Fabio Finotti, a professor of Italian studies at Penn, says one can find everything in the writings of Dante Alighieri, from science and sculpture to music and sex.

And here in the United States, people have found something in their perception of Dante that Finotti says “touches the American soul.

“I didn’t realize how important Dante was for the States until I came over here from Italy nine years ago. I think it has to do with the representation of a man able to find his own path. Studies on Dante are much more alive here than in Italy,” says Finotti, who is also the director of the Center for Italian Studies in the School of Arts & Sciences. “In Italy, you study the connection with history, the details of the language, but here you really have a more complex, broader vision of Dante as one of the foundations of Western civilization.”

In fact, Finotti says, Penn is home to one of the world’s most renown Dante scholars, Professor of Medieval French and Dante, Kevin Brownlee, who has been teaching Dante to graduate and undergraduate students at the University for a quarter century.

To celebrate the relevance and influence of Dante on the 750th anniversary of his birth, Penn’s Center for Italian Studies and Department of Music recently hosted a “Dante and Music” conference, drawing renowned musicians and scholars to campus from around the world.

Finotti says the idea for the conference topic rose out of the Center’s mission to foster interdisciplinary perspectives on the study of Italian language and culture.

“Dante was a perfect case for this interdisciplinarity,” Finotti says, “because of his multi-modal approach to the text. He creates links with all the possible human language: verbal, musical, economic, philosophical, and so on.”

Eva Del Soldato, an assistant professor of romance languages and graduate chair in the Center for Italian Studies, calls Dante’s “Divine Comedy” a “linguistic cocktail: at times written in high diction, at times in low, some parts in Italian, some in other languages like Latin or French. This multilinguism is incredibly innovative and totally unlike the poets who preceded him.”

Musical discourse is a particularly complex and fascinating topic for Dante scholars.

According to Finotti, “the conference showed how Dante inspired music, of course, but also how he is able to express different feelings and perspectives with the sounds of his words, which were sometimes unnerving and cacophonous and other times perfectly harmonious.”

Marina Della Putta Johnston, assistant director of the Center and undergraduate chair of Italian studies, describes the way Dante’s consummately controlled musical language changes in each book of the “Divine Comedy.”

“‘The Inferno’ is full of cacophony,” she says, “while earthy, liturgical music distinguishes ‘Purgatorio,’ and then you don’t really hear the music at all in ‘Paradisio’—it’s the unhearable music of the spheres. You have the sense of the mathematical regularity of the universe, but you no longer hear it because the music is at that point translated into the more rarified element of light.”

The idea of the “Harmony of the Spheres” started with Pythagoras and integrates a number of disciplines—including cosmology, astronomy, mathematics, and music theory.

“We still have the idea that the universe is regulated mathematically and that music is a part of that,” says Della Putta Johnston. “Just the other day, I read an article titled ‘NASA Recording the Harmony of the Planets.’”

More than seven centuries after his birth, Dante also continues to inspire new generations of students in the classroom.

Penn boasts an impressive collection of texts—and instead of being neglected in dusty book stacks, these items can frequently be found in the (scrupulously washed) hands of Penn students.

“We’re fortunate to be able to show many of these books in class,” says Federica Caneparo, a visiting lecturer of Italian studies. “It gives students a chance to see for themselves the different formats, papers, and bindings used to make the physical book. And they can see fascinating extratextual elements such as illuminations, commentaries, paratexts, and marginalia. When you put them in touch with something they can relate to concretely, it really changes the learning situation.”

The Dante collection at Penn’s Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts contains numerous texts, including 2,500 bequeathed by Dante scholar and University benefactor Francis Campbell Macauley in 1896. The Macauley Library boasts a number of first editions, rare manuscripts and folios, and translations of Dante’s work into 16 languages, including Bohemian, Sanskrit, and Pavian.

An enthusiast for archaeology as well as literature, Macauley was also one of the founders of the Penn Museum—which counts an onyx cameo of Dante’s profile among its holdings.

This iconic image of Dante (drawn with liberal artistic license after his death) can be found in the frontispieces of a number of books in the Kislak holdings.

“You should see their reactions,” adds Del Soldato. “One student of mine said, ‘Oh my God, I can actually touch it!’”

Associate Professor of Music Mauro Calcagno says that the particular ease with which professors can incorporate such hands-on experiences into the learning shouldn’t be underestimated.

“I’ve never seen such close a relationship between the classroom and the library as we have here at Penn,” says Calcagno. “Having our students work with these manuscripts enables them to travel back in time and really immerse themselves in their scholarship.”