The exhibition is one of the cornerstones of the articulated widespread exhibition specially designed for the celebrations of the centenary of 2021, which provides for the double homage to the Poet and to the city of Verona, which gave him "your first refugio and your first hostel" ( Paradiso, XVII, 70). The city of Verona, in fact, is not simply the background of Dante's story, but itself becomes the protagonist. This specificity, which characterizes it compared to the other Dantean cities, is enhanced through a city itinerary which, with the help of a specially created paper map, leads the visitor to rediscover twenty-one places - including squares, palaces, churches, monumental emergencies in city and territory – directly linked to the presence of the Poet, his children and heirs, and those of Dante's tradition.
The exhibition at the Modern Art Gallery is a tribute to Dante's Veronese exile and to the link between Verona and the Poet which, over the centuries, continued to feed, giving rise to a rich artistic production.
The exhibition project includes a selection of over 100 works including paintings, sculptures, works on paper, fabrics and material evidence of the Scaliger eramanuscripts, incunabula and printed volumes in original and digital format from civic collections, city libraries, Italian and foreign libraries and museums.
The exhibition covers a time span between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries and develops into two main thematic nuclei: the first intends to reconstruct the relationship between Dante, Verona and the Veneto region in the early fourteenth century, while the second focuses on the nineteenth-century revival of an ideal Middle Ages between Verona and the Veneto.
If the opening of the exhibition recalls the legendary and alleged meeting between Giotto and Dante in Padua and allows you to retrace the artistic culture of Verona in the great hub of the Giotto revolution, the exhibition then continues in the fascinating story of the deep bond that united Dante and Cangrande of the Scala, to whom the poet dedicated Paradise. The rich testimonies linked to the figure of the Scaliger outline the context in which Dante spent the years of exile up to the creation of his Poem. Decorated texts of the Comedy, handwritten and printed, accompany visitors from Dante's time to the end of the eighteenth century, attesting to the constant attention that Verona and the Veneto region paid to the Poet and his Work.
Among the works on display, not to be missed are the three drawings by Botticelli, on loan from the Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin. In particular, Dante and Beatrice. Paradiso II, was chosen as the coordinated image of the widespread exhibition, which graphically develops the theme of Dante's itinerary in Paradise and translates it into the path of the Poet, guided by Beatrice, along the streets of Verona, to discover the places linked to his memory .
The second thematic nucleus develops the rediscovery of the myth of Dante in the great nineteenth-century season, as an incarnation of the nascent ideals of the Risorgimento and at the same time an example of the creative torment of the exiled poet.
It is at this point of the exhibition itinerary that the visitor will be able to admire the iconographic fortune of Dante's characters, starting with Beatrice and Gaddo, but also of other female figures and the tragic events, linked to the theme of love and star-crossed lovers, of Pia de' Tolomei and Paolo and Francesca. This last theme introduces the myth of Romeo and Juliet, young lovers born from the pen of Luigi da Porto in the sixteenth century and made famous by William Shakespeare all over the world.
Through this path it will be possible to grasp the constitution of the identity of nineteenth-century Verona, which on the one hand is nourished by the historical and real presence of Dante at the court of Cangrande, on the other by the imaginary one of Romeo and Juliet, also created in the frame of a XNUMXth century Scala.
I two thematic itineraries, Dante's real one and Shakespeare's imaginary one, both in the background - still real and imaginary - of a Scaliger Middle Ages, define a salient feature of the urban and cultural physiognomy of Verona, still well recognizable today: for this reason the exhibition is inextricably linked to the "widespread exhibition" which is the city itself, in the monuments and in the urban and architectural testimonies linked to the memory of Dante and Romeo and Juliet.
