T.anto kind and so honest it seems
my woman, when she greets others
that each language must, trembling, change,
and their eyes do not dare to look.
I confess that when I have seen with Pupi Avati his film about Dante I was afraid of having to hide a certain disappointment from him. Dante’s life is sad. Deprived of the woman he loves, forced to marry a woman he doesn’t love, exiled from his Florentine homeland … I always thought that Dante’s true biography was Hell, where there is everything: Virgil, the favorite poet; Brunetto Latini, the teacher; the characters in which the author reflects himself, from the suicidal Pier delle Vigne (Dante also thought of suicide during exile) to the hero of knowledge, Ulysses, who neglects his family to become an expert in the world and the human soul; and of course Beatrice, the woman he loves.
Pupi Avati’s film about Dante
But a movie about Hell would cost like ten comedies about Northern Rome, which is the subject of almost all Italian films; so for the 700 years of Dante’s death no one did it. Unlike what I expected, Pupi Avati’s film is wonderful. You absolutely must see it. It is the story of how Dante’s work and memory were saved by Boccaccio (a great Franco Castellitto).
Among the thousand scenes, I choose one. The one in which Dante and Beatrice look at each other and play to repeat and steal the lines of the wonderful sonnet:
“She goes, feeling lauded,
kindly and dressed in humility,
and it seems that something has come
from heaven to earth to show miracles“.
That play on words and looks, that one amorous skirmish of two young Florentines who have been dead for seven centuries who have never known physical love, at least not between them, it moves me every time I think about it.
“It shows itself so pleasing to those who look at it
that gives the eyes a sweetness to the heart,
who cannot test it;
and it seems that his lip moves
a sweet spirit full of love,
which is saying to the soul: Sighs“.
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