Florence, Italian Republic
Region: Via Santa Margherita 1, Metropolitan City of Florence
Theme: Dante Alighieri, Historical Literature
Visit: August, 2016
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Since 1950, the foundation of a Florentine museum dedicated to the Supreme Poet was a top priority for the Unione Fiorentina association.
In 1960, in anticipation of the 700th anniversary of Dante’s birthday, the Unione Fiorentina (consistent with its purpose of enhancing the city) asked and received permission to found a museum inside the premises of Dante’s House (which, at the time, housed municipal offices). The museum spaces, designed and set up by the Associazione Culturale Unione Fiorentina, opened their doors to the public in May 1965.
Dante Alighieri was an Italian poet and moral philosopher best known for the epic poem The Divine Comedy, which comprises sections representing the three tiers of the Christian afterlife: purgatory, heaven and hell.
This poem, a great work of medieval literature and considered the greatest work of literature composed in Italian, is a philosophical Christian vision of mankind’s eternal fate. Dante is seen as the father of modern Italian, and his works have flourished before his 1321 death.
Dante Alighieri was born in Florence in 1265, the son of a moderately wealthy landowner. His mother died when he was just seven years old and his father when he was a teenager. As a young knight, Dante actively participated in the 1289 Battle of Campaldino between the rival cities of Florence and Arezzo and their respective allies.
The two sides in this battle were divided over their support for either the Pope (the Guelphs) or the Holy Roman Emperor (the Ghibellines), a rivalry that would cause a chasm in Florentine politics that lasted over half a century.
Back in Florence, Dante worked as a municipal official and was involved in politics between c. 1295 and 1302. In 1300 he was elected to the prestigious position of prior of the city (one of seven). Contrary to the government of Florence, Dante wanted to see his city free from papal interference, which he saw as a morally corrupt institution. He was further disillusioned with Rome following the Pope’s enforced exile to Avignon in 1309.
Dante began to support, instead, the ambitions of the Holy Roman Emperor, although his political allegiance shifted depending on circumstances. Dante nurtured hopes that the Holy Roman Empire would restore Christian order to Europe. In this he was hopelessly wrong, but he did at least correctly predict that the bickering between the different Italian city-states would only lead to the downfall of all.
Dante was effectively exiled for his political views in January 1302. As the translator D. L. Sayers notes in her introduction to Hell, part I of the Divine Comedy, Dante had “three gifts hampering to the career of the practical politician: an unaccommodating temper, a blistering tongue, and an indecent superfluity of brains” (xxxii). Dante was duly charged with massive corruption by officials belonging to a rival political faction.
The charges were fictitious but the sentence was real enough: to be burnt at the stake. Understandably, Dante, then on his way back from Rome, chose to avoid Florence. Never settling in any one city thereafter, Dante first went to Verona, then moved around central and northern Italy.
Meanwhile, Dante’s wife Gemma Donati and their three sons and daughter remained in Florence. It was during this wandering exile that he wrote his masterpiece, the Divine Comedy. Dante never did return home, and he died of malaria in Ravenna on 13 September 1321.
Photo-α: Museo Casa di Dante [Ingresso ➛]
Further information at: museocasadidante.it| Biography.com/DanteAlighieri | wiki.org/DanteAlighieri | wiki.org/Divine_Comedy
“The man who lies asleep will never waken fame,
and his desire and all his life drift past him like a dream,
and the traces of his memory fade from time like smoke in air,
or ripples on a stream.”
Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
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