Joseph Luzzi

When you lose your whole world in a moment, where do you turn? On a cold November morning, Joseph Luzzi, a Dante scholar and professor at Bard College, found himself racing to the hospital—his wife, Katherine, eight-and-a-half months pregnant, had been in a horrible car accident. In one terrible instant, Luzzi became both a widower and a first-time father. In the aftermath of unthinkable tragedy, Luzzi relied on the support of his Italian immigrant family, returning to his childhood home to grieve and care for his infant daughter. But it wasn't until he turned to The Divine Comedy—a poem he had devoted his life to studying and teaching—that he learned how to resurrect his life. Following the same structure as Dante's epic poem, Luzzi is shepherded out of his own "dark wood," passing through the grief-stricken Inferno, the Purgatory of healing, and ultimately stepping into the Paradise of rediscovered love. Beautifully written, poignant, insightful, and unflinchingly honest, In a Dark Wood is a hybrid of heartrending memoir and a meditation on the power of great art to give us strength in our darkest moments. Drawing us into hell and back, it is Dante's journey, Joseph Luzzi's, and our very own.

What Dante Taught Me About Grief, Healing, and the Mysteries of Love

In a Dark Wood

A story of love and grief. ‘I became a widower and a father on the same day’ says Joseph Luzzi. His book tells how Dante’s ‘The Divine Comedy’ helped him to endure his grief, raise their infant daughter, and rediscover love.

In a Dark Wood: What Dante Taught Me About Grief, Healing, and the Mysteries of Love

The life and times of Dante’s soaring poetic allegory of the soul’s redemptive journey toward God Written during his exile from Florence in the early 1300s, Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy describes the poet’s travels through hell, purgatory, and paradise, exploring the state of the human soul after death. His poema sacro, sacred poem, profoundly influenced Renaissance writers and artists such as Giovanni Boccaccio and Sandro Botticelli and was venerated by modern critics including Erich Auerbach and Harold Bloom. Dante’s “Divine Comedy” narrates the remarkable reception of Dante’s masterpiece, one of the most consequential religious books ever written. Tracing the many afterlives of Dante’s epic poem, Joseph Luzzi shows how it left its mark on the work of such legendary authors as John Milton, Mary Shelley, and James Joyce while serving as a source of inspiration for writers like Primo Levi and Antonio Gramsci as they faced the most extreme forms of political oppression. He charts how the dialogue between religious and secular ideas in The Divine Comedy has shaped issues ranging from changing conceptions of women’s identity and debates about censorship to the role of canonical literature in popular culture. An intimate portrait of a work that has challenged and inspired generations of readers, Dante’s “Divine Comedy” reveals how Dante’s strikingly original and controversial vision of the afterlife can help us define our spiritual beliefs, better understand ourselves, and navigate the complexities of modern life.

A Biography

Dante's Divine Comedy

One of The New Yorker's Best Books of the Year "A lively book.…[Luzzi] brilliantly sets the operatic stage of vibrant, violent Renaissance Florence and brings to life the characters who helped resurrect Botticelli." —Max Norman, Wall Street Journal Some five hundred years ago, Sandro Botticelli, a painter of humble origin, created works of unearthly beauty. A star of Florence’s art world, he was commissioned by a member of the city’s powerful Medici family to execute a near-impossible project: to illustrate all one hundred cantos of The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, the ultimate visual homage to that “divine” poet. This sparked a gripping encounter between poet and artist, between the religious and the secular, between the earthly and the evanescent, recorded in exquisite drawings by Botticelli that now enchant audiences worldwide. Yet after a lifetime of creating masterpieces including Primavera and The Birth of Venus, Botticelli declined into poverty and obscurity. His Dante project remained unfinished. Then the drawings vanished for over four hundred years. The once famous Botticelli himself was forgotten. The nineteenth-century rediscovery of Botticelli’s Dante drawings brought scholars and art lovers to their knees: this work embodied everything the Renaissance had come to mean. From Botticelli’s metaphorical rise from the dead in Victorian England to the emergence of eagle-eyed connoisseurs like Bernard Berenson and Herbert Horne in the early twentieth century, and even the rescue of precious art during World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the posthumous story of Botticelli’s Dante drawings is, if anything, even more dramatic than their creation. A combination of artistic detective story and rich intellectual history, Botticelli’s Secret shows not only how the Renaissance came to life, but also how Botticelli’s art helped bring it about—and, most important, why we need the Renaissance and all that it stands for today.

The Lost Drawings and the Rediscovery of the Renaissance

Botticelli's Secret

This groundbreaking study considers Italian Romanticism and the modern myth of Italy. Ranging across European and international borders, he examines the metaphors, facts, and fictions about Italy that were born in the Romantic age and continue to haunt the global literary imagination.

Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy

In this comprehensive guide, some of the world's leading scholars consider the issues, films, and filmmakers that have given Italian cinema its enduring appeal. Readers will explore the work of such directors as Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Roberto Rossellini as well as a host of subjects including the Italian silent screen, the political influence of Fascism on the movies, lesser known genres such as the giallo (horror film) and Spaghetti Western, and the role of women in the Italian film industry. Italian Cinema from the Silent Screen to the Digital Image explores recent developments in cinema studies such as digital performance, the role of media and the Internet, neuroscience in film criticism, and the increased role that immigrants are playing in the nation's cinema.

Italian Cinema from the Silent Screen to the Digital Image

While Luzzi establishes how certain qualities of film—its link with technological processes, capacity for mass distribution, synthetic virtues (and vices) as the so-called total art—have reshaped centuries-long debates, A Cinema of Poetry explores what is specific to the Italian art film and, more broadly, Italian cinematic history. In other words, what makes this version of the art film recognizably "Italian"?

Aesthetics of the Italian Art Film

A Cinema of Poetry

A poignant personal account from a child of Calabrian peasants whose lifelong study of Italy unveils the mysteries of this Bel Paese, "Beautiful Land," where artistic genius and political corruption have gone hand in hand from the time of Michelangelo to The Sopranos The child of Italian immigrants and an award-winning scholar of Italian literature, in My Two Italies Joseph Luzzi straddles these two perspectives to link his family's dramatic story to Italy's north-south divide, its quest for a unifying language, and its passion for art, food, and family. From his Calabrian father's time as a military internee in Nazi Germany—where he had a love affair with a local Bavarian woman—to his adventures amid the Renaissance splendor of Florence, Luzzi creates a deeply personal portrait of Italy that leaps past facile clichés about Mafia madness and Tuscan sun therapy. He delves instead into why Italian Americans have such a complicated relationship with the "old country," and how Italy produces some of the world's most astonishing art while suffering from corruption, political fragmentation, and an enfeebled civil society. With topics ranging from the pervasive force of Dante's poetry to the meteoric rise of Silvio Berlusconi, Luzzi presents the Italians in all their glory and squalor, relating the problems that plague Italy today to the country's ancient roots. He shares how his "two Italies"—the earthy southern Italian world of his immigrant childhood and the refined "northern" Italian realm of his professional life—join and clash in unexpected ways that continue to enchant the many millions who are either connected to Italy by ancestry or bound to it by love.

A Personal and Cultural History

My Two Italies

An einem kalten Morgen im November hetzt Joseph Luzzi, Dante-Forscher und Dozent am Bard College im Bundesstaat New York, ins Krankenhaus – seine Frau Katherine, die im achten Monat schwanger ist, hatte einen schweren Verkehrsunfall. Von der einen Sekunde auf die andere ist Luzzi Witwer und Vater zugleich. Um vor seiner Trauer fliehen zu können, kümmert Luzzi sich - zusammen mit seiner Mutter - um seine kleine Tochter und stürzt sich vor allem in Arbeit. Er studiert und analysiert Dantes Göttliche Komödie intensiver als er es je zuvor getan hat. Durch das epische Gedicht des italienischen Philosophen, lernt Luzzi mit seiner Trauer umzugehen und einen Weg hinaus zu finden. Auf Dantes Spuren wird Luzzi nach und nach aus seinem „dunklen Walde“ geführt, von der Hölle über den Läuterungsberg bis hin ins Paradies der wiedergefundenen Liebe.

Wie Dante mir einen Weg aus meiner Trauer wies

In einem dunklen Walde

A Cinema of Poetry brings Italian film studies into dialogue with fields outside its usual purview by showing how films can contribute to our understanding of aesthetic questions that stretch back to Homer. Joseph Luzzi considers the relation between film and literature, especially the cinematic adaptation of literary sources and, more generally, the fields of rhetoric, media studies, and modern Italian culture. The book balances theoretical inquiry with close readings of films by the masters of Italian cinema: Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti, Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Bernardo Bertolucci, and others. Luzzi's study is the first to show how Italian filmmakers address such crucial aesthetic issues as the nature of the chorus, the relation between symbol and allegory, the literary prehistory of montage, and the place of poetry in cinematic expression—what Pasolini called the "cinema of poetry." While Luzzi establishes how certain qualities of film—its link with technological processes, capacity for mass distribution, synthetic virtues (and vices) as the so-called total art—have reshaped centuries-long debates, A Cinema of Poetry also explores what is specific to the Italian art film and, more broadly, Italian cinematic history. In other words, what makes this version of the art film recognizably "Italian"? "A thought-provoking and well-written investigation of the role of history and realism in Italian cinema and the role played by the centuries-long tradition of poetry (or more precisely, poesis) in this quest."—H-Italy "Ambitious, inventive, learned . . . A Cinema of Poetry . . . brilliantly analyzes the art in the art film by showing how Italian cinema uses a chorus or expresses itself through allegory . . . This impressively intelligent re-description of the tradition surely takes its place alongside other necessary histories of Italian cinema."—Choice Joseph Luzzi is a professor of comparative literature at Bard College. He is the author of Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy, which received the MLA’s Scaglione Prize for Italian Studies; My Two Italies, a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice; and In a Dark Wood: What Dante Taught Me about Grief, Healing, and the Mysteries of Love.

Joseph Luzzi

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