The composer Luciano Chailly recently discussed an interesting subject in an article appearing on the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. He made his position clear from the start: “Setting Dante Alighieri to music, that is setting to music the author of the most extraordinary poem ever written, is a risky undertaking.”
In his scholarly article, the maestro expressed his opinion that it is more acceptable to compose an opera on one of Dante’s characters, whose figure would emerge through the medium of the libretto.
Many composers have already come under the spell of such figures as Francesca da Rimini, Pia de’ Tolomei, Count Ugolino and Gianni Schicchi. That article gave me an idea: why not ask the readers of our “Almanac” to let us know when they first learned about the Divine Comedy? How old were they, and who was it that introduced them to Dante’s poem? It would not be necessary to establish exactly when they began to read the Comedy: we know that the study of Dante begins in the first year of secondary school. The question would rather focus on the moment of the appearance of the poem in their life, a moment comparable to when we hear our first fairy tale, or to when we manage to write our first complete sentence in our school notebook.
I will start myself, and right away I have to make an embarrassing confession: for several years, two or three at least, I was convinced that the author of the Divine Comedy was Gustave Doré (1832-83), the great French engraver who also illustrated Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and Cervantes’ Don Quixote. In order to explain (I won’t say justify), I must go far back in time, to when my mother used to bring me with her on her visits to an old aunt whose name was Calpurnia, like the fourth wife of Julius Caesar.
Since I could hardly be interested in what the two ladies had to say between themselves, it was tiny aunt Calpurnia, who, with hands stiffened by arthritis, would open up in front of me a great volume bound in green leather, saying: “While we have a chat, you just look at Doré.” Who knows on the basis of what principles of child education I was left to gaze at those dark plates containing scenes of naked limbs, pain-twisted faces, precipitous cliffs and ghostly trees.
Apparently, and without my realizing it, it was always the Inferno that came before me. I was just learning to read, but it was certainly not the verses that caught my eye. The illustrations were enough. Doré was enough, in short. My memories are not that clear as to when exactly Dante occupied the place he legitimately deserved. At that time the last story-tellers were still to be found in small towns, reciting episodes of the Comedy in the corner of a square or among the tables of a tavern.
It may well be that it was in such an occasion that I first heard famous lines like “La bocca sollevò dal fiero pasto (1 )” or “Per me si va nella città dolente (2 ).” And those few of my generation still around have not forgotten that Dante was even mentioned in the song Giovinezza, the official hymn of Fascism. During gatherings, the air would resonate with the silvery voices of the balilla (children belonging to the Fascist youth organisation) singing the lyrics written by Salvator Gotta to the music that Giuseppe Blanc had composed for an old students’ song.
One verse in particular said: “Il valor dei tuoi guerrieri, / la virtù dei pionieri, / la vision dell’Alighieri / oggi brilla in ogni cuor (3) .
” The idea of a “vision” was in itself a vague reference to what the poem would soon reveal: a dream or the building of a world?
A reverie, a utopia, an illusion, an ecstasy, an unequalled hallucination - in short, any possible synonym of the word “vision”? Then came an Autumn day, shortly after beginning the liceo classico( 4) .
The Italian-literature teacher entered the classroom and went directly to the blackboard. He took a piece of chalk and began to draw a sort of large isosceles triangle, upside down. Then he drew a series of horizontal lines through it. He ended by writing “Jerusalem” at the top and “Centre of the Earth” at the bottom. Finally, turning towards us, he said: “This is Dante’s Hell.” More details followed.
We were asked to use our imagination and see the horizontal lines as circles. The shape was round: an inverted cone, an enormous funnel driven into the bowels of the earth. After so many years, I wonder if with Dante it was a case of love at first sight, one of those instantaneous affections that young people often feel for poets. But it was not so with Dante. He was too esoteric, far too laden with symbolism to be loved at first sight.
Accustomed as we were to the simple and sensible animals of the fables of Aesop and Phaedrus, the beasts that appeared in the first canto - the panther, the lion and the she-wolf – seemed to belong to an inaccessible zoology. Of course I don’t mean to attempt a demythologization of Dante, nor dent his glorious sacredness - it would be absurd and ridiculous. But why not admit that the first four cantos of the Inferno went by without trace? It was in the fifth canto that poetry had laid her admirable ambush, her golden snare - at verse number 82, to be precise: “Quali colombe dal disio chiamate (5) ”.
I might add that the charm was all in the pronunciation of disio (6) , so full of yearning. The index of occurrences shows that this word is already present in the second, third and fourth cantos, but not in that manner, and not with such a sinuous sound. Many months later I found the same surprising effect in the opening verse of the eighth canto of Purgatorio: “Era già l’ora che volge il disio (7) ”.
I think it is impossible to explain the impressions cast by moments like those that I have tried to recount. They are part of the unexpected discoveries of youth, when we still haven’t learned to investigate our instinctive preferences.
And it is difficult now, indeed, impossible, to feel with the same intensity the irreparably remote beauty of certain days, of certain hours. What we can still do, at least, is to recollect our memories and bring them to light for a while: as if drawing grey locks and wrinkles close to a faded group photograph, inhabited by young boys wearing knickerbockers and young girls in austere black frocks. Remembering means that too.
No one will tell us to write an essay or a report. We won’t be embarrassed (as our teacher was) if we happen upon the circle of the sodomites or the term, commonly heard nowadays, that Dante used to describe Thais.
It won’t matter if we confuse the bolgia of the flatterers with the bolgia of the hypocrites, the terrace of the proud with the terrace of the gluttonous, or the sphere of the moon with the sphere of the fixed stars. The past is wont to grant generous discounts to those who approach it bearing the devout lamp of memory.
(trasl.Interpres)

1 His mouth uplifted from his grim repast (Longfellow’s translation).
2 Through me the way is to the city dolent (Longfellow’s translation).
3 The valour of your warriors, / the virtue of your pioneers, / the vision of Alighieri / shine today in every heart.
4 A humanities-oriented secondary school.
5 As turtle doves, called onward by desire (Longfellow’s translation).
6 Ancient form, meaning “desire” and pronounced dee-ZEE-oh.
7 ’Twas now the hour that turneth back desire (Longfellow’s translation).”.