Combining the languages of illustration, comics and cinema I have brought out my version that is a little comical, a little tragic… and I am continually adding and modifying scenes from this wonderful Divine Comedy, also thanks to the enlightening Cathar reading of Maria Soresina.
Dante is so complex that he can be read throughout life, at all ages, and with each reading he offers us different visions because the Divine Comedy is a true mine of images…
So I am also making my own version that is somewhere between illustration, comics, cinema, video games…
Reading Dante, over the last 25 years, I have had different illustrative phases: at the beginning the drawings were desperate, then a child Dante was born, disoriented and scared, who made me see the comic side. Mixing the two substances, drama and comedy, I left some monsters from the first phase re-set in a lighter comic book atmosphere, and gave freedom to the visions that freed themselves from the weight of tragedy.
As Calvino says in his American lectures, the challenge is to make lightness coexist with heaviness.
At the third and fourth reading, where necessary, I added views that I had skipped and that cinematically link the scenes with fields and reverse shots, trying to envelop the multiple and dreamlike space of Dante’s journey.
I hope that the result is a non-stereotyped Dante who reaches readers of all ages to make us reflect on our human condition as only the great poet has been able to do for 700 years now and will continue to do so.
