Giuseppe Picci’s work, titled “Della letteratura dantesca contemporanea: rivista critica,” represents a precious fragment of mid-nineteenth-century Milanese publishing, elegantly printed by the Tipografia di Giuseppe Redaelli in 1846. The volume serves not merely as an academic analysis but as a vibrant observatory on the legacy of the Supreme Poet during the pre-unification period, a time when the cult of Dante took on profound patriotic and identity-driven significance. Within its pages, Picci gathers reviews, commentaries, and philological discussions, offering an intellectual snapshot of Milan, which was then the nerve center of Italian literary criticism.
The most fascinating and rare element of this edition is undoubtedly the refined lithographic plate accompanying the text, an evocative map titled “I luoghi del Benaco illustrati da Dante” (The Places of Benaco Illustrated by Dante). This precious cartographic testimony was not produced in Milan but was instead entrusted to the expertise of the Litografia Filippini in Brescia, which employed a clean and accurate graphic style to outline the profile of Lake Garda. The map is far from a simple aesthetic ornament; it constitutes the heart of a specific geographical-literary investigation contained within the volume.
The inclusion of Lake Benaco in a work of Dantean criticism is justified through the exegesis of the famous verses from Canto XX of the Inferno. In that passage, Dante describes the Garda basin with extraordinary topographical precision, citing locations such as Peschiera, the boundaries where the bishops of Trento, Brescia, and Verona could “bless their own,” and the river Mincio. By including this map, Picci intended to offer the reader tangible proof of Dante’s realism. Filippini’s plate allows the reader to visually trace the path of the waters and the boundaries described in the Divine Comedy, ennobling the landscape of Garda through the lens of poetry.
