Immaginazioni dell’aldilà nella narrativa italiana del secondo dopoguerra ad oggi

Abstract

For centuries Christianity’s imaginary netherworld has been influencing literary works such as Dante’s Commedia. As time went by, this vision of the afterlife has gradually lost ground. The man of industrialised society does not care about life after death anymore. Hell seems to have moved upwards to our world, in mundane life. Thus, since after WW2, several Italian writers as different in style and worldview as Giorgio Manganelli, Ermanno Cavazzoni, Dino Buzzati, Guido Piovene, Raffaello Baldini, Daniele Benati and Federico Fellini, have created a modern vision of the afterlife where borders tend to blur and sometimes even vanish.