Una traccia machiavelliana nelle pagine del Quijote

Between the lines, of the amazing literary work Quijote, we find a passage that brings to mind Machiavelli. In these entertaining and incisive lines, there is quite a bit of food for thought to make us reflect whether Cervantes had actually read pages from the Prince or if his ideas had come to him through other means. Therefore, in order to measure Cervantes’s degree of curiosity and competence regarding Italian and Italian writers, in this paper we take a glance at Cervantes’s familiarity with the irreverent and burlesque line of thought in Tuscan literature belonging to the 1500s. The traces and hints of familiarity with Machiavelli found in Quijote document Cervantes’s interest in the Italian writer and his ideas, however these points do not make Cervantes a Machiavellian. In any case, we can not affirm that Cervantes was oriented against the Florentine’s ideas considering his moral and theological beliefs. The difference between the two arises from the fact that Cervantes as Montaigne is among the founding fathers of a new dimension of Modern man, that leaves behind the anthropocentric certainties of the Renaissance, and promotes the emergence Between the lines, of the amazing literary work Quijote, we find a passage that brings to mind Machiavelli. In these entertaining and incisive lines, there is quite a bit of food for thought to make us reflect whether Cervantes had actually read pages from the Prince or if his ideas had come to him through other means. Therefore, in order to measure Cervantes’s degree of curiosity and competence regarding Italian and Italian writers, in this paper we take a glance at Cervantes’s familiarity with the irreverent and burlesque line of thought in Tuscan literature belonging to the 1500s. The traces and hints of familiarity with Machiavelli found in Quijote document Cervantes’s interest in the Italian writer and his ideas, however these points do not make Cervantes a Machiavellian. In any case, we can not affirm that Cervantes was oriented against the Florentine’s ideas considering his moral and theological beliefs. The difference between the two arises from the fact that Cervantes as Montaigne is among the founding fathers of a new dimension of Modern man, that leaves behind the anthropocentric certainties of the Renaissance, and promotes the emergenceof a different image of Man, which arises from the interiority of the private dimension, an outlook in stark opposition to the Public Figure known as the dominant theme in Machiavelli’s works.