"Dante's relationship with women is very complex, because the range of real women in Dante's life and in Dante Alighieri's imagined life is very different. There is an idealization of women that occurs when he is nine years old. He lost his real mother when he was five years old, so he is the son of a father and a stepmother. The neighbors of the Portinari family had six daughters and one of these is Beatrice, a nine-year-old girl, his age. Dante meets her gaze and from that moment he becomes almost a prisoner of that gaze, which is why nine is Beatrice's magic number, because he meets her at nine years old. The Poet follows her to Florence for another nine years, without ever receiving encouragement from her, until at eighteen, before entering the church where the girl goes every evening in Santa Margherita dei Cerchi which is the Portinari church, suddenly she decides to stop, look at him, smile at him, and says "I greet you" which is the only phrase Dante will hear from Beatrice. Dante remains completely satisfied by this smile and considers it the sealing of a relationship that has had no other type of concretization, nothing else, just this look and this greeting. He tells this story in this wonderful diary which is the Vita Nova, a set of poems and prose writings that he wrote in the aftermath of Beatrice's death."