The universality of Dante's narration speaks to everyone and at any latitude. We all know, from our own experience, what it means feeling lost in the "forest", in the quicksand of our anguish, about to drown, when a taste of death makes our lips sour. Up to here, it is everyone's experience, and Dante takes us by the hand and whispers to us me too, a pilgrim, me too an exile, me too lost along the way, like you.
Let’s put aside the rhetoric of the Sommo Poeta, the Father of Italian Language and Literature, let’s put aside the intimidating ‘Monument’. Dante is all of that, of course, and the Comedy is Divine because it is an immense novel, it is cinema, psychoanalysis, speleology, theatre, stunning alchemy of chanting and art, but, first, Dante is the man who reveals himself, he confesses to us: “I find myself”, he is the brother, the mortally wounded who indicates the fragile path of "our life", everyone’s life. But right there, in that darkness, where the curtain seems to fall forever, right there you can find the strength to make a jump, there is the Unpredictable, the Good, there, – the poet whispers in our ear: “il ben ch’io vi trovai” –, from there we will be able to embark on the journey that will ferry us from darkness to light. Paradise is already in that first step out of darkness. (...) For this "choral action" we will work on the first two cantos of Inferno, to which we will mix poetic fragments by Emily Dickinson, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Walt Whitman, and other poets of 'the poets’ Purgatory' constellation.
Marco Martinelli
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