Commentary Purg III 131-135

Adding insult to the injury of disinterment, the archbishop ordered Manfred's remains to be cast back into the world.  They had first at least been allowed burial in unconsecrated ground with the ceremony prescribed for the excommunicate ('with torches quenched').  And so the corpse is put out of the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily onto a bank of the river Verde, today the Liri.

      The name of the river, Verde (green), however, stands intrinsically opposed to such purpose, since it both traditionally represents the virtue of hope and happens to have been the color that Manfred himself favored.  And thus the identical rhyme 'Verde/verde' underlines the hopeful sign that Manfred's faith believed would come and his love longed for.  The Church's human agents may not understand God's hidden disposition.

      The final phrase here, 'ha fior del verde,' has caused much difficulty.  Lombardi (DDP Lombardi.Purg.III.135) paraphrases the passage as follows: 'so long as death does not entirely dry up hope, but leaves a single thread of it green.' The spirit of comedy in this canto overcomes the atmosphere of tragedy. We might reflect that this is the first true narrative of the Purgatorio (neither Cato nor Casella gives the sort of perfectly formed autobiographical performance to which we have become accustomed in Inferno). The first cantica has trained us to expect "tragedy," the tale told, from the sinner's point of view, of death and damnation. Unconsciously, we may expect exactly that sort of narrative here. And it surely seems to be similar, with its story of horrific death and undignified burial; yet here we find the tragic surmounted by the comic resolution offered by redemption. Thus Manfred's narrative is set as a pattern for all those we shall hear in Purgatory. For a discussion of Manfred's narrative as tragic in tone and comic in result, see Sarteschi (Sart.1999.2), p. 237.