Covid-19 and Dante’s Hell: Venturing from a Black Hole on the Thread of a Tune

What do Covid-19, a 21^st-century pandemic, and the Divine Comedy, a 14^th-century literary masterpiece, have in common? Apparently not much, except maybe for important anniversaries in 2021: the very first one for the pandemic, which was declared such—a pandemic—in March last year; and the seven-hundredth for Dante Alighieri, the author of the Divine Comedy, who died in 1321. Yet the two have often been associated, and not just because celebrations for the Dante anniversary worldwide had to take place during the coronavirus pandemic. As every literary masterpiece, the Divine Comedy is still able to speak to us today and is a source for thoughts and metaphors, including those that help us reflect upon and describe the effects of the virus.

In this talk, I look at how Dante has been considered so far in relation to Covid-19, that is at allegorical and metaphorical readings of the Divine Comedy that have been offered, and I propose my own reading, which I call metonymic, based on an in-depth analysis of three lines by Dante (Inf. III, 1-3). While metaphorical readings take one or few aspects of the Divine Comedy, such as human suffering, sin, or moral judgement, and transfer them to the pandemic world of today, eventually wiping out Dante’s text, my reading keeps Inf. III, 1-3 always at the centre while reflecting upon the Covid-19 crisis, holding the two together as contiguous systems.