Lucy Bamboo · June 24, 2026
Nobody plans to end up in the dark wood. That’s what makes it a wood and not a road. You look up one ordinary afternoon and the path you were sure you were on is simply gone. Dante’s first line announces this quietly, almost without ceremony: nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita — midway … Read more
Lucy Bamboo · June 23, 2026
Most readers remember “Abandon all hope” — the last line of the inscription on Hell’s gate in Canto III. Few stop on the line that precedes it, the one that is, in some ways, the most philosophically and theologically dense of the nine: Dinanzi a me non fur cose create se non etterne, e io … Read more
Lucy Bamboo · June 23, 2026
If you want to understand the Divine Comedy, you need to understand Florentine politics in the late thirteenth century. Not because the poem is political propaganda — it is far more than that — but because Dante’s exile drove him to write the Commedia, and that exile was the direct consequence of a factional defeat … Read more
