‘Questa parte del mare e della terra’

it was unexpectedly difficult to decide on the title of this chapter. ‘Geography’ would have been too comprehensive. ‘The earth’ might have been misunderstood as referring exclusively to dry land or to the heaviest of the four elements, while ‘The world’ would have been too abstract and too vague. ‘The terraqueous globe’ was precise but forbidding. ‘An inquiry into the location and configuration of water and earth’ was also precise, and it had the great advantage of being the title of Dante's last philosophical work; nevertheless, it had to be rejected as too cumbersome. The successful candidate – ‘Land and sea’ – may sound excessively informal, but it was suggested by a phrase in Dante's Convivio, and it has the merit of simplicity and precision. The subject of this chapter, then, is the slightly imperfect sphere, popularly called the ‘earth’ or the ‘world’, which lies at the centre of the medieval cosmos. And our main objective will be to visualize and understand Dante's mental picture of the distribution of land and sea over the surface of that sphere, and to investigate what use he made of that ‘picture’ in his poem.

The notion of a slight ‘imperfection’ in our globe is implicit in the very adjective ‘terraqueous’.