Today is “DanTuesday”the national day dedicated to Dante Alighieri established in 2020, and like every year there are now many initiatives to celebrate the Supreme Poet.
A video is available on the social channels of the Ministry of University and Research which in less than a minute retraces salient episodes of the Divine Comedy with animations and sound effects, still today, after more than 7 centuries, an inexhaustible source of inspiration for scholars, writers and artists. It was created by the students of the two-year illustration course at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence. A conference open to the city will be held in the Academy headquarters in via Ricasoli in collaboration with Unifi, « “You who move towards the third heaven”. Dante and the angelology of the 13th century”, edited by Anna Rodolfi, professor of the Florentine University.
Eight illustrations in all that make up the video: from the dark forest where the great poet meets Virgil, to the burning tombs of the heretics, then the frozen shores of Lake Cocytus where Dante places the traitors, and Purgatory among the slothful, avaricious and prodigal of the nineteenth Canto. Finally, Paradise where – guided by Beatrice – Dante reaches the Empyrean. The video, edited by teachers Juri Ciani and Alessandro Baldanzi, was created in collaboration with Mur.
The Accademia della Crusca, with the collaboration of the Teatro della Toscana Foundation, will return to celebrate Dantedì in its headquarters, the Medici Villa of Castello, with an event aimed at all lovers of the Italian language. Starting from 5pm, and after the greetings of the president Paolo D'Achille, the academic Rosario Coluccia will hold a lesson in the form of a conversation, entitled «Text and language of the Comedy». Following this, Gabriele Lavia will give voice to the poet's words with «A reading for Dante». It will be possible to watch the day's proceedings from the Academy's YouTube channel.
From today, one of the most precious editions of the Divine Comedy will be exhibited at the Lumsa University of Rome, the Venetian incunabulum of 1491 in Pietro di Piasi's edition, accompanied by a dense array of handwritten annotations, which integrate the notes of Cristoforo Landino, and an amazing figurative commentary that extends for over 500 pages in all the blank spaces.
The docu-film «Mirabile vision: Inferno» by the Marche director Matteo Gagliardi also returns, which will be screened for schools in 400 Italian theaters and will involve as many schools. Made in crowdfunding and with the support of private individuals in 2022, and produced by Starway, the film that traces the nine circles of Dante's Inferno, updating them thanks to sophisticated digital techniques and illustrations of the Divine Comedy by the Parma painter Francesco Scaramuzza (1803-1886) , immediately achieved great success and has so far been seen by almost 20 thousand students. It was also screened in the Sala Zuccari of the Senate of the Republic and obtained, among others, the patronage of the Ministry of Culture, the Dante Alighieri Society and Save the Planet, also involving Italian cultural institutions abroad including Sao Paulo in Brazil, Berlin , Vancouver and Brussels. With a multimedia language experimented by Gagliardi in his previous works (including «Fukushima: a nuclear story» from 2016), the viewer is led on his journey to the underworld by images and suggestions that range from reportage to fiction, making us contemporary in a hour and 33 minutes the evils that have always afflicted humanity: from greed to violence, from exploitation to the destruction of what surrounds us. A journey guided by two masters, father Guglielmo (Luigi Diberti) and teacher Delia Argenti (Benedetta Buccellato).