Via dei Malcontenti: The Street of the Condemned
Why is it significant?
At the corner where Via di San Giuseppe ends, a small painted shrine on the wall watches over the start of a narrow, straight street running east towards the river and the old city walls. Its name is Via dei Malcontenti: the street of the discontented. Few people walked it willingly.
Key Facts
| Place | Via dei Malcontenti: The Street of the Condemned |
|---|---|
| Address | Via dei Malcontenti, 50122 Firenze FI, Italy |
| Geo Coordinates | 43.76780, 11.26550 |
| Part of Walk | Dante's Florence: Beatrice, Exile and the Empty Tomb of Santa Croce |
| Generated | Generated |
At the corner where Via di San Giuseppe ends, a small painted shrine on the wall watches over the start of a narrow, straight street running east towards the river and the old city walls. Its name is Via dei Malcontenti: the street of the discontented.
Few people walked it willingly. Prisoners condemned to death were led from the jails in the centre of town along this street to the place of execution outside the gate known as the Porta alla Giustizia, the Gate of Justice, near the Arno. The crowds came to watch. The name is a piece of grim Florentine humour, and it has stuck for centuries.
They did not walk alone. Members of a lay brotherhood, hooded in black and known as the Compagnia dei Neri, spent the last night with the condemned, praying and talking with them. On the final walk one brother held a small painted panel, a tavoletta, right in front of the prisoner's face, with an image of the Crucifixion or a martyrdom, so that the last things he saw would be not the jeering crowd or the gallows but a picture of mercy. Some of those panels survive in museums today.
Remember the sentence of March 1302. If Dante had ever come home, this is very likely the road he would have taken, to be burned alive. In 1315 Florence offered exiles an amnesty, but on humiliating terms: pay a fine and do public penance. Dante refused, writing that he would not return to Florence by any road that cost him his honour. The city answered by renewing his death sentence and extending it to his sons. Almost seven hundred years later, in 2008, the city council voted to revoke it, a symbolic gesture to a man who had been dead since 1321.
So walk this street slowly, the way the condemned once did, and imagine a poet who preferred exile to a pardon on his knees. At its far end, by the river, a lonely stone tower stands on its own, the last guard of the walls Dante saw being built.