The marvelous in Italian literature assumes many forms. I intend to present here three typologies, chosen because they are archetypal and explain the future development of Italian literary taste. First Dante. In his work the epistemic level of the supernatural overlaps the level of the natural. Beatrice, the woman-angel, belongs to the real world, but through her qualities connects this world to the heavenly one. She is said to be a manifestation of the divine, a miracle. Second: episodes of magic in the chivalric poems underline the unforeseeable and the surprising, which always divert the lives of the characters, sometimes offering solutions, other times turning the hero aside from the right path. In Orlando Furioso magic also reveals the hidden wishes of characters and human beings, it is a kind of science of the imagination. Third: in travel literature the marvelous is a recurrent theme, because travel is a way of encountering the unknown, the unbelievable, the prodigious, since Marco Polo's Milione. At the beginning of the modern age new epistemology and disenchantment replace analogies and magic, but the marvelous does not disappear, on the contrary it acquires even more importance with the new science. I will end with few considerations on the marvelous in music in Seventeenth century literature.
Marvelous; Dante; Ariosto; Travel Literature-Baroque