Las relaciones parentales en los refranes españoles, sicilianos, italianos, neogriegos

Resum

In this thesis I explain the phases and results of a research project aimed at the sourcing, collection, study and comparative analysis of some proverbs in Spanish, Italian, Modern Greek and the Sicilian dialect, concerning the idea of family. The fundamental hypothesis was to consider proverbs as an important oral source for the analysis of social mechanisms in the Mediterranean cultures and, since the experience of family is shared by anyone regardless from age, social status, educational level, gender, religious belief, ethnicity, geographic location or birthplace, I believe that proverbs about family, and the relational dynamics arising from it, are so common as to be found in every culture; they find their way into everyone’s daily life and convey orally a valuable set of rules of conduct. Such research was carried out in the belief that this kind of tool has become in time functional to the transmission of culture, values, unwritten laws, both moral and ethical, in the different communities to such an extent that they are capable of connecting past and present, old and young. Every saying mirrors the mindset and the world view of a particular people: for this reason I believed it fruitful to integrate a multicultural and comparative dimension into the research hypotheses, so as to discover whether and how the proverbs of the four cultures I considered convey a common view of the family world and of the society in which couples live and interact. The heritage of traditions provided by proverbs, whose main goal is to pass down those teachings and life advice resulting from the wisdom of the elder, reflection of the soul of a certain people and of humane experience, often helps anthropologists, ethnologists and sociologists in their study of cultures...