Thursday, May 7, 20200397Sheltering in place might not look much like a dark wood, but my time in quarantine has brought Dante to the forefront of my mind. I have long been awed by the brilliance of his “Divine Comedy,” the indescribably beautiful rhythm and rhyme of his Italian, and the sheer bravado that inspired him both to locate his own contemporaries...
Friday, March 27, 20200283The word “quarantine” as we use it today was first coined in 14th century Venice – the leaders of that most serene watery republic ordered a mandatory period of isolation for people arriving in ships during the Black Death outbreak. A sequence of 40 days — una quarantina in modern Italian — was sufficient, they deemed, to...
