I remember some Italian friends telling me of an English couple holidaying at a seaside resort on the Ligurian coast with whom they struck up a friendship. The friends were invited by the couple to spend time with them in England. They took up the invitation and were very happy with their stay. Only one thing shocked them, however: the English couple did not know who Dante was. Dante – a member of that supreme trinity of European poets which includes Shakespeare and Goethe – the founder of the modern Italian language, the writer of that most wonderful poem of Italy and Europe, the Divine Comedy. How could their English friends not know about him?
I have not yet come across an Italian who did not know who Shakespeare was and which country he came from. Italians also expect that most foreigners should know who Dante is. This is, unfortunately, not always the case even if this week it’s the seven hundredth anniversary of Dante’s death on 25th March 1321, shortly after he completed his greatest work. It’s a day celebrated throughout the peninsula.
I’m sure my readers will know who Dante was. Whether they have read the Divine Comedy or know what it’s about may, however, be another matter. Dante’s Comedy (and it’s called a comedy not because it’s funny – although there are some very funny bits in it – but because it is written for the people in the vernacular Italian language and not for ecclesiastical intellectuals in the language of Latin ) is a long allegorical poem in three parts: hell or the Inferno, purgatory or the Purgatorio and heaven or the Paradiso. An allegorical poem represents much broader issues than seem to appear in the characters and scenarios it unfolds. For example, the well-known opening where the poet, midway through his life, finds himself lost in a dark wood also means that he finds himself aged thirty-five (halfway through the traditional biblical seventy years of human life) not knowing what to do and unable to get out of the existential darkness in which he finds himself.
The passage from the darkness of human ignorance and misery towards the light of God and the liberation of the soul is the central theme of the poem. Hell is the world of sin where transgressors are punished, purgatory represents the reparation of the soul and heaven displays liberation in a western equivalent of the Hindu Nirvana. Dante is accompanied on this journey by his admired ancient Roman poet, Virgil, in the Inferno and Purgatory and by his supreme lady-love, Beatrice, in Paradise. It is, indeed, a true pilgrim’s progress.
Dante has special relevance to our part of the world at Bagni di Lucca. The commune’s highest village Montefegatesi has at its summit a bust of the poet.
It looks towards the wild landscape of the Apennines and its Orrido di Botri, the awesome gorge which inspired the poet in his description of the infernal gates where all hope is lost to those who enter there.
The majestic Pania Della Croce also makes its appearance in the poem (Inferno Canto 32)
There is a tradition here of memorising the Divine Comedy. I have attended an evening performance at Fornoli’s church where a person recited by heart the canto mentioning Paolo and Francesca’s passionate love affair. It was amazing!
Italians are lucky in having a poet writing in the 13th and 14th centuries that they can still read without too much difficulty. At school, I remember that reading Chaucer and Langland, both mediaeval writers, in English was not such an easy task! Is this because the English language has changed so much more in these eight hundred years than Italian? I suppose so.
Anyway, why should we read Dante today whether in Italian or in translation (there’s a very good recent one by Clive James)? It’s because this divine poem has even more relevance in our disturbing age of plague, war, global warming and social anomie. We are, indeed, in a second mediaeval, evil age and our concerns are very close to those that affected Dante.
I’m not going to tell you what parts of the Divine Comedy to read: just start at the beginning and carry on with that extraordinary journey until the end – Dante’s is such a wonderful poem that it will change your life forever if you haven’t read it before…or even if you read it again.
Each part consists of thirty-three cantos rhymed in terza rima ie ABA BCB CDC. Indeed the number three is fundamental to the poem as moves towards Dante’s vision of the mysterious Trinitarian God himself. Each part ends with the word ‘stelle’, stars, with the final line of this sublime creation ending thus:
‘L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.’
(Love that moves the sun and the other stars).
May we too come out of our present darkness to see the stars again!
(For London’s 2019 Blake exhibition with more of his Dante illustrations see my post at https://longoio3.com/2019/11/08/19609/)
I find it timelessly insightful that Dante understood a “mid-life crisis”…something people experience generally all these centuries later. The classics are so important! They reveal the human experience in a way no current author or philosopher could capture and distill with time.
Comment from Sandra Pettitt
I agree we all seem also to have a teens crisis when big decisions are to be made about career choices which could affect us for the rest of our lives. Not to mention the realization of the fact of having to be little adults taking our own responsibilities that too can be very troubling that difficult transition from childhood to adulthood and all that that entails. There are also the sexual tendency choices that actually seem to trouble even younger minds who often make the bad choices of complete sex changes as has been proven more recently when even Doctors now agree that such matters should be laid to rest until later in life and then hopefully a more rational decision made.
Dante was indeed insightful in many directions instilling the fear of God in us with the Inferno and you can visit and even somewhat experience this in the wonderful rendition of Franco Zeffirelli’s interpretation of this at the Fondazione Franco Zeffirelli Museum in Piazza San Firenze 5 Florence his beloved city .We have been lucky to visit Dante’s Tomb in Ravenna. This was indeed a very emotional moment in our lives..