Long live Verona, especially if our guide of honor is Dante Alighieri. The Venetian city pays homage to the great Poet (1321-2021) with a widespread exhibition organized with the Civic Museums, the patronage and contribution of the National Committee for the celebrations of the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death.
Cangrande della Scala
An itinerary among squares and monuments, churches, palaces and libraries; an author’s map guides the visitor who is oriented by signs and apps. When Dante was expelled from Florence, the Venetian city and the Scaligeri welcomed him. In the “Comedia” there are several passages on his stay in Verona, as a guest of Cangrande della Scala (1312-1320); the Poet meets his friend and protector again in canto XVII of Paradise, he dedicates Epistle XIII to him in the third Canticle.
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The first stop is piazza dei Signori, the center of power both during the Scaliger domination and after their collapse; in the center of the square the Dante statue, restored this year, which the sculptor Ugo Zannoni created in 1865. The Palazzo della Ragione is now home to the Achille Forti Gallery of Modern Art, until 5 October the exhibition “The hand that creates : the public gallery of Zannoni ”curated by Francesca Rossi; same curator with Tiziana Franco and Fausta Piccoli for the exhibition: “Between Dante and Shakespeare. The Myth of Verona ”until 3 October.
An important selection of works and historical testimonies from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century, the relationships between Dante and the Verona of Cangrande and the incredible eighteenth-nineteenth-century revival of the Divine Comedy that inspired an ideal and tragic Middle Ages like the love between Romeo and Juliet . Absolutely to see Palazzo del Capitanio, initially a Scaliger residence, built at the time of Dante, then became the seat of the Serenissima (1405-1796). The Palazzo della Provincia is the residence wanted by Cangrande della Scala; the tomb of the della Scala family, the Arche Scaligere, is built in the church of Santa Maria Antica, here are buried some of the characters mentioned by Dante as Alberto I (died in 1301) whose sign of the Scala is surmounted by a large eagle, his sons Bartolomeo and Alboino; there is also the sarcophagus of Cangrande, who died suddenly in obscure circumstances; a mystery on which the University of Verona and Florence, the Civic Museum of Natural History of Verona are studying: analyzing the DNA of the aristocrat we will understand his tragic end.
Absolute masterpiece of the Romanesque-Lombard style is the church of San Zeno which, at the time of Barbarossa, was led by the abbot Gerardo whom Dante meets in the eighteenth canto of the Purgatory. On January 20, 1320, in the church of Sant’Elena, near the Cathedral, Dante held a lectio magistralis to explain the phenomenon of the emergence of the lands above the surface of the water; he thus hoped to be admitted to teaching in the Studio, the Verona high school which is becoming a University, unfortunately the logical Artemisio preferred to Alighieri and the poet continued to suffer.