A transmedia Commedia: The view from Dante Today

The crowdsourced digital archive Dante Today catalogues the adaptations and appropriations of Dante’s works across contemporary global cultures. Collectively, the 2000+ artefacts showcase the various ways that contemporary authors and artists engage in a transhistorical dialogue with Dante. This dialogue takes shape across multiple media: from novels and comics to visual and performing arts, advertisements and album covers to memes and street art. In addition to presenting a few choice artefacts from the archive’s film and television holdings, the article offers a reflection on the Commedia ’s transmediality, asking whether it is possible to read the Commedia today without the illustrations, extensions, memes and remixes we have documented in the Dante Today archive.