Live, it's beautiful: Benigni offers amusing insights to Dante's 'Inferno'

Sounds unlikely? Benigni thinks so, too.

Greeting the sold-out crowd with a few cheers, joyful hops, and political jokes, he also mocked his own ambitions for the evening: "It's like Jim Carrey doing a show about Walt Whitman, in Florence, in Italian."

With due respect to Mr. Carrey, it was nothing like that at all. After a brief standup routine that took amusing swipes at everyone from Silvio Berlusconi to Sal DiMasi, Benigni began talking about Dante Alighieri and his masterpiece. And what followed was, simply and almost inexplicably, superb.

"Tutto Dante" is not an evening of theater, exactly. It's more like the best college lecture you ever heard, an intellectual exploration of a great text, leavened by a warmth and humane wisdom that too few academic experts possess. At the end, with Benigni's simple and soulful recitation of the canto, or chapter, that he has just dissected, it becomes nothing short of transcendent.

After a graceful nod to John Ciardi's translation, Benigni uses Robert and Jean Hollander's more recent version to take us into the first circle of Dante's Hell, where the narrator encounters the adulterous Paolo and Francesca. The canto is projected on a large screen above Benigni's head, one tercet (rhymed three-line stanza) at a time, as he unravels classical references, points out metaphors, and otherwise deepens our understanding of the text.

Catnip for lit majors, of course - but Benigni's approach so deftly melds scholarship with humor and good sense that it's hard to imagine a cat of any stripe remaining immune. Berlusconi returns occasionally as a running gag; Benigni charmingly interrupts himself a few times to ask the audience's help in translating a difficult word; his fluent, accented English occasionally disappears in a burst of Italian. It's just a heavenly romp through hell.

It also takes quite a while. But what's remarkable is how engaged the audience remains. Judging from the hearty laughter at some of Benigni's quips in Italian, Saturday's crowd contained an unusually high proportion of native speakers - but even those of us who can't get much past ciao were held enrapt by Dante's imagery, Benigni's annotation, and the humane spirit that infuses them both.

Then, at the end, to hear the whole canto in Italian, recited with touching and profound simplicity: It is an experience beyond analysis, born of but surpassing the intellectual work that has come before. It is poetry, breathed into new life for every soul in the room.

Of course we all stood and cheered. How could we not? We were all in paradise together.

Louise Kennedy can be reached at kennedy@globe.com.

Because of a reporting error, a review on Monday's Names page of Roberto Benigni's "Tutto Dante," about the fifth canto of Dante's "Inferno," incorrectly described the canto's setting. Limbo is technically the first circle of hell, so the fifth canto, in which the poet encounters Paolo and Francesca, takes place in the second circle.