“Each navigation is almost a jump from the cliff of Leucade” Transversal figures from Dante's Ulysses in the Dialogue of Christopher Columbus and Pietro Gutierrez

The XXVI of the Inferno was a fundamental stage in the transformation of the myth of Ulysses. This fate is akin to what awaits Christopher Columbus, the discoverer of a New World. In the Operette morali, Leopardi uses Homeric material – which Dante reinterpreted – to introduce a “caricature” of Ulysses himself in the figure of Columbus as an emblem of the encounter between myth an history of the time, questioning the mythological paradigm but also the modern model.