Italy is a very large country, roughly triangular, and in the Mediterranean to the south lie Sicily, the whirlpool Charybdis, the rock Scylla, Sardinia, Corsica, and other islands. Rome is figured as a battlemented city, about halfway between Jerusalem and the Pillars of Hercules.
[To face p. 344.
MAP OF THE WORLD BY HEINRICH OF MAINZ,
ABOUT a.d. 1110.
Reproduced by permission from Beazley’s
“Dawn of Modern Geography.”
This is where Dante also places the imperial city, for in his system it is about 45°, or 3 hours, east of Gades and west of Jerusalem. He tells us in one place that it was vespers in Naples when the sun rose in Purgatory,[429] and in another that when it was vespers or three o’clock in the afternoon in Purgatory, it was midnight “here”[430] which may mean Florence or Italy in general; both these statements indicate a difference of nine hours or 135° between Italy and Purgatory. Purgatory in the Divine Comedy is exactly antipodal to Jerusalem, and therefore twelve hours distant in time;[431] and for the sake of his allegory Dante has so far departed from tradition as to place the Earthly Paradise here also.[432] These five places may therefore be diagramatically represented thus:—
With this key, Dante’s fondness for describing the time at one place by mentioning one of the others need be no stumbling-block, as it is to many readers.
The fact is that though Dante had none of our opportunities for changing time-reckoning by long journeys, nor for communicating with friends at the other side of the world, who wake while we sleep, the marvellous daily revolution of the skies had a fascination for him, and he delighted to picture a glorious sunrise taking place in one country while in another it was high noon, or the middle of the night. Thus, the beautiful description of the stars fading in the growing light of dawn, which we quoted above, is preceded by a picture of the sun glowing on the meridian some 6000 miles away (rather more than a quarter the circumference of the globe), while with us Earth’s shadow has sunk almost to a level plane.[433]