Calderón in 19th century Italian debates: Carducci, Graf and Martini

Abstract

When the echo of the romantic recovery of Spanish classic theater arrived to Italy, the selection proposed by Germans was accepted and Calderón was redeemed according to a partial view. In the second half of the nineteenth century, when schoolars went further the classical-romantic dispute, Calderón was studied in a less ‘ideological’ way, between returns to anti-Catholicism, historicistic approaches and new readings, as Italian Hispanism was borning. Our study considers three critical texts of this era: Goisuè Carducci’s review after witnessing a staging of La vida es sueño, in August of 1869; the essay by Arturo Graf «La vita è sogno, dramma di Pietro Calderón», published in 1878; and the article by Ferdinando Martini’s article «Nel secondo centenario di Calderón de la Barca» of 1881.