Handwritten manuscript of 26 pages written in green ink in the recognizable handwriting of Ungaretti, pages of 220 x 280 mm., Numerous corrections on almost every page in the text, in the interline, in the margin etc. & nbsp;

** «... Ungaretti's encounter with Dante takes place within that symbolic system of memory that from the first lyrics of the Buried Port ( The rivers) through the last section of the Sentiment of time finds its highest realization in The Promised Land . Poetry of memory as salvation from shipwreck: "what has been, has been forever", that is, contemplation of death as a reinvention of life in memory "(Mario Petrucciani) April 12, 1950, letter to Alessandro Parronchi: “(...) I started working at Dante for four or five days. They are notes from more than ten years ago; and I hadn't looked at him since. Something different comes to me, and now beyond my physical strength. I need to calmly re-read Dante. (…) I will do what I can; but if I don't get there, forgive me: Dante cannot be tortured: either I am able to do something that is not entirely unworthy, or the conference will have to be postponed. A hug from yours, Ungaretti. " That conference was no longer held, it was to inaugurate a Florentine cycle entitled Florence in Two hundred and fourteenth century , but it jumped. "Dante cannot be tormented" and this Ungaretti knows it well, he who has always been a reader of Dante, but not often his commentator. For the height of the material? Or perhaps because of the titanic effort, as a poet, to talk about the Poet? A bit of all this, a renunciation of the competitive momentum in dealing with a poem beyond the imaginable. What is certain is that he does not give up. To Piero Bigongiari, on 10 March 1952, he wrote: "I am working on Dante, and on reading the theses, and on the lessons on Manzoni (...)." Ungaretti had taken part in the 47th Dante Alighieri Congress on Dante and Ravenna, with a Commentary on the First Canto of Hell later published in Paragone , III, 36, December 1952, pp. 5-21. That reading was essentially the original core of the present manuscript, which was later published in its definitive form in Giuseppe Ungaretti, Il Canto I dell'Inferno , in Dante's Readings , edited by Giovanni Getto, I Inferno , Sansoni, Firenze 1955, pp. 3-23. Speaking of Dante, Ungaretti talks about himself and his own poetics , of that condition of exile / castaway, alter Aeneas / Dante, who also escaped shipwreck and exile, in perennial search for the "promised land". This manuscript proves it. Not a beautiful copy, but a working copy full of corrections, revisions, deletions and rit eyes, of various kinds. From the Beginning: "In the attempt to interpret the Divine Comedy that I will now try to do, I will refer especially to the first two Cantos of Hell; but having Dante proposed them almost as a prologue to his work, it is understood that it is an interpretation to be extended to the entire poem ". This long, initial preamble, I would say programmatic, disappears in the final version that went to print; perhaps Ungaretti considered it almost pleonastic, superfluous, or perhaps too didactic. Who knows. To the philologists who will work on these 26 pages written in green ink in the elegant Hungarian ductus, so strongly inclined, the arduous sentence. We are left with the pleasure of grasping in its making and unfolding the critical - but still Poetic - thought of the greatest poet of the twentieth century at the service of his illustrious fourteenth-century ancestor.Declaration of cultural interest has been started by the Soprintendenza Archivistica e bibliografica del Lazio