the Parco Letterario® Le Terre di Dante

 (Literary Park – Dante's Lands)

 

Great literature tells the story of men, facts and places both imaginary and real. When we read a literary work, our imagination retraces the events and places in the story: we try to imagine the houses, the towns, the landscape, the mysterious forests, the inaccessible mountains.

Well, the Parco Letterario® Le Terre di Dante (Literary Park – Dante's Lands) would like to accompany you along the path taken by the Poet, so you can see with your own eyes the beauty of the extraordinary places that the father of the Italian language immortalised.

During his long exile, wandering like a fugitive among the castles and noble palaces that offered him refuge, Dante wrote the Divine Comedy, transcribing into hendecasyllables (Italian 11-syllable verse) the images, sensations and manifold events of the lands between Tuscany and Romagna, where the Poet was born and died.

We are talking about the Casentino, with castles, parishes, the Monastery at Camaldoli, the Appenine ridges with the huge Casentino Forests National Park; about Romagna with its eternal conflicts, hundreds of stories; and finally, about the quiet beauty of the ancient city of Ravenna, on the sparkling Adriatic Sea.

The Parco Letterario® recommends you physically travel through these lands following itineraries offered by leterredidante.it. You will become directly acquainted with the places that inspired the poetry in those extraordinary pages from literature. Events and routes are suggested, along with places to stay and meditate, local products and crafts to get to know, things to see that are often hidden because they are off the mass tourism beaten track. Also on offer is a unique trip on the so-called "Dante Train", the Florence-Faenza-Ravenna train line, stopping in picturesque towns along the way, to pick up the route again to discover other Appenine towns, their traditions and lands.

This is why the Parco Letterario®, together with the UNESCO Convention, has become a promotional and protection tool for the area, networking activities, commitments, cultural assets, keepsakes that otherwise would be marginalised, forgotten or simply disappear.