By Danelia Rodriguez Santana
While walking through the streets of Florence, I encountered an interesting sight. Agroup of construction workers were working with a crane to place what seemed to be a fake tree trunk in the middle of Piazza della Signoria. It seemed to be something important as there were police and reporters around the construction site.
Continue reading Spruce Sculpture in Piazza Della Signoria
By Liliia Smichenko
The streets and buildings of Florence bear a weight of centuries of history. The wind delivers the echo of love and passion, first and last meeting. Street are soaked in declarations of love and heartbreaks. However, you wouldn’t notice it until you know the story of those places. A building is just a building however beautiful, until you find out that it hosted Dante Alighieri, one of the greatest poets of all time.
That’s how I decided I want to explore and understand Florence, through exploring the story of Dante Alighieri and Beatrice Portinari, a woman carved into human history.
Dante met Beatrice when he was only nine years old, when his father took him to the Portinari house, which today is Palazzo Portinari Salviati on via del Corso 6. On that day, during the May Day festivities, Dante fell in love once and for all.
He describes that meeting in his autobiographical work of prose and poems dedicated to Beatrice called Vita Nuova. The title can be translated as “new life” or “life’s springtime.”
This is how he describes their first meeting:
“Behold, a deity stronger than I; who coming, shall rule over me,” Dante writes.
He unexpectedly met her only nine years later, accompanied by two older women on the Lungarno, along the river. Lost for words, Dante ran away when she greeted him.
After that Dante and Beatrice had only two other brief meetings, one in the church of Santa Margherita dei Cerchi and the other at the wedding feast.
Dante’s love was idealistic and unattainable; it is possible she never even knew of his feelings. However, that didn’t stop Dante from loving her and express that love in all of his works including the Divine Comedy, where Beatrice is not only a character but the one who guides the poet through Paradise.
Even though Beatrice was his true love, they both married others and Beatrice died three years after her marriage at the age of 24.
Dante loved Beatrice from afar, and that’s how I explored Florence, studying at FUA-AUF at a distance through the Iconic Florence remote learning program. The physical distance didn’t prevent me from admiring and respecting the streets and buildings of Florence, just like how Dante experienced with Beatrice who become his great source of literary inspiration.