Contemporary Italian Research Articles

As Light as a Whale: Roberto Abbiati’s Una tazza di mare in tempesta and the Presence of Moby-Dick in Contemporary Italian Arts

Ever since Cesare Pavese’s pioneering 1932 translation of Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, Italy has proven particularly receptive to Herman Melville’s masterpiece, which has not only been enthusiastically loved by generations of readers and stimulated the interest and acumen of local Americanists, but has also inspired an extensive number of Italian writers and artists. The first part of this article sketches a provisional map of some of the most recent examples of Moby-Dick’s reception in the Italian arts. These range from Simona Mulazzani’s dreamy etchings of tatooed whales and Giovanni Robustelli’s delicate watercolors to Sara Filippi Plotegher’s environmentally-inspired illustrations and designer Matteo Ugolini’s Moby-Dick lamps. These works shed light on some of the meanings typically associated with Melville’s work and how they have changed over the last two decades. In particular, I intend to show how the understanding of Melville’s work has recently shifted from the somber and grave tone of early twentieth-century interpretations and rewritings – when it was all about tragedy, darkness, sacrifice, and folly – to the lighter tone of more recent admirers. Building on this shift, this essay investigates one of the most successful recent transmedial adaptations of Moby-Dick: Roberto Abbiati’s play Una tazza di mare in tempesta (A Sea Storm in a Teacup). This adaptation distills Moby-Dick into a seventeen-minute show performed for a very small audience within a wooden box that simulates the hold of a tiny ship. In fact, Abbiati manages to evoke the whole drama by using figurines and found objects, as well as by selecting with scalpel-like precision key passages from the novel. Abbiati has also published a beautiful and singular graphic novel adaptation of Moby-Dick, summarizing each chapter of the book with only one drawing. Abbiati’s works are evidence of the enduring vitality of Melville’s presence in contemporary Italian art and offer the opportunity to appreciate the lighter dimensions of Moby-Dick.

Mythopoetic Bodies. Representations of Disability in Contemporary Italian Narratives

Il presente articolo investiga la tendenza a rappresentare la disabilità come una condizione totalizzante che non lascia spazio ad altre caratteristiche dell’individuo. Nel fare ciò, il saggio analizza alcuni topoi della costruzione narrativa della disabilità: l’accostamento ad una seconda vita, la visione della disabilità come accusa o colpa, e la sua percezione come una forma di mancanza. Tale approccio fa risaltare la capacità mitopoietica alla base di un notevole corpus di produzioni narrative nel romanzo italiano contemporaneo. Al centro del discorso si trovano, fra gli altri, autori come Alessandro Perissinotto e Piero d’Ettorre, Michela Murgia, Carmen Verde, e Simona Vinci, scrittori che l’articolo propone come riferimenti contemporanei al tema della disabilità e che ricevono il testimone da autori più canonicamente studiati come Dacia Maraini e Giuseppe Pontiggia.

From comparative to causal relations: the case of siccome ‘because’ in the history of Italian

Abstract This article investigates how adverbial causal clauses come into being by tracking the diachronic development of the lexical item siccome ‘because’ from Old to Contemporary Italian. We show that adverbial causal clauses introduced by siccome in Contemporary Italian originate from comparative-similative clauses. By describing the steps of this diachronic change, we demonstrate that in specific contexts the comparative-similative marker has paved the way for a comparison between two events entailing a causal relation. The change is formalized by adopting a free relative clause analysis (Cinque 2020a. On the double-headed analysis of “headless” relative clauses. In Ludovico Franco & Paolo Lorusso (eds.), Linguistic variation: Structure and interpretation, 169–196. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter) to comparative and causal clauses.

Contested Professionalism and Spiritual Legitimization: Catholic Religious Education Teachers and the Theme of Spirituality in Contemporary Italian Schools

Based on observations and in-depth interviews with Catholic Religious Education teachers in Italy, this sociological study tackles “spirituality” as a register of legitimization in their professional settings. Compared with more established topics of “religious culture”, the motives of “spirituality” appear as a lesser category of justification in teachers’ discourse in two significant aspects: teaching about “spirituality” as a necessary component of human experience, and talking about their own relationship to “spirituality” as proof of sincere commitment and/or professionalism. Thus, in the context of teachers’ labor, “spirituality” constitutes an ambivalent category that can serve the purposes of Catholic institutions as well as forms of criticism of authority.

English Borrowings in Contemporary Italian: a Linguistic-Cognitive Aspect

In the article, the linguistic-cognitive aspect of English borrowings in contemporary Italian is considered. The globalization of the English language is one of the driving forces that raises questions about language contacts and interactions in modern linguistics. The presented scientific investigation aims to identify the linguistic-cognitive features of the usage of English borrowings in Italian-language news discourse. The linguistic-cognitive approach allows for analyzing the behavior of speakers and the organization of conceptual space in human consciousness. The article discusses the factors and phenomena to which users of the linguistic code are subordinate, as well as the impulses of internal and external systems that accelerate the penetration of English equivalents into the Italian language. English borrowings are revealed taking into account the universal characteristics of open systems. The article asserts that the analyzed linguistic-cognitive processes are universal-systemic, as they can be applied to the analysis of factors and phenomena of various natures, including linguistic and psychological.

Day-Ahead Electricity Price Forecasting in the Contemporary Italian Market

Day-Ahead Electricity Price Forecasting in the Contemporary Italian Market

Construções marcadoras discursivas formadas por olhar, no português, e guardare, no italiano: uma análise constrastivo-funcional

"Discourse markers formed by olhar in Portuguese and guardare in Italian: a contrastive-functional analysis. Discourse markers (DM) make up a hybrid category and little distinct from the others. As elements outside grammar, these constituents are difficult to delimit and, therefore, difficult to analyze. Based on this consideration, adopting a functionalist theoretical framework combined with the constructional approach to grammar, in the terms of Traugott and Trousdale (2013), Hilpert (2014) and Traugott (2021, 2022), among others, we proceeded to an analysis of a qualitative and contrastive nature of MD formed by the verbs of visual perception (Scheibman 2000) olhar, in Portuguese, and guardare, in Italian, in the detection of their correspondences and distinctions. We assume such MDs as specific pairs of form and meaning in contemporary uses of Portuguese and Italian, as procedural constructions, such as [olha só] and [guarda un po'], respectively. We found that these MDs act in calling attention, in monitoring interaction via manipulation of the virtually idealized attentional space, due to communicative purposes, as defended by Sambrana (2021, 2023), for Portuguese, and Oliveira and Lazzarotto (2022), for Italian. We found that they contribute to this functionality of the MDs researched cognitive processes of general domain, according to Bybee (2010), such as chunking and analogization, and also social cognition, according to Diessel (2017). Keywords: discourse markers; contrastive analysis; contexts of use; contemporary Portuguese; contemporary Italian."

Storia dei termini di colore italiani nell'area ROSA

This article is part of a series of studies that the authors have dedicated to the history of Italian colourterminology. §1. highlights some of the theses of Berlin & Kay (1969) and other scholars, with particularreference to the distinction between basic and non-basic terms. §2. is dedicated to the history of colour termsin the PINK area from Old Italian to contemporary Italian, and to the emergence of rosa as a basic colour term.This section also delves into their figurative meanings and the fixed collocations in which they occur. §3. dealswith the terms formed by means of morphological devices that are most frequently used in Italian to enrich thecolor lexicon.

Lucamante, Stefania, Righteous Anger in Contemporary Italian Literary and Cinematic Narratives, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2020, 333 pp.

Lucamante, Stefania, Righteous Anger in Contemporary Italian Literary and Cinematic Narratives, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2020, 333 pp.

The Diasporic Canon: American Anthologies of Contemporary Italian Poetry 1945–2015

The Diasporic Canon: American Anthologies of Contemporary Italian Poetry 1945–2015

Choice and solidarity in Viola Ardone's Oliva Denaro

Contemporary Italian writer Viola Ardone's most recent novel, Oliva Denaro (2021), fictionalizes the story of Franca Viola, a young Sicilian woman whose refusal to marry her rapist in the 1960s was the first such situation to become highly publicized. In 1981, the law supporting so-called “reparatory marriages” was repealed in Italy, and Viola's case is widely seen as having been the impetus for the change. This article first places the novel in its historical context. It discusses afterlives of Viola’ story, which was important in the Italian public sphere in the mid-1960s and has enjoyed renewed popularity since 2012. This article argues that the running thread of choice in Ardone's novel should not be read as a liberal feminist version of one individual woman defying an entire society and becoming a fully autonomous self in the process, but as a situation that applies to every character in the text. It demonstrates that, unlike the way in which Viola's story is often framed, Ardone views feminist social justice change as a collective endeavor—a gathering of many individual choices that contribute to a collective end and require institutional backing—rather than a sole individual's trajectory.

Contemporary Italian Women Artists of African Descent: A Transnational and Intersectional Approach to their Lives and Works

ABSTRACT This article considers the life and work of Afrodescendant Italian artists Iris Peynado, Nadia Kibout and Nadia Ali. Through my interviews with them and a critical analysis of their films, I underline the cultural value of their achievements and emphasize the discriminations that black women face in contemporary society and in the cinema industry. Racial, class and gender biases often are subjects of their filmmaking, and offer a critical site to reflect on the need for further social and political change. Their collective experience is seen in light of a transnational spatial and temporal continuity between black Italians and the diasporic communities around the world. A variety of nuanced cultural expressions makes it inaccurate to consider Italian Afrodescendant artists as a monolithic group of women having a single identity. In spite of societal biases, they are powerfully emerging as filmmakers, actresses, and activists. They contribute to our understanding that a true postcolonial approach requires a more fluid and flexible consideration of Italian identity as a transnational and multi-faceted expression of a fertile intersection of people of diverse genders, races, and religions.

The Contemporary Italian House in Toronto

The Contemporary Italian House in Toronto

Verdi's Emperor Charles V: Risorgimento Politics, Habsburg History, and Austrian-Italian Operatic Culture

AbstractThis article considers the figure of Habsburg Emperor Charles V in relation to Italy, first as perceived by Italians in his own time, the sixteenth century, but then especially as evaluated by Italians of the Risorgimento—and notably by Verdi in his operatic work. The article emphasizes opera as a crucial cultural medium of Habsburg engagement with the Italian peninsula and of Italian culture within the Habsburg monarchy. Contemporary Italian evaluations of Charles's role in the domination of Italy were both regretful of his military interventions (including the sack of Rome in 1527) and respectful of his political skills. During the Risorgimento, the conventional Mazzinian perspective was deeply hostile to the Habsburgs and conditioned the wars of Italian unification against the Habsburg monarchy. Italian opera, however, especially Rossini's Guillaume Tell (1829), Verdi's Ernani (1844), and Verdi's Don Carlos (1867) indicate a complex operatic perspective on the Habsburgs in Risorgimento culture. While the Austrian Habsburg representative Gessler is the villain in Rossini's Guillaume Tell, Verdi's Ernani actually places Charles V on stage in a major baritone role with beautiful music and an ambivalent presence. In Don Carlos, the ghost of Charles V hovers over and haunts the whole opera.

The Role of the Media in the Evolution of Contemporary Italian

The Role of the Media in the Evolution of Contemporary Italian

Peculiarities of Lexico-Syntactic Word-Formation in the Contemporary Italian Language: Criteria of Identification and Productivity of Multi-Word Expressions (polirematiche)

Peculiarities of Lexico-Syntactic Word-Formation in the Contemporary Italian Language: Criteria of Identification and Productivity of Multi-Word Expressions (polirematiche)

Animal Immanence

Review of Felice Cimatti and Carlo Salzani, eds., Animality in Contemporary Italian Philosophy (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020)

Animality in Contemporary Italian Philosophy

Animality in Contemporary Italian Philosophy

Clodagh J. Brook. Screening Religions in Italy: Contemporary Italian Cinema and Television in the Post-secular Public Sphere

Clodagh J. Brook. <i>Screening Religions in Italy: Contemporary Italian Cinema and Television in the Post-secular Public Sphere</i>

Stefania Lucamante. Righteous Anger in Contemporary Italian Literary and Cinematic Narratives

Stefania Lucamante. <i>Righteous Anger in Contemporary Italian Literary and Cinematic Narratives</i>