Carlino’s Crossings: Stuart Hood, Dante and a Civil War in Tuscany (1943–4)

The essay – which forms part of a larger project on travellers across the Tuscan Apennines – addresses three aspects of Dante’s presence in the region: first the poet's documented associations with and references to the mountains in which Stuart Hood (1915-2011) would find himself during the later years of World War II; secondly how readers of Dante had traced those associations within this landscape, especially during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (from the rise of bourgeois tourism to the Second World War); and thirdly Hood's wartime journeys in the Apennines and the relevance of his reading of Dante to the Tuscan "civil war" in which he himself became a combatant and to his later memoirs and novels which recall that conflict.

Keywords: Inferno, World War II, Tuscany