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A four-week institute for twenty-five college and university faculty to study Dante's Divine Comedy.

This four-week NEH Summer Institute Dante’s Divine Comedy, poetry, philosophy, and the city of Florence will lead non-specialist literature and general humanities college, community college, and university teachers through a close reading of the Comedy. The focus will be on how the city of Florence, as a vibrant archive, inspired the poet and shaped the poem. The most brilliant city in Europe during the Renaissance, Florence’s great cultural and economic expansion began during Dante’s time. While the Comedy represents the cultural flowering that was occurring, it is also full of concrete references to specific places in the city, to its citizens, and to its moral decline and political turbulence, of which Dante himself was a victim. Situating the study of the Comedy in Florence, offers an intimate yet intellectually expansive view of the poem and how Dante parlayed Florence’s emerging power into a massive critique of civic disorder, acquisitiveness, and corruption.