Badia Fiorentina Church
The Badia was founded in 978 by the Marchioness of Tuscany, and assigned to the Cassinese Benedictines. It is also a place crucially connected to the Dante and his literary work. In the Summer of 1373, a good number of Florentine citizens presented a petition to the Government of the People and Commonwealth in Florence, requesting to appoint a lecturer who could expound in public the lines of Dante’s Comedy. As the petition reads, these Florentines were “desirous of being instructed in the book of Dante, wherefrom, both to the shunning of vice, and to the acquisition of virtue, no less than in ornaments of eloquence, even the unlearned may receive instruction.” Only seventy-one years before, Dante had been accused of bribery, and condemned first to pay a fine (which Dante refused to do, claiming it would have meant pleading guilty) then to be permanently exiled from Florence. The petition was accepted. The appointed lecturer was another renown Tuscan author, Giovanni Boccaccio, who, on October 23, 1373, right in this church, opened his series of readings of Dante’s Comedy. The petition give specific indication as to the calendar of the lectures, scheduled “on consecutive days not being holidays, and in consecutive lectures, as is customary in these cases.” Boccaccio fell ill, and he interrupted his lectures at the canto seventeenth of the Inferno. Following Boccaccio’s suggestion, the title became Divine Comedy (Dante and his contemporaries would refer to it simply as Comedy).
