TURIN. Fifteen conferences, two lectures, a film review, five events of Dante’s readings or lecturae, three exhibitions, three initiatives aimed at schools and a game: the most influential Dante experts in the world, together with philosophers, jurists, doctors, physicists and scholars of cinema and media, will offer the public a multidisciplinary and transversal approach to the analysis of the work of the Supreme Poet. This is the program of the University of Turin, in view of the Monday, on the occasion of the celebrations in Italy and in the world of the seven hundredth anniversary of Dante’s death.
Stefano Geuna, rector of the University of Turin, Donato Pirovano, director of the Department of Humanities of the University of Turin and coordinator of Dante SettecenTo UniTo, and Giovanni Saccani, president of the Dante SettecenTo Committee spoke about it. The calendar involves researchers and researchers, professors, students and students of twelve departments of the University of Turin, humanities and scientific areas.
The most influential Dante experts in the world, together with philosophers, jurists, doctors, physicists and film and media scholars, will offer the public a multidisciplinary and transversal approach to the analysis of the work of the Supreme Poet, giving us back the figure of an intellectual which still has a lot to say about our time. It starts on 25 March, the date of Monday, the national day established by the Council of Ministers, with canto V of Hell. In the morning the trial of Paolo and Francesca will offer a commented reading of the fifth canto of Hell, with the help of law and philosophy on the YouTube channel Letture Dantesche Torino. In the afternoon in Global Dante sixteen foreign students from the University of Turin will try their hand, on Regno Media, in reading the song of Paolo and Francesca translated into their native language.
The 30 and 31 March on UniToMedia continues with the international conference entitled Dante for university teaching who will try to develop a reflection on the presence and importance of Dante in the university teaching of the humanities from a multiple point of view: the history and tradition of teaching, the current situation and future prospects. The conference will involve specialists coming not only from Italian literature, but also from other disciplines traditionally interested in Dante’s studies: Italian and Romance philology, history, art history, history of language and philosophy.
On April 8, in the ex Mater Amabilis building of the UniTo office in Cuneo, live streaming on Webex will reflect on the political vision of Dante Alighieri. A vision that represents a fundamental stage in the history of political thought, which reworked the fundamental elements of medieval political thought in a new way and also proposed an original synthesis of the relations between the Church and political systems.
From 21 to 25 September, at the Vivaldi Auditorium in Turin, the conference Dante in the poetry of the twentieth century and of the first years of the new millennium will investigate the many poetic reuses of the twentieth century and of the beginning of the new millennium of the Comedy, focusing, with the help of distinguished specialists, on those authors who were also exegetes and reiterated, through this double modality of reading, that Dante’s masterpiece stands as an indispensable paradigm for understanding the complex tragicity of the twentieth century. The five days of the conference will be accompanied by a program of exhibitions that will lead the viewer to see how contemporaneity has re-appropriated Dante’s masterpiece.
On 21 and 22 October, at the National University Library of Turin, it will be held Music and literature at the time of Dante, an international conference that aims to shed light on various aspects of European musical culture at the time of Dante. The relationship between music and literature will be investigated by focusing attention on the main genres of medieval sacred and profane mono- and polyphony: among others, sequentia, organum, conductus, motet, ballad, ballade, rondeau, virelai. Particular attention will be paid to a codex preserved in the Royal Library of Turin, containing three conductts and thirty-one motets, some of which are not attested elsewhere.
In Biella an exhibition will celebrate the presence of Dante in the world of comics. The original drawings by the designers will accompany the visitor on a visual discovery of Dante’s Inferno, which has always been a challenge for various artists, from Botticelli to Gustave Doré. On 28 November from 9 to midnight, in the courtyard of the University Rectorate and in the spaces of the San Federico gallery, the complete and continuous reading of the Divine Comedy will be carried out, a real Dante Marathon to offer the public the triplets of the Comedy, without comment, in their purest form. 100 readers, including the Mayor of the City of Turin, the Councilor for cultural activities of the City of Turin, the Rector and Vice Rector of the University of Turin, the Rector of the Polytechnic, Directors and teachers of various departments, Turin personalities of the show business, in addition to students and teachers of schools of all grades and volunteer citizens, one for each song, accompanied by live musicians, they will try their hand at the integral reading of the three Dante canticles for a total duration of about 15 hours of performance.
From 2 to 4 December it will be held in the Aula Magna of the Cavallerizza Reale Dark Screens. Dante’s hell in cinema and audiovisual media. The conference, organized in partnership with other Italian and international universities, aims to explore the ways and the meaning of the representation of Dante’s hell in the field of cinema, television, radio, videogames and the web, from the origins of cinema to the most recent productions. The first canticle of the Comedy, in fact, fascinated directors and artists of all ages, inspiring productions ranging from experimental animation to Hollywood blockbusters. These cinematic hells have contributed to the construction of a shared popular imagination, while also offering spaces for experimentation that reflect in particular on the relationship between poetry and image. During the same days of the conference, in collaboration with the Cinema Massimo, the RAI Bibliomediateca and the Academy of Sciences, the film festival entitled Luce nuova will be held. Dante al Cinema, a film and television retrospective focusing on the presence of Dante and his work in cinema and, more extensively, in audiovisual media.