Dante’s Walk – a 400km camino that follows the poet’s footsteps through the heart of Italy

‘Dante knew the most fundamental act of the mind was seeing, and no one sees more than the walker...’

Il Cammino di Dante passes through rural Italy, including areas such as this pasture outside of San Benedetto in Alpe. Photo by J.R. Patterson for The Washington Post.

J.R. Patterson
© © Washington Post

‘The Divine Comedy’, the poem-story of Dante Alighieri's journey from desperation to revelation, is so established in most people's minds that even those who haven't read it have an idea of what it contains: The eternally dammed of the Inferno. Demons with pitchforks. Burning popes. A frozen Lucifer. The redeemable sinners climbing through the Purgatorio. The angelic Beatrice. The bliss of Paradiso.

What fewer people know is that it was partly inspired by Dante's nearly 20 years of wandering around northern Italy after his exile from Florence in 1302. The expulsion of the poet, politician and patrician man about town by his political rivals offered a chance for reflective ambling, which Dante might have called solvitur ambulando, a Latin axiom for "it is solved by walking".