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: 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: 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: 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: Il presente volume raccoglie i saggi di Speranza Cerullo, Luciano Formisano, Claudio Lagomarsini, Paolo Maninchedda, Paolo Squillacioti e Riccardo Viel dedicati al tema del falso e della falsificazione nella tradizione letteraria italiana e romanza e nella società contemporanea, nati intorno all’esperienza della Summer School di Urbino del luglio 2019 dedicata a questo tema. L’evento urbinate, terza edizione del ciclo Costruire l’Europa, ha concluso il progetto che per tre anni ha posto a denominatore comune delle sue riflessioni un tema da sempre caro alla filologia romanza: l’idea di un’Europa vista nei suoi fondamenti culturali, letterari e linguistici.

Description: What does the growing interest of literary criticism towards the representation of nature and its ethical implications tell us? In which folds of narrative, poetic or cinematographic discourse do the manifestations of a continuously renewed sensitivity for the contradictions of progress, for the precarious coexistence between human, animal and plant agents lie? And what kind of relationships can there be between the semantics of places and landscapes, expressed in a fictional world, and eco-criticism? Sixteen essays suspended between 'text' analysis and theory of criticism are solicited and collected by Nicola Turi, in an attempt to answer these and other questions affecting the function and orientations of contemporary criticism, its ability to give back the forms of artistic language, and at the same time its recurring temptation to confront, as Calvino's Bradamante would say, with the «life behind it that pushes and disarranges all the leaves of the book».

Description: Author of Architettura del medioevo in Sardegna which won him the Premio Nazionale Olivetti in 1956, Raffaello Delogu was an art historian and Commissioner for Antiquities and Monuments in Sardinia, Abruzzo and Sicily. His correspondence with one of the most eminent Italian writers of the second half of the twentieth century, as transcribed and lavishly annotated here by Monica Graceffa, reveals him not only as a committed intellectual devoted to the study of ancient and modern art, but also as a caustic and playful friend. His dialogue with Giuseppe Dessí commenced in their youth, when Dessí was an amateur painter on the way to maturity, who instead rapidly developed into a mature writer and attentive connoisseur of all forms of art. In addition to their studies and mutual friends (including Claudio Varese and Maria Lai), they also shared an interest in painting and in what Dessí was experiencing (his moves, his political passion) and what he was writing (fiction, drama, essays); important in this regard are the letters touching on the collaboration of both on the Sardinian issue of Pietro Calamandrei's «Il Ponte».

Description: This volume brings together 474 letters that Luciano Anceschi and Oreste Macrí wrote each other for 50 years. The strong point of the deep (and maybe unexpected) friendship between the two critics – based on the shared and fierce activism, on the common outlook of an «uncompromising humanism» – is curiously a dialectical progression that almost always excludes the perspective of a total agreement. It is a dialogue that springs from differences, and that exhorts to think about them. After the Second World War, the protagonists of the correspondence started to relaxedly discuss about the present and future of the European cultural civilization, the meaning of a literature that seems to illustrate a permanent state of crisis, and the events that gave life to the literary debate until the threshold of the new millennium, between post-hermetic tendencies and new experimentalisms.

Description: As scattered pieces of a composite artistic path to be reassembled, the personal notes, writing tests, private letters and reviews kept by Giuseppe Dessí over the years allow Nicola Turi, who had already been following the author’s footsteps for some time, to reconstruct the sources of inspiration, the composition and revision processes, as well as the main stages of the critical reception of a work crossing the best part of the 20th century in Italy with an elegant gait which constantly brings it in on the same level as the great European models: a philosophical background which is always up to date, and the very fine sensitivity of someone who knows how to grasp the imperceptible movements of the human soul and the great changes of history at the same time. This volume is the result of a long archival work and, also by virtue of the bibliography (by and on the author) placed in the appendix, it aims at functioning as a journey through Dessí’s texts and, at the same time, at offering the readers the necessary hermeneutical support to understand his works.