Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture
“The real-life individuals Dante encounters in heaven and hell betray his political viewpoints. He opposed the aspirations of Pope Boniface VIII and longed for the Church to focus on the afterlife rather than earthly riches. Politically, he was nostalgic for the heyday of the Roman Republic, when leaders were loyal not to themselves but to the Republic.” — Tim Brinkhof, “Dante’s Divine Comedy isn’t only about religion. It’s a political statement.”, Big Think, July 4, 2023
“Fantastic this work, certainly dating back to the lockdown in March [2020] and unfortunately already in an advanced stage of deterioration. Protagonist Dante Alighieri, acknowledged father of Italian literature and language, author of the Divine Comedy, dressed as always in red and crowned with laurel. Arrested as caught without a mask by a policeman with an anti-Covid 19 mask (with an American uniform?) and by another figure in a spacesuit (an astronaut?), also with a mask! Live-size pictures. Many metaphors can be ventured! Florence, via delle Seggiole.” —Arte Leonardo blog, Leonardo da Vinci Art School
Dark Dante, a novel by Maggie Rose, takes place in Florence 700 years after Dante’s Inferno.
“In this engaging and evocative mystery thriller, a string of horrendous murders is committed in quick succession. Seeing that the Italian police are making little headway finding the culprit, Maria Farrell, the niece of the first victim, Peter Farrell, decides to investigate. Because of a family feud, she never met Peter, a specialist in art history, who lived in Florence most of his life. A theatre director from Manchester, Maria shrewdly exploits her professional skills and knowledge of Shakespeare’s theatre in her attempt to solve the murders.” –Troubador, 2021
To learn more about the novel, visit troubador.co.uk.
“Dante’s Florence was a circle of intrigue between the Holy Roman Catholic Church and Firenze’s powerful political parties. Dante, as a young Italian, became part of the struggle to keep the city for the people. He lost. He was exiled. He wrote The Divine Comedy, starting with The Inferno. Mirroring through reflection.
“I begin to understand the infernal map Dante had drawn. Florence itself is the paradigm for the nine circles of the inferno. The city is ringed around by streets that all move toward its center. In the time of Dante, the city had been a series of expanding fortresses, enlarging as the population and wealth increased. But the structure — the ringed city — with its quarters defined and stationary, is still in place. And the Arno River is one of its boundaries. Dante used Florence to define the parameters and structure of Hell — a spiraling atlas of infernal distances.
“Dante’s cosmos is just that: What one does is immediately mirrored in life and in death. As are Beatrice’s thoughts and actions; her awareness brought her closer to that state of unconditional awareness, one that sees more of the whole, the holy. The creatures in the inferno fell in love with the lesser good — money, food, fame, a lover —and staying loyal to that lesser love brings the limitations, the fragmentation of the whole. The lesser holds the whole, but the lesser is unable in its separateness from the whole to maintain the weight of all that is.” [. . .] –Sarah Odishoo, The Smart Set, August 22, 2021 (retrieved April 12, 2022)
Read Odishoo’s full essay about her journey to and within Florence here.
Fans of the Fiorentia football team “welcomed” back player Dusan Vlahovic to the team with a reference to Dante.
Vlahovic left Fiorentia to play for Juventus in January, but recently returned to Forentia. He was greeted with “a very special banner covering the entire end of the arena that referenced Canto 26, the section of Dante’s Inferno, where his protagonist continues his journey through hell, that is dedicated to frauds,” Football Italia said.
The banner read: “Vlahovic, throughout Hell thy name is spread about!”
All submissions will be considered for posting. Bibliographic references and scholarly essays are also welcome for consideration.
Coggeshall, Elizabeth, and Arielle Saiber, eds. Dante Today: Citings and Sightings of Dante’s Works in Contemporary Culture. Website. Access date.
