Show Originally Aired: 3/3/2003 CALL 1 800-423-TALK
The Dante Club
A Giotto portrait of Dante, with permission from the Longfellow House, Cambridge. Email to friend
View the full sized image of Giotto's portrait of Dante Alighieri.
Even reading Dante can be dangerous. Those lurid descriptions of Hell, where bodies writhe in torment and punishments that fit the crimes committed in life. Well, that was all too much for the powers-that-be at Harvard University in the year 1865. Proper Protestant Bostonians weren't eager for professors to teach such filth, especially when it was written in the language of the Italians, who, like the Irish, were pouring into "their" city.
And so begins a new novel, a murder mystery, called The Dante Club. Its heroes are some of the famous poets of the nineteenth century: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell and Oliver Wendell Holmes. They are Dante's defenders, and, it turns out, crime scene investigators. The dangers of discovering Dante.
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