Ada: The story we have comes from Giovanni Boccaccio, in his Trattatello in praise of Dante — written decades after the fact, not by any eyewitness.
Theo: So already we're in the territory of legend, not ledger.
Ada: Very much so. Boccaccio says Jacopo, the son, had all but given up. And then one night Dante appeared to him in a dream, dressed in white, his face lit with a strange light.
Theo: His dead father, coming back to finish the job.
Ada: In the dream Jacopo asks whether the poem was ever completed — and Dante leads him to his old bedroom, touches a spot on the wall, and says, here is what you have been searching for.
Theo: And they actually go and look?
Ada: They do. Boccaccio says Jacopo went to the room, found a hidden recess in the wall, and there lay the missing cantos — mildewed, nearly ruined by the damp, but legible.
Theo: So the ending of the greatest poem of the age was saved by a dream and a patch of damp plaster. That's almost too perfect.
Ada: It is — which is exactly why historians treat it as literature about the poem rather than fact. What's undeniable is that the final thirteen cantos did survive, and Paradiso came down to us whole.
Theo: And Florence — the city that condemned him to the fire — never got him back.
Ada: Never. They demanded his bones formally in thirteen ninety-six, and again and again after. Ravenna kept him. He rests there still.