Vita gazette – Today, March 25, is our national day dedicated to Dante Alighieri, the father of our great poet, language and literature. We will remember him with his Divine Comedy. Centuries passed after Dante, and we have arrived in the 21st century. But we still live in a world similar to Dante’s Inferno.

March 25 is Dantedì, the national day dedicated to Dante Alighieri, the date that scholars recognize as the beginning… The date, considered by scientists to be the beginning of the legendary journey to the Dark Forest, was accepted as “Dante’s Day” in 2020 by the Ministry of Culture. The Supreme Poet of all Italy from North to South begins to celebrate with meetings, events and lots of poetry. In The Divine Comedy, which has inspired many works of art and artists, Dante interacts with many real people; He comes to terms with the exploiter of religion, the bully, the trickster, the manipulative, the stingy, the wasteful, the rapist, the selfish, and all sinners in an extraordinary visual atmosphere. Living in the 21st century, we are still in conditions reminiscent of Dante’s Inferno. Wars for power and interest, economic and religious exploitation, hunger, diseases, massacres, jealousies, evils, hypocritical relations, dirty politics, disappearing seas covered with “spittle”, animal and plant species whose lives are completely terminated… And moral decay…

Dante had had extensive experience of human wickedness. The wanderings carried out in the years of exile revealed to him that all of Italy was – like his Florence, ravaged everywhere by fratricidal struggles. The twenty-second canto of Paradise describes Dante’s ascent into the sky of the fixed stars. His guide, Beatrice, invites him to look down for the last time, towards the earth. The poet is offered the grandiose panorama of the entire celestial universe (Vv. 133–135; “With my face, I returned to all / the seven hopes, and I saw this globe / such, that I smiled of its vile semblance”). Down there, at the bottom, the earth is nothing more than a bright dot in the indomitable vastness of the cosmos. The inverted perspective invites the author to reflect on the marginality of men; about how insignificant and ridiculous are those delusions of grandeur over which we never stop fighting, one against the other. To Dante who contemplates it from above, the earth appears as “the flowerbed that makes us so ferocious” (v. 51).

In canto fourteenth of Purgatory, dedicated to the exploration of the setting of the envious, Dante describes the course of the Arno river, which form the entire duration of its journey from its source to its mouth laps territories where the inhabitants have turned into bloodthirsty beasts. The Arno first flows between filthy pigs (the Casentinesi) more worthy of eating acorns than human food, then it finds a snarling bottle (the Aretini). In its lower course, where the valley is wider, the Arno finds a pit where dogs have become wolves (the Florentines), and finally descends into deep basins and meets foxes dedicated to fraud (the Pisans),  so that does not fear any cunning.

Wishing the wars to end, Happy Dante’s Day…