Dante Desire Line Poetry Path
Ross Birrell & David Harding
Dante Desire Line Poetry Path, 2025
Desire Lines
The neat right-angled paths created by architects around grassed areas are often subverted by people taking the shortest distance between two points – across the grass. These are beautifully described by planners as, ‘desire lines.’ In 1976, when employed as Town Artist of Glenrothes (1968-78), David Harding created a poetry path which paved such a pedestrian desire line in Glenrothes and which incorporated a new poem by the Scottish poet, Alan Bold: “I suggested to Alan that, by placing a word in the top left corner of each slab in both directions, half the poem could be read on the way to the shops and the other half read on the way back.” Forty years later, in a commission for documenta 14 (2017) Harding produced a new poetry path on a desire line in Rizari Park in Athens in a site near the Athens War Museum. The path featured a couplet from Samuel Beckett’s poem Cascando: ‘if you do not love me I shall not be loved / if I do not love you I shall not love’. Beckett’s words were cast in bronze letters set in concrete slabs and could be read in English by pedestrians walking in one direction and in Greek when walking the other way.
Agape
The theme of Harding’s path in Athens was ‘agape’ the Greek term for the ideal of unconditional and enduring love and was a testament to the spirit of Greece’s humanitarian response to the refugee crisis unfolding on its shores. A letter by Petros Kokkalis, the Deputy Mayor of Piraeus on the theme of Agape is buried beneath the path.
Dante
For, Lavinia, at the Loggia dei vini, Harding has returned to the theme of Agape in a work developed in collaboration with Ross Birrell (with whom Harding has workedsince2005). In the 18th century landscaped gardens of the Villa Borghese in Rome – a very different context from the architecture of postwar Scottish New Towns – there weaves a similar desire line which begins in a thicket of trees adjacent to the garden entrance near the Galleria Borghese and meanders past the historic Loggia dei vini. For the desire line poetry path in Rome, the artist have selected a fragment from chapter XI of Dante’s Vita Nuova (1294), the poet’s description and commentary on his love for Beatrice – the earthly embodiment of the concept of divine love. In the context of seemingly intractable wars in Ukraine and Gaza, we are drawn to the apparently simple declaration which lies at the heart of Dante’s text: “I would have pardoned whosoever had done me an injury”. In the face of unutterable violence against countless innocent children in Gaza and beyond, Dante’s sentiment is almost impossible for many to contemplate but will inevitably become all the more vital to countenance if peace is to prevail for the generations to come.
A letter on the theme of Agape by the classicist, teacher, and art writer, Richard Fletcher (aka Minus Plato), is buried beneath the path.
The typeface for the bronze letters which are set in 40x40cm concrete slabs is ‘Eurostile’, a sans-serif typeface designed in 1962 by Aldo Novarese for the Nebiolo foundry in Turin.