Italian Studies

Following the stellar career of papal physician Giulio Mancini, the article brings into focus learned doctors' uses of, and relationships with, manu- scripts. Manuscripts were the main outcome of their practice - as letters of consultation to patients and colleagues, as consilia of various kinds, including for use in courts of law, and also in the form of key professional tools such as casebooks. Clues found in Mancini's rich paper-trail shed light on material aspects of his professional writing and on the role that circulating knowledge in manuscript had in creating and sustaining medical networks. The article also argues that even in a domain as shaped by print as early modern medicine, physicians' use of this medium should not be taken for granted; especially in courtly settings, scribal, as opposed to print, publishing provided them with an effective means of building the social relationships on which their careers depended.

INFERNO II.108 has puzzled commentators from the beginning. There has been general agreement that Lucia's words to Beatrice at Inf. II.107–08, asking her why she does not hasten to Dante's help, ‘non vedi tu la morte che 'l combatte / su la fiumana onde [or “ove”] ‘l mar non ha vanto?’, must refer to the same predicament as that described in INFERNO I, where Dante's attempt to climb the mountain is finally thwarted by the Wolf. It has, therefore, been generally accepted that the death spoken of is that of the soul, and that the fiumana must refer to the impetus to sin, to cupidigia in a broad sense: attention to the things of this world rather than to the realm of the spirit and to God as the supreme good. However, despite this broad agreement, there has been no consensus on how precisely the images of the river and the sea at II.108 are to be understood, and in particular no consensus on what is signified by the descriptive phrase referring to the river, ‘onde/ove 'l mar non ha vanto’.

La storia della poesia latina in Italia durante il Duecento è ancora da farsi. Ben poco è in verità quello che sappiamo oggi attomo ad essa, e questo poco è per lo più così frammentario ed insoddisfacente, che un noto critico non ha esitato a dire che, nel campo della poesia latina, ‘il Duecento è silenzio, il lungo silenzio di Virgilio, fino alla solitaria improvvisa ripresa del Cenacolo Padovano.’ Eppure la versificazione in latino era tutt'altro che assopita durante l'età di Federico II, e i nomi di Riccardo da Venosa, Orfino da Lodi, Bongiovanni da Cavriana, Quilichino da Spoleto e Ursone da Genova, sono più che sufficienti a dimostrarci la vitalità di questa poesia.

Questi non ciberà terra né peltro, ma sapïenza, amore e virtute, e sua nazion sarà tra feltro e feltro.With these words, in the first canto of the Comedy, Dante's Virgil predicts the future arrival of the Veltro who, by driving the she-wolf back into Hell, will be the salvation of ‘quella umile Italia’ where Aeneas founded his state, the divinely willed origin of Rome and its world-wide Empire. The enigmatic sign by which this poor, wise, loving, and virtuous deliverer will be recognized is that his ‘birth’ or ‘nativity’, or his ‘nation’ or ‘people’, will be ‘between felt and felt’. Already at the time of Boccaccio, and again more recently in the present century, some interpreters of the Comedy have linked this reference to felt with the Mongols or Tartars, and specifically with the burial rituals or the enthronement of their Emperor, the Great Khan; hence the deliverance of the West might have its origins in the East with a ruler who, amidst great power and wealth, would be reminded of his own mortality and essential poverty, as represented by the felt. There are, moreover, two further lines of enquiry which connect Florence and the Tartars in or around the year 1300, perhaps indeed during the spring of that centenary Jubilee year, at the very time in which Dante set his account of the dark wood, his failure to climb the sunlit hill, and Virgil's prediction, and possibly even not long before he began to write this first canto.

Domenico di Bandino of Arezzo was one of that circle of humanists who in middle life studied in the orbit of Coluccio Salutati at Florence. Their books enjoyed a brief fame, but did not survive the test imposed by fifteenth-century developments in matter and style. Domenico himself was a prolific writer, but the very weight of his principal work, an enormous encyclopaedia called the Fons Memorabilium Universi, has discouraged a close study of it. Its most original and interesting section, the De Viris Claris Virtute aut Vitio, has been consulted for an aperçu of his knowledge of rediscovered Latin texts, and the whole has been rifled for autobiographical information, but little more has been done.

David Wallace is currently Chair of Comparative Literature and Judith Rodin Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. The following interview took place in London on 21 July 2005, within earshot of the police response to what turned out to be the failed bombing of Warren Street tube station. It took as its point of departure his most recent published volume Premodern Places: Calais to Surinam, Chaucer to Aphra Behn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). A graduate of the University of York, David Wallace completed his Ph. D. at Cambridge in 1983 before moving to America. After a year as a Mellon Fellow at Stanford, he was appointed Associate Professor in English at the University of Texas at Austin, and then, from 1991, Paul W. Frenzel Chair in the Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota prior to taking up his current post at Pennsylvania in 1996. His continued comparativist interest in Italian late-medieval literature and culture is apparent throughout his published work, from his monograph Chaucer and the Early Writings of Boccaccio (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1985) and his Italian contributions to the volume edited by A. J. Minnis and A. B. Scott, Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, c. 1100–c.1375: The Commentary Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), to his volume for the Landmarks of World Literature series, Giovanni Boccaccio: Decameron (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). In 1998 he was awarded the James Russell Lowell Prize for the best book by a member of the MLA for the volume Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). As an editor he oversaw both The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) and, together with Carolyn Dinshaw, The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women's Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

First printed in late August 1481, Cristoforo Landino's Comento on Dante's Comedy marks a pivotal moment in the Florentine cult of Dante, in commentary literature upon his poem, and in the book market for printed 'Dantes'. It is not surprising therefore that, in recent years, Landino's commentary has been studied in some depth and from a variety of points of view. Critical attention has been focused most closely upon the lengthy and ideologically charged proemio to the Comento as well as upon individual topics of interest such as the commentary's socio-political context, its allegorizing readings, its treatment of linguistic matters and relationship to vernacular humanism, and its Platonizing and Neoplatonizing preoccupations.

The standards of editing found in vernacular texts printed in Florence in the fifteenth century appear to have been dictated in most cases by the principles of ease and profit. The methods used, that is, here as in the rest of Italy, were those which were going to cause least trouble to the editors, least delay and expenditure for the printers, and which were going to ensure the widest sale. But there is at least one exception, an edition whose standards of scholarship have not received the credit which they deserve: the LAUDE of Jacopone da Todi printed in 1490 by Francesco Bonaccorsi. I wish first to give a brief survey of some key aspects of what one might regard as the normal approach to editing in Florentine vernacular incunabula, and then to look more closely at the reasons for which these LAUDE can be considered to stand on a separate plane.

The finding of this mandate, which is edited below, is of some interest for understanding the importance of Machiavelli's diplomatic career, for it appears to be the only such mandate to have been discovered. It is probably one of very few that were ever issued to him, and a consideration of it may help to re-fashion two ideas, which belong to interpretations of his diplomatic life. These two ideas are closely related. It is said that Machiavelli was never allowed to play any but a minor part in diplomacy and — as proof of this — that he was only a ‘mandatory’, never an ambassador. Involved in this view is a belief that mandatories, unlike ambassadors, were envoys sent on tasks of small importance and with limited powers — and even (in the diplomatic sense) without powers at all. It implies that Machiavelli, perhaps because of his relatively low birth, could never be an ambassador.

The importance of biography during the Renaissance period has been rightly stressed by the late P. S. Allen in his Age of Erasmus. The biographical approach to early Tudor history has, however, been so much used that its potentialities might seem to be exhausted. Yet so far there have been hardly any attempts to explore the cultural relations of England and Italy from this point of view, though abundant material exists for such work, as this essay may show. Adriano Castelli da Corneto, Polydore Vergil, Andrea Ammonio, and Peter Vannes, to name only a few of the Italians in England, Christopher Urswick and Pace in Italy, are among the lesser figures of the late Renaissance whose careers would repay careful study and illustrate the contacts between the two countries. The Italians in England whose names are enumerated above were chosen because each was at some time a collector or sub-collector of papal revenue here, and because each in his way contributed to the growth of humanism in England. Adriano Castelli, at once a cardinal and an English bishop, gave to the English kings his splendid new house in Rome designed by Bramante. Polydore Vergil brought English history before the eyes of Europe, giving the British past a continuity—even if it was a laudatory Tudor continuity. Ammonio was Latin secretary to Henry VIII and a friend of Erasmus. Peter Vannes, too, was Latin secretary, not only to Henry VIII hut to Edward VI as well, and from 1550 to 1556 was English ambassador to Venice. Griffo was such another, though his contribution to English culture has so far been overlooked. He is the least important of the series in many ways, and much the least well known. Material has now come to hand, however, which makes it possible to draw a much clearer picture of him.

In December 1513 Machiavelli wrote a letter to Francesco Vettori in which he reported that he had composed a book ‘on principates’ (de principatibus), and intended to dedicate it to Giuliano de' Medici. At some date in the next three years or so Machiavelli changed the dedication to Lorenzo de' Medici, nephew of Giuliano. It is usually thought that Machiavelli hoped to present Giuliano with a work which would assist him in governing that state which Giovanni de' Medici (since March 1513 Pope Leo X) planned to establish for him in Northern Italy. However, historians have suggested recently that in and after 1513 Machiavelli's political thought was prompted, less by present concerns than by a wish to understand the failure of the popular government in Florence which had fallen the year before, and warn of the mistakes committed by its chief magistrate, Piero Soderini.

Even the most superficial enquiry into the subject of Italians living in England under Queen Elizabeth brings to one's notice numerous surnames which are household words in the history and literature of Italy. There were then in London merchants of the Portinari and de' Bardi families, there was a Guido Cavalcanti, a Dino Compagni, who later changed his historic Christian name to Bartholomew. There were Alberti, a Machiavelli, members of the house of Bembo, a Castiglione, a Sassetti, a Pallavicino, whose two sons married daughters of Sir Oliver Cromwell thus becoming uncles of the future Protector. There was a Guicciardini, whose daughters and grand-daughters sent Italian blood flowing through the veins of at least four well-known English families—the Ayloffes, the Wentworths, the Mildmays and the Vanes. There was too the subject of this paper, a Castelvetro—Giacomo, nephew of the famous dramatic theorist, Ludovico. Giacomo founded no family, nor did he ever make an important position for himself in the country of his adoption—indeed, from a worldly point of view, he was a failure. His interest for us lies elsewhere—in the fact that, in his own way, he seems to have been little less important than Florio in furthering the study of Italian in Elizabethan and early Jacobean England.

The origin of this article lies in an enquiry made in November, 1949, to a University Librarian, asking him for a list of books on the topic outlined in the title, without, however, at that time, specifying any period of publication. His reply, which I quote, is as follows: ‘I can find only two works in the University Library on the subject you mention, viz.: T. G. Tucker, The Foreign Debt of English Literature (Bell, 1907), Chapter V, Italian Literature and English; and Paget Toynbee, Dante in English Literature from Chaucer to Cary (Methuen, 1910). The second of these is not concerned strictly with the Renaissance period, and the date of both books falls within the first, not the second quarter of the twentieth century.’

Hardly a decade has passed since the death of Cassiano dal Pozzo when some traveller, archaeologist, connoisseur, bibliophile or botanist has not revived the memory of his library and collections, the drawings of antiques, the paintings and portraits, the coins and medals, the strange animals, exotic fruits, pressed flowers and carbuncles or the wide circle of his learned and curious friends. As an intimate of Cardinal Francesco Barberini he was in a position to wield influenceon behalf of a variety of people needing help or information: artists wanting commissions, scholars wanting posts in Rome, access to rare books and manuscripts, permission to read books on the Index or help in retrieving confiscated works from the Inquisition, and fathers desperate to place supernumerary daughters in convents. Yet, among modem students of the seventeenth century his name is not familiar. Even to those who know him he is more interesting for his collections and his friends than for himself. In this connection his name has been kept alive by scholars in two fields: archaeologists working on the corpus of sarcophagus reliefs and art-historians studying Poussin. The archaeologists working under Robert at the German Institute in Rome continued the studies begun by Ciampini, Montfaucon and Winckelmann, all of whom had studied the drawings of antiquities collected by Cassiano. Poussin studies have never neglected Cassiano, who owned a considerable number of the painter's works. In both these fields recent or promised publications weld together a long chain of researches.

Epulario, or, The Italian Banquet; wherein is shewed the maner how to dresse and prepare all kind of Flesh, Foules or Fishes. As also how to make Sauces, Tartes, Pies, &c. After the maner of all Countries. With an addition of many other profitable and necessary things. Translated out of Italian into English.

Visitors to England from the Latin countries in Elizabethan and early Stuart times were invariably amazed at the number and abundance of our daily meals, and went home‘Swearing all other nations eat far less Than Englishmen.’

Lorenzo Magalotti was one of the most versatile spirits of his age and country. Diplomatist, traveller, poet, natural philosopher, and secretary at one time of the Accademia del Cimento, he was an early representative of a type which was to become more common in the following century. Sir Isaac Newton called him “the magazine of good taste.” Accomplished and widely cultured, he scorned all that was irrational, superstitious, or pedantic, but took an alert interest in everything else; although generally with the detachment natural to one who was primarily a man of affairs. During the few months he spent in England he added English to his considerable knowledge of languages, and was one of the first writers to propagate a knowledge of our literature in Italy. He was certainly the first Italian who is known to have paid any attention to Milton, a portion of whose Paradise Lost he translated; he made a version also of Waller's Battle of the Bermudas (roba meno diabolica assai, as he says), and of John Phillips' Splendid Shilling, while his translation, with explanatory notes, of the same author's Cyder was published posthumously at Florence in 1752.

It is a sign of the growing popularity of the Grand Tour that in 1677 the use of foreign travel was publicly debated at Oxford. Among the English travellers then in Italy was Sir Thomas Isham (1657–81), third baronet of Lamport in Northamptonshire, who had been a gentleman commoner at Christ Church in the previous year. As he had already been enjoying the pleasures of Rome for six months, he was probably amused rather than disconcerted to read in a letter from the agent in charge of his estate at home that ‘One of ye prime questions at ye encaenia in Oxford: was whither travelling be good for English Gentlmn.’ Sir Thomas had left England in October, 1676, when he was nineteen, with his twenty-five-year-old cousin the Reverend Zacchaeus Isham as his tutor, on a tour of Italy, Switzerland and France which was to last over two and a half years. About seventeen months (December, 1676-May, 1678) were spent in Italy—nearly a year longer than the time which English tourists normally devoted to the giro d'ltalia within the space of onewinter, spring and early summer. Nor was the itinerary of Sir Thomas and the Revd. Zacchaeus the conventional one through Marseillesand down the west coast of Italy to Florence and Rome. Their route lay through Paris, Lyons and Mont Cenis to Turin and Milan, and thence, with a detour which took in Cremona, Mantua and Este, to Padua and Venice. There they made their first long stay, paying ‘For 45 Dayes Dyet at Venice’ in February and March, 1677. They then set out for the object of their pilgrimage and, travelling through Padua once, more and through Bologna, Cesena, San Marino, Rimini, Ancona and Spoleto, arrived in Rome early, in April. After a few days they left for Naples, where they recorded a payment for ‘9Dayes Dyet’ in their account book, and returned to Rome in the first days of May. Here and at Frascati where he took a house Sir Thomas remained for the next ten months (May, 1677-March,1678).

In most histories of eighteenth-century Italian literature a few lines are devoted to the work of Vincenzo Martinelli, and, since the most productive years of his life were spent in England, his name is to be found in lists of emigrant Italian writers. Scarcely any attempt, however, has been made to assess the value of Martinelli's work as a whole, or to provide more than the briefest of details about his twenty-six years in this country. It is true that his voluminous writings have little intrinsic value, but as a divulgatore he deserves more attention than he has received. Almost all the energies of his maturity were directed towards explaining England to Italy and Italy to England, and it is clear that his personality and contacts gave him opportunities which were not neglected. When he first came to London in 1748, the virtual rediscovery of many fields of Italian literature was scarcely more than beginning in England, and Italian interest in English social and political institutions was developing but uninformed. When he returned to his own country at the end of 1774, the position in both spheres was very different. The credit for some of this change can be given to Baretti, but Martinelli played his part. London in the middle and later years of the eighteenth century was full of resident Italians, many of them adventurers and rascals, or merely insignificant hangers-on of the brawling Opera House world, but there was also a leaven of honest sober men whose abilities gained them a place in influential English circles, and who took advantage of their opportunities as unofficial ambassadors. Studies of the life and work of such individuals can help to explain the remarkable development of Anglo-Italian understanding and sympathy which bore such valuable fruit in the following century.

This essay gives some account of reactions to a single work of art over a hundred years, from the middle of the eighteenth century, when Winckelmann was becoming the prophet of a deliberate Neoclassicism, to the middle of the nineteenth, when Ruskin was proclaiming the moral superiority of medieval to classical and to classicizing art. I have chosen a statue, because sculpture, for most of this period, provoked stronger reactions than painting; a classical one, because the notion of the Ideal in art — a staple of discussion among theorists throughout the period — was rooted in the treatment by the ancients of the human body; a female figure because, in a world whose opinions were dominated by men, the sexual element, seldom absent from (though usually voiceless amid) art theory and appreciation, emerges most clearly from watching reactions to statues of women; the Medici Venus because it was the most famous, the most looked-at of such statues, and, being undraped, drew full attention to the relationship between — to use Lord Clark's useful distinction — the naked and the nude, or between nature and art. And I have concentrated on the reactions of tourists. It is, surely, no longer controversial to suggest that there is some connexion between works of art and theories of art, and the society that pays for, looks at, and reads about paintings and sculptures. Yet art history, when it does pay attention to art's audience, tends to see it in abstract terms, as a social, political or economic whole. Maimed as they are by self-consciousness and prior conditioning, the expressions of personal feeling I shall use are, I think, important as filling a gap in our understanding of art's significance at a given period, and of the nature of that significance. But before reviewing them in narrative form, let us look at the philosophical stances that bracket them.

The twenty-nine letters which form the basis of this article were written between the years 1824 and 1829 by the Hon. William Thomas Horner Fox-Strangways (1795–1865), the eldest son by the second wife of the second Earl of Ilchester. Educated at Westminster and Christ Church, Oxford, Fox-Strangways entered the Diplomatic Service immediately upon coming down from the University. He was posted in rapid succession as attaché to St Petersburg (1819), Constantinople (1820), Naples (1822) and The Hague (1824), but the greater part of his early career was spent in Italy, where he served as Secretary of Legation in Florence (1825–28), Naples (1828–32) and Turin (1832), respectively. He held no further posts in Italy after 1832, becoming Secretary to the Embassy in Vienna (1832–35), Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs (1835–40) to Palmerston during Lord Melbourne's second administration and, finally, Minister Plenipotentiary to the Diet of the German Confederacy in Frankfurt (1840–49), after which he resigned from the Diplomatic Service and held no further post in public life. He retired to live in Dorset, where his family owned two houses, at Melbury and Abbotsbury, and succeeded his half-brother as fourth Earl of Ilchester in 1858.

A survey such as this may begin with a glance back at the last century when, as Professor Whitfield noted in 1949, ‘Dante was as much our poet as Shakespeare was the Germans,' and we hedged him around with luore than as much apparatus.’ This apparatus, the impressive English Dante scholarship of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Moore, Toynbee, Gardner, Wicksteed are the first names to come to mind) was still touched by inherited sentiments of admiration and veneration deriving from the Romantic movement, and also in part from the religious revival connected with it. But such currents of feeling and belief were only stimuli and ’when they weakened the labour of the scholars persisted, held to its task by purely scholarly problems of textual criticism and interpretation; long outliving also that other factor represented by the favour the Italian language had enjoyed with the English educated class in the first half of the nineteenth century, when, as Professor Vincent has recorded; ‘all those with any pretensions to culture could talk it, and many could write it, at least as well as French.’ Yet popular interest in the poet was alive enough at the turn of the century to justify the Temple Classics editions and translations (1899–1906); and these in turn were abreast of recent scholarship. Meanwhile Edward Moore's critical text, the ‘Oxford Dante,’ had had its first edition in 1894, and been followed in 1898 by Paget Toynbee's Dictionary. In 1902 came Edmund Gardner's and P. H. Wicksteed's edition of the Eclogues, and in 1913 the former's still valuable Dante and the Mystics and the latter's Dante and Aquinas. The four volumes of Moore's Studies in Dante came out between 1896 and 1917, and in 1920 Toynbee's critical edition of the Epistolae, the work which was at once his own most enduring legacy to Dante studies and the last really important contribution to them by an Englishman for many years to come.

Having recently celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the Liberation of Italy and the end of fascist dictatorship, we look back over half a century of political turmoil. Post-war Italy has been plagued by political corruption and manipulated by the de-stabilizing forces of Gladio, the mafia, terrorism, the secret services, and masonic lodges. A crucial factor contributing to the distortions of democratic development lies in the transition from dictatorship to democracy, roughly spanning the period from the overthrow of Mussolini in July 1943 to the general election of April 1948. This article looks at this transition in one important area of Italian state administration, the police. It aims to show that there was no serious attempt to reform or democratize the Italian police system and that this failure was to have serious repercussions on the development of the democratic principles embodied in the 1948 constitution. All evidence points towards the deliberate use on the part of the new political class of a police system which though not politically fascist had played an important role in Mussolini's dictatorship and was ill-disposed towards democratic practices. This phenomenon reflects the general tendency towards post-war conservative institutional restoration in Italy.

This article offers a reading of Sanguineti's work of the early 1960s across narrative and poetic genres, focusing on the relationship of the novel Capriccio italiano (1963) to the poetic work that preceded it (Erotopaegnia, 1960), as well as to the collection alongside which it was written (Purgatorio de l'Inferno, 1964), and how these relationships relate to the development of Sanguineti's poetics more generally. The texts are read in the context of theoretical discussions in the Gruppo 63 and neoavanguardia, including questions of representation of the io and of objective reality, and how these are played out against the framework of genre categories and expectations.

‘Since the death of Eugenio Montale, Italy possesses once again a single “altissimo poeta”’. This is how Thomas Harrison begins an article on Zanzotto in The Empty Set. Statements of this sort, emphasizing the poet's singularity, are commonly found in criticism on Zanzotto, especially that which concentrates on his later work, beginning with LA BELTÀ.

The intention of this article is to study the significance of the raised platform, or ringhiera, of the Palazzo Pubblico in Florence as both an architectural and symbolic construct, and to examine how its physical situation and literary citation imagined it as the locus of legitimation in the context of continued political struggle within the nascent popular commune of the Trecento. The premise of the argument is that the consideration of the sociology of space provides an important tool in understanding the cultural construction of community, the socio-political configuration of power relations, the origins and maintenance of social inequality, and the possibilities for resistance. In assuming this perspective, the ringhiera of the Florentine Palazzo Pubblico is understood as neither an inert material place within and around which communal rituals and social relations revolved, nor a symbolic space which determined such activity. Rather, it is conceived as an active component in the continual redescription of ideological boundaries. An examination of the platform's liminality, therefore, is necessary, for whilst conferring legitimacy upon its occupants during periods of civic peace, it was the site where anxiety concerning the permanency of the prevailing political order was most clearly evidenced in times of political upheaval.

The renaissance of interest in classical rhetoric in late medieval Italian literary culture stands at the heart of many accounts of the origins of humanism as an educational programme and set of critical practices. This article, however, seeks to examine the spoken rather than the written word and the vernacular rather than Latin transmission of speechmaking know-how in the Due- and Trecento, with particular attention paid to the social and political contexts of the rhetorical revival. The aim is to move beyond some of the more narrowly configured definitions of rhetorical humanism and demonstrate how the increasing diffusion of rhetorical knowledge in the vernacular led to its democratization as translators and adapters 'opened' increasingly complex parts of rhetorical theory for a lay audience. Rather than delaying the onset of full-blown humanism, understood as an elite Latin-based enterprise, the vernacularization of rhetorical material functions as a keystone in the transmission of knowledge derived from classical culture for applied usage by a much wider social constituency.

Vat. Lat. 3196 is a manuscript in Petrarch's own hand which contains a considerable number of poems later included in the Canzoniere, together with a much smaller number which were ultimately excluded from it and certain other miscellaneous fragments. We also find a few lyrics by other writers who had addressed poems to Petrarch as proposte and to whom he had replied in verse. There are twenty folios in all and many critics, notably Cesareo, Quarta, and Wilkins, have attempted in the past to offer chronological sequences, if not always for all twenty folios, at least for selected parts of them. The object of this study will be to provide a somewhat different chronological order based largely, but not exclusively, on a reassessment of the evidence.

Rhetoricians give extra care to the beginning and end of their compositions, just as military commanders make sure their strongest troops flank their armies. Petrarch evidently had such prescriptions in mind for his Canzoniere. The opening sonnet and the final canzone (I and 366) undoubtedly provide an artistically strong framework for the collection; however, their incoherence, ideologically speaking, is striking. The sonnet is a statement of the achievement of detachment from the variety of emotions which derived from the poet's love of Laura; in the canzone the moral conflict between profane and sacred love is still unresolved and the Christian terms in which the poet speaks, specifically of the need for divine grace for conversion from sin and the right ordering of love, are transparently Augustinian.

The thirty-second canto of PARADISO has never received its fair share of critical attention. 1This may be due, in part, to its position in the cantica, bracketed as it is by two much more immediately interesting cantos. In comparison with the dramatic events of canto XXXI (Beatrice's departure from Dante's side and the appearance of St Bernard in her stead), or with canto XXXIII (the poem's narrative climax and perhaps the clearest demonstration of its author's intellectual and artistic mastery), the content of Paradiso XXXII is bound to hold a less straightforward appeal for most readers. It consists chiefly of discourse; and, moreover, of discourse intended to instruct, through the exposition of a number of fairly abstruse doctrinal issues. The reader might be forgiven for thinking that at this stage in the poem, with Dante-personaggio at last about to apprehend the divine mystery, Bernard's painstaking description of the arrangement and occupants of the ‘candida rosa’ is ill-timed, if not actually superfluous; for a moment, the visionary seems to be elbowed aside by the lecturer. On such grounds the canto has frequently served as a target for critics anxious to illustrate or defend the Crocean distinction between struttura and poesia in the Commedia; for here, if anywhere, the relationship between Dante's artistic aims and powers and his didactic purpose seems to be strained almost to the point of breakdown. Even as sympathetic a reader as Natalino Sapegno can find nothing kinder to say of this ‘canto prevalentemente descrittivo ed informativo’ than that it stands between cantos XXXI and XXXIII ‘a guisa di pausa preparatoria’.

There are few clearer indications of the remarkable extension of the knowledge of Italian literature in England during the sixteenth century than the immediate fame of Tasso contrasted with the slow growth of Ariosto's reputation. Apart from the doubtful echoes in Wyatt and Surrey, the first work inspired directly or indirectly by Ariosto seems to have been Peter Beverley's The Historie of Ariodanto and Ienevra, daughter to the King of Scottes, in English verse [1565/6]. This was followed next year by the presentation at Gray's Inn of George Gascoigne's version of I Suppositi, of which the earliest edition is that contained in the anonymous Hundreth sundrie Flowres (1573). It is on the title-page of this work that, so far as we know, the name of Ariosto appears for the first time in English literature. This runs: A Hundreth sundrie Flowres bounde up in one small Poesie [sc. Posy]. Gathered partely (by translation) in the fyne outlandish Gardins of Euripides, Ovid, Petrarke, Ariosto, and others: and partly by invention, out of our owne fruitefull Orchardesin Englande: relding sundrie sweete savours of Tragical, Comical, and Morall Discourses bothe pleasaunt and profitable to the well smellyng noses of learned Readers. Meritum petere, grave. At London, Imprinted for Richarde Smith, n.d. Besides the two plays with which it opens, Supposes and Jocasta (a version after L. Dolce of the Phoenissae of Euripides by Gascoigne and Francis Kinwelmarshe), and the miscellaneous poems with which it closes, the volume includes also The Adventures of Master F. J., Gascoigne's long prose-and-verse tale, which has considerable claims to be regarded as the first English novel. Into this Gascoigne incorporated the striking passage on Suspicion from Ariosto's Cinque Canti, a rendering of the first six stanzas of Canto XXXI of the Furioso and A Translation of Ariosto allegorized (on Bradamante's dream, O.F., XXXIII, 60–4). As these are the first undoubted English versions of Ariosto's poetry which have come to light, they may detain us for a moment. ‘F. J.,’ the hero of Gascoigne's tale, having enjoyed the love of Elinor for a season, begins to be consumed with jealousy, and this being momentarily assuaged, ‘the venimous serpent jelousie’ leaves in his bosom ‘one of hir familiers named Suspect.’ ‘A wonderfull chaunge, writes the author, ‘and here a little to staye you, I will discribe (for I think you have not red it in Ariosto) the beginning, the fall, the retourne, and the being of this hellish byrde, who in deede maye well be counted a very lymbe of the Divill.’

In his article ‘Fiction and the Southern “Subsoil”’, Silone contended that ‘the true aspirations’ and ‘the authentic energies’ of the southerners had not been made use of, and hence southern fiction remained to a large extent journalistic and descriptive. He linked this to criticism that had been levelled against Bakunin and Mazzini during the nineteenth century but which was still valid for later leaders of Italy, namely that they had not broken through to the peasants and had not provided them with objectives and symbols which expressed ‘their most profound aspirations’ (p. 33). He likened the Italian South to the South of other countries, Virginia, the Ukraine, Indonesia, and indeed the proletariat and the poor peasants of the whole world. This recalls in fact his mention in the preface to the definitive version of Fontamara of the suffering of ‘i fellahin i peones i mugic i cafoni’. This suffering ‘is today's present image of the suffering Christ; the penance and redemption of an absurd society’ (p. 34). And he dismissed the possibility of the humanist tradition coming to terms with major problems of society such as the class struggle and the racial question. His own set of values was firmly rooted in his experience of peasant life and active politics at the grass roots in Abruzzo. There with a ‘definite taking of sides’ amongst the ‘“red” peasants’ (such as he described presumably in ‘Polikusc'ka’ in Uscita di sicurezza) he came upon ’the incredible reserve of energy … which lies hidden at the bottom of the soul of the poor peasants of the South’ (pp. 35–36). This was the spirit at the root of the Franciscan movement in Abruzzo, the same spirit which took the peasants into the Socialist movement in the early twentieth century. This religious and social experience, he claimed, left its imprint even in his own ‘manner of expression and inventing’, and he quoted how the Swiss writer Aline Valangin had pointed out in a letter to him ‘that the principal situations of Bread and Wine and Seed under the Snow reproduce invariably liturgical situations. The Manger in the Stable (The Infant), the Flight, the Supper, the betrayal, the sacrifice’ (p. 39). He criticized Verga for writing history as ‘still-life’ (one thinks of Verga's ‘Malaria’ and, more to the point as Gramsci was aware, ‘La libertà’), and made clear his own preference for a life, and therefore presumably a literature, with ‘a radical antithesis’. The only name he mentioned with favour was that of Tolstoy: ‘the only books that a traveller found in the house of an artisan in Calabria were two volumes of Tolstoy’, and this was the class of reader the ambitious writer should be aiming at. When the artisan read Tolstoy he experienced ‘a universally human restlessness’ which would not disappear with the disappearance of poverty (so that the provision of money was not a total ambition), and it was to this ‘Utopian essence’ of a certain type of man of the South that the ambitious writer should be directing his attention (p. 40).

This article discusses the current state of Italian film studies, placing it within a critical context in which Italian cinema is thought to be perennially ‘in crisis’. It addresses the discipline's obsessive interest in neorealism and in auteur cinema, and looks at the history of debate on the contested critical status of Italian popular and genre production, using as a case study the inchiesta in 1955–56 in the Communist newspaper L'Unità on ‘cinema e popolo’. It argues that Italian film studies needs to develop a more sophisticated theoretical and historical approach to the study of both neorealism and popular cinema, in order to account for neglected films such as Vittorio De Sica's collaboration with David O. Selznick, Stazione Termini (1953).

From the moment it was formally established, the Accademia Fiorentina proved to be an animated forum for the often heated discussions of contemporary issues in Cinquecento Florence. One of the chief topics of contention in the academy's linguistic debates was concerned with the orthographic reform of the Tuscan language. Many scholars asserted that certain letters of the alphabet were redundant, since they were considered to be unsuitable and inaccurate in reproducing the exact pronunciation of a syllable or word. The letter ‘K’ (or ‘Ca’, as it was pronounced) was singled out for particular criticism. Several literary figures, notably Antonfrancesco Grazzini, Agnolo Firenzuola, and Michelangelo Vivaldi, seem to have taken a considerable interest in this issue, and this article attempts to answer the question ‘why?’. In the light of the contemporary cultural and linguistic issues being debated within the Academy, ‘che voleva dire “K”?’. An important clue lies in the Biblioteca Nazionale manuscript of the Academy'S ‘Capitoli, Compositioni, et Leggi’. Throughout this particular manuscript an anonymous scribe has altered the names of some of the academicians cited in the text; for example, next to Giovambattista Gelli, the title ‘calzaiuolo’ has been changed to ‘cazaiuolo’. In a similar fashion, wherever the question of the letter ‘K’ is mentioned, there is an additional ‘-zo’ added in superscript next to it. The contention of this article is that the discussion of the letter ‘K’ was transformed by certain letterati connected with the Florentine Academy in the 1540S into a literary ludus through the adoption of an ambivalent erotic register. Double entendres and equivocal language served to equate the ‘K’ with cazzo, and it was brought to the fore as an ostensibly serious issue in order to mock the pretensions and presumption of the more pedantic linguistic treatises and orthographic reforms of the time.

On the other side also there are wonderful things, only there's a black figure there which frightens me; I can't make it out at all, and would rather go on to the next picture please.

The second capitolo that Francesco Berni wrote to Ippolito de' Medici in 1532 finds him reflecting somewhat ruefully on his literary aspirations and in particular on his capacity as an ‘epic’ poet: Provai un tratto a scrivere elegante, In prosa e in versi, e fecine parecchi, Et ebbi voglia anch'io d'esser gigante; Ma messer Cinzio mi tirò gli orecchi, E disse: — Bernia, fa' pur dell'Anguille, Che questo è il proprio umor dove tu pecchi: Arte non è da te cantar d'Achille; Ad un pastor poveretto tuo pari Convien far versi da boschi e da ville.— (Rime, LV, 37–45)

While the two poets are still in Ante-Purgatory, Virgil speaks to Dante of the immediate reward for his difficult ascent of the Mountain of Purification; referring to Beatrice, he promises his pupiltu la vedrai di sopra, in su la vetta di questo monte, ridere e felice. (Purg. VI.47–8)

In questo saggio mi riprometto di indagare i modi e le strategie operanti dietro l'utilizzo del termine ‘fascismo’ nel Pasolini maturo. A tale fine mi concentrerò specificamente sugli scritti giornalistici del periodo 1970–75, per la maggior parte raccolti in testi quali Scritti corsari e Lettere luterane. Si tratta di articoli in cui emerge con insistenza la preoccupazione dell'intellettuale nei confronti di una ridefinizione del termine fascismo che, se da una parte non può prescindere dal suo ufficiale significato storico, dall'altra si emancipa da esso, in direzione apparentemente metaforica, proponendosi in congiunzione a nozioni quali ‘consumismo’, ‘neocapitalismo’, ‘edonismo’, ‘modernità’.

This article examines four retellings of Pinocchio produced during the years of the Fascist regime, ranging from 1923 to 1939. The four texts will be analysed as a case of 'intralingual' translation, where the popularity of Collodi's puppet is re-framed and re-interpreted according to different political and educational priorities. I employ a narrative approach in order to determine how the new stories engage with Collodi's novel while also positioning themselves in relation to broader narratives circulating at the time. The diverse ideological dimensions of the re-writings, combined with their chronological breadth, make those texts particularly suitable for showing the breaks and continuity in the narratives circulated by the regime and rooted in pre-existing ideological discourses. The appropriation of the almost mythical character of children's literature will be explored in its ideological implications, and related to the priorities of Fascism at different stages of its evolution.

In spite of appearances Vico scholarship has not yet reached anything approaching a state of maturity. This explains some of the more extravagant claims being made for Vico as precursor and innovator in areas ranging from mathematics to anthropology. Recent years have witnessed a growth of interest and research in and around Vico's immediate cultural, theoretical and social environments, and in time this should serve to temper the more fanciful overstatements arising from the enthusiastic rediscovery of what appears to be a remarkably modern thinker of encyclopaedic interests. Two areas of study, however, have consistently claimed Vico as their own since Croce resurrected the almost forgotten Neapolitan earlier this century: historiography and aesthetics. It is the latter which this article takes as its point of departure in seeking to assess the validity of understanding the poetic as an aesthetic category in Vico. The first part of this article will briefly outline the terrain of aestheticist interpretations, limiting itself to the major perspectives and suppositions shared by all the varieties of this approach. These revolve around two focal points, and the two subsequent sections will provide brief preliminary appraisals and correctives with regard to these points in the light of the text. A fuller critique will be embodied in the final section, which, more positively, will offer an alternative account of the poetic.

Memoirs written by those involved in the Ethiopian War were an important means through which the Fascist regime justified the invasion, and promoted the glory of Empire. In the post-war period, memoirs of the campaign continued to be published, and they constitute one of the rare places in which the memory of Empire was cultivated and nurtured. The writers of these texts had different views of the colonial experience, and this article aims to examine a range of these accounts in order to understand their diversity. It also suggests that this diversity is indicative of the problematic concept of 'consent' to the Fascist regime.

Agostino Nifo (1469/70–1538) was a philosopher-physician of great renown in his own day. He was courted by the rich and mighty, was offered the best jobs and was showered with honours. In recognition of this, he has in recent years become the object of sustained attention by Renaissance scholars, who have begun to shed much light on his vast literary output. They have stressed his important and influential role as a commentator and editor of Aristotle, and also Averroes, but at the same time they have increasingly come to realize that his reputation was not always earned by honest means. He was somewhat of a cheat (who claimed originality, for instance, for ideas borrowed from others), he was a shameless plagiarist (famous today above all for his plagiarism of Machiavelli's Principe), he was an indefatigable polemicist (forever prepared to impress others with his superior wit on any subject), but more than anything else he was a time-server.

In the second half of Collezione di sabbia (Milan: Garzanti, 1984), Calvino reproduces a series of short pieces written during his travels to Mexico, Japan and Iran. Amongst the Mexican essays is one entitled ‘La forma dell'albero’ (pp. 193–95), which tells of Calvino's excursion by bus to a spot not far from Oaxaca where there is a tree reputed to be two thousand years old. The passage deserves to be quoted at length.

In the Disciplina Clericalis of Petrus Alphonsus there is one of the richest, and shortest, of medieval short stories. It is called De Maimundo Servo. On his way back from market, happy at the money he has made, the master meets Maimundus, his lazy and gloomy servant. ‘Don't tell me any nasty rumours’, he says. ‘I won't tell you any nasty rumours, but our little dog is dead.’ ‘How did it die?’ Six questions, six answers, all in single or half lines, and everything the master had come back to is gone: the dog, the mule, the maid, his mother, dead; the house burnt to a cinder. It is, I suppose, no laughing matter, but I find it one of the funniest stories that I know.