Le parole della peste dal "Decameron" ai "Promessi sposi"

The paper examines the two best-known plagues of Italian literature with particular attention to the function of words in their description. Decameron concerns an event directly observed by the author and resolved in an alternative literary space, that, through the exercise of the word (the pleasant and orderly conversation of the “happy brigade” of young people), regains control of reality. I promessi sposi offers a scrupulous historical investigation into a plague that occurred two centuries earlier; in contrast to seventeenth-century historiography and the ideological interpretations of the Enlightenment, Manzoni’s novel highlights individual responsibilities of men of power, starting in fact from the “word-fraud” or “trufferia di parole” enacted to deny reality.