Five hours in Hell: U of C marks Dante Day with Inferno marathon
By Danijela Marcinkovic, April 16, 2026—
On March 25, George Ferzoco, a sessional instructor in the Department of Classics and Religion, hosted a Dante Marathon at the Den and Black Lounge. This marathon was held from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. and consisted of a reading of Dante’s Inferno by various students and faculty. For five hours, each canto was read consecutively by different people who had signed up to participate.
Ferzoco hosted this marathon because March 25 is considered National Dante Day throughout Italy and elsewhere. Dante Day commemorates the anniversary of the date on which Dante Alighieri’s trip through Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso in The Divine Comedy began. This year marks the 726th anniversary of this day.
Ferzoco hosted his first Dante marathon in 1996 at the University of Exeter, where he was an assistant professor within the Department of Italian. In 1998, he held his first marathon as head of Italian Studies at the University of Leicester. Here, he held these marathons annually until 2007. From 2007 to 2019 he held these marathons annually while he was teaching at the University of Bristol. During his time at the University of Calgary he has organized three marathons.
In an interview with Ferzoco, he discussed his reasoning behind hosting these marathons.
“I thought I would try something that I was pretty sure would be a failure. I thought, theoretically, students would enjoy the opportunity of experiencing this work in the way it was intended. And that is not by sitting there and reading it, but hearing it aloud,” he said. “That was one thing, and another was that I had doubts, which I shouldn’t have had, but I did have doubts that students really wouldn’t care…and I was proved wrong, really, because the first time I tried it, the feedback was very strong, very positive.”
“It was on the basis of an experiment that proved successful,” he added.
Many students gathered for Ferzoco’s marathon on March 25, including a graduate of U of C, which Ferzoco sees as a sign of success in his years of hosting these marathons.
Ferzoco added onto the importance of reading Dante aloud as it was done in antiquity.
“Most people, if they wanted to learn something, had it told to them. So that’s what I was trying to recreate,” he said. “And what I personally found to be the case, and several students have told me this, is that each and every time that I had read aloud, I’ve heard something new, something I didn’t think of before.”
“You learn more, I think, by listening carefully,” he concluded.
A student of Ferzoco, Zoë Catherwood, expressed how this marathon has furthered her knowledge of Dante in an interview with the Gauntlet.
“I’ve found it much different to experience it this way, because throughout the semester, we’re analyzing it, and laying in bed, and reading the canto, and then reading the notes and going back and forth…but hearing it like this, and having it all at once has made it more of a unit of work, and I was able to draw connections that I didn’t even think of before,” she said.
Ferzoco is looking forward to hosting this event again next year, and hopes his event can reach a broader range of individuals, not just students.
“I’m looking forward to doing this next year. And if I can dare to dream, maybe next year we could hold similar marathons for Purgatorio and Paradiso, and additionally include members of the public who could maybe read a canto in their mother tongue,” he stated.