«Uomini fummo, e or siam fatti sterpi». Nature arboree e metamorfosi vegetali nella selva dantesca

This contribution surveys the occurrences of the terms related to woodland places in the "Commedia" and analyses the types of forest landscape described in Dante’s poem, connected to symbolic scenarios: among them the thick of human perdition represented by the “gloomy wood” of the incipit, the unnaturalness of suicide envisaged in the dry and degraded vegetation of the infernal wood of canto XIII, the primordial condition of innocence of the uncontaminated forest of Eden. The investigation enlarges on some other authors (Boccaccio, Ariosto, Manzoni, Carducci) who have variously developed, with either a comic or an ‘existential’ tone (the forest as the maze of an altered consciousness), the features of the forest opening and ending Dante’s earthly path.