Will The Alighieri's Forgive Florence?



The cultural memory of Italians is truly muscular. Vendettas that outlast the lives of the original participants endure. Count Pieralvise Serego Alighieri, the most public descendant of the extraordinary Dante Aligieri, has turned down a request from city officials in Florence, Italy to attend an apology ceremony for the poet's banishment centuries ago. Transforming his anger into one of the most sublime works of Art, Dante composed a cosmology and sentenced his enemies to a Hell. And Dante got the last laugh, creating a work of such brilliance, it outlived by centuries all those named within its pages. Students in Italy and abroad now know the names of the long-dead Farinata, Filippo Argento and Brunetto Latini.

Of course The Divine Comedy is more than just a literary amber in which his political foes are trapped. The Divine Comedy is also a complex moral compass -- not unlike Homer's Odyssey -- made for navigating the Scylla and Charybdis of expressing far-reaching ideas under a repressive regime. As a refugee from Idi Amin's Uganda, The Corsair always found magnificent wisdom in Dante's work and the considerable political pressures that must have influenced his noble philosophy and otherworldly versifying, which was never -- mirabile dictu -- stained by the sepia-colored negativity of Hobbes, who came from a similarly precarious political climate, but came out squarely on the side of the pessimists on human nature. From Time:

"Italian master poet Dante Alighieri was ruthless with the leaders of his day. Armed with the mightiest of quills, he used his epic poem the Divine Comedy to finger contemporary politicians for everything from corruption and treason, to usury and sodomy. He wrote that Venedico Caccianemico, the head of Bologna's Guelph faction, prostituted his own sister to gain political advantage. Trapped in the boiling tar pits and frozen lakes of hell, these politicos were doomed to eternal literary damnation.

"Dante reserved his sharpest vitriol for the city fathers of his hometown Florence. Indeed, the poet's rancor for the ruling class came in large part from the 1302 decision by Florentine officials to exile him for life because of an ongoing political disagreement. 'Joy to you, Florence, that your banners swell,' wrote Dante in his masterwork. 'beating their proud wings over land and sea/and that your name expands through all of Hell!'

"Seven centuries on and Florence's city council is finally considering a symbolic end to the banishment by granting Dante a posthumous medal. A solid majority of council members voted last month to grant the poet the city's highest honor, the golden florin. Several leftists, though, voted 'no.' Nicola Rotondaro, from one of Italy's small Communist parties, said Dante doesn't need to be rehabilitated by the council. 'If he'd been condemned to death, would we have been asked to resurrect him?,' he quipped.

"In a retort that may prolong the controversy, oh, another century or two, Pieralvise Serego Alighieri, 54, a Tuscan winegrower ... this week said he will refuse the award on behalf of the family. The vote, he told Milan daily Corriere della Sera, fell well short of the clear mea culpa that his legendary forefather deserves. 'When I read the statements (of the opponents), I could have wept,' said Serego Alighieri, who wonders when Dante will 'finally be left in peace.'