This year’s GE group was a very diverse one – 28 engineers from 20 different countries, already well-credentialed with bachelors, masters, Ph.D., MBA, and science degrees, and scoring well above average on the exam I gave at the conclusion of the course. We discussed the important role that governments must play in “internalizing the externalities” of pollution; economic instruments employed in domestic and international carbon markets; and the current status of such instruments in countries around the world.

Dante’s death mask

On this Florence visit, I decided to give Michelangelo a break and focused instead on someone who had a major influence on his work: the poet Dante Alighieri, whose most well-known work is The Divine Comedy. And I’m sure you can guess why….. yes, I too – like hundreds of thousands (millions??) of others — had recently read Dan Brown’s Inferno. That novel was the biggest selling book of the past year, and it served a really valuable function in bringing both Dante and Malthusian environmental concerns to an extremely large audience…. & in a very entertaining way! I especially enjoyed the way Brown wove many of my own Florentine experiences — the Palazzo Vecchio’s Studiolo and Damien Hirst’s For the Love of God exhibit [see March 2011 posting] & a plug for Ross King’s book Brunelleschi’s Dome [April 2012] — right into the fast-paced narrative.

His book inspired a number of visits on this trip. One was a return back to the Palazzo Vecchio to see Dante’s death mask, which played such an important role in the story. Another re-visit was to the Duomo to see Domenico di Michelino’s well known painting La commedia illumina Firenze (The Comedy Illuminating Florence), shown below. That painting is on the northern wall of the Duomo, & depicts Dante, the city of Florence, and all three parts of The Divine Comedy (i.e., Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso).

The Museo Casa di Dante, where his family home stood, and Santa Margherita de’ Cerchi, were new to me, however. The latter is a church down the street from his home where as a nine-year-old boy he first saw the love of his life, Beatrice (then an eight-year-old girl). She obviously had quite an impact on the poet, because she later served as his guide in the Paradise section of his epic poem. He was never able to connect with her in real life – she married someone else, and then died at the age of twenty-four; he too married someone else (in that same church), but had a rather difficult marriage. Today there is a basket next to Beatrice’s shrine in the church where petitioners leave notes asking her to help with their love lives… & the basket was quite full on my visit!

A final stop was to see Dante’s statue in front of the Basilica di Santa Croce once again. Dante had a falling out with the city politicians, and was exiled – and was never allowed to return. Years later, the city realized its error, and prepared an elegant tomb right next to Michelangelo’s in Santa Croce – but it is still empty. His remains are buried in Ravenna instead.

(And yes, of course I visited the Paperback Exchange, Professor Robert Langdon’s favorite English language bookstore in the city, located only a block away from the Duomo – but I’m sure you’ve already assumed that as a given! In the novel he wanted to get a copy of The Divine Comedy there – but realized it was probably closed; I made sure to visit on an open weekday instead.)