Dante in a Walnut

A little gem of twentieth-century miniature art is nested in Naples: the Divine Comedy by Antonio Maria Esposito. In silence and solitude, this artist has created, as a spiritual exercise of patience, forty-two sculpted scenes from Dante’s masterpiece set in small walnut shells. The bodies of his characters are made of tiny drops of oil paint, the heads are grains of pear pulp, and yet they inhabit “enormous” landscapes, set in perfect perspective, representing the entire cosmos of the afterlife.
In this documentary, a tender, infinitesimal Dante guides us through the Dark Forest, the Gates of Hell, the snakes and the devils of the Malebolge, and then up to the mountain of Purgatory until we reach the unique work about Heaven: a vortex of angels in chants and dance. The film also tells the story of the difficult restoration of this unique work of art, and of the events that took place in Naples for the celebrations of the 700th anniversary of Dante. A very small, but intense hymn to art and its power to unite human beings across cultures and centuries