Il Mio Research Articles

Luigi Donato Ventura, a Trilingual Self-translator

Luigi Donato Ventura, a Trilingual Self-translator

The importance of self-definition: An interview with Djarah Kan

ABSTRACT This interview with Djarah Kan was conducted via email during May and June 2022. Djarah Kan discusses the importance of self-definition as a political act and highlights the power dynamics connected to the process of naming. Starting from her book Ladri di denti (Tooth Thieves), her short story “Il mio nome” (My Name) (published in the anthology Future), and some articles published in Italian journals and magazines, Kan addresses the issue of immigration, highlights the close connection between racism and sexism in the Italian cultural debate, and questions the idea of “universal sisterhood”. She also emphasizes the importance of knowing the past (and, in particular, Italy’s colonial past) in order to decolonize the present and build a more just future, discusses the meaning that white privilege takes on for her, and speaks about the limits and potential of social media as platforms that enable the creation of spaces of self-representation.

On Separateness

On Separateness Andrea Jurjević (bio) one The ticket to the world, my dad insisted, was speaking foreign languages. He didn't mean that in a literal way, of course, but that proficiency in foreign languages would expand my mind and enrich my understanding of the world. I took German in elementary school for several years, but instead of going to class, I often ended up with friends in the school park, sneaking off to smoke cigarettes incognito. Dad also tried teaching me Italian, but that went south with the first lesson, when he said, Okay, repeat after me: Amo il mio papà. It wasn't so much that his parental sentimentality was ridiculous but the fact that I had already taught myself more la lingua by reading the Italian porn mags he hid in the bottom of his wardrobe. I grew up in Rijeka, and we'd spend summers on the island of Krk, where Dad was from. Tourists, from just about every corner of Europe, and sometimes farther, had always been flocking to our coast. I'd help my parents rent a couple of our bedrooms, make frühstück for our guests, and work, first for a tourist agency as a porter and then in a hotel kitchen and a bar. With each new wave of arrivals, with new faces, I crushed fast on some Swede or Brit boy, their manner of speech, so utterly foreign, wonderful, dizzying. The world must be just like that, I used to think, so mysterious, so full of possibilities, so unlike our predictable reality. two Imagining the world through the lens of tourists became boring quickly, and my focus shifted onto music. While in elementary school I befriended an older teenage neighbor who didn't mind my hanging with her as she talked about music, cut band pictures from the Bravo music magazine, and wallpapered her room with them. We lived in one-bedroom apartments [End Page 153] in tall grey buildings. My sis and I had our bunk beds partitioned from our parents' room by a simple plywood sheet; my neighbor's living room doubled as her bedroom. Her parents had a low, glass-covered coffee table, and under that glass she assembled a collage of handwritten notes by various musicians—letters, signatures, drafts of lyrics to some of the best rock'n'roll songs. If I remember correctly, there was Dylan, Mercury, Bowie, Lennon, Hendrix, Joey Ramone, and more. I was captivated by their handwriting, how much individuality and intimacy each little note carried. Something so attractive and personal came through the curves of their script, the particularities of their strikes and dots, scratched-out lines, the varying pressure of their hand-scrawls. The musicians' notes looked cool, yes, but they also had an unusually freeing effect on me, as if their writing—so simply human, physical, and relatable—was closing the distance between what seemed like a grand world and our crammed one, between revolutionary art and the tedious everyday. I absorbed music, and all of its culture, with intense hunger. For a brief hot minute, I swooned at Duran Duran and Yaz, but then I quickly fell for the mad static of the Clash, the New York Dolls, the spellbinding quality of Bauhaus, Sisters of Mercy, and especially the deep, dark allure of The Cure as well as Siouxsie and the Banshees. Beyond their otherworldly sound, it was their particular brand of glam—Robert Smith's and Siouxie's spiky hair, black clothing, and deep red lipstick—and a diy approach that made it possible to imagine myself being a part of something bigger. I was especially enchanted by Siouxsie, her fetish and bondage garb, her particular brand of femininity, so commanding, aloof, modern, distinct, so unlike any woman I'd seen. They were the dreamworld I felt more at home in than anywhere else. And I couldn't get enough of it. I remember one day in the early eighties the evening news breaking into a report of the new death-obsessed youth "cult," who wore black, listened to morose music, and romanticized suicide, and, the news anchor said, trying to scare parents all across Yugoslavia, the...

«Donna d’effetto non lo sarò mai». De-erotizzazione e mascheramento nell’immagine divistica di Rita Pavone sulla stampa giovanile nella seconda parte degli anni Sessanta (Il caso «Giovani»)

The following paper aims at:1) Implementing Richard Dyer’s concept of “structured polysemy” (1979) to map the variety of conflicting images that emerge of Rita Pavone through films and youth magazines; 2) Describing the de-sexualization process that Pavone’s star image undergoes in youth magazines and how it affects her on-screen image (paying particular attention to the column “Il mio diario”, that she personally curated for the magazine «Giovani»);3) Evaluating these processes within the broader de-sexualization phenomenon that characterized specific youth and Italian pop music scenes in the years leading up to 1968. The following paper aims at 1) Implementing Richard Dyer’s concept of structured polysemy (1979) to map the variety of conflicting images that emerge of Rita Pavone through films and youth magazines; 2) Describing the de-sexualization process that Pavone’s star image undergoes in youth magazines and how it affects her on-screen image (paying particular attention to the column Il mio diario, that she personally curated for the magazine Giovani); 3) Evaluating these processes within the broader de-sexualization phenomenon that characterized specific youth and Italian pop music scenes in the years leading up to 1968.

“Devi Mangiare!” [You have to eat!]: Experiences of disordered eating among Italian-Australian women

In this article, the researchers report findings on how food meanings, culture and gender intersect in the experiences of Italian-Australian women. In-depth narrative interviews were thematically analyzed using a feminist social constructionist framework informed by anthropological theories about “foodways” and culture. Three core themes were identified in the women’s narratives: “il cibo e’ tutto, il cibo e amore” – “food is everything, food is love”; “fare la bella figura” – “to make a good impression”; and “il mio piatto” – “it’s my plate”. The researchers demonstrate how gendered expectations of women in Italian-Australian culture intersect with food meanings, cultural ideals and practices to produce distinct experiences of disordered eating and restricted access to formal support. The relevance of the findings are likely to be applicable to other migrant communities across the world. Particularly where ethnic communities retain distinctive food related meanings and practices post migration, that may intersect with cultural ideals venerating female thinness and the psycho-medical models and practices that pathologize disordered eating.

The Transits and Transactions of Migritude in Bay Mademba’s Il mio viaggio della speranza (My Voyage of Hope)

Migritude literature, or the literature of postcolonial migration, is often autobiographical and thus productively read through the lens of life writing. How authors position the immigrant self as subject sheds light on narrative possibilities and their potential impact on readers in contexts where racist, anti-immigrant discourses dominate. This article explores the scope and stakes of migritude life writing through the example of Il mio viaggio della speranza (My Voyage of Hope), a 2011 memoir by Bay Mademba, who recounts his journey from Senegal to Italy and bears witness to the discrimination he faces there. Mademba’s testimony responds to duress, which Ann Stoler defines as the “colonial entailments” that shape contemporary spaces, institutions, and relations. Produced by a small Tuscan press, the memoir circulates via immigrant street vendors. Through the convergence of narrative and material transactions, the book prompts reader-consumers to recognize their complicity in the duress that shapes their interactions.

Palazzeschi’s vecchie inglesi and the Performance of Difference in Stampe dell’800

Palazzeschi’s vecchie inglesi and the Performance of Difference in Stampe dell’800 Silvia Ross (bio) Another major twentieth-century figure whose oeuvre captured the critical eye of Eduardo Saccone was Aldo Palazzeschi, in particular his earliest novel, :riflessi, which Saccone examined through the lens of psychoanalytic theory, focusing on the protagonist’s narcissistic impulses in “Anticipi di Palazzeschi: ‘Alleg(o)ria di Novembre,’” in his 1988 volume of essays, Conclusioni anticipate. Originally published in 1908 (subsequently revised and reprinted under the title Allegoria di Novembre), :riflessi takes largely the form of a correspondence between a young prince, Valentino Kore, and his beloved friend John Mare. Within the context of his study, Saccone had already alluded to the homosexual character of the relationship between the two young men (Saccone 52), and Francesco Gnerre has since also noted that it is the first of Palazzeschi’s works to address the theme of homosexuality. In fact, virtually all of Palazzeschi’s literary production concerns homoeroticism at least obliquely, as the topic is articulated through the writer’s almost obsessive discourse of difference (Gnerre 61). Critics, including Gnerre and Marchi, among others, have come to recognize that Palazzeschi’s characters—be they men, women or even animals—frequently embody an authorial transvestism and function as a means through which the writer is able to “come out,” without actually verbalizing his queerness, expressing it instead implicitly through a code of alterity. Furthermore, the theme of marginalization for Palazzeschi goes hand-in-hand with other related concerns such as laughter, divertimento and creativity. [End Page S140] I want to examine here a specific instance as a kind of case study where the mechanisms of masking emerge in a typically Palazzeschian setting—his native Florence. More precisely, I will focus on a chapter contained in the collection Stampe dell’800 (1932) entitled “Vecchie inglesi,” one of a series of sketches recounting the author’s childhood in late nineteenth-century Tuscany.1 This particular literary portrait (like many of the others) is episodic in character and examines Englishwomen who reside in Florence, their relationship to the city and its inhabitants, and provides accounts of individual incidents, such as two British ladies allowing a local shepherd’s sheep and then his rowdy pig to graze on their meadow, or the Florentines’ reaction to Queen Victoria’s sojourns in the Tuscan capital. The story in question serves as an example of how Palazzeschi’s prose plays with notions of masquerade, performance, cross-dressing, spectacle, the carnivalesque, and divertimento, among others. The strong presence of women reflects the importance of female figures throughout the collection, among whom not only Aldino’s mother, but a whole host of women who could be characterized as different, or to use a term employed often by Palazzeschi, as buffe.2 Stampe dell’800 is populated by an array of eccentric women who exert their fascination on Aldino—be it for their unusual physical stature, appearance or behavior—with many of them lending their names to chapter titles (e.g. “La sora Parisina,” “La sor’Isabella,” “La sora Sofia,” “La sora Rosina,” “La sora Vittoria,” etc.).3 Palazzeschi the author was fully aware of his predilection for these sorts of characters, whether buffi or buffe, and in an interview with Ferdinando Camon he explained that he identified with those marked by any kind of difference:4 [End Page S141] Quelli che io chiamo “Buffi” sono semplicemente creature che per qualche particolarità, a volte per una posizione sociale di eccezione, si distinguono dalle altre. Il mio spirito e il mio gusto mi porta [sic] ad osservarli, conoscerli, scoprire i loro segreti, e per conseguenza ad amarli. L’uomo comune, uguale o troppo poco dissimile da milioni di altri uomini, coi suoi problemi pratici, economici e sociali, col suo conformismo, non mi attrae, non mi interessa. (Camon 47) Indeed, in the chapter “Vecchie inglesi,” the narrator notes his childhood fascination with these “foreign” women whom he observes on the streets of Florence: Queste donne ch’io vedevo tutti i giorni, e così diverse da quelle del mio paese colle quali non avevano nel portamento nel volto e nel costume nulla in comune, pure vivendo fra esse con...

Svevo, Blogging and the Future of Literature

Svevo, Blogging and the Future of Literature Giuliana Minghelli (bio) The ethos of writing, and the status of the writer and that unruly object known as literature, preoccupied Italo Svevo throughout his career. From the beginning, Svevo wrote about writing.1 Be it salvation or ruination, writing is the crucial experience in the life of his characters. Novel writing, shared dreaming, diary keeping, literary criticism, or fable-telling contests, the act of writing—and the ancillary act of dreaming—is the dramatic action in Svevo’s narrative world. Perhaps with the exception of Zeno (but even in his case we could argue to the contrary), life comes as an after-effect of literature.2 Rather than granting a secular after-life, writing for Svevo’s characters is what inaugurates (or thwarts) the possibility of living. As the double name Ettore Schmitz/Italo Svevo dramatizes, the two distinct regimens of living and writing are experienced and thought of by Svevo not as separate experiences but as coterminous, coalescent, overlapping instances, fluidly conversing with one another. This essay will explore Svevo’s original interweaving of life and literature through a reading of his theory of artistic expression and his socio-cultural analysis of [End Page S126] literary practice. In a turn-of-the-century panorama revolutionized by new media of mass communication, Svevo’s reflection bears important insights for our own turn of the century’s new practices of writing and living fostered by the Internet, in particular the phenomenon of blogging. Svevo’s mixing of life and literature could be read simply as a biographical effect, the unfortunate outcome of life’s contingencies: the story of a talented writer forced by economic necessity and marriage to set aside pen and paper and become a businessman in his in-laws’ paint factory. And yet, what we might call Svevo’s double allegiance is first of all an ontological condition of the poet, as he does not fail to remind us: “il sognatore … fa sempre una doppia vita e tutt’e due equivalenti per intensità” (“Echi modani,” Teatro e saggi 1088). This being the case, Svevo’s circumstances are in a way nothing but a footnote to what constitutes an inescapable condition, described by Svevo as “quella mia certa assenza continua ch’è il mio destino” (“Soggiorno londinese,” Teatro e saggi 899). On yet another level, and one of particular import for the present reflection, Svevo’s double life generates very specific material conditions under which literature is produced. The unwonted quotidian confrontation between the imperative to dream and write and the necessity to function in the world of business offers the occasion for what Bertolt Brecht defined as Umfunktionierung, the functional transformation of the task of the writer and the form and instruments of literary production. Because of his double status as writer and worker (even if managerial rather than proletarian), Svevo embodies the tensions and new possibilities that are central to modern art. Highly conscious of these changes, Svevo early on reflected on the new status of the writer in the pages of the Triestine daily L’indipendente. In a series of articles, the young journalist and aspiring writer sketched a cultural analysis of contemporary literary and theatrical production that precociously explored the changing roles of the various cultural players—author, public, critic—in fin de siècle society. Before we unravel the originality of Svevo’s position, it will be helpful to place him in the context of Italy’s cultural scene at the time. The fate of the poet, the role of the reading public, and the future of “good” writing were urgent questions in Italy as well as in Europe. Maria Grazia Lolla outlines a double tension informing cultural attitudes toward reading and writing in Post-Unification Italy.3 On [End Page S127] the one hand, faced with a dramatically low literacy rate, the government and the educational system tried to increase readership and foster a national literature. Whether popular, explicitly pedagogical or artistic, a flourishing literature was perceived as a necessary basis for strong nation building. However, as the internal publishing market expanded and readership grew, the image of the reader as a subaltern subject was transformed into...

Il Carnevale come soglia del moderno. Permanenze franco-tedesche nella descrizione della festa romana in Corinne ou l’Italie di Germaine de Staël

At the beginning of the 1960s Czeslaw Milosz recorded Aleksander Wat’s memories on tape. The recordings were then published with the title Moj Wiek (1977) and translated into many languages. A real “Odyssey of a Polish intellectual”, as the subtitle of the American version (1988) suggested, Wat’s memoir is regarded as one of the most important testimonies of the atrocities of the last century. Finally, after many years, it has been translated into Italian, and will be published in the Spring of 2013. An excerpt from Il mio secolo is published in this article with permission from the Sellerio publishing house. It is taken from the eighteenth chapter, where Wat describes the first Soviet jail in which he was detained.

Natalia Ginzburg: o confinamento como experiência de guerra e de escritadoi:10.5007/2175-7917.2010v15n2p285

In the post-war panorama, a name stands out in the Italian literature scenario: Natalia Ginzburg. Born in Turin, among antifascists, she experienced its opposition from the beginning. When the war broke out in 1939, she had just started her writing career. During three years of confinement in Abruzzo, Natalia wrote and published, under a pseudonym, her first novel. She wrote several essays about this war and writing experience – Inverno in Abruzzo (1944), Il figlio dell’uomo (1946), Il mio mestiere (1949) – and letters, some of which were directed to a childhood friend (at that time a refugee in Switzerland). In these letters the author expresses her loneliness, yearning, and strange feeling of confinement, besides sharing with her friend doubts and reflections upon her work. The similarities and differences between the essays and these letters are the subject of our analysis.

“So, then people do come here in order to live”: Interiority in the Novels of Rainer Maria Rilke and Scipio Slataper

For many, Trieste is better known as the temporary home of the Irish immigrant whom Ezra Pound once referred to as a refugee from (1) than for the numerous modern Italian authors who lived there. The final words of Ulysses, Trieste-Zurich-Paris, not only catalogue the three cities which James Joyce worked on his masterpiece, but also emblematize the way scholars tend to place Italian and German-language literature, an itinerary that ultimately leads to Paris, as the presumptive capital of modernist culture. Trieste, part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until its fall, can, however, also be seen as the geographic and intellectual passage between the German-speaking world, particularly Austria-Hungary, and Italy. (2) An Austro-Italian rather than a Franco-Italian or Euro-Italian perspective highlights elements of Italian modernism that remain underexplored. Italian modernism has been less examined than most other national European modernisms and, perhaps because it is chronologically and geographically diffuse, critics tend to concentrate on individual authors, such as Gabriele D'Annunzio, Italo Svevo, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Luigi Pirandello, and F.T. Marinetti, while the idea of a more general Italian modernism has remained a questionable proposition. A comparison of Austrian and Italian authors that concentrates primarily on what is similar between them adds to the picture of Italian literary modernism. (3) Engaging German criticism to read Italian works also helps reveal unnoticed meanings. This comparison of Rainer Maria Rilke and Scipio Slataper's novels is part of a larger project that focuses on what Austrian literature brought Triestine writers, and what Triestine writers then brought to the peninsula as a whole, by focusing on the analogous qualities between pairs of Triestine and Austrian novelists. (4) Italian Triestine authors were influenced by many of the same philosophers, critics, and psychoanalysts that informed the German-language authors of the Empire. These (at least) bilingual Triestine authors also read, often the original, and were influenced by Austrian authors. In addition, due to the comparable cultural climate of Trieste and other Austro-Hungarian cities, such as Prague, these Italian and German-language authors often produced similar works. The affinities between Rilke's Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge [The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge] (1910) and Slataper's Il mio Carso [My Carso] (1912) are an example of the latter. Die Aufzeichnungen and Il mio Carso feature walks around and reactions to a modern city. Malte has recently moved to Paris and Il mio Carso's narrator reacts to his own city, Trieste, whose rocky (or carstic, to be more precise) plateau, known as the carso, provides the work's unusual title. As these narrators explore their respective cities, they also explore their memories and their views on life and art. Though the similarities between these two works run deeper than a brief plot summary can illustrate (and one of their similarities is that a plot summary offers a poor characterization of the work), Rilke's is much commented upon and loved while Slataper's is not well known internationally. (5) Although the literary qualities of Rilke's work are superior, Slataper's novel is an interesting modernist work that might partially fill the lack that so often characterizes Italian modernism after its strong and early avant-garde movement. 1910, MODERNISM, AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY Many have described 1910, the year Die Aufzeichnungen was completed and Il mio Carso begun, as one of fundamental change. While scholars have also made comparable, persuasive claims for 1900, 1914, 1922 and other years as marking the beginning of modernism, 1910 is one of the most, and most famously, cited. Virginia Woolf 's claim that, in or about December, 1910, human character changed (320) has been repeatedly evoked and lends itself both to the title of a book, On or About December 1910: Early Bloomsbury and Its Intimate World, exploring why Woolf pinpointed this time period, and to a website of digital reproductions from 1910. …

Two Ways of Being Italian on Global Television

Two Ways of Being Italian on Global Television

Two Ways of Being Italian on Global Television

Two Ways of Being Italian on Global Television

Response: Nihil sub Sole Novum

23. Petrarch, of course, wrote two sonnets {Rime sparse, 77 and 78) about Simone's portrait of Laura: Ma certo il mio Simon fu in Paradiso / onde questa gentil donna si parte; / ivi la vide, et la ritrasse in carte / per far fede qua giu del suo bel viso. Aside from her telltale blonde hair, the Madonna Simone painted in the Annunciation also follows other normative conventions describing the poet's beloved. See Demp sey, Portrayal of Love, 53-64; and the classic article by Elizabeth Crop per, On Beautiful Women: Parmigianino, Petrarchismo, and the Vernac ular Style, Art Bulletin 58 (1976): 374-94. 24. E. H. Gombrich, and Form: The Stylistic Categories of Art His tory and Their Origins in Renaissance Ideals, in Norm and Form: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (London: Phaidon, 1966), 81-98, esp. 96. The comparison is odd, for, while Raphael is famous for his Madonnas, the Protestant Rembrandt painted few of them. Gombrich was surely thinking, as Elizabeth Cropper has suggested to me, of the long gallery of the Zwinger in Dresden, at one end of which is hung Raphael's Sis tine Madonna and at the other, facing it on axis, Rembrandt's famous Self-Portrait in which he raises a roemer aloft and bounces Saskia on his knee.

The Representation of the Metropolis in Scipio Slataper's Il mio Carso

Of the members of "the great generation of Triestine writers," 1 Scipio Slataper is the most difficult to interpret fully. 2 Part of this difficulty arises from the fact that Slataper's intellectual and cultural positions fluctuated in the years in which he was active as a writer and a critic. Furthermore, his premature death in 1915, at the age of 27, did not allow him to investigate thoroughly the possibilities inherent in the existential crisis that he witnessed in his time and thematized in his texts, especially in Il mio Carso, published for the Quaderni della Voce in 1912. 3 What makes Scipio Slataper's work particularly interesting and sets it apart from the works of other Triestine authors of the time [End Page 153] (such as Italo Svevo or Umberto Saba) is the fact that in his texts he contemplates the complex urban reality of Trieste but in interpreting such reality he reveals his inability to accept its intrinsic contradictions. Whereas Umberto Saba's poetry and Italo Svevo's prose embrace the multifaceted existence of the modern city, Slataper still strives to find a coherent and unifying meaning in the urban environment of Trieste, and in his prose he gives voice to the sense of alienation and anxiety that the individual feels in facing a world that seems increasingly governed by centrifugal forces. 4

Dante in Paradise: The End of Allegorical Interpretation

In the very last canto of The Divine Comedy, Dante finally comes to unite his gaze that of God. God is an eternally moving circle of light, and as Dante looks into it he finds at its center the image of Christ?or, literally, nostra effige, our image.1 This is a decisive moment: what Dante, and the reader along him, sees reflected in the revolving circle of God is his own image; God is a circle with our image within itself, and Christ being man, man is both reflected and contained in God: through the image of Christ we see not only God, but ourselves in God. Dante is unable to find words for this moment of unsurpassed transcendence, se non che la mia mente fu percossa / da un fulgore in che sua voglia venne [save that my mind was smitten by a flash wherein its wish came to it] (DC 140-41). There follow merely four lines: A l'alta fantasia qui manco possa; / ma gi? volgeva il mio disio e'l velle, / si come rota ch'igualmente ? mossa, / l'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle [Here power failed the lofty phantasy; but already my desire and my will were revolved, like a wheel that is evenly moved, by the Love which moves the sun and the other stars] (DC 142-45). Through this moment of unprecedented translucence, then, the desire of the poet is ultimately brought into harmony that of the Creator, becoming itself a revolving wheel moving towards its fulfilment in God. Coinciding, as it does, the end of the Comedy, this moment of transcendent inspiration is itself all times: a reference to a future already accomplished, which has nevertheless still to be begun, as this end in truth marks the moment which enables the beginning of the writing of the Comedy, the greatest of all allegories. The translucence which this final scene of the Comedy is marked allows us to look upon Divina Commedia as a transubstantiation, as it were, of allegory into symbol and vice versa. In Coleridge's famous distinction between allegory and symbol, however, translucence is taken to be the defining characteristic only of the latter:

'Liberty and truth' or 'the sovereignty of reason': Carlo Cattaneo and the place of politics in the modern world

My purpose here is to place the thought of Carlo Cattaneo in relation to French Restoration liberalism, and I therefore consider the doctrinaire school (among others, Guizot and Cousin) and the Coppet Circle (notably, Constant, StaËl and Sismondi). A concern to render reason sovereign was perhaps shared by all in post-revolutionary Europe who were cultivating human or social science, yet there was in Guizot's concept of 'the sovereignty of reason' a spiritualist, authoritarian and anti-individualist implication. By contrast, Cattaneo wished to honour 'the truth of local facts', that is the specific attributes of all the parts of which a state consisted, and in this regard his thought is descended not from the doctrinaires but from the individualist liberalism of Constant. I also remark upon Cattaneo's debt, openly declared, to the earlier historical writings of Thierry,and therefore to the political precepts of the late id é ologue tradition. Il mio scopo è quello di porre il pensiero di Carlo Cattaneo in relazione al liberalismo francese durante il periodo della Restaurazione, e confrontarlo in particolare con l'Ecole Doctrinaire (tra gli altri, Guizot e Cousin) ed il Circolo Coppet (principalmente, Constant, StaËl e Sismondi). L'idea di rendere la ragione sovrana era forse un sentimento condiviso da molti intellettuali nell'Europa post-rivoluzionaria, specialmente in coloro che dedicavano attenzione ed interesse alle scienze umane e sociali; tuttavia, nel concetto di Guizot sulla 'sovranitÀ della ragione' era insita una componente spiritualista, autoritaria ed antindividualista. Cattaneo, diversamente, tendeva ad onorare 'la veritÀ delle realtÀ locali', ossia di tutte le caratteristiche insite negli innumerevoli elementi di cui lo stato è composto; ed in questo aspetto, il suo pensiero traeva ispirazione dal liberalismo individualista di Constant piuttosto che dai doctrinaires. Credo anche che il liberalismo di Cattaneo sia dichiaratamente debitore verso gli scritti di Thierry ed inoltre nei confronti della filosofia politica appartenente alla tradizione degli idéologues.

Volponi and Desired Exile

In one of his early poems Volponi, referring to the city of his birth, wrote: La nemica figura che mi resta,! l'immagine di Urbino/ che io non posso fuggire,/ la sua crudele festaj quieta tra Ie mie ire. II Questo lasciare/ se io avessi I' ardire/ di lasciare· Ie mie carel piaghe guarire.1 The abundant contradictions expressed in these verses (crudele festa, quieta ire, care piaghe) are suggestive of the psychological conflict that characterizes Volponi' s life and literature. Central to this poetic statement is the verb fuggire and the inability to flee from Urbino. But the obstacle to leaving is not external but rather internal. What is lacking is the courage to leave what is familiar and secure even when they are also painful. Flight is expressed less as a desire than as a duty dovrei lasciare. But why does the poet feel this obligation? The final stanza of the poem may contain an answer: Allora i giardini pensili/ piegano l'ombra ostile dei pini/ verso quel punto dell'orizzontej nuovo ogni sera,/ dove io non giungero mail libero dai miei cattivi pensieri,/ dalla sorte nemical che il mio amore castiga (107). It is the realm of the unexplored and the unexperienced that causes in the poet a feeling of unfulfillment. The constant and contradictory themes in Volponi' s early poetry, especially in the collection Le porte dell' Appennino, is on the one hand the affectionate description of the unchanging land with the repetition of its seasons, and on the other an admiration and almost envy of all that is migratory. In his 1948 introduction to II ramarro, Volponi' s first collection of published poetry, Carlo Bo declared, Certamente it gesto piu evidente della sua voce e determinato dalla forza, dalla liberal del suo atteggiamento.2 This freedom of expression was understandably admired and praised in as much as it was among the very first new poetic voices to make itself heard after so many years of the

Dante, Ovid, and the Transformation of Metamorphosis

In the seventh bolgia of the Inferno, Dante encounters the thieves, who are punished by undergoing an horrific series of Ovid-like metamorphoses in which men are changed into snakes or unidentifiable amalgams of matter. Since theft violates particular justice, which is a dynamic process that coordinates relations, I will argue that Dante properly makes metamorphosis and the lack of relation it creates between the forms that are changed the fitting punishment for thieves. Ovidian metamorphosis, however, can only image the mutations they experience because Dante's sinners have undergone a transformation even before they are changed into snakes. For particular justice, as Aristotle says, is only part of a more general kind of justice which is complete excellence. In the Inferno, this global justice is the final cause of Hell (‘Giustizia mosse il mio alto fattore,’ Inf. 3, 4), and the principle of retribution that establishes the balance between the punishment and crime of those in it. This general justice, I shall argue, also effects a metamorphosis in the damned prior to their particular punishments, a metamorphosis of unbecoming which makes each of them a perverse parody of what God had originally made them. Every sinner in Hell is undergoing a deformation, a disordering movement away from form which unbalances the vital relationship between body and soul that had made him or her human. More precisely, even though we learn from Statius in the Purgatorio that the damned retain the rational soul, it no longer functions as the form of the body, for it has ceased to be that determining element which allows us to understand the one it is in is a member of the species man. Indeed, as the particular transformations of Agnello and Buoso will make clear, the substantial form of all the damned has become less the intellectual soul than the shape of their matter, from which the intellect can no longer abstract any intelligible form. And as their increasing corporeality suggests, the sinners throughout Hell are being transformed into creatures of ever greater density, who lack inner depth, creatures devoid of an animating essence whose powers persist despite outer change.