Dante's Florence: Beatrice, Exile and the Empty Tomb of Santa Croce

A literary walk through Florence from the hospital of Beatrice's father and Dante's neighbourhood to the prison where he was condemned, the flooded library of 1966 and the basilica that still waits for his bones

Florence · 11 stops · 27 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. 1. Santa Maria Nuova: The Hospital of Beatrice's Father

   Piazza di Santa Maria Nuova 1, 50122 Firenze FI, Italy

   In the little square of Santa Maria Nuova, a long arcaded front runs along one side, and behind it people in white coats hurry about their work, just as people have here for more than seven hundred years. This is a hospital, and it has never stopped being one.

   It was founded in 1288 by a rich Florentine banker, Folco Portinari, and it is the oldest hospital in Florence still in use. Folco had a daughter called Bice, short for Beatrice. According to Boccaccio, it was at a May Day party in the Portinari house in 1274 that a nine-year-old boy called Dante Alighieri first saw her, a girl of about eight in a crimson dress, and was lost for the rest of his life.

   They hardly ever spoke. Dante writes that nine years later she greeted him in the street, and that single greeting sent him home to his room in a kind of trance. She married another banker, Simone de' Bardi, and died in 1290, aged about twenty-four, only months after her father. Dante turned his grief into a little book of poems and prose, the Vita Nuova, and promised to write of her what had never been written of any woman. He kept that promise: in the Divine Comedy, Beatrice guides him through Paradise.

   Tradition gives the hospital a second founder, Monna Tessa, a servant in the Portinari household, who is said to have urged Folco to build it and gathered women to nurse the sick. Those women became the Oblate, and their old convent just behind the hospital is now a public library, the Biblioteca delle Oblate, with a terrace that looks straight at the dome. Folco himself lies in the hospital church of Sant'Egidio, under the portico in front of you.

   Two centuries later Leonardo da Vinci came here to study anatomy. In his notes he describes an old man in this hospital who told him he was more than a hundred years old, and who died quietly a few hours later; Leonardo dissected him to understand so gentle a death. Now head south-west through the old streets to Via del Corso, and turn left into the narrow lane of Via Santa Margherita.

2. 2. Casa di Dante & Santa Margherita de' Cerchi

   Via Santa Margherita 1, 50122 Firenze FI, Italy

   Walk into the narrow, shadowy lane of Via Santa Margherita and you reach a stern stone house with small arched windows and a corner that rises like a medieval tower. Florence calls it the Casa di Dante, the house of Dante.

   Here is an honest confession: it is not quite his house. Dante was born in 1265 in this parish, among the houses of the Alighieri, a family of small landowners and money-lenders. But the building you see was put up in the early twentieth century, in a medieval style, close to where the family homes were believed to stand, and it has been a museum about his life and times since 1965. The streets, though, are the real thing: this tangle of lanes was his whole childhood world.

   A few steps further up the lane, a doorway leads into one of the smallest churches in Florence, Santa Margherita de' Cerchi. Tradition says two things about it. That Dante married Gemma Donati here, a match arranged by contract when he was about twelve. And that Beatrice is buried here, among the Portinari tombs. Nobody can prove either, but lovers do not care: inside you will often find a basket full of handwritten notes, asking Beatrice for help in love.

   The church belonged to the Cerchi family, and that name matters. Around 1300 the Cerchi led the White Guelphs, while the Donati, Gemma's own clan, led by the violent Corso Donati, headed the Blacks. Dante married a Donati and sided with the Whites. In Purgatory he has Corso's own brother, Forese, foretell Corso's death, dragged by a horse towards hell, and that is exactly how Corso died in 1308.

   So in one lane you have Dante's birth, his marriage, his great love and the family feud that would wreck his life. Walk down to Via Dante Alighieri and follow it east to Via del Proconsolo, where two great buildings stand face to face across the street, one that condemned him, and one that explained him.

3. 3. The Bargello & the Badia: Dante Condemned, Dante Explained

   Via del Proconsolo 4, 50122 Firenze FI, Italy

   Stand on Via del Proconsolo between two very different buildings. On one side rises the Bargello, a fortress of rough stone with battlements and a tall tower. On the other, the slender hexagonal bell tower of the Badia Fiorentina pokes above the rooftops like a pencil.

   The Bargello was begun in 1255 and became the seat of the Podestà, the foreign magistrate who judged Florentines. In January 1302, after the Black Guelphs seized power, the Podestà condemned Dante, who was away from the city, for corruption in office: a heavy fine and exile. In March came a second sentence. If he ever fell into the city's hands, he was to be burned alive. He never saw Florence again.

   And yet inside this same building, on the wall of its chapel, there is a painting of Paradise attributed to Giotto's workshop, and among the blessed stands a young man in a red cap. It had been hidden under whitewash for centuries, and when it was uncovered in 1840 people recognised Dante. That gentle profile is now on countless book covers. The building that condemned him keeps the earliest portrait we have of him. Today the Bargello is a museum of sculpture, and those two trial panels for the Baptistery doors are here too.

   Across the road, the Badia is a Benedictine abbey founded in 978 by Countess Willa, mother of a margrave of Tuscany. Its bell rang the hours for the old walled city. In Paradise, Dante's ancestor Cacciaguida remembers that small, sober Florence, living in peace inside its ancient walls, hearing the hours of terce and nones ring out... from this very bell.

   Then the twist. In 1373 the city hired Giovanni Boccaccio to explain the Divine Comedy in public, the first lectures ever given on the poem, in a church belonging to the abbey. Ill health stopped him partway through the Inferno, and he died two years later. Barely seventy years after threatening to burn its poet, Florence was paying to have him explained. Walk south down Via del Proconsolo to the square where it ends, and face the long Baroque front opposite.

4. 4. San Firenze: Zeffirelli's Shakespeare and Florence's Courts

   Piazza di San Firenze 5, 50122 Firenze FI, Italy

   At the southern end of Via del Proconsolo the street opens into Piazza San Firenze, and one whole side of it is a single enormous Baroque front: a church at each end and a long convent in between, as if three buildings had agreed to wear one costume for a party.

   This is the complex of San Firenze, built over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for the Oratorians, the followers of Saint Philip Neri. After Italian unification the convent took on a sterner role: for generations it housed the law courts of Florence, until they moved to a new palace of justice on the edge of the city in the 2010s. So for a long time the judges of Florence worked within sight of the Bargello, where the Podestà had once condemned Dante.

   Today the building belongs to stories again. Since 2017 it has been home to the foundation of Franco Zeffirelli, the director born in Florence in 1923, with rooms full of his sketches, set designs and costumes for the theatre, the opera and the cinema. For a literary walk he matters because of one writer above all: Shakespeare. Zeffirelli filmed The Taming of the Shrew with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, a Romeo and Juliet in 1968 with actors barely older than the lovers, and a Hamlet in 1990. For millions of teenagers, his Romeo and Juliet was Shakespeare.

   Even his name is a small piece of literature. The story goes that his mother, who could not give him his father's surname, chose a word from an aria in Mozart's Idomeneo, Zeffiretti lusinghieri, the flattering little breezes, and that a clerk's spelling mistake turned it into Zeffirelli. As a boy he learned English from the elderly British ladies who lived in Florence before the war, and decades later he turned those memories into the film Tea with Mussolini.

   When the Arno flooded in November 1966, Zeffirelli took a camera into the drowned city, and you will hear what came of it a little later, at the library. Florence keeps doing this: condemning, judging, then telling the story beautifully. Walk round behind the Bargello into Via Ghibellina and follow it east to the corner of Via Michelangelo Buonarroti.

5. 5. Casa Buonarroti: Michelangelo the Poet

   Via Ghibellina 70, 50122 Firenze FI, Italy

   On the corner of Via Ghibellina and Via Michelangelo Buonarroti stands a dignified palazzo with tall windows and a sober doorway. It looks like the house of any well-off Florentine family, and in a way it is: the family was called Buonarroti.

   Michelangelo bought property here in 1508, but he spent most of his life in Rome and hardly lived in it. It was his nephew Leonardo who built the palace, and his great-nephew, also called Michelangelo, a poet and playwright, who turned it into a monument to his great-uncle, filling its rooms with paintings celebrating his life. The last of the family left it to the city, and it opened as a museum in 1859.

   Inside are two marble reliefs carved by a boy of about sixteen, around 1490 to 1492, while he was learning in the Medici sculpture garden. One is a tender Madonna sitting on a staircase. The other is a furious tangle of bodies, the Battle of the Centaurs. In those two slabs you can already see the whole of Michelangelo: the stillness and the storm.

   But this walk is about words, and Michelangelo was also a poet, author of around three hundred poems. He worshipped Dante. In one sonnet he writes that he would gladly trade the greatest fortune in the world for Dante's bitter exile, if only he could have his genius too. And in 1519, when Florentines petitioned Pope Leo the Tenth to bring Dante's bones home from Ravenna, Michelangelo added his own line, offering to make the poet a worthy tomb. His great-nephew later published his poems, in 1623, but tidied them up, changing some love poems addressed to a young man so that they seemed to be written to a woman. Readers had to wait centuries for the real text.

   The bones never came. We will see why at the end of this walk, in front of a tomb that is empty. For now, head south-east through the quiet back streets to Via di San Giuseppe, where a short, straight street begins with a little shrine on its corner.

6. 6. Via dei Malcontenti: The Street of the Condemned

   Via dei Malcontenti, 50122 Firenze FI, Italy

   At the corner where Via di San Giuseppe ends, a small painted shrine on the wall watches over the start of a narrow, straight street running east towards the river and the old city walls. Its name is Via dei Malcontenti: the street of the discontented.

   Few people walked it willingly. Prisoners condemned to death were led from the jails in the centre of town along this street to the place of execution outside the gate known as the Porta alla Giustizia, the Gate of Justice, near the Arno. The crowds came to watch. The name is a piece of grim Florentine humour, and it has stuck for centuries.

   They did not walk alone. Members of a lay brotherhood, hooded in black and known as the Compagnia dei Neri, spent the last night with the condemned, praying and talking with them. On the final walk one brother held a small painted panel, a tavoletta, right in front of the prisoner's face, with an image of the Crucifixion or a martyrdom, so that the last things he saw would be not the jeering crowd or the gallows but a picture of mercy. Some of those panels survive in museums today.

   Remember the sentence of March 1302. If Dante had ever come home, this is very likely the road he would have taken, to be burned alive. In 1315 Florence offered exiles an amnesty, but on humiliating terms: pay a fine and do public penance. Dante refused, writing that he would not return to Florence by any road that cost him his honour. The city answered by renewing his death sentence and extending it to his sons. Almost seven hundred years later, in 2008, the city council voted to revoke it, a symbolic gesture to a man who had been dead since 1321.

   So walk this street slowly, the way the condemned once did, and imagine a poet who preferred exile to a pardon on his knees. At its far end, by the river, a lonely stone tower stands on its own, the last guard of the walls Dante saw being built.

7. 7. Torre della Zecca: The Last Tower of Dante's Walls

   Piazza Piave, 50122 Firenze FI, Italy

   At the end of the street, alone on an island of traffic beside the Arno, rises a tall, square stone tower with nothing attached to it, as if the wall it once belonged to had simply walked away and left it standing guard.

   This is the Torre della Zecca, one of the few surviving pieces of the last circle of walls Florence built around itself. Work began in 1284 and the circuit was finished around 1333. The tower is named after the zecca, the city mint, which once stood nearby by the river. Dante was nineteen when the building began, and he watched his city burst out of its old clothes.

   What the mint produced changed Europe. The gold florin, first struck in 1252, became the dollar of the Middle Ages, trusted from London to Constantinople. And where there is good money, there are forgers. In the Inferno Dante meets Master Adam, who forged florins for a family of counts in the hills of the Casentino and was burned alive for it in 1281. Dante punishes him with a swollen belly and an endless thirst, dreaming of the cool streams of his valley. Florentine readers knew exactly who he was.

   Dante had complicated feelings about all this money. In Paradise his great-great-grandfather Cacciaguida praises the old Florence, sober and modest inside its ancient circle of walls, before the city grew rich. And in Hell, Dante blames the newcomers and their sudden gains for the pride and excess that tore Florence apart. The very walls being built around him were, to his eyes, a sign of a city growing too big for its virtue.

   Most of those walls disappeared between 1865 and 1871, when Florence was briefly the capital of Italy and the architect Giuseppe Poggi replaced them with wide boulevards. A few gates and this tower were spared. Now follow the river west along the Lungarno della Zecca Vecchia to a vast building with a tall tower of its own, the house of millions of books.

8. 8. Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale: The Flood and the Mud Angels

   Piazza dei Cavalleggeri 1, 50122 Firenze FI, Italy

   Facing the little Piazza dei Cavalleggeri, just back from the river, stands a monumental building of pale stone with a tall tower at one corner. It was built between 1911 and 1935, and the tower is not for bells: it holds books.

   This is the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, the National Central Library, one of the two great national libraries of Italy. It began with one man, Antonio Magliabechi, librarian to the Grand Duke, who left his enormous private collection to the city when he died in 1714. Contemporaries described a man who lived and slept among towers of books and cared about nothing else. His gift opened to the public in 1747, and today the library receives a copy of what is published in Italy and keeps treasures such as Galileo's manuscripts.

   On the 4th of November 1966, after days of rain, the Arno broke its banks. The Santa Croce quarter, the lowest part of the city, was hit hardest, and the library's basements and lower floors filled with water, mud and heating oil. More than a million items were damaged: newspapers, periodicals, rare books, catalogues. Across Florence dozens of people died, and in the basilica next door Cimabue's great painted crucifix was ruined.

   Then something extraordinary happened. Young people poured into Florence from all over Italy and from abroad, students, hikers, strangers, and formed long human chains, passing dripping volumes hand to hand up out of the mud. Florentines called them gli angeli del fango, the mud angels. Books were dried wherever there was space and heat, even in tobacco-drying kilns in the countryside. Franco Zeffirelli made a documentary about the disaster, narrated by Richard Burton, that raised money around the world, and the work of restoration went on for decades, helping to create modern book conservation.

   Here, more than anywhere, you can feel that literature is not only words but paper, and paper can drown. From the library, walk west along Corso dei Tintori, the old street of the cloth dyers, to the corner of Via de' Benci and a perfect little Renaissance palace.

9. 9. Museo Horne: An English Poet's Renaissance House

   Via de' Benci 6, 50122 Firenze FI, Italy

   On the corner of Via de' Benci stands a small palazzo of almost perfect proportions: rough-cut stone on the ground floor, elegant arched windows above, a cornice like the brim of a hat. It was built at the end of the fifteenth century, and it looks as if nobody has touched it since.

   Somebody did, very carefully. In 1911 the house was bought by an Englishman, Herbert Horne, and his story is one of the oddest in Florence. In 1890s London he had been a poet, a member of the Rhymers' Club alongside the young W. B. Yeats, as well as an architect, a designer of typefaces and the editor of an arts magazine. Then he fell in love with the Italian Renaissance, moved to Florence and gave years of his life to a single painter, Botticelli. His book on him, published in 1908, is still read by specialists.

   Horne restored this palace room by room and filled it with what a Florentine merchant's home might have held: paintings, furniture, majolica, drawings, even kitchen things. Among the treasures is a small panel of Saint Stephen attributed to Giotto. When Horne died in 1916, aged only fifty-two, he left the house and everything in it to the Italian state, and it became a museum.

   The palace belonged to cloth merchants, and the street you just walked, Corso dei Tintori, was the dyers' street, where the river water ran with colour. Wool and cloth made Florence rich, and the guilds ran the city. Even Dante had to join one to enter politics: after 1293 public office was reserved for guild members, so the poet enrolled in the guild of physicians and apothecaries, which also took in booksellers and painters.

   Horne was one of many writers from England who made Florence their second home. The Brownings lived across the river, and George Eliot came here to research her novel Romola, set in Savonarola's city. Walk up Via de' Benci and turn right into the great open square in front of Santa Croce.

10. 10. Piazza Santa Croce: Sermons, Football and a Painted Palace

    Piazza di Santa Croce, 50122 Firenze FI, Italy

    Step into the vast rectangle of Piazza Santa Croce. At its far end shines the white, green and pink marble front of the basilica, and on your right, along the south side, a long palace facade is covered from top to bottom in faded frescoes.

    The Franciscans laid out this enormous space for one purpose: crowds. Their friars preached to thousands in the open air, and in the 1420s the most famous preacher of the age, Bernardino of Siena, held the square spellbound. Listeners wrote his sermons down as he spoke, and they survive as some of the liveliest Italian prose of the century, full of jokes, scoldings and scenes from daily life.

    In June the square changes completely. Sand is spread over the paving, stands go up, and the four historic quarters of Florence fight it out at calcio storico, Florentine football in Renaissance costume: the Blues of Santa Croce, the Whites of Santo Spirito, the Reds of Santa Maria Novella and the Greens of San Giovanni, twenty-seven players a side, with the final on the 24th of June, the feast of the city's patron saint. It looks like rugby mixed with a street fight. In February 1530, with the city under siege, Florentines played a match right here to show the enemy camp how little they cared. And in 1580 the nobleman Giovanni de' Bardi published a little book setting out the rules of the game.

    Look at that frescoed facade, Palazzo dell'Antella. It was painted around 1620 by a team of artists, the story goes, in a matter of weeks. Set into its wall is a marble disc dated 1565, which marks the halfway line of the playing field. So the oldest football pitch marking in Florence is on a palace.

    In November 1966 floodwater filled this square to several metres, and small plaques on the surrounding buildings still mark how high it rose, often above your head. Now cross towards the basilica. On the left side of its steps, a stern marble Dante is waiting for you.

11. 11. Basilica di Santa Croce: Dante's Empty Tomb

    Piazza di Santa Croce 16, 50122 Firenze FI, Italy

    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.