My major research field is the Italian Renaissance literature
and its connected and interrelated systems of cultural
representation (‘ut pictura poesis'), including the
relationship between visual art and literature. My work aims to
fuse literature with essential cultural aspects of history. My
research interests include Italian Renaissance travel writing,
Paolo Giovio, and the representation of “Others” in Renaissance
culture. In addition, I have a strong interest in modern European
Literature. Although my work is strongly influenced by the insights
of philology, my training brought me to the study of historical and
social problems in literature. In my books, I have examined topics
such as different forms of social anxieties in Italian textual
production by synthesizing the methods of historical inquiry with
philological investigation. Considering how the Renaissance
challenged education, culture and intellectual life, I have widely
explored the myth of the “Turkish peril” and its representation in
this period. The stereotypes of the Ottoman Turk conceived as
non-historical, irrational, despotic, and fanatical “Other”, have
generally been considered more characteristic of the
nineteenth-century Orientalism than of early modern intellectual
structures, yet the intermediary location of Orientalist ideas
between the early modern period and the contemporary world has
encouraged a backward view onto early modern subjects. My focus on
travel literature also allows me to explore the various
conceptualizations of fear and its public perception, the
representation of the enemy, and the expression of Western
vulnerability in early modern texts.
Currently, I am developing a new book-project on the
relationship between the so-called crisis of representation in
Europe and the question of meaning in Renaissance culture with
particular attention to the representation of harem and female
slavery in XVI century. I have published the first results of
this new research in the book Battista Guarini e la retorica
dell'altrove politico. Un genere fra epistola, relazione
diplomatica e resoconto di viaggio (Bologna, I libri di EMIL,
2009), written with Luisa Avellin collaboration. In it I have
analized and edited the unpublished political account Discorsi
sopra le cosa della Polonia (manuscript I 496 Biblioteca
Ariostea of Ferrara) by Battista Guarini.
At the present I am working on the Iconography of Fortune
between Renaissance and Baroque age as I developed my competences
at The Warburg Institute in London. I recently edited P. Giovio,
Vita di Adriano VI, Napoli, La Scuola di Pitagora
(2015).
In 2014 I started to work on a new project on XIX Century
literature (Cristina Trivulzio di Belgiojoso: una donna allo
specchio dell'Oriente, "Lettere Italiane", 2, 2014) and I
published a book titled Il microscopio e l'allucinazione. Luigi Capuana fra Letteratura, scienza e anomalia (Bologna, 2015) and several essays in Journals.
