1096. A peasant whom I met in the Pineta said to me: "Have you seen Dante's Walk, under the trees by the canal? He used to walk there in the
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Piazza Byron, with Church of S. Francesco
evenings, studying." He said it as if his grandfather had met Dante walking there.
Ravenna is full of Dante. His tomb, inscribed, "Dantis Poetae Sepulchrum," is railed in with the eleven early Christian sarcophagi of the "Sepolcreto di Braccioforte," and with certain tablets to Mazzini hung with wreaths of dry leaves. It is in the earliest of these sarcophagi that d'Annunzio has planted a rose-tree in the first act of Francesca da Rimini, where Francesca walks round it in the court of her father's house, and touches the carvings on the four sides, and says, as she touches each in order:
The Redeemer treads
Under His feet the lion and the snake;
Mary saluted by Elizabeth;
Our Lady, and the angel bids "All hail!"
The stags are drinking at the running brook.
By the side of the tomb is the house, its windows bricked up, but the tall brown wall still solid, where, as the tablet tells you, Dante was the guest of Guido da Polenta: "Questa casa fu un tempo dei Polentani, che ebbero la gloria di accogliere ospitalmente Dante Alighieri." On an old red wall overlooking the public gardens near the station there is another tablet: "Beatrice, figliuola di Dante Allighieri, in questo cenobio di Santo Stefano degli Olivi si votò a Dio, indegnata delle nequizie del mondo, visto da una rea fazione di cittadini dannato il padre a perpetuo esilio e mendico ire in cerca dell'altrui pane" (Beatrice, daughter of Dante Alighieri, in this convent of Santo Stefano degli Olivi, devoted herself to God, wroth with the world's wickedness, having seen her father, through the evil dissension of citizens, condemned to perpetual exile, and to become a beggar for the bread of strangers).
After Dante, Byron is still the great presence in Ravenna. The hotel which
