The Laurel Crown That Never Came

Of all the buildings in the city, this is the one Dante loved most. My beautiful San Giovanni, he writes in the Inferno, by which point he has already been in exile for years and knows he will never set foot inside again.

He was baptised here, as nearly every Florentine of his generation was, and he held onto that baptism all his life as his bond with the city. When you go inside you find the octagonal font standing in the middle of the space, beneath a vault covered in golden mosaic showing a hell where the devil devours sinners, an image that hung above his head when he was a child.

In the final part of the Comedy he writes what he truly hoped for: to return with a changed voice, as a poet, and to receive the laurel crown at that very font. Crowning a poet usually happened in Rome, so he was asking for something unheard of, that his own city would honour him in his own baptistery, and that crowning never came, not even long after his death in Ravenna in 1321.

The baptismal beans and the golden doors of this building get their story in our other Florentine walks.

From here we walk back to the little square where the walk began, towards the tower on the south side.