L’EPIDEMIA SOTTO LA LENTE DELLA LETTERATURA ITALIANA: una revisione storiografica in prospettiva sociologica

The extraordinary conditions in which the entire global community found itself in the recent Covid-19 epidemic have stimulated very different reflections and thoughts in public opinion. If in fact common attention has been concentrated on the scientific debate around the spread of the contagion and the remedies to limit it, this epochal fact has also been the subject of discussions that have attempted to analyze this epochal event in a sociological and anthropological perspective, that is, under a more generically 'cultural' profile. In particular, the dramatic uniqueness of the events that characterized the two-year period 2020-2021 has favored a line of thought aimed at retrospectively considering similar events that occurred in the past and at identifying some topical elements that have cyclically repeated themselves in the epidemics described by historians and writers. It will be sufficient to note how they have found space in a national newspaper with a very wide circulation (also online) such as the «Corriere della Sera»: if we consider a time span that, emblematically, goes from the beginning of the first lockdown to the very recent suspension of the main restrictions, we will see that the newspaper on March 20, 2020 hosted an intervention by a culture journalist who proposed a rereading of the Manzonian plague in light of the events of those days (Di Stefano, 2021) while on June 30, 2021 that of a scientist who proposed a cultural and literary journey on the theme of contagion tracing it back to the stories of Thucydides (Mantovani, 2021). Having dealt with the plague in Italian literature a few years ago, it seems useful to return to the subject by extending the discussion to the cyclical nature of some social (but also anthropological and psychological) situations that recur in the history of epidemics. The investigative perspective presents itself as extremely broad since it deals with cases that from classical antiquity reach, as we have seen, the journalistic writing of the current moment. It seems reasonable to focus the research attention particularly on the epidemics recounted by the Italian historiographical and literary tradition. This certainly means returning to essential authors such as Boccaccio, Petrarca and Manzoni, whom I have already examined in the past with purely literary intentions, but also subjecting recently exhumed works to examination (such as the so-called Epistola della peste returned to Machiavelli by Stoppelli 2019) or extending the discussion to sectors of literature in which the social and anthropological element is predominant such as theatre and popular drama (on which Vescovo 2020). The nuclei on which the discussion is articulated are three, the historiographical one, the sociological one and the literary one. The interdisciplinary nature of the theme is necessary, which recounts, through the work of historians and chroniclers, the epidemics over the centuries, and analyses their social and system transformations, to arrive at the literary narration, the fulcrum of the entire work in three distinct but closely connected parts.