Dante’s Bones

How a Poet Invented Italy

Guy P. Raffa

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780674980839
• eBook ISBN:
  9780674246966
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: Literature

A richly detailed graveyard history of the Florentine poet whose dead body shaped Italy from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to the Risorgimento, World War I, and Mussolini's fascist dictatorship.

Dante, whose Divine Comedy gave the world its most vividly imagined story of the afterlife, endured an extraordinary afterlife of his own. Exiled in death as in life, the Florentine poet has hardly rested in peace over the centuries. Like a saint's relics, his bones have been stolen, recovered, reburied, exhumed, examined, and, above all, worshiped. Actors in this graveyard history range from Lorenzo de' Medici, Michelangelo, and Pope Leo X to the Franciscan friar who hid the bones, the stone mason who accidentally discovered them, and the opportunistic sculptor who accomplished what princes, popes, and politicians could not: delivering to Florence a precious relic of the native son it had banished.

In Dante's Bones, Guy Raffa narrates for the first time the complete course of the poet's hereafter, from his death and burial in Ravenna in 1321 to a computer-generated reconstruction of his face in 2006. Dante's posthumous adventures are inextricably tied to major historical events in Italy and its relationship to the wider world. Dante grew in stature as the contested portion of his body diminished in size from skeleton to bones, fragments, and finally dust: During the Renaissance, a political and literary hero in Florence; in the nineteenth century, the ancestral father and prophet of Italy; a nationalist symbol under fascism and amid two world wars; and finally the global icon we know today.

Notes

PROLOGUE

Epigraph: Henry Clark Barlow, The Sixth Centenary Festivals of Dante Allighieri in Florence and Ravenna (London: Williams and Norgate, 1866), 67. I keep “Allighieri,” an older form of Dante’s surname (“Alighieri”), when it is used in titles and quotations.

1. 1 Agnellus of Ravenna, a ninth-century abbot, tells this story in The Book of Pontiffs of the Church of Ravenna, trans. Deborah Mauskopf Deliyannis (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2004), 128–133.
2. 2 Filippo Lanciani to the Prefecture of Ravenna on October 27, 1864, quoted in Maria Carmela Maiuri, “Filippo Lanciani e il restauro dei monumenti ravennati nella seconda metà dell’Ottocento,” Ravenna studi e ricerche 7, no. 2 (2000): 77–113, at 79.
3. 3 Filippo Lanciani’s reports on the excavations are contained in letters from his father, Pietro, to the editor of L’Osservatore Romano (the newspaper of the Holy See), published on June 1 and June 14, 1865.
4. 4 Dante, Par. 22.106–117. A passage in Giovanni Boccaccio’s commentary on the Divine Comedy suggests the end of May (Boccaccio, commentary on Dante, Inf. 1.1–3, in the Dartmouth Dante Project database, https://dante.dartmouth.edu); Robert M. Durling and Ronald L. Martinez, in Time and the Crystal: Studies in Dante’s Rime Petrose (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), “incline toward May 27,” the day of the discovery, “as the date Dante knew or supposed to be his birthday” (85).
5. 5 For Fedele Spada’s participation, I rely on his personal statement, signed and witnessed on May 28, 1865. I examined this document at Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site (LONG 27930, box 4, folder 68), Cambridge, MA.
6. 6 Later that day, Angelo Dradi, identified as an “illiterate laborer,” signed the official report with an x (Della scoperta delle ossa di Dante: Relazione con documenti per cura del Municipio di Ravenna [Ravenna: Angeletti, 1870], xlix–liv, at liv). In the census of 1871, 62 percent of Italian males and 76 percent of Italian females over the age of six were illiterate, with an illiteracy rate of 72 percent (male and female combined) in the Emilia-Romagna region, where Ravenna is located (Martin Clark, Modern Italy, 1871–1982 [Longman: London, 1984], 35–36).
7. 7 The official report of May 27 contains the results of this preliminary examination of the bones (Della scoperta, li–lii). The doctors’ full, more detailed anatomical-physiological report includes information from a later examination (Della scoperta, i–xv).
8. 8 Giovanni Boccaccio, Trattatello in laude di Dante, first redaction, ed. Pier Giorgio Ricci, in Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, ed. Vittore Branca, 10 vols. (Milan: Mondadori, 1964–1983), 3:437–496, at 465, translated by Philip H. Wicksteed, rev. William Chamberlain, as Life of Dante (Richmond, UK: Oneworld Classics, 2009).
9. 9 L’Osservatore Romano, June 1, 1865.
10. 10 Romolo Conti, La scoperta delle ossa di Dante (Ravenna: Angeletti, 1865), 25.
11. 11 The official report of May 27, 1865, lists the measurements of the pine box as 77 centimeters long by 28.4 centimeters wide by 30 centimeters high (Della scoperta, l). The report of the National Commission, on June 12, 1865, specifies the length of one side of the box as 77.5 centimeters and the length of the other side as 74.8 centimeters (Ludovico Frati and Corrado Ricci, eds., Il sepolcro di Dante: Documenti raccolti [Bologna: Monti, 1889], 105–132, at 116).
12. 12 Primo Uccellini, Relazione storica sulla avventurosa scoperta delle ossa di Dante Alighieri (Ravenna: Angeletti, 1865), 13.
13. 13 At first the inscribed board was mistakenly believed to form part of the top or cover of the wood box. See Conti, La scoperta, 42–43; and Corrado Ricci, L’ultimo rifugio di Dante Alighieri (Milan: Hoepli, 1891), 348–349.
14. 14 The repackaging of the bones is described in the May 27 report (Della scoperta, lii–liii) and in Lanciani’s eyewitness account (L’Osservatore Romano, June 1, 1865).
15. 15 James Bentley, Restless Bones: The Story of Relics (London: Constable, 1985), 29.
16. 16 Barlow, Sixth Centenary Festivals, 67–68.

INTRODUCTION

Epigraph: Giambattista Vico, New Science, trans. David Marsh (London: Penguin, 2001), 8.

1. 1 Corrado Ricci, L’ultimo rifugio di Dante Alighieri (Milan: Hoepli, 1891), 174.
2. 2 Catherine Mary Phillimore, who cribs Ricci’s study in her account of Dante’s graveyard history, identifies the sacristan by name as Angelo Grillo (Dante at Ravenna: A Study [London: Elliot Stock, 1898], 215). Ricci’s statement that he was called or known as “Grillo”—“detto Grillo”—suggests that the word, even if it was the sacristan’s surname, served as his nickname.
3. 3 Dante, Vita nuova 3.15.
4. 4 The “scandals of his corpus and corpse,” as Sherry Roush puts it in the title of her chapter on narratives of Dante’s ghost, including these two dream sequences (Speaking Spirits: Ventriloquizing the Dead in Renaissance Italy...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Author’s Note
• Prologue: A Discovery of Bones
• Introduction: Dante’s Ghost
• I. Bones of Contention and Nationhood
• II. Fragments of Redemption and Warfare
• III. Relics of Return and Renewal
• Note on Texts and Translations
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index