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A Poet Without Honor - page spread

"The gentle lady thought in her dream that she was under a most lofty laurel tree, on a green meadow, by the side of a most clear spring, and there she felt herself delivered of a son, who in shortest space, feeding only on the berries which fell from the laurel tree, and the waters of the clear spring, grew up into a shepherd, and strove with all his power to have of the leaves of that tree whose fruit had nourished him; and as he struggled thereto, she saw him fall, and when he rose again, she saw he was no longer a man, but had become a peacock."

This dream so startled her that she awoke and quickly delivered a son, naming him "Dante," which means "giver." Boccaccio adds: "This was that Dante granted by the special grace of God to our age. This was that Dante who was first to open the way for the return of the Muses, banished from Italy. 'Twas he that revealed the glory of the Florentine idiom. … that brought under the rule of due numbers every beauty of the vernacular speech. … and brought dead poesy [poetry] to life."

When Dante arrived, Florence had come to a crossroads between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Dante helped lead the city into a new era. Ironically, though, this poet who embraced the Muses and exalted Florentine speech spent much of his life in exile. Only after Dante's death did Florence want him back.

Dante's Italy was a tumultuous place. Kings and emperors battled with each other and the papacy, pitting church against government. Guilds and powerful families carved Florence into spheres of influence. Fortunes could be gained or lost overnight.

Dante's family, the Alighieri, was of noble origin but no longer wealthy. Still, Dante took immense pride in his ancestry. In Inferno XV, he claims descendence from the "holy seed" of the Romans who colonized Florence under Julius Caesar.

When Dante was still a child, his mother died and his father remarried. Dante speaks affectionately of a sister in the Vita Nuova, but it is uncertain whether she was his full sister or a half sister. He also had three half-brothers.

Like most educated men of his day, Dante studied grammar, logic, and rhetoric (the basic academic trivium, from which we get "trivia"), as well as arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy (the more advanced quadrivium). Boccaccio records that Dante also learned the arts of poetry, painting, and music. In the Vita Nuova, for example, Dante shows close familiarity with poems by Provencal (French), contemporary Italian, and classical authors.

Before Dante turned 18, his father died. Prior to his death, however, he had arranged for Gemma Donati to be Dante's wife. The couple had three or four children together.

Although Dante includes numerous accounts of his contemporaries, friends, and enemies in the Divine Comedy, he says nothing of Gemma. Some commentators take this as a negative reflection on their relationship, but the memory might have been too painful.

The most important event in Dante's childhood was his first encounter with Beatrice Portinari at her father's house, when she was 8 and he was 9. In the Vita Nuova, Dante describes the event:

"She was dressed in a very noble color, a decorous and delicate crimson, tied with a girdle and trimmed in a manner suited to her tender age. The moment I saw her I say in all truth that the vital spirit, which dwells in the inmost depths of the heart, began to tremble so violently that I felt the vibration alarmingly in all my pulses. … From then on indeed Love ruled over my soul. … [and] I was obliged to fulfill all his wishes perfectly."

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