Italian Tradition Research Articles

Some pedagogical and syntactical aspects of Francesco da Buti’s (1324–1406)Regule grammaticales

AbstractThis essay aims at giving an account of some pedagogical and syntactical aspects of Francesco da buti’s (1324–1406)Regule grammaticales, a Latin grammar written in Central Italy in the second half of the 14th century. It occupies an important place in the history of positive grammar, providing an excellent example of Latin teaching in late medieval Italy. In fact, da Buti treatise deals not only with grammar, but also with rhetoric andArs dictaminis, as was customary in the Italian tradition in the final centuries of the Middle Ages. This article analyzes the sections devoted to nouns and verbs, while also pointing out some pedagogical features, such as the exercises of thethèmataand the use of the vernacular as a tool for learning Latin composition.

Establishing Italian Jazz on the International Scene 1960-1980

This paper sheds new light on the developments in Italian jazz in the two decades 1960-1980. It opens by touching on context and antecedents: the relationships with Italian musical traditions in early American jazz, the acceptance and refusal of jazz by Italian cultural institutions and movements before 1960, and the late '50s key developments both in jazz and arts/media. In the early '60s, Italian jazz was characterized by two small scenes with marked differences in Rome and Milan and with a few further relevant events. An active and well rooted specialist magazine (Musica Jazz) provides relatively good documentation on these beginnings, quite detached from other general movements in music. By the end of the decade several ideological, cultural, political ruptures will have changed this panorama, and while Italian jazz was active in these changes, its exponents also had to deal with the complex situation they created from the point of view of artistic challenges, working conditions, and relationships with the recording industry. In order to discuss these changes and the different strategies adopted by musicians, four case studies will be examined to gain a better understanding of the process. Nunzio Rotondo, while almost unknown outside of Italy, was one of the first Italian musicians to successfully perform internationally after the war. He subsequently worked within the Rome jazz scene, with limited exposure both live and on record. Giorgio Gaslini's ground-breaking work of the late 50s, his training in ‘classical' music, and his unflagging commitment to exploration made him a personality similar to Portal and Gulda. However, his artistic successes did not close the chasm between ‘serious' music and jazz in Italy. Enrico Rava took the opposite road to Rotondo, widely performing abroad and paying dues in Buenos Aires, New York, and Paris before gaining acceptance worldwide and in his own country. He has been instrumental in the creation of an international image of Italian jazz and even of an Italian sound, opening the doors to many others. Perigeo was a ‘jazz-rock' group of the early 70s. Their recordings are still extremely popular. The reaction to their music by the jazz establishment and then their curt dismissal by the industry led to their disbanding, after which the single members—Franco D'Andrea, Claudio Fasoli, Giovanni Tommaso—produced and still produce some of the most exciting Italian jazz.

James M. Buchanan and the Journal of Public Finance and Public Choice: Extending the Italian Tradition of Public Finance

The Journal of Public Finance and Public Choice began publication in 1983 under the title Economia delle scelte pubbliche, changing to its present title in 1998. Under either name, the Journal reflected the founding editor’s (Domenico da Empoli) desire to amplify and extend the Italian orientation toward public finance that Antonio de Viti de Marco (1888) set in motion. It’s fitting that James Buchanan’s (1983) “The Public Choice Perspective” opened the Journal, for Buchanan (1960) was instrumental in promoting awareness among Anglo-Saxon scholars of the Italian tradition that da Empoli sought to carry forward in establishing the JPFPC. With da Empoli’s death in December 2016, the Journal is now proceeding with a new editorial team (Emma Galli and Giampaolo Garzarelli) and a new publisher (Bristol University Press). The Journal’s orientation, however, remains unchanged, in that it continues to welcome contributions within public finance and public choice within the broad tradition outlined here. In this essay, I mark this change in editorial regime by reviewing how Buchanan’s orientation toward public finance continues and extends the tradition that de Viti (1888) began.

Two faces of theatre laboratory tradition: ways of working with song in the Laboratorio di Domenico Castaldo and in Raúl Iaiza’s project ‘Regula contra regulam’

The main purpose of this article is to describe the ways of working with music and song in the process of training actors in the ‘Regula contra regulam’ project conducted by Raúl Iaiza (Regula Theatre, Milan) and in the work of Domenico Castaldo (Laboratorio di Castaldo, Turin). The investigations of both artists belong to the stream of the Italian laboratory tradition, for which the main inspirations remain the work of Jerzy Grotowski and of Eugenio Barba. The article explains what the sources of this tradition are and how we can contemporarily understand the concept of the theatre as a ‘laboratory’. It subsequently describes briefly the most important findings regarding the approach to working with the voice advanced by Grotowski and Barba. We can find the continuation and expansion of their thoughts regarding work with the voice and with music in the work of both Iaiza and Castaldo, although, as this article attempts to show, the investigations of each of these artists achieve their own individual, original character.

An Italian-American view of grief: connection, transformation and resilience

Current theories regarding grief and mourning often acknowledge continued connection and reworking of the relationship to the lost person rather than relinquishing ties and bonds, and acknowledge the importance of culture in grief and mourning. Although there is little research regarding Italian-Americans and grieving, these ideas fit well with the description described by researchers as ‘Italians tend to keep their dead with them’. This paper explores Italian-American responses to the loss of a loved one. It comprises a brief summary of relevant literature around grieving, followed by an overview of themes from Italian traditions and culture that inform our thinking about Italian-Americans and grief. The authors, as participants in both the culture and the experience of grief, briefly situate themselves vis-à-vis these experiences. Three segments then illustrate our concepts of continued bonds and reworking relationships: a pilot study of Italian-Americans’ experiences of loss and grieving over time, a normative case study of one woman’s creative, ongoing response to major loss, and the importance of objects after loss from a research project of daughters who have lost their dads. Conclusions focus on the importance and complexity of mourning; the centrality of relationship; the use of symbol, ritual and meaning-making; and development of resiliency, for Italian-Americans and perhaps other groups.

How migrants keep Italian families Italian: badanti and the private care of older people

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to describe how migration affects the care of older people in Italy.Design/methodology/approachThe paper is based on anthropological fieldwork by one of the authors. This consisted of in-depth interviews with 20 “badanti” (migrant caregivers), with relatives of older people and with social workers in the city of Verona, Italy. It further included extensive study of secondary materials on the topic of migrant care of older people.FindingsBadanti, Italian families and older people find themselves locked in an uneasy contract: badanti because they are exploited and often unable to find better, formal employment; Italian families because they are aware that they fail to render their moral duty to their aged parents and grandparents; and older people because they feel neglected and maltreated by their children. Yet the three parties also rely on each other to make the best of a precarious situation. The relationship between badanti and Italian elderly highlights the contradictions within Italian politics on care and migration. This case study shows how migrants help Italian families to hold on to the tradition of family care for ageing parents.Research limitations/implicationsThe small sample of badanti and families provides a detailed and profound insight of the complexity of elder care in Italy but does not allow generalisation for developments in the country as a whole.Practical implicationsPolicy makers should take notice of the indispensability of informal migrant care in present day Italy.Originality/valueThe originality of the paper lies in the in-depth conversations with badanti and in the way in which elderly care is contextualised in the Italian tradition of care and present day politics.

Fund Accounting from the Italian Early Tradition to the U.S. GAAP for Governments

ABSTRACTSurprising correspondences emerge from the parallel investigation of fund accounting practices in Italian entities until the late nineteenth century and in the contemporary U.S. public sector. The analysis attempts to interpret similarities and differences in light of dissimilar environmental features, and wonders if the Italian tradition could have some explanatory capability on the U.S. present standards. The “fund” concept and its use are strictly similar; they are founded on information needs for governance and internal control. Contemporary requirements for democracy and transparency, and opportunities coming from modern ICT tools bring U.S. organizations to be accountable to the citizenry.

Review: Radical Design

Radical Design Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein, Germany 4 June–13 November 2016 Radical Design was the latest in a number of shows, including a special exhibition at the 1996 Architecture Biennale in Venice, devoted to the “radicals” of the 1960s and 1970s.1 That exhibition made clear that the “radical” approach did not concentrate on objects exclusively, but was in fact rather expansive: “from the spoon to the city.”2 In the beginning, Radical Design was an informal network, consisting primarily of young Italian architects who had forged friendships over their shared interests.3 Lacking building contracts, they began experimenting on a 1:1 scale, producing objects in practices that straddled the lines between design, art, and theory. This plainly adhered to the Italian tradition of architects who are active as designers and intellectuals as well. But in contrast to the representatives of earlier generations, these new Italian radicals came of age during a period of crisis. Graduates of architecture schools were extremely hard-pressed to secure building contracts in the 1960s.4 Their predicament was exacerbated by an increasing disillusionment with the “great masters” of modernism. Additionally, consumerism and mass production had become facts of life. The young Italians could not tolerate the idea of simply producing attractive objects that would then be absorbed by the systems of unfettered capitalism. Instead, they endeavored to develop designs that would resist mass consumption. Groups …

The Italian sources of the Catalan translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses by Francesc Alegre (15th c.)

Abstract The singularity of Francesc Alegre’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses into Catalan has been associated with its dependence on the Latin poem in contrast to the other versions of this text that circulated in print prior to 1500. This article argues that the Catalan translation is the work of a learned author who places himself in relation to the Italian tradition and draws on different sources to complete a work influenced by humanist ideas. Moreover, the evidence strongly supports the impact of Giovanni Bonsignori’s Ovidio Metamorphoseos Vulgare (c. 1375–1377) throughout the fifteen books of Alegre’s translation and in his allegorical interpretations in the second part of the work. I also contend that he may have known the Expositio and the Allegorie written by Giovanni del Virgilio (1322–1323).

Measure and proportion as keyword for qualitative town squares

<p class="PublicSpace-Abstract" align="left">The authors of this paper refer specifically to public space as that of the town square.<br />According to Italian tradition town squares have been clearly recognised since the Renaissance period.<br />There are several studies about meaning, perception, and the shape of public spaces such as squares but there is no research about their actual measures, proportions, and about the presence of some recurrent numbers.<br />This study develop a thematic synthesis about meaning, definitions and proportions before seeking similarity about spatial dimension using simple statistical instruments.<br />The study comes from a pedagogical exercise, undertaken in the last three years in the Course of Urban Design at University of Pavia, where students developed 80 data sheets based on free web information measures of Italian and European squares.</p>

“Framing and Fashioning of Images”: The Pictorial Invention of the Art Lover in Daniel Mytens’s Portrait of Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel (ca 1618)

Abstract The article examines Daniel Mytens’s portrait of Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, and the pendant portrait of his wife, Aletheia Howard (ca 1618), in relation to early modern rhetorical concepts in portrait painting and art theory. Particular focus is placed on the pictorial meaning of the depicted sculpture gallery in Lord Arundel’s portrait in its relation to the sitter. The author argues that the composition subtly transforms certain patterns of a long-standing pictorial code in portrait painting, which can be identified as a type of “picture within a picture.” Already established in the Italian portrait tradition, an integrated little picture or window view next to the sitter was a widespread formula in seventeenth-century Dutch and British portraiture, in order to praise a sitter’s moral and political virtues. Mytens reinterprets this portrait type, in this way inventing a pictorial mode of highlighting the particular virtues of the art lover: his portrait, through its adaptation of the picture-within-a-picture formula, praises the earl’s noble act of collecting antiquities while at the same time strongly emphasizing his intellectual strength.

Bishop Leodoin of Modena and the Legal Culture of Late Ninth-Century Italy

This article offers an analysis and contextualization of canon law materials found in the manuscript Modena, Biblioteca Capitolare O.I.4. It focuses especially on a letter, transmitted in the manuscript, written by Bishop Leodoin of Modena (ca. 871-ca. 891) to Abbot Theodoric of Nonantola. This letter is noteworthy for containing perhaps the earliest citations of the Pseudo-Isidorian decretais in Italy outside of Rome. Leodoin's arguments in the letter and his use of both the decretais and older canonical authorities are examined. The examination reveais that Leodoin had access to a Bobbiese collection of conciliar canons in addition to Pseudo-Isidore, and that he approached and used these two classes of authorities - decretais and conciliar canons - in quite different ways. Leodoin's letter is also situated in the broader context of the ongoing conflict between the Modenese church and the monastery of Nonantola in the ninth century. This contextualization sheds light on and corroborates some of what is found in Leodoin's letter, and also suggests that Leodoin's canonical-argumentative approach coexisted with other methods of prosecuting the perennial disputes between the two institutions. The article also catalogs the other canon law materials in the Modena codex, giving special attention to a neglected collection of extracts - many heavily edited - taken primarily from the Pseudo-Isidorian decretais, titled De accusatione episcopi. Analysis of the collection reveais that it was not produced using the incomplete text of Pseudo-Isidore found in the Modena manuscript, but rather a different Italian tradition of the A2-redaction of Pseudo-Isidore. This suggests that a creative, engaged approach to canon law (and particularly to the Pseudo- Isidorian decretais) was not unique to Leodoin, but was rather a feature of the broader legal culture of Northern Italy in the final decades of the ninth century. The article concludes with two appendices: an edition and English translation of Leodoin's letter to Theodoric and an edition of the De accusatione episcopi.

Direct Social Actions in Extreme Right Mobilisations. Ideological, strategic and organisational incentives in the Italian neo-fascist right

Social movements scholarship has increasingly turned to the study of direct social actions (DSAs) in times of economic hardship. This paper broadens this perspective to extreme right organisations. Combining a Political Claims Analysis of newspaper articles and online press releases, with a qualitative discussion of online propaganda material, we explore the engagement in direct social activism by three neo-fascist organisations in Italy: Forza Nuova, Fiamma Tricolore and CasaPound Italia (1996 -2015). Our findings suggest that their propen-sity to direct social activism, rather than being exclusively related to economic distress, responds to a broad set of ideological, organisational and strategic incentives. Ideologically, DSAs are linked to the interpretation of the relationship between ideas and action of historical Fascism and of parts of the Italian neo-fascist tradition. Organisationally, DSAs serve as a tool to build support and solidarity, especially at the local level. Strategically, they are used to frame activism as a direct intervention in defence of interests of native peoples, and against political elites accused of being unresponsive to the needs of citizens. Our results offer a first empirical observation of the use of DSAs by extreme right actors, paving the way for comparative work at the cross-national level and on different arenas of engagement

Das Migrationsthema bei Gianmaria Testa: zur ethischen und ästhetischen Hinterlassenschaft des Liedermachers aus dem Piemont

This article focuses on the work of the Italian Cantautore Gianmaria Testa, who died prematurely this year. In particular, it analyses his concept album Da quest parte del mare (2006), which deals with the issue of migration. In the eleven songs of this album, Testa establishes a link between the migrations of the past and the present, in order to show that human feelings and behaviour do not change in ‘times of crises’. As the article tries to point out, Testa’s musical style and lyrics are the result of an intense aesthetic work. It is based on ethical principles and empathy, it creates intertextual relations with contemporary literary texts and with the Italian tradition of songwriters and reaches a remarkable expressiveness.

Das Migrationsthema bei Gianmaria Testa: zur ethischen und ästhetischen Hinterlassenschaft des Liedermachers aus dem Piemont

This article focuses on the work of the Italian Cantautore Gianmaria Testa, who died prematurely this year. In particular, it analyses his concept album Da quest parte del mare (2006), which deals with the issue of migration. In the eleven songs of this album, Testa establishes a link between the migrations of the past and the present, in order to show that human feelings and behaviour do not change in ‘times of crises’. As the article tries to point out, Testa’s musical style and lyrics are the result of an intense aesthetic work. It is based on ethical principles and empathy, it creates intertextual relations with contemporary literary texts and with the Italian tradition of songwriters and reaches a remarkable expressiveness.

The Italian “Difference”. Philosophy between Old and New Tendencies in Contemporary Italy

Back in vogue today is the tendency of Italian philosophy toward reflection on itself that has always characterized an important part of our historiographical tradition. The present essay firstly analyzes the various interpretative positions in respect to the legitimacy, the risks, and the benefits of such a discourse, which intends to distinguish the different traditions of thought by resorting to a criterion of territorial or national kind. Secondly, the essay examines diverse paradigms that identify – in “precursory genius”; in ethical and civil vocation; and in “living thought” – the distinctive hallmark of the Italian philosophical tradition from the Renaissance to today.

Defining Italianness: Poetry, Music and the Construction of National Identity in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Accounts of the Medieval Italian Lyric Tradition

ABSTRACTThis article explores the role of music in nineteenth- and twentieth-century accounts of medieval Italian literature and its relation to the construction of Italian national identity both during and long after the Risorgimento. Tracing music's role in the writings of Giosuè Carducci, Vincenzo De Bartholomaeis and Aurelio Roncaglia, it argues that music somewhat paradoxically became entangled with Italy's literary identity even as scholars worked to extricate the peninsula's most renowned poetry from its grasp. In the realm of ‘popular’ poetry, Italianness depends on the presence of music, which serves as a marker of that poetry's popular origins. In contrast, music's absence from the realm of ‘high-art’ poetry was essential to the construction of an Italian tradition independent of and superior to its French and Provençal predecessors.

Atlantic reflections on Giuseppe Ungaretti: The man, the journeys, the poet

In this article I offer an Atlantic-world reading of Giuseppe Ungaretti’s life and poetry. Focusing on several important events in his biography and on how they contributed to the shaping of his poetics, I argue that Ungaretti can be fruitfully appreciated as an Atlantic poet, beyond the national confines of the Italian literary tradition. While Ungaretti’s oeuvre fits readily into a cosmopolitan ambience, the application of a specifically Atlantic-world paradigm to his works and days allows us to fully understand his famous claim of being a “docile fibra dell’universo.” This allusive subjective claim suggests that from the onset of his career he saw himself as a citizen of the world, a self-conscious status that nicely captures the way he approached his writing and the way he understood human experience in general. Furthermore, it is on this basis that I would also like to suggest a cultural dialogue between his work and the spirit of the blues, inasmuch as his poems are often the extemporaneous product of a particular biographical experience that tends to trespass geographical continents to become universal.

Dalle Regole del Fortunio a una grammatica ‘dell'utente’: l'italiano fra norma e uso

This essay follows the development of the history of Italian grammars from the earliest manifestations to the present, offering a wide-ranging analysis of the relevant linguistic debates across the centuries, as well as focusing on the role that texts such as Fortunio's Regole have played in the Italian grammatical tradition. The discussion outlines and examines the methodologies and approaches of different theorist of language as expressed in their works, with the aim of clarifying various aspects of the Italian grammatical tradition and highlighting new scholarly paths. Reflecting on grammar and grammar production is far from being a sterile and dry elaboration of research and teaching methods and perspectives. It is, on the contrary, a fertile and fruitful field of investigation.

Augusto Graziani's Equilibrio generale ed equilibrio macroeconomico: a key milestone in a long journey out of the neoclassical mainstream

Educated in the best Italian cultural and economic tradition, Augusto Graziani was a scholar of great finesse and erudition. These qualities come out clearly in Equilibrio generale ed equilibrio macroeconomico (1965a), interpreted here as the initial step in a process that eventually brought Graziani to the final rejection of methodological individualism and the reconstruction of microeconomics on macroeconomic bases achieved with The Monetary Theory of Production (2003). In his 1965 book, Graziani shows that, save for the Sraffian–Kaldorian heterodox alternative, extending Walras to dynamics in a multisectoral framework requires assumptions logically equivalent to those of single good models. This also points implicitly towards the need of interpreting the mainstream temporary equilibrium method in terms of path dependency when it refers to multiple sectors, and thus precludes that it converges towards a ‘plain’, long-term intertemporal general equilibrium. The latter is a notion generally associated with the name of Walras and early marginalists, but which owes much to later developments by Hayek, Lindahl and Hicks.For the single period, Graziani's work on the monetary circuit can be read as an original variant of the monetary temporary equilibrium of Myrdal, where money and debt, combined with errors in exogenous expectations, explain the path-dependency of short-term equilibria. For continuation analysis, this is completed with insights from Wicksell, Schumpeter, Marx and Kalecki, whereby the circuit provides a simple explanation of the Keynesian fallacy of composition critique of microeconomics.But the book is also an important contribution to an Italian debate on capital theory, which emerged mainly in Il Giornale degli Economisti in the 1960s, in parallel with the more cosmopolitan ‘two Cambridge capital controversies’ that developed at the same time in the top American and British journals. Both originated in Sraffa's famous 1960 contribution and should thus be examined together.