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BOOK SMART

On the 700th anniversary of Dante Alighieri’s death, the past caught up to the present when a Florentine nun and researcher uncovered what is believed to be one of the medieval Italian poet’s manuscripts, and U.S. comic-book artist George Cochrane published the first handwritten and illustrated copy of the Divine Comedy since the 15th century. While it took Dante 13 years to write his allegorical masterpiece, it took Cochrane seven to produce a copy of the poem in which Dante imagines a pilgrim travelling through hell, purgatory and paradise on a quest to understand salvation. Meanwhile, the contents of the sheaf of papers in Dante’s handwriting found in Florence and the Vatican are more mundane: As a student in Florence, his mentor dictated texts on the art of government, which he had to put to paper. She described the handwriting as “school-boy like” and “covers the idea of ethical government, which later showed up in the Comedy.”