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Meeting ID: 941 0836 7656 Passcode: 375282
Moderated by Jo Ann Cavallo, Department of Italian, Columbia University
Francesca Gambino (University of Padua, Italy)
RIALFrI: the Digital Repertory of Medieval Franco-Italian Literature
Franco-Italian is a hybrid literary language used to compose chivalric literature in Northern Italy between
the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. The first objective of RIALFrI (http://www.rialfri.eu), a project
directed by Francesca Gambino at the University of Padua, was to create a database that would make all
available medieval Franco-Italian texts widely accessible. Professor Gambino will discuss both the unique
characteristics of Franco-Italian chivalric literature and the development of the RIALFrI database.
Francesca Gambino is Associate Professor of Romance Philology in the Department of Linguistic and Literary
Studies at the University of Padua. In her research she has dealt with medieval texts and manuscripts in
Provençal, French, Italian, Venetian and Franco-Italian (see the database www.rialfri.eu and the Dictionary of
Franco-Italian). She co-edits the online journal Francigena (https://www.francigena-
unipd.com/index.php/francigena), which is joined by the monographic series Quaderni di Francigena.
Cecilia Marchetti (University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy)
Natural Imagery and Artificial Gardens in the Romance Epics of Boiardo and Ariosto
Based on the outcomes of research performed by archaeobotanists, Cecilia Marchetti proposes a novel
approach that utilizes DALL·E, a cutting-edge artificial intelligence model created by OpenAI, to
interpret the data and archaeological evidence at hand and to generate coherent and relevant visual images
from textual descriptions. In particular, she uses this new synesthetic approach to highlight the
relationship and contamination between reality and fiction in the romance epics of Boiardo and Ariosto.
Cecilia Marchetti is currently a PhD student in Humanities at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia and
has spent a period at Brown University under the guidance of Professor Massimo Riva. Her main areas of
study include the archetype of the garden and the influence of herbal texts in literature. She is developing with
artificial intelligence an innovative method to recreate the gardens described in literary works, thus allowing a
new form of exploration and interaction with classic texts.
