Basilica di Santa Croce: Dante's Empty Tomb

Why is it significant?

Beside the steps of the basilica a marble Dante towers over you, wrapped in a long cloak, crowned with laurel, frowning down at the square as if it still owed him something. Behind him rises the marble front of Santa Croce.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Beside the steps of the basilica a marble Dante towers over you, wrapped in a long cloak, crowned with laurel, frowning down at the square as if it still owed him something. Behind him rises the marble front of Santa Croce.

The statue, by Enrico Pazzi, was unveiled in 1865 for the six hundredth anniversary of Dante's birth, the same year Florence became the capital of the new Kingdom of Italy. For the young nation, Dante was the father of the Italian language, and so of Italy itself. The church behind him is much older, begun in 1294, though its neo-Gothic facade was only finished in 1863.

Go inside, and you walk among giants. Michelangelo lies here in a tomb designed by Vasari. Galileo was given his monument in 1737, almost a century after the Church condemned him. Machiavelli has his, with the proud inscription that no praise is equal to so great a name. Alfieri, Rossini... The poet Ugo Foscolo, in his poem On Sepulchres of 1807, made Santa Croce the temple of Italian glories, and in 1871 his own remains were brought here from a cemetery in Chiswick, in London. In January 1817 the French writer Stendhal left this church with his heart pounding, afraid he would fall, overwhelmed by so much beauty. Much later a Florentine psychiatrist, Graziella Magherini, gave the condition his name: Stendhal syndrome.

Now find the great monument to Dante on the right-hand wall, made in 1829 by Stefano Ricci. Dante sits above, deep in thought, and the inscription is from his own Inferno: honour the highest poet. But the tomb is empty. Dante died in Ravenna in 1321 and is buried there. When Pope Leo the Tenth agreed in 1519 to send the bones to Florence, the casket in Ravenna was found empty; the Franciscan friars had hidden them. They were found by chance in 1865, in a wooden box behind a wall.

And so this walk ends where it had to. You started at the hospital of Beatrice's father and passed the palace that condemned Dante, the abbey that explained him and the street he refused to walk. Florence has given him a statue, a museum and a magnificent tomb. Everything, except the one thing he wanted: to come home.