This paper is available for the academic year 2025-26. Topics are subject to change and will be confirmed in due course.
Can we speak of an Italian culture and society (and language) if Italy de facto did not exist before 1861 as a political entity? Can we speak of a single Italian identity in Italy's history or should we rather consider several Italian identities? From the Middle Ages to the end of the nineteenth century Italy was a politically and linguistically fragmented country. To more adequately understand Italy's tradition and culture through the centuries, one must then consider the variety of political and cultural centres that developed across the peninsula: from the 'comuni' and the 'signorie', to the republics, the Renaissance courts, the papal state, the dukedoms and the kingdoms, to the creation of a unified state in 1861, following the Risorgimento process. The aim of this paper is to acknowledge the richness and variety of Italy's local traditions, which often remain undifferentiated under a general umbrella of 'Italian' culture: it will offer students the possibility to gain a more detailed understanding of the country's history, language and culture by focusing on its local identities and texts of various genres that chronologically range from the Middle Ages to the present times.
Topic 1 Florence: Boccaccio's Decameron
Core text: Selections from Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron (recommended editions: either edited by Vittore Branca (various editions) or ed. by Amedeo Quondam, Maurizio Fiorilla, and Giancarlo Alfano (Milan: BUR, 2013)
Boccaccio’s language might take getting used to the original Italian. English translations can help in this, are inexpensive and widely available. The Brown University Decameron web site (see below) has a hyperlinked original text plus translation that will allow you to skip back and forth as needed.
Read as much of the Decameron as you can. Lectures and exams will focus on the following novelle. You are strongly encouraged to read these before the start of term.
- Proemio; Introduzione and Conclusione (general and of each day)
- I,1 I,6
- II,3 II,5 II,10
- III,1 III,3 III,4
- IV,1 IV,7 IV,8 IV,9
- V,9
- VI,1 VI,2 VI,3 VI, 4 VI, 5 VI, 7 VI,8 VI,9 VI, 10
- VII,6 VII,8
- VIII,3 VIII,5 VIII,6 VIII,7 VIII,9
- IX,3 IX,8
- X,6 X,10
Other Resources:
- http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/dweb/index.php (primary sources on the plague in Florence, maps of places referenced in the novelle, bibliography, bilingual hypertext).
For secondary reading for this module, see the IT5 Moodle page.
Topic 2 Urbino: The essence of courtly life: Castiglione’s Il libro del Cortegiano (1528)
By means of Baldassar Castiglione’s Il Libro del Cortegiano this topic offers a fascinating insight into Renaissance court life. Castiglione’s work, the ultimate ‘how to’ guide for aspiring courtiers, is considered one of the masterpieces of Italian and European literature.
Core text: Baldassare Castiglione, Il libro del Cortegiano (any modern edition)
Preliminary reading on Castiglione and the Renaissance:
- Burke, P., 1988. 'Il cortigiano', in E. Garin (ed.), L'uomo del Rinascimento. Bari: Laterza, pp. 133-65; English version 'The Courtier', in E. Garin (ed.), Renaissance Characters, trans. by L. Cochrane. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997, pp. 98-122.
- Burke, P., 1995. The Fortunes of the Courtier: The European Reception of Castiglione's Cortegiano. Cambridge: Polity Press.
- Burke, P., 1999. The Italian Renaissance: Culture and Society in Italy, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Polity Press.
- Cox, Virginia, 1992. Renaissance Dialogue: Literary Dialogue in its Social and Political Contexts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (the chapter on Castiglione in particular).
- Finucci, Valeria, 1992. The Lady Vanishes: Subjectivity and Representation in Castiglione and Ariosto. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
- Hanning, Robert W., and David Rosand (eds), 1983. Castiglione: The Ideal and the Real in Renaissance Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press.
- Onofri, S., 2010, In viaggio con il Cortegiano: la fortuna europea del Baldassarre Castiglione di Raffaello, [Mantua]: Tre lune.
- Mackenney, R., 2004. Renaissances: The Cultures of Italy, c.1300-c.1600. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
- Ossola, C. (ed.) 1980. La corte e il "Cortegiano": I. La scena del testo. Rome: Bulzoni.
- Ossola, Carlo, 1987. Dal "Cortegiano" all' "Uomo di mondo": storia di un libro e di un modello sociale. Turin: Einaudi, 1987.
- Quondam, A., 2000. Questo povero Cortegiano: Castiglione, il libro, la storia. Rome: Bulzoni.
- Woodhouse, J. R., 1978. Baldesar Castiglione: A Reassessment of 'The Courtier'. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. London: Batsford.
Topic 3 Between the Old and the New: Grazia Deledda's Sardinia
1926, the Sardinian Grazia Deledda (1871-1936) became one of the few women to receive a Nobel prize. But the path to literary recognition had not been an easy one. She had to struggle against odds to have her voice heard as a writer: she had to overcome the obstacles of language and culture and the hostility of her own community. Deledda grew up speaking dialect, had little formal schooling, and was born into an insular world that strongly frowned upon women who had intellectual aspirations and hoped for literary recognition beyond the world of domesticity. A very prolific writer, her works uniformly testify to her love for her native island, whose landscape is often portrayed as a metaphor for the difficulties in her characters’ lives. Her fiction often encapsulates the tension and conflict between the ancient ways of a world rooted in archaic values and the new modern mores brought along by political, cultural and social change. Peasant culture, moral codes and dilemmas, love and passion, religion and magic, temptation, sin and expiation, and sin, are dramatized in her writings. Her narratives speak to modern readers and touch upon topics and themes that are still nowadays debated issues: gender and feminism, social order, transgression, and economics.
Texts (you must read at least 3 of the following novels; any Italian editions):
- Elias Portolu (1903)
- Cenere (1904)
- Canne al vento (1913)
- Marianna Sirca (1915)
- La madre (1920)
But students are strongly encouraged to further explore Deledda’s rich oeuvre (novels, short stories, and theatre). Note that her posthumous Cosima (1937) is considered to be partly autobiographical.
For further information and a bibliography to prepare for the course, see the IT5 paper Moodle page.
Topic 4 Carlo Levi’s Souths
Between 1935 and 1936, the Turinese painter and doctor Carlo Levi was sent to confinement in Aliano and Grassano, two small villages in Lucania (now Basilicata), by the fascist regime, as a punishment for his antifascist activity. This experience put him into close contact with a reality that contrasted sharply with his urban and industrial background in Turin: Italy’s rural South, with its nature, people and rituals.
This topic will consider Italy’s Southern Question through the lens of Carlo Levi’s memoir of his confinement Cristo si è fermato a Eboli (1945) and its cinematic adaptation directed by Francesco Rosi (1979). In addition, Levi’s paintings will be considered, to reflect on how the radical alterity of the South was conceptualised and represented by the author across different media. Finally, selected passages from Levi’s reportages from Sicily (Le parole sono pietre, 1955) and Sardinia (Tutto il miele è finito, 1964) will be analysed, to understand the evolution of Levi’s approach to southern Italy.
Core texts and film:
- Carlo Levi, Cristo si è fermato a Eboli (1945)
- Cristo si è fermato a Eboli, dir. by Francesco Rosi (1979)
- Carlo Levi, Le parole sono pietre (1955) and Tutto il miele è finito (1964) [extracts will be provided by the lecturer]
Secondary bibliography (provisional; starred items are useful starting points):
- Daniela Bartalesi-Graf, Voci dal sud: A Journey to Southern Italy with Carlo Levi and his ‘Christ Stopped at Eboli’ (New Haven: Yale UP, 2011)
- *Carlo Levi e la Lucania: dipinti del confino, 1935-36 (Rome: De Luca, 1990)
- Gigliola De Donato and Sergio D’Amaro, eds, Carlo Levi e il Mezzogiorno (Foggia: Grenzi, 2003)
- Gigliola De Donato, ed., Oltre la paura: percorsi nella scrittura di Carlo Levi (Rome: Donzelli, 2008)
- *Ernesto De Martino, Magic: A Theory from the South [1959], trans. by Dorothy Louise Zinn (Chicago: HAU Books 2015)
- *Roberto Derobertis, ‘Southerners, Migrants, Colonized: A Postcolonial Perspective on Carlo Levi’s Cristo si è fermato a Eboli and Southern Italy Today’, in Postcolonial Italy: Challenging National Identity, ed. by Cristina Lombardi-Diop and Caterina Romeo (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 157–172
- *Giovanna Faleschini Lerner, ‘Francesco Rosi’s Cristo si è fermato a Eboli: Towards a Cinema of Painting’, Italica, 86.2 (2009), pp. 272–292
- *Giovanna Faleschini Lerner, Carlo Levi’s Visual Poetics: The Painter as Writer (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)
- Joseph Farrell, ed., The Voices of Carlo Levi (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007)
- *David Forgacs, Italy’s Margins: Social Exclusion and National Formation Since 1961 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2014) [In particular chapter 3: ‘Souths’]
- *Riccardo Gasperina Geroni, Il custode della soglia: il sacro e le forme nell’opera di Carlo Levi (Milan: Mimesis, 2018)
- Antonio Lucio Giannone, ed., Cristo si è fermato a Eboli di Carlo Levi (Pisa: ETS, 2015)
- Patrick McGauley, Matera, 1945–1960: The History of a ‘National Disgrace’ (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2019)
- Gaetana Marrone, The Cinema of Francesco Rosi (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2020)
- *Martina Piperno, ‘Myth and Classical Antiquity in Carlo Levi’s Cristo si è fermato a Eboli’, in Echoing Voices in Italian Literature: Tradition and Translation in the 20th Century, ed. by C. Piantanida and T. Franco (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2018), pp. 120-137
- Jane Schneider, ed., Italy’s Southern Question: Orientalism in One Country (London: Routledge, 1998)
- Natalia Samonà, Tra passato e futuro: il Meridione rurale in Carlo Levi, Rocco Scotellaro e Vittorio De Seta (Acireale: Bonanno, 2018)
Useful websites:
The preparatory reading for this paper is the primary texts listed above. In addition, students may wish to consult the following preliminary readings on Italian history, identity, regionalism, polycentrism, language:
- Asor Rosa, A., 1989. 'Centralismo e policentrismo nella letteratura italiana unitaria', in Id. (ed.), Letteratura italiana. Storia e geografia, vol. III, L'età contemporanea. Turin: Einaudi, pp.5-74.
- Coletti, V., 1993. Storia dell'italiano letterario: dalle origini al Novecento. Turin: Einaudi.
- Dionisotti, C., 1967. Geografia e storia della letteratura italiana. Turin: Einaudi, pp.1-54, 89-124.
- Duggan, C., 1994. 'The geographical determinants of disunity' in Id., A Concise History of Italy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Levy, C. (ed.), 1996. Italian Regionalism: History, Identity and Politics. Oxford: Berg.
- Raimondi, E., 1998. Letteratura e identità nazionale. Milan: Bruno Mondadori.
There will be 6 discussion seminars, to which students will be expected to contribute, interspersed between a series of 12 lectures - 3 on each of the four topics:
Michaelmas Term:
Two introductory seminars; three lectures and one seminar on Topic 1; three lectures and one seminar on Topic 2
Lent Term:
Three lectures and one seminar on Topic 3; three lectures and one seminar on Topic 4
These lectures/seminars will be supplemented by 8 supervisions, organised and run by members of the department.
For the It.5 Moodle site, please see here.
One five-hour examination will be set. You will be required to answer three questions. For each answer you will be expected to write between 1,200 and 1,300 words.
Candidates for this paper may not draw substantially on material which they have used or intend to use in another scheduled paper. Candidates may not draw substantially on the same material in more than one question on the same paper.
Professor Helena Sanson |
