Dante's Tombs I Seven hundred years ago, Dante died in exile in Ravenna and was buried there. His native Florence refused his body, but two centuries later, Florence wanted him back. The Pope approved the transfer, but the monks in Ravenna returned an empty coffin to Florence’s new memorial. They had removed the poet’s bones from his tomb for safekeeping and interred them in the basilica wall where they lay forgotten for three hundred years, until a renovation revealed them, and they were buried in a mausoleum near the church on a side street so narrow it is easy to miss. Forty years ago we visited Ravenna and found Dante’s tomb, the worn white marble softened by lichens, the inscription so weathered it was hard to read. How modest it seemed after a day of monuments already ancient in Dante’s time, Justinian’s mosaics in blue and gold and the tomb of Gallia Placida that inspired Purgatorio and Paradiso. Once the western outpost of a great empire, today’s Ravenna is a backwater, surrounded by marshes dotted with oil wells. II One hundred years ago, after the Great War, an Italian immigrant to Argentina resolved to build Dante a worthy monument in his new country on the other side of the world, a building emerging from the depths of the earth reaching to the heavens, in every detail and at every level an embodiment of Dante’s great poem, elaborate and fantastical, a celebration of the imaginary over the mundane, realized as a skyscraper named for himself, the Palacio Barolo. Twenty-two floors representing twenty-two stanzas sit on a foundation scaled to the golden ratio. The visitor begins in hell, progresses to purgatory, and ascends to heaven. The lobby, crowned with Latin inscriptions and statues of serpents, dragons, and condors, radiates from a central dome into nine vaulted archways, the nine circles of hell, lit by red lights set in metal flowers. Geometric patterns representing alchemist’s fire and Masonic symbols decorate floors, ceilings, and elevator walls in red, white, and green tiles, the colors of the Italian flag. The higher levels, corresponding to heaven, begin at an observation deck overlooking the sprawl of Buenos Aires, crowned by a lighthouse at the highest point of one hundred meters, like the Divine Comedy’s one hundred Cantos, topped by a statue of Dante ascending to heaven. Architect Pilanti intended the light from the tower of the Palacio Barolo to cross the light from the Palacio Salvo, his sister building across the Rio de la Plata in Montevideo, the two beams mingling like the heavenly union of Dante and Beatrice, welcoming visitors to the great estuary like the Pillars of Hercules to the Mediterranean. By a miscalculation of the earth’s curvature, the beams never crossed, and the cupola, intended for Dante’s remains, remains empty.
Anne Whitehouse is the author of six poetry collections. Meteor Shower (2016) is her second collection from Dos Madres Press, following The Refrain in 2012. She is the author of a novel, Fall Love, as well as short stories, essays, features, and reviews. She was born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, and lives in New York City. You can listen to her lecture, “Longfellow, Poe, and the Little Longfellow War” here.
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