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This article analyses the manner in which Dante's Vita Nova informs Antonio Delfini's collection Il ricordo della Basca (1938; 1956) and the novel by Gianni Celati, Lunario del paradiso (1978; 1989; 1996), providing a thematic repertoire as well as a structural model. Reclaimed in the nineteenth century as the archetypal ‘inner autobiography’ and testimony of Dante's early loves, the Vita Nova is shown to be an effective model for exploring the connection between desire, memory and writing, a suitable filter – as in the cases of Delfini and Celati – for the narration of the wandering youth in search of an idealized and elusive love. At the same time, however, the anacronistic revival of the Dantean model is not without consequences: if in the Vita Nova, and subsequently in the Comedìa, Beatrice acts as a Master in the Lacanian sense – the law that guides Dante's entire human, spiritual and literary journey – it is modernity itself, for Lacan, that is placed beneath the sign of elision of the Master's discourse. This ‘evaporation’ of the Law is evident in works such as Basca and Lunario, ‘modernity’s Vitæ Novæ’, and thus situates them in the realm of a wandering that is at the same time existential, erotic and textual.
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