I walked around Rome for three days and saw many of the famous monuments the city is known for. At the bottom of the Spanish steps, the cappuccino that I had in Milan which I thought was the best in the entire world was soundly beaten by another at the Antico Cafe’ Greco, a place where writers like Hemingway used to discuss stuff. I also got to see the Trevi Fountain, Piazza Navona, La Basilica di San Pietro, and many more.
That Saturday I participated in ‘Una Manifestazione Nazionale Opposizione Sociale…’ called No B Day. The B stood for Berlusconi (as opposed to the B for Birthday or Ben). At the start of the parade, whose members were composed mostly of radical Italian youths, members of the communist party, and people like me who just wanted to march, I met up with my housemate Marco and his friends Fabbio and Massimo. Fabbio’s famous two words of English (‘Oh Yeeah!’) were put to very good use, as were the eloquent curse words which I have discovered in the Italian language.
All through the manifestation I saw banners being waved, people chanting mean things about Berlusconi, and many very creative ways to protest. Two guys had made sort of prison they were porting around on their shoulders which had a doll replica of Berlusconi on the inside. Apparently Italy’s political system is thought to have strong ties to the mafia and to be very corrupt. We walked along streets with names like Repubblica and Augusto while Fabbio and Massimo joked and took pictures. My friend who I stayed with in Rome did not go the march because he thinks that they don’t do much good, but they do seem to be quite fun. One of my favorite parts was the appearance right after the march began of vendors on the street selling purple scarves. Purple is a color for protesting and for freedom, but these people grabbed the opportunity to make some money from the event (which seems to me as Italian as it gets).
The end of the march was followed by a couple of hours of very heated speeches where people vented their anger with Berlusconi’s reputed ties to the mafia, his almost complete control of the media, and his efforts to distract the populace with silly scandals while he makes shady deals behind their back. Two speeches in particular caught my attention: one by a man whose brother was murdered by the mafia, and the other by an advocate for the town of Aquiela which was devastated by an earthquake last year and the people are still living in tents (sort of like Italy’s Hurricane Katrina).
I ate a long dinner with bread and wine in a restaurant near the coliseum with Marco’s posse, spent a late night at the disco dancing, walked around Rome more the next day, and took a late train home. I crashed in my bed, slept for ten hours, and woke up almost ravenous to read Dante. I read cantos and notes for hours that Monday in preparation for an exam, and in the following week I studied more or less non-stop. While studying, I began to realize why I read Dante and why his Commedia is so beautiful.
The Commedia is divided into three parts: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, which are further divided into 34, 33, and 33 cantos. The whole work can be written (very small but legibly) on one poster, but what takes the most time while reading is the comments. There is practically an entire book for every line in the Comedy! In the first canto of Inferno, Dante is lost in a dark wood (selva oscura) because he has strayed from the direct path (diritta via). He suddenly sees a hill whose peak is bathed in sunlight and he wants to go to the top and achieve salvation. HOWEVER, his path is blocked by three jungle cats (fieri) which symbolize the three natural sins of passion in this world (sins in which humans do not use their ability to reason, as opposed to sins of violence in which humans use reason). He seems gloomy and lost and shouts ‘AHI!’ but thankfully he meets up with his teacher and guide Virgil who explains that he will take another route to the mountain peak. It’s not like the Blue Ridge Parkway where you can drive up the mountain and stop at overlooks: Dante is going to have to really work for this view.
Inferno follows Dante’s journey through steadily smaller circles to the pit of hell. Each circle holds the sinners punished for a particular sin, and their punishments get progressively more gruesome as the sins get worse. Dante talks and interacts with the punished and with Virgil throughout the descent. At the bottom, he sees Lucifero, who gnaws on the bodies of Cassius and Brutus (the most treacherous sinners against the empire) and Judas (against Christ) with his three mouths. Cassius and Brutus have their torsos and heads pointed outward, but Judas gets gnawed on head first!
Dante then takes a long tunnel up to the other hemisphere of the world and emerges on the beautiful beach of Purgatorio, a tall mountain island on which souls of sinners who put their faith in God are punished for a finite time for purification before being allowed into heaven. As he climbs up the mountain he passes through successive conices in which souls are punished in different ways according to the gravity of their sins. At the peak of the mountain he enters the garden of Eden (paradiso terrestre) and Beatrice takes over the role as his guide (Dante cries, which is kind of nice). Dante looks into Beatrice’s eyes as she looks directly into the sun, and Dante’s vision is transformed (Dante invents a new word here, trasumanar) and he enters Paradiso. Through the encounter with Beatrice the reader discovers the difference between amore divino (divine love) and amore terrestre (earthly love, or as me and my friend Guido like to put is, amore divano. Divano means sofa).
In Paradiso Dante ascends into successively larger and larger skies represented by the planets and sun. Each sky has a significance associated with the deity after which the planet in that sky is named (intellectuals for the Sun, love for Venus, wisdom for Saturn, etc.), and the saved souls in that sky are incredibly joyous and happy to be there. Dante reaches the sky of fixed stars (cielo delle stele fisse), the highest sky that humans are able to see, and then he passes into a sky outside of space and time called the Empireo which we are not able to sense (except with real good telescopes!... called bibles), where he receives the vision of the Trinity.
For most Italians, the Inferno is the most exciting, interesting, and important part of the poem because of all the action (violence, gore, tortured souls running after a blank flag and constantly swapping at the insects chewing on their bodies while maggots drink the blood that runs off at their feet). This is also the only part which I read in high school which inspired me to want to read Dante. However, throughout this semester I have discovered that my favorite is Paradiso because , in this final ascent, it becomes more and more difficult for Dante to put into words what he is seeing. The intensity of the light, joy of various souls, and exultation that Dante feels in his heart are beyond description with the use of human instruments. His effort to reach out and put these ideas into words is inspiring and fantastic. He does not have the words, which is how I feel sometimes, but he chooses the closest ones he can.
Dante with his Comedy hoped to put the human race back on the straight path to God and Christ because it had strayed very far away and eternal damnation awaits sinners in the Inferno. In this sense, our lives are less than a speck of sand on the beach, and after awaits an eternity of pain or paradise all depending on one decision: whether we have faith or not. On the other extreme is the view that our lives are really all we get and that before and after is only darkness. Either way our lives are incredibly important, but at this point it is interesting to ask a question. How would a person change their lives if they knew for sure which it was? Would they change it? Dante seems to touch on this issue at the beginning of Paradiso, where he talks about souls which put their faith in God to avoid burning in eternal fire. To me, this seems an inherently selfish and unworthy reason to be let into heaven, but these souls seem to get along pretty well. But if this forever was taken away, how would it change things?
Another part I looked for were the intersections between the Comedy and science. Dante often uses the science of optics to describe what he is seeing, integrating similes about reflecting rays of light and rainbows. After having my nose in a physics textbook for a good part of my last semester at UNC, it was a breath of fresh air to see some of the ideas used in literature. The first circle of the Inferno, Limbo, is a post reserved for souls which have not been baptized (cleansed of original sin) but have also committed no sins to be condemned for. In this circle are found all kinds of men who did great deeds but are trapped in an Elysian Fields of eternal sighs because they lack faith. In this circle, Dante finds a group of men in a circle around a fire in the middle of the eternal darkness. The fire represents the use of reason by humans for accomplishing amazing feats of thought, and among this group Dante notes the greatest philosophers and scientists in history (called magnanimi). Later on at the start of Paradiso, Dante explains the structure of this kingdom which is based on the construction of our solar system theorized by Ptolomy with the Earth at the center. This structure is not actually heaven (because that would be pagan), but is only a device created by God so that the souls can become sensible to Dante.
Rivers of many kinds are found along Dante’s journey, from the rivers which pour into the freezing depths of the Inferno to a river of pure light in heaven whose shining water nourishes the flowers bending towards it from the banks. After reading about Limbo, I began to imagine a river washing all of the sins of the world down to hell. The pain and damnation that is washed off during baptism and confession flows down to the underworld where it contributes to the suffering of sinners (peccatori). Dante also uses the river as a simile for human doubts about the Caholic religion. Our lives are like the turbulent rivers in the Appenine mountains of Italy: full of turbulence and turmoil (I know mine is). However, when we are accepted into heaven by God all of these doubts are solved and we find solace and peace just like the lazy slow rivers of the Po River plain.
My favorite verse in the entire poem is ‘Dolce color d’oriental zaffiro.’ Dante uses these words in the first canto of Purgatorio to describe the color of the azure sky when he emerges from the long tunnel leading from the pit of hell to the sparkling beach of the purgatory mountain. This image, from almost complete and utter darkness into beautiful sunshine, from closed cramped spaces into wide open views, is absolutely beautiful. The first word, dolce, means sweet (as in La Dolce Vita, a popular film with the actor Mastroianni), and it describes the feeling that the suffering souls have in purgatory because of their hope for salvation. Oriental zaffiro is a mineral of the most beautiful light blue color, much like Carolina Blue (some of that school spirit stays with me).
My second favorite verse (I could totally go on) is in the last canto of Paradiso in which Dante finally sees the holy Trinity: ‘la ‘mpresa/ che fé Nettuno ammirar l’ombra d’Argo.’ In the story of Jason and the Argonauts, the Argo is the first ship to sail on the sea. As expected, the god of the sea, Neptune, gets very angry at Jason for coming into his territory, and the image of the shadow of the ship passing over him highlights his anger. Dante inverts this pre-christian image of contempt to show the admiration that God has for saved souls. In my mind whenever I read this line, I see first an image of Neptune looking up with his trident from the ocean floor as the ship passes over him (panning camera angle), and then I see the scene from his point of view with the boat travelling on the surface of the water.
Lastly, my favorite character in the Comedy is Prince Manfredi, who Dante runs into further down the beach of purgatory. This man committed the most atrocious sins imaginable: killing his brother and father to become king, being excommunicated for rebelling against the church, the list goes on. BUT he is saved because of a decision that he made in the very last moment of his life while dying on a battlefield, the decision to have faith. A decision made in a split second determined his place in the cosmos for all of eternity, and the idea that all of our lives might be changed like this in a split second is beautiful.
At the moment I am getting revved up for a second semester here in Bologna. I have to wade again through the labyrinth that is the university website to figure out which courses I will take, and I am preparing for two more exams (which here usually come after Christmas. Why? I don’t know). I just finished up leading my parents on a tour of Italy to Florence, Pisa, Venice, and Bologna, as well as cooking them all kinds of delicious food, and I am planning on heading to explore the rest of Europe at the end of the month. Using Ryan Air I can pretty much leapfrog a bunch of big cities for very cheap, and I am planning on going to Barcelona and then Paris, where I will have the opportunity to practice my French for the Peace Corps. It’s freezing cold outside but warm in my apartment, and I am still very happy to be in this country.
Pictures of my beautiful parents in Italy.
