by Michael Haag
PART THREE
INFERNAL LOCATIONS
A Hard Day’s Journey
The dramatic events depicted in Dan Brown’s Inferno take place in March. The action begins in the middle of the night, as Robert Langdon begins to awaken from unconsciousness. He has no idea where he is, let alone why he’s there. Almost nothing he sees, it will eventually transpire, is what it seems to be. Of one thing, though, he can be certain – the ‘illuminated skyline’ outside his window is that of Florence.
All too soon, Langdon and Sienna Brooks are hurtling through the streets of the city. By the time they’ve left her apartment and are riding towards the Porta Romana, it is early morning. In the hectic chase that follows, they pass by and through several of Florence’s principal monuments and landmarks.
When the fugitives enter the Baptistery, it’s still ‘several hours’ before opening time, which is 1pm. The high-speed train to Venice takes two hours, and they arrive at St Mark’s in ‘late afternoon’.
The flying time from Venice to Istanbul is two hours, and on top of that the difference in time zones makes it an hour later in Istanbul. When Langdon arrives, ‘night had fallen on the ancient Byzantine capital’. He remarks that the great Byzantine church of ‘Hagia Sophia closes at sunset’, but it is specially opened for his visit. By the time everything is over, it is the middle of the night again. The entire story of Inferno has taken twenty-four hours.
Even during the most hair-raising episodes of that long day, Langdon and Brown between them manage to provide Sienna, and the readers of the novel, with a narrated tour of the historic and cultural highlights of those three cities.
In the next two chapters of this book, we set out to put some extra flesh on those bones. If Inferno has inspired you to follow in the footsteps of Robert Langdon and Sienna Brooks – or even those of Bertrand Zobrist – now read on…
CHAPTER TEN
Florence
The desperate, day-long chase at the heart of Dan Brown’s Inferno begins when Sienna Brooks and Robert Langdon escape from the hospital where Vayentha – complete with black leather motorcycle suit, close-cropped spiked hair, and silenced weapon – has tried to do her worst. They head first to Sienna’s apartment in ‘a dingy residential neighbourhood’ somewhere in the southern suburbs of the city. When that apartment in turn comes under siege, this time from men in black uniforms led by an icy-eyed agent with an impressive umlaut, they escape again. Soon they are gliding on Sienna’s Trike in the early morning light along the Viale Niccolo Machiavelli, ‘the most graceful of all Florentine avenues’, as it descends in a series of generous S-curves through a lush green landscape of hedges and trees towards the River Arno. They are heading for the historical centre of Florence on the other side.
As they approach the Porta Romana, a well-preserved city gate dating from the early fourteenth century, they run into a traffic jam caused by a police barricade. ‘That can’t be for us’, thinks Langdon in some amazement; but it is. Sienna quickly pulls the Trike off the road so that they can continue their escape on foot, climbing over a wall into the Boboli Gardens. Bypassing the police roadblock through the gardens would lead them to the Palazzo Pitti, from where they could cross over the bridge into the heart of the old city.
The extensive Boboli Gardens (1) are among the most beautiful in Italy. They were created in the middle of the sixteenth century for Cosimo I de Medici, ruler of Florence and all Tuscany, by Niccolò Tribolo. A brilliant hydraulic engineer, Tribolo made creative use of fountains and cascades amid the maze of pathways. Later that same century, Giorgio Vasari embellished the gardens still further. Now, as Langdon and Sienna make their way across those same gardens, they realise that they are being tracked by a drone overhead.
The couple dash into the back of the Palazzo Pitti (2), which became the official seat of the Medici dynasty in 1549, in the time of Cosimo I and following his move from the Palazzo Vecchio. These days it’s a fabulous museum, containing one of the finest collections of paintings in all Italy, including works by Raphael, Rubens and Titian. Sadly, Langdon and Sienna have no time for any of that; they discover that their way out through the front is blocked by armed police. Making a misleading feint towards the costume gallery, they race out the back, the way they came in, and run down the slope past a statue of an obese naked dwarf astride a giant turtle.
‘This can’t be where he’s taking us’, exclaims Sienna to herself, as they race towards the Buontalenti Grotto (3). Stalactites hang over the grotto’s gaping entrance, while the walls of the chamber beyond are ‘oozing’ and ‘melting’, and also ‘morphing into shapes’ that to the fearful Sienna look like ‘half-buried humanoids extruding from the walls as if being consumed by the stone’. The whole thing looks like a scene out of Botticelli’s Mappa dell’Inferno, she thinks. Although that description accurately captures the creepy and disgusting atmosphere of the place, that was far from the intention of the grotto’s creator, the architect and stage designer Bernardo Buontalenti, late in the sixteenth century. At that time, it would have been running with water and hung with dripping moss, the statues and reliefs round the walls serving to create a happy merging of man with nature.
Langdon and Sienna’s route through Florence; map courtesy of Blue Guides.
The Buontalenti Grotto in the Boboli Gardens.
Langdon and Brooks manage to avoid detection in the grotto – knowing a bit of dim mak is always handy in a crisis – but they realise that there’s no chance of escape if they venture out into the open and attempt to cross the river over the nearby Ponte Vecchio. Faced with the police, the soldiers and the drone all in action, not to mention Vayentha and her spiked hair, the pair trick their way into the Vasari Corridor (4). The corridor was built by Giorgio Vasari for Francesco de Medici in 1565 as a way for him to move from the Palazzo Vecchio, the seat of government, through the Uffizi, the ‘offices’ which then housed the bureaucracy and is now the famous art gallery, and over the River Arno to the family home at the Palazzo Pitti. It was a convenient passage in wet weather, and ideal for anyone elderly or in a wheelchair, but it also had the added bonus of keeping the Medici off the streets, where they were liable to be assassinated.
This walkway, which runs for well over half a mile through the city, makes clever use of existing features, including the Ponte Vecchio (5), the old stone bridge, which is lined with houses. The corridor simply adds another storey to the existing buildings and passes unnoticed. One change was required, however. Before the corridor was built, the buildings on the bridge were occupied by butchers and the smell could be unpleasant; these were removed and replaced with goldsmiths who remain there till this day. Few people know about the Vasari Corridor, and tours cost a fortune, but it is worth it for the fun, the sense of doing something secret, for the marvellous views along the Arno – Mussolini had large windows installed at vantage points so that a visiting Hitler could enjoy the scene – and for the many self-portraits by artists that hang along its walls.
Looking out along the Ponte Vecchio from the Vasari Corridor.
Eventually, Langdon and Sienna emerge from the Vasari Corridor in the fortress-like Palazzo Vecchio (6), which was built at the very end of the thirteenth century to house the priori, the topmost tier of officials governing Florence. Thus Dante, who was elected a prior, held office in this very place. Nowadays it contains several museums and halls and chambers that can take many hours to explore, including the Hall of the Five Hundred with the enigmatic words ‘cerca trova’ – seek and you will find – written on a banner in a battle scene painted by Vasari. Sundry stairways, passageways, attics and tunnels make it the perfect place for Sienna and Langdon to evade their pursuers for some time.
Langdon, who has of course been here many times before, knows all there is know about its secret passageways. He proceeds to demonstrate his erudition by whiling away twenty pages of Inferno in giving the reader a tour while he and Sienna are being chased. Starting through the corridor that opens up behin
d the Armenia panel in the Hall of Geographical Maps, they then head into the cupboard in the room of architectural models, down the Duke of Athens stairway, and at some point in between manage to get up into the attic. That’s when the poor pursuing Vayentha falls for a full three seconds and splats very much dead far below. All these areas are open to visitors, including Francesco de Medici’s mysterious Studiolo where he practised alchemy and other dark arts. There’s also Dante’s death mask, of course, always assuming that they have put it back since Langdon stole it.
Dante’s death mask plays a crucial role in Robert Langdon’s search for clues.
Outside, the Piazza della Signoria (7), the great square overlooked by wonderful Renaissance statues that include Michelangelo’s David, is where the scaffold was built for Savonarola who was hanged and burned for heresy and generally making a nuisance of himself. Among his most devoted followers was Botticelli, who probably watched as Savonarola was reduced to cinders; this was at about the time that Botticelli was working on his Map of Hell to illustrate Dante’s Inferno.
Michelangelo’s David.
Slipping out a small side door of the Palazzo Vecchio into the Via della Ninna, Langdon and Sienna – now disguised as punk rockers, by the way – then head north along the Via dei Leoni. They pass between the Bargello (8) on the right – an old seat of government, later a prison infamous for its tortures, now a museum noted for its superb collection of Florentine Renaissance sculpture – and the Badia (9) on the left. Nowadays the Badia is a very quiet place, home to the Monastic Fraternity of Jerusalem who give themselves up to silent prayer and contemplation. It was founded as a Benedictine abbey in the tenth century; Dante mentions the tolling of its bells in his Divine Comedy. And, of course, it was from the tall spire of the Badia that the Shade, aka Bertrand Zobrist, leaped to his death at the very start of Inferno.
Continuing north and then west into the Via Dante Alighieri, Langdon leads Sienna to the Casa di Dante (10). This is not Dante’s actual house, as Langdon explains to Sienna – it’s a twentieth-century reconstruction of a thirteenth-century house – but a museum that holds a collection of maps, models and reconstructions giving an impression of Florence in Dante’s time. Langdon has come here because he has been given a clue, and hopes the shop will have a copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy to find out what it means. But the Casa di Dante is closed.
Just north along the narrow street running north, however, is Santa Margherita de Cerchi (11), popularly known as Dante’s Church because it was his family’s parish church. It contains the Portinari family tomb, and some believe that Beatrice Portinari herself, the great love of Dante’s life, is buried here. Certainly an inscription says so, and a basket near the tomb overflows with handwritten messages from the lovelorn asking Beatrice for her intervention.
Dan Brown is wrong, however, in writing that here in this church Dante, at the age of nine, first laid eyes on Beatrice. There is one source and one source only that tells us where Dante and Beatrice first met, and that is Boccaccio’s life of Dante, which says they met at the Portinari family home, which is round the corner at the Palazzo Portinari Salviati at 6 Via del Corso.
Dante and Virgil (the cloaked figures on the left) visit Satan in Hell, depicted on a mosaic on the Baptistery ceiling.
Crossing the Via del Corso and walking north along the Via dello Studio, Langdon and Sienna come up against the flank of the Duomo (12), the great cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, crowned by the largest masonry dome in the world, the work of Brunelleschi. Skirting round the Duomo’s campanile, the huge bell tower built by Dante’s friend Giotto, they are now standing at the front of the cathedral. Still following his clues, Langdon is looking west for the Gates of Paradise.
The Baptistery (13) stands before them, and they walk across the piazza to its magnificent east doors. Commissioned to appease the wrath of God and to avert a future plague, these were cast in bronze by Ghiberti and described by Michelangelo as ‘the Gates of Paradise’. The doors have been secretly left open for Langdon and Sienna by the corpulent and now deceased Ignazio Busoni, and, unnoticed, the two go inside. One of the oldest buildings in Florence, the octagonal Baptistery was built in the sixth or seventh century, and its marvellous mosaic ceiling, some of the best mosaic work anywhere in Italy, was done in the thirteenth century. We can be sure, therefore, that Dante himself, who was baptised here – as were most other Florentine children – gazed up at this very same ceiling as an infant, and would have seen its horrific images of Satan and the damned. About a century after Dante’s death, and as a tribute to him from the city that exiled him and would have burned him at the stake, his figure, along with that of Virgil, was added to the mosaic.
Meanwhile Langdon has found another clue, which demands that he leaves Florence undetected and as quickly as possible. Assuming that the airport is being watched, he and Sienna, who have now been joined by a very itchy man sporting Plume Paris glasses, do the sensible thing and take a taxi along the Via Panzani to the Santa Maria Novella railway station (14), where they board a high-speed train to Venice.
Before we follow Robert Langdon and Sienna Brooks to Venice and beyond, we can briefly look ahead to the moment when Langdon eventually returns to Florence for a good night’s sleep. He stays at his favourite hotel, the one he mentions at the end of The Da Vinci Code, and here in Inferno describes as ‘Florence’s elegant’ Hotel Brunelleschi (15). Quite possibly the appeal of the hotel to Langdon lies more in its history than in its elegance, for it incorporates a high round stone Byzantine tower, which means it is the oldest standing thing in the city, and in the cellars of the tower are the remains of an ancient church and, older than that, a Roman baths. The view from its highest rooms towards Brunelleschi’s dome is spectacular.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Venice and Istanbul
The story of Inferno could have played itself out entirely in Florence; that would have seemed natural enough. Instead it moves from Florence to Venice and then to Constantinople, present-day Istanbul. In moving this way, from West to East, the story is retracing in reverse two great events.
The first is the Black Death epidemic, which began somewhere deep in Asia, travelled westwards to Constantinople and the Black Sea, and was carried from there by Genoese galleys to Italy – first to Venice, then to Sicily and Genoa, and finally to Florence in 1348. It then spread throughout the whole of Europe, claiming as many as one out of every two human lives, and in some places even more than that.
The second is the stimulus to the Renaissance that was provided by Byzantine civilisation before Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks. The Byzantines had long made themselves felt; the mosaics at the Basilica of St Mark in Venice are entirely the work of craftsmen from Constantinople, while the early mosaics at the Baptistery in Florence were made by Byzantine-trained craftsmen from Venice.
The whole back catalogue of ancient Greek and Roman civilisation that was preserved by the Byzantines – and indeed, to a great extent, was still actually lived by the Byzantines – was brought by them to Italy, and especially to Florence, in those last days before they lost their world to Mehmet the Conqueror and the armies of Islam.
VENICE
The clue that Robert Langdon had found at the Baptistery in Florence started off as a verse of Dante, but soon became something else, a message written by Bertrand Zobrist himself. ‘Seek the treacherous doge’, his words began, ‘who severed the heads from horses’. To Langdon this pointed to Venice.
‘Kneel within the gilded mouseion of the holy wisdom’, the message continued, which suggested to Langdon the Basilica of St Mark, the state church of Venice and the chapel of the doges, its interior luminous with mosaics and gold. That rich decoration earned the basilica the name of the chiesa d’oro, the golden church. Surmounting the central doorway of the church are the four bronze horses that were sent to Venice by Doge Enrico Dandolo in 1204, following his conquest of Constantinople, where they had stood in the Hippodrome.
Santa Lucia railway station stands at the far end of the Grand Canal. From there, thinks Langdon, there is nothing more pleasant if you have the time than to take the #1 vaporetto along the whole of its length, sitting up front in the open air, watching the churches and palaces pass by.
Langdon, however, does not have the time. He hires a high-speed water limousine, and he and Sienna, along with a fidgety fellow called Ferris with whom they somehow got fixed up back at the Baptistery in Florence, surge off towards the Basilica of St Mark, standing close to where the Grand Canal opens onto the lagoon and where cruise ships arrive in monotonous succession from the open sea.
The interior of the Basilica of St Mark in Venice.
Langdon and Sienna quickly move through the body of the church and go up to the balcony to take a close look at the bronze horses – only to glance down at the piazza below and see a commotion of black-uniformed soldiers. Once again Sienna and Langdon are on the run, this time scurrying down into the crypt that contains the bones of St Mark himself.
