D. Angiolieri

This is the Hotel Berchielli. It was built in 1890 and became a reliable destination for English tourists, who were a large percentage of its initial guests. Some scholars say that it was E. M. Forster’s inspiration for the hotel he called Bertolini in his 1908 novel A Room with a View. Romain Rolland, winner of the 1915 Nobel Prize for literature, stayed here in 1911.

On account of its popularity and quality (you could still get a double room for $5 a night in 1922), it appeared regularly in tour guides throughout the twentieth century. Other famous guests include Ezra Pound in April 1924, while he was revising his first thirty Cantos, and Ford Madox Ford who regularly brought his family here. Among its other famous guests were Simeon Solomon, Holman Hunt, Pablo Picasso, Rosalie Thorne McKenna, Aleksander Wat and Vasco Pratolini.

But none of this mattered to Dante. Instead, this hotel is one of our sights because it rests on an area that once belonged to the uncle of Cecco Angiolieri before he moved the family to the other side of the river. Although Cecco was born in Siena, he traveled quite a lot for someone of his time and probably met Dante at the battle of Campaldino in which they both fought in 1289.

Cecco and Dante exchanged sonnets and were likely friends for a few years before their falling out. His last sonnet to Dante dates from 1304 and it is thought that Cecco was dead by 1313. Unlike our poet, Cecco was a much worldlier figure. Although he probably wasn’t the sociopathic figure imagined by nineteenth-century scholars, he did enjoy a realistic, humorous genre in which it was possible to muse about playing dice, drinking in taverns, chasing skirts and hating his parents.

If there is still a connection between Cecco and the Hotel Burchielli, it may be that the ghost sometimes said to visit is part of the Angiolieri clan.

Our next site is the church of the Santi Apostoli.