Vol. 12 No. 2 (2023)
Historical Pills

Astronomy in the Divine Comedy

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  • Guido Risaliti
Guido Risaliti
Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia, Università di Firenze, Via G. Sansone 1, 50019 Sesto Fiorentino (FI)

Published 2023-09-28

Keywords

  • Dante,
  • Astronomy,
  • Divine Comedy

How to Cite

Risaliti, G. (2023). Astronomy in the Divine Comedy. Il Colle Di Galileo, 12(2), 23–35. Retrieved from https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/cdg/article/view/14782

Copyright (c) 2023 Guido Risaliti

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Abstract

There are over a hundred astronomical passages in the Divine Comedy. Astronomy is used both for its symbolic value and for its “exactness” in determining the times and places of the story. In order to appreciate, understand and value this aspect of the poem, the reader has to be able to identify with an intellectual of Dante’s time, amazed and fascinated by the explanatory and predictive capacity of the Ptolemaic system, in a pre-scientific era in which the understanding of natural phenomena was extremely limited.

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