Dante: the story of his life
MARCO SANTAGATA, trans. RICHARD DIXON

People of all faiths and backgrounds are moved by Dante Alighieri’s medieval epic of sin and salvation, the  Divine Comedy. Samuel Beckett, an avowed atheist, kept a copy by his bedside as he lay dying in a Paris hospice in 1989. Another tenacious dantista, the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, never left his Moscow flat without a paperback in his pocket. Over the centuries, the Florentine poet’s 700-year-old allegorical journey through hell, Purgatory and Paradise has passed from generation to generation enriched and reinterpreted. The 1935 Hollywood melodrama Dante’s Inferno, starring Spencer Tracy, contains a 10-minute reconstruction of the poet’s underworld modelled on Gustave Doré’s copperplate etchings. The damned are wedged “arsy-versy” against each other in a sulphurous hell-pit, “watering their bottoms with their tears”, as Beckett put it in All Strange Away. There is nothing quite like it in cinema history.

Marco Santagata, a Pisa-based professor of Italian literature, has written a superb intellectual biography of Dante, which claims the Florentine as the patriarch of modern letters and a revolutionary figure in the development of European culture. In order to reach a wider audience, Dante chose to write the Comedy in vernacular Italian instead of Latin. His overthrow of Latin preceded Geoffrey Chaucer’s by 80 years. Dante’s decision to write in the dolce stil novo – “sweet new style” – of everyday speech ensured that Italian was to become for a time the literary language of Western Europe.