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.”
Santa Fiora, in the Middle Ages an Aldobrandeschi county and therefore Ghibelline, is mentioned by Dante Alighieri in the sixth canto of the Purgatorio in the Divine Comedy. This citation has been recorded in at least three different versions over the course of history (“how obscure it is”; “how secure it is”; “how it is cared for”), although the most likely remains the following:
“Come, cruel one, come and see the oppression
of your nobles, and tend to their wounds,
and you will see how dark Santa Fiora is!”
(Purgatorio, Canto VI, verse 111)
Dante laments the politics of Emperor Albert of Habsburg, who neglects the Italian communes. Dante specifically refers to the town as an example of the Ghibelline power now in decline, represented by the Aldobrandeschi family, the ancient lords of the area.
Today, Santa Fiora is a splendid village on Mount Amiata, rich in attractions and activities, but the memory of Dante’s citation remains present in the central square. Here, a rectangular plaque is displayed to welcome visitors, bearing the Dantean verse.