VITA NUOVA (DUAL-LANGUAGE EDITION)

The Vita Nuova, with its unusual blend of prose and poetry, is universally recognized as Dante's early masterpiece and provides an indispensable prequel to The Divine Comedy. Set in thirteenth-century Florence, part autobiography and part religious allegory, it traces Dante's quest to find a poetic idiom worthy of Beatrice, whom he had loved since boyhood. Her premature death plunges him into an emotional turmoil that finds release only through his faith in her continuing spiritual influence and through his determination “to write of her what has never been written of any woman”.