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Dante Alighieri is a symbol of Italy and its poetry, but also of the city he was born, Firenze. A proud Florentine, Dante never kept the love he had for his hometown a secret, so why is he buried in Ravenna? Well, because that’s where he passed, of course, but the matter of where his mortal remains should rest was the cause of mystery and diatribes for centuries. Dante rests, today, in a quiet corner of the Emilia-Romagna town, his marble mausoleum protected by sunlight and heat by the leafy beauty of an oak planted by poet and Nobel laureate...

Translator leaves popes in Hell but saves Islam's prophet from perditionUTRECHT, Netherlands (ChurchMilitant.com) - A new Dutch translation of the Divine Comedy has erased the name of Muhammad from the opus magnum of the Italian poet Dante Alighieri to prevent the epic poem from becoming "unnecessarily offensive" to Muslims. Translator Lies Lavrijsen told Belgian Radio 1 that she expunged the founder of Islam from her translation to give it the "widest possible accessibility," particularly for "a younger audience." "We knew that if we left this passage as it is, we would have unnecessarily hurt a large part of the readers,"...

Ancient bones can return a wealth of information to the modern researcher. But they can’t ever truly reveal the dead’s lost humanity. Only when the hollow sockets become the thoughtful eyes of a girl or healed fractures give a knight a handsome scar does time vanish as skeletons turn back into real human beings...#5 The French MummyLouis XVI was beheaded in 1793, and King Henry IV of France had his long-dead head removed, as revolutionaries desecrated as many royal tombs as they could find. Rediscovered in a private collection, the skull's face was digitally returned, and to the excitement of...

On the evening of Good Friday, a man on the run from a death sentence wakes up in a dark forest, lost, terrified and besieged by wild animals. He spends an infernal Easter week hiking through a dismal cave, climbing up a grueling mountain, and taking what you might call the long way home. It all works out for him, though. The traveler returns from his ordeal a better man, determined to help others learn from his experience. He writes a book about his to-hell-and-back trek, and it's an instant best-seller, making him beloved and famous. For 700 years, that...

- YES! To begin with, let's try and fully understand what Renaissance Florence actually has accomplished, apart from making tourists feel like this: "I was in a sort of ecstasy, from the idea of being in Florence, close to the great men whose tombs I had seen. Absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty ... I reached the point where one encounters celestial sensations ... Everything spoke so vividly to my soul. Ah, if I could only forget. I had palpitations of the heart, what in Berlin they call 'nerves.' Life was drained from me. I walked with the fear...

THE controversy over cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad was reignited yesterday after an Italian Catholic magazine printed one on its front cover.Studi Cattolici carried a drawing of the Prophet in Hell, with the Italian writer Dante Alighieri asking the poet Virgil: "That man divided in two from his head to his feet - isn't that Muhammad?" Virgil replies: "Yes, it is him and he is in two because he has divided society - while the man next to him with his arms down represents Italian politics towards Islam." The cartoon is a play on Dante's Inferno - a similar scene...

ROME, FEB. 9, 2006 (Zenit.org).- Benedict XVI's new encyclical on love came as a surprise to most everyone. Some wags commented on the paradox of the "German Shepherd" exclaiming that God is Love. Others are amazed that the erstwhile watchdog of Church doctrine would choose to dedicate so much ink to social teachings. My surprise had nothing to do with this. I was floored when the Holy Father said he was inspired by Dante. During an audience with members of the Pontifical Council "Cor Unum" on Jan. 23, Benedict XVI introduced the new encyclical saying that the 14th-century Italian poet...

Dante's Divine Comedy, the most sublime religious poem the Christian West has produced in two thousand years, provides us to this day with profound insights into human nature. In the Inferno Dante provides us with a vivid, unforgettable image of what Christians have always believed about sodomites. He places them in the seventh circle of Hell, the fiery circle of the violent, far below the lustful heterosexuals of the second circle. Why this big separation? The answer is extremely important and revealing. Dante wants us to understand that homosexuals do not suffer in life from a deficiency of the will,...

Discovering Dante's Damsel in Distress Rossella Lorenzi, Discovery News A Majolica Jug: Missing Link? Dec. 1, 2003 — A 14th century jug unearthed in a Tuscan castle might shed new light on one of the most touching and mysterious female figures in Dante's Divine Comedy, according to Italian archaeologists. Legend has always linked Castel di Pietra, a castle near the village of Gavorrano in the Tuscan Maremma, with the sad fate of Pia dei Tolomei, a lady supposedly imprisoned there and then murdered by her jealous husband. "Do thou remember me who am the Pia/ Siena made me, unmade me...

Scientists recreate (less ugly) face of Dante By Malcolm Moore in Florence Last Updated: 2:26am GMT 12/01/2007 Dante Alighieri did not, after all, have bulging eyes or a pointed chin — but his enormous nose was true to life, according to scientists who have created a replica of the poet's face by measuring the remains of his skull. The 3D reconstruction, based on skull measurements, alongside Botticelli's portrait of Dante Alighieri The researchers at the University of Bologna have pieced together the "true face" of Florence's favourite son and discovered that it was very different from the portraits of him...