When Dante crosses the threshold into Purgatory proper and hears the door swing shut, he speaks of the one thing that could never be excuse...

A tantalizing buried library at Herculaneum could hold some lost works of Sophocles, Aristotle and more. The painstaking methods - old and...

L'arte non riproduce ciò che è visibile, ma rende visibile ciò che non sempre lo è. - Paul Klee As John Sinclair points out in ...

Purgatorio 4 begins with an assertion about the nature of the soul based upon  esperïenza vera; namely, that the soul is a single entity c...

Even as we are engaged in a slow reading* of parts of the Purgatorio in preparation for tackling the Paradiso , we can rest assured that w...

Reading  Purgatorio 3, we found the canto brought into an interesting relation two radically distinct modes: the theoretical realm of intel...

This exhibition of Greek bronzes, currently in Los Angeles, will come to Washington DC later this year - and from what one can see , it is...

(Written with time in short supply - a future post might be warranted.) Before a favoring wind the fleet sped on. The line in close arra...

biondo era e bello e di gentile aspetto ... Before we look at the role of Manfred in detail in  Purgatorio 3 , his entrance is worth n...

Corpo , the word for "body," appears four times in Purgatorio 3 -- more than in any other canto of the canticle, commentators no...

The beauty briefly experienced in Purgatorio 2 is intimately interwoven with this canticle's concern with the Aesthetic. We saw how th...