5 - Visiting the dead

Summary

When Dante died in Ravenna on 14 September 1321, his protector, Guido Novello da Polenta, had his remains enclosed in a sepulchral urn in the Franciscan cemetery, where, it was supposed, they remained. On 27 May 1865, a workman demolishing a wall of the Franciscan church uncovered a box of bones with an inscription stating that they were the bones of Dante, placed there by a friar in 1677. An investigation confirmed that the remains had in fact been removed from the sepulchral urn and concealed to protect them from theft or violation. By chance, their discovery occurred during the celebration of the sixth-hundredth anniversary of Dante's birth, an occasion observed in Italy with a series of festivals and exhibits attended by Dante-lovers from Europe and America. On 24 June the bones were placed in a crystal urn on an altar-shaped dais and covered with a white cloth. A procession to the shrine concluded with the removal of the white veil and the exposition of the darkened bones to the veneration of visitors. On 26 June, Dante's remains were replaced in the original sepulchre.

An instance of what Pater would later call the “survival” of earlier habits of thought or feeling, this curious exhibition and veneration of relics in the middle of the nineteenth century is of particular interest because, in all probability, it was witnessed by Pater himself. In the summer of 1865 Pater visited Italy for the first time in the company of Charles Shadwell, a student and later a translator of Dante.