As Boccaccio tells us, Guido Novello had scarce buried Dante in that temporary tomb in the church of the Friars Minor when he lost his lordship.  On April 1, 1322, he was elected captain of the people in Bologna, and when he was about to return to Ravenna he suddenly heard that the archbishop had been murdered and that the city was in the hands of his enemies.  Do what he would he never returned to his own city, and thus his intentions with regard to the tomb of the poet were never carried out.  The noble sepulchre which Guido had planned was not built and the body of Dante reposed in the ancient sarcophagus in which it had been first placed.  There it remained when Boccaccio came to Ravenna, probably in 1346 and certainly in 1350, as the bearer of a gift from the Or San Michele Society to Beatrice di Dante, then a nun in S. Stefano dell’ Uliva.

Boccaccio, it will be remembered, had in his life of Dante bitterly upbraided Florence for her treatment of her greatest son, and to his blame had added a prophecy that she would soon repent of her shameful ingratitude and would envy Ravenna “the body of him whose works have held the admiration of the whole world.”  This prophecy fulfilled itself many times and first in 1396.  In that year, upon December 22, Florence made the first of her many demands for the body of Dante, which she now wished to bury in S. Maria del Fiore.  The demand, as Boccaccio had foreseen, was refused.  It was repeated in 1429 and again refused.  By 1476, when her next attempt was made, Ravenna had passed into the power of the Venetian Republic.  It was therefore to Venice that Florence now turned through the Venetian ambassador, who is said to have been none other than Bernardo Bembo.

Bembo’s request on behalf of Florence was, of course, a failure, but he seems to have himself repaired the tomb and to have placed upon it an epitaph.

  “Exigua tumuli Dantes hic sorte jacebas
  Squallenti nulli cognite pene situ. 
  At nunc marmoreo subnixus conderis arcu
  Omnibus et cultu splendidiore nites
  Nimirum Bembus musis incensus ethruscis
  Hoc tibi quem in primis hoc coluere dedit.

  Ann Sal. mcccclxxxiii. vi.  Kal.  Jvn. 
  Bernardus Bemb.  Praet. aere suo Posuit.”

His work of reparation and of adornment was carried out by Pietro Lombardo who was already at work in Ravenna for the Venetian republic, the sculptured effigy of Dante in relief being also from his hand.

But Florence was by no means at the end of her resources.  In 1509 Ravenna had passed into the hands of the pope.  In 1519 Leo X., a Medici, being on the throne of Peter, the Accademia Medicea of Florence petitioned the pope (among the signatories of the petition was Michelangelo, who offered to “make a worthy sepulchre for the divine poet in an honoured place” in Florence), to be allowed to carry away the bones of Dante from Ravenna to the City of Flowers.  The pope gave the Florentine envoys the permission they required as was expected.  They proceeded to Ravenna and opened the sarcophagus; but when they lifted the lid, they found it empty, save for “a fragment of bone and a few withered leaves of the laurel which had adorned the poet’s head.”  From that time till our own day the resting place of Dante’s bones has been a complete mystery.