Welcome Home, Dante!

As we know from class and the Inferno, Dante loathed Pope Boniface VIII.  Just to give a brief reminder of the background, the Guelphs (after they were victorious over the Ghibellines) split into the White Guelphs and the Black Guelphs.  Dante was a White Guelph and thus wanted the Papacy to have less control over Italy, specifically Florence, while the Black Guelphs supported the Pope.  After the White Guelphs expelled the Black Guelphs, Pope Boniface VIII decided he was going to militarily occupy Florence.  In 1301, Charles of Valois was going to make a trip to Florence as the Pope's peacemaker, but a council sent a delegation to Rome because they were kind of suspicious.  The pope said all the delegates could leave (or should I say, would leave) but "asked" Dante to remain in Rome.  Meanwhile, Charles of Valois and the Black Guelphs were destroying Florence and the White Guelphs back home.  Thus, Dante was exiled and had to pay a big fine because the Pope said he had abused his power as Florence's city prior for money.  Dante wasn't really feeling like paying that fine (one, he didn't consider himself guilty, and two, all his possessions had been taken by the Black Guelphs in Florence).  Therefore, he was sentenced to perpetual exile, and he was threatened with a burning at the stake if he ever came back to Florence.

Dante was pretty sad about this.  Florence was basically the Athens of Italy; the Florentines were very proud of themselves and generally thought they were better than the other cities around.  So you can see why this proud Florentine might have shed a few (million) tears over his exile, not to mention why he would have sincerely prayed that Pope Boniface VIII would end up in Hell.

The battle for Dante's bones between Florence and Ravenna, the city in which he died, got pretty intense.  It even includes an episode in which Franciscan friars removed Dante's bones from their sarcophagus at the Basilica of San Francesco and hid them in the monastery's cloister until 1677 after Pope Leo X, petitioned by a group including Michelangelo, in 1519 agreed that Florence could send a delegation to Ravenna to reclaim Dante's bones.

Sadly, the title of this post may be misleading.  Dante's bones remain in Ravenna.

But maybe it would have made the great poet at least a little pleased to know that the Florence that once exiled him now desperately wants him back.  And maybe he would be also heartened by the fact that Florence passed a resolution revoking his death sentence...in 2008.  (Better late than never?)