Rondoni: And you, Roberto, you’ve never written a poem?
Benigni: I’ve written millions for my beautiful love! But I would never dare to publish or even recite one.
Rondoni: During your first, extraordinary television broadcasts reciting Dante, Mario Luzi, who was still alive at the time, said to me “You can tell he loves what he’s reading.” Now millions share the same opinion. But it’s not like you just got into poetry recently – there’s a scene in Down by Law where you quote Robert Frost… Reading poetry might seem like a strange thing but actually….
Benigni: Nabokov said it. When we’re little we identify with the author, which is the youngest way of reading. Then there’s the adolescent who reads “in order to find a message,” a road to follow. Then there’s the student who reads academically. Finally there’s the mature way of reading in which you retrace the steps of the author.
Rondoni: And as you’ve been retracing Dante, you’ve brought us all along…
Benigni: Poets are the most profound of the philsophers, the things they put inside you won’t come back out. Poetry is not a passing thought. It makes the everyday…
Rondoni: memorable. It makes it memorable…
Benigni: Hey, look at you finding the words, yes, poetry makes the everyday memorable and powerful thoughts as well.
Rondoni: You’ve experienced this Italy that is rediscovering Dante and recognizing that there’s something good to hold onto inside it… this is a strange hunger, a profound one. But often this sort of phenomenon is regarded with skepticism. It gets derided by people who say it’s a show or a fad. I believe that from a cultural point of view we are living in a very difficult time. Only 5 students out of 100 choose to do their college entrance exams on Dante and Francesco. Because these two are the pillars of our culture, it means that there is a crisis both of the tradition and of the future. Often institutions and intellectuals don’t pay attention to this fact, they just look after themselves. But there is this hunger I was mentioning… Having made this journey, what idea of Italy has come forward for you?
Benigni: The beautiful sensation of a big hug that can actually, physically be felt. I decided to make this journey, and I did it seriously. Each night there’s an average of 6/7000 people who leave loving Dante. They say that the Divine Comedy is beautiful, that poetry might interest them. I saw his Italy, because Dante went everywhere. Each time I went somewhere, I studied that place, its dialect, the history of the city, and finally what Dante did when he was there. It’s a mystery for me, too… in Palermo there was a full stadium, you’d have thought it was a Palermo-Rome soccer match.
Rondoni: How do you read this kind of hunger?
Benigni: The show could have been called “Dante, Berlusconi and Prodi: Hell” and certainly it would have filled the house. With “Tutto Dante,”[1] I had said we’d lose half the spectators. But actually it’s the second half of the show that gets to people the most. The part that’s just Dante. There’s not even nostalgia anymore for the funny part. The surprise was people’s reaction, their desire to be led into it so they could rediscover it and return to see what he’s really like. Sometimes the applause is for silence, for sensations instead of concepts. Last time in one of the southern cities there were at least 15 applauses for a scene opening with nothing, a nothing that means everything…
Rondoni: Because poetry is using words to say, to give voice to what can’t be known, to mystery, the the silence that speaks to us in what’s real…
Benigni: Right! I say things like a child who holds up what he’s just found. Dante did the same thing: he went to the very bottom of the ocean holding his breath, and then he came back up, almost suffocating, and then dived back under, saying continually “you’re all disgusting,” and then he immersed himself again and came back saying that we’re God. It’s moving. Dante saves us from the dullness of habit because he’s infantile himself, he shows how much fun he’s having with these dead people who are more alive than the living. Like Saba said. Dante touches you where you’ve never been touched. He’s high and low and gets to the bottom of things like an elevator that won’t stop. It’s a mystery, when you get to those verses that you can’t understand anymore, I don’t know how to explain them even to myself so I try to transmit this thing that can’t be known and is the most beautiful of all. Sometimes it’s happened that there’s a silence at the end of a canto as if at the end of a piece of classical music. For example when he says “And I fell to earth as a body falls dead”[2] It’s understood that Dante sees Paolo and Francesca crying as they embrace each other and he faints. Moreover, God made the wind and the noises stop so that the poet could hear, even God remains suspended for a moment. God himself wonders if this rule is just.
Rondoni: Our epoch is marked by two things that were very out of fashion for the culture of the second half of the twentieth century: God and liberty. The relationship between these two things is an urgent problem both for believers and non-believers. Dante had something to say because he decided to take his own life seriously. For him God is an active protagonist and liberty is what man makes and what he couldn’t live without. The Comedy is the Christian poem, that is, it is about liberty – both God’s and our own. Like in that supreme point, in the hymn to the virgin, when it’s understood that in order to save man in liberty God falls in love with Mary and waits for her forever.
Benigni: And he is the only one who really knows what it means to say– I’ve been waiting for you forever! That section is stupendous – you dedicated some beautiful pages to it that I use… it’s both exalted and a story for the fireside. There really are things that are meant for the hearth. The beauty of Dante, and it’s here in the canto of the virgin as well, and what fascinates me about him, is how much simple stuff there is. There’s superstition, not just theology. Like Stravinsky used folk music Dante goes from St. Augustine to St. Thomas, from St. Bernard to superstitions. In the Divine Comedy the sense of liberty is not just the mere “I want to do as I please” it’s the innate liberty within us, inalienable. Even if we are reduced to chains no one can take it away from us. That same liberty that disturbed even the church: the contrast between the divine omnipotence and human life, for which even God pauses.
Rondoni: That’s the reason I’m calling the Dante 09 festival ‘the meeting of Dante-esque people’ that is people who feel the adventure of the journey with both playfulness and seriousness, dizzy and humorous, vision and folk wisdom…
Benigni: His greatness is that there’s always both child and adult inside him. He makes you feel that even in humanity’s most horrendous situations, man is capable of goodness, there’s this liberty that nothing can crush. The liberty of saying no to God, to the divine part of ourselves. Man’s irreducibility, greatness… his magnificence can’t fail, it’s inherent. This is why I try, in simple language, to help people understand that an ethics based on religion is not more profound or different than an ethics without a religious base. This is an important thing, otherwise there can be no dialogue. The same profundity, the same attention to sadness, the same height.
Rondoni: I think ethics are a product of the depth with which one feels life, a product of aesthetics, of how beauty is perceived, its mystery… And what are poets good for? To help everyone remember and feel again that life is an irreducible event.
Benigni: An epiphany. Like falling in love. How does anyone bear what happens to us the first times? Thank goodness God gave us a way of dealing with it, otherwise we’d all end up in an insane asylum, we wouldn’t survive at all. It also happens with the astonishment of living. Dante makes us feel that even if our days and nights do not seem exceptional to anyone, each of us is the protagonist of an epic, irreplaceable, unique drama. He makes you feel that each one of us is here to complicate and complete the fresco. And there’s also the impression that there’s someone continually watching you, always, because they care for you deeply. That everything is working towards something. He even makes you feel that no one is too strange to be understood. We are all less strange and less hostile afterwards. The world is less foreign.
Rondoni: Did you ever expect to do a show like this?
Benigni: I didn’t even imagine it! Now however, I’m very happy with what I can manage to do. I make mistakes; sometimes I mess up wildly, but they feel how I love it to death, that part gets through and there remains in them a spark of this love. The result is just that, to show that you love something. A man who loves something is a show. So I already had a show because I love Dante himself. Every now and then my family used to talk about it. My parents are farmers and one of the things I remember that my father told me when I was little, when at 13 or 14 years old you look at life fearfully, was this: We were digging potatoes together and he noticed that I made a mistake every shovel-ful. He stopped and said to me “Boy, try to find a woman that you love, and nothing in the world will ever scare you again.” He dug the potatoes so that they came out like gold nuggets, he didn’t mess up a single one of them. I thought to myself, anyone who can dig potatoes like that must know a thing or two, I’ll listen to him! He spoke about Dante, even if he was someone who didn’t talk a lot, he was cheerful. My mother was illiterate, but like the “Madonna of the Cardellino” by Rafael, she was always holding the Gospel. She would get next to something warm and would open the book without knowing how to read. And I’d say to her “But mom, you don’t know how to read…” and she would look at me with this look and smile and say nothing but it seemed like she was saying “I know how to read better than you do.”
Rondoni: In Dante you see that the secret of art is obedience. Dante is one who “when Love breathes in me, takes note; what he, within, dicatates, I, in that way, without, would speak and shape.”[3]
Benigni: What a verse, once again! He obeys. I hadn’t thought about it but it’s really true, the secret of art is obedience. Since now I do it every evening, it’s become like a piece of music that I recognize like in a song-book… It’s incredible how he is able to hold it together technically. When you read the Convivio or the De Vulgari you understand the laboratory. He was a real scholar. He even invented editing and production. When it’s time for me to edit a movie, I remember the 10th Canto of the Inferno that begins with a scene in which the production is extraordinary. Before him it wasn’t even possible…
Rondoni: You must have seen all kinds of people on this trip…
Benigni: You know what, in Veneto even Baggio came to the show. I really love Baggio. He said to me “Do you know that you helped me to better understand Buddhism?” I said to him “Hang on, where are you going? You’ve got Christ, I mean, not to tell you what to do, but we’ve already got that guy… like your grandfather had him and the grandfather of your grandfather…”
Rondoni: That’s the same response they say Totti gave “Pardon, but are you Catholic?” “And whaddya want me to be?”
Benigni: That’s the exact answer I give when people ask me the same question “And what should I be?!” Except unfortunately I say it in Italian.[4] In the diaries of Gandhi, when Hinduism was in fashion and everyone was going to India after ’68, he wrote that he had discovered Christianity via Tolstoy. And he told the people coming to him “You’ve got Christ and you come to me?” But one can’t be facetious about these things because they’re so profound…
Rondoni: These days on the other hand we tend to simplify and turn this hunger for greatness into a banality, we throw away what is big in life, often with the excuse that it’s difficult…
Benigni: But difficulty is so beautiful, blessed… it’s a blessing from heaven that you don’t know what to do, because that’s when you become a man, you discover the world, life, you discover you’re alive. If you took a pill to eliminate this struggle it would dry up all emotion, you would be alive anymore. Worse than the slothful; it would be a new circle: the ones who didn’t want to live. Not just that they didn’t live, but they said “Nah, living doesn’t interest me.” That’s a kind of slothfulness Dante never encountered.
Rondoni: So listen, after Dante are you going to go back to making movies?
Benigni: Are you kidding? Of course!