inOpera Esercizi di lettura su testi contemporanei
«inOpera» is a six-monthly journal that offers reading exercises on individual texts, both poetic and narrative, from the last two centuries of Italian history, not without excursions that take the investigation to non-fiction and private writings and beyond. The project is ideally inspired by this sentence by Theodor Adorno: «Das Allgemeine der Schönheit vermag nicht anders dem Subjekt sich mitzuteilen als in der Obsession durchs Besondere» (Minima moralia).
The fourth issue of «inOpera». Vittorio Sereni
Copyright (c) 2025 Luca Daino, Fabio Magro https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
«You Sang, not Spoke». Vittorio Sereni and the Recorded Authorial Voice of Un posto di vacanza
After an introduction outlining the main historical, theoretical, and methodological issues related to the concept of «recorded authorial diction», the essay focuses on Vittorio Sereni, retracing his most significant experiences in the field of literary phonography, as well as his personal relationship with poetic diction. It then examines a public recording (dating from July 1967) of the first part of Un posto di vacanza. This audio document becomes the subject of a stylistic and performative analysis, in which the poet’s main compositional and performative strategies are brought to light through a systematic comparison between the written and the spoken text.
Copyright (c) 2025 Mario Gerolamo Mossa https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Vittorio Sereni, the «Libera Stampa» Prize, and the Collection Un lungo sonno
The essay offers a study of Sereni’s participation in the «Libera Stampa» prize and aims firstly to contribute to the analysis of the process that led to Sereni’s establishment in the Italian and international literary field in the 1940s and 1950s. Secondly, the focus is placed on the collection Un lungo sonno, which remained unpublished in the configuration presented by Sereni to the jury of the Swiss prize in 1956. Un lungo sonno is analysed in its macro-textual structure and in its connections with other books by Sereni (among them Diario d’Algeria, Gli strumenti umani, Gli immediati dintorni).
MONOGRAFICA - Poesia, prosa, traduzione, editoria (a cura di E. Gambaro)
Copyright (c) 2025 Giovanna Cordibella https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Vittorio Sereni as a “French literary specialist”. An unpublished Immagine di Guillaume Apollinaire
This contribution brings to light an unpublished text written by Vittorio Sereni, titled Immagine di Guillaume Apollinaire and currently held in the Vittorio Sereni Archive at Palazzo Verbania in Luino. Hypothetically dating back to the immediate post-Second World War period, this essay is compared to the two other known works by Sereni (published in Gli immediati dintorni, 1962, and in Letture preliminari, 1973), making it potentially the earliest known piece dedicated to the French poet. The curator’s introduction provides a contextualization of the text within the framework of Sereni’s subsequent poetic translations from Apollinaire.
Copyright (c) 2025 Giuliana Di Febo-Severo https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
From Un posto di vacanza to Il sabato tedesco: constants and novelties in the last Sereni’s works
The study highlights how, in the transition from L’opzione (1964) to Il sabato tedesco (1980), Vittorio Sereni employs images and motifs already present in Un posto di vacanza (1972) and engages in a reflection on the theme of identity with an unusual punctuality; how, moreover, by transferring to Il sabato tedesco a number of poems later included in Stella variabile (1981), he elaborates an original form of prosimetrum.
Copyright (c) 2025 Massimo Migliorati https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Disappearance and fading in Vittorio Sereni’s Stella variabile
Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo spoke of the «nihilism of the last Sereni» (in his article Il solido nulla, 1986), insisting on the images of silence, omission, lack and nothingness. Starting from Mengaldo's comment, our contribution aims to analyse some images of disappearance and fading present in Stella variabile. The contribution begins with an examination of the disappearance of the subject (i.e. the prefiguration of one's own death), and then dwells on forms of dissolution around the lyric subject and the fading and appearance of sound, through a reading of poems from Sereni's last collection.
Copyright (c) 2025 Yannick Gouchan https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Between “Improvisation” and “a Poem Yet to Be Written”: A Cross-Reading of Gli immediati dintorni and Il musicante di Saint-Merry
This study analyzes the structural and translational choices in Vittorio Sereni’s Il musicante di Saint-Merry, probing its connections with the prose collection Gli immediati dintorni. Disavowing theoretical systematization – a stance particularly apt for Sereni’s resistant poetics – this essay adopts a lateral approach. It prioritizes the why over the how of translational decisions that trace what might be termed a “parallel diary”, while mapping the intertextual echoes between the two works. Ultimately, it aims to illuminate that liminal space where memory and revision, mediation and rewriting converge—the very locus of these texts’ textual “truth”.
Copyright (c) 2025 Silvia Riva https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Metrical fairy-tales. Mario Benedetti’s anapests in Vanno via i tuoi occhi
This paper presents a metrical and thematic analysis of Vanno via i tuoi occhi by Mario Benedetti, starting from a single detail: the epigraph from La luna e i falò, «era morta la vecchia del Nido». The first section explores the connection between tragic aspects in Pavese and elegiac elements in Benedetti, focusing on the mythical and fairy-tale features. The aim is to determine whether Pavese’s influence extends to the metrical structure. The second section develops a generative account using Bracketed Grid Theory by Fabb and Halle (2008). The goal is to hypothesize an underlying anapaestic structure and connect it with fairy-tale and elegy elements.
Copyright (c) 2025 Alessia Giordano https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
A proposito di Dino Campana, “L’opera in prosa e in versi”, a cura di Gianni Turchetta, Mondadori, Milano 2024 [pp. 313-328]
Copyright (c) 2025 Edoardo Pisani, Gianni Turchetta https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Omissis: some Remarks on Reticence and Dialogism in Sereni
The essay takes its cue from some observations by Franco Fortini regarding the forms of “reticence” in Vittorio Sereni's Gli strumenti umani (1965) to focus on the function of omissions within the book, noting continuities and discontinuities within Sereni's poetic work.
Copyright (c) 2025 Luca Lenzini https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
The enigmas of the Madrigale a Nefertiti
The Madrigal to Nefertiti, because of its relation to the form of madrigal, can be seen as an outlier in the context of Sereni’s style, even more so if we consider his later poetry. Why exactly is this text peculiar? And why can it be described as obscure? This paper first analyses its metrical, syntactic and poetic structures; then it identifies some specific formal ambiguities, which then the article tries to explain by a possible echo from a poem by Saba, Ulysses, as well as a letter written by Sereni himself. Finally, the article connects these hypotheses to Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s interpretation of the myth of Ulysses. This combined analysis results in the possibility to gain a holistic account of both the author’s grammatical imagery, as well as the aesthetic object this text represents.
Copyright (c) 2025 Stefano Versace https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
The Mirror and the Double: Analysis of two Mirror texts by Vittorio Sereni on a petrarchan Track (Il sabato tedesco e Un posto di vacanza)
In Sereni’s poetic and prose corpus, the topos of the mirror is recurrent. In light of this constant theme, literature is conceived as a form of mirroring of interior and exterior reality. The idea of ​​art as a specular/speculative process, however, goes beyond the notion of pure mimesis of the self and the world, since the image that returns to the subject from a reflecting surface is never fixed but changeable and, at most, elusive. The use of this emblem is charged with a strong semantic significance in the production between the end of the Seventies and the beginning of the Eighties. In this essay, the detailed investigation focuses precisely on two key texts from Sereni’s late period: Il sabato tedesco and Un posto di vacanza.
Copyright (c) 2025 Ivana Menna, Salvatore Francesco Lattarulo https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
A shore, an encounter, and a mending: towards a metapoetic reading of Fissità
The article proposes a metapoetic interpretation of Fissità, a poem that, at first glance, does not seem to have a distinct metadiscursive nature. To support this interpretation, three recurring themes in Sereni’s poetry are examined: the liminal landscape, friendship, and sewing. Several poems from Stella variabile are analysed to reveal the metapoetic dimension of these themes, highlighting the metapoetic imagery the author constructs throughout the book. The analysis concludes with Fissità, a poem that embodies all three metapoetic themes. This brings to light an implicit reflection on poetry, suggested by the described landscape, the unspoken interlocutor (Fortini), and the mending performed by the encountered character – an allegory of the fragile yet persistent nature of the poetic act.
Copyright (c) 2025 Andrea Bongiorno https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Vittorio Sereni and Memory in Motion. From Frontiera to Stella variabile: The Turning Point of Car Travel
This essay explores the evolution of movement as a theme in Vittorio Sereni’s poetry, tracing the shift from train to automobile as a paradigm of a broader perceptual transformation. From the walking experience in Frontiera to the railway journeys in Diario d’Algeria, to the emergence of the automobile in Gli strumenti umani and Stella variabile, movement functions as a device that reorganizes the relationship between subject, landscape, and memory. The automobile, initially bearer of the «privilege of motion», reveals its limitations in the later collections, signaling the impossibility of achieving authentic memory recovery through speed.
Copyright (c) 2025 Marino Fuchs https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
The essay takes into consideration a poem by William Carlos Williams and the translation given by Vittorio Sereni, questioning the reasons for the affinities and differences existing between the two authors and what the ‘Italian’ text manages or fails to convey of the original: from the dark and bitter atmosphere of the first verses it finally turns to the recognition of how poetry has its roots linked to those of pain.
Copyright (c) 2025 Edoardo Esposito https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
«Mai tutto è veramente detto». Memory and Rewriting in Senza l’onore delle armi
The article aims to reread thematically and stylistically the five short stories of war and imprisonment gathered under the title of Senza l’onore delle armi, focusing then on passages in which memory and writing are reactivated without ever exhausting the subject matter of the narrative.
Copyright (c) 2025 Pietro De Marchi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
For a comment of Rossi Precerutti’s Entrebescar (1982)
This paper previews a commented critical edition of Entrebescar (1982) by Roberto Rossi Precerutti. Nine poems from the first section of the book have been selected, and can be considered as an inner micro-series showing the relevance of Derrida’s concept of dissemination in the context of the collection. The commentary is accompanied by metric notes and (when present) variants. Thanks to the commentary, the ways in which a reader can deal with this type of poetry starting from its structure (thus, the metrics, prosody and syntax) will be clear, even when the general meaning of the poems should be regarded as open and undecidable.
Copyright (c) 2024 Davide Belgradi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
The essay examines the importance of the genetic apparatus in the commentary; in this direction, the essay focuses on cases of intertextuality as a laboratory subject to approximations, shot corrections, internal adjustments involving single textual places or, on a macroscopic scale, the overall architecture of the text. Two case studies were examined: Delio Tessa and Vittorio Sereni.
Copyright (c) 2024 Mauro Bignamini https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
A commentary on Don Raffaè by Fabrizio De André
The essay offers a systematic commentary on the lyrics of Fabrizio De André’s song Don Raffaè (1990). Despite its ironic tone and seemingly tone, the song delivers a scathing social critique through a dense network of cultural references and allusions to contemporary events. By employing an original linguistic pastiche that blends “macaronic” Italian with Neapolitan dialect, the song presents itself as an entertaining and light satire that nevertheless addresses some of the most pressing issues of Italy at the time (and still today), such as the relationship between the state and organized crime, prison conditions, economic crises, and unemployment.
Copyright (c) 2024 Rosario Carbone https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Commenting on a theatrical text: the case of Le cinque rose di Jennifer by Annibale Ruccello
The essay aims to analyze some of the issues, that are linked to the edition of Le Cinque rose di Jennifer by Annibale Ruccello (1980), published in 2022 (edited by Vincenzo Caputo, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura). In fact specific passages in Ruccello's work allow for a more general reflection on the challenges of a theatrical commentary, especially when dealing with a work that is relatively recent in chronological terms.
Copyright (c) 2024 Vincenzo Caputo https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
L’articolo discute il lavoro di curatela e traduzione dell’opera di Samuel Beckett offerto da Gabriele Frasca nel volume Romanzi, teatro e televisione uscito nella collana dei Meridiani per Mondadori, ricostruendo la lunga fedeltà del curatore e le idee che ne hanno sempre accompagnato l’attività di mediazione all’interno dell’altalenante fortuna dell’autore irlandese in Italia. In particolare, si considera la decisione di presentare l’opera di Beckett attraverso una selezione che ne privilegia gli aspetti più innovativi e ipermediali, con attenzione non solo ai romanzi e ai testi teatrali ma anche un radiodramma e alle meno note pièce televisive. Infine, si ripercorrono le strategie traduttive adottate nei confronti dell’’equilinguismo’ beckettiano, e si illustra l’idea del traduttore della necessità di superare il mito dell’originale e di usare la traduzione come strumento di interpretazione "sospeso tra creazione e critica".
Copyright (c) 2024 Carmen Gallo https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
From Text Analysis to Reader’s Autobiography: Towards a Didactics of Literary Reading
Commentary reading and text analysis have had a prominent place in literary teaching in secondary schools for about fifty years. The article aims to highlight the reasons for this primacy and its effects on a school system that is also experimenting with new teaching models that assign commentary and textual analysis a renewed role as a result of studies in the didactics of literature.
Copyright (c) 2024 Simone Giusti https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
A commentary on "Ghirlandetta": two narrative strategies
The paper offers a close reading of Ghirlandetta – the central section of Giovanni Giudici’s Lume dei tuoi misteri – focusing on two narrative strategies adopted by the poet: 1) the intentional misdirection of the reader, with the goal of bringing him closer to the characters; 2) the female character’s rewriting of events in her favour. Because of the chosen focus, only some poems are selected for this analysis. After a brief contextualization of Ghirlandetta between the other sections, the two narrative techniques are clarified and illustrated through the commentary of the singular texts. The author’s unpublished textual variations belonging to Rodolfo Zucco’s archive are mentioned when needed.
Copyright (c) 2024 Margherita Coccolo https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
«Je est un autre». Autobiography and self-commentary by proxy (2001) followed by Interpo-sitions (2024)
Between 1997 and 2000, the publication of "Meridiani" of poets born in the 1910s and 1920s (Attilio Bertolucci, Mario Luzi, Andrea Zanzotto and Giovanni Giudici), published with the authors still alive and working, led to the redefinition of the commentary on the texts, to which the authors contributed. The article dedicated in 2001 to this phenomenon is reread by retracing the episodes in which poets of subsequent generations (analyzed are the cases of Milo De Angelis, Claudio Damiani, Fabio Pusterla, Valerio Magrelli, Marcello Frixione and Lello Voce) have bent to their poetic needs spaces previously the prerogative of second and third figures.
Copyright (c) 2024 Andrea Cortellessa https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
From Beginning to End. Comment on Primo Levi’s "In the Beginning" and "The Dark Stars"
The article analyses Primo Levi’s poems In the Beginning and The Dark Stars, focusing on their main metrical, stylistic, rhetorical, and thematic aspects, thereby taking particular account of their interdisciplinary and intertextual nature. The commentary, accompanied by introductory paragraphs and a conclusion, goes through the two poems individually, investigating on the one hand the effect of the hybridisation between science and poetry in Levi's work, and on the other hand the heterotrophic relationship between poetry and prose.
Copyright (c) 2024 Mattia Cravero https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Giorgio Caproni, "Parade" ("The Count of Kevenhüller", 1986)
The essay contains a commentary of a poem by the late Caproni, Parata (Il Conte di Kevenhüller, 1986). Caproni’s expressive system, especially from Il passaggio d'Enea (1956) onwards, seems to be based on the varying repetition of a few constants, both thematically and stylistically. Therefore, the commentary will seek above all to demonstrate the obsessive nature of the late Caproni’s expressive system: in the introduction, an attempt will be made above all to clarify the origin of certain themes, highlighting their diachronic evolution; while in the notes, the most significant intratextual recurrences will be reported, both thematically and stylistically.
Copyright (c) 2024 Stefano Volta https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
"Gli alberi" e Lu Xun, «una nuova razionalità». On the commentary of "Questo Muro" by Franco Fortini
Shortly after the publication of Questo muro, in a letter dated June 7, 1973, Italo Calvino comments on Fortini’s collection, focusing on the particular use of "natural and high-lyrical images". Following Calvino’s analysis of the meaning of vegetal figurae, a commentary on one of the poems from Questo muro is offered as an example.
Copyright (c) 2024 Elena Niccolai https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
"La libellula": At the Origins of Amelia Rosselli’s Experimentation
The contribution intends to dedicate ample space to the critical interpretation of one of Amelia Rosselli's earliest and most significant works, the long poem entitled La libellula, to which the author remained particularly attached throughout the entire course of her poetic activity. A brief introduction aimed at clarifying the importance of the poem within Rosselli's poetic trajectory is followed by a commentary that seeks to highlight its main content and formal aspects; furthermore, particular attention is paid to the dense inter-textual dialogue established by the author with some of the protagonists of the Italian and other literary traditions.
Copyright (c) 2024 Maria Veneruso https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Annotating Milo De Angelis’ "Somiglianze": exercise upon "Una generosità"
The contribution presents, in the first part, some reflections upon measure and intentions of the commentary on the poems of the first Milo De Angelis’ book, Somiglianze (1976), with some operational observations, and, in the second part, an interpretative exercise on a – in many ways – exemplary poem, Una generosità. The aim is to identify the constitutive elements of his note apparatus through a reasoned commentary, imagined in function of an annotated edition with a text general presentation (dating, location, overall structure, and main characteristics), followed by precise exegetical notes.
Copyright (c) 2024 Fabio Jermini https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Two commentaries. Confessions of a Boomer
In a retrospective way, two commentaries on twentieth-century Italian poets, Vittorio Sereni and Guido Gozzano, published respectively in 1990 and 1995, are the subject of reflection. By highlighting the specific critical approach to individual authors, the commentator's work is framed in a conception at the same time empirical and non-conformist, attentive to the structural constants and to the key words of the works examined.
Copyright (c) 2024 Luca Lenzini https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0