Book Review: "Dante" by Alessandro Barbero

When I read a biography, especially about a person who has been dead for over a certain amount of time, I want to see some intense amounts of research. I want to see people reading the documentation where available from this time, I want to see other biographies coming into play and I especially want to see drawn conclusions from the pros and cons of each primary and secondary source. Whilst reading Dante by Alessandro Barbero, I realised one thing - that all of this can be done and all of it can be argued and critiqued while the book covers context and ideas of the time in which our subject lived.

In the book Dante - Alessandro Barbero details the life, times and writings of the poet Dante Alighieri. Personally, I have read The Divine Comedy multiple times over the course of ten years and since then, I have come to understand that it was not a product of its time. Instead, it was far ahead of anything of even a similar time period. The very beginnings of the Early Italian Renaissance.

The book goes through Dante's background in meticulous detail, looking at what we know about him, what we may know about him through records and what we can speculate on about him from various sources that are all clearly, in some way, biased. I think the book does a great job of sifting through which speculations may or may not be true by tracing things back and looking, like an investigation, pragmatically at the ideas displayed by the various secondary sources.

When going through the story of Dante's adulthood and writings, there are a few sections before it where it details how Dante got his last name, how he got his first name and how he came to be a part of his family. I found these points not only interesting to read, but interesting to muse over since it isn't everyday you find the history of someone's family when they lived seven-hundred years' ago. The very thought that we would have so much information on Dante, even up to the point where his father died whilst Dante was either still a child or an early teenager seems to be more amazing than a lot of people might think.

We also have points about Dante's education which argue between two biographies written shortly after Dante's death in which it is discussed about what Dante studied, why and when. One thing they can both agree on is philosophy. Dante read a lot of philosophy and histories, and as the book details that history was still not yet a respected subject, it may have been necessary for him to learn it outside of school.

One thing I did love especially about this book is that it kept bringing in the biography written about Dante by Giovanni Boccaccio, author of The Decameron who admired Dante intensely. I adore both Giovanni Boccaccio and Dante Alighieri and studied both of them in order to complete my undergraduate dissertation in 2017 (which was easy because I had read them both before then as well). But it was really nice seeing them both mentioned in the same text with one upholding the other through means of fairly accurate biographical information - especially regarding Dante's education.

In conclusion, I see this as an essential biography for anyone about to embark on their journey into Dante, anyone who like me has studied Dante numerous times before and enjoyed it and really, anyone who just wants to know more about the man who penned what has become one of the most famous poems in all of human history - The Divine Comedy.