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Carved on stone, painted on canvas, wood or porcelain, stitched on fabric, written on parchment or printed on paper, the 109 inscriptions in this unique collection preserve the surviving public writing of Venice's individuals and collectivities in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. They celebrate the completion, authorship or sponsorship of buildings, sculptures, paintings, reliquaries and shrines. They caption the splendid mappa mundi of Fra Mauro and Jacopo de' Barbari's iconic view of Venice. They declare the ownership of a processional banner, of the recipient of a maiolica plate, and of neighbourhood association properties. They record wills, indulgences and appeals. They mark the graves of confraternities, a barber-surgeon and a master mason. They can be found from Piazza San Marco to the corners of Cannaregio and Castello as well as on the lagoon islands. Written in the vernacular, their weight of presence, unmatched by any other Italian centre, attests to the city's exceptional literacy in our period and provides a wealth of privileged historical information. The corpus, with accompanying photographic record, is the first of its kind. It is thoroughly contextualized and analysed in terms of historical and artistic background, script and language.Ronnie Ferguson is Emeritus Professor of Italian at the University of St Andrews and Cavaliere della Stella d'Italia. He is a Fellow of the Ateneo Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti and of the Accademia Galileiana. His research interests include medieval and Renaissance epigraphy, the language and culture of Venice, Renaissance comedy and historical linguistics.

Dante's works contain too much and too little blood. On the one hand, one might wonder why there is any blood in the Comedy; why are the souls - which lack flesh and blood - bleeding at all? On the other hand, we must ask: in a Christian poem that claims to be salvific, why are references to the Eucharist, and to the Passion either implicit, understated or parodic? Investigating blood across all of the poet's works, Leone shows that Dante's treatment of blood reveals a sophisticated and self-conscious metaliterary project: the poet exploits blood's connotative force in medieval culture in ways that engage with - and diverge from - the various traditions and cultural practices that inform his work: scientific, theological, devotional, classical and literary. Anne C. Leone is Assistant Professor of Italian Studies at Syracuse University.

Rome. Saturday 16 October 1943. This is where and when the largest single round-up and deportation of Jews from Italy happened. 1259 people were arrested by the German occupiers and gathered in a temporary detention centre for two days. They were eventually deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau from a local railway station, Stazione Tiburtina.From December 1944, literary texts of this event have facili­tated a national and international understanding and recollection of 16 October 1943. They have been bearers of historical awareness, channels of memory; not only outcomes of remembrance but also active ingredients in the process of forging cultural memory. In this pioneering interdisciplinary study drawing from literary and cultural memory studies, Mara Josi shows how 16 ottobre 1943 by Giacomo Debenedetti, La Storia by Elsa Morante, La parola ebreo by Rosetta Loy, and Portico d'Ottavia 13 by Anna Foa have operated on the personal and the collective level: in other words, on the reader and on society.Mara Josi obtained her PhD at the University of Cambridge. Before joining the University of Ghent as an FWO Post­doctoral Fellow, she was an IRC Postdoctoral Fellow at University College Dublin and a lecturer at the University of Manchester.

Imagined as an armed old man leaping like a locust or as a young man walking in the dark, doubt occupies a prominent place in the mental landscape of Renaissance Italians. Intriguing stories of doubters, as well as allegories and tales of doubt populated sonnets, dialogues, novelle, religious tracts, and a wealth of other vernacular texts. In an age of crisis and renewal, doubt no longer pointed to an exclusively individual condition nor was it solely the object of philosophical and theological reflections. Rather, doubt became a complex cultural object at the centre of numerous cultural strategies. Why was it so? Were Renaissance Italians especially inclined to doubt? And, if so, what were the cultural and emotional consequences of such an attitude? Resorting to a large and diverse array of literary and visual sources, Marco Faini reconstructs how doubt became a privileged tool to make sense of an increasingly complex world.Marco Faini is Assistant Professor of Italian at the University at Buffalo (SUNY).

This volume explores the complex phenomenon of exegetical work produced from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century on Petrarch's vernacular poetry, that is, both his Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (Canzoniere) and his Triumphi (Trionfi). This body of exegesis takes the form of commentaries, annotations, academic lectures, and other forms of para­textual and critical intervention, from biographies and glossaries to marginal notes and illustrative programmes.The volume gathers together ten contributions from Anglo-American, Italian and continental scholarship. It combines rigorous analyses of specific commentators and lecturers (the author of the 'Portilia' commentary, Silvano da Venafro, Giovan Battista Gelli) alongside contributions devoted to interpretative strategies in both commentaries and academic lectures. It also explores the reception in Italy, France and England of the major Petrarch commentary by Alessandro Vellutello, as well as forms of reception and interpretation in paratexts and images. The volume is divided into three sections: 'Philology, Materiality and Paratexts'; 'Exegetical Strategies in Commentaries and Lessons'; and 'Visual Exegesis and Reception in France and England'.

This volume offers a unique and fresh perspective on Italian Futurism by approaching it, for the first time, through the lens of microstoria. In this 'history from below' of what is one of Europe's most famous and important avant-garde movements, large-scale questions on the history of Futurism are explored by focusing on objects, practices and situations as diverse as The Church, Puppets, The Letterhead or Gymnastics. With contributions from fifteen renowned international scholars, the book offers an exciting, kaleidoscopic view of Futurism and its multiple artistic, political and societal connections. The final chapter of the book is an interview with Günter Berghaus, one of Futurism's most dedicated and prolific scholars today, to whom the book is dedicated.Sascha Bru is Professor of General and Comparative Literature at the University of Leuven; Luca Somigli is Professor of Italian at the University of Toronto; Bart Van den Bossche is professor of Italian Literature at the University of Leuven.

The Italian critic Francesco De Sanctis (1817-1883) identified Italianness with backwardness in order to oppose it to European modernity and promote a process of Europeanization of Italy. Two targets stood out in his attack on Italian backwardness: Chivalry and the Academies. A century and a half later we are able to acknowledge the continuity rather than the break between Italian early modernity and European modernity, revisiting a biased paradigm that no longer works and reassessing the historical importance of Chivalry and the Academies as cultural mediators. Divided into three sections devoted to chivalric poems, academic debates and Anglo-Italian relations, and dedicated to the work of Jane E. Everson, who has highly contributed to the re-evaluation of Italian early modernity, this volume gathers together some of the major experts of early modern Italy and highlights the relevance of Italian early modernity in framing and shaping European culture well into our contemporary world.Jane E. Everson is Professor Emerita of Italian at Royal Holloway University of London. Stefano Jossa is Reader in Italian, and Giuliana Pieri Professor of Italian and the Visual Arts, at Royal Holloway University of London

What do we know of the city of Rome, beyond the repertoire of images of universally recognisable monuments? In this new volume, architects, planners, historians, literary and film theorists come together to discuss the city beyond the walls: the city where the majority of Romans live, and the extended city of the Romans themselves. Beyond its heritage status, Rome today is a metropolis facing the same challenges as any major city, yet continuingly shaped by both its imaginary and its real landscape. Particular time periods and lesser-known cultural artefacts are discussed as factors that have made Rome the city it is now, both for those who visit in such large numbers and for those who live there.Lesley Caldwell is Honorary Professor in the Psycho­analysis Unit, and Honorary Senior Research Associate in the Department of Italian, at University College London. Fabio Camilletti is Reader in Italian at the University of Warwick.