700th anniversary of the death of Dante Alighieri
by Stefania Severi
This 2021, 700 years after Dante's death, offers us the opportunity to revisit his life and work and, to do so, we take inspiration from two phrases with which we usually indicate him.
Who called Dante “The fugitive Ghibelline”? It was Ugo Foscolo, in the poem Dei Sepolcri, and from then on the phrase became famous. In reality Dante was not a Ghibelline but a White Guelph. In summary, the Ghibellines were those who supported the supremacy of the Emperor (heir of the Holy Roman Empire of Charlemagne) while the Guelphs supported the supremacy of the Pope also in the political field. Once the Ghibellines were definitively defeated and outlawed, the Florentines, who had always been Guelphs, also divided themselves into White Guelphs, pro emperor, and Black Guelphs, pro pontiff, also to define the internal factions.
Dante, who from around 1290 dedicated himself to public life, entered, at various times, the Council of the People, the group of the "Sages" and the Council of Ten. In 1300 he was elected one of the 7 priors and thwarted Pope Boniface VIII's request to have a support cavalry provided and supported by Florence. For this reason, and not only, in 1302, under various pretexts, he was condemned and forced into exile. She will no longer return to his beloved city and will learn at his expense: «... how salty / other people's bread tastes, and how hard it is / going down and going up other people's stairs» (Paradiso, Canto XVII) .
On politics, between 1310 and 1313, Dante wrote a treatise in Latin, as all texts intended for scholars were written at the time, the De Monarchia. The inspiration had been provided by the arrival in Italy of Emperor Henry VII of Luxembourg, whom he admired. The treaty sets out the idea of a universal monarchy, the implementation of which is hoped for on earth, almost an overcoming of the conflict par excellence of the time, that between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines. Dante builds the idea of him by including all the previous illustrious thinkers and history, starting from Rome, the ideal center indicated by Fate. His position is original, compared to the times, and "modern", in fact it recognizes the political autonomy of the sovereign but also the religious autonomy of the pontiff.
Why is Dante known as “The Father of the Italian Language”? Because he is the first to write a poem, the Divine Comedy, in the vernacular, so that everyone could understand. In truth, the poet was a scholar of the language and analyzed the various dialects of Italy in order to identify the perfect language. It was therefore he himself, with the strength of his Comedy, written in the typical language of the Florence area, who indicated what the pre-eminent dialect would be. Centuries later, the phrase said by Alessandro Manzoni is famous: to improve the Italian of the Betrothed, he went to Florence in 1827 to "rinse his clothes in the Arno", that is, to adapt his language to that of the Florentines.
On the question of language, Dante wrote, between 1303 and 1304, a treatise, also in Latin, De Vulgari Eloquentia. In it he argues that if Latin should be used to write about law and religion and to draw up international treaties, a sort of lingua franca, the vernacular had to be used not only by the people but also among the nobles and become, to all intents and purposes, a literary language.
Precisely on the occasion of the Dante celebrations, the FUIS, the Italian Unitary Federation of Writers, promoted the project "Dante in artists' books" by inviting 30 artists to create a book on Dante, his life and his work. And since all the works were considered, De Monarchia and De Vulgari Eloquentia were also considered, complex and difficult themes but which the artists Maria Cristina Crespo and Vittorio Fava, thanks to their creativity, were able to tackle with wit and pleasantness, making them fascinating.
