Bill Giovinazzo 6/13/22 Bill Giovinazzo 6/13/22

Did Bambi Call his father on Father’s Day

Bill Giovinazzo 11/17/21 Bill Giovinazzo 11/17/21

Canto 28: Dante & Facebook

It is easy to be pessimistic. A pessimist can always find something about which to complain. Looking at recent polling, roughly 63% of Americans think that the country is on the wrong track. For more than the past ten years, over 50% of Americans have felt this way. I should note a slight dip to 49% in May of this year, but the rate has gone back up since then. The cause of this negative outlook is the result of a pandemic more lethal than Covid. A virus whose carriers do so willingly, happily. Dante describes these people in the Inferno.

Bill Giovinazzo 8/31/21 Bill Giovinazzo 8/31/21

Canto 1: Midway On The Journey

Midway upon the journey of our life / I found myself within a forest dark / For the straightforward pathway had been lost. These first three lines to The Divine Comedy are so well known that even many who have never read it know them. However, I have discovered that the deeper meaning of things that are well known often escapes us. Such is the case with these opening lines.

In one Dante class, the students who were in their late teens and early twenties wrote these lines off as Dante having a midlife crisis without much further consideration. There it was, a tidy little package all wrapped and labeled. Let’s move on to the good stuff of seeing people tortured in hell. I must admit that the first time I read The Divine Comedy, I did the same thing, missing the entire setup to the poem. I did not repeat the error in subsequent readings later in life.

Bill Giovinazzo 8/23/21 Bill Giovinazzo 8/23/21

100 Days of Dante

This September 14th will be the seven-hundredth anniversary of the death of the greatest poet of western literature, Dante Alighieri.

This claim of Dante’s position in literature, is more than the assertions of an Italophile. Eric Auerbach, the author of Mimesis, said that there is Dante and then all others. Michael Dirda notes that in the early part of the twentieth century, “one important writer after another argues strongly for Dante – even above Shakespeare – as the central figure of European literature, the linchpin of the great classical and Christian tradition of learning and culture.” For Italians, Italian-Americans, and Italophiles Dante bears even greater importance than the rest of the Western World.

Bill Giovinazzo 6/29/21 Bill Giovinazzo 6/29/21

Dante at 700

This September 13th is the seven hundredth anniversary of the death of Dante Alighieri, the greatest poet in all of western literature.

I am not sure where to go from there with this post. There is so much I would like to say, but I am not quite sure how to put it all together in a logical way that fully expresses my feelings about Dante without sounding trite. So much has been written over the past seven hundred years that you could easily spend the rest of your life reading about Dante without ever reading his actual work. Has it all been said? Is there anything new to say about Dante?

Bill Giovinazzo 6/14/21 Bill Giovinazzo 6/14/21

Noto Antica

There are days which will stand out in my life. This was one of them.