The dead soul and narrator of this verse from Canto Five of Dante’s Purgatorio is identified as a woman named La Pia Tolomei, born to a noble family of Siena, Italy, allegedly killed in 1295 on the orders of her husband, Paganello de’ Pannocchieschi. “Nello”, as he was known, owned a castle in the Maremma coastal region; the murder of his wife was an 11th century version of a tabloid sensation, taking place under such a cloak of secrecy that the true manner of La Pia’s death was never known, though popular rumor at the time had it that Nello ordered a servant to take Pia by the feet and drop her from a high tower window.
This, her request to be remembered, is delivered to Dante in the fifth canto, reproduced here for the sheer beauty of the poetic verse, even when translated into English (by John D. Sinclair for Oxford University Press):
‘Thou knowest well how there gathers in the air
the moist vapor which changes to water again as
soon as it rises where the cold condenses it. That
evil will which seeks only evil he joined with
intellect and by the power his nature gave he
stirred the mists and the winds; then, when day
was spent, he covered the valley from Pratomagno
to the great range with cloud and so charged the
sky overhead that the pregnant air was turned to
water. The rain fell and that which the ground
refused came to the gullies and gathering in great
torrents poured headlong to the royal river with
such speed that nothing stayed its course. The
raging Archiano found my frozen body near its
mouth and swept it into the Arno and loosed on
my breast the cross I made of myself when pain
overcame me. It rolled me along the banks and
over the bottom, then covered and swathed me with
its spoils.’
‘Pray, when thou hast returned to the world and
art rested from the long way,’ the third spirit
followed on the second, ‘do thou remember me,
who am La Pia. Siena gave me birth, Maremma
death. He knows of it who, first plighting troth,
wedded me with his gem.’
