An art tribute, with works from the Uffizi Galleries, to Dante Alighieri exile from Florence, in the land that first welcomed him in his exile, the Casentino.
The exhibition “Nel Segno di Dante. The Casentino in the Comedy “, promoted and organized by the Municipality of Poppi, hosted in the castle of the Counts Guidi – the place where he wrote a part of the Divine Comedy – concretely opens the exhibition program ‘Terre degli Uffizi’, conceived and created by the famous Florentine museum together with the CR Firenze Foundation, within the respective Uffizi Diffusi and Piccoli Grandi Musei projects.
The Casentino is the perfect place to honor the fugitive poet. Dante’s presence still lingers in Casentino, whose places evoke, starting from their landscape of hills, forests and streams, the “classic” form of the medieval wayfarer’s itinerary; or, as in the case of Dante, not a simple wanderer but also a fugitive in search of hospitality and protection. Alighieri, going to Casentino, hoped for a return to his homeland that never happened. The lords of these lands were honored to have him as a guest: the exhibition illustrates, first of all in terms of historical facts, what happened and why. In modern times then, the lands of the Casentino gladly preserved the memory of Dante’s passage, so much so that in the middle of the revival of the Middle Ages, they were reached by foreign travelers who traveled through them, as the exhibition catalog tells, leaving diaries and memories.
The works of the exhibition were chosen in relation to the three Canticles of the Comedy: Hell, Purgatory and Paradise; those from the Uffizi show the love for Dante’s poem throughout history. Proof of this is the main work of the exhibition, the large nineteenth-century painting purchased by the Galleries last year on the occasion of the first Dantedì, Francesca da Rimini in Dante’s Inferno (1810), by the romantic Nicola Monti, as well as the pastels by Beatrice Ancillotti Goretti (Marriage of St. Francis with Poverty, 1903). But also four sixteenth-century drawings of the Commedia by Federico Zuccari, from the Marches transplanted to Florence and chosen to complete the frescoes in the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore, which remained unfinished when Vasari died.
When Dante took refuge there, he found welcome and honors in Poppi and Casentino, just as he was sentenced to death in his homeland even in absentia. Well before Florence rehabilitated its “honorable citizen” (Giotto will do it by painting his portrait in the Bargello chapel), the Casentino instead accepted him, also seizing the opportunity of a revenge on the city of Giglio. The reflections and themes concentrated in the exhibition catalog, by various scholars and from different fields, tell how the figure of Dante has truly pervaded the history of the territory and help to reveal the leading role of the Casentino in the human and cultural history of the Supreme Poet.
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Hours: Monday to Thursday from 10.00 – 19.00,
Friday, Saturday and Sunday from 10.00 – 20.00.
Tickets: Full € 7 – Reduced: € 5 (under 26, over 65, families of at least 3 people, groups of at least 10 people) – Free (disabled including companion, residents in the municipality of Poppi, children under 6).