Celebrating the Supreme Poet and Father of the Italian Language
25th March: Celebrated Annually
What is Dantedì?
Dante Day, or Dantedì as the Italians call it, celebrates the life and works of the extraordinary Italian writer Dante Alighieri on 25th March. Alighieri is most famous for his masterpiece The Divine Comedy, which chronicles his journey to Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise.
The Italian government picked 25th March as the date because, according to scholars, Dante’s journey to Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, which he recounted in The Divine Comedy, began on that day, during Easter week in the year 1300. As Italy’s Culture Minister Dario Franceschini declared when announcing the day: “Every year on March 25, the date that scholars recognise as the beginning of the journey into the afterlife of the Divine Comedy, Dantedì will be celebrated.”
The day was proposed on 17th January 2020 by Franceschini, on an idea from editorialist and writer Paolo Di Stefano, to commemorate the seven hundredth anniversary of the poet’s death, which occurred on 14th September 1321. Di Stefano had first suggested, in an article in the Corriere della Sera in June 2017, that Dante deserved a national day in his honour similar to Bloomsday, dedicated to James Joyce.
There is also a deeper symbolic resonance to the date. The commemorations hold particular importance in Tuscany and Florence, where not only was the poet born, but 25th March was also the first day of the Florentine calendar. For Florentines, the date has always carried a sense of new beginnings.
The Life of Dante Alighieri
To understand why Italy celebrates this day so passionately, one must know the man behind the poetry.
Dante Alighieri was an Italian poet, writer, and philosopher, most likely baptised Durante di Alighiero degli Alighieri, and born around May 1265. He grew up among Florentine aristocracy and received formal instruction in grammar, language, and philosophy at one of the Franciscan schools in the city.
The Great Love: Beatrice
One of the most poignant threads running through Dante’s life and work is his devotion to Beatrice Portinari. Around the time he was nine years old, Dante met Beatrice, and apparently experienced love at first sight. The pair were acquainted for years, but Dante’s love was courtly and unrequited. Dante wrote a chronicle of his relationship with her in La Vita Nuova (c. 1293), in which he tells of his first sight of her, praises her beauty and goodness, and describes his own intense reactions. Beatrice died unexpectedly in 1290, and five years later Dante published Vita Nuova (The New Life), which details his tragic love for her. Her spirit would guide him through the entirety of Paradiso in the Divine Comedy, serving as the ultimate symbol of divine grace.
A Political Life and a Devastating Exile
Dante was not only a poet, he was a man deeply enmeshed in the turbulent politics of medieval Florence. In central Italy’s struggle between Guelphs and Ghibellines, Dante sided with the Guelphs, who generally favoured the papacy over the Holy Roman Emperor. Florence’s Guelphs later split into factions around 1300, the White Guelphs and the Black Guelphs.
Political trickery ended Dante’s dreams of a secure career. While he was away from Florence, the victorious Black Guelphs, backed by Pope Boniface VIII, deposed the Whites and exiled Dante, on pain of being burnt alive if he ever returned. The banishment was deeply distressing to him.
Dante circulated around the courts of northern Italy, serving various counts, dukes, and lords in Verona, and ultimately settled in Ravenna, where he died in 1321. He never saw Florence again. In 2008, the Municipality of Florence officially apologised for expelling Dante 700 years earlier, and in May 2021, a symbolic re-trial was held virtually in Florence to posthumously clear his name.
The Divine Comedy: A Journey Through the Afterlife
The Divine Comedy is widely considered one of the most important poems of the Middle Ages and the greatest literary work in the Italian language.
Written in the first person, the poem tells of Dante’s journey through the three realms of the dead, lasting from the night before Good Friday to the Wednesday after Easter in the spring of 1300. The Roman poet Virgil guides him through Hell and Purgatory; Beatrice, Dante’s ideal woman, guides him through Heaven.
The three great sections of the poem each explore a different realm:
Inferno
Inferno recounts Dante’s travels through the different regions of Hell, led by his mentor Virgil. Constructed as a huge funnel with nine descending circular ledges, Dante’s Hell features a meticulously organised structure in which sinners, carefully classified according to the nature of their sins, suffer hideous punishment.
Purgatorio
In Purgatorio, Dante emerges from the frozen floor of Hell and ascends the mountain of purgatory, where repentant sinners are purified and cleansed with fire to prepare them for their final ascent into heaven.
Paradiso
In Paradiso, Dante is reunited with Beatrice, who acts as his guide. In Heaven, he encounters the saved and the saints.
The work also presents suggestions for the resolution of Italy’s factionalism and an allegory on the fall of humankind and the hope of redemption. The roster of wrongdoers in Hell’s circles includes figures from Italian history and politics, Greek and Roman mythology, and the Bible. Several of the condemned are Dante’s personal enemies, proving that The Divine Comedy also served as an outlet for the author to cope with his exile.
Why Dante Called It a “Comedy”
The title is often misunderstood. Dante called his work Commedia, comedy, as an indicator that it had a happy ending. It was the writer Boccaccio who later called it Divina, divine.
Dante: Father of the Italian Language
Perhaps Dante’s most enduring legacy is the role he played in forging the very language modern Italians speak today.
Dante chose to write the poem in the vernacular Tuscan dialect instead of Latin, so that it could be read by the masses rather than the educated classes only. The Tuscan dialect utilised in the poem later became the standard literary Italian, giving Dante his famous title: Father of the Italian Language.
The Divine Comedy is arguably the most famous work of Italian literature and is the second most translated book in the world after the Bible. It formed the base of the Italian language and solidified it to a status that would one day replace Latin entirely.
As Culture Minister Franceschini put it: “Dante is the unity of this country. Dante is the Italian language. Dante is the very idea of Italy.”
How Dantedì is Celebrated
Dantedì was established not only to honour Dante’s genius but to involve schools, students, and cultural institutions across Italy and the world.
Public Readings
One of the most beloved traditions of the day is the public recitation of Dante’s verse. The Italians have started a tradition of reciting the Inferno on National Dante Day. At 6 p.m. on 25th March, people join millions of Dante’s fans around the world by gathering on their balconies and declaiming the opening lines of one of his most famous works. The official hashtags #Dantedì and #IoleggoDante (“I read Dante”) spread the celebration globally across social media.
Museums, Galleries, and Exhibitions
Planned exhibitions take place in Ravenna, Verona, Parma, Bologna, and Florence, in reverence and celebration of the Supreme Poet. The Uffizi Gallery in Florence has marked the day with major acquisitions and special exhibitions, and institutions worldwide use it as an opportunity to display their Dante-related collections.
Schools and Universities
Schoolteachers throughout Italy add Dante to their lessons on 25th March, and the Accademia della Crusca, Italy’s foremost institution for the study of the Italian language, brings together academics who explain what Dante means to them on its social media channels.
Ravenna: The City of Dante’s Rest
Visitors can travel to Dante’s burial site in Ravenna to pay their respects, with the city home to a golden iron Greek Cross blessed by Pope Francis and donated by Pope Paul VI. Interestingly, Alighieri also has a tomb built in his hometown of Florence, even though his remains are not there. Florence, which expelled its greatest son, was never permitted by Ravenna to reclaim his bones.
A Day for the World
The 2021 celebration was particularly special as it marked the 700th anniversary of the poet’s death. That year, award-winning Italian actor and filmmaker Roberto Benigni read a canto from Paradiso live from the Quirinal Palace in Rome, broadcast on national television, a moment that captured the extraordinary hold Dante still has on the Italian imagination.
Why Dante Still Matters
Both the man Dante and his work are closely tied to the events of his life, his encounter with Beatrice and her untimely death, the political misfortune of exile from Florence, and his expectations for political and social renewal are the themes essential to understanding this historical figure.
If Dante can be considered a universal writer, it is because he did not speak only to his own generation but to all humankind, so that all people, now as then, can undertake, just as he did himself, a course of redemption.
His status in Italian literature is similar to that of Shakespeare for English-speakers. And yet, unlike Shakespeare, Dante gave his nation something more: a language. Every Italian who speaks today is, in some small way, speaking Dante’s words.
Dantedì is Italy’s way of remembering that, a day when a nation pauses to honour the poet who made it whole.
“Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura…” “Midway upon the journey of our life, I found myself within a forest dark…” — Dante Alighieri, Inferno, Canto I
Leave a Reply