Dante the Florentine, Part 2

Dante
by R.W.B. Lewis, Ph.D.

(Page 2 of 3)

Dante was one year old in 1266, and he grew up in a city that was at last fully realizing itself. It had been moving fitfully toward that goal for a good many years, in a series of developments that led both to prosperity and to a gathering self-image: a feeling for the primacy of the civic and the public over the private and the factional, combined with a sense of the larger importance of the merchant class as against the nobility. The Florentine merchants began to form themselves into guilds (or Arti) as early as 1206, when the Bankers' Guild was founded. There followed the Wool Guild of 1212, the Silk Guild on Por Santa Maria in 1218, and much later Apothecaries, Judges, Notaries, and others, well into Dante's lifetime. Eventually, there were seven "major" merchant guilds and fourteen "minor" (artisan) guilds: butchers, bakers, blacksmiths, leather workers, and the like.

The guilds were the source of stability and continuity in thirteenth-century Florence, a vital bureaucracy that held the society together and kept the economy expanding while Guelphs and Ghibellines came and went. The surging Florentine economy was based principally upon banking and international trade in luxury items, especially handsomely adorned leather goods. And it was a telling moment in the Florentine annals when, in 1252, the first gold florin was minted and almost instantly became the basic monetary measure in Europe. For it was engraved not, as had been customary, with the image of a pope or emperor but with the symbols of the city: on one side, San Giovanni, the patron saint of Florence; on the other side, the lily, the city's secular emblem.

Dante made a public gesture of allegiance in 1295 by entering the Guild of Apothecaries (by a bit of legal stretching, philosophers and men of letters could inscribe therein). Meanwhile, he could take pride in the ways the city was completing itself physically. By the time of his birth, four bridges spanned the Arno at strategic intervals, uniting the northern and southern sections and in particular making the hitherto disregarded section known as Oltrarno, beyond the Arno, a significant part of the urban whole. The bridge Buondelmonte rode across to his death in 1216 had then been the only passageway over the river. About five years later, a second bridge was erected a short distance downriver; it was given the name Ponte Nuovo, the New Bridge (it is now Ponte alla Carraia), and the preexisting one immediately-and for always-became known as Ponte Vecchio. A third crossing, upriver, was added in 1237 (Ponte alle Grazie today), and in the late 1250s a fourth bridge was built near the church of Santa Trinità, from which it took its name.

There remained one major, indeed enormous, architectural necessity: a new circuit of walls, to give Florence its distinct and lasting shape. This was an urgent human need as well. By the time Dante entered his teens, the population of Florence had grown to some eighty thousand, in Europe second only to Paris. But a great many of these cittadini lived outside the walls that had been built in 1172, when the population was less than thirty thousand. Such folks led a precarious existence, their homes routinely destroyed in pursuit of a scorched earth policy whenever Florence came under siege. Besides, to live outside the walls was not really to belong to the city at all. The city was by definition a walled entity, and a citizen-cittadino actually means one dwelling in the città-was one who resided inside the circuit.

Similarly, several of the city's most valued religious centers were, as of 1280, outside the walls: the convent and church of Santa Maria Novella, the Florentine home of the Dominicans, to the west; the then small church of Santa Croce, the Florentine home of the Franciscans (created in the late 1220s, soon after the death of Saint Francis), to the east; the convent of San Marco, to the north, and that of Santo Spirito, to the south. Dante in his early years studied betimes with the Dominicans and listened to the Franciscan friars preaching in the piazza outside Santa Croce, and to do so he had to make his way beyond the protective walls.

To bring these families and monuments into the city, the Florentine government known as the Secondo Popolo decreed in 1284 that a new and very much larger circuit of walls be constructed, and appointed the Tuscan-born architect Arnolfo di Cambio to design it. It was the successor not only to the 1172 circuit mentioned above but also to the ancient circuit of a century earlier, the cerchia antica later named for Cacciaguida and cited by him in Paradiso xv as source and symbol of a happier time:

Florence, within the ancient circling ... abode
in peace, sober and chaste.

Neither peace, sobriety, nor chastity was a feature of Dante's Florence; but the circuit of walls planned by Arnolfo di Cambio is among the great urban-architectural achievements of all time. It expanded the city in all directions; it not only brought the several churches and convents into the city but also, by a curvature of walls, related them to each other meaningfully, along fixed diagonal lines-the Dominican Santa Maria Novella to the northwest, the Franciscan Santa Croce to the southeast, and so on. The entire circuit was about five and a half miles in circular length; the walls stood forty-seven feet high and were seven feet thick, wide enough at the top for two soldiers to pass each other on patrol. There were fifteen massive gates, shouldering up to as much as 115 feet; every 370 feet there was a tower, seventy-three in all, with an average height of 75 feet. A wide road stretched along the walls within (portions of it form Florentine boulevards today) and another one outside, with a broad ditch circling both road and walls. The entire circuit was completed in 1333.

It was prodigious by communal intention, a great wall to enclose and to give shape and identity to a great city; and it remained so, intact and shape-giving, until its demolition in the late nineteenth century. As construction proceeded, Florentine citizens clustered about this segment or that, pointing with amazement and delight at the various gates and towers, arguing with one another about probable statistics. Dante, it may be assumed, was among these proud onlookers, watching, appraising, commenting. The experience, with others, led to the maturing Dante's conviction that Florence was the ideal city-state, which is to say, the ideal human habitat.

© June 2001, Viking, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

About the Author

R.W.B. Lewis, professor of English and American studies at Yale University, is the author of Edith Wharton: A Biography, which won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Bancroft Prize. His other books include The City of Florence, The Jameses, and American Characters. He most recently was given the award for lifetime achievement as a biographer by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.