Dante’s Bones: How a Poet Invented Italy, published by Harvard University Press

Dante, whose Divine Comedy gave the world its most vividly imagined spiritual afterlife, has endured an extraordinary physical life beyond the grave. The year 2021 will mark the 700th anniversary of his death. Exiled in death as in life, Dante has hardly rested in peace over the centuries. Like a saint’s relics, his bones have been stolen, recovered, reburied, exhumed, examined, and worshiped. Above all, they have been exploited: Claims to his physical remains, this book shows, are also political, religious, or artistic claims to the authority of Italy’s greatest poet.

Actors in this graveyard history range from Lorenzo de’ Medici, Michelangelo, and Pope Leo X to the Franciscan friar who hid the bones, the stone mason who accidentally discovered them, and the opportunistic sculptor who accomplished what Florentine princes, popes, and politicians could not: allow Dante’s native city of Florence to repatriate a precious relic of the poet it had banished.

Dante’s Bones narrates for the first time the complete course of the poet’s physical afterlife, from his death and burial in 1321 to a computer-generated reconstruction of his face in 2006. Recovering and assembling the pieces of Dante’s lively skeletal history, this book closely examines a wide variety of archival and published sources across multiple fields, including literature, religion, architecture, art history, physical anthropology, and political and military history. Besides creative and scholarly works, it draws on scientific reports, diplomatic documents, popular materials (newspapers, magazines, films, videos), and eyewitness accounts in letters, diaries, and memoirs.

This graveyard history illuminates and is illuminated by the history of Italy. As the highlighted portion of Dante’s dead body has diminished—from a skeleton to bones to fragments, finally to dust—his cultural legacy has expanded from the city to the nation to the world. A political and literary hero for Renaissance Florence, the poet was transformed from Italy’s father and prophet into a nationalist champion during two world wars and Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship before becoming the one-name global icon we know today.

Winner of the 2021 Book Award (Medieval-Renaissance-Early Modern) from the American Association of Teachers of Italian

Read excerpts from the book at LitHub: On the City of Florence’s Struggle to Get Back Dante’s Body

and at Lapham’s Quarterly: Dante’s Exile

Reviews

“A fascinating narrative of translation (literal), cultural appropriation, and myth making. Dante becomes a humanist ideal, a nineteenth-century prophet, and hence father for Italy, and abstraction to which all political persuasions have sought to harness themselves. The actual travails of Dante’s remains also make for fascinating reading.” — Annali D’Italianistica (2021)

“Guy Raffa tells the remarkable story of Dante’s afterlife, by turns grotesque, lively and farcical, as the loss and recovery of his bones intertwines with the tempestuous fate of Italy.” — London Review of Books (July 15, 2021)

“Meeting the challenge of invigorating historical events with whodunit tones of intrigue, Guy P. Raffa’s Dante’s Bones delivers a fairly adventurous tale.” — Rain Taxi (March 2021)

“details the path that Dante’s remains trod in his physical afterlife, from the time of his death to the present, and of the people who wanted a piece of him for themselves. . . Has the marks of a detective story.” — Chronicles (January 2021)

“an excellent book for anyone with an interest in Dante, the arc of Italian history, or merely an historical adventure well told.” — StrategyPage (September 15, 2020)

“an intensively researched, gripping story of Dante’s lively bones that also tells a brisk history of modern Italy.” — Law & Liberty (July 23, 2020)

Raffa “has a deep acquaintance with Italian antiquarian lore, supported by immaculate prose craftsmanship.” — Wall Street Journal (May 29, 2020)

“In fiction and in fact, Dante Alighieri has been influencing the world order for centuries. Just how he’s achieved global-icon stature is the subject of Guy P. Raffa’s fascinating, comprehensive new book.” — AirMailWeekly (May 23, 2020)

“Pulling together many threads of Dante’s story, Raffa offers an engaging, informative, and original account of the material culture of the poet’s epic body of work. Highly recommended.” — Library Journal (May 1, 2020)

Guy Raffa “devotes this fascinating study to how the treatment of Dante’s remains over the centuries has reflected his centrality to Italian history and culture. . . . In tracing the history of Dante’s bones, Raffa also provides an illuminating exploration of Italian nationalism and political thought.” — Publishers Weekly (March 13, 2020)

Dante Alighieri changed literature forever by reimagining the afterlife, and Dante’s Bones now captures Dante’s afterlife in a way that has never been done. Adeptly guiding us through medieval politics as well as modern science, Guy Raffa achieves the elusive accomplishment of vividly bringing Dante to life through his death. — Matthew Pearl, author of The Dante Club and The Dante Chamber

Dante’s Bones is at once a vivid retelling of Dante’s fortunes in the centuries following his death and an important work of historical scholarship. Guy Raffa’s deft prose illuminates the enduring contest over the great poet’s mortal remains, providing a remarkable instance—by turns comical, deadly serious, and always captivating—of the appropriation of literary genius for political and cultural purposes. — Albert Ascoli, author of Dante and the Making of a Modern Author

Dante’s Bones is an enormous gift to readers and scholars of the poet and Italian history. With intensive scholarship in a wide variety of fields as his loom, Raffa has woven a fascinating tapestry out of 700 years of guarding, stealing, hiding, maintaining, studying, celebrating, debating, and claiming the material form and symbolic meaning of Dante’s remains. — Arielle Saiber, author of Measured Words: Computation and Writing in Renaissance Italy