A Guided Tour of Dante's Florence

Prologue: The Everyday world of Dante

Because Dante presents such a complete, self-contained world in The Divine Comedy, it's easy to lose of sight how closely his afterworld is modeled on his own experience. Of course, Dante is known for peopling the Comedy with his acquaintances, but more importantly, he vividly recreates the physical world of those people. Because the poet incorporates so many details of everyday life into his fiction, we can better understand his themes if we familiarize ourselves with daily life in Florence at the end of the Middle Ages.

Florence Then and Now

A New Jerusalem

Obviously much in Florence has changed over the last 600 years. But to Dante and other chroniclers of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, change was far more common than stability. The spirit of the Renaissance was beginning to displace the traditional outlook and values of the Middle Ages, as innovations in literature, art, music, business, and science challenged the dominance of the Catholic church in the daily lives of citizens.

Obedience versus Individuality

Generally, the medieval religious leaders and thinkers had maintained that individuals were only free when they subordinated their personal desires to the divine will. Renaissance artists and philosophers, however, argued that for individuals to be truly godlike, they first had to understand and develop their own unique qualities. In the work of Dante, standing as it does between the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance, we see the appreciation and promotion of individual talent and creativity (in Dante's comments on the artists Cimabue and Giotto, for example), and at the same time we are constantly reminded by the poet that individual talent that does not serve a higher purpose communicates only the pride and self-centeredness of the artist. Dante's observations on his city and its cultural, religious, and political turmoil often display an ambivalence toward change and stability.

Between Two Worlds

If, as many scholars have observed, Dante is the last great writer to believe in the unity of the cosmos, he is also one of the first writers to perceive the divisions between individual and society, freedom and authority, the secular and the sacred that Renaissance artists in the humanist tradition (Petrarch, Rabelais, Michaelangelo for example) would depict in their work.

In his criticism of Florence for its growing materialism and moral decay, Dante may seem rather conservative. In other ways, though, Dante broke away from medieval traditions: his group of poets, the stilnovisti or "new stylists," developed a "sweet new style" of poetry that substituted simplicity and elegance for the often harsh rhetoric and word play of earlier poetry. Dante also challenged tradition in the political realm. His commentary De Monarchia (On Monarchy) was so radical for its time in suggesting that the secular emperor should be on an equal footing with the pope that the church forbade anyone to read it, until the nineteenth century. Still, history credits later poets, political philosophers, and theologians with the revolutions in outlook that persist to this day. But despite six centuries of change in taste and philosophy, the fact that so much of medieval Florence survives today testifies to the enduring nature of its achievement.

Wandering through these Streets

After each introductory paragraph below are links to various web sites that portray an aspect of Florence in Dante's time. On these pages you may find links to other areas of interest. Feel free to explore these side streets; the detour can be as interesting as the main route. Should you get lost, use the Netscape Back button on the top of the Netscape screen (not the back button on the web page), or the Go command to trace your way back to this page. The links marked

consist of audio (.wav files). If your computer is equipped with a sound card and speakers or headphone, you can click on these and listen to them as you tour the sites.

Visit the churches

This tour created by Dr. Steven Hale, Humanities Division, DeKalb College
E:mail: shale@gpc.edu