Mod I: The module will be organized into critical units about Italian renaissance culture, which reinvents modern dramatic theatre by marrying ancient philology with the rich “Romance” experience of sacred and profane medieval festivities. We will analyze artistic texts such as Trissino, Rucellai, Giraldi Cinzio and Tasso which are examples of a train of thought which starts from Aristotele’s “philosophy” and goes on through classicism of Latin origin which experiments with a new model of Senecan tragedy, and arrives at the possible development of the modern tragedy in a private and psychological direction.

Mod II: The course, entitled "the anti-historical novel. Literature from the period after the union of Italy", aims to prove, in the Progressivist crisis which had made the traditional historical novel into an exceptional ideological vehicle of assertion of the middle classes and national identity, how the long-sighted narrators open towards a psychological and existential problematicism which marks the modern era with its scepticism and cynicism. This basic assumption will be discussed using the historical novels of De Roberto, Pirandello, Tomasi de Lampedusa, Banti and Genna.