Dante refused the Florentines his days and çoisRenéRavenna refused them his ashes, even though Michael Angelo, the resuscitated genius of the poet, was resolving to decorate the funeral monument of him who had learnt _come l'uom s'eterna._[517]
"The painter of the Last Judgment, the sculptor of the Moses, the architect of the dome of St. Peter's, the engineer of the Old Bastion at Florence, the poet of the sonnets addressed to Dante joined his fellow-townsmen and supported the petition which they presented to Leo X. with these words:
"'_Io Michel Agnolo, scultore, il medesimo a Vostra Santità supplico, offerendomi al divin poeta fare la sepoltura sua condecente e in loco onorevole in quest a città._'
"Michael Angelo, whose chisel was disappointed in its hope, had recourse to his pencil to raise another mausoleum to that other himself. He drew the principal subjects of the _Divina Commedia_ on the margins of a folio copy of the works of the great poet; a vessel which bore this two-fold monument from Leghorn to Civita Vecchia suffered shipwreck.
"I returned much moved and feeling something of that commotion, mingled with a divine terror, which I experienced at Jerusalem when my _cicerone_ proposed to take me to Lord Byron's house. Ah, what were Childe Harold and the Signora Guiccioli[518] to me in presence of Dante and Beatrice! Misfortune and the centuries are still lacking to Childe Harold; let him await the future. Byron was badly inspired in his _Prophecy of Dante._
"I have found Constantinople again at San Vitale[519] and San Apollinare[520]. Honorius[521] and his hen were indifferent to me; I prefer Placidia[522] and her adventures, the memory of which came back to me in the basilica of St. John the Baptist: they form the romance of the Barbarians. Theodoric[523] remains great, even though he put Boethius[524] to death. Those Goths were a superior race; Amalasontha[525], banished to an island in the Lake of Bolsena, strove, with her minister Cassiodorus[526], to save what remained of Roman civilization. The Exarchs[527] brought to Ravenna the decadence of their empire. Ravenna was Lombard under Astolf[528]; the Carlovingians restored it to Rome. It became subject to its archbishop; then it changed from a republic into a tyranny; finally, after having been Guelph or Ghibelline, after having formed part of the Venetian States, it returned to the Church[529] under Pope Julius II.[530] and lives to-day only through the name of Dante.