Dante and me tells the story of a life-changing coincidence of love-lives on the streets of Florence in 1273 and 1975 and how it led to Graham’s discovery of the poet of the Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri. 
  After three years spent living in Tuscany and working in Florence without having read a line of Dante, Graham moved to the French Catalan town of Cérét in the Eastern Pyrenees in 1976. 

One afternoon at the end of Winter, he writes, “an American couple asked us to tea just out of town. There was a thunderstorm on. We went anyway. Later, as we left, the elderly husband handed me a book. “Read that”, he said. It was a paperback edition of Dante’s Inferno translated into English verse by John Ciardi.  

I had not read a line of Dante before. It was like the storm breaking all over again. That book led to a life in which Dante has been presidential. I wish I could remember my benefactor’s name. But his wife was Grace, and