During the 700thanniversary of the death of Dante Alighieri, the town council of Torgiano decided to open the doors of its noble palaces to provide a prominent setting for the verses of the Comedy that Boccaccio called divine. In the hallways and rooms of the villas, the famous lines of the canticles of Dante resounded and soon they will be accessible in a video arranged by the director Gianluca Foresi for the administration of Torgiano. We will listen to it with great pleasure and recognize the Tuscan voice of our own Stefania Poli who took part in the project as she reads tercets, a number of them taken from the canto of Paolo and Francesca. The group of readers and cameramen includes Michela Caseti, Sandra Sarti, Alessandro Paci, Vittorio Gatti, Enrico Sciattella, Lorenzo Casagrande Berzilli and Oriana Dolci.
Meanwhile, for June, we have chosen to point out the buildings of Torgiano selected by the council as backdrop for the recitation. The first stands on the side of Ponte Rosciano at the top of a small hill covered with woodland vegetation at the confluence of the Chiascio and Tiber rivers: it is the eighteenth-century Villa della Montagnola. At that time, the villa was the residence of the Baglioni family used for formal receptions.
Then, along provincial road 401, a tree-lined avenue leads to Villa Goga, now Fattoria Spinola. Hub of a large estate acquired in 1843 by marchese Pietro Ugo Spinola, Apostolic Delegate of Perugia, later named cardinal, it was first used as a storage depot for agricultural equipment then, in the 1930s, the villa was restored to its original function as a holiday home.
At the Mulino Silvestri, we discover another distinct feature of the Torgiano territory: the Silvestri family produces varieties of flour and semolina at the water mill they own, located on the Chiascio River. Following traditional methods passed down from generation to generation, Silvestri flour is organic, obtained by grinding the grain with French natural-stone mills.
Even the Baglioni Palace was opened for Dante: the building was constructed in the 17thCentury, incorporating six pre-existing houses and a courtyard. The palace was built to allow the old family of Perugia to have a residence at Torgiano to administer the third part of the Signoria of Rosciano that the Baglioni had inherited from the Signorelli at the end of the 1500s. Palazzo Manganelli concludes this brief overview.
There you have it: these places full of character and close to one another form the backdrop that once again gives voice to Dante, an Italian who saw the united destiny of the peninsula before others did and, by evoking it, began to create it by giving us a common language.