ENG 255 A LOVE ITALIAN STYLE

Italy is stereotypically a patriarchal culture with a notorious attention to love and lovers (think Casanova). From Petrarch’s love sonnets to Laura, to Dante Alighieri’s La Vita Nuovo inspired by his love for Beatrice, to the bawdy stories of Boccaccio, we will develop a picture of love and courtship in Renaissance Italy. We will compare those visions of love to depictions of love in contemporary Italian literature (e.g., Dario Fo’s The Open Couple, Leonardo Sciascia’s The Wine-Dark Sea, and the Neapolitan novels of the now-popular Elena Ferrante) and film (e.g., La Dolce Vita, Pani e Tulipani, Io Sono L'amore).