italian-studies: Scholarly discussions in any field of Italian studies

Dear colleagues,
This message contains three announcements:
1. A new book from my colleague, Ennio Rao, on Humanisitic invective;
2. The latest volume of the series Studi e Testi, sponsored by Annali, 
on women partisans by Rosetta D'Angelo and Barbara Zaczek;
3. Announcement of the 2010 Annali volume, to be edited by Cristina 
Mazzoni, and call for papers.

Many thanks and wishes to all of you for the Spring 2008!

Dino Cervigni

1.

Ennio I. Rao, /Curmudgeons in High Dudgeon: 101 Years of Invectives 
(1352-1453)/. Messina: EDAS, 2007. Pp. 192.

As the subtitle indicates, the book is a comprehensive account (the 
first in the English language) of the more than 70 invectives exchanged 
by Italian humanists during a span of 101 years, beginning with 
Petrarch's attacks against some French adversaries in defense of Italy 
and the liberal arts and ending with the epic controversy between Poggio 
Bracciolini and Lorenzo Valla. Other valiant practitioners of the art of 
verbal vituperation included in this study are Coluccio Salutati, 
Leonardo Bruni Aretino, Antonio da Rho, Francesco Filelfo, Antonio 
Beccadelli Panormita, and Bartolomeo Facio, among others.

The Italian humanists, who were responsible for the revival of classical 
learning known as the Renaissance, were not the originators of the 
invective form or genre, but its continuators. Originating as the 
“vituperatio” of epideictic speeches, invectives often represented a 
negative biography of the adversary, ascribing ignoble birth, accusing 
him of crimes ranging from rape, theft, plagiarism, corruption of youth, 
and homosexuality to treason and heresy. The invectives have the special 
merit of conferring a new dimension, a more vivid color to the 
personalities of the humanists.

This book does not limit itself to a study of humanistic invectives. It 
also surveys their Greek, Roman and medieval antecedents, beginning with 
Homer’s /Iliad/ and the lost /Margites/, to the poets Archilochus, 
Hipponax, and Callimachus, down to the Latin writers Ennius, Lucilius, 
Catullus, Cicero, Sallust, Seneca the Younger, Juvenal, St. Jerome, 
Berengarius, bishop of Poitiers, and Gerard de Berry.

The book can be obtained from Casalini Libri, ibs.it, 
libreriauniversitaria.it, unilibro.it, and other book dealers, or 
directly from the publisher, edas.it ([log in to unmask]).

2.

*Rosetta D’Angelo and Barbara Zaczek, editors and translators*. 
/Resisting Bodies: Narratives of Italian Partisan Women/. Studi & Testi 
9. Chapel Hill, NC: Annali d’Italianistica, 2008. Pp. 33 + 224. ISBN 
0-9657956-8-3.

The volume is a translation of texts that explore the experience of 
partisan women in Italy between 1943 and 1945, focusing on the 
representations of a female body. The texts include autobiographical 
narratives as well as fictional accounts of partisan women published 
between 1944 and 2000. This anthology provides the American reading 
public with a long-needed access to World War II from a perspective that 
history and literature have often considered marginal and yet it offers 
not only a rich source of information but also a valuable teaching 
material for courses in Italian literature, culture, history and women’s 
studies. To order the volume, visit the website of Annali and click on 
Studi e testi (North America: $25 +$4 for shipping; Overseas: $25 +$7 
for shipping).

3.

*AdI 2010: Capital City: Rome, 1870-2010. To be edited by Cristina 
Mazzoni * ([log in to unmask])

The twenty-eighth issue of /Annali d’Italianistica/, to be published in 
2010, will be devoted to the city of Rome from 1870 to the present day.

For the past century and a half, as for the rest of its long history, 
Rome has been both the product of the imagination and one of its more 
prolific and enduring agents; Rome is a material, geographical place, 
but it also occupies the space of cultural representation. “Rome was not 
built in a day,” it is commonly said; less frequently does one realize 
that Rome was, and continues to be, built with words, images, and sounds 
as much as with bricks, stone, and cement: no clear boundary may be 
drawn between the real and the imagined Rome, between the city of myth 
and the city on the map. Thus, the volume intends to investigate Rome’s 
presence since 1870 in texts, films, events, works of art and 
architecture, popular culture, and more.

The volume will be articulated chronologically into four parts: 1. 
Across Two Centuries; 2. Fascism and World War II; 3. The Postwar 
Period; 4. Into the Third Millennium.

/1. Across two centuries/. With the “Breach of Porta Pia,” Rome was 
freed from the political authority of the pope and, shortly thereafter, 
made the capital of the Kingdom of Italy. Because it promised balance 
and mediation, in addition to its considerable historic weight, Rome was 
designated as the symbolic center of the young nation, through an active 
manipulation of both its urban outline and its less tangible urban 
culture: literature, politics, the arts, and those events that 
eventually formed the text of Rome’s history between the nineteenth and 
the twentieth century. All this was placed on top and in the interstices 
of a city already some twenty-five hundred years old, an urban 
palimpsest whose past never gets completely erased before the present is 
built to take its place.

/2. Fascism and World War Two./ Viewing Rome’s recent past as a decadent 
failure, Mussolini notoriously refashioned the capital so that it might 
better reflect his grandiose ideals of a new Italy; his approach was a 
mixture of reverence for Rome’s ancient past and ruthless desecration of 
its legacy. Artists, writers, and filmmakers have reflected on the 
novelties and the shortcomings of the regime’s myth of a monolithic 
capital, their critiques often veiled so as to avoid censorship—though 
the /Duce/’s demise and the traumas of the Second World War brought 
about copious and far more diverse representations of Rome in all 
available media.

/ 3. The postwar period./ The traces of its fascist experience rethought 
and rewritten (with the names of streets changed, the significance of 
monuments altered), Rome underwent further transformations during the 
second half of the twentieth century. But continuity prevailed over 
breaks with the past, and the city did not lose its long-standing 
significance as a place of mediation and circulation with respect to the 
rest of the country. Rome’s physical and allegorical contradictions, and 
its social and political role for the Italian peninsula as a whole, are 
expressed in the city’s art and architecture, literature and poetry, but 
also its cinema and its popular culture.

/ 4. Into the third millennium:/ Along with the urban face-lifts 
inspired by the 2000 Jubilee and the cultural politics of Rome’s recent 
mayors, the late twentieth century and the new millennium have marked 
Rome with a multicultural stamp. From the immigrants inhabiting both 
center and periphery, and peopling contemporary films and books, to the 
visible presence of foreign architects and artists, to the building of 
the largest mosque in Europe, Rome’s provincial face is changing 
rapidly. Rome was chosen as the capital of united Italy because it 
signaled a mythical view of a nation unified in the past, while pointing 
to a unified future. One of the many questions contemporary Rome invites 
us to ponder, then, concerns the ways in which Rome’s 1870 promise of 
unity has been and is being fulfilled, betrayed, or, rather, whether 
such a view should be re-examined altogether.

For each section we welcome scholarly investigations on any aspect of 
the city of Rome from 1870 to 2010.

Essays are due to the editor by May 1^st , 2009, with final versions due 
no later than December 1^st , 2009. Essays must be in English, not 
exceed 25 double-spaced pages, and conform to the MLA style; they need 
to be submitted electronically, using Microsoft Word, and should include 
a list of works cited. Interested scholars are invited to contact the 
volume’s editor as soon as possible.

For further information or to submit an essay, please contact Guest 
Editor Cristina Mazzoni, Dept. of Romance Languages, University of Vermont

([log in to unmask]).


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