Il Castello di Elsinore

Note di congedo

Franco Perrelli — 2025-05-26

A barriera in the form of a moresca

Alessandro Pontremoli — 2025-05-26

In the context of festive forms, dance plays a decisive role within the celebration: on the one hand, it takes on specific forms, such as social dances, theatrical and paratheatrical dances, which contribute to the consolidation of conversational relations also on the level of political diplomacy; on the other hand, the choreography as a technology pervades the entire structure of the celebration and determines the design of its forms, to offer a representation of reality as a spectacle, consolidate a common culture among members of the aristocracy and produce the sense of a shared experience. Dance associates its manifestations with the memory of the event and the ideological constructs that determined it. A particularly interesting and paradigmatic case is a barriera in the form of a moresca performed during the feasts for the marriage of Alessandro Farnese and Maria of Portugal in Brussels in November 1565. This essay seeks to demonstrate how the political watermark that watermark that shines through the symbols produced by the performance, in the context of the complex festive choreography, are generated precisely within the languages of representation and offer the key to understanding not only the celebrations as a whole, but also the entire wedding enterprise desired and planned by Philip II and conceived by the sovereign with foresight in view of the subjugation of Flanders, the most troublesome and rebellious province of his entire empire.

“Voglio la vodka!”. A short story of a drama of jealousy and melancholy

Ruben Donno — 2025-05-26

The purpose of this article is to reconstruct the historical and cultural context that allowed Ardengo Soffici to elaborate the unpublished manuscript entitled «Voglio la Vodka!» Tre tempi. The main source is precisely Soffici’s autobiography which, dwelling on the years in which Soffici lived in Paris (1900-1914), highlights some important figures who brought the Tuscan writer closer to the Russian world: first and foremost Hélène d’Œttingen, Serge Férat, and the artist Aleksandra Ekster. The two women, together with other Russian intellectuals, would in fact be indelible presences in Soffici’s later drama. The unpublished work, composed between 1944 and 1945 during the period of detention in the fascist camp in Terni, shows, in addition to the ambivalent relationship of encounter and clash between West and East, how at the centre of human action there are crystallised, and undoubtedly autobiographical, feelings of jealousy and melancholy towards a past to be cherished and remembered.

«Voglio la vodka!». Tre tempi

Ruben — 2025-06-05

Edition by Ruben Donno.

The representation of senescence and loss in Beckett’s "Waiting for Godot" and "Endgame"

Irene De Angelis — 2025-06-05

Samuel Beckett’s plays Waiting for Godot and Endgame were both published after the Second World War, in a period dominated by the model of the pièce-bien-faite. Drawing fruitful inspiration from Jean-Paul Sartre and the avant-gardes (Genêt, Adamov, Ionesco), Beckett offers an unconventional form of drama, which radically breaks with the past, focusing on the purgatorial condition of those who find themselves in the “nether region” – neither young nor yet dead, suspended in an in-between state characterized by uncertainty and existential greyness. This essay examines how in Waiting for Godot and Endgame Beckett conceives old age as a grey zone, a transitional stage from which it is impossible to escape, as we were all born, to some extent, to endure the pain and infirmities of decline.

L’ultimo grande esponente dell’arte della regia

Roberto Alonge — 2025-06-16

Un romanzo malgré tout: L’Immortalité di Milan Kundera

Giuditta Isotti Rosowsky — 2025-06-16

The article analyses the structural composition of a novel which characteristic feature is to be built on diversity and dispersion. The main theme, recurring in multiple forms, is at the same time, the text being estranged from itself, and the existential feeling of being estranged of the characters, displaying a devastating critic of today reality, directed by the imagologues.

Giaime Alonge, "Sentieri selvaggi" di John Ford e l’ideologia woke

Angela Falco — 2025-06-16