Dante begins the Divine Comedy

The story

A Florentine in Florence

Dante Alighieri was born in Florence in 1265, into a family of minor nobility. As a boy he studied, read a great deal and became a friend of poets such as Guido Cavalcanti. At the age of nine, according to his own account, he met a little girl named Beatrice, and fell in love with her for ever. Beatrice died very young, in 1290, and Dante dedicated to her a small book of verse and prose, the “Vita nova” (“New Life”).

Dante was also a man involved in politics. Florence was a republic torn by fierce struggles between two parties: the White Guelphs and the Black Guelphs, divided over how much the pope should count in the government of the city. In 1300 Dante became one of the six priors, that is, the heads of the city government, for two months. He was on the side of the Whites, who wanted to protect Florence's independence.

Exile

In 1301 Dante was sent to Rome as ambassador to Pope Boniface VIII. While he was away, the Blacks took power with the help of Charles of Valois, brother of the King of France. Dante was accused of corruption, without proof, and in 1302 he was sentenced in his absence to a fine and then to be burned at the stake if he returned to the city. He never saw Florence again.

A long exile began, lasting almost twenty years. He lived as a guest of lords and princes at various courts: in Lunigiana with the Malaspina, in Verona with the Scaligeri, and finally in Ravenna with Guido da Polenta. In the Paradiso he wrote that he knew “how salt is the taste of another man's bread, and how hard the way up and down another man's stairs”.

In exile he wrote many works: the “Convivio” (“The Banquet”), the treatise “De vulgari eloquentia” (“On Eloquence in the Vernacular”), in Latin, in which he defended the dignity of the spoken language, and “De monarchia” (“On Monarchy”). But above all he began his masterpiece. Scholars think he began the “Commedia” around 1306-1308.

A journey into the afterlife

The poem tells of a journey that Dante, the main character, makes through the afterlife, during Holy Week of 1300, at the age of thirty-five, “in the middle of the journey of our life”. He loses himself in a dark wood, and the Roman poet Virgil, a symbol of reason, guides him through Hell, an enormous funnel of nine circles where sinners are punished, then up the mountain of Purgatory, where souls are purified. At the top, Beatrice accompanies him into Paradise, through the nine heavens, up to God.

Dante meets popes, emperors, poets, friends, enemies, historical and mythological figures. Each has a punishment or a reward that suits his character. The poem is divided into three parts, or canticles, of 33 cantos each, plus an introductory one: one hundred cantos in all. It is written in tercets, stanzas of three linked lines in which the rhyme repeats in a regular pattern, and the number three, a symbol of the Trinity, appears everywhere.

A language for everyone

Dante wrote the Commedia in the vernacular, the Florentine spoken in the street, and not in Latin, the language of scholars. It was a bold choice: he wanted to be read by everyone, not only by scholars. He called it simply “Comedìa”; the adjective “Divine” was added later, by Boccaccio and then by the editors of the 1500s.

Dante died at Ravenna in the night between 13 and 14 September 1321, on his way back from a diplomatic journey to Venice, perhaps of a fever caught in the marshes. He is buried at Ravenna; Florence, which for centuries asked to have his bones back, has only an empty monument, in Santa Croce.