This essay shows that Manzoni is greatly indebted to Alfieri's works written between 1777 and 1779 (in particular, Della tirannide, Virginia, Congiura de' Pazzi). Not only does Manzoni owe to Alfieri single expressions, but also cultural and ideological issues. Indeed, Manzoni's knowledge of Alfieri's texts was deep, and not episodic. Actually, Manzoni continued to consider Alfieri very important, even after being deluded by Opere Postume. Alfieri's influence on Manzoni can be traced in the latter's early works, in the tragedies, and also in his civil poems and in the novel. This relationship, however, after the adolescent infatuation with Trionfo della Libertà and the subsequent admiration for Alfieri as a model of virtue, becomes a close comparison with Alfieri's ideology and political thought: as time goes by, Manzoni questions, contextualizes in a general different context, and corrects his model's ideas.

Balzac's work does not have a prominent position in contemporary Italian publishing, especially when compared to the translations of other nineteenth-century French classics. Despite this, Balzac is the hypotext of the two novels here analysed. These two novels are L'altra amante by Elisabetta Rasy (1990), explicit rewriting of La fausse maîtresse , and L'inizio è in autunno by Francesca Sanvitale (2008), built on Adieu. Although these two kinds of rewriting are very different, they both explore the potentialities of Balzac's narration through less famous texts of the Comédie humaine.

After exploring the abundance of quotations and allusions in Umberto Eco's novel Il cimitero di Praga , this contribution focuses on the presence of passages from nineteenth-century serial narratives and in particular from L'ebreo di Verona by the Jesuit Father Antonio Bresciani. In Eco's book, a long extract from this novel is delivered by Father Bergamaschi, a character whose biographical traits and psychological features could be related to Bresciani himself. However, the figure of the Jesuit author also lies behind another character, Father Pacchi, whose speech consists of quotations from L'ebreo di Verona. In these passages, Eco alternates between a type of rewriting aimed at linguistic modernization and the insertion of original details.

This article examines in detail the construction of Jacques Rivette's film-feuilleton Out 1, noli me tangere (1970) through the montage and reiteration of intra- and extra-cinematic quotations, precise references to the author's cultural and emotional background, and evocations through nebulous and sometimes contradictory images. A mirror of the Seventies' serial aesthetic and socio-artistic claims, this film reveals itself as an unexpected and paradoxical homage to Honoré de Balzac and introduces the spectator to an enigma which requires and, at the same time, denies its own decodification.

One of the most remarkable features of Jorge Luis Borges' work is the deliberate confusion between fictitious quotations and real references, and vice versa. This bizarre intertextual practice has inspired theoretical reflections by critics such as Gérard Genette and Antoine Compagnon, and the work of various writers, such as the American Mark Z. Danielewski. Through an analysis of the Borgesian echoes in Danielewski's first novel House of Leaves , this article examines the forms taken by quotations, the questions they pose and the effects they produce.

review, book

Sogno and Rosario delle stampe de tutti i poeti e poetesse antichi e moderni di numero 500 by the Dominican friar and idle academic Maurizio Di Gregorio were published in Naples in 1614. This essay examines the rewriting strategies supporting the entire structure of a work in which texts by more or less contemporary authors (Tommaso Garzoni, Giovan Battista Rinaldi) undergo an intense labour of revision. This analysis focuses particularly on the quotations identified in Sogno, as well as on the methodologies and composition techniques of the preaching-friar, and his peculiarly 'schizophrenic' literary practice.

This article will analyze the poeta-fabbro (poet-blacksmith) metaphor in various texts throughout time, starting with the analysis of Dante's expression “miglior fabbro” (used to refer to Arnaut Daniel in Purgatory , canto XXVI), up to Giorgio Caproni. Indeed, Mario Luzi – Giorgio Caproni's colleague – already called him a “splendido faber”. This image puts forward the idea that writing poems not only is an artistic process, but also implies artisanal work. In fact, like an artisan, the poet hammers and polishes lines in his workshop. This is also proved by T. S. Eliot's allusions to Dante in The Waste Land.

review, book

The imitatio of Sidonius Apollinaris (c 430-486 AD) grows out of a careful work and develops according to a particularly dense and cryptic intertextual texture. With his 'stylistic preciosity', the writer tries to make the entire cultural palimpsest of the Latin literary tradition seem alive; in the meantime, he challanges the reader to recognize the furtiva lectio . The simile here analysed confirms these characteristics of Sidonius's style. As for the numerous hypotexts that can be traced, not only do they prove Sidonius's 'glossographical memory', but have a specific literary strategy as well. In fact, they tend to exalt emperor Avitus's salvific role.