The Legend of Pia de' Tolomei

The story

In the fifth canto of the Purgatorio, Dante walks through a crowd.

They are souls. Many, in a hurry, crowding around him because they have seen that his body casts a shadow, and recognise him as a living man. They all ask him the same thing: when you go back to the world, remember us, speak of us, carry a prayer to our loved ones.

They are souls of people who died violent deaths, and they still have the haste of those who were cut short. They speak one after another. The first tells and tells. The second too. They have long stories, names of battles, of rivers, of places.

Then, when all have finished, a third voice steps forward.

It is a low voice, and it is in no hurry. Before saying her own name, she thinks of Dante.

"When you have returned to the world," she says, "and rested from the long road..."

She thinks he must be tired. Before even asking, she wishes him rest.

"...remember me, who am the Pia."

And then, two lines that have stayed in the minds of those who have read them for more than seven hundred years.

"Siena mi fece, mi disfece Maremma." Siena made me, Maremma unmade me.

Siena made her: that is where she was born. The Maremma unmade her: that is where she ended. There is nothing more. She does not say how, she does not say why, she accuses nobody. She says only that there are two places and a life in between.

Then, once more, a last sentence, almost under her breath:

"He knows it, who first, in marrying me, had put on my finger the ring with his gem."

She does not name him. She says "he", and leaves it there. And in the text Dante does not answer: there are no words of his, after hers.

They are seven lines. Seven in all, in a poem of more than fourteen thousand lines. A drop in the sea. And yet they are among the most famous of the Comedy, and some people know them by heart without ever having read the whole. Sometimes little is needed, to endure.

For this reason, after her, everyone has asked who the Pia was.

The first commentators, those who read the Comedy a few decades after Dante, explained it like this. Pia was a noblewoman of Siena, of the Tolomei family. She had married Nello d'Inghiramo dei Pannocchieschi, an important man, lord of Castel di Pietra, in the heart of the Maremma.

The castle stood on a rock. From above you could see the whole plain around Grosseto and the hills where metals were mined. It was a place made for looking far, and for being seen from afar.

Here, the tradition tells, Pia would have ended. A tradition, I repeat: not a proven fact.

We do not know how she lived in that castle. We can imagine her at the window, with the Maremma before her and the wind changing direction. We can imagine her thinking of Siena, its streets, its bells, a city of red brick left behind her. But these thoughts are ours. The tradition says little, and says things that do not resemble each other.

Imagine a woman looking far from a rock, and understanding she cannot go back. Imagine the sound of footsteps in the corridor. Imagine the silence of a castle where nobody calls you by name. Here the story has no more words, and it is right to have none.

One version says Nello had shut her in the castle. Another, that she was thrown from a window. Yet another, that she fell from the highest tower. Some say it was he who ordered it, because he had fallen in love with another woman, Margherita Aldobrandeschi, countess of Sovana and of Pitigliano, and wanted to be free to marry her. Others, older, say it was jealousy: a sudden suspicion, never proven, that she had betrayed him.

The versions change. On one point, though, the tales agree: Pia died in the castle, far from Siena, and of her nothing remained but a name.

And then you understand why, in Dante's lines, she speaks as she does.

The other souls, in Purgatory, tell their stories. She does not. She asks only to be remembered. Not to take revenge and not to be pitied, but so that someone, in the world of the living, will still pronounce her name.

Scholars today are cautious. They say the identification of Pia with a Tolomei has never been proven. That in Nello's papers no wife with this name appears. That perhaps the woman Dante speaks of was another, and that her story became mixed with that of another family, in another castle, with another husband. Other hypotheses speak of a noblewoman of a different house, married by proxy.

The mystery remains.

But the castle is still there, in ruins. On the rock remain the walls, the base of a small tower, great squared stones. Every year, on the first Saturday of August, at Gavorrano people dress in old costumes and re-enact that fall, and call it the Salto della Contessa, the Countess's Leap.

Some come for the festival and some out of curiosity. Someone, in silence, for another reason.

Because Dante's seven lines, seven centuries later, have done what the Pia asked. Nobody knows for certain who she was. But everyone, after her, has remembered her name.

Siena mi fece, mi disfece Maremma.