The Italian Qur’an: A Preliminary Analysis of the Panzeri Translation (1882)

Abstract

This article examines the first complete Italian translation of the Qur’an published after the declaration of national unification: the 1882 Milan edition by the publisher Giovanni Panzeri. Although presented as a direct translation from Arabic, the text is shown, through comparative analysis, to be a near-verbatim rendering of the French version by Claude-Étienne Savary, itself heavily influenced by Ludovico Marracci’s earlier Latin work. Far from being a neutral linguistic exercise, the translation emerges as a cultural product shaped by popularizing aims, comparative religious framing, and orientalist conceptual frameworks. By closely analyzing both textual and paratextual elements, the article reconstructs the strategies through which the Qur’an was made accessible to a general, non-specialist Italian readership. This process unfolded within a historical context marked by the early stages of Italian colonial ambition. Despite its lack of philological rigor, the Panzeri translation constitutes a valuable source for understanding how Islam was received and mediated in late nineteenth-century Italy. The analysis proposed here invites a critical reassessment of the edition as a meaningful expression of the intersection between popular publishing, Orientalist discourse, and cultural representations in late nineteenth-century Italy.