Papé Satan

How would the great poet live our present? His Comedy opens a window on life, on man today and in the past, and whoever reads the Comedy can only perceive how it speaks of him and of his aspiration to a full life. There are many similarities between us and the ancients, between ours and their aspiration to salvation, happiness and eternity. In Dante who wants to climb the luminous hill alone, at the beginning of Hell, we all find ourselves: but it is in an attitude of openness towards goodness, love and grace that the possibility of looking at reality in a more true. The Comedy is a work of poetry that has strong ambitions for truth. It intends to reveal the structure of the universe, shed light on earthly phenomena and scrutinize the human soul in its deepest mysteries. The man of our time, a prisoner of the increasingly chaotic vortex of life, is forced to question himself about ideological fractures and the way we live our existence, almost always based on a fixed pattern that does not help him find the right path. Playing on the figure of Dante in our world, representing him while he himself represents himself, and transporting his desire to affirm his being and the figure of him into our era. My Dante appears in the iconic red robe, echoes that of Botticelli from 1495 and reproduces his laurel wreath, a symbol of eternal poetic glory. But the revolutionary gesture is in the position of his arms: the right bent with the fingers in a V to indicate a victory, the left tense in the act of taking a selfie. It is a contemporary, vain and widespread gesture, a Dante who celebrates himself as an influencer, who does not find change or challenge strange and means “I am here, after 700 years, to put my ideas to bear”. The title of the work, one of the most well-known verses of the Comedy, is the ideal transposition of the words that a teenager would say while taking a selfie “For the lord of Hell, what do my eyes see?”.