Originating from the fourth ‘Susan and Donald Mazzoni seminar’, held by the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures of the University of Chicago between 1999 and 2001, this book is the chronicle of an experiment (or rather a series of experiments) in translation practice as well as translation history and translation theory. The book is divided into three sections, focusing, in turn, on ‘figures’, ‘studies’ and ‘modes’. The pieces collected are all published in Italian. Included are lectures, personal testimonies, and individual as well as collective translations, all linked by a common focus on the relationship between translation and comparative literature, and by the attention paid to the dialogue between Italian and Anglophone cultures, beginning in the Renaissance.