This chapter describes the literary milieu of nineteenth-century Italy and considers the influence of a range of different literary schools on Puccini’s artistic practice. It endeavours to understand exactly what is meant by operatic verismo – a contested term – and to trace the term’s relationship to literary verismo. Some of the key Italian literary movements of the nineteenth century, such as neo-classicism, had little impact on Puccini’s oeuvre; others were far more influential, such as the Scapigliatura movement, which appeared in northern Italy in the 1860s. Key figures involved in this movement were connected with the circles in which Puccini moved. The literary verismo movement – centred on the Italian south – is discussed in detail and direct connections are drawn between this movement and Puccini’s style in works such as Il tabarro. The author also traces the relevance for a consideration of Puccini’s oeuvre with such movements as decadentism, crepuscolarismo, hermeticism, modernism, and futurism.

Did the Byzantines have access to any Sappho that we do not? What interaction can we trace by them with the fragments that they did know? Chapter 23 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho examines an often neglected aspect of this ancient author’s reception.

Illustrated magazines provided some of the main vehicles for expressing ideas of modernity and modernism in the Brazilian context. The chapter focuses on three pioneering art nouveau magazines of the early 1900s (Atheneida, Kósmos, Renascença) and their mass-circulation successors (O Malho, Fon-Fon!, Careta, Para Todos) over the 1910s. The experimental work produced in the arena of design and photography by artists K. Lixto and J. Carlos, among others, is proof that an alternative version of modernism was already in place in Rio de Janeiro long before the modernist movement of 1922, focused not on fine art but mainly on graphic art and photography. By examining the complex linkages between the magazines and their personnel, the chapter demonstrates that this alternate modernism was a self-conscious and deliberate movement. The writings of leading art critic Gonzaga Duque provide the theoretical underpinnings that tie together the efforts of a broad group of practitioners. Interestingly, their vision of modern art weds the symbolist decadentism of Rubén Darío’s modernismo with a political outlook that ranges from anarchism to socialism and communism.