La Vita Nuova
Dante Alighieri
Dante's first book: the poems he wrote for Beatrice Portinari, and his own account of why he wrote each one.
Dante Alighieri put La Vita Nuova together in Florence in the early 1290s, a few years after the death of Beatrice Portinari in 1290. The book gathers 31 of the poems he had written over the previous ten years, mostly sonnets, and joins them with prose.[1] The prose tells the story behind each poem. He first saw Beatrice when they were both nine, and she greeted him nine years later. When she stopped greeting him, he learned to write poems that praised her and asked for nothing back. Then she died. The last page promises that, if he lives, he will write about her “what hath not before been written of any woman.”[2] He kept the promise in The Divine Comedy.
The title comes from the book's first sentence. Dante describes his memory as a book, with a heading written in Latin near its start: Incipit vita nova, “Here begins the new life.”[3] Modern Italian editions often use that Latin spelling, Vita nova. English readers mostly know it as La Vita Nuova, or The New Life.
The poems are 23 sonnets, 2 longer sonnets, a ballata, two single stanzas of canzone and 3 full canzoni, the long formal songs of Italian poetry. Dante chose them from verse he had written between about 1283 and 1293. Scholars date the finished book to 1292 or 1293, and some place it as late as 1294 or 1295. Modern editions divide the prose into 42 chapters.[1]
After most poems, Dante adds a short section explaining how it is built: where its parts begin and what each part says. Readers either skip these or find them the most revealing pages in the book. They show a young poet explaining his own technique while he is still grieving.[2]
Dante wrote the book for a friend. His first sonnet asked the poets of Florence to explain a dream, and one of the answers came from Guido Cavalcanti, whom Dante calls “the first among my friends.” Their friendship began there.[2] The book names Cavalcanti as the reader it was written for.[1]
Dante is nine when he first sees Beatrice, who is nearly nine, dressed in crimson. He says his heart shook. Nine years later he sees her again in a Florence street, dressed in white between two older women, and she greets him. The same night he dreams that Love holds Beatrice asleep in his arms and makes her eat Dante's burning heart. He writes a sonnet about the dream and sends it to the poets of Florence.[2]
To hide whom he really loves, Dante pretends to love another woman, whom he calls a screen for the truth. The pretence works too well. People talk, and Beatrice stops greeting him when they meet. Dante is desperate. A group of women asks him what his love is for, if he cannot even bear to be near her. He decides his poems will simply praise her, whatever she does.[2]
The poems of praise follow. The best known begins, in Rossetti's translation, “My lady looks so gentle and so pure / When yielding salutation by the way.” Dante writes that when Beatrice passed, people ran to look at her and said, “This is not a woman, but one of the beautiful angels of Heaven.”[2]
Beatrice's father dies, and Dante falls ill and dreams of her death. Then she does die. Dante is in the middle of writing a canzone about her when the news comes, and he leaves it unfinished on the page. Rossetti's note dates her death to 9 June 1290. Dante then spends a whole chapter on how the number nine runs through her life.
A young woman looks at him with pity from a window, and for a time he is drawn to her. He feels ashamed and returns to Beatrice's memory. In the last chapter he has a vision that he does not describe. He decides to write nothing more about Beatrice until he can do it worthily, and hopes to write of her what has never been written of any woman.
Dante never gives her surname. Giovanni Boccaccio, writing some decades later, identified her as the daughter of Folco Portinari, a leading Florentine citizen. He said the first meeting took place at a May Day party at the Portinari house in 1274. Edmund Gardner's Catholic Encyclopedia article repeats the identification with care: she was “probably the daughter of Folco Portinari,” and she married Simone de' Bardi. She died in June 1290.
Nothing in La Vita Nuova depends on those facts, and Dante never mentions her marriage. The book records looks, greetings, a withheld greeting and a death. Gardner describes Dante's love as spiritual rather than the courtly worship troubadours offered married women. Boccaccio adds that in later years Dante was greatly ashamed of the little book, though Boccaccio himself thought it very beautiful for a young man's work.
Dante counts in nines throughout. He sees Beatrice at the end of his ninth year. She greets him nine years later, at the ninth hour of the day. When she dies, he works out that it was the ninth day of the month by the Italian calendar and the ninth month by the Syrian one. He adds that the year was 1290, when the perfect number ten had been completed nine times in the thirteenth century.
He then gives his reason. Nine is three times three, and three is the number of the Trinity, so Beatrice was herself a nine, a miracle whose root was God. Modern readers can find the arithmetic strange. For Dante it was a way of saying that the girl from his street belonged to a larger order, which is exactly where The Divine Comedy later places her.
The free English version most people meet is by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the English painter and poet. His father was an Italian exile in London who wrote a commentary on the Inferno, and he named his son after the poet. Rossetti translated the whole book as a young man, mostly in 1845 to 1849, and asked friends including Alfred Tennyson for advice.
He could not afford to publish it with his own etchings, as he had planned. The translation finally came out in 1861 in The Early Italian Poets and was reissued in 1874 as Dante and His Circle. The prefatory note to the 1899 Siddal Edition says the book settled Rossetti's claim to be a poet in his own right. The English quotations here come from that edition, which Project Gutenberg reproduces.
The book was slow to reach print in Italy. The first printed edition was published by Bartolomeo Sermartelli in Florence in 1576. The Enciclopedia Dantesca notes that it was cleaned up for the Counter-Reformation. Quotations from scripture and references to God were changed or removed.
In that part of the book of my memory before the which is little that can be read, there is a rubric, saying, Incipit Vita Nova.In quella parte del libro de la mia memoria, dinanzi a la quale poco si potrebbe leggere, si trova una rubrica, la quale dice: Incipit vita nova.
At that moment, I say most truly that the spirit of life, which hath its dwelling in the secretest chamber of the heart, began to tremble so violently that the least pulses of my body shook therewith.In quello punto dico veracemente che lo spirito de la vita, lo quale dimora ne la secretissima camera de lo cuore, cominciò a tremare sì fortemente, che apparia ne li menimi polsi orribilmente.
It came into my mind that I might make use of this lady as a screen to the truth.E mantenente pensai di fare di questa gentile donna schermo de la veritade.
The woman who guides Dante through paradise first appears here, as a girl in a crimson dress in a Florence street.
Dante tells the story behind each poem and then shows how it is built. Few poets have laid their workshop this bare.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti's translation is public domain and on Project Gutenberg. His Victorian English is old-fashioned but close to Dante.
The book is short enough to finish in one sitting, which makes it the easiest way into Dante.
The first sonnet in the book, rendered by Rossetti as To every heart which the sweet pain doth move. Dante describes his dream of Love and Beatrice and asks the poets of Florence to explain it. Guido Cavalcanti's reply began their friendship.
The sonnet of praise in Chapter XXVI, rendered by Rossetti as My lady looks so gentle and so pure. Dante says it is so easy to understand that it needs no explanation, and it is the one poem in the book he leaves undivided.
1274
Dante first sees Beatrice, both of them nine. Boccaccio places the meeting at a May Day party at her father Folco Portinari's house.
1283
Nine years later Beatrice greets Dante in the street. He writes the sonnet about his dream that begins his friendship with Guido Cavalcanti.
1290
Beatrice dies in Florence in June.
c. 1292–1295
Dante gathers 31 poems written since about 1283 and joins them with prose to make the book.
1576
Bartolomeo Sermartelli prints the first edition in Florence, altered to remove references to God and scripture.
1861
Dante Gabriel Rossetti's English translation is published in The Early Italian Poets.
1899
The Siddal Edition of Rossetti's translation appears in London, the text Project Gutenberg reproduces.
The Divine Comedy
Dante Alighieri
The poem that keeps the promise on the last page. Beatrice returns at the top of the mountain of purgatory and guides Dante through heaven.
Read our takeConvivio
Dante Alighieri
Dante's later commentary on his own poems, which returns to the woman at the window and turns her into philosophy.
Read our takeDe Vulgari Eloquentia
Dante Alighieri
Dante's Latin treatise on writing poetry in Italian, the language of every poem in La Vita Nuova.
Read our takeDante's love for Beatrice, told through 31 of his poems with prose between them. He sees her at nine, she greets him at eighteen, she stops greeting him, and she dies in 1290. The prose tells what happened before each poem and explains how each poem is built.
The poems were written between about 1283 and 1293. Dante put the book together a few years after Beatrice's death in June 1290. Scholars date it to 1292 or 1293, and some to 1294 or 1295.
New life. The title comes from the first sentence, where Dante imagines his memory as a book with the Latin heading Incipit vita nova, Here begins the new life. The new life begins when he first sees Beatrice.
Dante never gives her surname. Giovanni Boccaccio identified her as Beatrice Portinari, daughter of the Florentine Folco Portinari. The Catholic Encyclopedia calls this probable and adds that she married Simone de' Bardi. She died in June 1290.
After Beatrice's death Dante is briefly drawn to a woman who looks at him with pity from a window, then turns back to Beatrice's memory. In the last chapter he has a vision and decides to write no more about her until he can write of her what has never been written of any woman.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti's translation is free and public domain, on Project Gutenberg. Modern choices include Barbara Reynolds in Penguin Classics, Mark Musa in Oxford World's Classics, and Andrew Frisardi's Vita Nova from Northwestern University Press.
Yes. The last page promises a future work about Beatrice, and in the Comedy she is the one who sends Virgil to rescue Dante and then guides him through heaven.
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View authorThe sources below include the primary text, editions, scholarship, archival materials, and other records that informed this page. They document La Vita Nuova, its publication, and its place in literary history.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti's public-domain translation, Siddal Edition of 1899, with its prefatory note and Rossetti's own notes. Every English quotation comes from it.
Michele Barbi's Italian critical text, for the opening chapters and the chapter numbering.
Dante's collected poems on Italian Wikisource, which gives the sonnet Tanto gentile with its Vita Nuova chapter reference.
The Italian text in the 1903 Roux e Viarengo edition, for the later chapters.
Edmund G. Gardner on Beatrice Portinari and the date of the book.
Boccaccio's account of the book and of Dante's later shame at it.
The primary text represented by this page, used for descriptions of the work’s contents and for any quoted passages shown here.
The primary text is the baseline reference for every book page. Additional references document publication history, interpretation, and historical context where that evidence is available.
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