Sky and Earth - Travelling with Dante Alighieri and Marco Polo

700 years after Dante Alighieri's death, this book intertwines the voice of the great poet with that of an exceptional contemporary, Marco Polo, who was equally curious about the geography of both earthly and celestial worlds. If Polo was the 'ordinary genius' of the XIII century, the designation of 'sorcerer genius' must go to Alighieri, the man with encyclopedic wisdom, at ease with his era's philosophy, theology, and science. The sorcerer genius-well versed in this world-must create their own, which he did with The Divine Comedy. On the other hand, The Travels of Marco Polo, the greatest classic in travel literature, offers wonder and provides delight. This book combines the unforgettable characters of both books, the darkness of the infernal landscapes with the immensity of the Asian deserts, the richness of the Mongol empire with the glamor of medieval philosophy, the aspirations and dreams of two great explorers with knowledge of the science of their time, as well as the ever-eternal cosmology. This is an accessible and entertaining book for high school students, scholars of scientific history and the history of ideas, and curious readers who want to know more about Dante and Marco Polo and their unquenchable thirst for knowledge.


This book is a translation of an original German edition. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content, so that the book will read stylistically differently from a conventional translation.


Giuseppe Mussardo is full professor of Theoretical Physics at SISSA. Author of several articles on the history of science and documentary films, he was awarded the 2013 Prize of Società Italiana di Fisica for Science Dissemination. His previous book, The ABC's of Science (L'alfabeto della scienza), has been translated by Springer.
Gaspare Polizzi is a professor of Social Pedagogy at the University of Pisa and is the author of many books. He studies the relation between art and science, and the history of scientific and philosophical thinking.