Dante fra Caucaso, Iran e Babilonia

Publisher: UniorPress

Series: Miscellaneous

Pages: 174

Language: Italian

NBN: http://nbn.depositolegale.it/urn:nbn:it:unina-29639

Abstract: When the essays contained in this book were conceived, the seventh centenary of Dante Alighieri’s death was being celebrated in Ravenna, where the poet of the Comedy spent the last years of his life and where he died. Dante’s city par excellence, Ravenna hosted the International Dante Congress in 2021: the relationship between the poem and oriental culture was discussed in the presence of specialists in a non-random place, not only because it had hosted the author but also because that city was port of the classis par excellence, i.e., the Roman fleet, as well as the Byzantine capital and crossroads of the Mediterranean, therefore at the center of East-West relations. During this volume, it will be easy to notice how the stories about otherworldly journeys, widespread in the ancient times of the Near and Middle East in different historical and cultural contexts, allow us to identify characters involved in these visionary experiences: heroes, wise men, and divine entities are encountered in celestial or subterranean eschatological scenarios, which sometimes had the fortune of arriving, through the mediation of Islamic culture, in the environments of the European Middle Ages in Dante’s era.