Giovanni Maver e gli inizi della serbo-croatistica italiana

Abstract

This article is centered on the figure of the Dalmatian Giovanni Maver, who was the first university professor of Slavic Studies in Italy. He was appointed as Head of the Chair of Slavic Philology at the University of Padua in 1921 and was a founding father of the newly established academic discipline of Slavic Studies in Italy. Special attention is here devoted to his writings on Serbo-Croatian language and literature, a thread of his research which has been less investigated than his Polish studies. After graduating from Vienna University, where he majored in romance philology, Maver began his scholarly career in Slavic studies by publishing essays on the influence of Italian on Croatian, as well as on the relationship between Italian and Croatian literatures, and on some Croatian authors such as Ivo Vojnovic e Ivo Andric. Read today, Maver’s writings appear extremely alive and significant, for they identify issues and questions that are still much debated in the contemporary critical field ofSerbo-Croatian studies.