Cuadernos de Filología Italiana (ISSN 1133-9527, ISSNe 1988-2394) is an annual scientific journal, founded in 1994 by the Italian Philology Department at Complutense University of Madrid. It publishes original, rigorous studies developing research in the field of Italian Philology in Spanish, Italian, English or any other language with a wide international appeal.
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Traces of Renaissance Neoplatonism in the Encomiastic Poetry of the Kingdom of Naples during the First Half of the 16th Century: Luminous and Solar Characterizations of Power in Garcilaso de la Vega, Vittoria Colonna, Luigi Tansillo and Bernardo Tasso.
In this work we will attend to one of the dimensions of encomiastic poetry written in the Hispano-Italian literary space of the Kingdom of Naples during the first half of the 16th century. We will study how certain traces of the Neoplatonic imaginary of light and the sun are manifested in the lyrical characterization of certain characters related to the Neapolitan spheres of power. To do this we will base ourselves on four fundamental poets in the formation of said space in the period that interests us: Garcilaso de la Vega, Vittoria Colonna, Luigi Tansillo y Bernardo Tasso.
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Pyramus and Thisbe in Boccaccio’s works between texts and images: new sources, variants and “errors” in the images of the De mulieribus claris
This essay focuses on the story of Pyramus and Thisbe told in Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris and offers an in-depth analysis of the iconographical variants in ancient manuscripts and printed editions. The study of the relationship between text and images made it possible to delve deeper into the question of the interference with other texts, as well as to bring attention to some details of Boccaccio’s story wich detach it from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Thus, it has been possible to discover that Boccaccio knew and used the French lai Piramus et Tisbé (perhaps through the mediation of the Ovide moralisé), and that the iconography of the printed editions analysed in this essay seems to be affected by Giovanni Bonsignori’s vernacular translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
de Miguel y Canuto, Juan Carlos (2023): Ciò che non esprimo muore. Pasolini e Lorca, due traiettorie a confronto, Pisa, ETS, pp. 64.
The last texts: Fifteen Venetian testaments of women in the year of the black death (1348)
The paper presents the edition, with linguistic notes, of fifteen testamentary cedulae dictated in Venice by women in the months following the outbreak of the plague in 1348. Since these documents are probably not autographs, but probably dictated, the interest in their linguistic form concerns above all the organization of the text, in which the social conditions of the authors are peculiarly reflected. (Macro)syntax and textuality thus become diagnostic elements in a historical situation of emergency and exceptionality such as that of the plague, which influences the conception and structure of these texts.
Modal overdetermination: an analysis of non-Tuscan texts
The paper presents a research on modal overdetermination in the vernacular texts of Northern and Southern Italy and of the “Area mediana” (1300-1420). The aim of the work is to broaden the data base on this phenomenon, which has already been thoroughly investigated – but almost exclusively with regard to Tuscan texts – by Franca Brambilla Ageno (1964). The survey provides useful information for a more general understanding of modal verb syntax, since the feature occurs not only in Late Latin and medieval Italo-Romance, but also in other ancient and modern varieties (Neo-Latin as well as non-Latin).
The syntax of 13th- and early-14th-century Tuscan accounting records
This paper focuses on syntax and textuality of the relatively vast galaxy of thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries Tuscan accounting records: from simple lists of expenses and receipts, to lists of land and collected and to-be-collected taxes, up to the more complex records that register the same operation in different books and add the final balance of income and expenditure. Shared to both the “static” lists and the “dynamic” accounting records is the highly formulaic use of syntax, substantially repetitive because it is functional to the identification and hierarchization of the relevant elements of each accounting movement.
Syntax and formulaicity of recipe books: The case of the Trattato della miniatura
The recent interest in artistic recipe books has promoted the development of specialized glossaries and linguistic studies, which have enriched traditional content analysis of these texts with a renewed linguistic appreciation. However, the investigation of the syntactic structures within late artistic recipe books—key witnesses to the gradual evolution toward the more mature textual form of the Renaissance treatise—remains relatively underexplored. This study aims to examine the formulaic structures and syntactic patterns characteristic of the Trattato della miniatura, a sixteenth-century collection of 104 recipes detailing the preparation of colors and the depiction of landscape elements, garments, and flesh tones. Particular attention will be devoted to analyzing the recursive syntactic constructs that structure the main expository sections of the recipes, including titles, incipits, and elements marking the distinct procedural stages. The findings will be compared with existing studies on the language of recipe books to assess the persistence of syntactic features characteristic of the genre and to explore how these elements evolve toward more extensive and standardized structures.
Il contributo prende in esame alcune caratteristiche sintattiche e testuali ricorrenti dei libri di famiglia fiorentini tre-quattrocenteschi. Si tratta di testi che da un lato presentano una scrittura decisamente schematica e formulare, alla base della quale risiede una duplice tradizione scrittoria: quella notarile in latino e quella contabile in volgare; dall’altro sono stati realizzati con finalità essenzialmente pratiche e documentarie da scriventi, perlopiù semicolti, interessati a un puro uso funzionale della scrittura. Sul versante della costruzione del periodo, si analizza un tipo di scrittura sintetica che consiste nel porre la sequenza delle informazioni su un’unica linea prospettica (talvolta azzerando anche la dimensione temporale e quella di causa-effetto) per mezzo dell’onnipresente connettivo-demarcativo e; ci si sofferma quindi sui frequenti cambi di progetto sintattici e semantici, sui mutamenti del soggetto sintattico non espressi, sulle costruzioni a tema sospeso. Sul piano della testualità, il focus è in particolare sugli aspetti più caratteristici (e devianti rispetto alla norma) nell’àmbito della progressione tematica del discorso.
Some Relative Clauses in the Letters of Alessandra Macinghi Strozzi
The article collects examples of relative clauses found in the letters of Alessandra Macinghi Strozzi, with particular attention to the cases of failure to express introductory that, even in the presence of an interposed clause (relative imbricata), to the syntactic clues that allow us to recognize in that the pronominal value or the exclusively conjunctive one and particularly to the resume pronouns, to the sequences of relatives, to the morphosyntax of the noun relative clauses.
Syntax in the letters of a merchant with a hybrid language. The Avignon corpus of the correspondence of Piero di Matteo Tecchini (1385-1386)
This article focuses on a small corpus of letters by the medieval merchant Piero di Matteo Tecchini. Born into a Florentine family, he grew up in a Provençal and Catalan linguistic environment and is the author of hundreds of letters, today preserved at the Archivio di Stato di Prato. The wide variety of hands that wrote the letters signed with his name reveals the presence of a large commercial team supporting him, but many of his texts are linguistically hybrid. The letters written by his collaborators, in particular, are entirely in a generally Tuscan vernacular, while those written by Tecchini himself (whose handwriting has been confirmed through internal elements of the correspondence) show distinctly Catalan forms within an Italo-Romance framework. This work provides the edition of Tecchini’s letters related to the Avignon warehouse, consisting of six documents, all written, at the end of the 14th century, by the hand identified as that one of the merchant, and analyzes their syntax and textuality, focusing on those features related to the tendency for rapid production of practical texts.
Metalinguistic reflection around linguistic change: A didactic proposal for Lusophone learners of Italian as a foreign language
The contribution is set in the context of teaching Italian LS to Lusophone learners, focusing on treating linguistic errors when analysed from the perspective, both diachronic and synchronic, of language change. It considers two negative transfers present in the interlanguages (IL) of learners at different CEFR levels of proficiency, involving the definite articles and the verbs essere and stare (ser and estar). These grammatical elements are then presented and described along with their phases of change in diachrony. The language transfers present in the ILs of intermediate-level learners (B1 / B2 CEFR) are then analysed. Lastly, the contribution outlines a didactic proposal which aims to stimulate metalinguistic reflection and cognitive action in the LS acquisition and learning process.
Aspects of vernacular syntax in common and practical usage between the 14th and 17th centuries. Introduction
«Con l’esercizio costante»: tra le carte e l’opera di Ada Prospero Marchesini Gobetti Con un racconto inedito dell’autrice
Elisiana Fratocchi’s book “With Constant Practice”: Between the Papers and the Work of Ada Prospero Marchesini Gobetti offers a thorough re-evaluation of Ada Prospero—not merely as the wife of Piero Gobetti or an icon of anti-fascism, but as an independent author. Drawing on extensive archival research (notebooks, correspondence, typescripts, editorial records), the book traces the intellectual and literary evolution of Prospero through three key works: La musica più bella, Storia del gallo Sebastiano, and Diario partigiano, along with a previously unpublished short story, Racconto di guerra. Fratocchi shows that Prospero’s writing, from her youth onward, was a continuous act of reflection, resistance, and testimony. She highlights the literary function of her work, beyond its political or pedagogical dimensions, emphasizing the complexity behind each piece, including multiple drafts and editorial negotiations. The archive becomes a tool for interpretation, allowing a reconstruction of thematic and stylistic coherence despite apparent discontinuities. Through a philological and cultural lens, the book sheds light on lesser-known aspects of Prospero’s thought—from pedagogy to civic engagement and reflections on gender. What emerges is a multifaceted portrait of a thoughtful, cultured writer who transformed personal experience into collective memory. Fratocchi’s work is a significant contribution to the recognition of a figure still underrepresented in studies on Italian literature and Resistance history.
Causal and consecutive semantic relations in Southern Italian administrative texts between the Late Medieval and Early Modern Age
The paper aims to shed light on the syntactic-textual features of a corpus of administrative texts produced in the Kingdom of Naples in the Modern Age (petitions, instructions, town registers). More specifically, due to their relevance in the overall organization of the texts, the semantic relations of causality and consecutiveness are highlighted. The analysis of the texts shows the ways in which writers of “median” cultural caliber use an array of syntactic-textual structures and solutions within socio-discursive genres typical of the administrative and chancery environments of Italy in the late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age. In this way, the paper contributes to the reconstruction of a general and vast framework related to writing practices and skills of writers who, although not being literates, participated in the consolidation of those writing practices that were necessary for the management of the administrative life of Italian cities.
Critical review of the translation of Juan de Valdés's Diálogo de la lengua (F.Malandrin Ed.)
Alighieri, Dante (2024): Vida nueva - Vita nuova, edición bilingüe, traducción, introducción, glosas, correspondencias Barbi/Gorni, índices de primeros versos, bibliografía y sitiografía de Augusto Nava Mora, Guanajuato, MIQ, 300 pp.
Reported speech in the letters of Francesco and Margherita Datini. Syntactic and discourse configurations
The paper addresses some aspects of “reported speech” in the correspondence of Francesco and Margherita Datini, highlighting the peculiar interaction between pragmatic, discursive and syntactic factors that we can observe in epistolary writing, a textual type constitutively dialogic and polyphonic. In particular, we analyze the organization of the enunciative planes, the intermingling of direct and indirect speech, the use of reportative evidential formulas and the co-occurrence of topicalization and representation processes of others’ words.
Book review: Santato, Guido (2024), Pasolini oggi. Studi e letture, Roma, Carrocci Editore, 234 pp.
Costruzioni inaccusative nel Cinquecento
To describe certain unaccusative verbs found in literary and epistolary texts from the sixteenth century, this essay begins by examining the different syntactic configurations of fuggire (e.g., sono fuggito, mi sono fuggito, ho fuggito) in Il libro del Cortegiano, the letters of Baldassarre Castiglione (1497-1529), and other Renaissance texts. The initial data emerging from this introductory observation are analyzed through the work of Elisabetta Ježek on the unaccusative verb constructions in Early Italian, which was the first to provide a diachronic description of this significant construction type. The essay aims to offer new data on the history of these constructions by drawing on various types of sixteenth-century texts (literary prose, poetry, letters, comedies), with particular attention to the most important linguistic change identified in Ježek’s study: the disappearance in modern Italian of the pronominal unaccusative construction (e.g., mi sono fuggito, fuggendosi), which was accepted (and prevalent) in Early Italian across all conjugations, unlike the simple construction, which was only allowed in compound and non-finite verbs (e.g., io sono fuggito, fuggendo). The research also examines other unaccusative verbs and the two additional changes identified by Ježek. The essay concludes with a brief discussion on the expunction of the construction *si [>sì] è* (the verb essere preceded by sì, which should not be confused with reflexive forms) in the third version of Cortegiano, a form which appears in the second version.
Syntactic notes on pratical texts from Treviso (first half of the 14th century)
The article analyses a series of practical texts (including expense notes, credit notes, payment records) compiled in Treviso in the first half of the 14th century and describes their syntactic uses, with particular attention to the expression of the personal pronoun, the uses of the relative, clitics, prepositions and verbal constructs. A picture emerges of a language that is at times close to orality, often eschewing canonical sentence constructions.
Bonomi, Milin / Calvi, Maria Vittoria / Uberti-Bona, Marcella (a c. di) (2024), Demolingüística del español en Italia, con un anexo sobre el español en Malta, San Marino y Ciudad del Vaticano, Madrid, Instituto Cervantes, 250 pp.
Scivoletto, Giulio, Una guerra con la lingua. L’italiano popolare in un epistolario siciliano (1915-1919), Palermo, Bolettino del Centro di Studi Filologici e Linguistici Siciliani, 446 pp.
De Cristofaro, Marco (2023): La memoria, la storia e la Forma. Percorsi autobiografici di Roberto Calasso autore-editore, «Leia», vol. 52, Lausanne-Berlin-Bruxelles-Chennai-New York-Oxford, Peter Lang, 294 pp.
Giuseppe Ungaretti and Jorge Guillén: unpublished epistolary stages of an intellectual affinity
The article examines four still unpublished letters, according to the data available to us, from the brief correspondence between Giuseppe Ungaretti and Jorge Guillén. By retracing the stages of the epistolary exchanges, the aim of the contribution is to determine the context and to define the profile, literary and human, of some of the personal meeting opportunities between the two poets.
Geography and iconography of a princely journey in the second half of the 17th century: the Iberian Grand tour of Cosimo III de’ Medici and its images
The documentation on the trip to Spain and Portugal developed by Cosimo III of Medici from 1668 until 1669, in large part still unpublished, is a source of great interest to deepen in the Iberian Peninsula of that moment, especially because of the role as a visual reporter developed by the painter Pier Maria Baldi, who painted 120 watercolours for illustrating the Relazione ufficiale, manuscript preserved at the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana (Florence). In this article we propose the travel’s definitive itinerary, remarkable historic attestation about a Grand tour in the Iberian context.
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Two discursive profiles in contrast: the case of poiché and dal momento che in synchrony and diachrony
The present study intends to draw the semantic-discursive profile of two connectors classified as causal, comparing the functioning of poichè and dal momento che in discourse. In the first part of the analysis, which is based on political (corpus Europarl) and journalistic (the Corriere della Sera) prose, the characteristics and peculiarities of both connectors in synchrony are brought into focus. In the second part, the diachronic perspective is examined, investigating the contribution of poichè and dal momento che to the discourse constitution in texts of the literary tradition. The analysis highlights that poiché is established from the very beginning of Italian literature as an argumentative connector with a broad semantic-discursive scope, whereas dal momento che is limited to the creation of local coherence. The analysis takes place within the framework of a linguistic theory of argumentation.
Jorge Guillén and the Italian editorial and critical world: letter to his daughter Teresa
Jorge Guillén was initially published in Italy in collective anthologies, but it is thanks to his friend and the mentor of his son Claudio, Renato Poggioli, co-director of the Florentine magazine “Inventario” and a professor in the United States of America, that his books are published, especially with the editor Scheiwiller and his collection All’Insegna del Pesce d’Oro. He would also appeared in the anthology selected and translated by Juana Granados for Cislapina and later in the one by Oreste Macrí for the publishing house Sansoni owned by Federico Gentile, son of the philosopher. The correspondence, especially with his daughter Teresa, shows the failed projects, like the one of the publishing house Guanda for a joint edition of Jorge Guillén and Pedro Salinas poems in a single volume or the one by the Lerici publishing house. It also shows the enthusiasm of the Spanish poet for the way he is received in Italy, wining the Premio Nazionale di Poesia Città di Firenze and the Premio de Poesia Etna-Taorminia. Among his translators, especially in magazines, and editors are found his friends: Eugenio Montale, Carlo Bo, Renato Poggioli, Leone Traverso, Mario Luzi, Piero Bigongiari and of course, Oreste Macrí.
The mediated or forgotten mediating object. Discrimination in twentieh-century Italian literature for transformative or nuclear fantastic linkages
The mediating object represents one of the most effective narrative mechanisms for materializing the threshold crossing between distinct diegetic or ontological planes in fantastic narratives (Lugnani 1983), both in those belonging to the generic canon of the nineteenth century and in the modal ones of the twentieth century. Within the Italian literary tradition of the twentieth century, taking as an example texts emblematic of the different types of fantastic constructions (Lazzarin 2015), we can grasp a development of this resource that loses its corporeity to leave space for an indirect presence, mediated by the imagination of the characters, their vital senses, the information they handle during the action, or even its disappearance, leaving the extra-ordinary event without counter-evidence. The analytical scheme derived from apperception theory (Remorini 2023a) also highlights how the presence of the mediating object is indispensable for a change in the apperceptive connections of readings around new referential attractors.
Formal genealogies in the author-publisher narrative: Stylistic choices and recurring themes in editorial memoir
The paper investigates “editorial memoirs” as a specific literary genre. From the second half of the nineteenth century, in fact, with Gaspero Barbèra's Memorie di un editore up to the present day in which we record a great diffusion of autobiographical writings by Italian publisher-authors, such as Calasso, Bompiani and Ferri, editorial memoir has been marked by a series of recurring formal elements and structural approaches. Despite the diversity among different creative horizons, the constant return of certain characteristic traits leads to an overall analysis of the works. The essay analyzes stylistic and thematic choices within some texts by Italian publishers-autobiographers from the second half of the nineteenth century to the present. The goal is to identify recurring textual elements that allow for an overview of this specific literary genre, providing a different perspective to studies of publishing history.
Forms and functions of per quanto riguarda NP. A corpus-based description and a cognitive explanation
The aim of this paper is to provide a description and explanation of the forms and functions of the Italian expression per quanto riguarda NP. We will analyze its formal variation and different functions, using quantitative data an examples from a corpus. We will present its assigned pragmatic function as a thematic marker and also consider the informational units where the expression can appear, to understand all uses of per quanto riguarda NP, not just the thematic ones. Thus, we will relate the various functions performed by the expression to a single cognitive function: the reference-point function.