“New Jersey band The Gaslight Anthem referenced the Comedy in their song ‘The Navesink Banks’ from the album Sink or Swim with the opening line, ‘All hope abandoned, ye who enter here’.” —Wikipedia
Monster Children – The Gates of Hell
“Rumour has it, this entrance leads to seven layers of interconnecting tunnels (the seven layers of hell) and that somewhere within them, is a room where you come face to face with Lucifer himself.
“The ‘Gates of Hell,’ is a series of water runoffs and underground tunnels located in Clifton, about an hour outside of downtown Manhattan.
“We passed several dry, smaller openings and eventually we came to a larger room with three tunnels, one of which smells a bit and is marked comedically, ‘…not the gate to hell…'” — Kealan Shilling, Monster Children, May 25, 2016
Summer Exhibition of Marble Carvings at the Casa Galiano (2018)
The Casa Galiano (East Brunswick, NJ) presents an outdoor exhibition of 18 marble carvings of the Divine Comedy. The carvings are on exhibit in summer and fall 2018. For more information, visit the Casa Galiano website.
While visiting, be sure to check out the Dante Sculpture Garden and Wall Mural, featured on Dante Today here.
Contributed by Dino Galiano
“Dante and Virgil Attend an Exhibition,” Caricatures by Antonio Manganaro at Princeton University
“Since Dante’s Divine Comedy (Divina Commedia) first appeared in 1320, visual artists have been rethinking Dante’s trip into hell with Virgil as his guide. Eugène Delacroix chose the subject for his first major painting, The Barque of Dante, also known as Dante and Virgil in Hell, which introduced the artist at the Salon of 1822. A few years later, William Blake drew visions of the Divine Comedy in London while G.G. Macchiavelli did the same in Bologna. William-Adolphe Bouguereau painted Dante and Virgil in Hell in 1850; Edgar Degas finished Dante and Virgil at the Entrance to Hell in 1858; and Gustave Doré financed his own Inferno in 1861, finishing the trilogy in 1868.
“In the wake of Doré’s popularity, the Italian caricaturist Antonio Manganaro (1842-1921) translated Dante’s epic to his own era, imagining what would happen if Dante and Virgil attended the opening of The International Maritime Exhibition held in Naples in 1871. Manganaro’s rare lithographic volume, recently acquired by the Graphic Arts Collection, includes plenty of ghosts, fish, and wine.” — “Dante and Virgil Attend an Exhibition,” Website of the Graphic Arts Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, Firestone Library, Princeton University (May 20, 2017)
Clinton Road, New Jersey
Urban legend has it that this road has been witness to numerous ill-fated events, ranging from accidents to the occult and the criminal. See the wikipedia page. Photo by Bryan Calvo.
Contributed by Bryan Calvo (Harvard, ’19)
