What do a dozen inmates at the MacDougall-Walker maximum-security prison in Connecticut; a dozen Yale theology students; 140 children from Kibera, a neighborhood on Nairobi’s periphery and the largest slum in Africa; and 1,000 residents of Ravenna; all have in common? The fact that they all were able to accomplish a feat bordering on the impossible: staging and transforming Dante’s The Divine Comedy, the poem par excellence, into a theatrical performance in far and diverse places.

Beginning in the 1960s, protests erupted in American universities on the part of students and professors against the so-called “dead white men” who dominated the curriculums of all disciplines. Since then, some of those men have been forced into retirement while a couple women, together with several ethnic or gender minorities, have been able to enter the literary and artistic canon, albeit with difficulty. But one figure was never at issue: Dante. Even in smaller universities lacking even one lecturer in Italian Literature, there are still courses on Dante’s Divine Comedy.