‘Divine Comedy’ illustrations online Floods ravage South Sudan

MILAN — Florence’s Uffizi Gallery is making available for viewing online 88 rarely displayed drawings of Dante’s “Divine Comedy”î to mark the 700th anniversary in 2021 of the Italian poet’s death.

The virtual show of highresolution images of works by the 16th-Century Renaissance artist Federico Zuccari will be

accessible “for free, any hour of the day, for everyone,” said Uffizi director Eike Schmidt.

The drawings illustrate Dante’s masterpiece, “The Divine Comedy,”î an epic poem in three parts recounting a pilgrim’s travels through hell, purgatory and heaven.

The pencil-and-ink drawings are in contrasting shades of black and red. They were completed during Zuccari’s stay in Spain from 1586 to 1588, and became part of the Uffizi collection in 1738.

The drawings have only been publicly displayed twice previously, and then only a selection, owing to their fragility: in Florence in 1865 to mark the 600th anniversary of Dante’s birth and coinciding with Italy’s unification as a nation, and for a specialized exhibit about Dante in 1993.

OLD FANGAK, South Sudan — On a scrap of land surrounded by flooding in South Sudan, families drink and bathe from the waters that swept away latrines and continue to rise.

Some 1 million people in the country have been displaced or isolated for months by the worst flooding in memory, with the intense rainy season a sign of climate change. The waters began rising in June, washing away crops, swamping roads and worsening hunger and disease in the young nation struggling to recover from civil war. Now famine is a threat.

In the Old Fangak area in hard-hit Jonglei state, parents spoke of walking for hours in chest-deep water to find food and health care as malaria and diarrheal diseases spread.

Now cattle are dying, and survivors have been transported to drier areas.

Remaining residents are eating tree leaves and sometimes fish to survive. Fevers and joint pain are widespread.