Itinerarium mentis in nihil

Abstract

The author reconstructs the topos of Six characters in search of an author which is present in Pirandello's works in the span of time from 1897 to the unfinished The giants of the Mountain (in his theatrical works as well as in his novels and short stories). The decisive contribution concerns the symbolic decodification of the said topos. By means of the onomastic scan (a form which Pirandello takes both from Filone of Alexandria and Middle Ages allegorical procedures), Umberto Artioli goes back to the secret sources of the Sicilian dramatist and one prevails above all. Serafino Gubbio, the protagonist of Camera! [Si gira], refers to the six-winged angel (the Seraphim to be exact), on which Bonaventura exemplified, in his famous Itinerarium mentis in Deum, the ascending gradatio. And not only: the medieval text is even the palimpsest on which Pirandellorewrites his own novel, according to the plans which remind Joyce's Odyssey rewriting.