Abstract (E ogni lingua deven tremando muta... From the Crisis of the Word to New Forms of Communication. Some Examples from the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries) A sense of inadequacy inherent in verbal language runs through Western civilization, assuming specific configurations within Italian culture. From its earliest manifestations, aphasia arises from the ineffability of the divine and the untranslatability of desire: words prove insufficient to convey the meaning of the sacred and of passion; hence Stilnovist poetics experiment with more refined, musical, and allusive registers. During the Romantic period, the need for dialogue among different communicative modes emerges, while the tension between self and world makes the representation of reality increasingly problematic. In the contemporary age, Montale’s invocation “Non chiederci la parola che mondi possa aprirti” signals a radical crisis of traditional values and expressive codes. The essay traces this impasse of orality through a selection of nineteenth- and twentieth-century works. Fenella, the Mute of Portici, a central figure in operatic and filmic texts, inaugurates the motif of the silenced woman, later developed in Maria Messina’s short story Ciancianedda (1918). Male muteness appears more positive: in Arrigo Boito’s Il trapezio (1920), Yao’s aphasia enhances the visual power of Oriental writing; in Luigi Pirandello’s Serafino Gubbio operatore (1925), silence and writing order reality and function as gestures of resistance to power. In the realm of the supernatural, finally, ghosts and artificial creatures (in Buzzati, Capuana, Gualdo, Speraz, Zena) rely on non-verbal codes that unveil truths, guilt and trauma. Literature thus shows that when language falls silent, it is the body—in its sensory polyvalence—that becomes the privileged locus for the relation with the Other and for the search for meaning.