Il mondo magico di Eduardo De Filippo. Sogno, illusione e realtà in due commedie del 1948

Abstract

In 1948, Eduardo De Filippo, one of the major Italian playwrights of the 20th century, staged two comedies: La grande magia and Le voci di dentro. Respectively dedicated to investigate the themes of magic and dream, both are about the delicate relation between reality and illusion. And in that very 1948, Ernesto De Martino, the most relevant of Italian anthropologists, published his main work, Il mondo magico, facing the same question from a historical and ethnological standpoint: where is the threshold between reality and unreality? The present article aims at identifying and discuss broad philosophical convergences in De Filippo and De Martino’s perspectives.