This article was written by Raffaella Cavalieri

La Verna Forest Photos by Raffaella Cavalieri

Some years ago, while I was in a library, my attention was drawn to the dusty and ancient cover of a book. Some golden letters composed the title: Through Dante's Lands. Impressions in Tuscany. I took the book from the shelf and opened it. A picture of Trinita's Bridge in Florence was there, the place where Dante first met his beloved Beatrice. This was a novel about a journey through Dante's lands in Tuscany, and the Trinita Bridge was the starting point for this journey:

I wanted Italy generally and vaguely, and felt that my first halting place must be where Dante first met.

This was the desire expressed by a young English girl called Persis Revel. I closed the book and decided to take it with me. I was interested in literary travels and I had already read some essays about a journey in Italy following Dante's footsteps. This kind of travel retraces its origins to the first years of the nineteenth century, when the Divine Comedy started circulating all over the world thanks to several published translations. Before the nineteenth century there were only a few. Generally they consisted of some popular episodes taken from The Inferno, such as the canto about Conte Ugolino or the one about Paolo and Francesca.

The first traveller who decided to visit the places Dante mentioned in the Divine Comedy was Jean-Jacques Ampere. He chose the city of Pisa - where the episode of Conte Ugolino takes place - as the starting point of his Italian journey. Two months ago I was in Pisa and looked for the Torre della Fame. It was once called Torre della Muda because eagles used to be closed in this tower in the moult period, but after Ugolino's story the name was changed into Torre della Fame (Hunger Tower). It used to be located in Piazza delle Sette Vie, the now-so-called Piazza dei Cavalieri di Santo Stefano, which is part of the Clock Palace. On its external wall (and inside too) it is possible to see the rest of the old tower, the one Dante wrote about. However, time has passed and things have inevitably changed, cars and motorcycles are passing by around the Torre della Muda ... comfort before antiquity.

While standing in front of these monuments and tuning out all the noises that modernity and comfort produce, I could perceive the presence of historical and literary men such as Conte Ugolino and Dante Alighieri. Jean-Jacques Ampere used to say that while walking in Florence he felt the historical people Dante wrote about were watching him from the windows. Now I can understand what he meant.

The book I borrowed from the library was a novel, not an essay. It was September 2001 ... I read the story of Persis and her brother Mark and found it so enrapturing that I decided to plan an excursion to those places, near to my hometown. All the books on journeying Italy in Dante's footsteps I've read - Jean-Jacques Ampere's, Alfred Bassermann's, the English travel guide by Ella and Dora Noyes, and Mrs. Coulquhoun Grant's novel Through Dante's Lands - tell of the place in which Dante's presence is still vivid: the Casentino Valley, between Arezzo and Florence.  Dante lived there during the first years of his exile, hosted by Conti Guidi's family in their Castles. He began writing the Divine Comedy while wandering through this valley. Here, time seems immutable. Modernity didn't reach the area. So only here we can really find something that has never changed since Dante's age: nature.

About twenty-five miles north-east of Florence there lies in the heart of the sterile Appennines a green and fertile valley called Casentino. Here the Arno takes its rise, and flows for many miles of its early course, fed by a thousand rivulets on its way . (Ella and Dora Noyes, The Casentino and its Story)

Since I live in Arezzo, I decided to start my trip from this city, following the state road 71 (SS71), Umbro-Casentinese, up to the valley of the Arno river. I took the Consuma Mountain Pass and chose the main halting places in the three monasteries: Vallombrosa, Camaldoli, and La Verna. This was quite a popular itinerary among travellers in the nineteenth century. As the road dipped into the valley I had the delightful impression that I was leaving the city and all its noises and  modernity behind. I opened the car window and breathed in the fresh air of the Tuscan country that swirled all around me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As I arrived in Bibbiena I left the main road following a street that rises to Chiusi della Verna and toward the Monastery of La Verna. I was alone, in my car, following the road that climbed a sprawling hill. After a bend I stopped the car and got out. In front of me there was a green hill, on which some rocks seemed to be precariously perched. Between them was the religious building evoked by Saint Francis in the main episodes of his life. A few minutes later, I was on the edge of that precipice looking down towards the entire Casentino Valley, where only minutes before I stood near my car looking at the monastery.

Beside me is the rock - it is said - that formed a sort of niche offering to Saint Francis; a refuge when the Devil tried to hurl him down the hill, over the brink. The landscape I was walking in was the same in which Dante, Ampere, Bassermann, Ella and Dora Noyes and Mrs. Coulquhoun Grant walked before me through centuries ... Ampere imagined: 

Dante actually walks with Virgil. He toils upward, he stops to take breath, he helps himself with his hand when his foot is not enough. He loses himself and asks his way, he observes the altitude of the sun and of the stars. In a word, one finds the habits and souvenirs of the traveller in every verse or rather in every step of his poetic peregrination.

I meandered the beech tree forest in which Dante wandered and then wrote:

Nel crudo sasso intra Tevero et Arno da Cristo prese lultimo sigillo che le sue membra due anni portarno.
(Heaven XI, lines 106-108, referring to the fact that Saint Francis received stigmata here.)

I was looking for Dante's traces and I found it in nature and in those places where time has never passed. Here I saw the bed made of stone in which it is said Saint Francis used to sleep.

Then there is the Sasso Spicco, a rock that is perched on the mountain, about to fall at any moment. It is here that Saint Francis used to pray many centuries ago. Even the Asissi earthquake in 1997 could not destroy it.

A few days after this experience I decided to follow my journey through the Valley of Casentino. The whole valley is pervaded by the memory and tradition of his presence, one seems to come upon his footsteps at every turn , and to lose them as often; they flee before you into the obscurity of castle or rock, or forest, as exclusive as that light unattainable lady of his own odes whom he was even pursuing if only to catch sight of the shadow of her vanishing garments . [Ella and Dora Noyes]

I stopped over in Camaldoli and Poppi. Poppi is a very typical medieval centre, placed on the top of a hill where its castle dominates the valley. It has been described, painted and drawn by travellers of every time, and nowadays it still preserves the same view. In the front stands Dante's bust to remember his presence here.  It ignited memories of Ampere and Florence, the piercing eyes and pointed nose staring directly at me, Dante's men watching me through the windows, like sentinals in a haunted house.

Leaving Poppi, I headed back to Arezzo then to Bibbiena again. I left the main road in order to reach Camaldoli, in the midst of an old forest of fir-trees. I went on a small pilgrimage to the monastery and the hermitage, paying my respects to the monks that are now long gone.  Upon its founding in 1012 by Saint Romualdo, the long-robed holy men once filled the cells and roamed the property, silently, perhaps they are still there today, watching, waiting for eternal peace. 

Every step I took through the Casentino Valley, I found out how the genius loci was vivid and alive through the forests in which echoes of ancient battles could be still heard among Saint Francis' words and Dante's steps of his solitary exile. There is another place where Dante's presence is more and more strong: Mount Falterona, Dante's Mountain. I was not able to make an excursion up there, but I promised myself to do it as soon as possible... I'd like to see and feel what Persis saw and felt all lovers of the Divina Commedia must wish to wander through this country which he has for ever immortalized.  [Mrs. Coulquhoun Grant]

I echo the same sentiments, next time, another trip, another canto . . . Dante's journey will continue on, in Tuscany and beyond.

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