Biography | Dante Alighieri — The Tomb Florence Never Reclaimed in Ravenna

People treat the empty marble in Santa Croce as Dante’s grave.

The bones are here.

He died in Ravenna on the night of 13–14 September 1321.

Boccaccio and one group of manuscripts give the 14th.

The epitaphs give the 13th.

The usual compromise is the night between them.

He had been a guest of Guido Novello da Polenta.

Early lives say he had gone on an embassy toward Venice that summer and came back with fever.

The malaria story is plausible and not proven.

The funeral was held the next day in the church then called San Pier Maggiore, now the Basilica of San Francesco.

He was laid in a Roman sarcophagus outside the cloister.

That chest is still inside the little temple.

In 1483 Bernardo Bembo had Pietro Lombardo add the relief portrait.

In 1780–81 Cardinal legate Luigi Valenti Gonzaga commissioned Camillo Morigia’s neoclassical box, the building Ravenna nicknames the sugar bowl.

Florence asked for the body more than once.

The friars hid the bones.

They were found again in 1865 and returned to this monument.

The garden and the silent street are later staging.

The pin is the sarcophagus Florence could not move.

Photo: Lorenzo Gaudenzi, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons