Narratives of Murder and Knowledge: Pellegrino Artusi and Dante Alighieri as Sleuths

Contributor(s): Mirna Cicioni

Using McHale’s notions of “epistemological” and “ontological” dominants, this article analyzes three historical crime novels that have real historical characters as their protagonist: Marco Malvaldi’s Odore di chiuso (2011), featuring Pellegrino Artusi as the detective, and Giulio Leoni’s I...

Il giallo in colonia: Italian Post-Imperial Crime Novels

Contributor(s): Luciana D’Arcangeli, Laura Lori

This article analyzes several crime stories set during Italian imperial history, in particular Andrea Camilleri’s La presa di Macallè (2003) and Il nipote del Negus (2010); Carlo Lucarelli’s L’ottava vibrazione (2008) and Albergo Italia (2014); and Giorgio Ballario’s Morire è un attimo (2008) and...

“I am Just a Policeman”: The Case of Carlo Lucarelli’s and Maurizio de Giovanni’s Historical Crime Novels Set during Fascism

Contributor(s): Barbara Pezzotti

This article analyzes two successful Italian novels set during the Ventennio and the Second World War, namely Carlo Lucarelli’s Carta bianca (1990) and Maurizio De Giovanni’s Per mano mia (2011). It shows how Lucarelli confronts the troubling adherence to Fascism through a novel in which...

From a Local to a Global Perspective in Crime Writing: On Massimo Carlotto, Impegno, and Respiro corto

Contributor(s): Enrichetta Lucilla Frezzato

Having conducted a thorough analysis of the social and economic environment of the Northeast of Italy and having exposed a scenario of widespread illegality and culpable collusion in his Alligatore series and noir novels, Massimo Carlotto concluded a narrative cycle by enlarging his object of...

Local Colour: Investigating Social Transformations in Transcultural Crime Fiction

Contributor(s): Rita Wilson

Over the last twenty years, Italian “migration literature” has made significant contributions to the redefinition of the country’s literary and cultural scene. While the initial phase can best be conceptualized as a generic “micro-system” encompassing canonical genres such as (auto)biography and...

Murders in Shocking Pink: Women, Love and Desire in Rossana Campo’s Noir Fiction

Contributor(s): Claudia Bernardi

This article analyzes Rossana Campo’s Mentre la mia bella dorme (1999), Duro come l’amore (2005) and Il posto delle donne (2013) in the context of Campo’s work in general, showing how her use of crime genre conventions is specifically designed to reveal flaws and pitfalls inherent in romance...

Giovanni Kreglianovich’s Orazio: An Exemplum of the Process of Rewriting

Contributor(s): Joanne Granata

Rewriting and reinvention of previously told stories and recognizable themes build upon an established literary canon, creating new connections amongst texts, while creating increasingly hypertextual works. This article explores the nature of rewriting, the reinvention of previously existing...

Fighting Eve: Women on the Stage in Early Modern Italy

Contributor(s): Nicla Riverso

The Catholic revival in the sixteenth century coincides with the opening of the commedia dell’arte stage to women, leading to progress for female performers. However, the presence of women in the commedia dell’arte immediately shows contradictions and disagreements with the teaching of the...

The Vichian Resurrection of Commedia dell’Arte: Michelet, Sand, and De Sanctis

Contributor(s): Rocco Rubini

This essay seeks to reconnect two intellectual events of major import in nineteenth-century France: Jules Michelet’s “rediscovery” of Giambattista Vico as a viable source for a critical review of modernity’s task and the scholarly, artistic, and moral accreditation of commedia dell’arte,...

Le lettere di e a Cesarotti nella Biblioteca Nazionale di Parigi (con documenti inediti)

Contributor(s): Andrea Penso

L’articolo presenta due lettere di Melchiorre Cesarotti ritrovate dall’A. durante alcune ricerche condotte alla Bibliothèque Nationale de France su materiali manoscritti. La prima lettera è indirizzata a Voltaire, e riguarda la traduzione delle due tragedie Le Fanatisme, ou Mahomet e La Mort de...

Guido Gozzano e la poesia crepuscolare tra innovazione modernista e interferenze d’oltralpe

Contributor(s): Marilena Ceccarelli

Il movimento crepuscolare italiano di inizio Novecen­to — riconosciuto e definito come tale non senza perplessità — appa­re segnare, per la sua intrinseca vocazione da un lato all’identificazione nell’esperienza delle esistenze più umili con cui il poeta è a colloquio, dall’altro alla...

La memoria del confine. Il motivo della patria perduta nel romanzo Il cavallo di cartapesta di Osvaldo Ramous

Contributor(s): Marinko Lazzarich

Nei testi letterari degli anni 1945–1956 che parlano dell’e­sodo degli italiani dalla città di Fiume il motivo del confine diventa il simbolo della conservazione di un’identità nazionale divisa. Al con­tempo, il tema della terra natale perduta lega direttamente la lette­ratura fiumana a quella...

Marco Paolini’s Theatre of Trauma: Vajont

Contributor(s): Andrea Bini

This paper analyzes the work of actor/writer Marco Paolini, and his acclaimed monologue Il racconto del Vajont in particular. In the wake of Dario Fo and Franca Rame’s teatro civile, Paolini’s monolo­gues contributed to the birth of the so-called teatro di narrazione in the 1990s, which can also...

Food Consumption in Ferzan Ozpetek’s Hamam and Luca Guadagnino’s Io sono l’amore: A Gender Issue

Contributor(s): Patrizia Sambuco

Within the wide range of scholarly works on food studies, the topic of food and cinema has gained increasing attention in recent years. This article contributes to the discussion offering a gender per­spective in the analysis of Italian films. It examines cinematic represen­tations of food...

Le vie verso la ragione: i segni del nuovo realismo in Gomorra

Contributor(s): Torunn Haaland

Il saggio si concentra sui concetti di realtà e impegno etico e civile in Gomorra. Il romanzo-inchiesta di Roberto Saviano viene in­serito nel contesto del ritorno al realismo e dell’emergere di “oggetti narrativi non-identificati” nella narrativa contemporanea, per poi es­sere associato al...

(Un)Human Relations: Transhumanism in Francesco Verso’s Nexhuman

Contributor(s): Jana Vizmuller-Zocco

Transhumanism is an international movement which es­pouses the idea that any human organ, function, sense, ability, can be augmented and ameliorated with the judicious use of technology. The ethical, cultural, social, biological, economic implications for this view are far-reaching and point to a...

Introduction: Becoming Italian American

Contributor(s): Franco Pierno, Alberto Zambenedetti

Primo Bartolini and the “Eye-talians” of Nashville: Becoming American in the Athens of the South

Contributor(s): Matteo Brera

This essay describes how the Italians who settled in Nashville between the end of the nineteenth century and before the outburst of the First World War favoured first and foremost their occupational mobility thus prioritizing their integration in the economic fabric of a thriving city. Initially,...

Nuovomondo, Ellis Island, and Italian Immigrants: A New Appraisal by Emanuele Crialese

Contributor(s): Marie-Christine Michaud

Ellis Island remains in the American collective consciousness a centre of immigration where thousands of Europeans who expected to enter the United States between 1892 and 1954, went through. As such, Ellis Island was a symbolic bridge between the Old World and the New. It is the vision of this...

Italian Americans, Education, and Italian Language: 1880–1921

Contributor(s): Matteo Pretelli

Italian migrants in the United States have been often associated to the tendency to neglect the importance of culture as an instrument of upward social mobility. Traditionally perceiving culture as a hegemonic tool of the elites, Italian migrants in the United States, who had a predominantly...