"Al pari delle cento novelle di Messer Giovanni": la narrativa cinese in Italia alla fine del diciannovesimo secolo

"On a Par with the Hundred Stories of Master Giovanni»: Chinese Fiction in Italy at the End of the 19th Century" What was the role that the newborn Italian sinology played in spreading the knowledge of Chinese literature in Italy during the second half of the 19th century? What were the criteria for choosing the works to be translated? This paper tries to answer such questions by analyzing what choices were made by early Italian sinologists (C. Puini, A. Andreozzi, L. Nocentini) in translating Chinese fiction into Italian. Furthermore the paper intends to contribute by interpreting the relationships between Italian and European sinologists in order to better understand through what kind of networks Chinese literary books circulated around Europe at the time. Its aim is also to find out whether the Italian sinology of the time offered an original contribution by just translating texts formerly unavailable to Western culture or simply re-proposed what had been previously translated into other European languages.