DANTE IN LOVE: THE WORLD'S GREATEST POEM AND HOW IT MADE HISTORY By Harriet Rubin Simon & Schuster, 274 pages, $23.95
I remember my first foray into Dante's Divine Comedy. I was a college sophomore in literature taking one of my required courses: Beginnings of Western Literature. One of our assignments was to read John Ciardi's translation of Dante's Inferno. I opened the book a little reluctantly, expecting just to pick away at the required passages. Instead, I found myself ...