Modern portuguese, in italian.The dictionaries of Raffaele Enrico Raqueni and Levindo Castro de La Fayette

This essay offers the first complete analysis of the Portuguese-Italian and Italian-Portuguese dictionaries compiled by por Raffaele Enrico Raqueni and Levindo Castro de La Fayette, published from 1899 onwards, and reprinted several times throughout the 20th century, up to the new edition edited by Enzio Di Poppa Volture, published by the Lello & Irm & atilde;o publishing house in 1974 and also reprinted until the 2000s. The essay traces the publishing history of this work and provides an analysis of its macro- and micro-structure, highlighting the choices made by the two authors. The latter adopted a modern lexicographic technique, either by giving the work the characteristics of a decoding dictionary based on in-depth knowledge of the mother tongue, or by concentrating the lexical corpus in a vocabulary devoid of highly specialised technical terms and more accessible and applicable to a wider audience. Thus, despite their practical and portable nature, these dictionaries have been adapted over time to various uses, both practical and cultured: commerce, tourism, learning foreign languages, translation, literary and editorial work. Offering a more extensive lexical corpus than most monolingual dictionaries (37,000 Italian entries and around 40,000 Portuguese entries), this dictionary represents a very useful source for studying the historical evolution of the two languages: Portuguese and Italian.