Accorso, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and
the jurist Zanobi della Strada were to have had magnificent tombs there
erected to them. Late in the fifteenth century, Lorenzo il Magnifico
applied in person to the Spoletans, asking them to give up the corpse
of the painter Fra Filippo Lippi for the cathedral, and received the
answer that they had none too many ornaments to the city, especially in
the shape of distinguished people, for which reason they begged him to
spare them; and, in fact, he had to be content with erecting a
cenotaph. And even Dante, in spite of all the applications to which
Boccaccio urged the Florentines with bitter emphasis, remained sleeping
tranquilly in San Francesco at Ravenna, 'among ancient tombs of
emperors and vaults of saints, in more honorable company than thou, O
Florence, couldst offer him.' It even happened that a man once took
away unpunished the lights from the altar on which the crucifix stood,
and set there by the grave, with the words, 'Take them; thou art more
worthy of them than He, the Crucified One! ' (Franco Sacchetti, Novella
121.)
And now the Italian cities began again to remember their ancient
citizens and inhabitants. Naples, perhaps, had never forgotten its tomb
of Virgil, since a kind of mythical halo had become attached to the
name.
The Paduans, even in the sixteenth century, firmly believed that they
possessed not only the genuine bones of their founder, Antenor, but
also those of the historian Livy.
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