I’m in Italy this August. I know, experienced travelers warned me that Italy in August can be an inferno. How right they are; the heat is oppressive. Yesterday, however, I found a literary inferno in a small piazza in the old city of Verona (perhaps better known as the home of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet). Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) lived in Verona for seven years and wrote a good part of the Divine Comedy here. You’ll recall that work describes his journey through Hell (Inferno), Purgatory (Purgatorio), and Paradise (Paradiso).
Peter Mires 