Please join us to learn about the research from  Nicola Guida & Mattia Italiano

Mattia Italiano is a Ph.D student in Italian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is interested in Gender and Sexuality studies in English and Italian Renaissance, with particular focus on the ways Italian literary tradition contributed to the creation of a homoerotic narrative in the poems of Barnfield, Shakespeare, Michelangelo and other poets from the Early Modern period.

Title: To Love Without Love: Isabella Morra and Lovesickness as Lack

Although Isabella Morra was born and raised in a flourishing literary environment, in which love poetry dominated the cultural scene, she remained almost entirely detached from it. This distance from the literature of her time was not, of course, voluntary, but imposed by a family that seemed capable only of inflicting pain. As a result of the departure of her father and the jealousy of her brothers, Isabella found herself confined to a castle in the town of Favale (now Valsinni), where she would remain until her premature death at the hands of her own brothers. Isabella’s inability to live in contact with the world also prevented her from experiencing meaningful interpersonal relationships, such as friendships or romantic bonds, instilling in her a lasting sense of solitude. The only solace for her tears was the composition of poetry, preserved in the form of sonnets and songs that have reached us only after centuries of near-total obscurity. The suffering conveyed in these poems resembles the lovesickness so often expressed during the Renaissance; however, in her case, it does not stem from the rejection of a beloved, but rather from a longing for love itself— an experience that seems foreign to her. The aim of this essay is to analyze Isabella Morra’s poetry in order to investigate how the absence of marital love, familial care, and public recognition gave rise to this life-long affliction.

Nicola Guida is a Ph.D. student in Italian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His work explores the intersection between Italian and English/American traditions in horror and occult from the Medieval and Early Modern periods to contemporary literature. His research interests also include Gothicism, Post and Transhumanism, and Gender and Sexuality Studies.

Title: The Monstrous Order:Repression and Abjection in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, o le 120 giornate di Sodoma is a radical meditation on gender, sexuality, and power under modern regimes of control. While the film is set in the Fascist Republic of Salò (1943–45), I argue that its historical framework works as a defensive exoskeleton through which Pasolini critiques the biopolitical logic of 1970s Italian neocapitalism. By weaving together psychoanalytic theory and feminist philosophy—particularly Sigmund Freud’s account of repression, Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection, with Michel Foucault’s concept of the implantation of sexuality—I explore how the film stages sexuality not as liberation, but as the primary terrain of domination through categories of the horror.

In Salò, desire is meticulously bureaucratized within a perfectly rational system. This order does not merely depict historical Fascism; rather, it allegorizes a modern apparatus that produces and standardizes sexual subjectivities under the guise of tolerance. The ritualized violence present in the movie reveals what Freud describes as the return of the repressed, while the infamous scenes of coprophagia and torture confront the viewer with what Kristeva calls the abject—the collapse of bodily and symbolic boundaries. Horror, therefore, emerges not from chaos, but from the seamless integration of repression and abjection into a coherent administrative structure.

Through its cold, abstract aesthetic, Salò marks Pasolini’s farewell to the romanticized body of his earlier work, exposing instead the commodified, colonized body of consumer capitalism. The film ultimately suggests that modern power no longer represses sexuality outright; it implants and organizes it. In doing so, Salò compels us to confront the unsettling possibility that the monstrous order it depicts through sex is not an aberration of the past, but the hidden logic of our present.