| What makes it wonderful? |
Dante Alighieri is most famous for his final masterpiece, La Commedia Divina, but so much led up to his final work! This museum, built on the thoroughly reconstructed site where he grew up, shows off his life in three levels!
The first level focuses on the Guild of Physicians and Apothecaries, which also included spice sellers and painters. Dante joined the Guild in November of 1295 and served as a prior for them into the 1300s, opposing the political goals of Pope Boniface VIII! It was his papal oppositions that had led to the next stage of his life and the second floor of the museum: exile!
Appointed ambassador to Rome, even though he had been hostile to the pope, Dante left Florence in 1301, never to return! That’s because while he was away, the opposing political subgroup of Black Guelphs charged him with corruption, failing to pay a debt, and gave him a death sentence before he’d even heard of the charges! Though the new pope tried to make peace, the Black Guelphs wouldn’t budge, so Dante never came back to Florence after his ambassadorial mission!
Level 3 of the museum is a celebration of the work he created while he was in exile in Ravenna, his epic poem, The Divine Comedy. In this brilliantly written poem, the main character gets led through the Inferno, the Purgatorio, and the Paradiso, discovering along the way all the people who had aided or betrayed him, in varying levels of punishment or reward! Shortly after he finished the final verse, he contracted malaria and discovered his own path to the afterlife. After his death, his brother, Francesco, sold this house, which subsequent owners expanded. His descendants remembered where it was, though, and after many centuries of gradual decay, the house was rebuilt on the traditional site between 1960 and 1965 and opened to the public as a museum! |
