Dante on View

"They provide a perspective of impact that goes in several important further directions. The essays deal with what the editors call ‘intermedial cultural practices.’ They’re not only concerned with illustrations and paintings on Dantean subjects from the Middle Ages through to Salvador Dalí, they’re also interested in the traditions of bringing the Inferno and the Commedia to life by embodying Dante’s poem in performance, in recitation, in theatrical, cinematic and even televisual adaptation. The structuring of the collection leads to the more popular and contemporary media, so part three focuses on Dante in the cinema and multimedia. They deal with Dante in performance, which of course implies wider accessibility. I think they’re also chiefly concerned in the way in which, as they put it, the literary text is first ‘read as part of the media culture in which it was conceived and then reinscribed within the contemporary and subsequent media cultures and practices of its readers.’ They then quote a line from the beginning of Dante’s Paradiso: ‘ Poca favilla gran fiamma seconda ’ – ‘A great flame follows a little spark.’ So what they’re aiming to do is to show how that vitality of Dante transmits itself into modern culture. I think that’s right. That’s certainly a feature that several of the contributors in the anthology focus upon. For example, the essay by Amilcare Iannucci focuses on the importance of the popularisation of the Commedia . I think another quite striking instance of the continuing vitality of Inferno, particularly, is that [in April 2009] in London alone there were three different forms of Dante performance. There was the avant-garde Italian theatre-company staging an approach to all three parts of the Commedia at the Barbican, there was Roberto Benigni’s one man show at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, and there was also a showing at the Barbican cinema of the 1911 silent film of the Inferno . Dante continues to be a very vigorous presence outside the academy. One example is the connection between Dante and Italian nationalism and this is particularly evident in Antonella Braida’s essay, when she makes some interesting suggestions about the relationship between Dante and Italian nationalism after the unification of Italy and before the First World War. Perhaps there have been some signs under the Berlusconi regime in Italy. A proposal was put forward in 2008 by some members of the Florence city council to revoke Dante’s exile, which looks awfully like appropriating Dante to further a right-wing agenda."