In Canto 4 of the Inferno, Dante turns to Virgil and asks him a veiled ( coperto ) question: “Now tell me, master, tell me this alone,”...

Prof. Giuseppe Mazzotta of Yale speaks of reading the Comedia "horizontally," that is, with attention to the interaction between...

Inferno 2. 7-9 O muse, O alto ingegno, or m'aiutate;  O mente che scrivesti ciò ch'io vidi,  qui si parrà la tua nobilitate....

Inferno 3  brings us to letters that inscribe the speaking threshold of hell. It foregrounds a curious fact: The first act of those taking ...

Dante's De Vulgari Eloquentia is his treatise composed in Latin that defended the use of Italian in poetry and prose. In that time, wri...

Prof. Roseanne Martorella indicates that this presentation at NYU's Casa Italiana will be available via streaming this coming Tuesday...

From a Paris Review interview with the delightful Umberto Eco: Compared to beauty and ugliness, comedy is terrifying. I’m not talking ab...

προσαναγκάζειν τὸν Σωκράτη ὁμολογεῖν αὐτοὺς τοῦ αὐτοῦ ἀνδρὸς εἶναι κωμῳδίαν καὶ τραγῳδίαν ἐπίστασθαι ποιεῖν , καὶ τὸν τέχνῃ...

So we are considering setting Dante's Paradiso as our reading beginning in the fall. It's a formidable text, and anyone who intends...

proof ( πίστις ) is a sort of demonstration ( ἀπόδειξίς ) Let Rhetoric be defined as the faculty of discovering in the particular case w...