Post

Botticelli painted me with the laurel crown I never actually received. I was promised the laureation in Florence. I was never able to return to Florence to receive it. I died in Ravenna in exile, aged fifty-six, in the service of a lord who was not my own city.

The Commedia was written in exile. Hell was written first, in the bitterness of expulsion; Purgatory in the long middle years of wandering; Paradise at the end, when I had either made peace with the exile or learned to pretend I had. I am not certain which. But the poem was completed. I began it in darkness and ended it in light. That, at least, is the correct direction.