Le citazioni del "Furioso" nei commenti danteschi del Settecento

This essay analyses the literary, ethical and religious principles on the basis of which four eighteenth-century Dante commentators chose to extrapolate and mention excerpts from Orlando Furioso. Francesco Laino, Giovannantonio Volpi, Pompeo Venturi and Baldassarre Lombardi contributed to sanction the editorial and didactic fortune of the Ariostean poem, without excluding any extreme forms of preventative censorship. Their exercises in rewriting and textual / interpretative criticism had a profound and scarcely examined influence both on the construction of the nineteenth-century national canon and the revision of the traditional tools of linguistic/literary analysis, such as the Crusca vocabulary which Vincenzo Monti and Giacomo Leopardi discussed afresh.