Reading Dante Impolitically: Gramsci’s Contrapuntal Criticism of Inferno 10

The relevance of Dante’s position in Gramsci’s thought has not been adequately clarified by scholars. There is no extended research on the role and meaning of Dante in the larger framework of Gramsci’s writings. Most discussions focus on Gramsci’s reading of Inferno 10 and are limited to why and how Gramsci read that canto, or what his reading could suggest to us about his aesthetics, hermeneutic philosophy, and theory of art. Recently, new hypotheses have been proposed to look at Gramsci’s notes on Canto 10 from a political perspective. According to Italian scholars Angelo Rossi and Giuseppe Vacca, in order to avoid surveillance, Gramsci—in secret cooperation with Palmiro Togliatti (the leading figure of the Italian Communists), Tania Schucht (Gramsci’s sister-in-law), and his friend Piero Sraffa (then professor of economics at Cambridge University)—had to find new means of political communication with Togliatti and the Party while in exile. Even his interest in Inferno 10 has been seen as an encrypted code for communicating with the communists abroad.