Late-medieval European vernacular literature defined itself as the redeployment of classical and post-classical antecedents in new cultural coordinates. Many authors of narrative and poetic fiction between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries resisted the idea that moving a text from one language to another produces a loss of meaning, or, as today’s idiom goes, that something always gets “lost in translation.” Rather, they understood the process of vernacular translation as a regenerative ...

Al centro c'è Pompei. Intorno, ventotto piccoli occhi studiano incuriositi le pietruzze colorate. Una manina si posa sulla spalla della restauratrice china a pulire i tasselli. «Tata, che fai?» È la più piccola bambina del gruppo a parlare. Lei non esita mai a fare domande.«Pensa come doveva essere prima che scoppiasse», dice Camilla a mezza voce al fratello. Un po' di paura il vulcano gliela mette anche adesso. Hanno capito che un giorno di quasi duemila anni fa ha sputato fuoco, ...

This book is addressed to “lovers of paradoxes” and we have done our utmost to assemble a stellar cast of Neapolitan and American scholars, intellectuals, and artists/writers who are strong and open-minded enough to wrestle with and illuminate the paradoxes through which Naples presents itself. Naples is a mysterious metropolis. Difficult to understand, it is an enigma to outsiders, and also to the Neapolitans themselves. Its very impenetrableness is what makes it so deliriously and irresi...

For the first time in one volume, the most elegant and accessible translation of Dante’s enduring masterpieceCharles Singleton’s English-language translation of The Divine Comedy is widely considered to be one of the finest renderings of Dante’s masterpiece. Singleton’s prose is both faithful and scholarly, and sensitive to the subtle nuances of meaning and richness of reference in Dante’s epic poem. Here for the first time is the single-volume edition of ...

The Ninth Day of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron is significant both for numerological and structural reasons. Whether we consider the Decameron as reproducing an itinerary toward the attainment of virtue or following other possible interpretive schematics, Day Nine remains a liminal moment of pause before the inception of the final stories dedicated to the highest civic virtues of liberality and magnificence.This collection is comprised of extensive and rigorous e...

The essays collected here join in, and contribute to, the current reflection on Dante’s vitality today in a critical, multidisciplinary vein. Their intervention comes at a particularly sensitive juncture in the history of Dante’s global reception and cultural reuse. Dante today is as alive as ever. A cultural icon no less than a cultural product, Dante’s imaginative universe enjoys a pervasive presence in popular culture. The multiformity of approaches represented in the collection matches...