Abstract: On the threshold of the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death, the fuel for this work was the curiosity to discover paths still less traveled of Dante’s exploration. In retracing the history of the great poet’s critical fortune, in fact, we can still see a flaw – partially healed – in the cinematic universe’s reception of the myth of Dante. In the transition from parchment to celluloid, Dante’s material showed, in fact, equal compositional elasticity: a flexible, plastic and highly flammable mixture, especially when in contact with the most subversive and heterodox artistic sources. Through the wide-angle lenses of the cinema, a special stop was dedicated – a sort of ‘still image’ – on the most unusual and caricatured metamorphoses that Dante encountered in the comic reworking of the Neapolitan popular comedy. In the saddle of Gerione we will follow his catabasis in the artistic bowels of the Neapolitan subsoil, between the 40s and 50s of the twentieth century, when Alighieri and his most famous creatures begin to be dragged into the tangled forest of the Neapolitan farce by an unusual guide of exception, admirable face of twentieth-century comedy: Totò, «mirabile volto» that with acuity and sumptuous «comic vis» will upset the moral and visual topography of Dante’s universe. Remaining in the sphere of comic distortions, it was inevitable not to put the spotlight on Totò’s cinema: offshoots of an art that drew continuity and inspiration from poetry and the long tradition of medieval comic-burlesque comedy.

Classe ‘89, nel 2016 si laurea cum laude in Filologia moderna presso la Federico II di Napoli con una tesi in Letteratura contemporanea su “Le cronache di viaggio in Calvino”. Prima di dedicarsi all’insegnamento si è occupata di social media communication, collaborando alla scrittura di articoli e recensioni per piattaforme web del Gruppo Mondadori, oltre che alla stesura di progetti scolastici di livello regionale. Avida spetta­trice, nell’ultimo anno ha conseguito il titolo di Media Educator: “educatrice ai linguaggi cinematografici e audiovisivi” presso il Ministero della Cultura. Attualmente fra i suoi interessi di studio figurano i pro­cessi di contaminazione fra letteratura, cinema e società nella prima metà del Novecento.