Michelangelo, who was born in time—­1475—­to enjoy in Lorenzo the Magnificent’s house the new and precious advantage of printed books, became as a boy a profound student of the poet, and when later an appeal was made from Florence to the Pope to sanction the removal of Dante’s bones to Florence, Michelangelo was among the signatories.  But it was not done.  His death-mask from Ravenna is in the Bargello:  a few of his bones and their coffin are still in Ravenna, in the monastery of Classe, piously preserved in a room filled with Dante relics and literature; his tomb is elsewhere at Ravenna, a shrine visited by thousands every year.

Ever since has Dante’s fame been growing, so that only the Bible has led to more literature; and to-day Florence is more proud of him than any of her sons, except perhaps Michelangelo.  We have seen one or two reminders of him already; more are here where we stand.  We have seen the picture in honour of him which the Republic set up in the cathedral; his head on a beautiful inlaid door in the Palazzo Vecchio, the building where his sentence of banishment was devised and carried, to be followed by death sentence thrice repeated (burning alive, to be exact); and we have seen the head-quarters of the Florentine Dante society in the guild house at Or San Michele.  We have still to see his statue opposite S. Croce, another fresco head in S. Maria Novella, certain holograph relics at the library at S. Lorenzo, and his head again by his friend Giotto, in the Bargello, where he would have been confined while waiting for death had he been captured.

Dante’s house has been rebuilt, very recently, and next to it is a newer building still, with a long inscription in Italian upon it, to the effect that the residence of Bella and Bellincione Alighieri stood hereabouts, and in that abode was Dante born.  The Commune of Florence, it goes on to say, having secured possession of the site, “built this edifice on the remains of the ancestral house as fresh evidence of the public veneration of the divine poet”.  The Torre della Castagna, across the way, has an inscription in Italian, which may be translated thus:  “This Tower, the so-called Tower of the Chestnut, is the solitary remnant of the head-quarters from which the Priors of the Arts governed Florence, before the power and glory of the Florentine Commune procured the erection of the Palace of the Signoria”.

Few persons in the real city of Florence, it may be said confidently, live in a house built for them; but hereabouts none at all.  In fact, it is the exception anywhere near the centre of the city to live in a house built less than three centuries ago.  Palaces abound, cut up into offices, flats, rooms, and even cinema theatres.  The telegraph office in the Via del Proconsolo is a palace commissioned by the Strozzi but never completed:  hence its name, Nonfinito; next it is the superb Palazzo Quaratesi, which Brunelleschi designed, now the head-quarters of a score of firms and an Ecclesiastical School whence sounds of sacred song continually emerge.