Last year, Italy decreed March 25 as National Dante Day. This year marks the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death. To honor these occasions, Guy Raffa explains how he came to write Dante’s Bones: How a Poet Invented Italy, on what some might consider to be a morbid topic.
Dante’s Bones is the most personal book I have written. In it, I tell the story of the poet's adventurous physical afterlife—how his bones have been stolen, hidden, contested, discovered, examined, and, above all, venerated—and I unravel the meaning of these events at pivotal moments in Italian history from the late Middle Ages to the present. The book’s exploration of Dante’s graveyard history reflects an obsession I have had with cemeteries and tombs—how we mourn and honor the dead—literally for as long as I can remember. I trace this fascination to my earliest memory: watching President John F. Kennedy's funeral procession with my parents on our black and white television set in 1963, when I was three years old.
Now, just past my sixty-first birthday, my memory of the slain president’s funeral feels more like the memory of a memory. I've seen those iconic images many times since that first, live experience, but one moment brings an aching pang of recognition whenever I see it on a screen or in my mind: John F. Kennedy Jr., on his third birthday, saluting his father’s flag-draped casket after it has been carried outside St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington, DC, and begins its slow journey to Arlington National Cemetery. Forever fixed in my memory is one three-year-old boy watching another three-year-old boy say goodbye to his father.
Forty years later, in 2003, my own father died. Dante was on my mind as I addressed family and friends at his burial in Long Island National Cemetery (Pinelawn), not far from Smithtown Pines, the town where I lived as a child. The pine trees of my young life and my father’s final resting place (my brother is also buried there) joined in my imagination with the famous pine forest—the pineta—outside Ravenna, where Dante died and was buried in 1321. The poet modeled the Terrestrial Paradise atop the Mountain of Purgatory, the most human-centered afterworld of the Divine Comedy, on this pine forest. My attachment to Dante’s Purgatory, the poetic site of loving care between purifying souls and living human beings, has grown stronger as I’ve grown older. Dante’s imagining of communion between the living and the dead is a big part of why I love reading, teaching, and writing about his Divine Comedy. This posthumous communion is also central to the adventurous afterlife of the poet’s mortal remains that my book recounts.
Personal and professional interests in Dante’s bones coincided when I learned that traces of the poet’s physical afterlife—a small packet of “Dante dust” and impressions taken of his skull—had been discovered in the National Central Library of Florence. On July 16, 1999, three days before the discovery, John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife, Carolyn Bessette, and her sister, Lauren Bassette, died when the plane he was piloting crashed into the ocean en route to Martha’s Vineyard. I had always felt an odd sense of connection to this famous Kennedy son, whom I only knew through media coverage. Similar to how he was known as “John-John” to his family, my parents had affectionately called me “Guy-Guy” to distinguish me from my father, whose birth name (Gaetano) had been Americanized as “Guy,” my given name. Reclassification of efforts to find the crash victims from “search and rescue” to “search and recovery” appeared in newspapers on July 19, 1999, the same day as the discovery of the missing Dante relics. The sad news of JFK Jr.’s death inevitably reawakened my memory of him saluting his father’s casket, while news of the “Dante dust” and cranial impressions piqued my curiosity about the fate of the poet’s physical remains. The seeds of Dante’s Bones had been planted.
Much of what I subsequently learned about Dante’s physical afterlife came to light during the 600th anniversaries of his birth (1865) and death (1921). #Dante2021 and #Dante700 are popular Twitter hashtags recognizing that 2021 is another huge year for Dante Alighieri: the 700th anniversary of the Italian poet’s death in Ravenna, where he is buried. He is thought to have died during the night of September 13-14, 1321. The year-long commemorations began in Italy on September 5, 2020, when Sergio Mattarella, the president of the Italian Republic, and Michele de Pascale, the mayor of Ravenna, presided over the opening of the refurbished chapel or tempietto (“little temple”) holding Dante’s tomb.
Celebrations of the poet’s life, works, and legacy have continued throughout the year not only in Italy but around the world, including a dynamic series of Dante-themed events in the United States—though the reality of life under COVID-19, with conferences, talks, and exhibits held remotely, has essentially erased borders and collapsed distances for the real-time dissemination of knowledge. While all-things-Dante are on the table for this milestone anniversary of his death, the occasion sparks special interest in the poet’s graveyard history, the subject of Dante’s Bones.
During World War II, the casket containing the poet’s remains was removed from the marble tomb and hidden underground to protect his bones from bombing and looting. But the last time the bones were actually taken out of the casket and examined was soon after the commemorations in 1921. It was reported last summer that plans are underway to reexamine Dante’s bones with modern scientific methods before the 700th anniversary of his death in September 2021. As you might imagine, I can’t wait to see what new light is shed on this subject that, for me, is more than just academic.
