Saint Valentine’s Day

Saint Valentine’s Day is fast approaching and it reminds me of my lessons in Italian class that dealt with this saint and with the topic of “Love”. My unit on Italian Courtly Love Poetry coincided with the feast day of Saint Valentine which is also linked with Italian beginnings (the persecutions of the early Christians in Rome ). I would have my students give their personal definition of love and we would then read Italian courtly love poetry by Cavalcanti, Guinizelli, and of course by Dante Alighieri. ( These poets were called the Dolce Stilnovisti/ the Sweet New Stylists). I would start with Dante’s sonnet, Tanto gentile e tanto onesta ( Vita Nuova) and finish at the end of Italian IV AP with Dante’s Divine Comedy. The students would wrtie an Italian imitative courtly love poem or a modern version of this theme and they would always be spectacular. My young proteges amazed me with the quality of the maturation of their thoughts on the subject of love. By the end of the unit my students understood what true spiritual love ( Caritas) was. They understood that God is love and that for amorous love to be perfect it needs to imitate God’s love. My poetry unit would begin with the Sicilian School to the Florentine School, then to the Bolognese School and end with an introduction to the genius epic poem of Dante Alighieri, the Divine Comedy in order to illustrate the evolutionary process of man’s christian concept of love. Materialistic troubadour poetry associated with wine and pleasure transforms itself into chivalrous and courtly love and then to doctrinal and philosophical love and finally with Dante, elevates itself to spiritual love. Love becomes associated with a gentle and noble heart ( il cuor gentil) and not with noble standing in society. What a revolutionary idea that Dante incorporates and instills in western civilization! Both men and women begin to be given the dignity they so deserve from the Middle Ages onward even if man has always had struggles with this nascent idea in Dante’s sublime work. Dante was influenced by Saint Francis of Assisi and this new finding gives me great solace because as those of you who know me, also know tha I have a great admiration and love for this great saint as well as poet. It always then, befuddles me when some or most modern historians call this period the Dark Ages. How ironic is it that this dark age gave way to one of the greatest luminaries of all time…DANTE whose extraordinary christian ideas transformed modern western society in many ways. Though the secular media would have us believe that these ideas are archaic, my students for the last thirty-five years have always proved to me by their own original poems on love that Dante’s concept of “Caritas” is profound irrefutable and immutable truth for all time. Once again, a lesson imbued with “Speranza”. I will truly miss teaching this beautiful unit on Italian literature. Alla Prossima, Dorina