Leggere Dante a Tor Bella Monaca

A thought-provoking, inspired novel that fuses the gritty reality of Rome’s infamous suburbs with the universal, chaotic, life-changing experience of middle school.
In a working-class neighborhood known for its high crime rate the work of Dante Alighieri arrives almost by chance. Sbaraglia teaches literature in an eighth-grade classroom where the students behave like hostages of a system that convinced them their future is destined to the streets. While dealing with one of Italy’s highest dropout rates and the outside world’s intrusion on school life, the teacher tries to weave his students’ lives together with the work of Italy’s greatest poet: he makes a case on how similar the conflict between the Guelphs and Ghibellines is to the rivalry between Lazio and Roma fans, and how close medieval poetic duels are to modern rap battles. Some colleagues criticize him for trying to bring Dante to Tor Bella Monaca, because there are other priorities; and yet, it works: Dante, with his limitless possibilities of themes, achieves the miracle of uniting worlds that looked far away from each other, while giving the students a chance to learn a lot about Italian literature, and life.