Il poeta alle "scuole delli religiosi": Dante, Pietro delle Travi e il convento di Santa Croce (1294-1296)

The monograph investigates the intellectual formation of Dante Alighieri during the crucial years between 1294 and 1296, when the poet—according to his own account in the Convivio—attended the “schools of the religious orders and the disputations of the philosophisers.” The book seeks to identify, with the greatest possible precision, the cultural and institutional milieu of Florence in which Dante was educated before his exile. The analysis focuses in particular on the Franciscan convent of Santa Croce and on the teaching activity of Pietro delle Travi (lector theologiae between 1294 and 1296). It examines largely unpublished manuscript sources, including the Lectura on Peter Lombard’s Sentences and Pietro delle Travi’s quaestiones disputatae. These documents provide direct evidence of the doctrinal knowledge— theological, philosophical, and astronomical—transmitted during those years through the continuous practice of the disputatio. The volume demonstrates that Dante’s Florentine works, especially the Vita nova and several Rime, consciously absorb and rework the vocabulary and conceptual frameworks learned in these environments. Dante draws on Aristotelian sources (the Metaphysics, the Physics) and scholastic concepts, resemanticizing them in order to confer theological meaning upon his texts. For instance, he employs a sententia from the Metaphysics to describe Beatrice as a separate substance (Vn XLI), and engages with contemporary doctrinal questions—such as the nature of the neutral angels or the eclipse at Christ’s Passion—that resurface later in the Commedia. The work thus highlights how Dante’s education was grounded in orality and dialectical interaction, shaping his literary production toward the attainment of intellectual authority. By assimilating and at the same time transcending the knowledge of the Florentine lectores, Dante transforms the Vita nova into a hybrid and syncretic text capable of conveying a “truth of faith” (veritas fidei) through the language of vernacular literature.