Rome (AFP)
Plenty of readings, exhibitions, reissues, and even a long letter from the Pope: Italy launched on Thursday the demonstrations marking the 700th anniversary of the death of Dante, the Florentine author of "The Divine Comedy" considered to be the "father of the Italian language".
The main titles of the Italian press devoted their cultural notebooks to this national monument entered centuries ago into the pantheon of immortal artists where Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and Marcello Mastroianni rest.
Born in Florence in 1265 and died in Ravenna in 1321, Dante Alighieri contributed to the birth of the Italian language by choosing the Tuscan dialect over Latin to write his masterpiece, "The Divine Comedy", an imaginary journey that Dante realizes with his guide Virgil through hell, purgatory and paradise.
Its success led other authors of the Middle Ages, such as Petrarch and Boccaccio, to also write in dialect, laying the foundations of modern Italian.
Despite the Covid-19 pandemic, which has claimed more than 105,000 lives in Italy and forced museums and theaters to close, a myriad of events are planned on the peninsula to celebrate the "Supreme Poet".
Most of the events organized on Thursday are broadcast on the vivadante.it site.
In Ravenna, the mayor Michele De Pascale was to preside over the reception of the oil offered by the city of Florence, of which Dante was a city councilor before being exiled, to maintain "the eternal torch" burning in front of the tomb of the writer.
The mayor also welcomed on Wednesday, in the presence of the French Ambassador Christian Masset, an exceptional work that has returned for the first time in the Adriatic city for 160 years thanks to a loan from the Louvre: the "Madonna in Trono con Bambino" (" Madonna on the Throne with the Child "), a sculpture that protected Dante's sarcophagus.
- "Prophet of hope" -
In Rome, Roberto Benigni, actor and director ("La Vie est belle") will read the XXVth song of "Paradise" on Thursday evening at the Quirinale palace in the presence of the President of the Republic, Sergio Mattarella, and broadcast live by the public television channel Rai 1.
For President Mattarella, Dante remains popular, seven centuries after his death, "because he talks about us".
"Let us think, for example, of its rediscovery by the Romantics, of the real cult of which it was the object during the Risorgimento (movement of Italian Unity completed in 1860, note), or of the rhetorical exaltation of it. fascism ", he noted.
"The identity of a nation - and Italian unity is only a century and a half old -" depends on cultural identity, the main instrument of which is language ", underlined the Head of State.
In Florence and Ravenna, one will also read without interruption the thousands of verses of the three parts (hymns) of the "Divine", Hell, Purgatory and Paradise.
Dante's year is also an opportunity for publishers and the press to publish anthologies, essays, art books ...
The daily La Repubblica, which has already sold the first two opus, releases the third in addition on Friday.
The newspaper also imagined a dialogue with the poet "on the world swept away by the pandemic and our sins which, 700 years after his death, have not changed so much: laziness and greed".
Even Pope Francis took up the pen to pay homage to the man of letters and politician whose commitment, in the 14th century, in a context of open war between rival factions in Florence, estranged him from Boniface XIII, whom he wished that his power was limited to spiritual matters.
Exiled, condemned to death, despoiled, thrown into loneliness and nostalgia, Dante is a "pensive pilgrim" whose "life is a paradigm of the human condition", writes the sovereign pontiff.
The tearing away from his native town, however, gave birth to "his vocation and his mission as a creator" for which he transformed himself into a prophet of hope ", continues Jorge Bergoglio.
If François recalls that Dante was an outlaw, convicted of corruption in particular, others intend to take the opportunity to rehabilitate him.
A criminal lawyer, Alessandro Traversi, has invited other lawyers and magistrates to reconsider his trial at a conference scheduled for May 21.
Count Sperello di Serego Alighieri, an astronomer descending in a straight line from Dante, as well as a descendant of Cante de Gabrielli, the judge who banished him from his Florentine city, were invited.
© 2021 AFP