Intorno ai versi di Ippolito Pindemonte per Isabella Teotochi Albrizzi

Included in the years between the 1787 and the 1800, the six poems in verse by Ippolito Pindemonte dedicated to Isabella Teotochi Albrizzi, which have come down to us in various ways, are first configured in a couple of sonnets in which we find a neoclassical homage to the beauty of the dedicatee, to the sharp and penetrating brilliance of her eyes, and then in three other compositions that exalt in idyllic terms the soothing pleasure of walking in the park of her villa. Finally, a more demanding, complex epistle in verse in which the 1800 disastrous war events in northern Italy echo, as well as the theme of the search for peace in the rural dimension.

L’India di Pasolini

As a traveller in India looking for the myth of a natural purity and the utopia of an alternative to neo-capitalistic society, Pasolini felt the burning clash between expectation created by images of an ancient culture and the painful discovery of a world that has lost much of its past due to the spread of Western models. In L’Odore dell’India, the genre of reportage departs from a purely documentary pursuit and becomes a subjective and lyrical experience. Acute and original interpretation of reality experienced by the author as a coded system of sensory signs, Pasolini’s view of India reveals the mythical dimension of his perception and his disillusion confronted with a world whose ‘innocence’ is full of contradictions.

Lungo i futuri possibili del poliziesco

In its rigorous and highly normative framework, the detective story often allows productive analyses on the functioning of its mechanisms and on the role of its elements when it is subjected to structural infringements in order to obtain specific narrative effects. The Minority Report (1956), science fiction story by Philip K. Dick, represents a particular case of ‘science fiction detective story’, a cross between science fiction and the context of the detective investigation, in which the knowability itself of reality and criminal actions change radically, thus providing the starting point for some considerations on how some key elements of the detective story are modified (or how, despite the different approach, they keep their role and function) in a context that represents a substantial and basic infringement of the genre scheme.

«Ho sempre desiderato di avere un grande album»

The posthumous work Album di vestiti, although not a real diary, constitutes an example of private writing capable of retracing the salient passages of the personal and literary story of Paola Masino, author and journalist of the 20th century. These are autobiographical pages where Masino reflects on the themes of motherhood, marriage, her concept of literature and the interest in the chromatic sphere expressed in her volumes. A work of memory, therefore, a ‘biography of clothes’ capable of revealing the dynamics that led to the drafting of some of the most famous passages of Paola Masino’s writings, as well as episodes related to the dear figures of the father Enrico Alfredo and Massimo Bontempelli.

«La più curiosa» regata in onore del duca di York (Venezia, 4 giugno 1764)

This essay analyses one of the most sumptuous regattas of the Serenissima Republic: it was organised in honour of the Duke of York, brother of George III of England, during his stay in Venice on June 4, 1764. Among the many races, the women’s race, in which the most famous rowers of the time took part, stands out. It was also celebrated in poetry: after that day, the poetic text is published here for the first time.

‘Menzogna romantica’ e ‘sortilegio romanzesco’

This contribution attempts to match the dimensions of the ‘menzogna and sortilegio’ of Elsa Morante’s novel, and above all its construction in relation to the novel of the bourgeois epic of the previous century, those of the ‘mensonge romantique’ and ‘verité romanesque’ of René Girard, and therefore of describe the geometries of mimetic desire that build the plot of this huge debut in European post-war literature.

Logos e Verbo: immagini del male nella narrativa di Nelida Milani

This essay aims to highlight the centrality of the themes of guilt and expiation in the writing of Nelida Milani, starting from the recognition of the founding and generating role of writing that is covered by the theme of the word. Logos, understood as the word of man, is at the same time the beginning and the end, the point of departure and landing, a declaration of belonging and identity, an act of faith and a reaction to the continually risk of aphasia and silence. If the word creates bonds and builds personal and collective identity, in Milani’s narrative it is from the betrayal of it, from the breaking of the relationship between signifier and meaning that the Evil is generated and also, at the moment when this break invests the Scriptures, that the meeting point between the word of man and the Word as the word of God is realised. It is therefore in this point of intersection that the reflection on the theme of Evil is central to the writing of Milani, and consequently on those of guilt and expiation, evident above all (but not only) in its most recent narrative. And it is in it, moreover, that the register spends from the ‘comic’ to the ‘tragic’, to identify the role of the writer in the category of ‘responsibility’, in inseparable unity with that of the ‘person’.

«Tutto il mondo è paese» (Ps, VI). Riflessi risorgimentali nei Promessi sposi

In the Promessi sposi Manzoni addresses the Risorgimento problem allusively by portraying situations and feelings attributable to Austrian oppression. Describing the evils of Spanish domination, he presents the reader with the requirements for a modern state. In the novel, the protagonists, not realising these expectations in their native country, seek them elsewhere.

Una rappresentazione varsaviense della goldoniana Donna di garbo

Due to the interest in the Italian Theater by the Court of Saxony in the mid-18th century, some comedies by Carlo Goldoni were exported from Venice to Dresden and Warsaw. For greater ease of the German and Polish public, the plot of the comedies was summarised in special printed brochures, many of which are now kept at the Landesbibliothek and the Staatsarchiv in Dresden. The leaflet of La Donna di garbo, which is studied here, presents interesting differences compared to the comedy that Goldoni printed since 1750. These differences allow us to partially reconstruct how the comedy was actually represented between the date of its composition, 1742, and the first printed edition controlled by Goldoni.

Un itinerario nell’opera di Lalla Kezich, con una lettura del romanzo breve La preparazione

A diminutive and a surname, acquired by her husband and well-known film critic Tullio, define the stage name of Lalla Kezich, ‘b-side figure’ in the Italian literary panorama of the Twentieth Century. This contribution aims to present some notes about her work and its reception, providing a preliminary reading of the short novel that made her enter – and partially affirm – in the Italian publishing market, to which she had already appeared since 1972, after some years spent working in cinema and radio industry. The last paragraph of this essay is dedicated to literary prizes she attended between 1978 and 1985.