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.
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