A DIVINE COMEDY

The Divine Comedy is an epic poem, written by Dante Alighieri at the beginning of the 14th century. In this autobiographical journey to spiritual freedom, the pilgrim Dante ventures into the three realms of Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise through the guidance of different characters that he meets along the way: from the dark wood to the beatific vision of God.

The poet Virgil represents logic, and it is through him that Dante is able to cross and to overcome the obstacles he faces in Inferno, the symbolical place where the daemons of our minds are trapped. Dante teaches us that it is through the courage of looking them in the eyes that we can win them over and free ourselves from all sufferance.

Beatrice is Dante’s spiritual alter-ego, his intuition. The two meet after Dante and Virgil have climbed the mountain of Purgatory and reached its summit, in the Garden of Eden. Through the encounter with Beatrice, Dante is telling us that, at a certain point along this journey of introspection, our logic can no longer be of aid; it is in this moment that we need to surrender, open our hearts and trust the invisible force of Love in order to start living for real.

It is with a renewed mind-heart connection that the poet shows us how to access paradise, not after the life but here on earth, in this very moment, in this divine comedy that is our life. 

DANTE IN ICELAND

It all started in 2002, when engineer Giancarlo Gianazza discovers a date encrypted in the position of the hands of Botticelli’s Primavera. After further analysis, he realizes that the painting depicts a scene described in the last six songs of Dante’s Purgatory: where a young Dante enters the Garden of Eden and after a rite of purification he reunites with his beloved Beatrice, together with whom he will ascend to the heavens.

This leads him into looking for more clues hidden in the lines of The Divine Comedy, which he finds and interprets as geographical coordinates pointing him to a precise location of central Iceland, a scenery that has a striking resemblance with the one Dante narrates in his epic poem. 

In 2004 Gianazza embarks on his first expedition to Iceland, where year after year and with the help of fellow seekers he will return year after year in search of the most infamous treasure of all time: the lost treasure of the Knights Templar. 

DANTES’ SECRET MESSAGE

From the treasure buried under the Icelandic permafrost to the lore conceal’d under close texture of the mystic strains in the Divine Comedy. One of the purposes of this film is to build a bridge between reality and imagination, between concrete and abstract, between material and immaterial. Sometimes the line that splits the human experience into these two spheres is so fine that it is hard to know where the truth lies. Being involved in this exercise – the search for Truth – we often witness a pole reversal, where abstract becomes concrete and concrete becomes ever more abstract. In the case of the film, on the one side we see pragmatic men applying a rigorous scientific method to find a treasure that is utopia, on the other we meet the female characters that through a philosophical and non-invasive approach believe that the truth can be found within our hearts. 

The message of Dante is not buried in some far away place but it is inside the verses of The Divine Comedy. The journey it is not outward but inward. This is the message of Maria Soresina, essayist and Dante scholar who through a unique and original analysis of The Divine Comedy unveils Dante’s real secret: the Cathar heresy.