Abstract

Alberto Asor Rosa formulated some fundamental epistemological principles, indispensable for anyone who researches on the Commedia, and he did so with incomparable clarity, sharp and generous as the colour of his eyes. Lucidity incomparably wise and brilliant, that will be forever missed. In the Commedia Dante talks about some eternal texts he has read during his journey: The inscription above the gate of Inferno (Inf. 3), and the page of the book to be read during Last Judgment which condemns the rulers who were alive in 1300 (Par. 19). The character of Dante, then, in Purgatorio admired the divine craftmanship of the carvings about human haughtiness (Purg. 12) and the skulls of the gluttons (Purg. 23). In the Heaven of Jupiter, the souls have written in front of him the first words of the Liber Sapientiae Salomonis (Par. 18). These are God’s writings, who writes terzine and traces eternal letters of the alphabet on human skulls and in the Heavens. Dante claims to have faithfully copied these five texts. Do their rhetoric and their graphic work as an archetype and graphic and rhetorical model of the poem? These excerpts are five petals of the sempiternal rose (Par. 30, 124), offered to Asor Rosa, palindromo gentile.