‘Intreccio d’amore’: l’esordio del terzo libro delle Confessioni di Agostino

The exordium of the third book is one of the most famous passages of Augustine’s Confessions. The intricate textual weave is due to the close connections between words, clauses and sentences and also to the verbal and conceptual references. This paper presents a detailed examination of the lexical, morpho-syntactic and rhetorical aspects of the text. The meticulous analysis highlights the textual weave, resulting from the weft binding together the various threads of the warp. The thread binding together the single words, clauses and sentences in the textual weave means the weft binding together the different feelings in the ‘weave of love’: Augustine weaves the text of the exordium, and in this way he describes the weave of the love relationship.