The Dante Conspiracy (6 page)

‘As well as the woman he married, Gemma, who was a member of
a powerful Florentine family – it was an arranged marriage, very common in those
days as a way to establish or consolidate relationships between families – Dante
fell in love with another woman at the remarkably early age of nine. Her name was
Beatrice
Portinari
, but he never got to know her well,
preferring to admire her from afar with a kind of courtly and unrequited love. She
was the subject of a number of poems he wrote, often being depicted as a sort of
semi-divine being, guiding and watching over him. But she died in 1290 and that
seems to have turned Dante into something of a recluse for a time. He retreated
from public life and appeared to lose himself in literature.

‘Later, he had some political ambitions, and to aid him in this
he became a pharmacist, because politicians were then required to be members of
one of the guilds here in Florence, but he actually achieved little in politics.
Then things took a turn for the worse for him. The Guelphs defeated the Ghibellines,
but then split into White and Black factions, the Whites taking power and expelling
the Blacks, which should have been good news for Dante, who was a member of the
White Guelphs. The problem was that the Blacks supported the Pope, while the Whites
wanted more freedom from papal interference, and that raised concerns in Rome. In
response, Pope Boniface VIII decided to occupy Florence with a military force and
issued orders to Charles of Valois to implement his wishes. Dante then became directly
involved, because he was a part of a delegation sent to the Vatican to try to discover
what the Pope intended to do, and hopefully persuade him not to launch an attack
Florence.’

Perini noticed that Lombardi’s eyes were starting to glaze over.

‘Try and stay awake, Cesare,’ he instructed.

‘That’s nearly the end of the history lesson,’ Guitoni said.
‘In Rome, the Pope dismissed all the delegates from Florence apart from Dante, but
while he was still in Rome, Charles invaded Florence and installed a new Black Guelph
government. At a stroke, Dante found himself on completely the wrong side of the
political divide. He was condemned to exile from the city of his birth for two years
and had a large fine was imposed on him. Dante both wouldn’t, and in fact he couldn’t,
pay the fine because he thought it was unjustified, and in any case all his assets
in Florence had been seized by the Black Guelphs, so he had no money. As a result,
he was then sentenced to perpetual exile, and this was serious stuff. If he ever
returned to Florence without paying the fine, he could be seized by the authorities
and burnt at the stake. Something else interesting I found out was that the sentence
against Dante was eventually rescinded.’

Guitoni paused and glanced at Lombardi, who now seemed slightly
more attentive.

‘Would you care to hazard a guess about when that was done?’

Lombardi shrugged.

‘Wheels around here tend to move pretty slowly, so I’d guess
it was probably after he died.’

‘It was,’ Guitoni confirmed. ‘In fact, it was quite a long time
after he died.
Almost seven hundred years afterwards, actually.
It was rescinded in June 2008, to be precise.’

‘That is slow,’ Lombardi agreed, smiling.
‘Even
by Florentine standards.’

‘So obviously what Dante couldn’t do was return home, and there
are various accounts of what he did next. It’s pretty certain he went to Verona
and
Sarzana
in Liguria, and then possibly to Lucca. Other
accounts claim he went to France and possibly even to Oxford in England, but there’s
actually no credible evidence that he ever left Italy. In 1312 Henry VII of Luxembourg,
the Holy Roman Emperor, attacked Florence and defeated the Black Guelphs, but Dante
wasn’t involved in the campaign. Afterwards an amnesty was granted to all citizens
of the city who were in exile, but required them to make public penance as well
as paying a heavy fine, which Dante refused to do. Then he was told his death sentence
had been commuted to one of house arrest, on condition that he would travel to Florence
to publicly swear that he would never enter the city again. This he also refused
to do, with the result that not only was his death sentence confirmed in perpetuity,
but was also
extended
to his sons. But for Dante, exile
from his beloved Florence was actually a form of death anyway.

‘In 1318 he was invited to live in Ravenna, an offer which he
accepted, but he died three years later, a comparatively young man of 56, possibly
from malaria, when on his way back to Ravenna from a diplomatic mission to Venice.
He was buried in the city at what was then called the Church of San Pier Maggiore
but is now known as San Francesco. Now, that’s a very short history of the man himself,
just the bare bones, as it were. The story of his poem,
The Divine Comedy
, is rather more complicated, but I think it’s relevant.’

‘I was afraid of that,’ Lombardi muttered.

‘Quiet, Cesare,’ Perini instructed.
‘Carry on, Ettore.’

‘It’s fairly certain that Dante didn’t start working on the poem
until he was forced into exile, though very little is known for certain about this
period of his life. There are some indications that he was already working on it
by 1315, possibly even as early as 1308. The poem consists of three parts
: Inferno,
Purgatorio
and
Paradiso
– Hell, Purgatory and Paradise – and they describe Dante’s own journey through the
three places, accompanied and guided by the Roman poet Virgil through Hell and Purgatory,
and then by Beatrice, the subject of his adoring and unrequited love, in Paradise.’

‘Doesn’t sound that funny to me,’ Lombardi commented. ‘Supposed
to make you laugh, was it?’

‘Not really,’ Guitoni replied with a kind of weary patience.
‘In those days, the convention was that all serious literary works were written
in Latin, so anything written in Italian or any other language was assumed to be
trivial in nature, the opposite of serious, and hence a “comedy”. And there was
another reason for the appellation as well. In classical literature, the word “comedy”
meant a work which demonstrated a belief in an ordered universe, one where events
proceeded in a logical manner to ultimate good, according to a kind of divine will.
As Dante’s poem showed him travelling through the torments of Hell to the uncertainty
of Purgatory, but finishing in Paradise, it was a “comedy” in the classical sense
of the word.’

‘And this is important why, exactly?’ Lombardi asked.

‘Bear with me, sergeant, I’m nearly there. We know very little
about the publication history of the three parts of the poem. It seems fairly certain
that the first part –
Inferno
– had been
published by 1317, but nobody’s ever than able to find out when the other two sections
were published, though it is likely that the last part,
Paradiso
, was actually published after
Dante died in 1321. Unfortunately, none of his original manuscripts have survived.
The earliest copies of his masterpiece were made by Giovanni Boccaccio in the 1360s,
and three of these do survive. In fact, it was Boccaccio who first called it the
“Divine Comedy”, the
Divina
Commedia
. Originally, Dante had just called
it the
Commedia
. The first printed version
wasn’t produced until April 1472, just over a hundred and fifty years after Dante’s
death. That was a run of 300 copies of which a mere fourteen are still around.

‘Part of the reason for this lack of contemporary manuscripts
is that although the poem quickly became recognised as both an important literary
work, and also as a solid marker in the evolution of Italian as a literary language,
it fell out of favour during the Renaissance.
The Divine Comedy
only really became established internationally as
one of the most important works of literature in Italian, in fact in any language,
in the nineteenth century, and by then Dante himself had already become recognized
as a literary icon.’

Perini finished the last of his coffee and beckoned the waiter
over to ask for refills for the three of them.

‘As I said,’ Guitoni continued, ‘Dante was buried in the church
in Ravenna, but it wasn’t until 1780 that a separate tomb was erected for him in
that city. In the meantime, the people of Florence finally realized how important
a literary figure he was, conveniently forgot how shabbily he’d been treated by
the authorities in his home town, and tried to persuade the city fathers in Ravenna
to send his body here. They refused, of course, and at one point they became so
convinced that what was left of his corpse would be taken by force that they bricked
up the bones in the wall of a monastery.

‘But the Florentines never gave up, and in 1829, just under a
century after Dante’s tomb had been built in Ravenna, they erected their own tomb
to await the eventual arrival of his body.’ He pointed down the piazza towards the
Santa Croce Basilica. ‘That’s the Dante cenotaph, of course, which is in the basilica.
It’s been empty since it was built, and it’s most probably going to stay that way.
So that’s a potted history of Dante. Anything else you want to know?’

Perini nodded slowly.

‘Thanks for the history lesson, Ettore,’ he said. ‘I don’t think
we’re any the wiser as far as our present investigation is concerned, but we’re
certainly better informed.’

‘But does any of that help?’ Guitoni asked. ‘We’re talking ancient
history, really, and I can’t see what bearing Dante’s life could possibly have on
the brutal murder of Professor Bertorelli. I know he believed he’d found a couple
of new verses from the
Inferno
, but I
think he was mistaken, at least in the interpretation he placed on them.’

Perini perked up at that.

‘In what way?’ he asked.

‘Well, I don’t like to criticise any of my colleagues, and especially
the ones who are unable to respond, but there are two obvious objections to his
conclusion that he’d found a new version of that part of the poem, the “Ravenna
Variant”, as he called it. First, although superficially the style of the additional
verses is similar to Dante’s writing, he had a particularly deft and accomplished
touch, and I don’t believe that you can see that in the new material. But there’s
a much more fundamental reason, which relates to the very structure of the poem.’

‘Yes? What’s that?’

Guitoni opened his document case and extracted several sheets
of paper, each printed with a number of verses.

‘This is just one part of
The Divine Comedy
,’ he said, pointing at the top sheet. ‘In all, the
poem consists of 14,233 lines divided into three
canticas
– Hell, Purgatory and Paradise
– and each of those contains thirty-three
cantos.
’

‘So that’s ninety-nine in all,’ Perini said.

‘Yes, but actually there’s also an initial
canto
that serves as an introduction to
the whole poem, so that’s a total of one hundred.
Numbers were very important
to Dante, and especially the number three. The
cantos
, for example, were made up of lines containing eleven syllables,
but arranged in groups of three, a form known as
terca
rima
, and the subject of each of the
canticas
also features
three multiplied by three, so there were nine circles of the Inferno, nine rings
of Purgatory and nine celestial bodies in Paradise. At the end is one further section
known as the Empyrean, which describes the very essence of God.’

Guitoni glanced at the two police officers to make sure they
were still following his argument. They were.

‘So quite obviously, as the whole work was written to a numerical
as well as an artistic plan, it is complete in and of itself, so no additional lines
or verses can be added, which is what I understood Bertorelli to have first suggested.
Then I gather he changed his mind and claimed that the new verses he’d found were
intended to replace the original text. But that doesn’t work either, because the
subject of the new text is jarringly inconsistent with the remainder of the work.’

‘In what way is it inconsistent?’ Perini asked.

‘It doesn’t really relate to either the preceding or following
sections, and seems to be dealing with an entirely unrelated subject.’

‘Which is what?’ Lombardi asked.

‘I don’t know. I can read what it says, but to me it looks almost
as if the new verses Bertorelli claimed to have discovered are actually written
in a kind of code, because the plain language really doesn’t make sense. Have either
of you actually read them?’

Both Perini and Lombardi shook their heads.

‘I’ve read the article Professor Bertorelli wrote,’ Perini said,
‘but I have to confess that I rather skimmed over the actual text he quoted.’

‘You should read the verses carefully,’ Guitoni said firmly,
‘and see if you can make any sense of them. They talk about matters that have no
place within the context of the poem, things like “the animal of the Greeks” and
the “By his hand the masterpiece lies below
Gaetani’s
bane”. Complete nonsense, in my opinion, and I’m quite certain they weren’t penned
by Dante.’

He finished his coffee and glanced from Perini to Lombardi and
back again.

‘So,’ he said, ‘has any of that helped you?’

Perini spread his hands in a universal gesture.

‘I really don’t know,’ he said. ‘The Dante connection was just
a lead I thought was worth exploring. Anyway, thank you for your time.’

As the slightly portly figure of the academic disappeared into
the crowds of tourists beginning to throng the piazza, Lombardi asked the obvious
question.

‘I heard what you said to Guitoni, obviously, but did anything
he told us help?’