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After a moment an arm was raised up front, the director handed the person a microphone, and it was asked whether the professoressa could put such images of hell in a more general context. . . .

Next Paolo himself put up his hand.

Grazie. Uno discorso meraviglioso, he began. My question is about the idea of sin in all of this. It is a long time ago, so I remember only one of Dante’s damned, the adulteress.

Francesca, the professoressa named her.

I’m sure that’s right. Her torment is to be forever blown in a terrible tempest.

Si. Francesca da Rimini. 

There was something disturbing about her fate, Paolo went on. It seemed she felt deeply for her lover. But there she is in hell suffering eternal punishment.

Yes, she answered. I understand. But for Dante, whose idea of sin is something like Aquinas’, the sin lies not in love per se, nor even the illicit love of the adulterer, but in the excess, just as the sin of gluttony consists of an excess of an otherwise natural human drive, namely to eat. It is always some excess that damns Dante’s sinners.

—The Italian Novel

Paolo called it her cosmic microwave background, and it seemed not so off the mark. It was the end of her first year at Dartmouth; she got pregnant. After a few weeks of heart-wrenching decision-thinking, she terminated it, an act as irreconcilable with her Christian upbringing as having had pre-marital sex in the first place. 

The cosmic microwave background, as best she understood, was what the universe looked like just after the Big Bang–looked and still looks like, because of course one can even now look up and across billions of light years to that time. Light travels fast but not fast enough. So if you look far enough you can see it still, the shape of things just after the Big Bang, this and the pattern of everything following that first universe of superheated plasma–the dense sectors, the diffuse ones.

As it was in the Beginning: getting knocked up freshman year was her Big Bang.

—The Italian Novel

Had he not been an astronomer, he might have come that day to believe that the stars really do shape our fate, that there are critical oppositions, baleful conjunctions, heavenly things align and one thief is saved. Yes, whatever stars govern secrets–secrets and their unravelling–they had come into that once-in-an-eon syzygy to disclose to him not just one but two unknowns, one rather more personal than the other, but both the kind of revelation that changes everything.

—The Italian Novel

She had begun to have the impression as she approached the museo that it was a prison. At first it was just that the boxy palazzo resembled one, but as the weeks wore on her time there came to feel like deathly servitude, hours, days shut away from life, emptied of everything but meaningless time-killing make-work—answering email from the assistant directress, who sat at a table not more than two meters from her own; small meetings with people from other museo offices for the coordination of everyone’s time-killing make-work; and worst of all, the great emptiness at the center of it all, the planning of the Galileo anniversary for a small tribe of wealthy patrons and museo leadership in order to reproduce an institution that contributed almost nothing to the public understanding of its eponymous hero.

—The Italian Novel

It was a short walk to the museo Galileo—across the piazza, south to the lungarno, then a couple of blocks downstream—but even before she passed grim Dante at the basilica, an icy sweat bothered the small of her back, her underwear was climbing up, and her best pumps began to bite. All early signs of the egg. 

Whitney Bitteredge was ovulating. 

For three or four days now, as her estrogen went to full amplitude, she would inhabit a body electric: Afternoon light hurt, she was hot then cold, slacks pinched at the waist, anything but silk or cashmere prickled, she was up all night ordering things on the Interweb, her patience wore to a tatter, she didn’t eat, there were migraines, her breasts were tender, she had difficulty concentrating (more than the usual difficulty), she drank more—these and a great twist of more exotic disturbances, all of which would vanish like a jinn on day fourteen.

—The Italian Novel

Waiting. What was it really? Donati mused. One waits for what is coming. What’s coming from the future. But coming from the future by way of the past, of an expectation formed in the past. So waiting was the future past, or the past future. There should be a verb form for it. One could say, There is an update or There is bread but use the past future to indicate, There is an update coming or There is bread coming.

—The Italian Novel

As surprising as it might be, he had not understood their dressing and undressing around one another as an element of intimacy until this strange dream. It wasn’t so entirely erotic watching a woman undress. Part of what draws one’s attention is how strange women’s bodies are–breasts, girlish or swinging, the incongruity of narrow waists and wide hips, that great patch of hair at the crotch, their behinds, especially with big-bottomed women. Women’s bodies are baroque.

But there is also something terribly tender in seeing such things exposed, like seeing a turtle without its shell, and he knew now it was something he had quietly and unconsciously enjoyed with her–watching her dress or undress. She dropped her towel and stood naked in the air. He could see all of her but what was under that makeshift turban. 

—The Italian Novel

On his way back to the hotel he passed over the Pont des Arts, where two young people, a man and a woman of perhaps twenty or so, were snapping photos of each other, then of the two of themselves together, along the iron railing above the Seine. A decade or so ago lovers fixed small padlocks to that railing as a token of their bond; there were hundreds, then thousands of them, and then just as the law of quantitative change predicts, when you keeping adding to something like that it will sometime become quite another thing, and on the Pont des Arts that thing was a great wall of locks, maybe the biggest in the world, a terrible steel curtain, dumb, obdurate and stretching all the way from right bank to left. Y remembered reading somewhere that when the ville de Paris finally had enough of it, there were a million locks to cut through.

—The Italian Novel