Dante's Bones by Guy P. Raffa

Author:Guy P. Raffa
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard University Press

11

Manly Mediterranean Bones

Dante therefore is the most glorious and authentic representative of the Mediterranean race.

—GIUSEPPE SERGI AND FABIO FRASSETTO

•     The military’s laying of a wreath at Dante’s tomb on September 11, 1921, anticipated its starring role less than two months later at another tomb. An even larger number of active troops and veterans joined thousands of other Italians in Rome for the burial of the Unknown Soldier in the National Monument to King Victor Emmanuel II.1 A monument to Italian unification, the “Vittoriano”—derisively called the “wedding cake” or “typewriter” for its rigidly tiered form—is Italy’s official “Altare della Patria,” its national altar. The train carrying the casket of the Unknown Soldier departed from Aquileia in northeastern Italy on October 29 and arrived in Rome on November 2, 1921. The state funeral in which the body was buried and the tomb unveiled took place two days later.

Dante and the Unknown Soldier may appear at first glance to have little in common. Worshiping Italy’s celebrated poet and prophet from the Middle Ages would seem unrelated to honoring an anonymous soldier killed in the Great War. Only on reflection do we see how they truly complemented each other, joining like two ends of a thread to bring healing closure to a grieving nation. Dante, after all, had no equal in Italian cultural life precisely because he ingeniously transformed the hardships born of political exile into the story of every individual seeking meaning in “our life.” Likewise, the tomb of the Unknown Soldier marked not, as gravesites conventionally do, an identifiable person’s death but rather the large-scale slaughter that in just a few years senselessly erased the lives of an unspeakable number of young men. While the Unknown Soldier was “special” by virtue of having been chosen to represent all his fallen comrades, he was at the same time an “everyman” allowing for collective as well as individual mourning.2 Both tombs were doubly symbolic as memorials to two individuals—the best known and the unknown—whose bones had the power to transform personal loss into a unifying experience.

Despite Gabriele D’Annunzio’s absence on both occasions, his influential role in events surrounding the tomb of the Unknown Soldier recalled his impact on the commemorations of the six hundredth anniversary of Dante’s death. Even though his writings on a fallen comrade, Giovanni Randaccio, helped inspire the tomb, D’Annunzio refused an invitation to attend the burial of the Unknown Soldier in Rome, just as he had refused to attend and speak at the ceremonies in Ravenna. Whereas D’Annunzio had dispatched three pilots to Dante’s tomb with laurel leaves in honor of the poet and dead Italian soldiers, he sent legionnaires from Fiume to lay a wreath at the tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Whereas D’Annunzio had requested that the mother of a fallen soldier be permitted to scatter the leaves at Dante’s tomb, a war widow who had also lost a son in the fighting was given the task of selecting the Unknown Soldier by choosing one of eleven identical caskets brought from the battlefields into the basilica in Aquileia.

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