Dante Alighieri (Florence 1265 – Ravenna 1321) refers to the Maremma on several occasions, describing it as intricate, wild, and difficult to traverse or govern in his masterpiece, The Divine Comedy. Our land is portrayed as a victim of the corruption and political decay of Italian noble families. Its ancient rulers, the Aldobrandeschi counts of Santa Fiora, have fallen into decline, crushed by the power of the young city-state of Siena.
Medieval Maremma was an inhospitable area, filled with impenetrable thickets and unhealthy, noxious swamps. When Dante describes the wood of suicides—the infernal circle where those who committed violence against themselves are punished by being transformed into “gnarled and tangled trees”—the immediate comparison is with the lucus of Maremma, situated at its extreme borders, Cecina and Corneto:
“nor are such harsh and dense thickets found / in those savage wilds that hate the cultivated lands / between Cecina and Corneto.”
The marshes and stagnant waters symbolically link malaria and Maremma, represented by its horrific inhabitants: the snakes infesting the pit of thieves, so numerous that Dante emphatically claims: “I do not think Maremma has so many as these.”
The sorrowful reputation of Maremma as a sinister and impervious place is further evoked in Inferno XXIX, where Dante describes the horrors of the tenth bolgia, claiming that such a spectacle of suffering would not be seen even if: “the plagues of Maremma and Sardinia / were all gathered together in one ditch.”
The ancient blood and the noble deeds
of my ancestors made me so arrogant
that, forgetting our common mother,
I held every man in contempt.
(Purgatorio, XV, 63)
Of Guelph lineage (while the other branch of the family, the Counts of Santafiora, supported the Ghibellines), he continued his father’s policy of opposing the Ghibelline Siena, even with the help of the Florentines. Omberto held lordship over Campagnatico, in the Ombrone Valley of Grosseto, from which he launched raids to rob travellers and harm the Sienese. He died in 1259, likely fighting valiantly against his eternal enemies, who had organised an expedition to kill him. According to other 14th-century accounts, Omberto was suffocated in his bed by Sienese assassins disguised as friars.
Omberto Aldobrandeschi appears in Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, in Purgatorio. The poet sees in him the sin of pride—the pride born of belonging to an ancient lineage, leading him to disdain others and forget the common origin of all humanity. It is Omberto Aldobrandeschi himself, bent under the “boulder / that tames his haughty neck,” like all the proud, who admits his guilt. Notably, Dante had attributed this same sin to himself, among his gravest faults (represented by the lion in the first canto).