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From Florence and Back Again: Alessandro Barbero’s “Dante: A Life”

Alessandro Barbero. Dante: A Life. Translated by Allan Cameron. New York: Pegasus Books, 2022.

 

Dante Alighieri is the most famous Italian of all time. He is the author of the Divine Comedy, the grandest Christian epic poem ever written. He is also a poet of love, having written many sonnets, but most famous for his love poem to Beatrice—La Vita Nuova. We know Dante the poet. But do we know Dante the man?

Alessandro Barbero writes that T.S. Eliot’s declaration that ‘Dante is at least as great as Shakespeare’” is “self-evident for an Italian” but not necessarily self-evident to everyone else. Barbero’s new biography of Dante, translated by Allan Cameron, is yet another book introducing to English-speaking audiences the poet that we probably know from a video game or from literary and religious studies. When at Yale, for instance, our medieval theology professor had us read The Inferno. Given my background in philosophy and Saint Augustine from undergraduate work, I ended up tutoring half a dozen students so that they could “understand” Dante’s poetic masterpiece (one-third of it, at least). But few of us know Dante the human being, the man born in Florence, exiled from his home, dying in Ravenna.

“The purpose of this book is not to explain why we should read Dante.” So Barbero writes. But why, then, bother to write a nearly 300-page biography of the great poet? Because we really should read Dante and maybe Barbero wants you to have some historical context to Dante’s voluminous writings—especially the Divine Comedy. It would certainly help first time readers of the Divine Comedy to have some basic foundation and context to what they’re about to read.

One of the things that is often off-putting to readers of the Divine Comedy is how intelligent Dante was and how much history is brought into the poetry. Readers unfamiliar with the Greek and Latin classics will seem disoriented by the litany of classical heroes and mythological figures in Limbo and hell. Moreover, the digressions on philosophy, morality, and implicit theology strikes our anti-humanistic readers who have never bothered picking up a text of philosophy or theology as a bunch of gobbledygook that is difficult to understand. Then add into the account all the historical people—important in Dante’s time, now entirely forgotten in our own—and it’s hard to get beyond a few pages. Maybe later, we tell ourselves; only because it is a classic.

What is unique about this biography of Dante is how it undresses the historical incidents contained in Dante’s poetry with what we now know from fuller archival research and archeology about the events and people that Dante describes. We know, as I’ve said, Dante the poet. We may not necessarily know Dante the warrior—the man intimately involved in the Guelph-Ghibelline feuds even though this defining series of events in Dante’s life make their way into the Divine Comedy. Dante was a Florentine warrior, a knight, who rose not from a longstanding aristocratic (noble) family but from an emergent middle-class family wherein newfound wealth propelled the Alighieri’s into a higher social status that brought with it new duties and responsibilities to protect Florentine liberty. Yet Dante gets some of his facts wrong; or, more accurately, he wrote with a rhetoric of definitiveness about things he didn’t actually definitively know about.

Does this lesson Dante’s poetry? Of course not. It does, however, cause the more serious reader of Dante to do a double-take when our pilgrim poet reimagines events and individuals in his journey through hell, purgatory, and paradise. Poetic license one might say. Not exactly. Dante was writing poetry, but he was trying to be faithful to events and individuals as best he knew. The problem is we cannot always take Dante at his word even if he thought he was providing factual descriptions of events and feuds and individuals whom he meets over the course of his tripartite journey.

Barbero’s life of Dante takes us to the bloody battlefields of the Guelph-Ghibelline wars that Dante remembers in The Inferno. It takes us to a prosperous Florence in which the new-moneyed middleclass enhanced their economic position by embracing usury and how church officials turned a blind eye to this new emergent practice or rationalized why side hustling interests on loans wasn’t real usury since one’s whole life didn’t depend on it. It takes us into the heart of Florence, the genealogical line of Dante, Dante’s birth, adolescence, adulthood, exile, and death in Ravenna. In short, Barbero does a commendable job in quickly highlighting the best hits of Dante’s life and setting the context in which the great poet lived though we often wish for more.

Here, however, some of our more avid readers of Dante may be disappointed. Barbero has written a biography that is meant to introduce Dante to readers for the first time, or, perhaps, provide more context than what someone has learned about Dante in a single university course session or from reading Wikipedia. Anyone hoping to unearth new information about Dante, some revelatory new finding, will have to wait. But that shouldn’t dissuade one from picking up and reading this fine, short, introductory biography to Italy’s greatest poet and a man to whom all educated and cultured persons well into the twentieth century regarded alongside Shakespeare, not to mention Virgil (the poet’s own guide through hell and purgatory) and Homer. Consider Barbero’s biography a concise introduction, a sort of pocket bible to Dante easily readable in a single sitting, while trying to answer some nagging questions about his family history and himself.

What Barbero’s book does best is provide a side-by-side commentary on the history of Dante’s life and encounters with those found in Divine Comedy when our author embraces the opportunity. (I wish, though, he had done more of it.) Some critics of the Divine Comedy, blind to its sublime majesty, complain that Dante’s own life and imagination has infected the epic too much. But that’s the point. Dante’s pilgrimage is his; but it is also ours: “Midway along the journey of our life” the poet writes. What Dante encounters is what we will encounter in our own lives. His advice to us is universal.

How can we not, like Dante—in meeting his relative Geri del Bello in hell (in The Inferno)—feel the need for avenging a relative’s death at the hands of rival so determined to wipe us out? Have we grown out of medieval blood feuds? We may have calmed down the temperature in which we seek revenge, but it is an all too human instinct. Someone who has affronted a close family member of ours, someone we love, often causes us to want to pummel that offender into the dust just as Dante clearly does in talking to his deceased relative. Virgil has to upbraid our pilgrim poet in this incident in the Malebolge. But we tend to sympathize with Dante. Yet we ought to remember the teachings of Christ too which Dante comes to learn: pity, forgiveness, love.

I sympathize with Barbero’s biography. While no Dante scholar, I have written essays on Dante’s Divine Comedy and poetry in the past. I know much about Dante the man and Dante the poet. Like Barbero—who clearly loves Dante and wants the world to encounter Dante the man for the first time—I also wish that people would come to know Dante more than just some poet who “invented” hell and the muscular protagonist of a video game. For those who have a very limited acquaintance with Dante (or none at all), Barbero’s new book is a great place to get a firm foundation. From Barbero, then, you can begin your more arduous journey through purgatory and into the paradise of Dantean scholarship to really get to know Italy’s greatest poet and Christianity’s chief artist. Though a biography of Dante the man, Barbero delightfully leaves us with a poetic ending, “That night the prophet went off to discover how much truth there was in the afterlife he’d imagine over a period of many years.”

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Paul Krause is the Editor-in-Chief of VoegelinView. He is a writer, podcaster, and the author of Finding Arcadia: Wisdom, Truth, and Love in the Classics (Academica Press, 2023) and The Odyssey of Love: A Christian Guide to the Great Books (Wipf and Stock, 2021). Educated at Baldwin Wallace University, Yale, and the University of Buckingham, he is a frequent writer on the arts, classics, literature, religion, and politics for numerous newspapers, magazines, and journals. You can follow him on Twitter: Paul Krause.

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