More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
By modern standards, The Divine Comedy has nothing comedic about it. It’s called a comedy for another reason entirely. In the fourteenth century, Italian literature was, by requirement, divided into two categories: tragedy, representing high literature, was written in formal Italian; comedy, representing low literature, was written in the vernacular and geared toward the general population.”
He now flashed on an old adage from early Grecian free divers who hunted lobsters in the coral caves of the Aegean Islands. When swimming into a dark tunnel, there arrives a point of no return when you no longer have enough breath to double back. Your only choice is to swim forward into the unknown … and pray for an exit.
Langdon thought a long moment and finally nodded. “There’s a site just around the corner where Dante enthusiasts gather. I bet someone there has a copy we can borrow.”
Ironically, it was the population’s taste for foreign luxuries that brought about its demise—the deadly plague traveling from China to Venice on the backs of rats stowed away on trading vessels.
By the time city officials realized it was the rats that were causing the disease, it was too late, but Venice still enforced a decree by which all incoming vessels had to anchor offshore for a full forty days before they would be permitted to unload. To this day, the number forty—quaranta in Italian—served as a grim reminder of the origins of the word quarantine.
Langdon still found it hard to fathom that this tiny city—just twice the size of Central Park in New York—had somehow risen out of the sea to become the largest and richest empire in the west.
The statue was well known for its missing foot, broken off while it was being plundered from Constantinople in the thirteenth century. Miraculously, in the 1960s, the foot was unearthed in Istanbul. Venice petitioned for the missing piece of statue, but the Turkish authorities replied with a simple message: You stole the statue—we’re keeping our foot.
