Dante ( what else?)

Dante died 700 years ago the day before yesterday, just in case you had not been told. Dante is hot at the moment, as my friend Andrew puts it. He was of course one of the little band of Dante enthusiasts who met at my flat in London every other Wednesday for over three years (with some interruption due to the pandemic) while we slowly made our way through the Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso.

                                             

 Above we find ourselves, on that very first evening, Christmas Eve 2017,  in that ‘selva oscura,' 

 'nel mezzo cammin di nostra vita’, where we set out to explore the great epic.

And here below we are, on the 26 June 2021, just before I left London, when we finally  arrived at the vision of God:  

                                   

During that journey, it must be said there were times when we- or at least I - found it something of a struggle, sometimes I could not muster up enough interest in 13th c. Florentine gossip- or sometimes the subject matter seemed too dry, too irrelevant. But then, there would be,  suddenly, a gem that sparkled that would make it all worth it. And perhaps not even  directly from the text, but the text would be a departure point that would take us off in other distant  directions,  far removed from 13th c. Tuscany, but universally relevant. Then sometimes it would feel as if perhaps Dante was sitting there among us, invisible, in the corner, smiling a bit, enjoying our exchange...and the fact that it came about through his words so long ago?   

There is plenty of order and symmetry not only in those great rolling stanzas of  terzo rima which Dorothy Sayers managed, incredibly, to reproduce in her masterly English translation, but also in a Dante's strong spatial architecture- we are travelling through finely described heavenly realms organized along the Ptolemaic system that was still used. Each of the Canticles end, rather beautifully, by a reference to the stars:     

                                           

When  Dante and Virgil finally escape Hell the last stanza of the Inferno :  ‘E quindi uscimmo a riveder le Stelle’. ('And then we came forth to see once more the stars)  has become a saying  used in Italian when one wants to express joy at the end of a time of great tribulation.

At the end of Purgatorio, Dante receives a final cleansing to be ready to ascend to Paradiso:

‘lo ritornai da la santissima onda

  rifatto si come piante novella

rinovellate di novella fronda

puro e disposto a salire alle stelle’

'From the most holy water I returned

Regenerate, in the manner of new trees

That are renewed with a new foliage,

Pure and disposed to mount unto the stars.'

(Longfellow’s translation)

And finally, at the end of Paradiso, God is  ‘the love which moves the sun and the other stars’::

‘Lamor che move il sole e l’altre Stelle’.

 Siena is the place most frequently mentioned in the Divine Comedy besides Florence. A hundred years ago, at the 600 anniversary of Dante’s death, the city of Siena put up a series of marble plaques on the walls of Siena with relevant quotations from the epic:

                                      

Here above  is one, which commemorates Sapia Salvani, a Sienese noblewoman  who lived between 1210 and 1278. Dante encounters her on the terrace of Purgatorio where the envious are punished and cleansed. She was a Ghibelline in her heart and therefore of another political persuasion than the Sienese people (and of Dante, who was a Guelph) She witnessed  the battle Colle Val d'Elsa on June 17, 1269 and prayed ardently for the Sienese to lose. She tells Dante of her sinful joy when they did: 

 

‘Savia, non fui avvegna che Sapia

Fossi chiamata, e fui degli altrui danni

Piu lieta assai che di ventura mia…’

‘Though called Sapia, sapient I was not

For I was more glad of others harm

Than I of my good fortune ever was’ .

                    

There is also another Sienese woman that Dante comes across in Purgatorio. She is called Pia, and is rather more of a local hero here than Sapia.  Pia de Tolomei was from another great Sienese noble family, and she too enjoys a marble plaque.  Little is known of her, but it is said that she was murdered by her husband, who came from the Maremma, a coastal region of Tuscany. She asks Dante to remember her in his prayers, to hasten her release into Paradise. Her brief appearance in the Divine Comedy has inspired many works of art, including one by Dante Gabriel Rossetti- Pia de Tolomei, below:

  

Her words on the plaque reads:

‘Ricorditi di Me, che son la Pia

Siena mi Fe, Discefemi Maremma’

Remember me who am La Pia

Siena made me, Maremma unmade me’

                                                         

-and just to end on another note of Dante celebration: I will enrol at the Dante Alighieri Language School tomorrow and do about a month of intensive Italian in the mornings. I am speaking it all the time of course, and I am refusing to speak anything else. Whether people actually understand what I am saying is questionable and there has been lots of misunderstandings....