Dante has been cagey about where he's from, using periphrastic phrasing to describe the Arno valley without naming it.

It was apparently the wrong thing to do . . . because one of the envious penitents is going to pick up the pilgrim's (and the poet's?) rhetorical games and push them much further into fully metaphoric space that is also somehow prophetic space, a diatribe against Tuscan corruption that borders on the incomprehensible at this moment before the speakers are named in Purgatorio XIV.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we play with truth and metaphor in the increasingly complex landscape of Purgatory.

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Here are the segments for this episode of WALKING WITH DANTE:

[01:41] My English translation of the passage: PURGATORIO, Canto XIV, lines 43 - 72. If you'd like to read along or even continue the conversation about this passage, please see the page on my website for this episode at markscarbrough.com.

[04:11] The standard interpretation of the allegory of the Arno valley.

[08:59] One more level of complexity: the personification of the Arno.

[11:02] A third level of complexity: so much periphrasis!

[12:32] A fourth level of complexity: a beast fable added to the rhetorical strategy (hello, Sapía!).

[13:34] A fifth level of complexity: fraud, the end stop of the Arno and INFERNO.

[15:06] A final level of complexity: The Old Man Of Crete in INFERNO XIV.

[16:33] The interpretive or rhetorical muddle after the allegory of the Arno.

[18:18] The bloody nephew's rampage: a metaphoric space.

[26:56] The pay-off of intimacy?

[29:52] Possible blasphemy in the high-level poetics.