A 700 anni dalla morte di Dante: la geomatica della Commedia

As we approach the 700th anniversary of the death of Dante Alighieri this work seeks to examine his Comedy in its entirety, providing, in the first instance, a statistical analysis of the places mentioned therein, and another dealing with the characters associated with these places. The analysis is intended to be exhaustive and includes those places, obviously less frequent, outside of Italy (in this regard, it should be remembered that Dante could not have had much greater knowledge of geography than that already condensed in Ptolemy's Ecumene). To this end, groups of high school students were asked to read all the cantos of the three Canticles of which Dante's Divine Comedy (by Dante Alighieri) is composed, and to prepare a list of the required data in a properly ordered list. Their dedication and painstaking efforts have provided an indispensable, invaluable and essential support for the creation of the database from which the statistical, graphical and geomatic analyses that form the core of this paper are derived. Next, the variance analysis (performed using the Pearson correlation coefficient) and the connection analysis (performed with the Bonferroni Indices) are presented, observing the absence of a law on the average behavior of the variables treated and yet a not entirely random permutation (in contrast, the values of the correlation coefficients display curious tendencies in Inferno and Paradiso, reflecting Dante's political ideas, while being almost non-existent in Purgatorio). Lastly, a network is created to organize the information flow between characters and places on the basis of the tables into which the data collected was placed. This network has a functional model similar to that of a leveling network, or a network of potential differences or flows, in other disciplines (despite the obvious absence of observations and a stochastic-metrological model for them). The data collected are condensed into a series of anamorphic maps that facilitate their reading. In this case too, precious and indispensable has been the contribution of the architect-graphic designer who produced the anamorphic maps and the other images, displayed to support the statistical and numerical processes presented in this work (in this regard, equal merits must also go to the teacher of Italian who coordinated all the work performed by the aforementioned High School students): Without some small, but nonetheless very useful, contributions, even the greatest of ideas are worth nothing. The analysis as a whole does not seek to analyze the Divine Comedy but rather to highlight, from a statistical point of view, the rigor of Dante's creation, in terms of its accuracy and reliability. On the other hand, from a geomatics point of view, the work does provide a further example of the possibilities offered by geomatics applications that today are able to find uses in areas traditionally far removed from geomatics and applied geomatics, such as those of the human sciences. This approach is particularly interesting, because it seeks to make available, without airs or graces, the point of view of geomatic scientists, with their measurement techniques, their mathematical models and their methods of calculation and analysis, to other disciplines, taking into consideration other data, different from  those traditionally dealt with by the surveying disciplines (with an eagerness to share ideas, and with a spirit of service and a wish to learn new things). Thus, the desired point of convergence is to expand the boundaries of Geomatics Applications, in this direction, and, also, on the other hand, to find interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary interlocutors who can propose examples, of certain appeal, who can critically evaluate the methodologies used and the results obtained, and who can maintain a constructive dialogue allowing both convergent communities to grow critically and to improve.