Homeric scholarship in Italian

Greek Homeric Greek and Early Greek Poetry
1

I was somewhat surprised to discover that there’s quite an ample selection of rather recent Homeric bibliography in Italian. I was aware that the Oxford Odyssey commentary originally appeared in Italian, but otherwise the English and German literature I’ve read almost completely ignores what has been written in Italian. Here are some works (commentaries) I was able to find quite quickly on amazon.it. Are these Italian commentaries just too pedestrian to be considered serious scholarship worth citing, or is it simply that no one reads Italian? It would be sort of understandable if these books were just unambitious schoolbooks, but I wonder.

This is just a random selection of the books I run into. I found it surprising that googling these names gave me little information.

I know almost no Italian, but it might be a funny idea to learn some along my Homeric studies. (The method has worked to some extent with German!). But I have no idea if any of these is worth anything.

Mario Zambarbieri: L’Odissea com’è. Lettura critica: 1 & 2 (favorably reviewed in Classical review)
M. Giordano & G. Cerri: Iliade. Libro I. La peste-L’ira.
Mario Marzi. A number of commentaries on different books of the Odyssey
Franco Robechi: Odissea. Libro 17
Antonio Sestili: Odissea. Libro VI
Manuela Padovan: Odissea XIX. Sotto mentite spoglie

2

I can’t speak to the specific texts you list, but a lot of first-rate classical scholarship has been coming out of Italy for many years–perhaps more so than France. The Scuola Normale di Pisa in particular is a hotbed of serious classical scholarship, but other Italian institutions are highly respected, too.

3

I did find a sample of Zambarbieri’s book, the first item on the list. Although my Italian relies heavily on Google translate, it does look like a work of some importance. It’s as if this had been written in a parallel universe, so conspicuously absent it is (with other commentaries in Italian) from all bibliographies I cared to check.

http://www.lededizioni.com/lededizioniallegati/zambarbieri.pdf

As for Homeric studies in French, I suspect that their relative absence from bibliographies is due them not being so good. There are some exceptions, of course.