ITAL-4460 Dante 

Course Description

The course will unfold as a reading of selected cantos of the Divine Comedy (Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise) and will highlight the thematic and conceptual continuity and unity of Dante’s poem. The course will stress the historical context, relations with Middle-Ages arts, the narrative structure of the poem and how it answers the question of spiritual conversion. It will discuss Dante’s involvement with the moral and political values of Florence and Italy and Dante’s political position with regards to the Empire and the Papacy; and it will emphasize both the stages in the pilgrim’s moral reformation and the poet’s deepening sense of his poetic art. It will end with an exploration of Dante’s representation of Paradise. Conducted in Italian.