- History and Fiction in Italian Literature of the 13th and 14th Centuries: Salimbene, Dante, Boccaccio
- The Themes and Style of Boccaccio, Between Latin and the Vernacular
- Luigi Pirandello Between Theater and Cinema
1. History and Fiction in Italian Literature of the 13th and 14th Centuries: Salimbene, Dante, Boccaccio
Sebastiana Nobili has long studied the works of Giovanni Boccaccio, from the Decameron to the Corbaccio and the Genealogia degli dèi pagani. Her research on medieval narrative later expanded to include chronicles, particularly the Chronicle of Salimbene of Parma, for which Nobili published an edition with facing translation and commentary. In this work too, she explores the historical and cultural contexts in which the text was developed, analyzing the broad narrative repertoire it presupposes—not only contemporary literature, but also exempla, the art of preaching, and political oratory, i.e., various forms of oral discourse. A comparison of certain passages in the Chronicle with those in Dante’s Commedia—featuring the same characters and themes—sparked a research project on the presence of exempla in 14th-century literature. This project extends from Dante’s masterpiece (in which so-called “domestic similes” can be reinterpreted in light of oral narrative tradition) to Boccaccio’s later works, particularly the Genealogia deorum gentilium. Nobili has also devoted various essays to the analysis of individual cantos or episodes of the Commedia, aiming to highlight both their classical and medieval sources as well as their anthropological implications.
2. The Themes and Style of Boccaccio, Between Latin and the Vernacular
On the subject of Giovanni Boccaccio, Nobili has organized two conferences and published journal articles on the Genealogia (Intersezioni, 2011), the Filocolo (Studi sul Boccaccio, 2011), and the Decameron (Conference Proceedings from Bologna, Il Mulino 2013, and Italianistica, 2013). In the Decameron, she examined the theme of weeping, focusing on the Introduction (the plague) and the Fourth Day; starting from the Filocolo, she explored the theme of narrative play among the storytellers, linking it to the quaestio scholastica, traces of which can also be found in the Genealogia. She has authored a commented anthology of Boccaccio’s works for university use, published in 2014 by Unicopli. In 2017, she published a comprehensive volume on the medieval authors she studies - Salimbene, Dante, and Boccaccio - entitled La consolazione della letteratura (Ravenna, Longo Editore).
3. Luigi Pirandello Between Theater and Cinema
Sebastiana Nobili has devoted numerous essays to Luigi Pirandello, beginning with her doctoral dissertation, in which she compared various versions of his texts - particularly short stories rewritten for the stage - and argued for the fundamentally narrative nature of Pirandello’s theater. She identified, among other things, the presence of a “dramatic narrator” in the playscripts, and eventually focused on Pirandello’s final short stories, which reveal affinities with the themes and techniques of the avant-garde, especially Surrealism (a topic still largely unexplored, particularly the role of dreams in Pirandello’s reflections during the 1930s across theater, cinema, and narrative).
Nobili has also worked on two novels in particular - Fu Mattia Pascal and Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore - placing them within the cultural debates of their time and reinterpreting them in light of contemporary film theory. These theories have only recently begun to be fully understood, thanks to the publication of many previously unpublished or long-forgotten texts (such as writings by directors like Jean Epstein, or theorists like Ricciotto Canudo). Nobili plans to expand her research to Pirandello’s final phase in both theater and narrative, which was deeply influenced by cinema, the avant-garde, and especially Surrealism. From this perspective, in recent years she has dedicated several essays to I giganti della montagna and La favola del figlio cambiato.
