits: Voix d’Italie, Paris: Editions des Femmes, 1977. Libreria delle donne di Milano, Non credere di avere dei diritti, Turino: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1987. Lonzi, Marta, and Anna Jaquinta, Vita di Carla Lonzi, Milan: Scritti di Rivolta Femminile, 1990. Melandri, Lea, Una visceralita` indicibile: La pratica dell’inconscio nel movimento delle donne degli anni Settanta, Milan: Franco Angeli, 2000. 100 titoli: Guida ragionata al femminismo degli anni Settanta, Ferrara: Luciana Tufani Editrice, 1998.

CARLO LORENZINI See Carlo Collodi 1076

ROSETTA LOY

ROSETTA LOY (1931–) A struggle between two opposing projects is at the heart of the twentieth century: the project of totalitarian regimes to destroy cultures and their memory and literature’s project to be the custodian of that memory’s survival. Few writers have more consistently chosen to be a witness to that struggle and to honor that memory than Rosetta Loy. Proust inspired her with a passion for the painstaking and unsentimental evocation of the past. She admired the richness of nineteenth-century narratives, first of all Tolstoy’s War and Peace, whose wide-ranging vision included all the facets of life. She found congenial Natalia Ginzburg’s probing of the secrets and silences that hide inside that fascinating entity, the family. In La bicicletta (The Bicycle, 1974), her first novel, four adolescents of the upper bourgeoisie come of age as the events of World War II bring to an end their lives of innocent ease in years marked by the constancy of the changing seasons. Family as a protective place and history as a painful awakening to awareness would remain intertwining elements in all of Loy’s fiction. With Le strade di polvere (The Dust Roads of Monferrato, 1987), Loy created an ambitious fresco. A patriarchal farming family in the Italian Piedmont struggles, prospers, grows, and declines during almost a century, from the time of the Napoleonic wars to the late 1800s when Italy became a nation. The narration often abruptly chooses the present tense so that the discrete episodes, the characters, and their passions, acquire an uncanny sense of actuality. The writer’s grasp of every detail of life, sounds, colors, smells, and fleeting sensations gives the story immediacy and great intensity. Even dreams and fantastic situations have the concreteness of lived experience. Every moment in the existence of each family member is given attention and weight: births and deaths, loves and hates, adventures and solitudes. Yet there are gaps in the flow of events, areas of darkness and silence that the reader must fill and interpret. Ultimately, that present akin to eternity inspires a profound sense of regret because it reveals the fragility and elusiveness of everything; life and happiness are here and gone.

A personal dimension inevitably enters any fictional world, and that is especially true of Loy’s work. Memory for her has not been an innocent realm from which we are excluded and that we may contemplate wistfully from a distance. Memory has been a witness to our common history’s luminous and dark moments. It carries with it the awareness of acts performed or left undone, of thoughts and words that bear a heavy burden of responsibility. Whereas the events narrated in Le strade di polvere take place in a time that only the power of writing can make present and alive, the stories Loy wrote in the 1990s speak of the traumatic period around World War II. Hers has been a descent under the surface of a past that her characters remember in flashes, incompletely and anxiously. In her fictional works, personal remembrance and societal memory appear in large fragments of astonishing vividness. Her characters are most often very young. Life for them is a mystery that is slowly being unveiled, and love is a new experience. They must live their coming of age in the midst of a cruel war that sets friends and family members against each other. Gestures and words, loves and rejections mark the lives of those who were then children or adolescents and must cope with confused remembrances. But Loy’s writing is also filled with human compassion and the world’s lightness and beauty, although these are fragile and often tainted with guilt. Loy has mentioned her debt to Primo Levi’s work, particularly I sommersi e i salvati (The Drowned and the Saved, 1987), which confirmed for her the necessity of being a witness to the past. Only the effort to retrieve and speak the truth as one saw it is worthy of literature. In a text that is part essay and part autobiography, La parola ebreo (First Words: A Childhood in Fascist Italy, 1997), she evoked the puzzling blindness of a privileged Catholic upbringing and the importance of language. For Rosetta Loy writing, which is discipline, freedom, and responsibility, has been a life work and a joy in spite of the darkness of her vision. The metaphor she borrowed from Sylvia Plath for the title of her most recent novel (Nero e` l’albero dei ricordi, azzurra l’aria, 2004), which contrasts the 1077

ROSETTA LOY darkness of the tree of memory with the blue of the air, tells us as much.

Biography Rosetta Loy was born in Rome, May 15, 1931, of Roman and Piedmontese ancestry. She studied journalism at the Pro Deo University. Loy has won numerous prizes for her fiction, among them the prestigious Viareggio for La bicicletta in 1974 and Le strade di polvere in 1988 and the Premio Bagutta for Nero e` l’albero dei ricordi, azzurra l’aria in 2004. She writes for several newspapers and periodicals, such as Il corriere della sera and Paragone. Her novels have been translated into ten languages. She has four children, three daughters and one son. She lives in Rome. ANGELA M. JEANNET

Selected Works Fiction La bicicletta, 1974; reprinted 1989. La porta dell’acqua, 1976; as The Water Door, translated by Gregory Conti, 2003. L’estate di Letuque´, 1982. All’insaputa della notte, 1984, reprinted 1990. Le strade di polvere, 1987; as The Dust Roads of Monferrato, translated by William Weaver, 1991. Sogni d’inverno, 1992, reprinted 1995. Cioccolata da Hanselmann, 1995; as Hot Chocolate at Hanselmann’s, translated by Gregory Conti, 2003. Ahi, Paloma, 2000. Nero e` l’albero dei ricordi, azzurra l’aria, 2004.

Other La parola ebreo, 1997; as First Words: A Childhood in Fascist Italy, translated by Gregory Conti, 2000.

Further Reading Actis-Grosso, Maurice, ‘‘La colpa degli innocenti. Una psicanalisi romanzesca: Cioccolata da Hanselmann e La parola ebreo di Rosetta Loy,’’ Narrativa, 16 (1999), 35–62. Brizio, Flavia, ‘‘Alla ricerca del passato: L’estate di Letuque´ di Rosetta Loy,’’ Romance Languages Annual, 2 (1990), 194–199. Brizio, Flavia, ‘‘Le donne e il femminismo di Rosetta Loy: La bicicletta,’’ Romance Languages Annual, 3 (1991), 160–166. Brizio, Flavia, ‘‘Tempo e strategie narrative ne Le strade di polvere di Rosetta Loy,’’ Quaderni d’ Italianistica, 13:1 (1992), 71–83. Figliola, Arthur, ‘‘Space and Its Role as a Medium for Human Interaction in Rosetta Loy’s Strade di Polvere,’’ Romance Languages Annual, 6 (1994), 248–252. Gambaro, Fabio, ‘‘Rosetta Loy: la tentation autobiographique,’’ Magazine Litteraire, 404 (2001), 98–103. Minghelli, Giuliana, ‘‘What’s in a Word? Rosetta Loy’s Search for History in Childhood,’’ MLN, 116( 2001), 162–176. Nedderman, Stefania, ‘‘Trascolorare: Metamorphoses in Rosetta Loy’s Le strade di polvere,’’ in Gendering Italian Fiction: Feminist Revisions of Italian History, edited by Maria Ornella Marotti and Gabriella Brooke, Cranbury, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999. Parisi, Luciano, ‘‘I collage di Rosetta Loy,’’ Romance Studies, 22(2004), 75–82. Pompei Karagoz, Claudia, ‘‘L’ottica inconscia del desiderio familiare in ‘Cioccolata da Hanselmann’ di Rosetta Loy,’’ L’anello che non tiene, 11–12 (Spring–Fall 1999–2000), 49–62. Wilson, Rita, ‘‘Personal (Hi)Stories,’’ Journal of Literary Studies/Tydskrif vir Literatuurwetenskap, 14 (1998), 253–269. Wetzel, Hermann-H., ‘‘Rosetta Loy: Sogni d’inverno,’’ Italienisch: Zeitschrift fur Italienische Sprache und Literatur, 17 (1995), 32–40. Wood, Sharon, ‘‘Rosetta Loy: The Paradox of the Past,’’ The New Italian Novel, edited by Zygmunt G. Baranski and Lino Pertile. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993.

GIAN PIETRO LUCINI (1867–1914) The idea of Gian Pietro Lucini as the primo dei moderni (first of the Moderns) was suggested in his introduction to the anthology Poesia italiana del Novecento (1969) by Edoardo Sanguineti, who regarded him as the sole and real alternative in early twentieth-century poetry who could overcome 1078

both the influence of Gabriele D’Annunzio’s poetics as well as the regressive, lower-middle-class cynicism of Giovanni Pascoli. This decisive reevaluation of Gian Pietro Lucini, supported by a generous selection of his poems in Sanguineti’s anthology, was accompanied, in the same period, by the

GIAN PIETRO LUCINI rediscovery of the poetic landscape of Symbolism and Futurism, facilitated, among others, by the studies of Glauco Viazzi. This attempt to place Lucini at the center of the Italian avant-garde brought new editions of his works to be published; and, as a result, he was read again. Many literary critics, such as Alberto Arbasino, felt that Lucini’s project of poetic renewal was so overproductive, heavy-handed, and, at the same time, incomplete that its full appreciation could only be postponed, perhaps indefinitely (‘‘Agony milanese,’’ 1977). Interestingly enough, in 1913 in Moscow, Anatoliy Lunacharsky had already suggested, in an article entitled ‘‘I Futuristi,’’ that ‘‘the greatest Italian artist in Europe’’ was not Filippo Tommaso Marinetti but Lucini. In other words, the debate on the poet’s contribution to the culture of the avant-garde in Italy is a long-standing one and has accompanied the changing fortunes on his literary production. Lucini debuted in 1888 with the novel Spirito ribelle (Rebel Spirit), indebted to naturalism, which he later turned into the social novel Gian Pietro da Core: Storia dell’evoluzione dell’Idea (Gian Pietro da Core: History of the Evolution of Idea, 1895). The main subject of the novel, as Glauco Viazzi has noted, is ‘‘the human couple (which immediately assumed religious-philosophical meaning from a gnostic-libertarian perspective) in relation to society and history’’ (‘‘Gian Pietro Lucini e il simbolismo,’’ 1979). His first collections of poetry were Il libro delle Figurazioni Ideali (The Book of the Ideal Figurations, 1894) and Il libro delle Imagini terrene (The Book of Earthly Images, 1898), central texts in Italian poetic symbolism. In 1898, he also wrote a series of poems in verso libero (free verse) that are perhaps his best work, I drami delle maschere (The Tragedies of the Masques), collected posthumously in 1973, a volume in which a crowd of Fantocci (puppets) act as symbols of the multiformity of the world of phenomena and refer to a Self as the ultimate collection of a plurality of subjects. This was followed by La prima ora della Accademia (The First Hour of the Academy, 1902), a sort of ideological dramatic poem on class struggle and individual conflicts, and La solita canzone del Melibeo (Melibeo’s Same Old Song, 1910), a private and intimate poem on the phenomenology of love. The common element to all these works is the central paradigmatic pattern of the theatrum mundi, because, for Lucini, only artifice and simulation can reveal the dichotomy between signifier and signified, between culture and life, according to the allegorical and

evocative model of Jules Laforgue and the lesson of the French symbolists. Perhaps his best known work, Revolverate (Gunshots, 1909), published in Marinetti’s literary series of Poesia, is a bitter countermelody between civil engagement and satire, the latter directed ‘‘in particular at his perpetual negative idols: the throne, the altar and the army,’’ as Sanguineti has written (Introduction, 1969). Instead, Nuove Revolverate (New Gunshots), published in 1970 as Le antitesi e le perversita` (Antitheses and Perversions), is a composite construction built from the most obsessive images, such as blood, tears, coitus, and incest. Lucini’s works of poetic prose mixed with verse, such as Le Nottole ed i Vasi (The Noctules and Vases, 1912) and the posthumous La piccola Chelidonio (Little Chelidonio, 1922) display a genuine art nouveau inspiration and mannered alexandrine verses. Profoundly republican and antimonarchic and close to individualist anarchism, Lucini rejected both idealism and positivism. With Futurism, too, he engaged simply in a temporary alliance rather than become an affiliate of the group or, even less, to depend on its poetics. His scornful isolation produced many contentious political and literary works. In Antidannunziana: D’annunzio al vaglio della critica (Anti-D’Annunzio. D’Annunzio Scrutinized by the Critics, 1914), the poet is the object of a merciless and amused ‘‘total criticism.’’ The second section, D’Annunzio al vaglio dell’humorismo (D’Annunzio Scrutinized by Humorism), was published posthumously by Edoardo Sanguineti in 1989. Finally, he wrote with Innocenzo Cappa an important theatrical work, Il Tempio della Gloria (The Temple of the Glory, 1913), which deals with contemporary Russian history, focusing especially on social and political matters.

Biography Gian Pietro Lucini was born in Milan on 30 September 1867. His father, Ferdinando Augusto, was a committed Garibaldino and republican. He graduated in law at the University of Pavia, 1892. He eloped with Giuditta Cattaneo, 1893. His father died, 1895. Lucini had suffered from bone tuberculosis since childhood and spent most of his life in isolation with his wife. He moved from Lake Como to the Italian Riviera and stayed in Milan sporadically. He traveled throughout Italy and met numerous intellectuals, among them Ugo Ojetti, in 1898. A convinced republican and pacifist, at 1079

GIAN PIETRO LUCINI the beginning of World War I he was incriminated. He invested a great part of his father’s inheritance and founded the Galli publishing house. Lucini died in Villa di Breglia, Plesio (Como) on 13 July 1914. STEFANO TOMASSINI Selected Works Collections Revolverate e Nuove Revolverate, edited by Edoardo Sanguineti, Turin: Einaudi, 1975. Scritti critici, edited by Luciana Martinelli, Bari: De Donato, 1971.

Novels Spirito ribelle, 1888. Gian Pietro da Core: Storia dell’evoluzione dell’Idea, 1895.

Poetry ‘‘Il libro delle Figurazioni ideali,’’ 1894. ‘‘Il libro delle Imagini terrene,’’ 1898. ‘‘Il monologo di Rosaura,’’ 1898. ‘‘Il monologo di Fiorindo,’’ 1898. ‘‘I monologhi di Pierrot,’’ 1898. ‘‘La prima ora della Academia,’’ 1902. ‘‘Carme di angoscia e di speranza in commemorazione del 28 decembre 1908,’’ 1909. ‘‘Revolverate,’’ 1909. ‘‘La solita canzone del Melibeo,’’ 1910. ‘‘Le Nottole ed i Vasi,’’ 1912. ‘‘Poesie scelte,’’ 1917. ‘‘La piccola Chelidonio,’’ edited by Carlo Linati, 1922. ‘‘La Gnosi di Melibeo,’’ edited by Terenzio Grandi, 1930. ‘‘Parade,’’ edited by Tommaso Grandi, 1967. ‘‘Le antitesi e le perversita`,’’ edited by Glauco Viazzi, 1970. ‘‘Prose e canzoni amare,’’ edited by Isabella Ghidetti, 1971. ‘‘I drami delle maschere,’’ edited by Glauco Viazzi, 1973.

Plays Il Tempio della Gloria, 1913, with Innocenzo Cappa.

Essays Il verso libero: proposta, 1908. L’ora topica di Carlo Dossi, 1911. Antidannunziana: D’annunzio al vaglio della critica, 1914. Libri e cose scritte, edited by Glauco Viazzi, 1971. Per una poetica del simbolismo, edited by Glauco Viazzi, 1971. D’Annunzio al vaglio dell’humorismo, edited by Edoardo Sanguineti, 1989.

1080

Further Reading Anceschi, Luciano, Le poetiche del Novecento in Italia, Milan: Marzorati, 1962. Arbasino, Alberto, ‘‘Agony Milanese,’’ in Certi romanzi, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1977. Baldassarri, Rita, Lucini, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1974. Ba`rberi Squarotti, Giorgio, Dall’anima al sottosuolo: problemi della letteratura dell’Ottocento da Leopardi a Lucini, Ravenna: Longo, 1982. Capoferri, Federica, ‘‘‘In sull’ambiguo giuoco della parola’: Maschera e persona storica nelle Revolverate di Gian Pietro Lucini,’’ Gradiva, 18 (2000), 34–50. Civolani, Eva, La sovversione estetica: Arte e pensiero libertario tra Ottocento e Novecento, Milan: Ele`uthera, 2000. Cordie`, Carlo, ‘‘Appunti su Gian Pietro Lucini e la Russia,’’ Filologia e letteratura, 14 (1968), 37–88. De Maria, Luciano, La nascita dell’avanguardia. Saggi sul futurismo italiano, Venice: Marsilio, 1986. De Michelis, Cesare G., ‘‘Panorama della letteratura russa in Italia,’’ in I russi e l’Italia, edited by Vittorio Strada, Milan: Scheiwiller, 1995. Ghidetti, Isabella, ‘‘Gian Pietro Lucini,’’ in Letteratura Italiana. I Contemporanei, Milan: Marzorati, 1974. Jacobbi, Ruggero, ‘‘Gian Pietro Lucini,’’ in L’avventura del Novecento, edited by Anna Dolfi, Milan: Garzanti, 1984. Lunacirsky, Anatoliy, ‘‘I Futuristi’’ (1913) in La rivoluzione proletaria e la cultura borghese, Milan: Mazzotta, 1972. Sanguineti, Edoardo, ‘‘Introduction,’’ to Poesia italiana del Novecento, Turin: Einaudi, 1969. Tomassini, Stefano, ‘‘Gian Pietro Lucini,’’ in Antologia della poesia italiana, edited by Carlo Ossola and Cesare Segre, vol. 3, Ottocento-Novecento, Turin: Einaudi, 1999. Valli, Donato, ‘‘Anarchia e aristocrazia: intervento su Lucini,’’ in Anarchia e misticismo nella poesia italiana del primo Novecento, Lecce: Milella, 1973. Viazzi, Glauco, ‘‘Gian Pietro Lucini e il simbolismo,’’ in Letteratura Italiana Contemporanea, edited by Gaetano Mariani and Mario Petrucciani, vol. 1, Rome: Lucarini, 1979. Viazzi, Glauco, ‘‘Le inedite ‘Armonie sinfoniche’ di Gian Pietro Lucini,’’ Lettere italiane, 22(1970), 500–548. Viazzi, Glauco, Studi e documenti per il Lucini, Naples: Guida, 1972. Villa, Edoardo, ‘‘Gian Pietro Lucini,’’ in Dizionario critico della letteratura italiana, edited by Vittore Branca, Turin: Utet, 1973. Viola, Gianni, Eugenio, Gli anni del futurismo: la poesia italiana nell’eta` delle avanguardie, Rome: Studium, 1990. Viola, Gianni, Eugenio, L’utopia futurista: Contributo alla storia delle avanguardie, Ravenna: Longo, 1994.

EMILIO LUSSU

EMILIO LUSSU (1890–1975) During the course of his exile in Paris (1929–1943), the Sardinian writer and politician Emilio Lussu wrote texts of great relevance to our historical knowledge of World War I. As an interventionist, he fought in the Great War and was one of the few intellectuals to record their experiences. His works were published in English, German, French, Spanish, and Italian only after the fall of Fascism in 1945. La catena (The Chain, 1929), Marcia su Roma e dintorni (The March on Rome and Thereabouts, 1933), and Un anno sull’altipiano (Sardinian Brigade, 1938) form a trilogy of autobiographical stories written in the first person; among their common themes are the hard years of the Fascist regime and the horrors of World War I. Set in 1926, La catena points out in the title the chain of events that the protagonist has to face. The book recalls the Fascist aggression he suffers in his own home in Cagliari: He shoots for self-defence, killing one of the aggressors. He is thus condemned to the confinement in the Sicilian island of Lipari. In Marcia su Roma e dintorni, the protagonist recounts Italian political life from 1919 to 1929, in particular the consolidation of Fascism in Sardinia. He also describes his escape from Lipari along with Francesco Fausto Nitti and Carlo Rosselli on a motorboat to Paris, where they founded the Giustizia e Liberta` political movement. Lussu signed the movement’s Quaderni under the pseudonym Tirreno. Un anno sull’altipiano met with greatest success the public and critical eye. The book tells the experiences of an infantry officer of the Brigata Sassari during the war against the Austrians on the Asiago plateau from 1916 to 1917: absurd trench warfare, where sometimes it is impossible to recognize the enemy, and innocent victims fall. Episodes of violence perpetrated by superiors, but also of solidarity among soldiers, are told in a fluent and colloquial style. There is also a psychological reflection on the innumerable characters: officers, soldiers, shepherds, farmers, and citizens are described with their vices and their virtues. The author approached their dramatic vicissitudes and their sometimes tragic destinies with great sincerity. The book is the fruit of a new and more conscious

point of view toward the war. At first, Lussu was declaredly interventionist, then he repudiated it after his personal experience on the front line. As a matter of fact, he was recognized as a valiant soldier; but afterward, he assumed a precise antiFascist position and was among the founders of the democratic Partito Sardo d’Azione in 1921. This party promoted the recovery of the Sardinian proletarian classes. Lussus’s narrative prose, pervaded by sad irony, is characterized by a wise modulation of tones. These works are considered firm opposition to the Fascist regime and against an absurd and cruel war. Based on Lussu’s eyewitness memoirs, Francesco Rosi made a powerful antiwar film, Uomini contro, in 1970. Alain Cuny starred as the fanatical general who orders his troops into a hopeless battle. Gian Maria Volonte` was the anarchist who is ordered to kill any soldiers who refuse to fight. Lussu’s books are mainly political memoirs, but he also wrote essays. In Teoria dell’insurrezione (Enter Mussolini, 1936) he thought that the fall of Fascism was possible only through the proletarian revolution, which he identified as the Resistance. In Diplomazia clandestina (1956), he wrote about his exile in France, during which he maintained his contacts with the Allies against the Fascist dictatorship. He supported the revolution in Sardinia, seen as the first step to the liberation from the oppressors. Even though he did not succeed in his intents, this activity attests to the forceful presence of an opposition to Fascism at the time. After Carlo Rosselli’s death, Lussu inherited the leadership of Giustizia e Liberta`, which grew as the revolutionary wing of the new Partito d’Azione, founded in 1943. After the party was dissolved in 1946, he became a minister during Parri’s and De Gasperi’s governments and, in 1947, he entered the Partito Socialista Italiano (PSI). Sul Partito d’azione e gli altri (Concerning the Partito d’Azione and Others, 1968) analyzes the politics of the postwar era. Essere a sinistra (Being a Leftist, 1976) and Discorsi parlamentari (Parliamentary Speeches, 1986) are collections of Lussu’s speeches as a militant socialist member of Parliament and address issues such as the defence of the Democratic Republic and the political and social progress of Sardinia. 1081

EMILIO LUSSU

Biography

Nonfiction

Emilio Lussu was born in Armungia (Cagliari), 4 November 1890. He earned his degree in law at the University of Cagliari, 1914; fought in World War I; and founded Partito Sardo d’Azione, 1920. In 1926, after Giacomo Matteotti’s murder, Lussu was condemned to five years of confinement in Lipari; he escaped to Paris with Carlo Rosselli and Francesco Fausto Nitti, 1929, with whom he founded the anti-Fascist movement Giustizia e Liberta` and the homonymous review. He was in a sanatorium in Switzerland, 1936–1937; here he wrote Un anno sull’altipiano e Teoria dell’insurrezione. Lussu met Joyce Salvadori and married, 1943. He fought in the Spanish war but in 1943 came back to Italy and was among the leaders of the Resistance. His son Giovanni was born in 1944. Lussu was a minister during Parri’s and De Gasperi’s governments, 1945, and a deputy of the Assemblea Costituente, 1946, as well as senator for the first three legislatures. He joined the Partito Socialista Italiano, 1947, and in 1964 was one of the founders of the Partito Socialista di Unita` Proletaria. Emilio Lussu died in Rome, 5 March 1975. GABRIELLA VESCHI Selected Works Fiction La catena, 1929. Marcia su Roma e dintorni, 1933; as An Autobiographical Account by a Leading Sardinian Republican Politician of Resistance to Sardiania from 1918–1930, translated by Roy W. Davis, 1992. Un anno sull’altipiano, 1938; as Sardinian Brigade, 1939, translated by Marion Rawson, 2000. Il cinghiale del diavolo, 1968; as Il cinghiale del diavolo e altri scritti sulla Sardegna, 1976.

Teoria dell’insurrezione, 1936; as Enter Mussolini: Observations and Adventures of an Antifascist, translated by Marion Rawson, 1979. La ricostruzione dello Stato, 1943. Diplomazia clandestina, 1956. Sul Partito d’azione e gli altri: Note critiche, 1968. Essere a sinistra: Democrazia, autonomia e socialismo in cinquant’anni di lotta, 1976. Per l’Italia dall’esilio, edited by Manlio Brigaglia, 1976; as Road to Exile, the Story of a Sardinian Patriot, translated by Graham Rawson, 1936. La difesa di Roma, edited by Gian Giacomo Ortu and Luisa Maria Plaisant, 1987. Discorsi parlamentari, 1986.

Letters Lettere a Carlo Rosselli e altri scritti di Giustizia e Liberta`, edited by Manlio Brigaglia, 1979.

Further Reading Antonicelli, Franco, ‘‘Presentazione e note,’’ in E. Lussu, Marcia su Roma e dintorni, Turin: Einaudi, 1974. Asor Rosa, Alberto, ‘‘Note introduttive,’’ in E. Lussu, Il cinghiale del diavolo, Nuoro: Ilisso, 2004. Brigaglia, Manlio, Emilio Lussu e Giustizia e Liberta`, Cagliari: Edizioni della Torre, 1976. Della Corte, Carlo, ‘‘Introduzione,’’ in E. Lussu, Un anno sull’altipiano, Milan: Mondadori, 1970. De Luna, Giovanni, ‘‘Introduzione,’’ in E. Lussu, Marcia su Roma e dintorni, Turin: Einaudi, 2002. Fiori, Giuseppe, Il cavaliere dei Rossomori: Vita di Emilio Lussu, Turin: Einaudi, 1985. Isnenghi, Mario, Il mito della grande guerra, Bari: Laterza, 1970. Lussu, Joyce, Fronti e frontiere, Milan: Mursia, 1969. Lussu, Joyce, L’olivastro e l’innesto, Cagliari: Edizioni della Torre, 1982. Nitti, Francesco Fausto, Escape: The Personal Narrative of a Political Prisoner Who Was Rescued from Lipari, the Fascist ‘‘Devil’s Island,’’ New York and London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1930. Orru`, Eugenio, and Nereide Rudas (editors), L’uomo dell’altipiano: Riflessioni, testimonianze, memorie su Emilio Lussu, Cagliari: Tema, 2003.

MARIO LUZI (1914–2005) The literary production of Mario Luzi, one of the greatest Italian poets of the twentieth century, proceeded uninterrupted for more than 70 years, and his works range from poetry to theater, prose, essay writing, and translations. His first poem, ‘‘Sera 1082

d’aprile’’ (April Evening), was published in Il feroce on July 7, 1931. At just over 20 years of age, Luzi contributed to the Florentine reviews Il frontespizio and Campo di Marte and lived the cultural climate of poetic

MARIO LUZI Hermeticism. In 1935, he published his first work, La barca (The Boat), in which there prevails the idea of immanent Providence. The religious theme transforms the poetry’s amorous dimension: Traditional amorousness, such as the contemplation of feminine beauty and anticipation of the encounter, expand to embrace the wider theme of religious charity. In Avvento notturno (Nocturnal Advent, 1940), the work most characterized by the influence of Hermetic poetry, there prevails instead the theme of absence, the principal reason for the subject’s search: He follows the traces of a repressed presence that left a mark on his affective memory, on his vision of spaces, on his hearing of words. The theme of epiphanies began to appear in Luzi’s poetry; these epiphanies were iconographic structures that, from the depths of consciousness, became evident in the present, flashes of another universe that sometimes broke the barrier of the opacity of the real. The figure of the mother without milk that dominates the poetic rhythm of Un brindisi (A Toast, 1946) is the tragic symbol of the war that, together with hate and desperation, induced the complete moral and physical disintegration of the individual. Humans could not escape pain. And yet hope did not abandon the poet. Faith in the word was born in Luzi from literary recovery of the Christian hermeneutic, for which the verbum was the enigmatic nucleus to dissolve, since it contains the hidden value of kerigma, of revelation. All of Luzi’s works recollect the biblical principal of life as vanitas vanitatum (vanity of the vain) and the necessity of seeking meaning nevertheless, through the discovery of alterity and the community of creatures. Quaderno gotico (Gothic Notebook, 1947), published at the end of World War II, represents the liberation of love and the force of life rediscovered after the metaphorical frost and the darkness of the years of war. From that darkness arose the persona vittoriosa, il corpo incorrotto (victorious person, with an uncorrupted body), and thus was born the theme of rebirth and liberation. Primizie del deserto (Firstlings of the Desert, 1952) instead registers the presence of Heraclitian and Parmenidean thought in reality, as eternal change: Life is magma, and humanity is humbly constrained to descend into this magma in search of the most profound meaning of existence. The idea of individual pride that sometimes appeared in the Hermetic attitude dissolved in the face of the breaking in of the voice of phenomena. Luzi thus rendered honor to truth with his

poetry, dense with existential meaning, and full of interest in time, space, figures, and objects. Onore del vero (Honor for the Truth, 1957) is the most mature and perfect culmination of the themes already present in Primizie del deserto. In this text, as Giorgio Ba`rberi Squarotti wrote, ‘‘on the one hand Luzi’s poetry transfers physical facts into notions of a metaphysical event; on the other, it becomes into a meditation on these notions, a presa di coscienza of the event, testimony of this’’ (Poesia e narrativa del secondo Novecento, 1961). Nel magma (In the Magma, 1963) signalled a dramatic gnoseological and linguistic shift in Luzi’s poetry. The work takes the form of a trial, intended as judicial procedure to which the narrating ‘‘I’’ subjects itself, in Dantean style, a procedure in which he also compares himself to others. It also recounts the untiring journey of the pilgrim who finds, in the collective nature of the present, the aim of his teleological quest. For this reason the space is defined by places of passage, of union, and diaspora, such as the halls of hotels, offices, cafe´s, and clinics. The poet traverses history and is immersed in it in his attempt to grasp il giusto della vita or the just in life (thus is titled the volume that collects Luzi’s poetry up until 1960), the sense of being nell’opera del mondo (in the work of the world), the title assigned to the second volume of Tutte le poesie (Complete Poems), published by Garzanti in 1979. Dal fondo delle campagne (From the Bottom of the Country, 1965) collects texts contemporary to Nel magma and constitutes, on a stylistic level, the passage from a lyric of the subject to a choral poetry. Beginning with Su fondamenti invisibili (On Invisible Foundations, 1971), the subject is shattered, transforming itself from undivided centrality into a device that records voices that often cannot express themselves. Luzi traveled the path from the individual to the multiple, nel corpo oscuro della metamorfosi (in the dark body of metamorphosis), to cite the title of one of his compositions. As a consequence the points of reference of his poetics change: No longer do they depart from the l’immobilita` del mutamento (the immobility of change) but rather from the untiring movement of everything, the rhythm of systole and diastole that marks the alternation of life and death, the creazione continua (continual creation). Thus is born an idea of poetry that critics have defined as ‘‘agonizing,’’ intended in the double sense of fight between death and life, loss and growth, and at the same time a presentiment of the end, a last 1083

MARIO LUZI resistance to the prevalence of nothingness. The poetry is ever more enquiring, doubtful, and the word becomes intermittent, isolated in the silence of incapacity to signify, finally recuperated through questioning. In works such as Al fuoco della controversia (In the Flames of Controversy, 1978), Per il battesimo dei nostri frammenti (For the Baptism of Our Fragments, 1985), and Frasi e incisi di un canto salutare (Phrases and Passages of a Salutary Song, 1990), there prevails the image of a disintegrated and disintegrating society constituted at the gnoseological and linguistic level by fragments, sentences (intended as broken discourse) that underline the enigmatic nature of the real and nostalgia for lost harmony. Luzi had the courage and the humility to defer ethical judgment on history. In this distance, he found the foundations of his faith, projected in a providential future, utopian and eschatological. In Viaggio terrestre e celeste di Simone Martini (Earthly and Heavenly Journey of Simone Martini, 1994), Luzi assumed the figure of the great Sienese painter as he completes his voyage of return from France to his homeland. Simone Martini is configured as a model witness, a scribe between heaven and earth who rediscovers the harmony of the world incarnated by nature and by woman. Nature records the continual return of life after death; woman represents the inherent concept of fecundity, of returning hope. And nature, in its dialectical rapport with the history of man, is the dominant theme of Sotto specie umana (Under Human Species, 1999). In verses attributed to Lorenzo Malagugini, the poetry aspires ‘‘a un discorso che fosse voce della molteplicita` (e simultaneita`) del vivente e fosse dalla stessa condiviso’’ (to a discourse that was the voice of the multiplicity [and simultaneity] of the living, and was shared by them). In 2003, the Poesie ritrovate (Rediscovered Poems) were published, poems written before his first volume appeared in 1935. These poems constitute the beginning of the poet’s career and are the point of departure for Luzi’s journey in contemporary Italian poetry. Corresponding to the poetic experience is Luzi’s dramaturgical writing. In 1947, he elaborated the text of Pietra oscura (Dark Stone), not published until 1994, and performed in 1998. But it was with Libro di Ipazia (Book of Ipazia, 1978) that Luzi’s theater gained fame. Once again the writer privileged the theme of change, describing, between the end of the fourth century and the beginning of the fifth, the conflict between the grecita` morente 1084

e il cristianesimo trionfante (dying Hellenism and triumphal Christianity) in the cities of Alexandria and Cirene. Rosales (1983) was inspired instead by the assassination of Leon Trotsky at the hand of the presumed killer Don Giovanni Rosales; it is a modern reformulation of a Don Giovanni as assassin, persecutor, and victim of his own destiny, who will nevertheless manage to redeem himself through the discovery of love as caritas. Hystrio (1987), in which the history of the Bulgarian dictator Zhivkov is perhaps embedded, is at once a metaphor for the relationship between fiction and truth in the contemporary world, and a study of the ambiguous fascination of power. The Corale della citta` di Palermo per Santa Rosalia (Choral of the City of Palermo for Saint Rosalia, 1989) departs stylistically and thematically from Luzi’s previous works. Written by Luzi on the suggestion of the then mayor of Palermo, Leoluca Orlando, it recounts the Palermitan plague of 1625, the discovery of the bones of Rosalia in the caves of Mount Pellegrino, and of her assumption to patron saint of the city. There returns the theme of the death– life relationship and of the discovery of the divine in the human. In Il Purgatorio: La notte lava la mente (Purgatory: Night Washes the Mind, 1990), Luzi dramatized the Dantean canticle, confirming an ethical and stylistic adherence to a poetic model that interprets the complexity of the real and uses the multiple language of social reality. The works of his last years were ever more oriented toward religious and social problematics. These include La Passione: Via Crucis (The Passion: The Way of the Cross, 1999) composed on the occasion of the celebration of the Via Crucis conducted by Pope John Paul II, in which Christ is configured as a sublime synthesis of the relationship between destiny of death and promise of salvation; Opus Florentinum (Florentine Work, 2002); and Il fiore del dolore (The Flower of Pain, 2003); dedicated to the figure of Don Giuseppe Puglisi, a priest assassinated by the Sicilian Mafia for his fight against crime. Luzi’s long poetic activity was also accompanied by critical and theoretical reflections on literature and the study of beloved authors. L’opium chre´tien (The Christian Opium, 1938) is a monograph on Mauriac, on whom Luzi wrote his thesis, while Un’illusione platonica e altri saggi (A Platonic Illusion and Other Essays, 1942) is a collection of writings on various themes and authors. In 1949 Luzi published L’inferno e il limbo (Hell and Limbo), reprinted numerous times, in which he suggested that two poetic lineages emerge in Italian

MARIO LUZI poetry: the Dantesque, with its choral, realistic word and the Petrarchan, centered around the memorial nucleus of subjectivity. In 1952, he published Studio su Mallarme´ (Study on Mallarme´), a fundamental contribution to knowledge of the French poet. In the period of the triumph of neo-Realism, Luzi, faithful to his idea of poetry, collected under the title of Tutto in questione (Everything in Question, 1965), writings that appeared in the review La chimera. These works contest the idea of literature as a mere reflection of the world and advance the possibility of an avant-garde expression of the neurosis of modern man. Later essays, such as Vicissitudine e forma (Vicissitude and Form, 1974), Discorso naturale (Natural Discourse, 1984), and Vero e verso (Truth and Verse, 2002) constitute the summa of Luzian speculation on artistic creation and on the role of literature in society. His translations were also numerous, from Charles Du Bos to Coleridge, Racine, and Shakespeare.

fuoco della controversia, 1978, and was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature, 1980–1997. He won the Alcide De Gasperi prize, 1982. He taught at the University of Florence, 1981. He traveled again to America, accompanied by Allen Mandelbaum. Luzi won the Mondello prize, 1985; the Librex Guggenheim, 1986; the European Prize for Culture, 1991; and the Viareggio-Versilia, 1995. He received the Legion of Honor of the French Republic, 1997, and was elected to the Accademia della Crusca, 2003. Mario Luzi died in Florence, 28 February 2005. ALFREDO LUZI Selected Works Collections Tutte le poesie, Milan: Garzanti, 1979; as After Many Years, selected poems translated by Catherine O’Brien, Dublin: Dedalus Press, 1990. Teatro, Milan: Garzanti, 1993.

Poetry

Biography Mario Luzi was born in Castello (Sesto Fiorentino), 20 October 1914. He studied Lettere at the University of Florence and graduated with degree in French literature, 1932–1936. Luzi began contributing to Il frontespizio and other literary magazines, 1935. He married Elena Monaci, 1942, and had one son, Gianni, 1943. He taught at the Liceo Scientifico in Florence, 1945. He met Cristina Campo, Stephen Spender, and Dylan Thomas, 1947. Luzi won the Saint Vincent prize with L’inferno e il limbo, 1949, and the Carducci prize for Primizie del deserto, 1952. He was a lecturer in French literature at the University of Florence, 1955. He won the Marzotto prize for Onore del vero, 1957. Luzi was invited by Carlo Bo, President of the University of Urbino, to teach courses in French literature, 1962. He traveled in the Soviet Union, 1966. He contributed to Il corriere della sera, 1967. Luzi traveled in India, Hungary, and Romania, 1968–1970. He won the Fiuggi prize for Su fondamenti invisibili, 1971. He taught comparative literature at the University of Urbino, 1972– 1981. In 1974, he traveled in the United States, holding a series of lectures in various American universities, and began to contribute to Il giornale. He traveled to Ireland for a cycle of lectures at Trinity College and at the Institute of Italian Culture, 1977. Luzi won the Viareggio Prize with Al

‘‘La barca,’’ 1935. ‘‘Avvento notturno,’’ 1940. ‘‘Un brindisi,’’ 1946. ‘‘Quaderno gotico,’’ 1947; as Gothic Notebook, translated by Carlo L. Golino, in Italian Quarterly, vol. 6 (1948). ‘‘Primizie del deserto,’’ 1952. ‘‘Onore del vero,’’ 1957. ‘‘Il giusto della vita,’’ 1960. ‘‘Nel magma,’’ 1963; enlarged edition, 1966. ‘‘Dal fondo delle campagne,’’ 1965; enlarged edition, 1969. ‘‘Su fondamenti invisibili,’’ 1971. ‘‘Al fuoco della controversia,’’ 1978. ‘‘Per il battesimo dei nostri frammenti,’’ 1985; as For the Baptism of Our Fragments, translated by Luigi Ballerini, 1992. ‘‘Frasi e incisi di un canto salutare,’’ 1990; as Phrases and Passages of a Salutary Song, translated by Luigi Bonaffini, 1999. ‘‘Viaggio terrestre e celeste di Simone Martini,’’ 1994; as Earthly and Heavenly Journey of Simone Martini, translated by Luigi Bonaffini, 2003. ‘‘L’opera poetica,’’ 1998. ‘‘Sotto specie umana,’’ 1999. ‘‘Poesie ritrovate,’’ 2003. ‘‘Dottrina dell’estremo principiante,’’ 2004.

Plays Libro di Ipazia, 1978. Rosales, 1983. Hystrio, 1987. Corale della citta` di Palermo per Santa Rosalia, 1989. Il Purgatorio: La notte lava la mente, 1990. Pietra oscura, 1994. Felicita` turbate, 1995. Ceneri e ardori, 1997. La passione: Via Crucis, 1999.

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MARIO LUZI Opus Florentinum, 2002. Il fiore del dolore, 2003.

Letters Una ‘‘purissima e antica amicizia’’: Lettere di Mario Luzi a Leone Traverso 1936–1966, 2003.

Prose Biografia a Ebe, 1942. Trame, 1982.

Further Reading

Essays L’opium chre´tien, 1939. Un’illusione platonica e altri saggi, 1942. L’inferno e il limbo, 1949. Studio su Mallarme´, 1952; reprinted, 1987. Aspetti della generazione napoleonica e altri saggi di letteratura francese, 1956. Tutto in questione, 1965. Vicissitudine e forma, 1974. Discorso naturale, 1984. Vero e verso, 2002. Le scintille del ‘‘Tempo’’: Dieci anni di critica luziana, 2003.

Translations Charles Du Bos, Vita e letteratura, 1943. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Poesie e prose, 1977. Jean Racine, Andromaca, 1980. Jorge Guille´n, La fuente, 1961. William Shaskespeare, Riccardo II, 1966. Francamente (versi dal francese), 1980. La cordigliera delle Ande e altri versi tradotti, 1983.

Ba`rberi Squarotti, Giorgio, Poesia e narrativa del secondo Novecento, Milan: Mursia, 1961. Fontana, Giovanni, Il fuoco della creazione incessante: Studi sulla poesia di Mario Luzi, Lecce: Manni, 2002. Luzi, Alfredo, La vicissitudine sospesa, Florence:Vallecchi, 1968. Marchi, Marco, Mario Luzi, Milan: Mursia, 1998. Mariani, Gaetano, Il lungo viaggio verso la luce: Itinerario poetico di Mario Luzi, Padua: Liviana, 1982. Panicali, Anna, Saggio su Mario Luzi, Milan: Garzanti, 1987. Pautasso, Sergio, Storia di una poesia, Milan: Rizzoli, 1981. Quiriconi, Giancarlo, Il fuoco e la metamorfosi: La scommessa totale di Mario Luzi, Bologna: Cappelli, 1982. Rizzoli, Luisa, and Giorgio Morelli, Mario Luzi: La poesia, il teatro, la prosa, la saggistica, le traduzioni, Milan: Mursia, 1992. Scarpati, Claudio, Mario Luzi, Milan: Mursia, 1970. Verdino, Stefano (editor), Mario Luzi: L’opera poetica, Milan: Mondatori, 1998. Verdino, Stefano (editor), Mario Luzi cantore della luce, Assisi: Cittadella Editrice, 2003.

LYRIC POETRY Characterized as an invention of the mythical Orpheus, lyric poetry is defined in Aristotle’s Poetics as a genre that subjectively expresses the poet’s feelings. Originally, it was accompanied by the lyre and other chorded instruments. Personal poetry appeared in Ionia and in the Greek isles beginning early in the seventh century BCE. Choral poetry was accompanied by dances and religious songs that marked the salient moments of existence: birth, marriage, death, and moments involving work or social calamity. The choral, ceremonial origins of Greek poetry require the poet to have knowledge of music and dance as well as of meter. The innovations resulting from the appearance around 600 BCE of Sappho and of Alcaeus are not limited to the island of Lesbos. Their poetry is personal, but the fame of the two poets exceeded these boundaries quickly, changing the very function of poetry. Innovation became even more 1086

evident with Anacreon, who sought interlocutors and protectors wherever he could find them (in Samos, in Athens, in Thessalonia), contributing importantly to the concept of poetry as a nomadic profession no longer tied to local rites. Under his influence, poetry became capable of a cosmopolitan style and a heterogeneous language made up of many dialects. The poet became a professional artist, and new importance was assigned to the writing of the text and, in the transition from oral performance to writing, to refined expression. When Greek lyric lost its ties to choruses, music, and dances, it went further in the search for rhetorical figures with greater visual intensity, choosing the path of symbolism and becoming a space of absence, a gap that the gaze must fill. The exercise of the gaze in lyric poetry relegates listening to a secondary function. This happened in the passage from Greek to Latin lyric poetry, which

LYRIC POETRY from an infinite number of metrical forms chose instead a limited number of possibilities. This new poetry was thus codified above all through writing, while all gestures, mimicry, and sonority were subtracted from it. Latin poetic production was of a more private nature with respect to the Greek and is destined to a more reserved circulation, often simply from sender to addressee. This was the case of Catullus, inspired by Sappho, but also of Propertius and Ovid, in whose poetry themes and meter have the intimate quality of an emotional outlet or of inner contemplation. Horace alone confronted various topics in the four books of Carmina, including some of a civic nature. The public reading of these texts had a very restricted reach, at its widest including Maecenas’s artistic coterie in the Augustan royal palace. Although Greek lyric is essentially choral and its myth of origin is that of Orpheus, Latin lyric became a forum for individual expression and lost its popular character. Over the course of history, poetry has frequently been surrounded by dancing, music, singing (one might think of the Provenc¸al troubadors, for example, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries). These poetic forms, set to music, can become spectacle, entertainment, or exquisite games with visual enigmas, as in Greek lyric (Ipsis). In the trobar clus, of which Arnault Daniel is a master, poetry is also a secret message. Furthermore, rhythmical music with the lute (me´los) is a remnant of both the popular and cultured origins of the form, in the various forms of canc¸on, alba, sirvente´s, tenson, planh, pastore`la, and romanc¸a. A sort of competition began between the visual arts and the art of the lyric word, a contest won by poetry because, paradoxically, it is more visual. Such a lyric triumph occurred in the thirteenthcentury Sicilian court of Frederick II and then in the stilnovistic circle. Of fundamental importance is the theory of Love at the heart of the Sicilian school: Love is a feeling born in the heart but ignited by sight, as Rinaldo D’Aquino suggested in his ‘‘Amor e` uno desio che ven da core’’ (Love is a desire that comes from the heart). Stilnovismo, which developed in Bologna and Florence from the end of the thirteenth to the beginning of the fourteenth century, enriched lyric poetry with new themes and forms, while making use of previous poetic experiences, including the Provenc¸al and Sicilian traditions and that of Guittone d’Arezzo and his followers. Guido Guinizzelli wrote the manifesto of stilnovismo, the canzone ‘‘Al cor gentil rempaira sempre Amore’’ (Love always returns to

the gentle heart), articulating concepts such as the nobility of the soul as opposed to nobility of origins; the gentilezza inherent to the feeling of love; and the function of the woman-angel and of Love in the process of ennobling the soul. In De vulgari eloquentia (Eloquence in the Vulgar Tongue, ca. 1304–1305), Dante Alighieri theorized the forms of this new poetry in the vernacular. His Vita Nova (New Life, ca. 1294), written before the Comedia (Divine Comedy, ca. 1305–1321), represents the highest form of stilnovismo. Petrarch also learned from stilnovistic lyric: It would be impossible for posterity—which he explicitly addressed—to understand the sight and the vision of Laura without the sight and vision of Beatrice or to make sense of the images of the Canzoniere (ca. 1342–1374) without the epiphanies and dreams of the Vita Nova. Amongst the ‘‘dualities’’ found in the poetry of the Canzoniere (Rerum vulgarium Fragmenta), it is important to underline that of presence/absence, fundamental in the texts that speak of his love for Laura. Exemplary in these terms are the two canzoni ‘‘Chiare, fresche, e dolci acque’’ (Clear, fresh, sweet water) and ‘‘Di pensier in pensier, di monte in monte’’ (From thought to thought, from mountain to mountain). Both typical canzoni of absence, the first is entirely founded on the flux of memory; the second is a renunciation that is compensated by substitutive images that appear in nature. In both, vision entirely replaces sight, in line with Andreas Capellanus’s theories of courtly love and anticipating the solutions offered by neo-Platonism. Petrarch’s ‘‘fragments’’ represent something more than Catullus’ nugae; They comprise an intimate poetic diary in which to seek gratification in the playful, fantastic, psychological sense of the term. This search brought the poet to discover the mechanisms through which poetry can compensate for absence or solitude. Modern lyric, conscious of its restorative, gratifying function, was born in the Canzoniere. The Mannerist lyrics of the sixteenth century, including those by Torquato Tasso, demonstrate the codifying power of this poetic path. All of the poetry by Pietro Bembo, Vittoria Colonna, Gaspara Stampa, Veronica Franco, Luigi Tansillo, and Celio Magno sings in absence and evokes presences by way of substitutive images. Colonna constructed entire sonnets using scattered verses of Petrarch’s Canzoniere. This is the model proposed by Bembo, followed by Stampa, and facilitated by the circulation of Petrarchan rhyme-books. The lack of a true Aristotelian codification of 1087

LYRIC POETRY lyric poetry incited sixteenth-century scholars to fill the gap with specific treatises. In Arte poetica (Art of Poetry, 1563), Antonio Minturno (ca. 1500– 1574) proposed substituting the Aristotelian bipartition (epic and dramatic poetry) with a tripartite scheme that includes lyric poetry, which ‘‘dilettevolmente si fa con versi d’armonia vestiti e ornati, che volentieri e di lor natura con musica e col ballo s’accompagnano’’ (one creates pleasingly with ornate, harmonious verses, that willingly and by nature can be accompanied with music and dance). In his Compendio della poesia tragicomica (Compendium of Tragicomic Poetry, 1601), Battista Guarini (1538– 1612) codified the lyric as the poetry of the ‘‘I.’’ Tasso also adhered to the model, although he varied it in the almost 2,000 poems of his Rime (Poems, 1591), so that, compared to Bembo and the contemporary women poets, his metrical style follows the more innovative line of Giovanni Della Casa. Tasso’s mannerist style arrives at the threshold of Baroque concettismo, but the occasions, themes, and amorous lexicon remain the same. Tasso infused this repertory with artistic originality, evoking atmospheres and colors different from those of Petrarch’s Canzoniere. Nevertheless, lyric poetry is codified as a gaze that interrogates the world, in search of the object that has been loved and lost, and seeking to make it reappear. From this moment, dreams and apparitions erupt into lyric poetry. Even a declared anti-Petrarchan poet, Giovanbattista Marino (who however admired the stilnovisti, Giovanni Pontano, Luigi Tansillo, and Torquato Tasso), participated in part in the Petrarchan tradition. Marino’s poetry, both that of the Lira (Lyre, 1608) and that of La Galeria (The Gallery, 1619), is poetry of substitution. The feminine bodies torn to pieces by the poet’s pen by way of metaphors and synesthesia displace the reader so thoroughly that the referential function itself becomes an abstraction. Baroque techniques accentuate a tendency that by now seems to be constant in poetry of sentiment and of private occasions. The Enlightenment and Romanticism swept away redundancies of concetti (concepts) and of forms, but lyric poets maintained the same evocative tendency. In Italian poetry, one thinks of Leopardi’s Canti (Songs, 1831), but this is a truly European phenomenon: Keats and Shelley in the English tradition, Lamartine and De Vigny in the French; Heine in the German; and so on. Even from a technical and formal perspective, memories and expectations fill the space of absence in Leopardi’s lyrics. While in Petrarch only woman and love represented the object removed and 1088

substituted by poetry, in Leopardi all of reality, existence itself, became part of the game. Leopardian syllogisms drive the poem to a bifurcation between sight and vision, in which the reader has no choice: All that sight offers to him is closed, limited, disappointing; all that that leads to vision is open, infinite, gratifying, given the transgressive nature of the eye, as Jean Starobinski remarked in L’Oeil vivant (1961). The descriptive or contemplative function in lyric poetry allows the poet to project him- or herself on images of the external world. The poet appropriates the object through the poetic gaze and delivers it to a memory destined to last longer than the experience that occasioned it, as for example in Ugo Foscolo’s sonnets ‘‘Alla sera,’’ (To The Evening, 1803) and ‘‘A Zacinto’’ (To Zacinto, 1803), or, in the twentieth century, in Eugenio Montale. It is precisely for the use and the excess of this function at the turn of the last century that the Crepuscular poets Sergio Corazzini, Marino Moretti, Corrado Govoni, and especially Guido Gozzano deserve attention. Gozzano, author of La via del rifugio (The Road to Shelter, 1907) and I colloqui (The Colloquies, 1911), appropriates all of the canons, ironically and creatively recycling all poetic forms codified until Romanticism. He is thus the most important poet of the group, capable of indicating the only future by then possible for poetry: the avant-garde, Futurism. The descriptive and evocative functions of lyric poetry became ever-more mixed, becoming apparently indistinguishable, for instance in Charles Baudelaire, Giovanni Pascoli, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Arthur Rimbaud, and Ste´phane Mallarme´. From the moment when poetry took the path of symbolism, the two functions were interlaced, the presence of the eye became overwhelming, and the lyric became the poetry of sight. The symbolic nature of language allowed lyric poetry to fix a point beyond the apparent object of speech, beyond the referent, beyond the occasion. But symbolism conferred a more clear awareness of the polyvalence of words and images, an awareness that allowed poets to transform every object into something that reveals something else, something beyond the phenomenon. The definitive loss of mimesis is characteristic of all contemporary poetry, as is the increase in the metaphorical dimension of the lyric message. The result is semantic dispersion and the foregrounding in the synesthesia of the primary senses (hearing and seeing) rather than the secondary ones. This is most evident in the poetic balancing acts of the avant-garde.

LYRIC POETRY In this sense, the founder of the modern lyric was Charles Baudelaire with Les Fleurs du Mal (1857). Rimbaud attributed colors to the sounds of vowels, and his Bateau ivre (1871) breaks the moorings to see beyond the limits of experience, even while concluding that there is nothing more to see in the world than that that can be presented by a paper boat pushed into a puddle by the hand of a child. In these poets, the importance of the multiplication of sight and of vision, achieved artificially through drug use, should not be underrated. Mallarme´, Pascoli, and D’Annunzio can also be considered part of this tradition. Lyric poetry approaches its own congenital paradox: As it says what is not said, the unsayable, the ideal poetry would be that which is silent, blank. Pascoli and D’Annunzio were masters of this symbolist art in Italy in profoundly different ways. In the Myricae (Tamerisks, 1891) and in the poetics of ‘‘Il fanciullino’’ (The Child), Pascoli recalled not only Virgil but also Gozzano and his meta-poetry. D’Annunzio, on the other hand, approached international Decadentism and its culture of the superman, of aesthetic hedonism. Pascoli’s Poemetti (Little Poems, 1897), Canti di Castelvecchio (Songs of Castelvecchio, 1903), Poemi conviviali (Convivial Poems, 1904), and Odi e inni (Odes and Hymns, 1906), together with D’Annunzio’s Poema paradisiaco (Heavenly Poem, 1893) and Laudi (Lauds, 1903–1904), demonstrate the great technical capability of the Italian lyric on the eve of the avantgarde. In understanding the process of abstraction, it is necessary to take into account that painting also discovered new paths, abandoning, with Impressionism, traditional artistic routes. It left the academies and sought, en plein air, to represent a reality that could be reconstructed by the eye of the spectator. On the other hand, the invention of photography and of cinema increased the visibility of the world and, at the same time, its visionary potential. If abstraction becomes a means of knowledge in general and in the arts in particular, literature cannot avoid revolution. The first avant-garde to call for it was Futurism. With Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and his group, poetry exploded syntactically and words were set free: It became visual, designed itself in graphic elements, etched itself on materials never before encountered (tin or fibers made from casein). Marinetti pushed the paradox that would characterize all of the twentieth-century avant-gardes: To better represent reality, it was necessary to renounce realism as a mistaken imitation of reality. From here, the

doors to Dadaism, Surrealism, and abstraction in general were opened. The unbounded imagination of the Futurists made possible an absolute freedom of the image, implying a typographical revolution as well. The Futurist book became a provocative object, made of new, experimental materials. Futurist writing was a calligram, following Guillaume Apollinaire’s experiments, or a lithographic procedure like that used for boxes of cookies, for instance in Tullio d’Albisola and Bruno Munari’s L’anguria lirica (Lyric Watermelon, 1934). Gian Pietro Lucini and Aldo Palazzeschi took their first steps with Futurism but then distanced themselves from it. Dino Campana, in the Canti orfici (Orphic Songs, 1914), established himself in an antiliterary, visionary perspective not far from Futurism. After Marinetti, nothing remained unchanged. Apollinaire, E´luard, Breton; Picasso and Braque; then Ungaretti, Montale, Sanguineti, and the neo-avant-garde: All these figures owed something to Futurism. Interferences between poetry and the other visual arts were multiplied. The explosion of the gaze permitted the synesthetic exchange of the senses, allowed for the spread of the lyric toward its vocation of second sight, of visual magic. Hermeticism is also tied to this process of abstraction. The paradox is even more accentuated: On the one hand, poetry sought an increase of vision, while on the other it concealed its meanings, making obscurity an aesthetic principle and taking care to express rather than communicate. Giuseppe Ungaretti, Salvatore Quasimodo, and in part Umberto Saba and Eugenio Montale participated in this trend. Their poetry does not take into account the addressee, unless it does so by way of the specular double of the poet (Montale’s tu). An original technique in Montale is that of the occasione, the occasion through which the poet constructs the poetic object beginning with a photograph, a strange name, an object that falls in the field of vision. The immobility of the point of view finds as its correlative an emptiness in which can be perceived flashes, wonders, salvific occasions. The essence of the occasion is in its double value, simultaneously etymological, literal, denotative on the one hand, and symbolic, connotative, philosophical on the other. It is the typical progression of abstract art that exceeds Eliot’s definition (accepted by Montale) of ‘‘objective correlative.’’ The increasingly more prosaic themes of lyric poetry are at times mixed with an expressionistic recuperation of dialects, as in Andrea Zanzotto. 1089

LYRIC POETRY Today, in a cultural climate of renewed interest in lyric poetry as event, one witnesses the curious editorial phenomenon whereby lyric poetry has become a literary form that many practice, few read, and very few acquire. Publishers tend not to publish poetry, unless the texts are classics. Poetry, which exited the book with the avant-gardes and the neo-avant-gardes, is no longer able to reenter into it. Instead, it manifests itself in more dynamic forms: literary festivals, theatrical events, and mass-media metamorphoses. GIUSEPPINA BALDISSONE Further Reading Archivio delle similitudini, Hildesheim, Zu¨rich, and New York: G. Olms Verlag, 1994. Archivio tematico della lirica italiana, Hildesheim, Zu¨rich, and New York: G. Olms Verlag, 1991. Asor Rosa, Alberto (editor), Letteratura italiana, 9 vols., Turin: Einaudi, 1992–1999. Ba`rberi Squarotti, Giorgio (editor), Storia della civilta` letteraria italiana, 6 vols, Turin: Utet, 1990–1993. Beltrami, Pietro, Gli strumenti della poesia. Guida alla metrica italiana, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1996.

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Cucchi, Maurizio (editor), Dizionario della poesia italiana, Milan: Mondadori, 1983. Cucchi, Maurizio, and Stefano Giovanardi (editors), Poeti italiani del secondo Novecento (1945–1995), Milan: Mondadori, 1996. Frabotta, Biancamaria (editor), Donne in poesia. Antologia della poesia femminile in Italia, Rome: Savelli, 1976. Greimas, Algirdas Julien, Essais de se´miotique poe´tique, Paris: Larousse, 1972. Lavezzi, Gianfranca, Manuale di metrica italiana, Rome: La Nuova Italia Scientifica, 1996. Lorenzini, Niva, La poesia italiana del Novecento, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1999. Lorenzini, Niva, Il presente della poesia. 1960–1990, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1991. Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo (editor), Poeti italiani del Novecento, Milan: Mondadori, 1978. Pozzi, Giovanni, La parola dipinta, Milan: Adelphi, 1981. Sanguineti, Edoardo (editor), Poesia del Novecento, Turin: Einaudi, 1969. Santagata, Marco et al. (editors), Incipitario unificato della poesia italiana, 4 vols., Modena: Panini, 1988–1996. Segre, Cesare, and Carlo Ossola (editors), Antologia della poesia italiana, 8 vols., Turin: Einaudi-Gallimard, 1997–1999. Sica, Gabriella, Scrivere in versi. Metrica e poesia, Parma: Pratiche, 1996. Starobinski, Jean, L’Œil vivant, Paris: Gallimard, 1961. Zumthor, Paul, Introduction a` la poe´sie orale, Paris: Seuil, 1983.

M ` MACHIAVELLI (1469–1527) NICCOLO Niccolo` Machiavelli was one of the most important political and literary figures of the period between the end of the fifteenth and the first half of the sixteenth centuries. His role in the history of historiography is fundamental, thanks to his novel accounts of missions and official travels and his critical reconstruction of the history of Florence. Machiavelli participated in the humanistic tradition of the study and analysis of the classics, and his analyses renewed the significance of the ancient texts. He paid close attention to ancient Rome, in fact, as a model of impartiality and democracy not found in the contemporary world. By commenting on and rethinking works of ancient history, in particular the writings of Titus Livy, he compared contemporary events to classical ones; the latter become exemplary models of behavior for those who must conquer and maintain power. Machiavelli was also a great man of letters: His first comedy, La mandragola (The Mandrake, 1518), is a work of great originality with respect to ancient theater and also demonstrates the necessity of revising classical themes. His poetry, almost always tied to occasional themes of composition, reflects his absorption of the fifteenth-century Florentine literary activity that flourished at the court of Lorenzo de’ Medici, who promoted both a renewal and a refinement of vernacular lyric. Machiavelli was born in Florence in 1469, the period of the reign of Lorenzo il Magnifico, and turned to political life after the death of Girolamo Savonarola. Savonarola guided Florence following

the restoration of the republic when Piero de’ Medici (who succeeded Lorenzo in 1492) fled following the arrival of Charles VIII in Italy. Disliked by the local oligarchy and by the church for its support of the artisan bourgeois, the Dominican friar died at the stake in 1498. Machiavelli did not demonstrate particular sympathies for the preacher, whom he considered to be an able manipulator of consciences in his addresses to the faithful. Yet he did occasionally go to listen to the friar in order to record, for example, accounts of the event for some friend, uncovering the hidden messages behind the rhetorical frills of Savonarola’s preaching. Further, a certain type of moralism that appears in Machiavelli’s works (as it does in the works of other Florentine writers between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries) reveals characteristics that go beyond the position of Horace in Ars Poetica on the necessity of ammaestrare divertendo (teaching by entertaining), or the idea of the utile dulci that pushes the recipient of the work to reflect on his mode of behavior. The Favola di Belfagor arcidiavolo (Fable of Belfagor, Arch-Devil, 1518), for example, is an amusing story written during the period of his exile on his farm in Albergaccio. Using the theme of misogyny, he created a pitiless satire on the customs of his contemporary Florence. The story, which depicts women so terrible that they make even devils flee, is well-documented in the short-story traditions of both the West and the East. Machiavelli’s version revitalizes the well-known tale by setting it in a city where all are 1091

` MACHIAVELLI NICCOLO prey to an irrepressible desire to get rich and to ‘‘appear’’ in society, even at the cost of ruining themselves by going into debt. His literary production on the whole seems influenced by such denunciations and by moralizing intent. Two theatrical works, La mandragola and La Clizia (1525), are significant in this sense. The former depicts a world populated by negative characters. These include a young man, enamored of a married woman, who offers money to the person who can help him obtain her deceptively; a priest willing to accept payment to support a clandestine abortion, and who uses sacred arguments to justify adultery; a ‘‘parassita’’ (‘‘parasite’’) modeled in part on Plautus’ Pseudolus, plotter of tricks, determined to re-establish the logical order when things are disordered by fate (which made a wise woman marry a stupid man); a member of the Florentine bourgeois who, although a man of the law, so yearns for a son that he helps to orchestrate his own betrayal; a mother willing to be complicit in her daughter’s betrayal of her husband; and finally, an honest and scrupulous woman who, realizing she has been tricked, decides to ‘‘accept’’ the life that fate and the vileness of others has dealt her. Although many factors tied to the political thought of the author and his particular condition in exile contribute to the work’s creation, the ‘‘black’’ atmosphere of La mandragola inevitably points to Machiavelli’s absolute contempt for spreading corruption. In La Clizia, on the other hand, moralism is manifest in autobiographical form: Machiavelli, although married, was attracted to a young singer, Barbara Raffacani Salutati, for whom he wrote musical intermezzos to insert in the staging of La mandragola. When Jacopo Falconetto, called Il Fornaciaio, asked him to write a comedy to celebrate his return to Florence after a period of exile, Machiavelli composed a work that appears superficially to be the rewriting of Plautus’ Casina. It is the story of a father and son who rival one another in contending for the love of a young girl. Although Plautus focuses on the comic nature of the skirmishes between the two men and their servants (who are involved by their masters in the intrigue), Machiavelli instead reads, in the love of Nicomaco for the young Clizia, his own attraction for the singer. His is thus at times a melancholy text that reflects on the themes of old age and the moralistic repression of desire. After the final trick, in fact, the protagonist returns to the role of faithful husband and to his wife Sofronia, the true author of familial unity. The comic and the tragic are also elements in many of Machiavelli’s poems, whether extemporaneous (as the famous strambotto ‘‘Io rido, e ‘l rider 1092

mio non passa dentro’’ [I laugh, and my laughter does not pass inside]) or tied to current events (such as his incarceration after the fall of the republic in 1512 and his subsequent return to the Medici, who relieve him of public responsibility after accusing him of betrayal). Machiavelli’s close friend Pier Soderini is named gonfalonier of the city in 1502; he thus participated in a series of diplomatic missions in Italy and abroad, missions that have significant effects on his political thought and his writings. For example, he closely followed the war against Pisa (which rebelled against Florence) and completed two missions with the ‘‘Duke Valentino’’ Cesare Borgia, son of Pope Alexander VI. Struck by Borgia’s political unscrupulousness, Machiavelli wrote, amongst various accounts of his travels, Il modo che tenne il Duca Valentino per ammazar Vitellozzo, Oliverotto da Fermo, il Signor Paolo e il Duca di Gravina Orsini in Senigaglia (The Way in Which the Duke Valentino Killed Vitellozzo, Oliverotto da Fermo, Signor Paolo and the Duke of Gravina Orsini in Senisgaglia, 1503) and Del modo di trattare i popoli della Valdichiana ribellati (The Way to Deal With the People of Valdichiana who Rebelled, 1503). In spite of their specific contexts, these works more generally register the development of the author’s ideas about human behavior and human judgment. Machiavelli also witnessed the fall of the powerful Borgia, a decline precipitated by the death of his father (who was his protector) and an illness that prevented him from closely following the state of affairs in Romagna. In the meantime, the author concerned himself with the problem of the military, arguing that because of the unreliability of mercenary troops, the state should instead adopt a citizens’ army. In 1506, he instituted an ordinanza (ordinance), the enrollment of men from the Florentine countryside. He also dedicated several chapters of Il Principe Del Modo di trattare i popoli della Valdichiana ribellati, 1532) (The Prince, 1503) to this problem and, sometime later, an entire treatise. However, events precipitated when the French, allies of the republic, were defeated at Ravenna by the Holy League led by Pope Giulio II; at this time, the Medici could re-enter Florence and the ‘‘secretary’’ was dismissed. During this period of isolation, he continued to consider political problems by writing Il Principe and the Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio (Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livy, 1531), works closely connected both thematically and in their time of composition. His goal, at least in the case of the former, was practical, for he sought to return to public life by initiating contact

` MACHIAVELLI NICCOLO with the Medici. For this reason he dedicated Il Principe to Lorenzo de’ Medici. Notwithstanding its scant success amongst Machiavelli’s contemporaries, the 26 chapters of the treatise are the most noteworthy and perhaps most innovative of the author’s works. His study of the various structures of principalities and the ways in which a prince might maintain control over them was approached with an entirely new point of view with respect to behavioral manuals for good rulers of state, widely diffused in the fifteenth century. The central idea is the education of the prince himself, his culture, his morality, his irreproachability. Although driven by the desire for abstraction and the idea of articulating a true theory of power, Machiavelli combined examples from ancient times with the realities of his own period. He was inspired by flesh-and-blood cases (like that of Cesare Borgia) and approached the argument by inserting some ‘‘revolutionary’’ ideas into an orderly, sequential context. To govern, he suggested, one must assume a new concept of virtu` (virtue), not consistent with its current meaning, but rather signifying the capacity to elaborate solutions that are not simply moral ones, a concept mediated by the virtus of ancient writers, Sallust in particular. In this new concept of political morality, religion becomes an instrument in the hands of the ruler. Human ‘‘virtue’’ has one ‘‘enemy’’ that it must constantly confront, Fortuna (Fortune), which can either be favorable or can harm inexorably, as in the case of the Duke Valentino. Machiavelli’s revolutionary contribution with respect to the traditional depiction of blind Fortune is also noteworthy. Instead of perpetuating the image of a blind Fortune that can never be opposed, he formulates a continual ‘‘confrontation’’ with Fortune. Il Principe was, not surprisingly, placed on the Church Index and Machiavelli’s heirs attempted in vain to republish the work, even in less controversial versions. Yet not even the proposal of making strategic ‘‘cuts’’ changed the censors’ opinion. In successive centuries, Machiavelli and ‘‘Machiavellism’’ circulated in Europe with varying success, and above all with erroneous interpretations. A close example is the ‘‘Machiavellian villain’’ of Elizabethan theater, who becomes a suitable catalyzer of the action since he requires little motivation, being a self-starting principle of malevolence. Aside from the resolutions he proposed, the author sought to signal the need to reflect on power and its maintenance, reflections that should set aside reasoning not strictly tied to the political strategies meant to secure and protect the state.

These concepts were drafted by Machiavelli in sixteenth-century Florentine vernacular, thanks to the position he took regarding the ‘‘Questione della lingua.’’ He also wrote the brief Discorso o Dialogo intorno alla nostra lingua (Discourse or Dialogue on Our Language, 1524) on the subject, a work that critics now agree in attributing to him, and one via which he fully entered the vivid debate on the choice of a vernacular. He sided with contemporary Florentine language, against Pietro Bembo’s ultimately triumphal position that sustains the use of the language of Boccaccio for prose and of Petrarch for poetry. His style, dry and rich with tension, is founded on the ‘‘dilemma-based’’ method, the proposal of two opposite versions of the problem under scrutiny. Il Principe was written between July and December of 1513 in a pause from writing another fundamental work, the Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio. In the Discorsi, the author vindicates the need to imitate the ancients in everything from art to politics. The environment in which he worked in an official capacity as secretary was a republican one, similar to that of the Orti Oricellari, and the effects of such a context can be felt in his work. The Orti were the gardens of the palazzo Rucellai where Florentine aristocrats and passing intellectuals gathered to discuss history and classical literature. Machiavelli’s participation in this circle endangered him several years later when, in 1522, an anti-Medicean conspiracy was discovered to have initiated in the group. He managed to exonerate himself, however. In the history of criticism, debate has focused around a need to justify whether or not two analytic perspectives as different as those engaged in Il Principe and the Discorsi can be explained by taking into account the era in which the author confronted these topics. The central problem is that of the direction, rather than the typology of power, whether republican or monarchic. At times the ruling classes themselves seemed uncertain about whether to establish a republican oligarchy or an absolutist state. The preoccupation of the man of politics and the historian was primarily the method needed to secure the state, not its configuration. Thus concrete questions surface most frequently. For example, there is the problem of enlistment, discussed in Il Principe, in the Discorsi, and in a specific treatise in dialogue form, Dell’arte della guerra (On the Art of War, 1521). Machiavelli’s primary concern was that of constantly linking military activity to the civic life of the state, for which war should be understood as an instrument of security and stability. The comparison with 1093

` MACHIAVELLI NICCOLO ancient Rome in this case led to pessimistic reflections on the realization of such a model because of particular political conditions in the sixteenth century. Nevertheless, he ceased to diligently sustain his thesis of a necessary recourse to a state’s own military. Machiavelli was appointed by the Studio Fiorentino to write a history of Florence for the sum of 100 florins for two years, and this assignment stimulated his reconsideration of the historic events of his city as a pretext for a more general reflection on theory. This was possible (in 1519) thanks to his having again taken up some ‘‘public’’ activity as the observer of specific facts of a political nature. He traveled to Lucca, for example, and from this trip came two works of a historical and political bent: Delle cose di Lucca (On the Things of Lucca), composed in the summer of 1520, is an analysis of the electoral system in force in the city, rich with both positive and critical observations; and La vita di Castruccio Castracani (Life of Castruccio Castracani, 1932), an ancient, famous condottiere from Lucca (1281–1328). He seems, then, to have once again taken up the much-desired involvement in public life. It was a period of renewed activism for Machiavelli, who subsequently went to Carpi to find a new preacher for Florence. On this trip he stopped in Modena to stay with his friend Francesco Guicciardini, then governor of the city, at the orders of the pope. In the following years he concluded the Istorie fiorentine (Florentine Histories) and turned them in officially in 1525 to Pope Clement VII, the former Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici. It is a notably original work because he abandoned the idea of a history focused only on diplomatic and military facts that would exalt the conduct of the princes; on the contrary, he meticulously followed Florence’s civil struggles, making evident the thoughtless behavior of the heads of state. He lacked, however, a full awareness of the truthfulness of his sources, and thus often the examples from antiquity are narrated without having been accurately verified. Overall, nevertheless, it is a work of great depth, particularly in the clearness of the comments on that which is recounted. The author’s general situation thus seemed to improve. His second comedy, La Clizia, was performed on a set designed by Bastiano da Sangallo. In 1525, his interdiction from public office was revoked, and the pope allowed him new assignments, entrusting him on various military and diplomatic missions. He at last received an official appointment as superintendent and chancellor of the Procuratori alle Mura for the defense of 1094

Florence. However, times once again were stormy: Papacy and empire clashed and the former, in this encounter, suffered the worse fate. Clement VII was forced to witness the sack of Rome by the Lanzichenecchi in 1527. The city required a long time to recover, and the Medici declined when the family was expelled from Florence in favor of a republican regime. This was yet another disappointment for Machiavelli because the new government chose not to trust those who were officially engaged under Medicean power. He died shortly afterwards, in the same year that Rome was sacked, having just found out about his most recent exclusion from public office. Machiavelli’s epistolary is key to a reconstruction of his life and person. Many of the letters he wrote to friends and acquaintances have been preserved, and they are vibrant missives that create a literary patrimony and not just a documentary one. Among his familiari those written to his friend Francesco Vettori, the Florentine ambassador to Rome between 1513 and 1515, are worthy of note. These letters contain much autobiographical information regarding the composition of Il Principe as well as portraits of daily life in his residence at Albergaccio. At times his reflections are quite subtle and touch on fundamental points of Machiavellian theoretical speculation, such as the relationship between virtu` and Fortune, or between saviezza (wisdom) and madness. His correspondence with Guicciardini in the last years of his life is full of historical and political reflections, as well as vivid accounts of jokes played on him or by him on and with other friends. Machiavelli was capable of passing from a serious tone to irony with great narrative dexterity, rendering some of the letters true satirical novellas. These missives, then, allow scholars to follow the evolution of the internal Machiavellian dialectic and frequently constitute a kind of expressive synthesis of his career. The affirmation he added to the end of a letter to Guicciardini, dated 21 October 1525, might be taken as a significant autocommentary. He speaks in this epistle of Guicciardini’s holdings, the political situation in the main zones of the peninsula, the occasion of the theatrical restaging of La mandragola, and some judgments on the tormented political times in which they live. These are the concluding sentences: ‘‘Comincio ora a scrivere di nuovo, e mi sfogo accusando i principi, che hanno fatto tutti ogni cosa per condurci qui. Valete. Niccolo` Machiavelli comico, historico e tragico’’ (I am beginning to write again, and I vent my anger by accusing princes, who have done all they can to

` MACHIAVELLI NICCOLO conduct us here. Stay well. Niccolo` Machiavelli comic, historian, and tragedian). The allusion to a new writing project almost certainly refers to his new engagements after the delivery of the Istorie fiorentine to Pope Clement VII. The triple self-definition with which he closes appears to be a lapidary formula for his own complex personality, whereby the ‘‘tragic,’’ left until last, seems to emphasize his strongest and most authentic attribute.

Biography Born in Florence 3 May 1469 to Bernardo, a notary, and Bartolomea Nelli. Received humanistic education, learning Latin but not Greek. Translated numerous works including Lucretian’s De rerum natura and Terance’s Andria. After the death of Girolamo Savonarola in 1498, named secretary of the second chancellery and then first chancellor. Married Marietta Corsini in 1501, and had seven children. Completed many missions in Italy and abroad for the Florentine republic, for which his friend Pier Soderini is gonfalonier for life. In 1507, nominated chancellor of the nine officials of the Florentine military. In 1512, Giovanni de’ Medici with the help of the Spanish reconquered the city. Soderini fled, and Machiavelli was imprisoned. Freed during amnesty, he retreated to a farm outside of Florence. Wrote many works there, including Il Principe, La mandragola, and the Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio. In 1520, nominated that same year chancellor of the Procuratori delle Mura. In 1527, Rome is sacked and the Florentine republic restored. Weakened physically and disappointed at the new and inevitable distance from public life, died in Florence, 21 June 1527. ANGELA GUIDOTTI Selected Works Collections The Chief Works and Others, translated by Allan H. Gilbert, 3 vols., Durham: Duke University Press, 1965; rpt. 1989. Tutte le opere, edited by Mario Martelli, Florence: Sansoni, 1971. The Portable Machiavelli, translated by Peter Bondanella and Mark Musa, New York: Viking Penguin, 1979. Opere, edited by Corrado Vivanti, Turin: EinaudiGallimard, 1997.

Political and Historical Writings Il Principe, 1503; as The Prince, edited and translated by Peter Bondanella, Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Il modo che tenne il Duca Valentino, 1503. Del modo di trattare i popoli della Valdichiana ribellati, 1503. Dell’arte della guerra, 1521; as Art of War, translated by Ellis Farnework, New York: Da Capo, 1990; as Art of War, edited and translated by Christopher Lynch, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003. Istorie fiorentine, 1525; as Florentine Histories translated by Laura F. Banfield and Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., 1988. Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio, 1531; as The Discourses, edited by Bernard Crich, translated by Leslie J. Walker, 1970; as The Discourses, translated by Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella, New York: Oxford, 1997. Delle cose di Lucca (composed 1920). La vita di Castruccio Castracani, 1932.

Theater La mandragola, 1518; as Mandragola, edited and translated by Eric Haywood, 2002. La Clizia, 1525; as Clizia in The Comedies of Machiavelli, 1985.

Poetry ‘‘Capitoli,’’ 1498–1512. ‘‘Rime varie,’’ 1502–1513. ‘‘Canti carnascialeschi,’’ 1508–1509.

Other Favola di Belfagor arcidiavolo, 1518. Discorso o dialogo intorno alla nostra lingua, 1524.

Further Reading Barchiesi, Marino, ‘‘Plauto e il metateatro antico,’’ in Il Verri, 31 (1969): 113–130. Bertelli, Sergio, and Piero Innocenti, (editors) Bibliografia machiavelliana, Verona: Valdonega, 1979. Chabod, Federico, Scritti su Machiavelli, Turin: Einaudi, 1964; rpt. 1982. Chiappelli, Fredi, Nuovi studi sul linguaggio del Machiavelli, Florence: Le Monnier, 1969. De Grazia, Sebastian, Machiavelli in Hell, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989. Del Lucchese, Filippo, Tumulti e ‘‘indignatio’’: conflitto, diritto e moltitudine in Machiavelli e Spinosa, Milan: Ghibli, 2004. Dionisotti, Carlo, Machiavellerie, Turin: Einaudi, 1980. Gilbert, Felix, Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and History in Sixteenth-Century Florence, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965. Guidotti, Angela, ‘‘Su alcune soluzioni tipologiche ed espressive della ‘Mandragola,’’’ in Lettere Italiane, 2 (1982): 1157–1175. Guidotti, Angela, Introduzione in N. Machiavelli, Delle cose di Lucca, Lucca: Pacini Fazzi, 1992; rpt. 2003. Inglese, Giorgio, ‘‘Mandragola di Niccolo` Machiavelli,’’ in Letteratura italiana Einaudi. Le opere, vol. 1, Turin: Einaudi, 1992. Najemy, John M., Between Friends: Discourses of Power and Desire in the Machiavelli-Vettori Letters of 1513–1515, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. Parel, Anthony J. (editor), The Political Calculus: Essays on Machiavelli’s Philosophy, Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1972.

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` MACHIAVELLI NICCOLO Parel, Anthony J., The Machiavellian Cosmos, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992. Praz, Mario, The Flaming Heart, New York: Norton, 1973. Raimondi, Ezio, Politica e commedia: Dal Beroaldo al Machiavelli, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1972. Rebhorn, Wayne A., Foxes and Lions: Machiavelli’s Confidence Men, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988. Ruffo Fiore, Silvia, Niccolo` Machiavelli: An Annotated Bibliography of Modern Criticism and Scholarship, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1990. Sasso, Gennaro, Niccolo` Machiavelli: Storia del suo pensiero politico, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1954; rpt. 1980. Sullivan, Vickie B., The Comedy and Tragedy of Machiavelli: Essays on the Literary Works, New HavenLondon: Yale University Press, 2000. Viroli, Maurizio, Machiavelli, Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Whelan, Frederic, Hume and Machiavelli: Political Realism and Liberal Thought, Lanham: Lexington Books, 2004.

DISCORSI SOPRA LA PRIMA DECA DI TITO LIVIO, 1531 Treatise by Niccolo` Machiavelli

Niccolo` Machiavelli’s Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio (Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livy) is a commentary on the first 10 books of Livy’s History; it is subdivided into three books, composed, respectively, of 60, 33, and 49 chapters. The Discorsi examine the political life that develops between structures of the state under various methods of governance, and consider both ancient and contemporary examples. The first book treats the constitution and legislation of a state; the second, relationships with other states and possible territorial annexations; the third, heterogeneous questions ranging from the necessities that assure a government’s stability, to the problem of the military, to the evolution of the state organism from its rise to its eventual decline. 1096

One of the most complex critical problems related to this work is that of the time of its composition: It was published posthumously in 1531 (as was Il Principe), but the draft of the work had been considered to date back to the same years as Il Principe. The most diffused thesis places that draft between 1513 and 1519. According to this theory, around the end of the eighteenth chapter of the first book, Machiavelli’s subject compelled him to pose the contingent problem of delineating the figure of a prince, a figure capable of adopting new instruments to govern his state and of improving the fortunes of Italy. Thus, it is suggested, he interrupted the draft of the Discorsi in December of 1513 in order to dedicate himself to the well-known treatise. The hypothesis is also borne out by the author’s affirmation, in the second chapter of Il Principe, that he had written a work that provided a comprehensive view of the republican regimes. Scholars therefore claim unanimously that the Discorsi preceded Il Principe, conceptually speaking. The author dedicated the work to his friends Zanobi Buondelmonti and Cosimo Rucellai, patron of the intellectual meetings that took place in the gardens of his villa (the Orti Oricellari). Machiavelli was a regular participant (and one considered by the group to be a true maestro) beginning in 1516. This context is fundamental to understanding the connection between the Discorsi and the political debate that developed in Florence in the years of the work’s composition. The conversations were driven by an interest in analyzing the mechanisms required to regulate the institutions of a state, using republican Rome as primary model. For this reason, the circle did not have an easy existence, and in 1522 it was dissolved when an anti-Medicean conspiracy was discovered. The guiding idea was that Classical history could be engaged to justify a largely democratic base, fed by enthusiasm for the republican virtues of Rome. In this way, the Discorsi acquired a strong theoretical value, a value evident in the prologue to the first book, which emphasizes the immutability of human nature and the utility of examples. Machiavelli continually compared the experience of modernity with the lessons of antiquity; in accordance with the pessimistic view of human nature that accompanies all of Machiavelli’s disquisitions, good laws can be adopted as a remedy for the malignita` (malevolence) of man. In spite of significant overlap between the two works, nevertheless some variants are to be found

` MACHIAVELLI NICCOLO with regard to the attitude assumed in Il Principe. The relationship between man and Fortune is not explained here as existing in a sort of balance (as emerges in the twenty-fifth chapter of the treatise): Only occasione (chance) determines victory or defeat. The Discorsi delineate with particular clarity the concept of an immanent Fortune, set in the midst of other natural forces far from every form of transcendence. The work also broadens the concept of imitation, no longer limiting it to the arts and literature, but extending it to include history as well. Here is born the value attributed to the esempio (example) that has been the subject of much critical discussion on the question of whether it is possible to establish, with precision, Machiavelli’s methods. In this case, as in the question of the time of the work’s composition, there is still lively debate among scholars. Some opt to attribute the author with an inductive method, the study of examples from which a general rule can be deduced; others claim he used a deductive method, choosing single cases that sustain a preordained theoretical thesis. It seems probable that Machiavelli at times verified that which he has deduced from a single contemporary case using many examples learned through his historical studies. He thus often sustained, over the course of the treatise, the need to recall ancient history as a model to imitate: He analyzed selected episodes, extracting them, in a manner of speaking, from their context, in order to derive the general rule. Paradoxically one might claim that his examples both suggest and presuppose the rules, demonstrating the originality of Machiavellian thought. ANGELA GUIDOTTI Editions First edition: Discorsi sulla prima deca di Tito Livio, Rome: Antonio Blado, 1531, and Florence: Bernardo Giunta, 1531. Critical editions: in Tutte le opere storiche e letterarie, edited by Guido Mazzoni and Mario Casella, Florence: Barbe´ra, 1929; in Tutte le opere, edited by Mario Martelli, Florence: Sansoni, 1971; edited by Corrado Vivanti, Turin: Einaudi, 2000. Translations: in The Historical, Political, and Diplomatic Writing of Niccolo` Machiavelli, translated by Christian E. Detmold, Boston and New York: Houghton, 1891; in Machiavelli: The Chief Works and Others, translated by Allan Gilbert, Durham: University Press Duke, 1965; as Discourses, edited by Bernard Crich, translated by Leslie J. Walker, Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1970; as Discourses on Livy, translated by Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov, Chicago:

Chicago University Press, 1996; as Discourses, translated by Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella, New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Further Reading Chabod, Federico, Scritti su Machiavelli, Turin: Einaudi, 1964; rpt. 1982. Godorecci, Barbara, After Machiavelli (‘‘Re-writing’’ and the ‘‘Hermeneutic Attitude’’), Purdue: Indiana University Press, 1993. Ho¨rnquist, Mikael, Machiavelli and Empire, CambridgeNew York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Mansfield, Harvey Claffin, Machiavelli’s New Modes and Orders, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979. Procacci, Giuliano, Introduction to N. Machiavelli, Le opere, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1969. Sasso, Gennaro, Machiavelli e gli antichi e altri saggi, Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1987.

IL PRINCIPE, 1532 Treatise by Niccolo` Machiavelli

Machiavelli wrote Il Principe (The Prince) from an uncomfortable position, politically speaking. Shortly before beginning this work, the Medici were restored to power and he was prohibited from engaging in political life in Florence; the republican regime in which he participated as a key player, as secretary of the second chancellery, or of foreign affairs, had crumbled. After spending 15 days in prison, he was freed thanks to an amnesty, but was also suspended for an indeterminate time from all office. Pursuant to this forced exile he retired to his farm outside of Florence, called the ‘‘Albergaccio,’’ where he meditated on the possibility of a re-entry into political affairs. To this end, he decided to embark upon writing a brief dissertation on the characteristics of a principality and of the person appointed to maintain it. He dedicates the work to Lorenzo of Piero de’ Medici, Duke of Urbino, appointed by Pope Leo X (former Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici) to rule the city of Florence. The treatise met a tepid reception and failed to achieve the effect most desired by its author. Nevertheless, it is an innovative work of great 1097

` MACHIAVELLI NICCOLO depth, well-known in the context of traditional treatise-writing (which originated in the medieval and humanistic periods). Il Principe considered the tasks of the ruler of a state, and both the discussions of the work and plagiarisms of it began from the moment the treatise circulated in manuscript form (from 1513, the probable date of its first draft). Il Principe, or De principatibus (as the author titled it), was plagiarized in 1523 by Agostino Nifo, who in his De regnandi peritia (The Art of Reigning) transcribed Machiavelli’s work into Latin only to flatten the contents in the final part, which he authored himself. On the other hand, the history of the ‘‘fortune’’ of this treatise spans centuries. Soon after its publication it faced the censorship of the Counter-Reformation, and subsequently proceeded on a path of praise and confutation that have not yet ended. This controversy is not surprising; one need only examine the work to recognize its significance and its revolutionary potential. Il Principe can be subdivided into three unequal parts. From Chapter 1 to Chapter 11, the author presents the typologies of principalities, with special attention to those that interest him most, that is, principalities newly acquired by arms or by fortune. In the third chapter, he reflects on the use of force as a medicina forte (strong medicine), but most significant are his analyses in Chapters 6 and 7 of the figure of Cesare Borgia. Machiavelli met Borgia personally on an official diplomatic mission and was particularly struck by the speed and ferocity with which the Duke Valentino had his political adversaries killed. Here he delineates the concepts of virtu` (virtue), Fortuna (Fortune), and occasione (chance), further analyzed in the second part of the work, composed of Chapters 12 through 24. In this section, the author proposes characteristics of the prince who, having acquired a new principality, must now maintain it. His treatment is pragmatic, departing from the presupposition that he need not pursue the figure of an ideal prince, but rather proceed in the characterization of his concrete image. To this end, he must unite contingent facts with universal laws of political action taken from past models. For example, in Chapter 15 he cites necessary talents, such as the use of cruelty, parsimony, and religion for instrumental ends (in case it becomes necessary to demonstrate himself Godfearing). Examples provided link Classical, Roman, and also Greek antiquity, as well as biblical times, to his present day. In Chapter 18, he sustains that it is necessary for the prince to have 1098

human gifts as well as savage ones; such qualities are exemplified in the force of the lion and the shrewdness of the fox, but above all in the image of the centaur, the perfect symbiosis between animal swiftness and human intellect. The two concluding chapters, 25 and 26, constitute a sort of ‘‘autonomous’’ corollary: In the first of these, Machiavelli returns to the concept of Fortuna as unknowable fate, but which man is called to confront. It is in fact necessary to seek equilibrium between human will and destiny. He thus compares Fortune to an impetuous river that breaks the dams and sweeps everything away. Thus it is necessary to forestall certain events by protecting oneself, for example, with an adequate military (the problem of a nonmercenary military constantly preoccupies the author). He speaks of the difficulty in Chapter 12 and later returns to the subject in the Discorsi and in Dell’arte della guerra. He elaborates the image of the woman whom one must ‘‘battere e urtare’’ (beat and strike) in order to ‘‘dominarla’’ (dominate her). She is thus the ‘‘amica dei giovani, perche´ sono meno rispettivi, piu` feroci, e con piu` audacia la comandano’’ (friend of the young, because they are less respectful, more ferocious, and they command her with greater audacity). Machiavelli then proposes the necessity of being impetuous in confronting events, as a possible opposition to a negative world. The work’s strong pessimism seems to diminish in the last chapter, with the exhortation to the Medici house to take to heart the events in Italy and to assume the task of unification. The conclusion, however, is mournful: The author in fact cites a few verses of Petrarch’s ‘‘Canzone all’Italia’’ in which he sings the praises of the ‘‘antico valore’’ (ancient value) not yet realized in the Italian race. From the point of view of the rigors of historical methodology, Machiavelli used sources without fully investigating their reliability. Yet Il Principe undoubtedly constitutes a move ahead in terms of analyzing and reflecting on facts. For the first time, a political method with foundations in reality was proposed, and an investigation was conducted not abstractly or generically, but rather founded on real occurrences and on the need to use the lessons furnished by experience. Il Principe refutes the scholastic and religious dogmatism of the medieval tradition. Important also is the valorization of man’s capacity to understand his world without making recourse to revealed truths. In Machiavelli is born an art of a politics that, even when constrained by the inscrutability of fate (Cesare Borgia

` MACHIAVELLI NICCOLO was subdued by the illness that leads to his death), indicates the most opportune means to achieving the security of the state. From this point of view, Machiavelli’s speculative innovation in dealing with this subject comprises also his lexicon and the power of his vocabulary. For example, the concept of virtu` is intended to be utterly distinct from religious implications; the ruina (ruin) corresponds to the total destruction of his own aspirations; prudenza (prudence) to his capacity to lucidly manage a given situation. ANGELA GUIDOTTI Editions First edition: Il principe, Rome: Antonio Blado, 1532, and Florence: Bernardo Giunta, 1532. Critical edition: in Tutte le opere storiche e letterarie, edited by Guido Mazzoni and Mario Casella, Florence: Barbe`ra, 1929; as De principatibus, edited by Giorgio Inglese, Rome: Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo, 1994. Translations: in The Historical, Political and Diplomatic Writings of Niccolo` Machiavelli, translated by Christian E. Detmold, Boston and New York: Houghton, 1891; in The Chief Works and Others, translated by Allan Gilbert, Durham: Duke University Press, 1965; as The Prince and Other Political Writings, edited and translated by Bruce Penman, London: Dent, 1981; as The Prince, translated by Harvey C. Mansfield, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1985, rpt. 1998; edited and translated by Quentin Skinner and Russell Price, Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988; edited and translated by Peter Bondanella, Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Further Reading Ba`rberi Squarotti, Giorgio, La forma tragica del ‘‘Principe’’ e altri saggi su Machiavelli, Florence: Olschki, 1960. Chabod, Federico, Introduzione e note al Principe, first ed. 1924, new ed. edited by Luigi Firpo, Turin: Einaudi, 1977. Chiappelli, Fredi, Studi sul linguaggio di Machiavelli, Florence: Le Monnier, 1952. Coyle, Martin (editor), Niccolo` Machiavelli’s ‘‘Il Principe’’: New Interdisciplinary Essays, Manchester, UK, and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995. Firpo, Luigi, Saggio su Machiavelli politico, Alpignano: Tallone, 1969. Gilbert, Allan H., Machiavelli’s ‘‘Prince’’ and its Forerunners, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1938. Richardson, Brian, Introduction to N. Machiavelli, Il Principe, Manchester, UK: Manchester University PressNew York: Vanni, 1979. Sasso, Gennaro, Introduction to N. Machiavelli, Il Principe, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1963.

LA MANDRAGOLA, 1518 Comedy by Niccolo` Machiavelli

La mandragola (The Mandrake) is a comedy whose title alludes to an herb supposed to have medicinal qualities, an herb reputed to cure various maladies, including sterility. It was written by Machiavelli around 1518 while in exile on his farm called Albergaccio, and is comprised of a prologue in verse and five acts. The plot is centered on a case of sterility: Nicia, a noted Florentine lawyer, wants to have children, but his wife Lucrezia seems unable to bear them. He turns to a hanger-on, Ligurio, for help; Ligurio decides to satisfy his desires together with those of the young Callimaco, who heard so much about the beautiful Lucrezia while studying in Paris that he fell in love with her and will do anything to have her. Ligurio must thus organize a complex hoax that progressively involves the stupid husband, an opportunistic priest, and the honest Lucrezia. He makes Nicia believe, using the complicit Callimaco as his mouthpiece, that thanks to a decoction of mandrake his wife will become pregnant, but that the first to lie with her will surely die. To convince Lucrezia, the schemers involve her mother, Sostrata, who is willing to support the hoax in the hopes that maternity will strengthen the social and economic position of her daughter. They also engage a confessor, Brother Timoteo, who is willing to be involved in the adultery for money. Lucrezia’s concerns are dispelled by the religious man, who makes recourse to the rhetorical art of preaching and uses blasphemous citations of biblical episodes to demonstrate the legality of conjugal betrayal when the goal is procreation. Once practical problems linked to capturing a young vagabond (who must, of course, be Callimaco) are resolved, thanks to a series of disguises, the story reaches its conclusion: Lucrezia accepts the new stato delle cose (state of things) made possible by the foolishness of her husband, the cunning of the servant, the corruption of the priest, and fate, all converging to make Nicia happy. Machiavelli’s mastery of all of the theatrical components makes this comedy a masterpiece. The plot is 1099

` MACHIAVELLI NICCOLO original and novel, since it concludes neither with the traditional discovery of the trick nor with the coming to awareness of the tricked. The dialogue is essential and aptly balanced between comedy and drama (Machiavelli had translated Terence’s Andria, thus learning the strategy of a theatrical language that must appear spontaneous even when deliberately constructed). The characters also represent an innovation, since they are renewed by the sixteenthcentury context and the author’s political thought. Ligurio is neither the servant nor the scrounger of Plautian comedy, but rather the lucid inventor of a complex plan with almost ethical ends. He maintains that it is unjust that a woman ‘‘savia e atta a governare un regno’’ (wise and qualified to govern a kingdom) should be subject to a fool. The priest is a typological innovation in the theatrical context, a figure rooted in contemporary society rather than in the tradition of fourteenth-century short story writing. All of the characters, in fact, have long engaged critics, thanks to the complexity of their personalities. Their original dispositions inevitably provoke multiple readings, from the allegorical to the autobiographical, from the anthropological to the political. An erotic component underlies the text, exemplified in the minor character of a woman caught in conversation with Brother Timoteo when Ligurio and Nicia come to visit him. She alludes to the ‘‘desires’’ of the deceased husband to whom she was constrained to be subordinate, and laments ‘‘tutto quello impalare’’ (all the impaling) of the Turks in their raids, a hint of the prevailing atmosphere in the work. The articulation of space and time constitutes a novelty: Between the fourth and fifth acts, an entire night passes, while all the scenes are essential to the plot. Numerous contemporary performances of the work met with enormous success, which was registered in the chronicles of the time: A Venetian performance of 1522 was interrupted because of the excessive crowd. After fading into oblivion of a moralistic vein, the work was once again frequently performed in the last century, and now figures in the repertory of theaters and directors, both Italian and non-Italian. ANGELA GUIDOTTI

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Editions First edition: Comedia di Callimaco et di Lucretia, Florence, 1518. Critical editions: La mandragola di Niccolo` Machiavelli per la prima volta restituita alla sua integrita`, edited by Roberto Ridolfi, Florence: Olschki, 1965; as La Mandragola, edited by Giorgio Inglese, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1997. Translations: as Mandragola, translated by Mera J. Flaumenhaft, Prospect Heights, NJ: Waveland Press, 1981; in The Comedies of Machiavelli, bilingual edition, translated by David Sices and James B. Atkinson, Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1985; in Ariosto’s The Supposes, Machiavelli’s The Mandrake, Intronati’s The Deceived: Three Renaissance Comedies, edited by Christopher Cairns, translated and introduced by Jennifer Lorch et al., Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1996; as The Mandrake, edited and translated by Eric Haywood, Dublin: UCD Foundation for Italian Studies, 2002.

Further Reading Blasucci, Luigi, Introduction to N. Machiavelli, Opere letterarie, Turin: Utet, 1989. Davico Bonino, Guido, Introduction to N. Machiavelli, Teatro (Andria, Mandragola, Clizia), Turino: Einaudi, 2003. Dionisotti, Carlo, ‘‘Appunti sulla ‘Mandragola,’’’ in Belfagor, 39 (1984): 621–644. Fido, Franco, ‘‘Machiavelli 1469–1969: Politica e teatro nel badalucco di messer Nicia,’’ (1969), in La metamorfosi del Centauro, Rome: Bulzoni, 1977. Guidotti, Angela, ‘‘Una perfetta macchina drammaturgia, la ‘Mandragola,’’’ in Il modello e la trasgressione, commedie del primo Cinquecento, Rome: Bulzoni, 1983. Guidotti, Angela, ‘‘Ligurio, Nicomaco, Niccolo`,’’ in Scenografie di pensieri (il teatro del Rinascimento fra progetto e sperimentazione), Lucca: Pacini Fazzi, 2002. Padoan, Giorgio, La commedia rinascimentale veneta, Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1982. Parronchi, Alessandro, ‘‘La prima rappresentazione della ‘Mandragola’: Il modello-l’apparato-l’allegoria,’’ in La bibliofilia, 64 (1962): 37–86. Ridolfi, Roberto, Studi sulle commedie del Machiavelli, Pisa: Nistri-Listri, 1968. Stauble, Antonio, Introduction to N. Machiavelli, La mandragola, Florence: Cesati, 2004. Vanossi, Luigi, ‘‘Situazione e sviluppo del teatro machiavelliano,’’ in Lingua e strutture del teatro italiano del Rinascimento, Quaderni del Circolo Filologico Linguistico Padovano, no. 2, Padua: Liviana, 1970. Vescovo, Pier Mario, Da Ruzante a Calmo, Padua: Antenore, 1996.

SCIPIONE MAFFEI

SCIPIONE MAFFEI (1675–1755) Francesco Scipione Maffei was one of the most versatile figures in the cultural environment of the Italian Enlightenment. A dramatist, archaeologist, and scholar, his fame in Italian literature stems from the role that he played in the reform of tragedy experimented in the early eighteenth century in the Venetian theaters, although he achieved his most remarkable outcomes in other fields. He was involved in the erudite culture and society of his times, which he tried to modernize in several ways. For example, in 1710 he wrote a pamphlet entitled Della scienza chiamata cavalleresca (On the Science Called Chivalry), in which he attacked caste prejudices, which was followed by numerous other works on the same subject such as the epistle De fabula equestris ordinis Costantiniani (The Fable of the Constantinian Order, 1712), and Arte magica annichilata (Magic Annihilated, 1754), all written in Latin. Until 1732, when be began a series of journeys that took him throughout Europe, he devoted himself both to erudite works and to the study of Italian drama, trying to raise it from its current state of decadence. In the early eighteenth century, several men of letters converged on a platform for an ideal theater, which would join together both the practical needs of the stage and the literary expectations of the well-educated public. Maffei had a very important role in this debate as a result of his close collaboration with the theater company of Lelio Riccoboni for which, according to Riccoboni’s memoirs, he acted in an advisory role, suggesting which works to represent in the Venetian theaters; indeed his 1723 anthology of tragedies, Teatro italiano o sia scelta di tragedia per uso sulla scena (Italian Theatre, or Works for Use on the Stage) gives an indication of the recommendations he gave the famous actor. Their collaboration culminated on June 12, 1713, with the staging in Modena of Maffei’s trage´die larmoyante Merope (1714). The tragedy was such a triumph that its author believed that he had overcome the much better-known French works with a single stroke, although it seems more likely that its success was due above all to its author’s close connection with Riccoboni’s

work on the stage, a conclusion supported by the fact that after their cooperation ended, neither the author nor the actor again achieved the same success. The plot of the play relates the sorrows of Queen Merope, whose husband and sons were killed by Polifonte, who now wants to marry her. She has managed only to save one of her sons, Cresfonte, who was hidden when he was a baby. When he returns, unaware of his true identity, Merope herself tries to kill him because she believes that he has killed her son. In the end, Cresfonte revenges his father killing Polifonte and saving his mother from a forced wedding. Maffei’s Merope is important because it brought to the Italian dramaturgy of the period fame on a European scale as a result of positive critical reviews by Voltaire and Lessing, and also because it represented the basic element in a project to develop erudite tragedy into a form of professional theater—a project that, it can be said, was accomplished on the one hand by Carlo Goldoni in the way in which he considered the work for the stage, and on the other hand by Vittorio Alfieri through his tragedies. Maffei also played a significant role in the theoretical debate on theater. In 1752, the Dominican friar Daniele Concina published De spectaculis theatralibus (On Theatre Shows), in three volumes, in which he accused theater of being an immoral activity. Maffei answered with his own treatise, De’ teatri antichi e moderni (On Ancient and Modern Theatres, 1753), in which he defended theater, its history, and its role in literature, and which was approved and applauded by Pope Benedict XIV himself. A true polymath, Maffei produced works in numerous other fields, including history with Italia diplomatica (Diplomatic Italy, 1727) and Verona illustrata (Illustrated Verona, 1732), which brought him vast fame; science, with Della formazione dei fulmini (On the Formation of Lightning, 1747); pedagogy, with Parere sul miglior ordinamento della R. Universita` di Torino (Opinion on the Best Organization for the Royal University of Turin, 1718); and politics, with Consiglio politico presentato al governo veneto (Political Advice Offered to the Government of the Veneto, 1736).

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Biography Born in Verona to a noble family on 1 June 1675. Educated at Jesuit colleges in Parma and Rome. Fought in the battle of Donauworth with his brother Alessandro, a general in the Bavarian army, 1704. Moved to Padua, 1709, where in association with Apostolo Zeno he founded the Giornale de’ letterati italiani, 1710. Moved to Turin, where for some time he studied at the Biblioteca Reale, 1710. After years in Northern Italy to complete historical studies, in 1732 moved to the south of France for archaeological research and then to Paris. Traveled to London, 1736, and from there to Oxford, where he obtained the degree of doctor. Died in Verona on 11 February 1755. NICOLA FUOCHI Selected Works Collections Opere drammatiche e poesie varie, edited by Antonio Avena, Bari: Laterza, 1928.

Plays Merope, 1714. Le cerimonie, 1728. Raguet, 1747.

Treatises Della scienza chiamata cavalleresca, 1710. De fabula equestris ordinis Costantiniani, 1712. Parere sul miglior ordinamento della R. Universita` di Torino, 1718.

Italia diplomatica, 1727. Verona illustrata, 1732. Consiglio politico presentato al governo veneto, 1736. Della formazione dei fulmini, 1747. Arte magica dileguata, 1749. De’ teatri antichi e moderni, 1753. Arte magica annichilata, 1754.

Edited Works Teatro italiano o sia scelta di tragedia per uso sulla scena, 1723.

Letters Epistolario, 1700–1755, edited by Celestino Garibotto, 2 vols., 1955.

Further Reading Gasparini, Giammaria (editor), La tragedia classica dalle origini al Maffei, Turin: UTET, 1976. Marchi, Gian Paolo, Un italiano in Europa: Scipione Maffei tra passione antiquaria e impegno civile, Verona: Libreria universitaria editrice, 1992. Mattioda, Enrico, Teorie della tragedia nel Settecento, Modena: Mucchi, 1994. Tessari, Roberto, Teatro e spettacolo nel Settecento, Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1995. Riccoboni, Lelio, Discorso della commedia all’improvviso e scenari inediti, edited by Irene Mamczarz, Milan: Il Polifilo, 1973. Ringger, Kurt, ‘‘La Merope e il ’furor d’affetto’: La tragedia di Scipione Maffeli rivisitata,’’ in MLN, 92, no. 1 (1997): 38–62. Romagnani, Gian Paolo (editor), Scipione Maffei nell’Europa del Settecento, Verona: Cierre, 1998. Salsano, Roberto, Capitoli alfieriani: Merope e dintorni, Rome: Bulzoni, 1977. Silvestri, Giuseppe, Scipione Maffei europeo del Settecento, Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1968.

MAFIA VENDETTA See Il Giorno della civetta (Work by Leonardo Sciascia)

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MAFIA

MAFIA The word ‘‘mafia’’ first appears in its modern sense in 1863 in the title of a dialect play by Gaspare Mosca and Giuseppe Rizzotto, I mafiusi di la Vicaria (The Mafiosi of the Vicaria), the name of the Palermo prison. The term gained rapid acceptance, and was employed routinely in the journalism and official reports into Sicilian life that appeared in the years following unification. Many disparate forces have contributed to the creation of the Sicilian mafia. The description of the individual mafioso as a ‘‘man of honor’’ is a reference to a specifically Mediterranean culture. The history of Sicily is a history of conquests by foreign forces, leading to a condition of alienation in which law and the state are objects of distrust among a people who have lost all sense of kinship with institutions of power. The tendency in such circumstances to retreat into trusted family circles is expressed in the use of the term famiglia to denote the basic unit of mafia association. The notion of omerta`, identified as fundamental to mafia power by Leopoldo Franchetti and Sidney Sonnino in their magisterial inquiry into Sicilian mores undertaken in 1876, carries the etymological meaning ‘‘manliness,’’ but denotes the refusal to collaborate with police or judiciary. Noting that no government in Sicily had attained the ‘‘monopoly of violence’’ that is conventionally viewed as the prime attribute of the state, the two men referred to the existence of an industria della violenza (industry of violence) in Sicily. The threat of violence is central to mafia power, even if the recourse to actual violence varies from age to age. There is little consensus on the mafia’s origin and history, or indeed on most matters relating to it. It can be asserted, however, that while the mafia as an organization emerged in mid-nineteenth century, its cultural origins are as old as the history of Sicily. Although it later expanded, the native habitat of the mafia was a triangle in western Sicily bounded by Palermo, Trapani, and Agrigento. It is conventional to see the first emergence, or prehistory, of the body in the convergence of interest between a propertied class in the citrus groves around Palermo in search of protection from the prevailing lawlessness, and a criminal group prepared to offer services, including violence. The

picciotti, the rank and file, came from the impoverished urban and rural underclass, but the leaders came from those privileged groups that would elsewhere have been the pillars of society. In 1838, the procurator general of Palermo, Pietro Cala` Ulloa, identified the leaders of these sette (sects) as being ‘‘qui un possidente, la` un arciprete’’ (here a landowner, there a priest) (Joseph Farrell, Understanding the Mafia, 1997). The assassination in 1893 of Marquis Emanuele Notarbartolo, governor of the Bank of Sicily, the first of history’s ‘‘excellent corpses,’’ or murders of distinguished servants of the Italian state, contained all the elements of later mafia criminality. Notarbartolo was an honest man caught up in financial and political intrigues between two leading politicians, Antonio di Rudinı` and Francesco Crispi. Corruption, or omerta`, in political, police, and judicial circles impeded the course of justice. Three separate trials in Milan, Bologna, and Florence ended in the acquittal of the accused, Raffaele Palizzolo, a member of Parliament. An outlook later called sicilianismo, a complex mixture of victim mentality, Sicilian nationalism, and opportunistic bad faith that was beneficial to later mafiosi, made its first appearance at the trial, and some of Sicily’s most eminent intellectuals, including the folklorist Giuseppe Pitre` (1841–1916), came to the defence of the accused. The mafia was allowed to thrive under the Liberal government, but was suppressed by Benito Mussolini and his prefetto di ferro (iron prefect), Cesare Mori (1872–1942). It re-emerged with the liberation in controversial circumstances, perhaps while the Allies were concerned with the defeat of Fascism, perhaps with the active connivance of the Americans who saw the mafia as an anti-Communist bulwark. Always flexible, the mafia transmogrified, approximately in the late 1950s, from a rural to an essentially urban body that was de facto allied to the ruling Christian Democratic Party. This political protection frustrated the work of investigators, and made it easy for the mafia to engage in such activities as controlling tenders for public works, and exacting a pizzo (protection money). With the rise of the drug trade, the mafia, without losing contact with its roots, metamorphosed again 1103

MAFIA into a globalized multinational, with links to sister organizations in the United States and with drug growers in such countries as Colombia. The mafia can be defined as a form of organized crime, following codes and employing methods dictated by its own traditions, and operating simultaneously as a state and an antistate. The myth of the ‘‘golden age’’ of a benevolent mafia can be discounted. The mafia is of its essence parasitical, a ‘‘blackleg’’ body that exploits enterprise, aids property and power. It is no accident that in the 1950s the mafia allied itself with landowning interests to thwart governmental land-reform programs, or that peasant and trade union leaders have been among its targets. The main aim of mafia crime is self-enrichment and self-advancement, while the central difference between mafia and other forms of criminality lies in the relationship of complicity and connivance that, in its efforts to embed itself in governmental agencies, the mafia will seek to establish with political power. It was long believed that the mafia was a culture with no fixed organization, but the revelations of the pentito (repentant mafioso) Tommaso Buscetta (1928–2000) have compelled commentators to rewrite history. There is now a consensus that the mafia has, and has always had, a hierarchical structure with welldefined initiation rites. In spite of political connivance and the failures of the state, the history of resistance to the mafia is coterminous with the history of the mafia itself, but it was only in 1963 that the Italian Parliament set up an official commission, the Antimafia, to investigate the subject. Successive commissions introduced new laws, usually in response to

particular atrocities. The level of violence reached unprecedented levels in the 1990s, when the Corleone gang under Toto` Riina assumed overall control, but at that time the mafia met the determined opposition of a new breed of magistrate, led by Giovanni Falcone (1939–1992) and Paolo Borsellino (1941–1992), both of whom were involved in the 1986 maxitrial of 474 mafiosi, but both of whom died as mafia victims. The full commitment of the Italian state to eliminate the mafia died with them, and mafia power is still strong in Sicily. JOSEPH FARRELL Further Reading Biagi, Enzo, Il boss e` solo, Milan: Mondadori, 1983. Blok, Anton, The Mafia of a Sicilian Village, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974. Dickie, John, Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2004. Farrell, Joseph, Understanding the Mafia, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997. Franchetti, Leopoldo, and Sidney Sonnino, Inchiesta in Sicilia, new edition, Florence: Vallecchi, 1974. Gambetta, Diego, La mafia siciliana, Turin: Einaudi, 1992. Hobsbawm, Eric, Primitive Rebels, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1959. Hobsbawm, Eric, Bandits, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969. Lupo, Salvatore, Storia della Mafia: Dalle origin ai giorni nostri, Rome: Donzelli, 1993. Pezzino, Paolo, Una certa reciprocita`, Milan: Franco Angeli, 1990. Pezzino, Paolo, Mafia: Industria della violenza, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1995. Santino, Umberto, La cosa e il nome, Soveria Mannelli: Rubettino, 2000.

CARLO MARIA MAGGI (1630–1699) Together with Giovan Paolo Lomazzo (1538–1600) and before Carlo Porta (1775–1821), Milanese poet and dramatist Carlo Maria Maggi was the most notable forerunner of that Linea Lombarda (Lombard line) of the realist tradition that includes, with different linguistic registers, Alessandro Manzoni and Niccolo` Tommaseo, Carlo Pisani Dossi and Delio Tessa, and Carlo Emilio Gadda and Giovanni 1104

Testori. At the same time, Maggi was also a representative of the late poetics of the Italian Baroque and was well-aware of the forthcoming developments of Arcadian Petrarchism. Most famous for his dialect plays, Maggi was introduced to the theater by the Jesuits in Brera and was brought up in the Lombard capital during the decline and relative reactionary turn of the political-administrative

CARLO MARIA MAGGI order resulting from the Spanish domination. He found his main (though not exclusive) literary instrument in the local dialect, which he adopted especially for his theatrical production. This precise linguistic choice witnesses to his disenchantment and to his consciousness of the contemporary crisis, but is also a call to social reconstruction, and favors a popular kind of theater closer to improvisation comedy than to classical sixteenth-century drama. Indeed, the expressive, natural, and direct power of dialect in Maggi’s theater manages to render human beings and their habits as seen through the mirror of truth, thus endowing them with an exemplary function not devoid of a certain nostalgia for ‘‘the personal myth of a lost state of nature,’’ as critic Dante Isella notes (Introduction, 1994). It is precisely this lost state that Maggi sought to recall with the society he represented on the stage. The ‘‘middle’’ values that characterize his theater are expressed through the good-natured and wise distance of humour, and turn the conceptualism of the Baroque into the everyday practices of one’s fellow human beings, the humble people that Manzoni would also represent, thus finally producing a ‘‘bourgeois poetry’’ that already looks forward to the great theater of Carlo Goldoni. This poetic lesson would soon acquire a spiritual dimension in the erudite and hagiographic biography written by his friend Ludovico Antonio Muratori and published in 1700. In his first verse comedy, Il manco male (The Lesser Evil), written in 1694 and staged in 1695, Maggi adopted not only the Milanese dialect but also a sort of grotesque and heavy macaronic Latin. Il manco male is the story of a rich widow besieged by 10 suitors who decides to enter into the Widows’ College in order not to lose her freedom. In the end, only one wedding will be celebrated: that between two loyal servants. Thus, monastic isolation, the ‘‘lesser evil’’ of the title, brings together Christian ethics and a popular sentiment of the sacred in a profound distrust for human beings and their history. On the contrary, the theatrical dynamic in Maggi’s most popular comedy I consigli di Meneghino (Meneghino’s Advice), represented during the carnival season in 1697, is completely based on wordplay. Its weak plot concerns the archetypal Milanese character of Meneghin Tandœuggia, a no-nonsense servant and God-fearing man of the people who, however, is not above pointing out, through his witty and sharp use of language, why and how people often believe wrongly that they are good Christians.

Maggi wrote his dialect plays mostly in his later years—indeed, Isella has rightly called him ‘‘a conformist as a young man and innovator as an old man’’ (Introduction, 1964). These works were preceded by a widespread production of libretti for the Milanese opera; most of them were never published and a few were later destroyed by the author. Recently, critics such as Roberta Carpani have remarked upon the ‘‘local character’’ of these texts, and on their ‘‘temporary departure from the Venetian opera repertoire’’ for a new comical context of allusions and innuendos that could be understood only by local spectators (‘‘La storia sanata,’’ 1995). However, this specificity also prevented their more widespread diffusion. Maggi was a fertile and multilingual author. He composed lyrics according to the demands of the Jesuit-led cultural policy. With his Rime varie (Miscellaneous Verses, 1688), which attracted the praise of Muratori, he produced a poetry that, as the faithful transcription of a truth already given, is programmatically distant from the subversive richness of the poetics of the Baroque (he would later reject this poetic production and revise it through the use of dialect). Resorting to a careful and controlled rhetorical repertoire, Maggi replaced the ‘‘ingenious’’ figures of the Baroque with ‘‘pathetic’’ ones, while the intellectual relationship between the ‘‘wit’’ of the author and that of the reader was substituted by a correspondence of emotions. Pierantonio Frare has observed that ‘‘on the basis of the Christian rhetoric outlined by St. Augustine, Maggi re-establishes the link between sapientia and eloquentia, and thus aim at reconverting the reader’’ (‘‘La sincerita` degli affetti,’’ 1998).

Biography Born in Milan on May 3, 1630, the son of a rich merchant in gold and silk. Educated by the Jesuits in Brera. Studied civil and canon law at the University of Bologna, 1647–1650. Married Anna Maria Monticelli, with whom he had 11 children, 1656. Appointed member of the secretary of Senate of Milan, 1661; in this period, he wrote a great number of consulte, i.e., written counsels about Senate issues, which were all lost. Taught Latin and Greek at the Scuole Palatine, 1664. Member of Arcadia and of the Accademia della Crusca. Supervisor at the University of Pavia, 1676–1689. Died in Milan on April 22, 1699. STEFANO TOMASSINI 1105

CARLO MARIA MAGGI Selected Works Collections Rime varie di Carlo Maria Maggi, sacre, morali, eroiche, edited by Ludovico Antonio Muratori, 4 vols., Milan: Giuseppe Malatesta, 1700. Comedie e rime in lingua milanese del signor segretario Carlo Maria Maggi, 2 vols., Milan: Giuseppe Pandolfo Malatesta, 1701. Il teatro milanese, 2 vols., edited by Dante Isella, Turin: Einaudi, 1964. Le rime milanesi, edited by Dante Isella, Parma: Guanda, 1994.

Poetry ‘‘Rime varie,’’ 1688.

Plays Il manco male, 1695. Il Barone di Birbanza, 1697. I consigli di Meneghino, 1697. Il falso filosofo, 1698. Il Concorso de’ Meneghini, ca. 1699.

Libretti Ippolita, 1670. Augusto in Egitto, 1673.

Further Reading Carpani, Roberta, ‘‘La storia sanata. Il libretto di Trionfo d’Augusto in Egitto di Carlo Maria Maggi,’’ in La scena della gloria. Drammaturgia e spettacolo a Milano in eta` spagnola, edited by Annamaria Cascetta and Roberta Carpani, Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1995.

Carpani, Roberta, Drammaturgia del comico. I libretti per musica di Carlo Maria Maggi nei ‘‘theatri di Lombardia,’’ Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1998. De Marchi, Emilio, Carlo Maria Maggi: Saggio critico, Milan: Vallardi, 1930. Frare, Pierantonio, ‘‘La sincerita` degli affetti: sulle Rime varie di Carlo Maria Maggi,’’ in Testo, 19 (1998): 45–74. Giannessi, Ferdinando, ‘‘La letteratura dialettale e la cultura,’’ in Storia di Milano, vol. 11, Il declino spagnolo (1630–1706), Rome: Fondazione Treccani degli Alfieri, 1958. Isella, Dante, Introduction to Carlo Maria Maggi, Il teatro milanese, 2 vols., Turin: Einaudi, 1964. Isella, Dante, Introduction to Carlo Maria Maggi, Le rime milanesi, Parma: Guanda, 1994. Medici, Luigi, and Gian Antonio Maggi (editors), Carlo Maria Maggi poeta meneghino, Milan: La Famiglia Meneghina, 1930. Muratori, Ludovico Antonio, Vita di Carlo Maria Maggi, Milan: Giuseppe Pandolfo Malatesta, 1700. Petrella, Antonio, ‘‘Carlo Maria Maggi’s Theory of Comedy,’’ in Italian Quarterly, 12 (1969): 223–237. Pierce, Glenn Palen, The ‘‘Caratterista’’ and Comic Reform from Maggi to Goldoni, Naples: Societa` Editrice Napoletana, 1986. Sirch, Licia, ‘‘‘Qui si recita un’opra cantata.’ La partitura manoscritta del Trionpho di Cesare,’’ in La scena della gloria. Drammaturgia e spettacolo a Milano in eta` spagnola, edited by Annamaria Cascetta and Roberta Carpani, Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1995. Zardin, Danilo, ‘‘Carlo Maria Maggi e la tradizione culturale milanese tra Sei e Settecento,’’ in Annali di Storia moderna e contemporanea, 3 (1997): 9–50.

VALERIO MAGRELLI (1957–) Along with his research activity and translations in the field of French literature, Valerio Magrelli is a poet in the post neoavant-garde environment at the end of the 1970s, even though his first collection, Ora serrata retinae, appeared in 1980 and was republished in 1996 along with his next two collections in the volume Poesie e altre poesie (1980– 1992). The title, Ora serrata retinae—a medical term that indicates the uneven margin of the retina beyond which the eye becomes capable of perception—brings to mind vision as a pivotal element of the poetic investigation. Among the five senses, in fact, Magrelli seems to have a preference 1106

for eyesight that, so to speak, has dilated beyond measure: ‘‘La mente... si ricopre di palpebre,’’ ‘‘la mano diventa pupilla’’ (The mind...covers itself with eyelids, the hand becomes pupil). The lyric voice takes a direct part in a poetic dialogue with reality that is not necessarily understood as an external entity, thereby turning out to be part of the same speaking entity, as well: ‘‘A volte mi scopro... oggetto tra gli oggetti,’’ he confesses, ‘‘inavvertitamente / sono arrivato alla fine / ad illustrarmi’’ (At times I discover myself... an object among objects, inadvertently / I arrived at the end / to make myself known). The expression ‘‘ora serrata retinae,’’ therefore, acts as both a perceptive

VALERIO MAGRELLI medium and as an object of perception, becoming the single anatomic unity in which the body of the poet is examined minutely in a study similar to the plastic ones of body art in the 1960s. From this point of view Magrelli’s poetic investigation assumes the appearance of an obscure alchemistic manipulation of natural elements rather than a chirurgic operation: He does not examine the material of the body, but its interaction and mutation at the point of contact with the lyric self: ‘‘La prima gemmazione dello spirito / e` dunque nella lacrima, / parola trasparente e lenta. / Secondo questa elementare alchimia / veramente il pensiero si fa sostanza / come una pietra o un braccio’’ (The first budding of the spirit / is therefore in the teardrop, / the word, transparent and slow. / According to this elementary alchemy / truly the thought becomes substance / like a stone or an arm). Extremely refined on its own, this interaction between body and mind assumes an apparently simple formal appearance because of the quotidian nature of many images and because of the choice of a free verse with strict rhythmic schemes. Yet it reveals itself to be highly controlled even in the most elementary lexical unities. The frequent alliterations are noticeable, as in this example, emblematic for its meaning and significance: ‘‘Preferisco venire dal silenzio / per parlare. Preparare la parola / con cura’’ (I prefer to come from silence / in order to speak. To prepare the word / with care). The incisive reiteration of the initial labial consonant is a choice that should raise the tone of the discourse, which otherwise remains at a middle level, thanks to the direct recourse to the essay form either with connections like ‘‘well’’ and ‘‘therefore,’’ or with a technical lexicon (‘‘logismografia’’). If in this collection a confrontation between the lyric self and the body-object is highlighted, in Nature venature (The Veins of Nature, 1987) a more radical clash is witnessed, revealed by the numerous terms that underline a spatial distance (abyss, cleft, lesion) that can also be temporal to the breaking into of memory, both personal and collective (with historical-literary quotations that fragment the form). The subjective self, moreover, now opens itself to new auditory perceptions, and the eyes, first capable of animating ‘‘la natura delle cose’’ (the nature of objects), now seem to impoverish them: ‘‘La sala da pranzo e` deserta / fissata da uno sguardo’’ (The lunch room is deserted / fixed by a look). The images are no longer flashing on the retina, but instead they are fixed, perhaps in the form of a drawing: ‘‘guardala...la moneta... sopra cui distingui / il volto...Il profilo sta fermo...

miracolosamente trattenuto / trattiene in se´ l’immagine’’ (look at it...the coin...on which you distinguish / the face....The profile is still...miraculously held / it holds in itself the image). The same elements that characterize Nature venature come through also in Esercizi di tiptologia (The Contagion of Matter, 1992). They are marked, however, by a heightened uneasiness. The self in Ora serrata retinae blends into the carnal material in an interactive and dynamic exchange as in ‘‘Io abito il mio cervello / come un tranquillo possidente le sue terre.... Il mio cervello abita in me / come un tranquillo possidente le sue terre’’ (I inhabit my brain / like a peaceful landowner does his land....My brain lives in me / like a peaceful landowner on his land). It is imprisoned in foreign forms, fallen in a covering that is a shroud. Didascalie per la lettura di un giornale (Captions for the Reading of a Newspaper) followed in 1999: The daily newspaper, symbol of reality and reflection of a world already broken up into news, exactly for its nature becomes the ideal object of a poetic venture that, in the passing from the ‘‘human’’ anatomy to the social one, unites with tragic nature an irony nourished by cynicism (Esteri), by a Hermetic dimension (Rebus), or even by a dignified one (citing in Latin). In the more recent Nel condominio di carne (In the Condominium of Flesh, 2003), however, the poet abandons poetry for prose, amplifying one of the main themes of his entire production: the ‘‘sensazione di incertezza, anzi, di inaffidabilita` rispetto al corpo’’ (sensation of uncertainty, or better, of unreliability with respect to the body), a body still ‘‘teatro della mutazione’’ (theater of mutation) but also ‘‘organismo infestato da pensieri’’ and ‘‘forma mutante tra le forme’’ (organism infested with thoughts, mutating form among forms) more and more divided from the lyric self. The self and the body are no longer the ‘‘tranquillo possidente’’ (tranquil landowner) cited earlier: The flesh has become an apartment house, the self its tenant. At the mutation of one, the migration of the other ends up reciprocating.

Biography Born in Rome on January 10, 1957; in 1984, earned a degree in philosophy from ‘‘La Sapienza’’ University in Rome with a dissertation in French literature; was researcher in French studies in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures 1107

VALERIO MAGRELLI at the Universita` di Pisa in 1990, and in French literature in the Department of Arabic, Islamic, and Mediterranean Studies at the Universita` di Napoli, L’Orientale, in 2004; from 2005 to the present Magrelli teaches at the Universita` di Cassino. Between 1987 and 1993, directed with Giuseppe Conte the poetry series ‘‘La Fenice’’ for Guanda publishing house, and since 1993 the trilingual series of the Writers Translated by Writers collection by Einaudi, an initiative for which in 1996 he was given by the president of the republic the National Award for Translation. He has received several awards, among them the Mondello prize for Ora serrata retinae, 1980; the Viareggio prize for Nature venature, 1987; the Montale award for Esercizi di tiptologia, 1992; and the Salzburg award for Poesie e altre poesie (1980–1992), 1996. In 2002, the Accademia dei Lincei conferred upon him the Antonio Feltrinelli award for Italian poetry. In 2004, he received the Thermes di Saint-Vincent (12th Edition) Literary Prize of French Studies; he collaborates with the cultural section of Il Messaggero, L’Unita`, and Diario; has translated texts by Ste`phane Mallarme´, Paul Vale´ry, Alfred Jarry, Rene´ Char, and Francis Ponge; his poetry has been translated into English, French, and Spanish; married in 1998 and has two children. LORENZA MIRETTI Selected Works Poetry Ora serrata retinae, 1980; as Nearsights: Selected poems, edited and translated by Anthony Molino, 1991. ‘‘Nature venature,’’ 1987. Esercizi di tiptologia, 1992; as Contagion of Matter, translated by Anthony Molino, 2000. Poesie (1980–1992) e altre poesie, 1996. ‘‘Didascalie per la lettura,’’ 1999.

Prose Nel condominio di carne, 2000.

Translations Paul Vale´ry, L’idea fissa o due uomini in mare, 1985. Claude Debussy, Il signor Croche antidilettante, 1986. Paul Verlaine, La buona canzone, 1986.

Other Profilo del Dada, 1990. La casa del pensiero: Introduzione all’opera di Joseph Joubert (1754–1824), 1995. Ultime tendenze della poesia italiana, 1995. Vedere vedersi: Modelli e circuiti visivi nell’opera di Paul Vale´ry, 2002.

Further Reading Bompiani, Ginevra, ‘‘I poeti degli anni Ottanta,’’ in Il verri (June 1989): 101–105. Bonito, Vitaniello, Il gelo e lo sguardo, Bologna: CLUB, 1996. Cucchi, Maurizio, and Stefano Giovanardi (editors), Poeti italiani del secondo Novecento 1945–1995, Milano: Mondatori, 1996. Inglese, Mario, Valerio Magrelli: Poesia come ricognizione, Ravenna: Longo, 2004. Lisa, Tommaso, Scrittori del riconoscimento: Su Ora serrata retinae di Valerio Magrelli, Rome: Bulzoni, 2005. Lorenzini, Niva, Il presente della poesia. 1960–1990, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1991. Lorenzini, Niva (editor), Poesia del novecento italiano: Dal secondo dopoguerra ad oggi, Rome: Carrocci, 2003. Mattei, Piera, ‘‘Valerio Magrelli e la tiptologia del miope,’’ in L’abbraccio, gli inferi, edited by Fabio Pierangeli, Rome: Nuova Cultura, 1995. Pagnanelli, Remo, ‘‘Su Valerio Magrelli,’’ in Studi critici: Poesia e poeti italiani del secondo Novecento, edited by Daniela Marcheschi, Milan: Mursia, 1991. Porta, Antonio (editor), ‘‘Altre nature morte,’’ in Poesia degli anni Settanta, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1979. Vicentini, Maria Isabella, Colloqui sulla poesia: Le ultime tendenze, Turin: Nuova ERI, 1991. Villanata, G. M., ‘‘Il vaso infranto: Poetica e ‘poetica della traduzione’ nel piu` recente Magrelli,’’ in Testo a fronte, 11 (October 1994): 77–82.

CLAUDIO MAGRIS (1939–) A Germanist, critic, essayist, narrator, translator, and playwright, Claudio Magris matured in an environment—the city of Trieste—rich in cultural stimuli. The world of his childhood and adolescence 1108

was in reality a border, a frontier, a city on the boundary between the Western World and Eastern Europe, a region for years dominated by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, yet full of diverse

CLAUDIO MAGRIS cultural influences: Jewish and Greek, Slavic and German, and, naturally, Italian. A city in which, extraordinarily, all of these cultures were able to coexist, often generated peculiar and innovative experiences. Along with the atmosphere of this multiethnic and multicultural city, the years of study at the university in Turin as well as his apprenticeship in Germany contributed to the intellectual development of the author, and guided him toward the study and the recovery of twentiethcentury Central European and Scandinavian literature, in which he identified a sort of metaphor for the crisis of contemporary civilization. Right from his first essay, Il mito asburgico nella letteratura austriaca moderna (The Hapsburg Myth in Modern Austrian Literature, 1963), the result of the elaboration of his university thesis, the author contributed to the diffusion, in Italy and abroad, of the ‘‘Hapsburg myth’’ and above all of the literature tied to the world and times of the AustroHungarian Empire. In a later study, Lontano da dove. Joseph Roth e la tradizione ebraico-orientale (Far from Where. Joseph Roth and the Eastern Jewish Tradition, 1971), Magris reconstructs the cultural history of Eastern Europe, focusing on Jewish writers, of whom he brings into particular focus the ambiguity of the diaspora, both a tragedy and a privilege to the uprooted immigrant for whom it is impossible to find a destination that will save him. Dietro le parole (Behind the Words, 1978) collects articles and prefaces in which the scholar deals with issues such as the comparison between classicism and avant-garde, or with the anarchist reactionary theater interpreted as a source of all nationalistic and Fascistic movements between the two World Wars, demonstrating his versatility as a critic. The collection of brief essays Itaca e oltre (Ithaca and Beyond, 1982) investigates the two antithetical directions of the voyage— physical, cultural, political—that is, nostos, the return, and escape, through the analysis of several great authors such as Italo Svevo—who became in a certain sense Trieste’s symbolic writer—Robert Musil, Henrik Ibsen, Gustave Flaubert, Thomas Mann, Jorge Luis Borges, and others. In this essay collection, the critical interpretation is harmoniously intertwined with autobiographical testimony and with political reflection. Finally, Utopia e disincanto (Utopia and Disenchantment, 1999), collects a wide selection of Magris’ essay production from 1974 to 1998. Through widely diverse texts, the current historical condition, the turning point of the end of the millennium, the role of the

intellectual today, and the concept of border are analyzed. Once again, great writers have a fundamental role in the critical discourse, from Goethe to Mann, from Dostoyevsky to Primo Levi and many others. With Illazioni su una sciabola (Inferences from a Sabre, 1984), a novella in which he narrates the epos of the Cossacks in Carnia during the last year of World War II, Magris crosses the dividing line between essay and narrative, offering an original form of writing in which narrative elements, historical discourse, and autobiographical references coexist. This technique is brought to perfection in the novel Danubio (Danube, 1986), which critics consider among his best works. Translated into 20 languages, it is variously defined as a survey, a travel story, and a narration with an autobiographical background, or as an essayistic investigation in which the author, following the course of the Danube River, crosses the Central European and Balkan world, depicting its numerous multicultural aspects, traditions, and historical vicissitudes as well as its natural and urban landscapes. Along its winding path, the river represents the multiplicity of spaces and of life, allowing for the evocation of a variety of figures—from Sissi (Empress Elisabeth of Austria) to Martin Heidegger, from Georg Luka´cs to Franz Kafka, from Louis Ferdinand Ce´line to Josef Mengele—who form a kind of cultural grid through which to interpret the complex reality of the Central European world. As Ernestina Pellegrini wrote, ‘‘With Danubio, Magris narrated in an extraordinarily complex literary form, which however offers itself to the reader with the freshness and agility of a ship’s log, his own revisiting as a sentimental traveler of the appointed places of his critical research’’ (Epica sull’acqua. L’opera letteraria di Claudio Magris, 1997). Un altro mare (A Different Sea, 1991) is the story of Enrico, a friend of the poet and philosopher Carlo Michelstaedter, who on the eve of World War I decides to abandon his city, Gorizia, and to embark for South America where he disappears in anonymity and solitude. Returning to his homeland after the fall of the Hapsburg Empire, Enrico must face a new historical reality. The narration, conducted in a dry and penetrating style, recounts the story of a love for life, which pessimistically, comes to the impossibility of living. If Danubio embraces an enormously vast geographic and cultural area, Microcosmi (Microcosms, 1999) guides us to the discovery of circumscribed lands that abound with very detailed 1109

CLAUDIO MAGRIS descriptions of the landscape and with stories of minimal existences, of which both animals and men were protagonists—coffee shop regulars and island inhabitants, the bear of Snow Mountain and the stray dog in the lagoon. Among the diverse themes that run through the work are the relationship between the landscape and the sense of time, identity and its uncertainty, and the continuous crossing of borders of every kind. Among the most recent works, the novel Alla cieca (Blindly, 2005) must be mentioned. In this work, Magris, through the story of numerous men, narrates the figure of the eternal rebel, at the mercy of the upheavals of history but also of his dreams of justice. History, myth, and memory are intertwined in a sort of voyage in time that travels the painful pathways of the soul in order to find a sense to history. Magris, lastly, has worked for the theater both as a translator (Ibsen, Schnitzler, Kleist, Buchner) and as a playwright. Among his theatrical works are Stadelmann (1988), the story of the last days of the life of Goethe’s servant, an ignorant and crude man who lives alone and forgotten by everyone in the squalid hospice of the poor in Jena, where he ages in the shadow of the memory of his master, and Le voci (The Voices, 1996), a monologue in which a man on the edge of madness listens to messages from female voices recorded on answering machines. Several of his shorter works, such as Illazioni su una sciabola and La mostra (The Exhibition, 2001) have recently been adapted for the stage.

Biography Born in Trieste on April 10, 1939; after his early education in his native city, he studied at the University of Turin where, in 1966, he graduated with a degree in German language and literature with a dissertation entitled Il mito asburgico nella letteratura austriaca moderna, published the following year; after an apprenticeship at the Universita` di Freiburg, became professor of German literature at the University of Turin, 1970–1978; later moved to the University of Trieste, where he still teaches; collaborates with Il corriere della sera and with numerous other newspapers and specialized journals; awarded the Strega prize for Microcosmi, 1998; married the writer Marisa Madieri, who died in 1996, and with whom he had two children. Lives in Trieste. PAOLO QUAZZOLO 1110

Selected Works Novels Illazioni su una sciabola, 1984; as Inferences from a Sabre, translated by Mark Thompson, 1990. Danubio, 1986; as Danube, translated by Patrick Creagh, 1989. Un altro mare, 1991; as A Different Sea, translated by M. S. Spurr, 1995. Microcosmi, 1997; as Microcosms, translated by Ian Halliday, 1999. Alla cieca, 2005.

Short Stories ‘‘Il Conde,’’ 1993. ‘‘La mostra,’’ 2001.

Essays Il mito asburgico nella letteratura austriaca moderna, 1963. Wilhelm Heinse, 1968. Tre studi su Hoffmann, 1969. Lontano da dove. Joseph Roth e la tradizione ebraicoorientale, 1971. Dietro le parole, 1978. Itaca e oltre, 1982. Trieste. Un’identita` di frontiera, with Angelo Ara, 1982. L’anello di Clarisse: grande stile e nichilismo nella letteratura moderna, 1984. Utopia e disincanto. Saggi 1974–1998, 1999. L’infinito viaggiare, 2005.

Plays Stadelmann, 1988. Le voci, 1996.

Further Reading Avirovic, Ljiljana, and John Dodds (editors), Umberto Eco, Claudio Magris autori e traduttori a confronto. Atti del Convegno internazionale, Trieste, 27–28 November 1989, Udine: Campanotto, 1993. Cattaruzza, Claudio (editor), Dedica a Claudio Magris, Pordenone: Associazione provinciale per la prosa, 1999. De la Rica, Alvaro (editor), Estudio sobre Claudio Magris, Pamplona: EUNSA Ediciones Universidad de Navarra, 2000. Dupre´, Natalie, ‘‘Saggismo ed utopia in Danubio di Claudio Magris,’’ in Narrativa, 20–21 (2001): 217–227. Governatori, Licia, Claudio Magris: l’Ulisse contemporaneo, protagonista di una straordinaria avventura dello spirito: la sua opera dal 1963 al 1986, Milan: Sabaini, 1988. Governatori, Licia, Claudio Magris: l’opera saggistica e narrativa, Trieste: LINT, 1999. Lubrani, Stefania, Ritratto: Claudio Magris, Pescara: Tracce, 2001. Pellegrini, Ernestina, Epica sull’acqua: l’opera letteraria di Claudio Magris, Bergamo: Moretti & Vitali, 1997. Polezzi, Loredana, ‘‘Different Journeys along the River: Claudio Magris’s Danubio and Its Translation,’’ in Modern Language Review, 93, no. 3 (1998): 678–694. Trentini, Daria, ‘‘L’idea di Mitteleuropa nell’opera di Claudio Magris,’’ in Il Veltro, 46, no. 5–6 (2002): 539–553.

CURZIO MALAPARTE (KURT ERICH SUCKERT)

CURZIO MALAPARTE (KURT ERICH SUCKERT) (1898–1957) Kurt Erich Suckert, a novelist and essayist who after 1925 assumed the pseudonym of Curzio Malaparte, is one of the most controversial and contradictory figures in modern Italian literature, known as much for his ideological militancy as for his writing. His unusual family background (his father was German) was also the basis for the construction of a unique self, as he constantly asserted his Italian essence by placing himself at the head of the currents of ‘‘magic realism’’ and then of the Strapaese movement. The key to his success, however, stems in his unusual combination of provincialism and worldliness (at times he even wrote his texts directly in French). Malaparte wore a variety of masks, often simultaneously: He was a soldier, a correspondent for the leading newspapers of his day, a Machiavellian confidant, perhaps a spy, a man of the world, a cynical moralist. Although he made his debut as an actor only in 1956, a year before his death, many of his actions are in fact theatrical, including the acceptance of his Italian Communist Party membership card directly from the hands of party secretary Palmiro Togliatti, and his conversion in extremis to the Catholic faith. After all, he maintained that at the root of genuine irony there always lies the attitude of the actor, participating in the lives of others while also winking at the public. The first mask worn by Malaparte, a young and ardent republican, is that of the santo maledetto (damned saint). The ‘‘damned saints’’ were the veterans of World War I, for the most part peasants or individuals from the lowest social classes, excluded from the Italian Risorgimento and marginalized by official society. Fighting in the trenches cemented the social conscience of these men, who were compelled by the password Viva Caporetto to bring an end to the conservative revolution initiated by the Great War. According to Malaparte, Fascism, unlike the Russian Revolution, favored an individual rather than collective rebellion. In Viva Caporetto! (Long Live Caporetto!), published in 1921 and immediately reissued

as La rivolta dei santi maledetti (The Rebellion of the Damned Saints), he wrote: Il fenomeno fascista mi ha dato ragione. Sono uno fra i pochi, uno fra i pochi rivoluzionari, che abbia sentito fin dal principio il fascismo non solo come una rivolta individualistica, ma come una rivoluzione diretta a liberare il popolo italiano dalla tirannia delle categorie politiche ed economiche The Fascist phenomenon proved that I was right. I am one of the few people, one of the few revolutionaries, who right from the beginning saw Fascism not only as an individualistic rebellion, but as a revolution directed at freeing the Italian people from political and economic categories.

Malaparte fought bravely in the war on the western front beside young people sent to the slaughter, and was himself injured in a gas attack. But by 1919 he was in Versailles in charge of the press office for the Italian mission, a role that allowed him a privileged view of the underhanded dealings of political history. He never abandoned the role of subtle geopolitical expert, ironically volunteering both as an advisor for the powerful and as a consultant for ordinary people who wished to understand the goings-on behind the scenes. In fact, the book Technique du coup d’e´tat (Coup d’e´tat: Technique of Revolution, 1931) is inspired by the lesson taught by another of what he would later call ‘‘maledetti toscani’’ (damned Tuscans), Niccolo` Machiavelli. As the author himself admitted on the occasion of the first Italian edition in 1948, the book would give him ‘‘gloria, quella povera cosa che e` la gloria’’ (glory, that cheap thing that is glory), but he would later come to hate it because it marked the origin of his isolation. In the 1920s, he had become an important figure in Fascist intellectual circles (he joined the party in September 1922), but after Mussolini’s rise to power he found himself increasingly relegated to the antibourgeois fringe of Fascism, and in particular to the Strapaese movement. This current included figures such as the journalist and publisher Leo Longanesi (1905–1957) and the painter Mino

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CURZIO MALAPARTE (KURT ERICH SUCKERT) Maccari (1898–1989), founder and director of the satirical journal Il selvaggio. Malaparte’s intention was to defend what he perceived as the true, revolutionary spirit of Fascism, which he identified with the people of the Italian heartland and in particular of his native Tuscany. As a consequence of his increasingly critical positions and of the publication of Technique du coup d’e´tat (immediately banned in Italy) he was arrested for anti-Fascist activities in 1933 and condemned to five years of confinement or internal exile, although he was subsequently pardoned thanks to the intercession of Count Galeazzo Ciano. He continued to work as a journalist, and in 1937 founded the journal Prospettive, which, unlike Il selvaggio, was open to European influences and reported from the war fronts of France, Croatia, and Russia during World War II. His masterpieces in fact originated in his experience at war: the novels Kaputt (1944) and La pelle (The Skin, 1949), constitute a sort of trilogy together with the posthumous and unfinished Mamma marcia (Rotten Mother, 1959). In his descriptions of the disasters of the war, Malaparte refers back to the gloomy style of Francisco Goya on the one hand, and on the other, to the grotesque gothic of Pieter Bruegel and of Hieronymus Bosch, by indulging with moralistic condescension in detailed description of the aberrations of conflict and the anatomy of horror. In Malaparte, historical characters become grotesque masks of the danse macabre that seems to trace its sinister spirals on the whole map of civilized Europe. Eastern Europe appears as a borderland between a refined civilization and a primitive culture of death only just touched by Christianity. La pelle, which treats the chaos and brutality of war, is set in Naples just after its liberation by the Anglo-American forces. References to real facts and places appear accidental, because of the emblematic and practically allegorical aim of the narration (in fact the town council of Naples asked for the writer Curzio Malaparte to be banned, and requested an official apology for having cast infamy on the city). But Naples had a whole civilization behind it, as Italy did: Here lies the root of the failure of Malaparte’s generation, nurtured by the cultural and political myths of Benito Mussolini, the self-appointed defender of the civilizing mission of Italians in the world in compensation for the incomplete Risorgimento, whose true aims he betrayed. Malaparte concludes that Italy cannot civilize anyone, nor can it be civilized. After all, war is nobler than hunger, and it is better to fight 1112

to avoid death than to fight to live. The shadow of the defeat of the fatherland, expressed by the author with aristocratic pietas, is also central, as is the dishonour that reached its peak with the armistice of 8 September 1943. Both praised and reviled, Malaparte’s war novels belong to the era of the European political novel. In an almost prophetic way, he expressed his disappointment with populism, which he had initially championed, during the last days of his illness. These final days were spent in Peking in contact with a peasant country that was advancing forcefully onto the historical scene, no longer centered on Europe. The result was the posthumous volume Io, in Russia e in Cina (Me, in Russia and in China, 1958). Malaparte’s evolution from a Fascist writer to a doubtful intellectual can be understood by visiting Villa Malaparte in Capri, the house that he designed in 1936, putting into practice the principles of rationalism. Looking beyond the two decades of Fascism, its architecture opens up existential horizons, and for this reason Jean-Luc Godard used it as the set of Le Me´pris (1963), the film based on Alberto Moravia’s novel Il disprezzo (Contempt, 1954). The charges of ambivalence and opportunism leveled against him, together with his wavering between populism and dandyism, do not so much discredit him from the vantage point afforded by historical distance. Rather, they appear as the sign of a biographically strong but ideologically weak individual. To justify this contradiction, unacceptable in the century of strong ideologies, Malaparte pushed ‘‘magic realism’’ to its extreme consequences. Behind reality and history, there is no ideology, but instead a primitive essence of being that resists all desecrations. In contrast to his one-time associate Massimo Bontempelli, a firm supporter of the modernist movement, Malaparte intended to test the power of ‘‘magic realism.’’ He thus urged the form beyond the limits of good prose and safe bourgeois environments, into the context of violence and cruelty expressed in the collective madness of totalitarianism and of war. However, Malaparte’s heart remained in Tuscany, where he set his only film Cristo proibito (The Forbidden Christ, 1950), and which he described in a 1968 interview to Giampaolo Martelli as ‘‘una regione d’Italia dove la natura e` magra, severa, essenziale, nuda. L’Italia di Giotto, di Masaccio, di Piero della Francesca: povera d’alberi, di acque, nuda di messe, una distesa ondeggiante di crete, dove vive un popolo pieno di una profonda morale’’ (a region of Italy where nature is scant, austere, parsimonious, bare.

CURZIO MALAPARTE (KURT ERICH SUCKERT) The Italy of Giotto, of Masaccio, of Piero della Francesca: lacking in trees, lacking in water, without crops, a rolling expanse of clay, where there lives a population full of profound morals).

Opere scelte, edited by Luigi Martellini, Milan: Mondadori, 1997.

Biography

Fiction

Born in Prato on 9 June 1898, the son of Erwin and Evelina Perelli. Completed secondary school at the prestigious boarding school Cicognini in Prato, where D’Annunzio was also a student, and became a sympathizer of the Republican Party. At the outbreak of the war, left for France with a legion of volunteers, 1914. Enrolled in the Italian army, 1915, and served on the frontline throughout the war, participating in the disastrous rout of Caporetto, 1917. As a journalist, followed the works of the Versailles Peace Conference, 1919. Left the Republican Party to join the Fascist Party, 1922. Founded the journal La conquista dello Stato, 1924; coedited 900 with Massimo Bontempelli, 1926; edited L’Italia letteraria, 1929–1931. The publication in installments of the satirical Don Camale`o was suspended by Fascist censorship, 1928; editor of the newspaper Il Mattino of Naples, and then of La Stampa of Turin, 1929. Arrested and condemned to five years of internment in Lipari, 1933. Released, rejoined the editorial staff of Il corriere della sera, 1934. Founded the journal Prospettive, 1937. In East Africa as a correspondent, 1939. Called to arms, served on the French front, June, 1940. Afterwards, wrote reports on the war operations in the Balkans and on the Russian front. The contents of his articles caused his arrest by the Gestapo and he was handed over to the Italian police. After Mussolini’s fall, he was arrested by order of the Badoglio government. Served as a liaison officer in Badoglio’s army with the Anglo-American command, 1943–1945. After the war, became involved in theater and cinema and continued traveling to Latin America, Russia, and China. Died in Rome on 19 July 1957 of lung cancer. ALESSANDRO SCARSELLA Selected Works Collections Opere complete di Curzio Malaparte, edited by Enrico Falqui, 10 vols., Florence: Vallecchi, 1957. L’arcitaliano e tutte le altre poesie, edited by Enrico Falqui, Florence: Vallecchi, 1963. Malaparte, edited by Edda Suckert Ronchi, 12 vols., Florence: Ponte alle Grazie, 1991–1996.

Poetry ‘‘L’arcitaliano,’’ 1928. ‘‘Il battibecco: inni satire epigrammi,’’ 1949. Avventure di un capitano di sventura, 1927. Sodoma e Gomorra, 1931. Fughe in prigione, 1936. Sangue, 1937. Donna come me, 1940. Il sole e` cieco, 1947. Kaputt, 1944; as Kaputt, translated by Cesare Foligno, 1946. Don Camale`o, 1946. La pelle, 1949; as The Skin, translated by David Moore, 1952. Mamma marcia, edited by Enrico Falqui, 1959. Il ballo al Cemlino e altri inediti di romanzo, edited by Enrico Falqui, 1971.

Plays Das Kapital, 1949. Du coˆte´ de chez Proust, in Das Kapital, 1949.

Nonfiction Viva Caporetto!, 1921; rpt. as La rivolta dei santi maledetti, 1921; expanded, 1923. L’Europa vivente: teoria storica del Sindacalismo nazionale, 1923. Italia barbara, 1925. Technique du coup d’e´tat, translated by Juliette Bertrand, 1931; as Coup d’e´tat: Technique of Revolution, translated by Sylvia Saunders, 1932; first Italian edition as Tecnica del colpo di Stato, 1948. Le bonhomme Le´nine, translated by Juliette Bertrand, 1932; first Italian edition as Lenin buonanima, 1962. Il Volga nasce in Europa, 1943; as The Volga Rises in Europe, translated by David Moore, 1957. Maledetti toscani, 1956. Io, in Russia e Cina, 1958. Benedetti italiani, edited by Enrico Falqui, 1961. Viaggi fra i terremoti, edited by Enrico Falqui, 1963. Diario di uno straniero a Parigi, 1966. Muss: Ritratto di un dittatore. Il grande imbecille, edited by Giuseppe Pardini, 1999.

Further Reading Barilli, Renato, and Vittoria Baroncelli (editors), Curzio Malaparte: il narratore, il politologo, il cittadino di Prato e dell’Europa, Naples: CUEN, 2000. Biondi, Marino, Scrittori e miti totalitari: Malaparte, Pratolini, Silone, Florence: Polistampa, 2002. Cavallo, Luigi, Soffici e Malaparte: vento d’Europa a strapaese, Poggio a Caiano: Comune di Poggio a Caiano, 1999. Di Biase, Carmine, Curzio Malaparte: la rivolta del santo maledetto, Naples: CUEN, 1999. Grana, Gianni, Curzio Malaparte, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1973. Grana, Gianni, and Vittoria Baroncelli (editors), Malaparte scrittore d’Europa, Prato: Marzorati, 1992.

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CURZIO MALAPARTE (KURT ERICH SUCKERT) Guerri, Giordano Bruno, L’arcitaliano. Vita di Curzio Malaparte, Milan: Bompiani, 1980. Guerri, Giordano Bruno, Il Malaparte illustrato, Milan: Mondadori, 1998. Hope, William, Curzio Malaparte: The Narrative Contract Strained, Market Harborough: Troubadour, 2000. Martelli, Giampaolo, Curzio Malaparte, Turin: Borla, 1968. Martellini, Luigi, Invito alla lettura di Curzio Malaparte, Milan: Mursia, 1977. McDonough, Michael (editor), Malaparte: A House Like Me, New York: Clarkson Potter, 1999. Pardini, Giuseppe, Curzio Malaparte: Biografia politica, Minal and Trento: Luni Editrice, 1998. Talamona, Marida, Casa Malaparte, Milan: CLUP, 1990.

LA PELLE, 1949 Novel by Curzio Malaparte

The first chapter of La pelle (The Skin) foreshadows elements that give the work coherence, beginning with the ambiguous moral character of the pseudo-autobiographic narrator, Malaparte (after 8 September 1943, the writer, like the narrator, joined the new Italian army as an officer under Marshall Badoglio). The character Malaparte assumes the role of interpreter and mediator between languages that cannot communicate, an incommunicability that is not only linguistic (although English and French alternate with Italian throughout the novel) but first and foremost conceptual. Even a reacquired democratic freedom is not enough to bring together the ‘‘conquerors’’ and the ‘‘vanquished.’’ The antithesis is triggered rather by the difference between a modern American mentality, based on genuinely Christian principles, and the irreducible heritage of older civilizations, founded on pre-Christian cults of fertility and orgiastic rites. Set in Naples in October 1943, the novel describes the chaos and desolation of a city ravaged by war and social pestilence. The freedom brought by the American army to an ancient city (a city that survived modernization apparently unchanged) expresses itself in the form of anarchy and madness, opening a Pandora’s box of unfulfilled desires and a renewed thirst for life. The scenes of the ‘‘plague’’ (La peste was the original title of the 1114

book, discarded after the publication of Albert Camus’ novel of the same title) and of the rampant corruption are observed by the Europeanized American officers with amusement, while the common soldiers, and in particular the AfricanAmerican troops, are sucked into the magma that seems to devour any residual certainty about the war, including the conviction that a losing population is also a submissive one. On the contrary, the winners literally become the slaves of the defeated, as in the market of the black soldiers who are at the center of a paradoxical and anachronistic Neapolitan slave trade. Not even the landscape, dominated by the threatening Vesuvius and free of tourist cliche´s, escapes the universal squalor. The representation of the wickedness of nature directly recalls the pessimism of Giacomo Leopardi’s La ginestra (The Ginestra, 1836) and expresses Malaparte’s contempt for the faith in human progress. In fact, the choice of Naples as setting for a modern ‘‘plague’’ of great symbolic value is not due only to the historical reality of its liberation: More importantly, the author was wellaware that he was referring to one of the privileged subjects of Italian prose, by authors ranging from Giovanni Boccaccio to Alessandro Manzoni. This tension, however, is fleeting, as behind the tradition there lies the brutal reality of war and conquest, with its grotesque deviations from the norms of human rights, trampled by the conflict like a corpse by a tank, crushed like a ‘‘bandiera di pelle umana’’ (‘‘flag of human skin’’). This scene was conveyed in its unprecedented violence by Liliana Cavani’s cinematic adaptation of the novel in 1981, with Marcello Mastroianni in the role of the protagonist. ALESSANDRO SCARSELLA Editions First edition: La pelle, Milano: Aria d’Italia, 1949. Other editions: La pelle, expanded edition by Enrico Falqui, Florence: Vallecchi, 1960; edited by Luigi Martellini in Curzio Malaparte, Opere scelte, Milan: Mondadori, 1997. Translation: as The Skin, translated by David Moore, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952.

Further Reading Baldacci, Luigi, Introduction to Curzio Malaparte, La pelle, Milan: Mondadori, 1978. Cecchi, Emilio, ‘‘‘La pelle’ di Curzio Malaparte,’’ in Di giorno in giorno: Note di letteratura contemporanea (1945–1954), Milan: Garzanti, 1954.

LUIGI MALERBA (LUIGI BONARDI) Covino, Sandra, ‘‘La pelle di Malaparte: i procedimenti della prosa e il modello dannunziano,’’ in South Carolina Review, 14, no. 2 (1999): 215–259. Marrone, Gaetana, ‘‘Il mito di Babele in La pelle di Curzio Malaparte: Pathos, veggenza, e l’invenzione nel racconto cinematografico,’’ in Rivista di studi italiani, 19, no. 2 (2001): 219–232.

Pardini, Giuseppe, Curzio Malaparte: Biografia politica, pref. Francesco Perfetti, Milan-Trento: Luni Editrice, 1998. Parente, Luigi, ‘‘Una citta` contro. La polemica NapoliMalaparte nel secondo dopoguerra,’’ in Italia contemporanea, 215 (1999): 303–324.

LUIGI MALERBA (LUIGI BONARDI) (1927–) Malerba is the pen name of Luigi Bonardi, who began to publish fiction in the 1960s after having collaborated on many film scripts from 1950 on in Rome, the center of Italian filmmaking to which he moved in that year. A supremely humorous and inventive writer, Malerba might fairly be called a ‘‘psychosomatic’’ author in the sense that the rational mind and the unruly body form a complex unity in his creation of verbal worlds in which illogical logic and other oxymora, as well as the somatic realm, reign supreme. Malerba’s fiction contests common sense and complacency, and is characterized by the writer’s questioning stance vis-a`-vis power structures, so-called ‘‘reality,’’ and the givens of both life and art. Malerba’s first fictional work, La scoperta dell’alfabeto (The Discovery of the Alphabet) appeared in 1963, the same year in which the neoavant-garde group known as the Gruppo 63 had its first meeting of writers and critics in Palermo. The volume is a collection of short stories whose protagonists are peasants from the plains around Parma (Malerba’s region of origin) and whose temporal setting is World War II. It might seem that Malerba’s choice of setting and characters in these stories would align them with certain neorealist techniques and thematics, but his tales move far from the tenets of any recognizable realism, into the estranging elements inherent in life and so wittily used by Malerba throughout his career. In the first story, which gives the volume its title, Ambanelli, an old peasant, wants to learn to read and write, but he soon puts into question the logic of the alphabet. Using the technique of estrangement a` la Brecht, Malerba challenges a basic given of language, which is itself allied with the structures of

power that control and shape society. With the astuteness of a practical man who doubts anything that seems to be without purpose or reason, Ambanelli, whose name suggests ‘‘ambivalence’’ or ‘‘ambiguity,’’ asks the boss’ son, who is giving him reading lessons, why the letters are in the order they are. The boy can only respond that it is for convenience’s sake, but Ambanelli is not satisfied, and maintains his view of the alphabet as ‘‘illogical.’’ Nonetheless, he learns enough to be able to write his name and to recognize 100 or so words, which he greets as old friends when he sees them in print. This story is, in retrospect, emblematic of what will become one of the most Malerbian of qualities, the putting into question of the very instrument of his art: language itself. In fact, Malerba is an author of works that contain many more questions than answers, and he always seeks to create a certain sense of unease in his readers, who are forced to rethink ‘‘common sense’’ and many givens of everyday life, such as the alphabet. As critic Maria Corti noted, Malerba’s most typical protagonists do not appear in his first book (Il viaggio testuale, 1978). It is only in his second and in some subsequent works that a type of protagonist is born who will become recurrent: the neurotic, even psychotic, visionary who has a very peculiar view of reality and a very particular mode of self-expression. Malerba first creates such a protagonist in his debut novel, Il serpente (The Serpent, 1966). He tells a very confounding story, which is a sort of mystery tale made up of bizarre occurrences, as recounted from the first-person paranoic perspective of the main character. This man ostensibly has a love affair with a woman named Miriam, for example, but she may well be 1115

LUIGI MALERBA (LUIGI BONARDI) a figment of his imagination. He asserts specific facts about his wife, only to proclaim later that he never had a wife. The novel ends up negating all of its own assertions, and we are left with a book that has consumed itself, just as the protagonist maintains that he has consumed Miriam in a cannibalistic act motivated by his overpowering desire to possess her completely. Malerba’s second novel, Salto mortale (What Is This Buzzing, Do You Hear It Too?, 1968), has as protagonist one ‘‘Giuseppe called Giuseppe,’’ who believes that he has discovered a murder, which he himself may or may not have committed. Again using the giallo or mystery story mode, Malerba constructs a labyrinthine world of multiple ‘‘Giuseppes’’ and a woman whose name constantly transforms from one rosebased appellation to another. In these and other early novels and stories, Malerba uses a number of estranging techniques that keep realism at bay: repetition of words and phrases; excessive use of the interrogative form; extensive digressions; constant shifts from indirect to direct discourse. An extreme example of estrangement is a talking phallus as protagonist in the novel, Il protagonista (The Protagonist, 1973). Humor is also employed, but it is of the sort that renders readers uneasy, just like the author himself, who has stated that he often writes in a state of great uneasiness. During the 1970s, Malerba was very prolific, writing a number of collections of short stories, novels, and books for children. His diverse interests are evident in the range of themes he uses in these works: ancient China in Le rose imperiali (The Imperial Roses, 1974); the Middle Ages in Il pataffio (Mish Mash, 1978) and Storie dell’anno Mille (Stories of the Year One Thousand, 1973), which he wrote with Tonino Guerra; bourgeois life in contemporary Rome in Dopo il pescecane (After the Shark, 1979); children’s classics in Pinocchio con gli stivali (Pinocchio’s Boots, 1977). From the early novels and short stories written during the 1960s when Malerba, like many other Italian authors, was deeply involved in neoavantgarde and neoexperimental techniques, and from the eclectic works of the 1970s, the writer moved in the 1980s toward an explicit consolidation of his abiding interest in dreams, as well as in politics. Diario di un sognatore (Diary of a Dreamer, 1981) and Il pianeta azzurro (The Blue Planet, 1986) are, respectively, a record of the author’s dreams as dreamed over a year, and a prescient novel about contemporary political corruption a` la Tangentopoli, the scandals of which hit Italy shortly after the 1116

book appeared. In the 1990s, Malerba displayed a strong interest in writing historically based fiction in which, however, his penchant for contestation, the interrogation of givens, and the exploration of the strangeness of the real continued. Novels such as Il fuoco greco (Greek Fire, 1990) and Itaca per sempre (Ithaca forever, 1997) reveal Malerba’s historical bent; both books make extensive use of historical sources, albeit heavily fictionalized. In 1996, a collection of essays concerning the role of the intellectual and of the writer in modern society appeared under the title Che vergogna scrivere (How Shameful to Write); the short pieces included in this volume are among some of the most acute observations on the decline of the intelligentsia’s leadership role across time, as art and the life of the mind have been pushed more and more to the margins of Western society. Always an enthusiastic voyager, Malerba published volumes in which his curiosity about and affection for foreign travel are displayed, in lively essays and personal anecdotes: Il viaggiatore sedentario (The Sedentary Traveler, 1993) and Citta` e dintorni (Cities and Surroundings) are examples of this side of Malerba’s ever active and inquisitive intelligence. His most recent work includes Il circolo di Granada (The Circle of Granada, 2002), a novel set in nineteenth-century Spain; La composizione del sogno (The Composition of the Dream, 2002), which gathers together his writings on dreams, one of his topics of abiding interest; and Ti saluto filosofia (I Greet You, Philosophy, 2004), a collection of essayistic stories in which Malerba’s disconcerting comic sensibility is joined to his deeply philosophical bent. Luigi Malerba is one of contemporary Italy’s most prolific and accomplished writers of prose fiction. He has never stopped exploring new modes of expression, and interrogating the strangeness of reality, be it in the realm of dream life, in past history, or in contemporary social and political life. His combination of serious ratiocination and carnal exuberance is unique in modern Italian letters, and his mastery of the craft of narrative prose puts him in the forefront of Italy’s pantheon of great prose masters. Malerba has written books for children as well, and his contribution to Italian cinema, as a screenwriter and occasionally as a director, is also important. Like Ennio Flaiano, he epitomizes the interchangeability of the work of a writer with that of the screenwriter, although he contributed primarily to the cinematic adaptations of Alberto Lattuada, and the erotic comedies of Pasquale Festa Campanile. Both the dream-like

LUIGI MALERBA (LUIGI BONARDI) qualities associated with film, as well as cinema’s materiality certainly must hold tremendous appeal for Malerba, who is equally attracted to the abstractions of the oneiric and the concreteness of material and corporeal reality. Writing often for journals and newspapers, he has enlivened the daily reading life of thousands, and he has always been a generous respondent in interviews and colloquia with academic scholars and students of Italian literature, thus providing his readers with many direct insights into his creativity. In his travels, he has brought knowledge about Italian letters to audiences in many European venues, as well as to American and Asian publics. Always inventive and often disconcerting in their challenge to complacency, Malerba’s books stimulate, entertain, and provoke thought, and have been rightly honored with many prizes in recognition of their excellence. Luigi Malerba is a modern classic. His works are widely translated around the world.

Biography Born 11 November 1927 in Berceto (Parma). Studied law at the University of Parma and received his undergraduate degree there in 1950; moved to Rome, 1950; cowrote and directed (with Antonio Marchi) the film Donne e soldati (Women and Soldiers), 1955; he ran an advertising firm that carried out the first research in Italy on subliminal advertising, 1959–1963; married Anna Lapenna, 1962; has two children, Pietro and Anna; cofounded the Cooperativa Scrittori (Writers’ Cooperative), 1973. Has been awarded numerous literary prizes, among which the Me´dicis for Salto mortale, the Mondello for Il pianeta azzurro, the Grinzane Cavour for Testa d’argento, the Flaiano for Il fuoco greco, and the Viareggio for Le pietre volanti. Extensive travels to America, Western Europe, and Asia throughout his adult life. Divides his time between Rome and his farm on the outskirts of Orvieto. REBECCA WEST Selected Works Fiction La scoperta dell’alfabeto, 1963. Il serpente, 1966; as The Serpent, translated by William Weaver, 1968. Salto mortale, 1968; as What Is This Buzzing, Do You Hear It Too?, translated by William Weaver, 1969. Il protagonista, 1973.

Storie dell’anno Mille (with Tonino Guerra), 1973. Le rose imperiali, 1974. Mozziconi, 1975. Pinocchio con gli stivali, 1977. Storiette, 1977. Il pataffio, 1978. Dopo il pescecane, 1979. La storia e la gloria, 1979. Le galline pensierose, 1980. Diario di un sognatore, 1981. C’era una volta la citta` di Luni, 1982. Storiette tascabili, 1984. Il pianeta azzurro, 1986. Testa d’argento, 1988. I cani di Gerusalemme (with Fabio Carpi), 1988. Il fuoco greco, 1990. Le pietre volanti, 1992. Le maschere, 1995. La mia donna ideale, 1996. Itaca per sempre, 1997. Avventure, 1997. La superficie di Eliane, 1999. Il circolo di Granada, 2002.

Other Le parole abbandonate: Un repertorio dialettale emiliano, 1977. Cina Cina, 1985. Il viaggiatore sedentario, 1993. Che vergogna scrivere, 1996. Interviste impossibili, 1997. Citta` e dintorni, 2001. La composizione del sogno, 2002. Ti saluto filosofia, 2004.

Films Donne e soldati (with Antonio Marchi), 1955. Corrida, 1966.

Screenplays Il cappotto, dir. Alberto Lattuada, 1952. La lupa, dir. Alberto Lattuada, 1953. La spiaggia, dir. Alberto Lattuada, 1954. Dove vai tutta nuda, dir. Pasquale Festa Campanile, 1969. Come perdere una moglie e trovare un’ amante, dir. Pasquale Festa Campanile, 1978.

Further Reading Almansi, Guido, La ragion comica, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1986. Ballerini, Rosalaura, Malerba e la topografia del vuoto, Chieti: Vecchio Faggio, 1988. Cannon, JoAnn, Postmodern Italian Fiction: The Crisis of Reason in Calvino, Eco, Sciascia, Malerba, LondonToronto: Associated University Presses, 1989. Colonna, Marco, et al. (editors), Luigi Malerba, ManduriaBari-Rome: Lacaita Editore, 1994. Corti, Maria, Il viaggio testuale: Le ideologie e le strutture semiotiche, Turin: Einaudi, 1978. Corti, Maria, ‘‘Luigi Malerba: Una scomessa con il reale,’’ in Autografo, 13 (1988): 3–21. Gemelli, Monica, and Felice Piemontese (editors), L’invenzione della realta`: Conversazioni su letteratura e altro, Naples: Guida Editore, 1994. Guglielmi, Angelo, ‘‘Il serpente,’’ in Vero e Falso, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1968.

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LUIGI MALERBA (LUIGI BONARDI) Heyer-Caput, Margherita, Per una letteratura della riflessione: Elementi filosofico-scientifici nell’opera di Luigi Malerba, Berne-Stuttgart-Vienna: Edizioni Paul Haupt, 1994. Mauri, Paolo, Malerba, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1977. Muzzioli, Francesco, Malerba: La materialita` dell’immaginazione, Rome: Bagatto, 1988. Pedulla`, Walter, La letteratura del benessere, Rome: Bulzoni, 1973. Petrignani, Sandra, Fantasia e fantastico, Milan: Camunia, 1985.

Schneider, Marilyn, ‘‘To Know is to Eat: A Reading of Il serpente,’’ in Yale Italian Studies, 2 (Winter 1978): 71–84. Trevisan, Elisabetta, Violenza e immaginazione nella prosa di Luigi Malerba, New York-Ottawa-Toronto: Legas, 1996. West, Rebecca, ‘‘The Poetics of Plenitude: Malerba’s Diario di un sognatore,’’ in Italica, 3 (Autumn 1985): 201–213. West, Rebecca, ‘‘Come One, Come All: Malerba’s Diffuse Fictions,’’ in The Lion and The Unicorn, 10 (1986): 95–110.

MAN OF SMOKE See Il Codice di Perela` (Work by Aldo Palazzeschi)

THE MANDRAKE See La Mandragola (Work by Niccolo` Machiavelli)

GIANNOZZO MANETTI (1396–1459) Giannozzo Manetti was a Florentine merchant and diplomat and a prestigious Humanist of the early quattrocento. Renowned for his vast and eclectic culture, he made contributions chiefly in the fields of translation, oration, and ethical writing. He was the initiator of Hebrew studies, and his translations of the Psalms from the original text rather than from the Vulgate set the basis for the development of Humanist Biblical exegesis. A significant part of Manetti’s literary production consists of orations written during his political and diplomatic career in 1118

Florence between the 1430s and 1440s. Among the most significant ones, delivered in vernacular but published in Latin, are the orations to Siena and Venice, those to Alfonso of Aragon and Nicholas V, the Oratio ad Federicum imperatorem (Oration to the Emperor Frederick, 1452), and the funeral oration to Leonardo Bruni (1444), all of which show Manetti’s support of the oligarchy of the Florentine republic. His conservative political views rest on the idea that the earthly city should reflect heavenly order, and that only an efficiently

GIANNOZZO MANETTI organized government can guarantee the peace. Manetti extends to the practical realm the Humanist idea that if man was created in the image of God, through free will he ‘‘makes’’ himself in His likeness. Similarly, by applying the same concept to the city, man builds the earthly city in the image of the divine, and the arts are the instruments to realize this design. Thus, the Humanist notion that man is the ‘‘knot’’ tying Earth and Heaven finds in Manetti a political equivalent. While serving as a public official and ambassador of the Florentine republic, Manetti wrote historical works of Humanist inspiration such as De illustribus longaevis (On Illustrious Old Men, 1439), describing the lives of men of great longevity from biblical, pagan, and Christian sources, as well as the Vita Socratis et Senecae (Lives of Socrates and Seneca, 1440), and the Chronicon pistoriensis (History of Pistoia, 1446). Also notable are his biographies of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio written in 1440, in which Manetti abandons the binary model followed by Leonardo Bruni to include Boccaccio, whom he praises for having introduced the study of Greek to Italy. He is the first to bring together the ‘‘Three Florentine Crowns.’’ His biographies present ideal Humanist models and offer good illustration of Manetti’s style of composition, based on an accumulation of heterogeneous sources. Among Manetti’s literary works worthy of mention are his Dialogus consolatorius (Consoling Dialogue), on the death of his son Antonio, and the Dialogus in symposio (Dialogue at a Banquet, 1448). Set 100 years after the Decameron, the Dialogus in symposio discusses the moral implications of two tales, Bruni’s Latin translation of Boccaccio’s novella of Tancredi and Ghismonda (Decameron IV,1), and Bruni’s complementary story of Seleucus and Anthiocus, based on classical sources and written in vernacular. While Bruni combined these two stories to illustrate the moral superiority of classical over contemporary models from a multifaceted Humanist perspective, Manetti brings the dialogue back to the Augustinian model, where an arbiter evaluates two opposite views on a moral issue, thus submitting classical ethics to Christian doctrine. Manetti’s most famous work is the De dignitate et excellentia hominis (On the Dignity and Excellence of Man), written in 1452 and first printed in 1532. On the occasion of Manetti’s ambassadorship to Naples in 1452, King Alfonso of Aragon, probably dissatisfied with a previous work by his secretary and historian Bartolomeo Facio (ca. 1400–1457), asked him to write on the same topic. In the traditional genre of a response to Pope

Innocent III’s De contemptu mundi (On the Contempt of this World) of the late twelfth century, Manetti’s De dignitate et excellentia hominis illustrates better than any other contemporary treatise the Humanist idea of man as carrying on the divine work of Creation. Although it assembles a number of heterogeneous sources, from Lactantius to Cicero to Philo the Jew, the originality of De dignitate et excellentia hominis consists in the fact that the arts are considered the instrument through which man participates in perfecting divine Creation. Although the theology of incomplete creation is present in patristic exegesis, the role that Manetti attributes to art and humankind reveals his learned Humanist formation. The treatise was condemned by the Inquisition in 1584. In 1453, Pope Nicholas V nominated Manetti apostolic secretary and commissioned from him a new translation of the Bible. A pioneer in Hebrew studies and Biblical scholarship, from 1455 to 1458 he translated the Psalms and the New Testament and wrote his Apologeticus (Apologue) in defense of his philological method of translation. Manetti’s biblical exegesis relies on the application of philological textual criticism to the Scriptures. He argues that the biblical translator must seek the middle way between translation ad verbum (according to verbal expression) and ad sensum (according to the meaning). In 1455, Manetti wrote a biography of Pope Nicholas V, illustrating the pontiff’s Humanist views in redesigning Roman architecture and the Vatican Library. He collaborated with the pope on the library project by significantly contributing to the collections of Greek and Hebrew texts, illustrating in Adversus Iudeos et gentes pro catholica fide (Against Jewish and Pagans for the Catholic Faith, 1454) his belief that Judaic and pagan traditions are both valuable to Christianity. His translations also include Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Eudemian Ethics, and Magna Moralia.

Biography Born in Florence on 5 May 1396 to a Florentine family of bankers and merchants, Manetti remained in the mercantile profession all his life, but he also cultivated the studia humanitatis, studying Greek with Ambrogio Traversari and, from 1442, Hebrew with Immanuel Ben Abraham of San Miniato. His wealth and fame led to a diplomatic career in Florence and a career as apostolic secretary in Rome. A supporter of the Medici, served Florence as vicar of Pescia (1440), Scarperia (1452–1453), and as captain of Pistoia (1446–1447). Elected several 1119

GIANNOZZO MANETTI times in the most important councils of the commune, such as the Eight of Security (1440–1441) and the Ten of War (1453). His fame as a Humanist led the Florentines to send him as ambassador on diplomatic missions to popes Eugenius IV and Nicholas V (1441–1453), to King Alfonso of Aragon (1443–1451), and to Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, lord of Rimini (1448). Charged with heavy taxes, in 1450 accepted the offer of Pope Nicholas V to work on a new translation of the Bible. The hostility of powerful Florentines such as Luca Pitti and Niccolo` Soderini prevented his return to Florence after the death of Pope Nicholas V in 1455. Then moved to Naples, to the court of Alfonso of Aragon and, after his death in 1458, of his son Ferdinand. In this same year accepted appointment as apostolic secretary to the newly elected Pope Pius II. Died in Naples on 26 October 1459. SUSANNA BARSELLA Selected Works Collections Giannozzo Manetti: das Corpus der Orationes, edited by Heinz Willi Wittschier, Ko¨ln: Bo¨hlau, 1968. Biographical Writings, edited and translated by Stefano U. Baldassarri and Rolf Bagemihl, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003.

Historical Treatises De illustribus longaevis, 1439; edited by Hans Baron in The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny, 1955. Vita Socratis et Senecae, 1440; critical edition by Alfonso De Petris, 1979. Chronicon pistoriensis, 1446; edited by Ludovico A. Muratori, 1731.

Humanistic Treatises Dialogus consolatorius, 1438; edited by Alfonso De Petris, 1983.

Dialogus in symposio, 1448. De dignitate et excellentia hominis (1452), 1532; critical edition by Elizabeth Riley Leonard, 1975; as On the Dignity of Man, translated by Bernard Murchland in Two Views of Man, 1966. Adversus Iudeos et gentes pro catholica fide (1454); edited by Hans Baron in The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny, 1955. Apologeticus (1455–1458); edited by Alfonso De Pretis, 1981.

Biographies Specimen historiae litterariae florentinae saeculi decimitertii, ac decimiquarti sive vitae Dantis, Petrarchae ac Boccaccii (1440); first edition, 1747; edited by Stefano U. Baldassarri, 2003. De vita ac gestis Nicolai quinti summi Pontificis (1455); first edition, 1734; critical edition by Anna Modigliani, 2005.

Further Reading Badaloni, Nicola, ‘‘Filosofia della mente e filosofia delle arti in Giannozzo Manetti,’’ in Critica storica, 2 (1963): 395–450. Botley, Paul, Latin Translation in the Renaissance: The Theory and Practice of Leonardo Bruni, Giannozzo Manetti and Desiderius Erasmus, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Dro¨ge, Christopher, Giannozzo Manetti als Denker und Hebraist, Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1987. Gentile, Giovanni, Il pensiero italiano del Rinascimento, Florence: Sansoni, 1940. Marsh, David, ‘‘Boccaccio in the Quattrocento: Manetti’s Dialogus in Symposio,’’ in Renaissance Quarterly, 33, no. 3 (1980): 337–350. Smith, Christine, and Joseph O’Connor, ‘‘What Do Athens and Jerusalem Have to Do with Rome? Giannozzo Manetti on the Library of Nicholas V,’’ in Perspectives on Early Modern and Modern Intellectual History: Essays in Honor of Nancy Struever, edited by J. Marino and M.W. Schlitt, Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2001. Trinkaus, Charles, In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought, 2 vols., London: Constable, 1970.

GIUSEPPE MANFRIDI (1956–) Giuseppe Manfridi is the most published and represented playwright of his generation in Italy today. His writing skills have often won him participation as a screenwriter and actor in feature 1120

films, such as Ricky Tognazzi’s Vite strozzate (Stifled Lives, 1996), Simona Izzo’s I maniaci sentimentali (The Sentimental Maniacs, 1996) and Camere da letto (Bedrooms, 1997). He also wrote

GIUSEPPE MANFRIDI the Italian dialogue for Clerks by Kevin Smith, Lisbon Story by Wim Wenders, and Leaving Las Vegas by Mike Figgis. Manfridi employs prosaic forms in a sophisticated metric structure, modulating his tempos in long and lyrical monologues, as in Vis a vis (produced in 2002), a terrible curse against God, commissioned by stage director Walter Manfre`. With astonishing adaptability, in Giacomo il prepotente (Giacomo, the Arrogant, 1989), commissioned in 1987 by the Compagnia Stabile di Genova for the 150th anniversary of Leopardi’s death and directed by Piero Maccarinelli, he revives the ceremonial language of the early nineteenth century to stage the last days of Giacomo Leopardi, while he is dying at Torre del Greco. In the first and third acts, the poet trails stench from his decaying body and dirty linen. In Act II, set back in Recanati, Leopardi’s birth town, his sister Paolina confronts her maid Lucella who was sent over by Giacomo to take away his last writings. The linguistic and social distance between the two women is apparent: Paolina (who is so obsessively drawn to her brother that she masturbates on stage) speaks a controlled, refined Italian, in sharp contrast with the vernacular of the sanguine servant. All the while, Paolina’s and Giacomo’s domineering mother looms in the background. The competitive humanity gravitating around the world of popular sport is a theme dear to the playwright. Manfridi depicts the obsession of groups at the fringe of society, where the boundaries between petit-bourgeois and proletarian classes disturbingly blur. In Teppisti! (Vandals!, 1996), written in hendecasyllables, a couple of young football fans are quickly pulled into the infectious violence of the stadium. In Ultra` (Hooligans, 1996), directed by Sergio Rubini in 1985, a young man from the city slums hears on TV that his football idol will be transferred to another team. He then calls the television station to express his disappointment. He protests in slang and curses, and is soon ignored by the program host. Manfridi’s female characters are affected by neurotic obsessions and psychological frailties. In Anima bianca (White Soul), which premiered in Rome in 1986 under the direction of Maccarinelli, Manfridi limits the play’s vocabulary to 350 words. The linguistic quiver of one of the characters, the masseur, wields power over Betta, the protagonist, who knows only 300 words and therefore is highly limited in her speech. In Corpo d’altri (Someone Else’s Body, 1992), the widow of an admiral (who died of cancer of the throat) insists on smoking his

pipe and tells a blind woman of her disturbing identification with her late husband. In this play, the two women are traveling on a ship reminiscent of T. S. Eliot’s ghostly salons. Manfridi draws from classic characters as well: grieving shadows possessed by the fire of vengeance as in Elettra (Elektra, 1993); or the frantic anarchist dominated by Rodin in La sposa di Parigi (The Parisian Bride, 1993), where the bride is Camille Claudel; and Beatrice Cenci in the morbid L. Cenci (1993). In this courtroom play, as though materializing out of Gothic and Artaudian reveries, Beatrice is introduced by her stepmother Lucrezia, whose mysterious death is at center stage. But pathologies and neuroses affect male characters as well. In Ti amo, Maria! (I Love You, Maria!, 1990), a former lover walls off his beloved in a bizarre space by an active elevator. The lost woman is confined to listening to the up and down motion, until the plot reaches the suicidal ending of the protagonist. And in Zozo`s (Zozo`s, 1994), where Manfridi cites Arthur Copi and Joe Orton, a young man literally stuck in coitus with a complaisant lady finds out she is his mother, and, in delirium, ends up suffocating her. This play premiered in Rome in 1989 with Carlo Delle Piane and Anna Bonaiuto in the main roles, and was staged in London under the direction of Peter Hall in 2000. No less remarkable is Manfridi’s work for the radio. In addition to having hosted several classical music programs, he produced Storie del ghetto di Venezia (Stories of the Ghetto in Venice, 1988), a six-part documentary; and Gli italiani di Shakespeare (The Shakespeare Italians), broadcast by RadioTre in 1995. Manfridi is not only a skilled actor—his monologue Il fazzoletto di Dostoevskij (The Dostoevskji’s Handkerchief) opened in July 2003 at the Todi Festival with him in the title role—but also a translator and adaptor for the most advanced European theatrical writing. He has translated Steven Berkoff, in collaboration with Carlotta Clerici.

Biography Born in Rome, 7 March 1956. Received a degree in humanities at the University of Rome with a thesis on Angelo Maria Ripellino, 1979; married Carlotta Clerici, daughter of the well-known sports journalist Gianni Clerici, 1990; had two children, Lorenzo (1999) and Gabriele (2001); divorced, 1993; married Paola Conte, 1998; won several awards, including the IDI (Istituto del Dramma Italiano) for Anima Bianca, 1983; the Taormina Arte award 1121

GIUSEPPE MANFRIDI and IDI for Giacomo, il prepotente, 1989; the Riccione-Ater Paolo Bignami for Ti amo, Maria!, 1989. In 2002, Manfridi and other playwrights, including Edoardo Erba, Raffaella Battaglini, Alessandro Trigona Occhipinti, founded the Teatro Civile in Rome. PAOLO PUPPA Selected Works Collections Teatro dell’eccesso. Tre commedie degli anni Novanta: Ti amo, Maria!, Cerimonie per un addio, Zozo`s, Rome: Gremese, 1990.

Plays Giacomo il prepotente, 1989. Zozo`s, 1990; as Cuckoos, translated by Colin Teevan, 2000. Stringiti a me stringimi a te, 1990. Corpo d’altri, 1992. Elettra, L. Cenci, La sposa di Parigi, 1993. Teppisti! - Ultra`, 1996. I venexiani: Il giovane Casanova e la storia di MM, 2003.

Translations Steven Berkoff, Alla greca, Decadenze, 1991 (with Carlotta Clerici).

Steven Berkoff, Il Natale di Harry, Acapulco, East-West, 1993 (with Carlotta Clerici).

Further Reading Ariani, Marco, and Giorgio Taffon, Scritture per la scena, Rome: Carocci, 2001. D’Achille, Paolo, Appunti sulla lingua del teatro italiano dal dopoguerra a oggi: Brusati, Fabbri, Manfridi, Rome: Aracne, 2002. De Matteis, Tiberia, Autori in scena: Sei drammaturgie italiane contemporanee, Rome: Bulzoni, 2004. Di Giammarco, Rodolfo (editor), ‘‘Manfridi in parole,’’ in G. Manfridi, Teatro dell’eccesso. Tre commedie degli anni Novanta: Ti amo, Maria!, Cerimonie per un addio, Zozo`s, Rome: Gremese, 1990. Giovanardi, Claudio, ‘‘Manfridi, il teatro dell’anarchia,’’ in G. Manfridi, L. Cenci, Palermo: Teatro Stabile di Palermo, 2001. Puppa, Paolo, Preface to G. Manfridi, Corpo d’altri, Milan: Ricordi, 1992. Puppa, Paolo, Il teatro dei testi: La drammaturgia italiana nel Novecento, Turin: Utet, 2003. Puppa, Paolo, ‘‘Per una scena prepotente,’’ in G. Manfridi, Giacomo, il prepotente, Bologna: Clueb, 2003. Quadri, Franco, ‘‘Tre donne in furore tra il linguaggio e la storia,’’ in G. Manfridi, Elettra. L. Cenci. La sposa di Parigi, Milan: Ricordi, 1993. Ronfani, Ugo, Preface to G. Manfridi, Stringiti a me stringimi a te, Milan: Ricordi, 1990. Ronfani, Ugo, La questione teatrale, Milan: Ricordi, 1992. Tognazzi, Ricky, Preface to G. Manfridi, Teppisti!–Ultra`, Milan: Ricordi, 1996.

GIORGIO MANGANELLI (1922–1990) Giorgio Manganelli is, along with Carlo Emilio Gadda and Alberto Arbasino, the central figure of one of the most prodigious and complex linguistic adventures of Italian literature in the second half of the twentieth century. The best definition is perhaps the one given by Alfredo Giuliani, who considers him a ‘‘scalpitante poeta della prosa’’ (pounding poet of prose) (Allegorie del teologo burlone, 1988). His work, resistant to any genre distinction, is a vast metaphoric space governed by the law of untruth, that is, of artifice and allegory. His narrations are produced by endless lexical series, collected and arranged in a plurality of texts in which the words are always, as Mattia Cavadini has written, ‘‘generators of possibilities, never of 1122

truth’’ (La luce nera, 1997). Manganelli’s oeuvre is like a huge linguistic machine, in which the author deploys a superb rhetorical inventiveness and literature becomes the key to explore the abyss, the limits of creation, and the boundaries of finitude. His first work, Hilarotragoedia (Hilarotragedy), completed in January 1961 but published only in 1964, centers on the themes of death and suicide. With great formal rigor and almost without emotion, Manganelli writes what Giuliani has defined a ‘‘capziosa autobiografia in forma di trattatello blasfemo’’ (captious autobiography in the form of a little blasphemous treatise) (Allegorie del teologo burlone, 1988). He plays with language so as to multiply in the reader the effects of disconcertment

GIORGIO MANGANELLI and fear. The genre of the treatise, with its strict humanistic tradition, is here contaminated by a thoughtful irony, which is absolutely new and personal. Amidst premises, glosses, and notes, as well as narrative passages, the author compiles a theoretical-practical handbook on the different definitions of death and on the classification of anxieties, especially as a result of his sessions of analysis with the Jungian therapist Ernest Bernhard. The exhibited practical aim of the work, its concrete use for the reader, underlines the exemplary function that writing should assume, in Manganelli’s view, when it reflects the events of an individual outside the egotistic deceits of the self. Indeed, the book opens with the individual’s farewell to the world and moves on in a sort of descent to Hell, with substantial quotations from Dante, in a progressive disintegration of the body. The conclusive image of the universe is that of a chasm in which the sacrificial nature of each destiny can be perceived. The infernal theme would be taken up again 21 years later in Dall’inferno (From Hell, 1985), in which Manganelli, a translator of Poe and a reader of Maturin and De Quincey, sharpens his visions by using all the rhetorical devices of the fantastic genre. This results in the final symbolic vision of a journey that leads, after trials and difficulties, to perfect contemplation and fuller meaningfulness. Meanwhile, in 1969 Manganelli published Nuovo commento (New Commentary), a sarcastic farewell to universal knowledge. In it, the erudite note-taker is confined by the very structure he would like to lay bare in the labyrinth of the text. But the commentary in this text is also a device for highlighting the contradictions of every form of institution, and therefore, through all that it can dismantle and reveal, it hints at a liberation from tensions and conflicts in language and the word. An important phenomenon of this period is that of the rewritings of classic texts, such as Arbasino’s SuperEliogabalo (Super-Helogabalus, 1969), Edoardo Sanguineti’s Il giuoco del Satyricon (The Satyricon Game, 1970), and Luca Ronconi’s version of Orlando Furioso (1969). Manganelli’s contribution is characterized by a personal loyalty to rhetoric as an exercise rather than a set of rules, with the aim of conscientiously trying out all the plausible directions that the reader will then be asked to share in the composition of the text. Among several works of this kind, the rewriting of Carlo Collodi’s masterpiece as Pinocchio: un libro parallelo (Pinocchio: a Parallel Book, 1977) is particularly important. Here Manganelli succeeds in allowing the topography of the original novel to produce a never-ending

challenge between the protagonist’s humanity and the metamorphic and nocturnal vocation of the matter of which the puppet is made. Manganelli is also the author of short satirical articles that would eventually be collected in Lunario dell’orfano sannita (Almanac of the Samnite Orphan, 1973), in which the reality of mass society and the places of civic life are irremediably dissected through the lens of disenchantment, and unexpected archaic remnants are traced in an open comical contrast with modernity. All along, Manganelli proves to be a skeptical observer, aware of the relationships that are necessary to someone who attacks the institutions and the consolidated hierarchies. In the last volume published during his lifetime, Encomio del tiranno (In Praise of the Tyrant, 1990), he remains loyal to a kind of literature that shows off its artificial and false nature. Between October 1975 and February 1976 Manganelli traveled to India on behalf of the magazine Il Mondo. The resulting reportage, collected posthumously in Esperimento con l’India (Experiment with India, 1992), is a crucial pilgrimage, also from the personal point of view, in which the writer discovered those primary symbols that are to be found in his later works. The following year he published Sconclusione (Disconclusion, 1976). Here, the theme of catastrophe is accompanied by that of the circle, which refers to the victory over formlessness and chaos, in a dense conversion to gnostic language and with, at the centre of the book, the theme of light and its philosophical implications. The image of the catastrophic rains, depicted in the last few pages, seems to carry out a design that, however, does not appear redemptive, as the flow of incessant prose is made up of a series of hypotheses, without even a punctuation mark. With Centuria. Cento piccoli romanzi fiume (One Hundred Ouroboric Novels, 1979), Manganelli delivers a number of fantastic short stories, almost the preliminary stage of metanovels, which share the same length and a common motive: the narration of a heroic itinerary leading, after fatal trials, flights, and chases, to transformation and to the attainment of regality, which, in esoteric thought, is completeness and the end of the metamorphoses. As critics have often stressed, Manganelli’s reader is asked to become an instrument of language, so that author and reader can perform together the obscure task toward the place of mystery and the sacred, in which pure and impure can no longer be distinguished. Among the works published posthumously, La palude definitiva (The Last Marsh, 1991) is one of 1123

GIORGIO MANGANELLI the most remarkable in Manganelli’s oeuvre as a whole. In it, a slanderous accusation forces the protagonist to flee, on the back of an improbable horse, toward the centre of an immense marsh. The narration of the extremely detailed observation of the marsh consolidates in the narrating subject the idea that he is part of a dyarchy, whose achievement represents his final damnation. Language is all that is left to the reader’s final contemplation, as Giorgio Agamben has suggested, pointing to a real political logic of the Baroque in Manganelli. Since ‘‘l’essere e` sempre l’essere della lingua, cosı` la lingua e`, per Manganelli, sempre la lingua dell’essere sempre la lingua dell’essere’’ (being is always the being of language, then language is, for Manganelli, always the language of being), in a vortex in which one can no longer distinguish between spirit and matter, nature and history, sleep and waking (‘‘Araldica e politica,’’ 2000). Manganelli’s work as literary critic is welldocumented in La letteratura come menzogna (Literature as Lie, 1967), in which the author carries out a series of personal readings, according to what Giulio Ferroni has called ‘‘a violently unilateral criticism’’ (Giorgio Manganelli, 1988). Supported only by the resources of language, this strategy is thus free from any objectifying and totalizing obsession, and is close to the critical experience of Edmund Wilson or William Empson (his admitted masters, albeit so very different from one another) but also counterpointed by the careful reading of Vladimir Nabokov. This critical enterprise pays particular attention to the structures and the devices with which texts are composed, to their explicit dynamics and underground developments, according to the lesson of Viktor Shklovsky and his school. But beyond the critical exercise, one can perceive an idea of literature and a practice of reading as a pursuit of the solution to conflicts, after the descent into darkness and the experience of the opposite and nocturnal side of matter, to which literature and reading must always lead. For Manganelli, therefore, literature is neither a treatment nor a cure, but a lie, which opposes the lies without music and enigmas of common sense and of the ordinary. It is a rage and a wound that speaks of the repressed and which, through language, is partially able to compensate for it.

Biography Born on 15 November 1922 in Milan. Degree in political sciences at the University of Pavia, 1124

November 1945, with the dissertation Contributo critico allo studio delle dottrine politiche del ’600. Taught high school for a few years. Left Milan for Rome in 1953, where he taught English literature at the university until 1971. Joined the meetings of Gruppo 63. Consultant with the publishers Einaudi, Mondadori and Adelphi and contributor to various newspapers and magazines such as Tempo presente, Il Giorno, Il Mondo, L’Espresso, La Stampa, Il corriere della sera, F.M.R., and Il Messaggero. Awarded the Viareggio prize, 1978. Died in Rome on 28 May 1990. STEFANO TOMASSINI See also: Neo-Avant-Garde Selected Works Fiction Hilarotragoedia, 1964. Nuovo commento, 1969. Agli de`i ulteriori, 1972. Sconclusione, 1976. Pinocchio: un libro parallelo, 1977. Centuria. Cento piccoli romanzi fiume, 1979; as One Hundred Ouroboric Novels, translated by Henry Martin, 2005. Amore, 1981. Discorso dell’ombra e dello stemma, o del lettore e dello scrittore considerati come dementi, 1982. Dall’inferno, 1985. Tutti gli errori, 1986; as All the Errors, translated by Henry Martin, 1990. Rumori o voci, 1987. Encomio del tiranno. Scritto all’unico scopo di fare dei soldi, 1990. La palude definitiva, edited by Ebe Flamini, 1991. Il presepio, edited by Ebe Flamini, 1992. La notte, edited by Salvatore S. Nigro, 1996.

Plays A e B, 1975. Il personaggio, edited by Luca Scarlini, 2002. Tragedie da leggere. Tutto il teatro, edited by Luca Scarlini, 2005.

Critical Essays La letteratura come menzogna, 1967. Lunario dell’orfano sannita, 1973. Angosce di stile, 1981. Laboriose inezie, 1986. Salons, 1986. Improvvisi per macchina da scrivere, 1989. Il rumore sottile della prosa, 1994. Contributo critico allo studio delle dottrine politiche del ’600 italiano, edited by Paolo Napoli, 1999. De America: Saggi e divagazioni sulla cultura statunitense, edited by Luca Scarlini, 1999. Il vescovo e il ciarlatano. Inconscio, casi clinici, psicologia del profondo. Scritti 1969–1987, edited by Emanuele Trevi, 2001.

MANNERISM AND BAROQUE UFO e altri oggetti non identificati: 1972–1990, edited by Graziella Pulce, 2003.

Travel Writing Cina e altri orienti, 1974. Esperimento con l’India, edited by Ebe Flamini, 1992.

Other Antologia privata, 1989. La penombra mentale: Interviste e conversazioni 1965–1990, edited by Roberto Deidier, 2001.

Further Reading Agamben, Giorgio, ‘‘Araldica e politica,’’ in Le foglie messaggere: Scritti in onore di Giorgio Manganelli, edited by Viola Papetti, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 2000. Barilli, Renato, La neoavanguardia italiana: dalla nascita del ‘‘Verri’’ alla fine di ‘‘Quindici,’’ Bologna: Il Mulino, 1995. Bricchi, Mariarosa, Manganelli e la menzogna, Novara: Interlinea, 2002.

Cavadini, Mattia, La luce nera: teoria e prassi nella scrittura di Giorgio Manganelli, Milan: Bompiani, 1997. Ferroni, Giulio, ‘‘Giorgio Manganelli,’’ in Letteratura Italiana. I Contemporanei, vol. 9, Milan: Marzorati, 1988. Galliano, Gianfranco, Letteratura e cultura in Giorgio Manganelli, Florence: Firenze Libri, 1986. Giuliani, Alfredo, ‘‘Allegorie del teologo burlone,’’ in Letteratura Italiana. I Contemporanei, vol. 9, Milan: Marzorati, 1988. Lucente, Gregory L., Beautiful Fables: Self-consciousness in Italian Narrative from Manzoni to Calvino, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986. Menechella, Graziella, Il felice vanverare: ironia e parodia nell’opera narrativa di Giorgio Manganelli, Ravenna: Longo, 2002. Pulce, Graziella, Bibliografia degli scritti di Giorgio Manganelli, Florence: Titivillus; Grosseto: Biblioteca Comunale Chelliana, 1996. Pulce, Graziella, Giorgio Manganelli: figure e sistema, Grassina: Le Monnier universita`, 2004. Terni, Paolo, Giorgio Manganelli, ascoltatore maniacale, Palermo: Sellerio, 2001.

MANNERISM AND BAROQUE The age of Italian mannerist and Baroque literature has no precise beginning nor end date. It is usually thought to have its origin in the years around the Sack of Rome in 1527 that concluded the High Renaissance, and to have endured into the late decades of the seventeenth century. After 1527, the cinquecento was marked by the final phase of the wars of Italy, the consolidation of Spanish power on the peninsula, the emergence of the system of old regime absolutist states, a succession of grave agricultural, industrial, financial, and fiscal crises, and the establishment of the Counter-Reformation. Moreover, cultural life in Italy was deeply affected by the expansion of European trade networks, propelled by the forces of colonialism and imperialism to the rest of the globe, as well as by the growing challenge from the Ottoman Turks in the Mediterranean. The seicento saw the continuation—punctuated by wars and civil unrest—of the old regime system, despite steadily increasing cultural internationalization, the dramatic weakening of Spanish hegemony and the rise of French influence, continuous military pressure from the expanding Ottoman Empire, and the definitive economic marginalization of the early modern Italian states within Europe.

Today the history, the significance, and even the existence of mannerism or of the Baroque as a literary and aesthetic movement remain open to debate among scholars. The term ‘‘maniera’’ was widely used, from the second half of the sixteenth century on, to indicate aesthetic products that deviated from the classicizing tenets of the High Renaissance. But exactly what this meant was, and is, a matter of dispute. It seems preferable to consider mannerism and Baroque as related to aesthetic aspects of the same early modern cultural trajectory of the old regime, while recognizing that there were also other divergent contemporary aesthetic trends. In the field of literature, what is certain is that new and compelling literary paradigms arose in Italy in the sixteenth century in response to changing conditions of literary production, ranging from (among others) the growth of the absolutist courts to the reconstitution of the Roman Inquisition to the rapid development of the publishing industry. Without a doubt early modern Italy exported a vastly greater number of cultural products, including literary works, to the rest of Europe than ever before. Although by the early 1600s no longer in the European vanguard, 1125

MANNERISM AND BAROQUE Italy’s literary traditions occupied a central and highly influential position well into the century. Italian cultural products, including literature, set the international standard of the age because their values—thanks to the prestigious achievements of antiquity and the Renaissance—were identified across Europe with those of culture itself. Humanism was gradually replaced in the cinquecento by a new international literary culture— which may be called ‘‘classicism’’—that actively revised, recirculated, and recycled an encyclopedic repertory of ancient and Renaissance texts, mythologies, epigrams, figures, symbols, codes, topoi, and the like. With a seemingly infinite number of potential themes and forms from which to work, classicism appeared able to interpret the experience of the present in all of its complexity. Emblem literature, one of the exemplary products of classicism, is—in its syncretic blend of image and text, antiquity and modernity—in this sense indicative of a far larger phenomenon. The inexhaustible textual network of classicism merged poetry, drama, narrative fiction, and literary theory into a universe of writing that would at a later date come to be known as ‘‘literature.’’ The repertory of classicism formed, in short, the cultural capital of early modernity. To write and to read meant to take possession of this repertory, to probe its limits and to reuse it creatively, thus generating fresh value for it. This was far from a static process, and could produce surprising results in Neo-Latin or in the vernacular: Indeed, much Baroque literature was devoted to corroding, warping, and distorting the classicist repertory to the breaking point. Nevertheless, its presence conferred continuity to the literary culture of Italy over a very long period of time. The early modern metamorphosis of Humanism into classicism had a second crucial consequence. After the long dominance of literary and textual models, visual and musical arts became the most important paradigms of aesthetic activity. The shift toward visual and musical modes of representation in Italy, with their inherent sensuality, transformed Italian literature as well between the cinquecento and seicento. Literary works such as Giovanbattista Marino’s Adone (Adonis, 1623) attempted to replicate by linguistic means the spectacular new visual and aural effects of the other arts. Countless lyrics were composed in order to be set to music, and of course the newly invented opera depended upon poetic texts in the form of the libretto. The wide public appeal of early modern theater was due in no small part to its visual and aural components, allowing texts to be ‘‘seen’’ and ‘‘heard.’’ 1126

Formerly restricted to courts or festivals, the theater developed in several new directions in the sixteenth century in Italy. Professional traveling theater troupes first appeared by 1545, and the first professional theaters were built not long afterward. Humanist comedies imitating those of antiquity (commedia erudita) continued to be popular, but plays in this genre were given progressively more complex plots, often involving a search for identity, such as identical twins separated by fate at birth and the like. These ranged from Pietro Aretino’s Il marescalco (The Stablemaster, 1533) and Gl’ingannati (The Deceived, 1537), written in Siena by members of the Accademia degli Intronati in 1531, to Giordano Bruno’s Il candelaio (The Candle-bearer, 1582) and Giovanni Battista della Porta’s La fantesca (The Maid, 1592). Triple plots with numerous complications became increasingly common in comedies of this sort, such as Annibale Caro’s Gli straccioni (The Scruffy Scoundrels, 1582), written in 1544, calling into question the importance of the ‘‘unity of action’’ for such works. In the meantime, popular profane comic theater in a variety of dialects began to become codified as commedia dell’arte. At first limited chiefly to the carnival season, the Arte plays were improvised on the spot by actors working with a rudimentary script (canovaccio) relying on temporary stages, stock characters and repartees, sight gags and stunts, comic masks, and slapstick routines. Each mask represented a different and readily identifiable set of regional, socioeconomic, and psychological traits: Harlequin the servant-clown was from Bergamo, the miserly old paterfamilias Pantaloon was from Venice, the pedantic Doctor Graziano was from Bologna, and so on. Some actresses, such as the famed Isabella Andreini of the Compagnia de’ Gelosi, were allowed to take the stage in the commedia dell’arte. Comedy was certainly not the only genre, however, to find favor with the public. Of the many theatrical experiments with pastoral, the most successful by far were Torquato Tasso’s Aminta (1573) and Giovan Battista Guarini’s equally renowned Il pastor fido (The Faithful Shepherd, 1590), both of which set the standard for all of Europe, and which were the only two Italian dramas of the age to attain the universality of Shakespeare, Caldero´n, or Molie`re. Finally, Italy witnessed in these years a renewed interest in tragedy—with works such as Giovan Battista Giraldi Cinzio’s Orbecche (1543), Sperone Speroni’s Canace (1546), and Tasso’s Il re Torrismondo (King Torrismondo, 1587)—which would later have important resonances for other European national theatrical traditions.

MANNERISM AND BAROQUE The comic theater continued to develop in the seventeenth century in accordance with the new Baroque aesthetic of wonder (meraviglia). Spectators, once they had paid to enter professionally run theaters, found familiar social hierarchies weakened or gone: The only important distinction was between performers and public. The experience of theatergoing thus became a discovery of an unknown ‘‘other’’ social world. The most prominent seventeenth-century Italian comic playwright, Giovan Battista Andreini, wrote a series of dazzling ‘‘new comedies’’ (commedie nuove) for his troupe, the Compagnia dei Fedeli, pushing theatrical concepts to extremes of illusionism in such works as Amor nello specchio (Love in the Mirror, 1622)— starring his company’s two leading actresses, Virginia Ramponi and Virginia Rotari, as lovers—and Le due comedie in comedia (The Two Comedies within the Comedy, 1623), featuring a double play-within-a-play. New ‘‘Arte’’ masks and zany stock plots appeared in the course of the seicento, and highly advanced stage technologies and theatrical designs were developed throughout the peninsula. The last part of the century, however, saw the appeal of the ‘‘Arte’’ diminish for the paying public, although troupes of Italian actors continued to be invited to perform abroad. Carlo Maria Maggi made a case against the ‘‘Arte’’ with his comedies, in which he exclusively used his native Milanese dialect to enhance the work’s reality-effect, rather than cultivate the extreme artificiality of earlier Baroque comic theater. Serious theater—influenced by developments in Spain during its cultural Siglo de Oro—also flourished, with writers such as Giovanni Andrea Cicognini embracing the new technology and aesthetic of extreme theatrical spectacle. Tragedies such as Federico della Valle’s Iudit, published in 1627 but written toward the beginning of the century, and Carlo de’ Dottori’s Aristodemo (1657), were among the finest to appear in Italy before the late eighteenth century, but had only limited success with the public. Petrarchan lyric poetry was practiced far and wide in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Under the influence of Bembo’s theory and practice, collections of Petrarchan sonnets offered a set of normative social, moral, and even spiritual ideals for aristocrats, courtiers, and those who aspired to their standards. Petrarchini, or pocket editions of Petrarchan sonnets, were commonplace throughout the age. Despite geographical and linguistic differences, Giovanni della Casa, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Vittoria Colonna, and Gaspara Stampa were among the many who produced

collections of Petrarchan poetry. But this was not the only direction for lyric verse. Tasso’s output of lyric poetry, including madrigals, sonnets, odes, and other encomiastic verse published between 1567 and 1593, while drawing on and revising the Petrarchan tradition, explored the growing bond between poem and song. Marino’s Rime appeared in 1602, and his La Lira (The Lyre) was published between 1608 and 1614, founding the lyric tradition of baroque ‘‘wit’’ or ‘‘conceit’’ in Italy to which many poets subsequently subscribed, such as Tommaso Stigliani (1573–1651) and Ciro di Pers (1599– 1663). Among those who were not followers of Marino’s worldly and sensual work, two must be mentioned: Gabriello Chiabrera, a tireless and influential experimenter with metrics and musicality, and the imprisoned philosopher Tommaso Campanella, who published his path-breaking collection of sonnets, odes, elegies, and canzoni in 1622 under the pseudonym of Settimontano Squilla. The development of the epic took at least two divergent paths in early modern Italy after 1527. One was the continuing popularity, influenced by Ludovico Ariosto, of the chivalric romance (including mock-epic parodies of it). The other was the ‘‘heroic’’ epic, whose most original proponent was Tasso. His Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem Delivered, 1580) was the most important poetic text to appear in Italy in the second half of the sixteenth century, and a great success across Europe. Tasso was the pivotal figure linking the earlier and later literary practices of Old Regime Italy. A gifted poet, he was also one of the most acute critical minds of the century, and his works on poetics represent one of the finest achievements of cinquecento literary criticism. However, he was drawn to chivalric and narrative verse as well, and after various test runs he completed and published his masterpiece while still imprisoned in Ferrara. Although his poem tells the story of the conquest of Jerusalem by the Crusaders in 1099, the extreme linguistic, psychological, and ideological tensions in the text generate a density and complexity that make impossible any univocal orthodox reading. Indeed, the Gerusalemme liberata seems quite close—in its labyrinthine portrayal of a wholly contradictory and undecipherable reality—to the modern novel. Tasso’s epic signals a definitive rupture with the literary tradition of the Renaissance and looks forward to the innovations of the seventeenth century and beyond. Marino’s gigantic, controversial, and highly influential ‘‘epic’’ poem Adone looms over the rest of the seicento. This ‘‘poem of peace’’ narrates the love of Venus for 1127

MANNERISM AND BAROQUE the antihero Adonis through a dizzying—and virtually plotless—whirl of analogies, digressions, descriptions, images, motifs, allusions, metaphors, and the like, celebrating the delights of the senses in pointed opposition to the chivalric poetic tradition. In deconstructing the epic, Marino’s poem also anticipates the development of new narrative forms such as the novel. Many kinds of narrative prose, such as the literary fairy tale, the autobiography, and the novel, did in fact first appear in the early modern period. The Neapolitan courtier Giovan Battista Basile authored the Cunto de li cunti (The Tale of Tales), published posthumously in 1634–1636, the first collection of literary fairy tales in Europe. Written in vivid Neapolitan dialect, its 50 tales recount for the first time the adventures of many of the classic fairy tale characters later to become known to the European reading public as Cinderella, Puss ’n Boots, Rapunzel and so on. In seventeenth-century Venice, the novel flourished in the circles of the Accademia degli Incogniti, represented by writers such as Ferrante Pallavicino (1616–1644), Giovan Francesco Loredan (1606–1661), Francesco Pona (1595–1655), Antonio Rocco (1596–1653), and Girolamo Brusoni (ca. 1614–ca. 1686), and the successful novelists of Genoa (the other center of novel production) included Anton Giulio Brignole Sale (1605–1665) and Giovanni Ambrogio Marini (1594–1650). The artist Benvenuto Cellini and the physicianphilosopher Gerolamo Cardano (1501–1576) were among the first to write their autobiographies, offering a blend of fact and fiction as seamless as that found in those of our own era. Other prose genres, such as the novella and the dialogue, evolved in step with the aesthetics of the age. Publishers took the ancient prose form of the letter and transformed it into a newly marketable product by printing collections of letters by famous writers: Aretino (1538), Bembo (1548), Tasso (1588), and Marino (posthumously, 1627) were among those whose letters were issued in volumes. The vogue for Tacitus and Seneca inspired many in the seicento to adopt a tersely laconic prose that was an antidote to flowery Ciceronianism and Marinism. Among others, the Bolognese noble Virgilio Malvezzi (1595–1654) was known across Europe for the concise vigor of his writing, as well as his acute analyses of contemporary social and political life. Galileo Galilei, the Florentine scientist, penned the great prose dialogue entitled Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo (Dialogue of the Two World Systems, 1632) and the sparkling Il Saggiatore (The Assayer, 1623). 1128

The art of treatise-writing was practiced from antiquity onward. With the progressive penetration of Italian culture by print technology in the sixteenth century, fresh impetus was given to this art. New markets and new publics were discovered by publishers and authors for works—ranging from the erudite to the popular—on a seemingly infinite variety of subjects, from botany to human sexuality to voyages of discovery. Among the most influential Italian treatises of the age were those dealing with good manners, in particular Baldessarre Castiglione’s Il Libro del Cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier, 1528), Giovanni della Casa’s Galateo (1558), and Stefano Guazzo’s La civil conversazione (The Civil Conversation, 1574). These were so widely translated and reprinted across the continent that they can be considered among the very first pan-European books. The language of politeness and manners (buona creanza) was defined by Castiglione, della Casa, and Guazzo for several successive generations of European (and American) elites. With the ‘‘rediscovery’’ of Aristotle’s Poetics toward mid-cinquecento, literary criticism and theory underwent a boom. As print culture expanded and previously unknown experimental forms of writing began to appear, such as tragicomedy, critics and theorists expended more and more energy on the establishment of rules for each genre. Heated literary debates took place in universities and academies, as well as in print. Ludovico Castelvetro’s commentary on the Poetics, Poetica d’Aristotele vulgarizzata e sposta (Aristotle’s Poetics Translated and Explained, 1570), which would become the authoritative source of the doctrine of the unity of time, place, and action, was the single most important critical work of mannerism, but others—such as Giovan Battista Giraldi Cinzio— also made significant contributions to the field. The key concepts of the Baroque aesthetic, such as ‘‘conceit’’ (concetto), ‘‘wit’’ (acutezza, ingegno), and ‘‘wonder’’ (meraviglia), were not fully developed in seicento literary theory until the publication of Emanuele Tesauro’s epochal Il Cannocchiale aristotelico (The Aristotelian Spyglass) in 1654. This extraordinary treatise—inspired by the textual machine of Marino’s Adone and the work of the brilliant Spanish moralist Baltasar Gracia´n—developed a theory of metaphor as a universal language of images and as a supreme intellectual act, at once an artifice and an epistemologically privileged mode of access to truth. Although the locus of political and social power, the old regime courts were not the only place in

MANNERISM AND BAROQUE which cultural interchange occurred in Italy. Starting in the middle years of the cinquecento, a large number of academies were founded across the peninsula, providing places in which new cultural, literary, and artistic ideas and practices could be discussed by the elites. Members’ works in verse and prose were subjected to (often extensive) criticism and revision by fellow academics, and debates on literary themes and topics were common. In Venice, the libertine Accademia degli Incogniti, one of the cornerstones of the Republic of Letters in the central decades of the seventeenth century, had a membership list that read like a ‘‘who’s who’’ of contemporary writers and intellectuals, including prestigious foreign intellectuals. In Florence, the Accademia della Crusca produced in 1612 the first modern dictionary of a European language, the Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca. Many other academies were far more modest, but the Italian fashion soon spread throughout Europe, leading to the foundation of (among others) the Acade´mie Franc¸aise in Paris (1634) and the Royal Society in London (1660). Thus the institutions of mannerist and Baroque Italy affected the development of culture and science in Europe far beyond the end of the seventeenth century and deep into modernity itself. JON SNYDER Further Reading Andrews, Richard, Scripts and Scenarios: The Performance of Comedy in Renaissance Italy, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Battistini, Andrea, Il Barocco: cultura, miti, immagini, Rome: Salerno, 2000. Blanco, Mercedes, Les Rhe´toriques de la pointe: Baltasar Gracia´n et le conceptisme en Europe, Gene`ve: Slatkine, 1992. Bolzoni, Lina, La stanza della memoria: modelli letterari e iconografi dell’eta` della stampa, Turin: Einaudi, 1995. Botteri, Inge, ‘Galateo’ e Galatei: la creanza e l’instituzione [sic] della societa` nella trattatistica italiana tra Antico regime e stato liberale, Rome: Bulzoni, 1999. Burke, Peter, The Fortunes of the ‘Courtier’: The European Reception of Castiglione’s ‘Cortegiano,’ Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995. I capricci di Proteo: percorsi e linguaggi del Barocco: atti del Convegno internazionale di Lecce, 23–26 ottobre 2000, Rome: Salerno Editrice, 2002. Costanzo, Mario, Critica e poetica del primo Seicento, 3 vols., Rome: Bulzoni, 1969–1971. Della Volpe, Gaetano, Poetica del Cinquecento. La ‘Poetica’ aristotelica nei commenti essenziali degli ultimi umanisti italiani, Bari: Laterza, 1954. Dooley, Brendan (editor), Italy in the Baroque: Selected Readings, New York: Garland Publishing, 1995.

Ferrone, Siro, Attori mercanti corsari. La Commedia dell’Arte in Europa tra Cinque e Seicento, Turin: Einaudi, 1993. ˆ ge de l’e´loquence: rhe´torique et ‘res Fumaroli, Marc, L’A literaria’ de la Renaissance au seuil de l’e´poque classique, Geneva: Droz; Paris: Champion, 1980. Getto, Giovanni, Il Barocco letterario in Italia, Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2000. Guaragnella, Pasquale, Tra antichi e moderni: morale e retorica nel Seicento italiano, Lecce: Argo, 2003. Heller, Wendy, Emblems of Eloquence: Opera and Women’s Voices in Seventeenth-Century Venice, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Hersant, Yves, La Me´taphore baroque: d’Aristote a` Tesauro, ´ ditions du Seuil, 2001. Paris: E Javitch, Daniel, Proclaiming a Classic: the Canonization of ‘Orlando furioso,’ Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. Kenseth, Joy (editor), The Age of the Marvelous, Hanover, N.H.: Hood Museum of Art, 1991. Ku¨pper, Joachim, and Friedrich Wolfzettel (editors), Diskurse des Barock: dezentrierte oder rezentrierte Welt?, Munich: W. Fink, 2000. Malato, Enrico, La fine del Cinquecento e il Seicento, vol. 5 of Storia della letteratura italiana, Rome: Salerno Editore, 1997. Maravall, Jose´ Antonio, Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure, translated by Terry Cochran, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Marino, John A. (editor), Early Modern Italy, 1550–1796, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Morandini, Giuliana (editor), Sospiri e palpiti: scrittrici italiane del Seicento, Genoa: Marietti, 2001. Morpurgo-Tagliabue, Guido, Anatomia del Barocco, Palermo: Aesthetica, 1987. Ossola, Carlo (editor), L’anima in Barocco: testi del Seicento italiano, Turin: Scriptorium, 1995. Parker, Alexander, ‘‘‘Concept’ and ‘Conceit’: An Aspect of Comparative Literary History,’’ in Modern Language Review, 77, no. 4 (1982): 21–35. Pozzi, Mario (editor), Trattatisti del Cinquecento, 2 vols., Milan: Riccardo Ricciardi, 1978. Praz, Mario, Studi sul concettismo, Milan: La Cultura, 1934. Praz, Mario, ‘‘Introduzione al Barocco,’’ in Bellezza e bizzarria, Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1960. Quondam, Amedeo (editor), Rinascimento e Classicismo: materiali per l’analisi del sistema culturale di Antico regime, Rome: Bulzoni, 1999. Quondam, Amedeo, ‘Questo povero Cortegiano’: Castiglione, il Libro, la Storia, Rome: Bulzoni, 2000. Raimondi, Ezio, Trattatisti e narratori del Seicento, Milan: Riccardo Ricciardi, 1960. Raimondi, Ezio, Letteratura barocca: studi sul Seicento italiano, Florence: Olschki, 1961. Richards, Kenneth, and Laura Richards, The Commedia dell’Arte: A Documentary History, Oxford: Blackwell, 1990. Rosand, Ellen, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice: The Creation of a Genre, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Schu¨tze, Sebastian (editor), Estetica barocca. Atti del convegno internazionale, Roma 6–9 marzo 2002, Rome: Campisano Editore, 2004.

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MANNERISM AND BAROQUE Snyder, Jon R., Writing the Scene of Speaking: Theories of Dialogue in the Late Italian Renaissance, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989. Snyder, Jon R., L’estetica del Barocco, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2005. ´ va, Barocco etico-retorico nella letteratura italiana, Vı´gh, E Szeged: JATE Press, 2001.

Weinberg, Bernard, History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961. Weinberg, Bernard, Trattati di poetica e di retorica, 4 vols., Bari: Laterza, 1970–1974. Zatti, Sergio, L’ombra del Tasso: epica e romanzo nel Cinquecento, Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 1996.

GIANNA MANZINI (1896–1974) By the late 1920s, the Italian literary scene had left behind the lyrical fragment championed by the avant-garde journal La voce (1908–1916), but was still indulging in the search for the contained perfection of prosa d’arte (art prose) and remained curiously indifferent to the great modern novelists emerging in its midst. Gianna Manzini’s Tempo innamorato (Time in Love, 1928) was greeted as a first, promising embodiment of a new Italian novel. Both traditionalists and innovators recognized the originality of her contribution (Emilio Cecchi praised the formal tension while Giansiro Ferrata hailed it as avant-garde), a fact that indicates, as Giacomo Debenedetti would later observe, how Manzini’s novel, starting from its evocative title, became emblematic of the aspirations and compromises of an entire literary and historical season (La Manzini, l’anima e la danza, 1963). Manzini’s work grew out of the experience of the literary journal Solaria (1926–1934). There, together with other solariani like Carlo Emilio Gadda and Elio Vittorini, she productively confronted the examples of Italo Svevo, Federigo Tozzi, and, notwithstanding the provincialism fostered by the Fascist regime, the great European modernists: Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. Because of its cosmopolitanism, Solaria represented both a laboratory of narrative innovation and a moral opposition to the regime. As for Tempo innamorato, traditional novelistic structure is dissolved. Much space is given to lyrical impressions, characters’ recollections, and the speculative flashbacks of an ambiguous narrator who erratically enters the story as if to visit with her characters. The evanescent plot is organized around the opposition (reminiscent of Svevo’s novel Senilita`) between healthy and sick 1130

characters: The self-denying, inept Clementina, defined by ‘‘una bruttezza quasi contagiosa’’ (an almost contagious ugliness), is abandoned by her husband, the mediocre Ugo, for the sunny Rita, ‘‘una di quelle creature che fanno pensare giovine il mondo’’ (one of those creatures that make the world seem young). Rita is the heart of the novel— she is the only character to act. Eventually she abandons Ugo and her younger child to pursue a new lover. It is for her that time comes to a stop, and ‘‘mantiene per lei, in un attimo tutte le promesse: e` innamorato’’ (instantly fulfills its promises for her: it has fallen in love). But Manzini knows that there is a flaw in this ‘‘perfect’’ temporality. Rita is one of those creatures ‘‘che trattengono il tempo, lo ingannano, lo stregano, lo innamorano. ...tutte salve, senza ferite, senza segni...finiscono col somigliare i frutti o gli uccelli imbalsamati’’ (that hold time, trick it, bewitch it, seduce it.... Safe, without wounds or marks, they end up resembling embalmed fruit or birds). Imprisoned within a biological destiny or a past that weighs on their narrative future, Manzini’s characters are threatened by this dehumanizing fate, similar to that of Pirandello’s masks in Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore (Six Characters in Search of an Author, 1921). Thus, the ‘‘time in love’’ ends up being not an affirmation but a negation of life. Rita confesses: ‘‘si fa strada in me una necessita` di compromettermi con la vita e paura di non potere’’ (there grows in me a necessity to compromise with life and the fear of not being able to). Each enclosed in their story of solitude, the characters of Tempo innamorato hover in the existential and narrative exile of this time outside time. But the one who truly succeeds in ‘‘tricking, bewitching, enamouring’’ time through a work of stylistic seduction—literally by

GIANNA MANZINI bracketing it through the use of parentheses—is the writer herself. ‘‘Sometimes one feels the same sense of reassured marvel as when seeing an acrobat land safely after holding one’s breath for five minutes,’’ Gadda wrote in a review of the stylistic virtuosity that characterizes Manzini’s writing (L’ultimo libro di Gianna Manzini, 1932). Pulled between the persistence of the lyric fragment and an openness to the narrative lessons of modernism, Manzini opts for a novel that paradoxically aspires to unfold as ‘‘un libro intero scritto su una pagina sola, lampante’’ (a whole book written on one single page, crystal clear) (Ritratto in piedi, 1970). Not a poem, but a poem in prose that relies on verbal visualization; a work of digging, as Giuseppe De Robertis writes, ‘‘dentro le immagini...quasi pensando per immagini’’ (inside the images...almost thinking through them) (L’arte della Manzini, 1941). This concentration of writing is captured in a figure that recurs throughout Manzini’s production: the portrait. Manzini knew very well that her dazzling virtuosity, often criticized as affected and Baroque, was (to borrow from one of her own titles), an ambiguous valzer del diavolo (waltz with the devil). The most original aspect of her later production is her self-analysis of her work as a writer. In Lettera all’editore (Letter to the Editor, 1945), the author/ narrator searches for a mirroring in the characters that yields metanarrative reflections on her own art: ‘‘Avvenimenti e cose straordinarie gli davan sicurezza, mentre la vita usuale lo sbalestrava: sicche´ lo portavo in me come il riflesso d’un mio difetto’’ (Extraordinary events and things gave him a sense of security, while everyday life confused him: hence I carried him within me as the reflection of my own flaw). The author, with some complacency, comes to question her artistic ethos. From this moment, the tutelary deities presiding over Manzini’s artistic world (her mother and father) become central characters in her search for a sense of natural measure. In the essay Forte come un leone (Strong as a Lion, 1944), the memory of a conversation with her father unveils the poetry hidden in the most worn and everyday language. The recuperation of a linear narrative and an increasing stylistic sobriety characterize Manzini’s masterpiece La sparviera (The She-Hawk, 1956), a reflection on art and death. But it is in Ritratto in piedi (Standing Portrait), suspended between the memory of her father and autobiography, that the author faces the challenge of time and the need to discipline language in the pursuit of cognitive truth.

The unspoken is no longer situated, as in her early work, in an unfathomable beyond, but within the writer’s childhood and relation with her father. Unlike the crazed horse that at the novel’s opening stumbles on the bridge of Santa Trinita`, the narrator wins through the unconscious resistance to speaking of the past. By telling the story of her anarchist father, ostracized by the family and persecuted to death under Mussolini, Manzini comes to terms with her personal guilt and her historical amnesia. Ritratto in piedi, and her last work Sulla soglia (On the Threshold, 1973), a dream narrative of a final encounter with the mother, are powerful confessions that leave little space for silence or even reticence. In an essay of Forte come un leone, La lezione della Woolf (Woolf’s Lesson), Manzini recognized her debt to the British modernist writer. But the question of her participation in literary modernism remains open and unsettled. If her negation of time, even at a subjective level, seems far from her modernist models, the way her writer’s consciousness invests all natural and everyday objects with a second, deeper life, constitutes a powerful actualization of the modernist stream of consciousness. Perhaps it is in her stories of animals and plants— Boscovivo (Living Woods, 1932), Venti racconti (Twenty Stories, 1941), Animali sacri e profani, (Animals Sacred and Profane, 1953)— that she reveals her core poetics. Inspired by the lesson learned from her parents, ‘‘di giungere al cuore delle cose senza guastarle’’ (of reaching the heart of things without harming them), as Manzini writes in Lettera all’editore, she realizes that it is a moral commitment not only to express but to understand.

Biography Born in Pistoia on 24 March 1896. She grew up in a broken family: Her mother was forced to separate from her husband, Giuseppe Manzini, a prominent anarchist, who died in 1925. She studied literature at the University of Florence with Giuseppe De Robertis, graduated with a dissertation on Pietro Aretino. From 1929 to 1932 she contributed to the literary journal Solaria. Moved to Rome in 1933 after breaking up with her husband, the journalist Bruno Fallaci. In 1945, directed the journal Prosa. Winner of several literary awards, including the Premio Soroptimist for Il valzer del diavolo, 1953; the Viareggio prize for La sparviera, 1956; the Marzotto prize for Un’altra cosa, 1961; the Napoli prize for Allegro con disperazione, 1968; the 1131

GIANNA MANZINI Campiello and Strega prizes for Ritratto in piedi, 1971. Died in Rome on 31 August 1974. GIULIANA MINGHELLI Selected Works Novels Tempo innamorato, 1928. Lettera all’editore, 1945. Il valzer del diavolo, 1947. La sparviera, 1956. Un’altra cosa, 1961. Allegro con disperazione, 1965. Ritratto in piedi, 1970.

Short Stories ‘‘Incontro col falco,’’ 1929. ‘‘Boscovivo,’’ 1932; selections: ‘‘A Cypress’’ and ‘‘The Fable of the Olive Tree,’’ translated by Martha King in Italian Environmental Literature, 2003. ‘‘Un filo di brezza,’’ 1936. ‘‘Rive remote,’’ 1940; selection: ‘‘Discordance,’’ translated by Robin Pickering-Iazzi in Unspeakable Women, 1993. ‘‘Venti racconti,’’ 1941. ‘‘Ho visto il tuo cuore,’’ 1947. ‘‘Animali sacri e profani,’’ 1953. ‘‘Cara prigione,’’ 1958. ‘‘Arca di Noe`,’’ 1960. ‘‘Il cielo addosso,’’ 1963. ‘‘Sulla soglia,’’ 1973.

Essays Forte come un leone, 1944. Album di ritratti, 1964. ‘‘Domenikos Theotokopoulos, detto El Greco,’’ in L’opera completa del Greco, 1969.

Cecchi, Emilio, ‘‘Gianna Manzini, Tempo inamorato,’’ in Pegaso, 1 (January 1929): 116–117. Debenedetti, Giacomo, ‘‘La Manzini, l’anima e la danza,’’ in Intermezzo, Milan: Mondadori, 1963. De Robertis, Giuseppe, ‘‘L’arte della Manzini,’’ in G. Manzini, Venti racconti, Milan: Mondadori, 1941. Fava Guzzetta, Lia, Solaria e la narrativa italiana intorno al 1930, Ravenna: Longo, 1973. Fava Guzzetta, Lia, Gianna Manzini, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1974. Ferrata, Giansiro, ‘‘Gianna Manzini, Tempo inamorato,’’ in Solaria, 3, nos. 9–10 (September-October 1928): 72–73. Forti, Marco (editor), Gianna Manzini tra letteratura e vita, Milan: Mondadori, 1985. Gadda, Carlo Emilio, ‘‘L’ultimo libro di Gianna Manzini,’’ in Il Tevere, 10 October 1932, p. 3. Ghilardi, Margherita, ‘‘Introduzione,’’ in Autoritratto involontario, Milan: La Tartaruga, 1996. Miceli Jeffries, Giovanna, ‘‘Gianna Manzini’s Poetics of Verbal Visualization,’’ in Contemporary Women Writers in Italy, edited by Santo Arico`, Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1990. Montale, Eugenio, ‘‘Il libro di cui si parla (Tempo innamorato),’’ in La fiera letteraria, 5, August 1928, p. 2. Nozzoli, Anna, ‘‘Gianna Manzini: metafora e realta` del personaggio femminile,’’ in Tabu` e coscienza: La condizione femminile nella letteratura italiana del Novecento, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1978. Panareo, Enzo, Invito alla lettura di Gianna Manzini, Milan: Mursia, 1977. Pasolini, Pier Paolo, ‘‘Un bestiario celeste nella gabbia d’oro della Manzini,’’ in Saggi sulla letteratura e sull’arte, vol. 1, Milan: Mondadori, 1999. Paulicelli, Eugenia, ‘‘Fashion Writing under the Fascist Regime: An Italian Dictionary and Commentary of Fashion by Cesare Meano, and Short Stories by Gianna Manzini and Alba de Cespedes,’’ in Fashion Theory, 8, no. 1 (2004): 3–34. Sanvitale, Francesca, Gianna Manzini tra letteratura e vita, Milan: Mondadori, 1985.

Further Reading Ballaro, Beverly, ‘‘Gianna Manzini,’’ in Italian Women Writers: A Bio-bibliographical Sourcebook, edited by Rinaldina Russel, Westport: Greenwood Press, 1994.

ALESSANDRO MANZONI (1785–1873) Alessandro Manzoni is a towering figure in nineteenth-century European literature. According to some critics, though not all (note, for instance, the negative opinions of Antonio Gramsci and Alberto Moravia), his I promessi sposi (The Betrothed, 1827, 1132

1840–1842), ranks with Tolstoy’s War and Peace as one of the greatest historical novels ever written. In this long and complex narrative, Manzoni recounts the story of two young peasants, thereby revolutionizing classical expectations that the poor be

ALESSANDRO MANZONI portrayed in only the most humble roles. He also evokes seventeenth-century Lombardy with a degree of historical accuracy seldom if ever before attempted in a novel. In these ways, among others, Manzoni takes a major role in transforming the possibilities of the genre. Published first in 1827, his compelling mixture of invention and historical research immediately wins popular acclaim in Italy of the Risorgimento, as it also garners praise abroad from the likes of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Alphonse de Lamartine. Yet Manzoni’s work on the volume does not end with this publication. In the years between its first appearance and its final, revised form, published in installments between 1840– 1842, Manzoni rewrites his novel in a language closer to the Florentine dialect as it was spoken by the educated classes. In this form, he reaches a broader audience. Equally important, he supports Italy’s developing national identity by helping to forge its language. In these years, Manzoni continues to ponder issues of truth that had long been important to him, and questions the power of the novel to deal with them. Without condemning his own work explicitly, he concludes that the historical novel is inherently flawed, and turns his attention elsewhere. For the last 30 years of his life, he writes works of history, philosophy, and linguistics rather than fiction. From the first, Manzoni believes that literature should, in good Horatian fashion, teach and delight. At its best, it can awaken readers to concrete historical and political issues, and convey a message of love, courage, and compassion. Manzoni’s earliest poetry, with its neoclassical forms, philosophical proclivities, and deist beliefs, does not reveal the historical and religiously inclined Italian Romanticism Manzoni eventually espouses. But this is only an early stage in a long and wide-ranging intellectual and spiritual quest. His inquisitive mind soon turns from impassioned readings of Voltaire and the Encyclopedists, to encounters with the poetic works of Giuseppe Parini, Vittorio Alfieri, and, above all, the historical work of Lodovico Muratori and Giambattista Vico. Though his education begins in Milan, it gains its distinctive direction during his five-year stay in Paris (1805–1810) with his mother, Giulia Beccaria, daughter of the famous Italian jurist, Cesare Beccaria. An eccentric and fascinating woman whom his father, Count Pietro, had met when she was only 20 years old (as the biography of the Manzoni family by Natalia Ginzburg attests), she had left for Paris to join her lover, Carlo Imbonati, after a few unhappy years of marriage. When the young

Manzoni reunites with her in Paris many years later, he enters into a cultivated and revolutionary intellectual circle, including Madame de Condorcet and the French ideologues, Antoine Destutt de Tracy, and Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis, as well as the young historian, Claude Fauriel, who would later play an important role in the reception (and translation) of his works in France. But it is only when Manzoni’s intellect is galvanized by an ethical commitment that he begins to produce the works for which he is best known. This transformation occurs through a dramatic return to Catholicism. Whether it is influenced by the young woman, Henriette Blondel, whom he marries in 1808, or his long readings of Blaise Pascal, his correspondence suggests that it happens in a sudden religious conversion at the Church of Saint Roch. From this point forward, Manzoni crafts a literary oeuvre inspired by a moral philosopher’s interest in exploring and judging the actions of human beings. Thomist in its leanings, Manzoni’s faith goes hand in hand with logic and rationality, and easily joins forces with his intensifying interest in history. Only a historical orientation can, in his view, produce a concrete and disciplined literature, one close to the particulars of the everyday, and to its ongoing tests of human character. It can also open literature to something beyond the pat love stories or mythological themes common in his day, allowing it to portray a new range of subjects and ideas. When Manzoni leaves Paris to return to Milan, he brings with him a solid knowledge of French language and literature, a powerful commitment to Catholicism, and also an interest in new modes of historical writing gleaned from Fauriel and Franc¸ois Guizot. In Manzoni’s hands, these tendencies begin to forge an Italian Romanticism completely his own. The first evidence comes when Manzoni publishes his religious poems, the Inni sacri (Sacred Hymns, 1815), marking his definitive break with the neoclassical tradition of his youth. His conversion had opened up a rich anthology of biblical themes, and he set out to compose a cycle of 12 hymns celebrating the main Christian holy days. The first one, ‘‘La Resurrezione’’ (The Resurrection), was written in 1812, and five others were completed over the following decade. In these odes, he tries to ‘‘bring back to religion those great, noble and human sentiments which flow naturally from it’’ (Lettera inedita di Alessandro Manzoni al Fauriel, 1967). Praised by Goethe more than Italian critics, the poems reconcile Christianity with ideas of freedom, equality and, at times, with 1133

ALESSANDRO MANZONI particularized descriptions of everyday life through which the future author of I promessi sposi can already be heard. The Inni Sacri, but especially ‘‘La Pentecoste’’ (The Pentecost, 1822), whose finale provides a review of various nations, professions and social classes, gathered in the equality of a divine yet human world, completes the complex and controversial process of Manzoni’s long initiation into Catholicism as they gesture toward his ongoing interest in the historical and political world. Indeed, during these same years, he wrote two specifically historical poems: ‘‘Marzo 1812’’ (March 1812), whose portrait of a Lombard in servitude made it one of the most popular patriotic lyrics of the Risorgimento, and ‘‘Il cinque maggio’’ (The Fifth of May), in which he reflects on the ambiguous legacy of the life and recent death of Napoleon. This last was particularly well-received by Goethe, if not by all who read it. He quickly had ¨ ber Kunst it translated and published in his journal U und Alterthum. In this era of enormous productivity, between 1820 and 1822, Manzoni’s historical dramas appear. Il conte di Carmagnola (The Count of Carmagnola, 1820) and Adelchi (Adelchi, 1822), along with a series of contemporary essays, reveal the power that history will have in Manzoni’s aesthetics. History appeals for several reasons. First, it conforms to his orientation toward a truth anchored in the concreteness of historical fact and the norms of Christian belief. Second, it allows him to highlight the themes of equality and justice, especially important during this period of Italian nation-building, the Risorgimento. Finally, it allows him to replace the classical ‘‘unities’’ with plots that are more particularized, more verosimili or ‘‘real,’’ and more apt to engage readers. Plots mixing history and invention, and the carefully articulated ethical and aesthetic beliefs that support them, pave the way for the historical novel to follow. Manzoni’s first published tragedy, Il conte di Carmagnola, presents, for instance, a wellresearched story of a fifteenth-century soldier of fortune. In it, he offers a new view of a historical figure and a new conception of drama itself, founded not on the classical unities, but on the reality of the past. He even provides historical notes to his play, prefacing the whole with words that clarify his new emphasis: ‘‘I place before the tragedy some historical information about the characters and facts that are its subject, thinking that whoever decides to read a composition mixing invented and historical truth wants to be able... to 1134

discover what real events lie behind it.’’ In an essay known as the Lettre a` M. Chauvet sur l’unite´ de temps et de lieu dans la trage´die (Letter to M. Chauvet, 1920) and originally written in response to a Paris review of the play, Manzoni states that in refuting the classical unities, he makes a place for history. In the reality of the past, he finds individual characters and acts of will. These are preferable to the antiquated rules of art and the false universality they pretend to impose. If such historical tastes set Manzoni apart from most other European Romantics, the context for his thinking is anything but parochial. It develops through readings and contacts extensive for Italians at the time. He appreciates a number of contemporary French authors—Victor Hugo, Mme de Stae¨l and Lamartine, as well as historians such as Guizot and Augustin Thie´rry. He also displays lively pleasure in the works of Shakespeare and Goethe. He favors Shakespeare for his organic historicism and, often, his Christian themes, and looks to Goethe as the one modern playwright able to follow in Shakespeare’s footsteps. In Sir Walter Scott, Manzoni discovers the first great examples of the historical novel, a genre he would soon develop himself, albeit in a somewhat different direction. Indeed, with an eye trained on Shakespeare and Goethe more than on any of his Italian precursors, Manzoni offers his tragic dramas to the Italian and European public. Though Italy and France are not enthused with Il conte di Carmagnola, Goethe is. This fact perhaps accounts for Manzoni’s second attempt at historical tragedy, the Adelchi, which dramatizes the conflict between a Lombard King and Charlemagne. Here Manzoni is, if anything, yet more preoccupied with history than before. Rather than giving his readers mere historical notes to the drama, he produces the Discorso sopra alcuni punti della storia longobardica in Italia (Essay on Some Aspects of Longobard History in Italy), a detailed description of Charlemagne’s eighth-century conquest of the Lombards, joined to a commentary on justice, political oppression, and individual free will. If these early tragedies demonstrate Manzoni’s intense commitment to history and his distance from the classical unities, they also reveal his rejection of Romantic imagination. For Manzoni at this critical point in his career, history remains the best and least arbitrary social basis for literary art and conforms to religious truth as well. If his Lettre a` M. Chauvet defends the view that historical poetry can reconcile poetry, historical truth, and social

ALESSANDRO MANZONI responsibility, another letter addressed to Cesare Taparelli d’Azeglio, Sul romanticismo (On Romanticism, 1823), establishes an important broadening and clarification. One part of this essay rejects mythology as idolatry, and criticizes the imitation of classical texts as well as the neoclassical rules. But another provides a vision of Italian Romanticism that draws together literally all his works beginning with the Inni sacri, and looks clearly to the future. Here he affirms the primacy of historical and moral truth, the need to create literature for the general population, and the importance of Christian inspiration for poetry. He states succinctly ‘‘that poetry and literature in general should propose for themselves the useful as their purpose, the true as subject matter and the interesting as means.’’ Closely interwoven with Manzoni’s views of historical truth is his animating conviction about the unity and power of Catholic belief. His most eloquent written defense of his views, Osservazioni sulla morale cattolica (A Vindication of Catholic Morality), is published first in 1819, but in definitive edition only in 1855. A work of Christian apologetics difficult to accept in the nineteenth century, it deepens his understanding of time and eternity, as well as of moral action. Its tenets join those articulated in his dramas and essays and come to life most effectively in the individual characters and actions of I promessi sposi. As early as 1821, in the midst of Manzoni’s creative and critical efforts to develop and rationalize his distinctive conceptions of poetry, he begins to draft the first published version of his historical novel. His religious inspiration sparks the plot and fires the individual portraits of characters and events, and in case the reader might miss the meaning of the whole, both of the main characters, Renzo and Lucia, provide at the end their views of what they have learned in the course of their long and troubled separation. Their entire story is, of course, a vast human trial. But it never risks devolving into allegory, thanks at least in part to Manzoni’s historical sense, with his taste for the real, everyday world of the past. Indeed, the specific period between 1628 and 1631 in Lombardy is its inspiration, as Manzoni explains to Fauriel, in a letter of 1822: The memoirs that have come down to us from that period give a picture of a very extraordinary state of society: the most arbitrary government combined with feudal and popular anarchy; legislation that is astounding, both in its aims and its results; a profound, ferocious, pretentious ignorance; classes with opposed interests and maxims; some little-known anecdotes

preserved in trustworthy documents...finally a plague which gives rein to the most consummate and shameless excesses, to the most absurd prejudices and to the most touching virtues, etc, etc.... That is the stuff to fill a canvas...

Fill a canvas he does, with fictional figures as well as a wealth of historical details. His story of two good peasants, Renzo and Lucia, whose marriage by Don Abbondio is interrupted by the local nobleman who wants to seduce Lucia, ends hundreds of pages—and countless episodes—later. The characters created—not only Renzo and Lucia, but also the entire cast of minor supporting actors, such as Don Abbondio, Perpetua, the Conte Zio, Fra Cristoforo, Don Rodrigo, the Monaca di Monza, l’Innominato—weave a web of complex human relations within a well-researched historical period. The public responds immediately. Unlike the cool reception that greets Manzoni’s tragic dramas, the novel is embraced with warmth and enthusiasm when first published in 1827. Not that a few critics do not find elements of concern: the question of the historical novel as a genre, and this particular novel’s unity, its historical accuracy, and the nature and political valence of its religious belief. But the popular response is immediate—and positive. Nine editions are sold out in the first six months, including one published at the author’s expense with illustrations by Francesco Gonin. Regardless of this success, Manzoni is not satisfied. For the next 20 years, he continues to paint and repaint his canvas, both in its broad lines and the details of its language. No sooner is the first version of the book completed than Manzoni travels to Florence, determined to ‘‘rinse his clothes in the Arno,’’ that is, transform his artistic language into the dialect that he believes can at last draw his country together linguistically and forge its nationhood. He also alters the plot, eliminates long digressions, and carefully balances history with invention. But in 1828, at nearly the same time he begins these revisions, Manzoni also starts drafting, as a letter intended for Goethe, Del romanzo storico e, in genere, de’ componimenti misti di storia e d’invenzione (On the Historical Novel and in General on Works in Which History Is Mixed with Fiction), a serious rethinking and eventual rejection of the historical novel as a genre. As critics point out, the historical novel, with its focus on a national past and its choice of characters from the middle and lower classes, has a renewed capacity for strong and well-substantiated political and social statements. It also expands the potential 1135

ALESSANDRO MANZONI of the novel as a genre, replacing longer episodic stories with more concise plots, concrete descriptions, and dialogue. All of this Manzoni accomplishes, largely due to his apprenticeship with the historical tragedy. But in his view, the genre has serious difficulties, indeed ultimately damning ones. As Manzoni reflects upon the historical novel, he develops a belief that literature mixing history and invention must in fact work on two separate planes: one reflecting verifiable fact and another corresponding to an ideal plane of truth. The first would be the ground of historical discourse—within or outside the historical novel. The second would be the ground of invention. For, according to his discussion in Del romanzo storico, invention ‘‘finds’’ an innate idea whose origin is God. Though this may solve a philosophical problem, ridding the poetic of arbitrary subjectivity, it does not support the historical novel as a genre. It creates an intrinsic division within it. In this essay, Manzoni traces the relationship of the historical novel to earlier narrative forms, such as the epic and historical tragedy—but also determines that the relationship between history and invention is ultimately untenable. Though he does not directly condemn his own work, he is convinced that the historical novel cannot continue to be written. Like epics of the past (Virgil’s Aeneid and Tasso’s Orlando Furioso), his I promessi sposi occupies a genre destined to die, even though the individual work may survive. Manzoni’s novel not only survives; it flourishes. It represents the nationalist spirit of his day in its careful tracing of Lombard history, its focus on humble peasants, and its clear condemnation of corrupt uses of power. It also brings to readers a story based on history rather than simple romance, in which long sections are given to meticulous historical narration. It similarly reinforces Christian belief through its complex history of good as well as evil, of forgiveness and hope. At the same time, its insightful characterization and lively dialogue set the agenda for a range of novels and histories that continue to this day. As Manzoni takes time to revise and reflect, his public impatiently awaits more novels. What he publishes in 1842, Storia della colonna infame (The Column of Infamy), does not fulfill their expectations. Though a beautifully drafted history of the plague years, and even novelistic in some ways, this indictment of the judges who falsely condemned some men accused of spreading the disease disappoints contemporary readers. It would have to await the twentieth century for a 1136

full appreciation and literary progeny in works such as Alexander Solzhenitzyn’s The Gulag Archipelago and Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. Manzoni’s life closes with a series of personal tragedies (including the death of two wives and five of his seven children) but also with productivity and fame. Though his later essays, dialogues, and historical narratives never attain the popularity of I promessi sposi, they contribute dramatically to the building of the Italian nation and to the development of its language. In 1868, he accepts the presidency of a commission studying the question of the Italian language and eventually publishes his Dell’unita` della lingua e dei mezzi di diffonderla (On the Unification of the Language and its Means of Diffusion, 1868) as well as a number of shorter essays and letters. In all of these he establishes his belief in the importance of a single national language, and discusses this within the context of more general linguistic principles, some still important today. Recognized as a great writer and a national figure, Manzoni receives visits from William Gladstone, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Newman, Pedro II of Brazil, and Honore´ de Balzac, among others. He sees Italy emerging as a nation and its language beginning the long process of unification for which he had worked. If in his revised 1842 novel he completes an artistic and ethical quest, in his poetry, his historical tragedies, and in his essays, he contributes to an ongoing tradition of works joining history and invention, and of critics—from Georg Lukacs to Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg—who calculate the consequences. When Manzoni dies in 1873, Italy’s greatest writer of the age inspires its greatest musician, Giuseppe Verdi, to dedicate to him a Messa da Requiem, which was performed in the Milanese Church of San Marco in May 1874.

Biography Born in Milan, 7 March 1785, to Count Pietro and Giulia Beccaria. Studied in the religious schools of the Padri Somaschi at Merate (Milan), 1791–1796, and Lugano, 1796–1798; parents separated, 1792; moved to Paris with his mother and her lover, Carlo Imbonati, a wealthy merchant banker, 1805; married Henriette Blondel, the younger daughter of a Swiss banker, 1808; converts to Catholicism, 1810. Lived a quiet life near Milan, with his wife and seven children. Wrote religious poetry, historical dramas, and numerous essays before publishing I promessi sposi, 1827; wife died, 1833; married Teresa Borri, 1837; King Victor Emmanuel II assigns him a

ALESSANDRO MANZONI life pension, 1859; named senator of the kingdom, 1860; wife Teresa died, 1861; granted Roman citizenship, 1872. Died in Milan, 22 May 1873. SANDRA BERMANN See also: Romanticism Selected Works Collections Opere poetiche, preface by J. W. Goethe, Jena: Frommann, 1827. Tutte le opere, edited by Alberti Chiari and Fausto Ghisalberti, 7 vols., Milan: Mondadori, 1954–1990. Teatro, edited by Giuseppe Altieri, Padua: RADAR, 1967. Tutte le lettere, edited by Giuseppe Altieri, Milan: Adelphi, 1986. Tutte le poesie, edited by Gilberto Lonardi, Venice: Marsilio, 1987.

Poetry ‘‘Inni sacri,’’ 1815; edited by Franco Gavazzeni, 1997; as The Sacred Hymns and the Napoleonic Ode, translated by Joel Foote Bingham, 1904.

Fiction I promessi sposi, 1827; revised edition, 1840–1842 (includes Storia della colonna infame); as The Betrothed, translated by Archibald Colquhoun, 1951; as The Betrothed and, History of the Column of Infamy, translated by David Forgacs and Matthew Reynolds, 1997.

Plays Il conte di carmagnola, 1820. Adelchi, 1822 (includes Discorso su alcuni punti della storia longobardica in Italia). The Count of Carmagnola and Adelchis, edited and translated by Federica Brunori Deigan, 2004.

Other Osservazionie sulla morale cattolica, 1819; revised edition 1855. Lettre a` M. Chauvet sur l’unite´ de temps et de lieu dans la trage´die, 1820. Discorso su alcuni punti della storia longobardica in Italia, 1822. Sul romanticismo, 1823; as ‘‘Letter on Romanticism,’’ translated by Joseph Luzzi, in PMLA, 119 (March 2004): 299–316. Del romanzo storico e, in genere, de’ componimenti misti di storia e d’invenzione, 1828; as On the Historical Novel, translated by Sandra Bermann, 1984. Storia della colonna infame, 1842; as The Column of Infamy, translated by Kenelm Foster and Jane Grigson, 1964. Dell’unita` della lingua e dei mezzi di diffonderla, 1868. Lettera inedita di Alessandro Manzoni al Fauriel (1 aprile 1817), Naples: A. Morra, 1967.

Further Reading Barricelli, Gian Piero, Alessandro Manzoni, Boston: Twayne, 1976. Caretti, Lanfranco, Manzoni e la critica, Bari: Laterza, 1969.

Carsaniga, Giovanni, ‘‘Manzoni and His Twenty-five readers,’’ in The Shared Horizon, edited by T. O’Neill, Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1990. Chandler, S. B., Alessandro Manzoni: The Story of a Spiritual Quest, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1974. Colquhoun, Archibald, Manzoni and His Times: A Biography of the Author of ‘‘The Betrothed,’’ London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1954. Colummi Camerino, Marinella, Idillio e propaganda nella letteratura sociale del Risorgimento, Naples: Liguori, 1975. Gadda, Carlo Emilio, ‘‘Apologia manzoniana,’’ in Solaria, 1 (1927). Ginzburg, Natalia, La famiglia Manzoni, Turin: Einaudi, 1983. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, ‘‘Scritti critici di Goethe sul Manzoni,’’ in La Lucia del Manzoni, ed altre note critiche, edited by Piero Fossi, Florence: Sansoni, 1937. Gramsci, Antonio, Letteratura e vita nazionale, Turin: Einaudi, 1950. Isella, Dante, I Lombardi in rivolta: Da Carlo Maria Maggi a Carlo Emilio Gadda, Turin: Einaudi, 1984. Leone De Castris, Arcangelo, La polemica sul romanzo storico, Bari: Laterza, 1959. Leri, Clara, Oscura prosa rimata: Studi sugli Inni sacri manzoniani, Pisa: Pacini, 1989. Leri, Clara, Manzoni e la ‘‘litte´rature universelle,’’ Milan: Centro Nazionale Studi Manzoniani, 2002. Luka´cs, Georg, The Historical Novel, translated by H. and S. Mitchell, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983. Mazzocca, Fernando, L’officina dei Promessi Sposi, Milan: Mondadori, 1985. Negri, Renzo, Manzoni diverso, Milan: Marzorati, 1976. Raimondi, Ezio, Romanticismo italiano e romanticismo europeo, Milan: Mondadori, 2000. Reynolds, Barbara, The Linguistic Writings of Alessandro Manzoni, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950. Sala di Felice, Elena (editor), Il punto su Manzoni, RomeBari: Laterza, 1989.

I PROMESSI SPOSI (1827/1840–1842) Novel by Alessandro Manzoni

Since its publication in 1827, Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi (The Betrothed) has been recognized as one of the most important Italian novels of the nineteenth century and as a central 1137

ALESSANDRO MANZONI text of European literature. Though some critics, such as Antonio Gramsci and Alberto Moravia, find it has serious weaknesses, others, including Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Carlo Emilio Gadda, and Georg Lukac´s, argue for its greatness. Its meticulous historical research and compelling characterizations portray the particular circumstances of early seventeenth-century Lombardy. Christian in its structure of beliefs, it remains open to the social conditions and existential choices defining human lives. Its scope is epic. With its precise, evocative, yet accessible language, Manzoni’s story has lived on for generations, embedded by now in the fabric of Italy’s national life. This complex novel grew out of Manzoni’s readings in Italian history, particularly the Historiae patriae (Milanese Histories, 1641–1643) of Giuseppe Ripamonti (1577–1643), a priest and a professor of rhetoric at the seminary in Milan, as well as the economic writings of Melchiorre Gioia (1767–1829), a follower of Locke and Condillac. From these Manzoni develops a keen sense of seventeenth-century Lombardy under the Spanish occupation of the Thirty Years War. Beginning his research in 1821, while still at work on his tragedies, he finds the first hint of his plot in a historical document of the Spanish governor of Lombardy. Manzoni frames the story of two young people of the peasant class—Lucia, a modest and devout young woman, and Renzo, a peasant, but also a silk weaver and worker. By his choice of protagonists, Manzoni immediately challenges Aristotelian expectations that heroic figures emerge from the nobility, and that characters of the lower classes be relegated to the comic. He also underscores the new and important place that the working classes will take in literature as well as in everyday life. A first draft of the book, entitled Fermo e Lucia, appears in 1823. But its many digressions, and occasionally stark divisions between invented plot, history, and authorial commentary, lead Manzoni to revise. A new, better calibrated novel, published in 1827, takes the title I promessi sposi: Storia milanese del secolo XVII scoperta e rifatta da Alessandro Manzoni (The Betrothed: A Milanese Story from the Seventeenth-century Discovered and Rewritten by Alessandro Manzoni). It recalls a venerable technique. Like Miguel de Cervantes, with his humorous asides to the reader, or Daniel Defoe, with his description of the London plague, Manzoni pretends to update and retell an earlier story, this one found in a seventeenth-century manuscript. Though the novel is an immediate success, he rewrites it yet again, recasting its language into 1138

the chosen Tuscan, in order to reach a broader audience and begin developing an Italian national language. The final version appears between 1840 and 1842. Its overall plot is simple: Renzo and Lucia, betrothed at the start of the novel, are prevented from marrying by the local Spanish noble, Don Rodrigo, who takes a liking to Lucia and wagers that he can seduce her. After a series of adventures, including kidnappings, imprisonments, a riot in the city of Milan, and the experience of the plague of 1631, the betrothed reunite and marry. In a certain sense, the interrupted marriage is precisely what permits the complex articulation of the plot. The variety of episodes allows Manzoni to explore a range of historical and geographic situations that together portray an era. They also provide opportunities to disclose distinct examples of the human spirit enmeshed in history, faced with the choices that create their meanings. There are Renzo and Lucia, two worthy peasants whose separate adventures trace their characters: Renzo, the active hero, naı¨ve but intelligent and determined, who makes his way, sometimes awkwardly but ultimately successfully, through complex historical situations; Lucia, the modest, spiritually luminous heroine whose quiet strength allows her to survive and even transform her feudal predators. Beyond the central figures, there are minor ones, including the priest Don Abbondio, whose fears leave him no resources to resist Don Rodrigo’s threats. Fra Cristoforo’s courage proposes a counterexample of strength, passion, and humility. Sister Gertrude, the nun of Monza, reveals a life distorted by the inhumanity of her parents. Don Rodrigo, the local Spanish noble who sets in motion the long series of adventures, and dies unrepentant, finds his double in the novel’s most threatening figure, the Innominato, whose evil life is finally transfigured through the presence of Lucia and a turn to God. Less prominent, yet equally important to the texture of the plot, are figures such as faithful Agnese, Lucia’s mother; Perpetua, the humorous housekeeper of Don Abbondio; and Azzeccagarbugli, the pompous, cowardly lawyer consulted by Renzo. Such characters draw in the seventeenth-century world of oppressors and oppressed—the Italian nobility, the foreign Spanish invaders, and the humble people, those buffeted by the great winds of history, without much power to escape or change it. Written in the early years of the Risorgimento, Manzoni’s novel speaks of feudal hierarchies, political fragmentation, and victimization to foreign

ALESSANDRO MANZONI powers—political issues that, though set in the seventeenth century, reach to his own day. As Georg Luka´cs puts it, ‘‘Without ever departing from the concrete framework of time, place, and the age and class-conditioned psychology of the times, the story of Manzoni’s lovers grows into the tragedy of the Italian people as a whole’’ (The Historical Novel, 1983). In a more recent work, Franco Moretti indicates the role of historical novels such as Manzoni’s in building national unities—often by revealing but then abolishing implicit spatial and temporal heterogeneities (Atlante del romanzo europeo 1800– 1900, 1997). Through characters such as Renzo, whose episodic story spans rural to urban spaces, but also through Lucia, who serenely triumphs over the feudal order of the past, the novel helps develop that ‘‘imagined community’’ that takes political form as a nation state some 20 years after the book’s publication, due in part to its unifying cultural effects. In Manzoni’s efforts to join history and invention, Sir Walter Scott is often cited as the primary influence. Indeed, Manzoni agreed that he might never have thought of writing a historical novel had it not been for Scott’s well-known efforts to combine history with invention. And like Scott, Manzoni uses the travels of hero and heroine to evoke a socioeconomic past as well as steps toward the future (indeed, as Moretti points out, he develops a double plot in I promessi sposi—leading toward the past in the figure of Lucia and the future through Renzo). But equally important—here as elsewhere in Manzoni’s oeuvre—is Shakespeare, whose ability to portray the many facets of human feeling and the complexity of motivation he particularly admired. Manzoni had already experimented with the portrayal of character through personal and political history in the tragedies. But the novel form, with its potential for dramatic dialogue, for lyric description, and the interweaving of plot and history, allows for more varied registers of language and thought. Here, his art discloses neither a providential pattern nor a simple admiration for the oppressed, the people. It is rather a ‘‘thick description,’’ an anthropological inquiry emphasizing the role of human choice as individual lives collide with greater historical forces. Though Manzoni soon turns from the historical novel to history itself (publishing the Storia della colonna infame in 1842), he leaves for posterity a stunning example of the genre. In Italy, I promessi sposi quickly becomes a classic, entering the daily lives of the populous as well as the critical life of

European Romanticism. For those who read it today, its characters and their world seem no less vivid and compelling, though perhaps even more strikingly Italian, than they did to the eager readers of the mid-nineteenth century. SANDRA BERMANN Editions First editions: I promessi sposi, Milan: Ferrario, 1827; includes Storia della colonna infame, Milan: Guglielmi and Redaelli, 1840–1842. Critical editions: I promessi sposi, edited by Luigi Russo, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1935; edited by Piero Nardi, Milan: Mondadori, 1940; edited by Attilio Momigliano, Florence: Sansoni, 1951; edited by Giovanni Getto, Florence: Sansoni, 1964; with Storia della colonna infame, edited by Lanfranco Caretti, Milan: Mursia, 1984; edited by Angelo Stella, and Cesare Repossi, Turin: Einaudi-Paris: Gallimard, 1995; with Storia della colonna infame, edited by Salvatore Silvano Nigro, Milan: Mondadori, 2002. Translations: The Betrothed Lovers, translated by Charles Swan, Pisa: Niccolo Capurro, 1828; The Betrothed, translated by Daniel J. Connor, New York: Macmillan, 1924, rpt. 1940; The Betrothed: A Tale of XVII Century Milan, translated by Archibald Colquhoun, New York-London: Dent, 1956; The Betrothed, translated by Bruce Penham, London: Penguin, 1972; The Betrothed; and, History of the Column of Infamy, edited by David Forgacs and Matthew Reynolds, London: J.M. Dent, 1997.

Further Reading Ba`rberi-Squarotti, Giorgio (editor), Prospettive sui ‘‘Promessi sposi,’’ Turin: Tirrenia Stampatori, 1991. Chiari, Alberto, Rileggendo il Manzoni, Rome: Ateneo, 1967. De Benedetto, Vincenzo, Guida ai Promessi Sposi, Milan: Rizzoli, 1999. Gadda, Carlo Emilio, ‘‘Apologia manzoniana,’’ in Solaria, 1 (1927). Luka´cs, Georg, The Historical Novel, translated by H. and S. Mitchell, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983. Mazzocca, Fernando, Quale Manzoni? Vicende figurative de Promessi Sposi, Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1985. Moravia, Alberto, Man as an End: A Defense of Humanism, New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1966. Moretti, Franco, Atlante del romanzo europeo 1800–1900, Turin: Einaudi, 1997. Pupino, Angelo R.,‘‘Il vero solo e bello’’: Manzoni tra retorica e logica, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1982. Puppo, Mario, Poesia e verita`: Interpretazioni manzoniane, Messina-Florence: D’Anna, 1979. Raimondi, Ezio, Il romanzo senza idillio: Saggio sui ‘‘Promessi sposi,’’ Turin: Einaudi, 1974. Russo, Luigi, Dal Manzoni al Gattopardo, Florence: Sansoni, 1981.

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ALESSANDRO MANZONI Spongano, Raffaele, Le prime interpretazioni dei ‘‘Promessi sposi,’’ Bologna: Patron, 1967. Wellek, Rene´, A History of Modern Criticism 1750–1950, vol. 2, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955.

TRAGEDIES Alessandro Manzoni’s two dramatic tragedies, Il conte di Carmagnola (The Count of Carmagnola, 1819) and Adelchi (Adelchi, 1822) usher in a new era of nineteenth-century Italian drama, establishing Manzoni as the undisputed leader of Italian Romanticism. His deliberate turn toward history, viewed from a Christian perspective, not only takes the theater of his day in a new direction, but also marks an important transformation in his own development. Written in the wake of the Inni sacri, the tragedies reveal his growing power as a writer, and his moral insight into the human condition. True, the tragedies could not be called great stage successes. In fact, the opening of Carmagnola in Florence in 1828 elicited primarily laughter and yawns, according to Giovan Battista Niccolini, while the opening performance of Adelchi in Turin 1843 was also poorly received, according to Angelo Brofferio (Guido Davico Bonino, Nota introduttiva a Adelchi, 1888). Yet Manzoni claimed that he did not write his tragedies for performance, but rather for solitary reading. Although their critical reception was mixed, they were in fact appreciated by some of the most discerning voices of the time, especially Goethe, who commented on their great depth and lyrical beauty. Manzoni begins Il conte di Carmagnola in January 1816, completing it only in August 1819, while drafting his fifth sacred hymn, ‘‘La Pentecoste,’’ and the first part of Osservazione sulla morale cattolica. Adelchi follows soon after, in 1822. Not surprisingly, moral concerns remain central to both dramas. But so does an aspiration to achieve ‘‘something new,’’ something inspired in part by Shakespeare—who was then known in Italy only through written texts (later in the century his plays were staged by the likes of Tommaso Salvini, Adelaide Ristori, and Ernesto Rossi). But the novelty Manzoni sought was also foreshadowed by 1140

Goethe, by Schiller, and by his own increasing interest in the role that history might play in an art that would deliver the true. In his preface to Il conte di Carmagnola, Manzoni specifically rejects the neoclassical ‘‘unities’’ of action and time, pointing out their false premises, and noting that the most important English and Spanish playwrights never abide by them, and that audiences never need them. He also highlights important innovations: his use of the chorus to provide the poet’s own perspective (the chorus being, in the wake of August Wilhelm Schlegel, the means for the poet to speak directly, and on behalf of all humanity), and the new role he gives to history. In this case he focuses on the historical life of Carmagnola, a mercenary soldier of the fifteenth century. To ensure that his reader appreciates the historical origins of the plot, Manzoni offers prefatory historical notes and divides his dramatis personae into ‘‘historical’’ and ‘‘ideal.’’ The drama portrays events occurring between 1426 and 1432, when Carmagnola, who had originally acted as a mercenary soldier in the ranks of Filippo Maria Visconti, is appointed commanderin-chief of Venetian forces. At first, he wins victories against Milan. But subsequent defeats lead to suspicions, accusations, and eventually execution. Examining the historical record, Manzoni rejects the view that Carmagnola was in fact guilty, believing him innocent but betrayed. In a long monologue of the drama, Marco, a Venetian senator, opposes his devotion to his country to his friendship with Carmagnola, whom he will betray. This tragedy vividly portrays an unjust state, manipulating individuals at will. As the plotline takes the reader over six years of action, Carmagnola’s situation and character gradually come into focus. If the first two acts portray his military prowess, the third reveals the growing suspicions surrounding him, and Act IV the manipulated agreement of his friend, Marco, not to warn him of the plan to lure him to Venice to arrest him. In the final act, Carmagnola is condemned to death. Carmagnola’s predicament—the just man in an unjust world—promotes reflection about Italy in the fifteenth century, and on history more generally. Above all, it casts light on the human spirit as it deals with a world that is fundamentally flawed. The climax of the play occurs after Carmagnola is betrayed by the Venetian senate and condemned. Alone in his cell, he contemplates his past and present state. Unable to seek justice in the earthly present, he seeks it in the eternal judgment of

ALESSANDRO MANZONI God. Speaking to his wife, his daughter, and his lieutenant Gonzaga, he reasserts his innocence and counsels forgiveness. As the drama closes, we observe the somewhat mechanical metamorphosis of the protagonist from a miles laico into a miles Dei, ready to proclaim God’s metaphysical justice. Though the play received only mixed reviews in Italy, its innovative use of history, its lyric chorus, and its accessible language building complex and moving characters, added much to Manzoni’s reputation as a leading Romantic, a reputation that grows through his historical system, described in the Lettre a` M. Chauvet and put into practice again in his second attempt at tragedy. The plot of Adelchi is set in Italy in 773–774, when Pope Adrian I asked Charlemagne’s help in warding off the invasion of the Longobard king, Desiderius, whose daughter, Ermengarda, had been married to and then rejected by Charlemagne. So concerned is Manzoni with the audience’s understanding of this complex history that he again provides prefatory historical notes, and eventually, a long essay, Discorso sopra alcuni punti della storia longobardica in Italia (Essay on Some Aspects of Longobard History in Italy). The tragedy follows the military campaign of Carlo (Charlemagne) against Desiderius and his noble, courageous, and loyal son, Adelchi, who fights at his father’s side in a war he believes to be unjust and doomed to be lost. In the course of it, Desiderius is indeed defeated, Ermengarda falls into delirium and dies, while Adelchi, who had argued from the first against his father’s invasion of papal lands, is betrayed and mortally wounded. Carried before Desiderius and Carlo, he seeks a promise that his father will not be harmed, and then prepares to die. Evoking a number of romantic heroes, but above all the figure of Christ, Adelchi awaits the eternal, having been betrayed by a worldly friend. Like Carmagnola, he learns that justice is not possible in historical reality, where force holds sway and power has the last word. In Adelchi, as well as in Il conte di Carmagnola, Manzoni’s focus on historical truth joins his rational, yet compassionate portrayal of the limits of human action to right an unjust world. His modern diction and moving psychological insights make the revelations of Adelchi and Ermengarda in the two choruses devoted to them in Acts II and IV some of Manzoni’s greatest lyric passages. The first, known as Italy’s chorus, describes society suffering under superior forces, evoking the plight of Italy in the early years of the Risorgimento. The second provides insight into private tragedy, where respite is found only in death. Read in the context

of the play, they support Manzoni’s creation of lasting characters. Adelchi is often compared to Corneille’s Polyeucte or Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and Ermengarda to Racine’s Phe`dre or Athalie. In particular, Ermengarda’s delirious monologue in Act IV, with its public and almost operatic confession of her sins before the nuns of the convent of San Salvadore in Brescia, makes her the most moving of all of Manzoni’s heroines. A mixture of Lucia and Gertrude, a wife and daughter of kings, Ermengarda describes her consuming passion for Carlo, mingled with a plea to an elusive and ultimately mute God, in a language that hovers between dream and magical invocation. Such a figure remains, in the end, distinctly Manzoni’s own, revealing his probing depictions of the human soul in its encounters with history and hopes for happiness and earthly justice. In later years, Manzoni’s pessimism lessens, but his intense interest in the private and political trials offered by historical circumstances only grows, finding new expression in the historical novel. SANDRA BERMANN Editions First edition: Il conte di Carmagnola, Milan: Vincenzo Ferrario, 1820; Adelchi, Milan: Ferrario, 1822. Critical editions: Adelchi, tragedia storica, edited by Giorgio Derzero, Turin: Paravia, 1947; Adelchi, edited by Aurelia Accame Bobbio, Rome: Signorelli, 1965; Adelchi, edited by Luigi Russo, Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 1967; Adelchi, edited by Isabella Becherucci, Florence: Accademia della Crusca, 1998. Il conte di Carmagnola, edited by Alberto Chiari, Florence: Le Monnier, 1947; Tragedie: Il Conte di Carmagnola e Adelchi, edited by Fausto Ghisalberti, Milan: Rizzoli, 1954; Tragedie, edited by Guido Bollati, Turino: Einaudi, 1965. Translations: The Count of Carmagnola and Adelchis, edited and translated by Federica Brunori Deigan, Baltimore-London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.

Further Reading Accame Bobbio, Aurelia, Storia dell’Adelchi, Florence: Le Monnier, 1963. Bene, Carmelo, and Giuseppe Di Leva, L’Adelchi, o della volgarit‘ di politico, Milan: Longanesi, 1984. Bosisio, Paolo, ‘‘Il Manzoni drammaturgo dal ‘Carmagnola’ all’‘Adelchi,’’’ in Otto/Novecento, 2 (1986): 5–37. Davico Bonino, Guido, Nota introduttiva a Adelchi, Turin: Einaudi, 1988. De Sanctis, Francesco, Manzoni, Turin: Einaudi, 1955. Getto, Giovani, Manzoni europeo, Milan: Mursia, 1971.

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ALESSANDRO MANZONI Lonardi, Gilberto (editor), Introduzione a ‘Il conte di Carmagnola,’ Venice: Marsilio, 1989. Lonardi, Gilberto, Ermengarda e il pirata: Manzoni, drama epico, melodrama, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1991.

Molinari, Cesare, ‘‘La (s)fortuna teatrale di Manzoni,’’ Biblioteca teatrale, 1 (1986): 77–93. Raimondi, Ezio, Romanticismo italiano e romanticismo europeo, Milan: Mondadori, 2000.

DACIA MARAINI (1936–) Dacia Maraini, novelist, playwright,