Dante’s Divine Comedy for India

A lecture/performance on Dante’s masterpiece by Franco Ricordi

An Instituto Italiano di Cultura di Mumbai and Literature Live! Presentation

Franco Ricordi will start by illustrating his philosophical interpretation of Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’. He will then analyse parts of some of the cantos. In the second part of the lecture, he will recite extracts from the narrative poem to express the theatricality of the text which, like the great poems of antiquity by Homer and Virgil, is, above all, an “oral” text. In this context, Ricordi will underline the difference between Dante, the author and Dante, the character. The latter is instrumental in understanding Paradiso, the final part of ‘Divine Comedy’. The lecture will also highlight how Dante, the character seems similar and, at the same time, antithetical to Hamlet, often described by William Shakespeare as his alter ego. These analogies between the two greatest poets of what Harold Bloom describes as the Western canon have also been observed by Thomas Carlyle and T. S. Eliot.

The importance of India in ‘The Divine Comedy’ will be underlined from Inferno, Canto XIV, Purgatorio, Canto XXVI and Paradiso, Canto XIX.

Franco Ricordi is a philosopher, actor, theatre director and artistic director. He is currently working on one of the most original and evocative interpretations of the Western thought. Among his publications, with Mimesis Edizioni: Shakespeare filosofo dell’essere (2011); Pasolini filosofo della libertà (2013); L’essere per l’amore (2015); Il grande teatro Shakespeariano (with Elisabetta Pozzi, 2016).

Admission on a first-come, first-served basis