Pescaia Santa Rosa

The Pescaia di Santa Rosa is a point on the Arno, where the river is dammed, making it possible to actually sit below the water level. In order to get there, you must climb over a low stone wall and descend a slope down to the riverbank. Once there, at low tide, you can walk out about halfway across the dam and sit down. While this particular spot is certainly not mentioned in the Commedia, rivers play an important role in the geography of the world which Dante constructs. Florence being, as Calvino would say, Dante’s “implicit city,” every river in the Commedia is in some sense a representation or a reflection of the Arno.

“The water that you see does not spring from/ a vein that vapor—cold—condensed—restores,/ like rivers that acquire or lose their force;/ it issues from a pure and changeless fountain,/ which by the will of God regains as much/ as, on two sides, it pours and it divides” (Purgatorio 28).

There are few other places—none that I know of along the Arno—where one is able to come into such visceral contact with the Arno river and the immense natural force it represents. Sitting out on the Pescaia di Santa Rosa, you hear the sound of water crashing onto water. You can meet the water on its own terms, at eye level, standing effectively beneath its surface. From this intimate vantage point, we see water doing as it always will in a perfectly arranged cosmos such as Dante’s: water will flow down. And it will do so with so much force, such deep conviction, for it has no other choice.