Partitura spezzata: Diario spirituale di un prostituto (La biblioteca di domani) (Italian Edition)

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Kundera sorride, si compiace della mia apprensione, e invita a sedere di fianco al Turco. In its own way, throught its own logic, the novel discovered the various dimension of existence one by one: With Thomas Mann , it examines the role of the myths from the remote past that control our present actions. Et cetera, et cetera. By that I mean: In the absence of the Supreme Judge, the world suddenly appeared in its fearsome ambiguity; the single divine Truth decomposed into myriad relative truths parceled out by men.

Thus was born the world of the Modern Era, and with it the novel, the image and model of that world. To take, with Descartes, the thinking self as the basis of everything, and thus to face the universe alone, is to adopt an attitude that Hegel was right to call heroic. Much has been written on the question.

Others see it as a celebration of that same idealism. Man desires a world where good and evil can be clearly distinguished, for he has an innate and irrepressible desire to judge before he understands. Religions and ideologies are founded on this desire. They can cope with the novel only by translating its language of relativity and ambiguity into their own apodictic and dogmatic discourse. They require that someone be right: He could go out freely and come home as he pleased. The early European novels are journeys through an apparently unlimited world.

They exist in a time without beginning or end, in a space without frontiers, in the midst of a Europe whose future will never end. Half a century after Diderot, in Balzac, the distant horizon has disappeared like a landscape behind those modern structures, the social institutions: It has set forth on the train called History.

The train is easy to board, hard to leave. Later still, for Emma Bovary, the horizon shrinks to the point of seeming a barrier. Adventure lies beyond it, and the longing becomes intolerable.

Within the monotony of the quotidian, dreams and daydreams take on importance. The lost infinity of the outside world is replaced by the infinity of the soul. In the face of the Court or the Castle, what can K. The infinity of the soul- if it ever existed- has become a nearly useless appendage.

A novel that does not discover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Il linguaggio di ciascuno di noi si evolve ogni giorno arricchito di parole nuove, un vocabolario criptato a noi fino a prima di adesso del tutto sconosciuto e in alcuni casi ancora incomprensibile. Ci si incontra e innamora su internet, si comunica by email, si viene assunti su Skype, licenziati su Facebook, mollati su Twitter. Quanto al Turco, sparito.

Con la gynoid seduta al tavolo di fianco al nostro. For in addiction to being a great center for chess, London was renowned for its enthusiasm for public displays of automata and other technological marvels. The arcades of Piccadilly, the streets of St. The Turk , dello scrittore inglese Tom Standage tomstandage. The Minds of Machines Philosophy Now. Chess had been a popular pastime in coffeehouses in both cities since the beginning of the century and enjoyed a period of heightened popularity in the s and s, when it became extremely fashionable in high society.

Playlist dei brani da ascoltare, lista dei libri da leggere, degli autori da approfondire, del materiale su cui scrivere, dei posti che mi piacerebbe visitare, dei films e le mostre da vedere, di citazioni e articoli di giornale. Improbabili liste di buoni propositi e scadenze da rispettare, progetti su cui lavorare. Un tic, in alcuni casi. Ho deciso che il deve portarmi bene, me ne frego della fine del mondo. Fuori il superfluo, dentro il necessario. Pragmatismo, la parola chiave. Che ne dite Avrei pensato a questi titoli, ognuno di voi si senta libero di inserirne di altri che andranno a sostituire quelli da me scelti.

Un poeta maledetto, alla maniera di Baudelaire , nostalgico, alla maniera di Rimbaud. Finito il college, Lowry si rifiuta di lavorare per il padre e a una carriera manageriale preferisce il mare, arruolandosi come marinaio; gira il mondo, subisce gli orrori della guerra, va a caccia di storie in buona parte contenute nel romanzo di debutto Ultramarine , del Insegue la propria stella. Over the broken horizon the Scorpion was crawling. There was the red, dying sun, Antares.

To the south-east, the Retreat of the Howling Dog appeared. The stars taking their places were wounds opening in his being, multiple duplications of that agony, of that eye. The constellations might have been monstrosities in the delirium of God. Disaster seemed smeared over the whole universe. Questi i links a un sito dedicato a Lowry e un articolo, nel quale si racconta della vita dello scrittore Malcolm Lowry The 19th Hole Life and Letters: Day of the Dead: Sotto, il primo capitolo del libro A man leaves a dockside tavern in the early morning, the smell of the sea in his nostrils, and a whisky bottle in his pocket, gliding over the cobbles lightly as a ship leaving harbour.

Soon he is running into a storm and tacking from side to side, frantically trying to get back. Now he will go into any harbour at all. He goes into another saloon. From this he emerges, cunningly repaired; but he is in difficulties once more. This time is serious: Passers- by stare at him curiously, some with anger; others with amusement, or even a strange avidity. This time he seeks refuge up an alley, and leans against the wall in an attitude of dejection, as if trying to remember something.

Again the pilgrimage starts but his course is so erratic it seems he must be looking for, rather than trying to remember something. Or perhaps, like the poor cat who had lost an eye in a battle, he is just looking for his sight? The heat rises up from the pavements, a mighty force, New York groans and roars above, around, below him: Signs nod past him: The Best for Less, Romeo and Juliet , the greatest love story in the world, No Cover at Any Time, When pain threatens, strikes- He enters another tavern, where presently he is talking of people he had never known, of places he had never been.

Through the open door he is aware of the hospital, towering up above the river. Near him arrogant bearded derelicts cringe over spittoons, and of these men he seems afraid. Sweat floods his face. From the depths of the tavern comes a sound of moaning, and a sound of ticking. Outside, again the pilgrimage starts, he wanders from saloon to saloon as though searching for something, but always keeping the hospital in sight, as if the saloons were only points on his circumference.

In a street along the waterfront where a bell is clanging, he halts; a terrible old woman, whose black veil only partly conceals her ravaged face, is trying to post a letter, trying repeatedly and falling, but posting it finally, with shaking hands that are not hands at all. A strange notion strikes him: He takes a drink from the bottle. Thousands collapse in Heat Wave. Civil War in Spain. Once he stops in a church, his lips moving in something like a prayer. Nobody seems to be looking. He likes drinking in churches particularly.

But afterwards he comes to a place not like a church at all. This is the hospital: Tilting the bottle to his mouth he takes a long, final draught: But between taken from Lunar Caustic, cap 1, by Malcolm Lowry, Dallo scorso settembre, le biblioteche inglesi sono state ingaggiate del compito di raccogliere, entro una lista, i libri che nel corso degli anni passati sono stati bannati, non solo in Inghilterra, ma nel resto del mondo.

O al mare, sugli scogli, a leggere dei dolori del giovane Werther , delle bravate di Holden, dei tormenti di madame Bovary, del lupo nella steppa, dei padri e dei figli della rivoluzione russa. E poi avevo la pessima abitudine di litigare coi professori. E di starmene in disparte dalla classe. Meglio ancora se fuori, a fumare nei giardinetti del cortiletto vicino la palestra. Che poi in fondo, ai professori, devo aver fatto pure un favore. Io marinavo scuola, loro non dovevano preoccuparsi di redimermi, o punirmi.

Il direttore di sospendermi. E tutti eravamo felici. Sapete ci sono scrittori che amano scopare con le parole. E, a mio parere, un capolavoro della critica e della prosa letteraria. La ragione per cui amo leggere Sartre consiste appunto nello stile, elegante, netto, attento, acuto, della scrittura. Join the Communist Party. Contempt for belles-lettres is spread out insolently all through your review.

An author who barely crawled from one war to the other and whose name sometimes awakens languishing memories in old men accuses me of not being concerned with immortality; he knows, thank God, any number of people whose chief hope it is. In the eyes of an American hack-journalist the trouble with me is that I have not read Bergson or Freud; as for Flaubert , who did not engage himself, it seems that he haunts me like remorse.

You want to engage them, too? They read quickly,badly, and pass judgment before they have understood. But we have to hit the nail on the head. And since critics condemn me in the name of literature without ever saying what they mean by that, the best answer to give them is to examine the art of writing without prejudice. Why does one write?

The fact is, it seems that nobody has ever asked himself these questions. And why would we want to? When a writer of past centuries expressed an opinion about his craft, was his immediately asked to apply it to the other arts? Doubtless, one could find at the origin of every artistic calling a certain undifferentiated choice which circumstances, education, and contact with the world particularized only later. Besides, there is no doubt that the arts of a period mutually influence each other and are conditioned by the same social factors. But those who want to expose the absurdity of a literary theory by showing that it is inapplicable to music must first prove that the arts are parallel.

Now, there is no such parallelism. Here, as everywhere, it is not only the form which differentiates, but the matter as well. And it is one thing to work with color and sound, and another to express oneself by means of words. Notes, colors, and forms are not signs. They refer to nothing exterior to themselves. To be sure, it is quite impossible to reduce them strictly to themselves, and the idea of a pure sound, for example, is an abstraction.

As Merleau- Ponty has pointed out in The Phenomenology of Perception , there is no quality of sensation so bare that it is not penetrated with signification. But the dim little mean ing which dwells within it, a light joy, a timid sadness, remains immanent or trembles about it like a heat mist; it is color or sound.

Who can distinguish the green apple from its tart gaiety? They are things, they exist by themselves. It is true that one might, by convention, confer the value of signs upon them. Thus, we talk of the language of flowers. My attention cuts through them to aim beyond them at this abstract virtue. I no longer pay attention to their mossy abundance, to their sweet stagnant odor. I have not even perceived them.

That means that I have not behaved like an artist. For the artist, the color, the bouquet, the tinkling of the spoon on the saucer, are things, in the highest degree. He stops at the quality of the sound or the form. He returns to it constantly and is enchanted with it. It is this color-object that he is going to transfer to his canvas, and the only modification he will make it undergo is that he will transform it into an imaginary object. He is therefore as far as he can be from considering colors and signs as a language.

What is valid for the elements of artistic creation is also valid for their combinations. The painter does not want to create a thing. And if he puts together red, yellow, and green, there is no reason for the ensemble to have a definable signification, that is, to refer particularly to another object. Doubtless this ensemble is also inhabited by a soul, and since there must have been motives, even hidden ones, for the painter to have chosen yellow rather than violet, it may be asserted that the objects thus created reflect his deepest tendencies.

However, they never express his anger, his anguish, or his joy as do words or the expression of the face; they are impregnated with these emotions; and in order for them to have crept into these colors, which by themselves already had something like a meaning, his emotions get mixed up and grow obscure. Nobody can quite recognize them there. Tintoretto did not choose that yellow rift in the sky above Golgotha to signify anguish or to provoke it. It is anguish and yellow sky at the same time. Not sky of anguish or anguished sky; it is an anguish become thing, an anguish which has turned into yellow rift of sky, and which thereby is submerged and impasted by the proper qualities of things, by their impermeability, their extension, their blindpermanence, their externality, and that infinity of relations which they maintain with other things.

That is, it is no longer readable. It is like an immense and vain effort, forever arrested half-way between sky and earth, to express what their nature keeps them from expressing. Similarly, the signification of a melody if one can still speak of signification is nothing outside of the melody itself, unlike ideas, which can be adequately rendered in several ways. Call it joyous or somber. It will always be over and above anything you can say about it.

Not because its passions, which are perhaps at the origin of the invented theme, have, by being incorporated into notes, undergone a transubstantiation and a transmutation. A cry of grief is a sign of the grief which provokes it, but a song of grief is both grief itself and something other than grief. Or, if one wishes to adopt the existentialist vocabulary, it is a grief which does not exist any more, which is.

But, you will say, suppose the painter does houses? He makes them, that is, he creates an imaginary house on the canvas and not a sign of a house. And the house which thus appears preserves all the ambiguity of real houses. The writer can guide you and, if he describes a hovel, make it seem the symbol of social injustice and provoke your indignation. The painter is mute. You are free to see in it what you like. That attic window will never be the symbol of misery; for that, it would have to be a sign, whereas it is a thing.

The bad painter looks for the type. He paints the Arab, the Child, the Woman; the good one knows that neither the Arab nor the proletarian exists either in reality or on his canvas. He offers a workman, a certain workman.

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And what are we to think about a workman? An infinity of contradictory things. All thoughts and all feelings are there, adhering to the canvas in a state of profound undifferentiation. It is up to you to choose. Sometimes, high-minded artists try to move us. They paint long lines of workmen waiting in the snow to be hired, the emaciated faces of the unemployed, battle fields.

I have no doubt that charity or anger can produce other objects, but they will likewise be swallowed up; they will lose their name; there will remain only things haunted by a mysterious soul. One does not paint significations; one does not put them to music. Under these conditions, who would dare require that the painter or musician engage himself? On the other hand, the writer deals with significations.

Still, a distinction must be made. The empire of signs is prose; poetry is on the side of painting, sculpture, and music. I am accused of detesting it; the proof, so they say, is that Les Temps Modernes publishes very few poems. On the contrary, this is proof that we like it. To be convinced, all one need do is take a look at contemporary production. But why should I want to? Because it uses words as does prose? But it does not use them in the same way, and it does not even use them at all, I should rather say that it serves them.

Poets are men who refuse to utilize language. Now, since the quest for truth takes place in and by language conceived as a certain kind of instrument, it is unnecessary to imagine that they aim to discern or expound the true.

Nor do they dream of naming the world, and, this being the case, they name nothing at all, for naming implies a perpetual sacrifice of the name to the object named, or, as Hegel would say, the name is revealed as the inessential in the face of the thing which is essential. They do not speak, neither do they keep still; it is something different. In fact, the poet has withdrawn from language-instrument in a single movement.

Once and for all he has chosen the poetic attitude which considers words as things and not as signs. For the ambiguity of the sign implies that one can penetrate it at will like a pane of glass and pursue the thing signified, or turn his gaze toward its reality and consider it as an object. The man who talks is beyond words and near the object, whereas the poet is on this side of them.

For the former, they are domesticated; for the latter they are in the wild state. For the former, they are useful conventions, tools which gradually wear out and which one throws away when they are no longer serviceable; for the latter, they are natural things which sprout naturally upon the earth like grass and trees. But if he dwells upon words, as does the painter with colors and the musician with sounds, that does not mean that they have lost all signification in his eyes.

Indeed, it is signification alone which can give words their verbal unity. Without it they are frittered away into sounds and strokes of the pen. Only, it too becomes natural. It is no longer the goal which is always out of reach and which human transcendence is always aiming at, but a property of each term, analogous to the expression of a face, to the little sad or gay meaning of sounds and colors.

Having flowed into the word, having been absorbed by its sonority or visual aspect, having been thickened and defaced, it too is a thing, increate and eternal. For the poet, language is a structure of the external world. The speaker is in a situation in language; he is invested with words. They are prolongations of his meanings, his pincers, his antennae, his eyeglasses.

He maneuvers them from within; he feels them as if they were his body; he is surrounded by a verbal body which he is hardly aware of and which extends his action upon the world. The poet is outside of language. He sees words inside out as if he did not share the human condition, and as if he were first meeting the word as a barrier as he comes toward men. Instead of first knowing things by their name, it seems that first he has a silent contact with them, since, turning toward that other species of thing which for him is the word, touching them, testing them, palping them, he discovers in them a slight luminosity of their own and particular affinities with the earth, the sky, the water, and all created things.

Not knowing how to use them as a sign of an aspect of the world, he sees in the word the image of one of these aspects. And the verbal image he chooses for its resemblance to the willow tree or the ash tree is not necessarily the word which we use to designate these objects. As he is already on the outside, he considers words as a trap to catch a fleeing reality rather than as indicators which throw him out of himself into the midst of things.

In short, all language is for him the mirror of the world. As a result, important changes take place in the internal economy of the word. Its sonority, its length, its masculine or feminine endings, its visual aspect, compose for him a face of flesh which represents rather than expresses signification. Inversely, as the signification is realized, the physical aspect of the word is reflected within it, and it, in its turn, functions as an image of the verbal body.

Like its sign, too, for it has lost its pre-eminence; since words, like things, are increate, the poet does not decide whether the former exist for the latter or vice-versa. Sartre on Literature Philosophy Now. It was here, in relation to his students, that certain strange problems were first observed.

Sometimes a student would present himself, and Dr P. Such incidents multiplied, causing embarrassment, perplexity, fear- and, sometimes, comedy. For not only did Dr P. At first these odd mistakes were laughed off as jokes, not least by Dr P. Had he not always had a quirky sense of humour , and been given to Zen -like paradoxes and jests? His musical powers were as dazzling as ever; he did not feel ill- he had never felt better; and the mistakes were so ludicrous- and so ingenious- that they could hardly be serious or betoken anything serious.

Well aware that diabetes could affect his eyes , Dr P. It was obvious within a few seconds of meeting him that there was no trace of dementia in ordinary sense. He was a man of great cultivation and charm, who talked well and fluently, with imagination and humor. And yet there was something a bit odd. He faced me as he spoke, was oriented towards me, and yet there was something the matter- it was difficult to formulate. He faced me with his ears, I came to think, but not with his eyes. I am not sure that I fully realized this at the time- there was just a teasing strangeness, some failure in the normal interplay of gaze and expression.

He saw me, he scanned me, and yet.. When I came back Dr P. What a lovely man, I thought to myself. How can there be anything seriously the matter? Would he permit me to examine him? It was examining his reflexes- a trifle abnormal on the left side- that the first horizon experience. I had taken off his left shoe and scratched the sole of his foot with a key- a frivolous- seeming but essential test of a reflex- and then, excusing myself to screw my ophthalmoscope together, left him, to put on the shoe himself.

To my surprise, a minute later, he had not done this. Finally his gaze settled on his foot: That is your foot. There is your shoe. I thought that was my foot. I helped him on with his shoe his foot , to avoid further complications. I resumed my examination. His visual acuity was good: He saw all right, but what did he see? I opened out a copy of the National Geographic , and asked him to describe some pictures in it. His responses here were curious. His eyes would dart from one thing to another, picking up tiny features, individual features, as they had done with my face. A striking brightness, a color, a shape would arrest his attention and elicit comment- but in no case did he get the scene- as-a-whole.

He failed to see the whole, seeing only details, which he spotted like blips on a radar screen. He never entered into relation with the picture as a whole- never faced, so to speak, its physiognomy. He had no sense whatever of a landscape or scene. I showed him the cover, an unbroken expanse of Sahara dunes. People are dining out on the terrace. I see coloured parasols here and there. I must have looked aghast, but he seemed to think he had done rather well.

There was a hint of a smile on his face. He also appeared to have decided that the examination was over, and started to look round for his hat. He had apparently mistaken his wife for a hat! His wife looked as if she was used to such things. I could make no sense of what had occurred, in terms of conventional neurology or neuropsychology. In some ways he seemed perfectly preserved, and in others absolutely, incomprehensibly devastated. How could he, on the one hand, mistake his wife for a hat and, on the other, function, as apparently he still did, as a teacher at the Music School?

I had to think, to see him again- and to see him in his own familiar habitat, at home. A few days later I called on Dr P. A magnificent old Bosendorfen stood in state in the centre of the room, and all round it were music-stands, instruments, scores.. There were books, there were paintings, but the music was central. We exchanged greetings , and chatted a little of current concerts and performances.

Differently, I asked him if he would sing. You will play them, yes? On that wonderful old piano even my playing sounded right, and Dr P. It was clear that the Music School was not keeping him on out of charity. What, I wondered, was going on in his parietal and occipital lobes, especially in those areas where visual processing occurred? I carry the Platonic solids in my neurological kit, and decided to start with these.

He asked if he might examine it, which he did swiftly and systematically: I took out a pack of cards. All of these he identified instantly, including the jacks, queens, kings, and the joker. But these, after all, are stylized designs, and it was impossible to tell whether he saw faces or merely patterns. I decided I would show him a volume of cartoons which I had in my briefcase. Here, again, for the most part, he did well. But cartoons, again, are formal and schematic. It remained to be seen how he would do with real faces, realistically represented.

I turned on the television, keeping the sound off, and found an early Bette Davis film. A love scene in progress. He was very unclear as to what was going on, or who was who or even what sex they were. His comments on the scene were positively Martian. It was just possible that some of his difficulties were associated with the unreality of a celluloid, Hollywood world; and it occurred to me that he might be more successful in identifying faces from his own life.

On the walls of the apartment there were photographs of his family, his colleagues, his pupils, himself. I gathered a pile of these together and, with some misgivings, presented them ho him. What had been funny, or farcical, in relation to the movie, was tragic in relation to real life. By and large, he recognized nobody; neither his family, nor his colleagues, nor his pupils, nor himself. He recognized a portrait of Einstein, because he picked up the characteristic hair and moustache; and the same thing happened with one or two other people.

But it was not merely the cognition, the gnosis, at fault; there was something radically wrong with the whole way he proceeded. He did not relate to them, he did not behold. Thus there was formal, but no trace of personal, gnosis. And with this went his indifference, or blindness, to expression.

A face, to us, is a person looking out- we see, as it were, the person through his persona, his face. But for Dr P. I had stopped at a florist on my way to his apartment and bought myself an extravagant red rose for my buttonhole. Now I removed this and handed it to him.

He took it like a botanist or morphologist given a specimen, not like a person given a flower. I think this could be an inflorescence or flower. But he complied courteously, and took it to his nose. Now, suddenly, he came to life. What a heavenly smell! I tried one final test. It was still a cold day, in early spring, and I had thrown my coat and gloves on the sofa. Now tell me what it is.

It could be a charge-purse, for example, for coins of five sizes. Do you think it might contain, might fit, a part of your body? He saw nothing as familiar. Visually, he was lost in a world of lifeless abstractions. Indeed he did not have a real visual world, as he did not have a visual self. He could speak about things, but did not see them face-to-face. The resting I had done so far told me nothing about Dr P.

Was it possible that his visual memory and imagination were still intact? I asked him to imagine entering one of our local squares from the south. Again he mentioned only these buildings that were on the right side, although these were the very buildings he had omitted before. It was evident that his difficulties with leftness, his field deficits, were as much internal as external, bisecting his visual memory and imagination.

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What, at a higher level, of his internal visualization? Thinking of the almost hallucinatory intensity with which Tolstoy visualizes and animates his characters, I questioned Dr P. He could remember incidents without difficulty, had an undiminished grasp of the plot, but completely committed visual characteristics, visual narrative or scenes.

He remembered the words of the characters, but not their faces; and though, when asked, he could quote, with his remarkable and almost verbatim memory, the original visual descriptions, these were, it became apparent, quite empty for him, and lacked sensorial, imaginal, or emotional reality. Thus there was an internal agnosia as well? But this was only the case, it became clear, with certain sorts of visualization. The visualization of faces and scenes, of visual narrative and drama- this was profoundly impaired, almost absent. But the visualization of schemata was preserved, perhaps enhanced.

Thus when I engaged him in a game of mental chess, he had no difficulty visualizing the chessboard or the moves- indeed, no difficulty in beating me soundly. Zazetsky and Dr P. But who was more tragic, or who was more damned- the man who knew it, or the man who did not? When the examination was over, Mrs P. Hungrily, hummingly, Dr P. Swiftly, fluently, unthinkingly, melodiously, he pulled the plates toward him, and took this and that, in a great gurgling stream, an edible song of food, until, suddenly, there came an interruption.: Startled, taken aback, arrested, by the interruption, Dr P.

He saw, but no longer saw, the table; no longer perceived it as a table laden with cakes. His wife poured him some coffee: The melody of eating resumed. How does he do anything? He does everything singing to himself. He sings all the time- eating songs, dressing songs, bathing songs, everything.

The School exhibited his pictures every year. All his earlier work was naturalistic and realistic, with vivid mood and atmosphere, but finely detailed and concrete. Then, years later, they became less vivid, less concrete, less realistic and naturalistic; but far more abstract, even geometrical and cubist. Finally, in the last paintings, the canvas became nonsense, or nonsense to me- mere chaotic lines and blotches of paint. I commented on this to Mrs P. He had indeed moved from realism to non-representation to the abstract, but this was not the artist, but the pathology, advancing- advancing towards a profound visual agnosia, in which all powers of representation and imagery, all sense of the concrete, all sense of reality, were being destroyed.

This wall of paintings was a tragic pathological exhibit, which belonged to neurology, not art. And yet, I wondered, was she not partly right? For these is often a struggle, and sometimes, even more interestingly, a collusion, between the powers of pathology and creation. Perhaps, in his cubist period, there might have been both artistic and pathological development, colluding to engender an original form; for as he lost the concrete, so he might have gained in the abstract, developing a greater sensitivity to all the structural elements of line, boundary, contour- an almost Picasso-like power to see, and equally depict, those abstract organizations, embedded in, and normally lost in, the concrete..

Though in the final pictures, I feared, there was only chaos and agnosia. We returned to the great music room, with the Bosendorfer in the centre, and Dr P. Can you tell me what you find wrong, make recommendations?

You are a wonderful musician, and music is your life. What I would prescribe, in a case such as yours, is a life which consists of music. Music has been the centre, now make it the whole, of your life. I think that music, for him, had taken the place of image. He had no body-image, he had body-music: And equally with the outside, the world.. How fascinated he would have been by Dr P. And this, mercifully, held to the end- for despite the gradual advance of his disease a massive tumor or degenerative process in the visual parts of his brain Dr P. Semmai vi chiedeste cosa questo abbia potuto significare, Boyd ve lo racconta e dalle quinte di un piccolo club in Tottenham Court Road ; LSD , Psychedelia e Rock,mods hippies hipsters e groupies, Folk and Funk and Blues: Make love,not riots-avrebbero detto allora Sotto una parte del libro tratta dal primo capitolo.

The Sixties began in the summer of ,ended in October of and peaked just before dawn on 1 july, during a set by Tomorrow at the UFO Club in London. BY April,our resident attraction,Pink Floyd,had outgrown us,so I was always on the lookout for new groups. I saw Tomorrow at Blaises one night and thought they were pretty good. When they made their UFO debut on 19 May it was love at first sight between them and our audience. Steve Howe,later to make his name and fortune with Yes, played guitar, while Twink, a key figure in the genesis of punk,was the drummer.

Everything was accelerating that spring. New drugs,clothes,music and clubs. The psychedelic underground and the pop scene were starting to overlap. UFO crowds were bigger each week, and it was getting hard to maintain the original atmosphere. It was also difficult to ignore the increased attention from the police: When plainclothes policemen asked to have a look around, I would state our policy: As for Mr Gannon, our landlord at the Blarney Club, he felt the case of whiskey delivered to Goodge Street police station every Christmas should take care of them well enough.

Hoppy and I agreed that an exception could be made, so I told the audience we were going to let the fuzz in to look for the clothes and turn on the overhead lights murmurs and booing. As the crowd spread out in a wide circle, some garments could be seen scattered around the floor. Many were tripping; most were laughing or grinning. As he made his way to the door, the working class constable regarded us with amazement, not hatred. We, in turn,regretted that he could not grasp why we took drugs and danced in the lights,lived for the moment and regarded our fellow man with benign tolerance, even love.

That was the theory, anyway. The first man I knew to take hallucinogens was Eric Von Schmidts. He would cook them up in a pot and invite friends over to drink the soup. It was an experience meant for an intellectual and spiritual elite, not the masses although he certainly would have never put it in that way. The market is too efficient, of course,to limit transcendence to people who can stomach peyote.

By , pure, powerful LSD tabs were still available while adulterated, amphetamine-laced concoctions were starting to be widely distributed. Few bothered about how elevated the experience might be. It has become the stuff of legend: Mars bars threesome, Marianne Faithfull naked under a fur rug,etc.. Incredibile cosa non si riesce a trovare negli scaffali di un second hand shop e per appena un pound; questo in cui vado spesso io raccoglie i proventi delle vendite in sostegno della ricerca sul cancro e offre una nutrita collezione di libri, oltre che di abbigliamento, accessori e bigiotteria vintage.

Master of the Death of the Virgin. A painter, active ,who is named from two altarpieces of the Death of the Virgin in Cologne and Munich. Centrale,nel romanzo, la figura del Dr. Sleep the slain white bull? The very constitution of twilight is a fabulous reconstruction of fear, fear bottom-out and wrong side up.

Every day is thought upon and calculated, but the night is not premeditated. The Bible lies the one way, but the night gown the other. His distress is wild and anonymous. He sleeps in a Town of Darkness, member of a secret brotherhood. He neither knows himself nor his outriders, he berserks a fearful dimension and dismounts, miraculously, in bed! Though some go into the night as a spoon breaks easy water, others go head foremost against a new connivance; their horns make a dry crying,like the wings of the locust,late come to their shedding.

You should, for the night has been going on for a long time. Neither are the nights of one city the nights of another. Let us take Paris for an instance, and France for a fact. La nuit, qui est une immense plaine, et le coeur qui est une petit extremite! Ah, good Mother mine, Notre Dame-de-bonne-garde! Intercede for me now, while yet I explain what I am coming to! French nights are those which all nations seek the world over- and have you noticed that?

The night and the day are two travels, and the French -gut-greedy and fist-tight though they often are- alone leave testimony of the two in the dawn, we tear up the one for the sake of the other, not so the Fremch. We are but skin about a wind,with muscles clenched against mortality. We sleep in a long reproachful dust against ourselves. We are full to the gorge with our own names for misery. Life, the pasture in which the night feeds and prunes the cud that nourishes us to despair. Life, the permission to know death. We were created that the earth might be made sensible of her inhuman taste; and love that the body might be so dear that even the earth should roar with it.

Yes, we who are full to the gorge with misery, should look well around, doubting everything seen, done, spoken, precisely because we have a word for it, and not its alchemy. Gurus, who, I trust you know, are Indian teachers, expect you to contemplate the acorn ten years at a stretch, and if, in that time, you no wiser about the nut, you are not very bright, and that may be the only certainty with which you will come away, which is a post-graduate melancholy- for no man can find a greater truth than his kidney will allow.

Ci sono libri dei quali si teme la lettura; le ragioni sono personali,i timori molto spesso infondati. A mio avviso frainteso da Kubrick in una prima rappresentazione cinematogrfica del , merita la seppure smielata e pietosa interpretazione di Adrianne Lyne,del A seguire il terzo e quarto capitolo Cap 3 Annabel was,like the writer, of mixed parentage: I remember her features far less distinctly today that I did a few years ago, before I knew Lolita.

There are two kinds of visual memory: Let me therefore primly limit myself, in describing Annabel, to saying she was a lovely child a few months my junior. They had rented a villa not far from Hotel Mirama. Leight and fat, powdered Mrs. Leight born Vanessa van Ness. How I loathed them! At first, Annabel and I talked of peripheral affairs. She kept lifting handfuls of fine sand and letting it pour through her fingers. Our brains were turned the way those of intelligent European preadolescents were in our day and set, and I doubt if much individual genius should be assigned to our interest in the plurality of inhabited worlds, competitive tennis,infinity,solipsism and so on.

The softness and fragility of baby animals caused us the same intense pain. She wanted to be a nurse in some famished Asiatic country; I wanted to be a famous spy. After one wild attempt we made to meet at night in her garden of which more later , the only privacy we were allowed was to be out of earshot but not out of sight on the populous part of the plage. Among some treasures I lost during the wanderings of my adult years, there was a snapshot taken by my aunt which showed Annabel, her parents and the staid, elderly,lame gentleman, a Dr. That photograph was taken on the last day of our fatal summer and just a few minutes before we made our second and final attempt to thwart fate.

I was on my knees, and on the point of possessing my darling, when two bearded bathers, the old man of the sea and his brother, came out of the sea with exclamations of ribald encouragement, and four months later she died of typhus in Corfu. Cap 4 I leaf again and again through these miserable memories, and keep asking myself, was it then, in the glitter of that remote summer, that the rift in my life began; or was my excessive desire for that child only the first evidence of an inherent singularity? When I try to analyze my own cravings, motives, actions and so forth, I surrender to a sort of retrospective imagination which feeds the analytic faculty with boundless alternatives and which causes each visualized route to fork and re-fork without end in the maddeningly complex prospect of my past.

I am convinced, however, that in a certain magic and fateful way Lolita began with Annabel. The spiritual and the physical had been blended in us with a perfection that must remain incomprehensible to the matter-of-fact, crude,standard-brained youngsters of today. Long after her death I felt her thoughts floating through mine. Long before we met we had had the same dreams. We found strange affinities. The same June of the same year a stray canary had fluttered into her house and mine, in two widely separated countries. Oh, Lolita, had you loved me thus! One night, she managed to deceive the vicious vigilance of her family.

In a nervous and slender-leaved mimosa grove at the back of their villa we found a perch on the ruins of a low stone wall. Through the darkness and the tender trees we could see the arabesques of lighted windows which, touched up by the colored inks od sensitive memory, appear to me now like playing cards- presumably because a bridge game was keeping the enemy busy. She trembled and twitched as I kissed the corner of her parted lips and the hot lobe of her ear. A cluster of stars palely glowed above us, between the silhouettes of long thin leaves; that vibrant sky seemed as naked as she was under her light frock.

I saw her face in the sky, strangely distinct, as if it emitted a faint radiance of its own. Her legs,her lovely live legs, were not too close together, and when my hand located what it sought, a dreamy and eerie expression, half-pleasure,half-pain, came over those childish features. She sat a little higher than I,and whenever in her solitary ecstasy she was led to kiss me, her head would bend with a sleepy, soft,drooping movement that was almost woeful, and her bare knees caught and compressed my wrist,and slackened again; and her quivering mouth, distorted by the acridity of some mysterious potion, with a sibilant intake of breath came near to my face.

She would try to relieve the pain of love by first roughly rubbing her dry lips against mine; then my darling would draw away with a nervous toss of her hair, and then again come darkly near and let me feed on her open mouth, while with a generosity that was ready to offer her everything, my heart, my throat, my entrails,I gave her to hold in her awkward fist the scepter of my passion. Cooper ponderously limped out into the garden.

But That mimosa grove-the haze of stars,the tingle,the flame,the honey-dew, and the ache remained with me,and that little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since- until at last,twenty-four years later, I broke her spell incarnating her in another. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. Pick out the girl you fancy and go over and tell her. Address the randomness of the situation directly by saying: Start a conversation with the whole group and say: I said I thought you were secret agents celebrating the end of an assignment- am I close?

The opinion opener is a simple way to guarantee yourself a few minutes of interesting conversation: Give the girl very specific compliment and let her know exactly why you like her: Use your Metro as the perfect prop. Turn to the girl, point to a picture of a guy in the paper and ask her: Cosa vale a fare di un uomo un-letteralmente parlando-eroe romantico? Si badi non mi riferisco a un uomo solito regalare fiori e organizzare romantiche cene a lume di candela,no. Intellettualoide sentimentale,dotato di senso critico e pragmatismo-mi piace. Anima inquieta e indipendente,apparentemente fragile ma oppositivo,di grande forza interiore-mi piace.

Uomo dal quale avrei molto da imparare-mi piace. Con Michel non sarebbe proprio un date,ma il preludio a una piacevole amicizia di certo-mi piace. Sotto una parte introduttiva del libro tratta dal primo capitolo- Rumblefish dal nome della tracks list registrata nella musicassetta. Nobody can hear it but me.

The neighbors are asleep. The diner next door is closed, but the air is still full of borscht and kielbasa. This is where I live now. A different town, a different apartment, a different year. This mix tape is just another piece of useless junk that Renee left behind. A category that I guess tonight includes me. I should have gone to sleep hours ago. Instead, I was rummaging through old boxes, looking for some random paperwork, and I found this tape with her curly scribble on the label. She never played this one for me. I pop Rumblefish into my Panasonic RXC36 boombox on the kitchen counter, pour some more coffee, and let the music have its way with me.

Just me and Renee and some tunes she picked out. All these tunes remind me of her now. We get together sometimes, in the dark, share a few songs. Just a sad California boy, plucking his guitar and singing about a girl he likes. She also wrote this inspirational credo on the label: Neither of us ever threw anything away. We made a lot of mix tapes while we were together. Tapes for making out, tapes for dancing, tapes for falling asleep,.

Tapes for doing the dishes, for walking the dog. I kept them all. I have them piled up on my bookshelves, spilling out of my kitchen cabinets, scattered all over the bedroom floor. I met Renee in Charlottesville, Virginia , when we were both twenty-three. So we drank bourbon and talked about music. I loved the Smiths. Renee hated the Smiths. Falling in love with Renee was not the kind of thing you walk away from in one piece. I had no chance. She put a hitch in my git-along.

domenica, aprile 02, 2006

Renee was a real cool hell-raising Appalachian punk-rock girl. She rooted for the Atlanta Braves and sewed her own silver vinyl pants. She knew which kind of screwdriver was which. She baked pies, but not very often. She had an MFA in fiction and never got any stories published, but she kept writing them anyway.

How much is learned? Using criteria formulated by the APC for the allocation of the lectureships among universities, the Selection Committee was charged with the task of ranking the submissions and recommending a distribution of the lectureships. The Committee decided that it would not give a priori preference either to the concentration of Italian Studies in a few universities or to their diffusion on as wide a scale as possible, but rather would make its recommendations according to the strengths of the cases for the development of Italian Studies, broadly conceived, outlined in the applications.

On this basis the Committee awarded the eleven lectureships to departments in nine universities, from oldest Universities of Sydney and Melbourne to newest University of the Sunshine Coast. Its report, providing further details and summarising the procedures followed, is attached in the Appendix below. Subsequently the Cassamarca moved not only to establish further positions but also to ensure the continuation of support for all its lectureships.

On the first count, it awarded a twelfth lectureship to Swinburne University of Technology to nurture the innovative idea of establishing an Italian language-and-culture stream in the business school. Secondly, the initial grant by the Foundation covered the funding of the lectureships for three years. In this was extended for a further three years, and in the Cassamarca Foundation and the participating universities agreed to co-fund the lectureships in perpetuity. The Foundation contributes 50 per cent of an Australian university lectureship salary, while the remaining costs are met by the participating university.

At present the Cassamarca-funded positions constitute about 20 per cent of all the fulltime Italian Studies teaching positions in Australian tertiary institutions. The perpetual funding arrangement will help to ensure the health of Italian Studies in Australia well into the future.

It is far more common to encounter a limited understanding and a kind of national amnesia about the massive human hemorrhage which saw over 25 million people depart Italy between and , a number whose magnitude is evocatively captured when described as equivalent to almost half the total population of Italy today. In this regard, it is not appropriate to see the kind of initiatives taken by the Cassamarca Foundation abroad as somehow irrelevant to the Italian homeland itself.

Elsewhere I have suggested that rather than endorse the negative perspective connoted by such terms as departure, depletion, loss, flight and abandonment, it is much more productive to emphasise the circularity of the Italian migration process. While the rate of Italian emigration was very high, so too was the rate of repatriation: Some 20 million Italians might have emigrated between and , but the net loss of population over this period was only 7.

Again, while just over nine million left in the thirty years after , the net loss was no more than 1. De Poli very clearly appreciates the circulatory nature of the migration process. In promoting and strengthening Italian studies worldwide, his astonishingly generous support has, of course, helped to ensure the future of these studies. However, it has also underlined the academic and practical importance of recognising and exploring the vital connection both in the past and into the future between Italians in Italy and Italians abroad.

Annali 24, Turin, Einaudi, , pp. David Moss was subsequently nominated as Chair. The Committee therefore contained a very wide range of disciplinary interests and considerable experience of Italian Studies programmes in different university settings. The basis on which an application for a lectureship could be made was very wide, covering diverse fields of study language, literature, culture, history, politics and society, especially migration studies and enabling institutions which did not currently teach Italian to apply to establish or restore an Italian Studies programme.

Criteria for the Evaluation of Applications In advance of receiving any applications the Selection Committee established criteria for their assessment, within the guidelines established by the APC. It established the work or project identified for the lectureship as the primary focus of evaluation, which would therefore concern in particular the strength of the case for the work and the evidence of the capacity to realise it. Given the likely variety of the applications, the SC identified five broad dimensions for evaluation: A Brief History 33 the extent of their support, financial or other, from the host university or other sources.

The Evaluation Process The Committee decided on a two-stage evaluation process. In the first stage, the five voting members would independently rank all bids into three broad categories of relative merit, omitting evaluation of any application made by the department with which they were, or had recently been, associated. The results would then form the basis for further detailed scrutiny at the meeting of the Committee in Brisbane in early December.

This procedure was designed to eliminate from the decisionmaking process the consequences of any bias deriving from the inevitable fact that applications would be submitted by departments to which SC members belonged or had recently belonged. The Committee received a total of 27 applications for the 11 lectureships. It was therefore immediately clear from the number and the content of the applications that more valuable work was being done and planned for Italian Studies than could be rewarded from the number of lectureships available.

Almost all applications reported a decline in staffing over the past three years. Since in many cases this decline has been accompanied by an increase in student numbers, the pressures on staff to combine a heavier teaching load and a greater commitment to research and publication have become intense. None the less, the applications provided unambiguous evidence of the widespread energy and imagination devoted to the defence of the quality and quantity of Italian Studies programmes, too often in the face of hostility or indifference to language programmes at senior university levels.

The Evaluation Outcome Given the possibility of wide variations in the evaluations made by Committee members from different disciplinary backgrounds who were scrutinising different kinds of projects, it must be recorded not only that an overwhelming consensus on the relative merits of the great majority of bids was evident from the first independent rankings by the five members but also that the final recommendations for the awards were reached unanimously. The 11 lectureships were recommended for award to 12 departments across 5 states. The Committee felt that this distribution reflected the primary concern of the Cassamarca Foundation to support the study of Italian language and literature and accommodated also its determination to promote the study of Italian history and migration.

The overall outcome has therefore ensured that the largest number of awards has gone to the largest category of applications language and literature programmes and to the state from which the largest number of applications was received Victoria. Final Comment As noted above, the Selection Committee was well aware that, despite the large number of lectureships to be awarded, the much larger number of applications ensured that the majority of applicants would be disappointed. Indeed, in the light of the evidence presented in the applications which testified to this work, the Selection Committee has encouraged the Australia Project Committee to examine ways in which further support for Italian Studies might be secured in the future.

At Catholic school we not only learnt and recited Latin for our Sunday and daily Masses, but five years of Latin study was integral to my high school curriculum and prerequisite for entry into some University courses. Many of my schoolmates were Italian or of Italian descent, children of skilled immigrants who had become our local artisans: My Dad, who loved Italian food, would take us regularly to Mamma Marias in North Perth or the Roma Ristorante in Fremantle for bolognaise and scallopini with spinach and pasta, followed by cassata, instead of our regular English fare of roasts or grilled chops, peas, potatoes and puddings.

Mum, on the other hand, had a passion for Italian art and we learned at a very young age of the glorious works of Michelangelo and Leonardo Da Vinci. Our family had a great love of the Roman Catholic Church: Saints like Clare, Cecilia, Francis of Assisi, Vincent de Paul, Maria Goretti and Gerard Majella were our inspiration and exemplars for lives to be led along principles of Christian love and charity, their names taken upon profession by the nuns and brothers who taught us. Over time, Italian influences on our lives were more obvious and commonplace.

Australians adopted pizza, salami and gelato as staple treats. Once we got to University we drove second-hand Fiats and Alfa Romeos, or equipped our Holden Monaros with Pirellis, aspiring to the greater marques of Lamborghini and Ferrari… as we still do! In our homes Alessi, Indesit and Zanussi added a touch of the exotic to our everyday lives.

It was quite a surprise to discover that our s Bendix washer with its upmarket electronics was designed and manufactured by Philco in Italy. In the world of fashion Italian style was setting global trends. In fact, the language, culture and land that had so fascinated Shakespeare, providing him with the sonnet form and settings for his plays like Mantua and Venice brought us so much more than a code of living, Gregorian chant, Palestrina, Prada, Maseratis, parmesan cheese and espresso.

It inspired much of the built form of Perth and its environs, such as the characteristic Italian-style villas with low-pitched or flat roofs, terracotta tiles and deep stone walls. Like a testament to a growing civilised culture in our far-away land stand the monumental heritage buildings of the University of Western Australia. Its magnificent Southern European-inspired architecture is reminiscent of Italian torri, piazze and edifici, and resides in a natural stateliness, the Juliet balconies of its stunning Winthrop Hall overlooking its beautiful and serene setting by the banks of the Swan River.

As media and international transfer of information became faster through the s and s, our understanding of the world beyond Australia developed further. My own formal association with UWA goes back a long way, from my first degree in science and a long period spent in the medical sciences, followed by a second degree in music and work in the Music School.

So when in my later role as Director of Development at the University, the Cassamarca Foundation presented me with the chance to contribute to encouraging the understanding and importance of Italian language and culture, it seemed only natural to explore every aspect of this opportunity and to support this civilising force which I felt was characterised by a love for life in itself and for all things Italian in nature.

It was integral to our ethics, philosophy and laws, rooted in fact in the genesis of our civilisation, and at the very core of our own Australian version of humanity. Il Progetto Australia — Mission Accomplished 37 The study of European languages had always been considered essential in Australian universities but despite their importance, these courses suffered severe funding cuts in the s. Indeed, I remember well my own first meeting with Loretta. She understood this vision and saw an opportunity others had been unable to imagine or grasp. And it seemed natural for her to land on the doorstep of our fledgling development operations.

The University was always seeking ways to engage on the international stage and it has enjoyed many international connections and projects. The Progetto was unique, however, because of its global scope, its multiple Australian university connections and the resultant magnitude of work to be undertaken. The funds were to be managed through a Trust arrangement that had several models already working well in the University, which itself has an impeccable record in managing its plentiful endowment funds.

So, armed with this confidence, we sought and won approval from the Fondazione for funding for eleven lectureships and scholarships for an initial period of three years, later extended to six. With an inaugural grant of three million dollars, a trust fund and a steering and management committee established under the umbrella of ACIS, everything possible was done through the meticulous preparation in planning and documentation to ensure that the Progetto was properly supported through its infancy. Mindful that funding would expire after six years, we then addressed the question of how to ensure that this great work could continue.

Full endowment was thought inappropriate and ACIS decided that Australian universities should be asked to match any future funding from a Cassamarca gifted endowment fund. To our delight the Cassamarca agreed to this proposition, ensuring that its support for Italian Studies will continue forever. The increasing complexity of managing the funds through arrangements involving many universities led to the creation of the position of part-time administrative officer, filled successively with enthusiasm and skill by Olivia Mair, Bianca Galipo and currently Melissa Hasluck.

Meanwhile President De Poli visited the University campus several times over the years to communicate his vision of Latin Humanism and to advance the Progetto. Meeting him and his wonderful family and staff are lifetime experiences that one could never forget. The visits which I made to the Cassamarca headquarters at Treviso always seemed to me like a homecoming too, welcomed with open arms by Antonella Stelitano who not only provided practical help at all points during our discussions but also ensured that each meeting should be a special experience for us all.

The opportunity was presented as a special surprise. Perhaps his best-known melody, it was transcribed for organ from the opening aria Ombra mai fu where King Xerxes of Persia sings to his cherished plane trees. Handel adapted his opera from that of Giovanni Battista Bononcini who in turn had adapted his from another famous Italian composer, Francesco Cavalli. To play on such an ancient instrument in this beautiful chiesa was the most incredible and thoughtful gift imaginable.

We always enjoyed and shared such wonderful hospitality and celebrated in true Italian style our new friendships and our important and blossoming international cooperation. For me, the establishment and development of relations with the extraordinary Cassamarca Foundation remains as one of the greatest and fondest memories of my working life. They revolve around two sets of themes: The work of reflection, cultural counterpoint, is present in all of them in different ways.

In some cases the contributors reflect directly on features of Italian history or culture. In others, they explore the ways that issues in Italian culture, history and language have been, or might be, tackled in our university curricula. In still others, they examine the ways that Italian authors with knowledge of Australia or Australians with experience of Italy have incorporated that experience and knowledge into their lives or works.

We do not of course make any pretence to have included either a sample of all work by Italianist scholars in Australasian universities on those themes or to have illustrated the full range of Italian topics on which they have worked. If we note that as many as one-third of the contributors to the most recent international guide to postwar Italian culture, society and politics, the page Encyclopedia of Contemporary Italian Culture Routledge, , came from Australasian universities, then the impossibility of illustrating the importance of their work in the small compass available here is clear.

Since this is a volume celebrating the support of the Cassamarca Foundation for Italian Studies here, we have selected examples from the work of those people most directly connected to the promotion and implementation of the Cassamarca initiatives from the beginning, adding the essays on Latin Humanism and Italian language in Australia and New Zealand which have been at the centre of the interests of the Cassamarca Foundation in promoting via ACIS the study of Italy. ACIS was set up in mid by members from the Australia Project Committee and the Lectureships Selection Committee to take advantage of the intellectual momentum generated by the new lectureships.

The Management Committee is itself accountable to the University of Western Australia through which all Cassamarca funds pass. Apart from responding to issues arising from the lectureships, the main activity of the Management Committee has been to plan and oversee the biennial ACIS Conferences. The Melbourne conference of will therefore celebrate ten years of conference organisation. When the financial constraints of recent years ease, we hope to renew support for these kinds of collaborative activities. No, in fact, neo-Latin is more or less the same as the Latin that was written in the ancient world — classical Latin.

Neo-Latin is basically the new or at least, not very old Latin which began to be written in Europe from around the time of the Italian Renaissance — roughly speaking, from the fifteenth century — in conscious imitation of the Latin of the ancient Romans. The Renaissance humanists were a new breed of scholars who threw themselves into learning the ancient languages Latin and then later on, Greek , recovering and translating long-lost manuscripts of the classical authors, and promoting a fashionable new programme of studies based on the ancient texts, the so-called studia humanitatis: At the root of the humanist project was a commitment to language and style which might strike us today as pedantic.

By studying and obsessively imitating classical Latin the humanists were straining to hear the authentic voices of the ancients over the crackle of the intervening centuries. They were reaching out to them — both literally and metaphorically trying to speak the same language. Much of it is, in fact, pretty workaday since, until not so long ago, Latin functioned in the West as a scientific, scholarly, and diplomatic lingua franca — much like English does today.

Doctoral dissertations at the University of Uppsala in Sweden, to cite just one example where a statistical survey has recently been conducted, were published almost exclusively in Latin well into the nineteenth century. It would be truer to say that it was swept under the carpet. The fact is that Latin never really went away. While many educated people may still be aware of this fact, few perhaps are aware of the vast extent of neo-Latin literature in the early modem period.

Literally thousands of documents, official and ephemeral, literary and scientific — textbooks, treatises, letters and diaries, learned journals, poems and plays, satires and even novels — remain untranslated to this day. And I should point out, too, that a huge volume of early modern translations of vernacular works into Latin — translated to be enjoyed by a wider, international audience — is now beginning to receive attention from social historians of language. Hsia Cambridge, , It is in fact the record of our own past which is slowly sinking under the waves. But why, I can hear you mutter, should we care so much about the pompous Latin poetry composed since the Renaissance by dead white European males?

The literary vernaculars of Italy and France grew out of Latin, struggling, at first, to mimic the expressive range of their more sophisticated parent. In the Renaissance, the Italian, Giovanni Pontano, composed lilting Latin lullabies for his children, and celebrated the humble joys of married life — to say nothing of his adventures with Neapolitan prostitutes.

Italy under the Southern Cross - Australasian Centre for Italian Studies

As for the English, Milton was genuinely torn between his vocations for Latin and English verse. The roots of such literary bilingualism are not difficult to discover. Not only was nearly every early modem schoolboy raised to appreciate Roman poetry, he was also, whether he liked it or not, a de facto Latin poet. Among the many brilliant women Latinists of the early modem period we might 2.

And, by the way, the Harvard collection is not the first, and probably not the last, to hit the shelves in recent years. Latin was carried around the globe by European colonists and missionaries in the early modern period — to the Americas, Africa, and Asia.

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A huge volume of neo-Latin literature is concerned with New World subjects, and exciting new research is being conducted, for example, into the colonial Latin heritage of Mexico and Brazil from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. Indigenous Mexicans were such talented Latinists that they put many European noses out of joint — their facility with the language led some to accuse them of possession by the devil! Indeed, Latin became the preferred language, over Spanish, for the expression of Mexican cultural identity. Terra australis was only colonized by Europeans after the suppression of the Jesuits, the crack troops of the Catholic Reformation who carried a Latin humanist education to far-flung missions in the Americas, India, China, and Japan.

Alas, Latin in Australia still bears the taint of elitism and monoculturalism — a legacy, no doubt, of its historical association here with British Empire, privilege and posh schools. An Italian mature-age student of mine 4. Stevenson, Women Latin Poets: A useful introduction to Mexican Latinity is provided by A. Laird in The Epic of America: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, I would like to put in a plea here for a more multicultural perspective on Latin: Many early Latin works on Asian history, natural history, medicine, linguistics, astronomy, economics, religion, and even interfaith dialogue, have yet to be translated or explored in detail.

Nearly twenty years ago I began my own voyage of neo-Latin discovery when I chanced on a fascinating book about the Renaissance philosopher, Giordano Bruno — that bold freethinker and perhaps magician who proclaimed an infinite universe of innumerable worlds, championed the heliocentric theory of Copernicus, thumbed his nose at the Catholic Church, and who, for his troubles, was burned at the stake in Rome in An indulgent doctoral supervisor allowed me to continue on what was then a rather eccentric path, and I have never looked back.

Of course, that was BI, before the Internet. Yes, slowly but surely, even the lost continent of neo-Latin literature is resurfacing on the World Wide Web. Rare titles — access to which once required the purchase of expensive microfilms, overseas research trips, and carefully worded letters of introduction to librarians in French, Italian, even Latin — are now unceremoniously spat out at me while randomly googling.

His genius was so great, so versatile and so far-reaching that Almost at once, however, Bill realised that his project would be a long one. Bill inherited from his teacher and mentor, Nicolai Rubinstein who died at the age of 91 in , the task of overseeing the edition to its completion. Sadly, the studious retirement that would permit this energetic scholar to set aside the myriad committees and projects in which he was involved, so that he could devote his whole attention to Lorenzo, was suddenly snatched away by an illness that was soon revealed to be terminal.

This book will now be published by Harvard University Press. The essay which follows was written several years ago, not long before Bill was diagnosed with a life-threatening cancer. The essay analyses, too, the raw, divisive emotions that were unleashed when news reached the Florentine population that the man who became known as Il magnifico had finally died, after years of uncertain health. In this essay, the author uses evidence gathered during many years of research in the Archivio di Stato, Florence, from private Florentine archives such as that of the Guicciardini family and from Renaissance chancery collections in the north of Italy left by the seignorial rulers of Milan, Mantua and Ferrara.

It has informed a very large body Death In Florence: His legacy lives on in a younger generation of scholars who were inspired by his charismatic teaching to become academics themselves. They were well trained by Bill and painstakingly acquired the linguistic, palaeographic and other skills that enabled them to go into Italian archives and to analyse documents in the same rigorous way that he himself had been taught in London in the s. It is gratifying but no accident that in a period that has seen a diminution of undergraduate courses devoted to this field in the United States there has been no lessening of enthusiasm among Australian undergraduates, many of whom have a very strong sense of connection with their European roots.

It positively leaps out, however, from the pages of the mortality records kept by the magistracy of the Officials of Abundance. His early death, aged just forty three, hardly came as a surprise to Florentines, and Italians more generally, who for weeks, even years, had been trading information and rumours about his see-sawing health. February had been the cruellest month so far. Indeed he was to continue dictating letters at more or less his accustomed fast and high rate until a few days before his death.

He appears to have been particularly susceptible to chill weather. Lioni had in fact earlier pressed upon his famous patient the beneficial effects of vigorous riding, to which pastime Lorenzo had been addicted in his salad days. But it was Lorenzo that Ercole wanted and needed to meet, a very powerful man whose manners, polished by years of diplomacy conducted with the ruling families of Italy, he would not have found wanting. Lorenzo died as he had lived, with dramatic intensity and surrounded not just by fanatically loyal friends and familiars but by an atmosphere of rumours and, at the end, dark controversy.

His own feelings during the last few weeks of his life must have been in turmoil, as his symptoms waxed and waned, his medical diagnoses, at least as reported by onlookers, varied from optimistic to deeply pessimistic, and all the city fell prey to contradictory stories that were duly broadcast around Italy. His second son Giovanni, recently created a cardinal, made a triumphal entry into his native city for his investment ceremony, to be received and entertained by the Florentines and his father in a sumptuous style that local and ambassadorial letter writers described in extreme detail.

All the same, he was far sicker than Giannotti knew, or at least said. Lorenzo had much occupied himself with the embellishment of this great civic building, especially over the last decade. If the banker Luca Rinieri miraculously escaped death when tons of Carrara marble collapsed on his nearby houses while he slept, as contemporaries love to tell us,24 one of those chroniclers — the pious pharmacist Luca Landucci — recounts that when Lorenzo heard in his sickbed that the debris had also fallen in the direction of the Medici palace, he prophetically proclaimed himself to be a dead man.

On that day Lorenzo, a letter-writer supreme, dictated his last missive, appropriately enough a standard letter of recommendation on behalf of a client to the captain of Volterra , the city the Florentines and their allies had conquered and sacked just twenty years before. Then came a great wind and the lightning strike on the Duomo in the evening, the preachers disagreeing among themselves, however, about whether lightning was indeed the cause of the damage.

Earlier in the century one preacher had made the accusation that homo-erotic friendships were so extensive as to form a basis of party factionalism in the city. For the Savonarolans it meant the destruction of their city if such sins were not extirpated. What Lorenzo might have thought of the Panizzi incident we cannot say — his friends, clients and acquaintances included not only Savonarola and other strict observant religious but also several known sodomites and men accused of the act, including Poliziano33 — and he was perhaps too far gone by that time to care.

But his death amidst such dramatic, threatening and divisive events seemed both to reflect and to herald a world about to turn upside down. He did, however, find the occasion as he lay dying to deliver in private a shrewd political maxim — conceived in the world of realpolitik in which he had always lived — to a trusted secretary: The latter both solemnly voted to commemorate Lorenzo in the new church of Santa Maria delle Carceri, the architect of which - his favourite Giuliano da Sangallo - he had more or less imposed on the local Pratese officials.

Many of these latter are gathered together in a file in the family archive. He used all the information he could glean to write in a chronicle one of his characteristic lists —a series of dot points avant la lettre — summarising the events surrounding it. Kings and princes, the Pope and prelates, kinsmen and citizens, sang the chorus of praise in Latin and the various Italian vernaculars. Manuals of letter writing, well-established chancery practices, informed the content and structure of these epistles, which were in almost every case meant to be read aloud or otherwise shared around.

Many letters announced the dispatch of special envoys to Florence, and indeed so many arrived over the next month that the government was forced to pay out a large sum to cover their expenses. May God grant us the grace to bear the harm received, both public and private. One citizen letter of condolence to Piero could not resist adding, very inappropriately, the customary request for a political favour. Written in the main by men who were in Florence at the time, some of whom were well-informed, most belonged to the Florentine ricordanze tradition, family diaries intended for descendants and only occasionally shared with other relatives, let alone outsiders.

Almost all take a clear and strong line, for or against Lorenzo as it were, although there are several simple factual recordings of the event, one of them inserted by an anonymous man towards the end of the account he kept of the sermons he had heard. He could hardly have made public the extreme views he expressed in his family ricordanze.

While Rinuccini concedes that Lorenzo was very versatile and brilliant, his hostility is so palpable as to be counter-productive. For the same reasons, and because of the tax burden, those somewhat further up the social ladder, the gentilotti with their social pretensions, were hardly grieving.

Lioni had killed himself, the The Death of Lorenzo: But it is all false because neither he, so far as anyone can know or see, has poisoned Lorenzo, nor did others throw him in. I went to see and questioned those in the house [where it happened]; in effect he wanted to die, and summoned up the will to do so. For some fifteen years he had been in touch with and helped by Medici, who had great faith in his skill. And this version of events persisted, despite energetic attempts privately and publicly to deny it.

Lioni, roused from his bed and confronted with the evidence of his guilt, hurled himself from the balcony into the one might think very conveniently situated well. The manner of his death stimulated as much controversy and rumour in his own day as the question of his place in Florentine and European history has since provoked in both the scholarly literature and in the more popular accounts of his life.

His influence and skills as a diplomat on the wider Italian stage have been considerably over-rated, it has been argued,92 and an influential scholarly tradition has it that he was something of a self-promoting fraud as an artistic patron, not at all the magnificent Renaissance Maecenas par excellence. The footnotes in this essay confine themselves to direct references to sources cited and the text takes as read many points and themes discussed in the other essays in this volume. ASF, Ufficiali della Grascia, , fol.

For his continuing output, see Protocolli del Carteggio di Lorenzo il Magnifico per gli anni , , ed. Del Piazzo, Florence, , pp. Toscani, Florence, , pp. Gargiulo, Florence, , pp. Letter to Giovanni Lanfredini, Bigi, Turin, , p. He adds however that Lorenzo had begun to ride again. BNF, Ginori Conti, 29, 67, fol. Culture, Society and Politics in Renaissance Italy, ed. Bornstein, Toronto, , pp. Marcotti, Naples, , pp. Almost every diarist or letter writer cited in this essay, and many others besides, recount versions of the story though details, for example the cost of the damage caused, vary , and most take these events as a bad portent for the city.

Luca Landucci, Diario Fiorentino dal al , ed. Del Badia, Florence, , p. Bartolomeo Masi, Ricordanze, ed. Corazzini, Florence, , p. Garin, Milan-Naples, , pp. Legazioni e Commissarie, 1, 7. Orvieto in Storia della Letteratura Italiana, ed. Bartolomeo Cerretani, Storia Fiorentina, ed. Berti, Florence, , p. The Milanese envoy reported on 3. The Death of Lorenzo: As translated in The Diary of John Burchard, trans. Mathew, London, , I, p. Published in Nuovi documenti per la storia del Rinascimento, ed. Perosa, Florence, , pp. V, 4, , pp. Salmi, Florence, , p.

Legazioni e Commissarie, 1: Jacob, London, , pp. Lenzuni, Milan, , p. Lorenzo, see Archivio Capitolare, S. Lorenzo, i , fols. Paolo, see ASF, Compagnie religiose soppresse, , no fol. Archivio di Stato, Prato, Ceppo Vecchio, , fol. Ceppo Nuovo, , fol. Diary and letter writers almost always give the full details; and see ASF, Miscellanea Repubblicana, 4, inserto, 15, fol.

The Wool Guild, in whose affairs Lorenzo was very influential, had voted to this effect as early as the day after his death ASF, Arte della Lana, 62, fol. See his letters to Piero Guicciardini of 9. Legazioni e Commissarie, I. Otto di Pratica, I, Legazioni e Commissarie, ed. Viti, Florence, , pp. BNF, Ginori Conti, 29, 35, fol. His letter of Like numerous other writers, he describes the elaborate ceremonies. La fortuna storica di Lorenzo il Magnifico, ed. Pirolo, Milan, , pp. Picotti, Scritti vari di storia pisana e toscana, Pisa, , p. Frosini, Florence, , pp. MaP, LV, 48, III, 9, , pp.

ASF, Tratte, bis, fol. Cerretani, Storia Fiorentina, pp. Aiazzi, Florence, , pp. Piero Parenti, Storia Fiorentina, I, Matucci, Florence, , pp. Calmette, Paris, , 3 vols. Parenti, Storia Fiorentina, pp. Carocci, ns, IV, , pp. ASMi, Sforzesco, , a damaged letter from Careggi clearly written just after Lorenzo had gone there: For Cerretani, see Storia Fiorentina, p. Io vi andai a vedere et examinare chi vi era in casa: ASMi, Sforzesco, , a damaged letter, the date of which is unclear, apparently written by the Milanese ambassador: Bullard, Florence, , p..

See also a letter of 4. Verde, Lo Studio Fiorentino, , 5 vols. Rotzoll, Pierleone da Spoleto: Vita e opere di un medico del Rinascimento, Florence, Garfagnini, Florence, , pp. ASMi, Sforzesco, , 9. Paoli, Lettere di Andrea Buonsignori, p. British Library, Additional Manuscripts, 24, , fol. Poliziano, Nutricia, in Silvae, ed. Machiavelli, Istorie Fiorentine, in Opere, ed.

Bonfantini, Milan-Naples, , p. Pillinini, Il sistema degli stati italiani, , Venice, ; R. The Origins of the State in Italy, — , , pp. The historiography for the other points alluded to is too vast to cite here, but references to it will be found throughout the other essays in Kent, Princely Citizen. Marzo-agosto , a cura di Lorenz Boninger, Milan, Volume 16 will appear in Yet Dante himself, and we readers with him, will eventually come again to this very place and will find it idyllic, to say the least.

As Dorothy Sayers puts it: On the lower slopes [ Twelve hundred years earlier, in another imaginary voyage, Lucian of Samosata had ventured into similar antipodean regions and had landed 1. Methuen, , vol. Dante, Purgatory, translated by Dorothy L. Sayers, Penguin, , pp. As he and his company approach the islands they smell the horrid stench of pitch mixed with burning human flesh and hear the cracks of whips and a multitude howling.

They put in at one of the islands: However, we managed to climb over the rocks by a path overgrown with thorns and thistles, and picked our way across some incredibly ugly country until we came to the prison itself. Frances Pelsaert, for example, in his Batavia of notes: It is a bad rocky land, without trees Indiana University Press, , pp. Syracuse University Press, , p. Local Consumption, , p. The harsh and cruel realities of life on this southern fatal shore, as documented for example in the graphic pages of Robert Hughes,7 would hardly seem a favourable environment for the flowering of poetry yet it appears that, in spite of the conditions, poets there were and one of these was Francis MacNamara.

Meredith and Whalan suggest rather convincingly that, as far as literary models are concerned, one really need look no further than Swift and Robert Burns. Even more enticing is the fact that the first great period of intense 7. Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: Meredith and Whalan, Frank The Poet, pp. All further references will be to this edition. See also William J. Cunningham, The Divine Comedy in English: A Critical Bibliography London: Oliver and Boyd, For a more recent and somewhat critical appraisal of these earlier studies now see V.

Croker, Researches in the South of Ireland London, , p. Stanford, Ireland and the Classical Tradition Dublin: Selected Stories of Price Warung, edited by B. University of Queensland Press, Inevitably, since its transmission was largely oral, the poem came to exist in a variety of different versions. For reasons of simplicity, I will confine my discussion to the version supplied by Whalan and Meredith in Frank The Poet. I, Are you that person?

The Poet duly begs admission but he is denied entrance: In any case, the Devil adds, if the poet is indeed the convict he appears to be, he has surely taken the wrong path for convicts never come this way but soar to Heaven in droves and legions A place so called in the upper regions. The Fatal Shore, p. Dante has the traitors, with Satan at their centre, frozen fast in the heartless barricade of their own lago del cor, all ordered and distinguished by location and position. By contrast, Frank has thrown them all together to blaze, boil and burn in fiery sulphur and brimstone.

Yet one has to admire how, even within this rather generic fire-filled hell, MacNamara manages to differentiate them and create some extraordinarily stark and dramatic images of infernal punishment, images that might be thought, in their inventiveness, to have something Dantesque about them. Not a textbook example of contrapasso, admittedly, and a coupling which seems in no way to be governed by the inexorable moral logic which nails sinners such as Ulysses and Diomedes or Ugolino and Ruggieri to each other for all eternity so as to expiate their sinful partnerships on earth.

Nevertheless, seen from the point of view of a transportee to a British colony which had become synonymous with prison, this coupling of Cook and the first inventor of gaols appears as a supremely fitting infernal punishment. And even more appropriate and more surprising is the suffering of the pair of sinners that Frank meets immediately after the legion of informers and overseers: And Captain Cluney by his side With a fiery belt they were lashed together As tight as soles to upper leather.

Their situation was most horrid For they were tyrants down at the Norrid. These tyrants together trod on prisoners with an iron heel, so now, through the action of the simile, they come to take on the aspect of a composite shoe, suffering a punishment symbolically appropriate to the tyranny they practised in life. Furthermore —and again uncannily— this simile cannot fail to remind readers of Dante of another pair of sinners frozen into eternal cohabitation in the lake of Cocytus.

Never was wood to wood so rigid locked By clamps of iron; like butting goats they jarred Their heads together, by helpless fury rocked. This is still far from any positive proof that Frank has been influenced by the Dantean text but the similarity continues to tantalize. The poet next sees the figure of an ex-company commissioner in a prostrate position offering a petition to the Devil, and then Frank comes upon Sergeant Flood: Readers of Dante might again think they recognize some familiar elements here.

Uppermost in memory might be the figure of Charon in Inf. III who arrives with loud shouting to ferry the souls of the dead to the other shore. Furthermore, although Sergeant Dante Down Under? III, 46 and Frank likewise answers Flood: Cheer up said I be not afraid Remember No. Three Stockade In the course of time you may do well If you behave yourself in Hell. All the same let us continue the tour with Frank for the next figure that we meet again has an uncanny air of familiarity about him. The appropriateness of a notorious police tracker, a so-called runner, being eternally punished by being thrust head-down into boiling lead, eyes no longer being able to track and feet no longer able to run, again might suggest some of the neatness of the Dantean contrapasso.

Furthermore, the graphic image might also bring to the mind of a Dante reader the punishment of the evil popes in the bolgia of the simonists Inf. XIX who are similarly thrust head-down into dark wells whilst flames flicker eternally along the soles of their upturned feet. And yet, as has by now become something of a pattern, glaring differences also immediately emerge, here perhaps, in the form of the conceptual difficulty of connecting the evil perpetrated by a police tracker with the ecclesiastical sin of simony.

Though in no way perturbed by the spectacle of the snakes as Dante certainly is in canto XXV since he actually, at that point, addresses the reader directly with his horror , Frank nevertheless turns from Chapman with the intention of leaving this place but Lucifer quickly attempts to detain him: Saying Frank by no means go man Till you see your old friend Dr.

Bowman Yonder he tumbles, groans and gnashes He gave you many a thousand lashes And for the same he does bewail For Osker with an iron flail Thrashes him well you may depend And will till the world comes to an end. At this point a coach and four drives up in haste and, rather comically, all Hell breaks into three cheers as about six feet of mortal sin without leave or licence trudged in Frank The Poet, p. And all the inhabitants of Hell With one consent rang the great bell Which never was heard to sound or ring Since Judas sold our Heavenly King.

Peter who is, if anything, rather more brusque than any of the other guardians Frank has encountered in the lower depths. Peter asks him to show his certificate of freedom or, alternatively, to name any acquaintances who may already be in Heaven. Isaiah is now told to go dress Frank in a scarlet robe, St. The theme of a voyage to the otherworld was certainly perfected by Dante in the Commedia but it is not exclusive to it, being everywhere present in both literature and folklore.

And we might also note another crucial difference: But, perhaps, what is most significant is the fact that, as unlike Dante in this respect as he is from other Australian poets of this early period, poets such as Barron Fields, William Charles Wentworth, Charles Tompson, and even the currency poet, Charles Harpur, Frank is quite clearly not a writer-poet attempting to locate himself within a literary tradition in order to communicate a universal moral vision to the world at large but rather a quick-witted rhymester attempting to do no more than to provide bittersweet entertainment for a circle of fellow-convicts trapped, like himself, in the relentless coils Dante Down Under?

University of Queensland Press, , p. Auckland argues convincingly that during this early period Australian poetry functions largely in the service of the British imperialist project. Clearly, MacNamara, as a recidivist convict who, in any case, would probably not have had any access to poetry being published at the time , stands completely outside and, as a rebellious Irishman, against, such a project. I would like to express my thanks to Mr. Elio Gatti and to the Rev. Ted Kennedy for having first raised the possibility of a connection between MacNamara and Dante, and to art historian, Dr.

Griffith is the author of the first and only Australian translation of the Divine Comedy. Griffith continued his Dante translation with the Vita Nuova which was printed for private circulation in In recent years, the framework for the exploration of Australian literary culture has widened to include what was read as well as what was written, to encompass what G. Two stories from Dante Alighieri, literally translated in the original metre Brisbane: Powell, The Inferno of Dante Alighieri.

Literally translated into English verse in the measure of the original Sydney: But it should be emphasised at the outset that literature was not the dominant Italian cultural form in nineteenth-century Australia. Music was more conspicuous and influential, and art and antiquity were more common associations with Italy than was literature. The following discussion is divided into two parts. Subscriptions to British newspapers and literary magazines kept them in touch with metropolitan developments and fashions.

Lyster and His Companies Sydney: Images and Identity Sydney: Allen and Unwin, , pp. A History of the Colony of Victoria Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, ; R. The intellectual life of the colonies expanded considerably from the s with the beginning of large scale immigration and the arrival of members of the educated middle-class, lawyers like Nicol Stenhouse and James Michael in Sydney and Redmond Barry in Melbourne, journalists like James Smith, W.

Duncan and Frank Fowler, minor literary figures like R. Writer and banker H. Culture, literature and art would unite the disparate, rootless groups of immigrants and native-born into a stable, harmonious society and rescue the colonies from sinking into a morass of materialism. Thus by the early decades of the second half of the nineteenth century, the cities of the Australian colonies were possessed of a cultural life and institutions comparable to those of the larger British provincial cities.

It was indeed a consumer culture but one that suffered little from the tyranny of distance. It was also a culture that went beyond English literature, learning and history to include that of Europe. I still sigh to see old Rome once more. Having tasted the inspiration of Italy, I cannot reconcile myself to the gum trees and kangaroos Griffith, Dante and the Italian Presence in Nineteenth-Century Australian Literary Culture 89 Samuel Griffith, the son of an immigrant Welsh Congregational clergyman, left Maitland just before his sixteenth birthday and began his studies in classics, mathematics and the natural sciences at Sydney University.

In preparation for his pilgrimage, Griffith studied Italian during the voyage from Australia to England. The decades that witnessed the beginnings of British colonisation in Australia coincided with a new wave of Italomania in England, associated with Romanticism. Mort Travelling Fellowship, p. Diary of a Tour of Europe, pp. On the English relationship with Italy, C. Romantic Italy was exported to the colonies as part of the cultural baggage of the educated immigrants and in English books and periodicals. It was then reproduced in local literary efforts.

After Sir Walter Scott, Byron was the most widely advertised author in the Australian colonies in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. The Italianate plays of his lesser brethren appeared regularly on the colonial stage. Farrell , Clari or the Maid of Milan J. Payne , Rugantonio or the Bravo of Venice M.

Another colonial tragedy with an Italian historical setting was Francesca Vasari by James Finnamore, published in Inglis Moore has pointed out, nineteenth-century colonial See for example the reviews in The Atlas, Freemans Journal, 19 September A Tragedy in Five Acts Melbourne: Griffith, Dante and the Italian Presence in Nineteenth-Century Australian Literary Culture 91 playwrights assumed that local life was unsuitable subject matter for drama. These were the themes of three short stories set in Italy which were published in the s: Italy also provided themes for colonial poets whether through translations from Italian poets — Petrarch, Metastasio, Tasso — or through recollections and evocations.

Thirty years later, the city Grammar School in Bridge Street included the reading of the French and Italian classics in its curriculum. The girls of the Stephen household were given Italian as Social Patterns in Australian Literature Sydney: Australian Monthly Register, March Melbourne University Press, , pp.

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