In a Dark Wood

A story of love and grief. ‘I became a widower and a father on the same day’ says Joseph Luzzi. His book tells how Dante’s ‘The Divine Comedy’ helped him to endure his grief, raise their infant daughter, and rediscover love.


On a cold November morning, Joseph Luzzi, a Dante professor, found himself racing to hospital – his wife, eight-and-a-half months pregnant, had been in a horrible car accident. In one terrible instant, Luzzi became both a widower and a first-time father. Adrift and grieving, Luzzi found himself sharing Dante’s dark wood with an intimacy that years of reading had never shown him: the words became a wise companion through the Inferno of his grief, his healing, and ultimately his rediscovered love.