On this day in 1321, in the night between the 13th and the 14th, Dante Alighieri died at Ravenna. He was still an exile from Florence, and he had only just finished the Paradiso.
What happens next is a bookseller's favourite kind of trouble. The story, told by Boccaccio a few decades later, is that the final cantos could not be found for months after the funeral; the family searched, friends assumed the poem was unfinished, and eventually one of his sons recovered the pages from a hiding place in the wall of his room. I have no way of testing the tale, and Boccaccio liked a good ending. But anyone who has cleared a house knows that paper hides better than furniture.
Boccaccio gave the poem something else, too. Dante called it simply Comedia. The Divina came later, from admirers, and it stuck so thoroughly that the plainer title now looks like a misprint. The fresco below has him laurel-crowned with the book open, flames to one side and the domed city to the other, which Fabien would tell you is a portrait of Florence as much as of the poet. The city that would not have him back put him on its wall.
Jun, the sequel is gloriously petty: Florence has been asking Ravenna for the bones back for seven centuries, and Ravenna keeps saying no. When Florence finally got papal permission in 1519 and opened the sarcophagus, it was empty — friars had quietly moved him, and the bones only turned up again in 1865, in a wall.
Jun, that panel is by Domenico di Michelino, painted in the 1460s, and the lovely thing is the timing: the terraces of Purgatory rise just behind Brunelleschi's dome, which was then still a novelty on the skyline. The poet gets eternity on the left and fresh masonry on the right.