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Why Does Everyone Love Dante? Article, Jason M. Baxter (2021)

January 12, 2022 By Harrison Betz, FSU '25

baxter_dante_article_screenshot“No other artist has aged as well as Dante Alighieri. He has never really gone out of fashion, except perhaps during the Enlightenment. Just after his death, his Divine Comedy was the subject of heavy-duty theological commentaries in Latin, a level of study generally reserved for works of sacred theology. A century later, during the Renaissance, ambitious designers, whose heads were full of cartography and perspective and new worlds, ambitiously mapped out Dante’s view of the afterlife, as if it were a newly discovered continent (see, for example, Botticelli’s famous map of hell).

“Now, during the 700th anniversary year of Dante’s death, Pope Francis has written an apostolic letter in his honor, calling him a ‘prophet of hope’ and a ‘witness to the innate yearning for the infinite present in the human heart.’

“In short, nothing makes you crave mercy, thirst for it with a dry mouth, quite like Dante’s avant-garde, modernist poem of pain and human failure. And I think this is what has motivated the pope to turn literary critic! At the heart of Dante’s poem is a fragmented vision. But paradoxically, it was precisely because Dante’s human plans failed him that he, purged of mere earthly longing, could emerge as the poet of hope and desire and mercy.” [. . .]    –Jason M. Baxter, America, the Jesuit Review, August 20, 2021 (retrieved January 12, 2022)

Read the full text of Baxter’s article here.

Also, check out our post on Baxter’s book about the Divine Comedy here.

Categories: Written Word
Tagged with: 700th anniversary, Articles, Commentary, Desire, Essays, Hope, Mercy, Popes, Reviews, United States

Sante Matteo, “Escape from Paradise,” Twelve Writers

January 9, 2022 By Professor Elizabeth Coggeshall

“Before Beatrice fled from Florence to Venice and beyond in my story, she migrated from the classroom to the written page, then set sail and found a welcome dock at Twelve Winters Journal.

“A course I taught on the Divine Comedy drew students with a wide spectrum of academic interests. I encouraged them to undertake a term project related to their field of studies, as long as it included an account of their research and how their secondary sources contributed to the creation of their final product (a bit like this commentary). Art students handed in paintings and sculptures; music students composed, performed, and recorded musical pieces; writing majors wrote poetry and stories; theater majors wrote and staged plays; film students scripted, shot, and showed movies; philosophy majors wrote Platonic dialogues. My office became a museum of intriguing works of art.

“Beatrice often figured in the students’ projects, which gave me the idea for a piece that showed how things might have looked through her eyes. After I retired and began to dabble in ‘creative writing,’ I emulated my students and took on the project of drafting a story presented from her perspective. [. . .]” –Sante Matteo, “Commentary on ‘Escape from Paradise’,” Twelve Winters

Read Sante Matteo’s story “Escape from Paradise” at Twelve Winters‘ website here.

See also Sante Matteo’s poem “Assignation” (here) and his essay on Dante and baseball (here).

Contributed by Sante Matteo

Categories: Written Word
Tagged with: 2021, Academia, Beatrice, Creative Writing, Fiction, Ohio, Oxford (Ohio), Paradise, Pedagogy, Short Stories, Student Projects, United States, Universities

St. Agrestis Liqueurs: Inferno and Paradiso

January 9, 2022 By Professor Elizabeth Coggeshall

“There’s a Brooklyn-based distillery called St. Agrestis that’s been around since 2014. They made their name with an amaro, but have since delved into other spirits. Notably for our purposes, they have a Campari-like bitter called ‘Inferno’ that’s pretty good and an aperitivo called ‘Paradiso.’ They also make bottled Negronis and Spritz using Inferno and Paradiso, respectively.

“Interestingly, the label design hints at a Dantean topography. Inferno and the Negroni both have labels that evoke layers or concentric circles. Paradiso and the Spritz both have a geometric pattern that uses triangles (Trinity?). The batched Negroni also comes in a 1.75L Franzia-style box with a spout (’20 Negronis in every box!’) and the canned spritz comes in a triangular 10-pack case.”   –Contributor Alex Cuadrado

Learn more about St. Agrestis’s products here.

Contributed by Alex Cuadrado (Ph.D., Columbia University)

Categories: Consumer Goods, Dining & Leisure
Tagged with: 2014, Alcohol, Brooklyn, Cocktails, Liqueur, New York, New York City, United States

Original Sin – The Seven Sins Short Film, dir. Amy Tinkham (2021)

January 8, 2022 By Harrison Betz, FSU '25

original_sin_short_film_poster“Original Sin is a modern-day love story about a broken-hearted heroine and her journey through the seven sins and the quest towards the virtue of Hope. The music of the legendary global rock band INXS seamlessly accompanies the film, and ultimately, the young heroine finds true love while the world heals with her.

“The film is loosely based on and inspired by celebrated Italian writer Dante Alighieri’s Inferno and the spiritual journey through the Seven Sins of Purgatory — pride, envy, wrath, sloth, greed, gluttony, and lust. The Original Sin short film reimagines Dante’s tale through the eyes of Jane, a 21st-century heroine isolated during the recent pandemic, who continues to search for love and the means to validate her soul.” [. . .]     –UMe, Cision PR Newswire, June 28, 2021 (retrieved January 6, 2022)

Watch a trailer (which includes direct quotes from the first canto of Inferno) for Original Sin here.

Listen to the short film’s Dante-inspired soundtrack here.

Categories: Digital Media, Music, Performing Arts
Tagged with: 2021, American Art, Films, Hell, Inferno, Journeys, Movies, Nel Mezzo del Cammin, Purgatory, Seven Deadly Sins, Short Films, Sin, Soundtrack, United States

Succession Season 3, Episode 6 – “What It Takes” (2021)

December 4, 2021 By Harrison Betz, FSU '25

Succession-What-It-Takes-40th-Birthday-Party-ThemeIn Episode 6 of Season 3 of the HBO television series Succession, Kendall Roy describes the planned theme of his upcoming 40th birthday: “ End Times: Weimar meets Carthage meets Dante meets AI and antibiotic-resistant superbugs.”

Succession has been featured multiple times on our website: see another reference from Season 1 here and a promotional poster citing here.

Categories: Digital Media, Performing Arts
Tagged with: 2021, American Television, Black Comedy, Dante, Drama, HBO, Satire, Televison, United States

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How to Cite

Coggeshall, Elizabeth, and Arielle Saiber, eds. Dante Today: Citings and Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture. Website. Access date.

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