When I want to understand Italian history I catch a train and go to Ravenna. There, between the tomb of Theodoric and that of Dante, in the reassuring neighbourhood of the best manuscript of Aristophanes and in the less reassuring one of the best portrait of the Empress Theodora, I can begin to feel what Italian history has really been.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Sunday, April 05, 2015
Ravenna
Arnaldo Momigliano (1908-1987), "Cassiodorus and Italian Culture of His Time," Proceedings of the British Academy 41 (1955) 207-245, rpt. in his Secondo contributo alla storia degli studi classici (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1984), pp. 191-229 (at 191):