Beatrice had the look

Beatrice had the look

fiction
edward w pritchard

Beatrice had the look. Walking as an eight year old not on a runway in Milan but on the crowded streets of Florence she captured Dante's imagination and inspired a million future lovers through his promotion of courtly love. Dante seldom comments on her physical appearance preferring to keep it mystical, about her emerald eyes and calling her his lord who came to him in his dreams. At their second meeting when she was eighteen and he nineteen, she greets him briefly and decorously and inspires eventually the Divine Comedy one of the seminal works in World literature. By age twenty four Beatrice is dead, leaving her husband, not Dante, to grieve, but Dante to glorify her perhaps as his Muse forever through his writing.

There's a small solemn chapel in Florence where he first clapped his eyes on her and her influence has been significant. More than a woman but a little less than a goddess.