Santagata Marco: DANTE: Roman o njegovu životu

Marco Santagata - DANTE: A novel about his life

Antagata leaves the reader with a completely open perspective, never docs or draws final conclusions, except when he warns about Dante's precisely "revolutionary" separation of thought and literary processes, almost unimaginable in the Middle Ages. Strindberg at the end of the 19th century. century prophesied that future literature will be completely autobiographical, will be written in the "I-form" and every novel will actually be biographical. And regardless of the fact that he more or less hit the mark with his prophecy, today, thanks to Santagata, it is clear how he "rediscovered" America, which had already been discovered long ago. The entire "Divine Comedy" is a great and elusive autobiography.

Travel was an obligatory form of medieval literature and therefore often trivialized. Dante found him all around him, in hagiographies, depictions and numerous similar secular and sacred works, and he ran away from him for a long time regardless, influencing stylists, Amor and composing sonnets and canzones in praise of Beatrice. He probably would have remained so, an extremely diligent and educated philosopher, an inspired poet and the creator of the first poetic autobiography in European literature (La Vita Nuova), if he never had a terrible break in his life. Just like Dostoevsky, six centuries later, who, if he had not been sentenced to death and ended up on the gallows, would probably have remained an "inflated bubble" of Russian literature, as Turgenev called it until then, so too Dante, condemned to death, had to go into exile, he had to accept and invent a new way of journey and become a true traveller-prophet from a self-proclaimed visionary of love. And from that is La Divina Commedia.

Personal sense of honor will be joined by honor and glory among descendants: Commedia will take Dante to a future where the exile condemned by his contemporaries will be a mere trifle. Towards the end of Paradise Dante hopes, and is even convinced, that he will be publicly honored in Florence as a poet-prophet in the vernacular. The cruel hearts of the Florentines who "threw him out of the pen" in which he was born will soften the song:

If ever the song of the world

in which the earth and the sky put their hands,

so that it dries me up for many summers,

overcome the evil that locks my beautiful pen

where like a lamb I dreamed a lot,

wolves that have no enemy true;

with a different voice and with a different rune,

as a poet I will return to the source

of my baptism to marry with a crown.

In his San Giovanni he will be crowned as a poet, but there is also one important detail: the return to Florence, if it ever happens, will happen solely because of his, Dante's merits; No pope, emperor or powerful lord can return the "tor" to him, but only a song.

The symbolic center of the "tor" is the Baptistry. In Dante's imagination, this church is the center of Florence. Persistence at Krstonici also shows how much the long-time exile is tied to myths and symbols that have lost all value to those who still live in the city. In the next few years, the symbol of Florence will become the new cathedral and its Marian cult, either in a religious or a political-social sense.

Dante never mentions Reparata or the church of Santa Maria del Fiore. At the end of his life, he dreams of redemption in the place that is still a city for him dski temple. Maybe he is not familiar with the changes, maybe he refuses to accept them. The wanderer's loyalty to the myths and images that only live in him is touching.

Marco Santagata (1947–2020) was one of the greatest Italianists and Italian experts on Dante and Petrarch, a world-renowned scholar and the author of numerous works of literary history and criticism. Santagata has published many books. Eight books as a narrator, twenty-six books of essays and debates, ten books as an editor. Readers and critics around the world praise these books, point out their high style and claim that each of the author's ideas is clearly expressed in them.

There is a relevant critical literature on this, in which there is unanimous respect for dedication and admiration for what has been achieved.

Santagata also wrote the historical novel "Pisar. One Petrarca Friday" (Ilcopista. Un venerdì di Francesco Petrarca). It is a marvelous and poignant book about one day of the earthly life of a poet who, after the plague took Laura, his son Giovanni and grandson Francesco, was abandoned by the scribe Giovanni Malpaghini, and who already doubts the immortality of the soul. Santagata also wrote the biographical novel "Dante", the one that the reader is holding in his hands, which is both a discussion and an essay, an example of genre mixing (the blurring of genres) on over five hundred pages, it was published by Mondadori, it has already been published in English and Spanish.