The Story
A programme note
Not a war spectacle. A private ritual of remeberence contained within the Piazza di Santa Croce.
A short award-winning screenplay by Katherine
Schimmel-completed in 2023 and now brought to the screen in 2026 by award- winning Filmmaker Cecilia Miniucchi
Monument to Dante Alighieri · Enrico Pazzi, 1865 · Piazza di Santa Croce, Florence
The true cost
War does not end when
the fighting stops.
It is not possible to calculate the true human cost of war, because estimates can never include the psychological or physiological costs to those who survive it — nor the long tail of intergenerational trauma carried into the years that follow.
Dinner with Dante lives inside that uncounted cost. It is a reflective, literary, intimate film — a study of grief and endurance and the inability to move on despite the passage of time.
Week after week
A life narrowed to a single ritual.
Week after week
Month after month
Year after year
The script carries a deliberate repetitiveness — a form that mirrors the narrowness of the protagonist’s world.
The premise
A
fictional young Italian woman, marked by the losses of the Second World War,
returns each week to the statue of Dante in the Piazza di Santa Croce. There, in monologues she holds only in her mind, she both speaks and questions the poet leaving the audience to wonder, will she ever find a way to carry her grief or will she forever remain neither her nor there.
The protagonist is fictional, yet the ground beneath her is real. The story was inspired by Katherine’s own, more limited conversations with the monument, combined with fragments of stories she had heard about the early post-war years in Florence.
On the writing
“
The narrative plumbs complex emotions and the lifelong attempt to cope with grief and mourning through meticulous description of emotions, and an educated and sophisticated use of language.