In one of Dante’s Eclogues , written at Ravenna and addressed to Giovanni del Virgilio of Bologna, who had invited him to that city to receive the poet’s crown, he says:⁠—

“Were it not better, on the banks of my native Arno, if ever I should return thither, to adorn and hide beneath the interwoven leaves my triumphal gray hairs, which once were golden?⁠ ⁠… When the bodies that wander round the earth, and the dwellers among the stars, shall be revealed in my song, as the infernal realm has been, then it will delight me to encircle my head with ivy and with laurel.”