Discovered the door to hell told by Malaparte: it is a cave in Galceti
Where did Dante go from to go to hell? But from Prato of course! Curzio Malaparte was sure of it and in some little-known stories he wrote it clearly: the gate of Hades is located in the city that gave him birth and precisely in Galceti.
The exact location of the cave – narrated in texts such as The adventures of a captain of misfortune (1927), Imaginary Tuscany (1936), Games in front of Hell (1937), The golden sun of Etruscan Hell (1956), as well as a Maledetti Toscani (1957) – was identified after careful research by the association «Curzio Malaparte Prato in the world», founded and chaired by Walter Bernardi.
Here are some passages from the story in which Malaparte describes the cave of hell.
«The memory of the people of Prato wants us to go down to Hell along the road to Figline. Dante passed by there, along the Bardena: the wild forest is the pine forest of Galceti». «A few years ago a cartman from Coiano, whom I saw and knew up close, once entered a green marble quarry that had been abandoned for centuries, right under the third hump of Monferrato, near Figline, and came out with his face burnt , half blind and deaf, speechless with fright. His name was Agenor. From his hat, found under a stone at the entrance to a green marble quarry, at the bottom of the Galceti pine forest, it was understood that he had descended to Hell, all dressed up and with his feet in shoes, like Orpheus».