Traveling in the spacetime with Virgil

 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0BTCCPJTQ

Traveling in space-time with Virgil

A drama in a prologue, three acts and forty four scenes

by ignazio salvatore basile

Characters

Virgil: a Latin dead poet

Dante: an Italian poet still alive

Men from Hell

Tommaso Cosimo Caccini, Lodovico delle Colombe, Niccolò Lorino, Claudio Acquaviva,  Benedetto Mandina , Jacopo Aldobrandini

e don Pedro de Vera: Judges Inquisitors of the Holy Inquisition in the Galileo’s Trial

Witnesses and Guards at Galileo’s trial

Alberto Tragagliolo: a timeless Florentine

Five Devils of Loudun

Sneezy, Freezy; Slippy, Drippy, Nippy,Showery, Flowery, Wheezy,

Bowery; Hoppy, Croppy, Poppy: Dwarves of French revolution;

James Morton and Lord Digheels: two damned from hell

Ferdinand Walsin Esterhàzi, Eduard Drumont, Major du Platy de Clam

and General Mercier and Alphonse Bertillon damned in the Devil’s Island

Harold Frederick Shipman, Irving Roy Cohn, Censors and Gunmen: Sinners from the Great Circle

Reverend Jones Marshall Herff Applewhite Jr, Jim MCelvane, Judy IJames

and Joyce Touchette: People of the Temple

David Berg Karen Zerby and Kathleen Maddox: other guests in the Hell

Ealk : Great Beast, guardian of the Ante Hell

Waitress

Eleanor of Sardinia and Brancaleone Doria: good people from Purgatory

T.C.B., J.L., J.H., J.M., J.B., B.M.,S.B., B.J., M.D., E.P.,J.R.

and L.H. : guitar players and other musicians from Purgatory

Angels from Paradise

Beatrice: a beautiful celestial lady.

Prologue

Somewhere in the space the Latin poet Virgil and the Italian poet Dante meet again, after almost seven hundred years, for starting a new journey on the universe of human vices and virtues.

Virgil will lead Dante Alighieri, as a guide, across the space-time, through as many different levels of the human vices, as many centuries have passed by from their first journey.

They will travel together through the hell of desperation up to the hope of repentance of purgatory. At the third level Dante eventually meets Beatrice who will lead him to the true love shore of Paradise.

Scene 1

Dante and Virgil

An aseptic room. On the left a door communicates outside. On the right a spiral staircase leads upside where the spaceship awaits for Virgil and Dante to go. In a total darkness the creak of an opening door. Dante will desperately call for his master Virgil.

Dante (a frightened voice in the darkness): May I come in? Is anyone there…? Schoolmaster!!! Are you there? Please answer me… for God’s sake…

(After a short but heavy silence’s time, a scrubbing sound of a lighting match will be heard in the darkness. Then a candle will light an old man sit down at a table covered by piles of books, papers and maps.

Virgil (after reawakening, he lights the candle ): I must have fallen asleep…Who is in there???

Dante (still trembling): Is it you, master?

Virgil: (going to meet Dante, hardly recognizes his friend, lighting his face) Dante…? My son!!! Why are you so shattered and distraught??? What happened to you???

Dante (getting closer to his master, almost crying in a mixture of joy and relief ) Oh, Virgil, masterly teacher of my trembling soul… if you only knew what I have gone through…

Virgil (placing his candle on the table, embracing him with protective affection): It’s all right now, my son…

Dante (falling on his arms, starts crying and sobbing): It has been really very hard outside there, in the darkness… I saw death in the face…

Virgil (l.b.): Please, take a sit, my son… It’s all over now…

Dante(reacquiring some trust): Thanks to God I’m with you now…

Virgil (l.b. pouring a glass of water from a jar on the table) Of course… It will be all right now… Please have some water…

Dante (drinking with desire the water): I have escaped three horrible beasts…

Virgil: Have you?

Dante (trembling again and looking afraid at the door): Yes… A tiger, a serpent and a monkey persecuted me up to here…

Virgil: Be calm now… they can’t surely get inside here…

Dante (reassured he looks gratefully at Virgil): I know they can’t my sweet master…

Virgil (with a gesture of affection): Forget about everything now…Are you still determined to take over our journey?

Dante (with a sigh of relief): More than ever master! With you by my side I can face anything fearless!

Virgil: (pointing out the spiral staircase) Don’t you fear to face a long and risky journey through the Universe with that spaceship?

Dante: Not at all, master!!! I told you: I’m ready to go anywhere with you by my side!!!

Virgil (taking a map on his hands): Let’s talk about it then! Everything is ready… I’ll show you…Do you know what is this?

Dante (bending on the map): Well … I see two cones turned upside down …

Virgil: Come on! It’s an astronomic figure!

Dante: I’m sorry…It might be a double cone diagram …

Virgil: That’s better. The bottom cone represents the past and the light cone, instead, is future! The point where the apices meet is the present; so we are here now , can you see it?

Dante (pointing the map): Yes master, I surely can! But what is this kind of spiral down here ?

Virgil: The Great Spiral contains all the human’s history, since our brain can retain trace of it…Every concentric circle corresponds to a century time… the inner you go to the center, the nearer you get closer to our ancestral roots, do you get me?

Dante (with a thrill of excitement): That’s makes me feel a bit lost…It’s all so stately… so magnificent…

Virgil: Of course it is! We are talking about the space-time…That’s what the spiral really represents…

Dante (like lost in the clouds): That’s would be fantastic…

Virgil (preventing and reassuring him ): It’s out of our route to travel the warped direction… we’ll walk the expanding direction instead… with our spaceship we’ll intersect the space time right here (he points up with a finger the map)… at the beginning of the fourteenth century and from there we’ll continue towards the present;

Dante (surprised and excited): But that’s the anniversary of my exile from Florence!!!

Virgil (with an accomplishing smile): Of course! Right the 1302… Don’t you want to know what happened after your left the town???

Dante (enthusiastically): So I’ll be able to see my beloved wife???

Virgil (beating him dear on his head): Have you forgotten we are going to visit the Hell??? You’ll see her in Paradise!!! Or at least in the Purgatory realms…

Dante (disappointed but thoughtful): I’m sorry master… I didn’t forget it but for a while I thought it might me a sort of passageway in the way to hell… ‘you know?

Virgil: Not at all, my son. Look! All along the spiral’s arms we’ll find the different circles of Hell; in its last part we’ll be in the so called Ante Hell; but here (he points the map again), where the final part of the spiral almost touches the present’s point we’ll aim the peaks of Purgatory…

Dante (with lively curiosity): so I may argue that the Hell is in the same dimension of past life?

Virgil (complying with satisfaction): That’s right my dear learner. As a matter of fact the right established punishment for the sinners is to stay in the unhappy condition of human life forever, without evolving in a better life like we’ll see for the Purgatory and, above all, for the praised of Paradise!!!

Dante: I see…

Virgil: Don’t be disappointed. Can’t you imagine a worse punishment than sharing your own time only with the evil without any good at all???

Dante (positively thoughtful): Of course you’re right…

Virgil: Put it this way: you’ll be able to see your enemies… those who exiled you… lost forever in their thirst of power, in the vacuity of their nothingness… and those who betrayed you…

Dante: I’m not sure to want such a revenge…

Virgil: That goes to your praise and merit…Aren’t you curious about the destiny of the big priest Boniface? Charles landless Valois? And what about Raniero Zaccaria?

Dante: (sadly) I would prefer to forget them!

Virgil: You don’t have to stop forcedly with them…We can decide the first stop in advance by the on board controls…

Dante: Do you mean we can land anywhere in the spiral lines of space-time?

Virgil: That’s exactly what I mean!!!

Dante: I fear to face events too close to my own story…

Virgil: There’s no problem, my son. We can go straight way to any of the circles of any century!!!

Dante : As far as I know something about some good guys I could really go further..Can I know only a few names before we go?

Virgil: Go ahead with the names please!!!

Dante: (thirstily) Giovanni Boccaccio, Cino da Pistoia, Pieraccio Tebaldi, Bosone da Gubbio, Geoffrey Chaucer, Johannes Gutenberg and his pupil Johann Numeister!

Virgil: You’ll find them all in the Purgatory or maybe in the eternal joy of Paradise!

Dante (with a sigh of relief): I think they deserve it, don’t you master?

Virgil: It’s not up to me to decide, not even to discuss such matters…

Dante: I’m sorry master…

Virgil (overflying any argument): Have you got any other name?

Dante: Can you just tell me something about a certain Francesco, the son of my friend, the notary Ser Petracco?

Virgil: Despite everything he has deserved to play another chance to reach Paradise..at least for literary merits… Don’t you think so?

Dante (bewildered, pedantly listing ): Well, I surely prefer Rinaldo Cavalchini, Menghino Mezzani, Manuello Romano, Giovanni Quirini, Angelo Poliziano, Luigi Pulci, Lorenzo di Pietro, Giovanni di Paolo, Cristoforo Landino, Franco Sacchetti, Leonardo Bruni, Francesco da Barberino and …

Virgil: (cutting him straight) That’s ok, my son!!! I have got your point of view!!! May be you would like to make our first stop further in the fifteenth or in the sixteenth century…

Dante (changing attitude, almost apologizing): Oh, the sixteenth is my favorite one..so full of art…discoveries…new ideas…

Virgil: I’m with you… you can start from there our journey… if you want to…

Dante: Well, it depends from the people we might find over there…in the lines of the infernal spiral I mean…

Virgil: You can make some names, if you want…

Dante: I have a great number in mind…

Virgil: Make ten of them… just to start…

Dante: Let me see… I would start with… Martin Luther, Nicolaus Copernicus, Leonardo Da Vinci, Niccolò Machiavelli, Michelangelo Buonarroti, William Barker, John Calvin, Sandro Botticcelli, Tintoretto, Luca Marenzio…

Virgil: All in Paradise!!!

Dante: That’s good!!!

Virgil: Any more names?

Dante: Oh, I’ve a great copy… Why don’t you tell me, master, some names worth to be heard? I would be so grateful…

Virgil: (surprised): Well, there are really plenty. What do you think of Hernan Cortes?

Dante: Do you mean the Spanish conquistador???

Virgil: That’s him, my son…

Dante (a bit upset): Speaking about Spanish people I would prefer to talk with Diego Guillén de Avila, Pedro Fernandes de Villegas or with Pedro de Padilla, ‘you see?

Virgil: Well, of course I see, but they are all guys of Paradise…

Dante (quite mortified): I’m really sorry, master…

Virgil (with resolution): Never mind! Do you have any other names?

Dante: if I were assured about some other figures I would ask you to start straight to the beginning of the seventeenth century…

Virgil: Whom would you like to know of?

Dante: Raffaello Sanzio, Giorgio Vasari, Sir Francis Drake, Amerigo Vespucci, Giovanni Bellini, Adriano Bancheri, Anne Boleyn, John Calvin, Catherine de Medici, Mary Queen of Scots, Charles the Fifth, Nostradamus, Ivan the Terrible, GianPierLuigi da Palestrina, Michel de Montaigne…

Virgil: All of them out of the Great Spiral except for Francis Drake, Nostradamus and Ivan the Terrible!

Dante: (very thoughtful) I’m in two minds… I’m not sure I want to stop just for three names…May I ask for any others?

Virgil: Come on with your last names then!

Dante (in one breath): Oliver Cromwell, Johannes Keplero, William Shakespeare, Cervantes, John Donne, Francis Bacon, Renè Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, Walter Releigh, Mazarino and Richelieu…

Virgil: Only Richelieu and Mazarino have got trapped on the Infernal spiral! But all these names lead us straight to the seventeenth century!

Dante: Very well! I’m ready for the 17th century now!

Virgil: Let’s go then!

(while they go towards to the staircase which leads to the spaceship the lights will be off)

After seven centuries

I take a part to an international competition: the storytelleruk2017 with Amazon.

I feel so   excited! It's the first time I participate in such a contest.

I entered the competition with a drama: "Travelling in the space-time with Virgil".

In my story Virgil and Dante meet again, somewhere in the space, after almost 700 hundreds years.

Virgil will lead Dante in the spacetime with his spaceship, from the Hell's damnation till the delight of Paradise.

I must say that in the competiton there are so many great books. Most of them are thrillers, spystories, historical romances, fictions and novels.Very few are the dramas and the poem's books.

Next time, maybe,  I will participate with an historical romance.

The present work is the first I have straightly  indited in English. I've published in English before, but mostly of my previous books had been translated from italian language into English (apart for some poems which have been composed directly in English).

I hope you'll find the time to take a look to my book, expressing you personal review through the link showed below.

I thank you all so much for the time you'll be spending on my literary efforts.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Travelling-space-time-Virgil-drama-prologue-ebook/dp/B071FB9SGV/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1495951931&sr=1-1&keywords=travelling+in+the+space+time+with+virgil

Dante's Ulysses

 –  Inferno Canto XXVI-

“When I left Circe who more than a year

   retained me over there close to Gaeta

long before Aeneas came  there

 giving the place that name,

   not fondness for my son, nor pity

on my old father, nor Penelope`s claim

to the joys of conjugal love,

   could overcome  in my mind the lust

 to get  experienced of  the whole world

and  all  human faults and virtues,

   and  I turned into the large and open sea

with just one  ship and only those few comrades

who  did not desert me. 

   I saw  both shores as far as Morocco

 and as far as Spain and I saw Sardinia

and the other islands  washed by that sea.

  I and my  comrades were old  and worn

when we sailed  into the narrow pass

where Hercules rose his columns

  warning all men not to go further,

already I had left Ceuta on the left,

Seville now sank behind me on the right.

  “Comrades,” I said, “who through a hundred thousand

perils have reached the West, in the short time

we have still left of our lives

   let us   not deny  ourselves  to experience

 the uninhabited world  following the course

of the sun where it set.

   Consider your origin! You were not born

to live your lives like brutes,

but to  follow the path of virtue and knowledge!”

   With this brief exhortation I made my men

so eager for the voyage I could hardly

have held them back if I changed my mind,

   and turning our stern toward morning,

we bore southwest out of the  known world ,

making wings of our oars for our fool`s flight.

   The night  showed already   all the constellations

 of the other hemisphere and our pole

 had so declined that it did not rise out of its ocean bed.

    Five times  the  moon’s face

 had brightened  and as many time  waned

since we had started our voyage

   when   a mountain appeared to us 

so far that it  looked dark,  a peak so tall

I doubted any man had seen the like.

   We cheered  and  soon we cried

because  a whirl broke hard

upon our ship from the new land:

   three times it turned over and over the ship

 in the wave ,  at fourth the poop rose

 and the bow went down, as Somebody wished

      till the sea closed over us.”

English Translation by Angelo Ruggeri

Dante and his time

Since 1800, a book a year has been edited, only in  English language, on Dante's masterpiece "The Divine Comedy",  which shows the great interest English culture has reserved to the "Supreme Italian Poet".

Is not a case that Dante Alighieri is enumerated between the six best poets of any time in the mondial literature.

Recently one more book has been published on the matter: Dante in love by A.N. Wilson.

Despite his title, it's not a book neither on Gemma Donati's love affairs, nor on Beatrice's. His right title could have been "Dante and his time", 'cause it's reckoned by his same author that the book deals with the social and political life in Florence during the poet's life (1265-1321).

May be that's the main reason why the book has had conflictual and opposite reviews by English critic and reviers.

As matter of fact while the Telegraph (both Daily and Sunday's) and the Times have expressed good opinions on the last Wilson's work, other papers, like The Observer and The Guardian show perplexities and douts on the reaching of his purposes and objectives by the book.

In Italy Angelo Ruggeri, a well known writer, very fond on classical studies, is working on Dante in love book's review.

Angelo Ruggeri believes that Wilson's Dante in love is well documented and solidly founded (as English, he affirms, have a great tradition on Dante's studies). He therefore underlines, according to Wilson's convictions,  the contradictions between  Dante's theories and his life, mostly because the Poet, while beloging to the Guelf's Party (thus being loyal to the roman Pope), nevertheless he vowed and wished the coming of an Universalistic  Empire (under the German power) able to gather and include old the states and all the world since then known.

He shares Wilson's statements quoting his book at page 118:

“His treatise written in exile, when he had changed his mind about being a papalist Guelf and became an ardente supporter of a universal monarchy, would strike many modern readers as bizarre and the open letters he wrote to the Emperor Henry VII would strike most dispassionate readers as deranged”.

Angelo Ruggeri gives evidence that Wilson's statement on Dante's incoherence and madness (of course in his political behaviour) was rightly confirmed by the judgement that Roman Church gave on Dante's treaty book  "The Monarchy".

But Angelo Ruggeri, at a certain point, leaves the Wilson's path and chooses his own ground:

" And if we  suppose "- asks the italian writer - "that Dante was neither Guelf nor Ghibeline, just wanting to be a mere and pure republican against both the papalist and the foreigner imperialists besieging Florence at the same time?"

... to be continued...