Performing Dante or Building the Nation?: The Divina Commedia between Dramaturgy of Exile and Public Festivities

Abstract

Dante, the “anima di fuoco [soul of fire]”—like Mazzini and Garibaldi, the two other main icons of the Risorgimento—gave off “scintille di senso [sparks of meaning]” across time, as Italian historian Mario Isnenghi so aptly put it. This meant he was surrounded by the same constant “effetto alone [halo effect]” that continued even through decades or centuries of apparent silence. Catapulted into modernity by literature and the visual and performing arts, the “Genio gigante [great Genius]”, apostle and prophet of the nation, poet of Italian regeneration, symbol of an individual and collective fate, therefore represented a pulsar memory, both inside and outside the text. For this very reason, as Alberto Savinio stated, “Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare are great names but they are timeless: we would say detached from life...they are men-oases, or men-islands, detached from the chain, or better the conveyor belt of ideas.” In the nineteenth century, Mazzini’s thought, the romantic myth, Italophilia, and the civil religion of an Italy devoted to unity and national pride (despite some severe divisions) promoted the internationalization and democratization of culture. These phenomena were responsible for reshaping a cult that was already transnational and reflecting its own identity, capable of combining both high and low culture, scholarship and popularization. So much so, in fact, that patriotic and literary causes were fought in the name of Dante, who was a national hero in the theater, through the 1865 Dante Festival—an event proposed by the English Dante scholar Henry Clark Barlow in the pages of Athaeneum and the Morning Post between 1858 and 1861, following in the footsteps of the national German and English festivities in honor of the literary glory of Shakespeare, Schiller, and Goethe.