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2021, UCSC News
Interview for UCSC News
The entire volume can be downloaded here: https://www.uclpress.co.uk/collections/ro_homepage_products/products/106880
Annali d'italianistica, Inc., was founded at the University of Notre Dame in 1983 and was sponsored by the Department of Romance Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1989 until 2017. Hosted by JSTOR, Annali d'italianistica is an independent journal of Italian Studies managed and edited by an international team of scholars. Annali is listed among the top tier journals (class A, area 10) by the Italian National Agency for the Evaluation of Universities and Research Institutes (ANVUR).
An analytical-critical review of monographs published on Dante during the year 2020.
2019 •
Cambridge Vertical Readings in Dante's Comedy
11. The Art of Teaching and the Nature of Love2015 •
Paola Nasti’s ‘The Art of Teaching and the Nature of Love’ examines the practice of philosophical teaching as it appears in the Elevens. Each of the Elevens treats the relationship between human arts and the Bible, one fallible and the other the ultimate source of truth. She argues that a vertical reading reveals a rationale for Dante’s rhetorical choices across the cantos. Each of the cantos exhibits the various writing genres used for commentary and, more broadly, for pedagogical purposes. In the final analysis, the movement across all three cantos, culminating in Thomas Aquinas’s preacherly, or Biblical, account of the life of Saint Francis, places emphasis on charity as that which should properly form the core of all human activities. (Editors' Introduction)
The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante. Princeton UP.
The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante1992 •
Annali di Italianistica
Dante in the Margins of Hannah Arendt, in "Unholy and Holy Violence in Dante's Comedy": Introduction and Table of Contents2021 •
The "Action" chapter of Hannah Arendt’s "The Human Condition" opens with a quotation from Dante’s "Monarchia". Why does Arendt choose this exergue? Why does she open the discussion of the “political activity par excellence” and fulcrum of her reactivation of active life with a reference to an author who asserts the primacy of the speculative over the practical? Through a complex exegetical and critical-hermeneutical work, this article delves into Arendt’s reflection and articulates its discourse in three parts: 1. "Margins and the Robber Quotation", which talks about the marginal position of Dante in Arendt’s work and the enigma of Dante’s quotation; 2. "Dante as Philosopher of Active Life", where, with the help of Étienne Gilson, Arendt presents Dante as the philosopher who, while reaffirming the primacy of contemplative life over the active one, gave it an unusual dignity in medieval thought; 3. "The Joy of Acting", which shows that, by referring to the passage from the "Monarchia", Arendt derives some fundamental characteristics of action, namely, the intensification of the agent’s being and its revelatory function.
Perspecta 46: Errors
Detours Through Autonomy: Mismappings in Translating the Divine Comedy2013 •
The specific nature of an expressive medium often becomes apparent only when attempts to translate formal structures from another medium result in discrepancies leading to unforeseen innovations. This essay considers inconsistencies within the world of the Divine Comedy and its translations across media. Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy is often seen to be a perfect work of poetry. Nevertheless, scholars such as Freccero and Kleiner have pointed out specific mismappings which underlie the work that are strategic ‘errors’. While these anomalies range from the literary to scientific, this essay concentrates on deviations of order, number, landscape, and event as reflected in the poem, their mapping or mismapping in cartography, their translation to paintings, and finally into an architectural project, the Danteum by Terragni. When Giuseppe Terragni designed the Danteum in 1942 as an allegory of the poem, its spatial “errors” prompted him to rethink fundamental architectural concepts of geometrical abstraction and embodied spatial experience. By examining various representations of the Comedy throughout history, this article will explore how the potential for error built into every translation helps constitute each medium’s autonomy. Interestingly, Terragni emulating Dante’s ‘Epistle to Can Grande della Scala’, has his ‘Relazione sul Danteum’, a document that maps the Divine Comedy onto the design decisions taken for the Danteum. Nevertheless, analyzing the project it is quite obvious that, direct mapping is problematic and that there are certain decisions that are inherently linked to the architect’s design language. Given the proclivity of the translation of the Divine Comedy through various forms of expression ranging from music, paintings, sculpture, architecture, and film, the question of mapping the original work becomes even more pronounced and often mismapping seen as an ‘error’ is more suggestive of the logic of the medium. By examining various representations of the Comedy throughout history, this article will explore how the potential for error built into every translation helps constitute each medium’s autonomy.
Quaderni d'italianistica
Fiction with Fiction: Confessing to Dante in Decameron I.12019 •
This essay addresses one specific element of Decameron I.1, the curious order in which the holy friar questions Ciappelletto in his confession, and relates it to the larger dialogue Boccaccio establishes with Dante’s Commedia. By avoiding the canonical models of confessing penitents, which traditionally unfolded according to the Decalogue, the seven deadly sins, or the sinner’s circumstances, the confession proceedings in the first novella evoke most distinctively and idiosyncratically the order of sins in Dante’s hell. Dante’s authoritative but not canonical text about the Christian afterlife, thus, colors our reading of the first novella of the new work, in which the protagonist, narrator, and author are all similarly involved in the making of a fiction.
2022 •
International Journal of Cross-cultural Studies and Environmental Communication
Longfellow's Florence2015 •
The Order of All Things: Mimetic Craft in Dante's Commedia (Dissertation)
The Order of All Things: Mimetic Craft in Dante's Commedia (TOC | Bibliography)2011 •
Annali d'Italianistica, special issue on “Literature, Criticism, and Ethics”
Dante’s Two Beloveds: Ethics as Erotic Choice2001 •
Sacred Heart University Review
The Poet in the Mirror: Epic and Autobiography in Dante’s Inferno2010 •
Dante Fifty Books, eds. Margherita Palumbo and Filippo Rotundo (New York, Rome: PrPh Rare Books, Philobiblon, 2016)
Reading and Collecting Dante, preface to Dante Fifty Books2016 •
Annali d’Italianistica 39
Olga’s Journey to Hell and Back: Echoes of Dante’s Commedia in Elena Ferrante’s I giorni dell’abbandono2021 •
2020 •
Journal of Anglo-Italian Studies
What Chaucer Really Did to Il Filostrato: The Ending of the Troilus and its Italian Sources2011 •
“‘L’ardüa sua opra’ (Par., XXXI, 34): Architectural Aspects of Date’s Rome,” with Chiara Sbordoni, Opus Incertum (2021) pp. 48-61.
L'arduasuaopra Cachey:Sbordoni2021 •
in Metamorphosing Dante: Appropriations, Manipulations, and Rewritings in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, ed. by Manuele Gragnolati, Fabio Camilletti, and Fabian Lampart. Berlin and Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2011, pp. 235-50.
“Re-writing Dante after Freud and the Shoah: Giorgio Pressburger’s Nel regno oscuro”2011 •
Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History, 3rd ser., vol. 13
The Art of Salvation: Sacramental Penance in Dante’s Commedia (Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History, 3rd ser., vol. 13 [2019]: 71-139)2019 •
in Ethics, Politics and Justice in Dante, ed. by G. Gaimari and C. Keen, London: UCL Press, 2019, pp. 14-29
On Grammar and Justice: Notes on Convivio, II. xii. 1–7Dante's Poets: Textuality and Truth in the Comedy. Princeton UP.
Dante's Poets: Textuality and Truth in the Comedy1984 •