leadership of Giovanni Papini by Rocco Carabba's publishing business. The series title was "Cultura dell’anima" (loosely, "Culture of the spirit"). He also worked for a year during 1923/24 as a replacement teacher at the "Regina Maria Adelaide" teacher training institute in Aosta. It was on the basis of this that in 1924 he won a national competition for the teaching of Italian and History. Ferrara and Berta Towards the end of 1924 he relocated to Ferrara (roughly equidistant between Bologna and Padua) where for some years he taught "literary subjects" - principally Italian and History - in various secondary schools. In addition, between September 1925 and December 1936 he taught at the Vincenzo Monti Technical College. It was while working as a teacher in Emilia-Romagna that he came to know Berta Ghedini, who was also working as a teacher in the city. The two of them married in July 1929. The marriage, which was childless, ended with the early death of Berta in 1937. Switch to the universities sector In 1930 Sapégno obtained a Libera docenza qualification, which under the Italian system permitted him to teach at a university level while not being a full-time member of a university. Between 1932 and 1936 he taught courses in Italian Literature on a free-lance basis at the nearby University of Padua. Between 1930 and 1936 he also at some stage worked on a similar basis at the venerable University of Bologna. Throughout this period he was also building his profile among Italian intellectuals with regular scholarly contributions to specialist journals such as "Archivum Romanicum", "Leonardo", "La Nuova Italia", "Pegaso" and "Civiltà Moderna". His published contributions included a succession of reviews on the works of Montale, Saba, Sbarbaro, Tecchi, Pavolini and Govoni. In terms of establishing his reputation within the academic community, the volume "Il Trecento" ("The fourteenth century"), written in 1933 and published in 1934, was probably more important than any of those learned literary reviews on the output of contemporary literati, however. The book was published by Valardi in Milan as part of the "Storia letteraria d’Italia" ("History of Italian Literature") series, replacing an earlier volume on the topic which had appeared in 1902. The replacement from Natalino Sapégno was well received by scholars: thanks, in particular, to a favourable review published in 1934 by Giulio Bertoni of the "Société de linguistique romane", won for its author one of the (four)