Dante's bestialities. Zoology of the Commedia

Flies, mosquitoes, fireflies and... Lions. Preface by Domenico De Martino

Alongside the innumerable human figures placed in the three realms of the afterlife (with their likenesses, stories, sins, beatitudes), there are frequent citations of animals in the Comedy , both ‘really’ encountered in the otherworldly system and, more often, evoked in similes and comparisons, as well as, in some cases, as figures in heraldic coats of arms: from mosquito todolphin (dalfino), from elephant to viper, from monkey (scimia) to firefly, from starlings to beaver (bivero), from lion (also lioncel) to foxes.

The zoological panorama is, in short, very rich, between common and exotic or mythological and imaginary animals (but here it is more properly just zoomorphic), and has been thoroughly investigated, even in very recent years, especially in the symbolic reflections that radiate from the moralised bestiaries, with new life and renewed energy, in Dante's work.

With a different point of view, the Florentine zoologist Marco Masseti now tackles the theme of animals in the Commedia. The author has, on the other hand, behind him similar effective interdisciplinary investigations between zoology, history and cultural traditions; suffice it to recall his La fattoria di Lorenzo Il Magnifico. Gli animali domestici e selvatici delle Cascine di Poggio a Caiano un'esperimento pilota nella gestione delle risorse agrosilvopastorali della Toscana del XV secolo.

With the serene humility of a precise technical competence - imbued with a lively personal curiosity -, Masseti acts as a guide, one might say, in Dante's ‘zoo’, taking us closer to the nature, types and environmental context of some of the (real) animals that appear in the Comedy. Among other things, the well-calibrated perspective effect between the situation then and now is particularly interesting in a framework of historical ethology.

In particular, the treatment points out the areal diffusion in the Middle Ages of the animals mentioned, and it is thus possible to identify and enhance, on the basis of concrete data, the possible actual skills of Dante in relation to what the Poet attributed, both descriptively and symbolically, to the various species. Maintaining a tone that is both serious and amused, Masseti outlines, with progressive approaches, Dante's ‘zoological’ culture, sometimes overestimated by some interpreters, showing how it instead corresponded to average information, normal in his environment and time, often nourished by the many fanciful popular beliefs that were widespread.

The book also offers, not secondarily, a rich and significant documentation of the presence of the animals examined here in the figurative art coeval with Dante, so that the discourse quickly expands to a wide-ranging reading that pinpoints the perception and place of the animal world in society and culture on the crest of the 14th century and a little beyond.

In reality, as Masseti reminds us, it was probably a small animal that was responsible for the death of the author of The Comedy: stung by an anopheles mosquito while returning from an embassy in Venice and crossing the marshes around Comacchio, Dante contracted the malaria that proved fatal to him. But it was only at the beginning of the 18th century that an Italian doctor realised the correlation between mosquito bite and malaria. Perhaps Dante, instead, in the delirium of fever, returned with infinite nostalgia to Florence and saw the hills , the Tuscan hillocks again, recognised the flight of insects, and imagined again the villan who at sunset, ‘as the fly yields to the mosquito, sees fireflies down the valley’ (Inferno XXVI, 28-29).