My dear friend Frederica Mathewes-Green and her husband Fr. Gregory are on a tour of Italy now, to celebrate their 40th anniversary. She sent the above photo from Ravenna, taken today, on the streetcorner near Dante’s sepulchre. She wrote, “I prayed for you today in front of Dante’s tomb.” Here she is standing at the entrance:

What a generous gift. What she didn’t know was that today, May 1, is the anniversary of the day Dante and Beatrice first met, as children, when they were nine years old. It was at a May Day party in her father’s house. Dante writes in his Vita Nova (trans. Andrew Frisardi) of that moment:

Nine times, the heaven of the light had returned to where it was at my birth, almost to the very same point of its orbit, when the glorious lady of my mind first appeared before my eyes — she whom many called Beatrice without even knowing that was her name. She had already been in this life long enough for the heaven of the fixed stars to have moved toward the east a twelfth of a degree since she was born, so that she was at the beginning of her ninth year when she appeared to me, and I saw her when I was almost at the end of my ninth. She appeared, dressed in a very stately color, a subdued and dignified crimson, girdled and adorned in a manner that was fitting for her young age.

At that time, truly, I say, the vital spirit, which dwells in the innermost chamber of the heart, started to tremble so powerfully that its disturbance reached all the way to the the slightest of my pulses. And trembling it spoke these words: “Ecce deus fortior me, qui veniens dominabitur michi.” [“Here is a god strong than I, who comes to rule me.”] At that time, the animal spirit, which dwells in the high chamber to which all the spirits of sensation carry their perceptions, began to marvel, and speaking especially to the spirits of vision it said: “Apparuit iam beatitudo vestra.” [“Your beatitude (or bliss) has now appeared.”]

Child Dante was overcome. He would not see Beatrice again for nine more years. Three years later, she married another man, a Florentine banker. In another three years, she was dead, aged 24. He never forgot her and what she meant to him. Dante’s life changed that day in 1287. Because of it, he found his way back to God, back to eternal bliss. He made her live forever in the Commedia; she became his guide through Paradise.

I intended to start blogging on Paradiso today, but events have intruded — very, very happy events, which I’ll tell you about soon. I’m preparing for dinner now. We are going to eat risotto and fish with marjoram and lemon, and insalate misto, and drink Champagne to toast Dante and Beatrice on their day, and to toast big things ahead. Dante blogging starts tomorrow.