g along the
banks of the Arno that he might catch a glimpse of the lovely Beatrice
Portinari, who died the wife of another man, a dozen years before the
Ghibelline disaster.

He had failed in the ambitions of his career. He had faithfully served
the town of is birth and before a corrupt court he had been accused
of stealing the public funds and had been condemned to be burned alive
should he venture back within the realm of the city of Florence. To
clear himself before his own conscience and before his contemporaries,
Dante then created an Imaginary World and with great detail he described
the circumstances which had led to his defeat and depicted the hopeless
condition of greed and lust and hatred which had turned his fair and
beloved Italy into a battlefield for the pitiless mercenaries of wicked
and selfish tyrants.

He tells us how on the Thursday before Easter of the year 1300 he had
lost his way in a dense forest and how he found his path barred by a
leopard and a lion and a wolf. He gave himself up for lost when a white
figure appeared amidst the trees. It was Virgil, the Roman poet and
philosopher, sent upon his errand of mercy by the Blessed Virgin and by
Beatrice, who from high Heaven watched over the fate of her true lover.
Virgil then takes Dante through Purgatory and through Hell. Deeper and
deeper the path leads them until they reach the lowest pit where Lucifer
himself stands frozen into the eternal ice surrounded by the most
terrible of sinners, traitors and liars and those who have achieved fame
and success by lies and by deceit. But before the two wanderers have
reached this terrible spot, Dante has met all those who in some way or
other have played a role in the history of his beloved city. Emperors
and Popes, dashing knights and whining usurers, they are all there,
doomed to eternal punishment or awaiting the day of deliverance, when
they shall leave Purgatory for Heaven.

It is a curious story. It is a handbook of everything the people of the
thirteenth century did and felt and feared and prayed for. Through it
all moves the figure of the lonely Florentine exile, forever followed by
the shadow of his own despair.

And behold! when the gates of death were closing upon the sad poet of
the Middle Ages, the portals of life swung open to the child who was to
be the first of the men of the Renaissance. That was Francesco Petrarca,
the son of the notary public of the little town of Arezzo.

Francesco