| Sumario: | This essay argues that in Dante’s Commedia, space is not merely a backdrop but a constitutive medium of meaning. Drawing on geocriticism and medieval spatial theory, particularly Paul Zumthor’s notion of spatium, the study shows how meaning in the poem is entangled with spatial experience, and how Dante constructs a moral and epistemological geography. Through these spatial dynamics, the Commedia reveals itself as a poetics of traversal, where navigating space becomes a mode of inquiry. The essay shows how Dante acts as both navigator and cartographer, engaging medieval cartographic traditions to unfold his world, collapsing physical and temporal distances into moral scales, and ultimately refolding reality to reflect divine order. The study contributes to the broader spatial turn in literary studies, inviting further exploration of space functioning as a medium of meaning.
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