Winter Weekend 1999 - Dante's Florence

With the exception of Homer's epics and The Bible, no other written work has had so deep an influence on the West as Dante's Divine Comedy. Hundreds of translations and thousands of depictions by artists over the past 700 years attest to its imaginative power.

Yet its best known part "The Inferno" poses many challenges to modern readers. Dante's account of a journey through Hell offers a gallery of vivid characters, but its black-and-white approach to the problem of evil confronts us with a harsh medieval world-view very different from our own. How do we read a 14th century poet in a 21st century world?

Over 120 Winter Weekend 1999 participants read Dante the author as Dante the citizen of Florence. (Hell, after all, is filled with famous Florentines he had once known.) Presenters painted a picture of Florence in 1300; talked passionately about the beliefs of its citizens, and revealed Beatrice– the young woman who inspired Dante to continue his quest beyond Hell, through Purgatory to Paradise.