«The Divine Dante with which I begin in the morning». Longfellow e la nascita degli studi danteschi in America

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was a superb linguist, a curious traveler, a pro- fessor of Modern Language and Literatures at the University of Harvard and, above all, an exemplary reader of Dante who gave to the American reader «the first full American translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy». The aim of this paper is to show the deep connection Longfellow had to Dante Alighieri, seen in the wider perspec- tive of Dante studies in the United States between the 18th and the 19th centuries.