ABSTRACT
Taking as a case study the use that Emilio Giannelli makes of clearly legible Dantean motifs in his recent political vignettes for the Corriere della Sera, this chapter suggests that three vectors of influence have participated in ensuring the contemporary vitality of Dante: his currency, iconicity, and glocalism. It also argues that each ingredient in the recipe Giannelli adopts, in his transposition of today’s political and social situations into widely recognizable visual and lexical allusions to Dante, is rooted in some of the cultural operations that Dante himself had initiated in his Comedy. Interweaving past and present characters and events, creating imposingly iconic figures, and addressing geographically specific and world-historical phenomena on par with each other are not pure innovations to be credited to, or blamed upon Giannelli. They are recognizable features of Dante’s own poetics.
