Il nome in fine. Strategie onomastiche pascoliane (e carducciane)

Abstract

In many of Pascoli’s poems, both in Italian and Latin, the protagonist’s name (usually an historical personage), is revealed only in the end, at the last line (see A Ciapin, Crepereia Tryphaena, Pomposia, Solitudo, and even the talk Un poeta di lingua morta). In particular the name of Luigi Lucheni (who stabbed to death Elisabeth of Bavaria, Empress of Austria, in 1898), appears as the last word in the ode Nel carcere di Ginevra. In the conclusion of this poem, pity is offered to the murderer, in opposition to Carducci’s ode Miramar, which closes on the name of Maximilian of Hapsburg, killed in Mexico in 1867, but as a homage to the victim instead.