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« O sommo Giove ». Sobre la fortuna literaria de una invocación de Dante (Purg. VI, 118)

Riassunto: In the tercet of Purg. 6, 118-20, Dante invokes God to eliminate the evils which afflict both Italy and the Church. In the pages that follow one seeks to determine, on one part, the sour­ces and, on the other part, the fortune of the Dantescan invocation in five medieval authors. As possible sources are indicated Aen. 1, 378-380 ("love Summo") and Aen. 4, 203-208 ("adspicis haec?"). As to the fortune of the invocation, its presence is recorded in the Italian Francesco Pe-trarca, Giovanni Boccaccio and Giacomo Belardi Arrigoni; in the German Dietrich von Niem; and in the Spanish Diego Moxena de Valencia. Notwithstanding the Virgilian inspiration and the general structure, the invocation had to undergo, from Petrarca onwards, a double metamorpho­sis: it was in fact related to another Virgilian source, namely to Aen. 5, 867-868, and used exclu­sively to lament the evils of the Church and implore the remedy.