One man's unpopular opinion: Dante wasn't all that great

The award for troll of the month goes to Arno Widmann, who wrote a guest column bashing Dante Alighieri to coincide with a holiday honoring the Italian poet.

The Guardian reports that Widmann’s primary criticisms were that modern schoolchildren struggle to read The Divine Comedy because of its language, that Dante was a lackluster imitator of medieval troubadours, and that Dante was less “modern” than William Shakespeare.

These remarks, published in the German newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau, were not received kindly by Italians; you can read their civil but sharp reactions to the Dante disses in the Guardian.

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