A renewed life begins, a new youth, a new love, perhaps a new way of poetry. The meaning of the three words included in the preface of Dante's "Vita nova" could be interpreted in many ways, a work that slightly anticipates the drafting of the Comedy and turns - ideally - to the memories of youth and love for Beatrice.

Words of rebirth that we would like to pronounce with conviction in the year 2021, just the one that greets the celebration of the seven hundred years since the death of the poet who redefined the aesthetic and compositional canons not only in literature, but in the entire imagination of artistic creation. Crossing the universe of Dante - not just that of the Comedy - means entering a tangle of marvelous visions with an extreme subversive force, fulminating in their lucidity, centuries ahead - now as then - compared to the common contemporary sensibility. Measuring and trying to penetrate the fantastic complexity of this firmament, following the path of the comets that cross it, becomes a stimulating challenge for any artist who is not satisfied with remaining within the comfortable limits of the known, but intends to explore the infinite possibilities and visionary interpretative hypotheses. It acquires even more significance to be able to do it in the city - Ravenna - which saw the last years of Dante's life and still preserves his remains today, together with the spirit that has never ceased to nourish his cultural and artistic health. The artists invited to participate in this project will be able to embark on one of the many rivers of abundance that flow into the Dante's ocean, challenging creative intelligence, the horizons of the imaginable visible, the chimerical, the fantastic, the divine.

Alberto Gross