Now, a copy of the entire Divine Comedy, micro-inscribed on sheets of a titanium and gold alloy, will be sent up into space and left there to float in the heavens among the stars that Dante wrote about.
“We knew there would be many special editions of the Divine Comedy coming out for this year’ 700th anniversary of his death and we wanted to do something totally different,” said Giorgio Amaroli, head of Scripta Maneant, a high-end art publishing house based in Bologna.
A facsimile of the second sheet will be made part of a traditional large format printed version of the Comedy and sold as a limited numbered edition of 700 copies, for the number of years since Dante died.
Amaroli got the inspiration for the project from Canto 22 of Paradise, when Dante is among the vastness of the spheres of heaven and the planets, looks down at earth, and is taken aback by its smallness.The special delivery into space will cost the publishing company more than 150,000 euros and the books will cost about 6,000 euros each, Amaroli said.