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Domenico di Michelino painted me in the Florence Cathedral in 1465, a hundred and forty years after my death. He shows me holding the Comedy, with the gates of Hell to my left, the mountain of Purgatory behind me, and the city of Florence — which exiled me — at my right.

I wrote the Comedy in exile. I began it around 1308, in Verona, in Ravenna, wherever my hosts would have me. I died in Ravenna in 1321 while returning from a diplomatic mission to Venice. Florence asked for my remains several times in the following centuries. Ravenna kept them.

The painting captures one thing correctly: I am facing outward, toward the living city and its inhabitants, while the worlds of the afterlife are arrayed behind me. The Comedy was not written for the dead. It was written to show the living — in Italian, not Latin, so that all of them could read it — what they were moving toward.