Nomi di parentela

Encyclopedia entry on "Kinship expressions and terms"

Modi di dire

Encyclopedia entry for "idioms" and "idiomatic expressions" in Italian

Dare voce agli invisibili: Il teatro di Beppe Rosso

The article – which is co-authored with Irene Zagrebelsky – focuses on the work of the Italian playwright and actor Beppe Rosso, and it is the most detailed critical account on Rosso’s production so far. Based on original material and interviews, it not only analyses Rosso’s widely acclaimed “Trilogy of invisibility” in the light of recent political events in Italy, but it also – in its first two sections – introduces the so called “teatro di narrazione” to Italian scholars in the UK, and in its two last sections opens up new perspectives on the relationship between contemporary theatre, citizenship and political participation.

Sbiancare un etiope. La pelle cangiante di un topos antico

The book is part of a multi-year investigation on the historical construction and representation of ethnic otherness through the use of language, and focuses on the history of the tópos expressed by the proverb Lavare/sbiancare un etiope (‘to wash an Ethiop white’), a tópos which is traceable in different languages across many centuries (and since II c. A.D.), which stays for either ‘to attempt the impossible’ or ‘to do something useless’. The research also tries to shine a light upon the cultural and social contexts in which ‘Ethiopian’ otherness have generated. Its final goal is to find out how the washing-the-Ethiopian tópos (in its verbal and iconographical forms) has become long-lasting, ductile and semantically productive key expression whose heterogeneous use not only document but also produce and fix otherness in time.