Modern Italian Culture Research Articles

Humanities Pedagogy in a Pandemic Context: Maintaining High-impact Practices in Virtual Classrooms

The arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic and its disruption of post-secondary education turned future planning for online courses into an immediate reality. Given the in-person limitations, courses centred on experiential learning (EL) opportunities were challenging to offer without their curricula undergoing extensive reconsideration. This article highlights how two Italian Studies courses at the University of Toronto (U of T) and University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM), known for their in-person EL opportunities and study abroad, were able to provide highly interactive, global learning spaces online through the deployment of digital technologies and inclusion of redesigned high-impact practices (HIPs). What emerged from these new virtual spaces and adjacent components (e.g. virtual lectures, tours, workshops, assessments) were models for the preservation of academic integrity, frequent peer-to-peer interaction, and innovative ways to put learners into direct contact with Italian culture. Drawing from these successes and from current scholarship in teaching and learning, the courses at the centre of this article – Modern Italian Culture (ITA358/9Y0, U of T) and Italian Culture through Food (ITA235H5, UTM) – are presented as case studies which champion the inclusion of digital learning tools, open access and virtual opportunities across humanities curricula, regardless of delivery mode.

The art of trascegliere e notare in early modern Italian culture

ABSTRACT Twenty years ago, historians complained that the art of excerpting was still a marginal topic. Ten years later, Ann Blair said that the history of note-taking had only just begun to be written. Indeed, historians spent nearly 25 years investigating how note-taking and excerpting systems developed in early modern Europe, and how great an influence they had on knowledge management and production in a society that gradually adapted to the mentality of printing. In the absence of an interdisciplinary book combining historical evidence with theoretical reasoning, this article aims at sketching out how early modern Italian culture took part in the debate on what we call the art of excerpting and note-taking (trascegliere e notare). The main hypothesis is that, within a century of the invention of the printing press, the notebook lost its function of memory aid and became a secondary memory. This functional change implied a loosening of the rhetorical structure of learning and experimentation with a new form of knowledge production, based on recombination. As a result, scholars discarded the culture of repetition and began to look for novelty. This produced a type of hypertrophy of variety: note-taking and excerpting techniques were understood as a way not only to avoid an excess of variety but also to produce substantially more variety than before. Knowledge was thus stored as a kind of “fine Capital” (Muratori) in view of an open future. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, scholars regarded such capitalisation as a question of “good taste”.

Performative Ethnicity, Embodied Memory, and Oral History in Narratives from the Bronx Italian American History Initiative

Research Article| January 01 2020 Performative Ethnicity, Embodied Memory, and Oral History in Narratives from the Bronx Italian American History Initiative Kathleen Lapenta; Kathleen Lapenta KATHLEEN LAPENTA is a senior lecturer in Italian at Fordham University and is co-director of the Bronx Italian American History Initiative. Her research specializes in modern Italian culture, diaspora studies, and memory at the intersection of literature and cinema; and she has published on Giovanni Verga, Florestano Vancini, Roberto Rossellini, as well as on Italian American identity and representation. She is currently at work on a book-length project that investigates representations of national diasporas in the contexts of migration, exile, and border crossings in Italy and abroad throughout the twentieth century. She is member of the Scientific Committee of the Italian Diaspora Studies Seminar at the University of Calabria. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Jacqueline Reich Jacqueline Reich JACQUELINE REICH is professor and chair of the Department of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University. Her areas of expertise include star studies, film history and theory, and Italian and Italian American cinema. She is the author of The Maciste Films of Italian Silent Cinema (Indiana University Press, 2015) and Beyond the Latin Lover: Marcello Mastroianni, Masculinity, and Italian Cinema (Indiana University Press, 2004). She is also co-author, with Catherine O’Rawe, of Divi: La mascolinità nel cinema italiano (Donzelli, 2015) and co-editor with Piero Garofalo of Re-viewing Fascism: Italian Cinema, 1922-1943 (Indiana University Press, 2002). Currently she is co-director, with Dr. Kathleen LaPenta, of the Bronx Italian American History Initiative, a community-engaged oral history research project at Fordham. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Italian American Review (2020) 10 (1): 1–18. https://doi.org/10.5406/italamerrevi.10.1.0001 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Kathleen Lapenta, Jacqueline Reich; Performative Ethnicity, Embodied Memory, and Oral History in Narratives from the Bronx Italian American History Initiative. Italian American Review 1 January 2020; 10 (1): 1–18. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/italamerrevi.10.1.0001 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressItalian American Review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2020 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2020 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

‘Liberty, Irreverence, and the Place of Women in Early Modern Italian Culture’ A symposium to celebrate the work of Letizia Panizza IMLR, 11 May 2018

‘Liberty, Irreverence, and the Place of Women in Early Modern Italian Culture’ A symposium to celebrate the work of Letizia Panizza IMLR, 11 May 2018

Interactions between Orality and Writing in Early Modern Italian Culture

Interactions between Orality and Writing in Early Modern Italian Culture

A bibliography of the works of Christopher Duggan

This is a full bibliography of the works of Christopher Duggan, including his D.Phil thesis, books, contributions to edited collections, articles in journals, newspapers and other periodicals, book reviews and review articles. It illustrates both the range of his own scholarship and his engagement with the fields of modern Italian history, politics, society and culture.

Interactions between Orality and Writing in Early Modern Italian Culture. Ed. by Luca Degl’Innocenti, Brian Richardson, and Chiara Sbordoni.Voices and Texts in Early Modern Italian Society. Ed. by Stefano Dall’Aglio, Brian Richardson, and Massimo Rospocher.

Interactions between Orality and Writing in Early Modern Italian Culture. Ed. by Luca Degl’Innocenti, Brian Richardson, and Chiara Sbordoni.Voices and Texts in Early Modern Italian Society. Ed. by Stefano Dall’Aglio, Brian Richardson, and Massimo Rospocher.

Christianity and political thought: Augusto Del Noce and the ideology of Christian Democracy in post-war Italy

This article engages with the thought of Augusto Del Noce (1910–1989), the most important Italian Catholic philosopher and political thinker of the 20th century. The focus is on how Del Noce came to elaborate a Catholic ‘modernity,’ bridging a positive encounter between Catholicism, democracy and freedom. This philosophical project had a considerable impact on modern Italian culture and politics. At the theoretical level, the argument is embedded within the larger aim of recognizing attempts within Catholic philosophy to articulate an Italian political trajectory that does not simply accept the tale of a singular path to modernity based on the Enlightenment model but instead tries to articulate an alternative vision of the modern, grounded within a transcendental perspective.

The Diva in Modern Italian Culture

This special issue arises from the papers delivered at the two-day conference in September 2011 entitled Desiring Divas: the Diva in Modern Italian Culture (Downing College, Cambridge, organized by...

A cinema of poetry: aesthetics of the Italian art film

A Cinema of Poetry brings Italian film studies into dialogue with fields outside its usual purview by showing how films can contribute to our understanding of aesthetic questions that stretch back to Homer. Joseph Luzzi considers the relation between film and literature, especially the cinematic adaptation of literary sources and, more generally, the fields of rhetoric, media studies, and modern Italian culture. The book balances theoretical inquiry with close readings of films by the masters of Italian cinema: Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti, Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Bernardo Bertolucci, and others. Luzzi's study is the first to show how Italian filmmakers address such crucial aesthetic issues as the nature of the chorus, the relation between symbol and allegory, the literary prehistory of montage, and the place of poetry in cinematic expression-what Pasolini called the cinema of poetry. While Luzzi establishes how certain qualities of film-its link with technological processes, capacity for mass distribution, synthetic virtues (and vices) as the so-called total art-have reshaped centuries-long debates, A Cinema of Poetry also explores what is specific to the Italian art film and, more broadly, Italian cinematic history. In other words, what makes this version of the art film recognizably Italian?

THE SINGING VOICE AND THE PRINTING PRESS: ITINERARIES OF THE ALTISSIMO’S PERFORMED TEXTS IN RENAISSANCE ITALY

In the early sixteenth century, the Altissimo was one of the major Italian oral poets: a laureate cantastorie singing his ‘improvised’ lyrical and narrative poems in Florence and in Venice, and publishing them in printed editions which often present their texts as live transcriptions of his performances. By analysing these editions (including a newly discovered booklet — his earliest known edition), this essay aims to investigate the Altissimo’s techniques of oral composition, his catalogue of subjects and styles, his sources and models, and the relations between the oral performance and the written transmission of his poetry. The essay also highlights the striking similarities that the Altissimo’s complex and multifaceted profile — which blended literature and music, fine arts and eclectic learning, performing skills and commercial enterprise, genius and craftsmanship — shares with figures such as Leonardo da Vinci, Pietro Aretino, Niccolò degli Agostini, and Niccolò Zoppino. The canonical perception of each of them as an artist, a writer, or a publisher is reassessed in the light of the clues that reveal their activity as oral performers, thus showing how pivotal and permeating oral poetry was in early modern Italian culture.

Depicting the Heavens: The Use of Astrology in the Frescoes of Renaissance Rome

This paper explores the use of astrological imagery in four ceiling frescoes painted during the Renaissance in Rome: the scenes of the Sala di Galatea in the Villa Farnesina, and those of the Stanza della Segnatura, the Sala dei Pontefici, and the Sala Bologna, all within the Vatican Palace. Significantly this imagery was not confined to the pages of private manuscripts as it had been in the Middle Ages, but took the form of frescoes on the walls and ceilings of public rooms, allowing viewers to bask in the celestial glory of the patron. Commissioned in 1575 by Pope Gregory XIII, I argue that the Sala Bologna imagery represents a critical juncture in attitudes toward natural philosophy, and demonstrates a shift from astrological interpretation, as condemned at the Council of Trent, to astronomical calculation, as promoted by the Catholic Church. I argue that the placement of these murals demonstrates that this type of pictorial aggrandizement was intended to reach a wide audience and was used by the patron, popes being the most prominent among these, as a form of visual self-promotion. I also examine how contemporaneous events - notably the Protestant Reformation and the Council of Trent - affected astrological practice and the monumental display of these horoscopes. Astrological imagery is not limited to Rome, but the four examples I discuss represent the peak of such decoration and offer insight into a widespread feature of early modern Italian culture that has yet to be adequately explored.

The Manly Masquerade: Masculinity, Paternity, and Castration in the Italian Renaissance

The Manly Masquerade unravels the complex ways men were defined as men in Renaissance Italy through readings of a vast array of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century evidence - medical and travel literature; theology; law; myth; conduct books; and, plays, chivalric romances, and novellas by authors including Machiavelli, Tasso and Ariosto. Valeria Finucci shows how ideas of masculinity were formed in the midst of acute anxiety about paternity by highlighting the beliefs - widely held at the time - that conception could occur without a paternal imprimatur or through a woman's encounter with an animal, or even that a pregnant woman's imagination could erase the father's 'signature' from the fetus.Against these visions of reproduction gone awry, Finucci looks at how concepts of masculinity were tied to issues of paternity through social standing, legal matters, and inheritance practices. Highlighting the fissures running through Italian Renaissance ideas of manliness, Finucci describes how, alongside pervasive images of the virile, sexually active man, early modern Italian culture recognized the existence of hermaphrodites and started to experiment with a new kind of sexuality by manufacturing a non-man: the castrato. Following the creation of castrati, the Church forbade the marriage of all non-procreative men, and in this move, Finucci identifies a powerful legitimation of the view that what makes men is not the possession of male organs or the ability to have sex, but the capability to father. Through analysis, anecdote, and rich cultural description, The Manly Masquerade exposes the 'real' early modern man: the paterfamilias.