Dante’s appeal

For the last nine months, I’ve been living in Rome, and the experience has helped me to appreciate another, more subversive side to Dante’s appeal. Though he may be force-fed to seventh graders, applauded in the Senate, and praised by the Holy See, Dante is, as a writer, unmistakably anti-authoritarian. He looks around and what he sees is hypocrisy, incompetence, and corruption. And so he strikes out, not just at the Popes, whom he turns upside down and stuffs in a hole, but also at Florence’s political leaders, whom he throws into a burning tomb, and his own teacher, whom he sets running naked across scorching sand.

In 2015, this sort of frustration still feels fresh. Earlier this month the latest World Expo opened in Milan, on the edifying theme of “feeding the planet.” All spring, the papers have been filled with stories of bid-rigging and extortion. Just the other day, the Expo’s procurement manager and six other officials were arrested for graft. “No one should be surprised,” Milan’s Corriere della Sera editorialized. To express their anger over the billions in public funds lavished on Expo, students went on strike and cars were burned in the streets of Milan. It’s hard to know what Dante would have made of flaming Fiats, but it seems likely that he would have sympathized with the protesters: for the abuse of public trust, he prescribed swimming in boiling pitch, and for avarice, an eternity spent rolling stones in circles. / John Kleiner, The New Yorker