Casa di Dante & Santa Margherita de' Cerchi
Why is it significant?
Walk into the narrow, shadowy lane of Via Santa Margherita and you reach a stern stone house with small arched windows and a corner that rises like a medieval tower. Florence calls it the Casa di Dante, the house of Dante. Here is an honest confession: it is not quite his house.
Key Facts
| Place | Casa di Dante & Santa Margherita de' Cerchi |
|---|---|
| Address | Via Santa Margherita 1, 50122 Firenze FI, Italy |
| Geo Coordinates | 43.77110, 11.25700 |
| Part of Walk | Dante's Florence: Beatrice, Exile and the Empty Tomb of Santa Croce |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk into the narrow, shadowy lane of Via Santa Margherita and you reach a stern stone house with small arched windows and a corner that rises like a medieval tower. Florence calls it the Casa di Dante, the house of Dante.
Here is an honest confession: it is not quite his house. Dante was born in 1265 in this parish, among the houses of the Alighieri, a family of small landowners and money-lenders. But the building you see was put up in the early twentieth century, in a medieval style, close to where the family homes were believed to stand, and it has been a museum about his life and times since 1965. The streets, though, are the real thing: this tangle of lanes was his whole childhood world.
A few steps further up the lane, a doorway leads into one of the smallest churches in Florence, Santa Margherita de' Cerchi. Tradition says two things about it. That Dante married Gemma Donati here, a match arranged by contract when he was about twelve. And that Beatrice is buried here, among the Portinari tombs. Nobody can prove either, but lovers do not care: inside you will often find a basket full of handwritten notes, asking Beatrice for help in love.
The church belonged to the Cerchi family, and that name matters. Around 1300 the Cerchi led the White Guelphs, while the Donati, Gemma's own clan, led by the violent Corso Donati, headed the Blacks. Dante married a Donati and sided with the Whites. In Purgatory he has Corso's own brother, Forese, foretell Corso's death, dragged by a horse towards hell, and that is exactly how Corso died in 1308.
So in one lane you have Dante's birth, his marriage, his great love and the family feud that would wreck his life. Walk down to Via Dante Alighieri and follow it east to Via del Proconsolo, where two great buildings stand face to face across the street, one that condemned him, and one that explained him.