Alessandro Magno nella letteratura italiana del Duecento e Trecento

This study aims to rebuild the fortunes of the figure of Alexander the Great in the Early Italian literature. An innovative job which stems from a threefold need: defining the landscape of 'alexandrine literature' in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth century; tracing the movement of sources concerning the figure of the Macedonian; proposing a documentary synthesis about works familiar and unfamiliar. In order to understand how one of the brightest symbols of classical culture is assimilated and reshaped by Dante, Petrarca, Boccaccio, and a large group of prose writers, poets, writers of chronicles and treatises, may allow you to see with greater clarity some lines of demarcation of the cultural horizon culture of the Italian Middle Ages. The intention, therefore, is underlining a hidden aspect of the connection between texts. The documenta have been submitted to the scrutiny of some interpretive joints that permit the reconstruction of the 'channels' traffic and usage patterns, such as to define a broader framework that includes classical and 'minor' works. The introduction outlines the textual history of Alexander the Great: from the clichés of the Pseudo-Callistene – an anthology of stories collected and edited in Alexandria of Egypt around a century after the death of 'leader-king' - to his Latin translators, to romance literatures. Within this rich corpus, western and eastern, forced to remakes and revisions, a landmark is certainly determined dall'Historia de Preliis by Leone Archpriest, written in Naples in mid-century X. The first chapter focuses on L’Intelligenza, the poem in which the Macedonian is the main character from the 216th stanza to 238th one, and highlights the contamination of the Latin source, through other connections with the Roman d'Alexandre of Alexandre de Paris. The second chapter outlines the borders of the field with the Libro di Varie Storie, the eccentric work by Antonio Pucci, unique in its pregnancy – quantitative but also qualitative – on the subject matter, derived dall'Historia de Preliis but with a broadening of perspective on the type of treatment from other sources that seems quite original. In the third chapter, Il Milione of Marco Polo and The Dittamondo of Fazio degli Uberti are analyzed on the basis of interesting tangents that attempt to describe the joints of orality and writing in the expression of authorship. In the next chapter, after an assessment of the emerging new models of the Humanism, We propose some examples that range from text fabula and historia, in an extremely rich landscape; jump through chronological and thematic evidence, analyzing such works as Il Novellino and Il Convivio, L’Avventuroso Siciliano of Bosone da Gubbio and Il Trecentonovelle of Sacchetti, Lo Specchio di vera penitenza di Jacopo Passavanti and the Fiorita of Armannino from Bologna, the novels of Boccaccio, Il Tesoretto of Brunetto Latini and Guittone d'Arezzo, poems by Pucci, Cino from Pistoia and Paul dell’Aquila, to come to the treatments offered by the historiographical background to Dante's Monarchia and Petrarch's De viris illustribus: works, the last one, which presents itself as the keystone of the passage that leads from the medieval allegorization to the model of large-scale, so common in the Renaissance. In the fifth and final chapter, the materials are analyzed for their structured around some basic conceptual isotopies that highlight the ethical aspect of the analysis medieval about the hero, mainly characterized by the 'pride' and 'liberal'. The substantial appendix contains the textual tranches found during the counting of the documents, ordered according to chronological criteria. The framework outlined – that aspires to completeness criteria without claiming to be exhaustive – even if it contains few traces of originality, in relation to the production of the novels written in Europe during the twelfth century, reveals a very significant aspect: in the 'point of origin 'of the Italian literature, the figure of Macedonian is one of the symbols that keep free from the wreck of classical culture the founding characters of the ancient historical debate, proving to hoard medieval encyclopedism models.