PANEL ABSTRACTS

Organiser: Margherita Acciaro

Modern Childhood between Education, Technology, and War in Italy (1890s–1918)

This panel investigates the representations and functions of childhood in Italy from the fin de siècle to the First World War, a period marked by accelerated mass education, technological change, and total war. Through a transnational and transmedial approach, it examines how children were mobilised as symbolic, pedagogical, and emotional figures within narratives of modernity. The first paper focuses on educational discourse and the representation of children’s behaviour in early twentieth-century Italian literature, analysing themes of discipline and misbehaviour. By examining literary texts addressed to or featuring children, the paper explores how narratives of obedience, disobedience, and emotional excess functioned as tools for negotiating new pedagogical models and social norms.
The second paper turns to early twentieth-century children’s fantasies of flight, examining flying children as mediators of technological modernity and aviation culture. These narratives combine elements of fairy tale and scientific imagination to negotiate fascination and anxiety toward mechanical innovation, while also revealing the gendered dynamics of early aviation. The panel concludes with a study of the child soldier in Italian and German children’s fiction during World War I. Focusing on the trope of the underage combatant, the paper highlights how children’s literature functioned simultaneously as an instrument of nationalist mobilisation and a mechanism of social control, enabling vicarious participation in war while reinforcing children’s place on the home front.
Together, the contributions explore how childhood became a key site for negotiating discipline, technological modernity, and national belonging in early twentieth-century Italy, showing how literature for and about children both reflected and shaped emerging models of citizenship.

Organisers: Alessio Aletta; Beatrice Bruno

(Re)imagining Sicily from 1800 to today

In his essay on Stendhal e la Sicilia, Leonardo Sciascia observes: «sappiamo per certo che un
viaggio in Sicilia non lo fece mai. […] Ciò, naturalmente (per come era nella sua natura), non gli impedì di scrivere, e più di una volta, di averlo fatto» (in L’adorabile Stendhal, 2003, p. 56). Stendhal’s Sicily is therefore purely imaginary; still, it contributes nonetheless to shaping
perceptions (and potentially self-perceptions) of the island. Starting from this extreme yet emblematic case, the panel aims to investigate the various configurations through which Sicily has been described, imagined, and reimagined over the past two centuries. We are interested in exogenous and endogenous perspectives, including the distant gazes of the many writers who, in the twentieth century, after leaving the island, described a “Sicily outside Sicily”, to quote the title of an essay by Massimo Schilirò included in Luzzatto and Pedullà’s Atlante della letteratura italiana (2012, pp. 335–347); in hybrid cases, in which authors of
Sicilian origin depict their homeland through the estranging perspective of a non-Sicilian character (as in numerous Pirandello’s texts) or through the point of view of
emigrants and return migrants (from Maria Messina to Camilleri); and, last but not least, in the experiences of “new Sicilians” and in the tension between Sicily as a historical crossroads of civilizations and as a gateway to Europe in the migratory flows of recent decades. Considering the different facets of this varied corpus, we wish to reflect on the following research questions: how has Sicily been understood in different literary traditions? Which cultural, historical, and landscape aspects have been most emphasised? Which “Sicilies” have been presented to readers?

Organiser: Gennaro Ambrosino

Liminal Naples: Memory, Imaginative Geographies, and the Thresholds of Modernity (1750-today).

From the mid-eighteenth century onward – following the beginning of excavation at

Herculaneum (1738) and Pompeii (1748), as well as the recurrent eruptions of Mount Vesuvius – Naples emerged as a major destination on the European Grand Tour and a focal point for transnational debates on historical consciousness and the deep temporality of the past. These encounters contributed to the formation of an enduring ‘imaginative geography’ (Chard, 1999) of the city and of southern Italy more broadly, a conceptual framework that continues to shape its global reception. Within this discourse, Naples and its surrounding region increasingly came to embody a distinctly liminal condition: a threshold where history and environment, life and death, past and present converge and become mutually legible. This panel examines how Naples has functioned, and still functions, as a space in which transition and tension are structurally embedded. Adopting a transnational perspective, drawing on a wide range of literary and visual traditions, and engaging with diverse methodological perspectives, the three contributions explore how liminality operates across bodies, spaces, and temporalities. In the first paper, Gennaro Ambrosino investigates the spectral and liminal dimension of Pompeii, focusing on representations of Pompeian bodies in early nineteenth-century literature. Greta Colombani, in the second contribution, examines British Romantic engagements with Naples as a threshold between life and death, exploring experiences of posthumous existence, prophecy, and disinterred time in the works of John Keats, Percy Shelley, and Mary Shelley. Finally, Fanny Clemente explores uterine representations of Naples and Neapolitan spaces from Leopardi to contemporary cinema. Together, the three papers offer a multifaceted account of how Naples can be considered a paradigmatic liminal environment in the modern and contemporary cultural imaginary.

Organiser: Federica Barboni

Lirica contemporanea e figure familiari.

È solo nella tradizione più recente che il rapporto con le figure familiari conosce uno sviluppo notevole anche nel genere lirico: relegato, dapprima, al discorso teatrale, da Euripide ad Alfieri, o in prosa, per esempio nel Decameron, si manifesta eccezionalmente in Tasso con l’incompiuta Canzone al Metauro, per consolidarsi in veste di topos tra Foscolo e Leopardi. A partire dalle soglie della modernità, la lirica italiana intesse dunque un dialogo sempre più serrato con i soggetti della cerchia familiare: figli (dal Pianto antico di Carducci al Dolore ungarettiano), ma anche nonni, madri e padri, protagonisti nella rosa dei testi più noti degli autori del secolo scorso, dal pascoliano X agosto alla Supplica a mia madre, di Pasolini. Tuttavia, manca ancora una riflessione sistematica sulle forme e, soprattutto, sul significato simbolico di questo dialogo, che evidentemente riflette lo statuto identitario del soggetto, il suo riconoscimento – o disconoscimento – nell’altro simile a sé. Il panel intende dunque definire il topos attraverso specifici affondi nella lirica del XX e XXI secolo, scelti dai partecipanti, da discutere nei loro rapporti con il ‘sistema’ rappresentato dal panorama contemporaneo. Si ragionerà anzitutto su: 1. particolari modelli e qualità della loro influenza per lo sviluppo del tema; 2. forme e funzioni del dialogo con il familiare, e dunque le trasformazioni e il molteplice carattere del ‘tu’ lirico; 3. valore ed espansioni simboliche del confronto con le figure affettive (antenati o padri ‘metafisici’, significato della paternità/maternità del poeta); 4. attivazione ricorrente di particolari campi semantici (lutto, solitudine, rivalità…).

Organiser: Giulia Beatrice.

Visual and Written Narratives of Libya under the Italian Colonial Rule.

This panel is the result of work carried out by the research unit “Decolonizing Italian Visual and Material Culture: From Nation-Building to Now,” founded by Carmen Belmonte in 2022 within the Weddigen Department of the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History. The research group was created with the aim of analysing and questioning works of art that actively contributed to colonial imagery, rooted in artificial constructions of identity and otherness in Italy. In the mid-1930s, the Italian colony of Libya, first invaded in 1911, was chosen by Governor Italo Balbo as the destination for a massive migration operation from Italy. Consequently, the geography of the country, and especially that of its main cities, was impressively transformed by Italian architects and engineers. At the same time, a large number of writers, photographers, journalists and painters travelled to the country to document life in the colony. As a result, an important body of written and visual material, much of it still unexplored, survives today as a valuable record of the colony’s vision from the point of view of artists and intellectuals. Balbo’s rhetorical and propagandistic operation of “modernization” of Libya foresaw the rebranding of the colony as a site of permanent settlement of Italian immigrants, the promotion of artistic and architectural projects, and the coexistence of diverse artistic movements. As a consequence, 1930s Libya offers a compelling case study for examining the development and rhetoric of Italian colonial art, examined in this panel through new perspectives such as gender dynamics and of ecocritical theory.

Organisers: Antonio Belfiore; Mia Pancotti

The Speaking Page: Orality, Vocal Writing, and Multimodal Literary Practice Past and Present.

This panel proposes a methodological reflection on the relationship between voice and page, exploring how interdisciplinary and multimodal approaches can reshape the study of Italian literature. Building on Albano Leoni’s insight into the phoneme as an abstract representation distinct from the physical realities of vocality, the session demonstrates how the tension between phonetic materiality and graphic conceptualisation informs both literary practice and reception in Italian Studies, as well as the complex relationship between ancient Greek society and alphabetic writing, providing useful frameworks for research. It examines conceptual and analytical tools to study how orality, writing, and vocal performance interact in production and reception of texts, reconsidering oral dimensions of the literary phenomenon and the shift from vocal to silent reading—e.g., in the transition from the medieval period to the Renaissance.

Structured as dialogue, the panel brings together two complementary perspectives.

Belfiore develops an intermedial methodology for analysing the processes involved when written texts enter musical–vocal contexts. He explores how voicing alters the expressive and communicative value of Italian texts and how multimodal engagement shapes their ontology and the interaction between metre and performance.

Pancotti draws on Cognitive Neuroscience and Classics to reassess the phenomenology of reading and the cognitive mechanisms that conceptualise and reproduce language. By examining the link between vocal reality and written representation, she revitalises a long-standing tradition and offers tools for exploring the continuum between voice, text, and interpretation. Case studies—from ancient Greek literature to Italian works set to music—will illustrate how intermedial and cognitively informed approaches reshape Italian Studies’ understanding of voice and writing.

Organisers: Erica Bellia and Jacopo Francesco Mascoli

Filming Italian Labour and Infrastructures before and after the Boom

The solid relationship between labour and cinema (Hediger et al 2024), dating back to the latter’s very origins, in the Lumière Brothers’ 1895 documentary on workers leaving the factory at end of the day, gained momentum in postwar Italy, as a result of Neorealist aesthetics and of the ‘economic miracle’ and the Hot Autumn (Pinkus 2020; Baghetti et al 2021). However, filming labour was also a key element of Fascist propaganda (Fabbri 2023) and films revolving around precarity have become a new genre in contemporary Italy (Bardan 2013). This panel intentionally brackets the postwar years, reflecting the fact that they have received more thorough scholarly attention, and interrogates what preceded and what followed them, to explore elements of continuity and discontinuity, resonances and dissonances, recurring tropes and rhetorics, and fractures. The focus will be in particular on documentary engagement with infrastructure and the urban dimension under Fascism and in the 2000s, to see how allegedly similar cinematic issues have generated different responses. We will be particularly attentive to the national and transnational dimensions of the processes in question and to lines of tension between past and present.

Organisers: Aretina Bellizzi; Elena Bilancia

Shaping Words for Her: Female Audiences and rhetorical strategies in Early Modern Italian Prose.

This panel invites contributions on how early modern Italian prose exploits the presence of female audiences ‒ explicitly addressed in paratexts or constructed within the narrative ‒ to redefine what can be said in the vernacular and how it can be articulated. Building on scholarship that has reconstructed the historical emergence of women as readers, book-owners, patrons, and imagined interlocutors, the panel focuses on a less explored dimension: the rhetorical consequences of such a presence for vernacular narrative itself.

From Boccaccio’s foundational appeal to his female readers to the proliferation of women as dedicatees, listening communities, and internal audiences, authors repeatedly mobilize female readership as a productive constraint. Acknowledging a female audience often compels authors to negotiate the boundaries of what the vernacular may narrate: how openly it can treat desire or transgression, how it may frame moral or social critique, and how it can claim literary legitimacy without relying on the authority of Latin. The figure of the woman reader becomes a device through which writers justify morally delicate material, legitimize the linguistic choice, and reshape narrative strategies borrowed from both medieval traditions and humanist culture, operating as a mechanism that alters the boundaries of what can be said and providing new rhetorical strategies. By highlighting the interplay between female readership and vernacular rhetoric, the panel aims to show how the role of women audiences shaped the evolution of Italian prose in the centuries following Boccaccio, influencing both its cultural ambitions and its expressive possibilities.

Organisers: Giulia Bernuzzi and Arianna Mazzola

In Dialogue with the Climate: Ethical and Aesthetic Approaches in Contemporary Italian Culture.

The accelerating pace of the climate crisis has turned representation itself into an emergency. In this context of urgency, scholars and authors must rethink how to make visible the diffuse, planetary threats reshaping societies and imagine viable pathways for inhabiting increasingly endangered environments.

This panel examines how contemporary cultural production responds to the representational pressures generated by the climate crisis by engaging three dilemmas. First, the problem of scale: how can narratives negotiate the gap between global, long-term processes and the immediate, embodied experiences of urban and rural communities? Second, the tensions between genres: realist, speculative and solarpunk modes each offer distinct affordances. Realist depiction can anchor abstract climate data in concrete lived moments; speculative fictions can warn of possible collapse and mobilize urgency; solarpunk imaginaries can foreground hopeful, collaborative reconfigurations of socio-ecological relations. Third, the need for a critical genealogy that traces how mid-twentieth-century Italian writers already registered the ecological stakes of industrial modernity, anticipating contemporary concerns about pollution, petrocapitalism, and cultural accountability.

By weaving together these stinterdependence andues that effective climate communication functions as an act of world-building: a practice that must balance plausibility with possibility, local knowledge with global interdependence, and move beyond fatalistic depictions towards narratives capable of activating responsibility and collective action in a rapidly warming world.

Organiser: Francesca Billiani

Italian New Muralism: An Open Question

New muralism is the site-specific production of public artworks by artists in dialogue with local communities, polities and histories. Spreading globally from the Americas in the 1990s, it has transcended its aesthetic origins, influencing design trends in often-controversial public and private urban regeneration projects, while also addressing themes of social and economic inequality.

In this roundtable we will present the preliminary results of the Leverhulme-funded research project New Muralism: Urban Futures Through the Arts in Italy (2025-2028). The project looks at case studies spanning nine Italian cities to investigate how commissioned, site-specific public artworks – new muralism – are reshaping urban public spaces in Italy by generating novel aesthetic trends, challenging political discourses and interrogating social formations. In this roundtable, we will address specific methodological, artistic and sociological concerns informing the study of such multifaceted phenomenon. More specifically, we will problematise the role of public and private institutions in supporting and sponsoring new artworks; discuss sociological aspects connected with attempts at gentrification and regeneration of urban spaces; identify aesthetic patterns across different artworks; and will look at specific geographical issues defining this artistic phenomenon. In doing so we will address the following main questions: why are some main aesthetic trends are used to create sustainable urban environments? How and why do stakeholders look to use new muralism to address social inequalities (e.g., through community-building activities), and to what extent are these projects successful?

Organiser: Elisa Russian; Anna Borgarello

This Is Not an Autobiography: Experimental Life Writing in Contemporary Italy

As life writing expands and diversifies in the new millennium, the term ‘autobiography’ has lost much of its definitional stability and heuristic force. Pierre Bourdieu’s declared ‘antipathy’toward the genre—grounded in what he termed the ‘biographical illusion’ of a sovereign subject (2004)—and Thomas Couser’s assertion that‘no one writes autobiography any more’(2012) both signal the declining viability of a unified, self-encompassing life narrative. Focusingon the Italian tradition, this panel investigates twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers who challenge the model of autobiography presupposed by these critiques: that of a linear, retrospective account of an individual life (Lejeune 1975). Rather than treating contemporary hybrid forms as a rupture, the panel situates them within longer genealogies of experimentation. Marxist self-critique, feminist consciousness-raising, and documentary testimony—alongside canonical works that exceed autobiography stricto sensu—have long reframed self-narration as a historically situated practice, in which individual experience is mediated by interpersonal and social relations and expressed through multiple formal strategies. The panel is structured in two interconnected sessions. The first examines relationality as a constitutive dimension of life writing, exploring how autobiographical acts take shape through encounters with others in family memoirs, dialogic texts, and addressed narratives. The second focuses on texts that expand or complicate autobiography’s conventional boundaries by engaging with other genres, such as the diary, the essay, and the novel. Together, the two sessions invite a rethinking of Italian ‘writings of the self’(Donnarumma 2014) as relational and generically unstable practices rather than self-enclosed narratives of identity.

Organiser: Monica Boria

La letteratura nella didattica dell’italiano L2/LS: approcci contemporanei

In un panorama educativo in rapida trasformazione, in cui le discipline umanistiche occupano una posizione sempre più marginale, la sessione intende offrire una riflessione critica sul ruolo della letteratura nell’apprendimento della lingua e della cultura italiane, ma anche nello sviluppo di quelle competenze ritenute essenziali nel mondo del lavoro (creatività, comunicazione, collaborazione e pensiero critico).

La sessione promuove un approccio multidisciplinare, dove prospettive di ricerca provenienti da ambiti diversi (pedagogia, linguistica, letteratura, drammaturgia, digital humanities, studi culturali, scrittura creativa) si combinano a proposte didattiche innovative a tutti i livelli dell’insegnamento dell’italiano come lingua straniera/seconda.

- prospettive diacroniche (integrazione nel percorso didattico L2/LS, a partire da testi letterari, di elementi storico-linguistici volti a favorire una comprensione diacronica della lingua e delle sue trasformazioni);

- letteratura e gioco (esperienze didattiche incentrate sulle potenzialità creative e ludiche dei testi letterari, ma anche utilizzi pedagogici della letteratura del gioco).

Gli interventi affrontano in modo teorico e/o attraverso esperienze didattiche concrete una serie di aspetti:

- tipologie letterarie (lettere, diari, autobiografie, poesie ecc.) e costruzione narrativa dell’identità dell’apprendente;

- scritture dialogiche (fumetto, drammaturgia/teatro) e sviluppo delle competenze orali, digitali e collaborative (creazione di booktrailer, storyboarding, reel, produzioni audiovisive);

- creatività e produzione scritta (traduzione letteraria, la scrittura creativa, esperimenti di letteratura elettronica, ecc.);

- storia del teatro e didattica dell'italiano L2/LS (utilizzi pedagogici innovativi della tradizione teatrale italiana, anche di epoca rinascimentale e barocca, visione e analisi di messe in scena, attività creative di recitazione, adattamento e rielaborazione scenica concepite a partire dalla letteratura drammatica italiana);

- letteratura e gioco (esperienze didattiche incentrate sulle potenzialità creative e ludiche dei testi letterari, ma anche utilizzi pedagogici della letteratura del gioco).

Organisers: Denise Brazzale; Guylian Nemegeer

Crisis and rebirth: dialogues across borders

Throughout Italian history, crises have often prompted a turn towards what is temporally, geographically or culturally distant. Moments of upheaval have encouraged writers and artists to seek forms of alterity that allow for critical distance, whether through the rediscovery of antiquity, encounters with foreign models or renewed attention to marginalised traditions. Such outward orientations have served to frame disorder within larger narratives of decline and regeneration, to test the stability of inherited aesthetic and political forms and to imagine alternative futures for the Italian peninsula. From early modern appeals to cyclical visions of history to later interrogations of national identity shaped by colonial entanglements, primitivist fantasies or transnational exchanges, Italian culture has repeatedly mobilised what lies beyond its borders to interpret and overcome periods of strain. This panel examines how Italian visual culture, literature and literary criticism have negotiated the conceptual pair of crisis and rebirth by engaging with models, voices and histories located outside familiar frameworks. Daniela D’Eugenio’s paper shows how Counter-Reformation visual and textual artefacts adopted emblematic structures that emerged from exchanges between Italian, Arabesque and Northern European traditions. Sofie Barthels examines nineteenth-century dramatic rewritings of the Sicilian Vespers that transformed a medieval uprising into a modern call for political insurrection, highlighting a neglected current of patriotic theatre shaped by transnational publication contexts. Guylian Nemegeer analyses how Italian modernists conceived a Latin Renaissance as a response to post-Risorgimento cultural and political crises, using the past to articulate new beginnings within modernity.

Organisers: Andrea Brondino, Marco Ruggieri

Umberto Eco Today: New Research Pathways Across Disciplines

This roundtable examines Umberto Eco’s intellectual legacy and how his work can be revisited to address contemporary research challenges across disciplines. Eco is among the most influential Italian thinkers of the twentieth century. His relevance within aesthetics, structuralism, and semiotics for the analysis of emerging cultural forms (from avant-garde art to popular mass media), went alongside Eco’s work as an extraordinarily successful novelist, as well as a recognised public intellectual on a global scale.

Eco invoked ten years of post-mortem critical silence on his work. 2026 will mark ten years since Eco’s death, featuring several CFPs, conferences, seminars, and public lectures, in Italy and beyond, discussing Eco’s work and legacy. This roundtable organically fits with this anniversary. This roundtable also brings together scholars from various fields to reassess the relevance of Eco’s concepts, methods, and narratives today. Participants will be invited to address the following questions:

- Rethinking with Eco: Opportunities and Challenges

Which aspects of Eco’s work are still underexplored today in contemporary research in literary, cultural, or media studies? Which elements are less suitable for current debates?

- Historicising Eco: Apocalittico or Integrato?

Eco was criticised both for being too “integrated” into mass culture, as well as for later expressing more “apocalyptic” views, for instance on digital media. What is the relevance of his long-standing work as a public intellectual? What position(s) did Eco occupy in the Italian and international contexts, discussing issues such as abortion rights, the digital age, and the roots of fascist thought?

Organiser: Gianluca Caccialupi

Staging the Mediterranean in Early Modern Europe

Between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries, Italian theatrical literature frequently drew on contemporary Mediterranean history, both to situate its plays and to provide a realistic context for its plots, as well as to update the agnitions that formed part of the classical comic mechanism. In this context, Mediterranean imagery became instrumental in the construction of comedy; likewise, the comic genre proved especially apt for representing the complexity of exchanges and conflicts among different peoples, and in particular between Christians and Muslims. At the same time, the comic repertoire developed in the Italian Peninsula enjoyed considerable success abroad. This panel will focus on the analysis of the representation of the Mediterranean in Italian comedy, as well as in its translations and adaptations, through a selection of case studies rooted in a period marked by a notable flourishing of Turkish imagery, spanning from the Battle of Lepanto to the onset of the crisis of the Ottoman Empire.

Organisers: Aistė Kiltinavičiūtė; Elsina Caponetti

≪Le facce tutte avean di fiamma viva≫: Perceiving and Representing Angelic Bodies in the Italian Middle Ages

Despite being widely regarded as incorporeal, angels that populate the medieval world were depicted with a blend of human, animal, and elemental traits, often taking on distinct physical features such as faces, wings, and hands. Drawing on recent work on divine intermediaries in premodern Italy (Barsella 2010; Gill 2014; Sivo 2015; Montemaggi 2021; Bussagli 2022; Suarez-Nani 2022; Rodolfi 2022), this panel examines how medieval Italians visualised and theorised beings deemed to be immaterial yet constantly portrayed in bodily terms.

Far from being a niche theological concern, angelic embodiment posed a challenge not just for medieval angelologists such as Thomas Aquinas or Bonaventure, but also—and especially—for writers and artists working in material and sense-oriented media.

From stilnovo poets who discern an angelic aspect in their earthly beloveds, to the Dante of the Vita nova painting angels ‘sopra certe tavolette’, to the cosmological operations of angels that impact earthly materiality in Paradiso, medieval Italian literature repeatedly wonders how one can produce a textual or visual image of an incorporeal being. Encounters between humans and (quasi-)embodied angelic guides in vision literature raise further questions: How can human bodies perceive and comprehend the immaterial but substantial bodies of angels? Wondrous yet familiar, how do these subtle bodies interact with the natural and human worlds? Our aim is to explore how representations of celestial messengers can illuminate the imaginative strategies through which premodern cultures made the invisible visible, while also speaking to enduring questions about what it means to have—or temporarily assume—a body.

Organisers: Alessia Carrai; George Rayson

Before the Stilnovo: Invention in Thirteenth-Century Italian Verse

In recent years, scholarship in the field of medieval Italian literature has enabled pre-Stilnovo

verse to be recognised for what it is: a decisive moment of invention in the history of Italian literature. Italian vernacular literature did not begin with the stilnovisti; rather, the thirteenth century witnessed the emergence of a sophisticated body of work that articulated new formal, linguistic, and philosophical trends. These texts, far from being juvenilia, reveal an early and deliberate exploration of the expressive possibilities of the vernacular.

This panel seeks to illuminate the significance of thirteenth-century poetry as a site of both technical and intellectual experimentation, reading the poetry of the Duecento as a coherent field of inquiry into the nature of poetic expression, knowledge, politics and human experience. Our contributions investigate the formal, linguistic, and conceptual intricacies of the poetry of the Italian Duecento, from the Sicilian School and the Siculo-Tuscan tradition, to non-canonical and performative texts (such as giullaresque poetry, didactic or moral verse, comic or satirical compositions).

Our aim is to explore the technical and speculative sophistication of thirteenth-century Italian poetry as a formative stage in the development of European lyric thought—a space where questions of form, language, and being converge to define the foundations of Italian poetic consciousness.

Organisers: Giulia Maria Cipriani – Paolo Rigo – Valentina Mele

The Legacy of the Three Crowns beyond Time and Space

The roundtable brings together scholars with extensive research and teaching experience at institutions outside Italy. It aims to offer a reflection on the legacy of the so-called Tre Corone. The discussion will explore multiple themes: from pedagogical practices to ongoing research and translation projects, and from the contemporary relevance of the three foundational authors of Italian literature to their presence in modern and contemporary cultural production. The purpose of the roundtable is therefore to take stock of the field’s current state and to provide an open space for dialogue. It also seeks to examine new critical and methodological approaches capable of enriching the exchange between tradition and innovation. Finally, the event aims to encourage future collaborations and to foster a network of scholarly exchange across diverse international contexts.

Organisers: Federica Coluzzi; Prof. Fabio Camilletti

Transnational Pre-Raphaelitism: Reframing the Italian Connection

This panel proposes a rethinking of Pre-Raphaelitism - broadly intended, and in full awareness of the arbitrariness and historical instability of the term -through the lens of Italian Studies and, more broadly, of the transnational turn that is increasingly imbuing its disciplinary remit. Conventionally, Pre-Raphaelitism has been framed as a chapter in the history of Victorian art, and to some extent of Victorian literature: a predominantly British phenomenon, spatially and culturally anchored in mid-century London

Yet the movement, in all its phases and afterlives, developed in dynamic relation with Italian culture. This occurred most visibly through the unique environment of the Rossetti family, a paradigmatic Anglo-Italian cultural node; through the communities of the so-called ‘Anglo-Florentines’; and, later, through the manifold ways in which Pre-Raphaelite aesthetics returned to Italy at the fin de siècle via artistic circles active in Rome and Florence, not least thanks to the decisive role played by Gabriele d’Annunzio in popularizing them.

The panel considers Pre-Raphaelitism as a mobile, transnational field shaped by circulation, translation, and reciprocal exchange, exploring the different facets of these Anglo-Italian entanglements. Together, they aim to reposition Pre-Raphaelitism not as a self-contained insular movement, but as a dynamic constellation of cross-cultural encounters whose reach far exceeded Victorian Britain.

Organisers: Berenice Daniele; Francesca Vitali

Boccaccio as the new Ovid: reusing and embodying Ovid in Boccaccio’s works

Boccaccio’s writings reveal a sustained and complex engagement with Ovid, whose presence has often been acknowledged in scholarship but rarely examined in its full depth and significance. A closer analysis reveals that this engagement, far from being limited to imitation or textual borrowing, informs the very structure and conception of Boccaccio’s works. As this panel will demonstrate, Boccaccio’s ultimate aim is not simply to recall Ovid but to embody him. The two papers will offer a comprehensive account of this process, combining literary and philological analyses. The discussion will trace a circular trajectory from Boccaccio’s early study and reading of Ovid, through an examination of his glosses, to the Ovidian configuration of his minor and mature works, with particular attention to passages in which his creative reworking of Ovidian material has not yet been fully appreciated, to end with a reflection on Boccaccio’s identification as a new Ovid. The panel ultimately proposes a comprehensive reassessment of Boccaccio’s processes of reading, using, and reusing the Latin poet, culminating in the notion of Ovid embodied within Boccaccio. Such a reassessment is crucial in this renewed aetas Ovidiana, which must, in turn, be understood as an aetas Boccacciana. Only by recognising Boccaccio as a humanist author who transcends medieval conceptions of Ovidian literature can we fully appreciate both the broader reception of Ovid beyond the Metamorphoses and Boccaccio’s decisive role in reproposing a new classical tradition to shape his conception of a modern humanist age.

Organiser: Rhiannon Daniels

Poetry in Italy 1200-1600

This panel discusses a project to review and interrogate poetry in Italy between 1200 and 1600, published as A History of Poetry in Italy 1200-1600, co-edited by Guyda Armstrong, Rhiannon Daniels and Catherine Keen (Cambridge University Press, January 2026). Widening the perspective offered by the traditional canon, this history reveals the poetry of Italy between 1200 and 1600 as a site of plurality of genre, form and even language, including not just written texts but also those presented in performance. Within this inclusive framing, poetry's content, its cultural and geographical contexts and its material media of transmission are given equal weight. Decentring major figures and their texts while recognising their broad influence, the innovative theoretical and methodological framework complements the variety and liveliness of poetic activity on the Italian peninsula over four centuries, from the first manuscript experiments in verse through to sophisticated print productions and elaborate performance media. Offering original, multidisciplinary insights into current debates and discoveries, this history enlarges the scope of what we understand Italian premodern poetry to be.

Engenders an emphatically pluralistic perspective on a period traditionally associated with a narrow canon of major writers
Gives equal weight to 'context, container, and content'; that is, the social context in which the texts were produced, the media in which they circulate (including oral performance as well as written material), and the texts themselves
Introduces cutting-edge, multidisciplinary theoretical approaches to the poetic text, providing wide coverage through multiple case studies rather than a single narrative history.

Organiser: Arianna De Gasperis

Children, Politics, and Literature in Revolutionary and Post-Unification Italy (1789-1890s)

Building on Philippe Ariès’s reflections on the historical construction of childhood, this panel examines the emergence of children as political and cultural actors in Italy from the Age of Revolutions to the decades following national unification. Through an interdisciplinary dialogue between history and literary studies, it investigates how childhood became a visible and meaningful category at key moments in the formation of national culture.

The opening paper explores children’s engagement during the revolutionary years of 1796–1799 and 1848–1849, analysing civic rituals, military formations, and insurgent practices. It argues that periods of upheaval temporarily loosened social boundaries, allowing childhood to be recognised as endowed with a form of political agency. The second paper moves to the second half of the nineteenth century, focusing on the figure of the ragazzo di strada in Italian comic and satirical literature, particularly in the work of Carlo Collodi. Interpreted as a figure of play, parody, and resistance, the urban urchin challenges bourgeois respectability and dominant pedagogical norms, prefiguring Pinocchio as a foundational model of modern Italian childhood.

The panel then turns to post-unification Italy. One paper examines the transformation of folklore into children’s literature through Luigi Capuana’s periodical Cenerentola (1892–1894), tracing the shift of the fairy tale from an object of demological inquiry to a literary genre for children and highlighting its role in the construction of national identity. The final paper focuses on Matilde Serao, analysing the presence of children in her narratives, journalistic inquiries, and legendary writings. Although not primarily a writer for children, Serao foregrounds young figures—particularly the scugnizzi of Naples—as social subjects and implied readers, linking childhood to projects of civic education and bourgeois formation.

Organisers: Lorenzo Dell’Oso; Anna Pegoretti

With and Beyond Dante: Literary, Doctrinal, and Devotional Cultures in Thirteenth- and Fourteenth-Century Florence

Dante would have been surprised to discover that his native city would one day be labelled “Dante’s Florence”. Thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Florence was, in fact, a dense and plural space of literary and doctrinal production, in which Dante was one voice among many. Building on Carlo Dionisotti’s insights into the history and geography of Italian literature, as well as on recent research into Florentine theological and intellectual environments, this panel investigates how the specific institutional topography of Florence – the mendicant convents and their studia, the cathedral schools and chapter, lay confraternities, notarial and mercantile circles, and, later, the civic Studium – shaped the circulation, negotiation, and transformation of ideas. By presenting some case studies the mainly related to the Franciscan Florentine hous of Santa Croce, . the panel challenges the myth of a monolithic “Dante’s Florence” and offers a more historically grounded account of how the city’s intellectual ecosystems contributed to the emergence of new literary languages (including the philosophical vernacular) and to the rethinking of the relationship between poetry, authority, and doctrine in late medieval Italy. Case studies include the theological teaching by friar Pietro delle Travi, the newly rediscovered version of St Francis’s Exhortatio ad laudem Dei, and … The aim is to offer a fresh image of Florence as a laboratory of intersecting and often competing “doctrines”, where oral and written practices, institutional teaching, preaching, disputation, and experimental vernacular forms continuously interacted.

Organisers: Claudia Dellacasa; Damiano Benvegnù

Rewilding Without “Wilderness”: Languages, Cultures, and Practises of the Wild in Italy

With 25 national parks, 134 regional parks, and over 22% of its territory officially protected, Italy has long been at the forefront of conservation strategies. Among these, and only partly at odds with traditional approaches, the practice of rewilding has recently taken centre stage in ecological debates. The reintroduction of apex predators at the top of trophic cascades promises, if successful, to secure richer, more diverse, and more resilient ecosystems. Yet this process also requires clear communication and widespread environmental literacy to be fully

understood and supported by local communities.

Crucially, in Italy this debate unfolds in a linguistic landscape that lacks an exact equivalent of the word wilderness. While Italian has terms for natura selvaggia or territori incontaminati, none carry the same cultural and philosophical weight that wilderness holds in English. This absence is not merely lexical: it signals a distinctive way of conceiving the relationship between humans and the surrounding environment – one shaped by centuries of agricultural intimacy, aesthetic cultivation, and layered histories of habitation. Nonetheless, traces of the “wild” persist in Italy’s cultural imagination: from Dante’s selva oscura to the rugged Apennines of Romantic painting and travel writing, the wild has often been a site of fear, revelation, and renewal rather than pristine otherness. This double panel explores what it means to think, write, and imagine the“wild”in a language that does not name wilderness. We will consider how this absence shapes Italian environmental thought, conservation practice, and creative expression, and how fiction, poetry, and non-fiction might “rewild” language itself, recovering forms capable of expressing ecological interconnectedness and more-than-human agency.

Organiser: Manuela Di Franco

Fumetti a luci rosse. Il lato B dei periodici italiani.

This panel examines Italian erotic comics of the 1960s and 1980s, particularly focusing on how the nature of these publications shaped their (inter)medial strategies and cultural significance. In these decades, erotic fumetti circulated primarily through low-cost publications, as comic books or in periodicals sold in kiosks, occupying a liminal cultural space between pulp literature and photo-romances, sometimes relying on well-known tropes and famous actors/actresses to attract a wide readership.Their reliance on recognisable formats, episodic structures, and sensational covers created a reading environment in which intermedial references – borrowed from films, television, celebrity photography, and popular genres – were not incidental but fundamental to meaning-making. Similarly to what happened with American comix, soon, independent comics adopted part of this imagery to polemically break with the purportedly prude imaginaries that monopolized Italian society at the time. By combining intermedial analysis with attention to production practices, distribution networks, and paratextual elements (covers, editorials, letters, advertising), the papers in this panel argue that sexualized representation in comics periodicals functioned as dynamic sites where cinematic aesthetics, television tropes, and mass-market erotica converged. As such, these magazines offer a revealing window into the visual culture and social tensions of a rapidly transforming Italy.

Organiser: Noemi Di Tommaso; Carlotta Moro

Women Writing Philosophy and Theology in Early Modern Italy

In recent years, the history of philosophy has been transformed by the recovery of early modern women, revaluing the literary forms they used and contexts in which they operated. Comparatively less attention, however, has been paid to their engagement with theology, even when literary studies have witnessed a growing critical interest in female-authored devotional literature. Bringing together these disciplines, our panel will map a constellation of related questions concerning the porous boundaries between literature, philosophical enquiry, and theological discourse in early modern women’s writing. The figures under consideration include Moderata Fonte (1555-1592), Chiara Matraini (1515-1604), Lucrezia Marinella (ca.1571/9-1653), and Maria Selvaggia Borghini (1654-1731). Through a series of case studies, we will explore how these authors directly and obliquely intervened in philosophical and theological discourse through genres such as the learned allegorical commentary, the pastoral, and the hagiography, as well as through rhetorical strategies like the ventriloquism of male clerical voices in devotional narratives, and through the translation of male-authored texts. Particular attention will be paid to the philosophical and theological dimensions of women’s utopian speculation, and to the role of the querelle des femmes in shaping their works.

Organiser: Iris Filippone

Tra Eros e Versus: declinazioni del desiderio nella letteratura italiana

Il panel propone una riflessione interdisciplinare sull’erotismo nella letteratura italiana, inteso non solo come rappresentazione del desiderio, ma come dispositivo estetico, politico e culturale che attraversa i secoli della nostra tradizione. Dalle modulazioni sensuali del Decameron alle codificazioni astratte del petrarchismo, dalle tensioni tra corporeità e spiritualità nella produzione religiosa fino alle sperimentazioni più audaci della letteratura profana, l’erotismo emerge come uno spazio privilegiato di negoziazione identitaria. Attraverso l’analisi di testi e contesti e mediante strumenti teorici differenti – dalla critica femminista agli studi queer, dalle poetiche del corpo alle prospettive socioculturali – il panel intende indagare le molteplici funzioni dell’erotico, che può agire come forza di trasgressione, dispositivo di sovversione o strumento di normalizzazione dei codici culturali. Particolare attenzione sarà dedicata al ruolo sociale dell’immaginario erotico, alle dinamiche di potere e di genere che vi si inscrivono, alle strategie discorsive e narrative che lo strutturano, nonché all’impatto della censura e dell’autocensura nella sua trasmissione. Sarà inoltre oggetto di discussione la capacità dell’erotismo di rinnovarsi attraverso mutamenti mediali e trasformazioni del costume. L’obiettivo è delineare una mappa critica che, attraversando i secoli, restituisca la complessità dei modi in cui la letteratura italiana ha prodotto, modulato e problematizzato il desiderio, facendone un terreno centrale per l’interrogazione del soggetto e della società.

Organisers: Giulia Gaimari and Giuseppe Ledda

Interpreting Dante. Medieval Texts, Contexts, and Cultures

Interpreting the complex world of Dante’s works – his linguistic and rhetorical choices, political views, self-portraits, and engagement with the classics, the Bible, and vernacular literature, to name only a few aspects of his oeuvre that still attract critical attention – requires investigation into a plurality of medieval texts, contexts, and cultures. Such inquiry is necessary in order to decipher Dante’s literary strategies and intellectual positions, including his adherence to, divergence from, and re-elaboration of a multifaceted constellation of medieval traditions and motifs. The present panel, Interpreting Dante. Medieval Texts, Contexts, and Cultures, seeks to show the relevance and necessity of research into the cultural, intellectual, and textual environments that surrounded and shaped Dante and his writings, as a prerequisite for interpreting his works critically. To this end, this panel brings into dialogue contributions that span from investigating the Vita nova’s engagement with Cicero and Christian affectivity (Gaimari), to considering how the late medieval court, conceived as a space producing affect, is represented in Dante’s post-exilic works (O’Connell); from addressing the theological andvsensorial significance of the painterly metaphors in the Commedia, read against sources suchvas vernacular homiletic literature and the medieval Latin allegorical tradition (Micheletti), tovexamining how Dante re-writes the descensus Christi ad inferos, a prominent theme in medieval theology and Florentine culture, through the figure of Beatrice (Rosati).

Organisers: Ylenia Gambaccini & Francesca Hartmann

Power as a Pathology of Desire: Dialogue on Consent in Brancati and Moravia

This panel explores how Vitaliano Brancati and Alberto Moravia formulate a critique of power through the lens of male desire, revealing the deep entanglement between erotic dynamics, social consent, and political authority in twentieth-century Italy. Both authors depict male subjectivity as structurally deficient: in Brancati, it is inflated and theatrical; in Moravia, it is emptied and apathetic. These opposite conditions converge in a shared insight—power arises not from strength but from a malfunction of desire.

Brancati portrays the virile Italian male as a performer whose erotic identity depends on public validation. This exaggeration of masculinity, especially in Il bell’Antonio and Paolo il Caldo becomes a metaphor for fascist consensus, which he interprets as the collective endorsement of a sexualized, spectacular model of authority. Consent thus emerges less as ideological conviction than as complicity in a shared fiction of virility.

Moravia, by contrast, situates desire within an existential vacuum. Characters such as Dino, Michele and Silvio in La noia, Gli indifferenti and L’Amore Coniugale seek political or interpersonal domination to compensate for emotional inadequacy and the inability to sustain

authentic relationships. Both authors overturn traditional feminine ideals—including the Sicilian honor-bound woman and the ethereal “donna-angelo”— transforming the female figure into the site where male illusions and power fantasies are dismantled. Power here is not theatrical but compensatory: a refuge from the anxiety of freedom and the instability of selfhood.

By juxtaposing the two writers, the paper shows how both conceive political power as the symptomatic expression of a distorted erotics. Their narratives uncover consent not as a rational choice but as a psychosocial mechanism rooted in the crisis of masculine desire, thereby offering a critical anthropology of modern authority.

Organisers: Simone Ghelli; Martina Mengoni

The LeviNeT Project: Reconstructing and Publishing Primo Levi’s German Correspondence Network

This roundtable is organized by the Research Team of the ERC project LeviNet – The German Network. Primo Levi’s Correspondence with German Readers and Intellectuals (Link). Its general aim is twofold: on the one hand, to present the ongoing research on Primo Levi’s correspondence, including its methodologies and preliminary outcomes; on the other hand, to offer an opportunity for reflection on the theoretical contributions that such an epistolary corpus can provide. These contributions concern not only the understanding of previously unexplored aspects and texts within Primo Levi’s oeuvre but also broader fields of inquiry such as memory studies, Holocaust studies, transnational studies, and epistolary studies, and digital humanities.

The roundtable will be structured into five sections (12 minutes each), each focusing on a different aspect of the project:

- Why LeviNeT? An Introduction (by Martina Mengoni, Principal Investigator):

This introductory section will outline the genesis of the project, its conceptual framework, and its main objectives.

- The LeviNet Portal: An Open Resource for Everyone (by Simone Ghelli):

This section will introduce the editorial core of the project—its online platform, LeviNet. It will also illustrate the team’s dissemination activities, including publications, conferences, and outreach initiatives with schools and the wider public.

- In Search of the German Network (by Camilla Veneziani):

This section will focus on the project’s research activities, illustrating the process of reconstructing the correspondences through the use of archival sources, fieldwork, and other methodologies.

- A Multilingual Project (by Alice Gardoncini):

This section will explore one of the most fascinating and challenging aspects of Primo Levi’s correspondence—the multilingual dimension of communication within the network, which includes German, Italian, French, and English.

- The German Reader: A Preliminary Account (by Riccardo Curcurù):

The concluding section will provide an overview of some of the theoretical insights the project has generated so far. In particular, it will offer a preliminary characterization of the “German reader” and discuss Primo Levi’s intellectual activity as a writer of letters.

Organisers: Dylan Gilbert; Rose Facchini

Italian Eco-anxieties: 1952/2052

This discussion aims to examine two distinct moments of Italian eco-anxiety: one from the Cold War period and another from an imagined future. From the short-lived postwar movement of arte nucleare to twenty-first-century Italian science fiction, we will consider how Italian responses to ecological threats have been a creative source of inspiration for artists and writers within avant-garde circles to address contemporary issues that conjure up abstract events not yet realized. For example, Milan-based arte nucleare spoke to a post-Hiroshima world, in which painting needed a new visual vocabulary to grapple with not only a new physical reality shattered by atomic weapons but also an impending hellscape brought forth by a nuclear holocaust. On the other hand, science fiction published by Delos Books allows us to examine the risk and public acceptance of novel foods and food technologies in light of climate change, offering a critical reflection on the ethical and political implications of food innovation and exposing the fragility of global food systems. In both instances, eco-anxiety rests at the core of artistic production, and it is through the Italian experience that we trace how the threat of nuclear annihilation became displaced with the climate crisis.

Organiser: Chiara Giuliani

Material Culture and Italianness (I) - The Poetics of Objects

Everyday objects silently tell our stories, they preserve our memories, and project our future. While inanimate, everyday objects embedded in our practices change, evolve in their roles and features, and we change with and through them. Objects or things are debated, contested and fought over; yet, as Daniel Miller argued, ‘material culture is often the concrete means by which the contradictions held within general concepts such as the domestic or the global are in practice resolved in everyday life’ (1997,19).

In the article ‘Italian Material Culture’ included in the special issue Key Directions in Italian Studies, the authors ask: “How can close attention to the objects that populate the material world help us to develop deeper and more complex understandings of Italian culture?” (Daniels et al. 2020, 164). Through the panel, Material Culture and Italianness, we would like to continue that conversation, inviting submissions focusing on the key role of material culture in presencing the past and future while defining italianità in new, and perhaps unexpected, ways. The panel is primarily interested in material culture approaches, but we also encourage interdisciplinary dialogues, including an archaeological lens to detect the temporal depth that objects bring to the fore of social lives. By interrogating the material world, its iterations, and fragmentations, the panel aims to examine the ways in which material production, consumption, and representation can facilitate an understanding of Italy and Italian culture across different historical moments and communities.

Organiser: Ruth Glynn

Material Culture and Italianness (III) - Objects and Gender

In the article ‘Italian Material Culture’ included in the special issue Key Directions in Italian Studies, the authors ask: “How can close attention to the objects that populate the material world help us to develop deeper and more complex understandings of Italian culture?” (Daniels et al. 2020, 164). Through the panel, Material Culture and Italianness, we would like to continue that conversation, inviting submissions focusing on the key role of material culture in presencing the past and future while defining italianità in new, and perhaps unexpected, ways. The panel is primarily interested in material culture approaches, but we also encourage interdisciplinary dialogues, including an archaeological lens to detect the temporal depth that objects bring to the fore of social lives. By interrogating the material world, its iterations, and fragmentations, the panel aims to examine the ways in which material production, consumption, and representation can facilitate an understanding of Italy and Italian culture across different historical moments and communities.

Organiser: Lachlan Hughes

Subjectivity, Selfhood, and Abjection in Early Franciscan Art and Literature At the heart of Franciscan spirituality, from its very inception, lies the deep-seated paradox between individual devotional expression and the ritual rejection of self. As a figure who became the contemporary alter Christus, Francis was exalted for a personal sanctity predicated upon the totality of his affective identification with Christ. It was only through bodily subsumption—centred on the corporeal violence of the stigmata—that he achieved ecstatic transmutation. These tensions—between ascension and abasement, individuality and abjection—became the constitutive frame for a Franciscan model of the self that was taken up by subsequent generations of his followers. This panel examines these tensions across a variety of forms, including lyric poetry, letters, visual art, and music. Clare of Assisi’s writings, rarely studied by literary critics, cast the iterative transformation of the self ‘into’ Christ as achieved through both affective and intellectual engagement, in a process triangulated between the self, God, and fellow human beings. Half a century later, Jacopone da Todi produced a body of work which offered readers a vehicle for interrogating their own subjectivity through the most subjective of all literary forms, lyric poetry. Finally, as an early catalyst for the emergence of secular portraiture, Franciscan strategies of representation are crucial for understanding artistic constructions of personhood in the following centuries. By addressing these interrelated themes across different genres, this panel offers a new methodological approach to issues of subjectivity, selfhood, and abjection in medieval Italian culture, and in Franciscan milieux in particular.

Organisers: Matilde Icardi, Noreen Kane

Daphne and her Sisters: Scenes of Gendered Violence in Early Modern Italian Literature

This panel examines representations of gendered violence in Italian literature from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century. Encompassing the novella, the chivalric epic poem, popular print, and comic theatre, it analyses the ways in which gendered violence emerges within multiple literary traditions: through the author’s silencing of the female voice and manipulation of classical sources; through shocking scenes that interrogate the boundaries between love and hate; through vernacular verse laments portraying female victimhood and desire; and through comic tropes that transform sexual coercion into laughter.

By bringing canonical and popular texts into dialogue, the panel traces how Italian literary works across different registers engage with gendered violence. Drawing on intertextual analysis and theoretical frameworks including rhetoric and performance studies, gender studies, and the history of early modern print culture, the contributions illuminate the variety of portrayals of gendered violence over three centuries of Italian literary production and reveal cultural attitudes toward gender, power, and violence in early modern Italy.

Organisers: T. Katinis; R. Celani

Rhetoric, Knowledge, and Truth-Making in Medieval and Early Modern Italy

This panel investigates how rhetorical strategies shaped the production, authorization, and communication of knowledge in medieval and early modern Italy. Across diverse genres - from practical literature to philosophical dialogues, from Dantean commentary to Baroque poetics - the four papers reveal rhetoric as a decisive instrument for negotiating truth, authority, and epistemic trust. Elisa Bisson analyses Iacomo della Lana’s commentary on Dante’s Comedy, demonstrating how university methods recast the poem as a reliable encyclopedic study-text, facilitating the transition from Latin to vernacular scholarly culture and reshaping Dante’s authority. Ruben Celani examines the use of rhetorical strategies in sixteenth-century Italian recipe collections, illuminating a tension between dissemination of empirically validated knowledge, commercial ambition, and the ethics of medical communication. Enrico Pasini explores Patrizi’s Ten Dialogues on Rhetoric, in which cosmological and semiotic arguments foreground rhetoric’s ontological and epistemological dimensions within late Renaissance Platonism. Angelo Lombardo investigates the interplay of rhetoric and poetics in Emanuele Tesauro’s Cannocchiale aristotelico, whose theories expose how imaginative language functions as a truth-bearing instrument, narrowing the gap between aesthetic illusion and epistemic certainty. Together, these papers illustrate how rhetorical practice operated as a foundational mode of truth-making, mediating between observation, interpretation, and belief across Italy’s intellectual traditions. Far from being confined to an ornamental role, rhetoric emerges as a constitutive principle of thought, capable of articulating – albeit problematically - the relationship between truth, language, and knowledge. Panel diversity statement (up to 100 words. Please outline how your panel reflects diversity. This could be, for instance, in the composition of the panel itself, in the topics addressed, or in the theoretical framework):

This panel reflects diversity through its gender-balanced composition, bringing together three male scholars and one female scholar at different career stages, from PhD candidates to senior researchers, and affiliated with institutions in the United States, Italy, and Belgium. Covering a wide chronological span from the Middle Ages to the early modern period, the papers address varied genres—from recipe books to philosophical dialogues, Dantean commentary, and Baroque poetics. The panel also integrates methodologies from literary studies, philosophy, history of science, and book history, ensuring a multifaceted and interdisciplinary exploration of rhetoric, knowledge-making, and intellectual culture.

Organiser: C. Leavitt

Ruins and Rubble in Post-War Italy

Ruins and Rubble in Postwar Italy is a forthcoming book, co-edited by Charles Leavitt, Silvia Ross, and Monica Seger. The roundtable gathers the editors and some of the contributing authors to discuss the project and to explore its implications for the field of Italian Studies.

Ruins and Rubble in Postwar Italy examines the significance of material remains—both the wreckage of the Second World War and the relics of earlier civilizations—within the modern and contemporary Italian urban context. Harnessing relevant critical theories and diverse methodologies, the book analyzes ruins and rubble from multiple disciplinary perspectives, including but not limited to art history, architecture, history, geography, film studies, and literary studies. The critical approaches informing the various contributions draw on geocriticism, environmental humanities, ecocriticism, posthumanism, trauma and memory studies, conflict theory, and the spatial humanities. Together, they argue for the importance of ruins and rubble as key objects in the study of modernity.

Organisers: Francesca Leonardi; Sarah Ferrari

“Renaissance Fame”: How to Build a Public Self as an Early Modern Artist

In Early-Modern Italy, fama was not merely measured as a matter of reputation but also conceived as a dynamic process of self-construction, an ongoing negotiation between artistic practice, social ambition, and moral visibility, which can be seen as spanning from male to female creators, with specific connotations. While canonical figures such as Michelangelo and Vasari turned to writing and biography to assert their intellectual and moral stature, women artists and writers, including those mentioned in Vasari’s Lives – Sofonisba Anguissola, Properzia de’ Rossi, and Vittoria Colonna – had to negotiate a system that limited their visibility and means of self-promotion, engaging with the rhetoric of fama from a more constrained position.

Building on recent scholarship on self-representation and the performativity of identity, this panel will explore how fame functioned as a site of negotiation between individuality and collectivity, ambition and modesty, body and spirit, considering its intersections with gender, authorship, and artistic labor. It will question how early modern artists and writers built their

public selves through words and images, exploring fama as both an aspiration and a narrative strategy, a cultural paradigm that shaped both artistic identity and its reception.

By rethinking fama through the lens of gender and self-fashioning, this panel seeks to illuminate the mechanisms through which early modern writers and artists, regardless of gender, transformed reputation into an enduring form of selfhood, reshaping ideals of virtue, authorship, and decorum to construct alternative forms of visibility.

Organiser: Matteo Leta

The Saracens in Premodern Italian Literature

During the Middle Ages, perceptions of Islam and the figure of the Saracen played a crucial role in shaping Italian cultural identity, profoundly influencing both collective imaginaries and literary production. Far from being a marginal presence, Saracens, also through central figures such as Saladin (Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn Yūsuf ibn Ayyūb), constituted a structural element of premodern Italian culture. Medieval writers, drawing on a wide range of sources, from literary tradition to mercantile accounts, constructed, represented, and reinterpreted the Islamic world in their works, revealing a shared concern with defining the self through the lens of cultural and religious alterity. Therefore, this panel aims to illuminate the multifaceted ways in which Saracen otherness functioned within the premodern Italian literary tradition through a selection of key case studies, including Dante’s Divina Commedia, Boccaccio’s Decameron, and Masuccio Salernitano’s Novellino.

Organiser: Enrica Leydi; Elena Borelli

Worlds Without End. Geo-cosmographical imaginaries in 19th-century Italy and its transnational networks

In his Saggio sopra gli errori popolari degli antichi (1815), Giacomo Leopardi evokes the need for a ‘Colombo della luna’ to demonstrate the existence of inhabited worlds beyond Earth, just as Christopher Columbus’s voyages had proven the existence of a populated Western continent to Europe. This projection encapsulates a broader transformation that characterised the long nineteenth century (c. 1750-1914): the progressive displacement of otherworldly prefiguration from Earth’s surface to the sky. This produced an epistemic formation that naturalised expansion and rescaled experience from the local to the planetary.

On the one hand, geo-cosmological treatises and an emerging planetary consciousness fuelled literary imaginaries centred on la fin du globe and the perceived inevitability of Earth’s extinction. On the other hand, literary practices increasingly appropriated scientific paradigms of representation and, thus, cartography became central to the organisation, visualisation, and dissemination of knowledge in literary scholarship as its circulation and epistemic authority expanded over the course of the nineteenth century.

This panel examines this cross-pollination between geo-cosmographical imaginaries and literary culture in Italy and its transnational networks through three case studies: the transatlantic revival of interest in Columbus in relation to post-Enlightenment cartographic thinking; late-century intersections of literary tourism, Dante reception, and map-making; and the emergence of planetary consciousness and the re-scaling of hItaly as an active laboratory rather than a passive recipient of planetary thinking.

Organiser: Francesco Lucioli

“TransLATINg” Italian Literature into Latin

This panel aims to present the results of a research project dedicated to translations of Italian literary texts into Latin, a practice that had an enormous success and importance in the circulation of Italian works in Europe. Latinising is not a neutral act; it entails

selecting elements of the source texts while excluding others. Additionally, it requires grammatical, lexical, and syntactic choices that pertain not only to the target text and its cultural context, but also to a language and culture with an ancient heritage. Thus, rewriting a literary work in Latin means inserting oneself in this tradition and addressing a supranational audience. Despite the enduring success of this phenomenon, we still lack a comprehensive critical analysis that considers the translators’ backgrounds, the context of their translations, the intended audience, and the reasons why these translations were created.

Organiser: Giulia Mascia

Trauma in Transnational Italophone Literature of the New Millennium

Hyper-contemporary Italian fiction is marked by a growing interest in the reworking of historical and collective trauma. In this context, transnational Italophone writing represents a particularly fruitful field of inquiry. The diasporic biographies of these authors lead them to stage new forms of trauma: no longer, or not only, the world wars and the Shoah, but also migration, exile, colonialism, and the Balkan wars. Taking Helena Janeczek’s Lezioni di tenebra (1997) as a point of departure, texts such as Anilda Ibrahimi’s Rosso come una sposa (2008), Nicolai Lilin’s Caduta libera (2010), Gabriella Ghermandi’s Regina di fiori e di perle (2011), and Elvira Mujčić’s Al di là del caos (2015) reveal new voices that move beyond twentieth-century narrative codes, representing historical and identity fractures through the interweaving of languages, genres, and diegetic planes. The theoretical perspectives of trauma studies and Hirsch’s work on postmemory make it possible to interpret narration as a device for re-elaborating collective catastrophic events and for transforming trauma from lived experience into narrated memory. Drawing on recent studies by De Rogatis, Leed, and Branchini, the works of Ornela Vorpsi, Younis Tawfik, and Igiaba Scego illustrate a literature that becomes a political space and a site of identity reconfiguration, transforming the narration of trauma into an opportunity for recognition and collective engagement.

Organiser: Katherine McKee

Dante’s Visual Exegetes

In the 700 years since it was written, Dante’s Commedia has enjoyed not only seven centuries of textual commentary but also seven centuries of visual commentary. From bas-de-page illustrations in the early 1330s to Sandow Birk’s lithographs in the early 2000s, artists have not simply pictorialized the Commedia; they have glossed and reglossed the text through image. This panel considers illustrations of the Commedia—from the fourteenth century to the twenty-first—as works of visual exegesis. This panel builds, most recently, on Matthew Collins’ edited collection Reading Dante with Images (Turnhout, 2021) and, more distantly, on ‘Pictorial Commentaries to the Commedia’ in Illuminated Manuscripts of the Divine Comedy by Peter Brieger, Millard Meiss, and Charles Singleton (Princeton, 1969, vol. 1, pp. 81-115). Heather Webb’s Dante, Artist of Gesture (Oxford, 2022) provides a framework for thinking about acts of visual interpretation historically, and Rebecca Bowen’s ongoing Dante Depicted project at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz on Botticelli’s Commedia drawings acts as a guide for approaching text and image side-by-side.

The panel’s three contributions trace a through-line between the three cantiche: the poetics of loneliness in Inferno, as captured by Salvador Dalí; the stenches and aromas of Inferno and Purgatorio, as imagined by early fourteenth-century illuminators; the problem of the ineffable in Paradiso, as tackled by modern artists like Leonard Baskin. Through these three approaches, this panel will open a rich discussion on what it

means to comment visually and how to approach the work of visual exegetes.

Organiser: Katharine (Kate) Mitchell

Early Feminist Moves on Page, Stage and Early Screen at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

This panel explores the influence and legacies of writers and performers who contributed to the success of Italy's entertainment industry — intended in its broadest sense to encompass all forms of media — at the turn of the twentieth century, including the early Italian film industry. We are particularly interested papers that address the transnational stardom and celebrity ‘texts’ (Dyer, 1979) of minority groups, including women and migrants, and texts that were produced, consumed and circulating in the South of the peninsular.

Panel diversity statement (up to 100 words. Please outline how your panel reflects diversity. This could be, for instance, in the composition of the panel itself, in the topics addressed, or in the theoretical framework): The panel draws on feminist media history and is particularly interested in exploring women’s contributions to the success of Italy’s entertainment industry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Organiser: Massimo Natale

Romanzo contemporaneo e figure familiari

Il romanzo è un genere intimamente legato alla dimensione genealogico-familiare, a partire dalla sua stessa fondazione, e con particolare intensità anche nella tradizione italiana (si pensi anche solo agli a0reschi familiari contenuti negli stessi Promessi sposi, o all’ombra paterna nella Coscienza di Zeno, ecc.). Il panel vorrebbe interrogare, in questa stessa chiave, il panorama del romanzo italiano contemporaneo, so0ermandosi su alcuni esempi significativi, estratti in particolare dalla narrativa del ventunesimo secolo. Per farlo ci si interrogherà su alcune figure di primo piano della narrativa italiana contemporanea; anche in un’ottica di “decostruzione”, si tenterà una prima analisi di alcune figure-chiave dei loro lavori narrativi. Si sceglieranno tutte figure non gravitanti nell’orbita del maschile, e peraltro generalmente marginali nelle analisi tematico-narratologico o, al contempo, in quelle di taglio più decisamente sociologico: è il caso, per esempio, della figura della nonna (Trevi), o di quella della bambina (Albinati). Si ragionerà anzitutto su: 1. Caratteri determinanti e funzioni simboliche delle figure analizzate; 2. particolari modelli e qualità della loro influenza per lo sviluppo del tema; 3. Importanza delle figure in questione per la costruzione del romanzo, dal punto di vista ideologico e narratologico; 4. Eventuale possibilità di situare i romanzi in questione, attraverso la verifica dei personaggi analizzati, entro una “tradizione” del contemporaneo.

Organiser: Elisabetta Olivadese

Renaissance Inside Out

Our training as literary scholars often leads us to approach the works of both minor and major authors as remarkable creations whose compositional history, editorial transmission, and formal or stylistic features we seek to reconstruct. In doing so, we sometimes overlook the fact that such works endured not only because specialists—then as now—could appreciate their artistry, but also because they were capable of eliciting an immediate emotional response in their readers. In line with a methodological orientation that has been shaping Renaissance studies for some time, this roundtable aims to recentre emotions in our critical conversations while grounding its analysis in traditional approaches to textual scholarship. The roundtable contributions aim to examine how selected affects are represented, theorised, and made operational within Renaissance literature, without losing sight of the disciplinary practices that have long informed the study of these works.

Recent RSA panels confirm the vitality of thematic criticism in early modern studies, as scholars increasingly use affective topoi to connect authors, genres, and cultural contexts rarely considered together. Many such investigations treat emotions as archetypal and universal, enabling a fresh assessment of the Renaissance’s cultural legacy and fostering interdisciplinarity, since the nexus of body, senses, and emotion productively intersects with research on early modern anatomical and medical knowledge.

Building on these developments, this roundtable argues for analyses more firmly grounded in textual evidence: systematic explorations of how specific emotions circulate across genres, shape social identities, and assume distinct functions within literary systems. Focusing on foundational affects, — selected also in light of the success of the recent film Inside Out (2015):

joy, sadness, envy, disgust, anger, and fear—across a diverse corpus ranging from lyric and narrative poetry to theatre and the Baroque novel, Renaissance Inside Out seeks to illuminate the mechanisms of emotional representation and to advance a nuanced, plural account of Renaissance affect.

Organiser: Ciro Perna

Il progetto D:verse (Dante in vernacular experience: readings, studies, exegesis)

D:verse (Dante in Vernacular Experience: Readings, Studies, Exegesis) è un progetto interdisciplinare, integrato nel portale dantelimina.it, che riunisce studi danteschi, filologia, sociolinguistica e digital humanities per analizzare e valorizzare le traduzioni vernacolari della Commedia. Tali traduzioni, prodotte dal XVII secolo fino all’età contemporanea, offrono elementi fondamentali per comprendere: a) l’evoluzione storica della lingua italiana; b) il ruolo delle identità culturali locali, mostrando come un capolavoro letterario abbia potuto fungere da catalizzatore dell’unità nazionale; c) l’interazione tra dialetti regionali e tradizione letteraria nazionale; d) le forme di (ri)appropriazione socio-culturale delle figure e degli episodi danteschi. D:verse realizzerà un archivio digitale completo, destinato a preservare l’intero corpus dei materiali raccolti, comprendente una sezione di edizioni digitali scientifiche selezionate, elaborate mediante metodologie basate sull’intelligenza artificiale e potenziate da strumenti di riconoscimento testuale, analisi semantica ed esplorazione interattiva. Attraverso modelli di machine learning dedicati alla pre-elaborazione dei materiali digitalizzati, migliorando l’accuratezza delle trascrizioni e l’adattamento alle variazioni linguistiche storiche, sarà sviluppato un chatbot avanzato, fondato sul paradigma della Retrieval-Augmented Generation, capace di assistere i ricercatori nel ragionamento filologico, nel confronto testuale e nell’analisi delle varianti. Il progetto attribuirà priorità all’accessibilità, garantendo pari accesso a tutti gli utenti, inclusi coloro con disabilità sensoriali e cognitive, e promuovendo il coinvolgimento attivo attraverso strategie di disseminazione inclusive, esperienze in realtà aumentata e tecniche di gamification. Il panel sarà occasione per una riflessione teorica sull’oggetto di ricerca, nonché metodologica, sulle possibili applicazioni di differenti soluzioni digitali.

Organiser: Mauro Puddu

Material Culture and Italianness (II) - Objects and Displacement

Organiser: Paola Quadrini

“Literature in Foreign Language Teaching: Its Values and Functions in a Technologically Driven World”

This panel reflects on the role of literature in foreign language teaching. It delves into key themes including language acquisition, cultural integration, and the civic functions of literature in a world driven by speed technology and the loss of a sense of history.

Presenter 1 examines the pedagogical significance of literature in language education, focusing on its capacity to promote a holistic development of both linguistic and literary competencies, while providing context and depth that enrich the learning process. The presentation explores literature as a discipline that delineates major areas of communication, including the development of communicative competence, interpretive and critical skills, metalinguistic awareness, creativity, imagination, and cultural-literary reflection, fostering linguistic growth and personal enrichment. It also highlights the interdisciplinary value of teaching.

Presenter 2 investigates the development of communicative needs through the manipulation of literature-based input and the analysis of universal topics proposed by literature. Indeed, good literature is about the complexity of life, its mystery and fragility. Since reading alters the brain intellectually because of the numerous insights and associations being generated during the reading process, reading literature can facilitate students’ becoming further aware of the multiple feelings and emotions that make individuals human. The presenter’s paper aims at showing how, through a hermeneutic approach, exposure to literature in the language class can provide reflection on universal human values while using the target language.

In this panel, the presenters attempt to demonstrate the enduring significance of literature within a hyper-technological society characterized by intellectual impoverishment and ethical decline.

Organisers: Alessia Risi; Rosalba Biasini; Enrico Cecconi

Teaching Italian: Connecting Language and Culture

The aim of this double panel is to bring together educators, researchers, and graduate students, working in Italian studies and related fields, to share insights into innovative materials, approaches, and strategies that engage a new generation of students with the Italian language and culture. At a time when educators are challenged to find new ways to motivate learners and spark curiosity, we welcome discussions that address the changing nature of today’s students—digital, globally connected, and shaped by new forms of communication and creativity. Our goal is to explore ways to reinvigorate the discipline by bridging the gap between Italian studies and students’ interests, identities, and digital environments, inspiring them to connect meaningfully with the richness of Italian language and culture.

Organiser: Silvia Ross

‘Women’s Nature? Ecofeminist Approaches to Italian Cultural Production’

This panel will explore contemporary Italian cultural production through the lens of ecofeminist and ecocritical theories, with special attention to gender. The current climate crisis has heightened environmental awareness, as seen in the literary and cinematic outputs of recent years, as well as in the burgeoning area of environmental humanities. That said, Italian writers have been engaging with environmental questions, exploring the relationship between the human and the non-human in a range of media, for decades, if not centuries.

While Western society has consistently framed nature as feminine and has equated the natural world with womanhood, many authors have problematized the woman-nature/man-culture dichotomy in thought-provoking ways. Ecofeminism as a theory posits that the oppression of women and the exploitation of the environment are the result of the extractivist ideologies of anthropocentric, patriarchal societies. The subjugation of women and the environment, moreover, are part of a network of oppressions predicated on race, ability, sexuality and age. Applying Ecofeminist theory (e.g. Plumwood; Gaard; Alaimo; Haraway; Adams, among others) to the analysis of modern and contemporary Italian literary production, this panel seeks to probe the complexities of the representation of the environment and gender, to dismantle rigidly-defined gender assumptions concerning nature and culture, and debunk essentialising discourse which equates women with the Earth. Papers will investigate such themes as corporeality and the environment; gardens; animals; toxicity and waste; rural-urban dynamics; vegetarianism; hybridity; life stages and the environment; the feminist ethic of care; spirituality; utopias/dystopias, among others.

Organiser: Charlotte Ross

Queer Kinship

This roundtable is linked to the ongoing interdisciplinary, transnational and comparative research project, the Queer Kinship Network, led by Silvia Antosa, Paolo Frascà and Charlotte Ross. The network fosters debate on the histories and new transformative shifts of queer affective bonds and familial dynamics, examining the impact of recent legal changes, social developments, scholarly contributions, and cultural representation. The network has organised two conferences and hosts online seminars as well as a blog. An edited collection of essays is forthcoming with Mimesis (2026), and further publications are planned.

This roundtable will reflect on the insights gained from activities thus far, but also makes space for new voices and perspectives. Topics to be discussed include:

1. Terminology: what terms and expressions are used to redefine/resignify relationships, familial roles and affective bonds (e.g. queer kinship, queer lineage, ‘sfamiglia’, ‘amicazze’), and what do these forms of linguistic innovation enable or signify?

2. Methodologies: what theories and conceptual frames might be most usefully employed to analyse representations or discourses of/on queer kinship?

3. Transnational dimensions: how does the Italian context compare to other contexts? How do individuals and groups navigate queer relationships across borders, or the international dimensions of queer family making?

4. Intersectionality: how can intersectional frameworks deepen our understanding of queer kinship formations, particularly in analyzing how race, class, gender, and migration status impact on non-normative kinship groups?

5. Applications: How can research and theories on queer kinship support and be informed by legal advocacy, political activism and solidarity, community building and other tangible forms of social action/change?

Organiser: Andrea Schembari; Vincent Mobilia

Rethinking things: potere materiale e immateriale degli oggetti nella letteratura italiana

Gli oggetti, in letteratura, non svolgono mai una funzione meramente accessoria: muovendo da questa consapevolezza e dalle suggestioni offerte da una tradizione di studi oggi riconducibile all’ambito critico e metodologico della Thing Theory (Brown 2001; 2015), il panel esplora diacronicamente, per sondaggi mirati, la rappresentazione e la funzione degli oggetti nella letteratura italiana, considerandoli dispositivi attivi, in grado di intrecciare relazioni e plasmare i soggetti che li possiedono, attraverso relazioni simboliche e forme di soggettivazione.

Accogliendo la nozione di “feticismo metodologico” (Appadurai 1986; Brown 2001), si intende riflettere sugli effetti performativi degli oggetti e sul lavoro che essi compiono all’interno del testo letterario. Infatti, assumendo la distinzione tra object e thing, è proprio quando l’oggetto perde la sua funzione pratica che emerge la sua “cosità” (Heidegger 1949), cessando di essere trasparente e imponendosi come presenza significativa. Questa dinamica trova riscontro nella categoria del “desueto” (Orlando 1993), secondo cui gli oggetti logori o improduttivi si configurano come “antimerci” e sono recuperati dalla scrittura per il loro valore estetico, affettivo e memoriale.

Il panel, dunque, se da un lato segue la riflessione di Remo Bodei (2009) – che mostra come le “cose” possano trascendere la serialità della merce attraverso l’investimento emotivo –, dall’altro adotta la nozione di “umiltà delle cose” (Miller 2005), rivelatrice del potere normativo degli oggetti e della loro capacità di orientare l’agire umano, anche quando restano apparentemente sullo sfondo.

Organisers: Michela Sereni and Bianca Rita Cataldi

Voices, Bodies, Action: Women Writers and Political Engagement in 19th- and 20th-century Italy

This panel proposes an investigation into the multiple forms of women’s political intervention in Italy between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, questioning the very notion of political action in light of the strategies through which women were able to shape public discourse despite being formally excluded from institutions. The aim is to reconstruct a complex map of the practices and representations that contributed to redefining the boundaries of the political, shifting its centre of gravity toward seemingly marginal domains: literature, philanthropy, sociability, the press, and performance (Mori et al. 2015).

Drawing on case studies that range from improvisational women poets (Mori 2011) and Risorgimento salonniéres (Palazzolo 1985) to journalists, activists, and intellectuals of the twentieth century (Gazzetta 2018), the panel seeks to show how women fashioned, in diverse and often indirect ways, a language of engagement and participation. Through spoken and written word, the organisation of associative networks, and the conscious use of their bodies and self-presentation, they developed practices of presence that may be read as early forms of cultural citizenship (Bortolotti 1963).

Attention will also be devoted to the ways in which national imagery has employed the female figure – as allegory, symbol, or political body – and, at the same time, to how women reclaimed and transformed such representations to negotiate new spaces of subjectivity and power (Banti 2006). Combining literary, historical, and visual approaches, the panel aims to move beyond viewing women’s political intervention as an exception, instead restoring it as a structural component of Italian modernity.

Organiser : Clara Stella

Female Writing Exploring the Dark Side in the Italian Long Renaissance

This panel explores the “dark side” of the long Renaissance through the lens of female-authored writing and female characters, focusing on the ways in which women writers and women’s voices engage with themes of transgression, violence, melancholy, desire, monstrosity, and moral ambiguity. Far from conforming to idealized or marginal roles, female figures and authors of the period also participate in the literary construction of darkness, using it as a space of narrative, psychological, and ideological experimentation. By examining a range of genres (including lyric, drama, prose romance, spiritual writing, and political discourse) the panel investigates how female authors negotiate the cultural anxieties of their time and how female characters embody the shadowed zones of early modern experience. Darkness emerges not only as a thematic concern but also as a critical tool through which women question authority, expose hidden power structures, and articulate forms of agency that resist normative constraints. Ultimately, the panel aims to reassess the long Renaissance canon by foregrounding the complex contributions of women to the literature of the “dark,” showing how female writing does not merely reflect prevailing fears and tensions, but can actively reshape the imaginative and ethical boundaries of the period.

Organisers: Agnese Strata; Marta Spina

The Classical Legacy in Italian Humanism

This panel focuses on new aspects of the reception of classics in Italian Humanism. Through four case studies spanning the fourteenth to the early sixteenth century, it addresses some of the manifold ways in which humanists and literati adapted classical models to new intellectual and cultural contexts, revealing patterns of reading, commentary, imitation, and textual transmission. The first paper examines Coluccio Salutati’s engagement with Sallust, showing how the Florentine chancellor relied upon the Roman historian’s thought to articulate his own political vision. The second contribution investigates the ways in which Filippo Beroaldo the Elder draws on the classical tradition to inform his political speculation. A third paper analyses the classical sources used by Girolamo Borgio in his poetic works, shedding light on the mechanisms of intertextuality. The final presentation offers a study on the reading practices and exegetical approaches of Giovanni Antonio Panteo, taking into account a copy of the Rhetorica ad Herennium that bears his autograph marginalia. Collectively, these contributions exemplify the dynamic processes through which Renaissance intellectuals negotiated their relationship with antiquity and articulated new forms of cultural authority.

Organiser: Aurora Sturli

Women Writers’ Authorial Strategies from Post-Unification to the Present: Genres, Networks, and Readership

This roundtable will explore the different strategies enacted by women writers to assert and negotiate their presence in the intellectual establishment, from post-Unification to the present. In particular, the roundtable will focus on specific aspects of authoriality: how did women writers engage with popular genres, and to what extent some genres have been perceived, in literary history, as feminine (it is the case, for example, of autobiographies: Fanning, 2017, and the domestic novel: Mitchell, 2014)? Which literary practices were and are to this day connected with female authorship (for example, translation: Sanson, 2022; and subtextual strategies: Fanning, 2021; Santovetti, 2016, 2021; or metaliterary self-reflections: Santovetti, 2018). The topic of discussion will also be the relational strategies, or the social capital female authors exploited in order to gain visibility with publishers, editors, and fellow writers. This approach, in particular, aims to unearth the self-awareness they held of their position in the cultural field, without neglecting authors who are active to this day and who can voice their own gendered experiences (Bazzoni, 2021). Finally, recent attention in the publishing world has been dedicated to the relationship between women writers and their readers, established through the pages of periodicals, which allowed them to create a public persona (Dentamaro and Campofreda, 2024).

The proposed roundtable highlights the recurrence of certain aspects of women’s production when inserted in the context of a patriarchal dominating intellectual field, which they had to strategically navigate to overcome gendered barriers.

Organiser: Sofia Tinetti

Early Modern Encounters with the Ottomans

Early Modern Italian Literature has been characterised by the recurring figures of Turks, which in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries become increasingly shaped by the shifting political, religious, and commercial dynamics of the Mediterranean world. These figures circulated widely across Italian cultural production, appearing in literary genres (commentaries, novellas, travelogues and epic) and in the visual works that shaped the imagination of the time. The panel aims to explore the functions of these representations. Beyond evoking an exotic world, depictions of Turks often serve to disseminate an image of the enemy, or conversely to use the “Other” as a mirror for blaming fragmentation of the Italian peninsula. In both cases, alterity becomes a tool for shaping collective identity. Furthermore, some of these works are shaped by shifting balances of power between Italy and the Ottoman Empire, as evident in early sixteenth-century commentaries; or by the conventions of literary genre, for example in the differing representations of the Turks in the traditions of novella and epic poetry, in the celebratory rhetoric of Caracciolo’s Vita and Commentarii and in Pietro della Valle’s Viaggi.

Organiser: Chiara Valcelli

“L’ombra sua torna”: Dante’s Afterlives between Italy and Ireland

This panel brings together four papers on the modern and contemporary reception of Dante between Italy and Ireland, examining how the Commedia is read, appropriated, and transformed within modernist and contemporary literary writing. The panel is organised within L’ombra sua torna. Dante, the Twentieth Century and Beyond, an international research network on the modern and contemporary reception of Dante.

Two contributions focus on Dante’s presence within Irish modernism. One paper offers a comparative reading of Purgatorio XXV–XXVI, Paradiso XXVI, and Joyce’s “Oxen of the Sun”, showing how Dante’s reflections on linguistic formation and mutability are reworked through Joyce’s use of biological gestation as a model for stylistic and historical development. A second paper examines the afterlife of Guido Cavalcanti, analysing how Inferno X shapes his image from medieval narrative constructions to its reappearance in Joyce’s fiction, where Cavalcanti emerges as a figure of philosophical and intellectual radicalism.

The other two papers address Dante’s reception in contemporary Italian poetry and theatre.

One explores Antonella Anedda’s Historiae, focusing on the reworking of the Dantean image of the geomètra in Paradiso XXXIII and on the modern confrontation with epistemological limits. The final contribution analyses Patrizia Vicinelli’s engagement with the Commedia, tracing a shift from early neo-avant-garde appropriations of Infernal figures to later works that reinterpret Dante’s journey through themes of imprisonment, justice, and political vision. Together, the papers show how Dante’s Commedia continues to shape literary writing in different historical and cultural contexts.

Organiser: Victoria Witkowski

Local Legacies, National Myths: Colonial Heritage and Public Memory

This panel examines how the material traces of Italian colonialism have shaped public memory from the 19c to the present, focusing on the interplay between local contexts and national narratives. Bringing together three case studies from different localities, it examines how colonial consciousness was cultivated from villages to cities through museum collections and commemorative practices, and how the legacies of these practices persist today.

The first paper investigates how a village in Piemonte continues to commemorate one of fascist Italy´s celebrated colonial marshals, analysing how monuments, museums and local debates negotiate his fascist and colonial legacy. The second paper explores how the city of Pavia marked Italy’s inaugural 1926 Colonial Day, opening a Colonial Museum that shaped local perceptions of East Africa, and built enthusiasm for Italian colonialism by exhibiting a collection donated by Luigi Robecchi Bricchetti. The third paper assesses the importance of museum location for the national colonial project, using the case study of Giovanni Miani’s Venetian collection of 19c African objects to analyse how place has influenced the reception and afterlives of ethnographic collections.

Together, the papers address broader questions central to current debates on the decolonisation of Italy´s collective remembrance: how do the legacies of empire continue to shape attitudes towards Italy´s colonial past, and how might we analyse the afterlives of such objects and collections? What remains of historical figures once hailed as local and national colonial ´heroes´? How do local institutions engage with current national and transnational debates on restitution and colonial legacies?

PANEL ABSTRACTS

SIS Dublin 2026

Links