In 2021 the seven hundred years since the death of Dante Alighieri occur - it was 1321. Author rooted in his time, with his works he embarked on a journey through history and man, between emotions, hopes and eternal feelings.

But what did Dante eat and how did he consider food? Apparently he wasn't very greedy. He believed that he had to eat to live, not vice versa, and he considered it unbecoming to indulge excessively in food. At the table of the gentlemen who hosted him, he will surely have respected the dictates of the Church to abstain from "fat" on Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays of each week, the eve of holidays and in the forty days of Lent, replacing meat with fish. . In this regard, a popular Venetian anecdote tells that Dante was invited to lunch by the Doge on a lean day and he was served small fish, full of thorns. The poet did not protest, but put one in his ear; the Doge, intrigued, asked for clarification and Dante replied that, since his father had died in that stretch of the Adriatic, he hoped that the fish could give him some information, but "El dise him and his companions - pointing to those on the plate - being too young and they do not remember, but that here they are old and great, that they will give me news ”. Once the allusion occurred, the Doge ordered that he be served a larger fish.

At the time of Dante the fish, rather than fished, were raised in fish ponds, and in canto V of Paradise he states: "As a fish pond that is quiet and pure, fish are drawn to what comes from holes so that they … ". Of eels we read in Purgatory, with Pope Martin IV, placed among the gluttons who repented on the verge of death: "... purge by fasting / the eels of Bolsena and the vernaccia"; a great eater, so much so that on his death the epitaph was composed "the eels are happy that this man lies dead here, who flayed them as if to punish them for their death". In Hell, on the other hand, in canto XXIX, where metal forgeries are punished, about Griffolino d'Arezzo and Capocchio da Siena, Dante uses a rather violent simile comparing the scratching of their nails to the knife that scales a fish from the hard scales: “and yes the scabies were drawn down / like a knife of scardova the scales / or of other fish that has it wider”.

For Alighieri the sin of gluttony was one of the seven deadly sins, considered one of the most serious in the Middle Ages, since it tended to teach to control futile desires and excessive consumption of food. He rarely wrote explicitly about food, although he often used it as a metaphor, a common use in his time.

The very title of his encyclopedic work, which has remained unfinished, is a food metaphor: the Convivio shows how the concept of nutrition is also used by Dante as a metaphor for knowledge, that is, expressing the appropriation of science and spiritual values ​​in general. The first paragraphs of the work elaborate in detail the metaphor: “… Oh blessed are those few who sit at that table where the bread of the angels is manicured! And miserable are those who have common food with the sheep! […] Those who at such a high table are fed not without mercy are the same as those who in beastly pasture see grass and acorns without eating ”.

In the Divine Comedy, food has mainly a negative meaning, becoming an instrument for the realization of a sinful condition that translates into yielding to the pleasures of food and therefore to the much feared sin of gluttony which, if for the lower classes there remained an inexorably never appeased desire, for the rich he was a faithful companion in daily life. The consequences to all this, as expected, translate into the punishments inflicted in Hell and in Purgatory. What about the punishment reserved for gluttons? As in life they have been obsessed with the recurring thought of food, so they are continually beaten by the rain. Cerberus, a three-headed dog, makes them devoured by the devourers they were. The poet states that among the possible faults for which one can be responsible, that of ending up in the group where there are gluttons is the least dignified, as well as the punishment suffered, that of remaining weak under a constant black and smelly rain, is the most unworthy of the various possibilities. But in the song which deals with this sin, the sixth, there are no references to food. In the first canto of the Inferno, however, Dante speaks of the three fairs at the entrance: the loin, which represents lust, the lion which symbolizes pride, and the she-wolf. It is the latter, on which the author dwells at length, that is the most controversial. It represents greed and avarice and is the most dangerous of the three. Greed is a term for hunger for earthly goods, not just for money, but for everything that is not spiritual. There is therefore a further judgment on the "hunger" of what is superfluous.

In Hell it is not only food that falls within the punishment, but also the different aspects that characterize the gastronomic world. In a certain sense, the act of cooking becomes a vehicle for administering punishment to the damned. During his journey, Dante arrives in the fifth pit of the eighth circle (malebolge), where barattieri, ie traffickers in public life, are condemned, immersed in boiling pitch. Already in medieval legends hell was described as a kitchen in which devils busied themselves, so next to the barterers, in cantos XXI and XXII of Hell, he places a patrol of ten devils that flutter in the pit like bats. The great poet compares them to the scullery maids who dip the meat into the pot with their hooks on behalf of the cooks. Their task also seems to be to go to Earth to take the souls of sinners. “Not otherwise the cooks to their vassals” and he continues “… they make the boiler mold in the middle, the meat with them hooks, why not roosters…” (XXI, 55-57). This scene clearly delineates the image of hell as a large kitchen where the devils, monstrous cooks, instruct their scullers to immerse the flesh of the damned well so that it does not emerge and therefore cook perfectly.

The alimentary aspect is also present in Purgatory. Here the astonishment of the explant souls, as soon as they landed on the beach, is compared to the tasting of a new dish: "The crowd that remained there, wild seems to be the place, gazing around like the one who tastes nine things ..." (II, 59-54) . The punishment for the gluttonous is linked to the sin committed and the souls atone for the sin of gluttony by suffering from hunger and thirst. And their suffering is made more acute by the sight of clear water and tasty fruits, which however they cannot touch, which hang from two trees placed at the entrance and exit of the cornice and from a source of water that gushes from the rock and rises to the top. They have a frightening thinness, to the point that the skin adheres totally to the bones and the face is so gaunt that you could read the word OMO, formed by the line of the eyebrows and the eyes.

A completely different story in Paradise, where feasting is no longer a source of sin but a reward for a correct life. Here Dante returns to using food as a metaphor; the celestial hosts live on the "pan of the angels" (II, 11) that is of mystical contemplation, together with the blessed and saints who symbolically feed on the divine mysteries, enjoying them in celestial banquets and tables. In this case gluttony is lawful because it is a gluttony of bliss, the act of feasting becomes a reward for a righteous and pure life; the act of eating is elevated to a very important spiritual gesture that diners perform in the presence of God. And what about drinks? Dante's drink par excellence is water; the other is milk, which he mentions with allegorical meanings: in canto XXIII of Paradise, he compares the reaching out of the blessed towards Mary to the child's outburst of tenderness towards the mother "after the milk took". Wine, on the other hand, is the drink that causes the numbness of the senses and mental faculties. It is also the metaphor of the thirst for truth, because since ancient times it was connected to sincerity, as demonstrated by the motto in vino veritas: it is demonstrated in canto X of Paradise, when, to indicate those who refuse to satisfy the desire for truth of another, affirms "who denied you the wine of his vial / for your thirst ...".