This book lays more emphasis on orality as source, as process or performance, as outcome. It looks at the primacy of the spoken language that seems to be the main common feature to these two phenomena of Italian theatrical culture.

Galvano Della Volpe was the dominant philosopher of Italian Marxism for twenty years after the Liberation. His most important book was a work of aesthetic theory - Critique of Taste. Della Volpe, proponent of a robust materialism in all his writings, was concerned to rehabilitate the inherently rationally and intellectual nature of art. Opposing both the sociological reductionism of Plekhanov or Lukacs, and the formalist irrationalism of Croce or New Criticism, Della Volpe's aim was to demonstrate that conceptual meaning is always inseparable from aesthetic effect. Whether he is discussing Pindar or Gongora, Cleanth Brooks or Roland Barthes, Goethe or Mallarme, Della Volpe is always challenging, always illuminating. Critique of Taste represents one of the major crossroads of twentieth-century aesthetics.