Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture
The sign cites (with a little alteration) from Inferno XXVI, 118-120
Considerate la vostra semenza:
fatti non foste a viver come bruti,
ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza.’
Consider well the seed that gave you birth:
you were not made to live your lives as brutes,
but to be followers of worth and knowledge.
(trans. Mandelbaum)
Contributed by Virginia Jewiss (Humanities Program, Yale University)
Watch YouTube video clips of Inferno (1911) and Satan Eating Human (1911).
“The Italian epic came of age with Giuseppe de Liguoro’s imaginative silent version of the Inferno, loosely adapted from Dante and inspired by the illustrations of Gustav Doré. L’Inferno was first screened in Naples in the Teatro Mercadante 10 March 1911. The film took over three years to make involving more than 150 people and was the first full length Italian feature film ever made. It’s success was not confined to Italy it was an international hit taking more than $2 million in the United States alone.
Tangerine Dream have composed the soundtrack based on their opera of Dante’s Inferno producing a soundtrack truly worthy of their position as one of the top film music composers in the world.” —L’inferno.com
Contributed by J. Patrick Brown (Bowdoin, ’09)
Photo by Kavi Montanaro, 2008
(Photo by Kavi Montanaro, October 21, 2008)
Banner on Via dei Servi in Florence, Italy. Students, faculty, and parents protesting funding cuts in education and privatization of the school and university systems.
Virgil is saying to Dante, “But no, Dante!… Even Inferno is now privatized… A single fiorino [medieval unit of currency] is no longer enough…”
(Photo by Kavi Montanaro, 2008)
