Presentation by Jo Ann Cavallo
Being enamored of Boiardos knights for over fifteen years, I joyfully accepted the invitation of Maestro Onofrio Sanicola to take part in this pairing of academic and popular culture, with the goal of discovering together the personality and the literary opus of Matteo Maria Boiardo.
How far weve come since 1969 when Carlo Dionisotti, in the context of a Scandianese conference dedicated to Boiardo, declared that "it would be difficult to find another of our poets, so genuine, as he seems to us today, so wholesome, simple and vigorous, who has been so harmed by the ignorance and the disregard, the presumptuousness and the insolence, of his presumed readers and critics, so openly and for such a long period of time"!
In recent decades we have seen, together with the 1994 conferences in honor of the five-hundred year anniversary of Boiardos death, with their published proceedings, a veritable explosion of volumes of criticism, essays, important new editions, the first complete translations into English of his major works, not to mention a new attention in the area of the performing arts. In the wake of all this activity, albeit independently from it, we can add at last the discovery and identification of the mortal remains of this great Italian poet.
While it is possible therefore to speak of a rediscovery of Boiardo on various levels, it is fitting to also remember the two traditions of popular theater that have always maintained a familiarity with him: the Tuscan-Emilian epic Maggio, whose traditional repertoire includes some plays based on the Orlando Innamorato along with the many scripts based on Ariostos continuation, the Orlando Furioso; and the Sicilian Opera dei Pupi, which more than any other cultural expression has a long-lived proximity to Boiardo. Suffice it to recall that the entire Orlando Innamorato was included in Giusto Lo Dico's Storia dei Paladini di Francia (1858-60), the text that served for over a century as the basic text in Sicilian puppet theater repertory. And thus it is not surprising that it was a Sicilian puppeteer who came up with the idea of this event dedicated to Boiardo.
An innovation with respect to the Pasqua Rosada of this year is the participation of scholars from European and American universities. In this context, the idea is not to adopt the model of a strictly academic conference in which the many speakers deal with a specific argument for a public of experts in the field, but rather to bring together a number of scholars who have seen in a new light an aspect of Boiardos opus, in order to construct a more complete image of his literary personality: epic poet, lyric poet, historian and translator of classical works.
The occasion that has brought us to dedicate this edition of the Pasqua Rosada to Matteo Maria Boiardo is the discovery of the mortal remains of the poet, an event envisioned and promoted by the journalist Silvano Vinceti and brought to fruition by the Colonel Luciano Garofano of the Scientific Investigatory Division of the Governmental Police of Parma, who, to our delight, will both participate in our cultural project.
Since the Middle Ages, chivalric stories have annulled categories of class; Orlando and company were the protagonists of the public squares and the court. Story-tellers, singers, imitators, and great poets followed each others in reinventing the grand medieval knights for a public that in some ways saw in themselves these same ideals. It was a phenomenon that ignored not only class barriers, but also boundaries of time, of language, and of state, with works in all the European languages, from Franco-Venetian to Catalan. And in this chivalric spirit our Pasqua Rosada likewise aims to cancel barriers, bringing together puppet theater and classical theater, popular and elite culture, the world of academia and the world of the performing arts, Northern and Southern Italy, not to mention Italy and the United States.
Jo Ann Cavallo
Associate Professor of Italian
Columbia University
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