Conclusion

Summary

Quando avrà provato il pane salato che si mangia altrove, non si lagnerà più della minestra di casa sua.

I Malavoglia 1.14

In an uncanny response to Dante's vision of what gluttony might do to the human community and his poem alike, the Italian futurist F. T. Marinetti dedicated one of his many invectives against the Italian intellectual class of his time to a tirade against those who fancied themselves dantisti. The futurist exponent singled out twentieth-century commentators in particular for their regressive approach to the study of the poet, comparing their mindless feeding on Dante's corpus to maggots devouring a corpse:

Who will deny that the Divine Comedy is today anything other than a filthy worm-ranch of commentators? To what end do they wander the battlefield of thought when the fight is over, to count the dead, examine the brutal wounds, collect the broken weapons and the abandoned insignia, under the heavy flight of knowing crows and the flapping of their paper wings?

Marinetti's love for the medieval poet alongside his hatred for contemporary commentators is a typical expression of the futurist's complicated feelings about the past and passéism, and his graphic metaphor loses some of its shock value when compared to the dozens of manifestos of equal or greater vulgarity. Marinetti is not often thought of as a serious reader of Dante—not least because of remarks like this—and yet the mindless feeding of maggots he describes would appear to indicate a surprising nuance in his reception of the Comedy, if only unconsciously. Just like the medieval poet, Marinetti knows that any table set with food, real or metaphoric, runs the risk of being set upon by parasites now that its author's body is devoid of life. Instead of building on the ground conquered by lost lives, scavenging readers pick through the remaining flesh for food and trophies and leave behind a sterile field of death for swooping crows. Their actions are those that Dante identifies in all of his gluttons: they consume voraciously and unthinkingly, and succeed only in becoming bloated and diluted, unmemorable and unrecognizable.