The Bargello & the Badia: Dante Condemned, Dante Explained

Why is it significant?

Stand on Via del Proconsolo between two very different buildings. On one side rises the Bargello, a fortress of rough stone with battlements and a tall tower. On the other, the slender hexagonal bell tower of the Badia Fiorentina pokes above the rooftops like a pencil.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Stand on Via del Proconsolo between two very different buildings. On one side rises the Bargello, a fortress of rough stone with battlements and a tall tower. On the other, the slender hexagonal bell tower of the Badia Fiorentina pokes above the rooftops like a pencil.

The Bargello was begun in 1255 and became the seat of the Podestà, the foreign magistrate who judged Florentines. In January 1302, after the Black Guelphs seized power, the Podestà condemned Dante, who was away from the city, for corruption in office: a heavy fine and exile. In March came a second sentence. If he ever fell into the city's hands, he was to be burned alive. He never saw Florence again.

And yet inside this same building, on the wall of its chapel, there is a painting of Paradise attributed to Giotto's workshop, and among the blessed stands a young man in a red cap. It had been hidden under whitewash for centuries, and when it was uncovered in 1840 people recognised Dante. That gentle profile is now on countless book covers. The building that condemned him keeps the earliest portrait we have of him. Today the Bargello is a museum of sculpture, and those two trial panels for the Baptistery doors are here too.

Across the road, the Badia is a Benedictine abbey founded in 978 by Countess Willa, mother of a margrave of Tuscany. Its bell rang the hours for the old walled city. In Paradise, Dante's ancestor Cacciaguida remembers that small, sober Florence, living in peace inside its ancient walls, hearing the hours of terce and nones ring out... from this very bell.

Then the twist. In 1373 the city hired Giovanni Boccaccio to explain the Divine Comedy in public, the first lectures ever given on the poem, in a church belonging to the abbey. Ill health stopped him partway through the Inferno, and he died two years later. Barely seventy years after threatening to burn its poet, Florence was paying to have him explained. Walk south down Via del Proconsolo to the square where it ends, and face the long Baroque front opposite.