7 centuries without Dante: 5 songs to remember his life and his masterpiece, the “Divine Comedy”

Dante Alighieri He died exactly 700 years ago, on September 14, 1321, sick with malaria, disowned and exiled from his native Florence, in an Italy united in year-round celebration of its “supreme poet”, but who would take then another five centuries. exist as a state.

Curiously, the national holiday of the poet, baptized Dantedì, has nothing to do with his death or his birth (in 1265, although the day is not exactly located), but with the day that scholars have fixed as the day of departure from the imagination. journey to the afterlife Divine comedy, March 25.

Dante is the Divine comedy, a masterpiece of Italian culture and one of the most important in world literature, because the poem collects his thoughts, feelings and experiences. But seven centuries after the death of its author, as is often the case with the classics, it can be read not only as the perfect conjunction of the ideas of humanism of the Middle Ages and the first Renaissance, but also with a current approach and even with certain similarities to our time.

Of the three stages – Hell, Purgatory and Paradise – that Dante goes through on his journey beyond the grave, the first, Hell, in which the classical poet Virgil accompanies him, is that in which the “poet supreme ”expresses his ideas most clearly on multiple subjects, from philosophy to love, including politics and religion. – “Halfway through life, in a dark jungle I found myself because my road was lost.” At 35, Dante finds himself in what could have been half of his life given the average age at the time and is plunged into a personal crisis.

His journey to the afterlife is a search for purification and redemption, based on the allegory of sinful man who deviates from the right path. – “We have arrived at the place I told you where you will see people in pain, who have lost the good of the intellect.” This is how Virgilio welcomes you to the underworld. In a society strongly influenced by religion, the consideration of the intellect or the reason as a fundamental good is a revolutionary idea which reveals the first gleams of the Renaissance. – “Love, forgive nobody liked to love.” In the mouths of Paolo and Francesca, the star lovers of Canto V del Infierno, the poet paraphrases the ideas of Andreas Capellanus, a thinker who wrote in the 12th century a treatise entitled “De Amore” (“On love”), where he affirmed: “Love cannot refuse love anything.

Love is of transcendent importance for Dante in the broadest sense of the word, as it supports his ascent to the truth revealed at the hands of his adored Beatrice, the young woman with whom he fell madly in love in his youth and who, despite her dead Twenty years, never forgotten. – “The three torches which burn in the breasts are greed, pride and envy.”

Dante never separated his status as a poet from his political involvement and actively participated as the White Guelph, the moderate faction that supported the Pope, against the Ghibellines, linked to the Holy Roman Empire. Tough and critical of himself and others, while he held one of the greatest political positions in Florence, that of prior, he expelled violent people who disturbed the peace, including a great friend of his, the poet too. Guido Guinizelli.

In a Florence mired in constant power struggles, of which he was also a part, these verses are just two of many that in his work attack the bad attributes of rulers. – “And then we went out to see the stars again.” The verse with which Dante concludes his journey to hell is a hymn to hope: having encountered on his way the most inhuman misfortunes, the poet leaves behind him the hellish night and prepares to climb the hill of Purgatory in search of of redemption. . It is one of those quotes that is part of popular parlance and Italians frequently use it to signal the return to normalcy after a dark period. Over the past year and a half, during the “hell” of the pandemic, many have said this optimistic song: “E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle”.

Source: Efe

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