Giambattista Vico’s answer to the constraints of extreme enlightened rationalism lies in the epistemological method of “explication,” or “spiegazione,” as he calls it in the New Science. Explication connects “inventively” the different logoi of human eras enabling us to understand the past comprehensively, but it also extends a bridge between t…[Read more]

In this essay, I read Pietro Verri’s “Discorso sull’indole del piacere e del dolore” (1781) in the context of eighteenth-century theories of the mind and by placing it in dialogue with Verri’s accounts of his experiences in his autobiographical writings and letters. I aim to demonstrate how Verri, working within Enlightenment epistemological categ…[Read more]

Translations of three poems from DIsturbi del sistema binario by Valerio Magrelli.

Review of Troy Jollimore’s award-winning book of poetry.

Review of Valerio Magrelli’s 2006 volume of poetry

A reading of Boccaccio’s poetics in the Decameron from the perspective of his interpretative strategies in the Genealogy of the Pagan Gods.

A reading of the sixteen poems in Boccaccio’s collection of bucolics.

An analysis of 20th-century Italian poet, Edoardo Sanguineti’s use and abuse of Dante’s works in his poetry and cultural criticism.

This chapter presents an overview of critical approaches to Dante’s Inferno and of Dante’s impact on Anglo-American and Italian literature.

A reading of Boccaccio’s exegeses of Venus in the Genealogy of the Pagan Gods and its implications for understanding erotic desire in the Decameron.