Our Name
Dante Alighieri, and the name we took
Every auction house is named after someone. Ours is named after a poet who has been dead for seven hundred years, and the reason is not decoration.
Why we are called Alighieri's
I was not born with this name. I took it.
The Divine Comedy reached me at a point when I needed a map more than I needed a book. It is not a comforting poem and was never meant to be. What it offered was a structure: an unflinching account of how far down a life can go, a route back up, and the insistence that the climb starts with looking honestly at where you actually are.
I needed a model for how to build a life, and it was not going to come from home. It came instead from a fourteenth-century Florentine who lost his city, his property and his place in the world, and spent the rest of his life writing the way out.
So when there was a business to name, and later a name of my own to change, there was never a second candidate. Alighieri is a thank-you letter.
Two things plainly, because people ask. I am not a descendant of Dante Alighieri — no connection of blood is claimed here by me or by anyone who works for me. And we are not the London jewellery label that borrowed the same surname for much the same reason. We are an auction house in Newnan, Georgia.
Michael Alighieri — Owner
Who Dante was
Durante di Alighiero degli Alighieri — Dante, for short — was born in Florence around 1265, to a family of the minor nobility. He saw Beatrice Portinari, by his own account, when he was nine years old. She died at twenty-four, and he spent the rest of his writing life turning her into the figure who leads him through Paradise. The Vita Nuova, the book of poems and commentary he built around her, came in his late twenties.
He was also a politician, and it ruined him. Florence in his lifetime was split between Guelphs and Ghibellines, and then, exhaustingly, between White Guelphs and Black. Dante served as one of the city's priors in 1300. Two years later, while he was away in Rome, the opposing faction took the city and condemned him in his absence. He was never allowed home. Florence later offered him a pardon on terms he found humiliating, and he refused it.
Everything he is remembered for was written in exile: the Convivio, De vulgari eloquentia, De Monarchia, and, across roughly the last dozen years of his life, the Commedia. He finished it in Ravenna and died there in 1321, aged about fifty-six.
He made one decision that matters as much as any line in the poem. He wrote it in Tuscan — the language people actually spoke — rather than in Latin, the language of scholarship. It was a deliberate choice to be read by ordinary people, and it is why Italians call him the father of their language.
Florence spent centuries asking for his bones back. The tomb it built for him in Santa Croce stands empty. He is still in Ravenna.
One detail belongs on a page about a name. In the middle of the Paradiso, Dante meets his great-great-grandfather Cacciaguida, asks him about the family he came from, and is told both where the Alighieri name came from and that exile is waiting for him. It is a strange and useful thing, for anyone weighing up a name, to find the poet already weighing up his.
The ascent, read as instructions
Most people meet the Commedia as the Inferno and stop there, which is rather like reading the first act. It is three books, and taken in order it reads less like a tour of the afterlife than like a sequence of instructions.
- Inferno
- The part nobody wants. You cannot climb out of a place you refuse to look at. Dante's hell is organised, catalogued and specific; the point of walking through it is not punishment, it is accuracy.
- Purgatorio
- The only one of the three realms where time passes and effort counts. It is a mountain, and it is climbed in order, terrace by terrace, slowly. This is the book about work.
- Paradiso
- What the climb is for.
And he ended all three books on the same word: stelle. Stars.
Thence we came forth to rebehold the stars.
E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.
The last line of the Inferno. All three books end on the stars.
Pure and disposed to mount unto the stars.
puro e disposto a salire a le stelle.
The last line of the Purgatorio.
The Love which moves the sun and the other stars.
l'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle.
The last line of the poem.
We are not going to pretend that running an auction house is a spiritual exercise. But the shape of the work is not unrecognisable. Things arrive in whatever condition a life left them in. The long, unglamorous middle is establishing what each one actually is. Then it goes on to someone who wanted it. Looking clearly, doing the work, and handing a thing on in better order than you found it is a fair description of both.
Lines worth keeping
The poem opens with a man who has lost the path. It is the most honest first sentence in literature.
Midway upon the journey of our lifeI found myself within a forest dark,For the straightforward pathway had been lost.
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vitami ritrovai per una selva oscura,ché la diritta via era smarrita.
The opening lines of the poem. Dante is thirty-five, and lost.
The gate of Hell carries its own inscription, and the gate speaks in the first person.
Through me the way is to the city dolent;Through me the way is to eternal dole;Through me the way among the people lost.
Per me si va ne la città dolente,per me si va ne l'etterno dolore,per me si va tra la perduta gente.
The inscription over the gate of Hell. The gate speaks for itself.
Six lines later the same inscription closes, on the words most people know even if they have never opened the book.
All hope abandon, ye who enter in!
Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate
The last line of the same inscription, and the most quoted line in the poem.
Deep in the Inferno, Ulysses tells his crew why they should sail further. It is the line this house keeps nearest to hand.
Consider ye the seed from which ye sprang;Ye were not made to live like unto brutes,But for pursuit of virtue and of knowledge.
Considerate la vostra semenza:fatti non foste a viver come bruti,ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza
Ulysses, in the eighth circle, urging his crew past the known edge of the world. It is the last thing he persuades them to do.
And the line anyone who deals in the belongings of the dead learns to recognise, spoken by Francesca when Dante asks her to tell him her story.
There is no greater sorrowThan to be mindful of the happy timeIn misery, and that thy Teacher knows.
Nessun maggior doloreche ricordarsi del tempo felicene la miseria; e ciò sa 'l tuo dottore.
Francesca, in the circle of the lustful, asked to tell her story.
The line Dante never wrote
The most-quoted Dante line on the internet is not his.
“The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who remain neutral in times of moral crisis.”
It appears on quote sites, in speeches and on posters, always with his name beneath it. It is not in the Commedia, in any translation. The source is John F. Kennedy, speaking in Bonn in 1963: he said that the hottest places in hell were reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality, and he credited it to Dante. It was his own paraphrase of a reading of the poem, and it has circulated in Dante's name ever since.
What makes it worth correcting is that Dante did write about the people who commit to nothing — and he was harder on them than the misquotation is. They are not in the darkest part of Hell. They are not in Hell at all. They are stopped in the vestibule, outside the gate.
This miserable modeMaintain the melancholy souls of thoseWho lived withouten infamy or praise.
Questo misero modotegnon l'anime triste di coloroche visser sanza 'nfamia e sanza lodo.
Virgil, on the souls who committed to nothing. They are in the vestibule, not in Hell proper.
Then Virgil, a dozen lines later, delivers the whole of their punishment. It is not torment. It is dismissal.
No fame of them the world permits to be;Misericord and Justice both disdain them.Let us not speak of them, but look, and pass.
Virgil closes the subject, and Dante never returns to it.
Kennedy's version threatens the fence-sitters with fire. Dante's does something worse: it refuses to discuss them. For a poet who spent twenty years assigning precise consequences to everyone who had ever wronged him, declining to name someone is the harshest sentence he had.
About the name
Why is the auction house called Alighieri's?
Are you related to Dante Alighieri?
Did the owner change his name?
Are you the Alighieri jewellery brand?
Which translation do you quote?
Where to go from here
- Michael Alighieri — the owner.
- About the house — what we do, and where we do it.
- Upcoming auctions — what is in the saleroom now.
- Consignment — if you have something that should be sold properly.
- Provenance and estate jewelry — the auction words that do the most work.
English quotations are from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's translation of 1867, which is in the public domain; the Italian is Dante's own. Canto and line numbers follow Longfellow's lineation, so every passage above can be checked against the source.