ROME (AP) – Roberto Benigni was reciting a page from Dante’s poem on love and the afterlife when he thought hell had come to Earth.

Shots rang out Tuesday night as the Oscar-winning actor-director was performing in a piazza in the southern Italian city of Cosenza, police said.

Upon hearing the gunfire, Benigni said: “What, is hell here, too?” – then resumed his performance, the news agency ANSA said.

Police said a security guard had stopped a man who was trying to get into the show without a ticket. The man pulled out a gun and fired six shots, five of which hit the security guard in the legs, local police spokesman Angelo Cosentino told The Associated Press by telephone Wednesday.

The guard was hospitalized but the injuries weren’t life-threatening, police said. A 45-year-old man with a police record for minor crimes was arrested for attempted murder.

Benigni is touring Italy with a show called “Tutto Dante (All Dante),” in which he mixes political satire with readings from “The Divine Comedy” – the allegoric voyage through hell, purgatory and paradise written in the early 14th century by Tuscan poet Dante Alighieri.

The 54-year-old Tuscan-born comic, who directed and starred in the film “Life Is Beautiful,” said he regretted the incident but thought it was poetic.

“The poetic greatness is that he did that just to hear Dante,” ANSA quoted Benigni as saying Wednesday. “I’m sorry, and I feel for the kid’s family, but he did it for poetry, and that’s a great thing.”

He added: “It’s incredible what life can put together. To hear shots onstage was absurd. … But to hear shots while you’re reciting about love … is truly something incredible, paradoxical.”

Most in the audience thought firecrackers had gone off, police said.

“Life Is Beautiful” won the best foreign film Oscar in 1999; Benigni won the award for best actor.

AP-ES-08-29-07 1622EDT