Carmine Abate is an author who represents a quite new orientation in Italian literature, the so called migrant literature. His literary works started to be appreciated fairly recently – only at the beginning of the 21st c. The text, basing on the research assumptions of imagology defined by Nora Moll, focuses on the representation of the image of culture as practiced by the small community of arbëresh, living in a small village in Calabria called Hora. What is taken under analysis is the first novel by Abate, Il ballo tondo (1991), whose action is permeated with elements typical for arbëresh culture.

The Aeneid is the most important intertext for the opus magnum of Dante; and Virgil, sometimes metonymically identified with his work, plays a relevant, or indeed crucial part as one of the characters in it. The main purpose of this article is, on the one hand, an analysis and interpretation of certain, only rarely investigated aspects of the relation between Virgil and Dante the pilgrim, in particular those which deal with the defeat of the former as an authority and guide for Dante on the road to spiritual perfection. They result mainly from Virgil’s excessive rationalism. In the critical moments of their journey through the otherworld Dante the author shows the frailty of Virgil’s Christian faith, attained only after his death and not illuminated by divine Grace; he also discloses the deficiencies in Virgil’s understanding of good and evil.
On the other hand the author of the article analyses the intertextual “dialogue” that the Comedy conducts with the Aeneid on the basis of the Dantean conception of art in general, and of poetry in particular, taking selected examples into consideration. An essential component of this dialogue is Dante’s reinterpretation of Virgil’s masterpiece, which assumes the form of an aemulatio and tends to reveal the Christian potentiality in the Aeneid, of which Virgil the poet was, of course, utterly unaware.

The Eridanus volume by Giovanni Pontano is addressed to the author’s last great love, Stella. The Po river, identified with the mythical Eridan into which fell down Phaeton’s burnt body, flows through Stella’s motherland. The myth of Phaeton from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (books I and II) becomes the main mythological motif of the Eridanus. Pontano makes an amplification of the episode of the Eridan – the very river that received and washed over Phaeton’s body. Pontano’s focus is on the restorative power of the Po (Eridan). The personification of the Po is presented as a benign and benevolent divinity that gives a shelter to lovers and takes care of unhappy people.