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The essay considers the representation of childhood and adolescence in the work of Dante. While in Convivio the poet discusses the ages of human life but does not address infanzia or puerizia, in his poem the representations of this earlier phase of life are many and varied, presented above all through similes. These representations illustrate the particular attention Dante paid to the mother/child relationship, which allows the reader to form hypotheses about his family environment and relationship with the woman with whom he shared his life in Florence: not Beatrice, but Gemma Donati.

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L’intervento indaga, all’interno della produzione artistica di Guttuso, il ruolo che ebbe la Commedia e la figura di Dante. Si prenderanno in esame le tavole realizzate dal pittore e si seguirà la storia editoriale dell’intero progetto fino alla realizzazione del volume finale, Il Dante di Guttuso. Si esamineranno, contestualmente, i rapporti con la tradizione illustrata della Commedia.

This article engages with new materialist discourses and material ecocriticism to examine three important moments of geological kinesis within the first two cantiche: the movement of landmass caused by Lucifer’s fall (Inf. XXXIV); the earthquake at Christ’s crucifixion (Inf. XII); and the mountainquakes of Purgatory (Purg. XXI). These geological events coincide with important moments in Christian salvation history, but they also offer examples of an affinity between the lithic and the human, presenting an alternative history of the Earth in which stone responds to cosmological, spiritual events with fear and love, literally changing the face of the Earth and shaking the foundations of Hell. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This essay offers an example of a guiding thread in my own research on and teaching of Dante’s Commedia. Specifically, I will follow a strand that leads us from Dante’s encounter with the “bella scola” of classical poets in Inferno Canto 4, through a key scene in the Purgatorio where Dante and his guide Virgil meet the late classical poet Statius, to the remarkable six-canto suite in the Heaven of the Stars, sign of Gemini, in which Dante-poet has Dante-character undergo a series doctrinal tests on the theological virtues. His successful response to the challenges posed by the apostles Peter, James, and Paul doubly authorizes him as poet and as Christian teacher of the highest order. These unique experiences as Dante is successively introduced to and made part of a rising series of elite groups, highlights his double role as humble student and prospective teacher of others. Among the various aims of this essay is to give a sample of a way in which teachers of the Commedia may address the perennial pedagogical problem of how to account for the extraordinary spectacle of a first-person epic that at once expresses deep piety with profound “charitas” (spiritual love) and appears as the absolute height of a self-aggrandizement seemingly inconsistent with Christian humility. Another is to suggest one possible strategy for teaching the Comedy as a whole, and especially the final canticle, the Paradiso, which even Dante himself notoriously thinks is “not for everyone”.

Indagini ormai “classiche” (Segre, Blasucci, Ossola) e importanti studi successivi (Zatti, Jossa, Geyer, Stierle e altri) hanno mostrato la pervasività dell’influsso della Commedia sul Furioso, sia a livello linguistico, stilistico e metrico, sia in ambito tematico, sia, infine, nell’ottica di una contrapposizione (spesso declinata in chiave parodica) di “ideologie” divergenti. A fronte della ricchezza di aspetti sinora analizzati, possiamo chiederci oggi se per Ariosto la Commedia abbia rappresentato un modello anche sul piano delle strutture narrative e del sistema dei rapporti tra il testo e la realtà extra-testuale. Mettendo in evidenza per la prima volta la presenza e la funzione delle riprese dantesche nei proemi dei primi canti del Furioso, il contributo mostra come Ariosto si appropri di precise strategie narrative della Commedia e costruisca così nuove dinamiche strutturali che presiedono alla narrazione in prima persona e ai riferimenti alla realtà contemporanea.

Moments of visual fixation appear throughout the Commedia. Reconstructing their connotations in relation to contemporary discourses on sight, this article argues that, as well as a literary trope, Dante's depictions of fixing the gaze function as a metaliterary device, an invitation to the reader's critical eye that, when interrupted, draws attention to the multiple cultures of gazing circulating at the time – from erotic obsession to contemplative ecstasy via visionary philosophical and theological inquiry. The roots of the trope are traced in Dante's rime and analysed in key episodes of the Commedia, including the dream of the Siren (Purgatorioxix), Dante's 'too fixed' gaze (Purgatorioxxiii), and the climatic gazes pilgrim and guide turn to God in Paradiso. By encouraging the reader to fulfil the poet's vision in her imagination, the fixed gaze, and its frequent interruption, emerges as a uniquely suitable trope for negotiating the representational challenges of transcendental topics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this contribution is to examine traces of the litanies in two of the three canticles of Dante's Divine Comedy. Starting from a previous study of the presence of litany in the medieval poetry, and from a theoretical study dedicated both to the evolution of the litany and the Weltanschauung that accompanied such process, I examine short fragments of the Purgatorio (XIII) and the Paradiso (XXXIII). The aim is to analyze the litanic (intertextual) elements and techniques within Dante's poem. In the Purgatorio (XIII) there is a direct quotation from the Litany of the Saints, while in the Paradiso we find tipically litanic rhetorical-semantic modes, as the prayer to the Holy Virgin in the final canto of the poem. Both litany and lauda are present in moments of prayer (Christian and pagan) in the mentioned cantos. Both litanies and laudas constitute models that build up the representations of sanctity within Dante's poem.

The issue brings together Dante's literature and semiotics with the aim of exchanging ideas, presenting the state of the art of the different disciplines and making different scholars dialogue. A second intention is to re-propose the reflection on Dante to today's semiotics, profoundly changed compared to the seventies, eighties and nineties of the twentieth century, when the leading exponents of the discipline took care of the Comedy. At the same time, semiotics aim to offer new stimuli to the current Dante interpretation.

Verses 22-45 of canto XXVIII of Dante's Inferno are problematic for translations into languages that are prevalent in predominantly Islamic countries. These verses, in fact, describe the punishment that Dante imagined for Muhammad and Alì. The severity of their punishment is expressed, in particular, through the figure of the face cleaved in two halves, a counterpoint for those who, according to Dante, committed the sin of dividing Christianity. The face is omnipresent in Dante's masterpiece. The article summarizes its semantics in reference also to the various terms used by Dante to designate different aspects of the face (faccia, viso, volto, sembiante); ; it distills the salient bibliography on the subject and proposes that the itinerary of the viator through the three dimensions of damnation, purgation, and bliss is also and above all an itinerary made of faces that the viator meets, his face also transfiguring itself gradually along the path of holiness.

The essay intends to focus on the character of Dante, proposed as the result of a process of textualization, reconstructing its alternating fortunes through the reading that of the character and of his work has been proposed, over the centuries, by different popes. The objective will be to reconstruct the path of construction of the "Dante text" by reading its different phases as stages of a process oriented toward the construction of a model that was at first secular and then more expressly Catholic and institutionalized. The object of the analysis, which will make use of the methodological tools of the semiotics of passions, will thus be the relationship that binds Dante to the ecclesiastical institution. Specifically, the relationship linking the Poet to the popes will be investigated, focusing expressly on the changes at the level of judgment expressed by different pontiffs.

Much has been written about the individual saints Dante mentions in his poem, but little has been published about the representation of holiness in Dante's work in general. This essay addresses this critical lacuna, because holiness is one of the main purposes of Dante's poetic journey through the afterworld, in an attempt to lead all the living to their heavenly happiness. Dante employs a rich variety of figures of speech, drawing from floral and courtly semantics, as well as the language of light, but his preferred linguistic source remains Sacred Scripture. Paying particular attention to rhetorical figures and lexical options employed by the poet for the representation of holiness, this essay discusses the poetic choices and the semantic fields involved, bringing them back to the scriptural, theological, and mystical traditions. Dante's depiction of holiness also includes some blessed souls that were not canonized, but whom Dante, in accordance with contemporary criteria for 'holiness', calls 'saints' nevertheless.

The paper focuses on the canto XXI of Paradise. In particular, the construction of the cosmological landscape and its superimposition on the level of ethical reading will be examined in order to reconstruct the semiotics of the world (Greimas 1966) of Dante's time. For this purpose, the theory of sign production will be used (Eco 1975). Attention will also be paid to the figure of Pier Damiani as a model of holiness proposed by Dante, deepening its ethical-political implications.

The study of Dante from a semiotic perspective has led to the double result of acquiring new perspectives on Dante's work and promoting international dialogue in the semiotic community, thus creating a fertile ground for experimentation, comparison and methodological advancement. The aim of this article is to provide an overview of the main semiotic approaches to Dante, highlighting methodologies and recurrent themes. In particular, four areas of research of undoubted semiotic interest will be outlined: intertextuality in Dante's work; the main interpretative styles adopted over the centuries regarding Dante's work; semiotic ideology in Dante; the Semiotics of time and space in the Divine Comedy and in Dante's other works. Finally, some hypotheses on the development of further lines of semiotic research on Dante in the near future will be presented.

A vertical reading of Cantos xi of the Comedy reveals a thick network of interconnections between the administration of money in Inferno, the punishment of the prideful through exempla of humility in Purgatorio xi, and the representation of Francis's mystical marriage with Lady Poverty in Paradiso xi. The strong links in subject matter among cantos xi in the three different canticles show how the opposition between the world of economic gain of northern Italy in Dante's time and the minimalist lifestyle the Franciscans preached in the same years might very well be a deliberate choice on the poet's part. The pathway from condemning wealth in hell moves through humility (another Franciscan virtue besides poverty), before it reaches to Francis's apotheosis of absolute poverty in heaven.

In 2010, the world's fourth-largest gaming company, Electronic Arts, released an action-adventure video game called Dante's Inferno. In the game, a weaponised, crusader Dante hacks and slashes his way through nine infernal circles to rescue his Beatrice, held captive by Satan in the pit of Hell. The game has sold a million copies, rates in the top quartile at review site Metacritic, and is critically acclaimed for its visual design. Dante scholarship, by contrast, has largely registered incredulity. This article takes the example of recent digital remediations of Inferno as a basis to explore what constitutes a 'faithful' remediation of Dante's poem, and why; asking questions such as: How do we evaluate the effects of the original text; that is, what it 'is' or 'does'? What conventions and mechanics of the original medium does the artefact depend upon? How can the effects invited or facilitated by one medium be translated into another? And: What constitutes 'fidelity' to the original work? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana MS Vat.lat.4776 (c. 1390–1400), line drawings, of particularly high-quality draughtsmanship, accompany Paradisoi–xi. Although Christ does not in any straightforward sense participate in the narrative of Paradisoi–xi, the majority of the drawings contain a small head and neck of Christ enclosed in a nimbus, strongly reminiscent of the devotional iconography of the Veronica or Holy Face. The images explore one of the central questions in the Commedia: how the divine is present in, or mediated by, human encounters. I investigate how, in different ways, in both the images and Dante's text (here focusing on Dante's 'in' neologisms in Paradisoix and on Paradisoxiv), Christ is understood as the reality that allows humans to share in a capacity for relatedness that is not bound by normal spatiotemporal limits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Es nuestra intención revisar el capítulo XX de la Vita nova y ver cómo éste desemboca en el canto V de la Commedia. Sin embargo, dado que este capítulo, y en general todo el Dolce stil novo, tiene un precedente fundamental en la canzone de Guido Guinizzelli, “Al cor gentil rempaira sempre amore” [Al corazón gentil retorna siempre amor], nuestra primera tarea será analizar esta canzone, la carga de argumentaciones “filosóficas” y el contenido doctrinal de ésta. De tal manera, se evidenciará la línea que va de Guinizzelli a Dante, así como la evolución en la calidad de los argumentos y cómo dicha doctrina confluye en la historia de Paolo e Francesca, en el canto V del Infierno.

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The article investigates the presence of Dante in a sermon of the Quadragesimale printed under the name of Johannes Gritsch, one of the main sermon bestsellers in late medieval Europe. Albeit quite in plain sight, this text that translates into Latin and comments extensively on Paradiso 33. 1–9 has been completely overlooked by sermon and Dante scholars. By analysing this Dantean passage and by contextualizing it within the Quadragesimale, the article underlines its relevance within the broader phenomenon of the use of the Commedia in late medieval preaching in and outside Italy. On this latter aspect, the sermon under investigation is a game changer. While a few German preachers who used sermons composed in Italy that included references to Dante were already known, this time we encounter a German Franciscan friar who, when composing sermons meant first and foremost for a German audience, engaged with a passage of the Commedia. He did so probably knowing nothing about Dante, perhaps not even his name. As a result, mediated by preachers and detached from its original cultural context, a fragment of the Commedia found its way on a prodigious journey across Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reconstruir a grandes rasgos su ascenso (desde el siglo XIV al siglo XVII), su caída (entre los siglos XVII y XVIII) y finalmente reflexionar sobre las interpretaciones de ayer y hoy sobre la actualidad y lo “innaturalidad” de Dante.

Las obras que le dieron fama a Dante están escritas en lengua vernácula y pese a ello hubo quienes lo incluyeron como integrante, o bien predecesor, del humanismo florentino. Se analiza esta cuestión y el hecho de que sus textos, en particular el Convivio y la Commedia, a diferencia de casi el resto de los escritos humanistas, exhiben un manejo erudito del estado del arte en cuanto al conocimiento de los escritos sobre óptica que circulaban a principios del siglo XV en Italia.

With the advent of studies in the area of mise-en-page and the increased interest in the relationships among text, image, and material structures in medieval manuscripts, the inherent problems of interpretation and "intentionality" have often been concentrated in critics' assignment of meaning and cultural "readings" to medieval illuminators. Yet numerous sources, especially the instructions to illuminators that remain still visible in unfinished manuscripts, confirm that methods of work in the illustrating of medieval texts were guided by very different criteria than interpretation. Instead, the material and mechanical realities of reproducing medieval texts, among them Dante's Commedia, were often subject more to production efficiency, cost effectiveness, taste, and scribal and cultural norms. Examining the instructions to the illuminator of an unfinished copy of a uniquely edited Veneto copy of the Commedia, initially produced in the 1340s (Codex Italicus 1 of the University Library and Archives of Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest), this essay investigates the systems and constructions imposed on the Commedia by a new scribal culture in the reproduction and "visual glossing" of the poem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lo studio analizza l'enciclica di Benedetto XV dedicata a Dante dal titolo In Praeclara Summorum. Il testo papale, scritto nel 1921 in occasione del sesto centenario della morte del Poeta, eleva Dante, nell'Europa devastata del primo dopoguerra, a guida morale, sociale e politica dei popoli straziati dalla follia bellica. Il mio obiettivo è quello di capire le profonde ragioni che spinsero papa Benedetto XV a trasformare l'Alighieri in mistagogo e teorico politico per l'uomo contemporaneo, col potere di rigenerare spiritualmente soprattutto i giovani e giovanissimi dell'Europa uscita dalla Prima guerra mondiale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The article discusses the close relationship Dante established in Inferno III and IV between fame and the trace every human being leaves on earth only through existing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Blake, appassionatosi a Dante fin dal 1780, dedica gli ultimi mesi di vita (1827) alle illustrazioni della Commedia, lavorando in particolare sull'Inferno, cui dedica la maggior parte delle incisioni, alcune rimaste incompiute. L'artista mescola insieme sensazione e terrore, emozione e passione, ma anche divertimento, ironia, rivelandosi molto complice dei presunti peccatori, che egli, come poeta, preferisce definire “trasgressori”.

Not only Plato and Aristotle are remembered in the communal Firenze. Epicurus also, mentioned by Dante, Boccaccio and Villani. But was there a Florentinian Epicureism? In their imaginary trip from the Commedia, Dante and Virgil -with divine help- manage to enter Ditis City, where the heretical are. In tombs full of fire, should be members of all sects and also the followers of Epicurus (died 270 BC), who was known through Cicero. In fact, the poet brings out notorious Ghibellines. Talks with Farinata degli Uberti and also intervenes with Guido Cavalcanti's father, to whom gives an ambiguous answer, that is in my opinion, a ray of hope for one that is labeled as support the "Epicureans' opinion". Rather, he could be an averroist, which brings together a whole group of intellectuals of the time who deny the immortality of the soul. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article asserts Pope Francis's Easter 2018 comments on God's surprising ways would have been appreciated by Dante Alighieri, who portrays God's unpredictableness in Il Convivio, De Monarchia, and the "Letter to Can Grande." It then reads Dante's Commedia in light of these treatises, analyzing instances of the unexpected in the epic—from punished popes to redeemed reprobates to almost absent theological authorities. The article concludes that Dante's assumptions about God are rooted principally in Catholic theology concerning the mystery of God, although they likely owe a debt to the poet's sense of the literary tradition and political situation as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

La forza dell’immaginario nato dalla Divina Commedia ha attraversato secoli e media dando vita a una vasta ed eterogenea selva di prodotti figli dell’eredità dantesca. Il fumetto italiano si è confrontato più volte con il poema “sacro”, ma l’unica trasposizione integrale dell’opera è Dante. La Divina Commedia a fumetti di Marcello Toninelli. Questa traduzione fumettistica lascia emergere con ironia il corpo a corpo con la fonte; dinamiche e meccanismi della narrazione poetica vengono parodiati e trasferiti nel linguaggio dei comics, dando vita a una macchina narrativa per immagini in cui, tra innovazione e imitazione, è anche possibile ritrovare l’eco della lunga e fortunata tradizione figurativa del poema.

Il saggio ripercorre due secoli di adattamenti coreografici della Divina Commedia(nell'ambito della danza classica, moderna e contemporanea), mettendoli in rapporto con la storia generale del ruolo di Dante nell'immaginario culturale d'Occidente, e sussumendone l'ipotesi di un uso generale di Dante come sintomo o catalizzatore di inquietudini epocali, paradossi formali e "vizi" poetici della danza degli ultimi duecento anni.

This essay re-examines the role of Ovid in Dante’s Commedia, complementing the traditional comparisons between Dante’s verses and Ovid’s Latin texts with a different source of Ovidian influence: the references to the Latin poet in Italian vernacular lyric poetry. Finding several precedents for Dante’s treatment of Ovidian material in the Commedia in the poetry of his predecessors and contemporaries, this essay argues that Dante’s Ovidian sources consist of both Ovid’s Latin texts and Ovidian readings in vernacular lyric poetry. Through the analysis of a main feature of such vernacular readings, the evaluation of Ovid’s authority in matters of love in sonnet exchanges, I illustrate the vernacular roots of Dante’s reading of Ovid in the Commedia, and show how Dante draws on the Latin and vernacular Ovidian traditions to define his writing in the Commedia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Il saggio ripercorre due secoli di adattamenti coreografici della Divina Commedia (nell'ambito della danza classica, moderna e contemporanea), mettendoli in rapporto con la storia generale del ruolo di Dante nell'immaginario culturale d'Occidente, e sussumendone l'ipotesi di un uso generale di Dante come sintomo o catalizzatore di inquietudini epocali, paradossi formali e "vizi" poetici della danza degli ultimi duecento anni.