RESEARCH

I teach and write in the areas of Italian and Romance Studies, with a focus on the Medieval and Renaissance periods. I have always been fascinated by the ways in which the act of transcribing (both with words and in images) ends up preserving the memory of complex cultural processes, involving various disciplines, different cultural traditions and multiple epistemological transitions. And this, even while denying or betraying that memory: so it is up to us to listen deeply, question everything and meet the Other on their, more than our, own terms.
This open-ended interest for processes and meanings that lie hidden in the deep layers of what we call culture has led me over the years in many different directions, and if at times I wonder what these paths may well have in common, at other times the deep-seated connections between them reveal themselves as obvious, yet always also mysterious and uncharted.
As a result, I always end up feeling more grateful for what I was offered to discover, than proud of what I might have accomplished. As the journey keeps unfolding, more vistas open and the “accomplishments” become necessary tasks, simple signposts. Yet the widening of the horizon always manifests as circular: over time and space, traveling farther is the only way of really coming home.

My research interests gather around two major ways of approaching the world and our human partaking of it, which are in fact two manifestations of the same worldview:

Gnosis: that is to say, knowledge as experience rather than axioms, or disembodied theories. Over time, I have explored this approach to life, and shared it with my students and readers, especially in dialogue with:

  • Dante Alighieri and his visionary writings, most notably the Vita Nuova and the Commedia
  • C. G. Jung and his analytical psychology, from the Collected Works to the Red Book
  • Henry Corbin, his phenomenological hermeneutics and the imaginal world as the dimension of the sacred

Wildness: that is to say, the indomitable interconnectedness of all living things and therefore also the coming together of ecology, culture and spirituality. This has led me to recognize and retrace the deeply feminine aspects of a way of being in the world that our dominant culture has labeled and keeps labeling, alternatively, as “archaic”, “esoteric”, “heretic”, “unscientific” while at all times endeavouring to disparage or suppress it. I follow the rhizomatic manifestations of wildness in:

  • myth, symbol, story as means of initiation and individuation
  • the feminine and/as the Beloved: anima, the goddess, mind
  • Hermeticism and gnostic traditions from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Servet, Montaigne)
  • alchemy and falconry as arts of inner transmutation
  • the indigenous roots of Europe, in dialogue with the work of today’s Indigenous Peoples
  • ancestral/inner journeys and journeys to the beyond, the land of the Dead
  • Sacred Spaces and Mandalas, East and West

the persecution of spiritual dissent (from Gnostics to Cathars, Waldensians and antitrinitarians; poets, prophets and visionaries; the medieval legacies of shamanic traditions)

CURRENT RESEARCH PROJECTS

  • «Archetypal Dante, Visionary Jung»: through a series of papers presented at the Jung Society of Vancouver and in other academic venues, I have engaged in the exploration of the ways in which Dante and Jung partake of a worldview. Rather than solely investigate Dante’s influence on Jung (which is in itself both undeniable and significant) I explore their interconnectedness by focusing on a number of “archetypal motifs and events” in their respective works.
  • «Sacred Weavings, Inner Journeys»: this project is in its inception stage. Weaving as a primary act of life, as feminine archetype, as symbol, as myth, as universal and most human form of art-making.

And if this sounds excessive, here is a disclaimer, which I am gratefully, and humbly, borrowing from someone for whose work I have the deepest of respect and admiration:
«I am now and then accused of dilettantism (or worse) for professing an equal interest in the cultures of precolonial North America, early Greece, folao China, and the European Renaissance — as if only a profound misunderstanding or a violent act of will could bring together domains with so little in common. I am not the first person so accused, nor probably the last, but it seems to me the accusation was answered fully and well by Lévi-Strauss in 1956: […] “At the beginning of the Renaissance, the human universe [as known to Europeans] was circumscribed by the limits of the Mediterranean basin … but it was already known that no fragment of humanity can hope to comprehend itself except through reference to all others.”» (Robert Bringhurst, Everywhere Being is Dancing, 85-86)