Dante in Ravenna

The shady Zona Dantesca/del Silenzio around the poet's local church, San Francesco, quickly became my favourite refuge from the sun, if not the humidity, during my charmed time in Ravenna.

Of course there's the wonder of the tomb itself, a symbol of the ongoing homages to the master combining an 18th century exterior by Camillo Moriglia

with Pietro Lombardo's 1483 original, including a fine relief.

The story of Dante's bones and their various shakeups since he died in 1321 after three presumably tranquil years under the patronage of Guido Novello di Polenta - the Polentas of Ravenna are buried and have memorials like this one in Dante's parish church, San Francesco -

is a fascinating one, and it's comprehensively told in the displays of the Dante Museum on the first floor of the Centro Dantesco.

While there is an active courting of the non-Dante-reading public with some of the displays,

the right wall of the 'Inferno' room tells the history. On Polenta's orders, Dante's remains were placed in a marble sarcophagus lodged in the Chapel of the Madonna between the church and the convent. In 1519, alarmed that the Florentines wanted to reclaim the bones of their exiled poet, the monks remove them to a sepulchre installed within the walls. Another monk rediscovered them in 1677 and had them placed in a wooden box with this inscription.

The box in turn was walled up when the fraternity was banished in the Napoleonic invasion in 1810 and not discovered until 1863, when a workman came across them. Great celebrations in Ravenna, and a public display of the bones, announced on this poster,

before they were lodged in the 18th century chapel. In wartime, the bones were moved yet again

and finally back again. Amen.

The museum has one original room decorated in 1921 by the Dante Society of Montevideo (!)

and fine views over the cloister of San Francesco's monastery (the monks moved back in a century and a half after their evacuation).

The next courtyard belongs to the Palazzo Rasponi where Byron lived - there was a Byron conference going on in the rooms adjoining the museum - and here we gathered on the first morning for what turned out to be a pretentious 'homage to Dante' by a 'poet' and a loud band (who were better). I didn't stay for long; the audience, however, was more interesting. One of these ladies was with a strapping 'figlio di momma', not pictured.

If that Dante event was a disappointment, there was a major compensation later that afternoon - on my way back along the main shopping drag from San Vitale, I came across the splendid reciter doing all the voices from memory, giving us the whole of the canto about Cacciaguida.

I was hoping to see him again on subsequent days, but I didn't.

The square of San Francesco is a lovely one, lined by trees and a pretty garden on one side and with a very good cafe-restaurant under the arches on the other.

Our Virgil in the Warburg Dante classes, Dr Alessandro Scafi, was responsible for choosing the quotations from the Divina Commedia carved into the stones. He wanted a sense of a passage from profane to sacred as one approaches the central west door of the church, in front of which we read 'Va, e andando ascolta' - 'Go, and listen as you do so'.

'Venite: qui si varca', 'Come: here is the crossing', are the words of the angel in Purgatorio 19:43.

And then there are the beautiful last four lines of its final Canto:

   Io ritornai da la santissima onda
rifatto si come piante novelle
rinovellate di novella fronda,
   puro e disposto a salire le stelle. 

(I returned from the most holy wave refreshed, as new plants are renewed with new leaves, pure and made ready to rise to the stars).

There is also a Dantesque inscription on the ex Casa del Mutilato on Piazza Kennedy, a Mussolini-era experiment from the years 1937-9 built in the demolished Jewish Quarter and now refurbished. Strictly speaking it's 'de l'alto scende virtù che m'aiuta'. 'from on high descends a power that helps me; line 68 of Purgatorio's Canto I.

The interior of San Francesco may seem a little gloomy compared to the mosaiced glories of other buildings in Ravenna, its sales table manned by two old ladies who had a little difficulty giving me the right change for the postcards I bought. But it has atmosphere, with its 22 columns of Greek marble and a splendid roof

and a treasure you might miss if you gave the building only a cursory glance: the crypt of Bishop Neon's fifth century original with a mosaic pavement now affected by Ravenna's rising water levels.

This only makes what you see through a grille below the high altar the more picturesque; and the goldfish are there for practical reasons, feeding on the algae which might otherwise destroy the mosaics. 

That more or less concludes my Dante instalments. I don't want to leave him behind. I have yet to make headway with the dual-language edition of Vita Nuova, and I'll certainly return to the Scafi-Took spectacular next 'term' for the earlier Inferno classes I missed by joining late.  As for the lead image, it's part of a splendid mural over one side of the boarded-up central market place, also featuring other Ravenna-connected celebrities. Insertion: a bit of classy graffiti elsewhere, presumably a take on Dante and Beatrice.

And there are several fine cafes and restaurants on the other side of the street, which the Ravenati frequent with their dogs - as regular a feature of the city as the bicycles.

Bach and Dante: hellish trials, heavenly light

So while I reached the Empyrean with Dr Scafi and Professor Took at the Warburg, and got to the end of reading Paradiso shortly afterwards, serendipitously just prior to visiting the Ravenna Festival, the one-Bach-cantata-per-Sunday scheme bit the dust again, this time on the first Sunday after Trinity. I'd already accumulated a backlog, which just got too much with so many summer weekends away.

It does seem good, though, to end on a very rich masterpiece which I also got to hear in John Eliot Gardiner's second Bach cantatas concert in the Barbican's rich Barbican weekend (alas, the only one I could make). BWV 20, 'O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort', had to be a big statement - it launched Bach's second Leipzig cycle on 11 June 1724 (thus another image of the Thomaskirche from my first acquaintance with it last December). 

No-one could write about this thunderbolt of invention better or with more inside knowledge than Gardiner, and he does so in Music in the Castle of Heaven, pages 313 to 317 (I recommend you read it all, of course).

It is an astonishing piece, one that sets the tone for the whole cycle and sums up so many of the original features we will encounter - a new range of expression, the use of operatic technique to enliven the doctrinal message and wild contrasts of mood....We seem to be already in the death-throes of the Trinity season, not at its start - but then Bach's was an age that had a taste for apocalypse and the theme crops up regularly and unexpectedly.

What, in  briefer terms, does Bach serve up? First a choral fantasia in the form of a French overture, starting with an astonishingly original idea and freezing us in our tracks on a diminished seventh, followed by heart-quaking fragments in a slower middle sequence. What an effect the three stammering oboes have at this point. No idea whose performance this is, but good to have the score accompanying the opening chorus on YouTube.

A tenor aria with a turbulent bass line and sorrowing strings 'piles on the agony' (Gardiner). The bass seems to shift into an almost comical light for the over-assertions of 'Gott ist gerecht', but we are back with pain and grief with the alto's tragic chromatic number. The coda, piano, for strings alone reprising what's been sung, is a subtle dramatic coup.

After this, prefaced by a hymn stanza, the preacher would have given his sermon. His the prerogative to make the transition to a very different mood, striking with the huge range of bass backed up by trumpet and strings. To my ears it outdoes Handel's 'The trumpet shall sound', but maybe familiarity has bred a certain taking-for-granted of that magnificent aria. There's a very expressive 'repent ye' alto solo, and then what struck in the Barbican concert, almost whispered throughout, as one of the most extraordinary, dramatic inventions in all the cantatas.

I have to quote JEG on this, since he clearly thinks so too:

It is not very often that Bach resorts to lurid pictorialism of the Hieronymus Bosch kind; yet, in the ensuing duet delivered to the errant programme as though by Bunyanesque angels (alto and tenor), he treats us to a ghoulish cameo of 'howling and chattering teeth', of the ominous approach of the hand-drawn hearse as it clatters across the cobbled street. Successions of first inversion chords over a disjointed bass line in quavers with parallel thirds and sixths in the voice parts give way first to imitative and answering phrases, then to an anguished chromaticism evoking the bubbling stream and the drop of water denied to the parched rich man. The voices join for a final flourish. We hear the gurgling of the forbidden water and the continuo playing a last furtive snatch of the ritornello. Then, dissolve...fade out...silence. Extraordinary.

This performance isn't a patch on Gardiner's, and I've got so used to hearing top mezzos and contraltos on the Rilling set that the countertenor doesn't please me much, but it's helpful to see what Bach is doing in the score.

There is light at the end of the concluding chorale, but the overall impression is one of disruption - and total, timeless genius. I may have given up this year, but I'll be thrilled to pick up where I left off in June 2019, sticking to the 1724 sequence.

In my last post yoking Bach and Dante, I was worried that our Warburg discussions about selected cantos of Paradiso were more interesting than the poetry in question. All that changed when Dr Scafi read, and Professor took reflected upon, Canto 17. We are in the heaven of Mars, moving upwards through concentric circles of planets, where we meet Cacciaguida, who died before Florence turned, in Dante's view, to the bad. This is the chance for our poet to lament the moral decline of his beloved city and to make the third, last and most explicit reference in the Divina Commedia to his own exile.

Cacciaguida, 'gazing at the point to which all times are present', makes this prophecy to Dante:

Tu lascerai ogne cosa diletta
   più caramente; e questo è quello strale
   che l'arco de lo essilio pria saetta.

Tu proverai sì come sa di sale 
   lo pane altrui, e come è duro calle
   lo scendere e 'l salir per l'altrui scale. 

E quel che più ti graverà le spalle, 
   sarà la compagnia malvagia e scempia
   con la qual tu cadrai in questa valle; 

che tutta ingrata, tutta matta ed empia 
   si farà contr' a te; ma, poco appresso,
   ella, non tu, n'avrà rossa la tempia. 

Di sua bestialitate il suo processo 
  farà la prova; sì ch'a te fia bello
  averti fatta parte per te stesso. 

You will leave behind everything loved most dearly, and this is the arrow that the bow of exile first lets fly. You will learn how salty tastes the bread of another, and what a hard path it is to descend and mount by another's stairs. And what will most weigh upon your shoulders will be the wicked, dimwitted company with whom you will fall into this valley, who will become utterly ungrateful, mad and cruel against you, but shortly after they, not you, will blush. Of their stupidity the outcome will provide the proof, so that for you it will be well to have become a party unto yourself.

The literal translation, as in previous blog instalments, is by Robert Durling, though I haven't scanned it as he does. Shall find it impossible to read more 'literary' versions, having once seen the unreproducable beauty of the Italian.

Dante, as ever, is sure of his place in history, perhaps in all eternity. Caccaguida advises him to 'make manifest your whole vision', however galling that may be at first to those with a guilty conscience. And in fact he didn't suffer in his wanderings for long, coming under the wing of the Lombards and then finding his final haven in Ravenna.

His destination as the pilgrim of Paradiso, though, is the Empyrean, and a brief vision of God in the final Canto, 33, which must have had some impact on Cardinal Newman in The Dream of Gerontius. As we move towards the greatest luminosity, Dante coins ever more neologisms - 'trasumanar', 'transhumanizing', the most famous of all, was actually introduced in 1.70 and begins to be properly realised in Canto 30 - and finds ever more poetic ways of saying 'I lack the words to describe what I saw' (the last two are in 33, lines 54-7 and 120-2).

Finally, within 'three circles, of three colours and one circumference' - the Trinity - he sees 'what seemed to me painted with our effigy'. Does this mean that man/mankind is the last vision - that, as Professor Took put it, 'central to the Godhead is the human project', that neither God nor man should be alone? I love, as usual, his summation of Dante heading 'into a plenitude of proportionate understanding and ultimate love'.

My end is going to be another beginning, which I've described on the musical front on The Arts Desk: Ravenna, where Dante could not have been unaffected by the dazzling domes of light, whether in the blue-and-gold intimacy of Galla Placidia's Mausoleum - pictured at the top of the post - or the lofty heights of San Vitale.

On this visit, my second since leaving my last Interrailing pal in the city's youth hostel and making my first independent travel in 1982, I fell in love with Dante's final resting place. On, then, eventually, to those most heavenly of mosaics.

Ever upwards with Bach and Dante

You can see I'm in danger of being left behind on terra firma in both my big pursuits of the year, with four out of seven Bach cantatas to catch up on here - I'll deal with the other three alongside next today's in a future post - and four Dante lectures to comment upon, of which I missed one. Nevertheless I'll make some effort to be light and airy like the masters.

It seems I was premature in leaving Purgatorio behind in my previous Dante/Bach post: there turned out to be one more Warburg Institute class on the middle cantica. The most treasurable utterance, of many, that I took away from Professor Took, of many, was a very helpful summary of the Dantean essence in response to one of the questions in the discussion: 'Peope's lives are mixed, ambiguous in the extreme, simultaneously in hell, purgatory and paradise. In order to explore [the issue], he divides it out. The moment of truth lies somewhere in the unutterable complexity of the here and now'.

Even so, Dr Scafi prepared us for 'a difficult and allegorical Canto' (33, the last, of Purgatorio) in the shape of the final processional which represents the triumph of the church (sketched above by Botticelli, no less), complete with the four cardinal virtues, three theological virtues and Beast of the Apocalypse. The difficulties pale into insignificance once we reach Paradiso. Dante warns the slackers among us - and there must be many more now than in that religiously obsessive age - at the beginning of Canto 2 (with acknowledgment to Robert W Durling's literal translation):

   O voi chi siete in piccioletta barca,
desiderosi d'ascoltar, seguiti
dietro al mio legno, ché cantando varca:
   tornate a riveder li vostri liti,
non vi mettete in pelago, che forse,
perdendo me, rimarreste smarriti;
   l'acqua ch'io prendo già mai non si corse;
Minerva spira, e conducemi Appollo,
e nove Muse mi dimostran l'Orse.

O you who in little barks, desirous of listening, have followed after my ship that sails onward singing, turn back to see your shores again, do not put out on the deep sea, for perhaps, losing me, you would be lost; the waters that I enter have never before been crossed; Minerva inspires and Apollo leads me, and nine Muses point out to me the Bears.

Despite the comfort of mythological and classical signposts, the Christian theology, albeit that Dante has such a singular take on much of it, is what makes so many of Beatrice's homilies rather hard for the contemporary reader. So is the assurance of a now outdated cosmology; it can't all be taken as poetic metaphor, after all. Nevertheless, the guidance of our Warburg Dante and Virgil (who has long disappeared from the scene in the Divina Commedia, of course), and the thoroughness of the notes to the Durling edition (of which the Paradiso volume runs to 873 pages) make the most difficult journey worthwhile.

The best of our two most recent classes, for me, has been in the discussions. I'm getting antsy: why should Piccarda Donati and the empress Constanza be in the lowest sphere, the moon, in Canto 3 (pictured above), simply because men snatched them out of their nunneries and forced them into unspeakable wedlock? And why does the narrative of Dante's Thomas Aquinas about St Francis seem so hard and charmless to us, expecting at least something of the goodly saint's conversation with nature?

Dante's Beatrice provides part of the answer when it comes to the two paradisical ladies in Canto 4: they merely appear in the moon, and actually adorn the first sphere, the Empyrean. It's a matter of conscience. Well, that's half satisfactory. And Prof. Took thinks that the narrator Dante is playing the serpent when he asks them if they don't desire a higher place. Smiling and joyful Piccarda replies that 'it is constitutive of this blessed to stay within God's will, and thus .our very wills become one' ('Anzi e formale ad esto beato esse/tenersi dentro a la divina voglia/per ch'una fansi nostre voglie stesse', 3.79-81).

As for Francis, the harshness is to do, as Prof. Took put it, with Dante's 'stringent selectivity' - he has an axe to grind with the Dominicans and their tendency towards luxury in opposition to the Franciscans, led by a man who took Poverty as his Bride. He's 'too angry', has 'too much of an agenda' to spend time on the birds and the beasts.

Bach doesn't always do the expected thing, either, though his line of communication is always direct thanks to the expressive power of music. His first Ascension cantata for Leipzig, 'Wer da gläubert und getauft wird' comes not with trumpets and drums but an exquisite halo of two oboi d'amore, a short if uplifting opening chorus and an affirmative tenor aria with ardent violin obbligato. Loveliest is the chorale for soprano and mezzo in imitation with dancing continuo support, as Brides of Christ complete with joyous 'eia's- irresistible when Rilling's soloists here are Arleen Auger and Carolyn Watkinson.

That fine alto distinguishes BWV 44, 'Sie werden euch in den Bann tun', with a superb aria alongside oboe and bassoon. The opening is surprising: two parts of the text run respectively as a duet for tenor and bass and a harmonically wayward chorus in faster tempo. The chorale for tenor here has a distinctly weird, chromatic accompaniment from bassoon, there are fabulous adventures from the bass line in the virtuoso soprano aria, verging on the Handelian, and the closing chorale is familiar from its similar setting in the Matthew Passion.

BWV 172, 'Erschallet, ihr Lieder, erklinget, ihr Saiten!' for Whitsunday, is much more what one might expect for Ascension. It comes as no surprise to learn that its three celebratory trumpets, which go virtuoso-crazy in the bass aria (a good, if short alternative to Handel's 'The Trumpet Shall Sound'), were originally meant for a secular celebration, but they suit the celestial setting of the Weimar chapel (pictured below, no longer extant, alas) for which they were destined in 1714. The tenor aria offers some room for reflection, and a presumably deliberate harping on minor seconds in the 'weh' of 'wehet'.

Intimacy is apt for the Whitsun Monday and Tuesday cantatas, both of which begin with charming recitatives. BWV 173, 'Erhöhtes Fleisch und Blut", is another cantata adapted from a profane congratulatory set. It haas a radiant beginning (plus a non-chorale final number, unusual but not unique among the cantatas) and a lilting 6/8 tenor aria (beautifully sung on the Rilling set by his regular, Adalbert Kraus) with flute doubling first violin line to strong effect. The most original number, in which each of three verses, first for bass, then soprano, then the two together, is treated with increasing elaboration, is ruined by the only inadequate soprano I've heard on the Rilling set so far; let's hope she's a one-off.

BWV 175, 'Er rufet seinen Schafen mit Namen' captures the good-shepherd pastoral aspect with three recorders - and we're back to excellent soloists - Watkinson, Schreier, Huttenlocher - exchanged for two very florid trumpets before the finale choral reverts to the original colouring. Last night, in the only one of the three Gardiner cantata sequences I was able to catch over the Bach weekend at the Barbican, there was equal rustic beauty in the perfect correspondence between countertenor Reginald Mobley and Rachel Beckett and Christine Garratt on two transverse flautes for the aria 'Wohl euch, ihr auserwählten Seelen' in BWV 20. But I feel that's all I can write on the evening's cornucopia of riches for now, lest you feel drowned in BWV numbers. More anon.

Bach and Dante over Easter

The Bach cantata pilgrimage with Rilling and company came to a halt over Lent, for obvious reasons. And since the only Palm Sunday cantata, BWV 182, was among the last I reached in my 2013 attempt to make a whole year of cantatas, Easter weekend marked the pick-up point. First, though, an essential Passion for Good Friday, since this year I didn't get to hear one live (the nearest I came was the unforgettable Lucerne staging of Schumann's Scenes from Faust). I have the Britten set of the St John on LP, unheard until now, with its bold reproduction of Graham Sutherland's Northampton Crucifixion on the cover, and it proved a very moving listening experience.

Having started with another boxed set I picked up recently in a quest to try and take unfashionable large-scale Bach seriously, Karajan's St Matthew Passion, and given up when faced with the sludge and the dim sound - back that goes to another charity shop - Britten's is a whole new world of biting passion and inscaped sadness. It's sung in English, with Peter Pears having worked on the recitatives and Imogen Holst collaborating on the rest; Colin Matthews writes briefly but eloquently on the changes in an essential booklet note. And I've been reading Imogen H on Britten and Byrd recently; what a superb clarifier she was (pictured below with Britten and Pears in the Red House garden).

Pears's burning delivery - the famous setting of Peter's weeping is as searing as any - makes it work. And there's plenty of thrust in the meaning from the Wandsworth School Boys' Choir - really, no extra voices? - and the superb soloists. John Shirley-Quirk helps realise Britten's special spirituality in the last bass aria with chorale, and Alfreda Hodgson is peerless in both Parts, much abetted by the English Chamber Orchestra oboes in No. 11. A great mezzo, easily the equal of Janet Baker and yet so overlooked by comparison.

Later I turned to another LP box I picked up recently, Britten's 'new concert version' of Purcell's music for The Fairy Queen, in which Hodgson sings Mopsa to Pears's Corydon (no all-male bad camp here, then, but plenty of esprit). Again, the stylishness and engagement leap out over a distance of 45 years, and I like what Britten does with the messy hybrid better than any other version. I've now ordered up his Schumann Faust-Szenen with Fischer-Dieskau as a third LP set to make a handsome trilogy.

Easter Day, Monday and Tuesday brought with them new cantatas to hear, so finally it was back to Rilling. 'Der Himmel lacht! Die Erde jubilieret,' BWV 31, was composed by the 30-year old Bach for Weimar - the size of it suggests the original venue as not the court chapel but the main parish church known as the Herderkirche where we were lucky to attend an Easter Sunday service back in 2015, looking on the splendid Cranach altarpiece -

and probably reused in Leipzig. Gardiner suggests a parallel between the five-part chorus and the Gloria of the B minor Mass, down to the slowing of tempo and rest for the brass in the middle. It's exactly what one would expect for a 'Christ is risen' Cantata, though the ensuing recits are perhaps more striking in their word-painting than the bravura arias. There's a sublime trumpet descant to the final chorale.

Our Easter Sunday anthem this year, by the way, was Hadley's 'My beloved spake,' which we all used to love in the choir of All Saints Banstead - I realise it also enable me to recite this bit of the Song of Solomon - and which was sung on Sunday by the choir of St Paul's Cathedral. So we went there through the drear and heard the music only from a great distance, among masses of tourists. Still, Hadley's juicy harmonic shifts and two big blazes made their mark. I'm hoping close friends Juliette and Rory will choose it for their wedding this summer.

Most fascinating on the Bach front is the extreme contrast between the Easter Day jubilation and the inwardness of 'Bleib bei uns, denn es will Abend werden,' BWV 6, composed for 1725's Easter Monday in Leipzig. The comparison here in the opening chorus is even more marked, with the bittersweet genius of 'Ruht wohl' at the end of the St John Passion, C minor key and sarabande movement included.

How wonderful the harmonies of the two oboes and oboe da caccia and the power of the chorus in Rilling's superlative performance; likewise the oboe da caccia's solo in counterpoint with mezzo Carolyn Watkinson, a singer I always liked and who appears in the Rilling Bach cantatas for the first time, and the piccolo cello against Edith Wiens (another unexpected name in the set) singing the central chorale. Profound music throughout in a great performance.

Gardiner is a thoughtful commentator again; he compares the contrast between the absence of Christ in a light-diminished world and a holding on to Word and sacrament, a contrast between dark and bright, with Caravaggio's first representation of the Supper at Emmaus, pictured above; it made me look up the second, where Christ has a beard.

Still, although it's less pertinent here (daylight is preferred to the night setting), Titian's representation, often overlooked in the Louvre because it hangs opposite Leonardo's Mona Lisa and currently in the stunning Charles I exhibition at the Royal Academy, is the one closest to my heart. Such gorgeous coloured silks, such an amazing composition.

Easter Tuesday's cantata is a little satyr-play by comparison with the Big Ones; it seems that a Telemann opening chorus was added, probably in performances after Bach's death. 'Ich lebe, mein Herze, zu deinem Ergötzen,' BWV 145, putatively reworks secular numbers lost to us. It dances its nine-minute way in a delicious opening duet with solo violin and a tenor aria with trumpet solo. A concert of all three cantatas would be as good a demonstration as any of Bach's phenomenal emotional range.

Dante's encyclopaedic frame of reference, in the meantime, continues to stun. Frail follower that I am, I missed the climactic Warburg class on Purgatorio, in which I'm told Dr Alessandro Scafi read Dante's meeting with Beatrice in the Garden of Eden with special tenderness; I'd only just back from Lucerne last Monday, and the extra half hour I'd promised the Opera in Depth students so that we could see the second and third acts of From the House of the Dead in Chéreau's production ran over; a furious pedal from Paddington to Bloomsbury would still have made me miss at least ten minutes of the class.

Anyway I shall reach the top of Purgatory Mountain under my own steam, and meanwhile I've had time to reflect on what my dual-language Dante edition calls 'the great expositions of doctrine at the centre of the Purgatorio'. That therefore means at the centre of the entire Divina Commedia. They appear in Cantos 15-18, and in our first class on the second instalment of the mighty work, Dr. Scafi and Professor Took chose three key passges from two of these Cantos. I'm going to gloze superficially in order, starting most skimmingly with the sharing of heavenly goods, which Dante adapts from Gregory the Great. Earthly ones, according to Dante's Virgil, cannot be shared without a lessening for each sharer; our democratic societies with their libraries, museums and hospitals, albeit under threat, would deny that, as translator Robert Durling points out.

Nevertheless the sharing in Purgatory which began in Canto 2 with the communal hymn in the boat bearing Dante's beloved composer Casella and others is one of the loveliest things about this second book after the total solipsism of the characters in hell. The language strikes me as especially beautiful in these central Cantos, so I'm going to quote at well with Durling's literal translation to follow.

     ...per quanti si dice più li 'nostro',
tanto possiede più di ben ciascuno,
e più di caritate arde in quel chiostro.

For the more say 'our' up there, the more good each one possesses, and the more charity burns in that cloister (15,  55-7).

    Quello infinito e ineffabil Bene
che la su è, così corre ad amore
com' a lucido corpo raggio vène.

That infinite and ineffable Good which is up there runs to love just as a ray comes to a shining body. (15, 67-9).

     E quanta gente più là sù s'intende.
piu v'è da bene amare, e piu si v'ama,
e come specchio l'uno a l'altra rende. 

And the more people bend toward each other up there, the more there is to love well and the more love there is, and, like a mirror, each reflects it to the other. (15, 73-5)

Well, we can at least aspire to that down here, can't we? 'We must love one another and die'.

By the way, I'm typing out the Italian in the hope that I can memorise more here, as I have of three-line segments of the Inferno. I don't really know where to start or end in Marco Lombardo's explanation of the relationship between fate/the stars and free will in Canto 16 (the soul trying to cleanse himself in the murk is illustrated by Doré above). But I'll try to keep it down. This is the beginning of Marco's exposition to Dante.

     Alto sospir, che duolo strinse in 'uhi!'
mise fuor prima; e poi cominciò: 'Frate,
lo mondo è cieco, e tu vien ben da lui.
     Voi che vivete ogne cagion recate
pur suso al cielo, pur come se tutto
movesse seco di necessitate.
     Se così fosse, in voi fura distutto
libero arbitrio, e non fora giustizia
per ben letizia, e per male aver lutto.

A deep sigh, which sorrow dragged out into 'uhi!', he uttered first, and then began: 'Brother, the world is blind, and you surely come from there. You who are alive still refer every cause up to the heavens, just as if they moved everything with them by necessity. If that were so, free choice would be destroyed in you, and it would not be just to have joy for good and mourning for evil. (16, 64-72)

'Lume v'è dato a bene e a malizia,' 'a light is given you to know good and evil,' Marco continues, tracing the origins with a lovely image which follows the feminine gender of 'anima',

     Esce di mano a lui che la vagheggia
prima che sia, a guisa di fanciulla
che piangendo e ridendo pargoleggia,
     l'anima semplicetta, che sa nulla,
salvo che, mosso da lieto fattore,
volontier torna a ciò che la trastulla.
     Di picciol bene in pria sente sapore;
quivi s'inganna, e dietro ad esso corre
se guida o fren non torce suo amore.

From the hand of him who desires it before it exists, like a little girl who weeps and laughs childishly, the simple little soul comes forth, knowing nothing except that, set in motion by a happy Maker, it gladly turns to what amuses it. Of some lesser good it first tastes the flavour; there it is deceived and runs after it, if a guide or rein does not turn away its love. (16, 85-93)

This is a fine amendment of Augustine's concept of original sin: Dante is telling us that human nature as such is not corrupt, but simply makes bad choices (by the way, God, please send me a Virgil who looks like Hippolyte Flandrin's above). No wonder Dante wanted to reinforce and expand on Marco's words with Virgil's in Cantos 17 and 18. Although the language is drier, more theoretical, I love these lines:

     'Né creator né creatura mai,'
comincio el, 'figliuol, fu sanza amore,
o naturale o d'animo, e tu 'l sai. 
     Lo natural è sempre sanza errore,
ma l'altro puote errar per male obietto
o per troppo o per poco di vigore.

'Neither Creator nor creature ever,' he began, 'son, has been without love, whether natural or of the mind, and this you know. Natural love is always unerring, but the other can err with an evil object or with too much or too little vigour.  (17, 91-6).

More on love natural and elective, with further subdivisions, is to be found in the continuation of Virgil's observations in Canto 19, but this is probably more than enough to try and digest for now. Mighty Dante - intellect and poetry perfectly conjoined to make independent thought that is anything but simplistically moralising.