Dante’s bones
One day, according to Boccaccio, Dante was in Verona; by this time, fame of his work, especially of the Inferno, had spread abroad, and he was known by sight to many. As he passed a gateway where a group of women were sitting, one of them said to the others, quietly, yet so that Dante and his company could hear: ‘Isn’t that the man who goes down to Hell as he likes, and returns, and brings back news of them below?’ To which one of the others replied: ‘Indeed it must be him—do you not see how his beard is singed, and his skin darkened by the heat and smoke that are below!’ And Dante, hearing these words spoken in all good faith, ‘passed on, smiling a little’.
A great and enthralling piece of writing, and glimpse of a monumental labour: Ciaran Carson’s foreword to his translation of Dante’s Inferno. (Thanks, Stuart.)
Natives of Belfast claim that they can tell each other’s identities—Protestant or Catholic by a combination of accent, vocabulary, clothes, bearing, gesture. The souls in Dante’s Hell reveal themselves by a phrase, by body language: a nod, an eye brow-twitch, the plucking of a garment. By these words, these actions, they epitomize their past lives.
‘One day,’ says Dino Compagni, a chronicler of [14th century Florence], many people of the city were gathered together, for the burying of a dead lady, on the Piazza de’ Frescobaldi; and it being the custom of the city that at such gatherings the citizens should sit below on rush-bottomed stools, and the knights and doctors above on benches, the Donati and the Cerchi, such of them as were not knights, being seated on the ground, opposite each other, one of them, either for the purpose of adjusting his dress, or for some other reason, rose to his feet. Whereupon those of the opposite party likewise rose up, suspecting somewhat, and laid their hands on their swords; and the others doing the same, they began to make a brawl.
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