Recensione di: Paolo Fabbri, Proposte di adozione. Problemi di semiotica generale, a cura di G. Marrone, Palermo, Edizioni Museo Pasqualino, 2024 (pp. 282)

Some readers skip over them, deeming them unimportant; others focus on them exclusively, convinced that the part is worth the whole. Some quickly skim through them, impatient to discover what lies ahead, while others read them meticulously but only at the end, perhaps hoping to find answers. These varied attitudes unite many readers when confronted with introductions, prefaces, and afterwords—elements that, since Genette, we have come to call paratextual. But what happens when such texts are extracted from their original works and compiled into a new volume? This is precisely the case with Proposals for Adoption. Problemi di semiotica generale, which gathers around thirty writings by Paolo Fabbri, some of which were previously difficult to access. These are not essays stricto sensu but rather introductions, prefaces, and afterwords written between 1986 and 2019. Before being curated into this volume by Gianfranco Marrone, these writings often accompanied semiotic texts or works relevant to the discipline, many of which were first presented to Italian readers under Fabbri's editorial guidance. The underlying premise is clear: these writings still have something to say—something that transcends mere commentary or explanation of the diverse and multifaceted works they originally accompanied.