Comedìa

Painted the day his son was born — a Dante for the 700th anniversary, on the wall of the Municipio.

Comedìa is a mural created by artist Neve in May 2021 on the facade of Palazzo Landriani Caponaghi in Piazza Risorgimento, Seregno, on the occasion of the 700th anniversary of Dante Alighieri's death.

"Comedìa" is a large-scale outdoor mural painted in May 2021 on the facade of the Palazzo Landriani Caponaghi — the seat of the Municipio di Seregno — on Piazza Risorgimento, in Seregno (province of Monza-Brianza, Lombardy). The work was commissioned for the 700th anniversary of Dante Alighieri's death. The title adopts the medieval Tuscan spelling and accentuation: "Comedìa" — with the stress on the final syllable, as the word was pronounced and written in Dante's own time. The figure rendered is not Dante himself as a living person but Dante as monument: the classical sculptural bust of the poet — based on the conventional iconographic tradition of portrait sculpture, crowned with laurel — treated as a marble statue, rendered in the grey-white palette of carved stone. Under his left arm, the poet holds his book, on which the word "Comedia" is legible. The statue is cracked. Through its surface run branching fractures filled with gold: kintsugi — the Japanese art of repairing broken objects with gold lacquer, treating the break not as damage to be hidden but as history to be honoured. In Neve's reading, the gold cracks in Dante's marble figure make the seven centuries of the poem's age visible as luminosity rather than deterioration. The lower portion of the composition abandons the marble palette entirely. From the waist downward, deep red bleeds into the grey — vivid, gestural, dripping — descending in paint runs to the base of the wall. The red was described by the artist as a reference to roots: the energy beneath, the blood of the language and the culture from which the poem grows. Above: cold stone and gold fractures. Below: red, alive, moving. The inauguration took place in an open public ceremony in Piazza Risorgimento, documented from above: chairs set at social distance, a crowd gathered to face the wall, the mural beside them. The work was painted the same day Neve's son was born.