Dantes Verse

A multifaceted afterword to the Divine Comedy by the Italian poet Dante Alighieri – and an invitation to read along. Dante Alighieri completed his Commedia seven hundred years ago, shortly before he died in exile in Ravenna in 1321. With it, the Florentine, who was expelled from his hometown, created an almost inexhaustible world of images and thoughts, which T. S. Eliot described as both simple and mysterious. The central Italian poem narrates a journey to the afterlife from a first-person perspective – accompanied by the dead Virgil – through the terrifying depths of Hell, a spectacular escape from Lucifer to the Mountain of Purgatory, and the reunion of two (youthful) lovers in Paradise. From April until Dante's death on September 14, 2021, various authors, including the Romance scholar Karlheinz Stierle, composer Lucia Ronchetti, writer Berit Glanz, and many others, engaged with Dante and his verses. Their comments, published in the FAZ's feuilleton and now compiled for the first time in book form, recount tales of animals and villains, popes, sinners, and traitors, of heat and icy cold, of the sounds of Hell and the birds in Paradise, of suffering in exile and the winking of grace. They all serve as an invitation to read Dante's Comedy anew.