Going astray: Dante’s so-called traviamento

In Purg., XXX and XXXI, upon arriving at the earthly paradise, Dante finds Beatrice, who criticizes him harshly for distancing himself from her after her death and turning his attention elsewhere (questi si tolse a me, e diessi altrui. Purg., XXX 126: “he took himself away from me, and gave himself to another”), following a false path (via non vera / imagini di ben seguendo false. Purg., XXX 130-31: “a way that was not true, going after false images of good”), thus interested in le cose fallaci or altra novità (Purg., XXXI 56 and 60: “deceptive things”; “other novelty”). The episode Beatrice is referring to, for which Dante scholars invented the convenient term of “traviamento”, has always been looked upon as autobiographically based, in the attempt, not without divergences of opinion, to arrive at a better understanding of its modalities and causes. Barbi, for example, viewed it as a moral crisis, represented allegorically by the pilgrim losing his way in the dark forest of sin. Others saw it as the inconstancy of a lover turning his attentions on other women, identified as the gentle woman of the Vita nuova or as the other protagonists of the Rime. Yet others perceived it as unfaithfulness to poetry in favour of philosophical studies, especially averroistiche leanings. Contini provides a metaliterary interpretation, referring to a stylistic straying. Some have also tried to combine all the various hypotheses, resorting to the observation that in Dante the biographical is determined by intellectual and literary choices. Whatever the phenomenology of the “traviamento”, Beatrice’s death certainly brought about a serious disruption in Dante’s experience, as the poet himself confesses explicitly in Purgatorio, presenting it essentially as “time prevailing upon eternity”, a gradual distancing from that “metaphysical goal”[1], to which Beatrice, by her mere presence, had drawn him.

[1] F. Mazzoni, Il canto XXXI del Purgatorio, Firenze, Le Monnier, 1965, pp. 57 e 64.