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Is it possible to appreciate fully Dante’s work without understanding the man himself and the society in which he lived? A recent book attempted to shed new light on what some have called the greatest of all European poems.

For the 700th anniversary of Dante Alighieri’s death (September 14th 2021), Open Culture decided to feature a timely resource: Teodolinda Barolini, a professor at Columbia University, posted online a course for anyone who wishes to read Dante’s Commedia from beginning to end. It features 54 recorded lectures, covering Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso, with each cantica being read in its entirety. Barolini also oversees a related web site, Digital Dante, where you can find Dante’s text in the Petrocchi edition with English translations by Mandelbaum and Longfellow. 

See also:

• To celebrate Dante's 750th birthday, in 2015 the BBC's Landmark programme discussed The Divine Comedy.
• Astronaut Reads The Divine Comedy on the International Space Station on Dante’s 750th Birthday
• BBC 2014 radio adaptation of The Divine Comedy
• Start the Week on The Divine Comedy
• Free Online Literature Courses: Dante
• A Free Course on Dante’s Divine Comedy from Yale University
• Botticelli’s 92 Illustrations of Dante’s Divine Comedy
• Danteworlds
• Divine Comedy in an illuminated medieval manuscript
• A Digital Archive of the Earliest Illustrated Editions of Dante’s Divine Comedy (1487-1568)
• Hear Inferno Read Aloud by Influential Poet & Translator John Ciardi (1954)
• William Blake’s Last Work: Illustrations for Dante’s Divine Comedy and on Blake's ongoing obsession with these drawings
• Visualising Dante’s Hell: See Maps & Drawings of Dante’s Inferno from the Renaissance Through Today
• A Free Course on Dante’s Divine Comedy from Yale University
• The curious history of Dante on screen
• The “Divine Comedy” is a salutary guide to hope amid adversity
• In the Divine Comedy, Dante goes down the circles of Hell meeting the world’s most illustrious sinners. 700 years after his death, a BBC series explored the contemporary meaning of the seven cardinal sins.