1250), son of Guido da Montefeltro (Inf. XXVII), was the leader of the Ghibellines of Arezzo in the battle of Campaldino, fought against the forces of Florence, a battle in which Dante himself probably took part. Buonconte died in that encounter on June 11, 1289, and his body was never found. But where his father, in Inferno, was, at the point of death, snatched from St. Francis by a devil, the soul of the son is saved from the devil by an angel. The devil’s revenge on Buonconte’s body counters the cloudless skies of Purgatory with an inexorable storm-scene in our world (V, 85–129).

Pia, possibly of the Tolomei family of Siena, was killed—hurled down from the balcony of her house—by her husband, Nello, chief magistrate of Volterra and Lucca, who outlived Dante. She concentrates her tragedy in three lines, but not before she has voiced her own compassion for the weariness of any living body undertaking a journey as arduous as Dante’s: “Pray, after your returning to the world, / when, after your long journeying, you’ve rested /…may you remember me, who am La Pia; / Siena made—Maremma unmade—me: / he who, when we were wed, gave me his pledge / and then, as nuptial ring, his gem, knows that” (V, 130–136).

After these three (and others who suffered violent deaths but do not speak—or better, who importune Dante but without his referring their words to us), it is the quiet enclave of the Valley of the Rulers that occupies the rest of Ante-Purgatory. We and Dante are introduced to the valley and its inhabitants (identified in the headnote to Canto VII) by Sordello (c. 1200–1269), the most famous of the Italian troubadours, who wrote in Provençal and served as courtier in Italy, Provence, and then again—under Charles of Anjou—in Italy. It is Sordello’s greeting of his fellow-Mantuan, Virgil, in Canto VI, 71–75, that spurs Dante’s polemical “digression” against Italy and Florence, well-placed in this canto of Sordello, a poet whose own achievements in political and didactic poetry were notable. Sordello’s review of the presences in the valley (VII, 91–136) is complemented in the next canto by the direct encounter with a political figure whom Dante knew well, the Guelph Nino Visconti—grandson of the Ugolino of Canto XXXIII of the Inferno—who died in 1296, after serving as animator of Guelph Genoa, Florence, and Lucca against Pisa. (Visconti’s only daughter, Giovanna, died in poverty in Florence before 1339; in 1300, his widow married Galeazzo Visconti, lord of Milan, who then fell on hard times. The serpent was emblem of the Milanese Visconti, the rooster of the Pisan Visconti: VIII, 67–81.) In that same canto Dante encounters Currado Malaspina, who died in 1294, but whose family offered their hospitality (here repaid) to the exiled Dante in 1306.

In Purgatory proper, Canto X has no new presences; and the next nine cantos assign speaking roles—or amply refer—to nine modern Italian penitents: the Tuscan Aldobrandesco (who died in 1259), lord of Campagnatico and a powerful enemy of Siena, who died in battle near Campagnatico or was killed in bed by assassins hired by the Sienese (XI, 49–72); Oderisi of Gubbio (who died c. 1299), the famous miniaturist, whose place in the terrace of pride is not divorced from Dante’s awareness of his own desire for artistic eminence (XI, 73–142); Provenzan Salvani of Siena (c. 1220–1269), a Ghibelline leader, who humbled himself to beg funds for the ransom of a friend who had been captured by Charles of Anjou (XI, 121–142); Sapia of Siena, an aunt of Provenzan (XIII, 100–154); one Ghibelline of Romagna, Guido del Duca (who died after 1249), and one Guelph, Rinieri da Calboli (who died in 1296), joint presences in Canto XIV; Marco Lombardo, a figure of the second half of the 13th century, known for his wisdom primarily from literary sources, not least this Canto XVI; the Abbot of St. Zeno, an abbot of Verona who has never been well identified outside this Canto XVIII; and in Canto XIX, Pope Adrian V, Ottobono Fieschi (born between 1210 and 1215), member of a powerful Genoese family, who was pope for 38 days in 1276, when he died (and since there is little warrant for applying Dante’s account to Adrian V but much for its relevance to Adrian IV, pope from 1154 to 1159, Umberto Bosco sees some confusion here in Dante). In Canto XX, Hugh (II) Capet, king of France from 987 to 996 (whom Dante confounds with Hugh ii’s father, Hugh the Great, as the founder of the dynasty of France), excoriates his successors.

On the remaining terraces of Purgatory (Cantos XXI–XXVII), all the speaking roles other than Virgil’s and Dante’s are assigned to poets—from three literatures, Latin, Italian, and Provençal—and to an old friend of Dante, Forese Donati, who, though not essentially a poet, had exchanged epistolary poems with Dante.

Statius (c. 45–96 A.D.), to whom Dante, following medieval confusions, assigns Toulouse as birthplace rather than Naples, was the poet of the Thebaid, the tale of Thebes from the struggle between Eteocles and Polynices to Theseus’ expedition against Creon; and of the Achilleid, which was to recount all the tale of Achilles, but was interrupted in the middle of Book ii by Statius’ death. (Dante probably did not know the Silvae of Statius.) With or without previous medieval sources before him, Dante “recruits” Statius to Christianity; and with warrant in Statius’ own work, he finds a surrogate and passionate complement for his—Dante’s—own adoration of Virgil (XXI, 94–136 and XXII, 64–73). Statius completes the company of poets of antiquity to whom Dante had himself joined in Limbo, in Canto IV of the Inferno. The poets of Limbo had included Homer, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Lucan; and now, Juvenal as well as others are mentioned “retroactively” by Virgil (XXII, 13–14 and 97–108). But the “effective” company to which Dante adds himself has Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, and Statius as its poets. However warm his relations to his Romance predecessors are, it is antiquity he hopes to join or asserts he has joined (even as the vision of the otherworld granted to Dante allows him to join Aeneas and Paul “in a manner most unusual for moderns”: XVI, 41–42).

For those Romance predecessors, it is three colloquies in Purgatorio that are central. The first is in Canto XXIV (34–63) with Bonagiunta (Orbiciani) da Lucca (c. 1220–death date uncertain), a poet instrumental in introducing the mode of the Sicilian poets to central Italy. The poets whom he sees as having been overarched by the “sweet [or suasive] new manner” of Dante and others are: the “Notary,” that is, Jacopo da Lentini, poet and notary at the court of Frederick II, doyen of the Sicilian school, who died c. 1250; and Guittone d’Arezzo, who died in Florence in 1294, the head of the school that may be seen as having worked in modes less harmonious and subtle than those of Cavalcanti and the earlier Dante.

The second colloquy with a Romance poet (XXVI) has as its poet-interlocutor Guido Guinizzelli (probably to be identified with a Guido who was exiled from Bologna in 1274 and died by 1276). Seen by Cavalcanti and Dante as forerunner of their manner, Guinizzelli here also comes down hard on Guittone d’Arezzo (or, better, one may say that Dante, using both Bonagiunta and Guinizzelli, seems to come down strangely—or understandably—too hard on Guittone, a predecessor to whom both he and Guinizzelli are much indebted). He also reappraises, among the Provençal poets, Giraut de Bornelh (in fact born near Limoges rather than in it: XXVI, 120), who lived between the last half of the twelfth century and the beginning of the thirteenth; for where Dante, in his De vulgari eloquentia, had praised Giraut, it is now Arnaut Daniel whom he has Guinizzelli praise as “il miglior fabbro”, “a better / artisan of the mother tongue—surpassing / all those who wrote their poems of love or prose / romances” (XXVI, 116–119).

Arnaut, Dante’s third Romance interlocutor, born in the same region as Giraut, was active as poet between 1180 and 1210. However much Guinizzelli may have been used by Dante for “local” anti-Guittone purposes, there is significant freedom from chauvinism in allowing Italian no special privilege among the modern maternal tongues, in assigning the premier post among all writers in the modern tongues to a Provençal (who here, in Purgatorio, speaks in Provençal: XXVI, 140–147).

This leaves one Florentine friend requiring a brief note: Forese Donati (XXIII and XXIV).