Rosaria Carpinelli Consulenze Editoriali

In the summer of 1940, an eleven-year-old boy listened to his father read and explain Dante's Inferno to his older brothers; the following two summers it was his turn to read Purgatorio and Paradiso. Half a century later that very boy, Vittorio Sermonti, would read and explain Dante on radio microphones and in more than five hundred public readings. Thus was born this "narrative-commentary" of the Divine Comedy, which set itself an only apparently modest goal: "To enable any Italian with average culture, intelligence and a little passion to travel through the greatest book written in Italian without continually interrupting the adventure to supply itself with news, elucidations and variants in the skirting boards of notes, which often border on the ceiling of the page." It is actually a very ambitious goal, and to achieve it required Sermonti's prose at once refined and colloquial, accurate and ironic. The three canticles of Dante's Comedy, narrated by Vittorio Sermonti with the supervision of Gianfranco Contini, return to bookstores in a new Bur edition.

Publication date: 21.05.2015
Publisher: Rizzoli BUR