Mahnaz Yousefzadeh. City and Nation in the Italian Unification

Dante Alighieri would have been puzzled to find himself transformed into a secularist, a bulwark of the Savoy monarchy, and an Italian patriot who anticipated, proclaimed, supported, and defended the Italian Risorgimento. In May 1865 the Florentine Republic that had exiled him was on the point of becoming (very briefly, as it turned out) the capital city of a Kingdom of Italy (minus the states of Rome and Venice). The safely dead Dante, the republican, Catholic “party of one,” was cast as the “most Italian of Italians,” a patriotic hero to rival Victor Emmanuel. He was a very useful Dante for Florence in 1865. This is a truncated Dante, the Dante of the Inferno, the unjust city, where simoniac popes roast upside-down in a parody of the Descent of the Holy Spirit. It is less the Dante of the Purgatorio, where souls learn to transcend local identity (in Purgatorio xiii, souls correct him when he asks if any are Italian—they are those who “lived in Italy as pilgrims”). It is certainly not the Dante of the Paradiso, where they dwell in a perfected empire, “the Rome where Christ is Roman.” Dante, like scripture, can be quoted toward a variety of ends.

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