Domenico Caon and his love for The Divine Comedy

Abstract

This work aims to discuss the life of Domenico Caon, an Italian immigrant who lived in Rio Grande do Sul, seeking to understand the intense relationship that he, as a reader, developed with the work The Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri. Domenico Caon was born in 1876 in the province of Padua, Italy, and immigrated to Brazil at a young age with his family, settling with his wife and children where today is located the municipality of Nova Roma do Sul. Domenico worked, among other activities, as a politician, merchant, artisan and farmer. This study was conceived from evidence of reading practices developed by the immigrant that deserve detailed attention, mainly in order to explain how his taste for reading arose and how Domenico related his reading experience with the social and its surroundings. The theoretical-methodological procedures applyed in this analysis are based on Cultural History and the History of Education; in particular, the concept of reading practices proposed by Batista and Galvão (2002) is used. Throughout this text, information from the immigrant’s genealogical research is presented, as well as evidence of how reading, especially the work The Divine Comedy, was present in his personal trajectory. From the investigation, it is concluded that reading practices developed by social actors, such as those of Domenico, allow to open investigative possibilities and examine the singularities that involve the historical processes of literacy outside the school environment.