 Ladies and gentlemen, dear friends, first I would like you to have a look at the picture there, because it contains more or less what we will talk about. On the right side you see Florence. In the middle, the center, our figure, Dante, who was not only a poet, he was also a great political thinker and a failed politician. So we will treat all these three elements of his life. And on the right, on the left side, you see Hell. You will notice that Hell and Florence are put on the same level. And then above Hell, you see the Mount of Purification, that's the purgatory, which is an enormous important concept because it contributed to the birth of capitalism in Italy. You will see, we will touch this argument more thoroughly afterwards. So let's start with September 14th in the year 1321 in Ravenna, the day when Dante died. Before there was a war between, there was a conflict, not probably a war, but a conflict between Ravenna and Venice regarding salt commerce. Some Venetian ships were seized by the Ravennies and the Venetian sailors were killed. This was very adventurous for Ravenna because Ravenna was much weaker than Venice. Republic of Venice had a much bigger military force. And Dante's patron, Guido da Polenta, the lord of Ravenna, was in no position to meet the challenge. He accordingly sent an embassy to negotiate terms. Dante was included because of his renown as an orator and his experience in negotiations. The mission failed. Dante returned to Ravenna by land through the legumes of Comacchio. He caught malaria and arrived home ill. In the early hours of 14 September, the feast of the exhortation of the cross, Dante set out his final journey. Perhaps death put him in a state of being that allowed him to compare the world beyond with the one he had imagined during his lifetime in the Divine Comedy as a morally ordered image of the earthly one. If so, then the poet must have woken up neither in eternal damnation nor in eternal bliss, but on a threshold of that, what he calls second region, where the human spirit is purged and becomes fit to climb to heaven. Before Dante, no poet had ever attempted a literary survey of the purgatory, let alone of the paradise and the hell. And none would have dared to have a suicide to keep vigil at the foot of the mountain of purification. But in Dante's eyes, Cato the Younger, 95 to 46 BC, had performed a godly deed when he departed life as a free man to escape Caesar's tyranny. He made this sacrifice for the common good in order to spare Rome a civil war. Dante chose him as a role model, not despite but precisely because of this extreme act. How highly the devoted Catholic, Dante valued freedom and peace was shown not least by the fact that he disregarded the negative judgment that Church Father Augustine had passed on Cato's suicide in the state of God. No doubt he knew the text. After all, he had studied philosophy and theology with the Augustinians. In the first canto of the purgatoria, Virgil, who accompanies the poets through the Inferno and the purgatory, exhorts him to kneel reverently before Cato and lower his gaze. Dante describes him, I quote, whose sight inspired much respect no father can owe to his son as a radiant figure of light. He wore his beard long, flecked with white like his hair of which a double strand fell to his chest. Since the day Cato had left Rome before Caesar's advancing force, he had not had his beard cut or his hair cut. Virgil introduces him to the poet with the words, I quote, let it please you to grace his coming here. He seeks freedom which is so dear to us as he knows who gives his life for it. Dante recognized himself in Cato. Both were deeply conservative and deeply freedom loving. Both advocated law and order and respected peace as the highest good. Like Dante, Cato saw it as his duty, now I quote Plutarch, to swim against the current of the habits and customs of time, since in his eyes they were corrupt and in need of sorrow renewal. Both Cato and Dante had witnessed a radical change in values that had fundamentally altered the world in just a few decades. Immense wealth had awakened new needs, provoked envy and greed, corrupted the ruling classes and shaken the moral framework of traditional order. Only strong characters like Cato and Dante hold on to their moral compass even in the face of civilizations ruptures. That oba for is also what makes them so relevant because we live in comparable circumstances. Those failed politically and triumphed morally. At the end their defeats turned into victories. As a successful politician which he had been until his expulsion from Florence, Dante would probably never have written the Divine Comedy. We know a little about Dante's life. He was born in Florence sometime in May or June 1265 and was given the name Durante, meaning the enduring one. Dante is a contracted form of Durante. What you see here is an idealized image done by Santro Poticelli more than 100 years after the death of Dante. You see the laurel wreath and the imponente philosophical posture. The oldest, there are a lot of portraits like this of him. But the oldest one was done by his friend Giotto. That's this one. He did it only 14 years after Dante's death and he chose a saltfully looking man with a long face and an aquiline nose. Since Dante's skeleton was measured in 1921, we know his height was 1.64 meters, almost 10 centimeters under the medieval average. Dante's father owned modest pieces of land in Florence and in the countryside and added to his income lending money. He doesn't seem to have earned any position of social distinction but according to a family tradition, the Aligieri could trace their origins to one of the Roman families reputed to have founded Florence. After his father died, when he was 18 years old, he had to take charge of the family business. Around 1285, he married Gemma Donati with whom he had four children, three boys, Giovanni Pietro and Jacopo and the girl, Antonia. He was already introduced to an elegant, very elegant and prestigious circle of the literary avant-garde frequented by high-cultured intellectuals. Before Gutenberg, literature circulated in copied manuscripts which were very expensive, so they read aloud most works in public. I've never been to a poetry slam, but a few years ago, I sat by chance on a plane next to a nice young lady. I didn't recognize her, so she had to explain me. She was a kind of pop star in Germany because she had received more than a million clicks for the videos of her poetry slam performances. Young Donati and his friends were enormously popular in Tuscany, an urban high life. I suppose the poetry slams were the best in town. Donati himself records that when he was eight years old, he met Pietrice Portinari, also eight years of age. He saw her again when he was 18. He told the story of his love in the Vita Nuova, the new life, which he wrote after her death. In the Commedia, he put her in a very spiritual center of the poem. She descends to hell, as Christ did, in her case to bring out a virtual as Dante's guide. Dante connected her role as a female incarnation of the human incarnation of God to the Virgin Mary. As Mary gave human features to Christ, so Pietrice enables Dante to have the final vision of the human Christ in paradise. Her death, in any case, started a spiritual turn in 1290. Dante began serious studies in post-philosophy and theology for a period of almost three years at the Augustinian Church of Santo Spirito in Florence. These studies elide him to the wide spectrum of the city's intelligentsia. They also held out to him the promise that he might excel in public life. Dante's gift was twofold, literary and political. Already most famous as a poet, he gained practical political experience in Florence, rising to the rank of the member of the priory. That was the highest municipal body. Return to the first image. We talk now about Florence in the Age of Dante. Since Enlightenment, an anti-Catholic pious prevented the intellectual class from recognizing the profound turn in European history that took place in the High Middle Ages. Voltaire, for instance, believed that, I quote, barbarism, superstition and ignorance covered the face of the world. The end of the Rome led to the triumph of barbarism and religion, wrote Gibbon. Similarly, in the 20th century, Bertrand Russell, it is not inappropriate to call this century's dark, especially if they are set against that, what became before and what came after. In reality, the course for the development of western civilization was set in the High Middle Ages, not in the Renaissance. And the constructive role of the church played a crucial part in this. The face of Europe changed profoundly and rapidly. The beginning of the cultural, institutional, economic and political renewal is no longer considered being between 1450 and 1500, but between 1050 and 1100, between the early and the high Middle Ages. Water and wind mills were built. New methods, just as the three field system and selective plant breeding revolutionized agriculture. The horse harness made it easier to transport people and goods over long distances. Military innovations helped to protect Europe from invasion and, in particular, to set limits to Islamic expansion. In Flanders and in Italy, the turning point became apparent earliest and most strikingly. In the course of a few decades, urban communes formed around the bishops. You know that when the Roman Empire fell apart, the bishops, the seats of the bishops were the administrative centers and that was for the whole time of the Middle Ages. And only in around 1100, it changed and there were cities formed around the bishops. The bishops lost their power. You probably remember that in those times, there was a deep conflict between the church on the one side and the German Empire on the other side of who has the right to establish a bishopry, who can nominate a bishop. And that was won by the church. So the German emperors lost their influence. This was a few decades before Dante started his life. So the villages changed into urban agglomeration. And the steady influx from the countryside into the cities began. The result was that the feudal structure in the villages broke down. But at the time of Dante, Tuscany was the most urbanized area in Europe. About 1200, the population of Florence did not exceed 20,000. A century later, it had become one of the four largest cities in Europe with a population that is estimated to somewhere between 90,000 and 130,000. The Florence we know and love differs greatly from the Florence in which Dante grew up. The photo above is Florence more or less as it is now. So it's dominated by the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiori. At the time of Dante, this was still in construction. He never saw its wonderful cupola. It was Filippo Brunelleschi who came into the world half a century after Dante's death who gave the skyline of the old town its unmistakable change with this dome. Also the construction of the bell tower on the left of the cupola you see began also only 10 years after Dante's death. The Campanile in the work of Dante's friend Giotto, it was done by Giotto, not even Giotto did see the completion of the work. Instead, and now look at the other photo, during lifetime there were around 150 towers of the kind shown in the photo of the Tuscan town of San Gimignano. These towers belong to the mayores, the grandees, the highest ranking representatives of the ruling class. There were fortresses that often included several outbuildings for the families, their servants and their armed men, most of them notorious troublemakers. I saw one of this similar house many years ago I made a film about the industry of extortions in Sardinia and then there was a guy in Mamoyada who happened to be a guest of a family which was specialized in kidnapping in order to afford to feud with another family in the village. High walls surrounded their house and the windows looked like loopholes. Similar types of buildings are still to be seen in the Balkans, for example, in the northern part of Albania. Family fields that turned into violent conflicts or for supremacy also characterized Dante's Florence. Street fights were commonplace. The conflict with the old noble families, the new families from the urban bourgeoisie prevailed in Dante's time. The professional groups organized themselves into arty kind of guilds which disempowered the urban nobility. Dante too belonged to a guild which was the prerequisite for a political career. Florentine merchants were active throughout Italy in the Levant around the western Mediterranean from province in Spain to north Africa and across northwestern Europe from France and the low countries to England. They built up the most extensive international network network of commerce and banking in western Europe. Florence struck its first gold fluorine in 1252. Only 50 years later, it was thanks to its stable intrinsic value the universal monetary standard used in international commerce and financial markets. The pepacy established it as the preferred money of account for its revenues. Some of the prominent merchant families, banking families, the Bardi, the Frescopaldi, the Emozi came from the feudal countryside. Others had more humble origins. All these people were mixed up in the town. The intermarried entered into partnership arrangements with one another and above all joined together in political factions thereby dissolving any clear defined class structure to this society. In the Middle Ages, Bright became before all as a major sin. But with the growth of a market economy, Averis moved ever closer to the top. The condemnation of Averis found one of its most eloquent expressions in Dante who carved out separate places in hell for its several manifestations blander, squandering, ushery, fraud, theft and counterfeiting. Now to the purgatory. The Florentines were well aware about the dangers to their salvation posed by the rapidly growing wells accumulated over the course of a few generations. But the last judgment not only warned of the fires of hell, it also contained the promise that souls would be allowed to answer to God. Only the good would be admitted straight to heaven as saints and only the really bad would go straight to hell. As most people are neither saints, nor really bad, this belief changed the world. And it was the prerequisite of the idea of a purgatory as it became established between 1150 and 12500, namely as a place of residence and purification for souls between heaven and hell. Connected with this way, this idea of a community, this was the idea of a community of solidarity between the living and the dead. The living accelerated the path of the deceased to eternal bliss, supraia and almsgiving. But they may also hope that this will be rewarded for them in their afterlife. Hence they would spend two-thirds of their fortunes to arm themselves against this last day. The doctrine of purgatory was formulated under Pope Gregory the Tense by the Second Council of Lyon in 1274. It became a point of contention between the Greek and the Latin theologians who accused each other of heresy. The Greeks rejected this because neither the Holy Scriptures nor the Church Fathers contained any reference to a purification process and ranked at the rank this idea of the purgatory among the list of heresies they blamed on the Latin Church. The doctrine owed is enormous sped first of all to Dante Alighieri. The French historian Jacques Legault called him the greatest theologian on the history of purgatory. Among Dante's contemporaries in Florence the concept of the purgatory pos-legitimized and promoted the city's rapid economic development. It became central to their spirituality as the Florentines became aware of the dangers of money. It could imperil one's soul but monetary legacies channeled into masses prayers and good works could also hasten one's journey to paradise. To shorten the stay in the purgatory for their relatives and for themselves the Florentines donated to the poor and to the church. In the cathedrals rich families set up side chapels to pray for their salvation. Italy's unique wells of lavish ecclesical buildings and religiously inspired works of art is due not least to the rising capitalist class fears of divine punishment and its trust in divine justice. I already mentioned that Florence at the age of Dante was an enormous construction site. Now let's pass over to politics. In the second half of the 13th century the German emperor had almost lost the power playing with the papacy over Italy. For the independent city-states like Florence the popes became the major trait because the popes wanted to annex cities and hold tasks to the papal states. During Dante's lifetime there were 14 popes. According to tradition he met two of them personally and he mentioned nine in the comedia. Five of them suffer hellish dormants in his vision of divine justice. In the first half of the 13th century there was an English in the purgatory and his arch enemy but you will not find his arch enemy that was Ponifas 8. Yeah, this is the guy. Dante negotiated with Ponifas as a member of a Florentine mission while Dante was still in Rome. The Pope in Florence seized power in town. It was a coup d'etat. On his way back Dante received news of violence in the town. The plunder and destruction of houses including his own made it impossible for him to return home. He had not even a way to contact his family. In the January of 1302 he and four others were accused in absentia of corruption. Their property was confiscated. They were prohibited from ever again holding public office in Florence find five cells in Florence and punished from Florentine territory for two years. Two months later the punishment against him and 14 others was extended to perpetuity with the further decree that they returned to Florence. If they returned to Florence they would be burned alive. Dante never returned to his hometown. For him it was clear that this coup d'etat could not have happened without the interference of Pope Ponifas. Dante wrote his comedy in exile between 1310 and 1320 but in the poem his journey from hell to heaven begins on Good Friday of the years 1300 and lasts seven days. At that time Ponifas was still alive which is why Dante could only reserve him a place among the simonists that are the sellers of secret offices. Nevertheless he mentioned no sinner among the popes in the comedy as often as him and none did you portray in such gloomy colors. In the Comedian Dante let St. Peter accuse Ponifas of having usurped the office. He has, I quote, he has made of my burial ground a cesspool full of blood and stench. Okay. The church now there is definitely less blood but I don't think that the stench is less than at the times of Dante. Maybe you heard the story of the Spanish bishop who left his bishop's seat in Catalonia. Now he lives together with a divorced wife with two children who is specialized in writing crime stories with satanic background. This is one story. The second story is a priest in Prato that's known as the Catholic Church and the second story is a priest in Prato that's near the town near Firenze industrial town and he took the money the people gave to him for charity works. He used it to buy drugs and which he distributed in the gay community of Prato and those are things that are very similar to what happened in medieval times. In Dante's views, Ponyface had taken the moral corruption of the church which had begun with the donation of Constantine to extremes. The papacy had degenerated into a whore letter he says a whore. Dante expected salvation from Henry VII's Luxembourg whose move across the Alps he hailed as the beginning of an era of peace but he remained deeply disappointed. Also Cardinals crowned Henry Emperor in Rome he failed to bring Italy under his authority. Henry died of malaria in Bonconvento in 1313. During these years, Dante collected ideas that he would elaborate in the as well as his major political work Monarchia after the death of the emperor. Probably the popes would have forgiven him if he had left it at denouncing the well-known sins of the but with this writing he shook the ideological foundation of the medieval papacy. It was necessary for every human creature to submit to the bishop of Rome Ponyface had decreed in his bull Unam Sanctum the one and only church had only one body and one head not two heads like a monster and this head could only be the pope. On the contrary Dante argued in the Monarchia that those two powers were equally established by God. The pope possessed the key to the heavenly kingdom and the ember of death to the worldly happiness. Since both are directly subordinated and responsible to God peace and harmony would prevail provided they do not rebel against nature and the divine order. Their independence follows from the unity which in turn strengthens the independence. Dante's political theory was deeply catholic and revolutionary at the same time. In 1329 a cardinal had the Monarchia burned in Polonia. He would have burned the bones of Dante too and that's when Ravenda did not allow it. In 1559 the Inquisition put the Monarchia on the very first list of banned books along with the works of Poccaccio and Machiavelli. It was not until three centuries later that it was removed from the index by Pope Leo XIII who reigned from 1878 to 1903. Leo understood how important Dante's arguments were for the separation of the spiritual and temporary power and this was the time in which the papal states ended and closed a long chapel and Dante had foreseen this outcome. Now I still have time but I want to give you two examples from the wine comedy just to explain you the enormous theatrical and poetic power of this man. Let's start with the old question. In the second circle of hell a hurricane rills and drives not only the souls of carnal sinners who allowed their desires to overcome their reason they are also Achilles, Paris, Tristan and countless knights and ladies who died as the result of love. Is love a sin as punishable as lust? The most beautiful verses in the Inferno are dedicated to Francesca da Rimini. She had an affair with Paolo, the younger brother of her husband the betrayed husband killed them both. Virtual calls their souls the wine drops and Francesca tells her story of a distorted and misleading love. Dante listens deeply moved and full of compassion. Francesca explains there is no greater pain than to remember happy times in misery. We read one day to our delight of Lancelot and how love constrained him. We were alone and without suspicion. We urged our eyes to meet and colored our cheeks but it was a single moment that undid us. When we read how that lover kissed the beloved smile he who will never be separated from me kissed my mouth or trembling. That day we read no more. Gabriele da Nunzio The Nunzio used this text for the drama which was put in music by Ricardo Zanodi maybe you have seen or heard of Francesca da Rimini it's worthwhile to hear it. No less famous are the lines in which Count Ugolino tells the story of his death. Together with Archbishop Ruggieri Ugolino is fixed in a single hole in a frozen lake pose a guilty of political betrayal. Ugolino knows the color of the Archbishop and when Dante asked him that sinner raised his mouse from the sage feast wiping it on the hair of the head he had stripped behind. The episode as such was well known in Florence where Dante was young. Archbishop Ruggieri had Ugolino imprisoned in a tower together with two sons and two grandsons without food and water. After eight days the tower was opened and the five bodies were found dead of starvation. Ugolino tells Dante what happened in the meantime in those eight days. I quote, when I woke before dawn I heard my sons crying in their sleep and asking for food. If you don't weep what do you weep at? My sons had hands from grief and they thinking that I did it from hunger said father it will give us less pain if you know it us. You put this miserable flesh on us now strip it off again. When he had come to the force day my son Gado threw himself down at my feet saying there he died and I saw three others for one per one. I called out for them for three days when they were dead then hunger at least did more than grief could do. Now the question is did Ugolino eat the flesh of his sons? Is Dante describing a case of cannibalism? We don't know. This last line in this verse lets it open it's liberally ambiguous but in any case if the episode finishes with the verse when he had spoken this he seized the wretched scar again with his teeth which like dogs are violent. Now cancer culture activists my feel provoked by a text written more than 700 years ago Dante had his beloved teacher Bruno de Latini and other gays, scholars and clerics polluted by the same vice who sinned against God and nature flee the infernal flames on burning earth. American college students would probably be horrified to be subjected to read about such cruelties against homosexuals in class so infernal tortures may be familiar to them from the subculture of comic books black metal bands and video games. Dante did not have to invent these tortures. He could draw inspiration from the common practices of the medieval penal system. When the poet was working on his extremely political epic the expulsion of the last crusaders had ended only two decades ago. Dante considered Islam a Christian heresy and Mohammed a schismatic. In this the city of Satan asks her a quote as if they came out of fire. On the occasion of this year on the occasion of the anniversary of that of Dante the Chinese edition of the Dante book by the Briton Jan Thompson was to be published this year. Nothing came out of it because they also did not accept the deletions that the state run institute for world religions demanded of him. The institute wanted him to delete 20 pages in the text where he analyzes Dante's relations with Islam. It is almost grotesque that the totalitarian regime that is pilloried worldwide for the oppression and persecution of 22 million Muslims demands these changes. Okay now last words you probably there is a strange thing with Dante that there is a really overwhelming number of Dante studies. Apart the Piper there is no text there is no text which has been commented so frequently and so often as the divine comedy. In doubtless more readers have discovered a comedy in the last 70 years than in the previous 77 centuries but the basic cultural prerequisites for understanding his work are fading more rapidly. The generation which grew up in the first half of the 20th century still knew that education has nothing to do with usable knowledge and that there is no better training for the mind than exposure to classical western culture readers who don't see it that way had better not get involved with Dante. Thank you very much for your attention.