Le vie dorate. Un'altra letteratura italiana: da San Francesco a Igiaba Scego

Abstract

Erudition and excellent knowledge of one's subject by an academic scholar do not always manifest in the ability to convey one's passion and deep understanding to students or readers. Johnny L. Bertolio is fully conscious of all the difficulties linked to the art of educating while keeping learners engaged and interested. Bertolio acquired his teaching sensitivity over the many years spent outside Italy as a tutor and formator of young minds wishing to know Italian literature while not attending Italian schools. Hence, Bertolio's manual Le vie dorate. Un'altra letteratura italiana: da san Francesco a Igiaba Scego displays the author's skillfulness in recognizing that the usual didactic tools need to be redesigned. The text, intended for international students of Italian (LS and L2), represents an innovative approach to teaching literature, in line with the needs of university courses, and reveals an extraordinary attentiveness and consideration to all the foundational changes witnessed in contemporary society during the past decade.In Bertolio's manual, there is a balance between the recognition and respect for the traditional approach to history of literature and the versatility of the innovation displayed through newly minted methodologies that demonstrate full command and comprehension of the all-encompassing reach of digital media. A historical-critical path within Italian literature conveys the deepening of grammatical structures and morphosyntactic, offering the tools for essay-argumentative and enriching content-lexical writing. Bertolio's work is a breath of fresh air within the landscape of anthological production. Accurate and thorough graphic research enhances the groundbreaking literal project and catapults the tradition of Italian literature into the terrain of social media.The book is an agile manual for young students and adults who want to approach Italian literature from an original point of view after having already acquired the foundations of the Italian language. Le vie dorate is “another and diverse Italian Literature” due to its original selection of authors: from Saint Francis—the eccentric “God's jester” considered one of the first producers of vulgar lyric in Italy—to Igiaba Scego, an Italian Somali writer among the most authoritative of contemporary literature, whose novels give accounts of migration, integration, multiculturalism, racism and the legacy of colonialism.Simultaneously, Le vie dorate offers a journey along the most and the least traveled roads within Italian literature anthologies. Amid several other underrepresented works, Bertolio includes a literary masterpiece such as Collodi's Pinocchio, too often marginalized in a sort of “ready-to-read” literature purgatory. In addition, along the manual pages, plenty of information embraces the history of Italian music with special attention to Italian Opera. Bertolio proposes “works and themes capable of questioning the present” while spotlighting the usual profile of the author par excellence (male, cisgender, white, believer in God but anticlerical, writing in the Tuscan regional language) that forged the literary canon at the end of the nineteenth century. On the contrary, the volume highlights all the aspects of authors’ life and works, both canonical and non-canonical, so as to put them in the corresponding context from all points of view.The volume contains forty-five units, each corresponding to an author (one-third are women), arranged chronologically from the thirteenth century to today. Bertolio comprehends that students cannot fully appreciate Italian literature without a frame of reference connected to history and geography. Hence, each unit opens with geohistorical coordinates that contextualize the authors’ analysis within the complex evolution of political and artistic/architectural Italy over the centuries. This diachronic scan is complemented by seven transversal thematic paths (“Environment, Landscape and Ecology,” “Faith and Sacred,” “Gender Issues,” etc.), which group the authors and texts by topics or literature perspectives and offer exercises of lexical activation, grammar review, writing and speech, and oral presentation training. These paths want to be “a track and inspiration to build as many syllabi,” and they function as operational suggestions to accompany the book paper version with the podcasts available in the digital volume expansion, downloadable from the Loescher's Imparosulweb portal.Social networks’ characteristic graphics shape each unit with a visual code immediately recognizable by the audience of this digital era. Each author's biography morphs into an ideally crafted social profile. In the anthological section, the usual lateral paragraphs’ summaries and numerous footnotes with paraphrase are replaced by keywords preceded by hashtags and hypertext functions or by vivid boxes. A box entitled The Meme presents an image “speaking” of the author's fortune over the centuries, accompanied by captions and a memorable quote. Misleading critical clichés are dismantled with an in-depth investigation cleverly entitled The Troll, for example, Was Machiavelli truly Machiavellian? Was Leopardi undoubtedly a pessimist? Bertolio peppers the book with these crafty nuggets of knowledge to foster reflexivity and in-class debates and deconstruct canonized preconceived notions. The modernity of the book conception never neglects literary content and never ignores the commitment to enhance the readers’ fluency in the Italian language. In fact, pertinent exercises precede every literature work to activate the investigation of vocabulary and fundamental lexicon needed to confront the selected piece and emphasize the correspondences between the Italian of the past and nowadays Italian. These annotations invite the readers’ active participation and stimulate their learning process in a not merely passive manner.Bertolio captivates his audience by finding an accurate admixture between classical knowledge and modern technological discourse. Le vie dorate is a gem of a book where tradition and innovation coexist for the good of all readers and all lovers of Italian literature.