2026
Divina fonocommedia by Paolo F. Bragaglia and Roberto Paci Dalò. Twelve Hours of Hendecasyllables, Sounds and voices on the first complete performance of the Divine Comedy from phonograph records.The Divine Comedy returns to resonate in its most radical dimension: that of voice, time, and listening. For the first time, the entire poem will be played without interruption through the complete series of phonograph records released by the label Cetra in 1962, featuring historic recordings by some of Italy’s greatest actors.
Twelve consecutive hours of words, rhythm, and recorded memory: from the beginning of Inferno to the light of Paradiso, in a unique passage that coincides with the work’s actual duration. Around the recorded voice, Paolo F. Bragaglia, Roberto Paci Dalò, and the invited artists create a live sonic flow of electronics, acoustic instruments, singing, and improvisation. Not a soundtrack, but a dialogue with the poem’s deep structure: the breath of the verses, the tension of its meter, the movement of the hendecasyllable. The record becomes both archive and presence. The recording of the past encounters the unrepeatable gesture of the present. In Ravenna, the city of Dante’s final years, in a place connected to the memory of his daughter Antonia, the Divine Comedy became a collective experience of duration: a contemporary ritual of listening, a sonic journey through seven centuries of language. A sonic ritual, a passage, a rave of the hendecasyllable.