It was prodigious by communal intention, a great wall to enclose and to give shape and identity to a great city; and it remained so, intact and shape-giving, until its demolition in the late nineteenth century. As construction proceeded, Florentine citizens clustered about this segment or that, pointing with amazement and delight at the various gates and towers, arguing with one another about probable statistics. Dante, it may be assumed, was among these proud onlookers, watching, appraising, commenting. The experience, with others, led to the maturing Dante’s conviction that Florence was the ideal city-state, which is to say, the ideal human habitat.
Drawing on the cultural legacy he had imbibed from Brunetto Latini, Dante came to believe that the city, the città, was the place where men and women could properly live and thrive—if the city were organized, ruled, and shaped in the Florentine manner of the 1280s. Città, in its richest meaning, was a term of utmost value for Dante. He could even imagine Paradise as a città, a heavenly city, and had obviously absorbed the Ciceronian idea, formulated in De Natura Deorum (with which Dante was reasonably familiar), that even the gods were “united in a sort of civic society,” so that the entire universe could be thought of as a city of gods and men. And he could find the theme expressed in the opening lines of Virgil’s Aeneid, the poem Dante most revered, where Virgil promises that his poem will tell of “a man who suffered much in war until he could found a city.”
In his larger vision, Dante conceived of his own mundus as a constellation of well-formed city-states under the ideally balanced leadership of pope and emperor. But Florence was to be the exemplar among the urban centers. With this inspiring thought in mind, Dante served his city in military venture against the Tuscan Ghibellines in the 1280s and took part in civic affairs from about 1295 onward. In 1300 he served a term in the city government as one of the six priors, collectively known as the Signoria; and in its dealing, he became notable for putting the welfare of the commune above all other considerations.
It was another fateful period in Florentine history. The Florentine temper, then as later, was combative; and the Guelphs, so long the city’s leaders, fell to quarreling vociferously with each other. In the fall of 1301, actual war broke out between them: between the White Guelphs, now so labeled, represented by Vieri de’ Cerchi and oriented toward the merchant class; and the Black Guelphs, led by Corso Donati and favoring the nobility. Dante happened to be in Rome when hostilities began. He was in Siena, on his journey north, in March 1302, when the Black Guelphs summoned him to appear to answer criminal charges. When he failed to show, he was convicted of heinous and wholly trumped-up crimes and condemned to death. Dante never set foot in Florence again.
During his nineteen years of exile, and despite problems of sheer survival in the early period (he was reasonably comfortable later, in Verona and then in Ravenna), Dante became the complete creative writer. He was prolific almost beyond reckoning. In 1304 there came the De Yulgari Eloquentia, a tract on the superiority of the vernacular over Latin for the writing of poetry. Not long after came the Convivio, or “Banquet”: a celebration of the mode of long lyric poem called a canzone (song), with Dante offering a number of his own canzones for analysis. Some time after 1308, Dante composed the De Monarchia, another Latin treatise, addressing the ideal relation of empire and papacy, inspired by the appearance of Henry of Luxembourg as the potential pacifier and uniter of Italy. But prior to that, Dante had launched upon his major enterprise, the three-part poem he simply called the Commedia, the term for him referring to a work that begins in misery and ends in happiness: from the souls in torment in the Inferno to the souls in blessedness in Paradise. But throughout, it is the voice of Dante the exiled Florentine that we hear.
The note is struck in the De Vulgari Eloquentia: “Of all who in this world are deserving of compassion, the most to be pitied are those who, languishing in exile, never see their country again, save in dreams.” The Commedia, to which the adjective Divina was affixed two centuries afterward, is, all things considered, the greatest single poem ever written; and in one perspective, as has been said, it is autobiographical: the journey of a man to find himself and make himself after having been cruelly mistreated in his homeland. It is also a rhythmic exploration of the entire cultural world Dante had inherited: classical, pre-Christian, Christian, medieval, Tuscan, and emphatically Florentine. And it is the long poetic tribute to Beatrice Portinari which Dante promised, at the end of the Vita Nuova.
While completing the Commedia in Ravenna, in 1321, in a passage at the start of Paradiso xxv, Dante voiced his increasingly dreamlike hope of a return to his city:Should it ever come to pass that the sacred poem
To which heaven and earth have set their hand
So that it has made me lean through many a
year,
Should overcome the cruelty that shuts me out
From the fair sheepfold where I used to sleep,
A lamb, foe to the wolves who war upon it
With a changed voice now, and with changed fleece,
I will return a poet, and at the font
Of my baptism I will take the laurel crown.
By 1321, the first two parts of the Comedy had been transcribed and sent in circulation for some years, and Dante was being acclaimed through much of Tuscany as its greatest poet. But the Florentine authorities did not soften toward him, and the imagined ceremony of coronation at the baptismal font in San Giovanni never took place. Dante died on September 14, 1321, in Ravenna, and was buried there.
The first sign of official acceptance did not come until 1373, when the Signoria granted a petition, urged on it by a number of citizens, to permit Giovanni Boccaccio to offer a series of lectures on Dante’s life and works. Boccaccio was the greatest and most influential admirer of Dante in his generation. The Decameron, like Boccaccio’s other writings, is thick with allusions to stories and passages in the Comedy; Boccaccio also transcribed and composed a commentary on the poem. In the early 1350s, he compiled the first biography of Dante; it remains a unique and indispensable source. Boccaccio was Tuscan-born, in 1313, and in his early years he could listen to tales and legends about the still living Dante Alighieri. In later decades—Boccaccio spent a considerable period in Naples but returned to Florence around 1340—he made a point of consulting people who had known Dante, including literary associates and followers. After 1345, Boccaccio lodged in the home of Lippa de’ Mardoli, the second cousin of Beatrice Portinari, who could tell Boccaccio a great deal about Dante’s youthful passion.
Boccaccio thus addressed his cultivated and attentive audience with an easy authority. The lectures began in late October 1373, and after an introduction at once reverential and spirited, in which Boccaccio spoke of Dante as “a very great poet” to whom all honor was due, he began to sketch out Dante’s life, beginning with his ancestry. He told of the Eliseo clan, one member of which had come from Rome to Florence in earliest time and had settled there. Into this family, with the passage of years, Boccaccio continued, “there was born and there lived a knight by the name of Cacciaguida, in arms and in judgment excellent and brave.” In his youth this knight’s elders gave him as a bride “a maiden born of the Alighieri of Ferrara....”
TWO
Neighborhood Presences: The Early Years
CACCIAGUIDA WAS a Florentine figure of heroic legend, knighted by Emperor Conrad III, whom he followed on the Second Crusade to the Holy Land, where he was slain in battle in 1148 at age forty-two. He appears to Dante, in Paradise, like a star shooting along a glowing cross composed of the spirits of the courageous; and over three cantos (xv-xvii) he gives an eloquent discourse on the history and vicissitudes of the city of Florence, on the genealogy of the poet’s family and the source of its name, and on Dante’s future after 1300. Addressing Dante as his dear descendant, “my leaf,” he informs him:... He from whom thy kindred has its name, and who a hundred years and more has circled round the Mount on the first terrace, was son to me, and thy grandfather’s father
.
The reference is to Cacciaguida’s younger son, Alighiero, named, as was the custom, after the warrior’s father-in-law and later known as Alighiero I. If he has been circling among the proud ones on Mount Purgatory for a hundred years, he has been dead (as of the imaginative encounter in 1300) since about 1200.
As to the sin for which Alighiero was doing penance, it was quite likely excessive pride of family. Cacciaguida’s ancestors, bearing the name Eliseo, came from ancient Roman nobility; more than that, when Alighiero I married, around 1170, he entered the family of Bellincione Berti, another honored personality—simple-mannered but valiant, in Cacciaguida’s image; and one that gave him as sister-in-law the maiden Gualdrada, la buona Gualdrada as Dante called her. She had demonstrated her goodness, or chastity, during a visit to Florence by Emperor Otto IV when, in the church of Santa Reparata (the precursor of the Duomo), her father, Berti, urged her to kiss the emperor, to which she replied that she would kiss no man except her husband. Much impressed, the emperor arranged a marriage between her and his henchman Guido Guerra of the vigorous and marauding family from the Casentino.
Berti’s two other daughters married scions of the Donati and the Adimari clans, already notable but not yet troublesome members of the Florentine scene. So Alighiero I, looking about him, could indeed locate a series of famous names among his kinfolk. Dante, perhaps thinking about his great-grandfather, seems to disdain such family vanity: “O poca nostra nobiltà di sangue” [how paltry is our pride of race] (Par. xvi); and yet he admits having yielded to the emotion.
Alighiero I named a younger son after his father-in-law. About this second Bellincione we know that he led a long life and that in the 1250s, during the Primo Popolo, the city’s first quasi-popular government, he held a position of respect. His own younger son, Alighiero II, was the father of Dante Alighieri.
Dante was born in the latter part of May 1265. During his first months, he was known around the household as Durante, presumably after his maternal grandfather, who is thought to have been Durante degli Abati (the name appears later, at a crucial moment in the family story, as a guarantor of a big loan transacted by the younger Alighieris). Durante was shortened to Dante at the time of the infant’s baptism in March 1266, along with all the other children born in Florence since the previous March, in the stately old Baptistery of San Giovanni, with its interior of mosaics and marble and its exterior of solid rustic stone.
Dante’s father made a modest but adequate living from the rental of property, both within Florence and outside in the country, and from moneylending. Dante’s friend and literary associate Forese Donati, in a somewhat spiteful letter in the 1280s, accused the elder Alighieri of the sin of usury. This was evidently quite untrue. In the Inferno, in the seventh circle, Dante comes upon the usurers, those who had charged exorbitant sums for loans of money. They are a bad lot, and they are huddled in burning sand, with flames licking about their heads. Dante peers intently into their tear-stained faces and makes a point of saying, “I knew not any of them.” The fact that Alighiero II was not himself among the Guelphs banished from Florence when the Ghibellines took over in 1260 suggests clearly that he was not conspicuous for either his wealth or political activity.
Dante’s mother was Bella (short for Gabriella) degli Abati, a family of considerable wealth and property, with houses in town and castles in the country. But it was a strongly Ghibelline family and fell into disfavor after one member, Bocca degli Abati, performed treacherously at the battle of Montaperti in 1260. Dante finds him in the ninth, and lowest, echelon of hell, encased in ice, along with other traitors to their own country. Dante kicks him in the face and pulls his hair, making the culprit yelp with pain and outrage.
Bella and Alighiero II had a younger child, a daughter, to whom Dante refers affectionately, as it seems, in the Vita Nuova, as the kind young woman, joined to him “by the closest blood-tie,” who looked after him during a “sorrowful sickness.” Then Bella died, in 1272, when Dante was seven years old. His father quickly remarried, to Lapa di Chiarissimo Cialuffi, almost totally unknown despite her ringing middle name. The couple had a son, Francesco—Dante would grow close to his stepbrother—and two daughters. But Alighiero II died in the early 1280s, and Dante, in his late teens, was suddenly the male head of the household. One cannot with any certainty measure the effect upon Dante of these parental losses. At several moments in the Comedy—with Virgil, with Brunetto Latini, with the poet Guido Guinizelli—Dante seems to be searching for another father, a spiritual and literary father, as it were. The image of a “true mother” is gradually absorbed by the figures in Paradise of Beatrice and the Virgin Mary.
The Alighieri houses were in the sestiere of San Piero Maggiore, a northern urban area spreading east from the ancient mercato vecchio (now the Piazza della Republica), essentially along Via del Corso, to the city gate for which the section was named. Florence had been divided into quartieri (quarters) at the time of the 1078 circuit of walls; but with the construction of the much larger circuit, beginning in 1172, the commune voted to carve the city into sixths, sestieri, or, as sometimes written, sesti.
The sestiere San Piero Maggiore was age-old family territory. Cacciaguida’s ancestors were born close by, the crusader says, and identified the spot more precisely:where he who runs in your annual race first enters the last sesto.
The race was held on June 13, the feast of San Giovanni, patron saint of Florence; and it consisted in fact of a dozen well-trained riderless horses sweeping across the city, west to east, guided by the lines of cheering Florentines and entering the last sestiere at the start of Via del Corso, itself named for the race.
Religion in all its aspects was, for Dante as for many (not all) Florentines, close to the center of life, and he could locate himself first of all in relation to the churches visible from the Alighieri windows. The little church of San Martino del Vescovo (St. Martin, Bishop of Tours is the figure invoked), a few steps away, was where the family went for daily prayers and Sunday services. Across the way was the Badia, the Florentine abbey founded in the heart of town in 978, through a huge gift of land and houses by the Countess Willa, and by 1250 a rich complex of chapels, gardens, libraries and shops. From childhood onward, Dante could hear the Badia bells chiming the canonical hours and so organize his day.
The sestiere was a neighborhood with families and individuals of great and often terrible importance for thirteenth-century Florence and in the life of Dante Alighieri. Above the Alighieri houses were the backs of the spacious homes of the Donati family, of whom Forese Donati would become a good friend of the poet in his skittish way, and Forese’s brother Corso would turn into Dante’s and the city’s worst enemy. A little farther to the north, opposite the Baptistery, were the eye-filling homes and towers of the Adimaris, an extremely wealthy and influential family, about whom Dante, via his ancestor, speaks in the Paradiso with carefully contrived poetic venom:The outrageous tribe that is a dragon
to those who flee, but a lamb to any
who show their teeth or their purses.
When Dante was on the run in 1302, one of the Adimaris pounced like a dragon on his confiscated property in revenge, it seems, for Dante’s action as a prior two years before in sentencing a young Adimari most harshly for his lawless public behavior. And then, a short distance to the east, lay the massive holdings—palaces and piazzas, court-yards and gardens—of the Cerchis, a more recently arrived, enormously rich and, for many Florentines, an infuriatingly upstart clan, charged with family pride.
As the century waned, the San Piero Maggiore region became known as the sesto degli scandali, the scandalous sixth: and this because out of it came the ferocious civil war, the murderous attacks and counterattacks, that tore the city apart and led to the banishment of Dante and so many others. It was in its local origins a war between the next-door neighboring families of the Donatis and the Cerchis. Dante initially, though with little enthusiasm, sided with the White Guelphs and went into exile
with them. But, as we will see, it was not long before he disassociated himself from both factions and, in the formula of his forebear, appointed himself a party of one—“a party of your self.”
Finally, and literally within a stone’s throw of Dante’s home, were the solid houses built there by Folco Portinari, the father of Beatrice.
Dante’s early years were not spent entirely within the walls of Florence. Fond allusions in his poetry to country scenes, to hills, woods, and streams, testify to his frequent sojourns in the Alighieri farmlands, north of town in the direction of Fiesole. Part of the family income came from the rental of these properties, and they needed to be overseen from time to time. The most cherished, for Dante, was Pagnolle, to the east, about eight miles above the present Pontassieve, amid the green mountains curving toward the Casentino, near the Sieve River as it courses downward to the Arno. Another favorite setting was Camerata, a more fashionable little area on the road that leads up from Porta al Pinti (created with the 1284 circuit) to Fiesole.
The first of May in Florence was the occasion for neighborhood gatherings to celebrate the full arrival of spring and the appearance of colorful Tuscan flowers. On May 1, 1274, Folco Portinari gave a party for the residents of San Piero Maggiore. The elder Alighieri was invited and, followed by nine-year-old Dante, made his way along the narrow passage from his home, past the little church of Santa Margherita, to the large-scale palazzo of the Portinaris on the Corso. Here, among the other young ones, Dante for the first time laid eyes on Portinari’s daughter Beatrice. He was captivated on the spot, and remained so in fact and in visual and poetic memory all his life.
Dante: A Life (PENGUIN LIVES) Page 2