It has been recently published the volume Ti do la mia parola. Sette saggi sul tradimento, edited by Alessandro Benassi and Serena Pezzini, with an introduction by Paolo Godani (Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2017).

The book is a collection of essays pivoted on the theme of betrayal and its representation in Italian literature, art, and cinema. Plus, it gathers a group of brilliant scholars and good friends, and the overall result is of outstanding quality, also thanks to the clever design by Serena Pezzini and Alessandro Benassi.

Illustration of the X canto of Ariosto’s Orlando furioso in the Varisco edition, Venice 1568.

I published here an essay titled Le conseguenze dell’amore. Donne furiose tra Ariosto e Tasso. I analyse the representation of Olimpia in Ariosto’s Orlando furioso; and of Armida in Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, highlighting how both the characters re-enact the ancient and long-standing motive of the “abandoned woman”. I argue that within this tradition the theme of betrayal is a device that triggers the creation of particular textual sequences in which are represented “emotional performances”. These verbal representation of emotions evoke a range of images that cross art history and convey recurring iconographic patterns, establishing the emotional visual language that Aby Warburg tried to map through the concept of pathos formula.