Dante

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1: Dante the Florentine
As you walk across the Ponte Vecchio in Florence today, you come upon a plaque bearing a passage from Dante's Divine Comedy. The lines are spoken by Dante's ancestor Cacciaguida, whom the poet encounters in one of the higher spheres of heaven

Chapter 1: Dante the Florentine, Part 2
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.

Chapter 1: Dante the Florentine, Part 3
Drawing on the cultural legacy he had imbibed from Brunetto Latini, Dante came to believe that the city, the città, was the place where men and women could properly live and thrive-if the city were organized, ruled, and shaped in the Florentine man

Only R.W.B. Lewis-the renowned biographer and author of The City of Florence - could write so insightfully about Dante Alighieri, Florence's famous son.

In Dante he traces the life and complex development-emotional, artistic, philosophical-of this supreme poet-historian, from his wanderings through Tuscan hills and splendid churches to his days as a young soldier fighting for democracy, and to his civic leadership and years of embittered exile from the city that would fiercely reclaim him a century later. Lewis reveals the boy who first encounters the mythic Beatrice, the lyric poet obsessed with love and death, the grand master of dramatic narrative and allegory, and his monumental search for ultimate truth in The Divine Comedy. It is in this masterpiece of self-discovery and redemption that Lewis finds Dante's own autobiography-and the sum of all his shifting passions and epiphanies.

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.

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