A birthplace from 1910

This house is a hundred and fifteen years old and pretends to have stood for eight hundred. An architect built it in 1910 in medieval style, tower and all, at the moment Italy wanted to give its national poet a birthplace to call his own.

What does hold true is the spot. The Alighieri family owned houses on this block, and the archives from those years list their names among those of the neighbours. They belonged to the lower nobility, with enough property to matter and too little to be untouchable, and that in-between position explains a lot of what happened to Dante later on.

The width of the street and the height of the walls around you capture his world well. It spanned a few hundred metres square, and within it you knew who had married whom, who hated whom, and who owned which tower. In his day Florence had perhaps sixty thousand inhabitants, and the people who counted knew each other personally.

Inside the museum you'll mostly find explanations of his life and his work, so if you already know the poem you'll get less out of it than someone just starting with it.

A few steps further along, on your left, stands a small church with a plain stone facade.