Giornale storico della letteratura italiana

This article analyses the penultimate novella in the Decameron (the story of Saladin and Messer Torello), showing how the main theme is the noble and courteous behaviour displayed by Torello and his wife Adalieta. The tale marks the culmination of Boccaccio’s reflections on courteous behaviour, present throughout the work. For him, courtesy is the modern virtue that most closely resembles Seneca’s beneficium, and it emerges not so much in love as in everyday life, e.g. in Cisti the baker’s noble gesture and in the generous hospitality that the couple from Lombardy show to the foreigner. Boccaccio takes leave of his readers proposing an exemplary couple and a model of behaviour well within their reach.

Between the second half of the 19^th century and the early 20^th century, the Dalmatian philologist Adolfo Mussafia represented an essential bridge between the new German Wissenschaft movement and the Italian cultural and academic spheres. This article publishes and contextualizes for the first time the ten letters and three postcards that he sent to Francesco Novati, cofounder of the Giornale storico della letteratura italiana (Milan, Biblioteca nazionale Braidense, Novati correspondence; Milan, Biblioteca della Società Storica Lombarda, Novati file) and Novati’s replies (nine letters and one postcard) (Florence, Biblioteca Umanistica dell’Università degli Studi, Mussafia file). An analysis of this unpublished correspondence makes it possible to add further (and at times surprising) details to the biographies of these two scholars and their scholarly endeavours, as well as to shed further light on European political and intellectual life at the turn of the century.

Numerous studies have dealt with onomastics in Promessi sposi [The Betrothed], but little attention has been dedicated to the name of Don Rodrigo. The only literary precedent that has thus far been considered is Don Rodrigue in Corneille’s Le Cid. However, there are other figures in literature who bear this same name. This article focuses in particular on Giambattista Fagiuoli’s rendering of Machiavelli’s Favola in a short poem in tercets, in which the name Belfagor in the original is replaced by Rodrigo/Don Rodrigo.

This article compares the ways in which Tommaseo and Leopardi considered folk traditions, in particular the specific case of female weavers’ songs and poems. Though stemming from different premises and aimed at equally unrelated endeavours, the attention that they both paid to the daily rhythms of the community transformed into poetry, represents a strong junction point between two parallel literary experiences.

Niccolò Machiavelli, Lettere, a cura di Francesco Bausi et alii (Jean-Louis Fournel), p. 622 – Gabriele Bucchi, Il grido del pavone. Alessandro Tassoni tra fascinazione eroica e demistificazione scettica. (Luca Ferraro), p. 625.

Si parla di: Dante. – L. B. Alberti. – F. Baricci. – «Schede Umanistiche /Antichi e Moderni». – M. Capriotti. – F. Galiani. – E. Bufacchi