The Empty Grave

The grandest monument to Dante in Florence rises above an empty box. Inside this church you'll find a marble tomb carrying his name, a grieving figure seated beside it, built in 1829 by a city that had once condemned him and then stayed silent for five centuries.

He died in 1321 in Ravenna, the city that took him in when Florence turned him away, and he lies there still. Florence has asked for his remains more than once, and Ravenna has refused every time, at one point hiding the bones inside a monastery wall for years to keep them out of reach. Even the oil for the lamp beside his grave now comes from Florence each year, the gesture of a city finally admitting it was wrong.

Out on the square he has looked out over people's heads in stone since 1865, carved when Italy marked six hundred years since his birth, then moved in 1968 to the terrace to the left of the entrance.

The ending came only in 2008, when Florence's city council formally overturned the sentence of 1302, with a few councillors voting against it who felt history should be left to stand as it is.

That brings our walk to a close, and thank you for coming along with him. Beatrice probably lies in this church, in the chapel belonging to her husband's family, and the building itself gets its own story in our walk about Michelangelo. The starting point at the Casa di Dante is ten minutes back to the west.