Biography | Dante Alighieri — Sentenced in Absentia at the Palazzo del Podesta

People treat Dante’s exile as a mood that settled over him in Rome.

It was a sentence read in this palace.

On 27 January 1302, Cante de’ Gabrielli da Gubbio, the new podestà installed after Charles of Valois entered Florence on 1 November 1301, condemned Dante in absentia.

The original of that act later burned.

A copy survives in the Libro del Chiodo, now in the State Archive.

The charge was baratteria: corruption and illicit gain during and after the priorate of 1300.

The penalty was five thousand small florins within three days, two years outside Tuscany if he paid, perpetual ban from office either way, and confiscation if he did not pay.

He did not appear.

The curia treated contumacy as a confession.

He was in or near Rome, held back after an embassy the Whites had sent to Boniface VIII in October 1301.

He never saw Florence again.

On 10 March 1302, in the audience hall now called the Salone di Donatello, the same court raised the penalty.

If he were taken, he was to be burned so that he would die.

The Palazzo del Podestà, later the Bargello, already held the city’s foreign judge.

Giotto’s workshop would paint Dante among the blessed in the Magdalen Chapel here within a generation.

The portrait arrived after the sentence.

The document came first.

Photo: Sailko, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons