Consonanze

Gli epigrammi di Platone. Studio introduttivo, edizione e commento

2025-10-01T09:25:02+02:00

Ancient tradition ascribes to Plato a group of epigrams, now widely regarded as spurious. Yet their transmission raises intriguing questions: why were they associated with the philosopher’s name, by whom, and in what contexts? This volume offers the first comprehensive study of the epigrams falsely attributed to Plato. It presents a new critical edition of the corpus, together with an extensive commentary and an introduction that retraces its history, reception, and the reasons for its attribution. The investigation combines philological and exegetical analysis with an exploration of the texts’ circulation and the literary and philosophical reception of a layered corpus, which reflects diverse practices of falsification, reworking, and misattribution. This perspective opens up less explored aspects of the Platonic tradition.

Strategie di ripartenza: uscire dalle crisi nel mondo romano

2024-03-11T11:06:55+01:00

The concept of 'crisis' has had a great importance in contemporary language, and not only in the political field. In the study of the Roman world, this concept has been applied in different ways to many historical periods, perceived as moments of fundamental and at the same time traumatic transition.

Inspired by the recent contingency, the conference held at the University of Milan in May 2022, the proceedings of which are collected here, placed the 'crisis' of the Roman world at the centre of reflections and interventions. The aim was to highlight the strategies implemented by Rome to overcome specific emergencies, that is, the responses that the community, both as a whole and in its various parts, was able to find when faced with particularly difficult circumstances. At the heart of this book, therefore, are the reactions, compromises and metamorphoses that enabled Rome to start again after moments when its unity and survival seemed threatened.

Le parole del potere. Il lessico delle istituzioni nelle cronache cittadine veneziane del Trecento

2025-03-18T16:06:52+01:00

In Venice, during the 14th century, historical narrative found its primary form of expression in town chronicles, while the political and institutional structure stabilized into what became known as the "Stato Patrizio". Starting with the Estoires de Venise by Martin da Canal and the works of the doge and chronicler Andrea Dandolo (1306–1354), this historiographical genre became widely disseminated within Venetian society of the time through a variety of distinct and unique works. The history of the city is, moreover, the history of its institutions: the connection between these two domains thus emerges as the most suitable object for studying the development and systematization of the lexicon of Venetian power and institutions. This book aims to analyze this semantic field, taking into account the textual, linguistic, and thematic dynamics of town chronicles, and it provides an annotated glossary of a hundred significant terms found across the chronicles written in the three linguistic varieties used in institutional and cultural contexts in Venice at the time (Latin, Venetian, and Old French).

Organizzare il tempo. Fasti e calendari a Roma e nell’Italia romana

2024-12-17T11:53:33+01:00

In the Roman world, the calendar marked the rhythms of a community and defined on a daily basis the appropriate times for each activity, public and private. In the organization of the civic year in Rome as in the local communities of Roman Italy, the entry into office of the magistrates signalized the beginning of the new year and thus determined the sequence of public and private occasions (especially of a religious nature) that would then be celebrated during the following twelve months and that would mark the succession of the seasons. The studies collected in this volume address, from different perspectives and with an interdisciplinary approach, some of the many problems posed by the Roman calendar, by focusing on issues such as the (ever fluctuating) date of the beginning of the civic year, the local reception of festivals and rites celebrated in the city of Rome, the aspect and the rituals of some festivals celebrated during the year as well as their literary declination. Ultimately, it will be shown how the shared organization of time represented an indispensable aspect of the religious and civic life of a city.

Studi sulla tradizione poetica nel Quattro-Cinquecento

2023-11-28T11:25:57+01:00

This volume collects the proceedings of the seminar Tradizione dei testi lirici tra manoscritti e stampa nel Quattro-Cinquecento, held in Milan on November 3-4, 2022. The meeting was designed for young scholars engaged in first-hand research on Italian Renaissance poetry, who were thus allowed to illustrate original investigations, illuminating single fragments of our literary history, but also touching on broader issues and intertwining fruitful connections with disciplines such as codicology, history of art and music, classics. The presence of established scholars enriched the seminar with a dialogue between generations and allowed the speakers to refine their contributions, which are published shortly after that occasion, so that nothing of the originality and freshness of the research presented is lost.

Aeolica Maasiana

2023-11-28T10:50:23+01:00

Paul Maas (1880-1964) was one of the most important classical scholars of the XX century. An excellent metricologist and theorist of textual criticism, he had the valuable habit of densely annotating the books of his personal library. Many of these volumes are now at the University of Milan and preserve a high amount of still unpublished reflections and textual proposals. In particular, all of the known volumes of Maas dedicated to Sappho and Alcaeus are now in Milan. In years when the study of Aeolic lyric has been revived by papyrological discoveries and new critical editions, this book aims at providing scholars with a broad selection of commented notes by Maas on the two poets. A postcard by Paul Maas to Achille Vogliano about a fragment of Aeolic lyric is published in the appendix.

Il cielo dei faraoni. I soffitti astronomici nell'Egitto del Nuovo Regno

2024-01-17T09:50:44+01:00

In the New Kingdom (1550-1069 BC), a high official named Senenmut had an image of the night sky painted on the ceiling of the burial chamber of his tomb at Deir el-Bahari: it is the first Egyptian astronomical ceiling that has come down to us, as well as one of the first complete representations of the vault of heaven in history. Throughout the New Kingdom, the pharaohs had splendid astronomical ceilings of different types (from simple celestial maps to more complex compositions narrating the circumnavigation of the sun and the stars in the celestial vault) made in their tombs and funerary temples. Thus, the astronomical ceilings became the hallmark of royal astronomical and cosmological treatises, constituting a veritable summa of pharaonic astronomy: they are real celestial atlases enriched with captions and complex texts of a scientific-religious nature with funerary connotations. This book constitutes a systematic study of all Egyptian ceilings containing depictions or texts of an astronomical nature datable to the New Kingdom, of which it also provides a complete critical edition.

Liminal Spaces, and Identity Transformations in South Asian Literatures and Arts

2023-07-05T11:37:50+02:00

The present volume is a collection of 16 papers presented at the International Seminar ‘Liminal Spaces, and Identity Transformations in Indian Cultural History’ in Milan, in September 2019, when we were on the brink of a historical change unknowingly. And afterwards, during the pandemic experience, exploring liminality, as category of reality applied to Indian culture and especially to art and literature, appeared to be a means to cope with an emergency the likes of which had never been seen before. Obviously, this work does not aspire to be exhaustive, nonetheless, the heterogeneity of the contributions offers a multifaceted perspective: in actual fact, since liminality implies potentially myriads of interpretations, it appears to provide us with one of the main keys to addressing the entanglement of reality, especially the complexity of the Indian civilization, past and present. The focus is particularly on the literary and artistic aspects of such an extraordinary cultural heritage, from the Vedic period up to modernity; literature and arts are the lens through which variegated anthropological issues, crossing different historical phases, are investigated: firstly, the ritual question, in compliance with van Gennep and Turner’s approach, but also religious experiences, sovereignty and violence, dialectics of identity, social dynamics, gender identity, etc. Literature and arts, but still by means of their own aesthetic devices, mirror critical points characterising such issues, as if poetry and artwork, zooming in on specific transition elements, were themselves on the threshold of manifold layers of reality, able to pass through their interstitial discontinuities. Finally, it is a great honour to dedicate such a volume to the memory of Professor Alexander Dubyanskiy (1941–2020), eminent scholar in Indian literature, especially in Tamil poetry, who experienced multiple aspects of liminality both of the South Asian culture and life.

Onorati gentiluomini e duellanti impavidi. La cultura nobiliare e gli ideali cavallereschi nella trattatistica sul duello del secondo Cinquecento

2023-07-21T14:54:50+02:00

From the middle of the 16th century, the practice of duelling, by then closely linked to the principle of honour and the defence of its integrity, became the subject of a large number of treatises addressed to a large audience of gentlemen, eager to know the most honourable ways to come to terms with the disputes that often involved them. Treatises on the duel, whose diffusion was favoured by the use of the vernacular and the intense publishing activity of the time, gave rise to a discipline, the science of chivalry, which played a decisive role in the diffusion of the myth of chivalry and in the definition of a common noble ethos. Through an indepth study, in Onorati gentiluomini e duellanti impavidi Giovanni Fiazza highlights the foundations of a way of understanding the division between the classes and social relations that would come to an end only two centuries later, with the end of the Old Regime.

Il Gran Sottisier. Mirabilia, falsi e plagi nel giornalismo letterario di Giovanni Pellegrino Dandi

2023-07-20T10:33:57+02:00

An abbot, a journalist, and a man of letters, Giovanni Pellegrino Dandi (1664–c. 1726) curated, during his frenetic activity, the columns of various literary periodicals. His writings immediately caught the attention of some of the leading Italian intellectuals of his time, from Lodovico Antonio Muratori to Antonio Vallisneri. While filling a gap in the coeval cultural press, Dandi’s publications, such as «Gran Giornale de’ Letterati» (1701–1704), were, in fact, a fraud. Rather than creating original works, Dandi appropriated writings that had been printed before, and were later forgotten by the readers. Jacopo Narros brings to light the documentation about Dandi’s cheatings, creating an entertaining narrative of the editorial nonchalance of this singular erudite, and outlining his fascinating figure of forger and plagiarist. Moreover, by investigating the relationship between the «gran sottisier» and the 17^th and 18^th century literary community, Narros shows the dynamism of the intellectual life of that period. In those years, erudites like Apostolo Zeno and Scipione Maffei were active in structuring new communicative strategies to transmit innovative scientific discoveries and literary experiences to their readership.