Dante’s Bones
How a Poet Invented Italy
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- $35.99
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- $35.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Raffa (The Complete Danteworlds), a UT Austin Italian studies associate professor, devotes this fascinating study to how the treatment of Dante's remains over the centuries has reflected his centrality to Italian history and culture. Beginning with the long-running dispute between Florence, Dante's birthplace, and Ravenna, his burial site, over the poet's legacy, Raffa is meticulous in unearthing telling, and sometimes astonishing, details. These include how Franciscan monks broke into Dante's tomb in the 16th century to steal his skeleton, and how it was displayed in a glass coffin to huge crowds in 1865, in a commemoration of Dante's 600th birthday, which also reflected his symbolic importance for the newly formed Italian nation. No less fascinating is how Mussolini connected "Dante's virility and intellectual capacity," as supposedly deduced from his remains, to the Fascist Party's racial-supremacist agenda, and how, during WWII's later stages, the tomb's watchmen protected it from both Nazi looters and Allied bombing raids. Italy's fascination with Dante continues up to the present: a final chapter discusses the University of Bologna's painstaking computer-generated 2006 reconstruction of what the poet's head may have looked like. In tracing the history of Dante's bones, Raffa also provides an illuminating exploration of Italian nationalism and political thought.
