Dantedì refers to the holiday celebrating the great Italian poet, Dante Alighieri.
From the website, ItalianTraditions.
March 25th is celebrated throughout Italy on Dantedì, the national day dedicated to Dante Alighieri, father of the Italian language and author of the Divine Comedy. This date is not random: scholars recognize it as the day the otherworldly journey begins narrated in his masterpiece, a universal symbol of search, redemption and knowledge.
Established in 2020, Dantedì represents a precious opportunity to rediscover the current events of Dante and the value of his work. It is not just a tribute to literature, but a moment to reflect on Italian cultural identity and the power of the word as tool for thinking and transformation.
Well, that is incomplete. In a day to reflect on the value of Dante’s Divine Comedy and on the Italy’s deep and grand culture, but also on today’s date, the traditional date assigned to the Blessed Virgin Mary assent to being the Mother of God. So today is a confluence of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the day Dante the character spent in Hell. Of course it’s not a coincidence. It is widely known that Dante the author starts the pilgrimage of Dante the character on Good Friday of the year 1300. What is not as widely well known, though growing in circulation, is that Good Friday of the year 1300 happened to be March 25th, which would make it on the same day as the Feast of the Annunciation. So the greatest Catholic poem ever written, also the greatest Italian poem ever written—heck, the greatest poem, period, ever written—sets the start of the action on both Good Friday and the Feast of the Annunciation.
On this Feast Day primarily of the Annunciation and secondarily
of Dantedì, I wish to commemorate with first let’s start with a clip from the
great Zeffirelli movie, Jesus of Nazareth, the Annunciation scene.
Second, I want to quote from the beginning of Dante’s Inferno,
the first canto where Dante the character is lost in a wood. From the wonderful Hollander and Hollander
translation which can be found at the Princeton
Dante Project.
1 Midway in the journey of our life
2 I
came to myself in a dark wood,
3 for
the straight way was lost.
4 Ah,
how hard it is to tell
5 the
nature of that wood, savage, dense and harsh --
6 the
very thought of it renews my fear!
7 It
is so bitter death is hardly more so.
8 But to set forth the good I found
9 I
will recount the other things I saw.
10 How
I came there I cannot really tell,
11 I
was so full of sleep
12 when
I forsook the one true way.
13 But
when I reached the foot of a hill,
14 there
where the valley ended
15 that
had pierced my heart with fear,
16 looking
up, I saw its shoulders
17 arrayed
in the first light of the planet
18 that
leads men straight, no matter what their road.
19 Then
the fear that had endured
20 in
the lake of my heart, all the night
21 I
spent in such distress, was calmed.
22 And
as one who, with laboring breath,
23 has
escaped from the deep to the shore
24 turns
and looks back at the perilous waters,
25 so
my mind, still in flight,
26 turned
back to look once more upon the pass
27 no
mortal being ever left alive.
28 After
I rested my wearied flesh a while,
29 I
took my way again along the desert slope,
30 my
firm foot always lower than the other.
Inferno, Canto 1, 1-30.
Finally, hear Dante’s beautiful Italian with a recitation of Inferno’s Canto 1 by the great Italian actor, Roberto Benigni.
Blessed Mother, ever Virgin, pray for us.
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