Guido Gozzano’s “Piumadoro e Piombofino” (1909) is a text light in terms of genre (a literary fairy tale), style (six short, poetic segments, rich in repetitions and fantastic elements), and, most obviously, content (the eponymous protagonist suffers from a spell that has made her body weightless). A comparison between Gozzano’s tale and its two literary antecedents — George MacDonald‘s “The Light Princess” and Luigi Capuana’s “Piuma d’oro” — reveals a play with citations and literary models analogous to that found in Gozzano’s poetry as well as the addition of significant social reflections: Gozzano’s protagonist overcomes the hurdles of a difficult age (embodied in the tasks of the Fairy of Adolescence); she saves the man she loves rather than the other way around; she starts out at the lowest social rank and becomes, in the end, a queen.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Mazzoni, C., (2025), "Of Golden Feathers and Light Reading: Guido Gozzano's "Piumadoro e Piombofino"", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

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1. Quaderni d'italianistica

Original publication: Mazzoni, Cristina. "Of Golden Feathers and Light Reading: Guido Gozzano's "Piumadoro e Piombofino"." Quaderni d'italianistica 29 (1): 2009. 105-124. DOI: 10.33137/q.i..v29i1.8495. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Quaderni d'italianistica. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Quaderni d'italianistica under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.