At the end of the _Vita Nuova_, his first work, Dante wrote down
that remarkable aspiration that God would take him to himself after he
had written of Beatrice such things as were never yet written of woman.
It was literally fulfilled when the _Commedia_ was finished twenty-five
years later. Scarce was Dante at rest in his grave when Italy felt
instinctively that this was her great man. Boccaccio tells us that in
1329[40] Cardinal Poggetto (du Poiet) caused Dante's treatise _De
Monarchia_, to be publicly burned at Bologna, and proposed further to dig
up and burn the bones of the poet at Ravenna, as having been a heretic;
but so much opposition was roused that he thought better of it. Yet this
was during the pontificate of the Frenchman, John XXII., the reproof of
whose simony Dante puts in the mouth of St. Peter, who declares his seat
vacant,[41] whose damnation the poet himself seems to prophesy,[42] and
against whose election he had endeavored to persuade the cardinals, in a
vehement letter. In 1350 the republic of Florence voted the sum of ten
golden florins to be paid by the hands of Messer Giovanni Boccaccio to
Dante's daughter Beatrice, a nun in the convent of Santa Chiara at
Ravenna. In 1396 Florence voted a monument, and begged in vain for the
metaphorical ashes of the man of whom she had threatened to make literal
cinders if she could catch him alive.
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