Performing Dante or Building the Nation?: The Divina Commedia between Dramaturgy of Exile and Public Festivities (original) (raw)

Mediaevalia, 2017

Abstract

Dante, the “anima di fuoco [soul of fire]”—like Mazzini and Garibaldi, the two other main icons of the Risorgimento—gave off “scintille di senso [sparks of meaning]” across time, as Italian historian Mario Isnenghi so aptly put it. This meant he was surrounded by the same constant “effetto alone [halo effect]” that continued even through decades or centuries of apparent silence. Catapulted into modernity by literature and the visual and performing arts, the “Genio gigante [great Genius]”, apostle and prophet of the nation, poet of Italian regeneration, symbol of an individual and collective fate, therefore represented a pulsar memory, both inside and outside the text. For this very reason, as Alberto Savinio stated, “Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare are great names but they are timeless: we would say detached from life...they are men-oases, or men-islands, detached from the chain, or better the conveyor belt of ideas.” In the nineteenth century, Mazzini’s thought, the romantic myth, It...

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