To mark the 700th anniversary of the death of the great poet Dante Alighieri, the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation has produced an audiobook featuring readings of selected passages of The Divine Comedy in thirty-three different languages.
Dalla selva oscura al Paradiso (From the Dark Wood to Paradise) takes listeners on a guided tour through the three cantiche of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise: a unique way to (re)discover an extraordinary poem that still today has the power to engage readers around the world and inspire generations of artists, writers, musicians, film and theatre directors.
Conceived and designed by the Foreign Ministry’s Directorate-General for Cultural and Economic Promotion and Innovation, the audiobook is the result of a joint project with thirty-two Italian Institutes of Culture, each of which sent a recording in the language of its host country of readings of selected passages from The Divine Comedy by local actors.
Sponsored by the National Committee for the Dante Celebrations, the Società Dantesca, and the Dante Group of ADI (Association of Italianists), the project was developed in partnership with the City of Ravenna, and with the scientific curatorship of two renowned Dante scholars, Alberto Casadei (University of Pisa) and Sebastiana Nobili (University of Bologna-Ravenna).
The thirty-three languages of the audiobook, for the 33 cantos in each of the three cantiche, are Italian, Albanian, Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, English, French, Finnish, Gaelic, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Lithuanian, Maltese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Turkish, Ukrainian.
To listen to the audiobook on Spotify click here.
