The ghost of the great poet, Dante Alighieri, haunts Florence, his memory omnipresent yet elusive. His cenotaph in Santa Croce is a tomb with no body, his “house” a monument rather than a place he actually lived. (It was restructured in 1911 to its current medieval aspect.) Even the Italian language is an echo of medieval Florentine dialect, chosen to be the official language of Italy. The new country would speak the language of Dante, the language of poetry.
But there is one place it could be argued his name is out of place: the so-called Church of Dante. Santa Margherita dei Cerchi is a 13th-century church down the road from Dante’s house-museum, next to a lampredotto window and across from a wine bar. It’s one of the oldest churches in Florence and said to be the burial place of Dante’s greatest love: Beatrice Portinari. It’s become something of a destination for lovesick travelers who leave notes in a red basket, hoping the spirit of Beatrice will help solve their relationship problems. The stone tablet outside labeled Chiesa di Dante bristles with “locks of love” and notes jammed into the cracks behind the plaque when the church is closed (which it seems to be most of the time). When I pass this plaque I wonder, shouldn’t it be called the church of Beatrice? With so few statues, plaques or monuments dedicated to women, isn’t this an opportunity to set history a bit right?
Little is known about the real Beatrice. She was born in 1265 to the banking family of the Portinari, her name noted as Bice di Folco Portinari. She was married to another banker, Simone dei Bardi, and died in 1290 at the age of 25. For more, we must turn to Dante’s texts where his personal experiences defined his work. His first book of poems, the Vita Nuova, is a combination of sonnets combined with his autobiographical accounts of what led him to write them. It is here he speaks about his few childhood meetings with Beatrice and how struck he was by her death.
His first meeting with her was on May Day in the Palazzo Portinari Salviati when he was smitten with one of the daughters of the household. He would have been nine, she would have been eight. The lovesick young Dante spotted her in the streets many times, but never spoke to her. Nine years later, he saw her near Santa Trinita Bridge, where she greeted him and Dante, overwhelmed by emotion, couldn’t even bring himself to respond. The dream he had about her after that encounter would become the first sonnet of the Vita Nuova.
He calls her “the glorious lady of my mind” and reflects on how this image of her is the medium through which he experiences Love with a capital L. He seems to separate the “real” Beatrice, who he does not pretend to know, from his personal experience of the emotions that she inspires. He is transformed by the feeling of Love, while Love, and Beatrice herself, remain unchanged. She is the ultimate muse: perfect, untouchable, unknowable, and gone forever.
It is fitting then that years later, when writing the Divine Comedy in exile from his beloved Florence, it is Beatrice again who meets the poet in Paradise. In contemplating Beatrice, he no longer dwells on youthful passions, but contemplates divine and spiritual Love, and the very nature of God.
I have frequently passed Santa Margherita dei Cerchi on tours, grumbling tongue in cheek about why it’s called Dante’s Church when Beatrice is the one buried there until one guest’s comment caused me to pause. “She wouldn’t be famous without Dante.” It’s true. The more I try to find out about her, the more she escapes me. Perhaps this is not an instance of patriarchal forgetting or an opportunity to rescue a historical figure unjustly forgotten to time (although there are plenty of those, to be sure).
Beyond being born, married and buried, we know nothing more of what the real Beatrice did, how she felt or who or what she longed for and loved. The Beatrice we know and admire is not real, but an unchanging and divine image created by the words of Dante himself. This Beatrice has entered into the collective imagination, painted by the pre-Raphaelites, her name frequently used in literature and cinema for delicate, ethereal, young love interests. A real woman may have inspired Dante, but his Beatrice, as stated even by him, is a figment of his imagination and now too of ours.
Now when I pass Santa Margherita dei Cerchi, I imagine three ghosts. There is the hook-nosed poet and his immortalized, symbolic Beatrice invoked again by the words scribbled on all the notes left for her. And then there is the ghost of another woman: the real and unknown Bice, all but lost to us beyond the shadow of a few dates, one of innumerous real historical people whose stories we will never know.
