Between Ancient Greek, Italian and L2

Introducing Homer through the contrastive translation

Abstract

This paper is based on a historical and cultural contextualisation of the debate on the renewal of the teaching of Ancient Greek in Italian high schools. It puts forward a didactic proposal to introduce students in the Italian classical high school to the study of archaic Greek epics, and Homer in particular. The proposal is grounded in the in-between spaces offered by the guidelines of the Italian Ministry of Education, combining the study of civilisation and multilingual contrastive translation as a useful resource for dealing with three passages of the first book of the Iliad (Il. I 17-21, 37-42, 446-74).