Now the evening hour had arrived, which touches everyone out at sea, that they long for the familiar friends to whom they had to say goodbye in the morning.


Era già l'ora che volge il disio


ai navicanti e 'ntenerisce il core


lo dì c'han detto ai dolci amici addio;



(Purgatorio VIII, 1–3, translated by Hartmut Köhler)

The poets, once said Giorgio Bassani, “have always been travelers to the hereafter because they have to withdraw from the world in order to become poets and would not be poets if they did not return”. Like so many Italian writers of his generation, Bassani was a meticulous reader of Dante, and his most famous novel, “The Gardens of the Finzi Contini”, published in 1962, is downright Dantesque: as in the Inferno, the action progresses in slow spirals, as in the Purgatorio the protagonist moves upwards with difficulty, as in Paradiso the beloved acts as a guide - only that the journey of the protagonist in Bassani's novel runs in the opposite direction to that of Dante: from the paradise of the gardens that give the title to the purgatory of everyday fascist life in Ferrara to the hell of the Expulsion and murder of Ferrarese Jews,among them also the Finzi Contini.

The novel is peppered with allusions to Dante's Commedia, and quotations from it are repeatedly used to characterize characters and evoke moods. The patriarch of the Finzi Contini, Professor Ermanno, is described as an educated citizen who always has the right Dante verse ready. And it is such a verse with which the professor surprised the protagonist (who, like Dante, is also the first-person narrator) one evening: “In the park, the day ended, as always, in a diffuse, milky twilight. I had moved away from the others ... I looked at the wall on which the last sunshine of the day lay. 'Era già l'ora che volge il disi ...', an ironic voice next to me declaimed. I turned around in amazement. It was Professor Ermanno. He smiled good-naturedly.“The professor's smile suggests an implicit understanding that the quote from the comedy reflects the state of mind of the protagonist: his loneliness, his premonition of the upcoming disaster, his disguised sadness.

Dante, the pilgrim in the hereafter, also receives this nostalgic tinge when he and his companion reach the valley at the foot of the Cleansing Mountain. It is the last stop of the pre-purgatory - according to the chronology of the comedy, it is the third day of the journey: Sunday, March 27th, 1300. The day is coming to an end, dawning, and a muffled longing seizes the heart. Because after the relief of the hardships overcome (in hell) and in view of the prospect of purification on the mountain, memories overtake the pilgrim. Like seafarers on the wide seas, he remembers the friends left behind, the distant home, the time before the journey. He knows that memory transfigures what has been remembered and abandons himself to the reconciling melancholy.

Not just these verses, but the whole song - and the mountain of purification in general! - have a melancholy tonality based on a mixture of sadness and hope. That is what makes this second part of the comedy so particularly attractive and perhaps also explains the popularity that it only and just gained in the second half of the twentieth century. Because after two devastating world wars, the fascination of those heroically damned figures from Hell seemed to be exhausted, and instead the figures on the Cleansing Mountain, with their moderate transgressions, mild atonements and expected cleansing, offered a surface for identification that was more appropriate to modern times. This is also where the enduring importance of comedy lies: that every era and every state of mind is reflected in it.

Stefana Sabin

is a literary scholar and author of the book “Dante on 100 Pages” (Reclam).

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