Florence Baptistery
The Baptistery was a building quite familiar, and dear, to Dante. It is also part of the Inferno scenery. In canto nineteenth, where the sin of simony (the practice of selling or buying spiritual offices, clergy promotions, consecrated objects) is punished, Dante runs into souls wedged head-first in the very floor of Hell. Their feet and legs protrude from holes in the rock; holes, Dante tells the readers, which resemble the fonts inside San Giovanni Baptistery in Florence—“il mio bel San Giovanni” (my handsome San Giovanni), as Dante addresses it, moved by the sudden memory of the Florence monument. Apparently, those fonts where also the site where Dante accomplished a quasi-heroic mission (here in Hell, and nowhere else, diligently recorded), when he broke one of them in the attempt to save someone from drowning. The reference to the autobiographical fact is brandished by Dante as a proof of his own integrity, juxtaposed to the mischievous conduct of the damned souls: They [the openings in the rock] did not seem to me less broad or more/than those that in my handsome San Giovanni/were made to serve as basins for baptizing;/and one of these, not many years ago,/I broke for someone who was drowning in it:/and let this be my seal to set men straight.’ Inferno 19, 16-21.
