Vita e Pensiero

This paper offers the critical edition of Dante’s Inferno XXVI and XXVII in the Latin hexametrical translation written by the Olivetan monk Matteo Ronto (1370/1380-1442). In this work, composed between 1427 and 1431, about ten years after the Latin translation in prose with commentary by Giovanni da Serravalle, Ronto elaborated a very complex poetical version, trying to preserve the correspondance between Dante’s hendecasyllables and the hexameters...

Among the institutions of the king’s house, the stable is responsible not only for his daily transport but also for his military activities. It manages the acquisition and maintenance of horses, harness and weapons for its tournaments and military campaigns. Keeping with medieval tradition, it also welcomes pages sent to the Court to be raised beside the sovereign...

This essay provides an overview of one of Anton Francesco Doni’s minor works, Gli Spiriti folletti. Published in Florence in 1546, the Spiriti folletti is basically a dialogue between two demons who talk to each other about their own misdeeds, also invoking the intervention of Satan on earth in order to administer human justice...

Giovanni Battista Morsolino (c. 1540-1591) was an Italian organist and composer. He had an active international career serving at the Bavarian Court in Munich, at Santa Maria Maggiore in Bergamo and in Milan cathedral (Duomo). Firstly, this work traces Morsolino’s biography focusing on the period spent in Milan (1590-1591)...

The essay deals with the first English destiny of the Aminta by Torquato Tasso, examining its focal moments and the cultural context in which its reception took place...

The essay looks into Marino’s tribute to his colleague and friend Battista Guarini, who died in 1612. This eulogy, which consists of two specular sonnets and is included in the Lagrime (the funerary chapter of Lira 3, Marino’s second poetical collection published in Venice in 1614), is a unique and interesting case study that can help us understand the making of Lira 3 itself...

The study focuses on Gli amori infelici di Ero e Leandro (1618) by Giovanni Capponi, a poetic text belonging to the idyll genre, one of the main forms of early Seventeenth- Century bucolic experimentalism. The analysis identifies the process of contamination with artistic re-elaboration of myth (Rubens’ painting “Hero and Leander”) and with ancient and modern texts, such as Ovid’s Methamorphoses, the Giovan Battista Marino’s Piramo e Tisbe idyll from La Sampogna, and the Boscan version of Hero and Leander Myth...