Dante nel Sette-Ottocento. Note e ricerche

In the eighteenth century, from Vico and Gravina to the Accademia dell’Arcadia, from Saverio Bettinelli’s Lettere virgiliane to the literary historiography of the Enlightenment, the story of the fortune and reception of Dante and his work moves between the extremes of substantial misunderstanding and attention to a poem considered obscure, dissonant, “barbaric”, but equal in energy and vigor to that of Homer. In the nineteenth century, after Vincenzo Monti’s meritorious work to revive the cult of Dante, his “rediscovery” by the Romantics, with their affirmation of new ideals, leads to the recognition of Dante as the father of Italian language and civilization. Against the backdrop of a multifaceted cultural context (treatises from the age of rationalism, epistolary production, literary controversies, the role of newspapers, the urgency of political matters), the volume investigates some decisive moments along this bumpy road: the revaluation of Dante’s work by a reclusive and eclectic Venetian writer, Giuseppe Luigi Fossati, whose Elogio di Dante (1783) never enjoyed particular consideration, although for Carlo Dionisotti it represents the best work on the subject produced during that time; the promotion of Dante in Europe by exiles and expatriates before the Unification, with readings in a mystical, esoteric, or political key alternating with exercises, albeit minor ones, of particular philological value; the study of Dante by an exceptional reader such as Giacomo Leopardi; the protracted investigations, falling somewhere between erudition and patriotism, of the “Scuola stroca” and of Giosuè Carducci, leading up to the diverse interpretations developed at the beginning of the new century.