Il Dante di De Sanctis è ancora attuale

Abstract

My aim is to show the contemporary relevance of the work of Francesco De Sanctis, which has been intensively researched, but is now relegated to our past. However, his Dante, in contrast with his Petrarch, has timeless ethical, ideological and political qualities, while his Petrarch is still a negative example of the past and present defects of Italian. De Sanctis is still relevant in the sense that, with Dante, he favours a culture and language for ordinary people, an antidote to the diglossic situation of a ‘high’ language not only in the Renaissance but also that of the avant-garde and the technicalities of critical language. Last, but not least, the human example represented by Dante is a stronghold against the spread of what the Anglo-Polish anthropologist Bauman calls the man of “liquid modernity”.