The municipal administration of Pavia intends to pay homage to the Supreme Poet with Dante Project: a rich calendar of recitals, conferences, musical events that will accompany an exhibition that will celebrate the 700th anniversary of the death of Alighieri.

The exhibition, set up in the hall of the ancient Court Library of the Visconteo Castle and open to the public from 18 June 2021, was designed by the C. Bonetta Civic Library in collaboration with the Civic Museums of Pavia and with the participation of the Ghislieri College.

The Bust of Dante, a plaster work usually exhibited in the Gipsoteca of museums, introduces a selection of rare documents from the Bonetta Library, the Civic Museums and the Collegio Ghislieri. Among these, two very precious parchment sheets of one of the oldest manuscripts of the Divine Comedy, made a few years after the death of the Supreme Poet, the first illustrated edition of the poem, commissioned by Lorenzo the Magnificent in 1481 with engravings taken from drawings by Sandro Botticelli , an aldina edited by Pietro Bembo and printed in Venice in 1502 and the monumental work illustrated by Amos Nattini (1892-1985), former illustrator of D'Annunzio, who began to design the so-called 'images' during the First World War, one hundred lithographs dedicated to the masterpiece, made in the course of twenty years of work.

The exhibition is accompanied by the fascinating video art works of the director and videomaker Rino Stefano Tagliafierro: the first consists of an artistic video installation that stages the three canticles of the Divine Comedy, through the technique of digital animation. Here, some important classical paintings, reworked in a completely new guise, come to life in an evocative representation of Hell, Purgatory and Paradise. The second work, conceived specifically for this exhibition and which will be installed from September, consists of an emotional experience, a suggestive journey into the atmosphere of the canticles of the Divine Comedy, through a digital processing of the engravings by the painter Amos Nattini.