The voices of Francesca

I was born in 1972 and have always lived in Borgo San Dalmazzo, a municipality of the Valle Stura in the province of Cuneo in Alpine Occitania.  The Piedmont dialect, widespread in that area and similar to that which is spoken by my family on my father’s side, was a part of my childhood mixed up with the one spoken by my family on my mother’s side, which in those days I did not realise was Occitan. Having completed my schooling specialising in classical studies, [...]

Liana Patarava was born in 1963 in Ozurgeti, a town in the Guria region, a beautiful mountainous region in western Georgia. She graduated in economics from the Tbilisi State University. She is married and has three children and two grandchildren. She loves art, poetry and writing and also has a musical education: her instrument is violin. In the field of art she has dedicated herself to an ancient and noble technique of gold and jewelery, the cloisonné enamel decoration, widely practiced in Georgia since the early Middle [...]

My name is Svitlana Hlazunova. I was born in 1962 in Kherson, a city in southern Ukraine. Since I was a child I had a great passion for music, transmitted to me by my parents. When I was a student I attended a music school and in 1978 I got a piano diploma. In 1983 I graduated from the University of Uman, faculty of pedagogy with a specialization in music education. At that time I started writing songs, both text and music. For twenty years [...]

Ghislaine Avan is a French multidisciplinary artist, born in Châtellerault. Choreographer, tap dancer and contemporary dance performer, videographer and film editor, she makes a path of life of her art. In 2006 she started a multimedial work based on the Divine Comedy, from which the “Le LA du Monde“ project derived, involving a large number of excerpts taken from Dante's poem and read by hundreds of people in languages all over the world. Here Ghislaine lends her voice to Francesca and reads Dante's relevant verses in two different French translations of the Comedy.

Inês Querido was born in 1984 in Caldas da Rainha (Portugal). After taking her degree in graphic design in Lisbon she embarked on a professional career as a freelance photographer [...]

Emma Clare O’Connor was born in Seattle in 1993 and is a New York based actor. She recently graduated from Sarah Lawrence College, where she focused in acting and studied abroad at the British American Drama Academy in London. She was most recently in a short film that premiered at the Museum of Moving Images in Queens, New York. Her website is www.emmaclareoconnor.com. ------- Emma O’Connor has lent her voice to Francesca da Rimini and read the relevant verses (Hell, Canto V, 88-142) in the [...]

  Alessandra Kersevan was born in 1950 into a working class family in Monfalcone, Italy, the third of four children. From her earliest childhood she breathed the ideals of justice and equality from the labourers in the city’s workplaces, and still feels herself bound to them to this day. She graduated in philosophy in 1974 with a thesis on contemporary history and the multiethnic atmosphere of her region also aroused her enthusiasm for less widely known languages; she devoted herself to the study and practice [...]

Anastasia Vilkova was born in Astrakhan, one of the principal cities in the south of European Russia on the Volga river. She completed her studies at the Faculty of Modern Letters in the University of Astrakhan where she specialised in linguistic history with particular emphasis on old Russian. Currently she is in charge of editing a newspaper for young men to whom she is teaching journalism in a workshop for art and culture which has been expressly dedicated to them. ooOoo Anastasia Vilkova has lent [...]