Episode 183: Dante’s Bones, or, A History of the Idea of Italy

October 28, 2020 / Intellectual History, Italy, Medieval History

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:24:14 — 115.7MB)

In 1321 Dante Alighieri died in the city of Ravenna, near the shores of the Adriatic. In the years since his perpetual exile from his native Florence, he had lived in a variety of places in Italy. Now he was at rest. But in future centuries even his bones would continue to move, although not so far as his body had moved in life. And, as his body diminished, his influence and legacy grew and grew, sometimes appearing in the oddest of places. Ultimately, the history of Dante’s bones is the history of the idea of Italy.

Guy Raffa has written a history of Dante’s legacy, appropriately titled Dante’s Bones: How a Poet Invented Italy. He is Associate Professor of Italian Studies at the University of Texas, and among other achivements has created the brilliant and wonderful Danteworlds website, which is “an integrated multimedia journey–combining artistic images, textual commentary, and audio recordings” of the three realms of the afterlife found in Dante’s Divine Comedy.

For Further Investigation

The website of Guy Raffa

Danteworlds: “A multimedia journey–combining textual commentary, artistic images, and audio recordings–through the three realms (Inferno, Purgatory, Paradise) of Dante’s Divine Comedy. This site contains, in addition to an abridged version of the original commentary in The Complete Danteworlds: A Reader’s Guide to the Divine Comedy and Danteworlds: A Reader’s Guide to the Inferno, Italian recordings of selected verses and a vast gallery of images depicting characters and scenes from the Divine Comedy. Like the books, the Danteworlds Web site is structured around a geographic representation of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise–the three worlds of Dante’s Divine Comedy.”

Digital Dante: “Digital Dante offers original research and ideas on Dante: on his thought and work and on various aspects of his reception.”

Dante’s Tomb: a little essay with many photos at Atlas Obscura

Canto per Canto: Conversations with Dante in our time