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Learning in Place

The irreplaceable experience of studying Dante in Siena
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In Charleston last week, a reader of this blog told me how much he enjoyed my blogging from Siena, and the Palio. To have a glimpse at such a different world was a delight, he said. Of course I agreed. That week I spent at the Palio was one of the great pleasures of all the travels I have done. The horse race itself was the least of it; the joy of Sienese culture, and observing (even participating in) communal rituals that come from the Middle Ages — well, who gets to do that, ever? The Palio is a living tradition, an organic link to the city and its culture as it existed many centuries ago. What a rare and beautiful thing in the modern world.

What brought me to Siena was not, in fact, the Palio, but the chance to sit in on two days of Dante courses taught by Ron Herzman and Bill Stephany, two American Dante scholars administering a marvelous teacher training program. Here is a description of the program, which is sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities:

A five-week seminar for sixteen school teachers on Dante’s Commedia, to be held in Siena, Italy.

This seminar immerses participants in studying Dante’s Divine Comedy in its historical, political, theological, philosophic, and artistic contexts, under the direction of William Stephany (University of Vermont) and Ronald Herzman (State University of New York at Geneseo).  In addition to exploring the Middle Ages and how the poem reflects its period of creation, the seminar examines Dante’s responses to recurrent human concerns: the potential for good and evil, the possibilities for spiritual transformation, the nature and purpose of political institutions, and reasons for reading and writing. Meeting four times a week in three-hour sessions, participants examine at most five cantos per session, allowing them to “crawl through the text,” building canto on canto, and thereby to read and discuss the poem as carefully and completely as possible. The co-directors point out that by setting the seminar in Siena, a town that has preserved its medieval character, “we coordinate the study of Dante’s text with the study of relevant artistic monuments [and topographical elements] in an ongoing way.” Dante’s native Florence is easily accessible from Siena; additionally, scholar-led trips have been organized to relevant sites in Rome, Orvieto, Ravenna, and Assisi. The three-volume facing-page translation of the Commedia by Robert Durling and Ronald Martinez serves as the principal text for the seminar. The directors orient participants to online resources for Dante study and provide a small traveling reference library of secondary materials for the teachers to use, in addition to arranging for participants to have access to all University of Siena faculty libraries as visiting scholars. Participants give group presentations and complete written projects.

I joined a diverse group of American teachers for this summer’s seminar. As longtime readers of this blog may recall, the terrific Great Courses lectures on Dante, by Ron Herzman and Bill Cook, were instrumental in opening up the Commedia for me. The idea of being able to spend even just two days learning from Herzman was a thrill. Plus, Ron’s colleague Bill Stephany had kindly spent his morning to me and my friend Casella last fall in Florence, giving us the Dante tour of the city. To be able to hear him lecture on Dante was a treat.

It is hard to overstate the value of both being in Florence, where Dante lived and where so many of the events and personalities in the Commedia happened and lived, and of being shown those places by a Dante scholar. From my post last fall recounting our morning with Bill Stephany:

One of the first places we stopped by was a building that was a medieval guild hall. Bill pointed out that for the Florentines of that era, a man who practiced his craft became a co-creator with God. Bill showed up reliefs on the building’s façade, each one celebrating a different craftsman. I better understood, then, why Dante was so harsh on usurers for being “violent against nature;” in this way of seeing things, the moneylender’s trade is unnatural.

We walked on and soon came to the house of the Guelph Cavalcante, whom you’ll remember sharing a tomb in Hell with his Ghibelline enemy Farinata degli Uberti (see our discussion of Inferno 10). “If this is where Cavalcante lived, I wonder where Farinata’s place was,” I said. Bill pointed just ahead, and led the way.

It was just up the street and around the corner — or would have been, if it were still there. After the Guelphs came back to power, they had the body of Farinata (who, recall, led the Ghibelline army in the Battle of Monteperti, in which they slaughtered 10,000 Florentine Guelphs and seized control of the city) exhumed, burned, and his ashes thrown in the Arno. Bill said they dismantled the Uberti family’s house and used the bricks to help build a city wall. And the city fathers passed a law forbidding anyone from building anything on that land, in perpetuity.

That property is still vacant, all these centuries later. It is now part of the Piazza della Signoria, next to which you’ll fine the Uffizi museum. “Think about it,” said Bill. “These men were literally neighbors in life, but even though they live in the same tomb, they won’t even recognize each other in death.”

On we walked toward the Ponte Vecchio, the old bridge, at the foot of which there occurred an infamous murder. It was Easter Sunday in the year 1215. Earlier, Buondelmonte, an arrogant young Ghibelline, had injured someone from the Amidei family, a powerful Ghibelline clan. It was decided that Buondelmonte could make reparation for his deed of dishonor if he married a young woman from the Amidei. On the day he was to ask for her hand in marriage, all gathered on the piazza for the event, but Buondelmonte passed by her, and instead asked for the hand of a Guelph girl. The Amidei swore revenge.

On Easter Sunday of that year, Buondelmonte crossed the Ponte Vecchio on horseback, coming into the city to be married later that day. Assassins from the Amidei and an allied family, the Lamberti, leaped out and murdered him in cold blood, almost at the doorstep of the Amidei family home. Do I even need to tell you that Buondelmonte’s family home was just around the corner from the Amidei? That murder set off the bloody Guelph-Ghibelline wars in Florence, which lasted for generations, and tore the city apart. Dante’s exile came almost 100 years later, as a result of the factional conflict. In the Commedia, Dante writes at length about how the fratricidal and communal hatred within families, between neighbors, and between political factions, destroyed so many lives and so much of the greatness of Florence. In Inferno 10, Dante makes the point that these men, Farinata and Cavalcante, who had been neighbors were so lost in their own worlds on earth that they couldn’t see anything they had in common. Both men were Epicureans, men who philosophically denied the afterlife, and who were therefore committed to believing that this world is all that exists. Consequently, they loved the things of this world unnaturally, to the point of destroying the peace of the city over their own passions.

The point Dante makes throughout the Commedia is that the Florentines had become so caught up in pursuing their individual, familiar, or partisan goods that they ceased to see the humanity of their fellow Florentines. Thus when one faction would fall from power, the rivals taking power would sometimes destroy the houses of the losers. It wasn’t enough for the Black Guelphs to take power in Dante’s Florence; they had to send White Guelphs like Dante into exile and seize their goods.

I knew this before I came to Florence, of course, but I don’t know that anything would have prepared me to understand the magnitude of Florence’s tragedy like coming here and seeing how intimate these associations were, and how physically close these families lived to each other. How could you do these things to someone you knew so well? They did. All of them did.

Because Siena is only an hour’s drive from Florence, the fifteen or so American teachers on this summer’s program will have, or by now will have had, the same experience: seeing the same places they’ve only read about, and doing so in the company of men who have made studying Dante and bringing him and his world alive their life’s work. To underscore a point I made in the earlier blog post, there’s nothing like seeing how small the medieval core of Florence was to appreciate the intensity of the passions that destroyed its community. Casella and I stood in the very spot where Buondelmonte’s assassins hid. We visited the small piazza where the riot took place that ultimately led to Dante’s exile. And on and on. Being there in Florence incarnated the people, places, and insights of the Commedia as nothing else could have done.

Though I was only in Siena for four days, I quickly discovered why it makes more sense to situate the Dante program there than in Florence. Siena maintained its medieval character — the architecture, the streetscape — far better than Florence did. This was not on purpose, not really. The Black Death devastated powerful Siena, and it never recovered its former glory. It fell into economic and political crisis, one that lasted centuries, and led to its massive diminishment. The blunt truth is that Siena ceased to matter to the flow of Italian history, and because it was so poor, the Sienese couldn’t afford to tear down their medieval buildings and put up modern ones.

The point is, if you want to see the world that Dante saw in his time, the best place to do so is Siena. True, Siena was the great rival — indeed the hated enemy — of Dante’s Florence, but Siena in the 21st century looks a lot more like Dante’s Florence than does Florence today.

On my first day in Siena, I got a lesson in the enduring power of factionalism in Italy. As I’ve mentioned here before, Siena is divided into 17 districts, called contrade.  The contrade of Siena date continuously back to the Middle Ages. The same contrade you see today, sending horses and jockeys to compete in the Palio, also sent troops to fight for their city-state in the same wars in which Dante himself fought. Today, the contrade are mostly nothing more than neighborhood associations, but that phrase does not do justice to the power of contrade in the imagination of the Sienese. It would be like calling the Atlantic Ocean a pond. People in Siena are extremely passionate about their contrade, most of whom have a declared enemy contrada — some more than one. Because Ron Herzman is a member of the L’Onda (The Wave) contrada, the American group became de facto Onda contradaoli. 

Onda’s hated rival is the next-door Torre (Tower). The seminar classroom is within the bounds of Torre. Ron warned us not to wear Onda colors inside Torre, certainly not on the week of the Palio. That’s how passionate the Sienese are about their contrade.

All of us connected to the seminar were able to experience that Palio week, in an intensely personal way, the power of civic passion to unite and to divide. Please take a look at this post I wrote from Siena, in which I talk about Siena, contrade, and the common good. Living the Palio that week with the Sienese made some of the political and social questions at the heart of Dante’s Commedia come vividly to life.

At one of the street dinners within Onda’s bounds that I attended, I sat next to a past graduate of the Siena program, Barbara Rosenblit, who is a Jewish school teacher from Atlanta. She was a delight to talk to. She told me that the Siena course seeded within her a love for Dante that has borne good fruit in her school, and beyond. I asked her how she made the profoundly Catholic medieval poet relevant to modern Jewish students. She discoursed at length on the roots of the Commedia in the Hebrew Bible, plus the universal lessons about human nature found in the poem’s cantos. Barbara conveyed a mad, joyful passion for Dante, one that was born right here in Siena over a decade ago, when she arrived on the NEH program to study with Ron and Bill. This morning, as I write this, I’m thinking about all the schoolkids in Atlanta over the years who have benefited from what Barbara learned in Siena.

In San Francisco, Callen Taylor, another teacher and graduate of the Siena program, started a Saturday morning Dante Club for her students, most of them immigrants from struggling families. It turned out well for all of them. And to think it all started in Siena! Though I was only there for a few days, I quickly understood that studying Dante here was an irreplaceable experience. The Commedia moves out of your head and into your bones here. I can easily imagine how after spending a few weeks in the summer encountering Dante on this program, set in Italy, teachers return home to America converted, as missionaries for Dante, whose great poem is one of the highest peaks of Western civilization.

So, it was a shock to learn from Ron Herzman that this summer’s program would be the last one in Siena. Wait … what?! True. The National Endowment for the Humanities will still fund the program, but won’t be funding it overseas. I’m not completely sure about this, but the sense seems to be that there’s political pressure from Congress not to be spending taxpayer dollars on humanities programs that take place on foreign soil.

If true, this is a shocking waste of an opportunity, and the sacrifice of an excellent program at the altar of a dull-witted political correctness. Herzman and Stephany could teach these classes in upstate New York, or anywhere in the US, and they would be well worth attending. But there is nothing like studying Dante in Siena — especially because Ron Herzman has so many deep and longstanding personal connections there, which he uses to give students a back door into real Italian life (e.g., all his students, and hangers-on like Sordello and me, became temporarily part of the Onda contrada thanks to the efforts of Ron and his team, and were able to experience the power of communal passion in a way that mere tourists cannot possibly do).

How does a mere horse race come to be seen as the epitome of civic life, and one’s tiny district of a small city turn into the most important thing in the world? Is this hyperlocalist patriotism a good thing, or a bad thing? What makes the difference? How can people who are friendly neighbors for most of the year become fierce and sometimes violent rivals during Palio week? Each contrada brings its Palio horse into its local chapel for a blessing on the day of the race. Is this mingling of the sacred and the profane a scandal to religion, or does it invest political life with transcendent meaning? Or both?

And so forth. To be in Siena, especially for Palio week, is to live out many of the questions at the heart of the Commedia. There is no substitute for it. It makes the Dante’s words leap off the page and come to life. To remove the program from Siena would be like telling a celebrated marine science seminar that it could no longer study in the ocean, but had to confine its investigations to a classroom.

I deeply hope that the NEH will rethink its decision. I have seen up close and personal the tremendous value of this Dante program, and of holding it in Siena. I discovered my passion for Dante without benefit of Siena, but I did have Ron Herzman as one of my main Virgils. To have been able to have him and his colleagues be my Virgils in Siena would have been a priceless gift. This is what the humanities endowment is supposed to do. According to the NEH website:

Because democracy demands wisdom, NEH serves and strengthens our republic by promoting excellence in the humanities and conveying the lessons of history to all Americans. The Endowment accomplishes this mission by awarding grants for top-rated proposals examined by panels of independent, external reviewers.

I stood with this year’s NEH group in Siena’s medieval Palazzo Pubblico, under the famous 14th-century frescoes of the Allegory of Good Government and Bad Government, listening to Bill Stephany lecture on the meaning of vice and virtue to politics and statecraft in the Middle Ages. Where else on earth could the moral vision at the core of the Commedia have been made so vivid, as standing under these images in the room in which Sienese justice was delivered?

Sometimes, you just have to be there. Please, NEH, reconsider the wisdom of ending the program in Siena. Because what happened in Siena, and in Tuscany of the late medieval period, was so important to understanding Dante’s world, it matters deeply to Western civilization. Siena’s history is our own, in a real way. Don’t cut off future groups of American teachers from the blessing of studying Dante and his world in Siena. The NEH program in Siena makes the abstract concrete. There is nothing else like it. It is a treasure. So let’s treasure it.

Barbara Rosenblit, Your Working Boy, and journalist Luca Fiore, at the Palio eve dinner in Onda
Barbara Rosenblit, Your Working Boy, and journalist Luca Fiore, at the Palio eve dinner in Onda

 

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