https://doi.org/10.25620/ci-02_20
Metamorphosing Dante: Appropriations, Manip-
ulations, and Rewritings in the Twentieth and
Twenty-First Centuries, ed. by Manuele Gragno-
lati, Fabio Camillei, and Fabian Lampart, Cul-
tural Inquiry, 2 (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2011),
pp. 339–53
DAVIDE LUGLIO
‘Anzichè allargare, dilaterai!’
Allegory and Mimesis from Dante’s Comedy to Pier Paolo
Pasolini’s La Divina Mimesis
CITE AS:
Davide Luglio, ‘‘Anzichè allargare, dilaterai!’: Allegory and Mimesis
from Dante’s Comedy to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s La Divina Mimesis’, in
Metamorphosing Dante: Appropriations, Manipulations, and Rewrit-
ings in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, ed. by Manuele
Gragnolati, Fabio Camillei, and Fabian Lampart, Cultural Inquiry,
2 (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2011), pp. 339–53 <https://doi.org/10.
25620/ci-02_20>
RIGHTS STATEMENT:
© by the author(s)
is version is licensed under a Creative Commons Aribution-
ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
ABSTCT: Early in his life Pasolini showed interest in Dante: in a leer
sent to Luciano Serra in 1945, he declared that ‘la questione di Dante è im-
portantissima’. He later reaffirmed his interest in Dante in two aempts to
rewrite the Commedia: La Mortaccia and La Divina Mimesis. La Mortaccia
is an unfinished text from 1959 wrien as free indirect speech in Roman
dialect, in which the author tells the story of a prostitute. Walking at night
along the Via Tiburtina, she meets three ‘canacci lupi’, which she tries in
vain to escape. Eventually Dante comes to her rescue and takes her to the
Rebibbia jail. But by 1963, Pasolini had already leſt behind the project of
La Mortaccia and its linguistic perspective, dependent on the legacy of the
fiſties. In that year he mentioned La Divina Mimesis for the first time. In
the seventh section of Poesia in forma di rosa (‘Progeo di opere future’),
it is described as ‘opera, se mai ve ne fu, da farsi’:
e ICI Berlin Repository is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the dissemination of scientific research documents related to the ICI Berlin, whether they
are originally published by ICI Berlin or elsewhere. Unless noted otherwise, the documents are made available under a Creative Commons Aribution-ShareAlike
4.o International License, which means that you are free to share and adapt the material, provided you give appropriate credit, indicate any changes, and distribute
under the same license. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ for further details. In particular, you should indicate all the information contained in
the cite-as section above.