Travelling/Wandering/Mapping
Dante deploys in the Commedia archetypal tropes of travel, including pilgrimage, biblical exodus, the journey to the underworld and to Italy, and the Bonaventuran itinerarium mentis in Deum, as an antidote to the existential experience of wandering in exile. His cosmological poem involved nothing less than a remapping of the cosmos, of the inhabited world, and of Italy. The poet re-inscribes his own place in the cosmos by alluding to his birth in Florence in three signature passages that reaffirm the Florentine citizenship denied the exiled poet and his sacred destiny within the cosmic order. The three passages are positioned strategically according to the medieval practice of numerical composition, one in each of the three canticles: Inferno XXIII, 94-6; Purgatorio XIV, 16-21; and Paradiso VI, 52-4.