• In the original, l’aer perso , the perse air. Dante, Convito , IV 20, defines perse as “a color mixed of purple and black, but the black predominates.” Chaucer’s “ Doctour of Phisike ” in the Canterbury Tales , Prologue 441, wore this color:⁠— “In sanguin and in perse he clad was alle, Lined with taffata and with sendalle.” The Glossary defines it, “skie colored, of a bluish gray.” The word is again used, VII 103, and Purgatorio IX 97. ↩
• The city of Ravenna. “One reaches Ravenna,” says Ampère, Voyage Dantesque , p. 311, “by journeying along the borders of a pine forest, which is seven leagues in length, and which seemed to me an immense funereal wood, serving as an avenue to the common tomb of those two great powers, Dante and the Roman Empire in the West. There is hardly room for any other memories than theirs. But other poetic names are attached to the Pine Woods of Ravenna. Not long ago Lord Byron evoked there the fantastic tales borrowed by Dryden from Boccaccio, and now he is himself a figure of the past, wandering in this melancholy place. I thought, in traversing it, that the singer of despair had ridden along this melancholy shore, trodden before him by the graver and slower footstep of the poet of the Inferno.” ↩