Michele Ginotta (Barge 1883 – 1944) was a literary critic, poet, and teacher, as well as a decorated war veteran (IJsewijn 1961: 173; Mola 2001: 206). He studied under Giovanni Pascoli, whose poetry he studied (Ginotta 1926), and completed his thesis on the dialect of his native Barge, a town in the Piedmont region, in 1909 (Ginotta 1912). Ginotta wrote poetry in both Latin and Italian. He translated Italian works into Latin, including those of Giosuè Carducci (Ginotta 1934; Ginotta 1948; Ginotta 2004). He also contributed Latin compositions to the journal Alma Roma. Ginotta’s most political poem, Dux, composed in Sapphic stanzas, might have been intended for the poetry competition organised by the Fascist Teachers’ Federation under the same name, won by Luigi Illuminati with a triptych also titled Dux (D’Andrea 2023). He also submitted his poem to the Certamen Poeticum Hoeufftianum in 1930 and later published it, with slight modifications, in his poetry collection Poesis specimina (Ginotta 1934: 2–4). In honour of Ginotta, the municipal library of Barge bears his name, and a study circle, Cenacolo studi Michele Ginotta, was established there in 2003 to organise events and publish books related to music and poetry.

Bibliography

Latin texts

Ginotta, Michele. 1930. ‘DUX’. Typoscript. Haarlem, Noord-Hollands Archief, 64. 833, nr. 34.

———. 1934. Poesis specimina. Turin: Chiantore.

———. 1948. Favole latine e poesie italiane. Edited by Maria Ginotta and Margherita Ginotta. Moretta (Cuneo): Scamo di S. Calandri.

———. 2004 [1938]. Hymnus in Bargias. Edited by Margherita Marconetto, Marino Boaglio, and Mauro Comba. Barge: Cenacolo studi Michele Ginotta.

Other works

Ginotta, Michele. 1912. Il dialetto di Barge: Parte I. Fonologia. Bologna: Tip. Mareggiani.

———. 1926. Gli affetti familiari nella poesia di Giovanni Pascoli. Saluzzo: Tip. Saluzzese Maccagno, Craveri & C.

Secondary sources

Binnebeke, Xavier van. 2020. ‘Hoeufft’s Legacy: Neo-Latin Poetry in the Archive of the Certamen Poeticum Hoeufftianum (1923-1943)’. In Studies in the Latin Literature and Epigraphy of Italian Fascism, edited by Han Lamers, Bettina Reitz-Joosse, and Valerio Sanzotta, 245–325. Supplementa Humanistica Lovaniensia 46. Leuven: Leuven University Press.

D’Andrea, Paola. 2024. ‘Echoes of the Vates Reverberating: A New Reading of Luigi Illuminati’s Dux in the Context of the Eponymous Poetic Competition (1929–1930)’. In Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Lovaniensis: Proceedings of the Eighteenth International Congress of Neo-Latin Studies (Leuven 2022), edited by Florian Schaffenrath and Dirk Sacré, 283–95. Leiden: Brill.

IJsewijn-Jacobs, J. 1961. ‘Conspectus poetarum Latinorum saeculi vicesimi’. Euphrosyne 3: 149–190.

Mola, Aldo Alessandro. 2001. Saluzzo: un’antica capitale. Rome: Newton & Compton.

Han Lamers & Erlend Myklebust