The double presence, or, the Italian American Dante

Criticism, translations in English and Italian dialects, creative rewritings, homages to Dante as icon of Italianness – Dante and his encyclopaedic world constantly appear not only in the pages of several Italian American intellectuals between the mid-nineteenth- and the mid-twentieth-century, but are “appropriated” as inerasable signs of distinction and identity. A Dantesque itinerary within Italian America offers a telling parable of the reception of the poet as a striking image at the intersection between devotion to the texts (understandably veered toward its political dimension) and a wider cultural strategy. In so doing, the Italian American Dante appears, on the one hand, a significant by-product of the Italian Risorgimento, with all its ideological mythologies; on the other hand, he is shrewdly adopted as symbol of uprootedness and exile, and can be reinterpreted as noble forefather and even prophet of a desperate, enraged, but ultimately successful immigrant condition. A trajectory among the various facets of this Italian American Dante can provide an assessment of the creative multiplicity of his surprising transatlantic reincarnation.