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Updated: June 4, 2025
Their first oratory was the principal chapel of the Hospital of S. Maria Nuova, which was conceded to them by the family of the Portinari.
Folco Portinari will defend his house so long as the stones of its walls hold together. My servants are arming now. I have sent to the Signory for aid from the Priors. If the Bardi beards me, let him look to himself." He turned to Dante, and addressed him. "Young man, I know you better than I did, and rate you higher.
Further, since I speak of the octave, were not those that had nimble judgments and sprightly memories able to recall that Madonna Beatrice's name was made up of eight letters, and then, following on this pathway of knowledge, to discover that the first letter of each line of the stanza corresponded in its order with the like letter in the name of the daughter of Folco Portinari.
When the two were under the shadow of the Portinari palace, Messer Tommaso Severo ceased talking, and going to the little door, knocked thrice upon it, whereupon the warder within, after peeping for a moment through a grill, opened it and admitted the doctor and his companion.
The street was all full of people running and shouting as they ran, and man caught at man as they ran and asked questions and was answered, and I heard the name of Simone dei Bardi and of the Portinari palace, and that was enough for me.
Now, the next page in the book of my memory that is concerned with the fortunes of my friend has to do with the feast that Messer Folco Portinari gave to the magnificoes and dignitaries, the notables and worthies, the graces and the radiancies of Florence a feast that, memorable in itself, was yet more memorable from all that came of it by what we in our wisdom or our ignorance call chance.
Such a feeling as the rough spearsmen of the Orléannais had for Joan the maid; or the great Florentine for the girl whom he saw for the first time at the banquet in the house of the Portinari; or as that man, who carried to his grave the Queen's glove, yet had never touched it with his bare hand.
The Palace of the Portinari was a great and stately building, with great and stately rooms inside it, stretching one out of another in what seemed to be an endless succession of ordered richness, and behind the great and stately house and within the great and stately walls that girdled it lay such a garden as no other man in Florence owned, a garden so well ordained after a plan so well conceived that though it was spacious indeed, it seemed ten times more spacious than it really was from the cunning and ingenuity with which its lawns and arbors, its boscages and pergolas, its hedges and trees, its alleys and avenues were adapted to lead the admiring wanderer on and on, and make him believe that he should never come to the end of his tether.
Then she dared him to this staking her great emerald, in a ring that the French prince gave her, on the terms that if he failed to gain the daughter of Folco Portinari he was in all honor and solemnity to marry her, Vittoria."
Who Beatrice was is again a mystery, but it has been agreed to consider her in real life a daughter of Folco Portinari, a wealthy Florentine and the founder of the hospital of S. Maria Nuova, one of whose descendants commissioned Hugo van der Goes to paint the great triptych in the Uffizi. Of Dante's rapt adoration of his lady, the "Vita Nuova" tells.
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