Dante Alighieri is a symbol of Italy and its poetry, but also of the city he was born, Firenze. A proud Florentine, Dante never kept the love he had for his hometown a secret, so why is he buried in Ravenna? Well, because that’s where he passed, of course, but the matter of where his mortal remains should rest was the cause of mystery and diatribes for centuries.
Dante rests, today, in a quiet corner of the Emilia-Romagna town, his marble mausoleum protected by sunlight and heat by the leafy beauty of an oak planted by poet and Nobel laureate Giosuè Carducci, in the early 20th century. The tomb, which is lovingly known by locals as the zucarira, or “sugar bowl” because of its shape, was designed and built at the end of the 18th century by architect Camillo Morigia. But before – and after – then il Sommo Poeta’s bones had little rest.
Dante died in 1321, while in Ravenna. Likely, the plan was to have him buried outside the church of Saint Francis, in a monumental sarcophagus offered by the lord of Ravenna, Guido Novello da Polenta. A century and a half later, in 1483, Bernando Bembo, then head of the town, had the tomb renewed and commissioned sculptor Pietro Lombardo the bas-relief with the features of the poet we still see today inside the mausoleum.
That was the last moment of peace poor Dante – or at least for his mortal body – had for some two hundred years. Florence, which wasn’t always particularly nice to her most famous child while he was alive, put her foot down to have him back and honor him properly, at least as a dead man.
Ravenna wasn’t going to let go. So, between the 16th and the 18th century, Dante’s remains just… disappeared. Or better, they were kept safe by Ravenna’s Franciscan monks.
Where did they keep them? We don’t know. Were they in Ravenna? Your guess is as good as mine. For two centuries, Dante was nowhere to be found. That, until 1781-82, when already-mentioned Camillo Morigia developed the current mausoleum, as commissioned by cardinal Luigi Valenti Gonzaga.
But if you think that was the end of it, then think again. In 1810, the Franciscans, who were in charge of the mausoleum, were forced to leave their convent because of Napoleon’s new regulations against religious orders; lest the invaders decided to take the father of the Italian language back to Paris with them, the monks hid his urn before leaving.
Some 50 years after the end of Napoleonic rule in Italy, on the 25th of May 1865, builders were busy at work on some structural renovations in the convent when they came across, inside a wall of the Quadrarco di Braccioforte, an unassuming wooden box they were set to throw in the garbage. We can thank a local student, Anastasio Matteucci, who was – just like all students in those years and for years to come in Italy – well versed in Latin if the bones of the most iconic poet in the history of the Italian language weren’t unceremoniously dumped like an old bag into a bin: he understood the incision on the box, which said it contained the bones of Dante.
On that occasion, the bones were collected in a crystal urn and put on display for some months. Then, they were finally buried in the mausoleum we all know. Inside it, besides the 15th-century bas-relief made by Lombardo, we also find a bronze and silver wreath offered by the Italian army at the end of World War One and a small votive oil lamp, filled with Tuscan olive oil, offered every year by the city of Florence, on the second Sunday of September, to honor her beloved poet in exile.
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