Interview- Domenico Palumbo

Why Dante today? Hasn't everything already been said, and the opposite of everything?

Calvino wrote: "a classic is a book that has not finished saying everything it had to say". Question: Is Dante a classic? Yes. Aulus Gellius, a Roman rhetorician of the second century, tells us what a classic is: it is the "chosen troops", they are the marines of literature. Question: why is Dante a classic? Because:
1. He uses Italian to speak to everyone, but above all to show that even with the vernacular one can write about very serious topics such as Paradise. Previously it was believed that it was only possible with Latin. In short, Dante was Stephen Curry before the NBA.
2. In English, 4 words with an F describe Italy well: Food, Fashion, Furniture, Ferrari. Dante invents new words: 'cibo' is a word that he invents; 'Professione' is another. After this year’s European football championships, which Italy won, there is a new word in the Italian language: "tiragiro".
So, Dante is the Lorenzo Insigne of the Middle Ages.
3. Dante's problem is the 'Danteists' because they either read the Divine Comedy like the Bible or distort the meaning of the text. You think I found a book called "Dante coach".
You asked me: is Dante modern? Of course not. I'll give you an example: the circle of Heaven that he describes is Ptolemaic, it puts the Earth in the center and the Sun turns.
I answer you in this way: in Dante, the answers are not modern, the questions are modern. He asked himself: as a man, what can I know? What is the use of loving? What does it mean to be free?
If you have also asked yourself one of these questions, then you confirm that Dante is ‘current’.

Is Dante only the Divine Comedy, or are other works still being read - and reinterpreted?

Dante is not only the Divine Comedy, as Shakespeare is not only Romeo and Juliet.
Lady Gaga is not only a singer, she is now also an actress. History tends to simplify and classify a lot.
Personally, I find the Convivio and the De Monarchia very interesting, but only because I have a philosophical background and therefore it intrigues me to understand how Dante has changed his mind over time, on politics for example, or on the relationship 'faith reason: remember that Pope Ratzinger wrote a book on this subject? In class, we read a few pages of the Vita Nova, and after the Comedy. Because it is after returning from the journey that his life changes and becomes 'nova', but it is a work that speaks of Beatrice, and therefore comes before the facts of the Comedy. In short, if you put together, the Comedy and the Vita nova, with this game of different lays, you have Proust before Proust.

The most interesting pop reinterpretation of Dante in your opinion?

The theatrical reading of hell by Carmelo Bene on July 31, 1981, in Bologna. A year has passed since the massacre at the train station, Italy is a wounded country, these are the ‘years of lead’, and Carmelo Bene, a theater actor, uses Dante as a 'pop' symbol as to say that Hell is not for ‘the dead’, but for ‘the wounded’, all wounded of all times. This was an incredible collective event, matched only by another: the passage, city by city, from Northern to Southern Italy, of the coffin of the Unknown Soldier, the unknown soldier who died in the Great War and used as a symbol to honor all the dead soldiers with no more identity.