This paper explores the highly gendered role of chastity (pudicitia) in the work of the Roman historian, Titus Livius. Livy, who lived from around 64 B.C.E to 12 C.E., composed a monumental work, the Ab Urbe Condita, which traced Rome's history from its mythic beginnings to 9 B.C.E. While only a fraction of the work remains, the Ab Urbe Condita provides insight into how one writer viewed Roman expansion and how he used the framework of gender to give shape to his vision of Rome's history.

The writer Italo Calvino and the architect Aldo Rossi were among the most prominent intellectual stars to emerge from Italy onto the international scene in the post-1968 period. Although there is no concrete evidence that the two men knew each other's work, or that they thought of themselves as part of the 'postmodernist' movement of those years, their respective career trajectories seem to parallel one another in sometimes striking ways. More importantly, Calvino and Rossi were erudite and voracious readers who shared a very wide-ranging set of literary and cultural references, as becomes apparent when the dense textual network of the Lezioni americane is mapped onto that of Rossi's notebooks (now known as the Quaderni azzurri), in which the architect recorded many of his readings as well as his reflections on the latter. This essay focuses principally on texts left unpublished by Calvino and Rossi while alive (and still not translated into English today), namely the unfinished lecture "Cominciare e finire"—drafted as part of the Norton series but eventually put aside by the author—and the aforementioned Quaderni azzurri. What emerges from the juxtaposition of these works is the central importance of theatrical texts, spaces, performances, and ultimately the concept of theater itself, in Calvino's and Rossi's respective cultural projects. For the former, theaters are a concrete "image of the ideal space in which stories take shape" (L/A 744), and thus may serve  as a synecdoche for all literary story-telling. For the latter, who designed and built a number of theaters over the course of his career, architecture is at its best when it concerned not with function but with making itself available ("disponibile") to the telling of the human story. This is never more the case than in the built environment of the theater, which is the desideratum of architecture—to become the place where stories with transformative power may take place—pushed to the extreme degree of what Rossi calls "pure availability" ("la disponibilità pura"). Both writer and architect not only acknowledge the cultural prestige of the theater, even in the media-saturated and dispersive era of late capitalism, but envision it as a place of unique imaginative freedom within the system of representation at the end of the millennium.

In three seventeenth-century comedies by the Italian playwright, poet, actor and capocomico Giovan Battista Andreini (1576-1654), the Mediterranean Sea plays an ambiguous role, simultaneously separating and connecting families, peoples, cultures, and empires that are scattered around its shores. In these plays the Mediterranean cannot be thought of in geographical terms—i.e. as an ensemble of bodies of water—but rather as a scene of interaction, a stage upon which distance and difference are affirmed or overcome through dialogue, sometimes with surprising results. Embodied above all in the themes of piracy and slavery, on the one hand, and in the figure of the renegade, on the other, the function of the Mediterranean in La turca (1611), Lo schiavetto (1612), and La sultana (1622) is the subject of this essay.

In the course of its existence, California Italian Studies has published essays by living Italian philosophers who were luminaries in the field, including Umberto Eco and Franco Cassano (now both deceased). Somehow, however, the pages of this journal never until now have hosted any contribution by Gianni Vattimo, the great Italian philosopher who passed away in September 2023 at age 87. Vattimo was a beloved teacher, a mentor, and a friend to several of the founding members of CIS, myself included, so it seems particularly appropriate for us to offer a posthumous homage to him in this open-theme issue of volume 13. I will offer just a few personal reminiscences here, as both Maurizio Ferraris and Simonetta Moro address in their respective essays the core tenets of Vattimo’s philosophy. Vattimo’s brief 1985 essay on myth and truth is included here because it so succinctly summarizes and illustrates the strand of his work for which he is most remembered today, namely il pensiero debole or “weak thought.”