“Celestino Schiaparelli and the Poetic corpus of al-Ballanūbī”, «Rivista degli Studi Orientali» Nuova Serie, thematic issue Celestino Schiaparelli (1841-1919): his Legacy & the Oriental School of Sapienza, A. D’Ottone Rambach (ed.), XCIV/1 (2021), pp. 127-240.

This paper aims to reconstruct the intermediate recensions of al-Ballanūbī’s songbook in the Schiaparelli edition. Schiaparelli, indeed, left the Arabic text edition and the Italian translation of some poems written by the Siculo-Arab poet from Villanova among his unpublished writings. Therefore, via thorough examination of the documents preserved in the Schiaparelli archive of the Italian Institute of Oriental Studies (ISO) at the University of Rome Sapienza, this article intends to reconstruct the network of relationships that the scholar maintained with intellectuals of his time. In particular, the learned correspondence he engaged in with Nallino provides some documented evidence of a long and complex process of collation and review. Furthermore, the final section of this study is dedicated to a comparison of the Amari translation of some verses by the Siculo- Arab poet and the same lines in the Schiaparelli translation, offering a glimpse of the documen tation work and semantic choices of this brilliant Arabist.