Dante Alighieri, an intellectual biography

Giovanni Papini, journalist, essayist, novelist, writer, poet, literary critic and philosopher, was a controversial literary figure of the early and mid-twentieth century and the earliest and most enthusiastic representative and promoter of Italian pragmatism.

Due to his ideological choices, Papini’s work was almost forgotten after his death, although it was later re-evaluated and appreciated again: in 1975, the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges called him an “undeservedly forgotten” author.

In 1913 he published his essay Ventiquattro cervelli (“Twenty four brains”), in which he reviewed, with a critical slant and with great philosophical scrutiny, the life and works of great personalities such as Dante Alighieri, Leonardo Da Vinci, George Berkeley, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jonathan Swift, Benedetto Croce and, finally, himself!

«The Divine Comedy is not yet complete. When the disdainful poet wrote that last fair starry line, he had merely finished the fundamental theme on which other men were to execute complicated variations. For a great book is only an initial motif, a starting point from which later generations proceed to develop all the possible themes of a perennial symphony».