Dante e il linguaggio dell'oltretomba. Schemi epigrafico-sepolcrali nella 'Commedia'

This article aims to draw attention to the important position held by standard epitaphic structures in the conversations between Dante the character and the souls that he imagines meeting during his voyage in the afterlife. In some instances, the words spoken by the spirits from the underworld seem to have been inspired by specific epigraphs engraved on extant gravestones or cited in manuscripts; more often, however, the themes and stylistic features are more characteristic of the sepulchral tradition of Classical and Late Antiquity that had survived to the medieval period. This article proposes that this technique of transferring actual epitaphs into poems in a disguised form may have been inspired by classical epic poetry - in particular by Virgil - as both Virgil and Ovid introduced fictional funerary inscriptions into their poems.