Dante & the Unorthodox: The Aesthetics of Transgression

Calling Dante: From Dante on the Steps of Immortality

Calling Dante From Dante on the Steps of Immortality Andrew Pawlowski Trans. James Miller THE PLAYWRIGHT’S INTRODUCTION Lately I have spent all my vacations in Italy. I was attracted by this country’s beauties and fascinated by its history and art. I was pursuing the shade of Dante who would appear to me at times only to disappear . I was tracing his steps, eager to find him in books—the thousands of publications on Dante and his works which fill up library shelves. Truth, lies, myths. Gubbio, the quiet medieval city where this drama unfolds, does not often appear in these books, though it has been listed among the many places visited by Dante during his exile. It is found at the foot of the Apennines, near Perugia. Behind it rises Mount Ingino, at the summit of which stands a church containing a pedestal with a crystal coffin. In this coffin rests the mummy of St. Ubaldo. As Bishop of Gubbio, this heroic warrior saved the city from the massacre planned by Barbarossa. The inhabitants of the city revere him almost as a god. He is the hero of the annual spectacle of the Feast of the Wax Candles, which each year on the fifteenth of May attracts thousands of tourists to Gubbio. It is said that after his death Ubaldo held out his hand to his faithful servant who remained in pain and poverty. He was wearing on his finger a ring impossible to remove, which the servant carried away for himself along with the saint’s forefinger. With this began the cult of St. Ubaldo in Alsace, where today in the city of Thann you can find a relic conjectured to be the finger. The most recent studies on the mummy of Gubbio and on the finger of Thann have not yielded the result that everyone has been waiting for. The finger didn’t quite fit the hand. 517 The medieval houses of Gubbio have low and narrow side doors, through which the coffins of the dead are carried out. Also of interest in the town is a medieval fountain: if you go around it three times, you may obtain the privileges enjoyed by the mad zealots in the cult of Ubaldo known as the Fraternity of the Possessed. I took a turn around it three times and from that moment I was initiated into the Fraternity. The excellent wine of the region also helps one understand the profound mystery of the place. Dante visited Gubbio at different times between 1305 and 1320. He was attracted by the very rich library of the monastery of Fonte Avellana and by the friendship of the poet Bosone de’ Raffaelli, lord of the castle of Colmollaro . Another native of Gubbio was Cante Gabrielli, who as podestà of Florence in 1302 condemned Dante in absentia at first to exile with a fine and then to death. Cante was a Guelf, Bosone a Ghibelline. The clashes and battles between the Gabrielli and Raffaelli families lasted for centuries according to tradition. Did Dante really murder Cante? Were Bosone and Sebastiano (author of a treatise on death) his accomplices? Did the people of Gubbio help them send Cante from this world? These questions remain unanswered. It’s still not possible to prove their involvement in Cante’s death even if data do not exist to affirm the contrary. The sources providing us with information about Cante neglect to tell us where or how he died. 518 PART VI
TRASMODAR Stairway leading to the front entrance of the Palazzo dei Consoli, Gubbio (first half of the fourteenth century ). On these steps the shade of Dante manifests himself like a genius loci to Pawlowski’s alter ego Kukla at the start of Dante on the Steps of Immortality. Photo credit: Andrew Pawlowski In Dante on the Steps of Immortality, I suggest that Bosone was also involved in the mysterious events surrounding the composition of the last thirteen cantos of the Paradiso. The official version states that these cantos were found nine months after the death of the poet. Iacopo Alighieri, Dante’s son, had a dream in which his dead father showed him a hiding place in the wall where he had hidden the manuscript. The next morning, Iacopo and a notary friend found the folios, which were damp and almost illegible; from them he recreated the missing parts of the cantos. Sometime later...