RIP Vittorio Sermonti

Thank you Frank

I remember with nostalgia and affection his Dante readings on Radio3 during the '80s.

«During the first summer of the war, my father read and explained Dante's Inferno to the twins, who were four years older than me and were preparing for their first year of high school. Whether out of vanity or resignation (I don't remember), I found myself included in the listening. In subsequent summers, Purgatorio and Paradiso were added to Inferno, just as hunger had set in. The cicadas performed their concert in the fig tree, my father's smoke from his Macedonia drifted climbing through the air, and I, practically, understood nothing. Neither concepts, nor symbols, nor words.

I did, however, understand—with a bewilderment made tolerable only by a thin padding of boredom—that the world was breaking into my perceptual field. The whole world created in its portentous concreteness. The misunderstood words assumed the arbitrary and irrevocable property of proper nouns. Names of people, rivers, or cities were inscribed on a minutely boundless map, yet enclosed in its own theatrical sweetness of a cemetery. I believe it was history.

In the secession of my eleventh year, I suffered the passion of a people and of its ancient language. I was a bit restless, very sad, and absolutely happy. And there was no (I remember) fortuitous pairing to which I did not immediately surrender, to which I had not already surrendered: the cello of the cicadas and the romance of Count Ugolino, the shapes of the smoke and the Provençal of Arnaldo Daniel, hunger and the lacerating acuity of God's light, my father and Dante, Dante and I.

I count that almost half a century of investigation allows me to specify what was happening to me then, as convinced as I am that what was happening to me, then, was nothing more and nothing less than the Divine Comedy»

Vittorio Sermonti, L’Inferno di Dante, Rizzoli, Milan 1988, p. xv

... a piece from the '900s that leaves us