Pier da Medicina

Profile

Pier da Medicina is a figure whose historical identity has not been established with certainty: documentary sources from the Duecento record several individuals bearing this name among the lords or «cattani» of Medicina, a sizeable village between Bologna and Imola, and scholars have hypothesized, without definitive confirmation, that he may be the «Petrus quondam Ayni de Medicina», whose name appears in documents between 1271 and 1277. The ancients present him as a subtle instigator of discord in Romagna. Dante introduces him in Canto XXVIII of the Inferno, where the damned soul asks the poet to remember him once he has returned to the world of the living, following a typical pattern in which the damned ask to be remembered.