In collaboration with Avvenire
Emilia Guarnieri, Teacher, former President of the Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples Foundation; Ron Herzman, Distinguished Teaching Professors at the State University of New York at Geneseo, USA; Vittorio Montemaggi, Senior Lecturer in Religion and the Arts in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at King’s College London, U. K.; Brian K. Reynolds, Department of Italian Language and Culture and the Graduate Institute for Comparative Literature at Fu Jen University, Taipei. Introduced by Filippo Gianferrari, Assistant Professor of Literature University of California, Santa Cruz. Moderated by Marco Aluigi, Vice Director & Congress Manager Meeting for Friendship Amongsts Peoples Foundation.

700 years after his death, we can still undertake the divine and human journey in the company of Dante Alighieri, in universities and schools, as well as in American prisons and in cultures seemingly far removed from that of the poet, and in many other situations.
The adventure of the Divine Comedy reveals the possible reality of a fulfilled experience of humanity; in its spiritual and symbolic parabola, Dante’s adventure is a journey of authentic humanity that reaches the ineffable encounter with the divine: “Trasumanar significar per verba / non si porìa; però l’essemplo basti / a cui esperienza grazia serba” (Dante, Paradiso, I, 70-73).
What characteristics make Dante’s experience universal to the point that even today his work manages to speak to men and women in every part of the world?
What kind of cultural, existential and ontological experience does he suggest and propose to today’s individual, even in such dark (“Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura”) and in some ways desperate times, as those of the pandemic?