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è considerato il padre della letteratura?

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è considerato il padre della letteratura?

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La notte tra il 13 e il 14 settembre 1321 moriva a Ravenna, gravemente malato, il padre della letteratura italiana, Dante Alighieri.

Intellettuale di riferimento per la nostra identità nazionale, è nel panorama italiano certamente uno dei più affascinanti. Nelle sue opere convergono tutti gli aspetti della cultura medievale, che sempre egli è pronto ad analizzare con curiosità e passione. Ma il suo merito più importante è forse la totale disponibilità al nuovo e all'autocritica, ciò che lo rende il prototipo dell'intellettuale per i letterati di tutto il mondo e di tutte le epoche, a partire dai contemporanei - si pensi alle letture pubbliche della Commedia tenute da Boccaccio - per andare poco più in là con Leonardo Bruni, nel Seicento con Milton e nel Novecento con Eliot e Montale.

E come non nominare l'impegno politico profuso per l'amata Firenze, cominciato con l'iscrizione all'Arte dei Medici e degli Speziali (era il 1295, aveva trent'anni) e culminato con l'accusa di appropriazione di denaro pubblico e di baratteria mentre era Priore del Consiglio dei Cento; nel 1302, con il prevalere della fazione nera guelfa, la pena si sarebbe tramutata in esilio e confisca dei beni. Dopo un periodo di sodalizio con i guelfi bianchi cacciati da Firenze, Dante scelse di accettare la pena e questa si rivelò la scelta definitiva, dopo che l'unica possibilità onesta e dignitosa di rientrare in patria, tramite l'auspicata liberazione della città ad opera di Arrigo VII nel 1310, era svanita. Gli ultimi anni della sua vita lo vedono muoversi di città in città, ospite gradito di eminenti personaggi, come Cangrande della Scala, dedicatario della terza Cantica della Commedia, e Guido Novello da Polenta, a Ravenna, dove tutt'ora giacciono le sue spoglie, invano richieste in futuro dai fiorentini.

Per quanto concerne la sua produzione letteraria, non si esagera quando si dice che nelle sue opere si può rintracciare tutto ciò che caratterizzerà la nostra letteratura nei secoli a venire: la Vita Nova è un prototipo di romanzo; le rime filosofiche, politiche o amorose innalzano la tradizione lirica; il Convivio è il primo esemplare di prosa filosofico-scientifica in volgare; il De vulgari eloquentia getta le basi per quello che sarà un dibattito di secoli sulla lingua letteraria.

Ma a 697 anni dalla sua scomparsa non si può non ricordarlo se non con l'opera che lo ha reso immortale: la Commedia. Questa non solo dà finalmente una possibilità concreta al volgare di dimostrare le sue potenzialità come lingua di cultura, ma racchiudendo in sé ogni campo del sapere, dalla religione, alla filosofia tomistica, all'amore, alla politica, alla cultura classica, alla mitologia, in un impianto organico e brillante, rende la scelta di Dante audace e il suo prodotto un unicum nella storia della nostra cultura.

Si citano qui alcune terzine che, a parere di chi scrive, rappresentano un punto di snodo - brutale forse - all'interno del percorso spirituale del poeta:
"così dentro una nuvola di fiori che da le mani angeliche saliva e ricadeva in giù dentro e di fori, sovra candido vel cinta d'uliva donna m'apparve, sotto verde manto vestita di color di fiamma viva. E lo spirito mio, che già cotanto tempo era stato ch'a la sua presenza non era di stupor, tremando, affranto, sanza de li occhi aver più conoscenza, per occulta virtù che da lei mosse, d'antico amor sentì la gran potenza. Tosto che ne la vista mi percosse l'alta virtù che già m'avea trafitto prima ch'io fuor di püerizia fosse, volsimi a la sinistra col respitto col quale il fantolin corre a la mamma quando ha paura o quand'elli è afflitto, per dicere a Virgilio: 'Men che dramma di sangue m'è rimaso che non tremi: conosco i segni de l'antica fiamma'. Ma Virgilio n'avea lasciati scemi di sé, Virgilio dolcissimo patre, Virgilio a cui per mia salute die' mi; né quantunque perdeo l'antica matre, valse a le guance nette di rugiada che, lagrimando, non tornasser atre. "Dante, perché Virgilio se ne vada, non pianger anco, non piangere ancora; ché pianger ti conven per altra spada"."
[Purgatorio XXX, vv 28-57]

Nell'arco di pochissime terzine avviene quel che tutti sanno essere il definitivo passaggio del testimone di Virgilio a Beatrice. Ma andando un po' oltre, si legge un richiamo chiaro alla Vita Nova, con la quale Dante sembra volersi riallacciare solo un istante, per riprenderne sentimenti e motivi subito vestiti però di significati teologici: ecco che " candido vel", " verde manto" e " vestita di color fiamma viva" indossati dalla figura descrivono niente altro che i colori delle tre virtù teologali (Fede, Speranza e Carità - anche nella Vita Nova Beatrice vestiva di rosso); la " cinta d'uliva" che ha sul capo rappresenta la Pace e la Sapienza; " lo spirito mio [...] tremando" adesso trema di fronte alla divinità che trasuda, di natura diversa da quella di VN XXVI.

Il poeta non l'ha riconosciuta, e vorrebbe chiedere, come un bambino, il perché percepisca un " antico amor" e una " antica fiamma" al " carissimo padre" Virgilio. Ma Virgilio è scomparso. O meglio, Dante si è tolto da solo quel padre da cui sembrava volersi affrancare già in Inf. XXV 45, quando lo aveva zittito; che aveva affiancato a Stazio da Pur. XXI e che già in Pur. XXVII aveva pronunciato le sue ultime parole (vv 124-142), congedandosi come maestro e guida (" Tratto t'ho qui con ingegno e con arte;/ lo tuo piacere omai prendi per duce[...]/ per ch'io te sovra te corono e mitrio). Ma cosa potrebbe simboleggiare tutto questo?

Quello che avviene in questi versi non è che la rinuncia a tutto ciò che riguarda la condizione umana, a tutto il passato, a tutto il male visto e compiuto, all'amore per qualsiasi altra cosa non sia Dio, alla conoscenza di qualsiasi altra cosa non sia Dio. Ecco perché Dante, tramite quella che gli si presenterà qualche verso più tardi come Beatrice, la donna un tempo amata, si rimprovera immediatamente per indugiare ancora nel pensiero di ciò che ormai è passato e si invita a pensare al lungo cammino che ancora lo attende.

Fonti

La Scrittura e l'Interpretazione, Palermo, 2011

La Divina Commedia, Torino, 2012

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Il padre della letteratura italiana: Dante - Classicult

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La notte tra il 13 e il 14 settembre 1321 moriva a Ravenna, gravemente malato, il padre della letteratura italiana, Dante Alighieri.

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Dante Alighieri (Italian: [ˈdantealiˈɡjɛːri]; c. 1265 - 14 September 1321), most likely baptized Durante di Alighiero degli Alighieri and often referred to as Dante (, ), was an Italian poet, writer and philosopher. His Divine Comedy, originally called Commedia) and later christened Comedìa (modern Italian: Giovanni Boccaccio, is widely considered one of the most important poems of the Divina by Middle Ages and the greatest literary work in the Italian language.

Dante is known for establishing the use of the vernacular in literature at a time when most poetry was written in Latin, which was accessible only to educated readers. His De vulgari eloquentia ( On Eloquence in the Vernacular) was one of the first scholarly defenses of the vernacular. His use of the Florentine dialect for works such as The New Life (1295) and Divine Comedy helped establish the modern-day standardized Italian language. By writing his poem in the Italian vernacular rather than in Latin, Dante influenced the course of literary development, making Italian the literary language in western Europe for several centuries. His work set a precedent that important Italian writers such as Petrarch and Boccaccio would later follow.

Dante was instrumental in establishing the literature of Italy, and is considered to be among the country's national poets and the Western world's greatest literary icons. His depictions of Hell, Purgatory and Heaven provided inspiration for the larger body of Western art and literature. He influenced English writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer, John Milton, and Alfred Tennyson, among many others. In addition, the first use of the interlocking three-line rhyme scheme, or the , is attributed to him. He is described as the "father" of the Italian language, and in Italy he is often referred to as ("the Supreme Poet"). Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio are also called the tre corone ("three crowns") of Italian literature.

Dante's house museum in Florence

Alleged portrait of Dante attributed to Giotto, in the chapel of the Bargello palace in Florence. This portrait was painted c. 1335 and has since been extensively restored.[17]

Dante was born in Florence, Republic of Florence, in what is now Italy. The exact date of his birth is unknown, although it is generally believed to be around 1265. This can be deduced from autobiographic allusions in the Divine Comedy. Its first section, the , begins, "Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita" ("Midway upon the journey of our life"), implying that Dante was around 35 years old, since the average lifespan according to the Bible (Psalm 89:10, Vulgate) is 70 years; and since his imaginary travel to the netherworld took place in 1300, he was most probably born around 1265. Some verses of the Paradiso section of the Divine Comedy also provide a possible clue that he was born under the sign of Gemini: "As I revolved with the eternal twins, I saw revealed, from hills to river outlets, the threshing-floor that makes us so ferocious" (XXII 151-154). In 1265, the sun was in Gemini between approximately 11 May and 11 June ( Julian calendar).

Dante claimed that his family descended from the ancient Romans ( Inferno, XV, 76), but the earliest relative he could mention by name was Cacciaguida degli Elisei ( Paradiso, XV, 135), born no earlier than about 1100. Dante's father, Alighiero di Bellincione, was a White Guelph who suffered no reprisals after the Ghibellines won the Battle of Montaperti in the middle of the 13th century. This suggests that Alighiero or his family may have enjoyed some protective prestige and status, although some suggest that the politically inactive Alighiero was of such low standing that he was not considered worth exiling.

Dante's family was loyal to the Guelphs, a political alliance that supported the Papacy and that was involved in complex opposition to the Ghibellines, who were backed by the Holy Roman Emperor. The poet's mother was Bella, probably a member of the Abati family. She died when Dante was not yet ten years old. His father Alighiero soon married again, to Lapa di Chiarissimo Cialuffi. It is uncertain whether he really married her, since widowers were socially limited in such matters, but she definitely bore him two children, Dante's half-brother Francesco and half-sister Tana (Gaetana).

Portrait of Dante, c. 1375-1406, from a fresco in the Palazzo dei Giudici, Florence

Dante said he first met Beatrice Portinari, daughter of Folco Portinari, when he was nine (she was eight), and he claimed to have fallen in love with her " at first sight", apparently without even talking with her. When he was 12, however, he was promised in marriage to Gemma di Manetto Donati, daughter of Manetto Donati, member of the powerful Donati family. Contracting marriages for children at such an early age was quite common and involved a formal ceremony, including contracts signed before a notary. Dante claimed to have seen Beatrice again frequently after he turned 18, exchanging greetings with her in the streets of Florence, though he never knew her well.

Years after his marriage to Gemma, he claims to have met Beatrice again; he wrote several sonnets to Beatrice but never mentioned Gemma in any of his poems. He refers to other Donati relations, notably Forese and Piccarda, in his Divine Comedy. The exact date of his marriage is not known; the only certain information is that, before his exile in 1301, he had fathered three children with Gemma (Pietro, Jacopo and Antonia).

Dante fought with the Guelph cavalry at the Battle of Campaldino (11 June 1289). This victory brought about a reformation of the Florentine constitution. To take part in public life, one had to enroll in one of the city's many commercial or artisan guilds, so Dante entered the Physicians' and Apothecaries' Guild. In the following years, his name is occasionally recorded as speaking or voting in the various councils of the republic. A substantial portion of minutes from such meetings in the years 1298-1300 was lost, however, so the true extent of Dante's participation in the city's councils is uncertain.

Mural of Dante in the Uffizi, Florence, by Andrea del Castagno, c. 1450

Not much is known about Dante's education; he presumably studied at home or in a chapter school attached to a church or monastery in Florence. It is known that he studied Tuscan poetry and that he admired the compositions of the Bolognese poet Guido Guinizelli-in Purgatorio XXVI he characterized him as his "father"-at a time when the Sicilian School ( Scuola poetica Siciliana), a cultural group from Sicily, was becoming known in Tuscany. He also discovered the Provençal poetry of the troubadours, such as Arnaut Daniel, and the Latin writers of classical antiquity, including Cicero, Ovid and especially Virgil.

Dante's interactions with Beatrice set an example of so-called courtly love, a phenomenon developed in French and Provençal poetry of prior centuries. Dante's experience of such love was typical, but his expression of it was unique. It was in the name of this love that Dante left his imprint on the dolce stil nuovo ("sweet new style", a term that Dante himself coined), and he would join other contemporary poets and writers in exploring never-before-emphasized aspects of love ( Amore). Love for Beatrice (as Petrarch would express for Laura somewhat differently) would be his reason for writing poetry and for living, together with political passions. In many of his poems, she is depicted as semi-divine, watching over him constantly and providing spiritual instruction, sometimes harshly. When Beatrice died in 1290, Dante sought refuge in Latin literature. The chronicles his having read Boethius's De consolatione philosophiae and Cicero's De Amicitia.

Dante and Beatrice, by Henry Holiday, inspired by La Vita Nuova, 1883

He next dedicated himself to philosophical studies at religious schools like the Dominican one in Santa Maria Novella. He took part in the disputes that the two principal mendicant orders ( Franciscan and Dominican) publicly or indirectly held in Florence, the former explaining the doctrines of the mystics and of St. Bonaventure, the latter expounding on the theories of St. Thomas Aquinas.

At around the age of 18, Dante met Guido Cavalcanti, Lapo Gianni, Cino da Pistoia and, soon after, Brunetto Latini; together they became the leaders of the dolce stil nuovo. Brunetto later received special mention in the Divine Comedy ( Inferno, XV, 28) for what he had taught Dante: Nor speaking less on that account I go With Ser Brunetto, and I ask who are his most known and most eminent companions. Some fifty poetical commentaries by Dante are known (the so-called , rhymes), others being included in the later Vita Nuova and Convivio. Other studies are reported, or deduced from Vita Nuova or the Comedy, regarding painting and music.

Statue of Dante at the Uffizi

Statue of Dante in the Piazza Santa Croce in Florence, Enrico Pazzi, 1865

Dante, like most Florentines of his day, was embroiled in the Guelph-Ghibelline conflict. He fought in the Battle of Campaldino (11 June 1289), with the Florentine Guelphs against Arezzo Ghibellines; he fought as a , responsible for the first attack. He was among the escorts for Charles Martel of Anjou (grandson of Charles I of Anjou) when he came to Florence in 1294. To further his political career, he became a pharmacist. He did not intend to practice as one, but a law issued in 1295 required nobles aspiring to public office to be enrolled in one of the Corporazioni delle Arti e dei Mestieri, so Dante obtained admission to the Apothecaries' Guild. This profession was not inappropriate, since at that time books were sold from apothecaries' shops. As a politician, he accomplished little but held various offices over some years in a city rife with political unrest.

After defeating the Ghibellines, the Guelphs divided into two factions: the White Guelphs ( Guelfi Bianchi)-Dante's party, led by Vieri dei Cerchi-and the Black Guelphs ( Guelfi Neri), led by Corso Donati. Although the split was along family lines at first, ideological differences arose based on opposing views of the papal role in Florentine affairs. The Blacks supported the Pope and the Whites wanted more freedom from Rome. The Whites took power first and expelled the Blacks. In response, Pope Boniface VIII planned a military occupation of Florence. In 1301, Charles of Valois, brother of King Philip IV of France, was expected to visit Florence because the Pope had appointed him as peacemaker for Tuscany. But the city's government had treated the Pope's ambassadors badly a few weeks before, seeking independence from papal influence. It was believed that Charles had received other unofficial instructions, so the council sent a delegation that included Dante to Rome to ascertain the Pope's intentions.

Pope Boniface quickly dismissed the other delegates and asked Dante alone to remain in Rome. At the same time (1 November 1301), Charles of Valois entered Florence with the Black Guelphs, who in the next six days destroyed much of the city and killed many of their enemies. A new Black Guelph government was installed, and Cante dei Gabrielli da Gubbio was appointed podestà of the city. In March 1302, Dante, a White Guelph by affiliation, along with the Gherardini family, was condemned to exile for two years and ordered to pay a large fine. Dante was accused of corruption and financial wrongdoing by the Black Guelphs for the time that Dante was serving as city prior (Florence's highest position) for two months in 1300. The poet was still in Rome in 1302, as the Pope, who had backed the Black Guelphs, had "suggested" that Dante stay there. Florence under the Black Guelphs, therefore, considered Dante an absconder.

Dante did not pay the fine, in part because he believed he was not guilty and in part because all his assets in Florence had been seized by the Black Guelphs. He was condemned to perpetual exile; if he had returned to Florence without paying the fine, he could have been burned at the stake. (In June 2008, nearly seven centuries after his death, the city council of Florence passed a motion rescinding Dante's sentence.) In 1306-07, Dante was a guest of Moroello Malaspina in the region of Lunigiana.

Dante in Verona, by Antonio Cotti, 1879

Dante took part in several attempts by the White Guelphs to regain power, but these failed due to treachery. Bitter at the treatment he received from his enemies, he grew disgusted with the infighting and ineffectiveness of his former allies and vowed to become a party of one. He went to Verona as a guest of Bartolomeo I della Scala, then moved to Sarzana in Liguria. Later he is supposed to have lived in Lucca with a woman named Gentucca. She apparently made his stay comfortable (and he later gratefully mentioned her in Purgatorio, XXIV, 37). Some speculative sources claim he visited Paris between 1308 and 1310, and other sources even less trustworthy say he went to Oxford: these claims, first made in Boccaccio's book on Dante several decades after his death, seem inspired by readers who were impressed with the poet's wide learning and erudition. Evidently, Dante's command of philosophy and his literary interests deepened in exile and when he was no longer busy with the day-to-day business of Florentine domestic politics, and this is evidenced in his prose writings in this period. There is no real evidence that he ever left Italy. Dante's Immensa Dei dilectione testante to Henry VII of Luxembourg confirms his residence "beneath the springs of Arno, near Tuscany" in April 1311.

In 1310, Holy Roman Emperor Henry VII of Luxembourg marched into Italy at the head of 5,000 troops. Dante saw in him a new Charlemagne who would restore the office of the Holy Roman Emperor to its former glory and also retake Florence from the Black Guelphs. He wrote to Henry and several Italian princes, demanding that they destroy the Black Guelphs. Mixing religion and private concerns in his writings, he invoked the worst anger of God against his city and suggested several particular targets, who were also his personal enemies. It was during this time that he wrote De Monarchia, proposing a universal monarchy under Henry VII.

Dante Alighieri, detail from Luca Signorelli's fresco in the Chapel of San Brizio, Orvieto Cathedral

At some point during his exile, he conceived of the Comedy, but the date is uncertain. The work is much more assured and on a larger scale than anything he had written in Florence; it is likely he would have undertaken such a work only after he realized his political ambitions, which had been central to him up to his banishment, had been halted for some time, possibly forever. It is also noticeable that Beatrice has returned to his imagination with renewed force and with a wider meaning than in the Vita Nuova; in Convivio (written c.  1304-07) he had declared that the memory of this youthful romance belonged to the past.

An early indication that the poem was underway is a notice by Francesco da Barberino, tucked into his Documenti d'Amore ( Lessons of Love), probably written in 1314 or early 1315. Francesco notes that Dante followed the in a poem called "Comedy" and that the setting of this poem (or part of it) was the underworld; i.e., hell. The brief note gives no incontestable indication that Barberino had seen or read even the Inferno, or that this part had been published at the time, but it indicates composition was well underway and that the sketching of the poem might have begun some years before. (It has been suggested that a knowledge of Dante's work also underlies some of the illuminations in Francesco da Barberino's earlier Officiolum [c. 1305-08], a manuscript that came to light in 2003.) It is known that the Inferno had been published by 1317; this is established by quoted lines interspersed in the margins of contemporary dated records from Bologna, but there is no certainty as to whether the three parts of the poem were each published in full or, rather, a few cantos at a time. Paradiso was likely finished before he died, but it may have been published posthumously.

Statue of Dante in Verona

In 1312, Henry assaulted Florence and defeated the Black Guelphs, but there is no evidence that Dante was involved. Some say he refused to participate in the attack on his city by a foreigner; others suggest that he had become unpopular with the White Guelphs, too, and that any trace of his passage had carefully been removed. Henry VII died (from a fever) in 1313 and with him any hope for Dante to see Florence again. He returned to Verona, where Cangrande I della Scala allowed him to live in certain security and, presumably, in a fair degree of prosperity. Cangrande was admitted to Dante's Paradise ( Paradiso, XVII, 76).

During the period of his exile, Dante corresponded with Dominican theologian Fr. Nicholas Brunacci OP [1240-1322], who had been a student of Thomas Aquinas at the Santa Sabina studium in Rome, later at Paris, and of Albert the Great at the Cologne studium. Brunacci became lector at the Santa Sabina studium, forerunner of the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas, and later served in the papal curia.

In 1315, Florence was forced by Uguccione della Faggiuola (the military officer controlling the town) to grant an amnesty to those in exile, including Dante. But for this, Florence required public penance in addition to payment of a high fine. Dante refused, preferring to remain in exile. When Uguccione defeated Florence, Dante's death sentence was commuted to house arrest, on condition that he go to Florence to swear he would never enter the town again. He refused to go, and his death sentence was confirmed and extended to his sons. Despite this, he still hoped late in life that he might be invited back to Florence on honorable terms, particularly in praise of his poetry.

Dante's final days were spent in Ravenna, where he had been invited to stay in the city in 1318 by its prince, Guido II da Polenta. Dante died in Ravenna on 14 September 1321, aged about 56, of quartan malaria contracted while returning from a diplomatic mission to the Republic of Venice. He was attended by his three children, and possibly by Gemma Donati, and by friends and admirers he had in the city. He was buried in Ravenna at the Church of San Pier Maggiore (later called Basilica di San Francesco). Bernardo Bembo, praetor of Venice, erected a tomb for him in 1483.

On the grave, a verse of Bernardo Canaccio, a friend of Dante, is dedicated to Florence:

In 1329, Bertrand du Pouget, Cardinal and nephew of Pope John XXII, classified Dante's Monarchia as heretical and sought to have his bones burned at the stake. Ostasio I da Polenta and Pino della Tosa, allies of Pouget, interceded to prevent the destruction of Dante's remains.

Cenotaph in Basilica of Santa Croce, Florence

Florence eventually came to regret having exiled Dante. The city made repeated requests for the return of his remains. The custodians of the body in Ravenna refused, at one point going so far as to conceal the bones in a false wall of the monastery. Florence built a tomb for Dante in 1829, in the Basilica of Santa Croce. That tomb has been empty ever since, with Dante's body remaining in Ravenna. The front of his tomb in Florence reads Onorate l'altissimo poeta - which roughly translates as "Honor the most exalted poet" and is a quote from the fourth canto of the Inferno.

In 1945, the fascist government discussed bringing Dante's remains to the Valtellina Redoubt, the Alpine valley in which the regime intended to make its last stand against the Allies. The case was made that "the greatest symbol of Italianness" should be present at fascism's "heroic" end.

Recreated death mask of Dante in Palazzo Vecchio, Florence

A copy of Dante's so-called death mask has been displayed since 1911 in the Palazzo Vecchio; scholars today believe it is not a true death mask and was probably carved in 1483, perhaps by Pietro and Tullio Lombardo.

Dante in the national side of the Italian 2 euro coin

The first formal biography of Dante was the Vita di Dante (also known as Trattatello in laude di Dante), written after 1348 by Giovanni Boccaccio. Although several statements and episodes of it have been deemed unreliable on the basis of modern research, an earlier account of Dante's life and works had been included in the Nuova Cronica of the Florentine chronicler Giovanni Villani.

Some 16th-century English Protestants, such as John Bale and John Foxe, argued that Dante was a proto-Protestant because of his opposition to the pope.

The 19th century saw a "Dante revival", a product of the medieval revival, which was itself an important aspect of Romanticism. Thomas Carlyle profiled him in "The Hero as Poet", the third lecture in On Heroes, Hero-Worship, & the Heroic in History (1841): "He is world-great not because he is worldwide, but because he is world-deep. . . . Dante is the spokesman of the Middle Ages; the Thought they lived by stands here, in everlasting music." Leigh Hunt, Henry Francis Cary and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow were among Dante's translators of the era.

Statue of Dante at the Dante Park of Manhattan, New York City

Italy's first dreadnought battleship was completed in 1913 and named Dante Alighieri in honor of him.

On 30 April 1921, in honor of the 600th anniversary of Dante's death, Pope Benedict XV promulgated an encyclical named In praeclara summorum, naming Dante as one "of the many celebrated geniuses of whom the Catholic faith can boast" and the "pride and glory of humanity".

On 7 December 1965, Pope Paul VI promulgated the Latin motu proprio titled Altissimi cantus, which was dedicated to Dante's figure and poetry. In that year, the pope also donated a golden iron Greek Cross to Dante's burial site in Ravenna, in occasion of the 700th anniversary of his birth. The same cross was blessed by Pope Francis in October 2020.

Dante from Promptuarium Iconum Insigniorum

In 2007, a reconstruction of Dante's face was undertaken in a collaborative project. Artists from the University of Pisa and forensic engineers at the University of Bologna at Forlì constructed the model, portraying Dante's features as somewhat different from what was once thought.

In 2008, the Municipality of Florence officially apologized for expelling Dante 700 years earlier.

A celebration was held in 2015 at Italy's Senate of the Republic for the 750th anniversary of Dante's birth. It included a commemoration from Pope Francis, who also issued the apostolic letter Cando lucis aeternae in honor of the anniversary.

In May 2021, a symbolic re-trial of Dante Alighieri was held virtually in Florence to posthumously clear his name.

Divina Commedia (1472)

Most of Dante's literary work was composed after his exile in 1301. La Vita Nuova ("The New Life") is the only major work that predates it; it is a collection of lyric poems (sonnets and songs) with commentary in prose, ostensibly intended to be circulated in manuscript form, as was customary for such poems. It also contains, or constructs, the story of his love for Beatrice Portinari, who later served as the ultimate symbol of salvation in the Comedy, a function already indicated in the final pages of the Vita Nuova. The work contains many of Dante's love poems in Tuscan, which was not unprecedented; the vernacular had been regularly used for lyric works before, during all the thirteenth century. However, Dante's commentary on his own work is also in the vernacular-both in the Vita Nuova and in the Convivio -instead of the Latin that was almost universally used.

The Divine Comedy describes Dante's journey through Hell ( Inferno), Purgatory ( Purgatorio), and Paradise ( Paradiso); he is first guided by the Roman poet Virgil and then by Beatrice. Of the books, Purgatorio is arguably the most lyrical of the three, referring to more contemporary poets and artists than Inferno; Paradiso is the most heavily theological, and the one in which, many scholars have argued, the Divine Comedy' s most beautiful and mystic passages appear.

Dante, poised between the mountain of purgatory and the city of Florence, displays the incipit Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita in a detail of Domenico di Michelino's painting, Florence, 1465.

With its seriousness of purpose, its literary stature and the range-both stylistic and thematic-of its content, the Comedy soon became a cornerstone in the evolution of Italian as an established literary language. Dante was more aware than most early Italian writers of the variety of Italian dialects and of the need to create a literature and a unified literary language beyond the limits of Latin writing at the time; in that sense, he is a forerunner of the Renaissance, with its effort to create vernacular literature in competition with earlier classical writers. Dante's in-depth knowledge (within the limits of his time) of Roman antiquity, and his evident admiration for some aspects of pagan Rome, also point forward to the 15th century. Ironically, while he was widely honored in the centuries after his death, the Comedy slipped out of fashion among men of letters: too medieval, too rough and tragic, and not stylistically refined in the respects that the high and late Renaissance came to demand of literature.

He wrote the Comedy in a language he called "Italian", in some sense an amalgamated literary language predominantly based on the regional dialect of Tuscany, but with some elements of Latin and other regional dialects. He deliberately aimed to reach a readership throughout Italy including laymen, clergymen and other poets. By creating a poem of epic structure and philosophic purpose, he established that the Italian language was suitable for the highest sort of expression. In French, Italian is sometimes nicknamed la langue de Dante. Publishing in the vernacular language marked Dante as one of the first in Roman Catholic Western Europe (among others such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Giovanni Boccaccio) to break free from standards of publishing in only Latin (the language of liturgy, history and scholarship in general, but often also of lyric poetry). This break set a precedent and allowed more literature to be published for a wider audience, setting the stage for greater levels of literacy in the future. However, unlike Boccaccio, Milton or Ariosto, Dante did not really become an author read across Europe until the Romantic era. To the Romantics, Dante, like Homer and Shakespeare, was a prime example of the "original genius" who set his own rules, created persons of overpowering stature and depth, and went far beyond any imitation of the patterns of earlier masters; and who, in turn, could not truly be imitated. Throughout the 19th century, Dante's reputation grew and solidified; and by 1865, the 600th anniversary of his birth, he had become established as one of the greatest literary icons of the Western world.

Dante and Virgil visiting Hell, as depicted in Inferno, painted by Rafael Flores

New readers often wonder how such a serious work may be called a "comedy". In the classical sense the word comedy refers to works that reflect belief in an ordered universe, in which events tend toward not only a happy or amusing ending but one influenced by a Providential will that orders all things to an ultimate good. By this meaning of the word, as Dante himself allegedly wrote in a letter to Cangrande I della Scala, the progression of the pilgrimage from Hell to Paradise is the paradigmatic expression of comedy, since the work begins with the pilgrim's moral confusion and ends with the vision of God.

A number of other works are credited to Dante. ("The Banquet") is a collection of his longest poems with an (unfinished) allegorical commentary. ("Monarchy") is a summary treatise of political philosophy in Latin which was condemned and burned after Dante's death by the Papal Legate Bertrando del Poggetto; it argues for the necessity of a universal or global monarchy to establish universal peace in this life, and this monarchy's relationship to the Roman Catholic Church as guide to eternal peace. De vulgari eloquentia ("On the Eloquence in the Vernacular") is a treatise on vernacular literature, partly inspired by the Razos de trobar of Raimon Vidal de Bezaudun. Quaestio de aqua et terra ("A Question of the Water and of the Land") is a theological work discussing the arrangement of Earth's dry land and ocean. The are two poems addressed to the poet Giovanni del Virgilio. Dante is also sometimes credited with writing Il Fiore ("The Flower"), a series of sonnets summarizing Le Roman de la Rose, and Detto d'Amore ("Tale of Love"), a short narrative poem also based on Le Roman de la Rose. These would be the earliest, and most novice, of his known works. is a posthumous collection of miscellaneous poems.

List of works

The major works of Dante's are the following.

Illustration for Purgatorio (of The Divine Comedy) by Gustave Doré

Illustration for Paradiso (of The Divine Comedy) by Gustave Doré

Illustration for Paradiso (of The Divine Comedy) by Gustave Doré

1. His birth date is listed as "probably in the end of May" by Robert Hollander in "Dante" in ^ Dictionary of the Middle Ages, volume 4. According to Giovanni Boccaccio, the poet said he was born in May. See "Alighieri, Dante" in the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani.

2. ^ Matheson, Lister M. (2012). Icons of the Middle Ages: Rulers, Writers, Rebels, and Saints. Greenwood Pub Group. p. 244.

3. ^ Haller, Elizabeth K. (2012). "Dante Alighieri". In Matheson, Lister M. (ed.). Icons of the Middle Ages: Rulers, Writers, Rebels, and Saints. Vol. 1. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood. p. 244. ISBN 978-0-313-34080-2.

4. ^ Murray, Charles A. (2003). Human accomplishment: the pursuit of excellence in the arts and sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950 (1st ed.). New York: HarperCollins. ISBN 978-0-06-019247-1. OCLC 52047270.

5. ^ Barański, Zygmunt G.; Gilson, Simon, eds. (2018). The Cambridge Companion to Dante's 'Commedia'. Cambridge University Press. p. 108. ISBN 9781108421294.

6. His birth date is listed as "probably in the end of May" by Robert Hollander in "Dante" in ^ Dictionary of the Middle Ages, volume 4. According to Giovanni Boccaccio, the poet said he was born in May. See "Alighieri, Dante" in the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani.

7. ^ Alighieri, Dante (1904). Philip Henry Wicksteed, Herman Oelsner (ed.). The Paradiso of Dante Alighieri (fifth ed.). J.M. Dent and Company. p. 129.

8. ^ Davenport, John (2005). Dante: Poet, Author, and Proud Florentine. Infobase Publishing. p. 53. ISBN 978-1-4381-0415-7.

9. Latham, Charles S.; Carpenter, George R. (1891). ^ A Translation of Dante's Eleven Letters. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin. pp. 269-282.

10. Carroll, John S. (1903). ^ Exiles of Eternity: An Exposition of Dante's Inferno. London: Hodder and Stoughton. pp. xlviii-l.

11. ^ Wickstool, Philip Henry (1903). The Convivio of Dante Alighieri. London : J. M. Dent and co. p. 5. And in that I spoke before entrance on the prime of manhood, and in this when I had already passed the same.

12. ^ Bertolo, Fabio M. (2003). "L' Officiolum ritrovato di Francesco da Barberino". Spolia - Journal of Medieval Studies.

13. ^ "Cangrande della Scala - "Da molte stelle mi vien questa luce"" [Cangrande della Scala - "This light comes to me from many stars"]. dantealighieri.tk (in Italian).

14. ^ Vauchez, André; Dobson, Richard Barrie; Lapidge, Michael (2000). Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers. p. 1517.; Caesar, Michael (1989). Dante, the Critical Heritage, 1314(?)-1870. London: Routledge. p. xi.

15. ^ Boswell, Jackson Campbell (1999). Dante's Fame in England: References in Printed British Books, 1477-1640. Newark: University of Delaware Press. p. xv. ISBN 0-87413-605-9. After John Foxe's enormously influential Ecclesiastical History Contayning the Actes and Monumentes was published (1570), Dante's role as a proto-Protestant was sealed.

16. ^ "In praeclara summorum: Encyclical of Pope Benedict XV on Dante". The Holy See. Retrieved 7 November 2014.

17. ^ Benazzi, S (2009). "The Face of the Poet Dante Alighieri, Reconstructed by Virtual Modeling and Forensic Anthropology Techniques". Journal of Archaeological Science. 36 (2): 278-283. Bibcode:2009JArSc..36..278B. doi:10.1016/j.jas.2008.09.006.

18. ^ Scott, John (1995). "The Unfinished 'Convivio' as a Pathway to the 'Comedy'". Dante Studies, with the Annual Report of the Dante Society. 113 (113): 31-56. JSTOR 40166505 - via JSTOR.

19. ^ Faidit, Uc; Vidal, Raimon; Guessard, François (1858). Grammaires provençales de Hugues Faidit et de Raymond Vidal de Besaudun (XIIIe siècle) (2nd ed.). Paris: A. Franck.

Barolini, Teodolinda (ed.). Dante's Lyric Poetry: Poems of Youth and of the 'Vita Nuova'. University of Toronto Press, 2014.

Gardner, Edmund Garratt (1921). Dante. London: Oxford University Press. OCLC 690699123.

Harrison, Robert (19 February 2015). "Dante on Trial". NY Review of Books. pp. 36-37.

Raffa, Guy P. (2020). Dante's Bones: How a Poet Invented Italy. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press. ISBN 978-0-674-98083-9.

Santagata, Marco (2016). Dante: The Story of His Life. Harvard University Press. ISBN 9780674504868.

Scartazzini, Giovanni Andrea (1874-1890). La Divina Commedia riveduta e commentata (4 volumes). OCLC 558999245.

Scartazzini, Giovanni Andrea (1896-1898). Enciclopedia dantesca: dizionario critico e ragionato di quanto concerne la vita e le opere di Dante Alighieri (2 volumes). OCLC 12202483.

Seung, T.K. (1962). The Fragile Leaves of the Sibyl: Dante's Master Plan. Westminster, MD: Newman Press. OCLC 1426455.

Toynbee, Paget (1898). A Dictionary of the Proper Names and Notable Matters in the Works of Dante. London: The Clarendon Press. OCLC 343895.

Whiting, Mary Bradford (1922). Dante the Man and the Poet. Cambridge: W. Heffer & Sons. OCLC 224789.

Guénon, René (1925). The Esoterism of Dante, trans. by C.B. Berhill, in the Perennial Wisdom Series. Ghent, NY: Sophia Perennis et Universalis, 1996. viii, 72 p. N.B.: Originally published in French, entitled L'Esoterisme de Danté, in 1925. ISBN 0-900588-02-0

Works by Dante Alighieri in eBook form at Standard Ebooks

Works by Dante Alighieri at Project Gutenberg

Works by or about Dante Alighieri at Internet Archive

Works by Dante Alighieri at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)

Dante Alighieri at Curlie

Works by Dante Alighieri at One More Library (Works in English, Italian, Latin, Arabic, German, French and Spanish)

Wetherbee, Winthrop. "Dante Alighieri". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

The Dante Museum in Florence: his life, his books and a history & literature blog about Dante

The World of Dante multimedia, texts, maps, gallery, searchable database, music, teacher resources, timeline

The Princeton Dante Project Archived 3 June 2009 at the Wayback Machine texts and multimedia

The Dartmouth Dante Project searchable database of commentary

Dante Online manuscripts of works, images and text transcripts by Società Dantesca Italiana

Digital Dante - Divine Comedy with commentary, other works, scholars on Dante

Open Yale Course on Dante by Yale University

DanteSources project about Dante's primary sources developed by ISTI-CNR and the University of Pisa

Works Italian and Latin texts, concordances and frequency lists by IntraText

Dante Today Archived 11 January 2018 at the Wayback Machine citings and sightings of Dante in contemporary culture

Bibliotheca Dantesca journal dedicated to Dante and his reception

Edmund Garratt Gardner (1908). "Dante Alighieri". In Catholic Encyclopedia. 4. New York: Robert Appleton Company.

Arthur John Butler (1911). "Dante". In Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica. 7. (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 810-817.

Dante Collection at University College London (c. 3000 volumes of works by and about Dante)

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Dante Alighieri (Italian: [ˈdantealiˈɡjɛːri]; c. 1265 - 14 September 1321), most likely baptized Durante di Alighiero degli Alighieri and often referred to as Dante (, ), was an Italian poet, writer and philosopher.

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Dante shown holding a copy of the Divine Comedy, next to the entrance to Hell, the seven terraces of Mount Purgatory and the city of Florence, with the spheres of Heaven above, in Domenico di Michelino's 1465 fresco

The Divine Comedy ( Italian: Divina Commedia [diˈviːnakomˈmɛːdja]) is an Italian narrative poem by Dante Alighieri, begun c. 1308 and completed around 1321, shortly before the author's death. It is widely considered the pre-eminent work in Italian literature and one of the greatest works of Western literature. The poem's imaginative vision of the afterlife is representative of the medieval worldview as it existed in the Western Church by the 14th century. It helped establish the Tuscan language, in which it is written, as the standardized Italian language. It is divided into three parts: , Purgatorio, and .

The poem discusses "the state of the soul after death and presents an image of divine justice meted out as due punishment or reward", and describes Dante's travels through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. Allegorically, the poem represents the soul's journey towards God, beginning with the recognition and rejection of sin ( Inferno), followed by the penitent Christian life ( Purgatorio), which is then followed by the soul's ascent to God ( Paradiso). Dante draws on medieval Catholic theology and philosophy, especially Thomistic philosophy derived from the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas. Consequently, the Divine Comedy has been called "the Summa in verse".

In the poem, the pilgrim Dante is accompanied by three guides: Virgil, who represents human reason, and who guides him for all of Inferno and most of Purgatorio; Beatrice, who represents divine revelation in addition to theology, grace, and faith; and guides him from the end of Purgatorio onwards; and Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, who represents contemplative mysticism and devotion to Mary the Mother, guiding him in the final cantos of Paradiso.

The work was originally simply titled Comedìa (pronounced , Tuscan for "Comedy") - so also in the first printed edition, published in 1472 - later adjusted to the modern Italian Commedia. The adjective Divina was added by Giovanni Boccaccio, owing to its subject matter and lofty style, and the first edition to name the poem Divina Comedia in the title was that of the Venetian humanist Lodovico Dolce, published in 1555 by Gabriele Giolito de' Ferrari.

Erich Auerbach said Dante was the first writer to depict human beings as the products of a specific time, place and circumstance, as opposed to mythic archetypes or a collection of vices and virtues, concluding that this, along with the fully imagined world of the Divine Comedy, suggests that the Divine Comedy inaugurated realism and self-portraiture in modern fiction.

Dante gazes at Mount Purgatory in an allegorical portrait by Agnolo Bronzino, painted c. 1530

The Divine Comedy is composed of 14,233 lines that are divided into three cantiche (singular cantica) - Inferno ( Hell), Purgatorio ( Purgatory), and Paradiso ( Paradise) - each consisting of 33 cantos (Italian plural canti). An initial canto, serving as an introduction to the poem and generally considered to be part of the first cantica, brings the total number of cantos to 100. It is generally accepted, however, that the first two cantos serve as a unitary prologue to the entire epic, and that the opening two cantos of each cantica serve as prologues to each of the three cantiche.

The number three is prominent in the work, represented in part by the number of cantiche and their lengths. Additionally, the verse scheme used, , is hendecasyllabic (lines of eleven syllables), with the lines composing tercets according to the rhyme scheme ABA BCB CDC DED... The total number of syllables in each tercet is thus 33, the same as the number of cantos in each cantica.

Written in the first person, the poem tells of Dante's journey through the three realms of the dead, lasting from the night before Good Friday to the Wednesday after Easter in the spring of 1300. The Roman poet Virgil guides him through Hell and Purgatory; Beatrice, Dante's ideal woman, guides him through Heaven. Beatrice was a Florentine woman he had met in childhood and admired from afar in the mode of the then-fashionable courtly love tradition, which is highlighted in Dante's earlier work La Vita Nuova.

The structure of the three realms follows a common numerical pattern of 9 plus 1, for a total of 10: 9 circles of the Inferno, followed by Lucifer contained at its bottom; 9 rings of Mount Purgatory, followed by the Garden of Eden crowning its summit; and the 9 celestial bodies of Paradiso, followed by the Empyrean containing the very essence of God. Within each group of 9, 7 elements correspond to a specific moral scheme, subdivided into three subcategories, while 2 others of greater particularity are added to total nine. For example, the seven deadly sins of the Catholic Church that are cleansed in Purgatory are joined by special realms for the late repentant and the excommunicated by the church. The core seven sins within Purgatory correspond to a moral scheme of love perverted, subdivided into three groups corresponding to excessive love ( Lust, Gluttony, Greed), deficient love ( Sloth), and malicious love ( Wrath, Envy, Pride).

In central Italy's political struggle between Guelphs and Ghibellines, Dante was part of the Guelphs, who in general favored the Papacy over the Holy Roman Emperor. Florence's Guelphs split into factions around 1300 - the White Guelphs and the Black Guelphs. Dante was among the White Guelphs who were exiled in 1302 by the Lord-Mayor Cante de' Gabrielli di Gubbio, after troops under Charles of Valois entered the city, at the request of Pope Boniface VIII, who supported the Black Guelphs. This exile, which lasted the rest of Dante's life, shows its influence in many parts of the Comedy, from prophecies of Dante's exile to Dante's views of politics, to the eternal damnation of some of his opponents.

The last word in each of the three cantiche is stelle ("stars").

Gustave Doré's engravings illustrated the Divine Comedy (1861-1868); here Charon comes to ferry souls across the river Acheron to Hell.

The poem begins on the night before Good Friday in the year 1300, "halfway along our life's path" ( Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita). Dante is thirty-five years old, half of the biblical lifespan of 70 ( Psalms 89:10, Vulgate), lost in a dark wood (understood as sin), assailed by beasts (a lion, a leopard, and a she-wolf) he cannot evade and unable to find the "straight way" ( diritta via) - also translatable as "right way" - to salvation (symbolized by the sun behind the mountain). Conscious that he is ruining himself and that he is falling into a "low place" ( basso loco) where the sun is silent (' l sol tace), Dante is at last rescued by Virgil, and the two of them begin their journey to the underworld. Each sin's punishment in Inferno is a contrapasso, a symbolic instance of poetic justice; for example, in Canto XX, fortune-tellers and soothsayers must walk with their heads on backwards, unable to see what is ahead, because that was what they had tried to do in life:

they had their faces twisted toward their haunches
and found it necessary to walk backward,
because they could not see ahead of them.
... and since he wanted so to see ahead,
he looks behind and walks a backward path.

Allegorically, the Inferno represents the Christian soul seeing sin for what it really is, and the three beasts represent three types of sin: the self-indulgent, the violent, and the malicious. These three types of sin also provide the three main divisions of Dante's Hell: Upper Hell, outside the city of Dis, for the four sins of indulgence ( lust, gluttony, avarice, anger); Circle 7 for the sins of violence against one's neighbor, against oneself, and against God, art, and nature; and Circles 8 and 9 for the sins of fraud and treachery. Added to these are two dissimilar, spiritual categories: Limbo, in Circle 1, contains the virtuous pagans who were not sinful but were ignorant of Christ, and Circle 6 contains the heretics who contradicted the doctrine and confused the spirit of Christ.

Dante, accompanied by Virgil, consoles the souls of the envious, from the Canto III of Purgatorio

Having survived the depths of Hell, Dante and Virgil ascend out of the undergloom to the Mountain of Purgatory on the far side of the world. The Mountain is on an island, the only land in the Southern Hemisphere, created by the displacement of rock which resulted when Satan's fall created Hell (which Dante portrays as existing underneath Jerusalem). The mountain has seven terraces, corresponding to the seven deadly sins or "seven roots of sinfulness." The classification of sin here is more psychological than that of the Inferno, being based on motives, rather than actions. It is also drawn primarily from Christian theology, rather than from classical sources. However, Dante's illustrative examples of sin and virtue draw on classical sources as well as on the Bible and on contemporary events.

Love, a theme throughout the Divine Comedy, is particularly important for the framing of sin on the Mountain of Purgatory. While the love that flows from God is pure, it can become sinful as it flows through humanity. Humans can sin by using love towards improper or malicious ends ( Wrath, Envy, Pride), or using it to proper ends but with love that is either not strong enough ( Sloth) or love that is too strong ( Lust, Gluttony, Greed). Below the seven purges of the soul is the Ante-Purgatory, containing the Excommunicated from the church and the Late repentant who died, often violently, before receiving rites. Thus the total comes to nine, with the addition of the Garden of Eden at the summit, equaling ten.

Allegorically, the Purgatorio represents the Christian life. Christian souls arrive escorted by an angel, singing In exitu Israel de Aegypto. In his Letter to Cangrande, Dante explains that this reference to Israel leaving Egypt refers both to the redemption of Christ and to "the conversion of the soul from the sorrow and misery of sin to the state of grace." Appropriately, therefore, it is Easter Sunday when Dante and Virgil arrive.

The Purgatorio demonstrates the medieval knowledge of a spherical Earth. During the poem, Dante discusses the different stars visible in the southern hemisphere, the altered position of the sun, and the various time zones of the Earth. At this stage it is, Dante says, sunset at Jerusalem, midnight on the River Ganges, and sunrise in Purgatory.

Paradiso, Canto III: Dante and Beatrice speak to Piccarda and Constance of Sicily, in a fresco by Philipp Veit.

After an initial ascension, Beatrice guides Dante through the nine celestial spheres of Heaven. These are concentric and spherical, as in Aristotelian and Ptolemaic cosmology. While the structures of the Inferno and Purgatorio were based on different classifications of sin, the structure of the Paradiso is based on the four cardinal virtues and the three theological virtues.

The seven lowest spheres of Heaven deal solely with the cardinal virtues of Prudence, Fortitude, Justice and Temperance. The first three spheres involve a deficiency of one of the cardinal virtues - the Moon, containing the inconstant, whose vows to God waned as the moon and thus lack fortitude; Mercury, containing the ambitious, who were virtuous for glory and thus lacked justice; and Venus, containing the lovers, whose love was directed towards another than God and thus lacked Temperance. The final four incidentally are positive examples of the cardinal virtues, all led on by the Sun, containing the prudent, whose wisdom lighted the way for the other virtues, to which the others are bound (constituting a category on its own). Mars contains the men of fortitude who died in the cause of Christianity; Jupiter contains the kings of Justice; and Saturn contains the temperate, the monks who abided by the contemplative lifestyle. The seven subdivided into three are raised further by two more categories: the eighth sphere of the fixed stars that contain those who achieved the theological virtues of faith, hope and love, and represent the Church Triumphant - the total perfection of humanity, cleansed of all the sins and carrying all the virtues of heaven; and the ninth circle, or Primum Mobile (corresponding to the Geocentricism of Medieval astronomy), which contains the angels, creatures never poisoned by original sin. Topping them all is the Empyrean, which contains the essence of God, completing the 9-fold division to 10.

Dante meets and converses with several great saints of the Church, including Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, Saint Peter, and St. John. The Paradiso is consequently more theological in nature than the Inferno and the Purgatorio. However, Dante admits that the vision of heaven he receives is merely the one his human eyes permit him to see, and thus the vision of heaven found in the Cantos is Dante's personal vision.

The Divine Comedy finishes with Dante seeing the Triune God. In a flash of understanding that he cannot express, Dante finally understands the mystery of Christ's divinity and humanity, and his soul becomes aligned with God's love:

But already my desire and my will
were being turned like a wheel, all at one speed,
by the Love which moves the sun and the other stars.

According to the Italian Dante Society, no original manuscript written by Dante has survived, although there are many manuscript copies from the 14th and 15th centuries - some 800 are listed on their site.

Coluccio Salutati translated some quotations from the Comedy into Latin for his De fato et fortuna in 1396-1397. The first complete translation of the Comedy was made into Latin prose by Giovanni da Serravalle in 1416 for two English bishops, Robert Hallam and Nicholas Bubwith, and an Italian cardinal, Amedeo di Saluzzo. It was made during the Council of Constance. The first verse translation, into Latin hexameters, was made in 1427-1431 by Matteo Ronto.

The first translation of the Comedy into another vernacular was the prose translation into Castilian completed by Enrique de Villena in 1428. The first vernacular verse translation was that of Andreu Febrer into Catalan in 1429.

Title page of the first printed edition (Foligno, 11 April 1472)

First edition to name the poem Divina Comedia, 1555

Illustration of Lucifer in the first fully illustrated print edition. Woodcut for Inferno, canto 34. Pietro di Piasi, Venice, 1491.

The first printed edition was published in Foligno, Italy, by Johann Numeister and Evangelista Angelini da Trevi on 11 April 1472. Of the 300 copies printed, fourteen still survive. The original printing press is on display in the Oratorio della Nunziatella in Foligno.

1472
La Comedia di Dante Alleghieri
Foligno

Johann Numeister and Evangelista Angelini da Trevi

First printed edition (or editio princeps)

1481
Comento di Christophoro Landino fiorentino sopra la Comedia di Dante Alighieri
Florence
Nicolaus Laurentii
With Cristoforo Landino's commentary in Italian, and some engraved illustrations by Baccio Baldini after designs by Sandro Botticelli

1491
Comento di Christophoro Landino fiorentino sopra la Comedia di Dante Alighieri
Venice

Pietro di Piasi

First fully illustrated edition

1506
Commedia di Dante insieme con uno diagolo circa el sito forma et misure dello inferno
Florence

Philippo di Giunta

1555
La Divina Comedia di Dante
Venice

Gabriel Giolito

First use of "Divine" in title

The Divine Comedy can be described simply as an allegory: each canto, and the episodes therein, can contain many alternative meanings. Dante's allegory, however, is more complex, and, in explaining how to read the poem (see the Letter to Cangrande) he outlines other levels of meaning besides the allegory: the historical, the moral, the literal, and the anagogical.

The structure of the poem is also quite complex, with mathematical and numerological patterns distributed throughout the work, particularly threes and nines. The poem is often lauded for its particularly human qualities: Dante's skillful delineation of the characters he encounters in Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise; his bitter denunciations of Florentine and Italian politics; and his powerful poetic imagination. Dante's use of real characters, according to Dorothy Sayers in her introduction to her translation of the Inferno, allows Dante the freedom of not having to involve the reader in description, and allows him to "[make] room in his poem for the discussion of a great many subjects of the utmost importance, thus widening its range and increasing its variety."

Dante called the poem "Comedy" (the adjective "Divine" was added later, in the 16th century) because poems in the ancient world were classified as High ("Tragedy") or Low ("Comedy"). Low poems had happy endings and were written in everyday language, whereas High poems treated more serious matters and were written in an elevated style. Dante was one of the first in the Middle Ages to write of a serious subject, the Redemption of humanity, in the low and "vulgar" Italian language and not the Latin one might expect for such a serious topic. Boccaccio's account that an early version of the poem was begun by Dante in Latin is still controversial.

Although the Divine Comedy is primarily a religious poem, discussing sin, virtue, and theology, Dante also discusses several elements of the science of his day (this mixture of science with poetry has received both praise and criticism over the centuries). The Purgatorio repeatedly refers to the implications of a spherical Earth, such as the different stars visible in the southern hemisphere, the altered position of the sun, and the various time zones of the Earth. For example, at sunset in Purgatory it is midnight at the Ebro, dawn in Jerusalem, and noon on the River Ganges:

Just as, there where its Maker shed His blood,
the sun shed its first rays, and Ebro lay
beneath high Libra, and the ninth hour's rays

were scorching Ganges' waves; so here, the sun
stood at the point of day's departure when
God's angel - happy - showed himself to us.

Dante travels through the centre of the Earth in the Inferno, and comments on the resulting change in the direction of gravity in Canto XXXIV (lines 76-120). A little earlier (XXXIII, 102-105), he queries the existence of wind in the frozen inner circle of hell, since it has no temperature differentials.

Galileo Galilei's copy of the first Giolito edition of the poem (1555)

Inevitably, given its setting, the Paradiso discusses astronomy extensively, but in the Ptolemaic sense. The Paradiso also discusses the importance of the experimental method in science, with a detailed example in lines 94-105 of Canto II:

A briefer example occurs in Canto XV of the Purgatorio (lines 16-21), where Dante points out that both theory and experiment confirm that the angle of incidence is equal to the angle of reflection. Other references to science in the Paradiso include descriptions of clockwork in Canto XXIV (lines 13-18), and Thales' theorem about triangles in Canto XIII (lines 101-102).

Galileo Galilei is known to have lectured on the Inferno, and it has been suggested that the poem may have influenced some of Galileo's own ideas regarding mechanics.

Dante reading the Divine Comedy at the court of Guido Novello, painting by Andrea Pierini, 1850. Palazzo Pitti, Florence

Without access to the works of Homer, Dante used Virgil, Lucan, Ovid, and Statius as the models for the style, history, and mythology of the Comedy. This is most obvious in the case of Virgil, who appears as a mentor character throughout the first two canticles and who has his epic praised with language Dante reserves elsewhere for Scripture. Ovid is given less explicit praise in the poem, but besides Virgil, Dante uses Ovid as a source more than any other poet, mostly through metaphors and fantastical episodes based on those in The Metamorphoses. Less influential than either of the two are Statius and Lucan, the latter of whom has only been given proper recognition as a source in the Divine Comedy in the twentieth century.

Besides Dante's fellow poets, the classical figure that most influenced the Comedy is Aristotle. Dante built up the philosophy of the Comedy with the works of Aristotle as a foundation, just as the scholastics used Aristotle as the basis for their thinking. Dante knew Aristotle directly from Latin translations of his works and indirectly quotations in the works of Albertus Magnus. Dante even acknowledges Aristotle's influence explicitly in the poem, specifically when Virgil justifies the Inferno's structure by citing the Nicomachean Ethics. In the same canto, Virgil draws on Cicero's De Officiis to explain why sins of the intellect are worse than sins of violence, a key point that would be explored from canto XVIII to the end of the Inferno.

The Divine Comedy's language is often derived from the phraseology of the Vulgate. This was the only translation of the Bible Dante had access to, as it was one the vast majority of scribes were willing to copy during the Middle Ages. This includes five hundred or so direct quotes and references Dante derives from the Bible (or his memory of it). Dante also treats the Bible as a final authority on any matter, including on subjects scripture only approaches allegorically.

The Divine Comedy is also a product of Scholasticism, especially as expressed by St. Thomas Aquinas. This influence is most pronounced in the Paradiso, where the text's portrayals of God, the beatific vision, and substantial forms all align with scholastic doctrine. It is also in the Paradiso that Aquinas and fellow scholastic St. Bonaventure appear as characters, introducing Dante to all of Heaven's wisest souls. Despite all this, there are issues on which Dante diverges from the scholastic doctrine, such as in his unbridled praise for poetry.

The Apocalypse of Peter is one of the earliest examples of a Christian-Jewish katabasis, a genre of explicit depictions of heaven and hell. Later works inspired by it include the Apocalypse of Thomas in the 2nd-4th century, and more importantly, the Apocalypse of Paul in the 4th century. Despite a lack of "official" approval, the Apocalypse of Paul would go on to be popular for centuries, possibly due to its popularity among the medieval monks that copied and preserved manuscripts in the turbulent centuries following the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The Divine Comedy belongs to the same genre and was influenced by the Apocalypse of Paul.

Dante lived in a Europe of substantial literary and philosophical contact with the Muslim world, encouraged by such factors as Averroism ("Averrois, che'l gran comento feo" Commedia, Inferno, IV, 144, meaning "Averrois, who wrote the great comment") and the patronage of Alfonso X of Castile. Of the twelve wise men Dante meets in Canto X of the Paradiso, Thomas Aquinas and, even more so, Siger of Brabant were strongly influenced by Arabic commentators on Aristotle. Medieval Christian mysticism also shared the Neoplatonic influence of Sufis such as Ibn Arabi. Philosopher Frederick Copleston argued in 1950 that Dante's respectful treatment of Averroes, Avicenna, and Siger of Brabant indicates his acknowledgement of a "considerable debt" to Islamic philosophy.

In 1919, Miguel Asín Palacios, a Spanish scholar and a Catholic priest, published La Escatología musulmana en la Divina Comedia ( Islamic Eschatology in the Divine Comedy), an account of parallels between early Islamic philosophy and the Divine Comedy. Palacios argued that Dante derived many features of and episodes about the hereafter from the spiritual writings of Ibn Arabi and from the Isra and Mi'raj or night journey of Muhammad to heaven. The latter is described in the and the Kitab al Miraj (translated into Latin in 1264 or shortly before as Liber scalae Machometi, "The Book of Muhammad's Ladder"), and has significant similarities to the Paradiso, such as a sevenfold division of Paradise, although this is not unique to the Kitab al Miraj or Islamic cosmology.

Many scholars have not been satisfied that Dante was influenced by the Kitab al Miraj. The 20th century Orientalist Francesco Gabrieli expressed skepticism regarding the claimed similarities, and the lack of evidence of a vehicle through which it could have been transmitted to Dante. The Italian philologist Maria Corti pointed out that, during his stay at the court of Alfonso X, Dante's mentor Brunetto Latini met Bonaventura de Siena, a Tuscan who had translated the Kitab al Miraj from Arabic into Latin. Corti speculates that Brunetto may have provided a copy of that work to Dante. René Guénon, a Sufi convert and scholar of Ibn Arabi, confirms in The Esoterism of Dante the theory of the Islamic influence (direct or indirect) on Dante. Palacios' theory that Dante was influenced by Ibn Arabi was satirized by the Turkish academic Orhan Pamuk in his novel The Black Book.

In addition to that, it has been claimed that Risālat al-Ghufrān ("The Epistle of Forgiveness"), a satirical work mixing Arabic poetry and prose written by Abu al-ʿAlaʾ al-Maʿarri around 1033 CE, had an influence on, or even inspired, Dante's Divine Comedy.[page needed ]

A detail from one of Sandro Botticelli's illustrations for Inferno, Canto XVIII, 1480s. Silverpoint on parchment, completed in pen and ink.

The Divine Comedy was not always as well-regarded as it is today. Although recognized as a masterpiece in the centuries immediately following its publication, the work was largely ignored during the Enlightenment, with some notable exceptions such as Vittorio Alfieri; Antoine de Rivarol, who translated the Inferno into French; and Giambattista Vico, who in the Scienza nuova and in the Giudizio su Dante inaugurated what would later become the romantic reappraisal of Dante, juxtaposing him to Homer. The Comedy was "rediscovered" in the English-speaking world by William Blake - who illustrated several passages of the epic - and the Romantic writers of the 19th century. Later authors such as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Samuel Beckett, C. S. Lewis and James Joyce have drawn on it for inspiration. The poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was its first American translator, and modern poets, including Seamus Heaney, Robert Pinsky, John Ciardi, W. S. Merwin, and Stanley Lombardo, have also produced translations of all or parts of the book. In Russia, beyond Pushkin's translation of a few tercets, Osip Mandelstam's late poetry has been said to bear the mark of a "tormented meditation" on the Comedy. In 1934, Mandelstam gave a modern reading of the poem in his labyrinthine "Conversation on Dante". In T. S. Eliot's estimation, "Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them. There is no third." For Jorge Luis Borges the Divine Comedy was "the best book literature has achieved".

The Divine Comedy has been translated into English more times than any other language, and new English translations of the Divine Comedy continue to be published regularly. Notable English translations of the complete poem include the following.

A number of other translators, such as Robert Pinsky, have translated the Inferno only.

Dante and Virgil, a painting by William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1850), which depicts Dante and Virgil in the eighth circle of Hell, observing two damned souls in eternal combat in Hell.[87]

The Divine Comedy has been a source of inspiration for countless artists for almost seven centuries. There are many references to Dante's work in literature. In music, Franz Liszt was one of many composers to write works based on the Divine Comedy. In sculpture, the work of Auguste Rodin includes themes from Dante. Sculptor Timothy Schmalz created a series of 100 sculptures, one for each canto, on the 700th anniversary of the date of Dante's death, and many visual artists have illustrated Dante's work, as shown by the examples above. There have also been many references to the Divine Comedy in cinema, television, comics and video games.

Eiss, Harry (2017). Seeking God in the Works of T.S. Eliot and Michelangelo. New Castle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. ISBN 978-1-44384-390-4.

Shaw, Prue (2014). Reading Dante: From Here to Eternity. New York: Liveright Publishing. ISBN 978-1-63149-006-4.

Trone, George Andrew (2000). "Exile". In Lansing, Richard (ed.). The Dante Encyclopedia. London and New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-41587-611-7.

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The Divine Comedy ( Italian: Divina Commedia [diˈviːnakomˈmɛːdja]) is an Italian narrative poem by Dante Alighieri, begun c. 1308 and completed around 1321, shortly before the author's death. It is widely considered the pre-eminent work in Italian literature and one of the greatest works of Western literature.

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In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period (also spelled mediæval or mediaeval) lasted approximately from the late 5th to the late 15th centuries, aligning with[citation needed] the post-classical period of global history. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 A…