Jutta points us to a WSJ piece about a new translation of 16 Greek plays  by James Romm and Mary Lefkowitz. Here's a snippet from the i...

Our next meeting will be the first Wednesday in September - the 7th. But as a number of our group will still be away, instead of jumping r...

Margaret writes to tell us that the new Criterion version of Chimes at Midnight , Orson Welles's unique rendering of Falstaff, will so...

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 ...