As we prepare for Verdi's Falstaff , here are the texts of Henry IV Part 1 and Part 2 . A few selections from the opera and from...

Maestri as Falstaff Verdi's last opera didn't come easily. W ith Arrigo Boito,  t he composer worked on  Falstsaff  in fits an...

Courtesy of Sententiae Antiquae and social media.

The above is a fragment containing what might be the oldest bits of Homer that we have. The words are from the Odyssey , and was featu...

Macbeth Royal Opera Our reading group has hit the pause button on  Paradiso for the summer, and John Goodman's lectures on Verdi ...

This will just be a brief suggestion, rather than a reading. The Paradiso , the city of God, spends more than three cantos at its dead cent...

The history of Florence before and after Dante is so rich and fraught with conflicts, treacheries and a wide cast of players as to make it ...

. . . every aspect of earthly life is here, if only in the concentrated power of the poet’s similitudes: “croaking frogs in the evening, a...

I've been wrestling with Mario's question of two weeks ago: Why, he asked, does Dante put this long, historically detailed image ...

The dense texture of Florentine family names in Paradiso 16 is truly a thick wood, yet there are traces in it of an argument developed by...

As we get more deeply into the loving portrait of old Florence drawn by Cacciaguida in Paradiso 15-17, a couple of additional links to the...

Paradiso 15  puts in place an elaborate setting for the meeting of Dante and Cacciaguida, the root ( radice)  of his Florentine stock. The ...