Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture
“I’m in the middle of the dance floor. The strobe lights above me are popping in time with the thundering kick drums and violent synth-bass rolling out of the speakers at 110 beats per minute. I’m shuffling to the rhythms, but I’m only able to control the lower half of my body. All of my movements from the waist up are being dictated by an exoskeleton strapped onto my trunk like a jacket.
“My arms jerk up and down and twist from side to side with the beat, but my own muscles aren’t doing the work; my flesh is being pushed around in space by the 45 pounds of metal, cable, and hydraulic cylinders running across my shoulders and down my arms. A robot is making me dance.” [. . .]
“The dance show, titled Inferno, is meant to be an experiential representation of hell, and I suppose it is, just maybe more fun. Inferno has been touring the world for a couple of years, and it made its US premiere in San Francisco this past weekend at the Gray Area Festival.” [. . .] –Michael Calore, Wired, July 30, 2019.
Read more about Inferno and the Gray Area Festival on Wired.
“While there is debate about the extent to which the Italian writer Dante was exposed to Islamic influences, it is very likely he knew The Book of Mohammed’s Ladder (translated into Castilian, French and Latin), which describes the Prophet’s ascent to heaven. The Divine Comedy, with its account of Dante’s imagined journey from Inferno to Paradise, was following in this tradition.
“Dante very likely heard lectures from Riccoldo da Monte di Monte Croce, a learned Dominican who spent many years studying Arabic in Baghdad before returning to Florence around 1300 and writing about his travels in the lands of Islam. Dante may have criticised Muslim teaching, but he was aware of its vast influence.” —, The Conversation, July 14, 2019
“The contemporary reimagining of the 14th century poem is among the first projects being developed by head of originals Lauren Corrao.
“The Freeform take follows Grace Dante, who thought her life sucked. Between parenting her drug-addict mother and her troubled brother, the twenty-something hero has had to give up all her dreams. Then one day everything changes and her dreams start magically coming true — school, career, love … but the godfather of all this good fortune is the devil himself. And to outwit him, Grace will have to journey through Dante’s Inferno, a contemporary reimagining of the 14th century poem set against the demonic underworld of present-day Los Angeles.” —, The Hollywood Reporter, October 28, 2019
“Allowing for translation, those are the immortal opening lines of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Here, some seven centuries later, are some of Lynn Darling’s opening lines from her new memoir, Out of the Woods: ‘The summer my only child left home for college, I moved from an apartment in New York City, to live alone in a small house at the end of a dirt road in the woods of central Vermont.'” —Maureen Corrigan, Connecticut Public Radio, January 9, 2014
Learn more about Lynn Darling’s 2014 book Out of the Woods here.
“Abandon hope all ye who enter here.”
Theme Park World, Bullfrog Productions’ 1999 construction and management simulation game. Upon selecting Halloween World, the Adviser references the inscription upon the gates of hell.
Learn more from Theme Park World’s Wikipedia page here.
“Dante Alighieri, in Italy known as “the Supreme Poet”, was born in 1265 in Florence. He was a major Italian poet, writer and politician of the Middle Ages.
[. . .]
“The pen is offered as a Lacquer piston fountain pen with rose gold trims in only 1.265 pieces all over the world (Dante’s date of birth).” —Chatterley Luxuries
“The story of Paolo and Francesca, two lovers entwined in an eternal whirlwind, was first told in Dante’s Divine Comedy, and has been the inspiration for countless classical artworks ever since.” —NET-A-PORTER
“Oggi il paradiso costa la metà
Lo dice il venditore di felicità
In fuga dall’inferno, finalmente in viaggio
La tua vacanza in un pacchetto omaggio.”
Check out Francesco Gabbani’s 2017 album Magellano on Spotify.
“Or as the poet Dante put it, ‘In the middle of the journey of my life, I found myself in a dark wood, for I had lost the right path.’ Eventually I would find the right path, but in the most unlikely place.” –Robin Williams as Hunter “Patch” Adams, Patch Adams (1998)
See IMDb for more about the film by Tom Shadyac.
