From the editor.

At the end of the current year, I will complete my tenth year as editor of Italica. In editing ten volumes of the journal, I incurred numerous debts. First, I would like to express my gratitude to my associates Paolo Giordano, Louis Kibler, Michael Lettieri, and Anthony Julian Tamburri for their constant support, expert advice, and effective help along the way. Their deep commitment to the enterprise merits special acknowledgment. The submissions accepted for publication were reviewed through the cooperative efforts of the members of the editorial board and other specialized readers. It is a great pleasure to thank these scholars who gave generously of their time and considerable knowledge. Also, I am most grateful to Deborah S. Starewich and Gina Patacca for their continued assistance and untiring work in preparing the issues for publication. Thanks to them and the many friends at A-R Editions, I was able to survive the taxing and often tedious production processes. Special recognition must go to the College of Humanities and the Department of French and Italian of The Ohio State University for having provided their full and generous support in the form of clerical help, mailing, copying, and office space during my tenure as editor. Finally, it has been said that the quality of a periodical depends by necessity on its contributors. I wish to express my appreciation to all the authors of articles and reviewers whose contributions enabled us to maintain the high scholarly and intellectual standards that readers all over the world have come associate with Italica now in its eightieth year of continued publication.

Personally, I am honored to have had the privilege to work with so many talented and worthy fellow Italianists, and to have served the AATI and the academic community at large as editor of Italica. Any new editor of the a professional journal such as ours has to proceed by looking to the future while at the same time reaching back to the best of its tradition in a constant effort to innovate. I have tried to apply the editorial policies introduced by the 1982 revised Constitution by appointing associate editors charged with specific responsibilities (reviews, pedagogy, bibliography). I also introduced the practice of term appointments for members of the editorial board in order to rotate the most qualified readers available. Institutional journals require a certain eclecticism of the type of materials they can publish. As the official journal of the AATI, Italica must reflect an open editorial policy that should not exclude areas of interests and approaches to scholarship and teaching common to the membership nor should it risk alienating its readers by not including materials of relevance to some of them. In my opinion, the editor of Italica cannot lose sight of its primary mission, namely the promotion and improvement of the teaching of Italian language and culture. This service commitment has been my major concern and guiding principle during my tenure as editor of our journal.