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La Comedia Nova di Andrea Chiarelli (2021)

October 17, 2021 By Professor Elizabeth Coggeshall

la-comedia-nova-andrea-chiarelli-cover“La Comedia Nova è il racconto in versi del ritorno di Dante nell’aldilà e la scoperta di un mondo nuovo e nuovi personaggi. Dante viene riportato nel loco etterno sotto la guida illuminata di Voltaire, che lo presenta a personaggi che sono vissuti dopo la vita mortale di Dante: da Cristoforo Colombo a Neil Armstrong, da Leonardo a Christiaan Barnard, da Galileo a Margherita Hack.

“Dante scopre che l’aldilà non è più organizzato nei tre tradizionali regni: Inferno, Purgatorio e Paradiso. Ora vige tutta un’altra organizzazione ed un altro modo di intendere premi e punizioni.

“La Comedia Nova è scritta seguendo lo stesso stile della Divina Commedia. È un poema di dodici canti scritto in terzine dantesche (terzine incatenate di endecasillabi), con un linguaggio che si ispira a quello di Dante, ma non troppo.”    —La Comedia Nova

Categories: Written Word
Tagged with: 2021, Christopher Columbus, Fiction, Galileo, Italian, Italy, Leonardo da Vinci, Neil Armstrong, Poems, Terza Rima, Voltaire

Mapping Dante’s Inferno, One Circle of Hell at a Time

July 8, 2019 By Gabriel Siwady '19

“I found myself, in truth, on the brink of the valley of the sad abyss that gathers the thunder of an infinite howling. It was so dark, and deep, and clouded, that I could see nothing by staring into its depths.”

“This is the vision that greets the author and narrator upon entry the first circle of Hell—Limbo, home to honorable pagans—in Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, the first part of his 14th-century epic poem, Divine Comedy. Before Dante and his guide, the classical poet Virgil, encounter Purgatorio and Paradiso, they must first journey through a multilayered hellscape of sinners—from the lustful and gluttonous of the early circles to the heretics and traitors that dwell below. This first leg of their journey culminates, at Earth’s very core, with Satan, encased in ice up to his waist, eternally gnawing on Judas, Brutus, and Cassius (traitors to God) in his three mouths. In addition to being among the greatest Italian literary works, Divine Comedy also heralded a craze for “infernal cartography,” or mapping the Hell that Dante had created.

“This desire to chart the landscape of Hell began with Antonio Manetti, a 15th-century Florentine (like Dante himself) architect and mathematician. He diligently worked on the “site, form and measurements” of Hell, assessing, for example, the width of Limbo—87.5 miles across, he calculated. There are several theories for why it was so important then to delineate Dante’s Hell, including the general popularity of cartography at the time and the Renaissance obsession with proportions and measurements.” […]    –Anika Burgess, Atlas Obscura, July 13, 2017

Categories: Visual Art & Architecture, Written Word
Tagged with: 2017, Circles of Hell, Drawings, Florence, Galileo, Hell, Inferno, Manetti, Maps, Renaissance

Measuring Hell

January 31, 2011 By Professor Arielle Saiber

measuring-hell-boston-globe

measuring-hell-boston-globe
Click Images above to watch full video.

“…Given his devotion to empirical fact, it seems odd to think that Galileo’s most important ideas might have their roots not in the real world, but in a fictional one. But that’s the argument that Mount Holyoke College physics professor Mark Peterson has been developing for the past several years: specifically, that one of Galileo’s crucial contributions to physics came from measuring the hell of Dante’s Inferno. Or rather, from disproving its measurements.
In 1588, when Galileo was a 24-year-old unknown, a medical school dropout, he was invited to deliver a couple of lectures on Dante’s “Divine Comedy.” Many in Galileo’s audience would have been shocked, even dismayed, to see this young upstart take the stage and start poking holes in what they believed about the poet’s meticulously constructed fantasy world.
Ever since its 1314 publication, scholars had toiled to map the physical features of Dante’s Inferno — the blasted valleys and caverns, the roiling rivers of fire. What Galileo said, put simply, is that many commonly accepted dimensions did not stand up to mathematical scrutiny. Using complex geometrical analysis, he attacked a leading scholar’s version of the Inferno’s structure, pointing out that his description of the infernal architecture — such as the massive cylinders descending to the center of the Earth — would, in real life, collapse under their own weight. Later, Galileo realized the leading rival theory was wrong, too, and that even the greatest scholars of the time simply didn’t understand how real-world structures worked.” [. . .]   –Christ Wright, Boston Globe, January 9, 2011

See Mark Peterson’s forthcoming book: Galileo’s Muse: Renaissance Mathematics and the Arts

Contributed by Patrick Molloy

Categories: Odds & Ends
Tagged with: 2011, Galileo, Hell, Physics, Science

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How to Cite

Coggeshall, Elizabeth, and Arielle Saiber, eds. Dante Today: Citings and Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture. Website. Access date.

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