ABSTRACT
The rationale for the celebrations held in honour of “great Italians” in the late eighteenth century was geographical, rather than chronological, in character. The 1864 celebrations in honour of Galileo offer a number of pointers with which to evaluate what was to happen one year later in Dante’s case from a comparative perspective. The main difference between the celebrations held in honour of Galileo in 1864, and those held to commemorate Dante the following year, lies in the fact that while the former were basically limited to the city of Pisa together with a few other places, the latter took on a genuinely national character, despite their focal point being the city of Florence. The 1865 celebrations offered Florence’s city council a pretext for going back to the council in Ravenna and ask once again that Dante’s ashes be returned to his native city.
