Patricia Dorff: Professor Luzzi, your work often explores the intersection of literature, culture and personal identity, particularly Italian American. What most animates your research?
Professor Joseph Luzzi: From my time as a graduate student at Yale, Dante has been at the center of my research—I’m especially drawn to Dante’s experience of exile and his complicated portrayal of his muse, Beatrice Portinari. My last couple books have actually taken me out of Dante’s medieval period and into the Renaissance. Botticelli’s Secret: The Lost Drawings and the Rediscovery of the Renaissance immersed me in art history, and my new book, The Innocence of Florence, was my most historical work, as it tells the dramatic story of a groundbreaking orphanage in Florence, the Hospital of the Innocents, which cared for nearly 400,000 children after opening its doors in 1445. I think the one concept that holds all my books together is a belief that truly great creative works can change our lives—that they’re not just something we study in a classroom or cultivate as connoisseurs. Rather, we can turn to them as guides, in our own life and as touchstones for a sense of who we are. I think Dante especially has been fundamental for me because he’s impacted so many readers over the centuries. When I take on a new subject, whether it’s Botticelli’s art or a Florentine orphanage, my question is always: Why does it matter now? What makes it relevant to us in the present tense?
Dorff: You have been writing about Dante for many years. After all that time, is there anything about the poet that still manages to surprise you?
Luzzi: I teach Dante every year—it’s become a ritual for me at Bard. But I talk about Dante to all different kinds of groups: undergrads, graduate students, and people at different learning stages of their lives. And yes, I’m always learning new things about Dante! There’s a famous line from Melville’s Moby-Dick, when Ishmael says “a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.” He learned so much on the boat that it was his university. For me, Dante’s been my university. He’s extraordinarily knowledgeable about the ancient world, making Virgil his guide. He’s incredibly learned about the political situation in Italy. And he’s unbelievably insightful about the Bible. As my advisor Giuseppe Mazzotta at Yale used to say, Dante has an encyclopedic imagination. So, I believe that you can keep teaching, studying, and reading Dante, and still keep learning something new. It’s never settled material. To me, it’s always organic. And that organic process takes its strongest form in the classroom and conversations with students.
Dorff: What fascinates you about Dante and how people respond to his Divine Comedy?
Luzzi: Certain aspects of Dante truly amaze me. In particular, how did he learn as much as he did, given the extreme circumstances in which he lived? He spent the last two decades of his life in exile, from city to city, rarely settled, always a bit on the run. And yet he managed to synthesize an oceanic amount of material. He must have had an extraordinary memory. So many want to learn about Dante, and each person finds something different in him. It’s fascinating to teach Dante to older students who have endured some of life’s difficulties. Many of my undergrads or younger students, of course, haven’t experienced some of the challenges that come with aging—the death of a loved one, illness, a terrible career setback. But Dante is the poet who somehow communicates with all, young and old. Dante has a religious message—he’s obviously Christian—but The Divine Comedy is also about that universal space of suffering, of defeat, that moment of crisis. Dante teaches us that it’s not what lands us in the dark wood that defines us, but what we do to get out of it.
Dorff: In an era shaped by AI, automation, and an increasingly uncertain job market for new graduates, what is the case for pursuing a degree in literature today, and how should students think about its value beyond immediate employability?
Luzzi: I truly believe that a degree in literature is a foundation for so many different things. Of course, I understand the humanities are suffering these days and there’s a kind of existential crisis about what a college degree should be. But I go back to my students when I am in the classroom with them and we’re studying Dante, and I can feel how deeply engaged we are with the material. I have many colleagues in the humanities who experience that same sense of total investment from their students. I believe as an article of faith that when you experience that hundred-percent investment from your students in the classroom, what you’re teaching them will be an important part of their education that will serve them going forward no matter what they do.
Dorff: Is there a difference between teaching your students at Bard and teaching Yale Alumni College students? Tell us a little about the people you see coming back to your YACOL classes eager to learn.
Luzzi: I think something remarkable is happening in the United States. There’s this whole movement of lifelong learners. To some extent, I think the model of retirement is changing. There have always been people who love to read and who love to keep being intellectually engaged—but now you have a critical mass who are taking classes and doing online workshops. Those people want to read Dante, Proust, Joyce, and they want to read them with a guide. They want to learn in a classroom setting. I think there’s going to be a major demographic shift going forward—a rethinking, recalibration of what it means to retire. Many retirees now want to be in school, maybe not literally enrolled in a degree program, but they want to be learning in some form. It’s like playing a sport or instrument you love. These things keep us engaged, connected. I think this is one of the most exciting trends in American society today. You can now study on a Zoom call or in a community group. You can take classes at the local university. And we do it through Yale Alumni College.
Dorff: As universities rethink the purpose of undergraduate education, especially in fields like literature, what do you see as your responsibility as a teacher, given that only a small fraction of students will go on to academic careers?
Luzzi: Of course, a big issue universities grapple with is the specific nature of how we teach our undergraduates—how we train them to think, and what we intend that training to provide. In my field, the question is often whether we are training our students to be future professors of literature. In all likelihood, the number of my students who are going to be professors of literature is small. That’s just a reality. I hope the ones who aspire to this career will be able to realize that goal. But in general, I don’t teach them literature in order for them to be future academics. If that happens, wonderful, and I’ll be the first to support them. Rather, I try to teach them how to inhabit fully the books we explore together and to keep thinking about these works after our course is over. That’s my goal.
Dorff: Do you have a book that you find students resist at first reading, but end up loving?
Luzzi: Yes, Paradiso by Dante! Of course, almost everyone wants to read Inferno. And it’s amazing, no question. Purgatory is also a kind of a cult classic—especially among poets, who historically have loved it. With its delicate, gorgeous language, it’s a very beautiful canticle. For many of my students, it becomes their favorite. But so often there’s a genuine resistance to Paradiso.
Dorff: How do you get your students to love Paradiso?
Luzzi: Paradiso can seem abstract. It’s very doctrinal, filled with Christian theology. Much of it deals with the ineffable. So, the first thing I tell my students is, yes, there’s going to be some challenges. Things are going to get technical—especially with regard to Christianity and its doctrine. Some of you may be really interested in that, others of you less so. So just be prepared. Second, I say that I believe it’s the most beautiful canticle of the three. In terms of poetry, it’s full of exquisitely original passages. It’s Dante firing at his most inventive. He even coins many new words in Paradiso.
Dorff: And does your approach work?
Luzzi: I hope so. If people see that you’re passionate about something and invested in it, they’ll usually give it a chance, even if it might not be their thing. I always tell my students there are some works that they’ll be able to read on their own. I love twentieth-century literature and authors like Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Woolf, and so on. All exceptional writers. I mean, The Great Gatsby is an amazing work—but likely more accessible than something like Dante’s Divine Comedy and Joyce’s Ulysses. You need a guide with those two, right? Paradiso is definitely one of those works where you need one. I just tell my students to be patient. I ask them to listen to it, surrender to the language without trying to force their understanding of it. Don’t try to grasp it all. Accept that some of it will elude you.
Dorff: Talk about your journey from being a newly minted professor writing academic books to becoming a best-selling author, publishing books geared to the general reader—and especially books where you often bring yourself into your own stories?
Luzzi: When my career started out it was very traditionally academic. After my PhD at Yale, my first two books were deeply researched and heavily footnoted. I loved writing them, and I still love doing that kind of scholarly work. Then my career took a turn and I ended up writing two memoirs: In a Dark Wood and My Two Italies. My work became more personal. The last few books I’ve tried to strike a balance. The Innocence of Florence and Botticelli’s Secret were deeply researched, but they’re also driven by narrative and storytelling as well because people love stories. We’re drawn to them. That’s the lesson I’ve learned from writing for the public: stories allow us to explore moral dilemmas, encounter the forbidden and the tragic, and ultimately discover who we are.
Dorff: You have had an amazing career, and you seem to do so much. How do you manage your time between your teaching, your lecturing, your Virtual Book Club—and your family and personal life? How do you juggle it all?
Luzzi: I get this question a lot. Here’s the thing: I don’t pull all-nighters. My number one priority is my family. I also love tennis. I do a lot of things—and I’m not always working. Yet I’ve been truly lucky in that I’ve been able to write many books. I find sticking with a schedule is important. I don’t do this all the time, but my ideal day would be to write from 8:00 am to 12:00 pm, Monday through Friday. That’s it. I don’t write on the weekend. When I’m not teaching, I go to my office in the morning and try to avoid emails, the Internet, and I will give myself four or five good hours to write. Then in the afternoon, I’ll do all the other work that needs to be done, answering emails to support my writing, teaching, and whatnot. Think about it: If you write 1,000 words a day, which isn’t all that much, at the end of the week, you’ll have 5,000 words. At the end of the month, that’s 20,000 words. After six months, that’s 120,000 words—basically the draft of a book. Then of course you go through multiple revisions. So, for me, it's all about rhythm and cycle. It’s not a continuous exhale. You write, you pause, you write, you pause, but you keep the momentum going. So, I try to just maintain this ritual, saving sacred space for writing in the morning.
Dorff: Outside literature, what other art forms—film, music, or paintings—shape the way you think about stories and meaning and how do you incorporate all of that into your work?
Luzzi: By nature, I was always a generalist—someone who tries to see connections and rather than staying in a specialized slot. So, I started teaching film after graduate school and ended up writing two books about it. Then I was in Florence on a sabbatical and I got deeply interested in Botticelli’s drawings of Dante. So, I wrote a book about art history. I follow my nose, as the saying goes. You have to trust your instincts, see where the work takes you. I always try to do that. I believe that books find us as readers as much as we find them. Sometimes you get this feeling that a book was written for you at a certain point in your life. It somehow found you, right? It’s the same thing with writers. An editor friend once said to me only write a book that feels necessary. For me, those necessary books sometimes come out of the blue. It’s the serendipity of life. I would have never written the Botticelli book if I had not gone to Florence with my young family on a fellowship. It just happened, and it was kind of magical. It was also challenging because I wasn’t trained in art history, but I like the challenge of having to learn something almost from the ground up.
Dorff: Now that you’ve finished your book The Innocence of Florence, what is your next project?
Luzzi: I’m excited to be writing a book called The Lives of Beatrice: The Muse Who Made Us Modern. It will be biography of Dante’s muse, Beatrice, and it will reconstruct her life and impact over the centuries, on figures ranging from Petrarch and Cervantes to Joyce and the Pre-Raphaelites. I’ll even explore how she has entered the mainstream of popular culture. It was a thrill to return to Yale this past fall and discuss this new project in the Italian Studies Annual Dante Lecture.
Dorff: How are you going about the research for a person about whom so little is known?
Luzzi: Think about the recent novel and film about Shakespeare, Hamnet. OK, we know that Shakespeare had a son named Hamnet who died at a young age, and a few years later Shakespeare wrote his famous play Hamlet. We also know that Hamnet was an alternate spelling for Hamlet. The author Maggie O’Farrell had an intuition—she thought there had to be a visceral connection between Shakespeare’s personal tragedy and his great play, though the scholarly record is inconclusive on the matter. I think the novel Hamnet is a genuinely interesting exploration of grief. Granted, the author takes liberties. After all, it’s a work of fiction—not history. But in its way, O’Farrell’s book is trying to understand something about Shakespeare through fiction, based on her sense that the death of his son must have affected him. My approach will be much more historical and entirely nonfictional, but in a similar spirit, I’ll follow my intuitions regarding Dante’s relation to Beatrice. In the scant writings on her, she often comes across as the flawless theological creature she embodies in Paradiso. Many find it difficult to connect with her because she’s perfect, the font of all Christian wisdom. But to me, Dante’s Beatrice is much more—and inseparable from the young woman whom he once fell in love with. Now I say “fell in love” in the broadest, most metaphorical sense. They did not have a romantic relationship; but I believe that Dante did love Beatrice in that she was an important woman from his world. They sort of grew up together—like kids from the same metaphysical block. So I think there’s a genuine personal and historical connection there—and my book will try to bring it to life, tracing its magical resonance over the centuries.
