Dante’s parents

Dante’s father, Alighiero II, was born around 1220 and was dead by 1283. He was introduced at an early age to the family tradition of financial dealings, trading in money and land. He practised his profession skilfully, especially in the Prato area, becoming quite wealthy, as indicated by his children’s substantial property inheritance. It does not seem that he, certainly a Guelf, took an active part in Florentine political life. It even appears that in 1260, after the victory of the Ghibellines, he was spared from exile. His first wife, Bella, who dies at a young age, may have been the daughter of the Judge Durante degli Abati (after whom Dante was probably named). Alighiero and Bella had two children, Dante and his sister, whose name is unknown and who married a town crier named Leone Poggi. Alighiero remarried Lapa di Chiarissimo Cialuffi soon after Bella’s death, and had another two children: Francesco, who got into debt at least once in order to help out his exiled stepbrother, and a daughter named Tana.

Dante makes no explicit mention in his works of his parents, stepmother, sister or stepbrothers. Some readers, however, believe that the donna giovane e gentile…di propinquissima sanguinitade congiunta (“a young and gentle woman…very closely related to me”) who lovingly attends to the ill poet in Vita Nuova, XXIII 11-12 is in fact his sister. In Inf., VIII 45, addressing Dante, Virgil also makes a reverent, but somewhat generic reference to Bella, drawn from a well-known verse of the Gospel (Luke, 11 27): Benedetta colei che ’n te s’incinse (“Blessed is she who carried you in her womb”). Attributable more to the conventions of comic-realistic literature than actual data are Forese Donati’s sarcastic reference to Tana and Francesco, and his accusation that Dante’s father is a despicable usurer, unworthy even of burial, in the sonnets of the tenzone.