Dante in exile
The brooding marble amid his hosts' square โ gratitude carved.
Didier Descouens โ CC BY-SA 4.0 ยท This Photo was taken by Andrea Bertozzi. Feel free to use my photos, but please mention me as the author and send me a message. โ CC BY-SA 4.0 ยท This Photo was taken by Andrea Bertozzi. Feel free to use my photos, but please mention me as the author and send me a message. โ CC BY-SA 4.0 ยท This Photo was taken by Andrea Bertozzi. Feel free to use my photos, but please mention me as the author and send me a message. โ CC BY-SA 4.0
When Florence exiled its poet he sheltered with Verona's lords โ Cangrande above all โ living here through Comedy-writing years and immortalising his host's praise in Paradiso. Florence built him a repentant empty tomb; Verona kept a square he actually lived in โ an irony its people relish.
Pure pride: lords unwilling to lie underground like commoners raised their sarcophagi on Gothic canopies above their own church โ Cangrande over its door, smiling on horseback. Funerary architecture without twin: the dead keeping watch over their city.
A contemplative half hour walks Erbe, Signori and the tombs โ but the right way is crossing them repeatedly: morning for market, noon for shade, evening for lit marble; every route passes anyway.
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One step under the whale-rib arch moves you from the Erbe market's clamour into a throne room's gravity: the Signori is Verona's court of state โ no vendors, no umbrellas, but the palaces of rule linked arm in arm by arches and passages: the medieval Palazzo della Ragione, the slender Renaissance Loggia del Consiglio โ by old consensus Verona's most beautiful building โ and the della Scala palaces where Dante lived as guest. Dante himself stands at centre in pensive marble since 1865: the exile sheltered by Verona's lords, who repaid them kindly in the Comedy โ and the historic cafรฉ on the corner has served coffee in his shadow under his name for two centuries. The square completes in its small neighbour: the fenced courtyard of the Scaliger Tombs, Gothic canopies hanging the lords' graves in the air above their church โ medieval Europe's strangest, proudest funerary art.
The brooding marble amid his hosts' square โ gratitude carved.
Early-Renaissance grace with a gilded front โ Verona's civic jewel.
The palaces of rule arch-linked around solemn space.
Piazza dei Signori, 37121 Verona