Dante e l’invidia

Dante Alighieri’s works contain definite universal motifs, based not only on their conceptualization of important truth, which concerns philosophical and rational issues, but also on their universal emphatic character. Dante defines a map of emotions, which, starting from personal experience, become exemplars valid for all his readers. This essay focuses on the way Dante deals with envy as an emotion and as one of the seven deadly sins. References to his relationship with the Florentine people and his experience of exile are frequent in the Divine Comedy. This article first analyzes how Dante represents envy as a real iconographic and allegoric figure in Purgatorio, Canto XIII. Then it focuses on two particular cases of envy which have different and opposite consequences (Piero Della Vigna in Inferno, Canto XIII, and Romeo of Villanova in Paradiso, Canto VI) and which can be clearly related to Dante’s autobiographical experience of the cause of his exile.