Abstract

The paper examines some of the cryptic allusions scattered in "Filologia e critica dantesca" (1965) by Gianfranco Contini and illustrates their sense in order to review the main meaning of that famous essay. Among other topics, the author alights on the mysterious anecdote - related to the name of B. Croce - that opens the script (regarding the correct interpretation of a verse of "Femmes damnées" by Baudelaire); on the "humanists" "entre guillemets" (a formula that refers, not without a vibrant self-deprecation, to a passage of Proust's "Du côté de chez Swann"); the comparison, encrypted via a reference to «the Limousin Astrologer», between the «masters and workers of verbal criticism» and the heroes of Roncesvalles; Finally, Inglese examines possible reasons for the definition given by Contini of Francesca da Rimini as "provincial reader".