Chapter 2: Dante’s Circle in Space

“Dante’s Florence” (here and more expansively on the Web with images of the plaques and places at https://www.florin.ms/DanteFlorence.html , each numbered in bold in that guide and in this book) has interacting layers, between the historical one of columns, churches, towers, and palaces in stone and the flesh and blood people who lived among them; then Dante’s writings, themselves hypertexts, written on parchment, next printed on paper, or now electronically on the Web , layering his virtualized vision back upon flesh and blood and stone reality, mapping it. We can peel back its layers in a “theatre of memory”, in this case to Dante’s time, before the Renaissance, before the Medici, from 1265 to 1302, from his birth to his exile. This is the cityscape of his Vita nova and it will be what he nostalgically remembers of his neighborhood in his dream vision in exile, the Commedia, particularly in Paradiso XV–XVI.