Dante Alighieri: in the eyes of an ignorant, through the lens of a cult
aka my Florence and Ravenna travel logs w/ badly captured photos
A year ago, as a gift to myself after graduation, I went on a week-long solo trip to some Italian cities, and unintentionally found Dante. Or maybe his spirit found me, but my non-religious self will excuse it as a natural consequence of choices and circumstances that turned an indifferent into a fake devout (read: interested, at a very surface level).
I had heard of Dante before—from a mention in passing during tiring hours spent in Italian language prep classes. Il Sommo Poeta, the father of the language we were struggling to batter in our memory, an important figure in history but held little significance to us students—who for the most part just wanted to pass exams and fly to new lands. My curiosity back then only spanned to saving a Vietnamese translation of La Divina Commedia to my to-reads list, which was left untouched for years.
Under the sweltering sun of August, on the trip I went, and already during my first stop at Naples I had stumbled upon an image of the poet—a statue standing proud in a square named after him, empty at noon saved for a few book stands. Wherever I found him, he was depicted with consistency—robed, donning a crown of laurel, with serenity and melancholy gracing his aging features. This seemingly inconsequential moment somehow marked the theme of my later exploration—a chase after fragments of a poet I only had the faintest idea about.
Florence, a city of elegance, the Cradle of the Renaissance, Dante’s birthplace and his everlasting pain. I had been there before during my first ever trip in Italy, but returning as a more experienced traveler brought new perspectives. Still exhausted from the five-hour train ride and a twenty-minute walk, my stubborn self still made it in haste to the Basilica di Santa Croce before closing time along with a not-so-interested-but-willing-to-tag-along friend. We ‘hunted’ for tombs and memorials of persons of influence, including Dante.
However, reading the information plague revealed that the tomb was empty, sparking questions in my forever prying mind. That evening, in the quiet darkness of the hostel room with nine other people, I looked up Dante’s eternal resting place. Turned out he spent his final days as an exile in Ravenna—a small city quite a distance from his home. The journey of his bones and the feud between the two cities is an interesting read on its own (there was a period of 200 years when his bones went missing and were miraculously recovered!).
Maybe curiosity got the better of me—ironic for a creature so rigid and used to organization—but I was alone for the rest of the journey, free to chase my impulses, and Dante was haunting my thoughts. My next stop was Bologna and I was taking a day trip to Forlì anyway, so squeezing in one more city did not seem that farfetched. In fact, there was not much to do in Forlì on a Sunday, and the combination of my sudden boldness and my tired feet carried me to the bus for Ravenna just mere minutes before its departure, sealing a journey unplanned.
It was the early hours of afternoon when I got off the bus. A five-minute walk, and there I was, enjoying the tranquil atmosphere of Zona Dantesca in Ravenna. Choices and consequences—this was where I had been seeking all my journey without conscious realization.
With my broken Italian—which was thankfully tolerated by a friendly receptionist—I finally obtained a ticket for Casa Dante and immersed myself in the cult dedicated to him. It was no Louvre or Musei Vaticani but had its undeniable charm—simple and thoughtful yet quirky, just like the glimpses of Dante the person from his writings and later academics.
How dangerous a cult could be for converting an ignorant to a shallow reader of Dante’s works. Great literary figures were often associated with grandeur and proses too alienated for the modern audience, but through the lens of his worshippers, Dante appeared more human, more intimate, with his own concerns and dramas and emotions. One outstanding example was his love for Beatrice—which was a little strange, all things considered, and would earn him the label of a ‘simp’ in modern slang. But Dante’s authenticity about his own shortcomings somehow made his messy human condition endearing.
While visitors might be shown his human side, we were constantly reminded that the poet was still a revered figure in Italy. Although Dante certainly never wore one during his life, the leitmotif of laurel wreath had their dedicated space in the Casa, thanks to a Botticelli’s depiction that has become the character design for Dante.
“Inclusa est flamma” – the flame is inside. The poet Gabriele d’Annunzio compared the flame of Dante’s tomb to the flame of the sanctuary of Apollo in Delphi. (Information source: Casa Dante)
After hours of being lost in this little pocket universe of Dante and his cult, I eventually paid a proper visit to his true eternal resting place. For all its humble design, the temple felt more sacred, maybe thanks to the knowledge that what remained of the poet was actually there— safe, secure, and cared for.
My journey with Dante as a traveler ended with the daily canto recitation done by volunteers of Casa Dante, but my journey as a reader of his work only started then. And now, being halfway through a version of Purgatorio translated by a Vietnamese priest—a religious guide to my atheist self—and reflecting on the path I have been walking semi-consciously, I’ve gone through my own changes. Reading through the three realms has not been the smoothest experience but I still have the years to mull over the canti, and maybe when I reach that heaven, I’ll come out with a discovery so trivial but uniquely mine.
P/S: Bonus photo.
Unseriousness adds warmth to devotion.