Dante Gets Posthumous Nose Job

[matcom]

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ROME (Reuters) - Italian scientists have made a reconstruction of the face of the poet Dante some 700 years after he died and have found some surprises, particularly about the supposed shape of his famous aquiline nose.

"It was a surprise for me too," said Professor Giorgio Gruppioni, an anthropologist at the University of Bologna's campus in Ravenna, the Adriatic city where Dante is buried.

Gruppioni told Reuters in a telephone interview that the multi-disciplinary project discovered that Dante probably did have a hooked nose but it was pudgy rather than pointy and crooked rather than straight, almost as if he had been punched.

"We all had our ideas of what Dante looked like. But if this is right, it shows his face was different," he said. "He looks more like a common man, a man on the street."

Popular conceptions of the face or profile of the author of the Divine Comedy -- considered one of the greatest literary works of the early Renaissance -- have always been dictated by artists' renditions.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070112/od_nm/italy_dante1_dc