Part Two: Resurrection explores Dante’s experience in exile, and his completion of the last two parts of the Comedy, shortly before his death in Ravenna in 1321.

Part Two: Resurrection explores Dante’s experience in exile, and his completion of the last two parts of the Comedy, shortly before his death in Ravenna in 1321. Interweaving soaring scenes drawn from Purgatory and Paradise, the film goes on to explore the literary and cultural fate of Dante’s masterpiece from the time of his death down to today. Embracing the entire human community, committed to an egalitarian vision that placed women on an equal footing with men, and determined to communicate to the widest possible audience -- Dante wrote his groundbreaking work in a form of vernacular Florentine that would become the basis of the Italian language itself. Centuries later, on these shores, the poem spoke to something deep in the emerging American psyche and soul: the Dante of exile, of freedom and free will. In praise to Dante for blazing a new path for language and literature, one that might serve as a model for American literature itself, Ralph Waldo Emerson declared: “Dante is Italian because at that moment he could most live as an Italian. At this moment, he would be born American.”