Dante’s events

This page will list (past and) future events regarding Dante and his work, in a casual manner.

Notice that this page will be almost entirely updated on request, so if you know of or are organizing an event about Dante, if you give me some basic information (i.e. time, place, public admittance, abstract, short bio about the lecturers or artists involved, email address or website with more information, etc.) in conspicuous advance, I can put it here for the benefit of the visitors of the site.

Be warned that I do not personally guarantee anything about the quality or validity of the various events, since in general I don't have any means to probe or verify the various reccomendations. Furthermore, I do reserve the right not to publish any reccomendation, according to my unquestionable free choice.

Paradiso: the last four cantos

speaker: prof. Franco Croce

email for information: alleottodellasera (at) rai (dot) it

Recordings of this speech are online at: http://www.radio.rai.it/radio2/

From the 13th to the 24th of August, prof. Franco Croce from University of Genoa held a series of lectures about Dante’s Paradiso. The lectures are now available freely on the Internet in Rai Radio 2 website at http://www.radio.rai.it/radio2/, in the section labelled ’Archivi’.

Commenting and reading the last four cantos of the Divine Comedy isn’t definitely an easy task, nevertheless it’s a fascinating and challenging one. Prof. Croce has taken this challange: he has followed Dante in the climax of his poem, explaining the experience of the man contemplating the divine, the mystical experience which Dante wants to describe with deadly words.

Croce largely based his lectures on the direct reading of the lively text. He also used some audio recordings from the archives of Radio 2 where famous Italian actors Vittorio Gassman and Carmelo Bene recite passages of the poem.

The entire poetical style of the Paradiso aims at describing the undescribable, the unspeakable reality of the divine. Therefore the last four cantos are the ones where Dante’s journey truly reaches its goal and ends with the visio Dei, the vision of God, the highest leap ever tried by human fantasy.

Biographical notes about prof. Croce:
Prof. Franco Croce was born in Genoa in 1927. He’d been full professor of Italian literature at the University of Genoa where he’d taught from 1958 to 1999. He’s now retired.
His main academic interests have been Dante, the Baroque literature and Montale.

Thanks to Mrs. Angela Zamparelli for the information about these lectures.