Abstract
Of several biographies published in Italy on and around the 700th anniversary of Dante's death, Giuseppe Indizio's Vita di Dante, with its 840 pages (inclusive of illustrations, bibliography and index), is by far the longest, attesting to the commitment of its author to a full re-construction of Dante's life and oeuvre. Another unusual detail is that Indizio is an independent scholar who, in the past thirty years, while working in Europe in the multinational insurance sector, has published an impressive number of high-quality research papers on and around some of Dante's most debated biographical issues. Subsequently, he has collected these articles in two volumes of Problemi di biografia dantesca, published in 2014 and 2022 under a title that, not by chance, recalls Michele Barbi's classic two-volume series of Problemi di critica dantesca (1934 and 1941). A rigorous and insightful historian and philologist, Barbi (1867–1941) left an indelible mark on Dante studies. His Dante: Vita, opere e fortuna, published first in the Enciclopedia Italiana in 1931 and, as a separate book, in 1933 (English translation, 1954), is still an invaluable resource for the study of the poet and his works. Like Barbi's, Indizio's Vita di Dante interweaves the little that is documented about Dante's life with the history of his times and the meagre findings of past and recent archival explorations by himself and other past and contemporary scholars.
The result is a monumental biography that starts with a brilliant sketch of Florence daily life, laws, customs and traditions in mid-13th century and a thorough examination of the last two centuries of Dante's family tree, and ends with a detailed look at the lives of his children following his death in Ravenna in 1321. The book is packed with documents about events, individuals and institutions that, although they may not directly concern Dante Alighieri, can be brought to bear on a date or the whereabouts of a person or an event which may in its turn help to narrow down the period in which Dante may have been somewhere or have done something. The investigative process is elaborate, but its outcome, albeit not sensational, is always interesting and worthwhile in view of the “re-construction” of the poet's life. Unfortunately, not a single scrap of paper, not even a single signature, has ever been found in Dante's hand. This has traditionally been the boon and bane of Dante's biographers who, while lamenting the exceptional lack of Dante related documents, feel encouraged, precisely because of it, to exercise their imagination, usually within the confines of circumstantial evidence, in support of their guesses. But even when documents do exist, they may be of a kind that create, rather than overcome, challenges. Dante biographies, ever since Boccaccio, have always been, and still are, skillful assemblages of the possible with the probable and the plausible.
Take for instance the case of Dante's marriage to Gemma Donati. We know of a fascinating notarial instrument, a dowry contract, dated 9 February 1277 (or possibly 1278), in which Manetto Donati endowed his daughter Gemma in her marriage to Dante Alighieri. The document no longer exists, but that it existed, and was authentic, is proved by the fact that it is the legal base of another document of 1329 in which Gemma, by then Dante's widow, applies to the City for compensation for the dowry confiscated to her together with her husband's property at the time of his judicial sentence. Leaving aside issues concerning the precise year of the act, we know that Dante, in February 1277, was still under twelve, and Gemma even younger, perhaps much younger, at a time when the minimum age for legal marriage in Florence was fourteen years for the groom and twelve for the bride. However, we know also that exceptions could be and were made, and impuberes married. So, were Dante and Gemma married on that day or was only a dowry contract signed, sealed and possibly paid up? The answer is more than a mere curiosity, for it reflects on other major issues such as the date of Dante's father's death, the teenager Dante's situation in the following five to ten years, and the dates of birth of Dante's three (or four) children. Whether or not Dante and Gemma were actually married on that day, most scholars believe that the couple moved in together only many years later. This sounds like a reasonable guess, as the first sentence that includes Dante's children is that of November 1315, most likely because only then they had reached the age of fifteen after which they too were by law subjected to their father's banishment and, if caught, decapitation (ducantur ad locum iustitie et ibi eisdem capud a spatulis amputetur, ita quod penitus moriantur). Indizio places the actual marriage in 1289, mainly to allow for Gemma's young age which at that point he deems to have been between fourteen and nineteen. He also suggests that the couple went to live in Geri del Bello's quarters—Geri being Dante's father's cousin, murdered in April 1287, whom the poet will “find” in the ninth bolgia of the eighth circle of Hell among the Sowers of discord (see If. 29.13–39). On the other hand, Indizio concedes that a very early marriage could have been brought on by the death of Dante's father, around 1275 (p. 80), when the ten-year-old Dante found himself orphaned of both his parents with two (possibly three) younger siblings, including the offspring of his father and his second wife, Lapa di Chiarissimo Cialuffi. But then, under whose tutelage was he placed? We don't know. However, those are most probably the years (1275 to early 1280s) that the adolescent Dante spent under “the incalculable influence” (p. 116) of Brunetto Latini (1225–1294), teacher, philosopher, poet, notary, statesman whose “dear and good paternal image” (If. 15.83) Dante in his journey through Hell will later “find” among the “sodomites”. It is just an example of the multiple ramifications of a document, and of some ramifications of its ramifications. As for Dante himself, when he wrote the Vita Nuova, around 1293, he focused at length on 1274 and 1283, the years of his first and second vision of Beatrice, but he said nothing about his parents, let alone his siblings or his wife. In such a web of insubstantial connections, the biographer who is not satisfied with the few indisputable facts, must proceed with both caution and courage. Of such an approach Indizio offers a particularly balanced and strong example.
In his re-construction of Dante's life in twenty chapters, Indizio examines in chronological order all that has been said and written about it so far. He casts new light whenever possible on Dante's private and public life: his ancestors, his mother Bella and father Alighiero, his education, his friendship with Guido Cavalcanti, Cino da Pistoia and other poets, his likely participation in the military campaign of Prata and Poggio Santa Cecilia (1285–1286), and his presence at the battle of Campaldino (1289). He covers Dante's marriage and children, his tragic involvement in Florentine politics and international affairs after 1295, and the ensuing series of sentences (1302–1315) of banishment and later decapitation. Once in exile, Indizio follows Dante's attempts to return home—first through the military organization of the White Guelphs and later with the help of Black individuals—his wanderings in central and northern Italy, and the historical backgrounds and cultural milieus of most of the cities and courts he came in contact with over the following twenty years, not to mention the many characters Dante encounters, as protagonist of the Commedia, in his journey through the afterworld.
Indizio confirms his previously made discovery that Tana was Dante's elder sister, not his stepsister. With reference to the poet's intellectual formation (pp. 210–216), he seems convinced that Dante spent an extended period of study in Bologna in 1286–1287, perhaps without enrolling in its university, and he considers it as certain that, in the early 1290s, he frequented the Schools of the Mendicant orders in Florence, particularly Santa Croce, even if they may not have been officially open to lay scholars. He believes that Venezia was one of Dante's stopping places in the first years of his exile (p. 335). He rules out the possibility that he ever went to Paris but accepts that he might have travelled to Avignon just after the death of pope Clement V, in 1314, returning to Italy (p. 567) before the election of the new pope, John XXII (1316). On his way to the south of France, in May–June 1314, Dante could well have made a stopover at the Monastery of Santa Croce del Corvo, near Ameglia (La Spezia), overlooking the mouth of the river Magra (pp. 543–552). There he could have met Friar Ilaro and let him make a copy of his completed Inferno. The story, told by Friar Ilaro in a letter handed down by Boccaccio, is disputed by several scholars, but Indizio is inclined to consider it grounded on facts. On the question of the precise date of Dante's death, traditionally said to have occurred between 13 and 14 September 1321, he leans toward the evening of the 13th, during the early hours of the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, which was indeed celebrated from the evening of the 13th until Vesper time of the day after, 14th September (p. 716).
Indizio invests much time and space in Dante's works, examining each one as both a potential source of information for the poet's life and thought, and at the same time as a subject itself in need of scholarly attention with regard to the time, place, mode, circumstances of its composition, distribution and reception. He meticulously considers all textual evidence, internal and external, including the manuscript tradition and the material transmission of the texts. His findings confirm by and large the chronological sequence now generally acknowledged: Vita Nuova in 1292–1293 (pp. 218–221); the various, complex phases of the glorious Rime from Dante's first Guittonian experiments in the early eighties to the late eighties under Cavalcanti's dolorous spell, then the Guinizzellian mode of the Vita Nuova, the petrose, the philosophical verse of his exile in 1302–1309 (pp. 449–455); the unfinished Convivio (pp. 382–395), with the first three books composed in Bologna in 1304–1306, and the fourth in the following two years in Lunigiana (the area that runs from the Appennines to the Tyrrhenian Sea straddling Tuscany and Liguria) and in Lucca; alongside the Convivio, the De Vulgari Eloquentia worked on intensely in 1305–1307, yet abandoned after the second book (pp. 395–416). Looking at the much-debated case of Monarchia, he is certain that the book was produced between 1311 and 1321 (p. 528), but probably written out between 1312 and 1314, at the same time as Purgatorio (pp. 535–537) and the frustrating campaign of emperor Henry VII in Italy. As for the Commedia, Indizio accepts Boccaccio's story of some canti, probably four—as recently suggested by Alberto Casadei—being written before Dante's exile (p. 437), at the same time hinting interestingly at the possibility that what the poet then wrote may have been about Beatrice in Paradise (p. 438). He places the composition of Inferno between 1307–1308 and 1313–1314 (pp. 567–579); Purgatorio in the years 1314–1315 (partly done in Lucca, which would explain Pg. 24); Paradiso between Verona (end of 1315) and Ravenna, where the poet moved—it is not clear why—in the first months of 1320 with his sons Pietro and Giacomo. As for the crucial question of the compositional mode, Indizio believes that, within the pre-defined plan of a rigidly sequential narrative, the poem must have been kept open to the occasional adaptation, partial re-elaboration and revision (p. 733), until of course the canticles were released and out of the poet's hands.
On Dante's disputed works, while believing in the authenticity of the Tenzone with Forese Donati, Indizio does not share with other influential critics the now prevailing view that the Fiore (a creative paraphrase in 232 sonnets of the Roman de la Rose), as well as the Detto d'Amore (a narrative poem based on the same Rose and dictated by Love in 480 seven-syllable verse), can be early works by Dante. He argues that the Fiore is a comic-realistic re-write of the Rose by an unknown Florentine writer of the 13th century with excellent knowledge of France and French: Dante is likely to have read it, but he is not its author (pp. 188–197). As for the other two disputed works associated with the poet's final years, he is skeptical about the Questio de aqua et terra (pp. 641–661) and undecided on the authenticity, at present generally accepted, of the controversial Epistle to Cangrande (pp. 661–665).
All in all, there are no earth-shattering novelties in this new biography, but a systematic and dependable review of all historical details and documents available to us today. This comprehensive approach seems to produce a more satisfying and plausible (though obviously not definitive) re-construction of the great poet's life in Florence and the reasons behind his wanderings in the twenty years of his exile—which is indeed a helpful and sound base for the reading of his works and an understanding of his thought and art.