From the editor.

This issue of Italica opens with a eulogy honoring the life of Pino Fasano, Professor at the University of Rome "La Sapienza" who died in Rome during the summer 2006. Professor Fasano, a well known scholar of nineteenth-century Italian literature, had long been working on an essay on Manzoni, which he planned on submitting to Italica. As a scholar of Manzoni myself, I was anxiously waiting the arrival of Fasano's piece, although I knew that his health was, sadly, deteriorating. Regretfully, his illness was one battle that he could not win and his energy in the latter months of his life was such that he was unable to complete the article. While Fasano's last piece will not appear in Italica, it is a privilege to print a tribute in Pino Fasano's honor, by Remo Ceserani.

This issue of the journal is a very full one. It hosts a series of essays that range from Petrarch to the nineteenth-century, including two comparative articles devoted, respectively, to the presence of the Greco-Roman classics in modern literature, and an interdisciplinary interpretation of the transposition of Othello into a libretto/opera and then into a film of the opera. Some of the articles are longer than our normal format, because both the readers and I felt that their scholarly strength and integrity would have been compromised if we had enforced the usual desired length. We also publish two review articles focused on major works devoted to nineteenth-century authors. It is a professional pleasure and duty for Italica, whenever there is a series of publications on a major subject/theme/author, to ask the best specialists in the field to write detailed critical discussions of the works involved. We hope these and all other reviews will prove to be useful and stimulating for our colleagues.

In the "Notes and Discussion" section, we include an article by Paolo Cherchi on the review as a (dying) scholarly genre. We are very grateful to Professor Cherchi for his witty and learned discussion on this topic, and we hope that one or more of our readers will feel free and motivated to reply to or to comment on what Dr. Cherchi has eloquently expressed in his piece. In the section devoted to "Creative Writings," we are very pleased to host an unpublished collection of poetry by Paolo Valesio, whose fictional works have appeared in many prestigious journals and reviews, and who has been published by prestigious presses. We thank him for having chosen Italica as his venue of publication. We remind our readers that this section, like every other, is subjected to specialist readers whose approval is needed in order to be published.

Finally, I would like to thank my associate editors for their invaluable contribution to each issue of the journal, each of the specialist readers who work around the clock to send their critical assessments to me in a timely fashion, my production editor Deborah Starewich, and Andrea Scapolo, my hard working and loyal research assistant at Indiana University.