Dante and the Marche, some parchments about the poet’s son discovered

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The appointment is in Fermo, on the afternoon of April 4th at the Teatro dell’Aquila. Complete with a municipal resolution, citizens are invited to participate in a public meeting: readings by a great actor of Italian theater (Giuseppe Pambieri, with his daughter Micol) and subsequent debate, with the president of the local company Dante Alighieri and a former mayor. The topic, on the web and on social media, is already making possibilityists and skeptics argue: did the Divine Poet live in our city?

The book

To unleash the quarrel is a book, the third of a trilogy that imagines the discovery of a lost play by William Shakespeare on the Divine Comedy and its author: Dante by Shakespeare III. How hard calle is (Solferino), by the couple Monaldi & Sorti, who will participate remotely in the event on April 4th from Vienna. With 12 novels to their credit accompanied by extensive historical appendices, translated into 26 languages ​​and 60 countries, the two authors (husband and wife in real life) in researching the Dante that Shakespeare could have told us in the theater, rediscovered two parchments from the early fourteenth century kept in the State Archives of Fermo, in which a certain Jacopo Alighieri appears in the service of the Municipality: the same name as one of the Poet’s sons.

It had always been believed to be a banal homonymy; and instead Monaldi & Sorti in the book documented the connections (political, biographical, temporal) between this Jacopo and the Dante Alighieri of the Comedy. And if Jacopo was in the city, his exiled father could easily have been there too, especially in the period in which he used the nearby Forlì as a base. But that’s not all: the two “history hounds”, as they have been defined by the Italian press, are finding new documents: “There is material to write a separate book on these discoveries alone.”

The Marche and Comedy

The Divine Comedy, Monaldi & Sorti recall in the appendices of their novel, is full of references to the Marche, including rare slang expressions: everything suggests that Dante stayed in the region. But the real news is that now Dante “appears” in the orbit of the mystical and mysterious Sibillini mountains: Fiastra, Corridonia, San Ginesio, Fermo, Urbisaglia… The oldest codex of the Comedy (1336), the famous Landiano, was written by a certain Antonio from Fermo, on behalf of Beccario Beccaria (captain of the people of Fermo, Dante mentions an ancestor in the poem). Even the Doctrinal, a short poem by Jacopo, son of Dante, “speaks” of the Marche region in certain passages. In Fermo in Dante’s years there was a strong colony of Florentine exiles, in an area that is still called “contrada Fiorenza”. The Elisei, Dante’s ancestors, were present in the area (in Paradise the famous Cacciaguida degli Elisei appears to the poet), and an alley called “degli Elisei” remains in the city. The blessed Fra Giovanni Elisei della Verna came from Fermo, and therefore probably a relative of the Poet (and Mount La Verna, in Tuscany, was well known to Dante). All these characters obviously have a prominent place in Monaldi & Sorti’s novel, and there is no shortage – borrowed from Severy midsummer night by Shakespeare – the hilarious amateur amateur dramatics show that stages the beginning of the Divine Comedy in the Marche dialect in the Sibillini Mountains.

Dante and the Marche, the parchments with the name of Jacopo

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Monopoly of Florence, Verona and Ravenna

Yet the “Marche Dante”, and in particular his passage through the Sibillini mountains, remains denied by History. «Perhaps also because the people of Marche and Fermo didn’t take care of it. They have not done healthy cultural lobbying for their land”, say Monaldi & Sorti. Dante’s biography was therefore “monopolised” by three regions: Tuscany (Florence), Veneto (Dante’s stops in Verona Verona), Emilia-Romagna (his death in Ravenna, and his probable youthful studies in Bologna). One of Dante’s best contemporary biographers, Giuseppe Indizio, however, believes that Forlì was Dante’s “base” for various diplomatic missions at the beginning of his exile, in search of support for his White Guelphs who had just been driven out of Florence. And Forlì could be an excellent “springboard” towards the south. The author of the «Marche» entry in Treccani’s Dante Encyclopedia, Febo Allevi (1911-1998), had intuited that the Divine Poet may have stayed precisely in his area (Allevi was from San Ginesio, MC). Monaldi & Sorti started from his intuitions. Allevi had reported the parchments with the name of Jacopo: two legal documents from 1306 and 1325 in which his name appears as syndic (i.e. special prosecutor) of Fermo, in some political-diplomatic negotiations between the Marche municipalities. Allevi did not proclaim that he was Dante’s son, because there was no connection with the Alighieri family of Florence. The two Fermo parchments were therefore forgotten (they are also absent in the new Dante Diplomatic Code of 2016, the collection of all the Alighieri legal documents, including the dubious ones).