The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (13 inch ebook reader .txt) 📕

rock opposite the entrance of the tomb, where it still remains.”

Forsyth, Italy, p. 378, says:⁠—

“Virgil’s tomb is so called, I believe, on the single authority of Donatus. Donatus places it at the right distance from Naples, but on the wrong side of the city; and even there he omits the grotto of Posilipo, which not being so deep in his time as the two last excavations have left it, must have opened precisely at his tomb. Donatus, too, gives, for Virgil’s own composition, an epitaph on the cliff now rejected as a forgery. And who is this Donatus?⁠—an obscure grammarian, or rather his counterfeit. The structure itself resembles a ruined pigeon-house, where the numerous columbaria would indicate a family-sepulchre: but who should repose in the tomb of Virgil, but Virgil alone? Visitors of every nation, kings and princes, have scratched their names on the stucco of this apocryphal ruin, but the poet’s awful name seems to have deterred them from versifying here.”

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Be satisfied with knowing that a thing is, without asking why it is. These were distinguished in scholastic language as the Demonstratio quia, and the Demonstratio propter quid. ↩

Places on the mountainous seaside road from Genoa to Pisa, known as the Riviera di Levante. Of this, Mr. Ruskin, Modern Painters, III 243, says:⁠—

“The similes by which he illustrates the steepness of that ascent are all taken from the Riviera of Genoa, now traversed by a good carriage road under the name of the Cornice; but as this road did not exist in Dante’s time, and the steep precipices and promontories were then probably traversed by footpaths, which, as they necessarily passed in many places over crumbling and slippery limestone, were doubtless not a little dangerous, and as in the manner they commanded the bays of sea below, and lay exposed to the full blaze of the southeastern sun, they corresponded precisely to the situation of the path by which he ascends above the purgatorial sea, the image could not possibly have been taken from a better source for the fully conveying his idea to the reader: nor, by the way, is there reason to discredit, in this place, his powers of climbing; for, with his usual accuracy, he has taken the angle of the path for us, saying it was considerable more than forty-five. Now a continuous mountain slope of forty-five degrees is already quite unsafe either for ascent or descent, except by zigzag paths; and a greater slope than this could not be climbed, straightforward, but by help of crevices or jags in the rock, and great physical exertion besides.”

Mr. Norton, Travel and Study, p. 1, thus describes the Riviera:⁠—

“The Var forms the geographical boundary between France and Italy; but it is not till Nice is left behind, and the first height of the Riviera is surmounted, that the real Italy begins. Here the hills close round at the north, and suddenly, as the road turns at the top of a long ascent, the Mediterranean appears far below, washing the feet of the mountains that form the coast, and stretching away to the Southern horizon. The line of the shore is of extraordinary beauty. Here an abrupt cliff rises from the sea; here bold and broken masses of rock jut out into it; here the hills, their gray sides terraced for vineyards, slope gently down to the water’s edge; here they stretch into little promontories covered with orange and olive-trees.

“One of the first of these promontories is that of Capo Sant’ Ospizio. A close grove of olives half conceals the old castle on its extreme point. With the afternoon sun full upon it, the trees palely glimmering as their leaves move in the light air, the sea so blue and smooth as to be like a darker sky, and not even a ripple upon the beach, it seems as if this were the very home of summer and of repose. It is remote and secluded from the stir and noise of the world. No road is seen leading to it, and one looks down upon the solitary castle and wonders what stories of enchantment and romance belong to a ruin that appears as if made for their dwelling-place. It is a scene out of that Italy which is the home of the imagination, and which becomes the Italy of memory.

“As the road winds down to the sea, it passes under a high isolated peak, on which stands Esa, built as a city of refuge against pirates and Moors. A little farther on,

‘Its Roman strength Turbia showed
In ruins by the mountain road,’⁠—

not only recalling the ancient times, when it was the boundary city of Italy and Gaul, and when Augustus erected his triumphal arch within it, but associated also with Dante and the steep of Purgatory. Beneath lies Monaco, glowing ‘like a gem’ on its oval rock, the sea sparkling around it, and the long western rays of the sinking sun lingering on its little palace, clinging to its church belfry and its gray wall, as if loath to leave them.”

In the Casa Magni, on the seashore near Lerici, Shelley once lived. He was returning thither from Leghorn, when he perished in a sudden storm at sea. ↩

After they had gone a mile, they were still a stone’s throw distant. ↩

See Convito, I 10. ↩

Manfredi, king of Apulia and Sicily, was a natural son of the Emperor Frederick the Second. He was slain at the battle of Benevento, in 1265; one of the great and decisive battles of the Guelphs and Ghibellines, the Guelph or Papal forces being commanded by Charles of Anjou, and the Ghibellines or Imperialists by Manfredi.

Malispini, Storia, ch. 187, thus describes his death and burial:⁠—

“Manfredi, being left with few followers, behaved like a valiant gentleman who preferred to die in battle rather than to