Dark Minerva by Giovanni Pascoli was first published in 1898. (The original title in Italian is Minerva Oscura.) It is an impassioned, often poetic, but also scholarly and critical investigation into Dante Alighieriʼs Divine Comedy. As Pascoli says in the Prolegomena, "To know and to describe Danteʼs thought, will it ever be possible? He eclipses in the profundity of his thought: he intentionally eclipses. I have already set my heart on following him in one of those disappearances in which, after having said ʻLook,ʼ he immediately leaves us in the dark. This time I said to myself, if I see, I will always see; if I understand him in this place, I will understand him everywhere else."

Giovanni Pascoli (AD 1855-1912) was a poet and Italian classical scholar, fluent in Greek, Latin, Italian and also English. He was a student of Giosuè Carducci, the Italian classicist poet and Nobel prize winner.