ALBERT

Description: From the 1920s onwards, the Soviet Union became a favourite destination for Italian writers, travellers who took it upon themselves to interpret and present the new Soviet world to Italian readers by sending articles to newspapers and magazines, most of which were later published as monographs. The present study aims to investigate the reasons that drove so many intellectuals to visit Russia and the Soviet territories after the October. Through references to historical and political ideologies that may have influenced the writers’ interpretations, the reconstruction of travel conditions and individual approaches to Soviet life, the study focuses on Italian intellectuals’ views on the USSR and the particular value that the reportages had in the construction of the image of the Soviet world in the Italian reality.

Description: The Common Slavic *bogŭ ‘god’ displays an astonishingly rich derivation across Slavic languages, both numerically and semantically, with lexemes including almost all parts of speech: inflected (nouns, adjectives, verbs, pronouns) and not inflected (adverbs, connectives, prepositions). In this article the author pays special attention to the exclamations and other exclamation-related expressions containing this base word, as well as providing a description of the syntactic patterns from which such lexical units are generated and a brief analysis of the semantic processes (lexicalization, refunctionalization) from which they derive.

Description: Narrative has been the subject of theoretical reflection and empirical investigation since Aristotle’s Poetics. However, with the turn of the millennium, we are witnessing a real narrative turn in the humanities and social sciences. This volume aims to provide an overview of recent developments in the theoretical analysis of narrative, offering the reader a series of contributions that are organized along the following three theoretical-disciplinary axes: theories of narrative at the intersection of cognitive, evolutionary, and computational approaches; narrative theory and cognitive neuroscience; and narrative and storytelling as socio-communicative phenomena.

Description: The contribution analyses the relationship between the Università degli Studi di Firenze and the city's literary and linguistic institutions in the hundred years of the University’existence. Three frameworks are dedicated to the link with the Gabinetto Scientifico Letterario G.P. Vieusseux, the Società Dantesca Italiana and the Accademia Toscana di Scienze e Lettere 'La Colombaria' for literary side, and one to that between the University and the Accademia della Crusca for linguistic one.

Description: In the early 19th-century, Milan was the most active Italian city in the publishing of books. There, collectors, librarians, scholars of ancient literature and young men of letters were protagonists in an intense activity of publishing classical texts. New editions of Divina Commedia, Petrarch's Rime, Boccaccio’s Decameron, Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata and of many works by writers of the 18th century were published in Milan, in particular by Società Tipografica de' Classici Italiani (Italian Classical Writers’ Printing Society). In a period rich in cultural and linguistic debates, even discussions on the procedures for publishing texts took on a new importance. By analysing the statements of the editors, investigating their textual choices, following their polemics, Alberto Cadioli, one of the well-known Italian textual bibliography scholars for the modern texts, underlines the importance of the «sana critica», the «sound criticism» – i.e. the philological practice, according to the language of that time - with which classical texts were published in Milan in the first decades of the 19th century. This book, that offers unknown data and a large documentation, reveals theoretical unexpectedly Modern observations and methodological indications, hidden in pages forgotten for many years.

Description: «Auf Wiedersehen in Florenz!» Voci di ebrei tedeschi dall’Italia presents a new Italian perspective on German exile literature, which is related to the migration of German-Jewish intellectuals to Florence after 1933. A reconstruction of the historical context is provided by shedding light on the intersections between Italian, German and Jewish cultures in the Florentine context but also on the literary production of the involved authors. Migration writers such as Alice Berend, Rudolf Borchardt, Karl Wolfskehl and Walter Hasenclever are presented in relation to the process of writing in exile, whereas the works of Max Krell, Monika Mann, Otti Binswanger-Lilienthal and Georg Strauss are analyzed in the section devoted to post-exile.

Description: In those Slavic languages where the vocative inflectional case endings are used inconsistently, a statistically increased occurrence of vocative’s endings can be observed with nouns having a diminutive or hypocoristic semantics. Assuming that is the ‘affective charge’ of some specific nouns which enhances the probability of vocative case forms, the present paper has two aims: 1. to verify empirically in three Slavic languages (Serbian, Polish, Bulgarian) whether the vocative case is better preserved with nouns having a derogatory semantics (insults and bad words), 2. to establish which are the rules governing their use.

Description: Besides its temporal semantics, the imperfect tense can express a wide range of modal meanings, which occur most typically in spoken varieties of language. The paper contrastively explores the modal uses of the imperfect tense in Italian and Bulgarian, a Romance and Slavic language respectively, and shows to what extent they are similar or diverge in the two languages. Although the basic notional configuration of the imperfect tense in Italian and Bulgarian seems to be exactly the same, occurrences of modal meanings are less frequent in Bulgarian than in Italian. Possible explanatory hypotheses suggest that the peculiarities of the tense system (dedicated future-in-the-past form; specific narrative mood), as well as the different syntactic rules governing the sequence of tenses in related sentences, put major constraints on the development of modal meanings of the imperfect tense in Bulgarian.

Description: The reception of Seneca’s Tragedies had a crucial moment during the 14th and early 15th centuries. In this period, after their recent rediscovery but before the extraordinary circulation across Europe in the Renaissance, Seneca’s plays attracted the attention of scholars and poets, and also of some exegetes who taught in Italian universities and schools. These cultural places represented a formidable medium for the dissemination of the Tragedies and the exegetical materials produced around them. In particular, an important role was played by Petrarch and Boccaccio, who read Tragedies and evoked them in their works, but also by some exegetes-professors such as Giovanni del Virgilio, Pietro da Moglio, Domenico Bandini, Bartolomeo del Regno and Petrus Parmensis, who focused their commentaries and lectures on Seneca’s plays. So, at first, this volume recalls the narrow spread of Seneca’s Tragedies up to Early Middle Ages, and examines their rediscovery, that was realized by Nicolaus Trevet and Paduan prehuminists Lovato de’ Lovati and Albertino Mussato, but which took place also in Tuscany and Bologna. Then, the book analyses the philological and interpretative reception of the Tragedies by Petrarch and Boccaccio, and the allusions to Seneca’s plays in the Expositio on Ovid’s Metamorphoses by Bolognese professor Giovanni del Virgilio, who may have influenced Petrarch. Furthermore, great attention is paid to the exegetic activity of Pietro da Moglio, professor in Bologna and Padua and author of poetic summaries of the Tragedies that were very popular. In detail, the volume contains a new edition of these text, which updates Giuseppe Billanovich’s edition on the basis of many recently rediscovered manuscripts. Then, the book explores the interest in Tragedies shown by Domenico Bandini, teacher in Bologna and Tuscany and close friend of Coluccio Salutati. A pupil of the latter, Lorenzo Ridolfi, in his youth wrote – almost certainly on Salutati’s advice – a proem and some original summaries of the Tragedies, an edition of which is offered in this volume for the first time. New investigations are also focused on the exegetical activity of Bartolomeo del Regno, student of Pietro da Moglio and professor in Bologna, and on an important manuscript of the Tragedies linked to him. Good attention is also given to the original glosses on the Tragedies written by Petrus Parmensis in a manuscript adorned with elegant miniatures, that show special features compared to the illustrations in other codices and textual commentaries composed by Trevet and Mussato. This continuous exegesis, multifaceted and also open to dialogue with the art of illumination, represented an indispensable point of reference for the pupils of such professors, including Coluccio Salutati, Francesco da Fiano and Francesco Piendibeni da Montepulciano, who were students of Pietro da Moglio before becoming humanists. After all, the book underlines that Francesco da Fiano and Francesco Piendibeni knew Seneca’s dramas, but also analyses the manuscript of Tragedies copied and annotated by Coluccio Salutati and lists all quotations from this plays in his Epistolary and De laboribus Herculis. Therefore, the ways followed by exegesis and fortune of Tragedies in the 14th century and at dawn of 15th, analyzed in this volume, offer an example of the multiple routes of the text’s tradition, but also an eloquent paradigm of the fact that Middle Ages and Humanism, far from being conceived as historical categories, in this era could productively dialogue on the level of hermeneutics and dissemination of knowledge.

Description: The volume contains Andrea Trovesi’s linguistic writings, hitherto scattered in various journals and miscellanies, all characterized by a pragmatic approach. The first part collects studies on Slavic vocative conducted from a comparative-historical perspective ranging from Proto-Slavic to modern Slavic languages. These focus in particular on categorical transformations of the vocative, its relics, so-called ‘new vocatives,’ and pragmatic values developed in the various Slavic languages. The second part of the volume is devoted to modal meanings of the imperfect in a Slavic-Romance contrastive framework. The research privileges Bulgarian, but does not neglect the other Slavic languages of which it analyzes interesting residual peripheral aspects of such linguistic usage. Both lines of research presented here stand out for their originality and theoretical value considered from a point of view that leads from Slavic linguistics to the broader perspective of linguistics as a science of language.