Volume 46, Number 2, 2025

EN:

This article traces the series of friendships depicted in Purgatorio 22 to 23 as a composite model of a dynamic relationship in the process of spiritual re-orientation. Presenting the friendship of Virgil and Statius as a Classical model of a righteous relationship, the poet presents two particular relationships undergoing righteous purgatorial renewal: one between Dante and his friend Forese Donati, and the other between Forese and his wife Nella. Examining the dialogue between Forese and the pilgrim on the ledge of gluttony as a re-enactment of the youthful tenzone exchange of poems between the two friends, I propose a re-assessment of the critical understanding of the tenzone as a form that is condemned by the mature Dante. Instead, exposing elements of transformative reciprocity in the tenzone reveals a poetic form that is exploited as a model of purgatorial re-orientation. Alongside this salvaging of the tenzone form, I propose a related re-assessment of the marital relationship between Forese and Nella, thus challenging Dante’s apparent lack of interest in the theme of marriage. Tracing scriptural resonances of “thirsting” in the larger episode of the terrace of gluttony, I suggest that Dante offers a model of passionate, righteous marital relationship that comes into relief when considered against the backdrop of this longer meditation on righteous friendships.

EN:

This article examines the supernal city motif in Italian literature as an imaginative response to earthly territorial conflicts, spanning Dante Alighieri’s Divina Commedia (early 14th century), Moses Chaim Luzzatto’s kabbalistic Mishkenei Elyon (18th century), and Italo Calvino’s Le città invisibili (1972). Rooted in Augustine’s City of God and biblical precedents, Dante innovates a theatrical, eternal heavenly Jerusalem superior to its terrestrial twin, employing “accommodated speech” to convey the ineffable. Luzzatto inverts Jewish theology by deriving earthly holiness from a celestial Temple, prioritizing mystical sanctity amid Enlightenment disputes. Calvino secularizes the trope with sublime, psychological cities that evade utopian clarity. Despite medieval Christian, Jewish mystical, and postmodern secular divides, these works unite around the common theme of redirecting focus from contested lands to the realm of the boundless imagination, thereby offering us a compelling model for non-violent worldview reconciliation. Invoking Frye’s anatomy, Bakhtin’s chronotope, Deleuze, and Lefebvre, this article posits Italian literature’s celestial cities as constructs that de-amplify jingoism, channeling energies from earth-bound conflict toward supernal peace-building and cooperation.

EN:

This article holds that compared to other fifteenth- and sixteenth-century commentaries on Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta Castelvetro’s commentary is unusual in its insistence on a non-sexual but constantly loving Laura whose chaste virtue saves the speaker from desperation and vice. Castelvetro’s view of Laura as a marvel of virtue does not merely reflect the reformist bent of Castelvetro’s Protestant thought but also expresses his reconstruction of the love narrative of the Rvf, which features Laura is an active agent whose attitude towards the speaker may vacillate, but whose love for him and chaste virtue remain, importantly, constant.

IT:

Il fotoromanzo, genere paraletterario nato in Italia nel 1946, ottenne fin dalla sua comparsa un clamoroso successo nazionale e internazionale. Tuttavia, pregiudizi diffusi ne hanno ostacolato per decenni uno studio approfondito, etichettandolo come “rivista per servette” e relegandolo alla sola tematica amorosa come sottogenere della letteratura rosa. Il presente lavoro, tramite l’analisi tematica qualitativa e quantitativa di 238 storie pubblicate tra il 1947 e il 1960 sulle tre riviste iniziatrici del genere: Grand Hotel, Sogno e Bolero Film, svela la presenza nei fotoromanzi, accanto al tema dell’amore, di altre quindici tematiche, tra cui emigrazione, guerra, divario sociale e violenza sessuale, rivelando una sensibilità “politica” e sociale inaspettata. Sebbene pertanto l’amore rimanga un elemento centrale nei romanzi rosa a fumetti del secondo dopoguerra, esso funge da espediente per affrontare temi delicati e socialmente rilevanti, offrendo al contempo alle lettrici un momento di svago e distrazione.

EN:

In late nineteenth-century literature, the figure of the female reader held significant importance, both in literary representations and in cultural debate, and was closely connected to the discourse on literary identification. An analysis of the production of La Marchesa Colombi (Maria Antonietta Torriani) reveals that the author engaged with the theme in various ways. She overturned this literary topos through the representation of male readers who succumb to romantic fantasies, but she also depicted the dangers for young women of an insufficient sentimental education. With Torriani’s female characters, the act of reading is strongly attached to the type of education they received, and so it has practical implications in their lives, particularly relating to their marital status. For this reason, we can observe both negative and positive examples in Torriani’s works. And by comparing Torriani’s fictional works with her 1871 essay on women’s education and with paratexts in her production, we notice how the act of reading, according to Torriani, was a necessary part of women’s cultural and social formation.

EN:

In Lazzaro Felice (2018), Alice Rohrwacher juxtaposes premodern Italian feudalism with contemporary capitalism to question whether conditions for agrarian workers are improving under the latter. This essay gives content to this comparison by discussing how Italian feudalism historically functioned not only as an economic system but also as a judicial system. Feudal nobles had the power and responsibility to enforce the law in their fiefs, and they used that authority to control and exploit their vassals. Lazzaro Felice’s depiction of contemporary democracy suggests that it has not fundamentally altered the judicial power of the wealthy and questions whether the powerful can still use the judicial system to control and exploit agrarian workers. In this light, Lazzaro Felice and Rohrwacher’s earlier Le Meraviglie (2014) can be seen as encouraging viewers to think about legal reform to help agrarian workers. This essay also examines Rohrwacher’s directorial strategies for depicting the sharp divide between the perspective of agrarian workers who care for nature and the perspective of entrepreneurs who see nature as a source of profit.

IT:

“Sono sempre stato un maestro senza eccessiva vocazione, in un certo senso un pessimo maestro”: con queste parole Leonardo Sciascia salutava nel 1983 gli ex colleghi della scuola elementare Generale Macaluso di Racalmuto, dove aveva lavorato dal 1949 al 1956. Le ricerche più aggiornate, però, hanno messo in discussione tale autorappresentazione, dimostrando che il rapporto dello scrittore con la realtà scolastica è stato decisamente più articolato e duraturo. Partendo da questi nuovi contributi, e in particolare dai registri del maestro Sciascia, il presente studio si propone di approfondire, tra scrittura narrativa, saggistica e progetti editoriali, gli aspetti distintivi della concezione didattica sciasciana. Infine, mediante il confronto con altri testi scolastici, si analizzerà in dettaglio l’antologia per la scuola media L’età e le età, curata da Sciascia insieme a Giuseppe Passarello e Susi Siino per le edizioni Palumbo, con l’obiettivo di contribuire a sfatare la leyenda negra del “pessimo maestro” e di riaffermare l’organicità tra l’impegno educativo e quello letterario del siciliano.

EN:

Much of the scholarly research produced on Emilio Salgari (1862–1911)—the creator of innumerable adventure novels featuring memorable characters such as the Malaysian pirate Sandokan and his imperturbable sidekick Yanez—has been dedicated to releasing him from the restrictive label of writer of young adult fiction, or, more recently, to measuring the degree of Orientalism or anti-colonialism in his portrayal of “exotic” locales and peoples. While not discarding the value of these approaches, this essay seeks to move in a different direction, and to examine instead the ways in which, by setting many of his stories in the Orient, and—in the case of the Pirates of Malaysia series—specifically in India, Salgari is able to interrogate questions of nobility, honour, loyalty, love, and morality.

EN:

This essay examines how the interest of Italian Futurism in radio technology coincided with early twentieth-century quantum physics discoveries and a growing awareness of the vitality of matter. In Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Pino Masnata’s “Il teatro futurista radiofonico (La Radia)” (“The Radia: Futurist Manifesto”; 1933), radio emerged not as a conduit for human communication but as a living organism with “radiophonic sensations,” channelling the vibrations of matter. The Futurists, inspired by the quantum revelation of wave–particle duality, devised a new and hybrid creature: a being-machine that would be a dynamic, vibrational body at once material and immaterial, wave and particle. Situating radia within an ecocritical and posthumanist framework, this essay argues that, by translating scientific knowledge into aesthetic process, the Futurists transformed radio into a cosmological interface where sound, energy, and bodies intersected—an avant-gardist vision of the universe as a responsive field of wave-like co-creation.