Dante Alighieri died in Ravenna in 1321 while serving as a diplomatic emissary, and the city has kept his bones ever since — to the enduring frustration of Florence, which exiled him. His tomb is a small neoclassical temple in the centre of the old city, built in the late 18th century, simple and dignified.
The interior is plain: a stone sarcophagus, a lamp burning with a flame supplied by Florence, and bas-relief decoration on the walls. It is not spectacular in the way of the mosaic monuments, but for anyone who has read the Divine Comedy, standing in the room where the author is buried — the author who wrote the topography of the afterlife — carries a particular weight.
The tomb sits in a small piazza beside the Basilica of San Francesco, and the combination makes a natural pairing: the basilica is where Dante's funeral was held, and its flooded crypt — covered in a shallow layer of water that has seeped in from the water table, now home to goldfish — is one of the strangest sights in Ravenna.