Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) is one of Italy’s greatest poets. Through La Vita Nuova and his epic poem The Divine Comedy Dante’s strong feelings for Beatrice – “the love of his life and inspiration muse”, as he defined her changed literature as we know it today. Dante’s ‘courtly’ love affair with Beatrice Portinari, which began when they met in 1274, inspired his poetry, especially after her death in 1290 at the age of twenty-four. Two years before her death Beatrice’s father, the banker Folco Portinari founded the first hospital in Florence - the Santa Maria Nuova Ospedale in the cloisters of a Dominican abbey. Both Beatrice and Folco are named on a tombstone in the Church of Santa Margherita dei Cerchi. Dante lived in Florence until his exile in 1301. During his lifetime and over two hundred years after his death Florence, under the Medici’s (patrons to Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo), became the leading light of Italian Renaissance culture. Florence lies along the Arno river valley between the Apennines, where it rises, and Pisa. I photographed Florence and quote from my diary of 17 November 2019:

“White-capped milk coffee-coloured storm waves, loaded with outback debris, thunder past Mars yellow shuttered walls towards the Ligurian sea. That's the raging, muscular Arno river. Some light came when the rain subsided; pigeons drank from puddles around the Duomo; merrily wet pink marble horses pranced in a fountain on the Piazza della Signoria. The remaining highlights of the day were as follows. Up in the Bargello museum I find Giotto's picture of Dante captured in a carmine robe, his aquiline nose finding its place in Paradise. On the opposite wall of the barrel-vaulted Mary Magdalene chapel I see Giotto's painting of Satan, hands full of struggling nudity, the condemned gripping his legs, a ferocious stare, perhaps the first illustration of the Inferno. Sometime in the thirteenth century the chapel became a prison, the walls were whitewashed and the condemned spent their last night before execution with the ghosts of the Divine Comedy. In the Donatello room, which I had explored a couple of years ago, I noticed the Crown glass windows set in an iron armature. Handblown glass, flattened, eight hundred years old. Speaking of Donatello I missed seeing the beautiful Penitent Magdalene, her white poplar steepled fingers shaped, but untouching, in prayer. On to the Santa Maria Novella where Dante studied with the Dominicans. There I found the glorious cloisters with sixteenth century frescoes, very faded, one depicting Thomas Aquinas preaching. The Cloister of the Dead was a haunting sight. Under the Basilica was the old morgue, now with little vaults, stairwells and frescoes. Meanwhile I needed more information on the Basilica Santa Croce, where Dante will have prayed and studied. I learnt of the Cimabue Crucifix. It was painted on wood in 1288 and hung in the Basilica. It was hugely revered. Dante will have seen it. The Franciscans commissioned it. They had a great library where Dante studied. All that changed on 4 November 1966 when Arno river flooded catastrophically and burst its banks. The water came two metres above the floor of the Santa Croce Basilica and six metres above the cloisters and the museum where the Cimabue had been placed. The Franciscan library was destroyed, the Cimabue was washed up in the mud losing 70% of its paint. Volunteers, known as ‘angeli del fango’ - mud angels - picked flecks of paint from the sludge with tweezers. The painting took ten years to restore. It now hangs in the Sanctuary. Sad though to think of three to four million books or manuscripts damaged or destroyed from a freak rain event in the Apennines.”

In the photo-essay I have tried to capture a sense of the city as Dante might have experienced it, or as it rose up magnificently after his exile and death. Naturally, this is an impossible task. So much has changed. Most of the towers that once dominated the skyline have been destroyed; civil strife and the plague years have ended; public executions (Dante says that he saw people burned alive) ceased long ago; the city and its population (90,000 in Dante’s day) have expanded. Yet a few echoes survive. Dante wrote his first book, La Vita Nuova between 1292 and 1294 in Florence. Today in the Church of Santa Margherita dei Cerchi we can still find a basket of letters to Beatrice praying for a blessing on the love lives of visitors. We find the impressive statue of Dante in the Piazza Santa Croce (moved from its earlier setting on the square when the painter De Chirico sketched it in 1910). In the Basilica we find the waiting tomb of Dante, ready if his remains are ever returned from Ravenna. The cloisters bearing images of an ancient hospital; the remaining towers, such as the Palazzo Vecchio and Palazzo del Bargello, with their 800-year-old Crown glass windows. provide some sense of an architectural past. Giotto’s frescoes (especially those that appear to illustrate Dante’s Inferno), and Cimabue’s Crucifix, add a cultural dimension. Finally, the Arno river flowing under the Ponte Vecchio, miraculous survivor World War Two, offers a geographical reminder of the city’s foundations. For the rest we have to imagine …