On Tuesday, my english professor took five of us on a tour of Florence. She called it the "Dante Tour". We walked around for over two hours as she pointed out buildings, plaques, and other sights having to do with Dante. We just finished Dante's Divine Comedy in class, which I really enjoyed. Before we started studying Dante I had no idea that he even lived in Florence. Actually, I didn't know anything about him at all. But basically Dante Alghieri was an Italian man who lived in Florence in the late 11th century and was eventually banned from the city. He was in love with a woman named Beatrice (in Italian pronounced bee-ah-tree-chay) who was forced by her family to marry another man, which left Dante bitter and miserable. He eventually married another woman and had two children, but his family was allowed to stay in the city when Dante was excommunicated so he died a lonely man. During this time, he wrote the Divine Comedy in which he is the main character and is lead through the seven levels of hell by Virgil, author of the Aeneid, another work we just finished studying. In these levels of hell Dante comes across many different characters, fictional and historical, and, as the author, he has the ones he was not very fond of placed in really horrific circumstances in this 'Inferno' he has created.
Dante was bitter with Florence for excommunicating him, but the people of the city LOVE Dante. They did then and they still do. There are plaques all over Florence with excerpts from the Divine Comedy, and some Italians even have the epic poem memorized. It's crazy long, so that is quite impressive. The Divine Comedy is of basic knowledge to any Italian elementary schooler. There is a statue of Dante outside the famous Santa Croce church, which houses the tombs of both Galileo and Michelangelo.
It was so crazy and so interesting learning about all the diffferent significant spots in Florence that had to do with Dante's life or his work. Here in the city we visited Museo di Dante, which is a replica of the villa that Dante supposedly lived in, in the location of where they suspected he once lived. Our professor also took us to Piazza del Limbo, which is the location of an old Roman bath here in Florence. 'Limbo' is the place in the underworld in the Divine Comedy where spirits of babies who never got the chance to be baptized are sent. They are not sent to hell because they had no control over their not being baptized, but they cannot go to the Paradiso (heaven) because they are not technically Christians. My professor said these unbaptized babies were actually buried under the stones of the Piazza 100s of years ago, and this is where Dante got the name for this dimension of Purgatory.When we were standing in the middle of the Piazza and she said all of this, I definitely got goosebumps.
When I have read literature and studied history in school in America, I have definitely always been interested in the work. But the experience here is so different than studying at home. I walk around this city, my home for 3.5 months, and every corner I turn is part of some history book somewhere, or some famous literature, and has some amazing significance that I am usually not even aware of.
There are restaurants here that are in underground rooms that are 600 years old. The street names and Piazza names remain the same from when they were initially named just as long ago if not longer. Literally, each street name is the Italian title for what used to be sold on that street. Street of shoes, street of silver, etc. And today, here I am, strolling on the same street on my way to H&M or a Gelateria or a pub to meet my friends.
My professor said: "You can easily look at Florence as a museum. Every street corner, every piazza; this city is an enormous museum of a number of things, it's almost impossible to see and know it all. But you can also look at Florence as a book. It is a book with many, many pages."
This comment has stuck with me. It's true that Florence is like a giant historical museum, but it also tells so many stories. Stories about Dante, about medieval times, about the renaissance, and also about the students who have studied here before me, and eventually the students who will venture here after me. Most importantly, this place is allowing me to create my own stories.. some that I will take home with me, and some that I will leave here, along with a little piece of my heart.
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