Virgil and Sordello’s Embrace in Dante’s Commedia: Latin Poeta Meets Vernacular Dicitore

Close to the foot of the mountain of Purgatory, while still outside the gate of Purgatory proper, Dante stages a scene of wishedfor political and cultural reconciliation. In Purgatorio 6, a troop of souls who repented late and were violently killed surrounds Dante and Virgil, clamoring for Dante’s attention. Just beyond this group, the two travelers encounter a solitary, seated figure who asks them where they hail from. “Mantoa...,” Virgil begins to reply, when the shade leaps up to identify himself as “Sordello / de la tua terra [Sordello from your city]” (74–75), and the two fellow citizens embrace. This imagined embrace between Sordello, a thirteenth-century troubadour born in Mantua, in the Italian region of Lombardy, and Virgil, the ancient author of the Aeneid (also born in Mantua), conveys both the future that Dante foresees for Italian literary production, as well as his political hopes for a pacification of the factional violence besetting northern Italy in his time, violence resulting from the ongoing conflict for hegemony between papal and imperial interests. Dante explicitly contrasts these two characters’ mutual benevolence to contemporary politics. Upon their embrace, Dante-narrator interrupts the narrative with a halfcanto digression in which he denounces contemporary Italy for engaging in internecine wars and civil strife when “quell’anima gentil [that noble soul],” Sordello, was ready to fête Virgil merely upon learning that they were both from the same northern Italian city. Is Dante here suggesting the importance of communal or regional identities even in the afterlife? It seems unlikely. Later, on the Purgatorial terrace of envy, when Dante-pilgrim asks if any of the souls are from Italy, the Sienese Sapia replies, “ciascuna è cittadina / d’una vera città [each of us is citizen of one true city]” (13.94–95), a seeming rebuke to her fellow Tuscan for his continued interest in divisive earthly categories.