Lingua latina su labbra americane: il dialogo cinematografico di "Quo Vadis" hollywoodiano

The dialogue in the historical films is often the weakest component of the presumed ‘authenticity’ in the recreating the vision of the past they usually aspire to. However, its artificiality is particularly evident in the productions about ancient worlds, because the historical characters typically speak in a language which has nothing to do with the reality presented on the screen. Such is a situation of Quo Vadis (1951), where the Ancient Romans communicate using modern English. This paper analyses several stylistic strategies used by the screenwriters of Quo Vadis in order to create a dialogue compatible with the Imperial Rome in the time of Nero, but at the same time functional to the film’s ideological message. Special attention is paid, above all, to the way the script deals with the forms of address and with military/ honorific titles, as these are usually the most important and evident signals of the ‘historicity’ in the film dialogues. Another important point examined in the paper is the relation between the cinematographic dialogue and the dialogue in Sienkiewicz’s novel, from which Quo Vadis has been adapted. While the original literary work has been written in Polish, there are evident traces of Sienkiewicz’s style in the film dialogue, filtred through Jeremiah Curtin’s translation as they may be. Curiously such influence regards only some characters, most notably Petronius and the emperor Nero.