![]() ![]() ![]() While in Florence he made friends with the lutenist Vincenzo Galilei, the illegitimate son of Galileo, who introduced him to his father, who had been convicted of heresy. But it appears he threw himself into the alien culture with gusto. Milton had described Catholicism as “the worst of superstitions” and a “heresie against the scripture”. “You encounter him as this towering figure of militant Englishness, someone who is very hostile to Catholicism and hostile to certain kinds of idolatory and tempting beauty, and all these things that the English Protestant mind associated with Italy.” “In some sense he’s the person you’d least expect to find there,” Moshenska said. Only a small plaque on a hotel five minutes’ walk from Florence’s vast Duomo confirms that Milton visited Florence “drawn … by the Italy of the classics”. If he is correct, one of England’s most famous works of literature also bears the stamp of the city of Dante. In preparation for a Radio 4 documentary – In Search of Paradise Lost –to be broadcast next Sunday, Dr Joe Moshenska, an academic at Trinity College, Cambridge, retraced Milton’s journey to Florence in the late 1630s and claims that the legacy of a formative trip can be spotted throughout Paradise Lost. ![]()
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