Denis
in the suburbs of Paris, sixteen weeks to Rome and a year to Jerusalem.
A table of time limits between Florence and the principal cities of
Europe and the East made by the Florentine Banking houses in Dante's
day, showed the number of days required for consignments of specie and
goods to reach their destination. Rome was reached in fifteen days,
Venice and Naples in twenty days, Flanders in seventy days, England and
Constantinople in seventy-five days, Cyprus in ninety days. How long it
took Dante to make the trip from Florence to Rome, we do not know but
history tells us that he went to the Eternal City in the year 1300. He
was indeed a great traveler. During his twenty years' exile, we know
that our poet's itinerary led him among other places to Padua, Venice,
Ravenna, Paris and there is good reason to believe, as Gladstone
contends, that he went for study to Oxford. The regret is permissible
that he did not leave us an account of his journeyings. "Had he given us
pictures--as he alone could have painted them--of scenes by the wayside
and of the courts of which he was an honored guest," says Dr. J.A. Zahm
in his Great Inspirers, "we should have had the most interesting
and the most instructive travel book ever written.
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