Dante and his loves

By Umberto Vitali

Seven hundred years after Dante's death, it is right to celebrate him by writing a novel about his life, in a simple and popular way, quoting some passages from the Divine Comedy and romantically reconstructing the path of his incredible material and spiritual life, without claiming to document historical value, but with the profound pleasure of sharing with him the loves and emotions of the greatest poet of all time, more relevant than ever, to deeply understand that man must live following virtue and knowledge, to save one's soul and attain earthly happiness and spiritual and universal bliss. Dante is the poet of the life and the  earthly and divine love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Umberto Vitali
• Release date: Oct 3, 2021
• ISBN: 9791220852951

Book preview

1.INTRODUCTION

This year is the 700th anniversary of Dante's death and I feel like celebrating him, writing a novel about his life, in a simple and popular way, quoting some passages from the Divine Comedy and reconstructing in a romantic way the path of his material life and spiritual, without claiming documentation of historical value, but with the profound pleasure of sharing the loves and emotions of the greatest poet of all time. Also to make his story and the spiritual content of his life more accessible to all on this anniversary. To make this novel it was necessary to consider starting from the simple man Dante, a young politician, who over the years suffers for exile and grows spiritually more and more, predisposed by God to rise with: literature, science, spirituality and religiosity, trying to understand him with the eyes of the years of present modernity. A Father who currently has no heirs due to the materialism that prevails today, due to the lack of morals, due to the spread of corruption even from the lowest levels, due to a lack of spiritual sentiment and high literary figures. Dante is more current than you think and there is more need than ever. Furthermore, there is no folk tale about our greatest poet that can be understood by simple people, in order to make it known to everyone and induce reflection on the spiritual salvation of man. In the 2000s the world is making mistakes, exchanging skills, opulence, wealth, food as means to achieve happiness in the earthly paradise, neglecting spiritual bliss. In 700 years the world has not changed, perhaps for the worse, there is largely the false god of wealth and the search for maximum economic and military power to expand by force, war and not with good.

The book is dedicated to everyone who wants to read it, because this desire expresses the possession of a superior feeling, of loving the greatest poet in history, of wanting to know his great loves, which lead to heavenly bliss.

2.DANTE IN CASENTINO

Dante, just over fortyyears old, went to live in the Casentino at the Guidi counts due to his exile from Florence. He remembered well the previous troubles and the battle of Campaldino (11 June 1289) at the foot of the Poppi hill, which allowed the dominance of Florence in Tuscany. Dante was a knight, who opened enemy ranks during the battle, upsetting the first enemy lines with spear and sword in the Florentine Guelphs array. Despite being pervaded by great fear, he behaved valiantly against the Ghibellines of Arezzo, winning the battle and wrote: I found myself young man in arms and where I had great fear, and in the end very great joy for the various cases of that battle. The memory of that epic battle always awakened the memory of the knight Bonconte da Montefeltro, killed with a sword blow to his throat. Dante met him in Purgatory and Bonconte asked him to pray for the salvation of his soul, since his family, ungrateful and forgetful of him, had not done so. Dante asked him why his body was not found on the battlefield. With these verses he addressed him like this: What force or what fortune led you away from Campaldino, that your burial was never known? Bonconte replied that he fell near the Archiano stream, wounded in the throat, and fled on foot. While he was losing blood, he could no longer see, falling to the ground without strength. He understood that he had reached the end of his life, so he invoked the Holy Virgin Mary to obtain the forgiveness of her sins and arrogance in her life, crossing his arms on the chest of her poor body left alone, later abandoned by the soul of her. An angel immediately appeared to take him to Purgatory, immediately afterwards a devil opposed, who was contending for his soul and wanted to take it to hell, together with the other dead from violence in battle, but that act of perfect repentance saved his soul, gaining purgatory. Meanwhile and immediately the sky darkened, a strong rain storm began, the Archiano river in spate, mercifully transported the body to the confluence with the Arno. The waters overwhelmed the poor body, the abandoned arms were released from the cross position, the body disappeared into the Arno river wrapped in debris.

Deep repentance at the point of death, one's own prayer and that on the part of loved ones, can lead to the salvation of the soul. Dante wanted to remind people of the importance of prayer for men, for their families, and of a perfect act of repentance at the end of life. Dante knew Casentino very well, after being exiled from Florence on 10 March 1302, because it was hosted by Count Guido from Battifolle. Even in the following decade he lived mostly between the Casentino and Romagna and later was still a guest of the Counts Guidi in the castle of Poppi, which in the XXXIIIth canto of Hell poem he defines brand new, because it was completed in those years. He also lived in other castles and fortified structures of the Guidi counts: Romena, Porciano, in the tower along the Arno in Pratovecchio, Poppi. He also visited the ancient churches, such as the hermitage of Camaldoli, the Sacro Sasso della Verna, where St. Francis received the stigmata, about eighty years earlier. La Verna was visible from every point of the valley: a mountainous spur between the Apennine peaks, which stood out when the sun rose and the moon appeared, in an immense and mystical sky, reminiscent of another great poet, Leopardi:

Always dear to me was this lonely hill, and this hedge, which so much part of the last horizon the gaze excludes. But sitting and gazing, endless spaces beyond that, and superhuman silences, and very deep stillness I am rapt in my thoughts; where for a while the heart is not afraid. And like the wind I hear rustling among these plants, I that one infinite silence to this voice I am comparing: and occur the eternal, and the dead seasons, and the present and alive, and the sound of her. So between this immensity drowns my thought: and to be shipwrecked is sweet for me in this sea.

3.THE WOMEN OF DANTE

In Dante's mind the memory of