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Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy is racist, anti-Semitic, against Islam, homophobic and should be banished from Italian schools, according to a research group.
"The Divine Comedy is the pillar of Italian literature and a cornerstone of Italian literature and the educational formation of the country's students," Valentina Sereni, president of Gherush92, anti-racism group that consults for the United Nations, told Adnkronos in an interview. "Students are taught the work's offensive and discriminatory language without any filter," she said.
Dante wrote the Divine Comedy between 1308 and his death in 1321 while in exile from Florence. In the epic poem, Dante's alter ego Pilgrim travels through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, even meeting God along the way. The work was written in the vernacular of Tuscan Italian, becoming the language template for the Italian peninsula and its disparate dialects that was united 540 years after Dante's death.