c. 1999 Religion News Service

FLORENCE, Italy _ Almost seven centuries after his death in Ravenna, a missing cache of”dust”from the bones of Dante Alighieri has been found in Florence, the city that sent the medieval era’s premier poet of the human soul into lifelong exile.

The sealed envelope containing matter collected from the poet’s tomb in 1865 turned up Monday (July 19) in a box on a shelf of rare manuscripts in the National Library of Florence, which had misplaced it 70 years ago. Also in the box was an impression of Dante’s skull on polished paper.”The relic came to light almost by chance,”library director Antonia Ida Fontana told a news conference.”And it has caused great emotion in everyone.” Two librarians, Carmela Santalucia and Giuseppe Capecci, found the box on the third floor of the library among 17th century books containing views of Florence, Fontana said.

The Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Roman hailed the discovery, saying the relic of the author of”The Divine Comedy”is”important to feed a flame that passes from poet to poet and from reader to reader, constituting the most living vein of our Christian and literary conscience.”It urged a full investigation into how it came to disappear.

Bruno Dallapiccola, one of Italy’s leading microbiologists, urged the relic be conserved in the hope that it might contain remnants of Dante’s DNA. He said it would be valuable to study the dust if one day”it is possible to discover a poetry gene.” But Fontana said the library had no intention of opening the envelope, which was stamped, signed and sealed by a notary, who attested to its contents.”The notary’s stamps and seals are sufficient,”she said,”and to open the envelope at this point would seem to me to be almost like damaging the memory of the poet.” Fontana and others referred to the relic as”Dante’s ashes,”but Francesco Mazzoni, president of the Italian Dante Society and a leading Dante scholar, said this was incorrect.”The supreme poet was never cremated and his bones are still in his tomb in Ravenna,”Mazzoni said.”You can’t speak of Dante’s ashes because it is inexact from every point of view. At the most, it could be dust from the bones.” The library obtained the relic as a gift in 1889 but lost track of the envelope after displaying it in an ornate urn in 1929 at a world conference of librarians held in the library’s partially finished new quarters. The urn has yet to be found.

The missing cache survived the move of the library’s 5.3 million books from the Uffizi Palace to its present building overlooking Piazza Santa Croce in 1935, the devastation of World War II and the 1966 flood that caused extensive damage to books on lower floors.

Dante, born in Florence to a family of impoverished minor nobility in 1265, was swept up in the Florentine power struggle of his day. The Guelphs, who supported the pope, were pitted against the Ghibellines, partisans of the holy Roman emperor.

A member of the Guelph faction, Dante was in Rome on a mission to Pope Boniface XIII when the Ghibellines seized power and condemned him to death in his absence in 1302, thus forcing him into lifelong exile. He died in Ravenna in 1321.

In”The Divine Comedy,”considered the highest spiritual achievement of his age, Dante travels through inferno, purgatory and paradise, led first by the great Roman poet Virgil, best known for”The Aeneid,”and then by Beatrice, the Florentine girl he met when she was 10 and whom he loved from afar.

After his death, Dante was entombed under the portico of the Church of St. Francis in Ravenna, then moved in the 15th century to a small temple nearby. In the 17th century, a monk hid the remains in a wall of the church to thwart attempts of the Florentines to reclaim the relics of the poet, who had come to be known as the father of the Italian language.

The remains were placed in their own tomb in the 18th century and remained undisturbed until 1865, when authorities decided to examine them to mark the 600th anniversary of Dante’s birth.

One of those present, the Ravenna sculptor Enrico Pazzi, scraped up the dust of the poet’s disintegrating bones from the cloth on which they lay, apparently acting with official connivance. An admirer of Dante, Pazzi designed the marble statue of the poet that stands near the library in Piazza Santa Croce.

Pazzi separated the ashes into six envelopes and in 1889 presented one of the envelopes to the then library director, Desiderio Chilovi, who planned to build a Dante room in the projected new library.

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The only other envelope known to exist today was discovered in 1987 in a medallion decorating the ceiling of the Italian Senate in Rome.

But, according to an account of the affair published in 1900 by Dante scholar Corrado Ricci, Pazzi distributed the relics to an array of important people of the day.”Only someone who knows Pazzi well can imagine what must have been his happiness in being able to distribute the antique ashes to sovereigns, ministers, municipalities, etc.,”Ricci wrote.”He even gave a little of it to a Polish princess, a small carton of it to the minister Baron Giuseppe Natoli, a sample of it to Sen. Achille Rasponi and to the city of Florence.” (END OPTIONAL TRIM)

The library’s envelope measured 4.5 by 2.7 inches. It bore official stamps and the signature of the Ravenna notary Saturnino Malagola, who certified that”the dust enclosed here was taken from the cloth on which lay the box and bones of Dante Alighieri.” The library director said the library would display the relic in connection with the Italian Dante Society’s celebrations in June 2000 marking the 700 years of”The Divine Comedy.”

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