Alinari’s Peregrinaggio Visivo: A Photographic Grand Tour of the Divine Comedy

Nicholas Berrettini, Yale University

Sometime amid the armistice and the Treaty of Versailles, Vittorio Alinari departed on a grand tour of Italy to visit all the places mentioned by Dante in the Divine Comedy. For nearly four years, the Florentine traveled about the Belpaese, photographing the many Italian cities, towns, and villages named in the poem. From Acquacheta to Verona, Alinari shot, developed, and arranged 213 photographs and 12 illustrations that, according to the photographer, visualized Dante’s Italy. The result of this journey, what critic Massimo Ferretti characterizes as “the culmination of his photographic achievement,” is a multimedia text entitled Il paesaggio Italico nella “Divina Commedia.”^[1] What exactly does this photo-text reframe, and what ideological work does it perform?

In this scholarly excursion, I argue that Alinari’s Il paesaggio Italico depersonalizes Dante’s poem and scaffolds a visual nationalist itinerary, erasing its moral and personal tension in favor of picturesque cohesion. Through a close analysis of the work’s sociohistorical context and formal peculiarities, I identify compensation as the central mechanism guiding the reception of Dante’s poem in Alinari’s photographic project. Taking the book’s preface as my point of departure, I situate Vittorio Alinari’s photographs in their historical and commercial context. I then provide an overview of Alinari’s biography before demonstrating how the organizational logic of his photographic text transforms the reader’s engagement with Dante’s poem into a touristic mode of participation. I conclude by considering how the visual vernacular of tourist photography renders Alinari’s multimedia text accessible to a wider audience beyond the alphabetized reader. In this context, attending to compensation shapes both visual reception of Dante and future interpretive possibilities.

Because the concept of compensation is central to my argument, let me begin by clarifying the term. Compensation derives from the Latin com- meaning “with” or “together,” and pensare, meaning “to think” or “to weigh.” The negotiation of meaning is embedded in pensare itself—a frequentative form of pendere, “to weigh.” Compensation, then, operates in a via di mezzo governed by the capacity to weigh ideas repeatedly and to calibrate thought with discernment. In using compensation, I refer not only to a reactionary attempt to offset a perceived absence but also to the strategic disavowal that obscures Italy’s national reality. As this essay will demonstrate, Vittorio Alinari’s Il paesaggio Italico partakes in this process of compensation, strategically weighing word against image and the local against the national in an Italy on the verge of the fascist ventennio.

In 1922, Vittorio Alinari published his Il paesaggio Italico, featuring a preface written by acclaimed dantista and friend Giuseppe Vandelli.^[2] Alinari had sent him a letter, quoted at length in the preface, where the photographer outlines the vision behind his project:

Mi proposi benché vecchio e stanco di ripetere in qualche modo le peregrinazioni del grande esule, pronto ad aggrapparmi per fotografare luoghi da lui menzionati su per le giogaie appenniniche anche se il mal tempo mi perseguitasse accanito, ad aggirarmi per le forre della maremma in quei dì mal sicure, a percorrere pianure e valli e laghi, a sfidare le ire del mare…^[3]

It is hard to miss the Romantic posture Alinari adopts in this passage. The intrepid desire of the traveler and the overall tenor of his note to Vandelli are redolent of the lofty style one expects to find in Grand Tour travel writings, such as those penned by Madame de Staël or Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Alinari proceeds to provide a long-winded list of the places traveled and perilous voyages faced during his visual pilgrimage. He employs a hammering anaphora of “volli,” accentuating his personal aspiration and readiness to capture every Italian location in Dante’s masterpiece—in his own medium.

Giuseppe Vandelli’s preface not only incorporates Alinari’s spirited letter but trumpets it into a subito crescendo. Vandelli unabashedly praises the work as a “vivida intelligenza” and the photographer as, “un uomo, che senza presumere essere o di venire considerato quale dantista di professione, può in coscienza vantarsi di conoscere e comprendere assai bene tutto il Poema.”^[4] This language ratifies Alinari’s authority on the subject matter while elevating his friend’s interpretative project to that of a Dante scholar. Might this adulation be a rhetorical attempt to compensate for what the project ultimately lacks?

A Dante scholar with the pedigree of Giuseppe Vandelli, a cruscante himself, ought to have known better. For one, much of Dante’s poetry is omitted in Alinari’s Il paesaggio Italico. In the instances that the poet’s terzine do appear, la parola dantesca is marginalized, abridged, and cast as an ancillary caption to the photographic image that governs each page. While Vandelli acknowledges this limitation among other inadequacies present in Alinari’s rendering of the Comedy, his preface remains in every sense a paean to his friend, anchored in an intensely nationalist rhetoric. In Vandelli’s own words, “la raccolta di tavole che ci dà l'Alinari” amounts to a Dantean work insofar as Alinari’s project, “conforme allo spirito di [Dante], agli altri suoi propositi e sentimenti d'italiano amantissimo del suo paese.”^[5] Alinari’s favoring of image over poetic text calls into question Vandelli’s appraisal and challenges conventional models of assessing Dante’s reception.

Alinari’s book invites a highly visual mode of reading, akin to perusing a tourist’s photographic album of the Comedy’s Italian locations. The aesthetic properties of the text induce such an intense visual interaction with the poem that the images obfuscate the few words on the page. Given its arrangement and, as far as I am aware, the lack of sustained scholarship on the relationship between Vittorio Alinari’s photography and Dante, Il paesaggio Italico occasions an uncharted case study for the photographic reception of Dante’s Comedy. So, how, then, does one approach Dante’s Comedy as if it were arranged as a photo-album?

Matthew Collins and Heather Webb have recently stressed the importance of multimodal approaches to reading the Comedy.^[6] In response to the poem’s visual quality, Webb rightly points out that “critics also need to develop modes of approaching the Commedia as if its textual images were arranged in a fresco programme such as that found in the Arena Chapel.”^[7] While the visual media at hand differ, this is the kind of readerly engagement that Il paesaggio Italico requires.

One key to understanding Alinari’s multimedia text lies in the author’s personal background. While I would not go so far as to say that Alinari is wholly lacking in artistic ability, I am reluctant to describe him as an artist.^[8] More aptly, Vittorio Alinari might be seen as a precursor to the modern travel marketing professional. The history of tourist photography in Italy owes much to the Alinari family. The firm was founded in 1852 in Florence by Vittorio’s father, Leopoldo, who originally trained as a bookbinder and then learned photography as an apprentice to the copper engraver Giuseppe Bardi, renowned for his landscapes.^[9] In 1854, Leopoldo was joined by his brothers, Giuseppe and Romualdo Alinari, and together they established the Stabilimento Fotografico Fratelli Alinari, which quickly became one of the most important photographic firms in Europe. The Fratelli Alinari were among the first to capture and sell souvenir photographs of Italy’s cultural patrimony and vistas to a burgeoning tourist market.^[10] The commercial photographic activity was passed down to Vittorio, who decided to sell the firm in 1920. Coincidentally, it was around the time he was making Il paesaggio Italico.

In light of his entrepreneurial background and training in photography, Alinari conceivably sought to capitalize on the expanding practice of Dante tourism. As Giovanni Capecchi affirms, “Nell’800 nascono i primi veri e propri tour danteschi, che hanno come tappe i posti dove Dante è vissuto e spesso le località rammentate nella Commedia.”^[11] The origins of Dante tourism can be traced to Jean-Jacques Ampère’s Voyage Dantesque (1839). Subsequent works consolidated what Ampère had initiated and incorporated trademarks of the Grand Tour’s visual ecology into Dantean travel texts. This transformation is evidenced by the picturesque vedute illustrating Carlo Beni’s Guida illustrata del Casentino (1881) and Corrado Ricci’s heliotypes and zincotypes in his La “Divina Commedia” di Dante Alighieri illustrata nei luoghi e nelle persone (1898).^[12] Alinari’s work inserts him into this evolving circuitry of Dantean travel, pictographic reception, and commodification.^[13]

On the formal and aesthetic qualities of the Alinari firm’s vast output, art critic John Berger is eager to point out that, “The Italian Countryside of the Divine Comedy is rich in implications.”^[14] He goes on to specify that, “when the camera’s attention was directed more emphatically towards types, activities, organizations, institutions, and customs,” the Alinari brothers’ corpus of photography “takes on astounding sociological significance.”^[15] Carefully framed images of landmarks and landscape views, typical of souvenir photography, exhibit a depersonalized gaze. Iconic buildings, sites, and artistic masterpieces of Italy are exalted without the presence of local people, often in frontal compositions that emphasize, via adjusted focal length and longer exposure time, clarity, symmetry, and documentarian precision. Vittorio Alinari’s pictorial approach, thus reflects and plays into not only the scientific ambitions of 19th-century photography, but perhaps more significantly, the commercial demand for standardized, reproducible images of Italy’s heritage sites and landscape.

Figure 1. View of the Augustan Forum in Rome. Attributed to Alinari Family Archive. Gelatin Silver Print (Undated) in V. Alinari’s Il paesaggio Italico nella “Divina Commedia.”

The very first photographic image of Alinari’s book exemplifies the aesthetic and formal qualities of souvenir photography (Figure 1). In this image, which sets the tone for many of the pictorial photographs that follow, note its frontal perspective and observe the center framing. The Augustan Forum is captured at a slightly low angle and casts a formidable shadow. The photographic space has a homogenized clarity and neatness to it. The composition exalts the monument yet obfuscates any persons, and the accompanying text belittles the monument as pagan. Such simplification is deceptive.

What sets Vittorio Alinari’s book apart is not simply its silver gelatin tableaus, but what they offset. After all, there are, according to Jean-Pierre Barricelli’s speculation, some 1100 works of art that are inspired by the Comedy, including, as it turns out, an illustrated edition published by Vittorio Alinari himself in 1903.^[16] When one considers visual interpretations of the epic poem, images such as Botticelli’s celebrated sketches, William Blake’s vivid watercolors, or Salvador Dalí’s otherworldly, psychedelic figures readily come to mind. Weighing these canonical illustrations of the Comedy, including, for argument’s sake, Alinari’s own attempt in 1903, against his later photographic rendering proves particularly revealing. Each of these works consistently foregrounds the human in ways that Alinari’s photographs eventually suppress. Notably absent are human figures, whose omission effaces the interpersonal and moral drama that animates Dante’s poem. Corrado Ricci’s photographic precedent explicitly announces this dimension in its title, “La “Divina Commedia” di Dante Alighieri illustrata nei luoghi e nelle persone.”

I believe the perceived absence in Alinari’s work provokes tremendous trepidation; the simplicity of tourist photography operates as a flattening translational force.^[17] This domesticized visual language simplifies Dante’s ideas into homogenized terms. I identify this process of recalibrating image and text as a form of compensation.

Dante’s flair for capturing moments of humanity with such fullness is, perhaps, unmatched. The pilgrim’s encounters with the many characters make the poem not only interesting but also a site of human edification. These anecdotal snapshots stage the poem’s dramatic tension and render the Comedy a work of human intimacy. Of course, many critics have recognized this quality of the epic, but Erich Auerbach puts it most candidly:

No, the souls of Dante’s other world are not dead men, they are truly living; though the concrete data of their lives and the atmosphere of their personalities are drawn from their former existences on earth, they manifest them here with a completeness, a concentration, an actuality, which they seldom achieved during their term on earth and assuredly never revealed to anyone else.^[18]

What Alinari’s images lack are the people—the damned, the purging, and the saved souls whose life stories illustrate the Comedy. The soulless character of the Alinari family’s photography stems from touristic origins, which in turn find their way into Vittorio’s personal endeavor. In fact, many of the images selected by Vittorio Alinari are originally taken as souvenir photographs. Such photographs are indicated in the book’s index as belonging to the family’s archival collections, which had specialized in documenting Italian cultural patrimony and landscape for a tourist public since its inception. Once more, the anonymity of the mechanical gaze and the dearth of human expression are evident in the book’s opening image, a photograph attributed to the family archive.

Because of humanity’s central position in defining the architecture of the poem, Dante’s text paired with Alinari’s impersonal images makes for some bizarrely frustrating mismatches. As with the shot of the Augustan Forum, the camera is repeatedly situated in a nearly identical position with respect to the framed subject. For example, the image of Castello d’Este replicates this perspective in a low-angle, frontal shot of the landmark devoid of any human subject (Figure 2). The caption reads: “e quell’altro ch’è biondo, / è Opizzo da Esti…” (Inf. 12. 110-11) There is no Virgil to speak these words, no Dante to hear them. Nor is there any human subject to stage the encounter with Opizzo. Instead, Alinari puts forth the flat, frontally framed façade of the Castello di Ferrara on a clear day.

An additional compensatory gesture is at play, as the Castle of Ferrara itself had recently undergone restoration through the first quarter of the Novecento. As scholars such as D. Medina Lasansky and Alessandro Giammei have noted, fascist appropriation of the past is implicit in such restoration projects. That is, this aesthetic uptake, or medievalization, reveals how architectural restoration models what the Medieval ought to resemble in a measured expression pursuant to the ideological beliefs of the time. In this image, the compensatory domestication of content is trifold: the postcard framing, the absence of a named soul in Opizzo d’Esti, and the freshly restored Castle. These enacted adjustments work together to produce an aesthetic appeal in line with the patriotic ethos of the nascent fascist regime.^[19]

Figure 2. Il Castello di Ferrara. Gelatin Silver Print Attributed to Alinari Family Archive (circa 1915) in V. Alinari’s Il paesaggio Italico nella “Divina Commedia.”

One striking example emerges in Alinari’s photographic translation of the transformative moment in Inferno 32, when Dante steps on Bocca degli Abati’s head in Antenora (Inf. 32, 79-81). It marks a key encounter in the Inferno, as Dante’s original pity and terror harden into a sharp, ice-cold sentiment of vengeance toward the Guelph traitor. Any such dramatic tension is lost in the attendant photographic image, which was in this instance taken by the author himself during the time of his project (Figure 3). As in previous examples, the appealing panorama of Montaperti flattens the value of the text. The momentous occasion of the fierce battle leading to a tremendous Florentine defeat is attenuated by Alinari’s adherence to the picturesque playbook, namely the rule of thirds.^[20]

Figure 3. Panoramic view of Montaperti battleground. Photomechanical print attributed to Vittorio Alinari (1917-1920) in V. Alinari’s Il paesaggio Italico nella “Divina Commedia.”

Yet, Alinari does something different here: rather than exhibit the commemorative pyramid of the conflict, agreeably positioned slightly off-center in the extreme distance, he modifies the sense of scale in what appears as a sort of miniatura of the monument—a scopic reduction of this significant episode in the Comedy. The expanded depth of field of this frame distances and downplays Dante’s momentary spike in anger, itself a psychological overcompensation that takes literal shape in the substantive vendetta. This is to say nothing of the deafening silence. Alinari’s editorial choice to erase the words cried out by Bocca degli Abati, “Piangendo mi sgridò,” yet keep the colon suggestive of speech exposes the optic overreach that flattens conflict and sutures the paesaggio Italico together vis-à-vis his passaggio fotografico.

Figure 4. A charming view of Pisa from la Torre della Citadella privileges the flat touristic gaze over Dante’s verse. Gelatin Silver Print attributed to Alinari Family Archive (circa 1890) in V. Alinari’s Il paesaggio Italico nella “Divina Commedia.”

The absence of the poem’s personalities is perhaps most felt in and complicated by Alinari’s treatment of Dante’s diatribe against the Pisani in Inferno 33. The photographer orchestrates a discordant pairing: a picturesque view of Pisa is captioned with the first two lines of Dante’s excoriation of the Tuscan city (Figure 4). Where Dante’s invective is rhetorically bolstered by an apostrophe to Pisa, Alinari not only blankets the poet’s ire with an attractive panorama of the city but censors the poet’s word as well. Alinari elects to include only the first two verses of the terzina, “Ah Pisa, il vituperio della gente / del bel paese là dove il sì suona” (Inf. 33, 79-80). These lines are as carefully cropped as the touristic photograph is framed. Alinari stops Dante at “la lingua del sì,” the Tuscan model for a standardized Italian. The causal “poi che” which begins the final line of the terzina and opens Dante’s infamous invective of Pisa, is omitted. In its place, an ellipsis appears. Note how the paralinguistic communication rectifies what was once a contentious encounter in the context of the pilgrim’s journey.

This textual aperture places the word-image combination in a state of imbalance, proffering a pleasant view of Pisa over the poet’s volition that the Pisani face a watery death in the Arno. It bears repeating that Alinari yet again did not take this photograph for this project. This is another example of a recycled view from the Alinari family archive of souvenir photography. Through both photographic and poetic framing, Alinari offsets Dante’s word, allowing a visual nationalism to come into deep focus not just for tourists, but also for an Italian population with varying degrees of familiarity with the poem. This type of word-image construction, irrespective of Alinari’s purported intentions, overrides any potential for warring Italianate factions and instead relies on a grand tour of overly idyllic visuals to reify a unified Italian identity.

Here I might add that the photo album-like arrangement of Il paesaggio Italico invites a touristification of the standard readerly experience. The minimal text and attractive images across its pages limit the poem’s controversial moments from gripping the reader. Instead, the word-image package mesmerizes the reader onward in a sightseeing excursion in such a way that the kinetic chain of images across its pages becomes almost cinematic.^[21] Engaging with the text as a literary tourist, the reader inattentively gazes at the photographs of Italian landmarks and landscapes, pausing only for a moment before turning the page. Alinari’s invitation to discover Italy in the Comedy through a curated series of pleasing photographs carries ideological consequences, a topic that I will discuss shortly.

This unlikely pairing of photography, tourism, and the Comedy is a fascinating case. If the touristic environment of Vittorio Alinari’s photography atelier is key to understanding his book, then the same holds true for the poet. While Alinari draws on a visual lexicon from an archive of bourgeois tourism, Dante mobilizes a linguistic repertoire of banishment. He does not chronicle the voluntary act of tourism; instead, he recounts his indignant and involuntary existence in exile.

Tu lascerai ogne cosa diletta

più caramente; e questo è quello strale

che l’arco de lo essilio pria saetta.

Tu proverai sì come sa di sale

lo pane altrui, e come è duro calle

lo scendere e ’l salir per l’altrui scale

(Par. XVII, 55-60)

In this poignant moment, as Teodolinda Barolini has observed in her commentary, Dante ventriloquizes Cacciaguida to speak through him—back to himself—about the already experienced exile.^[22] Deprived of autonomy, exiled from his homeland, and made reliant on the charity of others, Dante’s actual pilgrimage was one of suffering and humiliation. Dante surely was no tourist, but a vagrant living on the charity of others.

If anything, Il paesaggio Italico is an experimental work that takes partial terzine out of context and maps them incongruously onto visual portraits of Italian scenes. Its visual overcompensation, entrenched in a touristic imaginary of Italy as “seen” in Dante’s poem, is by no means insignificant. This quality of Alinari’s visuals allows them to engage with a wider range of Italians with varying degrees of literacy.^[23] One might quickly dismiss the multimedia text, for it does not espouse Dantean ideals, nor does it amount to a faithful interpretation of the epic poem. My excursion could end with such a dismissal. But it is through this mismatch that Vittorio’s Alinari’s Il paesaggio Italico has lent itself to ideological cooptation.

Ironically, the quality Alinari’s work most closely shares with Dante, that is, its accessible vernacular, brands the book of photographs as an effective platform for fascistic messaging. The depersonalized visual language of tourist photography projects a Dantean sojourn of Italy with an insensate quadro that lacks a human sguardo.^[24] The medium-specific affordances of Alinari’s publication offer the neutrality of a blank photographic gaze, erasing the character pluralities, linguistic anfractuosities, political factions, and Italic diversity that Dante centers in his writings. Put in the words of Luigi Zoja, “Nella dimensione totale della Commedia troviamo l’opposto delle faziosità di un poema nazionale. Dante parla di tutti i tempi, di tutto il mondo, di tutte le classi sociali, dei malvagi e dei sublimi.”^[25]

Figure 5. Cover art of Alinari’s Il paesaggio Italico nella “Divina Commedia” modeled on the “Monumento a Dante di Trento.” (Unknown artist).

The cover art of Vittorio Alinari’s book foregrounds a statue of Dante, extending his arm in what I interpret as a guarded gesture (Figure 5). Such a monumental statue is a vessel of polysemy: an expression of vigilant guardedness, of linguistic unity, of restoration. Behind him, as if his shadow were to cast it, the peninsula of Italy extends toward the horizon, with Sicily jutting toward the shores of North Africa, and Italy’s future colonies looming at the extreme edge. This perspectival framing of Italy stares down the peninsula and its islands like a grand tourist yearning to revisit the territories of imperial Rome in antiquity. The reader is primed to envision the pending photographic voyage in the terms of visual nationalist rhetoric—a pattern that the preface consolidates before Alinari’s photographic chronicle even begins. The sketched figure, however, is not the invention of the cover artist, but rather a stenciled copy of Cesare Zocchi’s “Monumento a Dante di Trento” (1896), a statue which Anna Pegoretti assiduously studies as an emblem of irredentist national pride in the wake of the Great War.^[26] Amid this excessive posturing, the concept of compensation comes to the fore.

To my knowledge, Theodore Cachey is among a short list of scholars to reference Vittorio Alinari’s Il paesaggio Italico in recent years, and he does so in a brief parenthetical.^[27] His argument, in any case, is useful to my own interpretation. Cachey shows that a cohesive Italian literary identity was essentially a compensatory response—a reaction to the peninsula’s fragmentation and absence of linguistic or geographic focal point. Cachey notes:

An Italian literary history of travel might well read Dante's Italy in the poem not as an established site (as in Revelli's L'Italia nella Divina Commedia or Alinari's Il paesaggio Italico nella Divina Commedia) but as a process of literary deterritorialization/reterritorialization designed to create a holy site in ways related to the processes by which historical sites of pilgrimage and tourism have been historically created.^[28]

Alinari’s mission is to corral Dante’s ‘holy literary site’ by breaking it up into vignettes and rearranging it into a harmonic whole. His piecemeal approach is almost Petrarchan, as his collection of fragmentary photographs is suggestive of the rime sparse. But leaving Petrarch aside, Alinari’s photographic journey compensates for the perceived lack of national coherence by anchoring Dante’s word in a reproducible series of harmonic Italian sites. To dispatch his redress, Alinari commingles two forces, the gaze of Italian tourism—as expressed in the visual vernacular of souvenir photographs—and Dante’s Tuscan terzine. While I find the use of Deleuze and Guattari’s process of deterritorialization to be compelling, I propose a modest modification to Cachey’s observation: Dante’s poem, tourism, and Alinari’s photography each appear to be compensating for a perceived absence.^[29]

Accordingly, I would like to conclude this succinct account of Dante’s poem as seen through the lens of Alinari’s souvenir photography by contemplating these conditions of compensation. How one relates to compensation, what one demands, accepts, or internalizes, shapes the degree of self-awareness for both individuals and societies. How an individual or society determines what merits compensation comes with heavy consequences. What I weigh with utmost importance is how scholarship deals with compensation, especially in the face of new media. Sustained dialogue—constant recalibration in the face of reactionary acts of compensation—is one such way to address overreach, as opposed to abrupt identification and dismissal. Reading Dante visually, literally, or literarily means to participate in said dialogue and, as access expands across divergent forms of literacies, it is my belief that new modes of reception must compensate for such change. The compensation due is one that accounts for people and not an unreal place.

1. Massimo Ferretti, “Fra traduzione e riduzione. La fotografia d’arte come oggetto e come modello” in Alinari: Photographers of Florence, 1852–1920, ed. Filippo Zevi (Florence: Alinari Edizioni & Idea Editions in association with the Scottish Arts Council, 1978), 13. ↑

2. In this note, I shorten the title to Il paesaggio Italico. It is worth pointing out that a slightly different version of Vittorio Alinari’s project was published at the end of 1921. The title is suggestively pluralized as Paesaggi Italici nella “Divina Commedia.” According to my correspondence with librarians, auctioneers, and the Fondazione Alinari, the 1922 edition that I address in this piece was printed in far greater numbers. Of the first edition, a rare book seller lists a copy for sale as “one of 500 limited edition copies signed by the author.” Available at: https://www.lafeltrinelli.it. ↑

3. The page numbers pertain to the following edition: V. Alinari, Il paesaggio Italico nella “Divina Commedia” (Florence: Fratelli Alinari, 1922). A digitized version of the complete text is available at: https://archive.org/details/alinari-paesaggio-italico-nella-divina-commedia/mode/2up. ↑

4. Giuseppe Vandelli, “Lettera di Vittorio Alinari” cited in “Prefazione,” in V. Alinari, Il paesaggio Italico, v. ↑

5. G. Vandelli, “Prefazione,” xxii-xxiii, in V. Alinari, Il paesaggio Italico. ↑

6. More precisely, the two works I reference here are: Heather Webb, Dante, Artist of Gesture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022); Matthew Collins, ed., Reading Dante with Images (London – Turnhout, Belgium: Harvey Miller Publishers, 2021). ↑

7. Webb, Dante, Artist of Gesture, 2. ↑

8. It is worth recalling that photography’s institutional acceptance as an art form came only in the 20th century. Artistic recognition began somewhat earlier, in the late 1800s, with the rise of Pictorialism—a movement inspired by painting in which Alinari himself participated. ↑

9. For a general survey of the life and practice of the Fratelli Alinari, I recommend Fondazione Alinari’s Fratelli Alinari: The Archives, the Photographic Files, the New Photographic Campaigns, the Art Printworks, the Publishing House (Florence: Fratelli Alinari, 1993). ↑

10. For an overview of the early history of Italian photography, see Marina Miraglia, “Note per una storia della fotografia italiana (1839–1911),” in Storia dell’arte italiana, (Turin: Einaudi, 1983), Vol. 3, Tome 2, 421–544. ↑

11. Gabriele Capecchi, “Introduzione,” in Gabriele Capecchi and Riccardo Mosena, eds., Turismi danteschi. Itinerari, esperienze, progetti (Perugia: Perugia Stranieri University Press, 2024), 11. ↑

12. For a confrontation of Ricci’s precedent with Alinari’s text, see Giovanna Corazza, “Luoghi danteschi dalla Milano-Napoli (1965),” in “Percorrere le geografie della Commedia sulle strade dell’Italia (sempre più) Unita: Daniele Sterpos,” Tenzone 22 (2023): 223–67, 230–31. ↑

13. Touristic objects, souvenirs, and trinkets associated with Dante attest to an increase in commercial exploitation of Dante. For instance, Mary Hensman’s ‘Onorate l’Altissimo Poeta’: Maps of Sites Associated with Dante (1892) prefigures Alinari’s emphasis on geographical location. For a comprehensive study of current forms of Dante tourism, see Capecchi and Mosena (note 11). ↑

14. John Berger, “Introduction” in Alinari: Photographers of Florence: 1852-1920, 9. ↑

15. Ibid, 8. ↑

16. Jean-Pierre Barricelli, “Dante in the Arts: A Survey,” Dante Studies 114 (1996): 79. ↑

17. I use this term as Lawrence Venuti describes it. Flattening produces an effect of domestication of language to render it more accessible, prioritizing fluency and readability. See Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2008). ↑

18. Erich Auerbach, Dante, Poet of the Secular World, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 134. ↑

19. For an analysis of restoration projects throughout Italy and their ideological effects, consult D. Medina Lasansky, The Renaissance Perfected: Architecture, Spectacle, and Tourism in Fascist Italy (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004); Alessandro Giammei, Ariosto in the Machine Age (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2023) for a study of fascist reenactments as an ideologically motivated means of Ariostan reception. For a description of these renovation and restoration projects, consult the Castello website: “Restoration Work (1910–1930),” Castello Estense, accessed June 29, 2025, https://www.castelloestense.it/en/the-castle/restoration-work/restoration-work-1910-1930. ↑

20. The picturesque movement, formalized in the late 18^th century painting, developed aesthetic codes through which an individual ought to appreciate nature. Landscape painting—and the later landscape photography—adhere to the aesthetic and formal guidelines of the picturesque. The rule of thirds states that the main subject in a landscape painting should never be placed in the center third of the framed image. For more on the picturesque, I recommend Christopher Hussey’s classic The Picturesque: Studies in a Point of View (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1967). ↑

21. The kinetic aspect is significant as it places Alinari’s phototext in conversation with cinematic interest in Dante’s poem. Here it bears mention Francesco Bertolini and Adolfo Padovan’s silent motion picture L’Inferno (1911). Milano Films’ silent feature shows some affinities in its appropriation of Italian landscape with Alinari’s photographic text, but the emphasis on location expressed in Alinari’s book is diminished onscreen. With the exception of the closing shot of the Monumento a Dante a Trento, the location shots are not pinpointed geographically as in Alinari. For a discussion of early cinema’s potential for Italian nationalism, consult Gian Piero Brunetta, Il cinema muto italiano (Rome: Laterza, 2008), 54. ↑

22. Teodolinda Barolini, “Paradiso 17: Back to the Future,” Commento Baroliniano, Digital Dante (New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2014). https://digitaldante.columbia.edu/dante/divine-comedy/paradiso/paradiso-17/, paragraphs 8–10. ↑

23. Howard R. Marraro, “Education in Italy Under Mussolini,” Current History (1916–1940) 23, no. 5 (1926): 705–9. ↑

24. Human vision exceeds the camera’s field in two ways: first, our two eyes afford a dynamic, stereoscopic image, and second, a wider span of peripheral vision than the single-lens apparatus (despite Alinari’s use of longer focal lengths to mitigate this reduction). Photographic visuals reduce human ocular sensitivity. ↑

25. Luigi Zoja, Narrare l’Italia: Dal vertice del mondo al Novecento, 1st. ed. (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2024), 67. ↑

26. For an overview of the Trento statue, see Anna Pegoretti, Dante a Trento! Usi e abusi di una retorica nazionale (1890-1921) (Rome: Castelvecchi, 2022); or more recently Anna Pegoretti, “Dante on the Border (Trento, 1890-1921),” Bibliotheca Dantesca 6 (2024): 245-63. Available at: https://penn.manifoldapp.org/projects/bibliotheca-dantesca-vol-6. ↑

27. Another scholar who briefly touches on Alinari’s text is Giovanna Corazza (note 12). ↑

28. Theodore J. Cachey, “An Italian Literary History of Travel,” Annali d’Italianistica 14 (1996): 61. ↑

29. According to Deleuze and Guattari, when a space undergoes deterritorialization, its established codes are discarded; the spatial organization of bodies loses its stability and becomes a chaotic mass of movements, marked by rhizomatic and indistinct patterns. Bodies are “decoded” as the space is “deterritorialized.” Upon reterritorialization, the bodies assume a new organization. They are, in turn, “recoded,” aligned with a renewed sense of what is sensible, and establish a new, stable pattern of movement. I see the relevance of the concept of deterritorialization here, but I also associate it within a particular context, as a response to the modern globalized world after Alinari’s period. ↑