Biography | Dante Alighieri — Baptised in the Font of His Beautiful San Giovanni

People treat Dante’s baptism as a private family rite.

Florence did not work that way.

Every Christian child of the city was brought to this octagon, the Baptistery of San Giovanni, in two yearly ceremonies: Holy Saturday and the Sunday of Pentecost.

Dante was almost certainly carried here on Holy Saturday 1266, months after a Gemini birth the year before.

Some handbooks print 26 March, others 27 March.

The day that matters is the Saturday before Easter in that year, not the argument over the computus.

The marble font he stood in no longer exists.

A later century demolished the great basin; an octagonal pavement now marks the floor.

Baptism then was immersion, not a sprinkle.

Dante named the building himself.

In Inferno XIX he calls it il mio bel San Giovanni.

In Paradiso XXV he writes of taking the first sacrament at the font of his baptism, and imagines coming home to take the poet’s laurel at that same font.

He never got the laurel.

The mosaics overhead are later than his infancy, but the green-and-white exterior and the octagon were already the city’s official baptistery, consecrated in the eleventh century and reserved for baptism from 1128.

Until the late nineteenth century, Florentines still began here.

The building outlived the republic that used it.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons, Florence Baptistery