Milano sconosciuta. La contaminazione di un Inferno orizzontale

Milano sconosciuta. The contamination of a horizontal Hell. The relevant voice of the Scapigliati in the press and, even more, the unique opportunity offered by the publication (1878) of Paolo Valera’s novel Milano sconosciuta mark the conflict between the myth of the “moral capital” and the myth of what we might define the reject capital. Its connected imagery emerges, and takes shape, from Valera’s violent denunciation of both the social conditions in which the class of the poor struggled along and of the bourgeois hypocrisy. A harsh scandal followed. After hardly ten years this upsetting imagery was corroded and overturned by irony, sedated and made harmless. Starting from that dynamic relation implied in literary – and not only literary – works that associates the beautiful with the right and the true, this paper investigates the dialectal pair pure/impure played by Valera in a text which was opening an unaware, necessary passage towards modernity.