Lectura Dantis apud Gondolam

Abstract

On October 1st, 1620, in his ancestral home in the old section of the city, Johannes Francisci Gondola, or as he was known in his Ragusan dialect, Divo Franov Gundulic (1589-1638), a young patrician in the very old and venerable city of Dubrovnik (in Latin and Italian Ragusa), on the east Adriatic coast, wrote of his "conversion".! In a preface to his King David's Penitential Psalms (Pjesni pokorne kralja Davida) , a translation of seven Penitential Psalms, Gundulic called all of his previous works "children of darkness", which he as "a Christian poet" (krstjanin spjevalac) was now rejecting. Regarding all his previous works as vain and frivolous, he characterized his new work as "the rays of light" stemming "from the beginning of true knowledge, the fear of