Joseph Luzzi, DANTE'S DIVINE COMEDY: A Biography & VITA NUOVA

Written during his exile from Florence in the early 1300s, Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy describes the poet’s travels through hell, purgatory, and paradise, exploring the state of the human soul after death. His poema sacro, sacred poem, profoundly influenced Renaissance writers and artists such as Giovanni Boccaccio and Sandro Botticelli and was venerated by modern critics including Erich Auerbach and Harold Bloom. Dante’s Divine Comedy narrates the remarkable reception of Dante’s masterpiece, one of the most consequential religious books ever written. Tracing the many afterlives of Dante’s epic poem, Joseph Luzzi shows how it left its mark on the work of such legendary authors as John Milton, Mary Shelley, and James Joyce, while serving as a source of inspiration for writers like Primo Levi and Antonio Gramsci as they faced the most extreme forms of political oppression. He charts how the dialogue between religious and secular ideas in The Divine Comedy has shaped issues ranging from changing conceptions of women’s identity and debates about censorship to the role of canonical literature in popular culture.

Part love story, part instruction manual, part spiritual journey, Dante’s “little book,” the Vita Nuova, has had a profound and far-reaching influence on global culture and is considered by many to be the perfect expression of the medieval ideal of courtly love, as well as an essential precursor to Dante’s sublime poetic apotheosis, the Divine Comedy. Joseph Luzzi, gives us a version of the Vita Nuova that is fresh, contemporary, and approachable―as vital and vivid as Dante’s original Tuscan dialect―rendered in a voice that will entice a new generation of readers to swoon over one of the most heartbreaking stories of unfulfilled love in all of world literature.

Dante Alighieri was born in 1265 in Florence to a family of minor nobility. He entered into Florentine politics in 1295, but he and his party were forced into exile in a hostile political climate in 1301. Taking asylum in Ravenna late in life, Dante completed his Divine Commedia, considered one of the most important works of Western literature, before his death in 1321.

Joseph Luzzi is the Asher B. Edelman Professor of Literature at Bard College and an award-winning writer, teacher, and scholar of Italian culture. His latest book, Botticelli’s Secret: The Lost Drawings and the Rediscovery of the Renaissance was shortlisted for the 2023 Phi Beta Kappa Society’s Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize and was selected as a New Yorker Best Book of 2022. He is also the author of the memoirs In a Dark Wood: What Dante Taught Me About Grief, Healing, and the Mysteries of Love and My Two Italies.

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