Dante Today

Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture

“Floodlines Part VI: ‘Reckoning'”

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“Well, I think the one that was most penetrating that I’ll never forget is in St. Bernard Parish. The whole levee just disappeared. Liquified. So all the ships and the shrimp boats and everything just went right over the Arpent levee and into St. Bernard, and then the water couldn’t get out. And so you had cars on top of houses that we found, and you had these skilled care facilities with all these dead senior citizens inside of them. It was, it was like a scene from Dante’s hell. It was really hard.”   —J. David Rogers, “Floodlines Part VI: ‘Reckoning,'” The Atlantic, March 11, 2020 (retrieved March 26, 2024)

Read the transcript of each part here

Macrodosing Podcast’s “Hell” Episode

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macrodosing-coverThe “Hell” episode of the podcast Macrodosing features Dante’s Inferno, hypothesizing which circles of Hell contemporary figures would find themselves in. Contributor Jack Switzer notes, “The podcast episode featured lengthy discussion of Dante’s Inferno and the structure of the Dante’s version of Hell, and the impact that the Inferno had on current views of Hell. The podcast’s hosts also placed contemporary figures in the respective circles of Hell. For the discussion, the hosts first briefly described each circle and then assigned modern day celebrities. Some notable celebrity examples included Jeff Bezos for the sin of avarice and Napoleon in the eighth circle of seducers and panderers.”

“When he wrote that, I don’t think he knew that eight-hundred years from now, that would be people’s idea of what Hell was, That’s what the majority of people in this country, they don’t get it from cartoons or pop culture, but even those derive themselves from what Dante wrote about Hell, just kinda like, yeah he was a scholar, but he was also just a hundred percent speculating on what Hell looked like. The one thing that I respect the hell out of Dante for doing is in the Inferno—he just put his enemies and his contemporaries that he thought were trash poets compared to him—he just put them in Hell. He was like, ‘I’m gonna write a book about hell just so I can roast my biggest enemies and I love the pettiness.” [. . .]    –PFT Commenter, Macrodosing, April 6, 2021

Watch or listen to the podcast episode here. Discussion of Dante’s Inferno begins at the timestamp, 1:10:09.

Contributed by Jack Switzer (University of Arkansas ’22)

“Ophidiophobia”: Eva Del Soldato and Marco Aresu on INF. 25 for “Canto Per Canto”

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A conversation with Eva Del Soldato and Marco Aresu.

Watch or listen to the video of “Inferno 25: Ophidiophobia” here.

Canto per Canto: Conversations with Dante in Our Time is a collaborative initiative of the Department of Italian Studies and Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò at NYU together with the Dante Society of America, conceived during the 2020 Covid-19 lockdown in anticipation of the seventh centennial commemoration of Dante’s death in the year 2021. Members of the Dante Society recorded conversations with friends and colleagues on their favorite cantos, reflecting on what Dante has to say to us now, in our time. All 100 cantos of the Divine Comedy will be published at a rate of two cantos per week over the course of a year, starting in September 2020.

Dante as Science Writer

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The Radio branch of Italian Rai 3, offers a podcast exploration of Dante’s knowledge of science (called “natural philosophy” in his time) and how excellent a science writer he was, and how effectively he communicated scientific ideas in his works.  (In Italian)

“Conosciamo Dante Alighieri come raffinato poeta, teorico della politica, esperto di linguistica, scrittore e filosofo. Ma forse molti si sorprenderebbero se lo definissimo anche come un grande divulgatore scientifico. In effetti le sue opere trattano molte questioni di filosofia naturale, che spaziano dalla cosmologia alla geografia, dall’ottica alla geometria. Ma Dante, da assertore di un’idea di accesso universale al sapere, tratta questi temi rivolgendosi non solo ai dotti del suo tempo, ma anche ad una platea più ampia. Lo sottolineava Pietro Greco in uno dei suoi ultimi libri, Homo. Arte e scienza (Di Renzo, 2020), e ce lo ricorda oggi lo storico della scienza Gaspare Polizzi, dell’università di Pisa. Non solo: le sue concezioni cosmologiche sono di una sorprendente modernità, come ritiene Marco Bersanelli, astrofisico all’università statale di Milano, e autore di Il grande spettacolo del cielo (Sperling e Kupfer, 2016).”    —Rai Play Radio, Radio 3 scienza, March 25, 2021

Contributed by Carmelo Giunta

“Steal this Poem”: Dennis Looney and Arielle Saiber on Inf. 24 for “Canto per Canto”

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Arielle-Saiber-Dennis-Looney-Steal-This-Poem-Inferno-24-canto-per-cantoAs part of the Dante Society of America’s Canto per Canto series, Arielle Saiber (founder of Dante Today) speaks with Dennis Looney (author of, among other notable works, Freedom Readers: The African American Reception of Dante Alighieri and the Divine Comedy) on the 24th canto of Inferno, the first of two cantos on theft in the Malebolge.

Watch or listen to the video of “Inferno 24: Steal this Poem” here.

Canto per Canto: Conversations with Dante in Our Time is a collaborative initiative between New York University’s Department of Italian Studies and Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, and the Dante Society of America. The aim is to produce podcast conversations about all 100 cantos of the Divine Comedy, to be completed within the seventh centenary of Dante’s death in 2021.

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How to Cite

Coggeshall, Elizabeth, and Arielle Saiber, eds. Dante Today: Citings and Sightings of Dante’s Works in Contemporary Culture. Website. Access date.

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