It’s a liminal stretch for both the imagination and intellect to call Alessandro Barbero’s DANTE a true biography, but one can’t fault the author one iota for trying. He ends up succeeding in unexpected ways.

It takes a certain kind of forensic and literary courage to attempt the chronological reconstruction of a figure so iconic, yet so personally elusive, that historians cannot even agree on the exact dates of his birth and demise.

Wikipedia, the global go-to for such data, states that Dante Alighieri was born circa May 21 to June 20, 1265 in the city-state of Florence and died circa September 13 or 14, 1321 in the city-state of Ravenna. Claimed as the foremost exponent of early Italian literature, even as “father of the Italian language,” Dante’s entire life was spent amid fractured and bickering political entities that weren’t even known as Italy yet.

"With so many questions left unanswered, Barbero still presents a vivid composite picture of what it was like to be a member of the minor nobility in and around late medieval Florence. For that alone, DANTE is a fascinating read."

More than seven centuries later, Dante’s written work --- such as La Vita Nuova (The New Life, 1294), Convivio (The Banquet, 1307) and the monumental Comédia (Divine Comedy, 1320), along with assorted poems, Latin treatises and political reports --- live much larger than the man himself. And, as Barbero tantalizingly points out, those penned in the Florentine vernacular that evolved into modern Italian offer fragmentary, often allegorical, glimpses into Dante’s personal realities.

Sifting meticulously through myriad legal, genealogical and historical records, as well as previous biographers --- starting with younger fellow Florentine Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) --- Barbero succeeds admirably in building the sociocultural, socioeconomic and sociopolitical milieu within which the great writer, and somewhat reluctant politician, moved around during his 56 or so years.

One can compare such a herculean task to peeling away the layers of a large onion that, like any bulb plant, doesn’t have a real center, simply an end to its layers. So if the “real Dante” is not to be found, then what does DANTE achieve beyond well-structured prose (exquisitely captured in Allan Cameron’s English translation)?

Happily, Barbero’s effort achieves a great deal, enough to be more than a worthy addition to the existing body of work about Dante. To fully appreciate his persevering work, one should look at the “onion layers” of his research instead of mentally discarding them on the way to some magical revelation about the Dantean persona. Each layer, each factual connection or comparison, adds substance to our understanding of how people of Dante’s social class lived.

The cumulative result in DANTE is a hybrid factual-imaginative sketch of a man whose fertile and cunning mind inspired the late medieval public during his own lifetime --- quite a feat when literacy was still a privilege of the rich and educated and the European invention of the printing press still more than a century in the future.

Thanks to Barbero’s acute eye for detail, we learn that notaries scribbled remembered lines of Dante’s poetry in blank spaces of their legal documents (vellum was expensive, extra space a bonus); people in 13th-century Florence did not identify themselves by an orderly sequence of first and family names (giving rise to eternal confusion for historians); influential families openly and violently fought each other in prolonged bloody vendettas lasting for generations; Latin was slowly giving way to common vernacular speech when it came to city politics; allegiance to whatever dominant families controlled one’s city-state was far more powerful than the vague notion of nationality.

To this day, we don’t know exactly how many marriages or children Dante had (likely more than the names that survive), if he was baptized as Dante or Durante, all the places where he lived after being politically exiled from Florence, how much of his writing was lost, exactly how much money he had or the property he owned, if he ever traveled as far as present-day France, or even an accurate contemporary portrait.

With so many questions left unanswered, Barbero still presents a vivid composite picture of what it was like to be a member of the minor nobility in and around late medieval Florence. For that alone, DANTE is a fascinating read.