Fabio Stassi - Farei parlando innamorar la gente. Curarsi con Dante

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2026

UMBRIA GREEN FESTIVAL LITERARY CAFE

FABIO STASSI – I WOULD MAKE PEOPLE FALL IN LOVE BY TALKING. HEALING YOURSELF WITH DANTE.

The Literary Café was born from his book "Every Coincidence Has a Soul" and one of its characters, Vince Corso, a bibliotherapist and literature enthusiast.

"Healing Yourself with Dante" is a beautiful and enchanting lesson on the therapeutic power of poetry and the saving power of the Supreme Poet's verses, which calls upon other great poets. An invitation to listen again to submerged voices, overlooked by the arrogance of an age that runs at the speed of digital.

When my publisher called to ask me to give a lecture on the therapeutic power of Dante's poetry, thinking about the stage I would be on (the Basilica of Maxentius), the audience, the enormity of the topic (whether Dante can cure oneself, and what), and also what Contini called "the shadowy world of Dante scholars," my first reaction was a wave of fear. I tried to control it, but barely. Fortunately, two other poets came to my aid: Brodsky and Saba. Brodsky, for a reflection I have never forgotten: writing is a practice that does not provide experience but constant uncertainty, and the feeling most frequently experienced is panic. And Saba, from a fragment that resurfaced from who knows where: "And from every evil a beautiful verse heals me."

This "discourse" by Fabio Stassi ranges through Dante's works (Commedia, Rime, Vita Nuova, Convivio), seeking an answer to three questions: why Dante is always contemporary, why his poetry is like a therapy from Melancholy to Beatitude, and how—the perennially suggestive question—he healed himself through insistent poetic self-analysis. An ingenious and precise journey through his words, hendecasyllables, canticles, songs, sonnets, with a careful eye on the analyses of many other poets (Saba, Borges, Brodsky, Leopardi, Ungaretti, Maldel'štam, T.S. Eliot...) who were convinced of the healing power of his verse.