Concerned mainly with achieving dominance in Mediterranean trade, Venice was immune to the struggles between the Guelfs and Ghibellines that afflicted the other cities in central and northern Italy during the Middle Ages. Venice thus maintained a detached position in the strife between Church and Empire, intervening only when its commercial interests were affected. Also on account of this particular political profile, Venice never really featured as an important place in Dante’s wanderings as an exile. The only definite information concerning Dante in Venice relates to August 1321, when, during his stay in Ravenna, he acted as envoy for his host Guido Novello da Polenta, taking part in a delicate diplomatic mission that aimed to solve a troublesome dispute related to the monopoly on smuggled salt that was causing strife between Venice and the Polenta Court at Ravenna. Dante left Venice between late July and early August that same year, returning before the mission had been finalized: during his journey, near the marshes of Comacchio, he had contracted a malaria fever which was soon to lead to his death. The lack of documentary evidence means that visits to Venice prior to 1321 are a matter of conjecture and therefore unreliable, such as the information in the non-canonical letter to Guido da Polenta that Dante was in Venice in 1314 to deliver an oration in Latin in honour of the newly elected doge Giovanni Soranzo. On the other hand, the idea that Dante was in the city between 1304 and 1305 to visit the busy Venetian Arsenal, later recalled in great detail in the famous arzanà simile, in Inf., XXI 7-18, is rather suggestive.

Drawing depicting the Venetian arsenal in an incunabulum of the Commedia.

Enciclopedia Dantesca, Rome, Istituto Italiano dell’Enciclopedia, vol. V, 1976.