In three seventeenth-century comedies by the Italian playwright, poet, actor and capocomico Giovan Battista Andreini (1576-1654), the Mediterranean Sea plays an ambiguous role, simultaneously separating and connecting families, peoples, cultures, and empires that are scattered around its shores. In these plays the Mediterranean cannot be thought of in geographical terms—i.e. as an ensemble of bodies of water—but rather as a scene of interaction, a stage upon which distance and difference are affirmed or overcome through dialogue, sometimes with surprising results. Embodied above all in the themes of piracy and slavery, on the one hand, and in the figure of the renegade, on the other, the function of the Mediterranean in La turca (1611), Lo schiavetto (1612), and La sultana (1622) is the subject of this essay.

The writer Italo Calvino and the architect Aldo Rossi were among the most prominent intellectual stars to emerge from Italy onto the international scene in the post-1968 period. Although there is no concrete evidence that the two men knew each other's work, or that they thought of themselves as part of the 'postmodernist' movement of those years, their respective career trajectories seem to parallel one another in sometimes striking ways. More importantly, Calvino and Rossi were erudite and voracious readers who shared a very wide-ranging set of literary and cultural references, as becomes apparent when the dense textual network of the Lezioni americane is mapped onto that of Rossi's notebooks (now known as the Quaderni azzurri), in which the architect recorded many of his readings as well as his reflections on the latter. This essay focuses principally on texts left unpublished by Calvino and Rossi while alive (and still not translated into English today), namely the unfinished lecture "Cominciare e finire"—drafted as part of the Norton series but eventually put aside by the author—and the aforementioned Quaderni azzurri. What emerges from the juxtaposition of these works is the central importance of theatrical texts, spaces, performances, and ultimately the concept of theater itself, in Calvino's and Rossi's respective cultural projects. For the former, theaters are a concrete "image of the ideal space in which stories take shape" (L/A 744), and thus may serve  as a synecdoche for all literary story-telling. For the latter, who designed and built a number of theaters over the course of his career, architecture is at its best when it concerned not with function but with making itself available ("disponibile") to the telling of the human story. This is never more the case than in the built environment of the theater, which is the desideratum of architecture—to become the place where stories with transformative power may take place—pushed to the extreme degree of what Rossi calls "pure availability" ("la disponibilità pura"). Both writer and architect not only acknowledge the cultural prestige of the theater, even in the media-saturated and dispersive era of late capitalism, but envision it as a place of unique imaginative freedom within the system of representation at the end of the millennium.

In this essay, which serves as an introduction to the set of six new translations included in this same volume of the journal, the author examines briefly the life and works of Matilde Serao, one of Italy's leading women writers of the post-Unification period, with particular attention to her early writings on Naples. The essay explores Serao's essentially hybrid prose writing in these texts, which blend together traits of narrative and essay, literary and oral traditions, and concludes with some remarks on the particular problems posed by Serao's style for an English-language translator.

In the course of its existence, California Italian Studies has published essays by living Italian philosophers who were luminaries in the field, including Umberto Eco and Franco Cassano (now both deceased). Somehow, however, the pages of this journal never until now have hosted any contribution by Gianni Vattimo, the great Italian philosopher who passed away in September 2023 at age 87. Vattimo was a beloved teacher, a mentor, and a friend to several of the founding members of CIS, myself included, so it seems particularly appropriate for us to offer a posthumous homage to him in this open-theme issue of volume 13. I will offer just a few personal reminiscences here, as both Maurizio Ferraris and Simonetta Moro address in their respective essays the core tenets of Vattimo’s philosophy. Vattimo’s brief 1985 essay on myth and truth is included here because it so succinctly summarizes and illustrates the strand of his work for which he is most remembered today, namely il pensiero debole or “weak thought.”

Translated by Jon R. Snyder and Megan Williamson

*This text originally appeared in RES: Anthropology and Aesthetic no. 9 (Spring 1985): 29–95. It is reprinted in California Italian Studies 13, no. 2 by permission of the University of Chicago Press.

This dissertation focuses on the representation of feminine figures in fairy tales from the seventeenth century to the present day. Using a narratological and feminist critical approach, I consider textual variations of three canonical fairy tales: "The Three Fruits," "Bluebeard," and "The Old Woman Who Was Skinned." Each of these fairy tales can be tracked down across multiple cultural moments, with each fresh re-telling of the tale at once a renewal and a revision of its core narrative elements. I specifically compare Italian fairy tales in literature, cinema, and theater with British and French texts that recount the same tale. Authors considered range from Giambattista Basile and Carlo Gozzi to Italo Calvino, Laura Gonzenbach, Edoardo Sanguineti, and Angela Carter, together with (among others) writer-directors Matteo Garrone and Emma Dante. My dissertation’s aim is to explain the intertextuality of seemingly inexhaustible fairy-tale narratives in relation to specific cultural modes of artistic production and reproduction and, in particular, pertaining to gender roles and the feminine sphere. I argue that the transformations into fairy-tale texts and the feminine sphere—their metamorphoses, in one word—are textual expressions of the inexhaustibility of fairy tales. By “feminine sphere,” I mean the female fairy-tale characters as well as the domestic and family domains associated with women. Furthermore, I claim that the feminine sphere is modified according to the author’s socio-cultural milieu. In representing and problematizing this sphere, fairy-tale texts express and critique deep-seated anxieties pertaining to the role of gender in the societies in which fairy tales originated. I contend that, by employing feminine metamorphoses in their fairy-tale rewritings, these texts work to counteract cultural fears and oppressive patriarchal tropes embedded in Western European societies, such as those of Italy, France, and the United Kingdom.

This dissertation has three main goals. The first is to provide a textual analysis of a body of texts rarely studied in this light. My second goal is to identify and define the practice of fairy-tale revisionism. I borrow the term “revisionism” from the philosopher Adriana Cavarero and critic Lucia Re, who have identified mythic revisionism in women’s literary appropriations of many classical myths. My dissertation applies mythic revisionism to fairy tales in light of the structural similarities between myths and fairy tales, which are both foundational narratives supporting key societal values. Fairy-tale revisionism—I claim—is a fairy-tale specific mode of intertextual renovation and feminist understanding of fairy tales, involving the author’s own take on the fairy tale’s significance in a precise historical moment and requiring a critical analysis of the narrative strategies employed to generate a fresh version of a pre-existing story. My dissertation’s third goal is to define a new intersectional role for femininity in fairy tales. While female characters such as Mother Goose and other archetypal motherly or grandmotherly storytellers traditionally represent the fairy tales’ narrative voice and the stories’ source, I study the presence in these tales of a feminine metamorphic figure that, by recurring in each text as well as by occurring in different ways throughout the fairy-tale web of representations, questions not only gender norms but also ethnic identification and discrimination, ageism, and corporal or psychological violence against marginalized members of society.

Introduction to CIS 5.1.

The authors consider the role of the sacred in Italy from the Middle Ages to the present day, particularly in relation to religion (above all Catholicism) as well as to the currents of modern critical thought.