'Now of that second kingdom I shall sing where human souls are purified of sin and made worthy to ascend to Heaven'

Purgatory is the second part of Dante’s The Divine Comedy ascending the terraces of the Mount of Purgatory inhabited by those doing penance to expiate their sins on earth. There are the proud – forced to circle their terrace for aeons bent double in humility; the slothful – running around crying out examples of zeal and sloth; while the lustful are purged by fire.

Though less well-known than Inferno, Purgatory has inspired many writers including, in our century, Samuel Beckett, and has played a key role in literature.

Featuring music of the period

Dante Alighieri

1265–1321

Dante Alighieri, ‘that singular splendour of the Italian race’ as Boccaccio, his first biographer, calls him, was born , a lawyer’s son, in Florence in May 1265. He was baptised Durante, afterwards contracted into Dante; and the old biographers loved to dwell on the appropriateness of both names, ‘the much-enduring’ and ‘the giver’. In his Vita Nuova, the new (i.e. probably early), life, he relates how he first set eyes on ’the glorious lady of his heart, Beatrice,’ he, then, being about nine years of age and she a few months younger. To Boccaccio, and to his statement alone, we owe the generally accepted fact that she was the daughter of Folco Portinari, for Dante himself never gives the slightest clues to her family name. That chance meeting in May 1274 determined the whole future course of the poet’s life. The story of his boyish but unquenchable passion is told with exquisite pathos in the Vita Nuova. There is no evidence that any similar feeling was aroused in the heart of Beatrice herself. She was married early to Simone de’Bardi, but neither this nor the poet’s own subsequent marriage interfered with his pure and platonic devotion to her, which became even intensified after her death, on 9 June 1290. Shortly after, Dante married Gemma Donati, daughter of a powerful Guelph family. That it proved an unhappy marriage is mere conjecture, based on the fact that after Dante’s exile he never appears to have seen his wife again. In 1289 Dante fought at Campaldino, where Florence defeated the Ghibellines, and was at the capitulation of Caprona. He was registered in one of the city guilds – that of the Apothecaries – being entered as ‘Dante d’Aldighieri, poeta.’ In 1300, after filling minor public offices, and possibly going on some embassies abroad, he attained to the dignity of one of the six priors of Florence – a dignity lasting for only two months. It was towards the ’White Guelphs’ or more moderate section that his sympathies tended; as prior, he procured the banishment of the heads and leaders of the rival factions, showing characteristic sternness and impartiality to Guelph and Ghibelline, White and Black alike. Shortly afterwards the leaders of the Whites were permitted to return. The partiality thus shown was a prominent feature in the accusations against Dante; but he had a complete answer in the fact that then he was no longer in office. In 1301, in alarm at the threatened interference of Charles of Valois, Dante was sent on an embassy to Rome to Pope Boniface VIII. From that embassy he never returned, nor did he ever again set foot in his native city. Charles, espousing the side of the ’Neri,’ or Blacks, their victory was complete; and in January 1302 sentence of banishment went against Dante and others, nominally on the baseless charge of misconduct in office. This was followed by a more severe sentence on 10 March, which condemned them to be burned alive if ever caught, and which was repeated in 1311 and 1315. Dante’s principal halting-places seem to have been – first Verona, in Tuscany, in the Lunigiano, near Urbino and then Verona again. During this period he is said to have visited Paris; but some of his biographers connect that visit with the period of his early education. Among these is Serravalle, who wrote as late as 1417, and who is also the sole authority for Dante’s alleged visit to England and Oxford. Those who, like Boccaccio, take him to France during his exile, suppose him to have been recalled to Italy and politics by the election of Henry of Luxemburg as emperor and his visit to Italy, where no emperor had set foot for more than fifty years…