Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Francesco Pona. L’ozio lecito della scrittura

2015; Iter Press; Volume: 37; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.33137/rr.v37i3.22469

2293-7374

Stefania Buccini, Sebastiano Bazzichetto,

Linguistic Studies and Language Acquisition

Many years after Giorgio Fulco published the critical edition of La Lucerna (1973), Buccini's book draws attention to the opera omnia written by Francesco Pona (1595-1655), nobleman and doctor in the Verona of the sixteen hundreds.Buccini's publication is divided into four main chapters that try to make sense of Pona's extended production, and to contextualize the author's complex, intellectual biography.By presenting significant sources-texts well known or, in some cases, as yet unpublished-the reader can follow the education of the young student in Padua and Bologna until the last years of his career, when he utterly denied libertine themes debated in La Lucerna, first published in 1625.Chapter 1, "L'esordio" (Debut), describes Pona's poetical debut in 1617 with his Rime (poems), published again two years later in a longer version.This is the period when the author began to get in touch with different academies, such as the Accademia dei Gelati in Bologna, the Accademia dei Filarmonici in his hometown, and, later, the Accademia degli Incogniti in Venice.His translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, in 1618, achieved success among both scholars and general readers.In 1620, "Il Sileno" was published, a fictional dialogue between a foreigner from Bologna, a citizen of Verona, and a servant-who discourse on the beauty and amenities located in the garden of Count Giusti, to whom the work is dedicated."Il Paradiso de' Fiori" followed two years later in 1622, a text that explores nature and the arts by making an inventory of features related to gardens, wild fields, and decorative and medicinal plants.The following chapter, "La trasgressione" (Transgression), is mostly dedicated to Pona's major work.It was in 1625 that La Lucerna di Eureta Misoscolo came to life, a work considered by some to be the first modern novel.Its sources and models must be sought among both seventeenth-century authors, such as Nicolò Franco, and classical ones, such as Lucano.Its motif is the reincarnation of a soul throughout forty-seven different bodies, human and not, until reaching the ultimate stage of a lucerna, an oil-lamp.The innovative plot develops in