Firenze 2011 Dante
Ah Dante. What a romantic figure! We headed to the Dante Museum on the tiny street where he lived. It is a few houses away from the small church of St. Margherita, where he probably first laid eyes on Beatrice at age 9 and was instantly smitten. Alas, both he and Beatrice had been pledged to wed someone else, arranged marriages being all the rage back then. He only saw her now and then the rest of her life, which ended at age 24. But even after her death, thoughts of her inspired him as he wrote the awesome “Divine Comedy”. Kathy got some excellent photos both of St. Margherita’s and of the young actor who recited from the epic poem in the courtyard outside the Dante Museum, dressed in a 13th century costume complete with the type of garlanded headband favored by Dante. I applauded and dropped a two-euro coin in the tip bucket when he came to a stop at one point, and he walked over to me and asked which language I spoke” “Deutsch? English?” I confessed to the latter, adding I spoke “un po’ Italiano” and he said to me in English that I was to flip to any page in the huge tome, recite the first line or two in Italian and he would continue the rest of the page. He assured me he had memorized the entire 14.233 lines that are divided into Dante’s vision of after-life in three stages—hell, purgatory and paradise. So I opened the thick volume to a random page and followed along as he recited it word for word – no, he did not just recite it, he acted it, with a flourishing bow at the end. What a performance! I could not imagine anyone committing so much to memory. I later learned that Dante undertook this incredible task between 1308 and his death in 1321. It is widely judged to be the preeminent work of Italian literature, and it helped establish Dante's language -–the Tuscan dialect of his time – as the basis for what would become standard Italian.
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