Commentary Purg III 27

Virgil died on 21 September 19 B.C. at Brindisi, a city in Apulia that still serves as a port for maritime travelers to and from Greece.  Augustus was responsible for the transfer of his body from Brindisi to Naples, or actually, Pozzuoli, some ten miles distant, where it was interred in a grotto in the vast tunnel, built by the ancient Romans, connecting Pozzuoli and the road to Naples.  John of Serravalle (DDP Serravalle.Purg.III.25-27) records his having visited the site on 30 August 1413 and having held bones of Virgil in his hands.  This passage begins what has been called 'an antepurgatorial preoccupation with the body and its place of burial' (Heil.1972.1, p. 44). Sarteschi (Sart.1999.2), p. 246n., points out that the four presences of the word corpo in this canto represent the word's greatest frequency in any canto of the poem, thus underlining the importance of corporeal concerns with respect to Virgil, Dante, and Manfred.

      Pietro di Dante (DDP Pietro1.Purg.III.25-27) was perhaps the first to cite Virgil's versified epitaph, as found in the Vitae of Virgil by Suetonius and Donatus: 

            Mantua me genuit, Calabri rapuere, tenet nunc

      Parthenope: cecini pascua, rura, duces. 

      [Mantua gave me birth, Calabria took me off; now Naples  holds me; I sang of pastures, fields, and kings.] 

Pietro was followed, among the early commentators, by Benvenuto da Imola (DDP Benvenuto.Purg.III.27) and by John of Serravalle (DDP Serravalle.Purg.VI.67-75)

Virgil 'sang' his Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid.  For the possible reference to the three Virgilian subjects in the final hundred verses of the canto, see Hollander (Holl.1984.4), p. 114: 

            46-78:   the barren landscape of this scene (rura)

            79-102:  the contumacious as sheep (pascua)

            103-145: Manfred and empire (duces) 

In this experimental formulation Dante would, in exactly one hundred lines, have deployed the three 'spokes' of the stylistic rota Vergilii (the wheel of Virgil).

      Carroll (DDP Carroll.Purg.III.19-33) cites Plumptre for the opinion that this scene reflects the (unverified) tradition that St. Paul visited Virgil's grave at Naples and wept for the great poet, whom, had he but known him, he might have led to salvation.