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440 “Italian Bookshelf.” Annali d’italianistica 25 (2007) apparato, mi si permetta di avanzare una sommaria richiesta per un’eventuale futura ristampa del volume: per facilitarne l’uso si sarebbe apprezzato un indice dei nomi degli autori citati in nota con il rinvio alle pagine in cui vengono menzionati, un indice che si rende ancora più necessario perché spesso i nomi non sono inclusi nella rubriche bibliografiche con cui si chiude il volume (173-87). Per concludere, alla Michelacci spetta, dunque, il merito di aver riproposto con decisione alla nostra attenzione un testo “minore” che ritorna, nei suoi apporti e nei suoi limiti, alla vita della storiografia letteraria del Cinquecento. Eloquente testimonianza del lungo e paziente studio che la Michelacci ha dedicato allo storico comasco, mi auguro che possa servire da stimolo per la realizzazione delle edizioni moderne dei rimanenti volumi della Pauli Iovii Opera, promossa dalla Società Storica Comense e l’Istituto Poligrafico dello Stato. Questa edizione del Commentario, pubblicata in sede autorevole e ora di facile accesso, costituisce senza dubbio anche una valida conferma del rinnovato interesse alla letteratura sul pericolo turco. Albert N. Mancini, The Ohio State University Andrea Ciccarelli, ed. Italica. Journal of the American Association of Teachers of Italian. In Honor of Albert N. Mancini: 82.3-4 (Autumn/Winter 2005). Pp. 332. This special issue of Italica is a tribute to Albert N. Mancini, for many years professor of Italian at The Ohio State University and a central figure in the scholarship, teaching, and dissemination of the many facets of Italian culture in North America. Many of us have had the good fortune of enjoying a lively intellectual exchange with Professor Mancini; the seventeen essays and one poem series included in this issue are an indubitable testament to his far-reaching and durable influence in the field. They also attest to his wide range of interests and to his desire to bring into scholarly discourse texts, authors, and even periods that had been unjustly forgotten. These essays fall into two categories: in some, a critical standpoint on well known figures prevails, while others show an aptitude towards unearthing texts and writers to enable further work by other scholars. A strong historical component is present in all of them, showing the philological, scholarly, and intellectual rigor that pervades Professor Mancini’s own writing. They cover the time span from the thirteenth to the twentieth century. Four of them bear on the seventeenth century, the unjustly forgotten and much disparaged period that is at the center of much of Professor Mancini’s own scholarship. Canonical figures are well represented (Dante, Petrarch, Pulci, Della Casa, Vico, Palazzeschi), but less frequented ones are too (Angela da Foligno, Giovanni Pigafetta, Francesco Pona, Giovanni Gherardo De Rossi). Additionally, some essays offer a more comprehensive view of a complex issue, such as Antonio Corsaro’s “Prisca aetas. Eros e paradosso nella cultura letteraria del Cinquecento” (390-407), Marco Santoro’s “La prassi bibliografica degli inquisitori romani di ancien régime: l’Index librorum prohibitorum nel XVI secolo” (408-25) and Robert C. Melzi’s “Dialogue or Dispute? Two Jewish Documents of the Early Seventeenth Century in Italy” (472-89). Space constraints do not allow even a short summary of each essay; I will single two out that indicate the worth of their object of study and offer vast new possibilities beyond. Paolo Cherchi’s “Secondo Lancellotti: le concordanze delle storie e gli errori degli antichi” (490-509) considers the work of a seventeenth-century prose writer who was simplistically read by later scholars. His 1623 tract L’hoggidì overo il mondo non
Annali d’italianistica 25 (2007). “Italian Bookshelf” 441 peggiore né più calamitoso del passato was so effective that in his 1961 Il Parnaso in rivolta Carlo “Calcaterra ha attribuito valore storico-documentario all’opera [...] e ha conferito all’autore un merito che lo avrebbe lusingato moltissimo” (490), but that does not take into consideration the polemical intent with which it was written. Indeed Cherchi goes back to the entirety of Lancellotti’s oeuvre and places it within a larger context than Calcaterra’s. He indicates Lancellotti’s ties with the querelle des anciens et des modernes and underscores the continuities and novelty of his thinking vis-à-vis his contemporaries. In so doing, not only does Cherchi undermine previous scholarship, but he indicates the richness of this neglected field for himself (508) and for other scholars. In “Italian-American? American of Italian Origin? The Case of Peter M. Riccio” (593-613), Olga Ragusa tackles a different century, another continent, and an issue that is contemporary, in fact burning: ethnic identity and the “Americanization” of immigrant populations during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Ragusa offers us some interesting and previously unstudied documents concerning the background, life, and professional achievement of Peter Riccio, who was student (class of 1921), faculty, assistant to the Dean of Students, and Director of the Casa Italiana at Columbia University, from which he retired in 1966. As Ragusa points out, “Riccio never made a secret of his Italian-American background” (594), and indeed wrote a letter to then Columbia University’s “President Butler asking why there was no Italian House” (607) in 1920. The documents Ragusa assembles and comments on in this article concern an individual as well as his circle of friends and their family members, immigrants from Italy and their children. Yet the focus is not narrow and restrictive — and this is not solely because these documents deal with a personality who had a foundational role at an Ivy League institution. It is precisely their individual nature that makes them important: history starts (and ends) with the stories we tell ourselves. Recovering the memories of Riccio and other Americans of Italian descent is a crucial element of discerning their selfimage, their sense of place, their relationship to their lands, their life on the hyphen, so to speak. Ragusa’s essay translates to a different (but far from unimportant) time and place one of Albert Mancini’s lessons: to look for the forgotten, to bring it back to light, to cherish it, and to study it. Giovanni Da Pozzo opens his essay “Serenità e ambiguità nella Relazione di Giovanni Pigafetta” with a passage that, in my mind, summarizes what I (and many like me) have learned from Professor Mancini: “La lettura di un testo porta a rimettere continuamente in discussione i modi stessi del nostro desiderio di comprendere ciò che esso comunica e che, in alcuni casi, è indipendente dal livello del valore estetico del testo stesso. Quanto più quel valore è giudicato secondo parametri tradizionali, tanto più tende a ridursi la volontà di capire come il testo funzioni [...]. La difficoltà del giudizio di testi poco apprezzati e frequentati viene dalla fatica ad accettare anche altre misure di valutazione che non siano quelle estetiche tradizionali, sulle quali già si è esercitata l’opera di controllo e assestamento del gusto secondo l’elaborazione delle varie forme letterarie che esso ha imposto nel tempo” (426). These essays, as well as Joseph Tusiani’s elegant Latin poems “De septem virtutibus” (645-51), indicate that Professor Mancini’s lesson has already borne ample fruits — and many more will certainly come. Maria Galli Stampino, University of Miami
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