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Dante Day and a Year of Dante in Australia
John Kinder • March 24, 2021
This year marks 700 years since the death of the great Italian poet Dante Alighieri. Professor John Kinder of the University of Western Australia explains the significance of 25 March within Dante's seminal poem, La Divina Commedia, and why we celebrate DanteDì.
25 March 1300, Florence. It is New Year’s Day. The practice of counting years from 1 January only became official with the Gregorian calendar reform of 1582. Just a few days after the spring equinox, and exactly nine months before Christmas, this is the feast of the Annunciation, the beginning of the Christian event.
Today, or according to others, in a few days’ time, on Good Friday in fact, 8 April, Dante Alighieri, a "Florentine by birth, not by character" begins a three-day journey that takes him through the three dimensions of reality, known to us as Hell, Purgatory and Paradise.
Fast forward 700 years, to 25 March 2020. The first DanteDì is celebrated in Italy. The idea was dreamt up by Corriere della Sera editor Paolo di Stefano and Accademia della Crusca President Francesco Sabatini and received official approval from the Italian Ministry of Culture.
The first Dante Day came at the beginning of lockdown as Italy became the first country in Europe to fight Coronavirus. So Dante Day went online and the Accademia della Crusca opened a Dantedì YouTube channel. The Accademia della Crusca posted two-minute videos of personal reflections from scholars, young and old. Not just academics, but politicians, actors, musicians remembered padre Dante online, and at 6 pm of 25 March, Italians gathered on their balconies, as they did during that first severe lockdown, but this time to declaim together the opening and closing lines of the Inferno.
Dante celebrations are quite the thing these days. In 2015 Dante (1265-1321) turned 750. Italy celebrated in style. Astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti from inside the International Space Station
read lines from the
Paradiso on the glory of the created universe, her reading beamed to a public audience in Florence. Roberto Benigni recited by heart the final canto of
Paradiso to a rapt Senate in the Italian Parliament. In Florence, trams bearing the poet’s likeness and quotes from the Comedy took the city’s favourite son to all parts of town and life-size cut-out figures appeared in unpredictable locations with a hole cut out at the face so tourists could become the poet for the time it takes to take a selfie. 750-year-old Dante has
his own Facebook page and hashtag: #dante750.
2021 is the 700th anniversary of the death of the poet of the Comedy. Celebrations are planned all around the world, starting on 25 March, the second ever Dante Day.
The Dante Alighieri Society of Canberra is coordinating a national series of events to reflect on Dante in twenty-first century Australia. Each month, from a different Australian city, we will be able to enjoy an amazing variety of reactions and responses to Italy’s national poem, from "Dante and the Making of Italians in Australia" to "Dante and the Clash of Civilisations" to "Dante in Australian Literature and Music" to a Mildura "Dinner with Dante" and a celebration of the William Blake illustrations of the Comedy held in the National Gallery of Victoria.
The series opens on Dante Day, 25 March, at 7 pm (AEST), with Professor Rodney Lokai speaking on "How Dante Changed my Life from Melbourne to Umbria in a Heartbeat".
It really does seem that Eugenio Montale was right: "the further Dante’s world recedes from us, the greater is our desire to know him and to make him known".
Open until 14 April 2024, the exhibition Emerging From Darkness: Faith, Emotion and The Body in the Baroque is presented at Victoria's Hamilton Gallery (on the unceded lands of the Eastern Maar and Gunditjmara peoples), in partnership with the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV). Unprecedented, and monumental in scope, Emerging From Darkness brings together an exceptional group of works from public and private collections in Australia. It was curated by Associate Professor David R. Marshall , Principal Fellow in Art History at the University of Melbourne, Dr Lisa Beaven , Adjunct Senior Research at La Trobe University, and Laurie Benson , Senior Curator of International Art at the NGV. Here two curators explain some of the project’s background and aims.
In Italy this year there has been no shortage of Manzoni celebrations, particularly in Milan . And in Australasia? Dr Stefano Bona , Lecturer in Italian Studies at Flinders University, Adelaide, on the lands of the Kauna nation, has lately been involved in creating a ‘special miniseries’ of radio programmes about Alessandro Manzoni. Now available for listening on demand are two longform interviews with Stefano Pratola at Radio Italiana 531 AM. Here Stefano Bona shares some background to this podcast project.
Announcing, with great pleasure, the winners of the 2023 ACIS Publication Prize for an established scholar, and the 2023 Jo-Anne Duggan Prize. ACIS awards both prizes every two years . In this case, each winning publication addresses the theme of mobility – a fast-evolving direction in Italian Studies research – and each brings forward a topic with clear contemporary significance.
The 12th Biennial Conference of the Australasian Centre for Italian Studies will be held at the Australian National University (ANU), Canberra, Ngunnawal and Ngambri Country, from Wednesday 3 July to Saturday 6 July 2024. The conference theme is ‘Italian Studies for Global Challenges: Transdisciplinary Conversations’.
Open to postgraduate and early career researchers, since 2018 the ACIS Save Venice Fellowship programme has been enlivening close links between Australasia and the city of Venice. Fellowship applications were suspended in 2022, for pandemic-related reasons. So it is a special pleasure to announce that Brigette De Poi has been awarded an ACIS Save Venice Fellowship for 2023. Already living in Venice to focus on her PhD project, Brigette shares some first reflections on her contact with Save Venice thus far.
Which memories are allowed to circulate in a particular culture – and which are relegated or silenced? What political logic is at play when a certain way of remembering is spelt out, even imposed? Matthew Topp was awarded an ACIS Postgraduate Scholarship in 2020, to source archival records for his doctoral thesis, which has the working title ‘ Ars Oblivionalis : A Study of Cultural Forgetting in Renaissance Italy’. Now returned from fieldwork, he shares a brief account of his PhD project and travels.
Two promising early career scholars – Lauren Murphy and Julia Pelosi-Thorpe – were the recipients of ACIS Save Venice Fellowships. Delayed due to COVID travel restrictions, they were finally able to access their Fellowships in 2022. Here they both reflect on their time in Venice and the benefits of the Fellowship to their respective research projects.
ACIS is delighted to announce that Professor Andrea Rizzi has been appointed the new Chair of the Australasian Centre for Italian Studies. He leads a renewed Management Committee with several new appointees who start their terms of office this year.
After a hiatus of three years due to travel restrictions, ACIS is delighted once again to be able to offer its Postgraduate Scholarships for Research in Italy. Two promising postgraduate students have been awarded scholarships in the current round: Brigette De Poi and Laura Di Blasi.