DANTE AND TUSCANY'S SANTA BRIGIDA

Ante concocts his dream landscape from the text he was reading when he fell asleep over it, Virgil’s Aeneid VI. It is the same map, the same monsters. But there are other landscapes patchworked into the text. Dante as a child played in the 14. Piazza Donati (Plate XXVI a, b). But in the hot Florentine summers all these families went away into the countryside where the land was higher and more healthy, where the Etruscans had dwelled in citadels, in contrast to the Roman love of low-lying mosquito and malaria-infested river valleys. Dante’s own family, the Alighieri, and that of the Portinari, would have exited from the Porta a Pinti, the Porta Fiesolana, out into the countryside around Ontignano and Santa Brigida, around Monte Ceceri of the Domenico di Michelino painting in the 4. Duomo (Plates XIX, LXVII a, b, c), Montesenario and Sasso, the region where I heard contadini still reciting Dante’s Commedia cantastorie by heart when I lived for four years as a hermit in that region.

An Irish pilgrim was coming through Fiesole’s town square during the election for a new bishop and so “Sanctus Donatus Scotus” was himself elected, the writer of Latin poetry about St Bridget of Ireland and the first to tell of the miracle of her placing her wet cloak on a sunbeam to dry, a tale I found in a manuscript (BML Mugellanus de Nemore 13), written out in the twelfth century in the Mugello, that was so huge that I had to stand to read it in the Laurentian Library. Sant’Andrea also arrived from Ireland and became a hermit on the mountain of Sasso, 829, San Donato then having him be his Archdeacon, and who became Bishop of Fiesole in turn. Sant’Andrea built the church of San Martino in Mensola that is below Harvard’s I Tatti, its altar, decorated by Fra Angelico, telling his legend from the ninth century. His sister, a different and later Santa Brigida, likewise came over from Ireland and lived in a grotto below that of Sant’Andrea’s cave at Sasso (a mirroring of Benedict and Scholastica’s Subiaco), the little Tuscan town of Santa Brigida growing up around her and to whom she taught the Bible. Locally the people think Donatus and Andrea came from Scotland as they were named ‘Scoti’ in the Latin documents about them. But the Irish, known as ‘Scoti’, settled Scotland from Ireland giving that region their name.

Then, 2 July 1490, during the Renaissance, the Virgin next appeared to the two Ricoveri shepherd girls at Sasso, their father imprisoned and ill in the Stinche, telling them to tell Florence to study the Bible. When the girls were not obeyed, she next healed their father’s illness, freed him, and appeared to the adults, telling them to believe the children, giving to all the same Magnificat world-upside-down message, that Florence must study and live the Gospel. Pilgrims from the regions around would come to the beautiful church and their own hospices at Sasso, these being bombed in WWII, though pilgrims are still welcomed there.

The next mountain over, Montesenario, was the site and still is the monastery, where seven rich merchants’ sons, all Florentines, and members of a Compagnia dei laudesi, had a vision of the Virgin, 15 August 1233, and several more following that. They gave up all to be the Servi di Santa Maria, the niece of one of them, Santa Giuliana di Falconieri, next founding the lay Order of the Servites, of which I am one. Their church in Florence is the Santissima Annunziata with its legend of the miracle-working frescoed Madonna at the Annunciation as finished by an angel.

I learned these stories mainly orally, taking them with a grain of salt but also with the Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief”. Just as I had in accepting, in Complementarity, St Helena’s choice of Mount Sinai, though knowing she had got it wrong, when I climbed it in 1992.  In 2001 I organized an international conference on the Alphabet and the Bible to which Jewish, Russian, Icelandic, Spanish, Irish and English scholars came and I took them to these sites, St Bridget’s grotto at Santa Brigida, Sant’Andrea’s hermitage at Sasso, the monastery of the Servites at Montesenario, explaining that these oral traditions about Irishmen in the region where Dante and Beatrice as children went each summertide could well have meant that Dante heard the likewise mainly oral traditions of the tales of the Voyage of Bran, of the Voyages of St Brendan, of St Patrick’s Purgatory.1 Dante gave that voyage beyond the Straits of Gibralter, of the Pillars set by Hercules, which Francesco da Barberino illustrated in the Tesoretto (Plate LXXVI c, BML Strozzi 146, fol. 10^r), to Ulysses in Inferno XXVI.2 And then he gave that landscape, of the island of Purgatory in the midst of the Ocean at the Antipodes to Jerusalem, to himself as a Pilgrim in the Purgatorio. Indeed, the Catholic Church had already taken on board that Irish concept of Purgatory, which came to permeate European culture, just as did also Celtic rhyming take over from Latin’s long/short quantitative measures. Dante’s terza rima is still sung today in cantastorie by Tuscan contadini. I have heard and recorded their chanted poetry for you.3