Resume

The title of my thesis is From Flesh to Soul. The Dichotomy of the Body in Alfonso Varano, Salomone Fiorentino, and Giacomo Leopardi. 

In this work I advocate the existence of a sub-cluster in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Italian poetry, often imperfectly labelled as ‘sepulchral’, focusing on the co-existence between the physicality of death, as explored by coeval science, and the religious longing for eternal life.

By dynamically relying on Dante’s model, I sustain, these texts explore the tension between belief and secularisation characterising the Enlightenment age, embodied by the corpse as an object of supreme ‘abjection’ (see Kristeva) and, at the same time, of devotional contemplation. 

I then hypothesise the existence of a direct literary lineage running from the works of Alfonso Varano (particularly Visioni sacre e morali, 1789) and Salomone Fiorentino (Elegie di S. F. in morte di Laura sua moglie, 1790) to Giacomo Leopardi’s early poetic experiments, and particularly to his youthful, Dante-inspired poem Appressamento della morte (1816), three works which can be defined as 'writings of excess' (see Botting). As a consequence, I detect a so-far under-investigated strain in Italy’s literary history, enabling me to provide a different assessment of Leopardi’s sources in composing this poem, beyond its overt Dantean inspiration.

Ultimately, such a cluster of Italian literary works can be understood as prone to, rather than alien to, the surrounding European Gothic taste.