A 2021 season of participative readings from The Divine Comedy

in the middle of the journey of our life …

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita …

700 years on from Dante’s death, his epic narrative poem The Divine Comedy continues to grip the imagination of countless artists, composers, film-makers, writers and academics across the world. Translated into more than one hundred languages, The Divine Comedy stand alongside the Bible and the works of Homer and Shakespeare as one of the ultimate pillars of literary creation in human history.

To celebrate Dante’s astonishing legacy and his poem’s enduring power and fascination, Milan theatre producer Julia Holden is curating a season of participative readings from The Divine Comedy throughout 2021, in collaboration with award-winning playwright Justin Butcher and a team of top UK theatre professionals.

To find out more, and to book your place, click here.

Canto 6 

In the third circle the shades of the gluttonous are battered eternally by hail, rain and snow. Written in a ‘low’ style, in contrast to the ‘high’ courtly romantic lyricism of Canto 5, this is a bitter allegorical critique of the ‘gluttony’ for dominion and power of Dante’s own city of Florence, which has consigned him to a lifelong exile. The name of the glutton who introduces himself as a fellow-Florentine is Ciacco – a derogatory Italian word for ‘pig’. Here Dante and Virgil also encounter Cerberus, the three-headed hound of the underworld, whose eternally ravenous mouths make him the prototype of the gluttons.