Poverty in Exile: Dante’s Idea of St Francis in Paradiso

A talk presented by Professor Rodney Lokaj, Associate Professor of Italian Philology, Università degli Studi di Enna, “Kore” (Sicily, Italy). Prof. Lokaj will guide the audience through some of the key passages in Paradiso XI, the canto in the Divine Comedy specifically dedicated by Dante to St Francis of Assisi. The audience will see what model of holiness Dante sought to propound and how in the very idea of poverty in worldly terms, but nobility in spiritual terms, lay the perfect parallel with his own plight – a leading intellectual of Florence forced into exile and poverty himself. In English.