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The article analyzes the shared visual world of Italian poet Dante Alighieri and Italian painter Giotto di Bondone. Topics discussed include allegorical strategy and spiritual development in "Divine Comedy," depiction of Christian narratives, physical blindness equated with moral blindness and personifications in di Bondone's frescos, visual perception as a means of reforming the soul and spiritual sight in "Purgatorio" and "Paradiso," and association of damnation with blindness in "Inferno."

The title of this special issue, Cross-Cultural Articulations of Italian Ecocriticism, indicates the theoretical framework from which we move — material ecocriticism — and the direction in which we want to take it — cross-cultural exchanges — starting from an Italian viewpoint. According to this framework, matter is densely storied, yet stories are not the same for all human or nonhuman inhabitants of an ecosystem. The narrative patterns they articulate depend on the embodiment of the entities participating in the encounter, the senses and technological apparatuses engaged in interpreting them, and the cultural, social, and political positionalities of the participants. Conversely, material stories affect those who explore them in complex ways contingent upon the encounter, the body and cultural background of the explorers, and their position within power relations. This introduction and the special issue articles expand scholarship developed at the crossroads of Italian studies and ecocriticism in the last thirty years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article gives a brief overview of the work of the Italian poet Patricia Cavalli. Her poetry draws parallels between the main themes of Cavalli and the ideas of contemporary philosophy and literature.

The unique creativity of the Italian poetess Patrizia Cavalli (1947–2022), one of the recognized masters of the poetic word of the Apennines since the mid‑1970s, is well known in the literary circles of Italy and other countries. However, she becomes truly widely known, especially in her native Italy, only after her death on June 21, 2022. The poetry of Patrizia Cavalli, in which Cavalli herself acts as a lyrical hero, is well recognizable due to the lightness of sound, the depth of meaning with external simplicity of description, the conciseness of the verse, play on words, sonority with internal “floating” rhyme and assonances, the hidden philosophy of a lonely intellectual woman. The introductory article, the poet’s memoirs and thoughts about his life path, about the poet Elsa Morante, about modern poetry and so on (from interviews of different years), as well as a selection of poems translated into Russian, makes it possible to get acquainted and get a general idea of the worldview and creative heritage of Patrizia Cavalli.

Dante in African American Literature as a theme of Dante studies has been developed by the Ameri- can scholar of Italian literature Dennis Looney. The article is written as a critical rethinking of Looney’s book and articles, in particular his concept and the examples he had collected. The author of the article denies the idea thoroughly elaborated by the American scholar that Dante was a notable figure in the process of the development of African American identity, as well as the fact that there was a tradition of African American study of Dante and his “Divine Comedy”, at least until the middle of the 20th century. T. Yakushkina argues that, firstly, a small number of examples in the 19th and the first half of the 20th century, without continuity or consistency among them, does not allow talking about a two-century-long tradition. Secondly, the examples have a different logic which correlates not with political processes in American society but with the development of African Ameri- can literature itself. Parallels with Dante’s name and allusions to his Commedia should be interpreted as artistic, not political, devices. One can observe the creative ease in using them only from the middle of the 20th century, when black literature overcame its lag behind the white mainstream and moved to a qualitatively new level of its development. In Dante’s Inferno African American writers found the material for solving their racial and cultural problems (Ralph W. Ellison, Amiri Baraka). In the 1980s, when African American Literature was built in the post- modern paradigm, Dante’s Inferno provoked the expansion of intertextual techniques along with the intention to see through the prism of the problems of black identity and assimilationism common human problems of the modern bourgeois world (G. Naylor). In addition, in the second half of the century, African American writers demonstrated a new attitude to Dante’s name. They used it not to get an access to the western culture but to reject it and proclaim their cultural identity. For modern African American culture, which is developing in a common dynamics with Western culture, it is characteristic to transfer Dante from literature to jazz and creative practices of rappers.

By bringing into dialogue the poet Amelia Rosselli and the artist Francesca Woodman, this article will focus on how an intermedial and comparative methodological framework can bring a better understanding of both poetic texts and visual arts. We will reflect on the conflict between devotion and defection of a given media tradition (photography on the one hand, poetry on the other) by analyzing some figures shared by Woodman and Rosselli: the visiting angel and the eel. Such a comparison will allow us to ask ourselves whether the two artists' texts andphotographs are as "feminine" as they appear at first sight, as well as to consider the formal procedures through which they achieved or voluntarily failed in the construction of a fixed identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the relationship between two seminal figures of the 1960s Italian experimental art scene: composer Luigi Nono and neo-avant-garde poet Nanni Balestrini. In particular, it focuses on their collaboration, in 1968, on Contrappunto dialettico alla mente (Dialectical Counterpoint for the Mind), a composition for two-channel magnetic tape based on Adriano Banchieri's 1608 madrigal Contrappunto bestiale alla mente (Bestial Counterpoint for the Mind). On the one hand, this essay provides a contextual analysis of Balestrini's four original poetic texts, which Nono elaborated electronically at the RAI's Studio di Fonologia in Milan. On the other, it demonstrates how the compositional technique used by Nono for Contrappunto dialettico alla mente inspired the later creation of Balestrini's eponymous poem published in 1969. Finally, this article argues for a novel reading of Balestrini's poem as the linguistic attempt at transposing to writing Nono's electronic montage and sound manipulation of the human voice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the transmedia reception of Dante's Commedia in a globalizing world is immediately visible, his lyric poetry might at first seem unsuited to the digital age. This article explores Lamberto Pignotti's 2016 re-creation of Dante's Vita Nova in his New Vita Nova, focusing on how, by engaging with Dante's libello in both verbal and visual terms, the Florentine artist and poet, one of the fathers of visual poetry, emphasizes three aspects which are latent in the medieval text: its nature as a language game, the fusion of traditionally separate aesthetic domains, and the "virtuality" of lyric gestures. Digital technology, in fact, seems to allow for the full realization of the "virtualissimo amore" that Pignotti sees enacted in the libello, and Pignotti's verbo-visual re-creation prompts reflection on how lyric gestures can move through different media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since he was ayoungpoet, Antonio Porta has always shown a strong interest in visual arts, in particular for abstract and conceptual painting. Porta began to experiment with collage in 1959, attending some key exhibitions at the Galleria Blu (Milan) and at the Galleria Arco d'Alibert (Rome) together with other Novissimi poets, including Alfredo Giuliani and Nanni Balestrini. This creative phase is often overlooked by critics and scholars. From this viewpoint, this article will show how these works brightly anticipate some crucial stylistic strategies that Porta will adopt in his linear poems later on in his poetic career--especially as regards the assembly of verses and lines. The contribution aims to investigate the connection between these earlier artistic projects andPorta's later works (focusing in particular on La palpebra rovesciata and L'enigma naturale). Lastly, thanks to archival materials stored at the Centro APICE, attention will be given to the profound relationship between these works and the private art gallery of the Paolazzi's family. From some unpublished bills of sale and artist agreements, I will rebuild this form of patronage and the links between paintings hanging on the domestic wall and pictures that Porta describes in his poetical verses. From this viewpoint, the article will investigate the pivotal relationship with Piero Manzoni--whose Achromes were formerly in Porta's father's collection--and Carlo Ramous--a Milanese painter related to his family by an official Atto di accordo, signed in January 1960. In the same year, Ramous drew the cover of La palpebra rovesciata and Porta, for his part, described one of his sculptures (Di fronte alla luna) in the homonymous poem of Rapporti. This philological approach will enable a better understanding of the poems that contain seemingly non-sensical elements but which actually depend on artistic sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As highlighted by Andrea Cortellessa, Laura Pugno's poetry has its generative sparkle in photographic images. This is particularly relevant in II colore oro, a poetry collection published in 2007, which sees a collaboration with the artist and photographer Elio Mazzacane. Mazzacane's photographs do not simply function as a complement to the poetic texts, as a sort of illustration of what happens within the collection nor of what the lyric subject sees or envisions, but it provides a parallel series of signifiers that own an intrinsic signifying power. This article will focus on the intermedial dialogue between Mazzacane's photography and Pugno's poetry with the aim to investigate to what extent this dialectical exchange determines the structure of the collection, both at a macrostructural and microstructural level. In particular, it will be shown how this photographic process of subjectification impacts both on the internal organization of the book and on the syntactical patterns that are employed by Pugno and Mazzacane. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Visual studies have legitimized the concept of icon-text, a practice based on the principle of insubordination of the text-image relationship. This article investigates the dynamics of Antonella Anedda's The Life of Details (2009), of one of the best icon-textual examples in contemporary Italian literature. Her rejection of the traditionally subordinate role of the visual is combined with a challenge to the methods of iconology--the reader-viewers are therefore not invited to embrace the traditional practice of "attribution"of a painting but rather to focus on the relation between images and their own reality. By shifting from an author-oriented to a reader-oriented perspective, Anedda engages us in a collective exploration of loss and mourning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article considers the folio of works by Italian poet Petrarch, titled "Francisci Petrarchae Florentini...OPERA quae extant omnia..." as the closest match to the edition of poems that English poet Thomas Watson used for his poetic sequence "Hekatompathia, or passionate centurie of loue." It mentions the matching of Watson's numbering of the poems to that of the folio of sonnets except in two instances, as well as the matching spelling except for two mistakes.

The question of the reasons and nature of the conflict between I. A. Goncharov and I. S. Turgenev, although he has his own impressive history of study, at present deserves close attention especially in view of new data associated with the role of Dante in the formation of Goncharov’s novel genre. The article proposes to correct the idea of the “Goncharov school” (V. A. Nedzvetsky) in Turgenev’s practice and determine the boundaries and degree of influence of Goncharov’s novel ideas on Turgenev’s novels. It is shown that by the time of close communication between the two writers in 1855, Turgenev was not disoriented as a novelist. He had a clear idea of what a Russian novel should be and how it differs from a Western European novel. He had his own novel experience, which reveals the movement of Turgenev as a novelist towards the “Faustian plot” as a variant of the “plot of salvation” demanded by the “plot space” (Yu. M. Lotman) of the Russian novel. A variation of the “plot of salvation” was Dante’s “The Divine Comedy”. It was this plot model, which presupposes the “rehabilitation” or “awakening” of the sinner to a new life, not “behind the door of the coffin,” but today and now, that Goncharov used as the basis for the architectonics of his type of novel (both the novel trilogy as a whole and each of its novels). With a high degree of probability, it can be assumed that Dante’s themes and ideas, above all the idea of a new life and salvatory female love related to absolute love, in Goncharov’s interpretation were heard and perceived by Turgenev. Hence his second completed novel, “The Noble Nest”, although it was seemingly based on plot elements close to the novel “Rudin”, was fundamentally different from it and gravitated not to the Faustian novel model, which was more characteristic for Turgenev, but to Dante’s one, not very typical of him. The article also touches on the question of the perception of “The Noble Nest” by contemporaries, which demonstrates that they just saw in this book not so much a tragedy, but a story about the hero’s new life. However, Goncharov’s reaction to the publication of “The Noble Nest” and the organic nature of the Faustian coordinate system for Turgenev’s creative thinking led him away from Goncharov’s novel ideas. “The Noble Nest’is presented in the article as the only experience of Turgenev in the “school” of Goncharov and as a novel text by the writer, which stands out significantly from his novel practice.

Beginning with Judith Butler's discussions of authority and citational practice, this paper examines authorial subjectival positions, notions regarding originality and creation, and the use of citationality in the poems of Francesco Petrarca and Gaspara Stampa. Fundamental to the poetic investments of each are discussions of loss, possession, gender, and conception, with conception being represented both artistically and literally. Whereas Petrarch is frequently regarded by critics as an "originator" while his many borrowings from the classical and troubadour traditions are minimized, Stampa has often been historically—and erroneously—cast as an imitator who produces derivative poetry. Yet, not only are Stampa's citational methods highly innovative, they are specifically managed to allow her to critique and supplant the Petrarchan model, by privileging her own text and the female body. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The article offers an outline of 20th century Apulian poets mainly focusing on their capacity to get rid of the dominating models. It mentions that moving away from the influence of the main cultural centres and going beyond any form of marginalization, this tradition achieves its fully-fledged position in both the national and the international literary framework.

This essay discusses some of the forms of interaction between academic philology, the poetic avant-garde, and the public, demonstrating the role played by the material book in shaping the cultural impact of Dante's lyric corpus on twentieth-century culture. A survey of the historical treatment of Dante's lyric poetry between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries lays the foundation for re-evaluating the earliest reception of Contini's edition of Dante's Rime and particularly its parallel genesis with Montale's Le Occasioni, resulting in two uncannily similar books of poetry published in the autumn of 1939: Contini's hermeneutics served as a hypotext for Montale's 1930s poetry, while Montale formed a key part of the intellectual milieu in which Contini was himself immersed. Through hermeneutics, but also through publishing strategies and personal relationships, Contini was able to portray Dante as a contemporary, avant-garde author, thus inspiring productive readings of medieval poetry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Antonio Sebastiano Minturno (1500–1574) is remembered today primarily for his substantial contributions to Cinquecento poetics, aimed at establishing the lyric as a macrogenre alongside drama and narrative poetry (De poeta, 1559; L'arte poetica, 1564). Yet in addition to his poetological writings, Minturno also produced a significant number of other works, including a series of poems in the volgare published under the title Rime et prose del Sig. Antonio Minturno (1559). What is more, Minturno referred to his own poems time and again in order to support his poetological positions and to exemplify his theoretical approaches to poetry and to literature in general. Although Minturno himself quite obviously saw a close connection between his poems and his poetics, his lyric oeuvre has received surprisingly little scholarly attention so far. The present paper seeks to fill this lacuna by investigating the nexus between theory and poetic practice in Minturno's works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay focuses on the autobiographical reformulation of Dante's myth in the short story "Switchboard Girl", by the Objectivist American poet Lorine Niedecker (1903–1970). Within the cognitive linguistics paradigm of storyworld possible selves, or SPSs (Martínez, María-Ángeles. 2014. Storyworld possible selves and the phenomenon of narrative immersion. Testing a new theoretical construct. Narrative 22 (1). 110–131, Martínez, María-Ángeles. 2018. Storyworld possible selves. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter), the study explores the projection of a past Dantean SPS as key to individuals' perspectival alignment with the narrator, and concomitantly, with the author's fictionalized formulation of the realities of American working-class women in the 1950s. The linguistic anchoring of this Dantean SPS is also analysed and discussed. The results highlight Niedecker's concern with drawing readers into sharing the personal hell of an intelligent, rural middle-class, mature woman with a serious visual disability, who is unsuccessfully applying for a menial job as a switchboard operator. The analysis also prompts a revision of the original SPS typology to include the author SPSs likely to be generated by readers of autobiographical narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on Vittorio Bodini’s journal L’esperienza poetica (1954-1956). It does so by locating its critical interventions within a cultural juncture characterized on the one hand by the end of hermeticism, and on the other by the consolidation of neo-realism as the dominant literary discourse. The study evaluates not only the affinities that link L’esperienza poetica to the journal Officina, but also the differences with other journals in the field. The article analyses the journal’s support for up-and-coming poets that did not conform to the dominant paradigms (post-hermeticism; neo-realism). In particular, the study demonstrates how the support and visibility given to the poetry of Umberto Bellintani and other minor figures can illuminate Bodini’s ideas on poetic language in the 1950s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fascination of classical civilization and the desire to restore the ancient splendor of Rome was the leitmotif of the life and political mission of Cola di Rienzo. From the analysis of some chapters of the Cronica di Anonimo Romano, as from the letters and the writings of Francesco Petrarca and Cola di Rienzo, a dramatic and at the same time controversial portrait is outlined. On the one side faithful to the ideals of humanitas on the other strongly contradictory and immensely ambitious, Cola di Rienzo appears as a perfect rhetor who often resorts to the rhetoric of images, but not always as a vir bonus, to reach after all his tragic ending. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Architect, important personality of a town (Torino) devoted to work, continuous engagement, hard work, during a life time, but also devote to poetry. Giorgio Raineri when working at his studio at Via Sacchi 24, often mixed very pleasant drawings and delicate poems, that are now printed together. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores how seemingly imperceptible attributes of character are revealed with reference to Antique literary topoi in the writings and poetry of Petrarch. Topics discussed include description of Petrarch's sonnets, his relationship with Italian painter Simone Martini, and intellectual transformation underwent by Petrarch in the early 1340s.

Cristina Alziati (Milano 1963) si è ormai imposta come una delle voci più interessanti e originali del panorama poetico contemporaneo, come dimostrato dai numerosi riconoscimenti ottenuti (‘Premio Pasolini’, ‘Premio Marazza’, ‘Premio Pozzale Luigi Russo’, ‘Premio Stephen Dedalus’). Questo studio, pur concentrandosi sulla produzione più recente, intende analizzare in modo sistematico l’opera dell’autrice, al fine di delinearne la poetica complessiva e di proporne una prima interpretazione unitaria. Inoltre, l’articolo tenta – attraverso una lettura aderente dei componimenti – di rintracciare le principali costanti strutturali, tematiche e formali di talecorpus, inserendolo infine nel contesto critico e letterario degli ultimi decenni. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the Italian writer, painter, musician Alberto Savinio who abandoned the field of metaphysics to go into battle. It further discusses the Italian poet Ludovico Ariosto, the illustrious pedestal standing in the center of Piazza Ariostea, on the seventeenth-century column designed by Ercole Grandi. It states that Ariostol was an Italian poet best known as the author of the romance epic Orlando Furioso.

Vernacular poetry is generally evaluated according to culturally specific aesthetic standards, what anthropologists call ethnopoetics. This article offers embodied entexualization—the culturally specific ways bodies are incorporated into as well as produce texts—as a means for analyzing how ethnopoetic systems reflect social and political histories and contexts. The poetry of the northern Italian town of Bergamo, and specifically a poem by a locally celebrated poet, Piero Frér, provides an illustrative case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article charts the rise to fame of Gabriele D’Annunzio by focusing on a number of key moments in his life and the strategies he employed to shape his public image. The Roman years and the 1890s saw the writer’s first iconic transformation into Italy’s aesthete par excellence, a myth and related iconography that still shapes our view of the poet. The years in Florence, spent at the Villa Capponcina, coincided with the time in which d’Annunzio re-fashioned himself into a self-appointed national poet. The war years were central to the creation of an entirely new figure, the poeta soldato, whose military heroics and charismatic leadership provided novel and dubious models of engagement with contemporary politics and culture. Finally the years of the self-imposed exile at Gardone focus on the late, and as yet undocumented, use of photographs employed by d’Annunzio to keep the myth of the national poet-soldier alive under Fascism. These subsequent transformations resulted in a highly successful and thoroughly modern staging of his personality which turned him into a national icon. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on Italian symbolist Giovanni Pascoli. It is noted that Pascoli was not popular abroad though he was considered one of the most representative poets of Italian symbolism. The author presents samples of his style and message in an effort to familiarize the reader with his verse. She discusses the rural environment and society that are depicted in his poems.

Dante Alighieri is the greatest Italian poet and one of the most important writers in Western literature. He is best known for the epic poem “Commedia”, later named “La Divina Commedia” that has profoundly influenced not only poetic imagination but also all subsequent allegorical creations of imaginary worlds in literature. This paper examines the poetic description of some episodes of loss of consciousness in Dante's poetry discussing how and why typical elements of epileptic seizures have been used. On the 750th anniversary of Dante's birth, his poetry still remains to be an inspiring source of debate and reflection. This article is part of a Special Issue entitled “Epilepsy, Art, and Creativity”. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the flourishing of Translation Studies as a discipline, there has been little comparative assessment of modern European poet-translators, much less from a quantitative perspective. This article illustrates the use of statistical analysis of modern European poet-translators to understand literary currents and translation trends within and among national European literatures. Statistical results reveal fundamental differences in the practice of translation among European poets, specifically, twentieth-century Italian, French, Spanish, and English-language poets. It becomes clear which European poets translated the most and from which languages, as do contrasts in translation trends between national literatures through the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes a new interpretation of the vast and understudied corpus of paintings and drawings produced by the poet Eugenio Montale between the mid-1940s and the 1970s. While critics have mostly discussed these artworks in connection with Montale's poetry from the interwar years, I argue, rather, that they constitute a direct intervention in the postwar cultural debate over the role of the author and the validity of traditional literary and visual languages. The article is subdivided in three parts: the first section surveys the style and prevalent motifs of Montale's art; the second section analyses its flawed critical reception through the close reading of relevant documents; and the third part illustrates the details of my argument on the basis of three major case studies, with references to contemporary artists such as Lucio Fontana, Alberto Burri and Piero Manzoni. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Sandro Penna's poetry (1906-1977), is a delicate combination of melancholy and exhilaration, and shows innovation and modernity inside the Italian lyrical tradition. Critically stereotyping Penna's poetry as a flower with no evident stem, meaning no external influences, narrows the depth of his literary corpus. In his notes Penna reveals himself as a voracious reader of modern international literature and critics Roberto Deidier and Pierfranco Bruni pointed out that his evident European influences completely lack investigation. Most criticism though do not seem to acknowledge how close Penna's poetry is to the ideas of "modern" and "new" as fostered by Modernists and Imagists. This essay challenges the literary commonplace that Penna is a miracle out of history and time and, investigating Penna's archives and poems, discloses connections, references and similarities between his poetry and the major movements - French Symbolism, Modernism, Imagism - and literary personalities of the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]