Cervia and Dante's trails
Cervia is mentioned in the Divine Comedy
The verses appear in Canto XXVII of the Inferno, entitled "Guido da Montefeltro" and are quoted on a marble plaque set on the facade of the Town Hall in Cervia.
“Ravenna has maintained for many years its state unchanged: Polenta’s eagle broods there and its spreading plumage overshadows Cervia”.
At the time, Cervia was under the domination of Ravenna’s lords “Da Polenta”, who were then competing with Venice for dominion over the salt pans.
Francesca Da Polenta, the same lady who was later to become caught up in a tragic story of love and adultery with Paolo, was on her way from Ravenna to Rimini to marry the eldest son of the Malatesta family, a journey that must have brought her to Cervia too.
She would have been fascinated by the variety of the local landscapes: the salt pans and the pine forest, defined as the southern "offshoots" of the "Divine dense forest, alive with green" celebrated by Dante in the XXVIII Canto of Purgatorio, as well as the city itself and the sea, the leitmotif that is nowadays the Riviera’s main attraction in summer.
The first documents relating to Cervia
The earliest documents relating to Cervia date back to the early Middle Ages, around the 10th century, and mainly concern its salt pans; this was probably the end of the period of the transformation of the marshes into a salt basin.
Cervia’s history and the fate were closely linked to the salt pans from when these were first established, and this link remained until very recently.
The presence of the salt pans was documented with certainty as early as the tenth century. In the same period the place-name "Cervia" began to prevail over the earlier “Ficocle” (place famous for algae).
The old town, Cervia Vecchia was located in the centre of what are now the salt pans.
The maps of the time testify to the fact that Cervia Vecchia was surrounded by town walls and salt marshes, with three entrances connected to the mainland by drawbridges and a defensive fortress built, according to legend, by Barbarossa.
The move from the Cervia Vecchia settlement to Cervia Nuova (the current one) took place in the second half of the 17th century.
In this period the gravitational centre of the Cervia community began to shift towards the sea offering a much healthier climate than the marshy area of Cervia Vecchia, which was often afflicted by malaria.
Shortly thereafter, there was an increase in commercial and mercantile traffic leading to the construction of buildings and infrastructures that could support this growth such as the Torre San Michele (a watchtower used for defence) and the Salt Warehouses.
The so-called “tourism boom” did not start until the eighteenth century, but it then produced a new sector of business activity, namely tourism.
Cervia's links to the life of Dante
Fact and figures
The biographical events of Dante's later years are linked to the relations between Ravenna and Venice for the dominion of Cervia’s salt pans.
- Cervia is mentioned in the Divine Comedy in Canto XXVII of the Inferno. The verses are displayed on a commemorative plaque that was placed on the façade of the Municipality of Cervia to celebrate the sixth centenary of Dante's death (September 1921). Here are Dante’s verses from the XXVII Canto of the Divine Comedy are inscribed on this marble plaque: “Ravenna has maintained for many years its state unchanged: Polenta’s eagle broods there and its spreading plumage overshadows Cervia”. At the time, Cervia was under the domination of Ravenna’s lords “Da Polenta”, who were then competing with Venice for dominion over the salt pans.
- The lines could be paraphrased as follows: "Ravenna has been in the situation in which it now finds itself for many years: the eagle of the Da Polenta lordship dominates it, overshadowing Cervia with its wings". The reconstruction of the events in Cervia in 1921 can be linked to the large exhibition “INCLUSA EST FLAMMA. Ravenna 1921: the Sixth Centenary of Dante's death ", exhibited in the Classense Library in Ravenna.
- The great architect Camillo Morigia (1743-1795) designed Dante's tomb in Ravenna in 1780 as well as the Casa delle Aie (1790) and the Oratory of San Lorenzo di Castiglione (1794) in Cervia.
- Film director Pupi Avati, commissioned to make a film for the centenary inspired by Giovanni Boccaccio's “Trattatello in laude di Dante”, had already shot another of his films in Cervia (“Zeder”, in 2003).
- The pine forest of Cervia is the southern section of the “Divine dense forest, alive with green” celebrated by Dante in Canto XXVIII of Purgatorio where reference is made to “the pine-woods on Chiassi’s shore” (Chiassi being the present day “Classe”).
Official Tourist Information Site of Cervia