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...

An Imagined Community of Their Own: Voices of Italian Immigrants in Il Lavoratore Italiano

Contributor(s): Thierry Rinaldetti

This contribution proposes to reflect on the experience and sense of identity of Italians through the analysis of Il Lavoratore Italiano, an Italian-language radical weekly newspaper published in Kansas from 1905 to 1927. A mouthpiece for Italian rank-and-file radicals in the U.S., the periodical...

Between Reality and Symbol: Fierce Dogs and Ferocious Wolves in the Decameron

Contributor(s): Julia M. Cozzarelli

Non-human animals have a long history of being utilized to understand human nature, and both wild and domestic canines have been particularly intertwined with humanity since ancient times. This article examines the representation of animals, and specifically of dogs and wolves, in Boccaccio’s...

The Influence of Milan on the Development of the Lombard Koiné in Fifteenth-Century Italy: the Letters of Elisabetta of Pavia

Contributor(s): Josh Brown

The main tendency characterizing the development of language in Lombardy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is the formation of a koiné. The extent to which Milan influenced the Lombard koiné is the subject of ongoing debate. On the one hand, scholars suggest that Milan provided a...

The Nineteenth-Century Italian Translators of Lord Byron’s Marino Faliero

Contributor(s): Sergio Portelli

The tragic story of Marino Faliero, the Doge of Venice who was executed for high treason in 1355, came to the attention of writers and artists of various European countries during the early nineteenth century thanks to a number of historians who published insightful works on the history of the...

Rhizomatic Cities in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities

Contributor(s): Sambit Panigrahi

Italo Calvino’s highly successful novel Invisible Cities thoroughly explains Deleuze and Guattari’s famous postmodern concept of rhizome. The cities in the novel do not possess a fixed and coherent structure; rather they exude a structurality that is immensely fleeting and continually evolving....

Vladimir Mayakovsky as Exemplary Character: Two Interpretations by Dario Fo and Carmelo Bene

Contributor(s): Malcolm Angelucci, Stephen Kolsky

This article contributes to the mapping of the role played by the Russian poet, playwright, artist and performer Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930) in the Italian context of the 60s and 70s, concentrating on Dario Fo’s L’operaio conosce 300 parole, il padrone 1000, per questo lui è il padrone...

Fables and Faith: Favoleggiare in the Commedia

Contributor(s): Mary-Michelle DeCoste

The verb favoleggiare appears twice in Dante’s Divina commedia, both times in the Paradiso. An examination of the use of this word, alongside a secondary consideration of the word favola as it is used elsewhere in the Paradiso, suggests the poet’s concern with the relationship between knowledge,...

L’arte del realismo onirico: architettura, pittura e letteratura nell’opera di Arduino Cantàfora

Contributor(s): Nicola Delledonne

Il presente contributo critico interpreta l’opera di Arduino Cantàfora (1945) — architetto, pittore e scrittore — attraverso la nozione di realismo onirico, coniata per evidenziare la propensione dell’artista milanese a trasfigurare gli elementi della realtà secondo un processo tipico del mondo...

Petrarch’s Fragmenta: The Narrative and Theological Unity of Rerum vulgarium fragmenta

Contributor(s): Joel S. Pastor

Introduction: Dialogues on the Decameron

Contributor(s): Katherine A. Brown

The Merchant and the Sacred: Artifice and Realism in Decameron I.1

Contributor(s): Susanna Barsella

By investigating the first novella of the Decameron from the perspective of the sacred this article questions the notion of realism as privileged key to the interpretation of Boccaccio’s style, poetics, and even philosophy in his major work. Although with different nuances of definition, realism...

Confession and Social Space in the Decameron

Contributor(s): Katherine A. Brown

This essay argues that confession in the Decameron is a liminal activity, which affords characters and readers a milieu removed from the space of society in which transformation and ultimately a temporary moment of transcendence of the secular world (almost a return to paradise) are achieved. In...

What a Difference a Sea Makes in the Decameron: The Mediterranean, a Structural Space of the Novella

Contributor(s): Roberta Morosini

This essay presents a reading of the Mediterranean sea as a narrative space in the Decameron. Through a reading of text and images, the paper illustrates the categories of mobile/static and foreign/domestic at work in the Decameron. It also introduces a third epistemological category, hybridity,...

Eros and Evanescence in the Decameron: The Weave of Love, Time, and Memory

Contributor(s): Timothy Kircher

This essay studies the interplay between the emotion of love and the sense of its transience, as the interplay is featured in the three authorial interventions of the Proem, the Introduction to Day 4, and the Conclusion. The author returns time and again to this interplay, emphasizing the role of...

“Forgers of Falsehood, Physicians of Nought”: Retailing Fictions in Boccaccio’s Decameron

Contributor(s): T. F. Gittes

Whereas Petrarch’s portrait of his doctor in Invectives Against a Physician is deliberately caricatural and seized at a glance, Boccaccio’s attitude towards doctors in the Decameron is far harder to grasp and easily overlooked. Yet, doctors and medical science are a central concern of the...

Fiction with Fiction: Confessing to Dante in Decameron I.1

Contributor(s): Simone Marchesi

This essay addresses one specific element of Decameron I.1, the curious order in which the holy friar questions Ciappelletto in his confession, and relates it to the larger dialogue Boccaccio establishes with Dante’s Commedia. By avoiding the canonical models of confessing penitents, which...