Cielo e inferno

Cielo e inferno [Heaven and Hell], in a fascinating haphazard way combines fragments of sacred texts with accounts by visionary mystics, poetic figurations by writers and accurate and no less imaginative speculations by philosophers and theologians, mixing the ancient and modern, faith and scepticism, gravity and humour. The reader will be enchanted by the paradise of Valhalla, where the warriors who died in battle every morning arm themselves, fight, die and are reborn, and the seven-storey hell of the Thousand and One Nights, one above the other and a thousand years apart. But, above all, the tenaciously earthly skies imagined by writers such as Charles Lamb or Miguel de Unamuno or Mark Twain, to whom we owe this lapidary description: “Wheresoever she was, there was Eden”, will forever go down in memory. As the brief Prologue augurs, moreover, "Who knows whether our volume might let us glimpse the millenary evolution of the concepts of heaven and hell: starting with Swedenborg, we think of states of the soul and not of one place for rewards and another for punishments".