Abstract
Purgatorio XX is one of the most political and historical episodes of the Commedia. This essay offers an analysis of the relationships between history and fiction in the speech delivered by Hugh Capet. Moreover, through the examination of the principal themes of the canto (the avarice of the Kings of France, Dante’s anti-gallicism, the censure of Capetian ‘pontificalism’), this paper aims at describing three modalities of Dante’s historical vision, which can be defined as ‘political’, ‘pseudo-objective’ and ‘narrative’.