Ravenna rendezvous – Frank McNally visits the tomb of Dante, who died 700 years ago

The tomb of Dante Alighieri has double-doors, and official opening hours, but tourists are not allowed in. The nearest you get is the steps of the small mausoleum, oddly located in a corner of Ravenna formed by two streets, where a sign warns noisy visitors that this is a "Zona del Silenzio". You can only lean through the doorway and peer around. Stand behind the rope, all ye who would enter here.

There isn’t much to see anyway, so visitors quickly move on to the neighbouring garden, Franciscan church, and other attractions. But Dante’s greatest monument, after all, is his writing, especially the “Comedy” (promoted to “Divine Comedy” by Boccaccio, a name that has stuck). Although in practice the book may not be nearly as much visited as the tomb, it remains one of literature’s most influential, not least in having turned the Tuscan dialect it was written into what we now call Italian.

A measure of Dante’s great fame is that, although he lived three centuries earlier, we know far more about him than we do about Shakespeare. Unusually for a man of the 13th century, this includes his appearance, on which historians and artists have formed a consensus. We also know exactly why, having been born in Florence, he ended up in Ravenna, where he died 700 years next Tuesday.

Dante is so well documented because he wasn’t just a writer or actor, like Shakespeare. He was a “player” in the more modern sense of the term, an impoverished aristocrat who became deeply embroiled in the politics of his era. He even helped rule the city of his birth briefly. But by then he was important enough to be double-crossed, in person, by the Pope, a setback that ended his career.

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It was a brilliant but dangerous age in Florence. The great political rift of the time was between the Ghibellines, who supported the political interests of the Germanic Holy Roman Emperor, and the Guelfs, who backed the (French-allied) Papacy.

Dante was born into a minor Guelf family and married into a greater one, the Donati. He even served the cause as a soldier. But when the Guelfs split into “black” and “white” factions, with the Donati in the former camp, he joined the latter. Being in opposition then tended to mean exile or worse. During one period of White government, for example, Black leaders were sentenced in absentia to having their tongues cut out.

But in 1300, Dante was one of three White Guelfs who left Florence to seek a diplomatic solution to hostilities via Pope Boniface VIII. The Pope sent two away, while inviting the poet to stay on for a while, as a guest or hostage. Meanwhile, back in Florence, the Black Guelfs were mounting a coup, with Boniface's blessing. As his biographer AN Wilson puts it, Dante had been "stitched up" by the Pope. He never saw his home city again.

Exile ruined him financially. It also broke his heart. But literature was the long-term beneficiary. If he hadn’t been a failed politician, fuelled by bitterness, he might have remained the good poet he already was and not the great one he now became.

Written in beautifully economic triplets, his Comedy is at its most basic an allegory of the human journey from sin to salvation.

On another level, it’s a retired statesman’s attempt at imposing order on a chaotic world, punishing the vices and rewarding the virtues of many named figures of the period and earlier.

But via the Inferno, especially, it was also an exercise in vengeance, allowing Dante to consign many of his enemies to eternal, often hideously graphic, punishment, at least in the imagination. In return for his treachery, Boniface VIII has earned the role of one of literature’s greatest villains. Several of Dante’s Donati in-laws were consigned to hell too.

In a flourish added by a later poet, Dante’s epitaph refers to the city that exiled him as his “unloving mother”.

But having lived to regret the mistreatment of her greatest son, Florence spent centuries trying to get him back from Ravenna, even building its own mausoleum for his eventual return.

His Franciscan minders saw fit to hide the poet’s bones for a time, even after the present tomb was built in 1781. There was a time when Dante had two competing mausoleums and was not residing in either. But 700 years on, Ravenna appears to be his final resting place. As the fires of Dante’s literary hell continue to rage, a smaller, gentler burner hangs from the ceiling of his tomb. It contains olive oil from Tuscany, sent every year by the regretful mother city.