Se non la realtà di Tommaso Landolfi

The book Se non la realtà is a collection of 21 stories each dedicated to a travel destination. The purpose of this essay is to show how Landolfi, behind the appearance of a travel book, continues to investigate himself and his relationship with the world. The external world (places and people) is described with such precision as to become distorted and sometimes repugnant, but actually, it is constantly desired. The narrator is aware that he needs other people, even if only to confirm his otherness.

«... più di quello che a professione donnesca conviensi»

This article analyses the particular situation of female production in the 16th century in a Venetian and Veneto’s environment, with particular attention to the world of both literary and musical writing and observing the apparent delay of musical creation compared to literary creation.

Sulla plaquette montaliana La casa dei doganieri e altri versi (1932)

The contribution focuses on a small collection of poems published by Montale on 1932. In this booklet poems are alternated with drawings made by some of the artists of the Antico Fattore restaurant in Florence, where they met and found a prize of the same name, which was awarded to Montale on 1931. The contribution examines material characteristics of this plaquette, the connection between poems and drawings, the literary importance of these five Montale’s poems, which are placed between the second edition of Ossi di seppia (1928) and the print of Le occasioni (1939).

Intorno al Viaggio musicale di Andrea Zanzotto

Starting from Viaggio musicale, a small book curated by Paolo Cattelan in dialogue with Andrea Zanzotto on the theme of music and poetry, the article follows the path of formation of the poet to music: the nursery rhymes of childhood, Toti Dal Monte and the Opera arias sung by the villagers, the theatre of puppets and music by Margot Galante Garrone, Federico Fellini and Nino Rota, the musicians who met his poetry and set it to music.

Il Petrarca dell’ingegnere

This paper focuses on a sonnet by Giovanni Casoni, who worked as engineer in Venice during the first half of the nineteenth century and developed some methods about medieval venetian Archeology. From his literary production, mostly still unpublished, are here slected some verses on the recognition, in 1843, of Francesco Petrarca tomb in Arquà. The composition is interesting for some new elements that it provides around this circumstance, and as evidence of the political inclinations of Casoni.

‘Per parti’ e ‘a voce sola’

The contribution is dedicated to the ‘teatro da camera’ of Annibale Ruccello (1956-86), thirty years after his death, recognized as one of the greatest Italian playwrights of the late twentieth century. ‘Teatro da camera’ in the dual sense of writing for a few characters (up to the monologue) and of performing in the constrained space of a ‘room’, even in comparison with other great examples of the drama that precedes and follows, from Harold Pinter to Mario Vargas Llosa (Al pie del Tàmesis, 2008). The ‘camera’ is of particular interest – even in comparison to these names – with a theater of personified mental space and ways of representing temporal experience.

La «disperazione delle passioni» nelle Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis

The present essay explores the concept of love, marriage and patriotism in the Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis. In Foscolo’s novel you meet unhappy and divided families, which reflect the misfortune of Italy. Thus the protagonist’s private life represents the situation and the fate of the entire nation.

Un’ultima polemica ‘giornalistica’ per l’ottantaquattrenne Saverio Bettinelli

Saverio Bettinelli’s last works consist of some volumes of pseudo-letters and verses ‘in the feminine’ which certainly contrast with his production prior to the Jesuit suppression. About these works lively controversy was created by those who considered them to be frivolous and morally dangerous. These are the accusations made against him in 1800, with a series of journalistic articles wrote by an unknown author now identified with the lawyer Luigi Bramieri, an energetic supporter of completely opposite classicist positions. These articles were followed by the reply of a still lively Bettinelli.

«Uomo e natura qui sono più vicini»

In Partita rimandata. Diario calabrese, Alberto Savinio’s writing is so digressing that singular metamorphic visions take precedence over the ideological clash of 1948: a ferry-boat becomes a female-ship, the palms of a public garden liven like Luciano’s woman-vines, lamb-like or ram-headed men appear here and there. Reggio, Catanzaro, Crotone, Cosenza: the steps that Savinio brings to the readers’ knowledge are not many, but sufficient to better define a powerfully visionary style, elaborating an idea of Calabria that integrates the present, the history, the myth.

Viaggio in Barberia di Luciano Bianciardi

Luciano Bianciardi visited Maghreb in 1968 and wrote about this experience in Viaggio in Barberia, published in 1969 by Editrice dell’Automobile. This trip offered him – a naturally sedentary writer – the opportunity to reflect theoretically on the possibilities and limits of travelling and of travel writing. By linking Viaggio in Barberia to other textual references from both Bianciardi and Enzo Melandri, this paper is going to propose a reading of the book which stresses its theoretical metaliterary force. In particular, Bianciardi’s reflections on analogy as the logical structure most frequently employed by travellers seem to open a fertile terrain for further exploration.