(ANSA) - ROME, SEPTEMBER 21 - "A militant and not very affectionate Dante has always been celebrated and so at school we hated him, they did everything to get him away and instead we must bring him closer to us. I always thought that the Divine Poet should be compensated".
So a visibly satisfied Pupi Avati told DANTE about him, a film he chased for eighteen years and which he finally made, in cinemas from 29 September with 01.
Does art justify a life?
"Certainly yes in the case of Dantee by Boccaccio and perhaps this also applies to me, even if, I must confess, the best gift for my wife will be to say: I will stop making films" says the director at the Casa del Cinema.
This is the movie.
We are in 1350 and Giovanni Boccaccio (SergioCastellitto) is commissioned to bring ten gold florins as symbolic compensation to Sister Beatrice (Valeria d'Obici), daughter of Dante Alighieri (Alessandro Sperduti), a nun in Ravenna in the monastery of Santo Stefano degli Ulivi.
Dante died in exile in 1321, but his fame spread everywhere.
His last twenty years have been terrible, in search of hospitality after a condemnation to the stake and beheading inflicted on both him and his sons who fled in turn from Florence.
The ten florins would be precisely the symbolic compensation for the confiscation of assets and the unjust sentence.
Against that part of the ecclesial world that considers the Comedy a diabolical work, Boccaccio accepts this assignment also in order to be able to carry out an investigation on Dante that allows him to deny the human story and the injustices suffered.
Along his long journey, Boccaccio, as well as his daughter, will meet those who, in the last years of Ravenna's exile, gave shelter and offered hospitality echoes, on the contrary, rejected and put the exile to flight.
From Florence to Ravenna, Boccaccio stops in the same convents, villages and castles, all to reconstruct his entire history.
(HANDLE).
