Serena Piccirillo

The project investigates Italian chivalric poems composed and published between 1532, the year of the definitive edition of the Orlando Furioso, and 1573, the moment of greatest intensity in the poetic production linked to the victory at Lepanto. This chronological span allows for a unified perspective on the development of the chivalric poem between Ariosto and Tasso, with particular attention to a wide corpus of texts that are today considered "minor" or non-canonical, but which are characterized by extraordinary productive vitality and a strong grounding in the editorial culture of the sixteenth century.
At the center of the research is the way in which these poems participate in the literary and cultural construction of the relationship between East and West, and in particular in defining Muslim otherness and the figure of the "Turk," in the context of Mediterranean and Ottoman-Christian conflict. The project analyzes the narrative, rhetorical, and figurative forms through which the chivalric poem helps shape an imaginary of the Islamic East, relating it to the political, ideological, and religious dynamics of the time.
Specific attention is given to the material and editorial dimension of the texts: the poems are considered not only as literary works, but as printed books, part of the powerful production machinery of sixteenth-century Venetian publishing.
The project therefore intertwines textual analysis, study of editorial devices, and reflection on narrative and symbolic geographies, observing the role of cities, borders, and Mediterranean spaces in configuring the conflict between Christianity and Islam, and critically questioning the applicability of contemporary anthropological categories of identity and otherness to a sixteenth-century literary corpus.