This week’s dream: Following Dante’s footsteps through Italy
Dante Alighieri’s vision of the afterlife wasn’t entirely drawn from imagination and lore, said J.R. Patterson in The Washington Post. The Italian poet and politician spent nearly 20 years roaming and reflecting in northern Italy after he was exiled from Florence in 1302 by political rivals. “What Dante saw gave a raw physicality to his Divine Comedy, setting the backdrop of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise.” Earlier this fall, my partner and I went looking for Dante’s Italy, setting out to hike half of Il Cammino di Dante, a 250-mile loop that connects Dante’s birthplace, Florence, with Ravenna, where he lies entombed. Unlike the poet’s Divine Comedy, though, our journey didn’t begin in a dark wood: “The sun was high and warm, with a slight breeze carrying the voices of fruit pickers from across orchards heavy with grapes, pears, plums, and figs.”
Hiking in new boots that raised blisters, “I quickly realized I would be achieving humility sooner than expected.” Fortunately, autumn in Tuscany was a balm. We were often alone, walking through chestnut forests or passing farmers in their fields, while the blue-green peaks of the Apennines loomed in the west. “Every time we came upon a wild blackberry bush, we gorged ourselves silly.” One day, a woman threw open the shutters of her country home and beckoned us to drink from her well.
Accustomed to seeing pilgrims, she thrust grapes into our hands and lamented the dry weather, “her Tuscan Italian full of soft g’s and c’s.”
After feasting on country stew and roasted eggplants with the nuns at the Hermitage of Gamogna, we plunged into the frigid Acquacheta, a stream whose famous waterfall appears in Dante’s Inferno. Later, our arduous trek into the mountains recalled Dante’s ascent of Mount Purgatory. When we finally reached Florence, the streets “heaved with people,” so we returned by train to quiet Ravenna, where the mayor commemorated the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death by reciting poetry outside the poet’s humble tomb. “The life force of Dante was thick here. It was the feeling of Paradise, the Paradise of home. That sense of renewal, of rejuvenation, could be seen in the faces of the onlookers as the mayor’s voice carried Dante’s cadence over them.”