Dante: Inferno to Paradise

Narrator as Dante: O reader, do not ask of me how I grew faint and frozen.

I cannot write it: all words would fall far short of what it was.

I did not die, and I was not alive; think for yourself, if you have any wit, what I became, deprived of life and death.

Webb: As Dante was finishing the "Inferno," which was just the first part of his 3-part epic poem, the "Commedia," he'd been in exile for almost 7 years, forced from his beloved city of Florence, homeless.

Being exiled in Dante's time is something we really can't comprehend fully now.

[Thunder] Within the gates of the city was security.

Alone, lost and uprooted, vulnerable, Dante had to keep moving, and the "Commedia," his guide through the afterlife.

It is because of his exile we get the gift of this poem, but it's a very painful condition from which he writes.

[Wind blowing] Narrator: By the spring of 1307, 6 Easters had come and gone since Dante's exile had begun.

6 years of wandering, impoverished, unmoored-- far from family and home, at constant risk.

An itinerant beggar, he wrote, forced to rely on the mercy of the lords of the Tuscan high country for protection, and consumed now with the creation of a vast poem unlike anything that had ever been written before-- a poem which, he hoped, if he could only find a way to finish it, might serve to confirm his greatness as a writer and provide him with a passport which might carry him triumphantly home.

The poem itself told of a fateful and phantasmagorical journey Dante had undertaken 6 years earlier, in the spring of 1300, before his woeful exile had begun-- a journey that would take him through the 3 realms of the underworld and afterlife-- from darkness to redemption.

A journey that had itself started, with haunting specificity, 3 days before Easter-- in the early hours of April 8th, 1300-- in the terrible darkness, anguish, and despair of Good Friday.

Bruscagli: In the "Divine Comedy," there's this crossing between the individual life of Dante and the collective life of Christianity.

Because the week of Easter, which goes from the passion and crucifixion of Christ to his resurrection, is the crucial moment of the Catholic faith, the moment where you go from the bottom of destitution and desperation to the peak of hope and happiness.

In this sense, the "Comedy" reflects what happens during the week of Easter, which goes from the abyss of death and abandonment to the resurrection, to the new life of Easter Sunday.

Narrator: Every spring, at Easter time in particular, the pain of his situation came over him acutely, along with an enormous longing to go home, to return to the city that had spurned him, to the great baptistry of St. John-- the center of all that was good in Florence, for Dante-- the beating heart of all hope and love and renewal... a place that he wished to return to almost as much as he longed to find some way back to the haunting beautiful Florentine girl he had loved passionately since childhood, and who had died more than 15 years earlier--Beatrice.

Webb: For Dante, the notion of returning to Florence is something that looms so large for him.

You know, he talks about going back to the baptistry of Florence, but already in terms where we know he suspects that may not be possible.

Timothy Verdon: When Dante speaks of the baptistry, he calls it "his beautiful San Giovanni"-- "il bel San Giovanni."

The baptistry was the most magnificent building in the city of Florence and, perhaps, in all of Tuscany.

And Dante speaks of it as a place of identity.

Dante's great ancestor, Cacciaguida, in the "Divine Comedy" very specifically says, "In this place I became, at the same time, Cacciaguida and a Christian."

He might have added, "I also became a Florentine," because all children born in Florence were brought here to be baptized.

No other church had the privilege of being able to give the sacrament of baptism.

And Florentines returned to this building on any number of important occasions.

Every year, in Dante's time, on the day when the church remembers the death of Christ, Good Friday, in Florence, all house fires were extinguished.

The city went dark and cold on Good Friday and would remain so for two days, until Holy Saturday, the day before Christ's resurrection.

And when they begin to celebrate the signs of his resurrection, here in the baptistry, in the afternoon of Holy Saturday, they lit a bonfire inside the baptistry.

If we imagine for a moment on what might be a dark spring day, a bonfire whose flames illuminate the glittering gold background mosaics and the then-gleaming marbles, and from that bonfire then, the flame for the Easter candle--the pastoral candle, which symbolizes Christ's resurrection--was taken, and from that same bonfire, the heads of all Florentines families came, with little buckets, to take ardent coals to take them to their homes, to again light the fires that would make it possible to cook, to end the fast that began on Good Friday.

And so, the light and heat and warm food, with which Florentines lived all year, came from a fire that had been illuminated in this place of baptism where, as children, they had been inducted into the hope of eternal life.

This was a refining fire.

It was a vital fire.

It was, in some way, a symbol of the fire of the Holy Spirit, which consumes sin and which makes us, as it were, flaming torches, giving light and truth to others.

[Wind blowing] Narrator: Sometime in the spring of 1307, as the exiled poet made his way east towards the protection of new patrons at Casentino, the unfinished manuscript of "Inferno" in a satchel on his back, Dante found himself, not for the first time, as he wrote, "in a flash of lightning"-- lovestruck, and all but overwhelmed by the beauty of a woman he chanced to encounter somewhere along the streams of the Arno-- a brief if wild storm of tempestuous feeling of the kind he had long sought to master, which would come back to haunt him before he came to the end of the next part of his poem--"Purgatorio."

Barolini: Dante was famous for lust.

That's how the early biographers talk about him.

His poems before the "Comedia" are among the most erotic poems that have ever been written.

I actually think this was a man of enormous erotic life.

So, in terms of what he struggled with, I don't know with precision--certainly pride-- but I think it did have more to do with passion.

Narrator: It was summertime, in all likelihood, when he neared Casentino and the headwaters of the Arno, and finally came under the refuge of Count Guido Salvatico, at the castle of Poppi.

It was there, as he settled into his new haven, that Dante would soon begin to step in his mind up the first luminous terraces of the mountain of Purgatory on a journey that would lead to the very top of the world and thence on to the farthest reaches of Heaven.

Adoyo: As Virgil and Dante emerge out of Inferno and end up on the shores of Purgatory, they're realizing that now they're in Easter Sunday, the moment of resurrection, the re-emergence... and they're re-emerging into the realm of penitence.

I like to think of Purgatorio as a realm of hope.

Inferno had been the realm of no hope.

Purgatorio is a realm of hope.

Why?

Because with the purging of the sins, then one ends up in the realm of salvation, in Heaven.

I think that one of the things that is in Dante is a tension between what human beings are in their worst moments, and what they can aspire to be.

And this is part of what makes the "Purgatorio" so moving, is to see people who are still part of their old lives, but are now becoming better.

Or they're better versions of themselves.

Ledda: In the first canto of "Purgatorio," the first thing that Dante sees is the sky before the dawn.

And he says, "Sweet color of eastern sapphires-- dolce color d'oriental zaffiro."

Narrator: As Dante and Virgil stood in silent wonder at the foot of the mountain on Purgatory's rocky shore, their gaze was drawn to a solitary figure standing at the mountain's foot, looking with stern perplexity at the living being before him and his phantom companion.

[Thunder] It was the guardian and gate-keeper of Purgatory-- Cato of Utica-- a Roman Senator who had committed suicide 46 years before the birth of Christ, so dedicated to the freedom of Republican Rome that he had stabbed himself in the bowels rather than submit to a life of slavery under the tyranny of Caesar.

Bruscagli: Cato is the guardian of Purgatory.

Cato was a pagan and committed suicide.

So, why is he there?

Because he chose to sacrifice his life not to become a servant of Caesar.

So, he is there as a champion of liberty.

Who are you--who, against the hidden river, were able to escape the eternal prison?...

Who was your guide?

when, you were set free?

The laws of the abyss-- have they been broken?

Virgil: I do not come through my own self.

There was a lady sent from Heaven.

Her pleas led me to help and guide this man... Ledda: Dante in the beginning of "Purgatorio" is described by Virgil as one who is searching for freedom.

"Purgatorio" is the voyage to freedom-- freedom from vice, from sin.

Now may it please you to approve his coming; he goes in search of liberty-- so precious, as he who gives his life for it must know.

[Wind blowing] ...Go then; but first wind a smooth rush around his waist and bathe his face, to wash away all of Hell's stains; for it would not be seemly to approach with eyes still dimmed by any mists,... the first custodian angel, one from Paradise.

Narrator: As Cato finished speaking, a light of dazzling whiteness approached from across the sea.

It was a winged angel of God-- ushering a boatload bearing more than 100 new spirits to the shore where Virgil and Dante stood.

And with that, Cato bid them start the long and arduous journey up the mountain towards Heaven.

The ascent of Purgatory had begun.

Bruscagli: The realm of Purgatory is really Dante's invention-- from a theological, moral, psychological, and even topographical point of view.

Christianity had always known--more or less-- that there was a Hell-- a dark, underground realm, horrific place, reserved for the unrepentant sinners, and that there was a Paradise-- a beautiful place in the heavenly empyrean destined for the eternal happiness of the good.

But what about Purgatory?

Did a place called Purgatory actually exist?

And if so, where was it, and for what purpose?

Purgatory really was not a very well defined place before Dante got his hands on it.

So, there's this very odd way in which this literary figure had an immense influence over the ways that Catholic doctrine got depicted from then on.

Narrator: As Dante the pilgrim would soon discover, with Virgil at his side, the steeply rising rock-strewn terraces of Purgatory, on the other side of the world, mirrored in reverse the 9 descending circles of Hell... ascending from more grievous sins, now repented, in the lower terraces-- pride, envy, wrath, and sloth-- to less grievous ones further up-- avarice, gluttony, and, finally, lust.

But where the souls in Hell were fixed for all eternity in the circle to which they had been assigned, the penitent souls in Purgatory were in constant movement up.

And where time did not exist in the eternal hopeless darkness of Hell, Purgatory existed in the same temporal realm as the human world itself, moved by the same shifting winds, illuminated by the same shifting light of sun, moon, and stars.

Bruscagli: The mountain of Purgatory according to Dante is a part of the earth's landscape.

It is something that exists on the surface of our planet.

And that's why Purgatory seems like an extension of human life.

Dante goes to sleep in Purgatory and dreams.

So, Purgatory really is a restoration of this almost biological rhythm of human life.

Ledda: In "Purgatorio," the souls are there-- but not eternally, temporarily, for a time.

They have to move to the next terrace.

So, there is also a journey, a pilgrimage.

The journey of the life continues.

Purgatory is the continuation of the exile from the earthly exile to the homeland, towards God.

Gragnolati: One can understand the process of Purgatory as that which allows the soul precisely to go out of its own obsessions.

One can think of Hell as the rigidity of identity.

It's like continuing to be stuck in one's own obsessions, in the past.

Purgatory is the therapy that allows the soul to abandon all that rigidity.

And it's the moment where the collectivity is revealed.

Souls in Purgatory help each other.

And this is really like a transformation that helps the soul precisely to go beyond.

Webb: Throughout the "Purgatorio," in fact, we see these groups working together.

They pray together, they speak together.

We might even think of it as a kind of a group therapy.

In "Inferno," it's as if time is frozen.

Bruscagli: Purgatory is the opposite.

Everything is in movement in Purgatory.

We enter a dimension where not only time counts, but everything revolves about a new perception of time.

Because Purgatory is ephemeral.

Purgatory is not destined to last forever.

So, it is structurally tied to the passing of time.

Guy Raffa: Dante makes Purgatory into a very earthly sort of place.

And he will meet spirits who, while they are purifying themselves, getting ready to go to Heaven, are still very attached to their earthly lives.

They're almost nostalgic for the lives that they left behind, and the people that they left behind.

He really describes Purgatory as this mountain in which spirits who are destined for Heaven, everybody in Purgatory is saved, but they have to purify themselves first by going through the different levels of Purgatory before they are ready to ascend to the stars.

Narrator: On the lowermost terraces of the mountain, as Dante imagined it, was a special zone for souls who must wait before entering Purgatory itself.

One such soul was the first that Dante would meet-- on the mountain's second terrace-- when he encountered Manfred, a great Ghibelline soldier, the son of Frederick the Second and sworn enemy of the church, who had been killed at the Battle of Benevento and excommunicated by the pope-- not once but twice-- but who, just before dying, had surrendered to God and been saved, though his broken body itself had been cast out, and buried ignominiously, never to be found.

Whoever you may be, as you move forward, turn and see: consider if beyond-- you've ever seen me.

Look now.

I am Manfred, the grandson of the Empress Constance; thus, I pray that, when you reach the world again, you may go to my lovely daughter, mother of kings of Sicily and Aragon-- Tell her the truth, lest she's been told something other.

After my body had been shattered by two fatal blows, in tears, I then consigned myself to Him who willingly forgives.

My sins were ghastly, but the Infinite Goodness has arms so wide that It accepts who ever would return, imploring It.

Now...rain bathes my bones, the wind has driven them beyond the Kingdom, near the Verde's banks... but despite the Church's curse, there is no one so lost that the eternal love cannot return-- as long as hope shows something green.

Raffa: Manfred was the son of an emperor who died in a battle in 1266.

And because he'd been excommunicated not once but twice by different popes, when he was buried, because he was a heretic, his bones needed to be thrown into territory that was not sacred.

But yet, he's still saved.

And so, he makes that point to Dante, that it doesn't matter what other people think on earth, even the pope.

It matters what was going on in his heart.

Narrator: Continuing their ascent up the rocky slopes of Purgatory, Dante and Virgil soon encountered another group of souls: those who had died violent deaths and achieved salvation only at the last possible moment... including, among them, a young woman from Siena, Pia de' Tolomei, who had been murdered by her husband in the swamp lands of Maremma and died without receiving absolution.

Voices: O soul.

O soul.

O soul who make your way to gladness with the limbs you had at birth, do stay your steps awhile... to see if there are any among us whom you knew, that you might carry word of him--or her--beyond.

Raffa: One of the most beautiful parts of Dante's Purgatory is the reciprocity between the living and the dead, the spirits in Purgatory persistently ask Dante to tell their relatives and other people that they left behind to pray for them so that they can speed their journey up the mountain and get to Heaven more quickly.

[Wind blowing] Dante even goes against the theology of his day.

He allows the souls in Purgatory to pray for the people on earth and to help them.

Dante says, "I'm going to create this world in which "the living and the dead really have a communion, a conversation between them."

Narrator: At the very end of the scene, Pia de' Tolomei implored Dante not to forget her when he returned to the land of the living, as she had no one else to pray for her deliverance.

Pray, after your returning to the world, when, after your long journeying, you've rested, ... May you remember me, who am La Pia; Siena made me-- Maremma unmade me: he--who, when we were wed, gave me his pledge... and then, as nuptial ring, his gem--knows that.

[Wind blowing] [Bird cawing] Narrator: In 1309, stunning news rocked the Italian peninsula when word came that the seat of the papacy had been moved by Pope Clement from Rome to Avignon in France, where it would remain for the next 69 years-- abducted, in effect, by the French King Philip, in a blow that for Dante, and Italians everywhere, struck at the very heart of their pride and identity.

The Church, as Dante would soon say of the shocking removal, had made itself a whore to the French giant.

That same year, however, equally momentous news arrived when word came that far to the north, Henry of Luxembourg had been elected Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, and two months later crowned King of Germany, bringing the promise of a restoration of political order on the unquiet Italian peninsula-- and accelerating a transformation long in the making in Dante's political allegiances-- as the prospect that the new emperor might chasten the corrupt worldly ambitions of the pope loomed like a utopian dream.

Bruscagli: It's a kind of moment of passage in Dante's especially political thought, because this is the moment where Dante becomes such a fierce supporter of the emperor.

Narrator: In January 1311, when Henry himself came south to be crowned in Milan, Dante was there to meet him-- urging him to bring Florence to heel, and to bring to an end decades of meddling by the pope.

Pertile: Dante was hopeful that Henry would in a sense open up the doors of the city to Dante.

Then Dante could return to Florence in a position of strength.

Webb: He wanted to go back and be crowned poet laureate at his bel San Giovanni, the baptistry where he was first baptized into the faith.

And so, there's this kind of immense hope for a resolution to his exile.

All of the penitents in each terrace of Purgatorio are at different stages.

Everyone there is going through their own personalized experience of penance.

And, therefore, some will be further along than others.

Some will be deeper into the vice, some will be closer to the opposing virtue.

Dante puts himself forward not as particularly exemplary, not as a shining paragon of all virtues, but rather as someone like the rest of us reading the poem, who ourselves will have some of his faults and might want to aspire to some of the virtues that are presented throughout the "Purgatorio."

And so, he tells us, for instance, that he's going to have to spend significant amounts of time on the Terrace of Pride, but envy's not really his thing.

Narrator: Having climbed all the terraces but one, Virgil and Dante ascended now to the Terrace of Lust, where purging souls repented the tempests of erotic feeling that had so overtaken them in life, and in refining fires, not of punishment but purification, sought to accommodate themselves to desires they do not so much repudiate as seek to understand and refine.

Quint: Poets before Dante, and the poets after him, did not particularly see erotic love leading towards the love of God.

And I think that that's what makes the "Divine Comedy" powerful and speaks to us, is that we are sexual beings, that we have these desires, that they are not simply illicit and lead us into temptations.

And they're not to be simply overcome but, in some ways, to be transformed.

Narrator: As the two pilgrims neared the very end of the terrace, they found themselves face to face with two of the greatest love poets of all time-- an exquisite lyricist named Guido Guinezzelli-- and the great Provencal troubadour Arnaut Daniel-- who more than anyone else had inspired Dante to use the vernacular to put into words feelings of longing and love.

Man as Daniel: Ieu sui Arnaut, que plor e vau cantan; I am Arnaut, who, going, weep and sing; with grief, I see my former folly; with joy, I see the hoped-for day draw near.

Now--I pray you--by the Power that conducts you to the summit of the stairway, remember, at time opportune, my pain!

sovenha vos a temps de ma dolor!

Poi s'ascose nel foco che li affina.

Fazzini as Dante: Then he withdrew once again into the fire that refines.

Narrator: The purging soul of Arnaut Daniel had scarcely withdrawn into the flames, when from beyond the flickering wall of fire an angelic emissary appeared, and to Dante's deep dismay made clear that all who would go beyond must themselves pass through the same refining wall of fire.

Paralyzed with fear, Dante adamantly refused to step into the wall of flames until Virgil, despairing he might never get his frightened charge across, reminded him that Beatrice was awaiting him on the other side.

Adoyo: Remember--when we first got into the "Commedia"-- we learned that Beatrice was the one who was responsible for this journey happening in the first place.

And we anticipate her arrival for the entire journey.

It's beautiful how Dante's love and desire to see her is always the impetus that drives him forward when his energy flags.

When he's too frightened, when he gets distracted, Virgil can always invoke Beatrice's name to get him moving.

Love prompted me.

That love which makes me speak.

Giunta: Dante writes the "Purgatorio" at the beginning of the second decade of the 14th century.

So, 1310-15.

Beatrice is dead since 1290, so, it's a 25-years gap.

And the whole structure of the "Comedy" is like a journey to Beatrice.

So, very touching is this long, long link of devotion to a woman he never touched, in fact.

Narrator: Having passed through the flames, Virgil and Dante rested for the night on the steps above the final terrace.

They had neared the very summit.

And it was now here, when they had reached the highest step, with the threshold of the Garden of Earthly Paradise before them, that Virgil turned his gaze lovingly to his charge and spoke.

Virgil: My son, you've seen the temporary fire and the eternal fire; you have reached the place past which my powers cannot see.

I've brought you here through intellect and art; from now on, let pleasure be your guide; you're past the steep and narrow paths.

Look at the sun that shines upon your brow; look at the grasses, flowers, and the shrubs born here, spontaneously, out of the earth.

Among them, you can rest or walk until the coming of the glad and lovely eyes-- those eyes that, weeping, sent me to your side.

Await no further word from me: your will is free, erect, and whole-- to act against that would be to err: therefore I crown and miter you over yourself.

Narrator: It was a momentous turning point, and for Dante, almost overwhelming to conceive that thanks to Virgil, and the long journey they had undertaken together, he who had once been lost had finally found himself again-- that once so self-enchained, he was now free.

Glancing towards his beloved mentor, Dante now stepped slowly and tremulously into the world that lay before him-- an ancient forest unlike anything he had ever seen before-- dense, alive with green, divine.

He had taken only a few steps into this enchanted world when a solitary figure--a woman he had never seen before-- appeared through the trees, singing softly as she gathered flowers, and when she had come close enough, confirming for him that he had come to the place where humankind had once been innocent, and where Adam and Eve had first sinned and fallen.

Deep in the shimmering forest beyond her, Dante could just make out 7 slender trees, which, as he approached, seemed to take the shape of a sacred candelabra.

Astonished, Dante turned back to Virgil for a moment, who returned his gaze with eyes no less amazed.

And now, when he turned back, a shimmering procession of figures had begun to drift into view-- solemn elders, two by two, angelic men and women, singing as they moved, with wreaths of lilies on their heads, and behind them 4 great 6-winged creatures in whose midst a chariot moved, drawn by a gryphon.

It was then--as the procession came to a halt-- that Dante finally made out the figure of an ineffably beautiful, infinitely familiar woman in its midst.

It was the moment of epiphany and return Dante had been dreaming of for years.

Narrator as Dante: I have at times seen all the eastern sky becoming rose as day began; and seen adorned in lovely blue the rest of Heaven; and seen the sun's face rise so veiled that it was tempered by the mist, and could permit the eye to look at length upon it; so within a cloud of flowers that were cast by the angelic hands... a woman showed herself to me-- above a white veil, she was crowned with olive boughs-- her cape was green; her dress beneath, flame-red... Within her presence, I had once been used to feeling-- trembling--wonder, dissolution; Still, though... now she was veiled-- ..., by way of hidden force that she could move, I felt the mighty power of old love.

As soon as that deep force had struck my vision I turned around and to my left--.... to say to Virgil: "I am left with less than "one drop of my blood that does not tremble: I recognize the signs of the old flame."

Narrator: But to Dante's unutterable grief and sorrow, Virgil was no longer there.

Narrator as Dante: Virgil had deprived us of himself, Virgil, the gentlest father, Virgil, to whom I gave myself for my salvation; and even all our ancient mother lost was not enough to keep my cheeks, though washed with dew, from darkening again with tears.

Barolini: For many readers, that moment when we lose Virgil near the end of Purgatory remains the ultimate moment of the poem.

Because what Dante really gives us is experiencing loss in real time as readers.

Ledda: Virgil, the guide in Hell and Purgatory, the poet, the author, the beloved master, had to go back to Limbo.

He is condemned to Hell.

He is in the eternal exile, he never can see God, never can have the knowledge he desired.

But we love Virgil.

Dante loves Virgil.

Dante cries when Virgil leaves.

Dante, though Virgil is leaving you, do not yet weep, do not weep yet.

Bruscagli: This is the first time that Dante's name is uttered in the "Divine Comedy," when Beatrice addresses him, calling him by name.

But, of course, when Dante meets her at the end of Purgatory, when there is this meeting-- the Beatrice that he finds is completely different.

She has grown into something totally unexpected, when you come to the end of Purgatory.

Dante...Dante...Dante, though Virgil is leaving you, do not yet weep, do not weep yet, you'll need your tears for what another sword must yet inflict.

Pertile: She treats him as a traitor, with severity as a boy, really, as a young man, who's not grown enough to take care of himself.

Here Beatrice is preparing herself to become the Beatrice of Paradiso.

Look here!

For I am Beatrice, I am!

How were you able to ascend the mountain?

Did you not know that man is happy here?

Adoyo: When she finally arrives and her demeanor is severe and dismissive and challenging-- "how dare you show your face here"-- it is confounding, because this is all he's wanted.

This is what has driven him to this point.

And she will not have it.

Narrator: As Dante averted his gaze, and looked down with shame and mortification, a sigh of sympathy on his behalf went up from the host of angelic figures in the procession before them... Angels: Lady, why shame him so?

Narrator: bringing Dante to even greater tears, and spurring Beatrice to explain to them why her manner was so severe.

I'm more concerned that my reply be understood by him who weeps beyond, so that his sorrow's measure match his sin... Adoyo: And this is where then she gets to articulate that that thing that he had intuited when he was 9 years old-- that she signified, symbolized, pointed to something beyond the merely material-- that is an intuition that he ought to have cultivated.

He, when young, was such--potentially-- that any propensity innate in him would have prodigiously succeeded, had he acted.

But where the soil has finer vigor, there precisely--when untilled or badly seeded-- will that terrain grow wilder and more noxious.

My countenance sustained him for a while; showing him my youthful eyes, I led him with me toward the way of righteousness.

As soon as I, upon the threshold of my second age, had changed my life, he took himself away from me and followed after another; when, from flesh to spirit, I had risen, and my goodness and my beauty had grown, I was less dear to him, less welcome: he turned his footsteps towards an untrue path; followed counterfeits of goodness, who will never pay in full what they have promised.

He fell so far there were no other means to lead him to salvation, except this: to let him see the people who were lost.

Adoyo: Here's Beatrice, recalling to him what he already knew, and he recognizes it, and is deeply, deeply contrite.

Not because it's a false accusation, but because it is too true.

Humblingly so.

Fazzini as Dante: Beneath her veil, beyond the stream, she seemed so to surpass her former self in beauty... as, here on earth, she had surpassed all others.

The nettle of remorse so stung me then, ... that those among all other things that once allured my love became most hateful to me.

Such self-indictment seized my heart that I collapsed, my senses slack; what I became is known to her who was the cause of it.

Narrator: When Dante's piercing self-indictment and heartfelt confession had brought to a climax his own purgatorial journey, he was solemnly bathed in the two unending streams that flowed through the enchanted forest-- first, in the waters of Lethe, that washed away the memories of sin, then in the waters of Eunoe, that restored memories of goodness and innocence.

And so, the final canto of Purgatory came to an end-- and with it the second great part of Dante's vast poem.

And as it did, Beatrice and Dante-- readied themselves to leave Purgatory once and for all-- "pure at last, and prepared to climb unto the stars."

All through the winter of 1311 and 1312, Dante was in Genoa as the armies of Henry VII gathered to the south near Rome, where that spring, the emperor was crowned yet again.

Declaring papal authority inferior to his own-- and all of Italy subject to imperial rule-- Henry then prepared to lay siege to the Guelph stronghold of Florence.

Bruscagli: When the emperor Henry VII came down to Italy to restore the rights of the empire around the peninsula, it's a project that, as we know, Dante totally supported at that point.

But the city of Florence responded in a very fierce way.

[Horse whinnying, explosions] Narrator: For 6 weeks, the city put up staunch resistance, until in the end, the emperor's forces were forced to withdraw, to Dante's bitter disappointment.

The following year, Henry regrouped his forces, and was preparing to lay siege to Siena when late that summer, he was stricken with malaria, and died on August 24th, 1313.

He was 40 years old, and with his death any hopes of imperial rule on the Italian peninsula quickly withered and faded away.

The following year, in 1314, with Pope Clement re-asserting papal rights over the Holy Roman Empire, "Inferno," the first canticle of Dante's great poem, was published for the first time-- followed, not long after, by "Purgatorio."

Dante had in all probability not yet even begun "Paradiso," the third and final canticle of the monumental undertaking.

But as copies of the first two parts of the poem began to circulate through the courts of northern Italy, his reputation began to soar upward.

In May 1315, officials in Florence, after years of refusing to grant him amnesty, finally offered the increasingly famous poet a chance to return home-- on condition that he publicly ask for grace, pay a fee to the commune, and undergo a humiliating ceremony of confession in front of civic dignitaries.

Outraged that the terms required acknowledging himself to be a criminal, Dante refused.

Alan Cox as Boccaccio: And as the poet himself wrote to the elders, in a fury: If Florence is to be entered by no other path, then never will I enter Florence.

Webb: I think that probably was one of the major points when he sort of realized he probably would never be going back.

And then I think you do see this shift where he's no longer seeing, perhaps, the most concrete solutions for how things are going to work out in this world.

There's this sort of sense to where it's the end of the "Paradiso" where certain earthly chances have been lost.

Dante does not see the same kind of hope for a resolution in the earthly realm that he had seen earlier.

So, I think there is kind of a dark turn that happens at some point... but that dark turn does not occlude the immense luminosity, and the joy of the "Paradiso," because what he's suggesting is that we need to look beyond the immediacy of our earthly situations.

[Wind blowing] Narrator: Dante's whereabouts in the years following Henry's death are veiled in uncertainty.

But sometime in 1316-- whether in Pisa or Verona-- he seems to have begun work on the first cantos of "Paradiso."

Narrator as Dante: The glory of the One who moves all things permeates the universe and glows in one part more and in another less.

I was within the heaven that receives more of His light; and I saw things that he who from that height descends, forgets or cannot speak; for nearing its desired end, our intellect sinks into an abyss so deep that memory fails to follow it.

Nevertheless, as much as I, within my mind, could treasure of the holy kingdom shall now become the matter of my song.

Narrator: In the 33 cantos that ensued-- the most luminous, daring, and in many ways groundbreaking of the entire poem-- Dante would ascend with Beatrice up through the 9 heavenly spheres radiating outward from the Earth in the third unearthly region of the afterlife, Paradise.

As the canticle began, Dante and Beatrice were still standing side by side at the very summit of the Mountain of Purgatory.

In the poem's chronology, it was near noon on Wednesday, April 13, 1300, just 6 days after his sojourn had begun in the dark forest.

The precise moment that they left the Earth would be described in a passage equally beholden to the drama of the moment it captured, to the dazzling interplay of light that would dominate and characterize all of "Paradiso," and to the ineffability of the new reality he was experiencing.

Narrator as Dante: I saw Beatrice turn round and left, that she might see the sun; no eagle has ever stared so steadily at it.

And as a second ray will issue from the first and re-ascend much like a pilgrim who seeks his home again, so on the sun I set my sight more than we usually do I did not bear it long, but not so briefly as not to see it sparkling round about, like molten iron emerging from the fire; and suddenly it seemed that day had been added to day, as if the One who can had graced the heavens with a second sun... from the sun, I turned aside; I set my eyes on her.

In watching her, within me I was changed.

Passing beyond the human cannot be worded until grace grant you the experience.

Narrator: Uncertain whether what he was experiencing was happening only in his mind, he was about to speak when Beatrice began to speak for him.

You are not on the Earth as you believe; but lightning, flying from its own abode, is less swift than you are, returning home.

Barolini: The first most remarkable thing about the "Paradiso" is the most beautiful language in the world in terms of feeling almost materially and corporeally what language of such density, and such metaphoric richness and such eros-- the most erotic language in the poem is in the "Paradiso."

All things, among themselves, possess an order; and this order is the form that makes the universe like God...

Within that order, every nature has its bent, according to a different station, near or less near to its origin.

Therefore, these natures move to different ports across the mighty sea of being, each given the impulse that will bear it on.

Narrator: As we are to discover, the experience of Paradise would be radically unlike what had come before.

While Inferno and Purgatory, as Dante had experienced them, were both real and existed as such, the Paradise Beatrice leads him through can only be a simulacrum of Paradise as it actually is because Paradise in its essence is beyond human apprehension.

Paradise in itself is an experience beyond time and space.

The only way Dante can receive this experience and can live this experience and can narrate this experience must be rendered in time.

So the souls come from the Empyrean and appear to Dante, heaven after heaven, and that simulates some sort of Paradise, but we know that this is just a show, and this is not the real Paradise.

This is a theater of Paradise, which is performed just for him.

Pertile: Dante on the one hand acknowledges the existence of this Paradiso beyond space and beyond time.

On the other hand, he creates a kind of accommodation for us, for the readers, and for himself as a human being, as a visitor, whereby Paradiso itself condescends to and adapts to the conditions created by Dante's poem.

[Choir singing in Latin] Narrator as Dante: Then it was clear to me how every place in Heaven is in Paradise, though grace does not rain equally from the High Good.

Adoyo: In Paradise, you almost never see human figures or any kind of anthropomorphic representation of a soul because everything is a flame or a spark, a scintilla of starlight, and you can tell who's speaking because that light emanates more brightly and then recedes.

Bruscagli: The exception is Beatrice.

Beatrice remains visible all throughout Paradise, and yet at the same time, Beatrice is not the same in Paradise, heaven after heaven, because her beauty increases.

Her beauty goes through a continuous augmentation of luminosity.

If in the fire of love, I seem to flame beyond the measure visible on Earth, so that I overcome your vision's force, you need not wonder; I am so because of my perfected vision-- as I grasp the good, so I approach the good in act.

Indeed I see that in your intellect now shines the never-ending light; once seen, that light, alone and always, kindles love.

Webb: What's so striking is how much Dante leans on Beatrice to provide so many of the central discourses of the "Paradiso."

Every so often, there are other characters who will come in and say things, but really it's Beatrice who takes the lead, and she takes Dante through the full range of all that is in Paradiso from the excitement and the joy to the righteous anger and all the rest of it.

Bruscagli: And so Dante goes from one sky to the other, dragged, almost propelled up by the beautiful gaze, luminous gaze of Beatrice.

Narrator: And so one by one they ascended through the heavenly spheres up through the sphere of Mercury and on still further through the heaven of Venus, where the many kinds of human love were unfolded and extolled-- erotic love, marital love, the love of friends, and love of the divine... and on to the heaven of the sun, where wisdom and truth were celebrated.

Webb: In Paradiso, most of the souls are not very visible because they're so luminous, but they still act as bodies in that they gesture.

They move toward Dante.

They smile and grow brighter when they smile.

There's that wonderful poignant moment when the souls all respond, "Amme!"

a kind of "Amen" to the declaration of the fact that they will get their bodies back, maybe not for themselves, but for their mothers and fathers and others who were dear to them.

So the notion is you want to have a body not for yourself but in order to interact with those who are beloved to you, and Dante makes that space not just for family members but for all those who are dear to you.

Narrator: It was in the next sphere, in the heaven of Mars, that Dante would have one of the most moving, personal, and fateful encounters of the entire poem, when he was brought face to face with his own long dead ancestor Cacciaguida... a knight who had fought in the Second Crusade and died in the Holy Lands in 1149.

O you, my branch in whom I took delight even awaiting you, I am your root.

The man who gave your family its name, who for a century and more has circled the first ledge of Purgatory, was son to me and was your great-grandfather; Florence, within her ancient ring of walls, that ring from which she still draws tierce and nones-- sober and chaste, lived in tranquility... To such a life-- so tranquil and so lovely-- of citizens in true community, into so sweet a dwelling place did Mary, invoked in pains of birth, deliver me; and I, within your ancient Baptistery, at once became Christian and Cacciaguida.

Narrator: The poignant meeting occurs halfway through Dante's ascent with Beatrice up through the 9 spheres of Paradise not long before the entire life-changing sojourn through the 3 realms of the afterlife was destined to come to an end.

Beginning now to anticipate his return to what he would soon call "the world of endless bitterness below," Dante asked Cacciaguida to tell him what fate held in store for him.

Hippolytus was forced to leave his Athens because of his stepmother, faithless, fierce; and so must you depart from Florence: this is willed already, sought for, soon to be accomplished by the one who plans and plots where--every day--Christ is both sold and bought... You shall leave everything you love most dearly: this is the arrow that the bow of exile shoots first.

You are to know the bitter taste of others' bread, how salt it is, and know how hard a path it is for one who goes descending and ascending others' stairs.

And what will be most hard for you to bear... will be the scheming, senseless company that is to share your fall into this valley; and thus, your honor will be best kept if your party is your self.

Bruscagli: His ancestor Cacciaguida finally lifts the veil and really reveals what awaits Dante.

No more illusions.

Now the future is in front of him, and it is a brutal future.

it's a future of rejection, it's a future of political disillusionment.

You leave everything that you love.

Adoyo: Dante says to Cacciaguida, "I have been told that there are dire times "that await me and Florence and my people, "and throughout this journey, I have also seen things "that reveal to me what the seeds "of those dire times are, "like how it is that we get to these places "that are so terrible.

"I want to tell people what I've seen.

"I want them to see what I have been able to discern, "to understand that we have a choice, "but I'm afraid to lose what I have, "I'm afraid to be ostracized, "and yet, if I am an enemy to the truth that I know, "then I am afraid that I'll be doing a disservice "to those who will call our times ancient.

"I will be doing a disservice to posterity "if I don't dare speak out against the corruption "and the greed and the malice that I've witnessed "and what it looks like, how it manifests in our society."

And Cacciaguida tells Dante, "Don't be afraid.

Speak the truth, no matter what it costs you."

Cacciaguida: A conscience that is dark-- either through its or through another's shame-- indeed will find that what you speak is harsh.

Nevertheless, all falsehood set aside, let all that you have seen be manifest, and let them scratch wherever it may itch.

For if, at the first taste, your words molest, they will, when they have been digested, end as living nourishment.

As does the wind, so let your outcry do-- the wind that sends its roughest blows against the highest peaks.

Bruscagli: And Cacciaguida said, "You go and tell the truth."

So Dante is stripped of any illusion about his future, but what remains is the mission of his poem.

His life has become his poem.

All the broken, fragmentary prophecies that he has been collecting during his journey come together, and all of a sudden, the poem is his destiny.

Forget about the exile, forget about Florence, forget about what happened to you as a politician, as a public figure.

What remains of your life is this poem.

This is your future.

Cachey: It's a self-authorization, a self-certification that is built completely around the fact of his exile.

It is revealed that his providential mission is to be exiled and to write the poem from the position of exile that will save the world fundamentally.

Narrator: Following Dante's refusal of the offer of amnesty in 1315, the city fathers of Florence had lashed out again, condemning the 50-year old poet one last time together with his sons to yet another sentence of death, this time by decapitation, with an additional provision that anyone who wished had permission "to harm them, in property and person, freely and with impunity."

The doors of his native city had closed one final time, never again to be reopened during his lifetime.

Cachey: Between 1319 and 1321, he's between Verona and Ravenna, and there's more questions really than answers, about what Dante's motivation was for moving to Ravenna.

Bruscagli: He was already a well-recognized poet at that point.

"Paradise" had not yet been completed or published, but "Inferno" and "Purgatorio" had been circulating already.

Narrator: In 1318, he moved one last time from Verona to Ravenna on the far eastern coast of the peninsula, where he came under the protection of the lord of the city Guido Novello da Polenta, a nephew of Francesca da Rimini.

Bruscagli: The court of Guido Novello might have been a harbor for Dante.

Guido Novello was a very kind and generous host for Dante in Ravenna.

Certainly the atmosphere in Ravenna was quieter.

Narrator: With its mysterious air of history and time and so much long gone Ravenna seemed to take powerful hold of his imagination.

Bruscagli: The last cantos of "Paradise" might have been inspired by the mosaics of the great churches in Ravenna.

Narrator: By 1321, the impact of more than two decades of exile and of the unimaginably exhausting demands of the poem itself had taken an enormous toll on the gaunt and beleaguered writer.

Fulvido di fulgore.

Narrator: In many ways, the experience of writing the poem and the narrative unfolding within it had converged almost completely.

Dipinte di mirabil primavera.

Cachey: And in 1320, he's writing the last canti of the "Paradiso," the greatest poetry that he ever wrote and that has ever been written from some perspectives.

E d'ogne parte si mettien ne' fiori... quasi rubin che oro circunscrive; poi, come inebriate da li odori... Cachey: To me, that suggests that underneath there's a really deep vulnerability.

Narrator: By the spring of 1321, Dante had completed 20 of the 33 cantos of "Paradise" and sent all but the final 13 to his former patron in Verona.

Not long after in late July, Guido da Polenta asked him to undertake an urgent ambassadorial mission to the Republic of Venice, a 3 days' ride up the marshy Adriatic coast, hoping that with war now looming between Ravenna and the Serenissima "his eloquence and reputation as poet," he said, "might avert impending ruin."

The mission, though not immediately successful, probably laid the groundwork for an eventually peaceful resolution of the crisis, though Dante himself would not be around to see it.

Returning from Venice through the pine woods of Classe on which he had modeled the heavenly forest where he and Beatrice had been reunited at the end of "Purgatorio," he contracted malaria coming through the swamplands north of Ravenna and died two weeks later over the night of September 13 and 14, 1321... surrounded by close friends, and his children.

He was 56 years old.

Writing of his death, Giovanni Boccaccio would write that he had left "the miseries "of this present life behind and rendered to his Creator his toil-worn spirit."

All Ravenna mourned Dante's passing.

Guido Novello, stricken it was said with "the greatest grief," ordered he be honored with rites reserved only for the greatest of poets, his body borne on the shoulders of the city's most distinguished citizens, carried through the streets accompanied by public lamentations to the Church of San Pier Maggiore, where it was placed in a plain stone sarcophagus and buried a few steps from the church in a simple tomb... the first of many that would eventually be erected there.

To this day, Italy's greatest poet lies at the end of a narrow lane within the modest if dignified sepulcher originally inscribed, with an epitaph that itself has long since vanished: "Here I, Dante, am confined, "an exile from my native shores, Born of Florence, a mother of little love."

It was widely presumed that before setting off on his final ill-fated mission to Venice Dante had finished his great masterpiece, but after the funeral, it was soon revealed to the enormous chagrin of his family and friends that the last 13 cantos of "Paradise" were nowhere to be found.

For months, his sons Jacopo and Pietro searched through their father's manuscripts for any sign of the missing cantos to no avail.

The catastrophe could not be overstated.

Dante Alighieri's gift to the world, the greatest poem, as he himself fervently believed, ever written in the history of Western literature, had been left tragically unfinished.

The survival and transmission of literary texts has always been subject to accidents of fate and the vagaries of time.

No manuscript of the "Divine Comedy" in Dante's own hand survives, and from the moment of his death, the question of whether his masterpiece would come down to posterity intact was fraught with uncertainty.

In this respect, as in so many others, posterity has Dante's first biographer, the writer Giovanni Boccaccio, to thank for what is known about the missing cantos of "Paradise."

Visiting Ravenna in 1346, 25 years after Dante's death, Boccaccio had met with a close friend and disciple of Dante's Piero Giardino, who had known the poet in his final years, who had provided Dante with the home he had stayed in, and who now shared with Boccaccio an extraordinary story.

In May 1322, 8 months after Dante died, the poet's younger son Jacopo, had come to Piero Giardino in the middle of the night in a state of agitation and told him of an uncanny dream he had had, "a marvelous vision" in which his father had come to him in his sleep.

That night, his father had come to him clothed in shining raiment and with an unusual light shining in his face.

Asking his father if he were alive, his father had said, "Yes, but in the true life, not in yours."

He then asked his father if he had completed his great work before passing to the true life and, if he had, where they might find the missing pages, whereupon his father took him by the hand and led him to the room where in life he had slept, and touching the wall at a certain place said, "Here is what you are seeking for," and then departed.

And so the son and the disciple started together and went to the place his father had touched and there beneath a mat on the wall found a little cavity neither had seen before, reaching into which they found papers mildewed by the damp and nearly rotting if they had stayed a little longer.

Carefully cleaning them, they saw they were the 13 cantos so much sought, and in great joy copied them and sent them first, as was the custom of the author, to the Lord Cangrande and then joined them to the imperfect work.

Narrator: One way or another, by a quirk of fate or a dream in the night, the final 13 cantos of "Paradise" had finally been accounted for, and with a full manuscript in hand, Jacopo and Pietro quickly copied out all 100 cantos of the poem, and "the work of so many years" was now complete.

[Bell tolling] Cox as Boccaccio: Citizens of Florence, welcome to this sacred place.

"Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita."

"Midway upon the journey of our life," et cetera.

I have been tasked, good people of Florence, with giving an exposition on what lies beneath the poetic veil of our Dante's "Divine Comedy."

A divine comedy.

It is fitting for a man to invoke the divinity at the beginning of a great enterprise, and as is clear from the works of Plautus and Terence, a comedy is that which has a tumultuous beginning and ends in peace and tranquility.

So it is with our Dante.

Let us proceed.

Narrator: Florentines began to regret having banished Dante almost immediately, even before he died, as word of the soaring masterpiece spread across the Italian peninsula.

In the decades following his death in exile in 1321, a younger generation of Florentine writers, outraged over the poet's fate, rallied to his cause and none more so than Giovanni Boccaccio, who, following in Dante's footsteps, would go on to write the next great masterpiece in the Florentine vernacular, "The Decameron," and spend a lifetime championing his work and reputation.

[Whispering] Determined to keep the flame of Dante's great work alive, Boccaccio would compose the first biography of Dante, one of the first biographies ever written, inspired in part by the deeply autobiographical character of the poem.

Boccaccio even copied out the entire text of the "Comedy" no fewer than 3 times and recited it for rapt public gatherings in the sanctuary of the Badia, not far from Dante's long-since dispossessed home, where he also gave lectures about the poem's deeper meanings and even conferred upon it the name by which it has ever after been known.

Bruscagli: Boccaccio read Dante in the very Chiesa della Badia just here in this chapel, and that was the first time that Dante was read publicly, and it was the first time that a secular text was explained and almost preached over in a religious space.

So Dante, the "Divine Comedy," was treated in a way like the holy scriptures and already like a national glory of Florence.

Boccaccio would read and explain the "Divine Comedy" in vernacular and would read for everybody.

All the citizens of Florence were invited to get familiar with or even memorize a text which was already a legendary text of our civilization.

Florence was trying to regain spiritually the son that it had exiled.

A little too late but better late than never.

Cox as Boccaccio: A divine comedy.

Narrator: As for Dante himself, who had spent a lifetime dreaming of Beatrice Portinari, who had journeyed to the afterlife and up through the heavenly spheres under her guidance and protection, and who had died still longing to be reunited with her, the final cantos of "Paradise" would prove to be at once an ecstatic vision and a glorious fulfillment.

Turn thee about and listen; Not in mine eyes alone is Paradise.

Narrator: They had arrived now in the seventh heaven, the sphere of Saturn, on the verge of the heaven of the zodiac and fixed stars at the outermost edge of the Ptolemaic universe at the very limits of space and time beyond which lay the Empyrean, the realm of God, the true Paradise, beyond the simulacrum they had just finished traveling through.

You are so near the final blessedness That you have need of vision clear and keen And thus, before you enter further, do look downward, See what I have set beneath your feet already.

Much of the world is there; if you see that Your heart may then present itself with all the joy it can to the triumphant throng That goes in gladness through this rounded ether.

Bruscagli: When Beatrice invites him to look down and under his feet he sees all the planets and at the center of the universe he sees the Earth, this little globe that makes us so ferocious to each other.

So the only solution is to look down and then look up into the eyes of Beatrice.

Narrator as Dante: My eyes returned through all the 7 spheres And all the 7 heavens showed to me their magnitudes, their speeds, the distances of each from each.

The little threshing floor that so incites our savagery was all-- from hills to river mouths-- revealed to me while I wheeled with eternal Gemini.

My eyes then turned again to the fair eyes.

Narrator: Leaving the sphere of the fixed stars, they ascended now into the final heavenly sphere.

Pertile: There is a moment in "Paradiso" when Dante moves into the Empyrean, and the Empyrean is not a place.

It's not a time.

It's a concept.

It's an idea.

It is pure existence, it's pure being.

Empyrean ultimately is the mind of God, and it is in that mind that all that Dante has been through is somehow contained.

It is a thought of that mind, and if that mind stopped thinking about it, our universe would vanish.

Narrator: And now here, in heaven's light, on the very brink of time and eternity, Beatrice spoke to Dante one last time.

From matter's largest sphere, we now have reached the heaven of pure light... light of the intellect, light filled with love, love of true good, love filled with happiness, a happiness surpassing every sweetness.

Here you will see both ranks of Paradise and see one of them wearing that same aspect which you will see again at Judgment Day.

Narrator: As Dante looked on, a great river of light seemed to take shape before him in the sky, curving slowly into an ever-widening circle, until at length a flower-like court of light loomed above him in the sky, revealing the circumference of a vast shimmering rose-- its circling rows of petals forming 1,000 tiers for all the souls of heaven, each petal the seat of one celestial soul.

Turning in awe and wonder to Beatrice, he saw now that she was no longer at his side, and in her place a saint-like elder had appeared, who to his urgent cry "Where is she?"

pointed to a circle near the highest rank of petals in the rose, where he now saw Beatrice seated at once far away and yet to his now undimmed vision so close he almost seemed to touch her.

Bruscagli: When at the end with the really moving farewell to Beatrice, the last time that he sees Beatrice, up in the Empyrean, she's far away, but in the Empyrean, the space doesn't count and the distance doesn't count.

She, for the last time, looks at him, but one last moment of silent intimacy, and then she looks up towards God, and Dante says farewell.

"O lady, "You drew me out from slavery to freedom "by all those paths, "by all those means that were "within your power.

"Do, in me, preserve your generosity, "so that my soul, which you have healed, "when it is set loose from my body, be a soul that you will welcome."

So did I pray.

And she, however far away she seemed, smiled, and she looked at me.

Then she turned back to the eternal fountain.

Narrator: And so Beatrice Portinari left Dante Alighieri one last time, taken into the very heart of the great heavenly rose above him... and in the pulsing lines and passages that remained of the great poem, Dante felt his own desire and volition come at last into ultimate alignment with the sublime harmony of God's will.

Bruscagli: Once again, Dante is not able to communicate and to share the real final experience of Paradise because to describe Paradise, the experience of seeing God face to face, according to the words of Saint Paul, that is--that is simply impossible for a human language, for a human tongue, so the real experience of Paradise is in the white space under the last verse of the poem.

Narrator as Dante: Here force failed my high fantasy; but my desire and will were moved already-- like a wheel revolving uniformly by the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.

Fazzini as Dante: A l'alta fantasia qui manc possa; ma gi volgeva il mio disio e 'l velle, s come rota ch'igualmente mossa, l'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle.

Narrator: Looking back, it would be almost impossible to overstate the magnitude of Dante's achievement in the 14,233 lines of hypnotically compelling verse that constitute the "Divine Comedy," a triumph of the human imagination and an incomparable outpouring of literary and poetic genius that would elevate and permanently transform the language, culture, and self-understanding not only of the Italian peninsula but of the European continent at large and eventually the world.

Bruscagli: So what happened in Italy?

What happened is that the language that Dante chose, the Florentine on the street, became the language of my country.

Why?

Because of the immense prestige of Dante's work and of the "Divine Comedy," which was followed by two other masterpieces written in the Florentine, the "Rhymes" by Petrarch and "The Decameron" by Boccaccio.

The Italian language and literature starts with this kind of big bang.

In 50 years, those 3 masterpieces, but the one who really indicated the path and gave the courage to the others to go through that path was Dante.

Raffa: After Dante dies in 1321, the "Divine Comedy" was widely disseminated.

It becomes essentially a bestseller, you know, if we can use that term for medieval literature, but not everybody is going to like what Dante says, because, in fact, he is being harsh against people in power.

Narrator: Following the enormous surge of enthusiasm and praise that greeted Dante's poem after his death in 1321, in the centuries to come, the vernacular tradition Dante had pioneered was overshadowed for a time.

Man: Dante became thought of perhaps even within Italy as being rough and old-fashioned, as a noble example but something that they'd superseded with a more sophisticated style, and so Dante sort of went out of fashion certainly in Northern Europe for a couple of hundred years.

Quint: In the 15th and 16th and 17th centuries, the "Divine Comedy" continued to be read, it continued to be imitated, it continued to be thought about, but it didn't achieve the kind of status that it has achieved until the last two centuries, till the 19th century and the 20th century.

[Explosion] Narrator: And then for Dante, as for Shakespeare, too, at essentially the same time, something extraordinary began to occur.

The change would coincide with the dawning of the Age of Revolution, first the American and then the French, and with the coming of an age of egalitarian hope and change, a world Dante had in so many ways anticipated.

Quint: For the 19th century, the Romantics found both in Dante and in Shakespeare these sort of titanic imaginations that really couldn't be held within the rules of neoclassical taste and of decorum and who exploded what were the classical genres, what were accepted as the forms in which poetry should work.

Narrator: In the English-speaking world, where Dante had gone untranslated for half a thousand years, the first complete translation would appear in 1802, inaugurating what would become an almost ceaseless tide of English translations over the next 220 years, 109 to date, and counting, and from very start of the American experiment, Dante spoke to something very deep in the emerging American psyche and soul, the Dante of exile, of freedom, and free will.

Cachey: Dante's an American poet in a way that people don't really appreciate.

Dante is extremely important at the foundations of American literary history.

The oldest academic society in the United States is the Dante Society of America, and Longfellow and Emerson did a translation of the "Vita Nuova."

Narrator: Praising Dante for blazing a new path for language and literature, Ralph Waldo Emerson boldly declared, "Dante is Italian because at that moment "he could most live as an Italian.

At this moment, he would be born American."

Raffa: Dante writes very explicitly about spiritual liberation, but people easily understood that also as a message about political freedom, about political liberation and individual liberation, and so it was easy to translate Dante from his Italian context to the American context.

Narrator: In Italy itself, for so long faction-torn and fragmented and long regarded by skeptics as a mere region on the map incapable of political unity, Dante's epic work would undergo a rapturous cultural rehabilitation in the middle of the 19th century as the struggle for Italian nationhood gathered momentum.

In 1860, the great Italian patriot and general Giuseppi Garibaldi, who had been campaigning for years from one end of the peninsula to the other, led a series of brilliant military expeditions from Sicily to Calabria to Naples, at last making possible the unification of southern Italy with the north.

[Chorus singing in Italian] One year later, the age-old dream of Italian unity and independence came to a sudden glorious culmination when in March 1861 the new Senate at Turin proclaimed Victor Emmanuelle II the constitutional monarch of the brand-new Kingdom of Italy.

[Cheering and applause] Almost overnight, Italy had become a country and Dante himself its patron saint as the icon and rallying point of a common Italian culture and identity.

Webb: The Italian language is, in fact, built on Dante's language, which was so radical at the time in the "Comedia" because it's such a mixture of things.

You can see him kind of inventing the fullest range of the Italian language in his poem.

Narrator: Not for nothing, it turned out, had Dante found Beatrice at the top of Mount Purgatory in the Garden of Earthly Paradise, wrapped ravishingly in red, white, and green, the very colors now of the new Italian flag.

Quint: When a democratic unified Italy came about, Dante provided a kind of model for using the words that come from the street and for a much more colloquial Italian.

One of the things that was found in the "Comedy" was that it was a good blueprint for the making of a national language, a language for the peninsula.

Narrator: in 1865 on the 600th hundredth anniversary of Dante's birth, the capital of the newly united country was officially moved from Turin to Florence, where that spring, to mark the occasion, a glorious 3-day celebration was held in honor of the new nation and the poet now universally recognized as its spiritual father.

Bruscagli: '65 was this apotheosis of patriotism and the new nation founded in a new capital and Dante being promoted at that point truly like the father of the language, the father of literature, the father of Italy, the father of everything Italian.

Narrator: On May 14, a crowd of nearly 20,000 gathered in the Piazza Santa Croce, where at noon, following a series of soaring speeches paying homage to "the Supreme Poet, "illustrious Philosopher, and great Citizen who had long sought a free and united Italy," a towering 19-foot tall marble monument was unveiled, at long last acknowledging Dante in the city of his birth.

Bruscagli: Why should we care about Dante, Dante Alighieri?

After all, he is so far away, so remote from us.

7 centuries separate us from him.

Our world is different, our cosmology is different, our science is different, our religion is different, so why should we care about Dante?

Because Dante addresses the core of our humanity.

Dante had the ambition of embracing everything, of embracing the sense of us being humans on this planet.

Cachey: Coming from whatever social, political, educational background, what the reader discovers is this question of their own ethical interiority.

You discover the problem of the pilgrim is your own problem, this problem of identity, this problem of ethics, this problem of the vices and the virtues, of the intellect.

Webb: Dante manages to convey so deftly all of the range of human experience from deepest despair to greatest moments of hope and joy and love.

[Reading in Italian] Lombardi: He had the sense that he was writing for us.

Every time this text is read by someone in a class, by students of different ages and different cultures, we are these people.

Webb: There's no question that Dante intends this poem to change your life, and I think that if you engage with it truly, really trouble all its difficulties, work through its ambiguities and sit with them, it will change you.

Bruscagli: What you immediately understand reading the "Divine Comedy" is that, OK, that was the life of Dante Alighieri 700 years ago, but the message is your life matters.

Take care of it.

Take care of it.

Your life matters.

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