Entomata: insetti e altri artropodi nelle opere di Dante

[Autom. eng. transl.] In the works of Dante Alighieri, and especially in the Divine Comedy, among the many animals mentioned there is no shortage of insects and other arthropods. In addition to being concrete presences, they recur in similes or for their value as symbols dear, even in the moral field, to the author and the spirit of the time. An overview of these lower animals in Dante's writings includes bees and their products, wasps and ants, flies and blowflies, horseflies and mosquitoes, caterpillars and butterflies, etc. Due to the differences in life habits, behaviour, usefulness or annoyance, and therefore due to the different symbolic meaning, certain species take on evident positive or negative connotations according to an ideal scale of values: for example, bees, worthy of mention in paradise, are comparable to the angels who fly between God and the blessed, the 'angelic butterfly' represents the goal of the metamorphosis that man must do to rise to virtue, while flies and blowflies, horseflies and wasps afflict certain categories of the damned and are suitable to hell. Recurring in the works of the Supreme Poet are honey, a symbol of sweetness, but above all wax which, due to its characteristics, lends itself to numerous citations. The spider web symbolizes plot and snare, almost the opposite of the silk of the thread in the cocoon, remembered in paradise. Both the man of letters and the naturalist and the entomologist can look with interest, according to their different points of view, at this set of quotations which reflect the encyclopedic knowledge of the poet in the context of thirteenth-fourteenth century culture: a composite mosaic rich in values ​​also for cultural entomology.