Thou shalt prove how salt is the taste of another’s bread and how hard is the way up and down another man’s stairs.

The line comes from Dante’s Paradiso, spoken as a prophecy of Dante’s own exile from Florence. In 1302, amid factional conflict between the White and Black Guelphs and the intervention of Pope Boniface VIII and Charles of Valois, Dante—aligned with the Whites—was condemned and permanently banished. In the Heaven of Mars, the spirit of his ancestor Cacciaguida foretells the bitterness of that banishment: Dante will be forced to live on others’ hospitality, dependent on patrons and moving from court to court. The “salt” and the “stairs” evoke the daily humiliations and physical strain of life as a guest rather than a citizen in one’s own home.

Dante compresses the experience of exile into two sensory images. “Another’s bread” suggests dependence: even basic nourishment is mediated by someone else’s generosity, and its “salt” becomes the taste of constraint and loss. “Another man’s stairs” captures both literal discomfort—climbing and descending in a чужой house—and the social awkwardness of living under another’s roof, subject to another’s rules and status. The prophecy frames exile as a moral and psychological trial that tests dignity, endurance, and identity. In the larger arc of the Comedy, the bitterness of displacement is also transmuted into poetic authority: suffering becomes the condition through which Dante claims the right to speak truth about politics, justice, and salvation.

1) “You shall learn how salt is the taste of another man’s bread, and how hard is the way up and down another man’s stairs.”
2) “Thou shalt learn how salt is the bread of others, and how hard a path it is to go down and up by others’ stairs.”
3) “You will come to know how bitter is another’s bread, and how hard the ascent and descent of another’s stairs.”