Tag: Dante Alighieri

Dante Alighieri has served as an inspiration for so many writers and poets throughout history. He was an influence on everyone from Petrarch to Percy Bysshe Shelley, both of whom I feature on The Modern Salonière. Dante first visited the university of Bologna in 1305 to discuss his ideas with the leading professors there, for instance, a visit I highlight in a post featuring the medieval wall and its gates of the city because they would have been a work in progress at the time. It’s mind-blowing for me to think about the fact I was able to touch such an antiquity as cars and motor scooters wizzed by!

I write about a poetic pilgrimage I made to the cathedral in Milan in another. I lowered myself into a pew in the right Transept before pulling two books I had brought from home from my bag. The first was Lehmann’s anthology of Shelley in Italy and the second was Dante’s La Vita Nuova (The New Life)—the latter a choice because I wanted to feel the essence of how Shelley might have felt reading one of his literary heroes within that “storied” building.

Each of my posts mentioning Dante or his poetry will be filed under this tag.