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Kristi Thompson
May 302 min read

"Dante" took 18 years from conception to production

Did you know...


“I had it all clear in my mind in 2003,"said director Pupi Avati, "... Then, 18 years later, I finally got the go ahead."* DANTE (ANSA, June 28, 2021)

  • Pupi Avati won BEST DIRECTOR for DANTE, 2022, FICE, Federazione Italiana Cinema d'Essai


Scholars admire Pupi Avati's vision of Dante:

  • “As a scholar of the late literary Middle Ages, as well as a film enthusiast, I find Pupi Avati's idea of constructing a cinematic narrative on the life of Alighieri very interesting, taking its starting point from Giovanni Boccaccio's Trattatello in laude di Dante, which is - as we know - the oldest biography on the first crown of our literature. This is undoubtedly an original and, at the same time, difficult idea.**

  • Dante Alighieri titled his most famous work, "Comedy (Comedìa)" and Giovanni Boccacci, a generation later added the adjective "divine (Divina)" to the title, out of his reverence for Dante's masterpiece.***


Director Pupi Avati was so moved by the reverential admiration that Dante Alighieri's literary successor, the poet Giovanni Boccaccio had for him, that Avati uses this to reveal Dante, the man as seen the way Boccaccio may have imagined him. The journey Boccaccio made to retrace Dante's life is intertwined with imagined flashbacks of who Dante Alighieri was as a person, showing an approachable Dante in his humanity, albeit still majestic, including a young Dante who falls in love with Beatrice, his heavenly inspiration.


The director invites his audience to experience this vision of Boccaccio's journey for a sense of the humanity of not just one but two of the greatest Italian writers in history.

  • Giovanni Boccaccio's works, numerous scholars say, were the sources for Chaucer.

  • Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, celebrated as the 'Tre Corone' (the three crowns) and have exerted an immense influence over western culture.


FREE!! (subject to availability)

Location: Casa das Histórias Paula Rego



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