Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit. Contemporary Italian writers remembering the Aeneid

Et haec olim meminisse iuvabit (Aeneid I 203). With these touching words Aeneas tries to hearten his men after the storm which forced them to land in Africa. One day, not only shall they remember their misfortunes, but they shall do it with pleasure. The memory of the misadventures that Aeneas and the Trojans had during their journey in the Mediterranean is also still alive in the literature of the following centuries. Restricting the survey to contemporary Italian writers, this paper aims to match the most important stops Aeneas makes in the Mediterranean to contemporary retellings of these episodes by Italian authors. The starting point, of course, is Troy, where Aeneas’ journey begins. One of the most famous moments of Aeneid book II, when Aeneas puts his father Anchises on his shoulders, holds his son Ascanius by the hand and escapes from Troy, is recalled both in Giorgio Caproni’s masterpiece, The Passage of Aeneas (1956), and by Attilio Bertolucci, in Towards Casarola, from the poem Winter Journey (1971), even though in Bertolucci’s version it is the father who takes the son on his shoulders. Another of Aenas’ escape (Aeneid book III), this time from Thrace after discovering Polydorus’ frightening ‘burial’ site, has been retold into a couple of lines by Caproni. Notably, these lines had never been published until four years ago. The “Little Troy” built by Andromache and Helenus in Buthrotum is the pretext for some interesting comments by Valerio Magrelli in the theatre piece called Buthrotum. Baudelaire and the Third Book of Aeneid, from Frankenstein’s Violin (2010). Two of the following episodes, from Aeneid books IV and V-VI respectively, are the basis for the unfinished poem The Promised Land by Giuseppe Ungaretti (19501, 19542). In the Choruses Describing Dido’s Feelings, the queen who committed suicide because of unrequited love has come to represent “the autumn of our lives”. Meanwhile in Palinuro’s Recitative, Aeneas’ helmsman, who heroically fought sleep before falling overboard, becomes a symbol of “desperate loyalty”. Palinurus’s story also made a deep impression on Carlo Emilio Gadda, who used Aeneid VI 357 as an epigraph, to make a comparison between himself and Palinurus, in his War and Imprisonment Diary (1916-1918), and, again, on Caproni, who combines the characters of Palinurus and Aeneas at the end of The Passage of Aeneas. The hero will not have a glorious future, as in Virgil, but will suffer from fatigue, just like Palinurus. Aeneas’s feelings on his arrival in Italy are imagined by Tiziano Rossi. For him the hero is a “nameless Aeneas”, a modern day immigrant, and nobody “would sing this man”. To conclude, an imaginary stop could be added to Aeneas’s journey and would be in Genova. Caproni – who is the focus of this paper –, in many lesser known pieces of prose, describes his poetic ‘meeting’ with a statue of Aeneas at the end of the Second World War, in a heavily bombed square in Genova, his hometown. He explains how this statue led him to consider Aeneas as a symbol of modern mankind, suspended between the past (Anchises) and future (Ascanius), and without a home.