A project by Lisa Capaccioli
Coordination Marco Capaccioli and Adriano Rigoli
Organisation secretariat Studio Etaoin
Technical sponsor Planet
With the collaboration of ICLM (International Committee Literary and Composers' Museums)
Under the patronage of the Dante 2021 National Committee of MIBACT
The project "Quattromilasettecentoundici in Commedia" wishes to celebrate the importance of Dante's Divine Comedy in Italy and the world, and it does so with the ambition of involving all the Houses of Great Personalities that are part of the National Association of Houses of Memory and the European network.
Each house will to read, inside the house museum, a piece of the Divine Comedy (in order for it to make sense, chosen from the proposed list). By video-recording it with a smartphone the project will recreate, verse after verse, video after video, the entirety of Dante's masterpiece. This is not an easy task, given the difficulty of Dante's verses and the size of the work, but it is possible: a first example of how to record oneself reading Dante's tercets will be provided as a tutorial for the project, accompanied by a file with simple instructions on how best to record using your smartphone. Each house will record in its own language.
To join the initiative you must fill in and send the form that you will find at the bottom of the page, indicating the chosen direction from the list proposed. Verses that have already been opted in and registered will be marked in red so as not to generate duplicates.
After shooting the video of their tercet, the House will send it with the free service wetransfer to the email
We will post it on our social media, and you can share the post. Once we have received all the recordings, we will edit them into a single video. It is sure to become a meaningful piece that we will present publicly when possible. This project dares to be a challenge: it wants to represent, for all Houses of Memory in Italy and Europe, the will and the possibility to unite in a common project, without the need to be in the same place; the plurality of voices and faces of those who will take part in the project aims to renew the bond between European citizens in a wide-ranging cultural action, proving that through culture you can achieve what you have heard and read for months: "we are close regardless of our distance"; demonstrating that in Dante's journey, in his challenges, we find our stories, our history.
But why 4711?
Because 4711 is the number of tercets in the Divine Comedy. The three cantos (Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso) are made up of a total of 14233 endecasyllabic verses structured in tercets in chained rhyme (ABA BCB CDC scheme...): this structure is now known as "Dantesque tercets".
In order to facilitate the reading of the tercets, we have decided to follow the division of the tercets by subject, according to Natalino Sapegno's guide published by La Nuova Italia Editrice in 1955, which inspired us for this voluntary and free project.
We realize this is an ambitious project, but we hope you will want to take part in it. We are certain that you will appreciate the importance of a project that, with the strength of a masterpiece that can still speak to all of us, seeks to represent and exalt the plurality of languages, voices and places that coexist in Europe.
Thank you for your attention and we look forward to seeing you.
List of "canti" and "versi" divided by "cantiche":
click to open the single list
