L’“approccio globale” cinquant’anni dopo

Francesco Della Corte (1913-1991), Professor of Latin Literature at the University of Genoa for almost forty years, took a constant and keen interest in the teaching of Latin, both at university and at school: some of his textbooks have been reprinted and often updated for thirty years. A text of particular methodological importance is the essay L’approccio globale con i classici, published in 1978. Della Corte proposed what he called a “holistic” perspective to the study of the so-called “classical” languages, a concept that recalls the approach of Boeckh and, in inguistics, that of Othmar Spann. Although Della Corte was still bound to a classicist conception, his openness to medieval Latin and the clear overcoming of the “colonialist model”, clearly identified in this essay, written almost half a century ago, are strong intuitions that are still constitutive for a serious reflection on the teaching of Latin.