Paolo and Francesca, the lovers of the fifth canto of the Inferno

Paolo and Francesca are the only lovers in the Divine Comedy whose story Dante tells with such sympathy. Their encounter fills the fifth canto of the Inferno, in the second circle, where the lustful are swept along for ever by a storm that never rests. Behind the verses, however, lies a real event that took place in 13th-century Romagna.

A family tragedy

Francesca was the daughter of Guido da Polenta, lord of Ravenna, and for political reasons was given in marriage to Giovanni Malatesta, known as Gianciotto, of the family that ruled Rimini. She fell in love with her brother-in-law Paolo, her husband's brother. Gianciotto surprised them and killed them both, probably between 1283 and 1286; contemporary chronicles say very little and the exact date remains uncertain.

Later Giovanni Boccaccio, in his commentary on the Comedy, claimed that Francesca had been deceived: to win her consent to the marriage, she was shown the handsome Paolo and allowed to believe that he was the groom. It is an evocative version, but unverifiable, and it makes the woman even more a victim of fate. The place of the crime is also debated, although local tradition sets it in the fortress of Gradara.

The storm and the tale

Dante sees the souls pass like flocks of cranes and asks Virgil whether he may speak with two who go together and seem light upon the wind. It is Francesca who answers, with a courtesy surprising in a place of punishment. In three tercets built on the word Love she explains how passion seized them, culminating in the line «Love, that exempts no one beloved from loving».

Paolo's name is never spoken. He weeps silently the whole time while she talks. Francesca does not name her husband either, but she recalls that the place of his damnation is already waiting: Caina, the zone of the frozen lake reserved for those who betrayed their kin. For her, Love and Death have remained joined.

The go-between book

When Dante asks how their love began, Francesca recounts an afternoon of reading. The two were reading together the romance of Lancelot and, reaching the passage where Guinevere kisses the knight, Paolo kissed her. In the French romances the meeting between Lancelot and the queen had been arranged by Galehaut, Galeotto in Italian: hence her words «A Galeotto was the book and he who wrote it».

Since then the Italian word galeotto has meant whatever acts as a go-between in love. The canto closes with Dante overcome by pity; he faints and falls «as a dead body falls». It is one of the moments in which the poet shows himself most fragile, struck by a sin he perhaps felt close to his own.

From the Inferno to the museums

The episode inspired painters, sculptors and musicians. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres painted the two lovers surprised by Gianciotto in 1819. Auguste Rodin conceived them for his Gates of Hell, and from that group came The Kiss, exhibited in 1887. In 1876 Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky composed the symphonic fantasia Francesca da Rimini, and in 1906 Sergei Rachmaninoff presented a one-act opera with the same title in Moscow.

The fascination of the canto lies in its balance: the judgement is firm, for the two are in Hell, yet the pity is deep. Francesca remains one of the most vivid female figures in Italian literature, able to speak of love with tenderness at the very heart of punishment. That is why, seven centuries later, her tale still moves its readers.