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Sung improvised poetry in ottava rima has been documented in Italy since the 14th century and has survived until now in Italian folk song. Although it is currently considered a male tradition, women played an important role especially in the 18th century, when they were admired both as famous improvvisatrici who performed in literary academies and as illiterate folk singers. This article deals with the involvement of women in the poetic duel in ottava rima in Central Italy. The first part is dedicated to the presence of women in sung improvised poetry in the 18th and 19th centuries, focusing on the gendered aspects of their singing and their public performance. The second part deals with a quite exceptional event: the meeting of improvised poetry in ottava rima dedicated exclusively to women, which took place in Borbona (Rieti) on 13 September 2019. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the recently digitised recordings made by Tullia Magrini and Giuseppe Bellosi in Romagna in the 1970s and early 1980s during their fieldwork on lyrical and satirical songs in hendecasyllabic lines. The recordings allow us to know who were the singers that the two scholars met, how the interaction between researchers and informants took place and how the singers contributed to the process of knowledge. This paper would like to suggest a special task for sound archives: the reconstruction of the relationships between the people involved in the processes of knowledge of musical diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The famous Italian improviser Maria Maddalena Morelli, known as Corilla Olimpica, inspired Madame de Staël's Corinne ou l'Italie, and other literary works focusing on the figure of the improviser, like Hans Cristian Andersen's The Improvisatore or Life in Italy. These novels combine travel experiences with the celebration of Italian improvisers, some of them were famous all over Europe. A tradition of extemporaneus poetry existed also as a kind of folk music, not only to sing poems in ottava rima like Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando furioso and Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata, but also to improvise duels on various topics. In the 19th century some genre paintings and engravings depict the improvvisatori from the foreigners' point of view (ex. Charles Yriarte's Improvvisatore), while popular drawings and engravings, like Bartolomeo Pinelli's, allow the spread of the Italian counterpart of the cliché of the improviser. This paper compares these two figurative approaches, by putting images in relationship with travel accounts, novels and musical sources, as well as with the tradition of improvised poetry attested in the Italian peninsula by the ethomusicological research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]