“These amazing little candies are hand forged by demons in the third circle of hell.” —Firehouse Pantry
Contributed by Lisa Flannagan
“The Temperature of Hell, a Colloquium”
“According to the best scientific data currently available, both the average and the mean temperatures of Hell have risen 3.8 degrees since 1955. Although an increase of this size may seem insignificant, especially to those not spending eternity there, the reality of the situation is quite different when experienced in concrete terms. For example, occupants of Hell who in 1955 were standing night and day in boiling pitch up to their knees report that, owing to the expansion of pitch at higher temperatures, they now must endure the torment all the way up to mid-thigh, or even higher, during Hell’s warmer seasons. Condemned souls who have to lie on their backs chained to a flat rock while a white-hot sheet of iron is lowered to within inches of their faces have stated that the rise in Hell’s ambient temperature now makes the iron seem much closer to their faces than it actually is.
Former Vice-President Al Gore, who was among the first to raise concerns about this problem, convened an interdisciplinary gathering in December of 2008 to discuss some of Hell’s climate issues and how we might begin to address them.” [. . .] –Ian Frazier, The New Yorker, July 20, 2009
Contributed by Elizabeth Ann Coggeshall (Stanford University)
Palacio Barolo, Argentina
“It was built by the Italian architect Mario Palanti (1885-1979) for his compatriot a powerful textile executive Luis Barolo (1869-1922), in the 1910’s decades, who used to think, as all Europeans settled in Argentina, that Europe would suffer numerous wars that would destroy the entire continent. In desperation to preserve the ashes of the famous Dante Alighieri, he wanted to construct a sanctuary on 1300 May Avenue, inspired by the work of the poet, The Divine Comedy.
[. . .]
“The building has plenty of references to Dante. The bulbs in the cupola represent the nine angelical choirs and the mystical rose. [. . .]
“The general division of the building and the poem is done in three parts: Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. The ground floor is Hell, the first 14 floors are Purgatory, and following floors are Paradise and the cupola represents God.
“The number of Hell hierarchies is nine, and nine are the arches of access to the building which represent initiation steps. Each arch has Latin phrases taken from nine different works from the Bible to Virgil. The cupola resembles that of the Budanishar Hindu temple dedicated to Tantra, representing the union between Dante and Beatrice.
“The songs from Dante’s work are a hundred just as the height of the building is a 100 mts. The majority of songs in the poem have eleven or twenty-two stanzas; the building has eleven modules per front, and twenty-two modules per block. The height is twenty-two floors. This set of numbers represents the circle which was, to Dante the perfect figure.” —Buenos Aires Travel
“. . .One of many buildings at risk of demolition, preservationists say, is the 1923 Palacio Barolo, a mansion commissioned by a self-made millionaire and designed in accordance with the cosmology of Dante’s Divine Comedy.” [. . .] –Emily Schmall, The New York Times, April 15, 2013
See the Palacio Barolo website for more information and history.
See also Sebastián Schindel’s 2012 documentary El rascacielos latino, available to view on YouTube (in Spanish; last accessed March 20, 2020).
Contributed by Juan Vitulli (University of Notre Dame)
Lee K. Abbott, “One of Star Wars, One of Doom” (2007)
“The story follows Mr. DeWine, a high school civics teacher looking for the love that will bring meaning to his middle years, and the two alienated students who plot death, havoc, and woe.” —Fantastic Fiction
“The first reference is to the two high school boys who shoot up the school as ‘founding members of the ninth circle.’ (Abbott) The second reference is made by Mr. DeWine as he notes a student’s inscription on a desk in his classroom, ”Abandon all hope,’ someone has scribbled. Dante-what a bozo. Blame the whole fiasco on Beatrice.’ (Abbott) This reference foreshadows the outcome of the story. –Katie Tiller
Contributed by Katie Tiller (University of Texas at Austin)
Measuring Hell
Click Images above to watch full video.
“…Given his devotion to empirical fact, it seems odd to think that Galileo’s most important ideas might have their roots not in the real world, but in a fictional one. But that’s the argument that Mount Holyoke College physics professor Mark Peterson has been developing for the past several years: specifically, that one of Galileo’s crucial contributions to physics came from measuring the hell of Dante’s Inferno. Or rather, from disproving its measurements.
In 1588, when Galileo was a 24-year-old unknown, a medical school dropout, he was invited to deliver a couple of lectures on Dante’s “Divine Comedy.” Many in Galileo’s audience would have been shocked, even dismayed, to see this young upstart take the stage and start poking holes in what they believed about the poet’s meticulously constructed fantasy world.
Ever since its 1314 publication, scholars had toiled to map the physical features of Dante’s Inferno — the blasted valleys and caverns, the roiling rivers of fire. What Galileo said, put simply, is that many commonly accepted dimensions did not stand up to mathematical scrutiny. Using complex geometrical analysis, he attacked a leading scholar’s version of the Inferno’s structure, pointing out that his description of the infernal architecture — such as the massive cylinders descending to the center of the Earth — would, in real life, collapse under their own weight. Later, Galileo realized the leading rival theory was wrong, too, and that even the greatest scholars of the time simply didn’t understand how real-world structures worked.” [. . .] –Christ Wright, Boston Globe, January 9, 2011
See Mark Peterson’s forthcoming book: Galileo’s Muse: Renaissance Mathematics and the Arts
Contributed by Patrick Molloy
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