Roberto Pazzi, ed. L'immaginario contemporaneo. Atti del Convegno letterario internazionale, Ferrara, 21-23 maggio 1999. Biblioteca dell'"Archivum Romanicum". Serie 1: Storia, Letteratura, Paleografia. 291
'The 'imaginary,' as a noun, is beginning to be seen in print in English, now that the expression is on its way to being established in Italian and French. Sebastiano Vassalli, with his wellknown lexicographical bent, comments on the rise of this neologism in one of the talks delivered during the three-day cultural festival held in Ferrara and published in this volume. He titled his paper 'Nuovi ippogrifi' (163-65), in homage to that city's greatest poet, who was also the greatest exponent of imaginative freedom. Vassalli equates the imaginary with the imagination and is upbeat about the power of the imagination, seeing its most hopeful and elevating manifestation in the capacity to invent blueprints for ever better worlds: 'Le utopie sono i nuovi dei e i nuovi ippogrifi'.... C