More than 600 years after the “The Divine Comedy” Proust writes, when seeing a water lily in a small river: “[The lily] would drift over to one bank only to return to the other, eternally repeating its double journey (…) like one of those wretches whose peculiar torments (…) aroused the curiosity of Dante, who would have enquired of them at greater length from the victims themselves, had not Virgil (…) obliged him to hasten after him at full speed, as I must hasten after my parents.” 3 Let’s move from Proust to Ismail Kadare, a contemporary writer.
He writes that, as a schoolboy in Albania, he found himself at the age of 13 or 14 coming across “two groups of cantos (which) were quoted more often than the others in books, magazines, newspapers: those on Paolo and Francesca, the tragic lovers who didn’t know any respite in the second circle of the Inferno and those on Count Ugolino in the ninth circle, who, famished, ended up eating his own children.