Abstracts

Panel A: Envisioning Dante I : Mapping the Page Workshop - G. Armstrong, R. Bowen, G. Bergel, S. Gilson
This 2-part session will showcase the research questions, methodologies, and first findings of the AHRC-funded project, Envisioning Dante c. 1472-1630: Seeing and Reading the Early Printed Page (c. £1 million; 2022-25). This project is the first full in-depth study of the material forms of Renaissance printed editions of Dante’s Comedy, from the first editions of 1472 through to the seventeenth century. It takes a new and innovative look at the book forms in which the text travels in this period by examining a uniquely rich and complete corpus of early printed books of Dante held in the John Rylands Research Institute and Library at the University of Manchester, UK (which lacks only 3 editions). With a multidisciplinary team from literary and visual studies, book history and computer science, we use machine vision technologies to look at - envision - the layout of the individual pages of each edition as discrete visual, graphic entities. The project is developing powerful new methodologies to approach Dante’s reception and, more widely, to track historic print production through time, space, and media, reflecting on how new technologies can enlarge and accelerate our ways of seeing the page.  This first panel is a workshop which will provide an introduction to the project as a whole and its diverse methodologies (deriving from traditional descriptive bibliography and book history, computational machine vision, and practice-based research), including practical hands-on demonstrations of our techniques for mapping the page and comparing editions using manual and digital devices.  

Panel B: Il Gotico in Italia I – M. Malvestio (Chair), S. Serafini, F. Camilletti, G. Ambrosino, S. Di Martino, E. Leydi
In the Gothic, the historically, socially, and psychologically repressed makes a disturbing return. The Gothic’s obsession with the past, in the form of ruins, castles, ghosts, the undead, or lost manuscripts, is also quite literally a return of something that was believed to be surpassed, historically absorbed, and yet that still pervades and haunts the present. The Gothic, moreover, is not limited to the arts, as it permeates a variety of cultural phenomena, from local folklore to non-fiction. Starting from this premise, this panel explores some of the nuances and forms of the Gothic within a period in which Italy was not a nation, but rather the laboratory of a nation, and the Gothic was not yet recognizable as a literary term and had little categorising force. The first contribution, by Simona Di Martino, explores late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Italian elegy through the lens of the Gothic applied to medical humanities, while the second and third papers, delivered by Gennaro Ambrosino and Fabio Camilletti respectively, investigate the role of Italian culture in the shaping and dissemination of those ‘often hidden, rejected, and oppositional beliefs and practices’ (68) that Christopher Partridge groups under the term ‘occulture’, with which he defines the survival and re-articulation of the various manifestations and ramifications of the occult in periods of secularization. With three speakers covering a period that spans from the seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century as well as a variety of cultural forms and texts (anecdotes, treatises, novels, poetry), this panel aims to demonstrate the pervasiveness of the Gothic in Italy outside well-known periods and circles, thus inviting a more nuanced and comprehensive study of the dissemination and influence of this mode across time and space.
Speakers&Papers:
1) Fabio Camilletti, Leonzio, la punizione dei morti e il gotico italiano: nel 1615 il gesuita Paul Zehentner assistette a Ingolstdat a una rappresentazione drammatica dai toni singolarmente macabri, probabilmente di origine italiana. Era la storia di ‘Leonzio’, un nobiluomo seguace di Machiavelli e spregiatore dell’anima immortale, punito da un morto da lui offeso: una storia che presenta numerose parentele col nucleo mitico-letterario di Don Giovanni, e che quasi esclusivamente in questa chiave è stata infatti riletta da filologi come Alessandro D’Ancona, comparatisti come Giovanni Macchia e antropologi come Marino Niola. Nel mio intervento aggiornerò la riflessione critica su Leonzio partendo da una nuova ricognizione delle testimonianze a stampa dell’aneddoto, evidenziandone le differenze rispetto al canone dongiovanneo e ricostruendone la circolazione nell’Italia sette- e ottocentesca, contesto nel quale la storia subisce una marcata torsione in senso gotico, finendo per influenzare lo stesso Alessandro Manzoni.
2) Gennaro Ambrosino, Ruins, Archaeological Landscapes and Spiritual Invocations in Le notti romane (1782) by Alessandro Verri: from the mid-eighteenth century, the excavations at Herculaneum in 1738 and Pompeii in 1748 marked the beginning of a new phase for archaeology, moving beyond a purely antiquarian approach towards professionalization and specialization. As the path of methodological and scientific development evolved, the astounding discoveries permeated the literary and popular imaginaries, fostering a growing connection between the allure of ruins, curiosity about the ancient, and an interest in the occult (Colby, 2009). With the aim of shedding light on the links between archaeology and the occult, this paper examines the intertwining of the motifs of ruins and spiritual manifestations – a topic that received particular attention following the publication of Atanasio Cavalli’s 1765 treatise, Delle apparizioni ed operazioni de’ spiriti, one of the earliest comprehensive Italian writings on spirit phenomena. Specifically, I propose a Gothic analysis (Malvestio and Serafini, 2023) of the novel Le notti romane al sepolcro degli Scipioni (1782–1804) by Alessandro Verri (1741–1816), inspired by the 1780 discovery of the Scipioni tomb. The archaeological context merges with evocations of ancient ghosts, highlighting the theme of dialogue with the dead in the nocturnal atmosphere (Di Martino, 2022) of an archaeological site – a Gothic trope rooted in the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini (first published in 1728) and his accounts of the summoning of demons at the Colosseum. The analysis of Verri’s novel provides insight into how archaeology and the atmosphere of ancient sites influenced Gothic narrative, contributing to shaping a literary world rich in supernatural elements and gloomy allusions.
3) Simona di Martino, La morte al femminile: scritture gotiche nell’elegia sette/ottocentesca italiana: l’intervento si propone di indagare alcuni esempi di elegie italiane che ritraggono donne morenti o in pericolo di vita per analizzarne il potenziale gotico. L’elegia sette/ottocentesca, poco studiata dalla critica, offre infatti degli spunti interessanti per uno studio della scrittura gotica in termini di eccesso (Botting 1996) e abiezione (Kristeva 1982) che più avanti pervaderà la poesia sacra e morale italiana. Saranno prese come casi studio per l’indagine due opere dedicate alla morte di donne, topos classico della tradizione lirica italiana: l’elegia di Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel Per un aborto (1779) che racconta poeticamente in prima persona il momento della perdita del suo atteso figlio, e quella di Giacomo Leopardi intitolata Nella morte di una donna fatta trucidare col suo portato dal corruttore per mano ed arte di un chirurgo (1819) che narra la morte per aborto indotto di una giovane donna, da una prospettiva esterna, quella dell’osservatore profondamente turbato dal reale fatto di cronaca e dall’intervento del medico. Attraverso un’analisi testuale delle rappresentazioni eccessive di dolore e sofferenza fisica e morale, l’indagine combinata delle due elegie consentirà di gettare luce su un’inedita prospettiva tratta dalle medical humanities e di dimostrare come i testi ben si confanno a quelle che sono state definite dalla critica anglosassone narratives of medicine e stories of illness (Whitehead 2013). Questo approccio sottolinea anche un aspetto solitamente trascurato dalla critica, e cioè la prospettiva sofferente degli stessi autori: è il caso non solo della Pimentel, realmente coinvolta nell’evento in prima persona, ma anche del giovane Leopardi, la cui nota esperienza di lunga malattia lasciò traccia del suo dolore in tutta la sua opera. 

Panel C: Temporal Tremors I: Anxiety in the Making of Italian Lyric Poetry, Middle Ages to Early Modern - H. Webb (Chair), G. Gaimari, G. Ledda, K. Travers
This panel seeks to unravel the intricate semantics of anxiety embedded in the Italian lyric tradition from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern period, while also exploring how the evolution and use of rhetorical devices responded to and were shaped by anxiety. Drawing upon a rich lexicon that stands at the crossroads between concern and anguish, desire and promptness (e.g., “ansietade”, “angoscia”, “affanno”, “cura”), pre-modern anxiety informs not only love and religious discourses but also the search for compassionate audiences as well as the construction and negotiation of the poetic authority. To do so, this panel will move beyond a mere linguistic analysis to encompass the broader cultural, historical, and literary contexts within which different anxieties unfolded. By employing an interdisciplinary approach that delves into lyric theory, affect theory, reception studies, and the history of emotions, papers in this panel will examine how the social, political, and religious dynamics of the time contributed to the emergence and transformation of anxiety within the poetic medium during this critical juncture in the development of Italian culture.
Speakers&Papers:
1) Giulia Gaimari, On the Edge of the Medieval Lyric: Anxiety, Authority, and Exegesis: Freud’s and Lacan’s theorisations of anxiety (Freud, 1920; Lacan, 1973) as a fear in absentia arising within a space of expectations cannot be applied to the Middle Ages without falling into anachronism. Nevertheless, it is essential not to be discouraged and to inquire into what anxiety meant, how it was named, articulated, and addressed in the pre-modern period, as well as how and to what extent anxiety shaped the lyric genre in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In this paper, I will first provide a survey of the medieval vocabulary of anxiety within the Italian medieval lyric tradition, with the aim to investigate its semantic spectrum. In the second place, I will take Dante’s two prosimetra – Vita Nova and Convivio – as a case study to reflect on medieval anxiety as a response to and an indicator of the interconnectedness between the poet’s intimate life and his public persona, between poetic communication and perceived reputation; a response that, in the case of Dante, gave life to the necessity (and strategy) of framing and controlling poetry through prose narrative and exegesis in which represented audiences play a significant part. Within the storytelling of both writings, in fact, Dante’s poetic voice needs to deal with the presence and judgement of its public; it is thus interesting to note that, according to his own account in Convivio I.ii, timore of infamy and desiderio of providing knowledge prompted the Convivio’s own enterprise.
2) Giuseppe Ledda, Desiderio e paura di dire: comunicazione, afasia e ineffabilità nella lirica italiana medievale: il contrasto fra il desiderio e il suo difficile o impossibile compimento tocca spesso, nella lirica italiana medievale, non solo il piano del sentimento amoroso ma anche quello della poesia che lo esprime. Nell’ambito della topica dell’ineffabilità, funzionale alla retorica dell’iperbole ben attiva nella tradizione della lode e quindi anche nella lirica, per manifestare la difficoltà o l’impossibilità di dire le lodi della donna amata o l’intensità dell’amore provato il poeta attinge frequentemente anche al lessico della paura, dell’ansia, dell’angoscia, del turbamento, del dolore, del tremore, della debolezza. In tal modo il desiderio di dire, di esprimere e di comunicare il sentimento amoroso, rivolgendosi alla donna o a un pubblico variamente selezionato, entra in un contrasto talvolta drammatico con la difficoltà o l’impossibilità di dire o con il blocco emotivo, oltre che linguistico e cognitivo, causato dalla natura estrema dei sentimenti provati. Collegato a questo fenomeno è quello dell’afasia al cospetto dell’amata, che nasce talvolta da una sopraffazione quasi mistica per la sua apparizione numinosa, talvolta si collega invece alla tradizionale necessità cortese di celare l’amore e l’identità dell’amata. Si tratta quindi di una serie di fenomeni testuali e retorici che connettono il piano emotivo, quello comunicativo e quello metaletterario e costituiscono quindi un punto di osservazione privilegiato per lo studio di alcuni motivi cruciali della lirica italiana medievale e delle sue diverse voci poetiche. Mi propongo di esaminare alcuni casi particolarmente significativi di questo fenomeno, da Giacomo da Lentini e dalla lirica del Duecento sino a Cavalcanti, Dante e Petrarca, per offrire un’analisi delle diverse tipologie e delle loro funzioni retoriche e comunicative, nell’espressione delle emozioni, nella riflessione metaletteraria e nella costruzione di un dialogo con i lettori.
3) Katherine Travers, “A ciascun passo”: Lyric Aporia and Anxiety in Petrarch’s RVF 15: lyric is built on an illusion: the lyric “I”. As the editors of this volume observe, when lyric speaks of desire, the invocation of the beloved anxiously signals them as absent. This anxiety structures not only the shape of the lyric subject’s relationship with the beloved, but also the lyric “I” itself. The speaker from whom desire emanates, who creates the “optative” mood of the lyric (Culler, 2105), is a useful mirage. This paper analyses the interplay of doubt and certainty within Petrarch’s Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta through the motif of movement, specifically the “step”, or “passo”. Centring on RVF 15, “Io mi rivolgo indietro a ciascun passo”, I ask: how does Petrarch use textual motifs of physical movement, and the structure of the lyric collection itself, to create a sense of the speaker unfolding over time, embedded within the lyric tradition? As a meticulously ordered sequence, the collection brings the reader with the speaker, step by step, on his journey. Despite feeding the reader more and more information about his desires and fears as the sequence progresses, the poetic speaker’s intentions never stabilise; famously, Petrarch never does quite seem to have severed his attachment to the beloved. His anxious attachment, however, proves more than just an extended Freudian game of “Fort/Da”; it signals to the many functions of lyric itself. Read through a pseudo-autobiographical lens, Petrarch’s sequence creates a space to hold medieval thought experiments (Knox, Morton, Reeve, 2018), perhaps staging a subject learning to cope with loss; but it also signals to the aporia surrounding the lyric “I”, which can prove productive. Petrarch’s anxious lyric “I” creates a mode for other readers and writers to imitate and occupy. As Lauren Berlant (2008) claims, in their formulation of the “intimate public”, “the personal is the general”. By stepping out his anxiety, Petrarch’s lyric “I” creates “intimate publics” that can move with him, through his sequence, and across the centuries.  

Panel D: Italy's Multidimensional Forgetting I – R. Gordon (Chair),M. Josi, G. Bartolini, C. Leavitt, V. Witkowski
Panel abstract: Several scholars have highlighted Italy’s difficulty in coming to terms with its recent violent past and take responsibility for its national crimes. Yet Italy’s memory struggles are often discussed in isolation, with works that focus on Fascism, Italian colonialism, the ‘migrant crisis’, the Holocaust, the Resistance, or Italy’s involvement in WW2. Taking inspiration from Michael Rothberg’s Multidirectional Memory, this panel seeks to reveal the multidirectional dimension of Italy’s flawed engagements with the past by showing how, within Italian culture, varied forms of forgetting shaped and influenced each other by being subject to ongoing ‘negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing’ (Rothberg 2009, p. 3). By ‘multidimensional forgetting’ we do not indicate a plain forgetfulness, but rather an interconnected network of self-absolving narratives that hinder a critical understanding of the past and of the effects of the latter on the present. By bringing together different processes (erasure, amnesia, disavowal, silencing, reinventing the past…) under the umbrella concept of ‘multidimensional forgetting’ we aim to shed light on Italy’s politics of forgetting and link the discussion of collective memory to the question of political responsibility. How did Italy’s erasure of its colonial faults influence the problematic debate (or lack thereof) about its involvement in the Holocaust and other crimes? And vice versa, how did the ‘missing Italian Nuremberg’ and reluctance to examine the crimes committed before and during the war inform Italy’s faltering postcolonial consciousness? How does the lack of critical reckoning with the legacies of past crimes shape the systemic racism and political dysfunction of contemporary Italy? In brief, how did processes of deferral, forgetting, and denial related to specific historical events connect and shape similar processes in relation to other historical contexts? And, crucially, what can we do to counter the politics of forgetting that enables the continuation of patterns of systemic exclusion, racial discrimination, and political closure? This panel aims to map the construction of social forgetting in Italy’s cultural and public debates, explore its consequences throughout the decades, and identify attempts to counter it through forms of critical interaction that foster transcultural solidarity and responsibility.
Speakers&Papers:
1) Charles L. Leavitt IV, “Io ricordo il mio mondo d’un tempo inghiottito dalle tenebre”: Agostino degli Espinosa After Fascism: Scholars have suggested a number of different frameworks for evaluating the Italian intellectuals whose allegiance shifted from Fascism to anti-Fascism over the course of the Second World War. These controversial figures have variously been called I redenti (Mirella Serri), or I fantasmi (Simon Levis Sullam), or I voltagabbana (Davide Lajolo) by critics who cast doubt upon the sincerity, the legitimacy, and the integrity of their turn away from totalitarianism. Whatever the term of choice, the implication is that the Italian intelligentsia sought somehow to conceal an inconvenient history, to forget Fascism—and to have their own complicity with Fascism forgotten—once the war was over. In my paper, I claim that the polemical critique of Italian intellectuals’ “multidimensional forgetting” of Fascism itself represents a historical distortion, or at least an incomplete history of Italy’s post-Fascist transformation. Analyzing a significant but understudied case study, the intellectual biography of the economist, historian, and novelist Agostino Degli Espinosa, I argue that complex confrontations with the contested memory of Fascism played a more significant role in Italy’s post-war transformation than did any efforts to cancel out past. Alongside the ongoing scholarly efforts to uncover the post-Fascist concealment of history, therefore, I propose a renewed emphasis on the weight of memory in accounts of intellectual life in Italy after the war.
2) Viktoria Witkowski, Fascism on Trial: Rodolfo Graziani and the Formation of Popular Memory in Postwar Italy: this paper utilises the 1948 trial of Fascist Italy’s most popular colonial hero, Rodolfo Graziani, to assess wider issues of transitional justice and the formation of popular memory of Italian fascism and colonialism. During the Fascist ventennio, the regime constructed Graziani as Italy’s first colonial war hero despite his leading role in genocidal measures during Fascist Italy’s colonial wars in North and East Africa. His position as the head of the army in Mussolini’s Salò Republic in World War II, however, crucially jeopardised his heroic reputation for the first time as he directly worked with Nazi commanders during the German occupation and became responsible for Anti-partisan deportations and massacres on Italian soil. Graziani was therefore tried for Nazi collaborationism at the Supreme Court in Rome, his colonial conduct left unquestioned. The Italian press called it ‘the trial of the century’ and international papers deemed the inquest ‘fascism on trial’, claiming that Graziani’s trial represented the entire reckoning of the Fascist regime. As the most widely publicised domestic trial, one which incited strong emotions along political, cultural and social lines, this paper will therefore analyse the trial proceedings, outcome and transnational representation to explore defascistisation and decolonisation measures and their impact in postwar Italy.
3) Mara Josi, Indifference, Denial, Responsibility: Italian Holocaust-related Traumas: During the German occupation of Italy (1943-1945), 81% of Jews survived by going into hiding (Picciotto 2017). The literary narratives reporting this experience have been so far underexplored. This paper introduces “the literature of hiding” - a new category of Holocaust literature I set up and which includes texts by Italian Jewish authors who avoided deportation by going into hiding -, discusses how the analysis of the Holocaust-related traumas reported in “the literature of hiding” can help reshape the physiognomy of what has been considered so far as a Holocaust survivor, and prompts further discussion about the complicity of the Italians in the process of discrimination against and persecution of their Jewish fellow citizens. This paper is divided into three parts. First, it discusses the authors’ recognition of themselves as victims and survivors of the Holocaust by analysing how traumas experienced in hiding were translated into the construction of multifaced, fractured, and torn selves (e.g., Caruth 1995; Rothberg 2000; Kurtz 2018; Bond and Craps 2020; Wehling-Giorgi and De Rogatis 2022). Second, by focusing on passages which report the interlocking nature of oppression in 1938-1945 Italy and reflecting on everyday forms of systematic segregation and persecution (e.g., Arendt 2003, Forti 2015, Rothberg 2019), it considers the evolution of the image of Italian bystanders, implicated subjects, and collaborators as perceived by those Jews who avoided deportation by living out of sight or under false documents. Third, it argues that disinterest in the texts of literature of hiding and indifference towards, if not denial of, Italian Holocaust-related traumas is linked to the difficulty of Italian society in dealing with a dictatorial past and coming to terms with individual and collective responsibility of discrimination and persecution (e.g., BenGhiat 1999; Focardi 2005 and 2013, Levis Sullam 2018).
4) Guido Bartolini, The Emergence of Complicit Voices in contemporary Italian literature about Fascism: over the past two decades major historians of Italian Fascism have criticised the state of the Italian collective memory contending that Italy has been unable to deal with its dictatorial past (BenGhiat 1999; Pavone 2004; Labanca 2005; Focardi 2013; Carter and Martin 2019). These criticisms, which appear to be further validated by the rise of far-right and populist movements in the Italian political landscape, reveal the inadequacy of the Italian collective memory: since the postwar era, the Italian Republic has tended to resort to instrumental and self-absolving discourses that have generated redemptive narratives that were dismissive of issues of collective responsibility (Focardi 2005; La Rovere 2008; Forlenza and Thomassen 2016). While the state of Italian collective memory remains discouraging, important innovations are currently taking place in the field of Italian literature. Benefitting from the advancements of historical research, contemporary writers are offering a rich engagement with the Fascist past, which relies more and more on perspectives of main characters and narrators who are complicit with past injustices. Authors such as Franca Cavagnoli, Antonio Scurati, Francesca Melandri, Antonio Pennacchi, Igiaba Scego, and Gian Marco Griffi are re-drawing the Italian imaginary of the Fascist past by relying on figures that occupy morally complex subject positions vis-à-vis Fascism, such as those of implicated subjects, accomplices, and beneficiaries. Presenting some preliminary results of the FWO research project Facing up to the Dictatorial Past: Cultural Memory and the Responsibility for Fascism in post-1990 Italian literature, in this paper I will show that contemporary Italian writers are going beyond the tenets of the cultural representation of Fascism that had dominated the Cold War era and, through the articulation of morally complex positionalities, are developing a more critical engagement with the legacy of the dictatorship that have the power to disrupt and counteract what we call Italy’s Multidimensional Forgetting.

Panel E: Women and Religion in Italian Literary Culture: Early Modernity – Present Day - C. Brook (Chair), R. Walker, C. Moro, N. Kane
Partly due to the pervasive influence of the Catholic Church, Italian female authors – whether lay or religious, believers, atheists, or agnostics – have consistently grappled with matters of faith, addressing theological and doctrinal questions in their literary works, as well as societal issues with religious dimensions. This panel seeks to reflect on the spiritual aspects of women’s writing in Italy across diverse historical periods, and on the ways in which religion intersects with their gendered identities, political perspectives, and creative expressions.
Speakers&Papers:
1) Carlotta Moro, Rewriting Holiness: Sanctity and Feminism in Lucrezia Marinella’s Holocausto d’Amore della Vergine Santa Giustina (1648): this paper will examine Lucrezia Marinella’s (c.1571-1653) often overlooked final literary work, the hagiography Holocausto d’Amore della Vergine Santa Giustina (1648). Situating Marinella’s life of Saint Justina of Padua within the context of the querelle des femmes and the Counter-Reformation backlash against female religious leadership, this contribution will observe the ways in which the hagiography aligns with the author’s feminist views, as articulated in her treatise La nobiltà et l’eccellenza delle donne (1600). Marinella’s departures from her sources, in fact, reveal an emphasis on women’s excellence as preachers, exegetes, and rulers. Consistent with other saintly lives produced by the Venetian writer, I will also argue that this work promotes a form of female holiness that is deeply inspired by the mystics and ‘sante vive’ who dispensed with male ecclesiastical mediation to establish a direct communion with the divine. 
2) Rebecca Walker, ‘Secular Selfhood and the Sacredness of Others in Goliarda Sapienza’s L’Università di Rebibbia and Le certezze del dubbio: in her ‘autobiografia delle contraddizioni,’ Goliarda Sapienza confronts the annihilation and rebirth of the self in purely secular terms, which is to say, in the absence of God. Sapienza’s secular worldview remains, however, an undiscussed element of her works. As she comments in L’Università di Rebibbia: ‘Senza giustizia terrena è dura la vita per noi laici’ (27), and so her work is concerned with how to orient oneself ethically as an active, speaking subject in the present. At the same time, Sapienza’s self-writing presents a mode of being-in-the-world which is secular but not de-sacralised. As Gordon Lynch argues, ‘the sacred is woven through contemporary social life’ through ‘sacred moments of human contact’ (2012, 3). For Sapienza, similarly, it is ‘sacred’ encounters with other women and with feminine spaces of self-discovery in the novels L’Università di Rebibbia and Le certezze del dubbio which enable her to transcend her persistent desire for self-annihilation. Using Lynch’s theory of the modern sacred and Luisa Muraro’s Il Dio delle donne (2003), wherein the female self is seen to encounter the divine in the self-giving, transformative meeting of self and other, this paper will offer a reading of the secular-sacred which emerges in Sapienza’s prison narratives, where what is most to be hallowed is the here and now, and reverence is rooted in the radical power of human relationships.
3) Noreen Kane, Catholic collegi and Transgenerational Trauma in the Work of Shirin Ramzanali Fazel: despite the vast amount of scholarship focussing on Italian postcolonial women’s writing in the past three decades, the role of the Catholic Church in the trauma perpetuated in Italy’s colonies has been relatively under-explored. In this paper, I analyse Fazel’s portrayal of the Catholic collegi in her 2010 novel, Nuvole sull’equatore, alongside her recent autobiographical text, Scrivere di Islam (2020), in which she connects contemporary Islamophobia in Italy with unresolved colonial attitudes. Drawing on psychoanalysts’ Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok’s concept of the transgenerational phantom (The Shell and the Kernel, 1994), I trace how the “phantom” of colonial trauma is represented through Islamophobic attitudes in Scrivere di Islam. In addition, to explore the notion of recovery from trauma through dialogue – an idea made manifest in the narrative structure of Fazel’s more recent text – I apply the lens of the pan-African worldview of Ubuntu, often translated as “I am because we are”. I thus aim to illuminate how Fazel’s narratives provide a transgenerational account of the traumatic legacy of the colonial Catholic schools in Somalia, while promoting the notion of dialogue across difference as a mode of coming to terms with this past in contemporary Italian society.  

Panel F: Life and Afterlife of Dante’s Convivio – L. dell’Oso (Chair), F. Coluzzi, G. Corbett, A. Camozzi-Pistoja, N. Vacalebre 
Although unfinished and largely unknown in the 14th century, the Convivio remains one of Dante’s most influential works, and the one in which Dante’s competence in matters of philosophy is most visible after his exile. From the first half of the fifteenth century, Dante’s Convivio experienced a particularly lively afterlife through the redaction of dozens manuscripts copied in Florence and, between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, became the most reprinted of Dante’s works after the Comedy. This panel aims to provide an in-depth look at the analysis, reception, interpretation, and development of the Convivio from the time of its composition to the 20th century. By considering the historical, literary, and philosophical contexts of different periods and readerships, the panel aims to trace the journey of the work and its continuing relevance.
Speakers&Papers:
1) Federica Coluzzi, Ponete mente a la sua bellezza, ch’è grande”: Women Nineteenth-century Translators of the Convivio: women had a central, albeit unknown, role in the mediation and popularisation of Dante's Convivio in late Victorian Britain. In the 1880s, at the peak of the transatlantic production of editions and translations of the Commedia and Vita nova, the Anglophone public accessed yet another piece of the Dante canon thanks to two budding translators. Whereas Elizabeth Pryce Sayer's version of the Convivio (George Routledge and Sons, 1887) had been commissioned by Henry Morley to complement Longfellow’s Commedia (1885) in his Universal Library series; the one by Katherine Hillard (Kegan Paul, Trench and Co., 1889) was a more complex scholarly edition complemented by a long introductory essay, a conspicuous apparatus of notes and even a "plan of study" for its readers. Bringing forth previously unseen archival evidence, my paper will offer a comparative textual and book-historical analysis of their translations, tracing their individual composition and reception histories. It will argue that as they navigated the linguistic and theoretical complexities of the Convivio, Hillard and Pryce Sayers fulfilled Dante's expectations for its female public: a receiving audience eager to assert itself as autonomous and dynamic interpreters of his ambitious work.
2) George Corbett, The Convivio by Matteo Romani (1862): in his chapter-by-chapter commentary on the Convivio (1862), Matteo Romani argues that Dante rules out and corrects in this work any identification between Beatrice and a real woman; instead, if understood correctly, Dante is explicating the competing loves in his soul for philosophy and for Christian revelation. Romani’s study of the Convivio followed on from his major commentary on the Commedia, in three volumes (1858, 1859, 1860). Apart from my own references (in Corbett, 2013) and a brief entry in the Enciclopedia Dantesca (Esposito, 1970), Romani’s scholarship on Dante, informed by his deep theological and philosophical learning, has heretofore been neglected. My paper analyses Matteo Romani’s interventions into the debates about the status of Beatrice, and the appropriate hermeneutical approach to Dante’s three autobiographical works, in the nineteenth century.
3) Ambrogio Camozzi Pistoja, La materia digesta e apparecchiata” (Cv II.1) - Hylemorphism and Allegory: Dante’s Convivio between Ovid and Vico: the paper explores the synthesis of Platonic and Aristotelian ideas on the unity of matter with Dante's theory of allegory in Convivio Book 2, Chapter 1. It frames Dante's concepts within the medieval commentary tradition of Ovid's "Metamorphoses" and "Ars Amatoria," and juxtaposes them with Vico’s "Institutiones Oratoriae" and "Scienza Nuova," highlighting a continuous, evolving dialogue in philosophical thought and poietic practices.
4) Natale Vacalebre, "Bello e Chiaro”: How Torquato Tasso Read (and Re-Read) Dante’s Convivio: this paper aims to explore the evolution of Torquato Tasso's interpretation of Dante's Convivio. It focuses on the two printed copies of the treatise that Tasso annotated in two different stages of his life. Today the two books are located at the Kislak Center for Rare Books and Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania and the Biblioteca Laurenziana of Florence. The primary objective of this paper is to conduct a comparative analysis of the annotations found in these books, examining Tasso's shifting perspectives, thematic preferences, and critical reflections over time. By dissecting Tasso's insights and reactions to the Convivio, this paper underscores the enduring relevance and adaptability of Dante's philosophical treatise in subsequent periods. Tasso's annotations serve as a bridge between the medieval and post-medieval worlds, offering a lens through which we can perceive the ongoing engagement with Dante's ideas in the evolving literary and philosophical landscapes. Moreover, this research contributes to filling gaps in our understanding of the Convivio's early modern. It offers valuable insights into how later scholars and writers, such as Tasso, grappled with Dante's concepts, adapting and interpreting them in their own intellectual and creative endeavors. This paper thus becomes a crucial piece in the mosaic of the Convivio's reception, shedding light on its enduring legacy and significance well beyond its initial medieval context. Ultimately, by emphasizing the pivotal role of Tasso's annotations in shaping the post-medieval reception and fortune of the Convivio, this research endeavors to enrich the historical narrative of Dante's work, highlighting its continued influence and relevance across centuries and cultural shifts.

Panel G: Literature and Political Thought – N. Impellizzeri, S. Wilson, G. Genovese -  C. Giuliani (Chair)
Speakers&Papers:
1)Nancy Mariarita Impellizzeri, An unpublished Sicilian vulgarizer: the autograph manuscript dated 1556 by Antonio Filoteo degli Omodei and Sicilian distrust in the face of “ furor theutonicus” : the contribution will present the personality and production of one of the most interesting figures of the Sicilian sixteenth century: Antonio Filoteo degli Omodei, the only historian, poet and novelist in the island literature of those times, as well as a very active individual in the Rome of the Council of Trent. Of the same one has studied the manuscript production and, principally, the codex with the shelfmark U.Ms.C.008 preserved on the premises of the Regional University Library of Catania, which, an autograph copy of 1556, is the bearer of the vulgarization of the Historia of Ugo Falcando with the present title of Historia di Ugone Falcando Siculo, degli fatti del Re Mal Guglielmo di Sicilia, et quelle cose che successero nella minore età del re Guglielmo suo figlio. Here the episodes of hostility and circumspection recorded within the Norman court prior to the marriage between Constance of Altavilla and the German emperor Henry VI of Swabia, rise to a veritable anthropological and ethnographic treasure chest for the plots and pitfalls of a courtly nature to which they bear witness.  Specifically, the contribution will focus on the investigation conducted on the epistle extending from paper 23r. to paper 35v. of the ms. catanese, a catalytic product of patriotic ideas and passions designed to stir the consciences of the inhabitants with the aim of making them converge towards the interests of the Kingdom in danger of being barbarized and ending up being raped by the furor theutonicus which, confirming the existence of psycho-existential categories that are all Sicilian, draws attention to the fact that the use of militant and politically engaged poetry is for the island territories not only an instrument of political, social and cultural denunciation, but also a means of identity construction that finds lifeblood precisely in the struggle and defense against the barbaric invader. The vulgarized epistle, moreover, is arousing interest and curiositas since the comparative analysis of the two linguistic systems in question allows for a full understanding of the reworking mechanisms that the Sicilian put in place to achieve its rhetorical-divulgative purposes.
2) Samantha Wilson, Citizenship and Republican Political Thought in Nineteenth-Century Italy, c. 1830–1882: I shall present a section of my doctoral research on the nature of republican political thought in nineteenth-century Italy (c. 1830–1882). My central intention is to determine how accurate it is to label those like Carlo Cattaneo, Francesco De Sanctis, Giuseppe Mazzini, Cristina Trivulzio di Belgiojoso, and Pasquale Villari republicans based on their views of citizenship. I gauge this by focusing on how they spoke about public citizenship (representative democracy), private citizenship (freedoms and equality), and civic education. I also consider how far their republican visions of citizenship developed throughout the nineteenth century and, thus, how far events such as the 1848–1849 revolutions and the Second and Third Wars of Italian Independence impacted their thought. My secondary intention is to consider how much these republican visions of citizenship were influenced by the Florentine republican tradition of 1494–1532. To address this, I look at the impact of the thought of Florentine republicans like Francesco Guicciardini, Niccolò Machiavelli, and Girolamo Savonarola. I conclude that the definition of republicanism in nineteenth-century Italy should be fluid when considered through the lens of citizenship, as significant overlaps existed with other political ideologies like democracy and liberalism. Moreover, this “republicanism” shifted throughout the nineteenth century and was never monolithic or static. This evolution was influenced by the emergence of a more pragmatic reading of the Florentine republican tradition and created a version of republicanism that was distinctive in nineteenth-century Europe..
3) Giulio Genovese, Paolo Volponi’s socio-political novels: Dantean echoes in Il sipario ducale and Il pianeta irritabile:  since his first novel Memoriale (1962), where the writer engages with the alienation of the  factory worker during the Italian economic boom, Paolo Volponi’s literary interest has always entailed a commentary of Italian society and its political and social transformations. A militant of the Italian Communist Party, Volponi experimented with a literary prose that aimed at combining the political and the lyrical, often borrowing from the Italian canon to hybridize the narrative form. In this paper, I will trace Dantean influences in two Volponi’s novels, published in 1975 and 1978 respectively: Il sipario ducale and Il pianeta irritabile. While the former comments on the pervasive role of television within the Italian society following the terrorist attack on the Banca Centrale dell’Agricoltura in Milan in 1969, the latter engages with the threat of global militarization and annihilation by imagining a post-atomic society where a nuclear war around the year 2000 has nearly destroyed civilization. The aim of this analysis is to show how Volponi transferred into narrative forms a social commentary on the Italian political landscape through a conceptualization of Dante’s Divine Comedy; moreover, this paper will address how Volponi’s Dantean usage has evolved along with the author’s own artistic and conceptual trajectory.  

Panel H: New perspectives for the project “Dante LiMINA” I - Medioevo - E.Tonello (Chair), G.Alvino, F. De Biase, B. Mosca, R. Montalto
Il concetto di traccia, segno, scrittura marginale apre a diverse prospettive negli studi sulla ricezione di un’opera complessa come la Commedia di Dante. All’interno del nascente progetto di ricerca LiMINA, questo doppio panel intende esplorare i riverberi delle reazioni dei lettori al poema in diverse epoche e in diversi ambiti artistici con lo scopo ultimo di indagare e misurare le conoscenze, i gusti e gli orizzonti culturali dei lettori e interpreti di un testo fondante della tradizione occidentale, con particolare attenzione alle espressioni di culture, arti, strati sociali “marginali”.Nei manoscritti medievali si conservano sistemi di segni verbali e non verbali (maniculae, segni di attenzione, note, marginalia, glosse, annotazioni personali, disegni amatoriali etc.) che incorniciano il testo principale o che sono affidati agli spazi bianchi della pagina, dove il lettore/annotatore può lasciare traccia di sé e del proprio pensiero. Nel caso della Commedia, letta dalla borghesia laica oltre che dagli intellettuali, si tratta di materiale prezioso che, se razionalizzato permette di cogliere numerose informazioni sui ceti sociali di cui la Storia conosce ancora oggi poco. Verranno presentate tre tipologie e metodologie di analisi dei limina (proto-commenti, testi brevi, notazioni estemporanee in rapporto o meno al testo dantesco…) in alcuni manoscritti della Commedia, posseduti da mercanti e borghesi, dimostrando come sia possibile (rin-)tracciarvi la primissima ricezione del poema, le emozioni suscitate dal testo, il grado di cultura e competenze delle fasce medie alto-medievali.
Speakers&Papers:
1) Giuseppe Alvino, Personal Dante. Commenting for oneself: ancient anonymous glosses to the Divine Comedy: l’intervento vuole portare l’attenzione su alcuni sconosciuti sistemi di chiose alla Commedia di Dante conservati in manoscritti trecenteschi. L’antica esegesi al poema, già viva a partire dal 1322, ha aiutato generazioni di studiosi a comprendere la parola di Dante, e in particolare a far luce su fatti storici e personaggi di cui si sarebbe altrimenti persa memoria; e l’utilità di questi commenti è tuttora evidente. Questo è stato possibile soprattutto grazie alle operazioni esegetiche sistematiche, estese talvolta a tutte e tre le cantiche e dotate di una precisa politica interpretativa: avendo l’obiettivo di arrivare a un certo pubblico, alcuni di questi ebbero anche una straordinaria fortuna (Iacomo della Lana, Benvenuto da Imola, ecc.). Ma la storia dei commenti danteschi è più complessa: molti appassionati lettori annotavano la Commedia per uso personale, non avendo verosimilmente l’intenzione di destinare le loro chiose a una qualche circolazione. Si nota come questi improvvisati commentatori potevano agire sul testo nei modi più disparati, utilizzando l’esegesi pregressa o ricorrendo alle proprie conoscenze se non alla propria fantasia, come dimostrano gli errori interpretativi che potevano commettere. La loro diversa provenienza sociale, di cui i codici conservano qualche spia, poteva del resto influenzare il grado di padronanza del volgare di Dante o della stessa lingua che utilizzavano per commentare, per questo spesso costellata di inattesi calchi e neologismi.
2) Federica de Biase, Mercanti copisti, mercanti lettori della Commedia: il ms. Pluteo 40.24 della Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana di Firenze: la Commedia fu una lettura “universale”, in grado di indirizzarsi verso un pubblico molto variegato di lettori e di diffondersi lungo tutta la gamma dei modelli grafico-librari esistenti. Recenti studi mostrano, di fatto, come il poema dantesco ebbe un’importante circolazione anche in un ceto “liminare” come quello mercantile. Alla luce di questo interesse, l’intervento intende offrire alcune osservazioni sugli elementi paratestuali del ms. Pluteo 40.24 della Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana di Firenze. Il codice, vergato di propria mano dal mercante pratese Giovanni di Stefano, è un chiaro esempio di fruizione del poema dantesco in ambiente mercantile
3) Beatrice Mosca & Riccardo Moltalto, «Di soglia in soglia / per questo regno»: ai margini della Commedia: nel saggio Seuils (Genette 1989), Gerard Genette introduce il concetto di “soglia” quale snodo dell’interpretazione e dell’attualizzazione del testo letterario, analizzando il processo di empatizzazione e appropriazione dei lettori e la condizione di pluralità data dalla ricezione, o meglio, dalle ricezioni diverse che di volta in volta attivano disparate proprietà di una stessa opera. Nella Commedia le indagini svolte sul poema e sull’autore hanno da sempre stimolato numerose osservazioni interpretative, esegetiche, linguistiche e di stile che testimoniano un’apertura sempre più puntuale nei confronti di un testo le cui “tracce” hanno permesso di ricostruire a posteriori le vicende storiche, politiche, sociali e culturali del suo tempo e la sua ricezione per una lettura da parte del pubblico in un’ottica temporale ridefinita che dal Medioevo giunge sino ai giorni nostri. L’intervento congiunto, pertanto, si pone un duplice obiettivo: da una parte, proporre una sistematizzazione di alcune tracce scrittorie reperibili negli spazi liminali dei codici della Commedia, in funzione di un proficuo approccio alla conoscenza delle realtà di cui i testimoni manoscritti hanno fatto parte nel corso della loro storia; dall’altra porrà un caso studio specifico che dimostrerà concretamente quanto la voce dell’opera non sia data soltanto dal testo e dal messaggio autoriale, ma anche dall’«attività cooperativa che porta il destinatario a trarre dal testo quel che il testo non dice, […] a riempire spazi vuoti, a connettere quello che vi è in quel testo con il tessuto dell’intertestualità». (Eco 2016).

Panel I: Italian Studies Across Disciplines: Tools and technologies – A. Finozzi (Chair), M. Ceravolo, A. Romanzi, M. Beltrami, M. Maselli
In the volume Italian Studies Across Disciplines: Interdisciplinarity, New Approaches and future directions (Ceravolo & Finozzi 2022), as the title suggests, we gathered a series of contributions to explore the theorical possibilities – Posthuman and Nonhuman Studies, New Materialism, Media Studies, Feminist Studies, Trauma Studies, Children’s Studies – offered by the collaborations between young and established scholars in Italian Studies worldwide. Our attention was directed to different kinds of artistic production, including but not limited to social media, installations, children’s fiction, and visual arts. In this roundtable, we would like to uphold the conversation and explore a new series of intersections between Italian studies and other disciplines (which will end in the publication of the second volume of the series), as well as to try to answer our main questions: what does Italian Studies look like today and what scenarios should we expect in the near future? Differently from the first attempt to give a picture of this multifaceted debate, here we propose a more in-depth focus on tools and technologies, with the aim of exploring new practices and methodological resources available to Italian Studies scholars. In particular, we refer to digital tools, empirical methods, distant readings, and data mining, but also to translation and narrative strategies. For this reason, we asked contributions to experts in the fields of translation studies, Dr. Andrea Romanzi, in Artificial Intelligence, Matteo Maselli, in narratology, Dr Marzia Beltrami. The roundtable will be introduced by Marco Ceravolo and chaired by Dr Anna Finozzi.

Speakers&Papers:

1) Marco Ceravolo Italian Studies across Disciplines: an introduction: the idea of the first volume of Italian Studies across Disciplines was born in Spring 2020, when Italy was facing its first lockdown due to the Covid–19 pandemic. Our work is to be placed in that context of uncertainty, when we advocated the necessity of starting a dialogue across different disciplines and scholars in order to frame the possibilities that the coming decades could offer, what possible scenarios we can expect, what the role of our disciplines will be. Over the last decades, an increasing interest in connecting Italian cultural practices with methodologies coming from other disciplines has been broadening Italian Studies far beyond the traditional mono–disciplinary approaches (Brook & al. 2017). In this introduction, I will elucidate the content, the editorial choices, the publishing process, and the reception of the project Anna Finozzi and myself are carrying out since 2020. My contribution will clarify and single out our thoughts on methodologies and tools, which is the topic of the roundtable and of the upcoming dedicated second volume.

2) Andrea Romanzi A translator-centred approach to understand national publishing histories: Literary translation plays a crucial role in the mechanisms of cultural, transnational exchange and cross-contamination. On the one hand, the system of imported literature might contribute to the construction of a local perception of the country of origin (Nergaard 2004), shaping collective imaginaries and cultural understanding of the other through reception, adaptation and diffusion of mythemes, national iconographies, and exogenous representations. On the other hand, literature imported from abroad might inform national literary cultures by introducing innovative aesthetic, thematic and conceptual forms of creative expression.Within this framework, translators play a pivotal role. Although often dismissed and overlooked, among the many professional agents that populate the publishing market, translators may act as cultural mediators becoming bridging ties (Borgatti and Halgin 2011), therefore links between two different national publishing networks otherwise not connected, becoming loci of cultural exchange and innovation. Their professional practice does not remain limited to the task of text translation, but it stretches across several professional profiles within the book industry, such as literary scout, literary agent, acquisition editor and independent mediator. Considering the centrality of the role of translators and the cultural power they own (Sela-Sheffy 2014), a translator-centred approach (Hu 2004) applied to the study of publishing history might contribute to a better understanding and to a rewriting of national cultural histories. The growing interest in the analysis and extensive use of translators’ archives, with particular attention to translators’ intellectual correspondence, autobiographical testimonies, and accounts, combined with the most recent micro-sociological and micro-historical readings of translators’ trajectories (Meylaerts 2008, Sela-Sheffy 2008, Blakesley 2019), helps scholars focus on the ‘little facts’ (Szijártó 2002, 210) allowing them to challenge and undermine ‘dominant historical discourses of text production’ (Munday 2014, 77).

3) Matteo Maselli Computerised Hermeneutics for the Study of Allegorical Variations in Dante: this contribution intends to reconstruct the hermeneutic processes that led to the development of different allegorical forms (in verbis vs in factis) later adopted by Dante in his poetics. Since traditional hermeneutics has not yet put an end to the question on the emergence of the gap between the two forms of allegory, I will attempt a critical experiment with which to exploit the implicit knowledge of texts through an automated extractive process. I refer to the use of algorithms that reconstruct a form of knowledge through a recombination of data in new information datasets obtained through data-mining. Through computer-based interpretative techniques, historical-critical information dependent on applied science principles will thus be made explicit, allowing highly reliable hypotheses to be formulated. In this way, not only will an important issue for Dante and the entire medieval exegesis be clarified, but it will also be shown how to relate traditional investigative practices with computerised research perspectives.

4) Marzia Beltrami Narratology as toolbox: narratology is a toolbox. Although perhaps this can be said of any framework, it seems to me that its beauty and appeal lies precisely in its theoretical capability of providing conceptual tools that are flexible enough to be able to tackle, unpack and analyse any narrative across a wide variety of contexts and media – from literature, to films, comics, and oral exchanges. Although narratology seemed to have been somehow sidelined due to its structuralist origins and alleged disregard for the context, starting from the Nineties the discipline witnessed a renewed upsurge of interest and research, which has been termed “postclassical narratology”: postclassical narratology is characterised not only by taking on board new insights and ideas from theories such as gender studies, cognitive sciences, philosophy of mind and sociolinguistics, but also from a change in method that re-evaluates and includes also critical interpretive practice on texts. In my contribution, I intend to give an overview of recent research in narratology – with a particular focus on the strand originated from the encounter with cognitive sciences, namely cognitive narratology –, pointing out how the combination of the narratological framework and cognitive perspective may offer a fresh way of understanding what narrative is as well as useful tools for researchers in Italian studies across multiple approaches.

Panel A: Envisioning Dante II - Reading the Elements - G.Armstrong (Chair),  R. Bowen, S. Gilson, G. Monaco, G. Moorman - (Room 0-05)
The second panel in the series showcases work emerging from these new approaches to page analysis, flipping the hierarchical preference for treating the poetic text as a privileged vehicle for cultural expression and focusing on the often-neglected aspects of paratext and page design as eloquent testaments to literary reception. Papers also explore the impact of the print tradition on the development and dissemination of Dantean iconographies arising both from the interpretation of the Commedia and from the reception of Dante as a figure of literary and political interest.
Speakers&Papers:
1) Rebecca Bowen, The (In)Complete Dante: Omissions in the Early Print Tradition: from missing diagrams and images to whole lines of text, omissions occur throughout the early tradition of printing Dante’s Commedia. These exclusions leave blanks in the material record, inviting us to consider what was required for an edition to be seen as ‘complete’ in late fifteenth-century Italy as manuscript culture transitioned to print. Drawing on discoveries assisted by the application of machine learning technology to the visual segmentation of the printed page, this paper unpacks the affordances of omissions as testaments to the impact of printing (as material and philological process) on the dissemination and reception of Dante’s text. Focusing on two ground-breaking incunables—the first printed edition of the Commedia to include commentary, produced in Venice by Wendelin von Speyer in 1477, and the first edition to include illustrations, printed in Florence by Niccolò della Magna in 1481—the paper traces the entanglements between these editions and earlier manuscripts, exploring omissions as unique testaments to the developing cultural impact of printed Dantes across different geographical and historical realities and undertaking copy specific analysis to reflect on the ways in which omissions prompt interaction with the book.
2) Simon Gilson, Printed Annotations in Late-Fifteenth and Early-Sixteenth-Century Printed Editions of Cristoforo Landino’s Comento sopra la Comedia : this paper examines the presence and significance of printed annotations in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Venetian printed editions of Dante with Cristoforo Landino’s commentary. Beginning with the 1491 edition printed by Pietro de’ Piasi, editors had begun to place printed annotations on Landino’s commentary (not Dante’s text) in the margins of page. This paper presents an analysis of the annotations in this edition and explores the relationship between this edition and earlier handwritten marginalia in manuscripts and early prints of Dante. The paper then moves on to assess how the printed annotations are developed and altered in successive Venetian reprints of Landino with attention to the editions of 1493, 1497, 1507, 1512, 1520 and 1536. 
3) Giulia Monaco, Applying Philology to Images: Dante’s Illustrated Incunabula: the purpose of this paper is to illustrate some of the methodological results of my doctoral research, in-progress, which focuses on the illustrated incunabula of Dante Alighieri’s Commedia. Devoted in particular to the two venetian prints (Benali-Capcasa and Piasi, 1491, both accompanied by one image per canto, totalling one hundred woodcuts each), the study also analyses the two other important attempts to provide the Commedia with a corpus of images: the edition produced in Florence by Della Magna in 1481 (twenty engravings) and the one printed in Brescia by Bonini in 1487 (sixty-eight woodcuts). These four incunabula are all accompanied by Cristoforo Landino’s Comento sopra la Comedia and they belong to the same “iconographic family”, since their respective series of illustrations are very similar to each other.  Starting from the most recent acquisitions in the field of the iconographic tradition of the Commedia – especially as far as illuminated manuscripts are concerned – this presentation proposes a philological method for analysing the images in the four incunabula, sharing the results of a collation of the illustrations of the Della Magna and the Bonini editions and presenting some specific case studies, including early considerations regarding the relationships between the Bonini and the Benali-Capcasa and Piasi editions. Finally, the paper presents some initial findings of an on-going survey of the relationships between the two venetian editions, which share an almost identical corpus of images that is not, however, without significant variations.
4) Gloria Moorman, New Worlds after the Ancients: Dante and the Cartography of Afterlife and the Americas:  during the sixteenth century, the excitement caused by a special strand of cartographic representation depended on visual languages that drew on the reassuringly familiar, including the evolving reception of Classical Antiquity and Dante’s Divine Comedy, to visualize—and vicariously triumph over—the formerly unseen worlds of death and empire. From the 1506 edition of the Comedy onwards, commentators introduced maps that guided readers on a vicarious itinerary from the known to the unknown: Virgil’s Cumae (former Greek colony from Antiquity) thus features as common entrance to Hell, while the Southern Hemisphere (still held to be uninhabited) left space to be filled, imaginatively, by Mount Purgatory.  This paper explores ensuing visualizations of the Afterlife and the Americas in print after the designs of Giovanni Stradano (1523-1605). Stradano would eventually represent Dante at the centre of the former terra incognita of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise (c. 1595). Yet in his celebrated Nova Reperta series (c. 1588), Stradano had already placed the poet second to Vespucci, pictured as the intrepid explorer of the New World. By means of Dante’s conscious cameo appearances in colonially oriented cartography, the Americas were made part of a flexibly Florentine, aspirational strand of world history. 

Panel B: Il Gotico in Italia II – S. di Martino (Chair), E. Leydi, M. Malvestio, S. Serafini - (Room 0-02)
The Gothic (understood here as a transmedial mode exploring the dark, disturbing side of individuals, cultures and societies to interrogate socially dictated and institutionally entrenched attitudes and laws relating to gender, class, race and power) intrudes upon and pervades an extraordinary variety of Italian cultural products, from the short stories that appeared in forgotten magazines of the fin de siècle to literary classics such as Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi (1827) or Antonio Fogazzaro’s Malombra (1881). These texts are rarely, if ever, recognised as Gothic because of a two-fold tendency among Italian critics: first, the refusal to take seriously, from a rigorous, academic perspective, what is conventionally called ‘genre fiction’; second, the difficulty of fitting the irrationalism that is inherent to the Gothic into the larger picture of Italian culture, which, from the Renaissance onwards, has viewed itself as innately ‘rational’. In line with recent explorations in academic criticism (as for example the 2023 Italian Gothic. An Edinburgh Companion, co-edited by Marco Malvestio and Stefano Serafini), this panel aims at complicating the relationship between contemporary Italian culture and the Gothic, sparking discussion on the notion of an Italian Gothic, whose key characteristics are still being defined and negotiated, and highlighting the continued and pervasive presence of the Gothic in the history of the country from the unification onward. With three speakers covering almost a century and a half of Italian history and a variety of genres and literary forms, from Carlo Collodi’s dark fable, to interwar crime fiction, to the new challenges that the Anthropocene poses to representation, the panel will prove to be an essential and timely contribution to the conference, with the possibility of dialoguing with multiple fields of research and theoretical approaches, from gender studies to the environmental humanities.  
Speakers&Papers:
1) Enrica Leydi, Pinocchio, ovvero una commedia degli orrori: questo intervento esplorerà il gotico in Le avventure di Pinocchio di Carlo Collodi con un duplice obiettivo: discutere l’interazione del gotico con il modello tragico e quello comico e sottolineare l’importanza, spesso trascurata, del teatro dei burattini come serbatoio di temi, motivi, immagini, personaggi e narrazioni gotiche. A tal fine, mi concentrerò sui capitoli XIV-XVII, in cui l’atmosfera gotica è particolarmente evidente e la tragica morte di Pinocchio si risolve in una comica resurrezione. Nella prima versione del romanzo di Collodi, pubblicata a puntate sul Giornale per bambini a partire dal 7 luglio 1881, il capitolo XV segnava la fine della storia con la morte di Pinocchio per impiccagione. Tuttavia, a grande richiesta, nel volume pubblicato nel 1883, Collodi resuscitò il suo eroe burattino e gli concesse un lieto fine, cambiando così la traiettoria della storia di Pinocchio da tragica a comica. Esaminando la risemantizzazione degli elementi gotici da tragici a comici nei capitoli XIV-XVII, mostrerò anche come questi stessi elementi possano essere messi in relazione sia con la letteratura “alta”, attraverso un confronto con il capitolo XVII dei Promessi Sposi, sia con la tradizione popolare più “bassa” del teatro dei burattini. In conclusione, questa nuova prospettiva sul gotico in Pinocchio amplierà gli studi esistenti evidenziando l'interazione tra tragedia e commedia, letteratura e cultura popolare nel romanzo di Collodi.
2) Stefano Serafini, Scienza, letteratura e occulto nell’Italia interbellica: il mio contributo esplora alcuni sviluppi del gotico nella letteratura criminale italiana del periodo tra le due guerre mondiali (1918–39), che vede il riemergere di alcune discipline legate alla sfera del soprannaturale, in particolare lo spiritismo, come conseguenza principale dell’enorme perdita di vite umane durante la Prima guerra mondiale. Analizzando il lavoro di alcuni autori che si concentrano sul mutevole e complesso rapporto tra criminalità, investigazione e soprannaturale (Vasco Mariotti, Renato Umbriano, Augusto De Angelis, Pietro Zampa), intendo dimostrare come il progressivo scollamento che si registra nel periodo interbellico tra scienza e occulto contribuisce a un sostanziale inaridimento del potenziale trasgressivo del soprannaturale letterario. Che sia esso ridotto ad elemento coreografico (De Angelis, Umbriano), razionalizzato e riassorbito dalla scienza (Mariotti), oppure decostruito e depotenziato (Zampa e la radioestesia), il soprannaturale letterario perde la componente ambigua (quando non sovversiva) che caratterizza certa narrativa criminale tardo Ottocentesca e della Belle Époque, prima di subire un ulteriore mutamento dopo la catastrofe della Seconda guerra mondiale.
3) Marco Malvestio, L’Antropocene gotico di Luigi Musolino: Il gotico è un genere sempre più spesso letto in relazione alle sfide intellettuali poste dall’Antropocene, come testimoniano le teorizzazioni di quello che è stato definito ‘ecogotico’, ossia un tentativo di leggere la produzione gotica e horror alla luce delle environmental humanities: la narrativa dell’orrore e del perturbante fa emergere il senso di inquietudine legato all’agentività del non-umano e allo stesso tempo svela la dimensione ecofobica che sottende il nostro rapporto con l’ambiente, vale a dire il modo in cui i tentativi di controllare o annullare questa agentività hanno regolato i comportamenti ambientali della specie umana attraverso la sua storia. Questo tipo di considerazioni ritornano prepotentemente nel lavoro di Luigi Musolino, in particolare in racconti come “Uironda”, “Acido lattico”, e “Nere colline del supplizio”. Nato nel 1982, Musolino è uno scrittore relativamente noto nel circuito della narrativa horror italiana, e una selezione dei suoi lavori è apparsa negli Stati Uniti per la casa editrice specializzata Valancourt Books (A Different Darkness, 2022). La mia tesi è che Musolino, a dispetto di un’enfasi su realtà locali e rurali che permette di apparentarne il lavoro con la recente riemersione del folk horror, abbia al centro questioni legate alla trasformazione sociale e ambientale occorsa in Italia durante il boom economico, e quindi coincidente con la Grande Accelerazione dell’Antropocene – trasformazioni occorse su scala globale, il che implica che la dimensione locale del lavoro di Musolino vada letta nella lente del “globalgothic” teorizzato da Glennis Byron, Fred Botting e Justin D. Edwards. 

Panel C: Temporal Tremors II, Anxiety in the Making of Italian Lyric Poetry: From Modern to Contemporary - F. Pedriali (Chair), A. Bardazzi, R.  Binetti, L. Costa (Room 0-03)
Building on the foundations laid in the first panel, this session will extend the exploration of anxiety in Italian lyric poetry into the Modern and Contemporary periods. It will trace the evolution of the transhistorical elaboration of anxiety and explore how the cluster of words and rhetorical devices identified in the Middle Ages and Early Modern periods persisted, transformed, or paved the way for new forms of expression. The interdisciplinary and diachronic approach will be maintained, with a particular emphasis on the ways in which Italian lyric poets engaged with and responded to the changing socio-cultural landscape. Affect theory, lyric theory, reception studies, and the history of emotions will continue to serve as valuable frameworks for analysis. By investigating the modern anxieties in Italian lyric poetry, this panel seeks to provide insights into how poets navigated the challenges and upheavals of their times, using their craft to articulate, resist, or reflect the prevailing anxieties and hierarchies of influence.
Speakers&Papers:
1)  Luca Costa, The Feeling of Nothingness: Anxiety in Leopardi’s Poetry: anxiety is one of the most present feelings in Leopardi’s poetry. However, it does not appear necessarily under this name; indeed, when Leopardi speaks of “angoscia” or “ansietà”, for example, those are not very interesting terms. On the contrary, the term “noia” (boredom) is much more meaningful. This is not simply the kind of boredom that can be felt about the things of everyday life, nor does it simply coincide with Baudelaire’s “spleen”, or other contemporary forms of boredom. It is something quintessentially Leopardian, which could be defined as the feeling of nothingness. Sartre and Heidegger wrote diffusely on this kind of feeling, in a way that can be extremely fruitful to understand Leopardi’s anxiety. They call it “angoisse” and “Angst” respectively, and they both define it as the feeling that catches us when we are faced with the tragic fact that existence is nothingness, and that it is up to us to make something of it. This feeling can also be found in Leopardi’s poems, particularly in “L’Infinito” and in “Canto notturno di un pastore errante dell’Asia”. In the existentialist tradition, anxiety is also linked to the infinity of possibilities we can embrace to give meaning to existence; a similar anxiety towards infinity is indeed expressed in “L’Infinito”. A close comparison with some authors of existentialism can be helpful to detect anxiety in Leopardi’s poems, even when it is not expressed with this name, or disguised under the name of boredom.
2)  Roberto Binetti, Cosmic Tremors and Universal Scales. Relativistic Anxieties in Pascoli and D’Annunzio’s Decadent Exploration of Space and Time: as the nineteenth century transitioned into the twentieth century, a wave of scientific discoveries, particularly Poincaré’s ground-breaking insights in 1895, captured the global imagination and inspired poets worldwide. Poincaré’s argument, later expanded by Albert Einstein in his 1905 theory of relativity, posited the impossibility of detecting absolute or relative motion of matter in relation to the ether. This principle of relativity, suggesting the uniformity of physical laws for observers in stationary or uniformly moving states, stirred the imaginations and anxieties of poets and writers. This paper delves into the exploration of anxiety surrounding the scale and proportion of time and space in the works of two prominent Italian decadent poets, Giovanni Pascoli and Gabriele D’Annunzio, who wrote during the pivotal period between the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. Focusing on Pascoli’s “Il bolide” from the Canti di Castelvecchio (1903) and D’Annunzio’s “La conoscenza” from Libro Segreto (1935), the analysis seeks to unveil how these poets grappled with the shifting paradigms of space and time. Both Pascoli and D’Annunzio, within the context of Italian decadent poetry, engage in a reflection on the malleability of space and time. By comparing and contrasting their poetry, this paper aims to shed light on how these literary figures navigate the anxieties associated with the shifting understanding of modern physics.  The study not only contributes to our understanding of Italian decadent poetry but also provides insights into the broader cultural and intellectual milieu of the turn of the century.
3)  Adele Bardazzi, Emotion as Method: Rethinking Scholarly Inquiry through and against Affect Theory: this presentation delves into the convergence of emotion, scholarly investigation, and methodological paradigms within academic discourse, focusing particularly on anxiety as a pivotal lens to read lyric poetry. It challenges the traditional interpretation of emotion as a mere object of scrutiny, advocating for its inherent as well as inevitable involvement within the subject-object dynamic in scientific investigations. The paper explores pivotal research inquiries, specifically examining how scientific analysis might adopt methodological postures typically confined to “creative writing”, particularly in the realm of non-fiction narratives, and are not accepted within the category of scientific scholarship. It explores the potential advantages and limitations of departing from the presumed “neutral” stance of scholarly inquiry, revealing the parallels between ostensibly “neutral” scholarship and systems rooted in specific emotions. Moreover, this paper scrutinizes the transformative capacity of writing, examining the profound impact of different emotional lenses on the scholarly gaze and the consequent reformation of the studied subject. This exploration aims to elucidate the interconnectedness between emotional involvement and scholarly interpretation, offering a reimagined perspective on methodological approaches in academia and literary studies specifically. To illustrate these concepts, the presentation will focus on comparative case studies within the context of contemporary Italian lyric poetry that elucidate the influence of diverse emotional perspectives on the object of study. A particular focus lies on a recent experiment conducted with undergraduates at the University of Utrecht, showcasing the practical application and re-conceptualization of Affect Theory through the lenses of anxiety. This inquiry seeks not only to challenge but to expand the discourse on methodological approaches within scholarly inquiry by interrogating the implications of emotional engagement, ultimately advocating for a more nuanced understanding of the scholarly process and its inherent emotional entanglements

Panel D: Italy's Multidimensional Forgetting II – G. Miglianti (Chair), S. Bellini, A. Brondino, G. Mancosu, J.C. Marston, A. Pesarini (Room 0-04)
Panel abstract: Several scholars have highlighted Italy’s difficulty in coming to terms with its recent violent past and take responsibility for its national crimes. Yet Italy’s memory struggles are often discussed in isolation, with works that focus on Fascism, Italian colonialism, the ‘migrant crisis’, the Holocaust, the Resistance, or Italy’s involvement in WW2. Taking inspiration from Michael Rothberg’s Multidirectional Memory, this panel seeks to reveal the multidirectional dimension of Italy’s flawed engagements with the past by showing how, within Italian culture, varied forms of forgetting shaped and influenced each other by being subject to ongoing ‘negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing’ (Rothberg 2009, p. 3). By ‘multidimensional forgetting’ we do not indicate a plain forgetfulness, but rather an interconnected network of self-absolving narratives that hinder a critical understanding of the past and of the effects of the latter on the present. By bringing together different processes (erasure, amnesia, disavowal, silencing, reinventing the past…) under the umbrella concept of ‘multidimensional forgetting’ we aim to shed light on Italy’s politics of forgetting and link the discussion of collective memory to the question of political responsibility. How did Italy’s erasure of its colonial faults influence the problematic debate (or lack thereof) about its involvement in the Holocaust and other crimes? And vice versa, how did the ‘missing Italian Nuremberg’ and reluctance to examine the crimes committed before and during the war inform Italy’s faltering postcolonial consciousness? How does the lack of critical reckoning with the legacies of past crimes shape the systemic racism and political dysfunction of contemporary Italy? In brief, how did processes of deferral, forgetting, and denial related to specific historical events connect and shape similar processes in relation to other historical contexts? And, crucially, what can we do to counter the politics of forgetting that enables the continuation of patterns of systemic exclusion, racial discrimination, and political closure? This panel aims to map the construction of social forgetting in Italy’s cultural and public debates, explore its consequences throughout the decades, and identify attempts to counter it through forms of critical interaction that foster transcultural solidarity and responsibility.
Speakers&Papers:
1) Gianmarco Mancosu, Beyond “Methodological Amnesia”: Rituals of Colonial Nostalgia in Republican Italy: recent scholarship from various disciplines increasingly sheds light on the politics of memory in the Italian (post)colonial context, revealing the biased and uncritical nature of that recollection and its instrumental role in remaking national identities in the aftermath of WWII. Despite this progress, the recollection of the Italian colonial past is often depicted as surrounded by amnesic and oblivion paradigms. In contrast to this perspective, my paper aims to consider this extended chapter of Italy’s past as intrinsic to understanding Italian culture from a transnational perspective. I will focus on the activities of nostalgic associations born between Italy and the Horn of Africa between the forties and the mid-seventies – mainly the Associazione Nazionale Combattenti e Reduci d’Africa and the Associazione Italiani Profughi d’Etiopia – following the different waves of returnees from the former colonies. Drawing on a multifaceted body of sources, my presentation will tackle the modalities through which the colonial past has been retrieved and revived, not simply in relation to the construction of certain collective memories but also in connection with several political and social issues. Methodologically, the social and cultural practices of those associations will be examined against the backdrop of the sacralization of imperial nostalgia in Republican Italy. This has allowed nostalgic groups to cope with the trauma of expulsion and to re-articulate the memories of the empire in anniversaries related to colonialism and in specific sites of remembrance (monuments, but also social and cultural practices). Moreover, the historiographical interpretation of these processes will prompt a multifaceted reflection addressing the reconceptualization of the prolonged and opaque end of Italy’s empire, its transnational character, and the conflation between neo-fascist and colonial memories in Republican Italy.
2) John Colin Martson, Decolonizing memory in the Museo delle opacità: between cancellation and recuperation: this paper will seek to chart the post-war afterlives of the collections of the former Museo Coloniale di Roma. The varying modes of public presentation of the collections, some 12,000 objects ranging from paintings stolen from the Ethiopian Parliament to Libyan food stocks displayed in imperial expositions of the Giolitti era, offer material witness to the “difficult heritage” and memory of Italian colonialism. The majority of the objects in the collection pose structural problems for art historians, anthropologists, and historians, since many were stolen, seized, and collected with the aim of propaganda and colonial exposition, and do not contain records of provenance. Interpreting the various post-war exhibitions and venues these objects were housed in, and the contestations between restitution, silence, and recuperation offers a case-study in the suppressed memory of the Italian colonial period, which continues to inform public attitudes and academic debates. More recently, the re-fashioning of the collection under the Museo delle Opacità speaks directly to the continued “opacity” of violence and cultural damage committed by Italian colonialism, and opens an avenue on how to initiate new forms of public memory through engagement with contemporary artists, Italo-African communities, and the general public.
3) Angelica Pesarini, Cancelling or Being Cancelled? Selective Memory and Practices of Resistance: “New Italians”, “second generations”. These are just some of the most frequent terms used to define people born in Italy, or who arrived at a very early age and considered indeed “new”, that is, not belonging to the nation. But who are these second generations? And why do they always remain second? It is curious to note how time seems to pass for those who consider themselves/are considered “native” Italians and who, proudly and linearly, can claim a detailed family history composed of several generations; while, for others the temporal sphere seems to have crystallized at number two, in a dimension of perennial anachronism. Using the Unification of Italy as a starting point, this paper will illustrate the epistemological effects of having ideas of blood and whiteness attached to national identity, and its consequences in relation to issues of history and memory. The depiction of Italy as a white country has brought about specific narratives of belonging in which Black people and people of colour are not included. Nonetheless, from movements of social justice, the art scene to literary and academic arenas, we witness the recovery of powerful -counter-stories of resistance. These testimonies are critical because not only dismantle a dominant and oppressive and exclusionary idea of identity, but they also highlight subaltern memories of resistance. The telling of these stories adds missing pieces to a fragmented and selective History.
4) Stefano Bellin, Crushing the Future: Italy’s Multidimensional Forgetting and the G8 Summit in Genoa: this paper will discuss Italy’s multidimensional forgetting by analysing how the future was contested, imagined, and violently repressed during and after the protests for the G8 summit in Genoa, from July 18 to July 22, 2001. There is a close relationship between the politics of memory and the way in which we project ourselves into the future and imagine new social arrangements. I will argue that one of the reasons why Italy struggles to come to terms with its past is the disappearance, from all sides of the political spectrum, of what Reinhart Koselleck (2004) called ‘horizon of expectation’. We live in a world that seems to have largely lost faith in politics and the ‘dialectic of history’, the field of action that emerges through the symbiotic relationship between ‘space of experience’ and ‘horizon of expectation’. In the regime of historicity that François Hartog (2003) has defined as ‘presentism’, hopes for radical political change have collapsed under the weight of the neoliberal hegemony. This is a global condition, but it is particularly evident in Italy, the country that, among other things, was the birthplace of Fascism, that used to have the largest Communist party in the Western world, and that was at the forefront of the alter-globalization movement. To explore how the loss of futurity affects our collective memory, I will analyse how the future was ‘forgotten’ during and after the protests for the G8 summit in Genoa. To do so I will focus on two works: the film Diaz - Don’t Clean Up This Blood (2012; dir. Daniele Vicari) and Guido Mazzoni’s poem Genova (2017).
5) Andrea Brondino, Italy’s phantom pasts: on the political impact of conspiratorial narratives and alternative histories: in this paper, I argue that conspiratorial narratives constitute a peculiar way of remembering Italy’s history. For historical reasons too, the Italian context is uniquely ripe with alternative reconstructions of the country’s past, based on the alleged roles played by secret groups, hidden forces, and obscure puppeteers. The main question my paper addresses is: to what extent do conspiratorial narratives shape collective memory by creating phantom pasts, that is alternative histories that affect the way Italians think about their past, react to present issues, and imagine possible futures? My paper focuses on one specific case study in which mainstream Italian culture has legitimised and channelled conspiratorial narratives: the 9/11 terrorist attack in New York and their aftermath. The fall of the Twin Towers arguably raised unprecedented and international conspiratorial attention. How did Italian intellectuals, activists, and opinion-makers react to the event? And why did the attacks generate an unusual number, for a European country, of cultural and artistic responses? In this paper I will quickly analyse the specific cultural connotations of, and reactions to the attacks in the Italian context, as well as how Italian TV and fictions across media channelled and repurposed 9/11 conspiracy theories originally born on the Internet. In particular, I will examine the latest novel by the historian Alessandro Barbero, Brick for Stone, which suggests alternative ideas about the true responsibilities behind the attacks, hinting at larger geopolitical plots within which occult Italian characters still (nostalgically) play a decisive role.

Panel E: Primo Levi Digital Commentary - R. Gordon (Chair),  C. Leavitt, V. Montemaggi, V. Geri, K. Powlesland
(Room 1-02)
The goal of this roundtable is to present and discuss a new digital commentary on Primo Levi’s Se questo è un uomo  https://levidigitalcommentary.org>. Co-created by scholars at the University of Cambridge and the University of Notre Dame, the Primo Levi Digital Commentary collects the contributions of more than thirty international scholars from a variety of disciplines, focusing on the text of one chapter of Levi’s book, ‘Il canto di Ulisse’. The digital commentary seeks to offer a lively resource that supports scholars and students interested in Levi and/or the Holocaust, and that looks beyond more conventional accounts of this well-known work. We hope that the roundtable will encourage scholars both to use the existing commentary in their research and teaching and to contribute to the commentary as it continues to grow. We welcome contributions in varied media (text, film, artwork, audio, etc.), using approaches ranging from close reading and textual analysis to computational methods and visualization, to creative or reflective work. 

Panel F: New perspectives for the project “Dante LiMINA” II, L'età contemporanea - C.Perna (Chair), F.M. Giallombardo, S. Malatesta (Room 1-03)
Come in ogni processo mitopoietico, esistono zone grigie nei passaggi che rendono certe figure, espressioni, passi memorabili e presenti a un immaginario collettivo. Il caso della Commedia di Dante è in questo senso esemplare. Dopo l’incredibile successo immediato dell’opera, dopo ripetute ondate di disinteresse, la Commedia rappresenta oggi uno dei testi più noti della letteratura mondiale, l’unico testo italiano a essere inserito nel Wester canon di H. Bloom (1994). I suoi messaggi, le sue atmosfere, le architetture infernali e paradisiache, la sfilata di personaggi che popolano le pagine del poema sono presi a modello non solo dalla letteratura alta, ma anche da diverse espressioni artistiche che hanno lottato per essere riconosciute in pari dignità delle arti tradizionali come gli anime, i manga o i murales, o da correnti controtendenza come il Modernismo brasiliano. Il panel indagherà le modalità, le frequenze e i canali attraverso cui la Commedia si è depositata in queste aree culturali ‘periferiche’.
Speakers&Papers:
1) Federica Maria Giallombardo, Le miniature di Monika Beisner come soglia pittorica e poetica della Commedia nel contemporaneo: le miniature per la Commedia dantesca di Monika Beisner (Amburgo, 1942) compendiano secoli di storia dell’iconografia: attraverso sapienti tecniche pittoriche (ad esempio la miscela di pigmento e tuorlo d’uovo) si riconoscono gestualità da scriptorium; analizzando i modelli studiati con appassionata diligenza dall’autrice – su cui spiccano i quattrocenteschi Giovanni di Paolo e Lorenzo di Pietro detto il Vecchietta – si ripercorre la tradizione miniaturistica medievale e umanistica; osservando le cento tavole si assiste al processo di sintesi degli apparati iconografici moderni, da John Flaxman a William Blake. Un “universo elegante” plasmato in sette anni di lavoro (1992- 1999) che fonde insieme elementi antichi e contemporanei della tradizione illustrativa legata al poema. Se Lucia Battaglia Ricci conclude la rassegna del suo volume Dante per immagini (Torino, Einaudi, 2018) con un capitolo dedicato al Novecento (senza menzionare la Beisner e con un numero limitato di autori), tuttavia esistono tracce esigue di discussioni scientificamente condotte circa il rinnovato interesse degli artisti contemporanei nel raffigurare l’impresa del viator. Con questo intervento, applicando le categorie proprie della filologia dei manoscritti miniati, si intende approfondire il legame tra simbologia medievale e sistemi figurativi contemporanei attraverso il caso-soglia di Beisner, esempio quasi per nulla conosciuto ma indicativo della condizione odierna dell’illustrazione della Commedia – nonché della sintesi dell’immaginario dantesco dei nostri giorni.
2) Serena Malatesta, Il viaggio di Dante negli anime e nei manga: esplorando le allusioni della Divina Commedia nella cultura visuale giapponese: l’intervento si propone di esplorare le allusioni tratte dal viaggio narrato nella Commedia di Dante Alighieri nell’universo degli anime e dei manga. L’indagine si concentrerà sulla maniera in cui la cultura giapponese ha recepito i temi, i luoghi e i personaggi danteschi. A partire dal Dante Shinkyoku di Gō Nagai, si analizzerà la presenza di riferimenti a strutture e narrazioni del viaggio attraverso l’Inferno, il Purgatorio e il Paradiso nelle opere giapponesi e si valuterà la prossimità e distanza rispetto al modello della Commedia. Osservando il design dei personaggi, le ambientazioni, gli espedienti narrativi e la riflessione filosofica, si tenterà di esaminare il modo in cui personaggi e ambientazioni del viaggio dantesco hanno ispirato l’immaginario visuale giapponese, evidenziando il dialogo interculturale tra la tradizione letteraria occidentale e la vibrante cultura popolare giapponese.

Panel G: Multimediality and Orality in Teaching, Learning, and Research – C. Powell, A.L. Minnucci - S. Genovesi (Chair) (Room 1-04)
Speakers&Papers:
1) Céline Powell, Learning English in the late 18th century Italy. Methods, practices and usage: during the eighteenth century, French became the language of the European cultural elites and the medium of international exchanges, ranging from diplomacy to science (Terrall 2017; Wright 2006). There are numerous examples of French cultural hegemony in Italy, such as the correspondence of Italian intellectuals, which are partly, if not entirely written in French; or the masterpieces of European literature that arrived in Italy through French translations.  While a good command of French allowed intellectuals to stay up to date with European news and in contact with their peers throughout Europe, learning other modern languages was considered superfluous. However, it is interesting to note that at the end of the eighteenth century in Italy, the language of Shakespeare awakened the interest of Italian writers and artists, both men and women.  Taking inspiration from Antonio Canova's booklet Libretto di esercizi di lingua inglese (1792) and from Francesca Roberti Franco’s letters from the 1780s, this paper aims to investigate the way in which English was learned in the eighteenth century Italy and which teaching methods and practices were then in use. The motivations and goals of each of the two intellectuals will then be explored. This last question will lead us to reflect on the meaning and the relevance of learning English in the Venetian context of the late 18th century, and also to investigate the cultural and social consequences of such practice.
2) Alessandro Ludovico Minnucci, VOCAL NETWORK: ITALIAN SPOKEN WORD IN THE DIGITAL AGE : given its role in conveying political messages and voicing the social struggles of underrepresented communities, Italian spoken word is becoming an interesting field of research. However, despite its recent development, the phenomenon of performance poetry is still understudied in Italy. Among the many questions that have not yet been addressed, a crucial one is the effect of new technologies and media on contemporary spoken word. How have these performers employed the numerous opportunities for audience engagement on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitch? How do their voices and bodies traverse these different media? Moreover, can these performers effectively convey their social struggles through performance poetry and social networks? This presentation aims to explore the relationship between contemporary Italian performers and the social networks, focusing on its political impact. Moreover, it attempts to consider whether the recent developments in spoken word should be viewed in terms of continuity with the performance poetry of the last century or as a departure from it, as their relationship with social networks places them in a different phase in the history of media, specifically the one that Henry Jenkins defines as 'convergence culture.' 

Panel H: Per un’epica delle corti: il Mambriano di Francesco Cieco da Ferrara – M. Dorigatti (Chair), A. Carocci, A. Perrotta, J. Everson (Room 1-05)
A partire dai lavori legati alla preparazione dell’edizione critica e commentata del Mambriano di Francesco Cieco, poema cavalleresco stampato a Ferrara nel 1509, il panel indaga l’importanza storico-culturale del poema, sia all’interno della tradizione cavalleresca sia come prodotto della letteratura di corte degli inizi del Cinquecento. Erede della lezione boiardesca, il Mambriano costituisce un rilancio del genere cavalleresco come letteratura insieme di intrattenimento e di insegnamento, di proposta e promozione di un modello politico in un momento di grande fervore culturale. Il suo autore, Francesco Cieco, costituisce una figura mediana tra la cultura popolare dei mestieranti dell’ottava rima e la cultura umanistica, e con il Mambriano dà vita a un’opera crocevia tra generi diversi (l’epica, il romanzo, la novella) di grande forza innovativa. I contributi del panel costituiranno una riflessione sui principali motivi di interesse del poema rispetto alla tradizione classica e romanza e insieme una presentazione del lavoro collettivo svolto nell’edizione e nel commento dell’opera.
Speakers&Papers:
1) Jane E. Everson, Il Mambriano di Francesco Cieco da Ferrara – storia di un’edizione critica storia di una collaborazione scientifica: auanto tempo ci vuole per portare a termine un’edizione critica? La risposta ovviamente dipende dalla lunghezza e dalla complessità del testo, e dall’esistenza di precedenti edizioni. Nel caso del Mambriano, di cui sta per uscire la prima edizione critica commentata in assoluto, il lavoro ha richiesto decenni. Il mondo universitario, almeno in paesi anglosassoni, da tempo non dà sufficiente valore alle edizioni critiche, al tempo richiesto e alla complessità del lavoro. La necessità di poter presentare pubblicazioni di ricerca a ritmi forzati ostacola ulteriormente un progetto di edizione critica. In questo intervento vorrei proporre una possibile soluzione, derivata dalla collaborazione delle tre curatrici che, nel corso degli anni, s’è sviluppata intorno al Mambriano per portare a compimento l’edizione. L’intervento seguirà i vari motivi del passaggio da lavoro di singolo studioso a collaborazione, le varie fasi della preparazione, la divisione dei compiti e il modus operandi stabilito e portato avanti anche durante la pandemia. Si rifletterà anche sui problemi presentati da tale collaborazione per la valutazione della ricerca del singolo studioso. Soprattutto si mirerà a sottolineare gli aspetti molto positivi di tale esperienza e a incoraggiare altri a considerare i vantaggi del lavoro di équipe anche in campi in cui la collaborazione non si presenta normalmente come approccio utile e proficuo.
2) Annalisa Perrotta, Un’alterità irriducibile: il personaggio di Mambriano: l’eroe eponimo del Mambriano di Francesco Cieco è uno dei personaggi più complessi di tutto il poema. Da una parte, la sua figura riprende quelle dei grandi nemici della tradizione cavalleresca, che assaltano la cristianità e ne minacciano la sopravvivenza, ed è connesso con le storie di Rinaldo da Montalbano. Dall’altra parte, però, il personaggio di Mambriano contiene anche elementi fortemente innovativi: si presenta come un personaggio in formazione e costituisce lo strumento per una riflessione sui modelli di sovranità (spesso incarnando uno speculum principis negativo); portatore di un’irriducibile alterità (non si convertirà mai al cristianesimo), la sua figura gioca con modelli classici (come la figura di Ulisse) e romanzi. L’intervento mira a ricostruire il ruolo del personaggio nel poema (nei termini dell’antagonista, dell’anti-eroe, del modello), e a valutare il suo significato all’interno della politica delle corti che Francesco Cieco propone nella sua opera.
3) Anna Carrocci, Un ambiguo regno ideale: la magia nel Mambriano: nella letteratura cavalleresca di secondo Quattrocento la magia occupa un posto importante e via via più articolato, perché al tradizionale ricorso alle arti magiche per mano del mago cristiano Malagigi Boiardo aggiunge la presenza dei regni magici di stampo morganiano, creati da maghe e fate per intrappolare i cavalieri. Nell’intervento si esamina il ruolo della magia a opera di personaggi maschili e femminili nel Mambriano, diretto erede dell’Inamoramento de Orlando e insieme suo contraltare. Anche per la magia, infatti, Francesco Cieco da Ferrara accoglie entrambe le possibilità offerte dalla letteratura cavalleresca dopo l’Inamoramento (la possibilità della tradizione e quella dell’innovazione boiardesca) e le sottopone a una rielaborazione originale: in apertura del poema si assiste a una declinazione apparentemente positiva non solo della magia cristiana ma anche di quella pagana, attraverso la rappresentazione di un regno magico caratterizzato dai princìpi di ordine e armonia tipici del “buon governo”; poco alla volta, però, questo quadro si trasforma, lasciando emergere una critica sempre più circostanziata al ricorso alle arti magiche. Si tratta di una declinazione della magia quanto mai inconsueta nella letteratura cavalleresca, che mostra la capacità del Cieco di riconsiderare e anche di risemantizzare gli elementi tradizionali del genere in cui si inserisce, pur senza rinunciare alla piacevolezza della narrazione. 

Panel A: Dante’s Landscapes between the Classical Tradition and Contemporary Critical Theory – H. Webb (Chair), A. Carrai, A. Kiltinavičiūtė, G. Rayson (Room 0-02)
In his Introduction to Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces (2007), Bertrand Westphal claims that ‘the concrete details of geography often relate to a spiritual hermeneutic rather than to immediate observation’. Dante’s landscapes combine both elements: they feel tangible and real, thanks to multiple narrative cues for readers’ engagement, yet they also open themselves to symbolic, liturgical, theological, and metapoetic interpretations. Incorporating elements from classical texts, biblical language, and the vernacular lyric, Dante’s representation of nature is a fascinating example of landscape as a cultural-natural palimpsest. A focus on landscape allows us to ask questions about the affordances of different kinds of landscapes; the division between culture and nature; the agency of the nonhuman and more than human; and the role of landscapes in Dante’s self-fashioning as an author. This panel will investigate the landscapes of the Commedia from the perspectives of ecocriticism, history of the senses, reception studies, and lexical analysis, reflecting on how landscapes shape the experiences of the souls in the afterlife, the narrator, and the reader.
Speakers&Papers:
1) Alessia Carrai, Rivers and Poetry from the Vita Nuova to the Commedia: Evolution of a Metaphor: the encounter between Beatrice and Dante in the “selva antica” of the Earthly Paradise has been widely discussed by scholars as a crucial moment in Dante’s self-fashioning as a poet and a prophet. The aim of this paper is to enrich this discussion by bringing to light the importance of the landscape surrounding Beatrice’s appearance in Purgatorio 30, with a particular attention to the element of water. Through the analysis of selected intertextual references from Purgatorio 28 and Purgatorio 30, the proposed paper examines Dante’s use of the metaphorical link between flowing water and poetic speech, and argues for the relevance of such a metaphor in the representation of Beatrice. By taking into account two passages from the Vita Nuova dealing with rivers and poetic eloquence, the paper will also consider the diachronic development of this metaphor in Dante’s works, reflecting on the interaction between biblical and classical subtexts at different stages of his poetic production.  
2) Aistė Kiltinavičiūtė, The Sensescapes of Dante’s Earthly Paradise: as Dante’s Monarchia tells us, the Earthly Paradise represents the beatitudo huius vitae (3.15.7), a perfect integration of the senses, as well as the harmony of the spirit and the body. Dante’s evocative, cross-sensory depiction of the Edenic landscape, and the lexical precision with which words such as temperare, aura, and aulire are used, exemplify the poet’s desire to represent at least some of the prelapsarian perceptual fulness by means of his fallen sensory vocabulary. The protagonist’s interactions with the landscape in the final cantos of Purgatorio constantly highlight the ambiguous nature of sensation in the Earthly Paradise, which, as its very name suggests, simultaneously partakes of the earthly and the paradisiacal. Adopting Colin Burrow’s notion of ‘dreamitation’ (Imitating Authors 2019), I will investigate how imaginative and fictional experiences can influence our perception of reality by looking at how Dante’s final purgatorial dream, together with classical poets’ literary dreams, foreshadow the real-life manifestation of the Earthly Paradise (Purg. 28.141). Moreover, I propose that the notion of Adamic sleep in the Earthly Paradise, influentially examined by Isidore of Seville, Gregory the Great, and Augustine, helps to explain not only why Dante is transported into this realm through dreaming, but also how the landscape of Eden, replete with sensory illusions and failures of perception, allows Dante to engage with ideas about ideal sensory harmony, the differences between pre- and post-lapsarian sensation, and human perceptual perfectibility.
3) George Rayson, The Lexicon of Landscapes in Purgatorio: Challenges to a Localised Imagination: in Purgatorio XXVI, Dante compares the astonishment shown by the souls in response to his being alive in the afterlife to an uncivilised [rozzo e salvatico] mountain peasant [montanaro] who falls silent [ammuta] in wonder upon entering a city [inurba]. The vivid realism of this comparison relies on a shared imagination between poet and reader of the landscape surrounding a city in medieval Italy. The passage contains a rich density of words found nowhere else in the Commedia: rozzo, montanaro, ammutare, and inurbarsi are all hapax legomena. The challenge that these rare and unusual words pose to readers encourages a shared affective response with the imagined peasant and the souls on Mount Purgatory. This paper will analyse how in Purgatorio, Dante writes landscapes through a lexicon which continually stretches the imagination and undercuts the expectations of the poem’s readers. In Purgatorio IV, Dante compares the straitened pathway up the mountain to the gaps between rows of vines in a vineyard which are filled with thorns [impruna] to prevent thieves from stealing the grapes when they are ripened [imbruna]. Benvenuto da Imola, an early commentator to the Commedia, transports us to Dante’s world, explaining that this image has a particularly Florentine character. Benvenuto then adds that next to the pathways in Tuscan vineyards, the pathway up Mount Purgatory is ‘difficilor sine comparatione’ (‘more difficult without comparison’). The comparison allows our imaginations to maintain a foothold in reality, but really, it is no comparison at all. The landscape of Mount Purgatory has a singular quality which is accessed through a lexicon which at once urges our imaginative participation in a world of local landscapes and flaunts our expectations in its continual demand for more attentive, more imaginative interpretations. 

Panel B: Women Out Loud: presence, visibility, representations in public space (1830-1920) - B. Meazzi (Chair), D. Vitagliano, O. Dal Maso (Room 0-03)
It is intended to present an interdisciplinary panel between Italian fiction, history and political philosophy. We will focus on examining three fields of intervention of the female voices: public lectures, journalism, and political philosophy. The innovative character of this specific research concerns the historical period: in fact, we will consider key historical moments in Italian women's history that remain as of now insufficiently studied by critics: the mid-nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. When the voices narrating political, national, or international history are no longer those of great men recounting major events and wars, but rather those emerging from the margins, from subaltern social groups considered inferior or irrelevant, such as women, then history loses its characteristics of a statuesque and universal monolith. History undergoes a definitive transformation: it becomes partial, situated, non-linear, non-neutral, and non-universal, assuming different temporalities depending on the subjects narrating it. Similarly, traditional political themes like war, revolution, peace, struggle, hegemony, and power reveal themselves through new lenses and perspectives.
Speakers&Papers:
1) Daniela Vitagliano, Intruders: Italian women lecturers and political struggle: this paper would like to present the partial results of a wide-ranging research on the creation of an inventory and a cartography of lectures given by women between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in Italy, so that we can shed light on a substantial network of circulation of ideas brought by female voices. French historian Mathilde Larrère points out that although the French Revolution paved the way for women’s civil rights, the doors of institutional power remained the prerogative of men, as the strict separation of the public and private spheres remained intact (Des intrus en politique. Femmes et minorités: dominations et résistances, 2018). This paper will explore the ways women, from Matilde Serao to Maria Goia, tried to appropriate public space through speeches and lectures on important political and social issues: civil rights, access to culture, socialist struggle.
2) Ottavia Dal Maso, From the margins to the mainstage: Angelica Balabanoff's contribution to Socialist discourses and narratives, 1917-1926: Angelica Balabanoff was a prominent figure in the international labor movement and the Italian Socialist Party, a tireless propagandist and Marxist theorist who actively and critically engaged in the events that upheaved Italy and Europe during the years under analysis. My proposal is therefore to restore historical and political significance to a voice forgotten by history and to sources, such as autobiographies, that seemingly only recount personal events and experiences. This will involve analyzing events such as the First World War, the Bolshevik Revolution, the founding of the Comintern, the emergence of Italian fascism, and the beginning of clandestine political work through the narrative, voice and writings of a political woman, following paths from Italy to Russia and to the summits of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, to Sweden, to France, and to Italy again, to definitively align herself against the fascist regime. This research on a woman – an unconventional voice relegated to the margins of historical narration who left a considerable corpus of autobiographical and political writings in various languages – remains a fundamental and urgent exercise to operate.

Panel C: New Strategies in Italian Language Pedagogy – R. Biasini (Chair), S. Lis Ventura, M. Borghi, E. Cecconi (Room 0-04)
This panel seeks abstracts that delve into inventive and contemporary approaches to teaching Italian. We welcome submissions that explore pedagogical strategies, technology integration, curriculum development, and other innovative methods that contribute to the enhancement of Italian language education. Presentations should focus on the dynamic and evolving landscape of Italian language, encouraging dialogue on fresh perspectives and effective teaching and learning practices.
Speakers&Papers:
1) Sara Lis Ventura, Literature and Digital Storytelling: A Pathway to Developing Genre Awareness: this research paper explores the impact of integrating literature and digital technology on Foreign Language Learning. The study investigates how combining the analysis of a literary text with the creation of a multimodal composition contributes to developing students' genre awareness. The classroom practices are devised following and applying the theoretical principles of the multiliteracies approach and involve a phase of formal textual instructions followed by the creation of a new text (Paesani et al., 2016; Kern, 2003). In this study, students first analyse a literary text featuring a mix of genres: a procedural text (recipe) and an autobiographical narrative (memory recount). Subsequently, they are tasked with creating a Digital Story, i.e., a short video incorporating voice-recorded narration, images, sounds, and music. The project aims to assess whether this approach helps students recognize the stylistic features used in Italian to realize specific genres and empowers them to create a multimodal text that embodies these genres’ conventions while reflecting personal expressive intentions. Genre in this study is intended as a goal-oriented social process (Martin & Rose, 2008) with a specific communicative purpose (Kalantzis et al., 2016), recurring yet never occurring in identical textual forms. Genre is intended as a high-level unit able to include multiple variables that arise from individual stylistic choices made by the author (Swales, 1990). To explore whether this teaching methodology can help students navigate conventions while expressing their personal voice, a Multimodal Discourse Analysis of Students’ Digital Stories and a content analysis of students’ individual reflective interviews is undertaken.
2) Martina Borghi, The role of Visual Culture in Critical Pedagogy: new teaching practises to make Italian language students the ‘curators’ of their own cross-boundary approach to language learning:  critical pedagogy in foreign language teaching is vital for implementing strategies that develop learner’s critical thinking and emphasise language as a bridge between cultural, social, and historical relations. A critical attitude characterises language teaching proposals that aim to foster learner awareness, interpretive competence, and active engagement. The use of Visual Culture and Art History can represent a tool to encourage contextualised learning, avoiding stereotypical norms and converging language learning with social and cultural enquiry. This paper aims to explore the workshops held in 2019 at the Estorick Collection in London for high-school and university Italian language students for the exhibition ‘The Making of Modern Italy: Art and Design in the early 1960s’. The display featured diverse design objects, photos, and magazines, creating an engaging environment for students to improve their listening and speaking skills. Interacting directly with various materials and participating in gallery exercises stimulated a rich conversation in Italian that went beyond the exhibition itself, helping students in contextualising and understanding the analysed period’s complexity. This approach to language can be implemented within a classroom and tailored for intermediate and advanced levels. This paper demonstrates how impactful art forms like modern design, collage, urban graffiti, or visual poetry can empower students, granting them control over their learning. Through curatorial activities, students can creatively explore a foreign language, curating their own image selection based on a topic or title. This process improves narrative skills, fosters subjective and interpretative choices, and encourages critical thinking, therefore improving verbal communication, facilitating knowledge exchanges, and giving relevance to students’ decisions.
3) Enrico Cecconi, Performing short stories in the Italian language classroom: speaking the language and embodying the culture through theatre techniques: although communicative language teaching has been advocated for decades, language teaching is often form-focused and decontextualized where mechanical practices and mnemonic activities persist. Performance becomes an ideal space to analyse encounters with otherness (Santucci, 2019) and contributes to a transformative experience for the learning, creativity and social/emotional development. I will present on how I have redesigned language units in Italian by reimaging the final purpose of teaching grammar as a performative learning experience. My work was underpinned by research in drama education and methods/reflections on language teaching. I incorporated highly innovative drama methods/ theatre impro activities to enhance spontaneous communication in the L2 and foster students’ engagement by expressing, interpreting, negotiating, constructing meanings collaboratively while using the grammar and lexicon elements learnt, moving away from a mere manipulation of linguistics and preparing them to face the unforeseen which is the constant in real life language use contexts. Students read in Italian short stories set in Italy. Warming up activities/drama education games were used. Students were invited to be “mobile” and engage with situations from the narration of the stories using embodying language in action (Piazzoli, 2019) and taking part in graphic narratives activities. The core idea was to move from a physical/artistic dimension to the longform verbal narratives, allowing students to take decision, be in/out of role without a script, producing spontaneous language in new unpredicted scenarios.

Panel D: Re-mediating memories of Italian colonialism in archive and object collections – G. Bartolini (Chair), S. Wyer (Respondent), A. M. Morone, E. Bond (Room 0-05)
This panel aims to address and contribute to current debates around the contested memorialization of colonial and imperial histories, with a focus on Italy’s early attempts to establish colonies in Libya and the Horn of Africa. Offering interdisciplinary perspectives on a single case study looking at the travels, networks and extant object collections of the proto-colonial explorer and geographer, Luigi Robecchi Bricchetti (1855-1926), the papers presented will examine key sites and moments in which memory both exceeds and falls short of historical fact in order to argue for the contemporary importance of acts of archival and object-based re-mediation.  We view Bricchetti as one vector in complex transnational networks of early European imperialism and our research aims to shed new light on how the information he collected contributed to the Italian colonial mission in various ways: (1) enhancing geographical, linguistic and cultural knowledge to facilitate the occupation of territories by Italy; (2) creating a cultural imaginary of (future) colonies in Italy through the exportation of objects for public display; (3) exploring the possibilities for commercial enterprise; and (4) liaising with other European colonialists and intermediaries on his travels.  Ultimately, the panel seeks to explore the question of how memory can be re-mediated through new understandings of the role of diverse connectivities, networks and intermediary relations within the context of early European colonialism in Africa. Although the papers themselves are grounded in fieldwork carried out in various archives and museum collections, the discussion will branch out to address the possible applications both of new memory studies paradigms and of critical decolonial methodologies to the field of Italian colonial history more widely.
Speakers&Papers:
1) Antonio Maria Morone, Sapere coloniale e reti internazionali nella prima espansione dell’Italia in Africa: il progetto coloniale italiano in Africa fece ricorso alla forza per imporre il proprio dominio. Altrettanto rilevante fu il ricorso a discipline organiche alle finalità coloniali. Linguistica, geografia, letteratura furono tutte discipline piegate allo sforzo coloniale, insieme a un uso pubblico e connotato della storia. Lo studio delle società africane inteso a produrre alterità e subalternità finì per consolidare un sapere prettamente coloniale. Storicamente, la transizione al colonialismo dell’Italia fece perno su una serie di reti internazionali che servirono appunto a mobilitare individui o gruppi per acquisire conoscenze in funzione dell’espansione coloniale. Si trattò appunto di reti internazionali popolate da figure tanto italiane o europee così come africane; tali reti possono dunque essere analizzate come network di intermediazione rispetto a un dominio coloniale incipiente.  Il caso di studio dell’esploratore italiano Luigi Robecchi Bricchetti è quello di un facilitatore coloniale che a partire dagli anni Ottanta dell’Ottocento si muove tra le attuali Libia orientale, Etiopia e Somalia facendo base al Cairo per compiere una serie di viaggi che ebbero anche la funzione di promuovere l’espansione italiana in una prospettiva di possibili vantaggi politico-economici. La storia e la memoria della sua figura venne pienamente integrata in epoca fascista nella narrazione dell’Italia coloniale per poi essere ridimensionata alla mera esplorazione naturalistico-geografica, una volta finito il colonialismo. In una prospettiva di critica (post)coloniale, la presentazione intende ripercorrere la storia di Bricchetti per tracciarne l’uso pubblico in relazione al colonialismo e infine rivelarne la centralità nella costruzione di reti di intermediazione sul crinale dell’occupazione coloniale italiana dell’Africa.  
2) Emma Bond, Imagining Africa in early colonial objects collections: thinking relations between the Kosmos Museum, Pavia, and the Ethnographic Museum, Cairo: early Italian explorers in Africa amassed large collections of objects in order to create a visual and cultural imaginary of (future) colonies back in their home cities and communities. These objects were often collected specifically for onward sale to national museums or exhibitions in order to formulate Eurocentric, racialised categories of African social life and personhood for Italian viewing publics, but many also ended up in local museums or even personal collections. What, if anything, can such objects really tell us about the populations they were meant to represent? What information do they still hold now that they have been dislocated from their original signification, both in Africa and in Italy? Following extensive explorative travel through North and East Africa between 1885 and 1903, Luigi Robecchi Bricchetti donated his remaining personal collections to his birth city of Pavia. On 21st April 1926, fascist Italy’s inaugural “Colonial Day”, this collection became the “Colonial Section” of the city museum. Now held in storage in the University-run Kosmos Museum, the collection bears significant resemblance to the “Africa” room in the Ethnographic Museum which is housed within the Egyptian Geographical Society in Cairo. Did Bricchetti purchase his African objects in Cairo, and if so, what can the two collections tell us about networks of colonial intermediaries active at the end of the 19th century? How do these objects now signify differently in these two different locations? This presentation will aim to tease out connectivities between the two collections in order to tell new stories about mediated memories of early colonial collecting in and through the key hub of Cairo.  

Panel E: New Directions in Medieval Cultures I – B. Lorenzin, G. Caccialupi, F. Jermini, R. Pepin - R. Scott (Chair) (Room 1-02)
Speakers&Papers:
1) Bruna Lorenzin, From classification to concretisation. Peraldus’ Summa de virtutibus et vitiis among the sources of Dante’s Afterlife:  between the XIII and XIV century the Mendicant friers developed a significant homiletic literature, consisting of books used by preachers to compose their sermons. A masterpiece of this kind of texts is the Summa virtutum ac vitiorum, an encyclopaedic work about the virtues and the seven deadly sins written by the Dominican frier William Peraldus in the first half of the XIII century. This text was a precious source of information for Dante, while writing his Commedia, as Franco Mancini discovered in the 1960s. Also, today we don’t have any systematic study of the relationship between these two works and scholars use to regard the Summa only as a valuable source of similes and exempla. Instead, the present paper will attempt to show that it is possible to distinguish several ways in which the Summa may have contributed to the connotation of Dante’s Afterlife. The main ones are at least two: the characterisation of the punishments and the characterisation of the damned. If Peraldo classifies sins and virtues into strict patterns, the poet makes them concrete, giving them the appearance of human beings who suffer or are blessed. Some significant examples will be shown during the speech, without neglecting to compare Peraldus’exposition with that of other representatives of the genre, such as Bono Giamboni, Zucchero Bencivenni, Servasanto da Faenza and the curious exposition on the vices offered by ms. 1738 of the Biblioteca Riccardiana.
2) Gianluca Caccialupi, Arturi regis ambages pulcerrime’ (DVE. I. x. 2): ‘fabulae’ or ‘historiae’? : Dante’s expression ‘Arturi regis ambages pulcerrime’ has long been debated. While some (Trissino, Rajna, Picone) interpreted the word ambages as a synonym for fabulae, i.e. fantastic stories with a deeper allegorical meaning, others (Cittadini, Mengaldo, Rossi) considered it to be a Latin translation of the Old French word aventures. This paper provides further evidence in favour of this second interpretation, by showing that the concept of fabula is not compatible with Dante’s understanding of the Arthurian romances. In the Middle Ages, the most common distinction among narrative works was that between fabula and historia, i.e. texts whose literal sense was fictional or real, respectively. A study of references to the Matter of Britain in thirteenth-century Italian literature reveals how Arthurian heroes often flank figures from classical history – and thus from the historiae – in lists of exemplary characters. The same tendency can be seen in the manuscript tradition of thirteenth-century Italy: Arthurian romances were sometimes copied alongside, or together with, the romans d’antiquité. This tendency is also evident in Dante’s works: while in Inferno V Tristan is mentioned alongside the ladies and knights of antiquity, in the DVE, when discussing the genres of the vulgare prosaicum, Dante mentions the Arthurian ambages together with ‘the Bible compiled with the histories of Troy and Rome’ and other ‘ystorie’ and ‘doctrine’. The claim that Dante intended the Arthurian romances to be historiae also challenges the traditional idea that Inferno V expresses a moral condemnation of the Matter of Britain.
3) Fabio Jermini, «Tant’abbo di Becchina novellato / e di mie madr’e di babbo e d’Amore». Profile of Cecco Angiolieri: between (auto)biography and fiction: we know very little about the life of Cecco Angiolieri, chanter of the cruel Becchina, despiser of his avaricious father and apologist for wealth, the pleasure of carnal love, wine and gambling: he was born in Siena around 1260, into a family of very high social class (his mother belonged to one of the most noble Sienese families, the Salimbeni; his paternal grandfather was a banker to Pope Gregory IX; his father held important public offices). His image as a poète maudit ante-litteram was built at the end of the nineteenth century on the basis of the very famous sonnet S’io fussi fuoco arderei ’l mondo [If I were fire I’d burn the world], with the support of the few biographical data: the fines (two for having abandoned the siege of Turri in Maremma in 1281, two for insolvency and two for violation of the curfew), the involvement in 1289 in the attempted assassination of Dino di Bernardino di Monteluco and in 1313 his children’s renunciation of their inheritance, because it was burdened by debts. The extraordinary nature of his literary system is undeniable, as he uses his sonnets to narrate a “hardly exemplary life”. In particular, through: i) the use of a senhal; ii) the chronological indications; iii) the sonnet in dialogue; iv) the palinody sonnet; v) the network of topical situations and interactions with the characteristic figures of his poetry (Becchina, his father and other people), which contribute to the construction of the author-character.
4) Ryan Pepin, Performing the Commedia like Dante: Using Digital Humanities (NLP) tools to Recover the Score: this work begins from an investigation of the incidence of ‘rhythmical figures’ in Dante’s Commedia – an idea of mnemonic repetition introduced in the 1960s by Gianfranco Contini and which was the basis of the speaker’s doctoral research. Recently, with the aid of a new syntax and scansion database, and a new Digital Humanities query platform, this work has issued in a large new catalogue of verses which the poet not only recalls but, on the basis of the prior rhythmical and syntactical model offered to him, which he exploits to fashion new verses. One outcome of this research is new information on the division or pronunciation of individual verses in the Commedia – the catalogue internal echoes producing, in its quantity, a score internal to the work that serves to punctuate or to direct performance. As a result, this talk will offer notes on the vocal realisation of Dante’s verse.  

Panel F: Text, Image, and Intermediality – J.J. García, S. Stifano -  M. Ruggieri (chair) (Room 1-03)
Speakers&Papers:
1) Javier Jurado García, From trendy to extinction. The North Italian Printmakers and the identity of the antique in the quattrocento: from the beginning of the quattrocento, Italy became in the centre of the revolution of the new Renaissance ideas, which led to the creation of its own identity in the field of art, giving rise to the so-called 'Italian forms' that would have a fundamental influence on the rest of the European schools. Within this period, from the 1460s to 1500, a movement of printmakers took place in Italy and more specifically around the northern schools (Florence, Mantua, Padua) who developed their own modes of creation and discourse which, in barely fifty years, gave rise to the creation of a set of some 300 compositions, unique in the history of graphic art, created using the technique of fine manner and broad manner. However, it would be at the end of the century, between the first (1494) and the second journey of Dürer (1505) when the Italian forms and language of the fine and broad manner would disappear due to the impact of the graphics of the aforementioned master and the northern schools. Becoming what literature is known as a dead language. The contribution will present the results of the analysis of the Italian graphic collections of the Albertina and the British Museum among others, in order to present the peculiarities of this period and the loss of the pure Italian character and identity, giving way to new “italian modes” with traces of this first period.
2) Sara Stifano, «Pianga la bella dea l’amante amato». Lacrime e immagini nell’Adone di Marino: si è indagato come il personaggio di Adone e il poema omonimo possano essere considerati una reazione alla violenza collettiva imperante sulla fine del XVI e nel corso del XVII sec. Abbiamo individuato due forze contrastanti nell’opera: la violenza e la pietà, analizzando specialmente quest’ultima sia a livello di microtessere lessicali sia di macromecccanismi descrittivi e narrativi. Soprattutto, ci si è concentrati sull’evento cardine della morte di Adone del c. XVIII, tanto nel suo confronto con le precedenti riscritture del mito e con il modello cristologico della letteratura delle lacrime, quanto – specialmente – nel raffronto con il repertorio iconografico di Cinque e Seicento. Ci si propone di fornire alcune considerazioni finali sul rapporto tra testo e immagine all’interno del grande poema mariniano, opera in verità assai più ecfrastica de La Galeria, focalizzando l’attenzione non solo sulla potenza evocativa e visuale del Marino, ma soprattutto valutando in che modo l’Adone si inserisca nella lunga tradizione dei libri illustrati e se e come abbia influito sulla iconografia secentesca del triste e finale addio dei due sfortunati amanti.  
3) Salvatore Francesco Lattarulo, «RILEGGO MOLTE VOLTE LE TUE LETTERE … SONO TUE FOTOGRAFIE»: L’EPISTOLARITÀ COME STRATEGIA NARRATIVA E VIA DI FUGA IN UNA VITA DI ITALO SVEVO: già Giuseppe Genco notava che il protagonista di Una vita è «al centro di una fitta rete di lettere di ogni tipo» (Italo Svevo tra psicanalisi e letteratura, Guida, 1998, p. 46). Il primo romanzo di Italo Svevo è inaugurato e concluso da due missive: la lunga confidenza di Alfonso alla madre sul disagio esistenziale del fuorisede e il breve dispaccio della banca sulle circostanze della morte di un suo dipendente. Il personaggio principale entra così in scena con una lettera autografa ed abbandona il teatro della vita con una lettera semi-anonima. L’epistola iniziale funge da testo in limine destinato a presentare l’identikit psicologico del Nitti, a farne affiorare l’autocoscienza. Il giovane impiegato ha un culto quasi feticistico per la carta da lettera vergata dalla sua cara genitrice. Come una madeleine proustiana il materiale scrittorio stretto tra le mani lo riporta con la fantasia al villaggio nativo. La comunicazione epistolare obbedisce a una ricca polisemia nell’opera. Se ora è veicolo degli affetti intimi di Alfonso, talaltra è sintomo della sua alienazione, quella di lavorante della ditta Maller costretto di contraggenio a occuparsi della corrispondenza bancaria. Crocevia di questi due poli dell’epistolarità è la relazione con Annetta: dopo la separazione dei due il loro intenso carteggio oscilla tra amore e gelo sentimentale. La lettera è uno strumento strategico non solo nell’economia narrativa ma anche nella logica comportamentale dei personaggi. A una missiva essi affidano spesso le scelte cruciali della loro esistenza. La scrittura privata diventa altresì un alibi per sottrarsi a un confronto diretto, un modo vile per abdicare all’azione, un tratto, si potrebbe dire, della proverbiale ‘inettitudine’ dei caratteri sveviani. Talvolta astenersi dalla redazione di un testo epistolare rappresenta un gesto non meno eloquente di incapacità di vivere a pieno i rapporti umani, di solipsismo estremo e inguaribile. È il caso emblematico della rinuncia di Alfonso a far pervenire un messaggio d’addio all’amata prima del suo suicidio: «Si trovava con la penna in mano dinanzi al suo tavolo, ma non gli riusciva di vergare una sola parola». È il muto e fiero commiato dell’eroe dal mondo. Il fluviale epistolografo della prima ora si inaridisce perciò al cospetto della sua ultima ora.

Panel G: La nuova testualità metamoderna: letteratura ergodica, digitale e intelligenza artificiale – L. Rorato (Chair), F. Medaglia, D. Raffini, D. Carnevale (Room 1-04)
Il panel intende indagare come le forme della testualità e della trasmissione dei testi mutano in relazione all’avvento delle nuove tecnologie e al nuovo panorama mediatico. I testi ergodici e gli ipertesti, digitali o non, alterano i tradizionali ruoli attanziali e li rimescolano: in tal senso, rappresentano una nuova modalità di fruizione del testo da parte del lettore e di costruzione del senso da parte dell’autore. Il digitale cambia le modalità di fruizione dei testi, ma anche le modalità di produzione: in tal senso, è di particolare interesse la generazione di testi tramite sistemi di intelligenza artificiale. Uno sguardo che partendo dalla letteratura ergodica e dall’ipertesto si spinge fino ai mutamenti determinati dalle più recenti tecnologie permette di individuare nuove forme di testualità e approfondire i mutamenti che queste nuove tipologie testuali e letterarie stanno comportando dal punto di vista teorico, nonché nella composizione e nella fruizione dei testi. 
Speakers&Papers:
1)  Francesca Medaglia, Letture complicate: visivo e testuale nella letteratura ergodica: l’intervento intende indagare i nuovi stratagemmi destrutturanti messi in campo dalle narrazioni degli ultimi vent’anni, che conducono al potenziamento e, in certi casi, all’esasperazione delle strategie già in uso nel romanzo del postmoderno, in modo da condurre in uno spazio metamoderno (F. Vittorini, Raccontare oggi. Metamodernismo tra narratologia, ermeneutica e intermedialità, 2017). Nella più vicina contemporaneità la narrazione diviene più complessa, conducendo alla creazione di nuove tipologie di storytelling, che esondano i limiti del testo stesso e si muovono su più livelli parallelamente. È proprio questo il caso della letteratura ergodica, sulla quale si concentrerà l’attenzione, come esempio delle nuove forme di storytelling ipermoderno: inizialmente tale tipologia letteraria designava, più o meno esclusivamente, il testo cibernetico e quella letteratura che andava al di là del libro, includendo perfettamente la letteratura elettronica e i testi virtuali (E.J. Aarseth, Cybertext. Perspectives on Ergodic Literature, 1997). Nel tempo, il termine si è esteso (H. Ferraz Maio Gomez, Of Structural Denial: A Narratological Study of the Structural Disintegration of the Novel Form, 2014), arrivando ad includere i romanzi caratterizzati da una struttura narrativa complessa e non lineare, quali, ad esempio: House of Leaves (2000) di Mark Z. Danielewski, The Raw Shark Texts (2007) di Steven Hall e S. Ship of Theseus (2013) di J.J. Abrams e D. Dorst. Con la letteratura ergodica si è posti di fronte ad una narrazione di tipo non convenzionale, che estende la scrittura al di là dei suoi confini tradizionali: in questo modo, la complessità diventa la nuova marca tipologica e stilistica della narrativa contemporanea.
2) Daniel Raffini, Autorialità e allucinazione nell’AI novel: il caso di Non siamo mai stati sulla Terra di Rocco Tanica:  La produzione di testi letterari per mezzo dei sistemi di intelligenza artificiale (oggi principalmente tramite i Large Language Models) rivoluziona alcuni concetti della teoria della letteratura, primo tra tutti quello di autorialità. L’intervento propone una ridefinizione del concetto di autorialità come processo, a partire dalle teorizzazioni di Calvino e dalle dichiarazioni in sede paratestuale di alcuni produttori di AI novel. In un secondo momento ci si concentrerà sul concetto di allucinazione, termine con il quale si indicano gli errori dei sistemi di intelligenza artificiale nella produzione di significato, che diventano possibilità espressive per la produzione artistica e stabiliscono un legame tra i testi generati automaticamente e la creatività umana. Tale aspetto è stato messo in evidenza per la prima volta da alcuni artisti visuali, come Anna Ridler, e più di recente è stato ripreso anche nel contesto della produzione di testi letterari, come nel caso di Ross Goodwin e Rocco Tanica. Entrambe le questioni saranno esemplificate attraverso l’analisi di Non siamo mai stati sulla Terra (2022) di Rocco Tanica, libro che nasce dalla collaborazione tra l’autore umano e un sistema GPT e che può essere considerato il primo contributo italiano di rilievo nel contesto dell’AI novel.  
3) Davide Carnevale, Tra libro e videogame: le prime avventure testuali come forme di narrazione ergodica: all’interattività esclusivamente metaforica (o ermeneutica) concessa in genere dalla narrativa tradizionale si contrappone l’interattività letterale offerta da romanzi come Rayuela (1963) di Julio Cortázar o The Unfortunates (1969) di B. S. Johnson, opere ergodiche, per riprendere la fortunata terminologia coniata da Espen J. Aarseth in Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (1997), in cui «nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text», in cui il lettore è chiamato in prima persona a compiere scelte e a stabilire la direzione del racconto, mettendo in atto una vera e propria performance “extranoematica”. Da questo punto di vista, opere certamente ergodiche come i gamebooks si configurano come l’anello di congiunzione tra la letteratura e il videogame. Attraverso la disamina dei meccanismi da cui dipendono tanto opere letterarie come House of Leaves (2000) di Mark Z. Danielewski e S. (2013) di Doug Dorst quanto i primi videogiochi testuali, e in particolar modo delle affordances (termine coniato da James J. Gibson per indicare le possibilità di interazione offerte da un determinato ambiente) comuni a queste produzioni ergodiche, la presente proposta intende indagare da un punto di vista diacronico e comparativo le modalità attraverso cui l’interattività si manifesta, mettendone in evidenza l’evoluzione in senso intermediale.

Panel H: Narratives from the Periphery: Translating Regional and Urban Identities of 20th-21st century Italy – C. Marinetti, L. Wren-Owens, A. Saroldi - O. Santovetti (Chair) (Room 1-05)
This panel explores the intricate relationship between marginalized, regional, and minority voices and the world of translation in the context of twentieth- and twenty-first century Italy. It delves into the transformational power of translation in shaping representations of Italy, challenging, reinforcing, or interrogating prevailing power structures and linguistic hierarchies. The panel also addresses issues of cultural hegemony and the politics of language in translations, both within the Italian landscape and in its translated representations, in textual, performative, and digital forms. As highlighted by Bonsaver, Reza, and Carlucci, ‘there is no such thing as a homogenous nation or homogenous space, however “local”’ (2019). While it is largely acknowledged that “Italy” is all but a homogenous concept, this paper will address this question in relation to some of its more localised cultural and linguistic clusters, namely Venice, Sicily, and the Alpine mountain range of Northern Italy. In particular, we will ask how these clusters, their culture and their multilingualism, are represented in texts and in their translations, how they travel beyond their own borders, and how they are changed and shaped in their dissemination. Building on Kershaw and Saldanha (2013), we aim to further the conversation and reflection on local and regional landscapes in translation. Beyond the importance of spatial, and landscape in particular, metaphors for literary theory, we ask how specific geographical spaces are textualised by, in, and through translation (ie. becoming their own metaphors, undergoing a dilution of their regional core, or else?). In essence, this panel underscores the vital role of regional and minority voices in the multifaceted landscape of Italian cultural representation, from summit to sea.
Speakers&Papers:
1)  Anna Saroldi, TransAlpine: Transnational Alpine Identity in Women’s Writing: this paper looks at mountaineering literature as World Literature, focusing in particular on the Italian contribution. Despite sitting at the border of the geographical nation, the Alps are a key and defining element of the culture and identity of Northern Italy. In this paper, I will look at how the literature produced in these regions (including life-writing), rather than being marginal, forms a particularly strong connection with other regional and minority communities across Europe. In particular, I will address the works of women mountaineers, both as writers (such as Antonia Pozzi, Ninì Pietrasanta, and Giovanna Zangrandi) and as translators (Nea Morin, Janet Adam Smith) of mountaineering literature in Italian, arguing that their contributions can be better understood in the larger frame of the transnational community of women climbers as writers. Building on recent works on mountaineering literature (Rak, Moraldo), this paper frames mountaineering literature as eminently transnational, at the same time highlighting the specificity and regionality of the Italian contribution, to argue that, through translation, it defined foreign mountaineering practices as well.
2) Cristina Marinetti, ‘I am a monument’: citizen performance and counter-translation in contemporary Venice: the paper explores the recent and yet unstudied flowering of activist theatre and citizen performance in Venice (2015-2023) as a ‘site of translation’ (Simon, 2019). Translation in this sense is not understood as the transfer of texts from one language to another, but as a dynamic process in which cultural identities are expressed, contested, and reshaped (Simon, 2019: 24). Drawing on interviews with Venetian artists, activists, and citizen performers, as well as ethnographic observations of rehearsal and performance, the paper uncovers a range of what I call ‘counter-translation’ practices employed by Venetian artists and citizens. These practices aim to reclaim parts of the city's urban landscape for the expression and affirmation of Venice's linguistic and cultural heritage in response to the dominance of global English as the language through which the city is represented and experienced. The paper is part of a larger study which looks at contemporary Venice as a ‘translational city’ (Cronin & Simon, 2014) at a time when the sustainability of residents’ language, identity and way of life is being threatened by the cultural and material appropriation of the city's spaces and heritage for tourist consumption.
3) Liz Wren-Owens, Creating space for Sicilian Voices: Early translations of Verga and Italian American narratives:  This paper examines the ways in which early translations of Giovanni Verga’s work at the end of the Nineteenth Century and beginning of the Twentieth Century sought to carve out a space for Sicilian voices to be heard in the anglophone world. Focussing on the paratext of translations by Mary Craig (1889), Nathan Haskell Dole (1896) and D.H. Lawrence (1923-28), it asks how the texts map onto discourses constructing Sicily as a regional and national space within Italy following Unification and how they intersect with the positioning of Sicily (and Italy) in the emerging Italian American narratives of the period. It asks how the translations contribute to an understanding of Sicily as constructed both against the nation and as a transnational space, shaped by its encounters with a broader Mediterranean in the past and a ‘redeeming’ America in the present. The paper asks to what extent ‘Sicilianness’ and ‘Italianness’ need to be conflated with more universal identities such as class in order for the writers’ voices to be heard, and examines translation’s role in mediating and fashioning this space.

Panel A: “Un grande libro genererà infiniti libri”: New Methodological Reflections on Dante’s Contemporary Reception – F. Coluzzi (Chair), S. Perpetuini, V. Mele, C. Cattermole Ordóńez, D. Galassini, M. Moretti, C. Santarelli, S. Vandi, C. Valcelli (Room 0-02)
The workshop aims to serve as an opportunity for dialogue among various scholars engaged in the research field of Dante’s contemporary reception. The participants will engage in discussions centred on key texts identified as foundational to this research field and they will discuss selected case studies. Rather than advocating a specific method of investigating Dante’s influence in contemporary culture, the workshop intends to reflect on different theoretical and methodological approaches that can be useful in formulating new questions and responses to investigate the poet’s presence in contemporary culture, with a transnational perspective. Ultimately, the session aspires to consider Dante’s reception as a paradigm within the broader spectrum of Reception Studies, thus possibly offering a shared framework for investigating reception of other canonical authors, in other cultural contexts and times. Some of our starting questions would be: how has the ever-growing field of the study of Dante’s contemporary reception been changing? Can the Bloomian notion of anxiety-laden literary influence be replaced with the more capacious concept of literary relation (Boldrini, 2001)? What kind of new methodological and theoretical opportunities is the digital revolution offering to the study of Dante’s reception? Would a dialogue with scholars studying Dante’s own sources (Dante ‘receiving’ texts) be fruitful for an integrated discourse on Reception Studies as applied to Dante? Can Dante be a paradigm for Reception Studies? How can we integrate the study of reception in our pedagogical practices so that students at undergraduate and postgraduate level can learn to think beyond the text, and consider the broader mechanisms of historical circulation and cultural dissemination? Our workshop aims to actively involve the audience, benefitting from the occasion of a conference gathering many colleagues working on text reception in many different ways.

Panel B: Fascism at 100+: An Interdisciplinary Re-Interpretation – C. Brioni (Chair), M. Ruggieri, F. Billiani, F. Pedriali, G. Bartolini, G. Pieri (Room 0-03)
This roundtable reflects the renewed academic interest in the fascist period and adopts an interdisciplinary perspective to (a) re-interpret the very concept of 'fascist culture' and (b) identify its traces and long-term impact on contemporary Italian culture and collective memory. A substantial number of recent publications – including, for example, the volume of Annali di Italianistica titled 'Fascism in Italian Culture: 1945-2023' (2023, Vol. 41) – demonstrate this renewed interest. In these recent publications, the proliferation of more interdisciplinary approaches and the increased attention to the complex audience response to the regime’s mass culture and propaganda have both allowed significant progress in this research area. Nonetheless, several questions of crucial importance remain still unanswered. The speakers participating in this roundtable have all worked in this field, each from a different angle – e.g., memory studies, identity studies, and visual arts. They will be asked to address three key questions: 

• Did a ‘fascist culture’, meant as a cultural production inspired by a solid underlying ideology with unique and recognizable traits, actually exist? 

• Is the regime's attempt to equate 'Italian culture' and 'fascist culture,' as well as 'Italian identity' and 'fascist identity,' to be considered entirely unsuccessful – as the notion of ‘imperfect totalitarianism’ seems to suggest? 

• Notwithstanding the complete or partial success (or failure) of this operation, what traces of the ‘fascist culture’ remain today? 

These questions are fundamental and yet unresolved. Against this background, this roundtable aims to lay the groundwork for an interdisciplinary re-interpretation of fascism, understood both as a historically situated phenomenon and as a broader and atemporal one whose impact is still visible today – as outlined in "Ur-Fascism" by Umberto Eco (1995), How to be a Fascist: A Manual by Michela Murgia (2022), and The Temptation of the Wall by Massimo Recalcati (2022). 

Panel C: Using New Technology for Learning, Teaching, and Assessment in the Italian Language Class’ - A. Risi (Chair), C. Piantanida, A. Puglisi, F. Sturani (Room 0-04)
This panel invites abstracts addressing diverse teaching, assessment types and effective evaluation techniques in the context of Italian language education. We encourage submissions that delve into different and innovative forms of teaching and assessment. Presentations should explore best practices in evaluating language proficiency, the integration of technology in assessments, and strategies for providing constructive feedback. The goal is to facilitate a comprehensive discussion on assessment methodologies that enhance the learning experience for Italian language learners.
Speakers&Papers:
1) Alessandro Puglisi, Assistant or Tyrant? Italian Language Teachers’ Attitudes, Beliefs, and Cognitions in Using ChatGPT: the rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) tools in education poses both opportunities and challenges. While literature reviews by Tahiru (2021), Zhai et al. (2021), and Limna et al. (2022), along with studies on AI in language learning like Rebolledo Font de la Vall & González Araya (2023), yielded valuable insights, a research area that remains relatively unexplored appears to be the one related to attitudes, beliefs, and cognitions of language teachers towards AI tools. This contribution focuses on technology integration from a language teacher cognition perspective (Borg 2019). Particularly, it investigates how teachers of Italian for foreigners, both in Italy and abroad, engage with tools such as Large Language Models (LLMs), and specifically ChatGPT. An ongoing anonymous questionnaire, comprising 21 questions, is being conducted and has received over 200 responses to date. It was distributed through newsletters and mailing lists in the field. In addition to data related to the teaching context (Italy or abroad) and years of experience as a teacher, the survey investigates the level of awareness of Large Language Models (LLMs) and of ChatGPT in particular. Furthermore, questions are asked about the frequency of use of these tools (using Likert scales) and about attitudes towards potential biases and issues related to the use of AI based tools Data are statistically processed, primarily in terms of inter rather agreement (Cronbach’s alpha) and then analysed by means of the statistical software R , identifying statistical correlations , with the aim of producing an initial description of attitudes, beliefs, and cognitions of teachers of Italian to foreigners.
2) Cecilia Piantanida, Artificial Intelligence and Assessment in the Italian Language Class: the current development of freely available Artificial Intelligence software, such as Open AI’s ChatGPT, has deep theoretical and practical implications for language teaching and learning. As a consequence of the simultaneous translation capability of AI software, ‘AI could make it less necessary to learn foreign languages’, as the Economist recently titled (17 August 2023), depleting intercultural communication and encounters. On the other hand, there are also several productive applications of AI for language pedagogy, which are still unexplored. AI’s fast developing capabilities and reach have the potential of engendering large scale cultural and societal changes which cannot be ignored. This paper considers the significance of AI for Italian language pedagogy, with a particular attention on assessment. Focusing on writing and translation classes for intermediate and advanced students of Italian (B1-C1), I will first discuss the validity of various types of assessment in the context of AI; secondly, I will outline a sample learning activity integrating AI in class and coursework, concluding with an illustration of assessment accounting for AI and its potential impact on language learning.
3) Federica Sturani, The Introduction of Interpreting Exercises into Second Year Language Classes at the University of Liverpool’: in a new approach to teaching translation as a language skill in our undergraduate language module, supported amongst others by Cook (2010), Balboni (2010) and Biasini (2016), translation is now an integral component of language modules in many UK universities. Despite this revival, the translation component, in most cases, remains a written exercise often introduced at the upper intermediate level. This paper argues that introducing translation at an early stage in students’ learning is beneficial. Early exposure to contrastive analysis from beginners’ level helps in developing L2 competence and familiarise learners with the metalanguage used in language teaching. The early introduction of translation, primarily in written form, paves the way to the progressive adoption of intermodal translation tasks, such as interpreting and subtitling, as learners become more proficient in the target language. I will explore the importance of early integrated skills in language learning, arguing that translation at beginners’ level can aid in grammar and vocabulary acquisition, as well as improve textual and language awareness in both English and the foreign language. The paper primarily focuses on presenting the experience of introducing interpreting exercises to second-year post-beginners’ students (CEFR level B1), as a progression from written to oral translation. It reflects on the importance of early integrated skills in language learning, enhancing student engagement. Introduction to interpreting strategies at post-beginner level means that students can learn valuable skills for real-life situations during their year abroad. Additionally, it provides essential practice for the final year interpreting component. 

Panel D: Roundtable Book Launch: Dante's Vita nova: A Collaborative Reading - Z. Baranski, H. Webb, S. Gilson,  C. Keen, P. Nasti, T. Cachey, T. Kay   (Room 0-05)
Taking the new volume that emerged in December 2023 as a point of departure, participants will discuss the latest approaches to the study of Dante's Vita nova, considering issues such as Dante's Florence, Dante's poetic interlocutors, lyric modes, lexis, intertextualities, and the structures of the text.  

Panel E: Multicultural Encounters Across Italy – L. Cittadini, E.M. Mirković, L. Parisi - E. Traversa (Chair)
(Room 1-02)
Speakers&Papers:
1) Lorenzo Cittadini, Giuseppina Fumagalli in Spagna. Viaggiando nella Terra di Don Quijote: il contributo intende analizzare i reportages di viaggio contenuti nel volume Terra di Don Quijote di Giuseppina Fumagalli, pubblicato nel 1936 ma relativo agli scritti raccolti nel 1934. L’opera, quasi del tutto sconosciuta alla critica letteraria italiana del Novecento, raccoglie le sensazioni, gli incontri, le scoperte e le impressioni della brillante studiosa in Spagna, seguendo le tracce del Don Quijote di Cervantes. Da Barcellona a Madrid fino al cuore dell’Andalusia, a bordo di un treno Fumagalli visita una nazione in subbuglio, a pochi mesi dallo scoppio della Guerra civile spagnola. Terra di Don Quijote si inserisce, inoltre, all’interno di una tradizione italiana di scritture di viaggio in Spagna, sebbene limitata e meno nota rispetto alle opere principali del genere della letteratura di viaggio. Infatti, punti di convergenza, affinità ma anche grossolane differenze date da contesti e periodi storici diversi, si trovano risalendo la linea del tempo dai reportage in Spagna di Edmondo De Amicis, Mario Praz, Vittorio Bodini, Leonardo Sciascia fino a Eugenio Montale e i più recenti Claudio Magris e Antonio Tabucchi. Attraverso un viaggio comodo, lento e borghese, con una visione a tratti pittoresca e stereotipata, Giuseppina Fumagalli viaggia in cerca dell’anima profonda della Spagna, seguendo le orme di un’ideale, di un mito, di un’epica che cerca di spiegare il mondo contemporaneo, nella difficoltà, però, di abbandonare il proprio guscio fatto di sicurezze e incolumità, senza mai mettersi completamente in discussione e a servizio del viaggio.
2) Eliana Moscarda Mirković, Implicazioni e sfide del turismo letterario nella Regione Istriana nel contesto del nuovo millennio: l'attuale concetto di turismo letterario si manifesta come un anacronismo, quasi un residuo del Grand Tour. Tuttavia, l'opera letteraria, alla stregua di altre manifestazioni artistiche, rivela il potere di evocare immagini di luoghi, trasformandosi in un elemento intrinseco nella memoria collettiva quando è condivisa. Per una regione che ha dato i natali a tali opere, queste diventano testimoni del passato, incisi nella coscienza sia del viaggiatore sia dell'abitante. Nonostante il concetto di turismo letterario non sia del tutto nuovo (Squire, 1994; Anglani, 2000; Herbert, 2001; O'Connor & Kim, 2014; Hoppen et al., 2014), l'indagine accademica in questo ambito appare ancora limitata, soprattutto in Croazia. Recenti studi a livello internazionale (Çevik, 2020) hanno rivelato l'elevato potenziale di questa forma di turismo (Avalle, 2021) e di come il turismo letterario apporti considerevoli vantaggi alle destinazioni (Hoppen et al., 2014). In questo contesto, il turismo letterario si svela come un campo di studio di notevole interesse anche per la Croazia, soprattutto per la Regione Istriana, dove la natura si coniuga con i valori storici e culturali del territorio. La proposta di intervento si concentrerà sull'analisi delle potenzialità dei testi letterari della produzione in lingua italiana della Regione istriana e quarnerina, ovvero quella letteratura in lingua italiana nata alla fine della Seconda guerra mondiale in Istria e a Fiume e per la quale Bruno Maier (Maier, 1996), per primo utilizzò la definizione di letteratura istro–quarnerina. Saranno presentati spunti di riflessione per consentire di valorizzare questo specifico segmento di turismo esperienziale in Istria, sfruttando le risorse naturali e culturali della penisola, per innovare l'offerta turistica e individuare nuove aree con un elevato potenziale turistico, complementari alle destinazioni tradizionali.

3) Luciano Parisi, Aspetti epici nella narrativa di Maria Rosa Cutrufelli: I identify four different stages in the literary production of Maria Rosa Cutrufelli: in the first one Cutrufelli exclusively writes monographs on economics and sociology; in the second one she switches to novels focused on isolated female protagonists; the third stage is an experimental and transitional one which leads to a final stage in which the author writes novels focused on communities where women play an increasingly leading role. I call epic the texts written by Cutrufelli in this final stage for five main reasons: (1) her focus is more on communities than individuals, (2) these communities are not static but in transition, facing significant historical challenges, (3) the stories of these communities are not told by a single perspective but by many conflicting points of view, (4) there are explicit references to ancient poems (especially the Homeric ones), and (5) oral communication plays a role that is rare in modern or contemporary Italian novels. Written in Italian, set in Italy, with characters who mostly communicate in Italian, Cutrufelli’s novels are all but national, with a strongly multicultural focus. 

Panel F: Real and Fictional Women in Italian Societies – E. Ciccarella, J.L. Robarts, J. Pellerito - J. Everson (Chair) (Room 1-03)
Speakers&Papers:
1) Erica Ciccarella, Women doctors in the Italian Literature: from Boccaccio to Goldoni: traditionally, medical practice in the early modern period has been portrayed as predominantly male-dominated, with women systematically excluded from Faculties of Medicine. However, the reality of societal practices was more intricate: women actively collaborated in hospitals, legal settings, and within domestic spheres alongside physicians and surgeons. Moreover, there is substantial evidence of women actively involved in caring for the body within the realm of household medicine, encompassing roles that extended beyond midwifery. Literature, considered as a secondary source reflecting societal norms, plays a pivotal role in unveiling a discourse that appears lost or obscured concerning the presence of female physicians in early modern society. While many literary works depict women as healers, their portrayal often confines them to the periphery, showcasing them only in exceptional circumstances or as objects of fascination. This presentation aims to showcase a diverse array of female figures found in Italian literature from Boccaccio to Goldoni, including Aretino, Ariosto, and Tasso. The objective is to provide, for the first time, a comprehensive overview of female healers and their depictions within Italian literary works authored by men.
2) Julie Louise Robarts, Disentangling gender, praise and blame between manuscript and print in the satires and defences of the Strozzis and the Academia degli Unisoni:  the Veglia prima, Veglia seconda, and Veglia terza degli Unisoni, (Venice: Sarzina, 1638), describe three evenings of discussion, poetry, and musical performance hosted in Venice in 1637/8 by Giulio Strozzi (1583-1652) under the name of the Academia degli Unisoni. These printed materials respond to dialogues and letters attacking the honour of Giulio and Barbara Strozzi (1619-1677), and others in their circle, that were compiled with the title ‘Satire et altre raccolte per l’Accademia de gli Unisoni in casa di Giulio Strozzi’ (Marciana, It X, Codice 115 (=7193)). These documents shed light on earliest days of Barbara Strozzi’s public role as composer and performer. This paper considers previously unexamined additional materials from the meetings that appeared in the Bizarrie Academiche (Venice: Sarzina 1638) of Giovanni Francesco Loredano (1607–1661), founder of the Academia degli Incogniti, as a third, and arbitrating voice in the controversy, that seek to delimit the role of women and “foreigners” in Venetian intellectual life. 
3) James Pellerito, Venere Botticelli as Italian Cultural Ambassador and Social Influencer: in early 2023, ENIT, the Italian National Tourist Board, launched a promotional advertising campaign for Italy’s cultural heritage, featuring Sandro Botticelli’s Venus, from his painting The Birth of Venus (1480s), as ambassador and social influencer. At a reported cost of nine million Euro, this campaign purporting to represent the “meraviglia dell’Italianità” to the rest of the world, has drawn criticism from several quarters in Italy. Out of step with the older generation, out of fashion with the younger generation, and hopelessly out of touch with contemporary Italian society, this plastic, artificial, inauthentic rendering of a thirty-year-old Italian woman with wind-blown blond hair and a social media handle of @venereitalia23 begs the question—who is the intended audience? At a time in the nation’s history when the country has never been as multi-culturally rich or ethnically diverse, the Old Italy is having an identity crisis. The word Italianità, as deployed by the advertising campaign, serves as a powerful weapon for the outdated ideal of Italianness—that which is proper Italian in language, character, customs, culture and civilization—dating all the way back to the Renaissance. Increasingly, the country’s long-established heteronormative, predominantly Roman Catholic, and xenophobic population markers have evolved into a more inclusive form of national representation. Through the prism of audience reception and social media, this paper measures the reaction and resistance to oldfashioned ideas of national identity as exemplified by Venere Botticelli.

Panel G: Modern Women Writers – B. Basile, E. Rea, I. Filippone - A. Anelotti (Chair) (Room 1-04)
Speakers&Papers:
1) Beatrice Basile, A Re-Vision of One’s Own: Goliarda Sapienza’s Diari and Taccuini (1976-1992): in this presentation, I focus on fragments from Italian writer Goliarda Sapienza's Diari and Taccuini (1976-1992) that critics haven't considered widely. Within the diaries, Goliarda Sapienza (1924-1996) starts from her personal experiences to rework them concretely and reflect on her life vision. In this way, the writer’s existence is staged, and we can read authentic pieces of her daily life, observing her lifestyle and vitality. Despite Sapienza constantly rejecting any ideologies, particularly the feminist ideology she long criticized, it seems that her use of writing, especially in the diaries and notebooks, aligns closely with what Adrienne Rich defines as Re-Vision in When We Dead Awaken: “Re-vision—the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction—is for us more than a chapter in cultural history; it is an act of survival.” In this act of retrospective reconstruction and reflection on oneself and others, I argue that there is a sort of implicit self-awareness that doesn't refer to any specific ideology but embraces multiple disciplines (as we would say today): from psychoanalysis to self-awareness feminism pure stylistic expression aimed at unraveling the knots of a complex past. In this way, the Diari and Taccuini, which have long been ignored, can be considered an actual literary work in which the narrating self can understand the world through personal experience.
2) Elisabetta Rea, Scendendo nel “pozzo” del mondo: sguardi sulle alterità lungo l’opera di Anna Maria Ortese: tra gli autori che, nel contesto degli italian studies, stanno recentemente giovando di un inedito interesse critico c’è sicuramente Anna Maria Ortese. La sua opera solleva questioni epistemologiche che diverranno urgenti, nelle pieghe paradossali della modernità. In particolare, attraverso il corpus si delinea una lucidissima decostruzione delle categorie binarie e dei miti identitari dell’umanesimo occidentale: partendo dall’alterità sociale (come la “plebe” de Il mare non bagna Napoli), quella animale e naturale, contrapposta all’umanità (L’Iguana e Alonso), dall’identità di genere e razziale (L’Iguana), nonché dalla fatale creaturalità dell’infanzia, la sua opera non dà semplicemente voce agli oppressi, ma agisce rovesciando lo sguardo di chi osserva (e legge). La fertile intersezione degli approcci  dell’ecocritica e dei postcolonial studies, permette di portare alla luce le strategie che decostruiscono lo sguardo sull’altro, e la sua violenza intrinseca (la creazione di otherness, cioè). Si vorrebbe dunque far emergere la costante formale e retorica che, in moltissimi racconti e romanzi, agisce come lucido dispositivo di smascheramento – puntuale, ad esempio, il ricorso a un lessico dell’alterità (“natura”, “animale”, “plebe”), che significativamente ricorre spesso tra virgolette, cui apparentemente l’autrice aderisce e che viene invece problematizzato, decostruito, ribaltato. Le grandi opere di Ortese sembrano condividere questa strategia di “travestimento e smascheramento”, che agisce cognitivamente a un livello profondo sul lettore, causando dapprima lo smarrimento come esperienza di ricezione tipica della sua opera. A dispetto di un’immagine vulgata di “zingara” (definizione di Vittorini), “visionaria”, l’intervento vorrebbe mostrare la potenza epistemologica sovversiva dell’opera di Ortese, lo sguardo lucido pur nella trasfigurazione del reale.
3) Iris Filippone, Women Empowerment Through Oriana Fallaci’s Pen. The Case Study of an Unpublished Document on Abortion and Contraceptives: this contribution aims to examine Oriana Fallaci's intellectual role in the sexual revolution of the 1970s - the voice and pen of the revolutionary intellectual were continually spent fighting political and social struggles, claiming the right to make a fight and take a stand on the great issues of contemporaneity - starting from an autograph and unpublished statement on abortion and contraceptives (except for a few lines quoted in an article published in Panorama, in 2016, by Cristina Manetti) and investigating how these dialogues with one of the author's most famous autobiographical novels: Lettera a un bambino mai nato. As is well known, the author's personal history and her writings are very often directly related, wich is this reason study why this novel will be accompanied by the analysis of some of the author's televised, journalistic and literary statements - thanks to the donation made by her nephew and universal heir of Oriana Fallaci, Edoardo Perazzi, in 2016 the Regional Council of Tuscany acquired the important documentary collection of the Florentine writer - and through their comparison with Lettera a un bambino mai nato, an attempt will then be made to delve into her thought, focusing on the influence of her statements on two of the great themes of the sexual revolution: abortion and contraceptives. 

Panel A: Cultures and Politics of the Printed Media in the Long 19th Century – R. Glynn (Chair), S. Boezio, M. Corradi, O. Frau, K. Mitchell, O. Santovetti (Room 0-02)
This panel intends to investigate and discuss some peculiar and under-investigated examples of cultural products and their fruition during the long 19th century. Our papers, in many respects in conversation with each other, aim to shed light on cultural features, policies and practices of a deeply transformative phase through the study of a wide array of publications, ranging from newspapers and journals to screenplays and dictionaries, so far often neglected or overlooked.    
Speakers&Papers:
1) Sara Boezio, Foreign Policy and the Fourth Power in the Fin-de-Siècle Italian Periodical Press: in this paper, I will examine how the periodicals “Vita Internazionale” and “Corriere della Sera” contributed to shaping Italian foreign policy during the fin de siècle. In this complex historical period, the press emerged as a central player in the political field and wielded a powerful and active influence over governments. I will show that at the end of the nineteenth century, journalists became more able to supply firsthand accounts of events as foreign correspondents — moving away from sole dependence on official dispatches — thus entailing a significant transformation in journalism and political practice. I claim that this evolution granted the Italian press unprecedented autonomy, and allowed it to transition from being merely a mouthpiece for political factions to becoming a diverse ensemble of independent authoritative figures in the political arena. By engaging in advocacy and in current debates, periodicals proceeded to define their own political stances, cultivated their clout, and effectively established themselves as an authentic ‘fourth estate’.
2) Morena Corradi, New Horizons for a Changing Profession: Italian Newspapers’ Foreign Correspondents in the Late Nineteenth Century: my presentation will address the experience of some prominent Italian foreign correspondents (Rossi, Bizzoni, Barzini) at the turn of the nineteenth century. I am interested in the way their perspectives and experiences engage with issues such as foreign politics, migration and colonialism with multifold and surprising outcomes, thanks also to their quite unique personal background. These very reporters also significantly contributed to pave the way to a modern interpretation of their profession, no longer linked to the figure of journalist as entrepreneur or as exponent of a political group. 
3) Ombretta Frau, Angelo De Gubernatis and the Dizionario biografico degli scrittori contemporanei: my presentation concentrates on extraordinarily prolific, and controversial, author, scholar, orientalist and publicist Angelo De Gubernatis’ Dizionario biografico degli scrittori contemporanei (Le Monnier, 1979). The genesis of the Dizionario, a collection of thousands of biographical portraits of men and women of letters in Italy and elsewhere, presents numerous issues regarding the popular genre of biography in nineteenth century Italy.  Specifically, I am going to focus on De Gubernatis’ methodology, and on the unusually strong ‘female’ presence in his Dizionario. 
4) Katharine Mitchell, Italian Female Writers for the Silver Screen and their Representations in Film Journals: a pioneering cohort of Italian female screenwriters born in the later nineteenth century made a crucial contribution to the silent film industry. While they have all individually received attention as writers and/or performers, their collective achievement has not yet been recognised or analysed. In this paper, I analyse a selection of excerpts in film journals to interpret their important work. The women, many of them major celebrities in their time, included Matilde Serao, La Marchesa Colombi, Elvira Notari, Eleonora Duse, Annie Vivanti, Francesca Bertini and Gemma Bellincioni. They were connected to one another through friendship or professional ties. They all, throughout successful careers, adapted their novels or short stories as screenplays or wrote expressly for the silent screen, and enabled the rise of the ‘diva film’ which centred on a fascinating yet threatening and tragic Fallen Woman.
5) Olivia Santovetti, Does Una donna (1906) by Sibilla Aleramo represent the end of the 19th century woman reader cliché or its feminist continuation?: this contribution continues to challenge this idea of passive reading characterising the cliché of the 19th century woman reader. It will focus on Una donna [A Woman], 1906, by Sibilla Aleramo, which is not only one of the first feminist novels in the Italian tradition, but also an enlightening reflection on reading and writing. This contribution will answer the question: does Una donna represent the end of the 19th century woman reader cliché or its feminist continuation?  

Panel B: New Perspectives on the Lyric: Authorship, Circulation, and Communities – C. Keen (Chair), F. Giusti, L. Banella, V. Mele (Room 0-03)
In the animated field of lyric studies, various and sometimes opposite trends have addressed the definition of lyric in recent years (Culler 2015; Giusti 2021; Jackson 2005, 2023; Ramazani 2009, 2020, among many others). The proposed panel sets out to bring Italian poetry into dialogue with current international debates on the history and theory of the lyric, while investigating four crucial and interrelated aspects: 1. the particular modes of circulation, reception, and repurposing to which lyric poetry lends itself; 2. the challenges and potentialities of the production, circulation, and reappropriation of lyric across media, from visual commentaries to computer-generated poetry; 3 the limitations and possibilities that lyric poses to the construction of authorship and cultural authority; 4. the ways in which lyric can enable or envision community formation, both in terms of historically, culturally and gender situated communities, and in terms of transhistorical and transnational communities. The papers will focus on three emblematic cases that prompt reflection on these crucial aspects of lyric: the intermedial reception and interpretation of Dante’s lyric poetry in manuscript illuminations of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; the reception and appropriation of Dante by three poets of the Berkeley Renaissance and the ways in which reading Dante becomes a means of establishing a poetic community; and finally the questions that Nanni Balestrini’s poetic contribution to Epreuves d’écriture in 1985 raises regarding authorship and the shareability of the code, creating a space of friction between the provisional space of the intellectual community and its relation with a re-appropriation by the algorithmic code.
Speakers&Papers:
1) Laura Banella, Reading Dante in an Intermedial Way: Visualising and Illuminating the Lyric: while early lyric poetry collections in French, Occitan, and Italian have a rich illustrative tradition, from the fourteenth century onwards Italian lyric books usually do not have any images (illustrations will be common again only in Petrarch’s manuscripts of the fifteenth century). Among the hundreds of copies of Dante’s lyric poems, only a handful of manuscripts contain illuminations and drawings directly related to Dante’s poems. Images may be considered a ‘visual commentary’: they interpret the text and sometimes convey further meanings that are not evident, or that are not in the text itself. The paper will interpret the illuminations visualising Dante’s lyric poems, disentangling the semantic codes operating in and through them. Anthologies and miscellanies of Dante’s lyric poetry produced a distinct author, different from Dante the poet of the Commedia. Exploiting the extraordinary malleability of lyric poetry, whose meaning and influence can uniquely change over time according to its circulation, reception contexts, and readership, this Dante has been appropriated, repurposed, and used by scribes, compilers, artists, and other poets to create multiple identities for Dante and, in turn, for these readers, writers, artists themselves. This paper will therefore explore an intermedial way of representing Dante’s authority as a lyric poet, specifically one that is somewhat closer to the authoritative image of Dante as he is portrayed in the Commedia tradition, but at the same time shows a peculiar approach to Dante as a lyric poet, both in relation to other lyric poets and to other poetic genres.
2) Valentina Mele, Reading Circles, Poetic Communities. Dante at Berkeley 1946-1950: between 1946 and 1950, poets Robin Blaser, Robert Duncan, and Jack Spicer attended Ernst Kantorowicz’s lectures at the University of California Berkeley. By examining unpublished material collected at the Bancroft Library Archive, this paper discusses the ways in which the three poets had access to, read, and appropriated Dante’s text, with references to other authors of the Italian literary tradition, including Petrarch. The analysis will shed light on Dante’s relevance to the three poets’ definition of the poetic coterie known as the Berkeley Renaissance, while discussing examples of Blaser’s, Duncan’s, and Spicer’s reuses of Dante. While considering these reuses in comparison with the modernists’ practices of metamorphosing Dante, the analysis will make use of Stanley Fish’s theory of the ‘interpretive community’ (1980) to investigate the poets’ practice of reading Dante as a means to establish a poetic community deeply historically, geographically, culturally, and gender situated.
3) Francesco Giusti, Epreuves d’écriture and Digitized Lyric: Whose Language Is it?: in 1985, an experimental protocol for online collaborative writing entitled Epreuves d’écriture took place around the groundbreaking exhibition Les Immatériaux, curated by Jean-François Lyotard and Thierry Chaput and held at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris from 28 March to 15 July 1985. Twentysix writers and thinkers were given for discussion a list of fifty words related to matters at the core of the exhibition (such as Author, Code, Writing, Image, Language, Interface, Interaction, Matter, Simulation, Simultaneity, Speed…). In this endeavour, which featured intellectuals of the calibre of Jacques Derrida, Bruno Latour, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jacques Roubaud, and Michel Butor, Nanni Balestrini’s intervention was to produce poetry by elaborating the other’s pieces of writing through an algorithm. This practice raises crucial questions of shareability of the code and authorship, especially given that the language Balestrini re-uses comes from major intellectuals endowed with strong authorship. As Épreuves d’écriture makes clear, digital writing forces a reconsideration of categories of creative originality, autonomy, and individual expressivity. By appropriating each of the other contributor’s texts into a collective summary generated through a predetermined formula, Balestrini’s poetic interventions provide a key to explore the space of friction between the singular utterances and the shared protocol, between the provisional space of the literary community and its relation with a re-appropriation by the algorithmic code.

Panel C: Posthuman, Ecology, and Literary Hybridisations – A. Combina, A. Chiafele, S. Perpetuini - E. Traversa (Chair) (Room 0-04)
Speakers&Papers:
1) Alessandro Combina, Posthuman New Weird: Non-realistic Literature in the Time of Climate Crisis: this contribution aims to situate itself at the intersection of three extremely pregnant perspectives for the interpretation of the contemporary world: the posthuman, new weird literature, and ecological criticism. By scrutinizing pivotal works in hypermodern Italian literature (such as Laura Pugno's Sirene, Alda Teodorani's Belve, and Paolo Zanotti's Bambini Bonsai), the aim is to elucidate the characteristics arising from this rich conceptual intersection. Against a backdrop of a world undergoing rapid transformations, these perspectives engage in a strategic counterplay, catalyzing an equally dynamic transformation within contemporary humanity. Non-realistic literature, particularly the realm of new weird literature, emerges as a fitting medium to encapsulate such concepts. Distinguishing between transhumanism and posthumanism, this exploration reveals that the amalgamation of posthumanism with the other two perspectives doesn't yield a mere summation of stances but births original artistic constructs of profound visionary potency. What narratives do these works weave about our current world? What insights do they unveil about our humanity and our role as inhabitants of Earth? How does the Italian literary landscape uniquely approach these themes and positions? Several decades post-Foucault's revelation of the artificiality and ideology behind the concept of "man," these authors fervently advocate for a profound reassessment of the historically determined elements encapsulated in this term. This research delves into the implications of such a reevaluation, offering a fresh perspective on our evolving relationship with ourselves, the environment, and the urgent issues posed by the climate crisis.
2) Anna Chiafele, Global warming and the ecological significance of the home: in this presentation, I would like to discuss Lorenza Pieri’s novel Erosione (2022), which I identify as a captivating example of Italian cli-fi. Cli-fi novels often rely on sensationalist climatic effects, such as floods, avalanches, or droughts. This is not the case in Pieri’s novel where the effects of global warming are subtle. In this analysis, I will discuss how the home acquires a strong ecological significance which makes climate change more “realistic” and familiar. The personal and intimate space of the house is here used to make global warming visible. In Erosione, climate change is in fact “brought home”; however, the regional is not treated in isolation, and the global effects of climate change emerge as well in this gripping narration. As Ursula Heise has demonstrated, a sense of place should be linked to a sense of planet. Furthermore, I will bring to the fore the psychological and emotional distress caused by environmental degradation; as Albrecht states, “environmental change can create distressed environments inhabited by distressed people.” In this novel, several characters suffer psychologically. Despite such a gloomy scenario, hope still appears to be a possible venue within the Anthropocene; in fact, Margaret’s closing words (“Avete lasciato lo spazio per i fiori? Andiamo al vivaio che è di strada.”) may reveal hope; these words come from a woman doomed to die of an incurable disease, Alzheimer. Her brain starts to forget as the water rises. Nonetheless, hope is still a possibility.
3) Stefano Perpetuini, Uomini e cani: ibridazioni nell’opera di Stefano D’Arrigo: il presente contributo intende offrire una prospettiva sulla fluidità che intercorre tra la natura umana e quella canina nell’opera di Stefano D’Arrigo. L’intervento seguirà un andamento circolare che, partendo da un articolo di giornale del D’Arrigo giornalista e non ancora scrittore (1948), passando brevemente per Codice Siciliano (1957) e Horcynus Orca (1975), mostrerà il fil rouge che lo lega al suo ultimo romanzo: Cima delle Nobildonne (1985). Scopo del presente contributo, dunque, sarà indagare su di una figura animale che, a differenza dell’orca che dà il titolo al suo romanzo capolavoro e a quella del delfino, che ne è l’altra protagonista, non ha ancora ricevuto adeguata attenzione. L’obbiettivo della relazione, quindi, sarà mostrare come l’utilizzo della figura canina nell’opera darrighiana non si limiti all’adesione a una tradizione simbolica consolidata, che le assegna significati ben precisi, bensì la veda sottoposta ad un’originale ibridazione con la figura umana, in quanto creature da considerare sullo stesso livello.

Panel D: Postcolonial Gramsci(s?) in transhistorical perspective – E. Zucchetti (Chair), S. Agbamu, M. Puddu, V. Saldutti, S. Kroonenberg (Room 0-05)
Since the publication of the first English translation of the Prison Notebooks (Hoare, Nowell-Smith 1971), knowledge of Antonio Gramsci’s political thought has been spread around the world and has become increasingly influential in historical and cultural research. Categories such as “subalternity”, “organic intellectual”, and “common sense” have been particularly relevant in the field of postcolonial studies. Edward Said, Ranajit Guha, and Gayatri Spivak, to cite some leading figures, have acknowledged their debt to Gramsci’s ideas. This has created a “postcolonial Gramsci”, that is a specific postcolonial reading of Gramsci’s thoughts. The studies inspired by Gramsci on postcolonial topics have, in turn, exercised a great influence on the understanding of the ancient world. Especially in the last few years, Gramscian categories have influenced a variety of research regarding the ancient world, encompassing literary, historical, and archaeological studies. This panel aims to offer a forum for scholars coming from different fields of research (postcolonial and world literature, Greek and Latin literature, ancient history, and archaeology) to discuss methodology, theory, and disciplinary applications of Gramsci’s ideas in the context of postcolonial studies and their usefulness to the understanding of ancient cultural and historical phenomena such as popular literature, Greek and Roman colonisation, and material culture.

Panel E: Unruly Anthologies in/of 20th- and 21st-century Italy – E. Bellia, E. Bond, M. Medugno, S. Vari
(Room 1-02)
In this roundtable session researchers will exchange ideas around questions such as:

• What are the new trends in the production of anthologies?

• What is at stake in the production of transnational, inter-artistic and ‘unruly’ anthologies in

• contemporary Italy?

• What place do ‘unruly’, transnational and translated literature anthologies occupy in the literary

• field?

• Which readership for which anthologies?

• Challenges and potential of the anthology format

• Power relations in the anthology

• What are the most fruitful theoretical and methodological frameworks to approach anthologies? 

• From Museum Studies to ‘Anthology Studies’: a purely derivative pattern?

• Theories and practices of collaboration in anthology making – and reading

• Selection, inclusion, exclusion, montage between ethics and aesthetics

Thus, this roundtable will also be an occasion to reflect on the political significance of unruly anthologies in contemporary Italy.

Panel F: Heart, Gestures and Emotions in the 19th century Italian writers – M.S.Marini (Chair), D. Shalom Vagata, , M.Aghelu, S.Scriva, G.Scialanga, E.Benucci (Room 1-03)
Following SIS 2023 themed conference, Affect Emotion Sensation, the panel Heart, Gestures and Emotions in the 19th century three Crowns intends to investigate the representation of emotions in 19th Italian literary works. At the turn of the 19th century a new sensibility towards the individual’s emotions and its visual manifestation can be observed. Foscolo’s interest on the notion of grace, as  well as a Manzoni’s attention on the gestures of his characters in Promessi sposi are just few examples of this new attitude. The panel together with the one proposed by Maria Silvia Marini’s Asking for Justice Rage, hope, imagination: “sense of justice” in the late modern Italian literature, aims to bring new attention on 19th century Italian writers inside the Italian studies in UK and Ireland. Papers may include but not limited to the following topics:

• Representation of body and gestures in the 19th Italian literature, especially in Foscolo’s, Leopardi’sand Manzoni’s work

• «Solo il cuor m’è maestro»: the symbolism of the heart and its connections with the writers’s idea of literature

• Drawing, painting, acting interpreted as a physical translation of emotions

• Senses as the gateway of phycological introspections of feelings

• Modern and antique sources of Foscolo, Leopardi and Manzoni’s representation of emotion

Speakers&Papers:
1) Marialaura Aghelu, The spirit of the nation in Ugo Foscolo’s tragedies. First notes: the paper aims to investigate the patriotic component of Ugo Foscolo’s tragedies. In the first part we will focus on the reuse that the Italian-Greek author makes of the classical sources of the tragic works. In a second moment we will explore in depth some letters that he exchanged with some Greek compatriots. From the analysis of these private documents we aim to make clear how the classical setting is closely connected to Foscolo’s ideological desire to convey love of country in his theatrical works.
2) Simone Scriva, The Problem of Dante’s Sources in Foscolo’s Lyric Representation of Passions: the question of Dante’s sources within Foscolo’s poetic production lacks a complete analysis that considers, in addition to the most evident and well-known aspects from the earliest critical editions, the different modalities through which Dante's source works. Here, an attempt will be made to focus on its role by analysing it in all its different declinations, with particular attention to its function in Foscolo’s representation of passions. The theme is variously articulated, and concern, among others, the epic-bellicist aspect of Foscolian poetry, which refers, very often and in a more or less direct manner, to typically Dantean themes and expressions; in this sense, it is particularly important to reason on the intermingling between the lyric Dante and the Dante of the Commedia – that is the mainly epic and political one. This type of reflection will be preliminary to the study of the fundamental emotional dialectic in Foscolo’s poems, carried out by the two substantial prototypes that are the soothing one of Venus and the agitating one of Mars, deriving respectively, but with modalities worthy of further study, from Petrarchan and Dantean models. Examining the way in which Dante’s source contributes to the representation of this dialectic, which is structural in Foscolo’s lyricism, is a fundamental piece in the mosaic of Foscolo’s reuse of Dante’s sources, as well as an important contribution to the clarification of the different practices of Foscolo’s expression of passions.
3) Giulia Scialanga, The Representation of Fear and Amorous Desire in Giacomo Leopardi: in my contribution, I will analyse the relationship between the phenomenology of fear and amorous desire in Giacomo Leopardi’s works. Focusing on the time span between 1816 and 1834, I will highlight how, on the one hand, Leopardi draws from the semantics of ‘fear’ to represent the effects of amorous desire and how, on the other, the depiction of fear and that of desire share a common corpus of images. The latter are centred on sensorial aspects and bodily reactions, including the acceleration of the heartbeat, trembling, sweating, paleness, and the inability to speak. Moving from elegiac and autobiographical experiments (Appressamento della morte, Memorie del primo amore, Il primo amore, Elegia II) to dramatic drafts (Telesilla) and from the Zibaldone (3443-46) to the Canti (Consalvo, Il sogno, Aspasia, Amore e morte), I will examine this recurring symptomatology, while also emphasising Leopardi’s peculiar use of ‘spavento’ and ‘paura’. These terms are in fact recurrent when it comes to addressing the fearfulness inherent in the experience of longing, as well as in the description of the figure of the lover. In so doing, I will also discuss the crucial role played by Petrarca, Sappho, and Plato – who are explicitly mentioned as models – in shaping Leopardi’s phenomenology of fear and amorous desire.
4) Elisabetta Benucci, Due cose belle ha il mondo: amore e morte: Leopardi and the Tragic Nature of Love in Consalvo: Leopardi’s Consalvo is a theatrical scene: it stages the warrior Consalvo who wish even the death in return of a kiss from his beloved Elvira. Beaten to death, he will receive the long awaited kiss… Through an analysis of Consalvo, the most beautiful poem of Ciclo d’Aspasia, the paper illustrates the sensual representation of the contrast between Love and Death.

Panel G: Scribes, Imitators, and Illustrators of Dante in the Middle Ages and Renaissance - Z.G. Barański (Chair), F.Feriozzi, , A. Zammataro, M.C. Camboni, L. Hughes (Room 1-04)
This panel aims to provide new insights into the reception of Dante Alighieri’s works from the late middle ages to the Renaissance. It does so by analysing very different aspects of the matter (textual tradition, illustrated manuscripts, intertextuality) applied to different works by Dante (Commedia, Monarchia, the lyric Dante). The phenomenon will be analysed from two perspectives: that of the physical objects carrying Dante’s work, their internal logic and their circulation (Francesco Feriozzi will look at the manuscripts of the Monarchia, Alessandro Zammataro will discuss Antonio Grifo’s illustrations for a printed copy of the Commedia); and that of intertextuality and of Dante’s role in the definition of literary genres in Italy (Matilde Camboni will examine Dante’s influence into the Italian tradition of the sestina as a poetic genre, Lachlan Hughes will look at Dante within the wider canon of the Fimerodia). Ultimately, these analyses try to unveil new information about the ‘making of’ a classic at a time when the construction of Dante’s authority intertwines with the rise of humanist culture and of the Petrarchan model; as well as about the role of paratexts and commentaries into this process. The panel is presented by Zygmunt Baranski, whose Chiosar con altro testo. Leggere Dante nel Trecento (Fiesole: Cadmo, 2001) remains a fundamental work on the matter of Dante reception. 
Speakers&Papers:
1) Francesco Feriozzi, Theologian, Heretic, Philosopher, Classic: The Dante of The Monarchia through the Manuscripts: notoriously mentioned alongside the Commedia in the epitaph on Dante’s tomb and condemned as a heretic text by Bertran du Pouget, Dante’s Monarchia was read and discussed attentively in the first three centuries of its existence. In this presentation, based on the research I am carrying out within the University of Notre Dame’s project on the Canon of Dante’s works, I am going to look at the miscellany manuscripts that contain the Monarchia to discuss how the contents of these collections are symptomatic of different perceptions of the treatise and of its author. Thus, for example, MSS C and H associate the Monarchia with works by Doctors of the Church, conveying a ‘theological’ Dante, while its association with texts discussing papal and imperial authority in MSS F and D (as well as in the editio princeps) clearly presents it as a political work. Other manuscripts (B, L, P, Pg, S) carry the Monarchia alongside classical or medieval literary works, thus proposing a literary canon and giving us important insights into the perception of the Monarchia among the early humanists. The miscellanies will be interpreted also in the light of whether each manuscript attributes the work to Dante and whether there are any explicit expressions of approval or rejection of the treatise’s ideology in the manuscript. The data extrapolated from the manuscripts, together with what we find in biographies and commentaries, will show us different representations of Dante.  
2) Alessandro Zammataro, Unveiling the Reception of Dante’s Divine Comedy Through Illuminations: The Visual Exegesis of Antonio Grifo: the Divine Comedy with commentary by Cristoforo Landino, printed in Venice by Pietro Cremonese in 1491 and housed at the Casa di Dante in Rome, provides an extensive apparatus of marginalia and an elaborate set of miniatures created by the poet and painter Antonio Grifo (Venice, ca. 1430-1510). In addition to the existing woodcuts in the incunabulum, Grifo offers a rich collection of illuminations that systematically depict the three canticles. These illuminations portray key scenes from the Divine Comedy, accompanied by explanatory captions and citations from Landino’s commentary. This contribution aims to analyse the Italian poet and painter Antonio Grifo’s reading of Dante’s Divine Comedy through a close study of his illuminations. It will explore the hermeneutical implications embedded in Grifo’s iconographic apparatus and its relationship with the text of the Divine Comedy, the tradition of contemporary commentaries, and the glosses he wrote around Dante’s text. The study will delve into different iconographic matters, such as plant anatomy, book bindings, and astrological and celestial globe depictions. Through the examination of these specific examples, I will demonstrate that the iconographic progamme is not merely decorative: the meticulously detailed illuminations accompanying the text of the Divine Comedy constitute a true visual commentary, by providing crucial semantic references to Dante’s text. Furthermore, the research will be enriched by comparing Grifo’s iconographic scheme depicted for the Divine Comedy with the Incunabulum Queriniano G.V.15, wherein the poet and painter integrally illustrated Petrarch’s Canzoniere for the first time. This comparative approach will offer insights into Grifo’s artistic and interpretative contributions across different literary works, enhancing our understanding of his broader contributions to the intersection of literature and visual arts in the late 15th century.
3) Maria Clotilde Camboni, Seni senarii ad imitationem… Renaissance perspectives on Dante and the sestina: nowadays, the early history of the sestina is quite straightforward. Invented by the Provençal troubadour Arnaut Daniel, this form of canzone was introduced into Italy by Dante, who also adapted it by means of establishing the structure that was to become canonical. It was then codified by Petrarch, who reused Dante’s variation several times in his Canzoniere. When a Renaissance author writes a sestina, he is imitating one of these great models. However, during the second half of the fifteenth century, knowledge of all these antecedents was far from widespread. Consequently, Renaissance authors of sestine could have in mind different models, according to which previous texts they knew. In some cases, they become acquainted with earlier texts at a later date, and proceeded to incorporate them in their canon, in accordance with their renewed view of the history of the form. Then in the early sixteenth century several intellectuals knew both Dante’s Al poco giorno and Arnaut’s Lo ferm voler, and were therefore able to have a comprehensive historical perspective on the sestina. However, this knowledge does not result in equal consideration given to all three antecedents, and different Renaissance authors chose to imitate or refer to different earlier authors of sestine, extolling or downplaying the latter’s role according to their personal literary tastes and agendas. The paper will present a range of such Renaissance perspectives on the sestina, giving special consideration to the role played by Dante.  
4)  Lachlan Hughes, Poetic and Musical Authority  in Jacopo del Pecora da Montepulciano’s Fimerodia: From Dante to Francesco degli Organi: Jacopo del Pecora da Montepulciano’s Fimerodia (c. 1395–1404) has long been recognised as a significant milestone in the canonisation of the tre corone, offering a fascinating, if partial, insight into the rich cultural and intellectual life of late fourteenth-century Florence. Written in Dantean terza rima and composed of 38 ‘canti’, Jacopo’s allegorical dream vision includes a procession of famous Florentine citizens, in the style of Petrarch’s Triumphi, beginning with Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio and concluding with a trio of illustrious living Florentines: Coluccio Salutati, Filippo Villani, and Francesco degli Organi (II, iii). The culmination of Jacopo’s allegorical procession, and perhaps its most striking inclusion for modern readers, Francesco degli Organi (c. 1325/35–1397) is today remembered as the most important composer of medieval Italy, whose polyphonic works are anthologised in the sumptuous early fifteenth-century Squarcialupi Codex (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Med. Pal. 87) as well as a handful of other retrospective codices and fragments. In my paper I will use Jacopo’s Fimerodia as a focal point for exploring the construction and negotiation of poetic and musical authority in late fourteenth-century society more broadly. In particular, I will explore the significance of Jacopo’s placement of Francesco as the culmination of a long line of illustrious Florentines, beginning with Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio.  

Panel H: Thinking with Primo Levi – E. Lima (Chair), M. Maiolani, S. Ghelli, R. Murphy (Room 1-05)
Over the past few years, scholars have devoted more attention to the intersections of Levi’s work with extra-literary disciplines, such as history, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, theology, psychology, animal and memory studies. This growing interdisciplinary interest demonstrates the overcoming of the image of Levi as exclusively a witness of the Holocaust. It has led to two fundamental hermeneutical acquisitions: the recognition of Levi’s work in its entirety, beyond the traditional division between testimonies and the rest of his essayistic and narrative production, and the appreciation of Primo Levi as an interpreter of political, social, and cultural phenomena. Exploring Levi’s curiosity for ‘other people’s businesses’ beyond traditional boundaries, the presentations in this panel aim to reconstruct the path of Levi’s intellectual history and explore the different trajectories of his thought. Convinced as we are that Levi needs to be considered – alongside his status as witness and narrator – a philosopher and intellectual, our talks will put his works and thought in dialogue with pressing philosophical and political questions of the 20th century. They explore the place of philosophy in Levi's work, the post-colonial and ecological undercurrents in his short stories, and how his writing on anti-Semitism may be brought to discussions of anti-Black racism.
Speakers&Papers:
1) Simone Ghelli, «No, non fa per me». Primo Levi and (Italian) Philosophy: my paper investigates Primo Levi’s tricky relationship with philosophy. Especially over the last decade of his reflection (the 1980s), Levi never hid his idiosyncrasy towards such discipline, not only by claiming his preference for natural sciences but especially by accusing philosophy of being an obscure and sterile form of knowledge that constantly replicates aporetic and outdated ontological questions. Although Levi’s judgment may turn out to be excessively polemic, reductive and lacking charitable interpretation - and hence we could easily dismiss it -, I think we can truly understand the reasons for Levi’s harsh refusal by tracing it back to his adolescence, that his during the Liceo years. Here is when Levi develops both his passion for natural science within his house walls and, simultaneously, his dissatisfaction with humanities at Liceo. The latter is the school as resulted from the well-known Riforma Gentile, the “most fascist of reforms” according to Mussolini himself, which established a hierarchy of knowledge whose apex was philosophy, the Italian neoidealism of Croce and Gentile, thereby relating natural science to the bottom since “pseudo concepts”, mere informative and superficial forms of knowledge. Such hierarchical understanding of knowledge is exactly what caused the division of the “due culture” that Levi would attempt to overcome with his intellectual activity as a writer. Moreover, Levi’s idiosyncrasy towards philosophy is also and probably primarily political, one of the facets of Levi’s anti-fascism. In the eyes of a man of science, the idolization of the Spirit is nothing but the most effective instrumentum regni to obtain a hierarchal and obedient society.
2) Michele Maiolani, Postcolonial Holocausts? Indigenous Cultural and Ecological Extinctions in Primo Levi’s Work: my paper investigates the intersection of Levi’s accounts and analyses of his experience in the Lager with two different strands of his reflection: the description of disappearing Indigenous cultures and the representation of environmental disasters. Although these intersections are still largely overlooked by Levi scholars, we can frequently find points of contact between Holocaust testimony, anthropology, and ecology, especially in short stories such as ‘Gli stregoni’ (‘The Sorcerers’), ‘“Cara mamma”’ (‘“Dear mother”’), ‘Verso occidente’ (‘Westwards’), and ‘Recuenco’, revolving around Indigenous cultures living in remote and endangered areas of the planet (such as deserts or rainforests). Taking inspiration from ethnographic as well as scientific sources, Levi depicts imaginary or really existing populations while experiencing the threat of climate change and facing an irreversible process of cultural and ecological extinction. In the meantime, at a closer look, Levi implicitly draws compelling parallels between the history and present conditions of Indigenous cultures living in remote areas of the world and experiencing the consequences of Western colonialism and European Jews who were mass exterminated during World War II.
3) Ruth Murphy, Primo Levi and James Baldwin: A Dialogue Between Jewish and Black Suffering: this paper discusses the relationship between anti-Semitism and anti-Black racism through the work of Primo Levi and African-American writer James Baldwin (1924-1987). The non-fiction work of these two writers may be seen as a sustained response to a reality of extreme suffering: on the one hand, the Holocaust, on the other, America's 'racial nightmare' (Baldwin). To what extent may they speak to each other? Though dialogue between Black and Jewish suffering can be fraught with relativisation and antagonism, in the words of Paul Gilroy, the absence of thoughtful dialogue 'weakens all our understanding of what modern racism is'. It is on this premise that I bring Levi and Baldwin together, paying specific attention to moments in their work that make explicit connections between the plight of Jewish and Black people: these include a 1979 lecture given by Levi on 'L'intolleranza razziale', and a number of Baldwin's essays, such as 'The Harlem Ghetto' (1948), and 'Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind' (1962). 

Panel A: Claiming Dante: Nation, Nationalism, Transnationalism – D.O’Connell (Chair), F. Coluzzi, V.Mele, D. Galassini, S.Vandi, T.Kay, S.Milner (Room 0-02)
This session, co-organized with the Centre for Dante Studies in Ireland, will focus on how the reception of Dante over the last 150 years, both within Italy and beyond, has intersected with questions of nationhood. It is well known that over the last two centuries Dante has often been monumentalized as a symbol of the Italian nation-state, consecrated as the ‘sommo italiano’, as Fulvio Conti has recently put it, as well as the ‘sommo poeta’. At the same time, his cultural afterlife during the same period attests to his work’s extraordinary flexibility and transnational vitality, appropriated by voices from a rich array of cultural, political, social, linguistic, gender, and religious standpoints. The recent 2021 centennial celebrations attested to both of these dimensions of his reception history, with Dante claimed by some (especially in the Italian political sphere) in the name of an essentialized idea of Italian culture and identity, and by others who used him to rethink and reconfigure fixed and bounded ideas of national identity. This roundtable will offer a forum to reflect upon questions such as:  

• The persistence and the limits of ‘national’ readings and appropriations of Dante and his work;  

• The uses of Dante to promote, and to resist, nationalist ideologies; 

• The uses of Dante as a resource of meaning in national (and intra-national) conflicts and struggles beyond Italy, including Irish sectarianism; 

• Transnational and transcultural responses to Dante’s work, and the potential of Dante to unsettle as well as reinforce national categories; 

• The value of transnational frameworks, emphasizing intercultural connectedness, in confronting the multilingual and transcultural realities of pre-national medieval cultures.  

Panel B: Vernacular Translations of Greek Texts in the Italian Renaissance: Authors, Methods, Contexts of Reception – F.Forner (Chair), C.Sideri, P. Fokianos, F.Carnazzi, L.Cantoni  (Room 0-03)
The Western European ‘rediscovery’ of Greek works at the dawn of the fifteenth century soon resulted in the systematic production of Latin translations by well-known Italian humanists. Subsequently, since the second half of the century there was a considerable wave of vernacularisations, almost always based on pre-existing Latin renderings. As indirect, mediated translations, often produced by less known or even anonymous authors, volgarizzamenti are generally neglected by scholars (with some exceptions). However, studying them seems crucial to understand a vital phase in the reception of Greek intellectual heritage in the Italian Renaissance. This panel seeks to investigate some case-studies of translations among the several that have not been explored before, as well as cases of re-use of Greek sources in the Italian Vernacular. Through textual, codicological, and linguistical analysis, papers will investigate (also in a comparative perspective) the translating methods and aims, the contexts of production and reception, as well as the long-term impact of vernacularisations. Paper will mainly focus on three geographical and cultural areas of production: Florence, the Estente court of Ferrara, and Southern Italy (in particular, the Aragonese court on Naples).
Speakers&Papers:
1) Cecilia Sideri, Bartolomeo Fonzio’s vernacular translation of Lucian’s «Calumnia»: the paper will analyse the vernacular translation of Lucian’s Calumnia made by the Florentine humanist Bartolomeo Fonzio (1446-1513). The text, which was translated in the early 1470s, is attested in a unique manuscript, currently preserved in Berlin, KupferstichKabinett, with the call number 78 C 26. The paper will focus on three main aspects: the material features of the only surviving manuscript, which is a luxury copy made by Bartolomeo’s brother, Niccolò, and heavily annotated – as well as decorated – by Bartolomeo himself; the relationship with the Latin intermediate source; the translation methods and techniques, as they emerge both from the vernacular rendering itself and from the self-comments and theoretical declarations made by Bartolomeo along the margins. The paper will thus offer an insight into the vernacular reception of a text – Lucian’s Calumnia – that had a strong impact on the Italian Renaissance (not only in literature, but also in the visual arts).
2) Francesca Carnazzi, Language and fortune of Appian’s Roman History translated by Pier Candido Decembrio: the paper intends to focus on the vernacularisation of Appian’s Roman History made by Pier Candido Decembrio (1399-1477). The translation is transmitted in the presentation copy prepared for Ercole I d’Este, dated 1473 (Modena, Biblioteca Estense Universitaria, It. 164 =alfa.K.3.18). It also survives in a copy preserved at the Biblioteca Comunale of Livorno (Br 8 24). The text is remarkable because it is the outcome of a complete translation process from Greek into the vernacular. Indeed, in 1450-1454 Decembrio had translated four books of Appian from Greek into to Latin for the Pope Nicholas 5th. About twenty years later, Decembrio turned Appian into a vernacular version, that would enrich the library of the Duke of Ferrara. In the first instance, an attempt will be made to investigate Decembrio’s translation techniques. Secondly, the paper will provide an insight into the main linguistic features of the translation. Did the twofold process of auto-translation (Greek à Latin; Latin à vernacular) had a specific impact on the language in terms of syntax and vocabulary? Finally, some remarks will be made on the dissemination and reception of Decembrio’s vernacular Appian in Italy between the 15th and 16th centuries.
3) Luca Cantoni, Vernacular Humanism in Quattrocento Naples: The ‘Batrachomyomachia’ in ottava rima by Aurelio Simmaco de’ Iacobiti (1456): the Pseudo-Homeric Batrachomyomachia has been widely known in Italy since the 15th century, with the oldest vernacular translation being the reworking in ottava rima by the Abruzzese Aurelio Simmaco de’ Iacobiti (1456), based on Marsuppini’s Latin version (ca. 1430). The author was a humanist about whom little information is known. He was certainly employed by the secretary of the prince of Taranto, Giovanni Antonio Orsini del Balzo, and was involved in the court of Alfonso the Magnanimous in Naples at least since the 1450s. The only existing witness of Iacobiti’s Batrachomyomachia is found in ms. BNF 1097 (ff. 1- 13). Upon scrutinizing this manuscript — especially its marginal notes — it appears to represent an interim stage in the compilation of an anthology of Iacobiti’s texts, most of them written in the vernacular and some in Latin, possibly intended for the audience at the court of Taranto. The text is a remarkable case study: first, it is the earliest known vernacular translation of the Pseudo-Homeric poem — probably used to figuratively depict the troubled political situation —, preceding by around fifteen years the vernacularization in terza rima by the Veronese Giorgio Sommariva (ca. 1470); second, it is all the more remarkable in that it anticipates by a long way the season of vernacular translations composed in the Kingdom of Naples between the 1470s and 1480s (e.g., the works of Brancati or Albino). The translation strategies used in Iacobiti’s Batrachomyomachia, with respect to the Latin model, and the main linguistic aspects will be examined.
4) Petros Fokianos, The ‘forgotten’ corpus of the anti-Turkish orations of Janus Lascaris: Preserving and transmitting the Greek-speaking historical narratives of late Byzantium: one of Anna Meshcini-Pontani’s most remarkable and least exploited academic contributions is the transcription, editing and publication of the three anti-Turkish and at the same time crusading rhetorical speeches of the Greek humanist and diplomat Janus Lascaris (1445-1535) (Anna Pontani, Paralipomeni dei “Turcica”: Gli scritti di Giano Laskaris per la crociata contro i Turchi, «Römische Historische Mitteilungen» 27, 1985). The content provided by Lascaris in these texts  is not, for the most part, original, since it is largely rooted in the texts of late Byzantine historians and chroniclers. However, as their preservation in manuscript tradition shows, our presentation aims to demonstrate that these texts responded to a particular need at the beginning of the 16th century. This need was none other than the synthesis and restitution of pre-existing Greeklanguage Byzantine literature on the Ottomans, a literature still relatively unknown - except perhaps to the Venetians - in the Western world. Lascaris selects, translates on a case-by-case basis, and uses key historical and chronicle texts from the late Byzantine period, which are not necessarily accessible to the West in general and the Italian vernacular in particular. In this way, Lascaris, without indicating the sources he employs, valorising his readings and the wealth of his personal library, achieves a personal synthesis of these works, rhetorically serving the mobilizing purpose of his text, while at the same time rendering Byzantine texts accessible both to a much wider Italian-speaking public and to the highest Western officials with whom the Greek scholar happens to be in contact.

Panel C: New Approaches in Cinema and Media Studies – R. Glynn (Chair), C. Mereu-Keating, M. Baldaro
(Room 0-04)
Speakers&Papers:
1) Carla Mereu-Keating, Friend or Foe: Mario Zampi’s Career in the British Film Industry: my contribution seeks to historicise the ways in which national identity impacted Italian filmmakers’ status, employment and mobility within the British film industry before, during, and after the Second World War. The talk concentrates on the filmmaking activities of Mario Zampi, prolific director, production manager and producer born in Italy but mainly active in British studios between the 1920s and the early 1960s. Zampi is credited in Britain for having set up the production company Two Cities Films alongside the better-known Italian émigré Filippo Del Giudice (Street, 2000). Two Cities, according to the Encyclopedia of British Film, ‘produced a number of quintessentially English film classics’ forming ‘the backbone of the quality cinema’ that came out of British studios in the 1940s (Ryall, 2014, 773). In the Italian film press of the period, Zampi was described as the loyal fascist who ruled the ‘kingdom of Teddington City’ (Cinema Illustrazione, 51: 9, 1937); in the 1950s he became the film expat who brought honour to his motherland. Discussing recently declassified World War Two files available in the National Archives which document Zampi’s internment in a British POW camp because of his status as ‘enemy alien’, the paper highlights the prejudices and the prospects that characterised British-Italian film relations during the Fascist regime and after the end of the war.
2) Michele Baldaro, Variations of memory on war and colony across time and media. The case of Mario Tobino's Il deserto della Libia and its film adaptations: this paper conducts a comparative analysis of Mario Tobino's novel Il deserto della Libia (1952) and its film adaptations, Scemo di guerra by Dino Risi (1985) and Le rose del deserto by Mario Monicelli (2006). Mainly focusing on the literary aspect, the research explores how the discourse of Italian deresponsabilization regarding World War II and the colonial experience develops over time. In the post-World War II period, the myth of «Italiani brava gente» reshapes the national image (Del Boca, 2005). Processes of disseminating and erasing collective memory regarding war responsibilities, fascism, and colonial past occur (Andall-Duncan, 2005; Focardi, 2013). Memory, forgetting, and the resemantization of the past (Burdett, 2001) thus offer a problematic reading key to post-war Italy, particularly in cultural production (Bartolini, 2021). Initially, the paper emphasizes the nuanced national portrayal in Tobino's novel, fluctuating between guilt acknowledgment and a tendency toward absolution, primarily through the “insanity” and «victimhood» paradigms (De Luna, 2011; Mondini, 2014). However, as situations or characters from the novel are identified in both film adaptations, a comedic reinterpretation emerges. This version features a trivialized portrayal of the colonial Other and an overly positive depiction of Italians in Africa and during wartime, unquestioningly embraced and ultimately crystallized. In conclusion, by illustrating the variation in the approach to representing the wartime and colonial past based on socio-historical context, the paper introduces a problematization. Despite the historicization of such experiences, the self-absolving narrative, initially stemming from the witness's personal account, has been universalized in Italian public culture.

Panel D: New Approaches in Comparative Literature – C. Paltrinieri (Chair), S. Evangelista, G. Barracco, A. De Blasio, E. Rubinacci
(Room 0-05)
Speakers&Papers:
1) Stefano Evangelista, The poiesis of remembrance: childhood and memory in William Wordsworth’s and Giovanni Pascoli’s poetry: in the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth defines poetry as ʽemotion recollected in tranquillity’. According to Wordsworth, memory plays a fundamental role in poetic production. Giovanni Pascoli in the lyric Speranze e memorie defines memories as ʽombre di sogni per il cielo’. Therefore, memory seems to be a common feature of both Wordsworth’s and Pascoli’s poetics, indeed many of their lyrics take inspiration from the memory of man’s reaction towards nature through that ʽinward eye’ (Wordsworth, Daffodils, 1804) which is the inner gaze of the poet. Moreover, it is through memory that the poet can return to the images of childhood, an age during which man tends to get closer to nature, but also to the imagination and sensibility typical of poets (see Pascoli, Il fanciullino, 1897). According to Harold Bloom, memory, in the Freudian sense, is ʽa defense against death’ (The Scene of Instruction in Willliam Wordsworth), an observation that can also be applied to Pascoli’s poetry. In Wordsworth’s poem We are Seven (translated and reduced by Giovanni Pascoli with the title Siamo sette for the poetic anthology Fior da fiore) a little girl asked about the number of siblings obstinately answers seven, although she admits that two of them are buried in a churchyard. Similarly, there are many lyrics written by Pascoli in which the relationship with the deceased is activated through memory. The paper aims to investigate how memory and childhood interact with each other in the literary productions of these two authors.
2) Giovanni Barracco, Crisis of Bildung and grammar of loneliness in the Western postmodern novel: Treno di panna, Gli sfiorati, Fluo: the contribution intends to focus on the evolution of the representation of the young character in generational and coming-of-age novels between the 1980s and 1990s. From a comparative perspective it will be shown how Italian novels, from Treno di panna (1981) by Andrea De Carlo, to Gli Sfiorati (1990) by Sandro Veronesi, up to Fluo. Storie di giovani a Riccione (1996) by Isabella Santacroce, stage some exemplary dynamics of the postmodern time, in tune with the trends of European and American literature represented by books such as Less than Zero (1985) by Bret Easton Ellis and Family Dancing (1984) by David Leavitt. The disorientation that leads to perdition or solitude, the inability and refusal to fit into a logic of productivity and work, the continuous search for an elusive meaning, the sense of solitude given by the perception of one's own decisive otherness, even sexual, or by the feeling of disharmony towards the world, the family, others, are all pieces of a broader crisis of Bildung, of an impossibility of finding a completeness of one's self, in an era dominated by the commodification of experience and the linguistic and emotional sclerotization of relationships. In a fifteen-year period full of adolescent fiction (from Tondelli to Fortunato, from Patroni Griffi to Golinelli and Nove), the novels examined reflect the problem of education and the crisis of the young character as the outcome and symptom of an epochal fracture between generations , the landing point of a youth that becomes a symbolic form of a postmodernity marked by the problem of the inauthenticity of experience, by the drama of an impossible communication, lost in a labyrinth of unreal media mirrors, which make the possibility of a recomposition, in the context of consciousness, of a defined identity.
3) Antonella de Blasio, Imagery from Dante’s vision of Hell in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy: Dante's vivid portrayal of the realms beyond – the Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise – stands as a profoundly impactful literary achievement. Dante Alighieri's poetic creations in his epic poem have been a wellspring of inspiration for artists and scholars over countless centuries. While Dante's epic trilogy holds considerable influence, it is Inferno that is widely acknowledged as the most pivotal, particularly in shaping religious perspectives and artistic endeavors. Dante, in this section, uniquely illustrated a vivid and unmistakable depiction of hell, an unprecedented portrayal that profoundly impacted both religion and art. The nightmarish imagery crafted by Dante has endured across centuries, serving as a wellspring of inspiration for countless artists and scholars. The paper aims to explore Dantean influences within a contemporary work: Philip Pullman's trilogy His Dark Materials, specifically in The Amber Spyglass, published in 2000. Pullman incorporates various scenes and imagery inspired by Dante's portrayal of Hell. The His Dark Materials trilogy, composed of Northern Lights (1995), The Subtle Knife (1997), and The Amber Spyglass (2000), has gained worldwide acclaim, receiving numerous awards and accolades. The specific utilization of science fiction and fantasy conventions, the exploration of human nature, and the incorporation of religious and theological elements are just a few of the distinctive features of Pullman's fantasy trilogy. The article investigates how the adaptation and appropriation of Dante elevate fantasy to a higher level through intertextuality.
4) Emanuele Rubinacci, BETWEEN ‘’THE EXHAUSTED’’ AND “THE ABSURD”: STUDIES ON THE PHILOSOPHICAL PERSPECTIVE OF “IL DESERTO DEI TARTARI": my work aims to explore how Camus' “The Myth of Sisyphus” can offer a new lens for interpreting Buzzati's “Il deserto dei Tartari”. I begin by drawing parallels between Drogo and Deleuze's concept of “the exhausted”, aiming to enrich this comparison by incorporating Camus' notion of “the absurd”. The demise of Angustina, the ‘'vates'’ of the Fortress, evokes Camus' observations regarding Dostoevskij's character Kirillov and his “higher suicide”,serving as a rebellious assertion of independence, leading to a god-like existence. Consequently, Angustina emerges as the novel's inaugural absurd character. Buzzati's apprehension of time's passage becomes evident in his creation of a dimension where time and space converge, ultimately nullifying each other. This protective construct for Drogo inevitably transforms into a condemnation, confining him to a state of '’expectation'’ (Minkowski), instigating paralyzing anguish that culminates in exhaustion. Existing within a “temporal capsule” (Barbour), Drogo fails to perceive “change”, thus amplifying his plight. Only upon leaving the Fortress does Drogo achieve a clearer understanding of existence. In an inn — a Marc Augé-defined non-place — he attains awareness, anticipating his end akin to a “condemned man”. The “happy ending” (Bellaspiga) is thus motivated by Drogo's evolution into the “absurd man”, transcending Deleuze's enigmatic exhaustion and, with a smile, grasping the illumination of the stars amidst the final night's darkness. 

Panel E: Aspetti della religiosità tra XIV e XV secolo: la Bibbia tra citazioni, riscritture e strategie retoriche – S.Laiena (Chair), M.Giola, S.Iaria, L.Mazzoni (Room 1-02)
Nel corso del Medioevo la Bibbia era divenuta elemento imprescindibile non solo per i monaci, ma anche la formazione culturale dei chierici e, in un secondo momento, pure dei laici, uomini e donne, attraverso la predicazione e la letteratura. Nel corso del secolo XV poi i frutti della collaborazione tra Umanesimo e studi biblici saranno evidenti tanto sul piano letterario, – con significative esperienze anche in volgare (dalle sacre rappresentazioni, ai cantari, ai poemetti biblici e alla Bibbia in volgare) – quanto su quello filologico con riflessioni sul testo stesso e sul suo uso sia in contesti religiosi che politici dove la lingua latina era dominante. Il panel intende soffermarsi su alcuni di questi aspetti prendendo dapprima in esame le peculiarità di una riscrittura medievale attraverso l’analisi di un esempio tratto dal Fiore novello della Bibbia (o Fioretti della Bibbia), per proseguire con l’uso “strumentale” delle citazioni bibliche in  alcune opere di Enea Silvio Piccolomini ed infine con l’analisi retorica di alcuni poemetti biblici di Lucrezia Tornabuoni.
Speakers&Papers:
1) Marco Giola, Mitologie di sapienza arcana e parafrasi veterotestamentarie alla fine del Medioevo: Zoroastro nel Fiore novello della Bibbia: trasmesso da una fittissima tradizione manoscritta e, poi (ma con molti aggiustamenti), da un’incessante divulgazione tipografica interrotta solo dal Concilio di Trento, il Fiore novello della Bibbia (o Fioretti della Bibbia) costituisce uno dei più fortunati episodi di riscrittura biblica dell’intero dominio romanzo. Quest’opera compilativa in volgare mescola ecletticamente episodi estratti dalle Sacre Scritture con altri elementi ecletticamente estrapolati dalla storia antica e dalla mitologia. Un passaggio assai interessante è costituito dalla menzione di Zoroastro, associato dall’anonimo autore al regno di Nino in Persia sulla base di una presunta autorità aristotelica: si tratta con ogni probabilità di un innesto cólto (la fonte potrebbe essere lo pseudo-Clemente nella versione di Rufino) all’interno di una parafrasi biblica destinata a un pubblico non dotto (se non ‘popolare’) che merita di essere chiarito all’interno del panorama culturale italiano del Tre-Quattrocento.
2) Simona Iaria, Note sull’uso della Bibbia negli scritti di Enea Silvio Piccolomini: il Piccolomini fu tra i primi a dare notizia nel 1455 della stampa di un esemplare della Bibbia a Magonza, ma il suo interesse venne richiamato dall’evento straordinario e non dal testo in sé che invece era emerso prorompente alla sua attenzione fin dagli scritti prodotti durante il concilio di Basilea. Il contributo intende soffermarsi proprio sull’approccio del Piccolomini alle Sacre Scritture attraverso le citazioni presenti in alcune sue opere di questo periodo per proseguire negli anni trascorsi alla corte imperiale e in quelli in cui fu vescovo di Siena. In prospettiva diacronica si osserverà da un lato l’uso politico-religioso delle fonti bibliche lette in favore del concilio, per un certo periodo della sua vita, e rilette o ritrattate in favore del papa  in seguito; dall’altro il loro impiego in discussioni a carattere letterario nelle quali sono messe a confronto con fonti classiche e medievali. Nell’esaminare i rinvii si renderà nello stesso tempo necessario distinguere tra citazione diretta e citazione di “secondo livello” (attraverso l’intermediazione di altre fonti) e soffermarsi sul metodo: sebbene il Piccolomini non sia autore di commenti alla Bibbia e non si accosti ad essa attraverso l’allegoria medievale, tuttavia si rifà in alcuni casi all’interpretazione storico-morale alla quale accosta la tecnica dello smontaggio e rimontaggio tipico degli umanisti.
3) Luca Mazzoni, Strategie retoriche nella poesia di Lucrezia Tornabuoni: Lucrezia Tornabuoni (1427-1482) fu autrice di cinque poemetti sacri che rielaborano storie bibliche dell’Antico e del Nuovo Testamento: Vita di Sancto Giovanni Baptista, Ystoria di Iudith (in ottave), Ystoria di Susanna (capitolo), Storia di Hester, Vita di Tubia (rispettivamente dieci e otto capitoli). Si aggiunge una canzone dedicata al peccato originale e all’incarnazione di Cristo. Le fonti bibliche e la lingua letteraria di Lucrezia sono state studiate, mentre poco è stato detto riguardo alle sue strategie retoriche: nella mia comunicazione affronterò questo aspetto della produzione letteraria della madre del Magnifico.

Panel F: Italian Social Media - M. Ruggieri (Chair), C. Brioni, T. Venturi, S. Wyer (Room 1-03)
This panel discusses ongoing research projects in Italian Studies that make use of social media content as a primary source and a cultural text. While it is now common to include social media content in academic research as a way to understand current news and social trends, or the reception of other cultural texts, the panel aims to focus on what it means to study digital texts that are specifically produced by amateur/proteur/professional creators and posted on social media like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube and Twitch. The research presented in the panel will explore questions of (self-)representation, political and social activism, stardom and celebrity, identity, language, and beyond. In addition, this panel aims to spur discussions on research practices and methodologies in the field of Italian social media studies.
Speakers&Papers:
1) Cecilia Brioni, Historicising Social Media: Notes on making a cultural history of YouTube Italia: in Italy, social media have played a pivotal role in shaping communication and socialisation for more than 15 years to date. This paper argues that, in order to fully grasp its significance in contemporary Italian society and transmedia system, social media content should be historically contextualised. To do so, it uses YouTube Italia, namely the community of content creators uploading videos in Italian on the platform and their audiences, as a case study. First, the paper discusses the importance to delve into the historical evolution of social media celebrity dynamics (Abidin 2018), shifts in platform utilisation patterns (Kor-Sins 2023), and the ever-changing media landscape. Second, it acknowledges the challenges entailed in constructing a historical narrative of social media, including issues related to the quantity, quality, and availability of digital primary sources. Lastly, the paper presents attempts by content creators on the platform to offer a history of YouTube Italia, and reflects on the importance of first-hand accounts to make this cultural history.
2) Tristan Venturi, Paths to Masculinity. A netnography of transmasculine Instagram users in Italy: over the past twenty years, Internet-based platforms in general and social media in particular have played an instrumental role in the unprecedented mainstreaming of transgender subjectivities, embodiments, and communities. Such phenomenon has been observed in several Western countries, including Italy. Scholarly research produced so far on transgender individuals' use of social media has focused predominantly on the production of contents related to bodily and aesthetic aspects of gender transition. However, the gender-affirming function served by platforms such as Instagram and TikTok does not seem to be restricted to the domain of physicality and embodiment. Instead, these digital sites also provide transgender users with the opportunity to affirm their identity in relation to the social, cultural, and political aspects of gender as well.  Starting from such assumption and employing the Italian Instagram mediascape as a case study, this presentation explores the modalities through which trans-masculine Instagram users are circulating new knowledge around gender-related matters they feel particularly drawn and/or close to, most notably gender-based violence and gendered healthcare. I argue that Italian trans-masculine social media users choose to publicly disclose their previous embodied experience as female-passing citizens to practice a politically committed, socially conscious use of their past. Through netnographic work carried out through the qualitative analysis of Instagram contents (i.e., posts, reels), I seek to highlight the ways in which their activity serves to both denounce the violence to which they were subjected pre-transition and promote a new kind of ‘ethical’ masculinity centred upon feminist strategies rather than patriarchal practices.
3) Sean Wyer, “Palermo is a Mosaic”: Leoluca Orlando's use of social media to construct a multicultural Sicilian identity: the political messaging of Leoluca Orlando, the five-time mayor of Sicily’s capital, Palermo (most recently, until 2022), articulates a cosmopolitan vision of local identity. Orlando seeks to emphasise Palermo’s ‘tolerant’ values, including an openness to immigration, invoking the city’s history to foster this image, as well as using a variety of rhetorical strategies. He portrays Palermo as having a true ‘essence’, which is necessarily multicultural. I use an asynchronous digital ethnography to analyse Orlando’s pronouncements on his official Facebook page, as well as observing his audience’s reactions to his messaging there, both supportive and critical. I examine how Orlando articulates the narrative that Palermo has historically been a ‘mosaic’, or a composite of various cultural influences, proposing that the contemporary city is the ‘true’, welcoming face of the Mediterranean. As well as exploring the political utility Orlando sees in such arguments, I analyse the risks inherent in this essentialising project. 

 
Panel G: New Intermedial Approaches – G. Gronchi, C. Giuliani, C. Protani - M. Borghi (Chair) (Room 1-04)
Speakers&Papers:
1) Gianmarco Gronchi, Smashing from the inside. The role of Gianni Sassi between magazines, graphics and countercultures: this contribution would like to deepen the work of Italian art director and graphic designer Gianni Sassi (1938-1993). Gianni Sassi was a key figure within the Italian culture of the 1970s and 1980s, who mainly worked as a visual communicator with a multidisciplinary approach. In particular, this research presents Sassi’s revolutionary graphic production. Diverging from corporate image practice, Sassi created a new widespread graphic style, mixing underground aesthetics and avant-garde art forms with mainstream communication. Thus, this research deepens the work by Sassi as an art director for several magazines. It analyzes how Sassi subverted the rules of editorial graphic design by provoking yet carefully gauged images. Furthermore, it will trace a comparison with Sassi’s works as an art director for his own music label “Cramps Records” and as a professional graphic advertising for the Al.Sa. As an outsider, Sassi challenged the norm of the so-called “good visual design”, as he used counterculture communication strategies for industrial advertising. This contribution  highlights the role Sassi had in the field of visual communication and visual culture. With his non-conformist approach, Sassi was able to boost new figurative graphics, questioning norms and forms of traditional Italian communication. Furthermore, Sassi gave voice to the claims of countercultural groups, introducing political and social demands within the public debate of his time. Highlighting Gianni Sassi’s counter-narratives – both in terms of form and content – clarifies his predominant role in reshaping the Italian visual and cultural debate of those decades.
2) Chiara Giuliani, United Colors of Italian Society: Fashion, Identity and Material Culture:  the 2021 Settimana della Moda di Milano saw the launch of a collaborative project between Italian fashion brand Benetton and the Italian-Tunisian rapper Ghali who designed a new line of clothes. Echoing the historic Benetton’s slogan, the line was called ‘United Colors of Ghali’. As specified in the promotional press release, Ghali was chosen as brand ambassador because he embodied Benetton’s ‘founding values of multiculturalism and integration’. Indeed, as representative of the ‘nuovi Italiani’, as Vanity Fair Italia defined him, Ghali’s musical repertoire often deals with the issue of citizenship, diversity and integration. All the items included in the clothing line reflected Ghali’s transnational belonging, featuring a wide variety of patterns, colours and writings that speak of his Italian life and, simultaneously, of his Tunisian roots. One of the pieces designed by Ghali, however, stood out: the unisex hijab. Specifically labelled as a ‘unisex hijab’ by Ghali himself, this balaclava could be purchased in different colours and patterns for approximately 35€. It was immediately sold out. Understanding objects as inseparable from humans and considering them not as representations of cultural patterns but rather cultural patterns themselves (Roberts 2017, Brown 2004), this paper will investigate Ghali’s ‘unisex hijab’ and its cultural relevance in an increasingly multicultural, yet discriminatory, society. The paper will analyse this specific item as a transcultural object, interrogating the process that led to the transformation of a gendered, highly debated, religious head covering, into a unisex fashion accessory.
3) Chiara Protani, Elsa Morante Between Classical Tragedy and Contemporaneity: Analysis of the One-Act Play “La serata a Colono. Parodia”: this study aims to analyze Elsa Morante's one-act play La serata a Colono, a reimagining of Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus. The textual analysis will focus on the formal innovations employed in the construction of the play. First, it is a theater of words: the author brings forth an innovative writing style, deviating from the traditional dramaturgical canon, where theater, poetry, and narrative characteristics coexist. Secondly, as indicated in the subtitle, La serata a Colono is a parody. However, the term has nothing to do with ironic elements, and the text should be interpreted as a poignant parody. While reversing the Sophoclean tragedy, the text retains its tragic features and amplifies them, incorporating the trauma of contemporary history. Lastly, the author's intention is to create a linguistic-thematic conflict among the characters: Oedipus represents the myth and uses a lofty and grandiloquent language; Antigone represents history and, therefore, employs a mimetic language suited to the orality of contemporary peripheries. Morante constructs Antigone's language from a regional Italian rooted in the amalgamation of various popular strains from central-southern Italy, aiming to make it resemble the children, symbols of authenticity, who populate her works. The purpose of this study is to demonstrate that Morante reverse the entire figural, archetypal, and cultural heritage to create a new relationship between classical theater and contemporary dramaturgy.

Panel A: From Page to Stage and Vice Versa: Theatre and Novella from Boccaccio to Pirandello I –  A.Carrai (Chair), A.Falduto, A.Azzarone, S. Laiena (Room 0-02)
These panels aim to discuss the multiple entanglements throughout the history of Italian literature between theatre and novella from the fourteenth to the twentieth century, thus addressing questions of hybridisation of literary genres, versatility of writers, and intermedial translation. The interaction between the two genres has been broadly explored in relation to specific periods (Longo 2004; Telve 2004; Barberi Squarotti, 2006). These panels originally propose to tackle this subject on a wider chronological remit, thus favouring the identification of different trends of cross-fertilisation over the centuries. Starting from the analysis of the Decameron as a veritable “zibaldone” – to borrow Nino Borsellino’s famous expression – for Renaissance playwrights, the first panel will address the iteration and the distortion of novelistic topoi on early modern stage in Italy and beyond, focusing in particular on the analysis of key characters in the sixteenth-century imagery, from the clumsy pedant to the fearsome Turk. Through the examination of socially marginalised characters, deemed “alien” to their communities, this panel will advance knowledge of the socio-cultural dynamics of Medieval and Renaissance Italy. The second panel will explore the transformation in playwrights’ approach to the novelle, from the “zibaldone” method, the dominant paradigm in early modernity, to the scaffolding one, a method consisting of authors’ use of their short stories as preparatory work for their own plays. Through a close reading of the works of some of the most prominent nineteenth- and twentieth-century Italian playwrights, the validity of this model will be at times proved and contested, thus foregrounding the fluidity of these intertextual, transgeneric, and intermedial relations.
Speakers&Papers:
1) Alessandra Falduto, La presenza di Boccaccio nella commedia rinascimentale italiana: la riconversione scenica di Decameron II, 10 e III, 6: novella e teatro sono universi che presentano numerosi punti di contatto, come dimostrano i vari casi di contaminazione tra tecniche narrative e tecniche drammaturgiche. La produzione novellistica offre molteplici spunti per l’elaborazione di trame e personaggi delle pièces teatrali e, al contempo, il teatro rappresenta un esempio da prendere in considerazione per l’adattamento performativo della narrativa breve. Una prova della prossimità fra questi due generi letterari è l’apporto fornito dal Decameron di Giovanni Boccaccio alla formazione del teatro comico italiano del XVI secolo. La commedia rinascimentale si sviluppa a partire dalla tradizione del teatro greco e latino, alla quale vengono affiancate cospicue riprese della più recente produzione letteraria in volgare. Il Centonovelle, in particolare, costituisce un inesauribile serbatoio di topoi e intrecci comici da mettere in scena. Ciò si deve senza dubbio al fatto che  la raccolta boccacciana presenta evidenti caratteristiche teatrali, ma anche ad una profonda affinità che è possibile rintracciare tra l’opera del Certaldese e la commedia rinascimentale. Il presente intervento intende riflettere sulle influenze della novellistica nel teatro cinquecentesco a partire da alcuni casi di riconversione scenica del Decameron (II, 10 e III, 6). La vicenda di Riccardo di Chinzica ha una diffusione teatrale piuttosto ampia, tant’è che a Firenze viene ricordata nell’Assiuolo di Giovan Maria Cecchi e a Venezia ispira l’intreccio della Turca di Giovan Francesco Loredan. La novella III, 6 riscuote successo soprattutto a Firenze, come si evince dalle sue riprese nella trama della Mandragola di Niccolò Machiavelli e del Frate di Antonfrancesco Grazzini.
2) Annamaria Azzarone, Narrating and representing turcherie: the Turkish character in theatre and short stories between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: the Islamic world was already present in some medieval tales; however, starting from the Turkish occupation of Constantinople, the Western Christian world’s attention to the turcherie became more marked. In European stories more and more themes and characters with specific and direct links to figures and places in Turkish history appeared. As is well-known, the great victory at Lepanto provoked an incredible literary explosion in Europe. These texts were denigrating towards the  Turkish world and laudatory towards the Christian one. Between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it was particularly in the theatre that feelings and fears around the Turkish problem were expressed, filtered through classical models. On the European stage we encounter «quell’attrazione-repulsione che [...] invade la società europea che ai suoi confini sente premere l’Impero ottomano e che quotidianamente, ai suoi margini – isole, porti, confini orientali –, con quello intavola rapporti e affronta battaglie» (Carandini 2006). This paper aims to examine the development of the Turkish character in the novella and in the comic theatre of the sixteenth and seventeenth century with particular attention to the following aspects: the interaction between Turkish themes and topoi typical of the two genres, the language of the Turkish characters, and the authors.
3) Serena Laiena, The Pedant: Antecedents and Afterlife: this paper focuses on one of the most emblematic comic characters to appear on the Italian Renaissance stage: the Pedant. A caricature of the scholar, the Pedant is imbued with humanistic culture  and deeply linked to the social and cultural dynamics of Cinquecento Italy. As observed by Arturo Graf, this character is both the son and the victim of his own time. For this very reason, scholars have neglected to embark on a quest for its models or ascertain its links with the characters of the novella. Divided into two parts, this paper will first provide an analysis of the characteristics of the Pedant in Renaissance theatre with a specific focus on the highly hybrid language that Italian playwrights coined for this character. It will then retrace the evolutionary parable of the character from Trecento to Ottocento. It will look at possible antecedents of the Pedant included in fourteenth-century collections of novelle, in particular in Boccaccio’s Decameron. It will address the fortune of the character in seventeenth-century French comedy, highlighting the differences from the Italian model. Finally, it will consider a revival of this character in nineteenth-century Italian novelle. In examining the antecedents and afterlife of this Renaissance character, this paper will address the dynamics between language and power in Italy across the centuries and will display the role played by literary genres in shaping the main features of the Pedant.

Panel B: «Arricchire il proprio Paese di tesori». Forme epistolari del transfert culturale nella storia della letteratura italiana I (Il Settecento e l’Ottocento) – F. Danelon (Chair), F. Forner, A.M.Salvadè, P. Colombo,, S. Caiola, A. Zangrandi (Room 0-03)
The recent translation of Pascale Casanova’s La Repubblica mondiale delle Lettere (Nottetempo, 2023) brings us back to the possibility of reasoning no longer, or not only, on a particular national literature, but on the (direct, or indirect) relations it has had with other literatures. Starting from a happy metaphor by Paul Valéry, with which the writer defines intellectual exchanges in terms of a “spiritual economy”, a literary “stock exchange of values”, it may become interesting, once again, as Michel Espagne already did, to investigate the history of European and non-European literature through the lens of cultural transfer. The most frequent studies in this field focus on literary translation, the reception of foreign authors and works, editorial fortunes and the circulation, in manuscript or in print, of a literary work outside national borders. In such a potentially wide and heterogeneous framework, epistolography (or rather the study of private or fictitious correspondence between the protagonists of the cultural and literary scene) could, perhaps, constitute an interesting guideline for moving in a more linear and homogeneous manner in this particular niche of Comparatistics. The “epistolary function”, through which we would like to investigate the phenomenon of the Kulturtransfer, is not only understood on the synchronic level of the abscissa (dialogue with others) and on that of the ordinate (reception, tradition...), but intersects a third level, which is that inherent in the polymorphism of the epistolary genre. Either as a paratext – take for example the dedicatory letter at the beginning of a literary work – or as the form chosen for the writing of a treatise or newspaper article, the epistle has constituted a form of expression through which it is possible to reconstruct the intellectual debate, inside and outside national borders, that has arisen around an often, but not only, literary case.
Speakers&Papers:
1) Fabio Forner, Un giornale di lettere nella Venezia del Settecento: le «Memorie per servire all’istoria letteraria»: in 1753 the first issue of “Memorie per servire all'istoria letteraria” was published in Venice, a periodical founded on the initiative of Zaccaria Seriman, the author of Viaggi di Enrico Wanton alle terre incognite australi, ed al paese delle scimie, of Girolamo Zanetti and of the journalist Angelo Calogerà. The three men of letters, in different roles and with different means, were engaged in transferring selected new publications from the transalpine world to the states south of the Alps. The new publishing enterprise, which had a very troubled history, obviously did not only deal with transalpine cultural life: most of its articles were dedicated to Italian publishing production; however, it paid particular attention to what was happening in France, the United Kingdom or Germany. The “Memorie” presented itself at the same time as a bridge and a filter. From the fictitious correspondences published, a fairly clear, though not always coherent, picture emerges of what was printed beyond the Alps, of what was judged positively and negatively. The aim of the paper is to describe, by means of a few examples, the different evaluations that the journal presented of the major foreign works published at that time, by, among others, Voltaire, but also by lesser-known scholars and men of letters. The result of this investigation is particularly relevant because the exclusive use of the form of the anonymous letter instead of the article makes the “Memorie” one of the first models of Opinion journalism, which was thus programmatically created with the aim of selecting and evaluating cultural novelties.
2) Anna Maria Salvadè & Paolo Colombo, Autoritratto d’autore. Popoli e culture nelle Lettere varie (1757) di Francesco Algarotti: precious and impressive testimony of the outstanding network of European relations woven by the author, Francesco Algarotti’s correspondence did not fail to arouse interest and curiosity already among his contemporaries, ending up influencing even some of his most convinced nineteenth-century detractors such as Camillo Ugoni and Cesare Cantù. But the idea that the large and often illustrious correspondence accumulated over the years could offer an effective atout for self-promotion within the Republic of Letters was certainly pretty clear to Algarotti himself, who wanted to dedicate a specific section to it in the first volume of the Opere varie published in Venice by Pasquali in 1757. From the attentive selection, composed of 45 letters addressed to various protagonists of the political, diplomatic, scientific and artistic panorama of the time (among others Frederick II, the ambassadors of Tuscany and Spain Franchini and Grimaldi, men of letters such as Metastasio, Bettinelli, Frugoni, Gozzi, the Bolognese scientists and friends Francesco Maria and Eustachio Zanotti, the violinist and composer Giuseppe Tartini), one derives both the desire to be accredited as a protagonist of the intellectual debate of the time and the presence of a dual mediation activity, in which Algarotti is involved both in the role of promoter of Italian culture abroad and in that of a refined connoisseur of innovations coming from abroad, as documented, for example, by the consultancy provided for the construction of the new Berlin Opera House and the sincere defense of Voltaire’s tragic theater (10th November 1742 and 12th October 1735).
3) Emilio Boaretto, Affondi nel carteggio Voltaire – Querini: the correspondence between François-Marie Arouet and the cardinal Angelo Maria Querini is mainly preserved in the manuscripts held at the French National Library, at the Queriniana Library and at the QueriniStampalia Foundation. It was almost completely published in the rich Bestermman edition of Voltaire's works. It was not, or rather was not merely, a “friendly correspondence” (Trebbi, 2016). Antonio Gurrado, in the introductory essay to his Voltaire cattolico, pays attention to the relations between the French Philosophe and Pope Benedict XIV, focusing his analysis on the Jansenists' criticism of Voltaire, after the publication of the tragedy Le fanatisme, ou Mahomet le prophète (1742) and the Poème de Fontenoy (1745), works that celebrated, in the eyes of the French Jansenists, the grandeur of the Catholic religion. Angelo Maria Querini was among the readers of the Poème. The Cardinal Querini had moments of great conflict with the Roman curia, due to his irenistic tendencies. Through the erudite study of Ecclesiastical History, he sought to reconcile Catholics, mostly Italians, and Protestants of the Countries north of the Alps (see for example Querini’s edition of Cardinal Reginald Pole’s epistolary). The paper proposes a closer analysis of the epistolary exchange between Voltaire and Querini that is rich in biblical and literary citations. The aim is to shed light on the ideological-religious affinity that emerges in the literary production of the two correspondents, this affinity makes this theological-cultural exchange even worthier of deeper investigation.
4) Sabrina Caiola, «Fo l’uomo di lettere e non ne so l’arti»: la Lettera di Grisostomo al molto reverendo sig. canonico don Ruffino: there are many letters printed in the «Conciliatore», a scientific-literary periodical published in Milan, by Vincenzo Ferrario, twice a week, from 3 September 1818 to 17 October 1819. These are either fictitious epistles, the authorship of which can be attributed to the various compilers, or writings that are really arrived  at the «Società del Conciliatore». Among these, the Lettera di Grisostomo al molto reverendo sig. canonico don Ruffino, published on Sunday, 29 November 1818, in n. 26 of the “foglio azzurro”, stands out for its biting ironic tone and heated literary polemic. The contribution, therefore, intends to propose a cataloguing of the letters found in the «Conciliatore», in order to offer a quantitative and qualitative overview, shedding light on the journalist’s use of the epistle as a place and instrument of intellectual debate. In addition, the paper aims to analyse, from a linguistic-stylistic and thematic-content related point of view, the letter of reply that Giovanni Berchet addressed, through the periodical, to Don Ruffino. The epistle, in which Girolamo Tiraboschi’s importance in Italian Literature is discussed, is a clear example of the function that this literary genre acquires in the journal: that of prospecting forms and ways of cultural exchange.
5) Alessandra Zangrandi, Le lettere italiane di Theodor Mommsen: Theodor Mommsen (Garding 1817 – Charlottenburg 1903) was a devoted friend of Italian culture in the broadest sense: his studies of ancient history, epigraphy, numismatics, ancient and modern law took him to Italy several times from 1844 onwards, and his knowledge of the Italian language enabled him to forge relationships with scholars and men of letters that lasted over the years. Mommsen’s relations with Italy are also testified by the recent collection Letters of Theodor Mommsen to the Italians, edited by Marco Buonocore (Città del Vaticano, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana 2017, 2 vols.). The 883 letters date from 1845 to 1899, are written in Italian, French and German, and are addressed to 159 Italian scholars from different disciplines, many of whom received more than one epistle. Mommsen interweaves epistolary dialogues with archaeologists, epigraphists, librarians, museum curators, linguists and jurists: the occasion is often of a practical nature, linked to their respective research activities, but almost always the letters display colloquial tones that testify the interest and curiosity Mommsen felt for Italy, not only for its historical, artistic and archaeological heritage, but also for the events of the Italian Risorgimento that were taking place. Reading Mommsen’s Italian letters makes it possible to ascertain what image of Italy and its culture an exceptional European had in the 19th century and to analyse a very precise sector of cultural transfer in the middle of the 19th century: the written language skills of a cultured writer who, in order to deal with very precise questions relating to epigraphy, archaeology and ancient law, used a language that was foreign to him.

Panel C: Ekphrasis as Transmedia Creating Mimesis from Antiquity to the Digital Age I – M. Zaccarello (Chair), A. Verdone, R. Lokaj, T.Colleluori, E. Vivaldi (Room 0-04)
Originally intended as an exercise of rhetorical skills – with the Greek noun ἔκφρασις standing for a vividly descriptive speech with pictorial characteristic – the ensuing definition of ekphrasis as the literary response to a visual representation (and vice versa) found the most appropriate afterlife with Horace’s coined phrase ut pictura poesis. This phrase came to stand for a whole tradition of inter-artistic comparison and / or mutually illuminating relation which has survived not without challenges, such as the one put forward in the 18th century by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. Nowadays, however, the concept of ekphrasis aiming to make the invisible visible has received increasing scholarly attention also in other art/media forms, such as cinematography, comics, music, photography and television, so much so that ekphrasis may now be defined as the representation in one medium of any description composed in another medium (Siglind Bruhn, Musical Ekphrasis: Composers Responding to Poetry and Painting, 2000). Additionally, the ekphratic merit of ‘listening’ to images, pursued by contemporary multimedia encounters, encourages us to consider “‘accommodations’ for people with disabilities as adding artistic and rhetorical value, not simply transposing or distilling meanings” (Jay Dolmage, Disability Rhetoric,140). This panel aims to trace the origins and the ensuing uses of ekphrasis throughout the centuries, from antiquity to the present day, in order to assess the great variety of ekphratic discourses in the Humanities (narrative and poetic ekphrasis, pictured and picture-less, printed, screen, and musical) and to investigate the current expansion of ekphrasis in terms of transmedia encounters, social and political dimensions.
Speakers&Papers:
1) Alessio Verdone, Continuità discontinue. Per un’ipotesi di antigenealogia dell’ekphrasis: costruire una genealogia ecfrastica lineare è un tentativo destinato a fallire. Innanzitutto, per la difficoltà di mettere in ordine uno spazio teorico e testuale vastissimo ed eterogeneo. In secondo luogo, perché il concetto stesso di ekphrasis si presta a notevoli fraintendimenti e distinzioni (si ricordi come essa venga collegata a enargheia, phantasia, descriptio, evidentia, ipotiposi, prosopopea, llustratio, demonstratio, verbalizzazione, rappresentazione, transcodificazione, traduzione…) (Eco, 2002; Heffernan, 1991, 1993; Webb, 2016; Panagiotidou, 2022). Per tali ragioni, più che adoperarsi in senso prettamente genealogico (e analogico), si ritiene decisivo capovolgere i termini del ragionamento. Ciò perché nell’evoluzione sconnessa dell’ekphrasis contano più le discontinuità, i salti, le disomogeneità che i rasserenanti caratteri di parentela, affinità o attinenza, i quali rimangono molto spesso in una posizione secondaria. In sostanza sarà fondamentale rivolgersi verso quella continuità della discontinuità che sembra essere la marca costitutiva dell’intera vicenda ecfrastica. Per farlo si offrirà una piccola selezione di esempi selezionati dall’antichità fino ad oggi – senza distinzione di genere – capaci di accogliere la tradizione e sollecitarla producendo fertili discontinuità. Questa piccola antologia tiene fuori dal discorso gli esempi più storicizzati, per osservare invece alcuni passi che per un motivo o per un altro sono rimasti in ombra nella tradizione dei visual studies internazionali, su cui l’intervento fonda parte delle proprie premesse. Il primo dei casi che si osserveranno è quello di Luciano (Imagines, De Domo, Hippias e Zeuxis) (Maffei, 1987; Newby, 2002). Si passerà successivamente a Boccaccio (Filocolo, Teseida, Amorosa Visione) (Bartuschat, 2009) e a Poliziano (Stanze) (Ciccuto, 2004). Infine, gli esempi contemporanei saranno Fernando Bandini (Caelum sacelli Xystini), per la poesia, e Tommaso Pincio (Il dono di saper vivere), per la narrativa. Dopo una riflessione sui caratteri di discontinuità e, dunque, di innovazione in questi autori, si concluderà tratteggiando una metodologia per studi futuri sulla storia delle pratiche testuali ecfrastiche.
2) Rodney Lokaj, Gonzaga-styled Ekphrasis: Mantegna re-delivered in Latin: life at court under the Gonzagas was as lively and innovative in terms of architecture, antiquarian taste and collectionism as it was in self-promotion and international politics. And Humanist endeavour was one of the forces fuelling and shaping it. While pandering, perhaps, to their local princes, Mantuan humanists, however, took their intellectual lead from Rome. Indeed, it was fully in line with the Urbs, with its abundance of ‘talking’ paintings, statues and façades (cf., eg., Pasquinate, Raphael’s tomb, the Coryciana etc), that Mantuan humanism too produced ‘talking’ pieces of art often characterised by ekphrasis, that is, art not merely describing other works of art but engendering them. The paper proposes to analyse one particularly eloquent example, Falco Mantuanus de pictura (1504 ca.), a Latin elegy by Domizio Falcone on a (now lost) painting by Mantegna, the race between Atalanta and Hippomenes. The title was given by Angelo Colocci in Rome, which in itself is a gauge of its intrinsic importance in its own age, but the elegy also stands quite on its own inasmuch as it provides the only extant proof that Mantegna did not only effectively paint this scene but plausibly did so specifically for Isabella d’Este’s famed studiolo in Mantua. The paper will demonstrate how the poetic language deployed by Falcone sought to reproduce the painterly technique applied by Mantegna to this enigmatic theme of initiation and metamorphosis. Time permitting, the paper will then also link such artistic production to Castiglione’s own, where the future author of the Book of the Courtier was to describe, and thereby ekphrastically exalt, even enter into conversation with, the portrait Raphael Sanzio had painted of him in 1515 now hanging at the Louvre.
3) Tylar Colleluori, Cartographic Ekphrases in Moderata Fonte’s Tredici canti del Floridoro: Collapsing Temporal Distance through Spatial Proximity: Moderata Fonte’s Tredici canti del Floridoro (1581) is indebted not only to the previous tradition of Italian authors in the chivalric epic genre (Boiardo, Ariosto, Tasso), but also to authors of epic in antiquity: namely Homer, Virgil, and Ovid. While the influence of these classical authors on Fonte’s characters and plot has been the focus of recent scholarship (Arms and the Woman, D’Alessandro Behr [2018]), what has yet to be adequately considered is how texts like the Odyssey, Aeneid, and Metamorphoses undergird the political preoccupations of the Floridoro. In this paper, I foreground two instances in which Fonte (perhaps also inspired by heightened cartographic production in late 16th-century Venice) implements ekphrasis to make geography visible in her poem. I argue that, in these moments, Fonte uses her fiction as a thread to suture together myth and history, enabling her to situate ongoing Ottoman-Venetian tensions within a longer spatio-temporal narrative. In canto II of the Floridoro, the narratorial voice presents the reader with a bird’s-eye view of Thrace. I posit that the geography expounded in this ekphrasis not only orientates the reader as the action of the poem expands outward from Athens, but also lays the foundations for the parallels that Fonte will draw between the Athenian-Thracian conflict in her fiction, the mythic Greco-Trojan past, and her contemporary historical context. The second instance of geographical ekphrasis, in canto XIII, occurs as Circetta (daughter of the Homeric Circe, and a character invented by Fonte) relates the history of Venice to her guests, the Italian sailors Silano and Clarido. During a break in her narration, Circetta pinpoints their current position on the island of Ithaca through references to the wider Mediterranean. In doing so, I argue that Fonte frames the recent Battle of Lepanto (1571) as a “new Actium,” once again uniting disparate mythic, fictional, and historical timelines within a mutual geographical space.
4) Elisa Vivaldi, Concrete, visual, electro-phonic: Ekphrastic experimentations and the legacies of Futurismo: my paper aims at investigating the development of new forms of visual and phonic poetry within the context of 20th century avant-garde aesthetics, and the consequent attempt to break free of the traditional book form by employing increasingly experimental ekphrastic practices, thus reflecting on the broader meaning of ekphrasis, which involves representing a description originally composed in one medium through another medium. To capture the intrinsically ‘inter-medial’ element that characterises these practices, I intend to conduct my enquiry by following the development of Futurismo and Neoavanguardia, thus focusing my attention on the historical precedents of ‘freewordist’ poetry and their consequent typographical experimentation into the radical poetical production of authors such as Giulia Niccolai, and Nanni Balestrini, with the main objective of reconstructing the progressive evolution of poetry into figurative and electro-acoustic practices. This enquiry will also address the origin of these poetical experiences as a direct response to different, yet complementary crises that characterised the past century, thus remarking on the shared focus of historical and ‘neo’ avantgardes on a marked rethinking of subjectivity. In the 1961 introduction to I novissimi, which marks the birth of Gruppo 63, Alfredo Giuliani stresses how in moments of crisis, the ‘way of doing’ becomes identical with meaning, thus invoking what is now considered one of the key characteristics the modern understanding of the concept of crisis, namely the need to act swiftly to ‘tip the scale’ to resolve an ongoing illness of the present. Therefore, by focusing on the way in which avant-garde paved the way to a new understanding of both written and spoken words as tools for a radical assessment of contemporary reality, I finally intend to shed light on the underlying politically engaged element that characterises these visual and phonic artworks. 

Panel D: Verismo in digitale: le grandi opere e la ricezione attraverso le Digital Humanities -  M. Paino (Chair), A. Zammataro, D. Bruno, D. Spampinato, C. D'Agata, L. Barbarino, E. Vitale, M. Giuffrida,  A. Amaduri
(Room 0-05)
Il panel intende focalizzarsi sulla letteratura primaria e secondaria correlata al Verismo anche attraverso i nuovi strumenti digitali approntati grazie al lavoro congiunto di studiosi e ricercatori dell’università e del CNR. Il movimento verista, infatti, ha affrontato le ripercussioni del processo di unificazione nazionale sulla situazione economica, sociale e culturale del Sud Italia; in questo modo ha accompagnato l’iter di stabilizzazione del concetto di identità nazionale italiana con tutto il dibattito che ne è scaturito. Il panel, che si inserisce all’interno del progetto PRIN PNRR C.O.Ver.Le.S.S. (Corpus On line del Verismo tra Letteratura, Storia e Società), mira a fornire una riflessione e un primo bilancio, in itinere, del lavoro di ricerca; una ricerca che ha lo scopo di produrre una mappa trasversale delle “reazioni” alle opere letterarie nell’arco temporale che va dal 1872 al 1890, consentendo di mettere a fuoco temi e motivi che visti nel loro insieme restituiscono la “storia degli effetti” (Gadamer 1960, Jauss 1969) che il testo letterario ha avuto nel dibattito sulla dimensione socio-storica e geografica del Verismo. All’interno del panel verrà presentato anche il portale verismodigitale.it, frutto dell’attività del gruppo di ricerca, coordinato da Marina Paino, che, all’interno del Progetto PNRR CHANGES, Spoke 3, si propone quale piattaforma integrata relativa alla letteratura maggiore del verismo. Tale piattaforma offre un’edizione digitale multilivello degli autori maggiori del verismo, dotata di strumenti di analisi testuale, interrogazione lessicale, commenti testuali interattivi, implementando il modello offerto dall’Edizione Digitale collegata all’Edizione Nazionale dell’Opera Omnia di Pirandello. All’interno del panel si offrirà anche un’anteprima dell’approccio digitale che viene portato avanti grazie alla collaborazione tra Università e CNR (Centro nazionale delle ricerche) al fine di creare una piattaforma strutturata secondo tecnologie integrate di archiviazione e interrogazione dei dati che, già dal 2025, consentirà agli studiosi di attuare ricerche diacroniche per parole-chiave e/o per temi e motivi.
Speakers&Papers:
1) Daria Spampinato, Denise Bruno, Alessandro Zammataro, The COVerLeSS project and new digital prospectives for the Italian Verismo: The COVerLeSS project aims at preserving, valorising and analysing, in an integrated and open access Web environment, a searchable archive of the secondary literature (including reviews, journalistic and non-fiction texts) related to the literary production of the Italian Verismo. From a cultural point of view, the project is intended to provide an innovative concept of Verismo, thanks to its reverberations on the journalistic and non-fiction texts of the time and the way they contributed to building a precise image of the post-unification Southern Italy in social, cultural and economic terms. The research objectives will be achieved through three phases: (a) preservation: acquisition of the scanning of primary sources (mainly journals) according to the protocols established by the National Digitisation Plan, metadata, semi-automatic transcription via OCR and encoding in XML/TEI format; b) exploitation and use: creation of a Web environment with systems to display images, related transcriptions and user-friendly interfaces. This phase includes the design as well as the development of an Internet portal offering the visualisation of the primary sources, the search engine and the in-depth paths, starting from the identification of the target audience (students, scholars and general users); c) analysis. The strength of the project lies in its multidisciplinary nature, as it involves the field of Digital Humanities, and it promotes, in line with the objectives of the PNRR, the interaction between universities and research organisations. The project respects gender equity, since one of the 2 PI and one of the unit members are women.
2) Christian D'Agata, Liborio Barbarino, Eliana Vitale, Da PirandelloNazionale a VerismoDigitale: modelli di edizione e hyperedizione: Il contributo presenta il progetto, finanziato nell'ambito del PE5 Changes, Spoke 3, finalizzato alla creazione di un ecosistema digitale intorno alle opere della letteratura verista. Tale lavoro matura nel laboratorio del CINUM (Centro di Informatica Umanistica dell’Università di Catania) come espansione e parziale riorientamento dell’esperienza profusa nella cura della vetrina digitale dell’Edizione nazionale dell’Opera Omnia di Luigi Pirandello. Le opere, sottratte all’approssimazione della rete, sono proposte con un dress-code adeguato al XXI secolo e trattate con le cure che meritano i classici: grazie alla codifica XML-TEI e allo sviluppo di interfacce ad hoc, i testi diventano hub da cui si muovono hyper-edizioni, edizioni digitali sinottiche, concordanze, edizioni facsimili corredate da autografi. Muovendo da Pirandello, e attraverso due casi di studio (I Malavoglia, I Viceré), si discute un modello d’uso del digitale che propone un’integrazione profonda di filologia, lessicografia, ermeneutica, didattica. Un equilibrio dinamico tra il rigore scientifico e la necessaria accessibilità della ricerca, che consenta di intercettare anche il lettore non specialista.

3) Milena Giuffrida & Agnese Amaduri, Un caso di studio: il naturalismo francese e De Sanctis: L’intervento, che si colloca all’interno del progetto Co.Ver.Less, intende fornire un esempio delle possibili ricadute dell’uso di strumenti digitali nello studio di specifici problemi di critica letteraria. Fondamentale, infatti, per indirizzare il pensiero critico degli intellettuali e come punto di partenza per una valutazione teorica, è stata la riflessione sul naturalismo francese di Francesco De Sanctis, ancor prima che Zola procedesse a una sistemazione compiuta della nuova corrente letteraria attraverso Il romanzo sperimentale (1880). Un interessante spunto per le implicazioni socio-culturali del progetto è dato proprio dall’intrinseco legame che De Sanctis riscontra tra la situazione politica e sociale francese e la produzione di Zolà, che avrebbe messo bene in evidenza la corruzione (termine ricorrente nel discorso desanctisiano) come un contagio che finiva col guastare ogni fascia sociale. Tuttavia, De Sanctis riconosce a Zola la funzione basilare di avere impresso un nuovo corso alla letteratura, creando

una distanza con gli ultimi strascichi dell’idealismo tardo-romantico. Lo studio del reale, del vero, attraverso la scienza e la natura appare però anche esasperato nello scavo sulle brutture dell’umanità rappresentata; l’insistenza su alcuni termini, come “degenerazione”, “istinti”, “vizii”, “ventre” denunciano un atteggiamento di perplessità di fronte alla spietata analisi e “pittura” zoliana, una perplessità che parrebbe condivisa almeno da una parte della cultura italiana, se si pensa alla reazione di Emilio Treves quando, nel 1886, rifiutò la raccolta La Sorte di Federico De Roberto asserendo che «non si descrive che quel che v’è di brutto, di marcio, di sensuale nella società».

Panel E: Asking for Justice. Rage, hope, imagination: “sense of justice” in the late modern Italian literature – M.S. Marini (organizer), D. Shalom Vagata (Chair), M. Sereni, M. Rebaudengo, C. Li Mandri
(Room 1-02)
The reflection on “justice” runs throughout the course of human history. One of the most interesting periods, in this sense, was the late modern age: both in Europe and in Italy, the “sense of justice” emerges from a multitude of different reflections. In Italy, at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, the Italian intellectual world questioned the meaning of war, the human costs of industrial progress, human rights and the confrontation between peoples. This happens in conjunction with a new consideration of the imaginative faculty, which assumes a role no longer ancillary to reason, but decisive. This “rediscovery” of imagination implied a re-evaluation of the embodied dimension of knowledge, determining a new, different approach to the human nature considered as a whole. We can find evidence of this tendency mainly in Giacomo Leopardi, but also – among others – in the writings of Foscolo. How, then, is it possible to reconnect the question of justice with the embodied conception of human nature? What did it meant to introduce the notion of imagination in the discussion about justice? What was gained by studying the role of imagination in thinking about justice? Did a focus on imagination imply a change in the principle-centred approaches of the time? And, if so, how? The panel – together with the one proposed by Daniela Shalom Vagata’s Heart, Gestures and Emotions in the 19th century Italian writers – aims to bring new attention to 19th century Italian literature inside the Italian Studies in UK and Ireland. The panel encourages proposals on the broad topic of justice between 18th and 19th centuries. Possible dimensions affected by the topic are: linguistic justice; colonization, diversity; social justice; critique of anthropocentrism; women rights.
Speakers&Papers:
1) Michela Sereni, Unveiling the Revolutionary Metamorphosis: Women's Struggle for Equality and Justice in 19th Century Italy: how can we describe the lengthy struggles for equal rights that have involved women in Italy over the last two centuries? How did this intricate process begin, and what psychological tools were employed during the Italian Risorgimento to prompt society's awareness of the incredible injustices that women endured throughout history? This paper aims to present the transformative journey that propelled 19th-century women from mere objects to active subjects within Italian society - a metamorphosis spurred by their pivotal role in the propaganda of the Risorgimento era. Central in this narrative is the pursuit of justice. Exploring the multifaceted nature of the fight for women's rights in 19th-century Italy, this research investigates diverse manifestations, from the establishment of clandestine female societies to the impactful expressions of artists and writers such as Giannina Milli and Cristina Trivulzio di Belgiojoso, and the political activism of salonniérs like Emilia Toscanelli Peruzzi and Bianca Milesi Mojon. Through an interdisciplinary lens, the study illuminates the hierarchical gender dynamics entrenched in Italian society for centuries, revealing the tools employed by women to subvert their passive and subjugated roles. By highlighting the power of imagination, this research unveils how 19th-century women harnessed their creativity to awaken societal consciousness regarding the brutality of their circumstances. This awakening, unprecedented in its magnitude, propelled Italian women en masse to rally for their rights, marking a historic turning point in the pursuit of gender equality and justice.
2) Maurizio Rebaudengo, «Giustizia ha i dritti suoi»: signs and senses of justice in nineteenth-century Italian libretto according to our contemporary ethics: with the words quoted from Act II, scene VI of I due Foscari (opera tragedy by Francesco Maria Piave, music by Giuseppe Verdi; first performance: 3 November 1844, Rome, Teatro Argentina), the Doge of Venice Francesco Foscari welcomes the members of the Council of Ten to announce the definitive exile to his son Jacopo, who during the night, in the prison cell where he is imprisoned, has been tormented by the apparition of the Count of Carmagnola's ghost. Starting from this significant locus on the theme, the paper intends to examine the signs of “justice” in nineteenth-century librettos (especially in the operas of the four main opera composers: Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti and – above all – Verdi) according to certain concepts elaborated by the American philosopher Martha Nussbaum, particularly in the connection between human dignity and social justice.
3) Chiara Li Mandri,  Eco-Ethical Reflections: How Leopardi Can Help Us Rethink Justice in the Era of Climate Change: in one of his final works, Leopardi envisions a humanity where 'justice and charity' prevail (La Ginestra, v. 153). This essay argues that Leopardi's reflections, encapsulated in this vision, offer a valuable perspective for reevaluating the relationship between individuals and their environment. Leopardi consistently engages with the animal and plant kingdoms, prominently demonstrated in La Ginestra, surpassing the ideal of the Vitruvian man and associated anthropocentric values. Instead, he replaces them with principles embodied by a plant – the broom. Drawing from this model, which transcends the entire animal kingdom and has its roots in the plant world, Leopardi emphasizes the enduring significance of human actions, such as love, friendship, and the 'social chain' [la social catena], despite their finiteness. This enduring significance is akin to the broom's growth in arid terrain – destined to annihilation by lava, yet still perfuming the desert. Leopardi’s work emphasizes the non-centrality of humans in the universe, acknowledging submission to the same natural laws which govern it. Simultaneously, he critiques the elevation of technical progress and the perfectibility of human nature as central values. This critique doesn't oppose progress but condemns naive trust in its inevitable improvement of living conditions, urging greater evaluative caution. Given the aforementioned considerations, Leopardi's thinking gains particular relevance in an era where climate change and the emergence of non-human entities in public discourse demand a heightened considerations for justice.

Panel F: Material Legacies of Fascism: afterlives of totalitarian spaces – G. Pieri (Chair), S. Storchi, C. Burdett, C. Belmonte (Room 1-03)
Over one hundred years after the rise of Fascism, the time is ripe for an evaluation of the afterlives of the material legacies and spaces of the fascist regime, their post-war history and reception, their preservation, and their role and impact in shaping contemporary Italian national and political identities, collective memory and ideas of citizenship. Recent events and debates, both in Italy and internationally, have highlighted the timeliness of this evaluation. Examples include the current restoration and repurposing of fascist buildings and spaces; the international debate around contested monuments, statues and sites of national heritage; a recrudescence of right-wing populism in Italy, Europe and the USA; the deployment of Fascism-associated symbolism in anti-lockdown, anti-restrictions and anti-vaccine activism during the Covid-19 pandemic; the Black Lives Matter movement and the global debate on decolonisation. All of these which have thrown into relief questions about the legacy and memorialisation of Fascism and the formation of 21st century citizenship. Focusing on the material legacies of Fascism and the afterlives of fascist spaces in Italy and the USA from the end of WW2 to the present and using an interdisciplinary perspective, this panel intends to address different aspects of how Italy has dealt with the material legacies of the fascist regime since the end of the Second World War and, more generally, how the afterlives of totalitarian spaces intersect with and affect the creation of public history, cultural memory, collective identities and ideas of citizenship. The panel will also address current debates and offer new methodological responses to the questions of difficult heritage, diasporic identities and decolonisation.
Speakers&Papers:
1) Simona Storchi, Fascist material legacies and the ‘curse’ of beauty: narratives of attachment and belonging beyond ‘difficult’ heritage: using as a case study the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana and the EUR quarter in Rome, this paper explores how narratives have been constructed about some fascist material legacies – particularly artistic and architectural - that have detached them from their ‘fascistness’ and have resignified them in the post-war national discourse and imagination. Regarding some of the artefacts of the fascist regime, the aesthetic dimension seems to have been used to exonerate them from post-war condemnation. Instead, post-war public reception and perception have been built on layered narratives, which have mobilised established identity markers, positive historical associations and artistic connotations to create a response based on identification, attachment and recognition, which have obfuscated the original, highly political and ideological significance of these buildings. Such narratives have been instrumental in the creation of heritage and heritage values and contribute to answering the question as to why some fascist material legacies have managed to escape stigmatization, thus complicating notions of ‘difficult’, ‘dissonant’ and ‘contested’ heritage in the Italian case.
2) Charles Burdett, The metaphysics of fascism and the debris of empire: one of the most important features of Fascism was that it did not propose simply to promote alterations to an already established order but that it sought nothing less than to introduce a change to the collective experience of reality and, most significantly, to the nature of the relation between the individual and society. It was through the imperial project of the regime that this logic was most visible. The accelerated pace of expansionism under Fascism, the brutal operation of the newly constructed empire, and its rapid shattering in the early phases of the Second World War have left many material traces. The paper explores some of the means through which literature and curatorial practice facilitate understanding of the meanings of the material debris of empire.
3) Carmen Belmonte, ‘Difficult heritage’ in Italy: where are we now and where are we going?: in the last years several publications addressed the afterlives and management of Fascist-era and colonial heritage in Italy. These works are mainly focused on material heritage, which, compared to other countries that experienced dictatorships, is widespread throughout Italy and well-preserved for the most part; on the re-emergence of the Fascist and colonial past in art practices and cinema; and on the history of exhibitions.  Among this growing body of studies, several have embraced the concept of ‘difficult heritage‘ to frame these legacies. Drawn from the work of anthropologist Sharon Macdonald dedicated to the analysis of the management strategies for the Nazi rally grounds in Nuremberg, such a definition has been framed by a vivid international academic discussion on the handling of material legacies and sites associated with violence, trauma, and histories of power. With an overwiew of most recent publications on Fascist-era and colonial heritage in Italy, this paper adresses limits and potentialities in the use of this concept as applied to the Italian context togehter with new critical tools. Delving into empirical research, the presentation will consider further gaps to be covered. 

Panel G: New Directions in Medieval Cultures II – C. Bambozzi, G. Corazza, S. Scandella, F. Contin 
(Room 1-04)
Speakers&Papers:
1) Camilla Bambozzi, Dante’s genealogy of love: a diachronic perspective: Dante Alighieri’s idea of love is the object of continuous investigation by the Florentine poet. Over the years, Dante changes much his view on how to define love and what is the right way to pursue it, both in a lyric and theological perspective. In the earliest stage of his career, in the Rime and in the Vita nova, Dante develops the idea of love especially by addressing the figure of Beatrice. In the Vita nova, Dante lays the foundations for a further development of his idea of love which, at this stage of his poetic career, if compared to the Commedia, shows a theological “immaturity”. Indeed, in the Commedia, Dante provides his ultimate and crystallised view of the right and just nature of love, according to a Christian perspective. But the intermediate phases between these two stages of Dante’s poetic development – the Vita nova and the Commedia – are marked by reasonings which are directly addressed in some of Dante’s texts, in poetry and in prose. Specifically, among these, there are some texts which are part of the tenzone with Dante’s friend and fellow poet, Cino da Pistoia. The analysis of these texts provides an interesting and valuable tool to explore the intermediate phases of the development of Dante’s position on the nature of love. The paper aims to bring to light the fundamental turning points behind Dante’s literary, philosophical, and theological theorization of eros, through a precise textual analysis and in a diachronic perspective. 
2) Giovanna Corazza, Italian inland waters from the Alps to the Po. The Garda-Mincio fluvial-lake system (Dante Alighieri, Inferno XX 61-93): although the cosmological aspect of Dante’s Comedy has been the subject of close examination, as has the topography of the underworld kingdoms, the terrestrial geography present in the poem does not seem to have aroused an equally vivid interest, despite constituting a prominent component of the work. The chorographic paintings described by Dante offer a detailed image of the Italian landscape that has still not been sufficiently studied as regards their compositional modalities, variety of sources, and the literary strategy. The proposed paper will focus on the hydraulic system consisting of Lake Garda and its emissary Mincio, a tributary of the Po, which Dante illustrates in Inf. XX 61-93. The flow of the waters is at the heart of Dante’s complex chorography, relating to an area of crucial importance for the economy and short- and long-distance mobility, amongst the trajectories for mainland Europe, the Adriatic, the Apennine passes towards the Centre and the South of the Peninsula. The poet creates a real verbal map and particular attention will be paid to the relationship with contemporary cartography, considering the relatively high number of extant fourteenth and fifteenth-century maps of Lake Garda and the remarkable persistence in subsequent regional cartographies, of elements similar to Dante’s depiction, such as the cartographic field, the orientation, and the selection of the geographical objects. As is the case with other geographical passages of the Commedia, the passage legitimizes the attribution to its author of a non-secondary role in the history of the portrayal of the territory.
3) Stefano Scandella, A Lover’s Mask: the Function of love’s discourse in the philosophical poems of Frederick II’s Itinerary Court: throughout Western European History, masks have developed from physical objects that represented character types in Ancient Greek Theater into objects that represented a deceptive concealment of identity in the Middle Ages. The platonic concept of separation between the body and the soul, the former being a mere physical shell that encased the ‘true’ self, was further transmitted by Augustine in Early Christian thought: “the body itself became a persona, a mask its wearer only escaped at death” (Napier, 1986). In the carnivalesque context, that is one that allows a temporary inversion of official values (Bakhtin, 1968) masks are the physical tool allowing individuals to escape their social established identity and to roleplay. These concepts of persona and fictional identities may be used as tools to have new readings of Early Italian Literature works, in particular representatives of Frederick II’s itinerary court (1225-’50): Giacomo da Lentini, Pier delle Vigne, Jacopo Mostacci, Guido delle Colonne among others. In this context, there is a fundamental formal pretext: the lady sung by the poet functions as a mask or rhetorical device, allowing Frederick the II’s functionaries to debate on social and political power. Inspired by Occitan Poetry on courtly love, these poets inherited the theme of the fin’ amor though in a whole different social context: from the discourse on courtly love we move to a phenomenology of love that serves as a basis for the discovery of the ontology of the human being.
4) Filippo Contin, Defending the New with the Old: a Scholastic Argument in Support of Vernacular in Dante's Convivio: it is well known how, in the Convivio, Dante's approach to philosophy presents at least two elements of strong innovation with respect to the most widespread approach among the university masters of the time: first, philosophy is conceived by him not as elitist knowledge reserved for a restricted circle of individuals, but as an indispensable tool for every man for the realisation of his own natural end; second, he chooses to use the vernacular instead of Latin precisely to broaden the scope of his popularising project. A large part of the first treatise is therefore dedicated to the theoretical justification of this use. The present proposal intends to show how Dante adopts vocabulary, images and arguments drawn from the specialised university philosophical debate in support of his own defence of the vernacular, i.e. precisely at the moment when he most distances himself from the elitism proper to the university magisterium. Dante's originality thus lies above all in the profoundly original reuse of arguments proper to university knowledge in entirely new contexts. To exemplify this thesis, my aim is to analyse Convivio, I xɪɪɪ 4. In particular, it highlights how the core of the passage in question is an argument by analogy inspired, on the one hand, by the way Aristotle sets the relationship between nature and art and, on the other, by the paripatetic-derived philosophical debate on the series of essentially ordered causes. Particular attention is paid to certain commentaries on Metaphysica and Liber de causis, in which it is canonical to juxtapose the same examples (human generation and the forging of a knife) found in Dante's text.
 

Panel H: The David Rizzio Project: David Rizzio across Arts and Media - C. Paltrinieri (Chair), E.Patti, A. Zamperini, T. Sinclair, D. Di Rosa (Room 1-05)
This roundtable will showcase some of the research questions and findings of the project 'David Rizzio at the Scottish Court', funded by the Royal Society of Edinburgh (2023). David Rizzio (1533-1566), also known as Davide Riccio,  first joined Mary Queen of Scots' court as a musician, but he was then promoted to private secretary a couple of years later, playing a significant role in the scenario of religious conflicts which marked the Scottish Reformation. These reasons, together with his close relationship with Mary Queen of Scots and his tragic murder at the hands of the Queen's husband and other Protestant lords, have made him a highly romanticised historical character, represented in the arts (painting, cinema, literature, theatre, music) for centuries. Despite the centrality of David Rizzio in Scottish and European history, there are barely any scholarly publications on either his political and cultural role in the sixteenth century or his artistic influence and reception in the following centuries. By bringing together experts from multiple disciplines, including History, History of Art, Scottish Literature and Culture, Opera, and Italian Studies, this project, re-funded by the RSE in 2024-2025, will provide the first comprehensive account on Rizzio's life and afterlife across the arts. In this roundtable, we will screen the 30-min documentary which was written and produced as part of one of the outcomes of the project, and present 3 lightning talks about on the afterlife of Rizzio across the visual arts, cinema, and opera.

Panel A: From Page to Stage and Vice Versa: Theatre and Novella from Boccaccio to Pirandello II – E.Bellia (Chair), M.Leta, G. Lo Castro, V.Taddei, , A.Carrai (Room 0-02)
These panels aim to discuss the multiple entanglements throughout the history of Italian literature between theatre and novella from the fourteenth to the twentieth century, thus addressing questions of hybridisation of literary genres, versatility of writers, and intermedial translation. The interaction between the two genres has been broadly explored in relation to specific periods (Longo 2004; Telve 2004; Barberi Squarotti, 2006). These panels originally propose to tackle this subject on a wider chronological remit, thus favouring the identification of different trends of cross-fertilisation over the centuries. Starting from the analysis of the Decameron as a veritable “zibaldone” – to borrow Nino Borsellino’s famous expression – for Renaissance playwrights, the first panel will address the iteration and the distortion of novelistic topoi on early modern stage in Italy and beyond, focusing in particular on the analysis of key characters in the sixteenth-century imagery, from the clumsy pedant to the fearsome Turk. Through the examination of socially marginalised characters, deemed “alien” to their communities, this panel will advance knowledge of the socio-cultural dynamics of Medieval and Renaissance Italy. The second panel will explore the transformation in playwrights’ approach to the novelle, from the “zibaldone” method, the dominant paradigm in early modernity, to the scaffolding one, a method consisting of authors’ use of their short stories as preparatory work for their own plays. Through a close reading of the works of some of the most prominent nineteenth- and twentieth-century Italian playwrights, the validity of this model will be at times proved and contested, thus foregrounding the fluidity of these intertextual, transgeneric, and intermedial relations.
Speakers&Papers:
1) Giuseppe Lo Castro, Dal racconto alla scena, dalla scena al racconto. La scrittura naturalista e il teatro: l’intervento intende indagare il rapporto tra scrittura narrativa e teatro nei maggiori autori del naturalismo italiano. In primo luogo si metterà a fuoco la teoria del dramma naturalista e la convinzione dell’inferiorità del genere teatro rispetto alle forme narrative. In secondo luogo si approfondirà la presenza poliedrica del teatro nella scrittura di Capuana, Verga e De Roberto. Questo è stato terreno ampiamente e pervicacemente praticato di sperimentazione, e si è servito in larga prevalenza delle novelle come repertorio di soggetti da cui trarre materia per un vero e proprio laboratorio di trascrizione. Non manca però un singolare caso rovesciato, Dal tuo al mio di Verga è infatti l’esito di un passaggio quasi filologico dal copione per la scena al romanzo. Da un altro lato la forma narrativa, specie quella romanzesca, come nel caso emblematico del Mastro-don Gesualdo e poi dei Viceré, esibisce una forte tendenza in direzione dell’ipertrofia del dialogo e della scena rispetto alla narrazione evenemenziale e alla descrizione. In questo senso si intendono rileggere anche alcune prove di Verga specie dopo Novelle rusticane, accostandovi la scrittura del dialogo umoristico di Capuana e i programmatici Processi verbali di De Roberto la cui prefazione teorizza la necessità del predominio del dialogo ai fini della costruzione del romanzo impersonale, sottolineando anche la significativa presenza di gesti, mimica e prossemica. In questa direzione si leggerà anche la presenza della recita e della finzione, come del mondo del teatro in molte novelle come nelle forme della vita che il naturalismo s’incarica di sondare.
2) Matteo Leta, Le declinazioni possibili de La lupa di Giovanni Verga tra novella e dramma: le intersezioni e le riscritture tra teatro e novella occupano, sin dagli albori della tradizione letteraria italiana, uno spazio centrale nella produzione e nella fortuna di innumerevoli scrittori, da Boccaccio a Pirandello, passando per Anton Francesco Grazzini e Girolamo Parabosco. Lo scopo di questa comunicazione si concentrerà, però, su un singolo caso di studio: la riscrittura per il palcoscenico de La Lupa di Giovanni Verga (1880). Dopo la pubblicazione della novella su rivista e in Vita dai campi, l’autore decise di adattarla per il teatro, inizialmente come melodramma, quindi facendone un dramma in prosa. La pièce, rappresentata il 26 gennaio 1896 al Teatro Gerbino di Torino dalla compagnia Andò-Leigheb, conoscerà anche il torchio da stampa nello stesso anno. L’opera di Verga, dunque, si consolida sia come testo novellistico che teatrale, aprendosi ad uno studio comparativo e intertestuale che si concentrerà sulle modalità attraverso cui lo scrittore siciliano ha adattato la novella. In questa prospettiva, il nostro contributo si propone di censire in modo esaustivo le diversioni e le profonde affinità che, sotto diversi profili (narrativo, lessicale, linguistico) si instaurano tra La lupa novella e La lupa dramma. Ne risulterà un affresco composito che metterà in luce non solo le fratture, ma anche le continuità che si possono tracciare tra due testi concepiti per una diffusione e una fruizione assai diverse.
3) Valeria Taddei, Pirandello's Stories and Plays: Inner and Outer Theatre: the close relationship between short stories and theatre in Pirandello's work is well-attested by the sheer number of plays based on previously published short stories. In combination with Pirandello's view of roleplay as an inherent part of human interaction, and with the inherently theatrical language and style of his novelle, this philological evidence has long led scholarship to consider his stories as little more than preparatory work for theatrical pieces. As this reductive view of Pirandello's storytelling has now been rightly challenged, the complex relationship between narrative and theatrical development also needs to be reassessed. This paper will explore how the existential theme of roleplay is developed in Pirandello's story "Quando si è capito il giuoco" (1913) and the play Il giuoco delle parti (1918), its theatrical transposition. Both the story and the play stage a conflict that unfolds between the characters, but also within them, as they must choose for themselves which part to play. The analysis will consider the direction of Pirandello's significant re-elaboration, which led one of his shortest stories to become his longest play, focusing on how it affects the balance between the parts and the dynamics of inner and outer roleplay. The overall aim is to highlight how the short story and the theatrical piece play to their strengths in bringing out the inner and outer theatre of each character, and to assess what specific contribution the earlier narrative elaboration of this dramatic nucleus brought to the later play.

Panel B: «Arricchire il proprio Paese di tesori». Forme epistolari del transfert culturale nella storia della letteratura italiana II (Il Novecento) – A.Zangrandi (Chair), F.Danelon, G.Perosa, F.Barboni, M.Natale, C.Sorrentino (Room 0-03)
The recent translation of Pascale Casanova’s La Repubblica mondiale delle Lettere (Nottetempo, 2023) brings us back to the possibility of reasoning no longer, or not only, on a particular national literature, but on the (direct, or indirect) relations it has had with other literatures. Starting from a happy metaphor by Paul Valéry, with which the writer defines intellectual exchanges in terms of a “spiritual economy”, a literary “stock exchange of values”, it may become interesting, once again, as Michel Espagne already did, to investigate the history of European and non-European literature through the lens of cultural transfer. The most frequent studies in this field focus on literary translation, the reception of foreign authors and works, editorial fortunes and the circulation, in manuscript or in print, of a literary work outside national borders. In such a potentially wide and heterogeneous framework, epistolography (or rather the study of private or fictitious correspondence between the protagonists of the cultural and literary scene) could, perhaps, constitute an interesting guideline for moving in a more linear and homogeneous manner in this particular niche of Comparatistics. The “epistolary function”, through which we would like to investigate the phenomenon of the Kulturtransfer, is not only understood on the synchronic level of the abscissa (dialogue with others) and on that of the ordinate (reception, tradition...), but intersects a third level, which is that inherent in the polymorphism of the epistolary genre. Either as a paratext – take for example the dedicatory letter at the beginning of a literary work – or as the form chosen for the writing of a treatise or newspaper article, the epistle has constituted a form of expression through which it is possible to reconstruct the intellectual debate, inside and outside national borders, that has arisen around an often, but not only, literary case.
Speakers&Papers:
1) Massimo Natale, Fra Irma e Larbaud: dai carteggi di Montale: Eugenio Montale’s letters have recently returned to the center of critical debate thanks to the publication of the very important correspondence with Sergio Solmi (Ciò che è nostro non ci sarà tolto mai, edited by F. D’Alessandro, Quodlibet, 2021). As the Montale reader and critic of others – that of the Secondo mestiere – the epistolograph can also give several insights and hints to scholars; but the correspondences are, more generally, a very useful tool to reconstruct Montalian readings, interests, idiosyncrasies. The present paper aims to take stock of the study of Montale’s letters, focusing in particular on the correspondence with Irma Brandeis (published in 2006, by Mondadori, edited by R. Bettarini, G. Manghetti and F. Zabagli) and especially on the less investigated but also fascinating correspondence with Valéry Larbaud (published in 2003, by Archinto, edited by M. Sonzogni), which could become an excellent point of observation for the relations between the poet of the Ossi di seppia and the French culture of the 1920s-30s.
2) Giulia Perosa, Reti epistolari e traiettorie dell’opera di Svevo: in the context of a wider inquiry into the global dissemination of Svevo’s oeuvre, this paper aims to examine the translations of his work, analyising the materials kept in the Fondo Eredi Svevo of the Museo sveviano in Trieste. This collection contains the correspondence between Livia Veneziani – Svevo’s widow – and numerous personalities linked with the author’s literary production, including Italian and foreign publishers, translators, critics, directors, and others. Of the nearly 4,000 archived documents, a considerable number relates to the translation initiatives and dissemination of Svevo’s works abroad. This aspect holds significant importance in the literary evaluations of the writer in Italy, as testified the role of James Joyce, Benjamin Crémieux, and Valery Larbaud, who prompted the “Svevo case”. The talk will begin with a brief overview of the translations of Svevo’s works in Europe. The materials provided by the Fondo Eredi Svevo will be the main focus of discussion during the rest of the talk. The most crucial epistolary evidence regarding these translations will be showcased, followed by an selective analysis of their origin and reception. The correspondence with publishers and translators will thus allow to reconstruct some stages within the history of Svevo’s work, while also providing insight into the publishing dynamics, trajectories, and reasons for Svevo’s presence outside of Italy.
3) Chiara Sorrentino, «Your Buddy Ces». Cesare Pavese e la questione dello slang americano: “Spero si ricorderà il gran seccatore che sono stato con Lei durante il Suo ultimo anno torinese”: although it may seem an unusual opening for a letter addressed to an acquaintance, this incipit constituted the beginning of a friendship (and also an epistolary exchange) based on curiosity about a nation that, at that time, was acquiring a key role in the world cultural scene, the United States. The seventy letters exchanged between Cesare Pavese and his friend Anthony Chiuminatto during the years between 1929 and 1933 are a precious testimony of the Piedmontese author’s fascination with the USA; a vivid interest that invested every aspect of Yankee culture and that led the Italian writer to attempt the translation of numerous American novels, as well as to publish important essays on contemporary authors from overseas. One of  the most debated and interesting aspects of the correspondence are the disquisitions on American slang: the author of Santo Stefano Belbo seemed to have, in fact, a real obsession with the linguistic rendering of some idioms and phrases of people’s speech found in the novels he translated. Starting from the linguistic analysis of the thoughts about slang (whose first repercussions can be traced back to the language adopted by Pavese in his letters) it is possible to trace the genesis of the dialogue between Italy and the United States, destined to constitute a process of reciprocal cultural transfer between the two countries, moreover during a complex and delicate historical period such as the fascist dictatorship, demonstrating how sometimes language can constitute the first meeting point between two different cultures.
4) Fabio Danelon, Spigolature nel carteggio di Alberto Vigevani: the speech intends to examine the correspondence of the Milanese writer and publisher with some Italian writers (Gadda, Bassani, Calvino) and critics (Contini, Romagnoli, Baldacci), partially unpublished. It documents the variety of relationships built by Vigevani and the opening of an epistolary dialogue where an international culture is relevant in the years around the Second World War and in the following decades.

Panel C: Ekphrasis as Transmedia Creating Mimesis from Antiquity to the Digital Age II – A. Moroncini (Chair), J. Parodi, S. Parisi, E. Zappalà, C. Portesine (Room 0-04)
Originally intended as an exercise of rhetorical skills – with the Greek noun ἔκφρασις standing for a vividly descriptive speech with pictorial characteristic – the ensuing definition of ekphrasis as the literary response to a visual representation (and vice versa) found the most appropriate afterlife with Horace’s coined phrase ut pictura poesis. This phrase came to stand for a whole tradition of inter-artistic comparison and / or mutually illuminating relation which has survived not without challenges, such as the one put forward in the 18th century by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. Nowadays, however, the concept of ekphrasis aiming to make the invisible visible has received increasing scholarly attention also in other art/media forms, such as cinematography, comics, music, photography and television, so much so that ekphrasis may now be defined as the representation in one medium of any description composed in another medium (Siglind Bruhn, Musical Ekphrasis: Composers Responding to Poetry and Painting, 2000). Additionally, the ekphratic merit of ‘listening’ to images, pursued by contemporary multimedia encounters, encourages us to consider “‘accommodations’ for people with disabilities as adding artistic and rhetorical value, not simply transposing or distilling meanings” (Jay Dolmage, Disability Rhetoric,140). This panel aims to trace the origins and the ensuing uses of ekphrasis throughout the centuries, from antiquity to the present day, in order to assess the great variety of ekphratic discourses in the Humanities (narrative and poetic ekphrasis, pictured and picture-less, printed, screen, and musical) and to investigate the current expansion of ekphrasis in terms of transmedia encounters, social and political dimensions.
Speakers&Papers:
1) Jacopo Parodi, La seduzione della filologia. Testo e immagine nel “Longhi” di Contini e Garboli: il presente intervento affronterà il problema dell’ekphrasis all’interno di uno dei nodi più interessanti sul fronte dei rapporti tra testo letterario e immagine nel Novecento italiano. Si fa riferimento alla figura del massimo storico dell’arte italiano del secolo, Roberto Longhi, considerato da Gianfranco Contini uno straordinario scrittore, degno di essere studiato come tale e, quindi, inserito nel canone della letteratura italiana contemporanea con un’edizione delle sue opere scelte per i «Meridiani» Mondadori, curata nel 1973 dallo stesso Contini. Contini ha a più riprese ricordato di aver tratto diretta ispirazione dalla scrittura di Longhi e dal suo complementare approccio di attribuzionista, di connaisseur, tanto per il proprio modo di concepire e parlare di un testo letterario, quanto per il metodo filologico di ricostruzione e attribuzione dei testi.  Si cercherà di affrontare, quindi, il debito che la filologia di Contini intrattiene con l’opera di Longhi scrittore, critico e conoscitore d’arte, attraverso una prospettiva in parte inedita. Che cos’è per Longhi un’opera d’arte, una volta trasposta in parole? E, soprattutto, l’operazione di Contini è qualcosa di accettabile nei confronti dello statuto degli studi letterari e filologici? Per rispondere a questi interrogativi, si ricorrerà al dattiloscritto preparatorio di una relazione tenuta, su invito e pressante insistenza dello stesso Contini, da Cesare Garboli al primo grande convegno su Longhi tenutosi nell’ottobre del 1980 a Firenze. Questo testo, poi pubblicato più volte nel corso della vita di Garboli, anche con il titolo di Longhi lettore e di Longhi filologo, si presenta qui in una forma che tradisce in modo esplicito il debito con il “Longhi” di Contini e, ancora più esplicitamente, lo affronta cercando di prenderne le distanze. In altri termini, Garboli cerca di superarlo proponendo un proprio “Longhi”, tentando al tempo stesso di capire e analizzare nel profondo quello di Contini.
2) Sara Parisi, Unravelling the Truth Through Art: Ekphrastic Strategies in Leonardo Sciascia and Vincenzo Consolo: in his 1996 preface to Pino Di Silvestro’s Le epigrafi di Leonardo Sciascia, Vincenzo Consolo comments on Sciascia’s production by stating that «amava il disegno, Sciascia, le gravures, acqueforti e puntesecche, che, con il loro segno nero si potevano accostare alla scrittura, erano anzi per lui un’altra affascinante forma di scrittura, simile allo scrivere che è “imprevedibile quanto il vivere”». It is significant that it was Consolo who made this observation on the consubstantial nature of art and literature in Sciascia’s work, since the production of both authors is informed by a rich dialogue between art and images. This paper aims to scrutinize the ekphrastic strategies adopted by the two writers in their novels to see how they are used to convey a political-ethical discourse and also to establish what a contemporary reader could find relevant for his age. I will use Sciascia’s Todo Modo and Consolo’s Il sorriso dell’ignoto marinaio as case studies, the reasons for this choice lying in the correspondence between the use of art in relation to the unravelling of the political theme. The ekphrastic strategies used by the two authors are significantly different and denote a diverse approach to the rendering of the visual theme in literature, but at the same time they meet halfway in their common need to analyse the relationship that literature has with history, civic commitment and art.  My analysis will show how, in both novels, art ultimately serves the purpose of disclosing truth by spurring the protagonists to read the images, to look beyond appearances and make connections with reality. Ekphrasis is indeed «designed to produce a viewing subject»,1 because it guides the readers’ eye and teaches them to become active observers, without passively submitting to the description of an artwork.  
3) Emiliano Zappalà, Muoversi tra copie di copie: funzione politica dell’ecfrasi letteraria nella narrativa contemporanea: nel numero della rivista «Between» intitolato Avverare la realtà. Letteratura e orizzonte politico i curatori si interrogavano sul modo in cui è possibile rappresentare la realtà in un mondo in cui la tecnologia mischia ormai inesorabilmente tra loro vero e falso (2015). Qualche anno più tardi Nele Wynards rifletteva su come possa ancora avere l’immaginazione influenzare la comprensione i fatti che ci circondano, al tempo della «realtà alternativa» (2020).A mio parere tali domande stanno al centro del percorso artistico di molti scrittori di oggi, impegnati attraverso la narrativa nella ricerca di espedienti che consentano di scandagliare una realtà sempre più sfuggente. In Autori come Genna, Falco, Lagioia o Raimo questa tensione è risolta attraverso il ricorso a pratiche di ecfrasi narrativa che, anziché rappresentare direttamente il reale, descrivono e ripropongono in forma verbale la sua copia digitale e mediatica. Questi che passaggi fortemente intermediali, che ri-rappresentano materiali fotografici, filmati giornalistici ed estratti televisivi, hanno oggi un profondo valore politico e tendono a un doppio obiettivo: da un lato, trovano una escamotage retorica per aggirare i precetti anacronistici della mimesis, generando sofisticate forme di «realismo dell’irrealtà» (Simonetti, 2020); dall’altro, scompongo il discorso mediatico, per suggerire ai lettori una riflessione sulle modalità attraverso cui la verità è oggi confezionata e veicolata, inducendo a una presa di coscienza socialmente sempre più esiziale (Lorusso, 2018). Tutto questo induce a rileggere e re-interpretare sia la funzione letteraria dell’ecfrasi, rielaborando il concetto oraziano dell’ut pictura poiesis; che a proporre un suo ruolo chiave all’interno del dibattito sull’impegno letterario e sul «ritorno al realismo» (Donnarumma, 2006). Nel mio intervento mi propongo di inquadrare – in una prima parte – tale discorso teorico, offrendone alcune coordinate fondamentali. Nella seconda parte, mi concentrerò sulle particolarità e sulla funzione politica dell’ecfrasi narrativa all’interno del dibattito letterario contemporaneo. Nell’ultima parte mi dedicherò all’analisi dei testi, offrendo esempi concreti del fenomeno in questione.
4) Chiara Portesine, Nuove forme di committenza pubblica nell'ecfrasi italiana degli anni Duemila, tra musei e rete: con l’avvento della Rete e il venir meno di alcune comunità interdisciplinari (tipiche, ad esempio, delle avanguardie storiche e delle neoavanguardie), l’ecfrasi ha progressivamente modificato il proprio campo di applicazione. Da una scrittura che nasceva frequentemente dalla ‘committenza amicale’ di pittori e scultori (come si può riscontrare nella vasta produzione delle poesie scritte per cataloghi d’arte, brochure o altre sedi editoriali effimere), si è passati a una selezione più dispersiva e legata al gusto, personale e monadico, del singolo poeta. Avendo a disposizione di click l’intero ‘supermarket artistico’ della postmodernità, il poeta è portato spesso a costruire un canone fai-da-te, esterno a qualsiasi logica generazionale o estetica, semplicemente, plurale. In questo assortimento personalistico, a essere privilegiate sono soprattutto le iconografie già canonizzate e manualistiche, da Leonardo Da Vinci a Marcel Duchamp.  Questo intervento si propone, invece, di mappare alcune potenziali inversioni di rotta rispetto al dilagante soggettivismo dell’ecfrasi. Concentrandomi sullo specifico della situazione italiana degli anni Duemila, proverò ad analizzare due progetti di moderna ‘committenza’ pubblica che hanno stimolato alcuni poeti a realizzare delle poesie dedicate a opere d’arte contemporanee, scelte dai singoli scrittori oppure proposte, come un ‘compito per casa’, dai soggetti promotori dell’iniziativa. Largo spazio verrà riservato alla call aperta dalla rivista digitale «layout magazine». Nel novembre del 2021 la rivista aveva lanciato una rubrica (intitolata significativamente La Galleria) che avrebbe poi accolto dieci ecfrasi di due opere astratte (Parallelepipedo e scarabocchio rosso di Gabriele Romei e Numero 110 di Stefano Casati). Le poesie, pubblicate nel numero successivo della rivista, hanno fornito l’innesco per parlare del significato attuale delle categorie di ecfrasi e di pittura astratta, in una felice alleanza tra prassi e sistematizzazione teorica.  Un affondo specifico verrà dedicato anche al progetto della «Casa Museo Boschi Di Stefano» che, durante la paralisi degli spostamenti dovuta all’epidemia di SARS-covid 2019, aveva chiesto ad alcuni poeti di generazioni diverse di scegliere un’opera dall’inventario del Museo e di descriverla in versi. Per ovviare alla chiusura dei musei e all’impossibilità di vedere materialmente le opere, i curatori avevano commissionato delle ecfrasi ‘sostitutive’, che fornissero ai visitatori delle parafrasi a distanza (e non delle semplici riproduzioni fotografiche) dei quadri in mostra. L’ecfrasi diventa, così, uno strumento imprevisto per arginare un trauma collettivo, un modo per dare forma a un mondo che, per le restrizioni sanitarie, era provvisoriamente sparito dalla nostra esperienza scopica. 

Panel D: Philosophical and Psychological Approaches to Literature – T. Grandi, F. Marchetti, F. Baldinotti - S. Genovesi (Chair) (Room 0-05)
Speakers&Papers:
1) Tommaso Grandi, The Flight and The Fall. Imagination and Subconscious in Daniele Del Giudice’s works: the theme of flight is present in each Del Giudice’s work. It can be found in the short stories of Staccando l’ombra da terra as in the novels that made him notorious to the great public, Lo stadio di Wimbledon and Atlante occidentale. It’s a common theme in the italian and world literature from the twentieth century, that had to take into account the diffusion of the airplane mobility, not just in a diegetic perspective, by extending the narrative in terms of space, but also as a container which men and women tend to fill with their most deep and irrational fears, the most obscure and unclear imaginations. By this meaning, this paper would like to analyze the theme of flight in Del Giudice’s works as a different dimension, an imaginative landscape, the kingdom of the subconscious and of the possibility of question it. For the analyses I intend to use, on one side, the instruments of twentieth-century psychology of imagination (Sartre, Bachelard); on the other side, classic Freudian psychoanalysis and Ludwig Binswanger’s thought (particularly for the notions of Verticality and Horizontality used in the exam of Ibsen’s works). The aim of this work is not just that of clarifying the role of flight inside of Del Giudice’s fiction, but also that of enlightening some fundamental aspects of the theme in contemporary literature.  
2) Filippo Marchetti, Alberto Radicati of Passeran’s Critique of Eucharist between Skepticism and Materialism: the aim of the paper is to reconstruct Alberto Radicati of Passeran’s – the ‘first enlightened Italian thinker’ according to Piero Gobetti – twofold critique of eucharist. The argumentative strategies of this philosopher can broadly be distinguished in two skeptical arguments and in putting the ontology underling the eucharist in a materialistic setting. The paper is divided in three parts. In the first, I address the narrative framework of Radicati’s autobiographical A Comical and True Account of the Modern Cannibal’s Religion. In this work, the encounter with otherness allows the philosopher to call into question the customs in which he had been raised and those in which he lived in early eighteenth-century Turin – thus doubting of his paternal religion. Secondly, I consider the skeptical arguments against eucharist. Starting from Pierre Bayle’s entry on Pyrrho in the Historical and Critical Dictionary, Radicati argues that this catholic dogma clashes with two principles, namely the identity principle (according to which one body cannot be in two places at the same time) and the substance-accident relationship (according to which an accident is ontologically grounded in a substance that keep it into existence). This last argument is developed by Radicati into a pantheistic conclusion. Radicati’s endorsing a form of monistic materialism in which all things are in perpetual motion and in continual change puts Catholics in front of a dilemma: if the eucharistic dogma had been true, then all the atoms would have become gods themselves.
3) Fiorella Baldinotti, "E tu padre non puoi essere felice..."/ "and you, father, can't be glad: Ida Dalser and her imprisonment in S. Clemente Hospital: my paper will be focused on the story of Ida Dalser, the first wife of Mussolini. I'll speak about her experience inside the S.Clemente- Hospital in Venice where she was prisoned until her died. I'll show how her free independence and honesty attempted at the fascist regime and how it produced hard consequences on her life. Through the reading of Ida Dalser's letters and telegrams, that she wrote, but which never reached the recipient, we can understand all the pain of a woman who was arbitrarily deprived of her freedom and removed from her son. The medical records refer to specious pathologies, reporting episodes not verified during the period of internment, deliberately altered in an almost paradoxical manner in the contents and tones, but she maintained until the end an extraordinary awareness and rationality about what was happening, in relation to those who were responsible for the proceedings brought against her and her son.

Panel E: Politics, Migration and Literature in Post-War Italy – G. Miglianti, P. Polanowska, L. Basilone - G. Bartolini (Chair) (Room 1-02)
Speakers&Papers:
1) Giovanni Miglianti, “Non solo in Lager!”: Analogy and the Holocaust: drawing upon close reading and affect theory, this paper investigates the relevance of analogy in Italian Holocaust testimonies, with special reference to the writings and public speeches of Primo Levi and Lidia Beccaria Rolfi. Moving beyond the Holocaust uniqueness debate, these survivors grounded their testimony in the constant analogy between their extreme experiences within the concentration camps and the ordinary lives of their readers and listeners. The proposed contribution begins by presenting analogy, or rather imperfect analogy as the key rhetorical figure of Levi’s I sommersi e i salvati and Beccaria Rolfi’s L’esile filo della memoria. Levi’s last book, introducing readers to the “paradossale analogia tra vittima e oppressore”, draws analogies not only between the “microcosmo del Lager” and the “macrocosmo della società totalitaria”, but also between life within and outside Auschwitz. Understatement plays a crucial role in these comparisons, with several analogies occurring in brackets––e.g., “Il discorso sul privilegio (non solo in Lager!) è delicato.” In L’esile filo della memoria, Beccaria Rolfi’s own homecoming story relies on analogy to show the continuity of oppression between fascist and post-fascist Italy. The second part of the paper focuses on Beccaria Rolfi and Levi’s activity as public witnesses to the Holocaust in Italian schools for over three decades, from the 1960s onward. Based on original research conducted in the Beccaria Rolfi private, this presentation analyses her and Levi’s practice of comparing the Holocaust to contemporary events taking place in Vietnam, Cambodia, Argentina, etc, as well as their reflections on such a method.  
2) Patrycja Polanowska, Artisti ed intellettuali polacchi in Italia nel secondo Novecento. Tra Gustaw Herling-Grudziński e Jerzy Grotowski: Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, l’autore del famoso libro autobiografico Un mondo a parte, durante la cerimonia di conferimento dell’Ordine dell’Aquila Bianca all’Istituto Polacco di Roma il 5 giugno 1998 dichiarò: «Quando mi sono stabilito a Napoli, nel 1955, vigeva ancora la tutela comunista su gran parte della vita culturale italiana; cosa essenziale per me che ero scrittore e per lo più anticomunista. Mi sono sentito quindi come un lebbroso. Non che il fenomeno sia stato limitato all’Italia. […] Si trattava del famoso “progressismo” occidentale, per il quale un esule dai felici Paesi dell’Est non poteva che essere per definizione un animale strano e pericoloso, comunque da tenere alla larga. Non a caso il “Paese Sera” dell’epoca pubblicò la richiesta di espellermi dall’Italia». Quello di Herling-Grudziński non fu un caso isolato. Molti intellettuali polacchi arrivati in Italia nel 1943 con il II Corpo di Władysław Anders, pur avendo contribuito fortemente alla liberazione d’Italia dall’occupazione nazista, dopo la fine della guerra emigrarono in Inghilterra o in Francia, a causa del clima sociale e politico di allora. Per capire meglio i rapporti culturali fra i due paesi dalla fine della seconda guerra mondiale fino alla caduta del Muro di Berlino, l’intervento si propone di esaminare due casi contrastanti: si comincerà con la rivista “Tempo Presente” fondata da Nicola Chiaromonte ed Ignazio Silone, nel cui comitato direttivo fu lo stesso Herling-Grudziński, per passare poi al Teatro Laboratorio di Jerzy Grotowski, la sua ricezione in Italia e la collaborazione del regista polacco con Eugenio Barba.
3) Linetto Basilone, Travelling as political engagement controvoglia: Alberto Moravia’s writings on China in the 1936, 1967 and 1986: over half a century, Moravia visited China three times, producing valuable travel accounts and completely different portrayals of the country, as well as its people, culture and society. As a young reporter for Gazzetta del popolo in 1936, he narrated a dying civilization facing intestine wars and foreign interference. In 1967, he depicted the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the years of the Cultural Revolution and the so-called Maoist utopia. In 1986, Moravia produced a disillusioned account of post-Maoist China for Corriere della Sera. While Moravia’s travelogue La Rivoluzione Culturale in Cina (1967) is internationally renowned and often regarded as an example of the Western Intellectuals’ fascination for the PRC, his 1936 and 1986 travel narratives are nearly unheard of. Moravia’s accounts of China are evidence of a systematic interest of the author for the Chinese society, culture and politics. In this comparative study, I situate the Alberto Moravia travels and his travel writings on China in the canonical production of knowledge on the country in relation to and Italy’s intellectual background in three consecutive timeframes, 1930s, 1960s and 1980s. I argue that Moravia’s travel narratives display a dialogue between the dominant rhetoric on China in each period and Moravia’s political engagement and world view, themselves changing and evolving in time. Furthermore, I suggest the textual and political nature of the Chinas described by Moravia and the role of such narratives to reinforce specific political identities and images of Italy.

Panel F: Disrupting Artistic Boundaries from Futurism to Digital Convergence: Intermedia in Italy – C. Brook, F. Mussgnug, G. Pieri (Room 1-03)

One of the strongest cultural forces driving Italian creativity in the 20th and 21st century has been the increasingly close interrelations between artistic media. Taking a chronological approach, we will share some ‘snapshots’ of instances and artists that have dismantled boundaries between the arts, reconceiving how the arts and media intersect, and how the contact zones between them shift. The work we'll discuss is the first attempt at a large-scale mapping of this cultural force in Italy, which has received tantalizing, but only fragmentary, charting up to now. Confronting such vast cultural material over a substantial period has presented significant challenges. We will discuss the challenges of this kind of cultural mapping and the solutions which we finally adopted in the co-authored book, Intermedia in Italy (Legenda, spring 2024). This lecture and book presentation is grounded in the collaborative work undertaken by the Interdisciplinary Italy research group (www.interdisciplinaryitaly.org), funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). It presents findings and methodologies from Intermedia in Italy: From Futurism to Digital Convergence (Legenda, 2024), co-authored by Clodagh Brook, Florian Mussgnug and Giuliana Pieri.  

Panel G: Against the system: the Antiacademism of the Three Crowns  - S. Gilson (Chair), L. Dell'Oso, P. Chiaranunt (Room 1-04)
Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio share a striking attitude of opposition to the intellectual establishments of their time. Whether it was Beatrice in Paradiso against those who “filosofeggiano” in the “scuole”, or Petrarch against the Averroists, or Boccaccio’s lambasting of lawyers, theologians, and the idle rich in the Genealogie, the Three Crowns always tried to dialogue with, but also to challenge and discuss the ideas of the academic world in works ranging from Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia, Convivio, Commedia, Monarchia to Petrarch’s De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia, De otio religioso, De vita solitaria, Invectiva contra medicum and Boccaccio’s Decameron and Genealogie. This panel will explore the anti- academic spirit of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio as a powerful critique and alternative to the dominant ideologies and methodologies of their time. Through comparative analysis, papers may explore how their outsider positions enriched their narratives, fueled their innovations, and cemented their legacies as transformative forces in literature and beyond.
Speakers&Papers:
1) Lorenzo Dell’Oso, The Convivio in Bologna among “judges and lawyers, doctors, and almost all clerics” (Cv III.xi.10): a militant text?: this paper sheds light on some unpublished medieval and philosophical quodlibetal disputes that took place in the Bolognese Studium around the early 1300s, i.e. at the most likely time when Dante could have been in Bologna writing the Convivio. The comparison between the ideas transmitted by these magistri and the theses of the Convivio will make it possible to define Dante’s “positioning” on certain subjects and, more generally, to better understand the way in which the Convivio had to relate to its "contexts". The analysis of the knowledge conveyed by these disputes will make it possible to grasp Dante’s positions on issues that must have been felt in the Bolognese intellectual milieu: from the length of human life, to the philosopher’s knowledge of God, to the functioning of the intellect in relation to the body. Dante, who was not a member of the Studium, acquired this information, made the technical vocabulary his own and used it for his own theses. His definition of the “true philosopher” seems to attack the elitist image of the professional philosopher who knows everything - an image that was publicly proclaimed in Bologna by a professor of philosophy himself; the use of the same technical vocabulary allows him to outline the functioning of the intellect in the act of knowing and to testify to its inability to fully know separate substances. Above all, the paper will show how Dante arrives at a position that is different, if not opposite, to that held in one of the questions examined, where it is claimed that only the professional philosopher would have the possibility of "understanding" God, insofar as he is intelligible. This is a thesis that Dante rejects in his Convivio. Can we therefore speak of the Convivio as an “anti-academic”, if not “militant” text?
2) Peerawat Chiaranunt, Physical and Theological Presuppositions in Paradiso II. 34-45 (with Notes on Cecco d’Ascoli):  throughout the Purgatorio’s depictions of bodies overlapping in place, Dante was no doubt inspired by an epic trope: the failed embrace between Aeneas and his father. Yet in Paradiso II. 34-39, the physically impossible phenomenon of bodies interpenetrating—this time, the pilgrim and the lunar sphere—is invested with a new technical valence. This paper studies the philosophical presuppositions and significance of this episode, comparing it with how one contemporary poet-philosopher, Cecco d’Ascoli, also handled this same issue of multiple bodies in one location. It begins by furnishing the physical and theological background to the axiom that two or more extended bodies cannot co-locate. This involves a doxographic overview of two distinct discourses: 1) the Aristotelian and scholastic physics of place and chemical mixtures, and 2) theological speculations about the possible properties of resurrected bodies. The paper then turns to an analogous discussion of the impenetrability axiom by Cecco d’Ascoli (Acerba IV.6), in which the conventionally physical terms of the issue are brought to bear in poetic form. When juxtaposed with Cecco’s more ‘scientific’ (if also at certain junctures equivocating) account, Dante’s treatment is unabashedly theological. How this orientation transforms the language of physics that is nonetheless present in the Paradiso passage (e.g., the hapax dimensione and the verb repere) shall then be reflected upon. The paper concludes by considering how the Acerba’s discussion of impenetrability could be read as a kind of academic reaction against Dante’s claim to have entered into the moon without resistance. 

Panel H: Lithic and Liquid: Representations and Methodologies on Water and Stone in the Italian Context – A. Bongiorno (Chair), J.Turini, E.Pavan, E.Guaraldo (Room 1-05)
Water and stone are symbolically opposing elements: while water conveys an idea of life, flow, and mobility, stone often signifies permanence, stasis, and inertia. Nevertheless, their connection is profound, extending beyond archetypal associations. In addition to being constituents of landscapes and environments, water and stone play crucial roles in place-making dynamics and serve as identity landmarks. In an era marked by severe geographical change, elements like water and stone prompt a reconsideration of our relationships with the world. This encompasses concepts of place and identity, as well as the discursive links between politics, nature, and the environment. In this context, the intersections of the humanities with hydrology and geology contribute to constructing a non-anthropocentric perception of space and time. Representations of the relationship between the lithic and the liquid manifest in various forms, shaping geographical and territorial relationships, and acknowledging the social, political, historical, and environmental issues involving these two elements. This panel aims to analyse and reinterpret this constitutive relationship in an Italian context, and through the lenses of Ecocriticism, Geocriticism, Environmental Studies, Eco-humanities, and Anthropocene studies. Key questions include: How do water and stone relate to each other? How do they shape our perception of space and time? What kind of places and landmarks do they inform as natural elements? In what ways do literature and art use and have used these materials, and for what purpose? By focusing on water and stone, this panel aims to explore how lithic and liquid elements influence the temporal and spatial aspects of the territory in continental and insular Italy, as well as its multiple borders. It seeks to illuminate not only the modes of representation in art, landmarks, and visual culture but also the contributions made to theory and methodology. This includes exploring Literary Geology, Environmental Sociology, and Material Culture. In reimagining water and stone, the panel involves a reconsideration of artistic possibilities and epistemological intentions, serving a new geographical and anthropic sensibility.
Speakers&Papers:
1) Emma Pavan, “Inutilmente incoronata di pruni accecata da pietre. / Inabissata. Liquida”: Shapes of water and stone in Antonella Anedda: an insular gaze – the critics agree – characterises Antonella Anedda’s work: the island is not only a geographical reality but a fundamental perspective point for looking at historical and contemporary events. In this sense, the writer represents the (provisional) point of arrival of an idea that goes from Montale through Zanzotto to her own, and which envisages that “solo gli isolati comunicano” (only those who are isolated can communicate). But what is an island? The simplest definition identifies it with a portion of land that, by geological conformation, is entirely surrounded by water.  Given the importance in the last century of geological terminology for various poetics, – to go back to the same line of examples, it is sufficient to mention that Zanzotto, referring to Montale, states that “essa s’impone come la più adatta per parlare dello spirito divenuto oggetto” (it imposes itself as the most suitable to speak of the spirit that has become an object) – this paper sets out to analyse the characteristics of the two main elements of the island, earth-stone and water, in Anedda’s work. The aim of the investigation is to understand how the focus on these two elements allows us to insert the reflection on the identity of the subject in particular and human existence in general into the broader discourse of the wider temporality of nature.   
2) Emiliano Guaraldo, The Toxic Hydro-social Territory of the Bormida Valley: this paper examines the Bormida River, flowing from Liguria to Piemonte, as a vivid case study in the context of toxic hydrosocial territories (Boelens et al. 2016), an area marked by significant anthropic and economic activity dating back to Roman times. The river’s transformation since the late 19th and early 20th centuries into one of Italy’s first toxic rivers, due to industrial developments by entities like ACNA and Ferrania, reflects broader hydro-sociological trends where human activities mirror geologic-scale forces, leading to altered hydrological patterns such as declining snowpacks, shrinking aquifers, and freshwater degradation (Zeitoun and Warner 2006; Murphy 2021). This has resulted in multigenerational socio-ecological conflicts, with enduring impacts evident in the ongoing environmental and public health crises in local communities. The focus of this paper is to explore the representation of the Bormida River within artistic and literary projects by local practitioners and authors. These creative expressions from communities living alongside this contaminated water body provide a window into the lived experiences and challenges wrought by the river’s toxic legacy. The narratives offer critical reflections of the hydrosocial dynamics, underscoring the intersection of ecological degradation, corporate politics, and cognitive injustice (Iovino 2017) in shaping the identity and history of the Bormida Valley. Integrating perspectives from political ecology, hydrosociology, and material ecocriticism (Boelens et al. 2023; Iovino and Oppermann 2014; Seger 2022), this study focuses into creative projects that engage with the Bormida’s toxic body. The artistic and literary works taken into consideration reveal the potential of artistic and literary practices from below amid damaged ecosystems, offering alternative mappings of damaged hydrosocial territories marked by socio-environmental injustice.
3) Jacopo Turini,  Literary Geology. Reading Place as an Event in Time. Italian Trajectories:  geology is a discipline that enables the visualization of events so distant in time (and so alien in materiality) as to be scarcely imaginable. The geological perspective reveals the temporality of a place; in geology, space and time thus coincide. This contribution aims to propose the concept of Literary Geology, specifically a critical approach to reading a place and its temporalities in literature. Literary Geology is based on disciplines such as Material Ecocriticism, Geocriticism, and Literary Geography, as well as on the theories of geographer Doreen Massey. Through the analysis of representations of geological matter and geological perspectives, Literary Geology aims to explore the possibilities of representing and analysing temporalities of places, involving a (geo)political perspective that relativizes traditional history and geography in the light of the Anthropocene. From this perspective, the concept of a place as a fixed entity is called into question. Instead, the place must be read and considered as a process – not only in natural terms but also in the dynamics of place-making, identity construction, and territorial organization that influence and relativize perception and, consequently, representation. In this perspective, and taking into consideration the latest theoretical contributions on the theme of depth and stone (Scaffai 2023, Luisetti 2023), this paper aims to offer an interpretation of geological material in various examples and genres of contemporary Italian literature.