Dante, Petrarca and Boccaccio are the founding fathers of Italian literature. The masterpieces they have given us – in addition to being the factories of Italian – are “world works” within which all aspects of our humanity obtain poetic license. Invitation to associate an allegorical image with each of the three masterpieces. Dante and the Divine Comedy Dante
‘s Commedia (defined as “divine” by Giovanni Boccaccio) we can imagine it as an ascending ray, in the sense that it has a point of origin (the wild forest) and an ascending trajectory directed towards Paradise, towards infinity of God.
The masters of world literature of the twentieth century profoundly renewed Dante’s exegesis. According to the American poet Ezra Pound Dante’s journey consists in a crossing of the states of the mind carried out by the everyman, the every man, in the sense that the protagonist of the poem is the individual concretion of mankind: Dante’s goal is of an extra – literary type, that is “to remove viventes in hac vita de statu miseriae et perducere ad statum felicitatis” (to distance men from the moral misery of this life and lead them towards a state of happiness).
Ezra Pound’s pupil, TS Eliot, wrote that the subject of the Comedy is «the most comprehensive, and the most orderly presentation of feelings that has ever been given […]. The structure of sentiments, for which allegory is the necessary framework, is complete in Dante and goes from the most sensual to the most intellectual and spiritual ». Divine Comedy, Dante’s most memorable verses Dante
‘s “Comedy” is one of the most famous and loved literary works in the world, so much so that many verses are preserved in the memory of all Petrarch and Il Canzoniere
Unlike the Comedy, Petrarch’s Canzoniere, another founding father of Italian literature, appears as a labyrinth. In this work it is possible to record an unresolved, precisely labyrinthine, comings and goings between novel and radical lyrical timelessness, narration and contemplative stasis. Petrarch’s is a poetic investigation into the logic of the human heart, where the Aristotelian principle of non-contradiction does not exist. We can imagine the protagonist of the Canzoniere as a Dante who was trapped in the dark forest, a victim of the fascination of his inner beasts (the passiones). The Canzoniereand a theatrum memoriae that stages, in a Leopardian way, the story of a soul that meditates on its relationship with existence. Great artists manage to make individual existence universal. Those who do not recognize themselves in a verse as “Peace I cannot find and not or to make war”, which in just eleven syllables marks all our neuroses
Poetry – Italo Calvino taught us – and “the art of letting the sea enter a glass “(Calvin’s phrase is similar to that of the American writer W. Faulkner, according to whom” the poetry and history of the human heart on a pinhead “). The Canzoniere of Francesco Petrarca, a loving way of the cross
On the day of Good Friday Francesco Petrarca falls in love with Laura. The writer Dario Pisano tells us the story of an unrequited loveBoccaccio’s Decameron
The third masterpiece, the Decameron can be compared to a circle. In addition to the circular disposition of the boys who tell the stories, the debut of the book – just like Dante’s poem – opens to the eye a hellish, apocalyptic scenario, that is, the plagued Florence, theatrum mortis, from which the happy brigade departs. The message on which Boccaccio’s Human Comedy is centered is the following: literature saves life, and keeps away the common destiny, Death.
The fortune of this last book experienced alternating phases: in the Counter-Reformation period the licentious short stories were expunged; the paladins of the classicist style always had some perplexity towards the more salacious stories. The truth is that many centuries before Romanticism, Boccaccio had learned, in the wake of Dante’s Comedy – the great post-classical example of the confusion of styles – that the ways of art are infinite and capable of implying any reference. Why Giovanni Boccaccio “invented” literature
The writer Dario Pisano analyzing Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron reveals the consolatory and entertaining role of literature, capable of making us live several lives The fathers of Italian literature
The fourteenth-century cult of stylistic ubiquity thus represents the elaboration of the specific modern literary.
Dante, Petrarca, Boccaccio are considered the founding fathers of Italian literature. Seven hundred years have passed, and these authors continue to be loved and studied. One of the most fascinating and paradoxical tales of the twentieth century is Pierre Meynard, author of “Quixote”. It is an invention that comes from the pen of the great Argentine writer JL Borges.
Pierre Meynard, a minor 19th century French poet who enjoys little fame, one day is visited by an idea: to rewrite Don Quixote. Not in the sense in which we say that Calvino has somehow, by telling it, rewritten the Orlando Furioso, transforming it into his own Furioso. The protagonist of the story literally rewrites Cervantes’ book. The text of Meynard and that of Cervantes are verbally identical but the second, comments Borges, “is almost infinitely richer” and expresses the great themes of contemporary culture.
How is it possible that a fully reproduced text changes meaning with respect to itself
What Borges insinuates through this paradox is what to read and always rewrite. The words that an author has given to the pages sediment the reader’s mind with meanings that he reassembles according to his own sensitivity.
Marcel Proust taught us that every reader and reader of himself, in the sense that we use the books of others as optical tools to see better within ourselves. When we do this, we also give something to those books that they didn’t have before.
In this way the act of reading is a real execution of the work of art and of course we all know that there are no two perfectly identical performances of a Mozart or Chopin sonata!
When Dante, having reached the last stage of his journey, receives the supreme privilege of the vision of God as a gift, in the intimacy of the Trinitarian mystery he finds his own face (Pd XXXIII, v. 129-132: “within himself, of his color itself / it seemed to me pint of our effigy / for which my face was all placed in her “).
In the great masterpieces of the fourteenth century written by the fathers of Italian literature we find ourselves, to the point that – quoting Dante – we could exclaim “that I reflected myself in it as a pair”. The great Italian literature has the prerogative of being the science of the self that becomes the science of us.
Dario Pisano
