by Dante
22–27. The protagonist wants to know (1) the root of his roots, as it were; (2) about the times in Florence when Cacciaguida was a youth; (3) the number of inhabitants in the city in those days; and (4) the best people in the city then. His first question is reminiscent of Farinata’s to him (Inf. X.42), “Chi fuor li maggior tui?” (Who were your ancestors?). [return to English / Italian]
28–32. This simile, at least from the time of Scartazzini (comm. to vv. 28–33), has been recognized as Ovidian in provenance, reflecting the similar comparison (Metam. VII.79–81) describing Medea’s renewed infatuation with Jason. It seems odd that, for a description of Cacciaguida’s rekindled affection for his great-great-grandson, Dante should resort to Ovid’s description of Medea’s reignited passion for the handsome youth who will, as she almost fully realizes, betray her. (Dante had previously visited a part of this long passage dedicated to Medea and Jason [VII.1–403] in Par. II.16–18. For the “rewriting” of Ovid involved in that tercet, see the note to Par. II.17–18.) [return to English / Italian]
33. What language does Cacciaguida speak? Breaking ranks with the vast majority of modern commentators who believe that it is twelfth-century Florentine, Porena (in his second endnote to the canto, found in his comm. to verse 154 in the DDP) suggests that it is Latin. This solution had already been proposed by Daniello (comm. to this verse). It was held in favor until Poletto, some 330 years later, perhaps rightly sensing that Dante never would have used the terms “dolce” or “soave” to describe Latin as contrasted with the vernacular, cited Beatrice’s use of Florentine vernacular, as referred to at Inferno II.57, as part of his understanding that the text refers to the Italian spoken in Cacciaguida’s time. Grabher (comm. to vv. 28–33) is firm in denying Daniello’s hypothesis; he favors a reference to Cacciaguida’s use of the Florentine vernacular. (Grabher also denigrates a second theory, which had occasionally been pressed into service after Vellutello introduced it [comm. to vv. 28–33], that Cacciaguida spoke in “the tongues of angels.”) He, like Poletto, is sure that it is best to understand that Dante is concerned here with the transitory nature of any stage in a vernacular tongue’s development, as reflected in Convivio I.v.9, a concern that led to his promise, in the next sentence, to take up that matter in De vulgari eloquentia (which he did: see Dve I.ix.6). Pézard (Peza.1967.1), for all intents and purposes, resolved the issue in favor of the Florentine vernacular of the twelfth century. [return to English / Italian]
34–36. The Annunciation, occurring on March 25 of the first year of Christian history, marked by the words “Ave Maria” in Gabriel’s Latin, coincides with the date of the new year as measured by Florentines in Dante’s age. It is probably not an accident that we are supposed to understand that the poem itself begins on that date in 1300. See the note to Inferno I.1. [return to English / Italian]
37–39. “ ‘This fire (Mars) came 580 times to its Lion, to be rekindled under its paw.’ Between the Conception—the beginning of the year 1—and the birth of Cacciaguida, Mars returned 580 times to the constellation of Leo, which, being of like disposition to Mars, reinforces the influence of that planet. As Mars completes its revolution in 687 days, we shall get the year of Cacciaguida’s birth by multiplying 687 by 580 and dividing by 365: 1091. He was therefore 56 when he followed the crusade, having lived from 1091 to 1147. Cf. Moore [Moor.1903.1], III, 59–60. G. Federzoni, In quale anno nacque Cacciaguida? in Fanfulla della Domenica, 22 Nov. 1914 (XXXVI, no. 39), would adopt a reading tre for trenta, as Pietro Alighieri and some others did, giving fiate three syllables as usual, and thus would get a date 1106 instead of 1091” (Grandgent, comm. to vv. 37–39). The variant tre has now mainly been dismissed from the discussion, perhaps as a result of Lombardi’s strong opposition (comm. to vv. 34–39), which even countered the opinion put forward by the Accademia della Crusca. [return to English / Italian]
40–42. Here is John Carroll (comm. to vv. 40–45) clearing up this difficult passage: “The use of the word sesto by Cacciaguida is, strictly speaking, an anachronism. It is proper to a later time when the city was much larger, was enclosed in a second line of walls, and was divided into six wards or sestieri. The smaller city of Cacciaguida’s day lay within the first wall, and was divided into four wards—quartieri, formed by a line of streets running from the ancient Porta del Duomo on the north to the Ponte Vecchio on the south, and crossed by another line from east to west, running through the Mercato Vecchio, now demolished to make way for the hideous Piazza Vittorio Emanuele. The quartiere in which the house of his ancestors stood was that named after the eastern gate, Porta San Piero. An annual game was run on June 24, the day of the patron saint of the city [John the Baptist], and, as its course was from west to east, this quarter was the last the competitors reached. And what Cacciaguida says is that the house in which he and his forefathers were born stood just at the point where the runners entered this last quarter of the city. This would localize it in the Via degli Speziali which runs off the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele towards the Corso, …” [return to English / Italian]
42. Elements in this canto, including the reference to the annual palio, the race around the inner routes traversing the city, remind some readers of Brunetto Latini (Inf. XV.121–124). As the civic/political figure closest to the center of Inferno, he seems to have a certain similar placement and function both to Marco Lombardo (Purg. XVI) and to Cacciaguida (Par. XV–XVII). [return to English / Italian]
43–45. A series of debates has followed this tercet. Nonetheless, the context offered by the opening of the canto, where the protagonist is portrayed as glorying in his ancestry and is cautioned by Beatrice’s smile against so doing, perhaps offers us all we need to know to unravel this skein. Cacciaguida will not feed his great-great-grandson’s pride by narrating his heroic noble past, which may be traced back to the Romans. This is the sense offered by Bosco/Reggio (comm. to verse 45), who sensibly go on to explain that in fact necessity lies behind the author’s reticence: No one knows (or perhaps ever knew) the family history that is supposedly here suppressed in the service of modesty. [return to English / Italian]
46–48. Answering the protagonist’s third question, Cacciaguida leaves us in a quandary because his response is not clear. The males of “draft age” (as we would say today) in early-twelfth-century Florence were 20 percent of (a) the entire population in 1300 or (b) the males of draft age in 1300. The Italian would clearly (as our translation suggests) indicate that the first is what is meant. [return to English / Italian]
47. The phrase “between Mars and the Baptist” is a way of describing the confines of the city in Cacciaguida’s day by its nothernmost and southernmost monuments within the original walls (the Baptistry and the statue of Mars at the Ponte Vecchio). [return to English / Italian]
50. These three small towns are today known as Campi Bizenzio (the nearest), Figline, and Certaldo (the farthest away from Florence; Boccaccio was born there in 1313). Readers have assumed that, in his choices, Dante expected local readers in the fourteenth century to recognize certain families that had recently arrived from these towns and associated themselves with nefarious activities. [return to English / Italian]
51. Cacciaguida is referring to the “unmixed” (i.e., Roman and pure) blood of the original inhabitants, pure in even the least artisan and not yet diluted by the bad bloodlines of those descended from the Fiesolans—or from those even worse. [return to English / Italian]
52–57. Cacciaguida is of the opinion that the quality of urban life would have been much improved had these new folk kept outside the boundaries north (Trespiano) and south (Galluzzo). However, they instead entered the city, bringing with them the “stench” of men like Baldo d’Aguglione and Fazio da Signa, both of whom, renegade White Guelphs, were involved in the “exile question” during Dante’s attempts to return to Florence and both of whom were also opposed to the city’s welcoming Henry VII. In short, each was a personal and political enemy of Dante. [return to English / Italian]
59. There soon results a linguistic “family resemblance” between the emperor and Dante (see Par. XVII.47), to both of whom the city behaves like a cruel stepmother (noverca). [return to English / Italian]
61–63. Ever since Grandgent (comm. to verse 61, referring to two contemporary Italian sources), there has been a tradition among commentators to assign an identity to this exiled family from Semifonte (a town conquered and “colonized” by Florence in 1202), that of Lippo Velluti. One of the things that makes this hypothesis especially attractive is that Lippo was instrumental in sending Giano della Bella (see vv. 131–132), author of the Ordinamenti di Giustizia (1293), into exile. Dante, like Giano, was a prior of Florence and shared with him a noble bloodline (at least Dante may have sensed a similarity in this regard) as well as a deep distrust of the great noble houses, which abused their powers easily and often. Giano’s Ordinamenti placed severe limits on their ability to do so. While neither Lippo nor Giano is mentioned by name, their antagonistic relationship may help unriddle the references in this passage as well as in the later one. [return to English / Italian]
64–66. Continuing in the same vein, Cacciaguida argues that the Conti Guidi, the Cerchi, and the Buondelmonti (about whom we shall hear more at the end of this canto) all would have been better off had they not become Florentine citizens, staying in their original homes outside the city. [return to English / Italian]
67–72. The mixing of peoples, like overeating, ruins a city, with the result that it becomes too large and too cumbersome. Its resulting unwieldiness is compared to that of a bull or of a superfluity of swords in the hand of a swordsman. This last is perhaps meant to mirror the 500 percent growth in Florence’s population referred to in verse 48 (if it was to so great an increase that Dante was there referring [see the note to vv. 46–48]). [return to English / Italian]
73–81. Two Roman cities, Luni (near Carrara) and Urbisaglia (near Macerata), had fallen into ruins well before Dante’s time and remained in that condition. Two others, Chiusi (near Siena) and Senigallia (near Ancona), seemed to be suffering a similar fate. If cities show such mortal tendencies, reflects Cacciaguida, how much more subject to mortality are mere families? This unhappy thought leads toward the death-list of the great Florentine families that will occupy much of the rest of the canto. [return to English / Italian]
82–87. Introduced by a simile (as the Moon causes tidal change that variously inundates and lays bare litoral planes, so the goddess Fortune does with Florence), Cacciaguida’s task will be the recording of the great families who are dying out and whose remembrance is also growing faint. His purpose is to rescue their fame from “the dark backward and abysm of time.” [return to English / Italian]
88–139. The catalogue of once-great families of Florence includes the following, arranged here in groups of five [with those referred to by periphrasis in square brackets] and numbering forty: Ughi, Catellini, Filippi, Greci, Ormanni; Alberichi, dell’Arca, della Sannella, Soldanieri, Ardinghi; Bostichi, Ravignani (the noble and ancient family of Bellincion Berti [Par. XV.112], mentioned with the later-arriving Conti Guidi and with those who took their name from the first Bellincione), della Pressa, Galigaio, [Pigli] (“the stripe of fur”); Sacchetti, Giuochi, Fifanti, Barucci, Galli; [Chiaramontesi] (“those who blush because of the bushel”), [Donati] (“from which the Calfucci sprang”), Sizii, Arrigucci, [Uberti] (“those now undone by pride”); [Lamberti] (“balls of gold”), [Visdomini] (“the fathers”), [Tosinghi] (“the fathers”), [Adimari] (“the proud and insolent race”), Caponsacchi; Giudi, Infangati, della Pera (the Peruzzi?), the Baron (Hugh of Brandenburg), Gualterotti; Importuni, [Buondelmonti] (“new neighbors”), [Amidei] (“the house that is the wellspring of your tears”), [Gherardini], [Uccellini] (these last two are referred to as “allies” of the Amidei).
“Il XVI è quasi tutto una cronaca irta di puri nomi, ed è la più lunga e più arida pagina di cronaca di tutto il poema” (Canto XVI is nearly entirely a chronicle bristling with mere names; it is the longest and most arid page of chronicle in the entire poem [Momigliano, comm. to vv. 22–27]). Momigliano’s judgment is, if more harsh than most, not atypical. Not only does it miss the aesthetic point of the catalogue of families (which might be compared to Homer’s masterful catalogue of ships in Iliad II—if it cannot hope to rival that first and possibly best of literary catalogues), it severely overstates its length: not “quasi tutto una cronaca irta di puri nomi,” but only a little over one-third of the canto, occupying verses 88–139.
For praise of the nostalgic poetic quality of Paradiso XVI, so roundly criticized by so many readers precisely for its unpoetic qualities, see Porena’s first endnote in his commentary to this canto (appended to his comm. to verse 154 in the DDP). [return to English / Italian]
94–99. Carroll: “[These lines] refer to the Cerchi (see note [in Carroll’s comm. to vv. 58–66]). Their houses were above the Porta San Piero, and had been acquired by this wealthy family from the Conti Guidi, who sprang from the ancient house of the Ravignani, the head of which was the Bellincion Berti of Par. XV. 112. The fellonia or treason charged against the Cerchi seems to be their failure as leaders of the Whites to defend the city against the Blacks in Nov. 1301. Dino Compagni says ‘their hearts failed them through cowardice’: the Priors gave them orders to prepare for defense and urged them ‘to play the man.’ But ‘from avarice’ they refused to pay the hired troops, made practically no preparations, and so handed over the city to six terrible days of outrage and pillage. The exile of the Whites which followed is the ‘lightening of the barque’ to which Dante refers in line 96. For a full account of this disastrous struggle between the Bianchi and the Neri, see Dino Compagni’s Chronicle, Bk. II, and Villani’s, VIII.38–49.”
These six lines have been the cause of a certain confusion and of considerable debate; Carroll’s view, however, seems sensible. For an English translation of Dino Compagni’s chronicles of Florence in Dante’s time, written by one of his contemporaries, see Compagni (Comp.1986.1). [return to English / Italian]
101–102. As knights, members of the Galigaio family had, as their emblem, the gilded hilt and handle of a sword. [return to English / Italian]
103. The Pigli had a stripe of squirrel-fur on a red field as their insignia. [return to English / Italian]
105. For Dante’s earlier reference to corrupt procedures in Florentine weights and measures, see Purgatorio XII.105 and the last paragraph in the note to XII.100–108. [return to English / Italian]
109–111. Carroll: “Those ‘undone by their pride’ are the Uberti, the great Ghibelline family, banished in 1258, and never allowed to return. Farinata, who saved Florence after Montaperti (1260), belonged to it (Inf. X.22 ff.). The other family, referred to by its coat of arms, the ‘balls of gold,’ is the Lamberti. To it belonged Mosca, whose famous phrase, Cosa fatta capo ha, sealed Buondelmonte’s fate—and his own (Inf. XXVIII.103 ff.).” [return to English / Italian]
112–114. Carroll: “The reference is to the Tosinghi and the Visdomini, whom Villani (IV.10) calls ‘patrons and defenders of the Bishopric.’ During a vacancy, they enjoyed the use of the Bishop’s palace until a successor was appointed, and apparently they did not spare the larder.” [return to English / Italian]
115–120. Carroll: “A bitter stroke at the Adimari,—dragons to the timid, but to men with teeth or purse, lambs. Dante’s bitterness is not unnatural when we remember that, according to early commentators, one of this family, Boccaccino, gained possession of the poet’s property, and
therefore opposed strenuously his recall from exile. This might account also for his scorn of Filippo Argenti (Inf. VIII.31–64), who belonged to a branch of the Adimari.”
The wife of Ubertino Donati, a member of the twenty-second family referred to in Cacciaguida’s social registry of ancient Florence, was a daughter of Bellincion Berti; Ubertino was displeased when Bellincione, his father-in-law, arranged for the marriage of another of his daughters to a member of the Admiari clan, thus making Ubertino their kinsman. [return to English / Italian]
124–126. Carroll: “That one of the gates of ‘the small circuit’—the first city-wall—viz., the Porta Peruzza, was named after the Della Pera family might seem incredible for various reasons that have been suggested: (a) how small the circuit must have been when this was one of the city-gates; or (b) how free of jealousy ancient Florence must have been when one of its gates was named after a private family; or (c) how hard to believe that a family so forgotten now was so ancient that a gate in the earliest circuit of walls was named after it. The drift of the comments on the other families favours the last interpretation.” [return to English / Italian]
127–132. Carroll: “ ‘The great baron’ was the Marquis Hugh of Brandenburg, viceroy in Tuscany of Otho III. Villani says he knighted five Florentine families, who for love of him bore his arms. One of these, the Della Bella, is here referred to as having surrounded the arms with a border of gold. It was a member of this family, the famous Giano della Bella, who in 1293 proposed the Ordinances of Justice, in order to curb the lawlessness of his own order, the nobles, and it is probably he who is referred to as having ‘joined himself with the people.’ How the Marquis Hugh was converted, built the Badia, died on S. Thomas’ Day, and was buried in the monastery, will be found in Villani, IV.2.” [return to English / Italian]
