Dante’s Casentino

Campaldino, 1289

On 11 June 1289 the flat farmland below Poppi was a battlefield. Florence and its Guelph allies met the Ghibellines of Arezzo at Campaldino, and Dante, in his mid-twenties, rode among the Florentine cavalry in the front ranks. He never wrote a set-piece of the battle, but he never forgot the day. Stand on the plain now, with the castle of Poppi on its hill above you, and you are looking at the ground where his public life began.

The river that runs through Purgatory

The Arno rises on Monte Falterona at the head of the valley and runs the whole length of the Casentino before it ever reaches Florence. Dante follows that water twice in the Comedy. In Purgatory he traces the river from its source down a valley whose people he scolds without once naming the stream, so bitter is the memory. And in one of the poem’s most tender passages the Ghibelline captain Buonconte da Montefeltro, mortally wounded at Campaldino, tells how he stumbled down to where the Archiano torrent meets the Arno near Bibbiena, spoke the name of Mary, and died, his body carried off by the current. The battlefield and the river are the same afternoon, seen twice.

The forged florins of Romena

Above Pratovecchio stands the ruined castle of Romena, once a stronghold of the Guidi counts. There, Dante tells us, a craftsman called Master Adam counterfeited the gold florin of Florence for the counts, folding three carats of dross into the coin. For it he was burned, and Dante sinks him into the lowest circle of Hell, bloated and racked with thirst, longing aloud for the cool little streams of the Casentino that run down its green hills into the Arno. It is the homesick cry of a man who knew exactly which valley he had lost.

A guest of the Guidi

When Florence exiled Dante in 1302 he became a wanderer, and the Casentino gave him shelter. The Guidi counts, whose towers still line the valley, were among his hosts, and tradition sets him at the castle of Poppi and at Porciano above Stia, where a tower is still shown as his. From here, in 1311, he is said to have sent a furious open letter to the emperor Henry the Seventh, urging him to march on Florence. The valley that had watched him ride to war as a young man kept him again as an old exile who could not go home.

See the valley today

Dante’s Casentino is not shut in a museum. It is the plain, the river and the towers, still standing where he left them. The valley keeps its story moving with theatre, talks and reenactments through the year, and here is what is on now.

• 23Jul Teatro del Fiume: Strange Fables Castel Focognano · Culture
• 23Jul The roots of the future Subbiano · Culture
• 25Jul Falcon show at the Castle Poppi · Culture
• 25Jul Flag-wavers show Bibbiena · Culture
• 26Jul Talk: Poetry and historical violence Poppi · Culture
• 26Jul Inflatables and Nutella party Chiusi della Verna · Culture

The whole calendar →

Three names from the Divine Comedy - the Archiano, Romena and the streams of the Casentino - all point at this one small valley. Dante fought here at twenty-four and was still writing about it in his final years.