ABSTRACT
Refl ected in the works of Francesco De Sanctis and Giosuè Carducci, Dante played a particular role in Italy’s medieval revival. He had been the fi rst to use the Italian volgare for complex academic and poetic treatises, thus laying the foundations for a cultural-linguistic understanding of the Italian nation. Through his emphasis on Italy’s cultural unity Dante appealed thematically to nineteenth-century commentators, but also aesthetically, through a new style of representing historical realities based on “the dramatization of civic and political ideas.” Petrarch was the other medieval poet who inspired the Risorgimento’s imagination. However, as Andrea Ciccarelli has demonstrated, Petrarch symbolised a very different view of the Middle Ages. For Petrarch,
memory (with its attachment to the past) represents the only faculty that can remove humanity from an ever-changing, uncontrollable reality. . . . Dante’s cultural lesson . . . implies precisely the opposite point of view. The metamorphic nature of reality is not avoided but rather pursued. . . . The instability of experience includes the possibility of change from a negative to a positive mode of existence.6
