Scarpato, G., Omero e la "letteratura anti-scritturale". Note su cultura e popolo tra Vico e Leopardi

Homer and “non-written literature". Vico and Leopardi on the role of culture in national communities. Abstract: Leopardi read Vico’s Scienza Nova in 1828, as a research source for interpreting Homer’s poems. Influenced by Vico as much as by Wolf, Leopardi elaborated on the idea of a peculiar approach to poetry held by the Ancient Greek. Such approach was characterised, for him, by the usage of publingly reading poems to the whole population. According to Leopardi, such a close relationship between poetry and community - which the literature of his times has completely lost - clearly manifests itself in the stories that the poems of that age narrated, and made poetry contribute to the building of national identities. Homer's Iliad, for Leopardi, was part of such a context. Leopardi seems to share, therefore, Vico's idea that the Iliad was a national poem in the sense indicated above. A less expected consonance between the two authors can also be noticed: both saw traces of that ancient world’s oral culture in Naples’ popular culture of their times.