Elisabetta Mascellami dabs her forehead and décolleté with a paper handkerchief: “Non c’è aria per niente”, she moans: “You can’t breathe at all!” Of course not. It is a tomb in which she stands on this still hot summer evening – and therefore not intended to be used to recite poems. But that’s exactly what the Italian teacher does: She reads from the Divina Commedia, the Divine Comedy. And strictly speaking, it is the right place for it: it is located in the Tomba di Dante in Ravenna, built in 1780 as a neoclassical marble temple, where Italy’s greatest poet died exactly 700 years ago and is also buried. A suitcase-sized loudspeaker carries her voice to the small square in front of the mausoleum. Carabinieri keep things tidy. Swallows sail over the brick walls of the Franciscan monastery, on whose cloister Dante’s grave nestles. It is 6 p.m. and thus the time of the daily Lettura Perpetua, the perpetual reading, which has been celebrated here every day for almost a year, as part of the program of the celebrations in honor of Dante Alighieri.
She drove here from the Marche especially, two hours in the car, just to read aloud, says Elisabetta Mascellami. Sì, sì, all out of passion for the poet. She raves about the “work of inner growth”, the “beauty of language”. And anyway: “Commedia is music!” She calls Dante “padre della lingua”, the father of language, because the following applies not only to Mascellami but also to philologists: Italian first became a literary language through the Divine Comedy.
“We readers come from all over Italy,” explains the teacher. Of course, public reading was restricted during the pandemic: “Only people from the area were allowed to read.” As early as 1372, the poet Boccaccio, himself an admirer and biographer of Dante, founded the public recitations from the comedy. Today the neighboring Museo Dantesco organizes the readings, on its website interested parties like Elisabetta Mascellami can register online to read aloud.
There is little documented knowledge about Dante. Newly designed multimedia presentations for the anniversary year will also be presented in the museum exhibition, giving his verses high-end sonority and social media suitability. There is also a damaged fir wood box, which for a long time housed the poet’s bones. Florence wanted the bones back as early as 1346. When the Pope – and a native of Florence – Leo X approved the transfer of the mortal remains in 1519, the Franciscan monks secretly removed them from the sarcophagus and hid them in the monastery for centuries until they were forgotten and only found again by chance.
The poet was always on the move. The Divine Comedy is also about a journey
It is still agreed in Ravenna today that Dante’s remains should never be returned to Florence. After all, the poet, who had just been absent, had been sentenced to death at the stake in 1302 after the black Guelphs loyal to the Pope had taken over Florence. Dante, who had pleaded for the separation of secular and ecclesiastical power, preferred not to return to his hometown – and became a political refugee.
Much knowledge from his life is therefore based on his written work. The exiled poet himself was constantly on the move, and the Divine Comedy describes the journey of the protagonist Dante through the three realms of the hereafter: Hell, Cleansing Mountain and Heaven are visited by the first-person narrator – as a lover until the transfiguration, who follows his childhood sweetheart Beatrice, who died at an early age. Knowledge of himself and the world come together in his terzinen, the stanzas in three verses each, a form of poetry invented by Dante. In them he enumerates his travel encounters. These figures and places can be from mythology – but sometimes also contemporary.
This is exactly where the Cammino di Dante comes in. This “Dante footpath”, a circular route from Ravenna to Florence, is a pure hiking route on connecting roads that have been used since the Middle Ages. Almost 400 kilometers long, the route follows the stations of Dante’s life or literature in 20 daily stages. One encounters places, buildings, natural spectacles described in the Divina Commedia. And the story of the people who worked here in Dante’s time. It is still appealing today to look for Dante in the region between Florence and Ravenna. And surprisingly, where you can still find the poet – 700 years after his death – everywhere.
When Dante arrived in Ravenna in 1318, he had already been in exile for 16 years. Here, at the court of Guido da Polenta, whose secretary he becomes, he spends the last three years of his life before he presumably dies of malaria and is buried in the Basilica of San Francesco. Since the three-aisled pillar basilica, located a few meters behind the Tomba di Dante, like all of Ravenna’s ancient buildings, sinks into the soft ground of the city, its crypt is more than 3.50 meters deep and thus below the groundwater level. Today goldfish swim in the water, which attacks the mosaics over a large area and reminds us that Ravenna was a lagoon city until the Po changed its inflow into the Adriatic and silted up the city. Today the city center is around nine kilometers from the sea. But even on the beach you can find the poet: On the arterial road to Cervia, a sign on the left leads to the fine sandy Lido di Dante, complete with orange umbrellas and neatly lined up deckchairs. And not far from the beach begins the Pineta di Classe, a pine forest to which Dante erected a monument in the comedy and whose pine needle-muffled paths are still easy to hike today.
Sara Cavina likes to walk in Dante’s footsteps. The 41-year-old is a certified nature guide and works a lot in her homeland, the Romagna Apennines, where Dante stayed in 1302 and 1303, i.e. immediately after his exile from Florence. After a two-hour hike through the narrow Acquacheta valley in the Foreste Casentinesi National Park, always along the crystal-clear torrent, you come to the Acquacheta waterfall, starting from the village of San Benedetto in Alpe. It pours over the rocks over a width of 35 meters, 70 meters deep.
Dante visited the now dilapidated Benedictine monastery here, says Cavina. And had climbed to the highest point of the Acquacheta waterfall in order to record his hike afterwards in a famous parable: “So we heard on a steep slope / The dark waters rush loudly down / That they numb the ear in a short time”, it says in the 16th song of hell. “When Dante speaks of the Phlegethon in his Divine Comedy, the river of the underworld that carries flames instead of water, he compares its roaring rumble with the roar of Aquacheta,” explains the guide.
The torrent below the waterfall is still a popular destination in summer today, as the dense foliage keeps the paths cool or at least tolerable even in the heat. And because the gently meandering water repeatedly forms small basins in which you can cool down wonderfully. “Maybe I’m doing them an injustice,” jokes Sara Cavina, “but are they really there because of Dante?” The Italian points to a couple of people resting in swimwear, who are dozing on the smoothly polished, level river rocks in the shade of the deciduous forest: “I think they just want to go swimming.” The torrent gurgles. An almost transparent crayfish wanders unhurriedly underwater. Everything breathes idleness.
Oh dear And yet you know what Dante had to say about the lazy: They had to go to the Cleansing Mountain, where they had to wash off the seven deadly sins – one of which is laziness. In the fourth circle of the purgatory, as the poet describes it, rush those who had approached life too comfortably. Well. If the stress in the afterlife is waiting for us anyway, nothing speaks against staying a little longer by the torrent. No matter what Dante, no Dante: after all, it is also the land of dolce far niente.
Travel information
Danteweg: Cammino di Dante circular route, camminodante.com; over ravennaincoming.it Cammino di Dante packages can be booked. Le Vie di Dante (“The Streets of Dante”) are a one-way route and, in contrast to the Cammino, can be experienced not only on foot, but also on the train or by bike. viedidante.it
Stay: Albergo Cappello, Ravenna, from 90 euros / double room. Seven guest rooms in a renaissance palace, albergocappello.it
Al Vecchio Convento, Albergo diffuso with rooms in the monastery and throughout the village, landlady Marisa Raggi is a hit, the small garden with pomegranate tree and wine pergola is magical, from 80 euros / double room, vecchioconvento.it
Hiking tours with Sara Cavina, bookable from 150 euros per day, over 4allora.it