Dante Alighieri will forever be associated with Florence, city of his birth and the dialect he helped elevate such that it would one day become the basis of Italy's national language. Yet when Dante died nearly 700 years ago this week, Florence isn't where he ended up. The story of how Dante's remains came to be in Ravenna isn't that complicated. It's how they came to stay there that gets strange.

When the poet died, sometime between September 13-14th, 1321, he hadn't seen Florence for some 20 years. Exiled for life after finding himself on the losing side of a war for control of the city, Dante spent the next several years roaming, defiantly refusing conditional offers to return home on terms he saw as unjust. He eventually settled in Ravenna, in present-day Emilia-Romagna, at the invitation of its ruler.