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| Jordi Santanyí visits The Casa di Dante Museum |
Today, Jordi Santanyí and his friends have visited The Casa di Dante Museum located in one of the oldest areas of the historic center of Florence, on Santa Margherita street.
Jordi Santanyí and The Grandma love Literature and talking about Dante Alighieri is talking about one of the greatest writers of the history. Dante is the author of The Divine Comedy, a long narrative poem considered a masterpiece of the universal literature.
Before going to visit the museum, The Grandma has studied a new lesson of her Intermediate Language Practice manual (Vocabulary 14).
More information: Interest and Free Time
The Casa di Dante Museum located in one of the oldest areas of the historic center of Florence, on Santa Margherita street. The museum is mainly didactic, with numerous explanatory panels on the Divine Comedy, Dante, his time and his characters. It contains reproductions of documents about the poet, models and dioramas that shed light on some aspects of his life and the historical events of the time, such as the Battle of Campaldino. There are also reconstructions of furniture, costumes and other aspects of the daily life of medieval Florence, as well as weapons, coins and original ceramics of the time.
The Divine Comedy, in Italian Divina Commedia, is an Italian long narrative poem by Dante Alighieri, begun c. 1308 and completed in 1320, a year before his death in 1321. It is widely considered to be the preeminent work in Italian literature and one of the greatest works of world literature.
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| Dante Alighieri's shield, Firenze |
The poem's imaginative vision of the afterlife is representative of the medieval world-view as it had developed in the Western Church by the 14th century. It helped establish the Tuscan language, in which it is written, also in most present-day Italian-market editions, as the standardized Italian language. It is divided into three parts: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso.
The narrative describes Dante's travels through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise or Heaven, while allegorically the poem represents the soul's journey towards God. Dante draws on medieval Christian theology and philosophy, especially Thomistic philosophy and the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas.
Consequently, the Divine Comedy has been called the Summa in verse. In Dante's work, Virgil is presented as human reason and Beatrice is presented as divine knowledge.
More information: Durante degli Alighieri, De Vulgari Eloquentia
The work was originally simply titled Comedìa in the first printed edition published in 1472, Tuscan for Comedy, later adjusted to the modern Italian Commedia. The adjective Divina was added by Giovanni Boccaccio, 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.
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, in 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.
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| Visiting The Casa di Dante Museum, Firenze |
The number three is prominent in the work, represented in part by the number of cantiche and their lengths.
Additionally, the verse scheme used, terza rima, is hendecasyllabic (lines of eleven syllables), with the lines composing tercets according to the rhyme scheme aba, bcb, cdc, ded....
Additionally, the verse scheme used, terza rima, is hendecasyllabic (lines of eleven syllables), with the lines composing tercets according to the rhyme scheme aba, bcb, cdc, ded....
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 whom 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.
More information: Museo Casa di Dante (Italian version)
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).
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| The Grandma visits The Casa di Dante Museum |
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.
More information: BBC
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.
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.
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 blame over the centuries.
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| Dante Alighieri's bust, Firenze |
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 timezones of the Earth. For example, at sunset in Purgatory it is midnight at the Ebro, dawn in Jerusalem, and noon on the River Ganges. 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.
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.
Consider your origins: you were not made to live as brutes,
but to follow virtue and knowledge.
Dante Alighieri
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