La Commedia, le litanie, la santità. Alcune riflessioni tra il Purgatorio XIII e il Paradiso XXXIII

The purpose of this article is to examine traces of the litanies in two of the three can ticles of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Starting from a previous study of the presence of litany in medieval poetry, as well as a theoretical study dedicated to both the evolu tion of the litany and the Weltanschauung that accompanied such process, I examine short fragments of the Purgatorio (XIII) and the Paradiso (XXXIII). The aim is to analyze the litanic (intertextual) elements and techniques found in Dante’s poem. In the Purgatorio (XIII) there is a direct quotation from the Litany of the Saints, while in the Paradiso we find typically litanic rhetorical-semantic modes, as the prayer to the Holy Virgin in the final canto of the poem. Both litany and lauda appear in moments of prayer (Christian and pagan) in the above-mentioned cantos. Both of these genres constitute models that build the representations of sanctity in Dante’s poem.