El teatral regreso de Celestina a Italia y las políticas culturales fascistas durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial

Abstract

The return of Celestina to Italian publishing houses during the Second World War has been examined in a series of recent research publications. These studies have not, unfortunately, described in a satisfactory manner the reasons underpinning this interest in a foreign piece; nor have they explained how it came to be one of the most regularly performed Spanish classic texts in twentieth-century Italy. The aim of this article is to settle this critical deficit, taking into account the political, cultural and theatrical contexts which enabled said return. Seen from this broader perspective, the reappearance of Celestina offers testimony to the cultural relationships between Spain and Italy in times of fascism, along with providing ways of approaching and appropriating a morally challenging text. Celestina, I argue, is a particularly revealing case study for understanding the role of classics in the construction of European identity throughout the twentieth century.