dantealighieri: (Default)
skyeventide on tumblr said:

Consider, Forese Donati dies and Dante goes to the funeral, meeting Corso there. Just, that whole situation.
 
It was a sudden thing, the death, and that was what made it so hard to comprehend. Everything in those days felt demanded by a sense of narrative, from the smallest passing conversations to the movements of the city’s most important political actors, all dictated as a part of some larger story. It had been like that since Piccarda died, in some ways, but now there was something of an acceleration about it. I felt it, and so did my husband, and so— I presume, I don’t see how he couldn’t have— did Corso.

Did we know how the story would end, then? Did we know the direction in which we were being inexorably pulled, all of us, the whole city— though somehow it felt so intimate, as though we three alone were at its center? Did we sense it? I believe we did. I believe I did, at least. My husband certainly never lacked for a sense of narrative, and Corso—

Well. If he didn’t know where things were going, exactly, he certainly did not lack for a vision.

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dantealighieri: (Default)
skyeventide on tumblr asked:

dante and/or gemma + c
 
c: a moment of respite

AUGUST, 1299

When I think back to those days just before the turning of the century, the primary impression that comes to my mind is heat. It was a blistering, brutal summer; the temperature seemed to build and build to a crescendo throughout June and July, and by the time mid-August arrived the entire city seemed to be baking alive. Though the earlier months of the year had been busier than usual, a frantic political nervousness coloring the collective life we lived along the narrow streets, everything now was slow and lethargic, paralyzed by the merciless sun. Those who could escaped to the countryside, the cool banks of the Arno to the west— or in the case of the especially wealthy, the Tyrrhenian coast. Those who could not (and we were among their number, prohibited from travel by the needs of two young boys and a baby girl) stayed, and felt as though we were cooking alive in a giant’s oven.

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