There Romena lies

 Introduction 
 The aim of this booklet is to describe the links between Dante and Casentino.
Dante lived in the Casentino between 1304 and 1311, even if irregularly. Most of the 13 letters we still have were written from the Casentino and we must thank an unknown local archivist for their preservation. Five of them mention dates and places - from the Arno springs, from Poppi Castle -. The time he spends in the Casentino is fundamental in Dante’s life: the poet is at the full height of his strength but at the hardest and most uncertain moment of his political circumstances. While in the Casentino, Dante is under the delusion of going back to Florence quite soon – at first he hopes to make peace with the Neri faction, later he is almost certain that the Italian Operation organised by the young and waited-for king Henry VII will be successful. He will leave the Casentino only when he gives up all hope of returning to Florence.

 Dante had left Florence for Rome in 1301 together with other two Florentine ambassadors. Theirs was to be one of the most important legacies ever arranged by Florentine government. That government had developed from the ‘Ordinamenti di Giustizia’ (Court System) by Giano della Bella, after the bitter struggles and resulting agreements between rich Ghibelline families and Guelf common people. The mission had to meet Pope Bonifacio 8th but its end brought serious consequences to Dante.

 During the Campaldino expedition in 1289 Dante had probably met Francesca da Rimini’s brother, the woman who had tragically died four years before. In Campaldino, among the Guelf allies, there was Guido del Duca, author of the diatribe against the ‘maledetta e sventurata fossa’ (cursed and wretched hollow) formed by the Arno and including the Casentino, Arezzo, Valdarno, Firenze, Pisa, from Mount Falterona to the mouth of the river (Purg. XIV). In Campaldino Dante had to face Buonconte da Montefeltro, as young as he was and more ill-fated than the poet himself (Purg.V). Later he would meet Gherardesca, Guido Novello’s wife and Conte Ugolino’s daughter (Hell XXIV) in Poppi. On her behalf he would write three letters to Marguerite, Emperor Henry VII’s wife, letters that have come down to us. In Pratovecchio Dante would meet Manentessa, Buonconte’s daughter and Guido da Battifolle’s wife. In the Casentino he wrote four very significant letters that reveal the depth of his political and civil commitment as well as his exceptional ability to use different language styles. The letters were addressed to the Emperor Henry VII, to the cardinal Niccolò da Prato, to the Italian kings and senators and to the wicked Florentine people. He also wrote two more letters that show the human side of the man – a letter to the dukes of Romena (I am penniless and could not find a horse to get to the funeral in time – see page 17) and a letter to Marcello Malaspina (I have fallen in love with a woman so deeply that I would find it difficult to go back to Florence, should they call me back there now – see page 22). In the Casentino Dante writes or develops parts of Hell and certainly most of Purgatory (first 24 cantos). In 1312 Henry VII died and his death brought about the Guidi family’s agreement with the winning Neri faction in Florence. These events made Dante leave the Casentino and Tuscany for ever: he would die in Ravenna. His leaving the Casentino may be poetically represented by the episode of Matelda in Purgatory. In fact Matelda plunges the poet in the river that removes hopeless expectations and lost hopes. Farewell to the Casentino and the Arno. From now on his river will be the Adige.

 The above short hints clearly suggest how significant the Casentino was for Dante, both for its history and its scenery. The landscape descriptions found in Purgatory are images of country life, beautiful landscapes, steep mountains, demanding and often difficult paths. Dante calls the Apennines ‘the Alps ’ and points out that only in very few places along the whole ridge, from Liguria to the Peloritani mountains in Sicily , do the Apennines reach the same height as in the Casentino. He also remarks how easily one may get lost in the fog and how nice it is to be back in the sunshine. All those who have gone mushrooming in the Oia valley - on Mount Falco (Falterona) towards Stia - or in the chestnut woods above Reggiolo, perfectly know that it is not at all unusual to get lost there when it is foggy.

 Ricorditi, lettor, se mai ne l'alpe
ti colse nebbia per la qual vedessi
non altrimenti che per pelle talpe,  3 
  come, quando i vapori umidi e spessi
a diradar cominciansi, la spera
del sol debilemente entra per essi;  6 
  e fia la tua imagine leggera
in giugnere a veder com'io rividi
lo sole in pria, che già nel corcar era.  9 
  Sì, pareggiando i miei co' passi fidi
del mio maestro, usci' fuor di tal nube
ai raggi morti già ne' bassi lidi. 
Remember, reader, if you've ever been
caught in the mountains by a mist through which
you only saw as moles see through their skin,  3 
  how, when the thick, damp vapors once begin
to thin, the sun's sphere passes feebly through them,
then your imagination will be quick  6 
  to reach the point where it can see how I
first came to see the sun again-when it
was almost at the point at which it sets.  9 
  So, my steps matched my master's trusty steps;
out of that cloud I came, reaching the rays
that, on the shores below, by now were spent.
In addition to the Casentino, we must not forget Arezzo , where Dante first found shelter in those difficult times after the sentence of his exile. In Arezzo he met Ser Petracco again, who was a Florentine exile too and who had just become the father of the future genius Francesco Petrarca. Dante mentions the Giostra del Saracino (the Saracen’s Tournament) that takes place in Arezzo . He does that with the same bantering mischievousness as he personally had experienced after the battle of Campaldino, when the Florentines, and lui con essi (he with them) during their raids spent some days under the walls of Arezzo , mocking and teasing each other, ( the Florentines and the Aretines).  The tournament trumpets accompany and amplify the most famous raspberry ever heard from the underworld. All the students know the last verse of the 21^st canto of Hell, when Barbariccia gives the starting signal to the devilish tournament. The event is solemnly compared to the Arezzo tournament in the shrill beginning of the following Canto:

 Io vidi già cavalier muover campo,
e cominciare stormo e far lor mostra,
e talvolta partir per loro scampo;  3 
  corridor vidi per la terra vostra,
o Aretini, e vidi gir gualdane,
fedir torneamenti e correr giostra;  6 
  quando con trombe, e quando con campane,
con tamburi e con cenni di castella,
e con cose nostrali e con istrane;  9 
  né già con sì diversa cennamella
cavalier vidi muover né pedoni,
né nave a segno di terra o di stella.  12 
  Noi andavam con li diece demoni.
Ahi fiera compagnia! ma ne la chiesa
coi santi, e in taverna coi ghiottoni. 

Before this I've seen horsemen start to march
and open the assault and muster ranks
and seen them, too, at times beat their retreat;  3 
  and on your land, o Aretines, I've seen
rangers and raiding parties galloping,
the clash of tournaments, the rush of jousts,  6 
  now done with trumpets, now with bells, and now
with drums, and now with signs from castle walls,
with native things and with imported ware;  9 
  but never yet have I seen horsemen or
seen infantry or ship that sails by signal
of land or star move to so strange a bugle!  12 
  We made our way together with ten demons:
ah, what ferocious company! And yet
"in church with saints, with rotters in the tavern." 

This short passage can be read as a play, it can be considered as a draft for a script. Theatre people should make a play of this description, with the necessary adjustments, since only a stage performance could convey the emotional force found in the events and the character evoked here. Three actors, some music and a few pictures on a screen could be sufficient.
I would like to see it played in one at least of the following places: Poppi Castle, Dante cinema in Ponte a Poppi, Dovizi Theatre in Bibbiena.
I owe my renewed interest for Dante and the Casentino to the sisters Ella and Dora Noyes (1).
(1) It happened some years ago, here at the Lame of Ortignano where lately I have revised these notes. At the time Stefano Dei showed me an old book bought from a bookstall in an out-of-the-way Italian village. The title on its green cardboard cover was: The Casentino and its Story. Four oval pictures on each side showed Dante, Virgil and the coats-of- arms of the Camaldoli and Guidi families. Inside, as a dedication, ran the verses: ‘where the Etrurian shades high overarched imbower.’ (Milton, Paradise Lost) 
The verses are followed by the words: ‘Mi meraviglio che tu non abbia mai messo piede in Casentino e lungo i suoi confini: qui c’è La Verna, il Santo Eremo di Camaldoli, il sacro Cernobio diVallombrosa. Qui c’è la sorgente dell’Arno.  ( From Count Roberto di Batifolle’s letter to Francesco Petrarca). The foreword starts like this: ‘A region so beautiful and so interesting as the Casentino needs no recommendation’. Then there are the watercolours, among which there is the picture of Poppi just as I had seen it as a child, with the tabernacle of the Madonna, the dwarf’s house, the climbing road, the Abbey and the Castle.
Printed in London and New York in 1905! 
They loved Italy and Mr Dent, a publisher and a lover of our country as well, asked them to write a ‘tourist guide’ first of Ferrara, then of the Casentino. Ella’ tools were a pen and a notebook, Dora’s pencils and brushes. They toured the area in the years 1903 -1904.
They must have been in very good physical shape, as they toured all the ‘Valle chiusa’ (closed Valley) on foot more thoroughly than the coalmen, woodcutters and hunters living in the area at the time. They knew the inner road between Raggiolo and Carda, they also walked along the longer road between Rassina and Carda – which today is travelled by car. They speak of Prato in Strada, Rifiglio and Pagliericcio, Cetica and Caiano providing information about lanes, brooks and springs with more accuracy than the Military Geographic Institute could do. They describe their running down from Mount Falco (Falterona), to avoid an impending storm, at a deer’s speed. They were in their thirties, the same age as Dante six centuries before, when he was in the same places - places that they visited again as if they could see him.  
They had a long, well-deserved life.
Ella, the writer, lived 86 years (1863-1949).
Dora, the painter, lived 96 years (1864-1960). She did 25 watercolours and 24 ink drawings in the text. 
In England there was the eldest sister, Minna, who lived 98 years (1851-1949). Today the three of them rest together in the graveyard of St. John Evangelist’s in Sutton Verry. Ella and Dora Noyes were born in Middlesex, north-west of London, but they spent their long life in the southern county of Wiltshire, near Salisbury, not far from Stonehenge, the famous ancient archaeological site of light and mystery. For Ella and Dora, however, the ancient site of light and mystery was the Casentino. If you read their book, you will realise that.   
 Why Romena  
Two of the 25 watercolours in the Noyes sisters’ book represent Romena. Though Ella Noyes did not know that Purgatory had been written in the Casentino, she states that Dante imagined the sloping mountain with its cliffs and circles after he saw Romena. In fact Romena had three circles of walls under which the terraced land sloped down to the Arno and the Fiumicello below. Ella also says that Dante filled his heart and eyes with the sky studded with stars, which he could gaze at all around during his sleepless nights. In conclusion, Dante’s first immersion in the sky of the fixed stars took place when he was watching the sky from Romena. He will see them again in the XXIII canto of Paradise, as a prelude to the Fiumana di Luce (‘River of Light’) and to the Candida Rosa (‘White Rose’) in the XXX Canto up to the Empyrean Heaven. Going back to Romena in the XXX Canto of Hell, when Master Adamo recalls its ruscelletti che de’ verdi colli del Casentino discendon giuso in Arno (‘the brooks going down to the Arno from the green hills of the Casentino’) we can certainly say that Romena encompasses a large part of Dante’s life  and much of the Divine Comedy. The watercolour of Poppi as seen from the bridge fascinates me as a person and allows me to show the tight and deep connection between Ella’s text and Dora’s drawings, the former a great screenplay, the latter great photography. That is why Paola and I have sent the book to the Taviani brothers to invite them to make a film from it, since they love Tuscany and the Arno. We did not get an answer to the letter we sent them (2), but perhaps a director may sometimes decide to make a film from the life of the two romantic sisters. Let’s go back to the picture of ‘Poppi from the river’. Dora painted the arches, the little chapel over them, the climbing road  winding up, appearing and disappearing, like a big ‘S’; next, high up, Poppi with its walls, the convent of the cloistered nuns, the Castle, the trees of the Pratello, the Abbey. More or less the same as we see it nowadays – or more as I saw it as an eight–year-old boy, when I would cross the bridge and go along the road passing by Nano’s and Corinto’s houses on the left. After passing Fochi’s house and the ruins of the old mills on the right, I would cut across the space where the war memorial now stands – memorial to remember those who at the time were not yet casualties of the first, foolish and most dreadful of the world wars. I would go inside the walls through the Ancherona door, giving onto the Misericordia, I would go up along the narrow lane and I would get to the kindergarten, where the nuns were waiting for me to commit my 3-year-old- brother and 5-year-old sister to my care. With them I would walk down along the same route. At that time my mother was taking care of Carlo, the newly born child, who later was to become mayor of Poppi. But let’s leave aside personal matters. Let’s go back to Dora and Ella, in particular to Ella. She is looking at Dora’s picture, like I did, fading it in as she always does with Dora’s paintings. Before, however, she watches what life is like about them – life that Dora cannot draw for lack of space: on the shore of the river the women are rinsing the washing that before was kept in a perforated  basin, where water and ashes have made the lye. It’s a pity Ella cannot see us children throwing pebbles or catching roaches and barbels in the grottoes. Ella however always emphasizes how peaceful the atmosphere is and how kind and good the common people are. She considered them happy, unlike those British women and children who at the time worked buried from dawn to sunset in Manchester spinning-mills or degraded in Welsh mines and workhouses. After Ella explains all the things that at the moment are not inside her sister’s picture, she presents two fading-in pictures. They are historically distant, but they both are linked to the Guidis, the ‘sword of the Casentino’. 
In the first scene, two elegant countesses, surrounded by pages, ride on the bridge towards the Castle speaking to each other. They both were‘made orphan’ by the war: Gherardesca, Ugolino’s daughter and Manentessa, Buonconte’s daughter. Ella will find them again in one of Sacchetti’s ‘Three Hundred Short Stories’. In the story, not in the best of taste, the Guelph Gherardesca says to the Ghibelline Manentessa: “What wonderful wheat, watered by the blood of your dead, is growing in the plain of Campaldino”. Buonconte’s daughter answers. “If you are waiting to quench your hunger with it, you will sooner die.”
It is an unpleasant story, though its moral is not perhaps so unpleasant, but the point is the same. 
The second scene takes place two centuries later. The bridge is full of soldiers and armed horsemen. They too speak Florentine. They have come to drive out Francesco, the last of the Guidis, who was not quick enough to turn the way the wind was blowing: “The Signory says that time is over; a pass for Germany is ready” (homeland of every Count Palatine – note of the editor).
Here again there is a witticism and the scene shows Francesco Guidi, with 30 mules loaded with household goods, saying farewell to the Castle forever. The bridge becomes a symbol of the journey and of the change, a distinguishing feature, the end of something and a new beginning.  
2) To the Taviani brothers 
Dear Sirs, While we were getting on reading the book which we have taken the liberty to send you, we were watching images of landscapes and people as if on a screen. In fact the cinema has indeed become the ideal medium to which we would like to trust the images we love and the emotions they excite in us. Consequently we have thought of you, both because you are from Tuscany and because your films have shown past stories largely set in our region. Besides we have recently read a short interview in which you talked about the Arno as, ‘a collection of memories, a journey between past and present’ (La Repubblica, July 6^th 2003).
The book ‘Il Casentino e la sua storia’ is the translation of the original ‘The Casentino and its Story’, published in London and New York in 1905. The text is a rarity, perhaps a copy may be found at a rare book dealer’s; however Poppi’s public library has one. The Italian translation we are sending you was privately published in 2001 with a limited number of copies. The authors of the story are two English sisters, Ella and Dora Noyes, the former a writer, the latter an illustrator (watercolours and ink drawings). We have only some information about them, as you can read in the enclosed note. We can however assume they were intelligent, they were receptive and unconventional, somebody says they were feminist, certainly they were interesting women. Likewise interesting we have found their book, full of realistic remarks but also of poetic comments concerning that period of time. In particular they describe the village dwellers and their daily work, the landscape with its castles and parish churches wonderfully lit at dawn or at sunset. They relate about the monasteries of La Verna and Camaldoli, about the spirit that inspired them and which followed the Franciscan view of Christian poverty. The sword, the cross and poetry are, in the authors’ opinion, the symbols that sum up the history of this valley. The reasons above have encouraged us to write to you, hoping that you too will read this book and, why not, transform it into as poetic images as you can always do. 
 Paola Galli and Urbano Cipriani, Poppi, 4th August 2003 

Dante Biographical data
Dante’s family.
Father:             Alighiero II degli Alighieri (died about 1281-82)
Mother:            Bella (died about 1270-75) 
Sister:              Tana (Gaetana) married to Leone Poggi 
Step-mother:    Lapa, Chiarissimo Cialuffi’s daughter, married to Alighiero about 1275/1278. Lapa gave birth to Francesco.