Formed in 2011 as a result of the merger of four different departments ¬  ̶, namely, the Department of Linguistics, Communication Studies and Performing Arts; the Department of Italian Studies; the Department of Anglo-Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures; and the Department of Romance Studies, the Department of Linguistic and Literary Studies (DiSLL) reflects and recasts the academic heritage, the resarch traditions and directions of its predecessors in a successful attempt to embrace the future while honouring the past. Notably, it was by incorporating the substantial historical holdings of the pre-existing departments that one of the most important Italian libraries for philological, linguistic and literary studies was created.

DiSLL covers a broad spectrum of subject areas pertaining to the study and teaching of the following disciplines:

• Historical and General Linguistics,
• Italian Studies,
• Italian Philology and Comparative Literature,
• Theory and Anthropology of Literary Texts,
• Linguistics and History of the Italian Language,
• Mediaeval and Humanistic Latin Literature,
• Romance Philology, Languages and Literatures (French, Galician, European and Brazilian Portuguese, Romanian, Castilian and Latin American Spanish),
• Germanic Philology, Languages and Literatures (American, English, German),
• Slavic Philology, Languages and Literatures (Czech and Slovak, Polish, Russian, Serbian and Croatian, Slovenian),
• Hungarian Philology, Language and Literature
• Greek Language and Literature
• Byzantine Philology
• Music
• Drama and Theatre Studies
• History of Cinema
• Film Studies
• Performing Arts.