N. 24. - Inscription and coat of arms to commemorate the PORTINARI in Via del Corso, Palazzo Cepparello:
Reading edition
Sovra candido vel, cinta d’oliva Donna m’apparve sotto verde manto Vestita del color di fiamma viva. DANTE, Purgatorio, XXX, 31–33. In white veil with olive wreathed A virgin in my view appeared, beneath Green mantle robed in hue of living flame. H. F. Cary’s translation.
In these words Dante describes the appearance of Beatrice, come down from Paradise to become his guide in the place of Virgil, who then vanishes. Pelli observes, that Dante makes Beatrice appear clothed in the colours of the three theological virtues. The white veil being the symbol of Faith, the green mantle of Hope, the red tunic of Charity. This would justify the idea of those, who would see in Beatrice only a theological, poetical symbol. But a few verses further on we read, that at the sight of her he felt “the power sublime, that had already pierced me through, ere from my boyhood I had yet come forth”. Meaning his love for Beatrice Portinari, the daughter of Folco Portinari, whom he first met and began to love at the end of his ninth and in the beginning of her ninth year, as he tells us in his “Vita Nuova”, his first poetic work, which is dedicated to this love, and at the end of which he wrote the remarkable aspiration, that God would take him to himself after he had written of Beatrice such things as were never yet written of woman. It was literally fulfilled, when the Commedia was finished, twenty-five years later. Beatrice had been dead ten years at the date of the poem. Her father, Folco di Ricovero Portinari, founded the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova and other charitable institutions in 1280 and died 1289.
CONSORTERIA OF THE CAVALCANTI