ABSTRACT
Echoing the younger Dante’s phrase on the feelings of the pilgrims travelling through Florence to Rome, who ‘forse pensano de li loro amici lontani’ (Vn, xl), this celebrated opening of a canto, describing the hour as night-time approaches on Dante’s first day in Purgatory, has long been seen as an expression of the nostalgia of all those far from their home and friends, and of Dante himself, the exiled poet and ‘sailor’ across the waters of his poem (Purg., i. 1–3). The canto closes with an autobiographical allusion to the circumstances of his physical exile from Florence, in Currado Malaspina’s prophecy that within seven years from the springtime of 1300 he would experience at first hand the generosity, valour, and virtue of the Malaspina family in the Lunigiana (Purg., viii. 121–39).
