Letteratura dalmata italiana. Atti del Convegno internazionale di Trieste, 27-28 febbraio 2015, a cura di Giorgio Baroni e Cristina Benussi, Pisa-Roma, Serra, 2016

This review of Dante studies published in the proceedings of a conference on Italian Dalmatian literature held in Trieste in 2015 analyzes the contributions of various Dalmatian scholars who dealt with Dante Alighieri from the 16th to the 20th century. Dalmatian culture showed an extraordinary variety of approaches to the Comedy, from the political-pedagogical significance attributed by Pier Alessandro Paravia, who saw Dante as a master for the formation of Italian identity, to the consolatory and intellectual resistance use made of it by Mirko Deanović during his imprisonment in the Stara Gradiška concentration camp, where he organized Dante courses for his fellow detainees. The tradition also includes fundamental philological contributions, such as those of Giovan Francesco Fortunio who in 1516 placed Dante at the center of the first Italian grammar, of Adolfo Mussafia who applied modern methods of German philology to the text of the Comedy while intuiting the different tradition of each canticle, and of Antonio Lubín, considered together with Niccolò Tommaseo the greatest Dalmatian Dante scholar. The latter developed original interpretations mixing literary and historical analysis, while other scholars like Arturo Colautti creatively reworked Dante episodes and Serafino Raffaele Minich applied the biographical method interpreting the Comedy as an attempt at moral rehabilitation by the exiled poet. The whole testifies to the richness and continuity of Dante's reception in Dalmatia across the centuries