698 Dante in Love (with Ellen Nerenberg and Anthony Valerio) [Ad-Free Archive Edition]

The History of Literature

Jacke Wilson

History, Books, Arts

4.6 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 24 April 2025

⏱️ 66 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It's springtime! A great time to be in love - and if you're a poetic genius like Dante Alighieri, a great time to catch a glimpse of a girl named Beatrice on the streets of Florence, fall madly in love with her, and spend the rest of your life beatifying her in verse. In this episode, we present a conversation that first aired in February 2018, in which Jacke talks to Anthony Valerio and Professor Ellen Nerenberg about their love for Dante and his great prose-and-poetry love story, La Vita Nuova. Additional listening: 650 Dante's Divine Comedy (with Joseph Luzzi) 589 Dante and Friendship (with Elizabeth Coggeshall) 469 A Room with a View by E.M. Forster (with Gina Buonaguro) Help support the show at patreon.com/literature or historyofliterature.com/donate. The History of Literature Podcast is a member of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate Network. Learn more at thepodglomerate.com/historyofliterature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the Podglomerate Network and Lit Hub Radio.
0:09.1	Hello, this is Jack in 2025, bringing you an old favorite episode of ours, part of our
0:15.2	once-a-month series to resurface something from the archives, presented without commercial interruption as best we
0:23.5	can. In this episode, we discussed Dante's early work, Levitanova, which Dante wrote about 25 years or so
0:31.4	before he began writing the Divine Comedy. In it, he expressed his youthful love for Beatrice, whom he'd seen fleetingly in the street.
0:40.7	He hadn't gotten over it. And guess what? Decades later, he still hadn't. He used to call this
0:47.9	early work his little book. It's a mix of poetry and prose, and it's a book I truly love.
0:55.2	I was lucky to have the chance to talk it over with my former Italian professor, Ellen Nurenberg,
1:00.6	and her sweet partner, Anthony Valerio, both of them authors and scholars in their own right.
1:07.2	We'll skip past a visit from Oliver Twist and a letter from a listener and just get straight into the introduction of the two guests.
1:14.2	So here we go, the Dante in Love episode from back in February of 2018.
1:20.4	I hope you enjoy it.
1:21.5	Music I'm I'm I'm
1:28.3	I'm
1:30.3	I'm
1:31.3	I'm
1:32.3	I'm
1:33.3	I'm
1:34.3	I'm
1:35.3	go and
1:36.3	Oh
1:37.3	Oh
	...

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