Recensione di Pluda, A. (a cura di) (2019). «Infeliçe e sventuratta coca Querina». I racconti originali del naufragio dei Veneziani nei mari del Nord . Roma: Viella, 100 pp. Interadria – Culture dell’Adriatico 21.

This essay traces the lives of Carlo Leonardo Speranza and his son Gino, prominent figures in New York’s Italian community around the turn of the twentieth century. Carlo, born in Verona as Leonardo Augusto Tabacco, left Italy in 1877 amid financial and legal troubles and reinvented himself in the United States, becoming a scholar of Romance languages. Gino, born in 1873, pursued a legal career and helped build institutions for Italian immigrants, but in the 1920s he embraced more restrictive, nativist views. Their trajectories reveal contrasting paths of mobility and assimilation within the Italian American experience.

The manuscript R.10.9 in Trinity College Library, Cambridge, contains nine unpublished madrigals in Marino’s style by Pietro Petracci, a priest and scholar from Udine who lived in Venice in the early 1600s. These poems were commissioned by the heterodox Giacomo Castelvetro of Modena, who gifted them to the young Venetian sisters Orsetta and Marta Amadini. The author briefly reconstructs the activities of Petracci and Castelvetro in Venice: the former was a talented poet, editor, and compiler; the latter was an editor involved in religious and political causes and an intelligence asset for England.

This article presents the Venetian poet Pier Franco Uliana, who stands out in the contemporary poetic scene for his dialectal poems about the Cansiglio Forest and for his translations into contemporary dialect of some Medieval Venetian works, such as the Canzone di Auliver , the Proverbia quae dicuntur super natura feminarum and the De Babilonia civitate infernali . The article mainly examines the style used by Uliana in his work 14 sonetti a Treviso e una canzone to translate some poems of the fourteenth-century poet Nicolò de’ Rossi. Particular attention is paid to the analysis of the content, style and language of the translations.

This article explores the biographical and poetic experiences of Luciano Pallaro, an obscure poet born in Piombino Dese (Padova) who emigrated to the German-speaking canton of Switzerland in 1959. Despite settling permanently in Switzerland, Pallaro retained strong physical and emotional connections with his homeland, its dialect, and his family. He was the author of a brief poetry collection, Il pane dell’anima (1998), in which he articulates his longing to return and the emotional complexities of a voluntary yet painful migration. In his poems, Piombino is not merely a geographical location but an idealised locus amoenus and heimat , symbolising childhood and affection.

The paper provides an update about the activities conducted by the editorial group of the Etymological and historical dictionary of Neapolitan (DESN) and reflects on the prospects offered by the new digital lexicographic platform for the creation of vocabulary entries. The platform, which is currently in the testing phase, was developed within the PRIN 2020 QM – The Future of Old Italian. Towards a New Digital Lexicography with the Southern Texts Corpus. This tool will transform the DESN in a web-based dictionary, simplifying the compilation process and facilitating the implementation of the vocabulary in the new digital environment of LexicHub, which will collect some in-progress etymological and historical dialectal dictionaries.

This article introduces a still unpublished comedy but long known to studies on seventeenth-century theatre, in particular to those who dealt with Venetian comedy before Goldoni: Il Lippa by Domenico Balbi. The article briefly traces its publishing history and sets the text in the cultural context in which it was produced. Particular attention is paid to dramaturgical choices, the re-use of the literary canon and linguistic devices for comic purposes. A preview of the critical edition of the work, currently in progress, is also provided here, joined by a few examples of the commentary that will accompany the text.

This article discusses the presence and eventual disappearance of the verb catar ‘to find’ in the history of the Venetian dialect. It is divided into two parts: the first one offers a sociolinguistic description that explains the absence of the verb in contemporary Venetian, the second one presents some entries from the Vocabolario storico-etimologico del veneziano (VEV), such as catar and a series of its derivatives and compounds. The article will show that, to this day, catar survives in Veneto dialects with the exception of Lagoon Venetian, due to dynamic characteristics that ultimately assign a sociolinguistically low value to catar, explaining in this way its absence in contemporary Venetian.

This article examines the Vocabolario del romanesco contemporaneo, edited by Paolo D’Achille and Claudio Giovanardi (2023). It explores the structure of the headwords, the characteristics of the lemmary, and the approach to incorporating literary examples. Special attention is given to the inclusion of neologisms and archaic terms that remain familiar to speakers. The innovative influence of youth language is also highlighted. In addition to dialect words, the vocabulary features terms used in Rome with unique meanings distinct from their standard Italian counterparts.