Dante's Poetry of Donati: The Barlow Lectures on Dante Delivered at University College London, 17-18 March 2005: No. 7: The Barlow Lectures on Dante ... for Italian Studies Occasional Papers, 7) - Tapa blanda

Members of the Florentine family of the Donati feature prominently in Dante's Divine Comedy . Their presence is explored by Piero Boitani, as a 'comedy' within the Comedy, in close readings of the three major episodes in which they appear, one for each of Inferno , Purgatorio , and Paradiso .

A medievalist, Dante scholar, and comparatist, Piero Boitani taught Italian literature at Cambridge, then American and English literature at the Universities of Pescara and Perugia. In 1985 he returned as professor of English to his alma mater "La Sapienza", where since 1998 he has held the chair of Professor of Comparative Literature. He is well known as a visiting professor, particularly in North America, as Honorary President of the European Society for English Studies, as a member of learned societies, including the British Academy, and for his work as a critic, for which in 2002 he was awarded the Feltrinelli prize by the Accademia dei Lincei. His prolific output includes The Tragic and the Sublime in Medieval Literature (CUP, 1989), The Bible and its Rewritings (OUP, 1999), Italian translations of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and The Cloud of Unknowing (Milan, Adelphi, 1986 and 1998 respectively), and of Cymbeline (Milan, Garzanti, 1994), and a complete Chaucer with facing texts (Turin, Einaudi, 2000).