Dante at the Roma Termini Train Station
Italian Commuting
“Mr. Parks lives in Milan, where he runs a postgraduate translation program at Istituto Universitario di Lingue Moderne. Living here saves him from the hellish predawn 100-mile commute from Verona, a Dante-esque daily journey that he writes about at the outset of Italian Ways.” –Rachel Donadio, The New York Times, June 7, 2013
See Tim Parks’ book, Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo (NY: W. W. Norton, 2013)
Dante in Times Square – 42nd St. Subway Station
Contributed by Steven Bartus (Bowdoin, ’08)
Mark Lilla, “Filippic” (2011)
A poem for the Brooklyn Book Festival
The F train
Is the brain train.
iPad lasciate,
Voi ch’intrate,
Eve’s backlit apple,
Gold ‘n delicious,
Tempts us not.
We have spines to break,
Penguins to tame.
Thou user!
Thou blue of tooth!
Thou faceless face,
That hath no book!
@ us, towns talk & captions contest
While black-rimmed dandies
Wink at the straphangers
Who grin at the infinite jest.
But banished shalt thou be
Back into space,
No means of return,
No options, commands, or escape,
While we, the Brooklyn d’élite,
Knuckles bared, planted feet,
Bend dead trees at will
And inspect our kill.
Recycle that, battery boy.
I got your charger right here.
— Mark Lilla, The New York Review of Books, September 16, 2011
Metro Station, University of Naples
“On March 26, the 40,000 commuters of Naples, Italy, who pass daily through the University of Naples metro station found that virtually every surface had been transformed into a candy-colored kaleidoscope by the American designer Karim Rashid. . . . He printed wire-frame patterns on quartz flooring, applied portraits of Dante and Beatrice to the stairs and tiled the walls with words coined in the digital age.” [. . .] –Shonquis Moreno, The New York Times, April 20, 2011
Contributed by Hope Stockton (Bowdoin, ’07)
Mary Shelley’s Schoolbus
Dante On the Bus: Piazza San Marco, Florence, Italy
Photo by Arielle Saiber, 2009
Dante Drives a Honda Civic
Cambridge, MA with CT plates
(Photo by Dien Ho, 2008)