Regards croisés France-Italie

The rapport between Italy and France is historically replete with enthusiasm but also prejudice, the appeal of transalpine trends but also a refusal to accept their neighbor's customs and language. The relationship between the two countries over the centuries mirrors the hidden rivalry between them even though they share both a common religious and linguistic background and a humanistic cultural heritage. Despite this, their political, economic and social points of view divide them. The intense cultural and economic exchanges between these two countries (recounted by writers, travellers, diplomats, historians, translators, and migrants since the Middle-Age) took, and still take, the form of unconditional consensus at times while, at others, they become open hostility and claims of individual and/or national superiority. The relations between Italy and France cannot be reduced to the exchange of trends, movements and genres, or to political and diplomatic contacts. Rather, at each step, they imply a subtle yet deep and reciprocal, rethinking of our place in the world. Despite the frequency of contact between the two countries over the centuries, however, the relationship is still marked by a gulf, a gap to fill in, an irreducible divergence, which, at the same time, is the condition for the continuity and of the fecundity of the relationship between these two countries.

About the Authors
Donatella Bisconti is Maître de conférences at Blaise Pascal University of Clermont-Ferrand. She is a member of the CNRS IHRIM research centre (Institut d’Histoire des Représentations de la Modernité) UMR 5317. She collaborates with CERLIM (Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches sur la Littérature Italienne Médiévale). She has published papers on Dante, Boccaccio, and Leon Battista Alberti on poetical intertextuality and on chivalric poems of the 15th century. Moreover, her studies focus on Lorenzo de Medici’s court. Currently, her work centers on a research project concerning the language of the intellectual debate between 1450and 1478.

Daniela Fabiani is an associate professor at the Department of Humanities at the University of Macerata. She specialises in French literature of the 20th and 21st centuries - in particular novels and short fiction. Currently, her work focuses on French literature dealing with migration. Among her publications are papers on Julien Green Paul Gadenne, Jeanine Moulin, Philippe Claudel, S.Germain, Edmonde Charles-Roux, François Cheng, and I. Némirovsky