Variazioni su Adone. I. Favole lettere idilli (1532-1623)

Among the many classical myths, the story of Adonis is the most successful one, appearing within the European literary tradition from the Middle Ages to the XXth century. Thanks to its intrinsic dynamism which serves well the freedom of composition of the writer who uses the myth in his/her works, in time the Adonis myth has been the subject of a continuous process of semantic stratification. Because of its cultural complexity, the myth has often been used as the symbol of fundamental themes in western culture (the cyclic idea of time, orphic suggestions, the relation between man and nature, the tragic dialectic between passion and reason, the connection between love and death, the Christological aspect…). Despite this complexity, up till now there is no systematic analysis of the way in which the myth of Adonis was used after the classical age and late antiquity, both in literature and in other art sectors. The many revivals of the myth show continuous changes in the function of the fabula which presents thematic differences in the different versions; in the same way, from time to time the story of Adonis is modeled according to the formal and structural features of a certain period (this is the reason why many different genres are involved in this research: opera, epic poetry, drama, essay writing, novel) and is influenced by the poetic trends and modes of thought, so much so that going from one period to another, or passing from a writer to another (among which: Pierre Bersuire, Ronsard, Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, Marino, La Fontaine, Shelley, D’Annunzio…), we can find an epic Adonis, a pastoral Adonis, an opera lover – Adonis, a courtly Adonis, a christianised Adonis, and so on. The present edition and the commentary of the most interesting italian renaissance poems on Adonis Mith (before Marino’s Adone) is then an inquiry into the dynamics of cultural memory as well as on the diachronic and interdisciplinary ways in which thematic and expressive topoi are reused.