Le storie sulla morte di Ippolito Nievo: tra fatti, cospirazione e finzione

Abstract

The article aims to describe the stories about Ippolito Nievo’s death, as depicted in various genres of texts from the 1960s to the present. These texts exhibit a combination of essayistic and narrative elements, incorporating both factual information and the authors’ imaginative interpretations. The popularity of the topic is closely tied to the prevalence of conspiracy theories, which have gained significant traction in recent decades. Furthermore, it should probably be placed within the Risorgimento revisionism current that radicalized in the seventies of the last century and represents a broader trend of revising official historical accounts. Among the texts identified, four were selected for an in-depth analysis both from the point of view of the content and from the point of view of the authors’ approach and their formal choices. These texts do not lend themselves to a simple classification of the literary genre, falling somewhere along the continuum between a narrative essay and a novel.