Il viaggio Purgatory
«Per correr miglior acque alza le vele»
A mountain rising from the southern sea, climbed at dawn. Souls here are still becoming: the language turns to hope, memory and the future, and your grammar is refined terrace by terrace.
Your guide: Virgilio, lo mio maestro e ’l mio autore
Annotated by hand: every word glossed, today’s Italian, grammar, living idioms, and a guardian to face.
Cato and the Shore
Easter morning, just before sunrise, on the shore of an island at the bottom of the world. After Hell’s dead air the sky is the blue of an eastern sapphire and Venus is making the whole east laugh. Four stars you have never seen hang over the pole. An old man with a long white-streaked beard is walking toward you across the sand.
Catone
The Angel Pilot and Casella
A white light comes skimming over the sea faster than any bird: an angel, standing at the stern of a boat so light it draws no water, ferrying more than a hundred souls who sing In exitu Israel with one voice. One of them steps from the crowd to embrace you. You knew him in Florence; he set your poems to music.
L’angelo nocchiero
Beatrice Appears
The top of the mountain: Eden. A chariot drawn by a griffin has halted in the ancient forest, and out of a cloud of flowers thrown by angels’ hands a woman appears, veiled in white, cloaked in green, dressed in the colour of living flame. You turn to Virgil, as a child runs to its mother, to say: I know the signs of the old fire. But Virgil is gone.
Beatrice
si sale · you climb
The climb begins at the foot of the page. Go to Canto I ↓