Commentary Inf VIII 1

For the first time the poet interrupts the chronological flow of his narrative, interpolating events that occurred before the situation described in the very last verse of the preceding canto (for a briefer but similar interpolation see the first tercet of the thirteenth canto). Either the first 12 or the first 24 verses of canto VIII relate what occurred between the travelers' first experience of the wrathful sinners in the Styx ([Inf VII 129]) and their arrival at the foot of a tower of the walled city of Dis ([Inf VII 130]). The self-conscious interruption of the narrative may be enough to account for the self-conscious opening verse: 'To continue, let me say....' However, Boccaccio, in his commentary to this canto, was the first to sponsor the idea that in fact Dante only now, in Lunigiana in 1306, took up again the composition of his poem, begun in Florence before his exile and left behind when he could not return to the city. According to Boccaccio, a friend brought him the text of the first seven cantos, which had lain fallow for some six or seven years. While most do not credit this version of the history of composition of the Comedy, it has some support. See Ferretti (Ferr.1935.1) and Padoan (Pado.1993.1). The latter's book is devoted to a reassessment of the problem of the compositional history of the entire poem. In his view, Inferno was composed between 1306 and 1315, while most students of the problem argue for a completion of the first cantica around 1310, if most agree, at least approximately, about the date of Dante's first work on the poem: between 1306 and 1308.

For the identical phrasing of the mathematician Paolo dell'Abbaco (even if the phrase was probably common enough): 'Io dicho seghuitando,' see Vallone (Vall.1991.1), p. 75.